unitary authority elections

Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue: is ‘Blue Labour’ part of the left response to the rise of UKIP?

/ inlogov / Leave a comment

Martin Stott

It is a commonplace for commentators to say that the recent success of UKIP in the shire elections poses a threat to Labour as well as the Tories. There is some truth in this, but a strand of thinking in the Labour Party has been grappling with some of the issues UKIP poses from a left perspective for several years. This is referred to as ‘Blue Labour’.

Essentially it is a critique of both Old and New Labour. It understands that the relentless progress of the last Labour Governments caused many Labour supporters to feel as if their communities had been left soulless. It recognises that Labour developed a top-down style of government and is critical of its neo-liberal view of the world – globalisation understood entirely on terms set by finance capital. Instead it focuses on a different approach to socialism, stressing communitarianism, self reliance and mutuality.

The debate has been driven by the credibility of many of those leading it, most notably the Labour MP and Milliband’s policy review chief, John Cruddas and cultural studies professor, Jonathan Rutherford. They set out the Blue Labour stall thus:

“…today Labour is viewed by many as the party of the market and the state, not of society. It has become disconnected from the ordinary everyday lives of the people. In England Labour no longer knows who it represents; its people are everyone and no one. It champions humanity in general but no one in particular. It favours multi-culturalism but suspects the popular symbols and iconography of Englishness. It claims to be the party of values, but nothing specific. Over the past decade it has failed to give form to a common life, to speak for it and defend it against the forces of unaccountable corporate power and state intrusion”.

A lot of people on the left can relate to that and the ‘Blue Labour’ argument is essentially that the loss by Labour of over five million votes between 1997 and 2010 is a reflection of this, encapsulated in Tony Blair’s famous 2004 comment “Leave the past to those who live in it”.

The problem with that mind-set is that this view of Labour supporters certainly does resonate with UKIP recruits from Labour. Recent focus groups of UKIP supporters when, after rehearsing a lengthy catalogue of things they didn’t like were asked what they did like about Britain, reportedly responded, ‘The past’. Cruddas’s summary of the trajectory of New Labour under Blair is:

“At its best New Labour encompassed both the progressive and the traditional, captured in Tony Blair’s, early recognition of the need for a ‘modern patriotism’. Over time however, it became all about the ‘progressive new’. By the end it embraced a dystopian destructive neo-liberalism cut loose from the traditions and history of Labour”.

What ‘Blue Labour’ is trying to articulate is a direction of travel that is different from a ‘progressive’ politics that uncritically embraces globalisation, neo-liberalism, consumerism and a market economy that leaves great swathes of the population behind and whose guiding principles were graphically exposed by the banking crisis of 2008.

By contrast, the current Government is a constant source of dismay to its supporters as it takes its admiration of all things ‘Blairite’ to new heights, with its attempts to flog off parts of English common life to the highest bidder, forests, waterways, parks, the Post Office, sport and culture, not to mention that national institution, the National Health Service. Hence the mass defections to UKIP from the Tories

By contrast ‘Blue Labour’ is attempting to create a polity through a set of values rooted in relationships – reciprocity, mutuality, solidarity and co-operation rather than the managerial, the bureaucratic and the corporate. It is not just a critique of New Labour though – Blue Labour is not that keen on Old Labour either.

As long ago as 1952, Richard Crossman in an article entitled “Towards a philosophy of Socialism” recognised that the post-war project, the creation of the Welfare State, the triumph of Fabianism, took for granted that politics was the business of maximising general happiness through social planning.

However a welfare state administered centrally in Whitehall sapped the life blood of the Labour Movement. “Before 1945, for hundreds of thousands of active trade unionists and party workers, socialism was a way of life and a vocation”. Now (and this was in 1952!), it seemed that it was exclusively the business of politicians at Westminster acting through an unreformed civil service. Those activists who had previously helped run municipal “gas and water socialism” were given “no vision of new socialist responsibilities”. ‘Blue Labour’ takes a similar view and indeed a deep scepticism of the Welfare State seems to be one of its defining features.

Navigating a credible path between a critique of the Welfare State, hostility to globalisation and neo-conservative economics, and a potentially reactionary nostalgia, is not easy. Labour’s traditions of solidarity, at their best, have been cross-class, cross-generational, cross-gender and cross-national. That is why the bust-ups over immigration prompted by the comments of the original exponent of ‘Blue Labour’ Maurice Glasman (enobled by Ed Miliband in 2011), hurt. It is also true that the ‘flag, faith and family’ tag has more than a hint of not just nationalism, but patriarchy. Some have denounced its perceived conservatism as a ‘Janet and John’ 1950’s style approach to family life. But the Labour Movement has a ‘tradition’ that embraces feminism, internationalism and more recently, multiculturalism. In this regard, ‘Blue Labour’ needs to be a lot more nuanced than current public perception of it.

It has also been criticised for having no coherent economic policy. Certainly talk of limiting the market, bemoaning the “commodification of human beings” and the promotion of regional banks and ‘city parliaments’, doesn’t constitute an economic policy. But unlike the “Big Society”, a shameless Tory ‘borrowing’ of the narratives of community and mutuality, ‘Blue Labour’ is not utterly silent on the market.

