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Forward, not back Following
Labour’s third election victory, Peter Hunt argues that mutuality
should be at the heart of modern socialism Months
after the ballots closed, memories of the campaign remain fresh. Those of us
with the experience of several general elections will have been struck by how
under-whelmed the electorate was with Labour; how hard it was for us to inspire
any real enthusiasm for the task at hand. How much time did we spend on the
doorstep trying to convince doubters that they should vote for us? We listed our
government’s achievements, told them how we were making things better. But how
many of us ended up reverting to our most persuasive yet ultimately lamest
argument – that we were not as bad as the alternative? Who ever imagined that
winning a third term would be like this? After
eight years in power, the problem is significant – we still don’t know what
new Labour is for. Do we really have a bold vision of the Britain that people
can believe in, or do we just offer different management? Simply put, there is
no narrative to new Labour, no story to tell. Unfortunately, there never has
been. I don’t wish to be mean-spirited about this. I too, experienced the wave
of optimism, the spirit of 1997, which brought Labour to power in the first
place. Back then, it was more than just about getting rid of the Tories, we
believed it was a new beginning for the country. But
what type of new beginning? Even then, we failed to articulate much more than
that the election was really about an unspecified better future. We had specific
pledges, yet the closest we came to developing a theme was the inference that we
were ‘cleaner’ than the corrupt and discredited Tories. The electorate was
mainly left to fill in the blanks. Any
salesman realises that they must know their product and believe in its
properties if they are to succeed in convincing others of its worth.
Doorstepping for Labour in the election was frustrating because the good things
we know about our government don’t really impress voters, who are more
interested in themes and directions than specifics. What we are selling must be
simple, attractive and realistic at the same time. But we must also want to
believe in it ourselves. So far we have been blessed with a hopeless opposition.
This is luck. Now, we have a wonderful opportunity in our third term to put back
what has been missing from the first eight years. Why
we are Labour Active
Labour Party members are attracted to the Party because they believe it is a
vehicle for delivering social justice. They believe that Labour governments
should do their best to give this to the country. For many years, in the minds
of Labour activists, this has translated into a desire for government
interventions that seek to deliver equality of outcome. The Labour of the Webbs
and Shaw is still alive. It is odd that ideas rooted in the early 20th century
were never properly updated to account for our advanced society. Instead,
traditional Labour still wants a strong role for state and municipal authorities
in ensuring fairness, by providing services directly. New Labour does not. In
the name of quality and efficiency, private businesses have continued to
encroach on the traditional role of government service providers. The
fundamental weakness is that this ignores the real need for public
accountability, which has usually been transferred to unelected regulators. In
seeking to be ‘new’, Labour has thrown out its old baggage to be replaced by
‘what works’. At the core of Labour philosophy, the changing of clause IV
may have stripped away outmoded and often failing mechanisms for achieving
equality, but it left a void in the beating heart of Labour. This is fine for
those who still fear the advance of staring-eyed state socialism, but it is not
enough for those of us who need to believe in what we are doing, and draw our
motivation from that. No wonder Party membership has fallen through the floor.
Evidently, full-blooded socialism is a chimera that never made it into any
Labour government. But we should not continue to fear redefining it. We must
capture a sense of our Party’s purpose and genuinely try to put it into a
modern context, rather than dealing with it as if it were an embarrassing
elderly relative. The
Conservatives did better at defining their philosophy over two decades of
government. The Tory message that individuals mattered more than society was
attractive to many because it was aspirational, rewarding and simple. Everyone
knew what Thatcher stood for. It was precisely why we hated her. But her
approach remained popular with many voters. Simplistic and selfish though it
was, it touched on an innate desire of people to feel they had more control of
their lives. The popularity of her privatisations and housing sell-offs showed
that there is a deep-rooted appetite for ownership and control in our country.
We should not ignore this, but neither should we imitate it. In the cold light
of day, the scorecard reads that Thatcher did indeed change society. Has Tony
Blair? Labour
needs to stop apologising for being socialist – at least to ourselves – and
instead try and define what this means in a relevant and useful way. It may be
that social ownership is the key. So
why don’t we just go back to what most people understand to be traditional
Labour? The answer is simple, if a little painful for the remaining true old
Labour believers – it does not work. Indeed, every Labour leadership – both
government and opposition – has found the same thing to be true. Some have
ignored it and simply acted pragmatically, but only new Labour has finally
admitted that it doesn’t work and shed any continuing loyalty to it. The
problem that remains is that nothing has replaced the old statist orthodoxy,
which shied away from rewarding successful individuals and levelled down the
average in pursuit of equality. When new Labour tried to fill the gap, it came
up with a selection box of unsatisfying initiatives that made third way,
stakeholding, citizenship, localism and so forth look like more privatisation
than anything else. The language is attractive but the substance has been
lacking. No-one really knows what this is all about. It need not be like this.
