See below text of a letter I have written to Transport Minister following a meeting with her on Wednesday.
Rt Hon Theresa Villiers MP
Minister of State
Department for Transport
Great Minster House
76 Marsham Street
London SW1P 4DR
20 July 2011
Dear Theresa
THAMESLINK ROLLING STOCK PROJECT
Thank you for your letter of 15 July 2011 and for facilitating the meeting attended by colleagues from Derby and Derbyshire and myself in Westminster today.
I am afraid that I cannot accept the apparently resolute position taken by the DfT on this matter, as it represents a complete disaster for the communities that my neighbouring MPs and I represent. As you saw earlier today, we are totally united across the normal party divisions on the Bombardier question. This unity will be reflected when a complete cross section of society rallies in Derby on Saturday.
I sincerely believe that you are being seriously misinformed by your officials, both on the way in which the Thameslink procurement has been undertaken and in your options for doing something about it. As a former local government leader, I can tell you that the default position of bureaucracies everywhere is to convince their political leaders that they are the passive victims of immutable processes. Please do not fall into that trap so early in your stewardship of the Department for Transport.
The Thameslink procurement was designed by human beings and can be amended by human beings. Whether or not Ministers in the last Labour Government should have understood the minute details of the Thameslink procurement process and to have done something about it is a moot point. That process was plainly designed by officialdom in a way that enabled Siemens to deliver a knock-out financial blow through the use of its unrivalled balance sheet and its status as a German bank.
This alone is justification for the Government to review whether it has truly achieved “the most economically advantageous solution” as set out in the procurement process. Siemens is now in a position to deploy the same trick again and again to the detriment of competition and innovation in the UK train market.
Moreover, as our discussion on the technological aspects of the process revealed today, Siemens has been given an extraordinary breathing space in which to develop a new lightweight train bogie. Furthermore, as your officials conceded, the Siemens bogie is still a theoretical proposition that only exists on a drawing board, there is a huge question mark hanging over the deliverability of the Siemens option.
For these reasons alone, British taxpayers will find it hard to understand why they should be put at risk to enable Siemens to bring its train to anything like the standard of the Bombardier design. Even then, its reliability will be questionable until it has actually been in service on real British railway lines, rather than test lines in Germany. I therefore sincerely question how this can be presented as the most economically advantageous solution for the UK.
As I said at our meeting, I am genuinely worried that unless this decision is overturned Bombardier could pull out of the UK altogether. Such an outcome would be a calamity for British manufacturing because, as you will be well aware, Bombardier is the last remaining British based train manufacturing company.
I do not doubt the sincerity of your concern over the future of our constituents in Derby and Derbyshire who are employed by Bombardier and its many suppliers. I also sympathise with the position in which you now find yourself following the pledges you gave during the General Election campaign.
Finally, I can assure you that using the power of your office to find a solution to this mess will secure nothing but praise from the people of Derby, Derbyshire and further afield. But if you and your colleagues continue to follow the lead of your dogmatic civil servants, I am afraid the impact of the Thameslink decision in our part of the world will never be forgotten by future generations.
Yours sincerely
Chris Williamson MP
Derby North
Friday 22 July 2011
Monday 4 July 2011
BLUE LABOUR REDISCOVERS LABOUR'S ROOTS
David Lammy MP, has written a brilliant summary about the thinking around ‘Blue Labour’ and what it has to offer the future direction of the Labour Party. I was struck by the fact that the ‘Blue Labour’ prospectus articulates the Derby Labour Party’s neighbourhood agenda and outreach campaigning.
The following is a note that David Lammy distributed to Labour MPs.
BLUE LABOUR
By David Lammy, MP for Tottenham
Helen Goodman’s critique of Blue Labour is an important moment. It brings out into the open a debate that has been taking place in private conversations and seminar rooms for months now. The Blue Labour eBook, which I contributed to, was an attempt to provoke a debate that would contribute to the renewal of the Party. Helen picked up the conversation in her response and I want to continue it here in the same spirit.
Helen frames her response to the eBook around four anecdotes. I would like to start with a short story of my own. It is of my mother – a quiet but inspirational woman who arrived in Britain at the tail end of the Windrush generation. Born in a small village on the banks of the Demerara River, Guyana, she was the first of seven children, raised solely by her mother who worked as a seamstress to make ends meet.
Aged 32, she landed at Gatwick in 1970 to a routine strip search. Swapping the calm of rural Guyana for the chaos of the London metropolis was a culture shock to say the least. Just two years on from Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, Britain was far from a picture of racial harmony. Nor were the odds stacked in favour of a woman entering the workforce without much in the way either of money or formal qualifications.
My mother was not a political animal but she was a Labour voter through and through. At a time when comics would routinely insult black people on television, she relied on the Left to help her stand up to racists and bigots. When my father left, she became responsible for looking after five children alone. The same people who fought against racism were those who also spoke up for single mothers. They were the counterweight to Tory politicians and their friends in the media.
Meanwhile, there were bills to be paid. At times mum did three jobs to get by and was, of course, a beneficiary of the Equal Pay Act, passed in the same year she arrived in Britain. Like countless others, she trusted socialists to stick up for her when the child benefit was frozen. She relied on public libraries to nourish the minds of her children. She watched proudly as the first generation in our family was given the opportunity to go to university. Later in life she was cared for wonderfully by the NHS, which treated her with dignity and compassion. No-one in our family needs reminding about the value of individual rights, or that the state can be an enormous force for good. As Helen says, 1945 was an historic victory, not a wrong turning.
LIBERTY, EQUALITY…FRATERNITY
The question begged by Blue Labour is what this inheritance of social liberalism and a robust defence of the welfare state leaves out. What are its limitations? For me the answer is that Labour stands not just for liberty and equality, but also fraternity. Something important exists in between the state and the individual – our relationships with one another.
When my mother arrived in Britain it was not just the state that stepped in to help her. A friendly trade union official from NUPE helped her into a course of learning that made it possible to find work that could provide for a family. The local church provided a sense of fellowship and community. Friends and neighbours looked after her children while she juggled life as a single mother. When she was ill doctors in the NHS treated her illness, but Macmillan nurses also provided invaluable care. As she grew older she relied more and more on her children, just as we had once relied upon her. All these relationships made the difference to her life. This is what Blue Labour is trying to get at.