Whatever we think of the specific prescriptions that have emerged so far, what we are seeing with ‘Blue Labour’ is a return of something that was repressed under New Labour. Labour is once more talking about class and ideology and from that, some constructive new thinking and a credible response to the UKIP threat, should emerge.

stott

Martin Stott has been an INLOGOV Associate since 2012. He joined INLOGOV after a 25 year career in local government, both as an elected member and as a senior officer.

Responsibility without power: some futures for local government

/ inlogov / Leave a comment

Martin Stott

There was a really good April Fool this year from green think tank the Green Alliance announcing the abolition of the Department for Communities and Local Government. Apart from the clue in the date of the blog, it didn’t take long to realise that it was a jape because of the wonderful comment about how Whitehall didn’t need to guide local government any more as they ‘can’t any longer tell council how to raise or spend money.’ Pull the other one! It’s just as well though that the Green Alliance pranksters didn’t take the opposite tack and instead announce the abolition of local government itself. Plenty of people would have been taken in by that and admittedly probably briefly, panic would have ensued.

This little diversion did bring to mind the recent Capita report ‘Planning into uncertainty; four futures for local government’. It is well worth reflecting on these scenarios as the local elections for county and unitary authorities come round, as none of them make pretty reading, either for prospective new members or particularly, for their political parties. The report author Jonathan Flowers sets out four futures which he terms ‘national delivery’, ‘delivery for place’, ‘local government bypass’ and ‘smaller spider, bigger web’.

stott table apr 13

Source: Capita

The view in the report is one looking back from 2022 and it takes a look at two of the sources of uncertainty that will have a fundamental impact on local government:
• Will the mood of localism continue or will we see a centralising retrenchment?
• Will local government be given more powers and a wider remit or will it be gradually chipped away?
It assumes that there is an ‘austerity decade’ which sees local government cut its costs dramatically over the first five years and ‘how its share of the public purse declined even more in the five years after that’.

From a local government practitioners point of view ‘smaller spider, bigger web’ sounds the most promising and Flowers reports that it is what ‘much of the thinking in local government generally seems to be about’. It is much the most optimistic scenario where as the name suggests, there is a more ‘localised and growing remit for local government’ where local authorities are very much at the centre of managing complexity. With councils needing to be even more in touch with their local communities at ground level in order to maintain a local ecosystem of healthy organisations that are happy and able to work together, elected members assume a kind of community organiser-cum-networker role for their locality. As the report comments it would be a ‘very fulfilling but quite demanding’ role, but with a very limited role for the political parties. Councillors as local champions, not party champions, all the more so if they had their own distributed budget allocations.

The other scenarios have a much more marginal role for councillors. ‘Delivery for place – a centralised and growing role for local government’ sounds promising but the reality of this is ‘local government becomes the head office of a local public service conglomerate’ or to my mind, local administration, not local government. The scenario rather generously assumes the role of members will be ‘an ambiguous one’. Actually it will be a highly technocratic environment. The report finally comes clean admitting ‘As the effective power of members diminishes, the power of the senior officer team and especially the chief executive will grow significantly.’ This scenario builds upon a lot of what the last government had in mind. ‘Local government bypass – a localised declining role for local government’ is described as ‘not a pleasant world for local government’. It is about managing decline. If it is done well and local authorities successfully compete for business against other entities (private sector, third sector, quangos) members will become a bit like non-executive directors. Not a bad place for some, but it won’t require many members and not much store will be set by political skills.

Finally what I suspect many in local government would see as the doomsday scenario, ‘national commissioning’ – a centralised, declining role for local government’. Here, local government lacks the capacity and resources to engage and all kinds of current functions are removed from it, from highways maintenance (to the Highways Agency) to a new national agency for environmental health and trading standards to promote growth by giving a national level playing field for business. As the departure of schools from local authority control demonstrates, this hardly constitutes blue-sky thinking. In this scenario some authorities successfully win local delivery contracts from these national organisations, but quite a few others have virtually disappeared ‘providing democratic services for a group of members who have less and less influence on their area.’ It’s hard to think of a sadder ending.

The report rightly says that all these scenarios are extreme cases and that in practice bits of all four are likely to come to pass. Fair comment, but not a very enticing prospect for prospective members. I’d like to add one further dollop of gloom to the mix. My scenario five. This is ‘local government as deliverer of difficult decisions’. There are plenty of things Whitehall would like to get as far away from Ministerial desks and responsibility as possible, and local government remains a convienient dumping ground for many of them. The most obvious is the whole package of welfare reforms. Under the guise of ‘localisation’, the devolution of difficult decisions about whether to charge benefits recipients council tax or cut services, how to manage budgets when the benefits budget has been devolved minus 10% but with protection for large groups such as pensioners, are already under way. The care of elderly people is another expensive hot potato and as climate change apparently takes hold more rapidly than anticipated, responsibility for expensive flood control and other adaptation measures looks ripe for localisation too. Welcome newly elected members, responsibility without power awaits you.

stott

Martin Stott has been an INLOGOV Associate since 2012. He joined INLOGOV after a 25 year career in local government, both as an elected member and as a senior officer.