Frank Field - An Agenda for Britain

The importance of such memories in deciding how to vote are underplayed by the Party élite, many of whom have little day-to-day contact with voters. For example, most do not ride on buses, their main means of transport being their own private car. The private car, and the need for security, has had a profound impact on the direct link between senior politicians and voters. Some of my constituents remember seeing photographs of Ramsay MacDonald and Stanley Baldwin hailing cabs at the corner of Downing Street and Whitehall. After some Cabinet meetings Attlee would adjourn to a bar on Liverpool Street Station. He would be accompanied there only by his Parliamentary Private Secretary (Roy Jenkins’s father) and they would travel by a Circle line underground train. Such mixing is impossible now and without it senior politicians are dangerously exposed to hearing only what they want to hear.

The Party’s negative image has been compounded by our painfully slow adjustment to Mrs Thatcher’s violent shake-up of the political kaleidoscope. Indeed in some areas the adjustment has still to take place. Many of her changes were to the public’s liking and good. For example, bringing the trade unions within the law, rather than setting a law by which the trade unions agreed to be bound. This Barbara Castle tried to implement and it should have been a Labour reform. Likewise, giving members control over their union ought to have been a Labour reform. However, far from being advocated by Labour, both reforms were bitterly opposed by the Party, and some members have still to accept the new accord. It is no use Labour’s breast swelling with pride now as it claims to be the party fighting vested interests here, there, and everywhere except in respect to the block vote’s operation in Labour Party affairs. Such posturing does not present the image of a party ready for government.

The list could be extended. But the message is clear. Not once since 1979 did Labour break free, leapfrog the Thatcher Government and start setting out its own stall with wares relevant to the new world. Changes were made but only after one, or sometimes two, election defeats. Had the Party embraced the ‘one person–one vote’ principle when it was first proposed this would have been part of Labour’s new stance, rather than a reform seen to be emanating from the SDP. Selling council houses similarly could have been to the Party’s advantage. In Labour’s hands the resources raised would have been used to replenish stock and prevent the rise of the sink estates which now pockmark so much of the country.

But, some will say, look at the opinion polls. Yet in past parliaments the polls predicted future Labour success. Now, with Labour’s enormous lead, the length of time the Conservative Government has been in office, its ability to make a mess of things, all point to a Labour success next time. This is as comfortable a reading of events as it is a misleading one.

However, in a country which appears to many voters to be a one-party state, by-elections and opinion polls have assumed a new role: they have partially replaced the Opposition’s function of harassing the Government. Most Government seats are now unsafe in a by-election. Whilst the electorate enjoys turning out a member of the ruling party at a by-election to express its anger at the latest piece of Government nonsense, this form of protest is limited and, above all, safe, as was evident at the last general election where every seat lost by the Government in the previous Parliament was won back handsomely.

Opinion polls, which now play a crucial part in our democratic process, serve a similar role of giving the Government a rough time. Voters trying to get government policy modified or changed willingly mislead the pollsters. The trouble is that politicians have yet to wake up to what is going on. The polls give voters a chance to double- and sometimes treble-bluff the Government. Clearly, the more they are used in this way the less accurate they are as a guide to how voters might behave two or three years hence at a general election. It would be foolish therefore for Labour, or any party, to read the polls as we might have done in the 1950s or 1960s.

The polls, then, give no accurate guide to what voters will actually do on polling day. Moreover, the long-term socioeconomic trends are against the Party. So what actions should Labour take? Given the seriousness of the situation I believe it imperative for the Party to develop a two-track strategy. The first is to go for an all-out win next time. The second is simultaneously to plan sharing power with the Liberal-Democrats as a serious fall-back position. A contradictory approach? When asked about holding what might be contradictory positions, Jimmy Thomas, a Minister in Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour Government replied that, if you couldn’t ride two horses at once there was no point being part of the circus. And while it is a mistake to think of political life only in terms of the circus there are common elements to both activities.

In planning for an outright win Labour must ask itself the most fundamental question of all: what is it that Labour believes it can and should add to political life that no other party does or can contribute? Once the question of what Labour believes in is asked we are immediately faced by Labour’s black hole. It is a question which has taken a long time to be asked, and even longer to be answered. But now two major political events have swept away the political life-support machinery which had hitherto prevented such a question being even posed.

The first, the collapse of communism, has had a silent but devastasting effect on Labour’s confidence. It is not that many activists wanted a Bolshevik state established in Britain, but rather, that the Soviet régime acted as a beacon for those believing in Utopian politics. Here was an example not only of a Utopian ideal translated into day-to-day practice, but of a superstate motivated by a system of ethical judgement based around rewards – each according to his ability, each according to his needs. The Soviet régime collapsed almost overnight. Labour is taking a much longer time to adjust to the sweeping away of Utopian politics.

Secondly, Labour has at the same time suffered a series of major electoral rebuffs with which the Party has still to come to terms. At first senior party figures believed that the loss of power, while regrettable, was part of a normal course of events in the two-party system. That view is still mightily represented in some parts of the Party hierarchy and expresses itself around the idea that one more heave will restore Labour to power.

The results of the last four elections were not solely about the electorate embracing the Conservative cause. Equally important has been the electorate’s rejection of the kind of socialism Labour was offering. An economy with core industries nationalized, a highly centralized government machine (although not nearly as centralized as the Thatcher Governments proved themselves to be) run on the basis of a compact with the trade unions, is not now the formula for successful electoral politics. Most of the activists in the country know this to be true, but some of the party’s hierarchy is slow to adapt to the political facts of life. The key question is what should replace Labour’s traditional appeal which has so often emphasized institutions rather than values.

This political life-support machinery – of believing that a Utopian solution to British political and economic problems was at hand, and that a swing back to Labour is inevitable – now needs to be switched off. Labour must answer the fundamental question of what it believes in.

In doing so, it must face the reality that, for at least the forseeable future, no party is going to get elected which is against the market economy. Here is the crunch. Is Labour going to embrace the market economy or not? At the moment the Party’s position is ambivalent. Labour mouths statements in support of the market principle but all the Party’s body language speaks of a deep distrust.