The focus on relationships explains why, despite the overlap with strands of liberalism, Labour is not a liberal party. Unlike the Lib Dems we do not see people simply as free-floating individuals. Our politics is not orientated towards an unrealisable version of freedom where we can each do whatever we please. Instead Labour politics is built on the idea that people are social beings, dependent on one another. We are not born free but dependent on our parents. As we grow older, a good life depends in large part on family, friends, neighbours, colleagues and strangers. We never stop being mutually dependent. How we treat each other matters.
Because relationships are so important to people’s lives they must be important to our politics. Labour, for example, needs a story about the family. Of course we care passionately about women’s rights and children’s rights but that’s not the end of the story. We have to seriously raise the volume and the focus more on the value of strong relationships between adults, good parenting and care for the elderly. We are at our best when we speak to that ethic of care, as well as a language of liberation. We can’t be satisfied by talking about children in care and retirement homes – the workings of the state. There is just more to it than that.
In the workplace there should be the same emphasis. Of course we stand for workers rights – on pay, on leave, on flexible working and the rest. But if the conversation between employers and employees never gets further than the right to strike versus the right to sack an employee then we have big problems. The reason worker representation on company boards is such a powerful idea is that it holds out the promise of constructive, respectful relationships based on give and take. Workers taking responsibility for the success of firms. Firms taking responsibility for the well-being of workers. Again, it’s not just about the state telling employers and employees what to do. It’s also about the quality of the relationships between employers and employees within firms.
In other areas of life, the principle holds. We support free speech but that doesn’t mean we have given up on the idea of a society with civility and mutual respect. We support personal and religious freedom but we also understand the importance of an integrated and harmonious society. Too easily a language of individual rights can regress into a shrill and anti-social individualism. Labour politics fails when these ties we have to one another fray. If families disintegrate, if workers do not have a voice, if neighbourhoods are divided and strangers fear and mistrust one another then our politics is stone dead. We end up willing the ends for social justice, but the means are impossible. People retreat into their own lives and any sense of the common good disappears.
Blue Labour’s insight is that solidarity is both important and fragile. It must be constantly worked at. We can’t just wag our finger and demand that people be good to one another, we have to take seriously the things that make mutual respect more difficult than it should be. This means listening to people and what they tell us. So when someone says that immigration is a problem in their area then the instant response cannot be to simply brand them a racist. Our job is to question why neighbour is set against neighbour in the scramble for scarce homes, jobs and services. Rather than judging people for airing their concerns we should be interested in how to ameliorate the things that cause these tensions.
Likewise when someone says that the family has come under pressure since women have entered the workforce we shouldn’t simply shout them down. Rather, we should ask how we can help families adapt to a world in which women rightfully have the chance to pursue their ambitions and earn a living. In particular, we might consider how we help fathers take on more of the caring at a time when mothers do more of the earning. Feminism and ‘the family’ don’t have to be at odds. We often slip into the same trap where faith is concerned. When a person or an organisation draws their values from a particular faith then the reaction cannot simply be to dismiss them. We can disagree with faith groups on abortion but still join together to campaign for a cap on lending rates, or against the commercialisation on childhood.
There is, of course, still racism, sexism and religious bigotry to be found in Britain. The battles our party has fought against discrimination of all kinds have been historic and hard won and they are not over yet. But when we decline the opportunity to enter into conversations about issues like the family, immigration or faith we undermine our own political project. If Blue Labour reminds us of this then it has already achieved a great deal. We are not the Lib Dems, let’s not act like them.
BIG SOCIETY…BIG BUSINESS
If one half of the coalition doesn’t understand the importance of fraternity, the other half forgets that it should apply in markets too. Helen says the catastrophic error of the Big Society is that it does not understand that the voluntary and public sectors often work in partnership. Absolutely. Ask any Safer Neighbourhoods team. But this is only half the story. The other fundamental weakness of the Big Society is that it has nothing to say about the market place. ‘Big Society not Big Government’ says Cameron, leaving Big Business out of the picture altogether. The Blue Labour essays are an attempt to address this. They are an antidote to what Ed called the ‘take what you can’ mentality in his speech on social responsibility.
Blue Labour stands opposed to anyone being used simply as a means to an end. That explains why employers should not treat staff as commodities to be exploited, but rather human beings to be respected. People should have a voice at work and be paid a wage they can live on. It explains the opposition to loan sharks who exploit people’s poverty, enticing people into debt that they will never be able to escape from. It explains the offence at companies who target advertising at other people’s children, manipulating young girls and boys. It explains why people were so angry at Jack Straw’s revelation that insurance companies are selling personal information to accident lawyers behind people’s backs. It explains why the public are so angry that the banks were able to hold the country to ransom.
This is what the Tories do not understand when they talk about people making ‘free choices’ in markets. A choice between eviction and a loan shark is no real choice. A choice between two bad jobs is no real choice. A choice about whether to let banks go down with millions of people’s savings, or to bail out the richest people in the country is no real choice. None of these reflect relationships built on give and take: they are about the powerful bullying and exploiting the powerless. Helen is clear that none of this will change without a role for government. I agree, as I expect every contributor to the Blue Labour eBook would. Collective action is how we stand up to those who profit at the expense of the rest of society. We do it together, through trade unions, cooperatives, consumer movements, civil society campaigns and of course, government at national and international level.
But collective action is not easy. Again we have to be careful how we build the trust and the solidarity and the momentum to take on those who abuse their power in the marketplace. Finger-wagging will not work here either. We have to find connections with people’s lives as they live them. There is a national campaign for a living wage because, first of all, there was a specific, tangible campaign against certain firms in the City of London. Momentum grew from there as people joined the dots between excess in the City and poverty for those who cleaned the offices of the ‘masters of the universe’.
Stella Creasy is running a brilliant campaign not just against loan sharking in general, but also some credit companies in particular. It gives the campaign a sense of vibrancy and a practical orientation, while the Tories continue to vote measures down in the House. The Billingsgate campaign that Jon Cruddas has been involved in is another good example. One response to the market porters would be to nod sagely and promise to do what we can at the next G20 summit. Another is to campaign for their cause at a local level, as well as pressing for international action.
In my own constituency I have been working hard to prevent Tottenham Hotspur from leaving the area. The more people get involved in that campaign the more the momentum builds for proper representation of fans on the boards of all football clubs. In the local party we are campaigning against betting shops swamping local high streets and, despite the Tories and Lib Dems voting down my amendments to the localism bill, building support for a change in the law.
The point is that we shouldn’t be afraid of the particular and the local. This is where people live their lives. It is when discussions about justice and equality become abstracted from everyday life that they lose their persuasive power and political purchase. Labour was founded as a movement to civilise capitalism – what Blue Labour reminds us is that this must take place in workplaces, in neighbourhoods and in civil society as well as rooms in Whitehall.
LABOUR TRADITIONS
Blue Labour is not a panacea. It has its weaknesses. Some worry that it is overly nostalgic about the past, rather than projecting something modern and forward looking. That it hankers for a world that has gone and isn’t coming back. Others question whether it has enough to say about self-improvement – that it gives the impression that people should be satisfied with their lot, rather than encouraged to strive for something better.
These have to be taken seriously and worked through. But even here we should be careful not to repeat some mistakes from our recent past. Labour always needs a forward-looking agenda, but we lose touch with people when we fetishize change for its own sake. When people see their job become more insecure, when they see their family less and when they feel they no longer know their neighbours, this doesn’t always feel like progress – and we need to show we understand that. Similarly, nothing could be closer to my own heart than helping people from poorer backgrounds fulfil their goals and realise their talents. But there is a difference between ambition and greed. The CEO’s pay matters if they take home millions while their cleaners are not paid enough to get by. We should stand for aspiration but not the pursuit of money for its own sake.
Nor should Blue Labour be feared as a Trojan horse for something else. The debate it has started is an opportunity to reconnect with some of the ideas our party was founded upon, after thirteen years in government and a political project that challenged many of the Party’s traditions and shibboleths. We should take its arguments on their merits, rather than mistake it for something it is not, or dismiss it on the basis of an ill-conceived name.
In the foreword to the Blue Labour eBook Ed writes of Labour as ‘a party of overlapping traditions and tendencies’. He is absolutely right. Labour itself has always been a coalition – of trade unionists, Fabians, Christian socialists, NGOs and local community activists, human rights campaigners, environmentalists, feminists and anti-racists. These traditions compete and coalesce with one another, enriching our party in the process. Blue Labour has something important to offer, alongside our tradition defence of individual rights and a robust defence of the modern state. Let’s engage with it in that spirit.
The following is a note that David Lammy distributed to Labour MPs.
BLUE LABOUR
By David Lammy, MP for Tottenham
Helen Goodman’s critique of Blue Labour is an important moment. It brings out into the open a debate that has been taking place in private conversations and seminar rooms for months now. The Blue Labour eBook, which I contributed to, was an attempt to provoke a debate that would contribute to the renewal of the Party. Helen picked up the conversation in her response and I want to continue it here in the same spirit.
Helen frames her response to the eBook around four anecdotes. I would like to start with a short story of my own. It is of my mother – a quiet but inspirational woman who arrived in Britain at the tail end of the Windrush generation. Born in a small village on the banks of the Demerara River, Guyana, she was the first of seven children, raised solely by her mother who worked as a seamstress to make ends meet.
Aged 32, she landed at Gatwick in 1970 to a routine strip search. Swapping the calm of rural Guyana for the chaos of the London metropolis was a culture shock to say the least. Just two years on from Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, Britain was far from a picture of racial harmony. Nor were the odds stacked in favour of a woman entering the workforce without much in the way either of money or formal qualifications.
My mother was not a political animal but she was a Labour voter through and through. At a time when comics would routinely insult black people on television, she relied on the Left to help her stand up to racists and bigots. When my father left, she became responsible for looking after five children alone. The same people who fought against racism were those who also spoke up for single mothers. They were the counterweight to Tory politicians and their friends in the media.
Meanwhile, there were bills to be paid. At times mum did three jobs to get by and was, of course, a beneficiary of the Equal Pay Act, passed in the same year she arrived in Britain. Like countless others, she trusted socialists to stick up for her when the child benefit was frozen. She relied on public libraries to nourish the minds of her children. She watched proudly as the first generation in our family was given the opportunity to go to university. Later in life she was cared for wonderfully by the NHS, which treated her with dignity and compassion. No-one in our family needs reminding about the value of individual rights, or that the state can be an enormous force for good. As Helen says, 1945 was an historic victory, not a wrong turning.
LIBERTY, EQUALITY…FRATERNITY
The question begged by Blue Labour is what this inheritance of social liberalism and a robust defence of the welfare state leaves out. What are its limitations? For me the answer is that Labour stands not just for liberty and equality, but also fraternity. Something important exists in between the state and the individual – our relationships with one another.
When my mother arrived in Britain it was not just the state that stepped in to help her. A friendly trade union official from NUPE helped her into a course of learning that made it possible to find work that could provide for a family. The local church provided a sense of fellowship and community. Friends and neighbours looked after her children while she juggled life as a single mother. When she was ill doctors in the NHS treated her illness, but Macmillan nurses also provided invaluable care. As she grew older she relied more and more on her children, just as we had once relied upon her. All these relationships made the difference to her life. This is what Blue Labour is trying to get at.
The focus on relationships explains why, despite the overlap with strands of liberalism, Labour is not a liberal party. Unlike the Lib Dems we do not see people simply as free-floating individuals. Our politics is not orientated towards an unrealisable version of freedom where we can each do whatever we please. Instead Labour politics is built on the idea that people are social beings, dependent on one another. We are not born free but dependent on our parents. As we grow older, a good life depends in large part on family, friends, neighbours, colleagues and strangers. We never stop being mutually dependent. How we treat each other matters.
Because relationships are so important to people’s lives they must be important to our politics. Labour, for example, needs a story about the family. Of course we care passionately about women’s rights and children’s rights but that’s not the end of the story. We have to seriously raise the volume and the focus more on the value of strong relationships between adults, good parenting and care for the elderly. We are at our best when we speak to that ethic of care, as well as a language of liberation. We can’t be satisfied by talking about children in care and retirement homes – the workings of the state. There is just more to it than that.
In the workplace there should be the same emphasis. Of course we stand for workers rights – on pay, on leave, on flexible working and the rest. But if the conversation between employers and employees never gets further than the right to strike versus the right to sack an employee then we have big problems. The reason worker representation on company boards is such a powerful idea is that it holds out the promise of constructive, respectful relationships based on give and take. Workers taking responsibility for the success of firms. Firms taking responsibility for the well-being of workers. Again, it’s not just about the state telling employers and employees what to do. It’s also about the quality of the relationships between employers and employees within firms.
In other areas of life, the principle holds. We support free speech but that doesn’t mean we have given up on the idea of a society with civility and mutual respect. We support personal and religious freedom but we also understand the importance of an integrated and harmonious society. Too easily a language of individual rights can regress into a shrill and anti-social individualism. Labour politics fails when these ties we have to one another fray. If families disintegrate, if workers do not have a voice, if neighbourhoods are divided and strangers fear and mistrust one another then our politics is stone dead. We end up willing the ends for social justice, but the means are impossible. People retreat into their own lives and any sense of the common good disappears.
Blue Labour’s insight is that solidarity is both important and fragile. It must be constantly worked at. We can’t just wag our finger and demand that people be good to one another, we have to take seriously the things that make mutual respect more difficult than it should be. This means listening to people and what they tell us. So when someone says that immigration is a problem in their area then the instant response cannot be to simply brand them a racist. Our job is to question why neighbour is set against neighbour in the scramble for scarce homes, jobs and services. Rather than judging people for airing their concerns we should be interested in how to ameliorate the things that cause these tensions.
Likewise when someone says that the family has come under pressure since women have entered the workforce we shouldn’t simply shout them down. Rather, we should ask how we can help families adapt to a world in which women rightfully have the chance to pursue their ambitions and earn a living. In particular, we might consider how we help fathers take on more of the caring at a time when mothers do more of the earning. Feminism and ‘the family’ don’t have to be at odds. We often slip into the same trap where faith is concerned. When a person or an organisation draws their values from a particular faith then the reaction cannot simply be to dismiss them. We can disagree with faith groups on abortion but still join together to campaign for a cap on lending rates, or against the commercialisation on childhood.
There is, of course, still racism, sexism and religious bigotry to be found in Britain. The battles our party has fought against discrimination of all kinds have been historic and hard won and they are not over yet. But when we decline the opportunity to enter into conversations about issues like the family, immigration or faith we undermine our own political project. If Blue Labour reminds us of this then it has already achieved a great deal. We are not the Lib Dems, let’s not act like them.
BIG SOCIETY…BIG BUSINESS
If one half of the coalition doesn’t understand the importance of fraternity, the other half forgets that it should apply in markets too. Helen says the catastrophic error of the Big Society is that it does not understand that the voluntary and public sectors often work in partnership. Absolutely. Ask any Safer Neighbourhoods team. But this is only half the story. The other fundamental weakness of the Big Society is that it has nothing to say about the market place. ‘Big Society not Big Government’ says Cameron, leaving Big Business out of the picture altogether. The Blue Labour essays are an attempt to address this. They are an antidote to what Ed called the ‘take what you can’ mentality in his speech on social responsibility.
Blue Labour stands opposed to anyone being used simply as a means to an end. That explains why employers should not treat staff as commodities to be exploited, but rather human beings to be respected. People should have a voice at work and be paid a wage they can live on. It explains the opposition to loan sharks who exploit people’s poverty, enticing people into debt that they will never be able to escape from. It explains the offence at companies who target advertising at other people’s children, manipulating young girls and boys. It explains why people were so angry at Jack Straw’s revelation that insurance companies are selling personal information to accident lawyers behind people’s backs. It explains why the public are so angry that the banks were able to hold the country to ransom.
This is what the Tories do not understand when they talk about people making ‘free choices’ in markets. A choice between eviction and a loan shark is no real choice. A choice between two bad jobs is no real choice. A choice about whether to let banks go down with millions of people’s savings, or to bail out the richest people in the country is no real choice. None of these reflect relationships built on give and take: they are about the powerful bullying and exploiting the powerless. Helen is clear that none of this will change without a role for government. I agree, as I expect every contributor to the Blue Labour eBook would. Collective action is how we stand up to those who profit at the expense of the rest of society. We do it together, through trade unions, cooperatives, consumer movements, civil society campaigns and of course, government at national and international level.
But collective action is not easy. Again we have to be careful how we build the trust and the solidarity and the momentum to take on those who abuse their power in the marketplace. Finger-wagging will not work here either. We have to find connections with people’s lives as they live them. There is a national campaign for a living wage because, first of all, there was a specific, tangible campaign against certain firms in the City of London. Momentum grew from there as people joined the dots between excess in the City and poverty for those who cleaned the offices of the ‘masters of the universe’.
Stella Creasy is running a brilliant campaign not just against loan sharking in general, but also some credit companies in particular. It gives the campaign a sense of vibrancy and a practical orientation, while the Tories continue to vote measures down in the House. The Billingsgate campaign that Jon Cruddas has been involved in is another good example. One response to the market porters would be to nod sagely and promise to do what we can at the next G20 summit. Another is to campaign for their cause at a local level, as well as pressing for international action.
In my own constituency I have been working hard to prevent Tottenham Hotspur from leaving the area. The more people get involved in that campaign the more the momentum builds for proper representation of fans on the boards of all football clubs. In the local party we are campaigning against betting shops swamping local high streets and, despite the Tories and Lib Dems voting down my amendments to the localism bill, building support for a change in the law.
The point is that we shouldn’t be afraid of the particular and the local. This is where people live their lives. It is when discussions about justice and equality become abstracted from everyday life that they lose their persuasive power and political purchase. Labour was founded as a movement to civilise capitalism – what Blue Labour reminds us is that this must take place in workplaces, in neighbourhoods and in civil society as well as rooms in Whitehall.
LABOUR TRADITIONS
Blue Labour is not a panacea. It has its weaknesses. Some worry that it is overly nostalgic about the past, rather than projecting something modern and forward looking. That it hankers for a world that has gone and isn’t coming back. Others question whether it has enough to say about self-improvement – that it gives the impression that people should be satisfied with their lot, rather than encouraged to strive for something better.
These have to be taken seriously and worked through. But even here we should be careful not to repeat some mistakes from our recent past. Labour always needs a forward-looking agenda, but we lose touch with people when we fetishize change for its own sake. When people see their job become more insecure, when they see their family less and when they feel they no longer know their neighbours, this doesn’t always feel like progress – and we need to show we understand that. Similarly, nothing could be closer to my own heart than helping people from poorer backgrounds fulfil their goals and realise their talents. But there is a difference between ambition and greed. The CEO’s pay matters if they take home millions while their cleaners are not paid enough to get by. We should stand for aspiration but not the pursuit of money for its own sake.
Nor should Blue Labour be feared as a Trojan horse for something else. The debate it has started is an opportunity to reconnect with some of the ideas our party was founded upon, after thirteen years in government and a political project that challenged many of the Party’s traditions and shibboleths. We should take its arguments on their merits, rather than mistake it for something it is not, or dismiss it on the basis of an ill-conceived name.
In the foreword to the Blue Labour eBook Ed writes of Labour as ‘a party of overlapping traditions and tendencies’. He is absolutely right. Labour itself has always been a coalition – of trade unionists, Fabians, Christian socialists, NGOs and local community activists, human rights campaigners, environmentalists, feminists and anti-racists. These traditions compete and coalesce with one another, enriching our party in the process. Blue Labour has something important to offer, alongside our tradition defence of individual rights and a robust defence of the modern state. Let’s engage with it in that spirit.
BLUE LABOUR REDISCOVERS LABOUR'S ROOTS
David Lammy MP, has written a brilliant summary about the thinking around ‘Blue Labour’ and what it has to offer the future direction of the Labour Party. I was struck by the fact that the ‘Blue Labour’ prospectus articulates the Derby Labour Party’s neighbourhood agenda and outreach campaigning.
Helen Goodman’s critique of Blue Labour is an important moment. It brings out into the open a debate that has been taking place in private conversations and seminar rooms for months now. The Blue Labour eBook, which I contributed to, was an attempt to provoke a debate that would contribute to the renewal of the Party. Helen picked up the conversation in her response and I want to continue it here in the same spirit.
Helen frames her response to the eBook around four anecdotes. I would like to start with a short story of my own. It is of my mother – a quiet but inspirational woman who arrived in Britain at the tail end of the Windrush generation. Born in a small village on the banks of the Demerara River, Guyana, she was the first of seven children, raised solely by her mother who worked as a seamstress to make ends meet.
Aged 32, she landed at Gatwick in 1970 to a routine strip search. Swapping the calm of rural Guyana for the chaos of the London metropolis was a culture shock to say the least. Just two years on from Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, Britain was far from a picture of racial harmony. Nor were the odds stacked in favour of a woman entering the workforce without much in the way either of money or formal qualifications.
My mother was not a political animal but she was a Labour voter through and through. At a time when comics would routinely insult black people on television, she relied on the Left to help her stand up to racists and bigots. When my father left, she became responsible for looking after five children alone. The same people who fought against racism were those who also spoke up for single mothers. They were the counterweight to Tory politicians and their friends in the media.
Meanwhile, there were bills to be paid. At times mum did three jobs to get by and was, of course, a beneficiary of the Equal Pay Act, passed in the same year she arrived in Britain. Like countless others, she trusted socialists to stick up for her when the child benefit was frozen. She relied on public libraries to nourish the minds of her children. She watched proudly as the first generation in our family was given the opportunity to go to university. Later in life she was cared for wonderfully by the NHS, which treated her with dignity and compassion. No-one in our family needs reminding about the value of individual rights, or that the state can be an enormous force for good. As Helen says, 1945 was an historic victory, not a wrong turning.
LIBERTY, EQUALITY…FRATERNITY
The question begged by Blue Labour is what this inheritance of social liberalism and a robust defence of the welfare state leaves out. What are its limitations? For me the answer is that Labour stands not just for liberty and equality, but also fraternity. Something important exists in between the state and the individual – our relationships with one another.
When my mother arrived in Britain it was not just the state that stepped in to help her. A friendly trade union official from NUPE helped her into a course of learning that made it possible to find work that could provide for a family. The local church provided a sense of fellowship and community. Friends and neighbours looked after her children while she juggled life as a single mother. When she was ill doctors in the NHS treated her illness, but Macmillan nurses also provided invaluable care. As she grew older she relied more and more on her children, just as we had once relied upon her. All these relationships made the difference to her life. This is what Blue Labour is trying to get at.
The focus on relationships explains why, despite the overlap with strands of liberalism, Labour is not a liberal party. Unlike the Lib Dems we do not see people simply as free-floating individuals. Our politics is not orientated towards an unrealisable version of freedom where we can each do whatever we please. Instead Labour politics is built on the idea that people are social beings, dependent on one another. We are not born free but dependent on our parents. As we grow older, a good life depends in large part on family, friends, neighbours, colleagues and strangers. We never stop being mutually dependent. How we treat each other matters.
Because relationships are so important to people’s lives they must be important to our politics. Labour, for example, needs a story about the family. Of course we care passionately about women’s rights and children’s rights but that’s not the end of the story. We have to seriously raise the volume and the focus more on the value of strong relationships between adults, good parenting and care for the elderly. We are at our best when we speak to that ethic of care, as well as a language of liberation. We can’t be satisfied by talking about children in care and retirement homes – the workings of the state. There is just more to it than that.
In the workplace there should be the same emphasis. Of course we stand for workers rights – on pay, on leave, on flexible working and the rest. But if the conversation between employers and employees never gets further than the right to strike versus the right to sack an employee then we have big problems. The reason worker representation on company boards is such a powerful idea is that it holds out the promise of constructive, respectful relationships based on give and take. Workers taking responsibility for the success of firms. Firms taking responsibility for the well-being of workers. Again, it’s not just about the state telling employers and employees what to do. It’s also about the quality of the relationships between employers and employees within firms.
In other areas of life, the principle holds. We support free speech but that doesn’t mean we have given up on the idea of a society with civility and mutual respect. We support personal and religious freedom but we also understand the importance of an integrated and harmonious society. Too easily a language of individual rights can regress into a shrill and anti-social individualism. Labour politics fails when these ties we have to one another fray. If families disintegrate, if workers do not have a voice, if neighbourhoods are divided and strangers fear and mistrust one another then our politics is stone dead. We end up willing the ends for social justice, but the means are impossible. People retreat into their own lives and any sense of the common good disappears.
Blue Labour’s insight is that solidarity is both important and fragile. It must be constantly worked at. We can’t just wag our finger and demand that people be good to one another, we have to take seriously the things that make mutual respect more difficult than it should be. This means listening to people and what they tell us. So when someone says that immigration is a problem in their area then the instant response cannot be to simply brand them a racist. Our job is to question why neighbour is set against neighbour in the scramble for scarce homes, jobs and services. Rather than judging people for airing their concerns we should be interested in how to ameliorate the things that cause these tensions.
Likewise when someone says that the family has come under pressure since women have entered the workforce we shouldn’t simply shout them down. Rather, we should ask how we can help families adapt to a world in which women rightfully have the chance to pursue their ambitions and earn a living. In particular, we might consider how we help fathers take on more of the caring at a time when mothers do more of the earning. Feminism and ‘the family’ don’t have to be at odds. We often slip into the same trap where faith is concerned. When a person or an organisation draws their values from a particular faith then the reaction cannot simply be to dismiss them. We can disagree with faith groups on abortion but still join together to campaign for a cap on lending rates, or against the commercialisation on childhood.
There is, of course, still racism, sexism and religious bigotry to be found in Britain. The battles our party has fought against discrimination of all kinds have been historic and hard won and they are not over yet. But when we decline the opportunity to enter into conversations about issues like the family, immigration or faith we undermine our own political project. If Blue Labour reminds us of this then it has already achieved a great deal. We are not the Lib Dems, let’s not act like them.
BIG SOCIETY…BIG BUSINESS
If one half of the coalition doesn’t understand the importance of fraternity, the other half forgets that it should apply in markets too. Helen says the catastrophic error of the Big Society is that it does not understand that the voluntary and public sectors often work in partnership. Absolutely. Ask any Safer Neighbourhoods team. But this is only half the story. The other fundamental weakness of the Big Society is that it has nothing to say about the market place. ‘Big Society not Big Government’ says Cameron, leaving Big Business out of the picture altogether. The Blue Labour essays are an attempt to address this. They are an antidote to what Ed called the ‘take what you can’ mentality in his speech on social responsibility.
Blue Labour stands opposed to anyone being used simply as a means to an end. That explains why employers should not treat staff as commodities to be exploited, but rather human beings to be respected. People should have a voice at work and be paid a wage they can live on. It explains the opposition to loan sharks who exploit people’s poverty, enticing people into debt that they will never be able to escape from. It explains the offence at companies who target advertising at other people’s children, manipulating young girls and boys. It explains why people were so angry at Jack Straw’s revelation that insurance companies are selling personal information to accident lawyers behind people’s backs. It explains why the public are so angry that the banks were able to hold the country to ransom.
This is what the Tories do not understand when they talk about people making ‘free choices’ in markets. A choice between eviction and a loan shark is no real choice. A choice between two bad jobs is no real choice. A choice about whether to let banks go down with millions of people’s savings, or to bail out the richest people in the country is no real choice. None of these reflect relationships built on give and take: they are about the powerful bullying and exploiting the powerless. Helen is clear that none of this will change without a role for government. I agree, as I expect every contributor to the Blue Labour eBook would. Collective action is how we stand up to those who profit at the expense of the rest of society. We do it together, through trade unions, cooperatives, consumer movements, civil society campaigns and of course, government at national and international level.
But collective action is not easy. Again we have to be careful how we build the trust and the solidarity and the momentum to take on those who abuse their power in the marketplace. Finger-wagging will not work here either. We have to find connections with people’s lives as they live them. There is a national campaign for a living wage because, first of all, there was a specific, tangible campaign against certain firms in the City of London. Momentum grew from there as people joined the dots between excess in the City and poverty for those who cleaned the offices of the ‘masters of the universe’.
Stella Creasy is running a brilliant campaign not just against loan sharking in general, but also some credit companies in particular. It gives the campaign a sense of vibrancy and a practical orientation, while the Tories continue to vote measures down in the House. The Billingsgate campaign that Jon Cruddas has been involved in is another good example. One response to the market porters would be to nod sagely and promise to do what we can at the next G20 summit. Another is to campaign for their cause at a local level, as well as pressing for international action.
In my own constituency I have been working hard to prevent Tottenham Hotspur from leaving the area. The more people get involved in that campaign the more the momentum builds for proper representation of fans on the boards of all football clubs. In the local party we are campaigning against betting shops swamping local high streets and, despite the Tories and Lib Dems voting down my amendments to the localism bill, building support for a change in the law.
The point is that we shouldn’t be afraid of the particular and the local. This is where people live their lives. It is when discussions about justice and equality become abstracted from everyday life that they lose their persuasive power and political purchase. Labour was founded as a movement to civilise capitalism – what Blue Labour reminds us is that this must take place in workplaces, in neighbourhoods and in civil society as well as rooms in Whitehall.
LABOUR TRADITIONS
Blue Labour is not a panacea. It has its weaknesses. Some worry that it is overly nostalgic about the past, rather than projecting something modern and forward looking. That it hankers for a world that has gone and isn’t coming back. Others question whether it has enough to say about self-improvement – that it gives the impression that people should be satisfied with their lot, rather than encouraged to strive for something better.
These have to be taken seriously and worked through. But even here we should be careful not to repeat some mistakes from our recent past. Labour always needs a forward-looking agenda, but we lose touch with people when we fetishize change for its own sake. When people see their job become more insecure, when they see their family less and when they feel they no longer know their neighbours, this doesn’t always feel like progress – and we need to show we understand that. Similarly, nothing could be closer to my own heart than helping people from poorer backgrounds fulfil their goals and realise their talents. But there is a difference between ambition and greed. The CEO’s pay matters if they take home millions while their cleaners are not paid enough to get by. We should stand for aspiration but not the pursuit of money for its own sake.
Nor should Blue Labour be feared as a Trojan horse for something else. The debate it has started is an opportunity to reconnect with some of the ideas our party was founded upon, after thirteen years in government and a political project that challenged many of the Party’s traditions and shibboleths. We should take its arguments on their merits, rather than mistake it for something it is not, or dismiss it on the basis of an ill-conceived name.
In the foreword to the Blue Labour eBook Ed writes of Labour as ‘a party of overlapping traditions and tendencies’. He is absolutely right. Labour itself has always been a coalition – of trade unionists, Fabians, Christian socialists, NGOs and local community activists, human rights campaigners, environmentalists, feminists and anti-racists. These traditions compete and coalesce with one another, enriching our party in the process. Blue Labour has something important to offer, alongside our tradition defence of individual rights and a robust defence of the modern state. Let’s engage with it in that spirit.
Helen Goodman’s critique of Blue Labour is an important moment. It brings out into the open a debate that has been taking place in private conversations and seminar rooms for months now. The Blue Labour eBook, which I contributed to, was an attempt to provoke a debate that would contribute to the renewal of the Party. Helen picked up the conversation in her response and I want to continue it here in the same spirit.
Helen frames her response to the eBook around four anecdotes. I would like to start with a short story of my own. It is of my mother – a quiet but inspirational woman who arrived in Britain at the tail end of the Windrush generation. Born in a small village on the banks of the Demerara River, Guyana, she was the first of seven children, raised solely by her mother who worked as a seamstress to make ends meet.
Aged 32, she landed at Gatwick in 1970 to a routine strip search. Swapping the calm of rural Guyana for the chaos of the London metropolis was a culture shock to say the least. Just two years on from Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, Britain was far from a picture of racial harmony. Nor were the odds stacked in favour of a woman entering the workforce without much in the way either of money or formal qualifications.
My mother was not a political animal but she was a Labour voter through and through. At a time when comics would routinely insult black people on television, she relied on the Left to help her stand up to racists and bigots. When my father left, she became responsible for looking after five children alone. The same people who fought against racism were those who also spoke up for single mothers. They were the counterweight to Tory politicians and their friends in the media.
Meanwhile, there were bills to be paid. At times mum did three jobs to get by and was, of course, a beneficiary of the Equal Pay Act, passed in the same year she arrived in Britain. Like countless others, she trusted socialists to stick up for her when the child benefit was frozen. She relied on public libraries to nourish the minds of her children. She watched proudly as the first generation in our family was given the opportunity to go to university. Later in life she was cared for wonderfully by the NHS, which treated her with dignity and compassion. No-one in our family needs reminding about the value of individual rights, or that the state can be an enormous force for good. As Helen says, 1945 was an historic victory, not a wrong turning.
LIBERTY, EQUALITY…FRATERNITY
The question begged by Blue Labour is what this inheritance of social liberalism and a robust defence of the welfare state leaves out. What are its limitations? For me the answer is that Labour stands not just for liberty and equality, but also fraternity. Something important exists in between the state and the individual – our relationships with one another.
When my mother arrived in Britain it was not just the state that stepped in to help her. A friendly trade union official from NUPE helped her into a course of learning that made it possible to find work that could provide for a family. The local church provided a sense of fellowship and community. Friends and neighbours looked after her children while she juggled life as a single mother. When she was ill doctors in the NHS treated her illness, but Macmillan nurses also provided invaluable care. As she grew older she relied more and more on her children, just as we had once relied upon her. All these relationships made the difference to her life. This is what Blue Labour is trying to get at.
The focus on relationships explains why, despite the overlap with strands of liberalism, Labour is not a liberal party. Unlike the Lib Dems we do not see people simply as free-floating individuals. Our politics is not orientated towards an unrealisable version of freedom where we can each do whatever we please. Instead Labour politics is built on the idea that people are social beings, dependent on one another. We are not born free but dependent on our parents. As we grow older, a good life depends in large part on family, friends, neighbours, colleagues and strangers. We never stop being mutually dependent. How we treat each other matters.
Because relationships are so important to people’s lives they must be important to our politics. Labour, for example, needs a story about the family. Of course we care passionately about women’s rights and children’s rights but that’s not the end of the story. We have to seriously raise the volume and the focus more on the value of strong relationships between adults, good parenting and care for the elderly. We are at our best when we speak to that ethic of care, as well as a language of liberation. We can’t be satisfied by talking about children in care and retirement homes – the workings of the state. There is just more to it than that.
In the workplace there should be the same emphasis. Of course we stand for workers rights – on pay, on leave, on flexible working and the rest. But if the conversation between employers and employees never gets further than the right to strike versus the right to sack an employee then we have big problems. The reason worker representation on company boards is such a powerful idea is that it holds out the promise of constructive, respectful relationships based on give and take. Workers taking responsibility for the success of firms. Firms taking responsibility for the well-being of workers. Again, it’s not just about the state telling employers and employees what to do. It’s also about the quality of the relationships between employers and employees within firms.
In other areas of life, the principle holds. We support free speech but that doesn’t mean we have given up on the idea of a society with civility and mutual respect. We support personal and religious freedom but we also understand the importance of an integrated and harmonious society. Too easily a language of individual rights can regress into a shrill and anti-social individualism. Labour politics fails when these ties we have to one another fray. If families disintegrate, if workers do not have a voice, if neighbourhoods are divided and strangers fear and mistrust one another then our politics is stone dead. We end up willing the ends for social justice, but the means are impossible. People retreat into their own lives and any sense of the common good disappears.
Blue Labour’s insight is that solidarity is both important and fragile. It must be constantly worked at. We can’t just wag our finger and demand that people be good to one another, we have to take seriously the things that make mutual respect more difficult than it should be. This means listening to people and what they tell us. So when someone says that immigration is a problem in their area then the instant response cannot be to simply brand them a racist. Our job is to question why neighbour is set against neighbour in the scramble for scarce homes, jobs and services. Rather than judging people for airing their concerns we should be interested in how to ameliorate the things that cause these tensions.
Likewise when someone says that the family has come under pressure since women have entered the workforce we shouldn’t simply shout them down. Rather, we should ask how we can help families adapt to a world in which women rightfully have the chance to pursue their ambitions and earn a living. In particular, we might consider how we help fathers take on more of the caring at a time when mothers do more of the earning. Feminism and ‘the family’ don’t have to be at odds. We often slip into the same trap where faith is concerned. When a person or an organisation draws their values from a particular faith then the reaction cannot simply be to dismiss them. We can disagree with faith groups on abortion but still join together to campaign for a cap on lending rates, or against the commercialisation on childhood.
There is, of course, still racism, sexism and religious bigotry to be found in Britain. The battles our party has fought against discrimination of all kinds have been historic and hard won and they are not over yet. But when we decline the opportunity to enter into conversations about issues like the family, immigration or faith we undermine our own political project. If Blue Labour reminds us of this then it has already achieved a great deal. We are not the Lib Dems, let’s not act like them.
BIG SOCIETY…BIG BUSINESS
If one half of the coalition doesn’t understand the importance of fraternity, the other half forgets that it should apply in markets too. Helen says the catastrophic error of the Big Society is that it does not understand that the voluntary and public sectors often work in partnership. Absolutely. Ask any Safer Neighbourhoods team. But this is only half the story. The other fundamental weakness of the Big Society is that it has nothing to say about the market place. ‘Big Society not Big Government’ says Cameron, leaving Big Business out of the picture altogether. The Blue Labour essays are an attempt to address this. They are an antidote to what Ed called the ‘take what you can’ mentality in his speech on social responsibility.
Blue Labour stands opposed to anyone being used simply as a means to an end. That explains why employers should not treat staff as commodities to be exploited, but rather human beings to be respected. People should have a voice at work and be paid a wage they can live on. It explains the opposition to loan sharks who exploit people’s poverty, enticing people into debt that they will never be able to escape from. It explains the offence at companies who target advertising at other people’s children, manipulating young girls and boys. It explains why people were so angry at Jack Straw’s revelation that insurance companies are selling personal information to accident lawyers behind people’s backs. It explains why the public are so angry that the banks were able to hold the country to ransom.
This is what the Tories do not understand when they talk about people making ‘free choices’ in markets. A choice between eviction and a loan shark is no real choice. A choice between two bad jobs is no real choice. A choice about whether to let banks go down with millions of people’s savings, or to bail out the richest people in the country is no real choice. None of these reflect relationships built on give and take: they are about the powerful bullying and exploiting the powerless. Helen is clear that none of this will change without a role for government. I agree, as I expect every contributor to the Blue Labour eBook would. Collective action is how we stand up to those who profit at the expense of the rest of society. We do it together, through trade unions, cooperatives, consumer movements, civil society campaigns and of course, government at national and international level.
But collective action is not easy. Again we have to be careful how we build the trust and the solidarity and the momentum to take on those who abuse their power in the marketplace. Finger-wagging will not work here either. We have to find connections with people’s lives as they live them. There is a national campaign for a living wage because, first of all, there was a specific, tangible campaign against certain firms in the City of London. Momentum grew from there as people joined the dots between excess in the City and poverty for those who cleaned the offices of the ‘masters of the universe’.
Stella Creasy is running a brilliant campaign not just against loan sharking in general, but also some credit companies in particular. It gives the campaign a sense of vibrancy and a practical orientation, while the Tories continue to vote measures down in the House. The Billingsgate campaign that Jon Cruddas has been involved in is another good example. One response to the market porters would be to nod sagely and promise to do what we can at the next G20 summit. Another is to campaign for their cause at a local level, as well as pressing for international action.
In my own constituency I have been working hard to prevent Tottenham Hotspur from leaving the area. The more people get involved in that campaign the more the momentum builds for proper representation of fans on the boards of all football clubs. In the local party we are campaigning against betting shops swamping local high streets and, despite the Tories and Lib Dems voting down my amendments to the localism bill, building support for a change in the law.
The point is that we shouldn’t be afraid of the particular and the local. This is where people live their lives. It is when discussions about justice and equality become abstracted from everyday life that they lose their persuasive power and political purchase. Labour was founded as a movement to civilise capitalism – what Blue Labour reminds us is that this must take place in workplaces, in neighbourhoods and in civil society as well as rooms in Whitehall.
LABOUR TRADITIONS
Blue Labour is not a panacea. It has its weaknesses. Some worry that it is overly nostalgic about the past, rather than projecting something modern and forward looking. That it hankers for a world that has gone and isn’t coming back. Others question whether it has enough to say about self-improvement – that it gives the impression that people should be satisfied with their lot, rather than encouraged to strive for something better.
These have to be taken seriously and worked through. But even here we should be careful not to repeat some mistakes from our recent past. Labour always needs a forward-looking agenda, but we lose touch with people when we fetishize change for its own sake. When people see their job become more insecure, when they see their family less and when they feel they no longer know their neighbours, this doesn’t always feel like progress – and we need to show we understand that. Similarly, nothing could be closer to my own heart than helping people from poorer backgrounds fulfil their goals and realise their talents. But there is a difference between ambition and greed. The CEO’s pay matters if they take home millions while their cleaners are not paid enough to get by. We should stand for aspiration but not the pursuit of money for its own sake.
Nor should Blue Labour be feared as a Trojan horse for something else. The debate it has started is an opportunity to reconnect with some of the ideas our party was founded upon, after thirteen years in government and a political project that challenged many of the Party’s traditions and shibboleths. We should take its arguments on their merits, rather than mistake it for something it is not, or dismiss it on the basis of an ill-conceived name.
In the foreword to the Blue Labour eBook Ed writes of Labour as ‘a party of overlapping traditions and tendencies’. He is absolutely right. Labour itself has always been a coalition – of trade unionists, Fabians, Christian socialists, NGOs and local community activists, human rights campaigners, environmentalists, feminists and anti-racists. These traditions compete and coalesce with one another, enriching our party in the process. Blue Labour has something important to offer, alongside our tradition defence of individual rights and a robust defence of the modern state. Let’s engage with it in that spirit.
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