There are ideas on the left that could form the basis for an attractive
narrative for our government. If we can place our Labour values into this, we
can create a story that is every bit as attractive as Tory neoconservatism was
in the 1980s and 1990s. Socialist
values So
if ‘socialism’ can motivate our members, can it be made attractive to
voters? Clearly, it would be absurd to suggest that we should seek to base our
appeal on ideology when there is no evidence that this is in demand. We do,
however, need a narrative that is rooted in our socialist values. A new
socialism is required that is radical in its application and has real substance.
Not one that places the state in people’s faces, one that really puts the
people in control. In 1999, a Guardian editorial posed the question, ‘Could
mutualisation do for Labour what privatisation did for the Tories – give it a
lasting political legacy?’ The
growth of mutuality in this country over the last few years is evidence of a
quiet revolution. The mutualisation of a range of public services, from leisure
to health, housing to childcare, shows how it is genuinely possible to re-engage
the end user, the citizen, with the services they need. The success of new
mutual community businesses, such as football supporter trusts, show that
ordinary people, properly motivated, are prepared to join and contribute to
collective enterprises. There
are now over 110 football supporter trusts, with 75,000 new members; 31 NHS
foundation trusts so far with many more in the pipeline and a membership already
exceeding 400,000; 20 new producer-led GP out-of-hours mutuals; the prospect of
large social housing mutuals following stock transfers; new mutuals in child
care through Sure Start programmes; and there’s continued growth in leisure
service mutuals. In all, there are already more that half a million more citizen
members of new mutuals – a real growth of co-operative organisations and
membership. What makes them special is that their members are entrusted with the
social ownership of these bodies. Ownership
matters To
be able to engage ordinary people in large enterprises, it is essential to
foster a kind of ownership that enables citizens to feel that institutions in
which they have a stake are run on their behalf, and not for someone else’s
vested interest. Over 150 years ago, progressive thinkers invented mutual
structures – membership organisations that were committed to the members they
served, often very large sections of the population. Many of these mutuals
continue to thrive today, playing a distinct role in the market place. In
a modern context, this very structure is ideally suited for the provision of
many public enterprises. Modern community mutuals can include all stakeholders,
including government, by making management accountable to a board comprising
employee, customer and government representatives, along with other
stakeholders. Of course managers must have the freedom to make tough decisions,
but this structure of accountability ensures that these decisions are made with
the right interests in mind. As
well as addressing the weakness of the decision-making process in the
traditional company structure, these models also provide many benefits in their
own right, such as local community control, a constitutional role for employees,
the encouragement of citizenship and the promotion of long-term thinking in the
interests of the community. They achieve the basic objectives of efficiency and
flexibility, but they also connect with their stakeholders far more effectively
than many proprietary businesses. There is a host of examples of mutual
enterprises in Britain (not to mention Europe and north America) taking on some
of the old functions of the state far more efficiently and cost-effectively than
the private sector ever could. Who
cares anyway? This
does beg the question of whether people really care about these things. The
public can be offered all the opportunities in the world to participate, but
these opportunities are worthless if people can’t be bothered to use them.
Gordon Brown said recently: ‘One of the challenges we face is to find new ways
of giving power away, so that local people can take decisions about their
communities. Mutuality provides a practical way of ensuring that citizens have
rights to go with their responsibilities and are enabled to play an active role
in the decisions that affect their lives.’ The
aim of mutualism in public enterprise is to blend the entrepreneurialism and
responsiveness of the private sector with the social purpose of the public
sector. This is achieved partly by giving a number of stakeholder groups an
ownership stake, thus by-passing the tendency – manifested in both private and
public sector organisations – to serve only one entrenched interest group, and
partly through the granting of extra freedoms from day-to-day interference from
government. Staff,
users and local specialists would have more of an input in deciding how
standards could be improved and the particular needs of local communities met.
This is done by making management accountable to an elected board, comprising
employee, customer and government representatives. It is how it works in the
examples above. The
honest answer to the question of whether people care is ‘sometimes’. It is
fair to say that if things are running smoothly there is a natural tendency to
leave well alone. However, when things go wrong everybody has a view on how to
fix it, or at least an interest in berating those charged with sorting out the
problems – ask any commuter. Once a crisis passes, interest wanes.
Consequently, few people want to engage with any issue all of the time. We
should probably be suspicious of those that do. But
one of the main causes of things going wrong or becoming unpopular is that
providers are out of touch with their users. Keeping in touch with a
cross-section of these important people, and hopefully not always the same ones,
should be a good idea in principle. Representation American
independence fighters famously wanted representation in return for their taxes.
They didn’t all want to be MPs, but they needed the opportunity to be
consulted through their representatives, with the sanction of changing them if
they felt the need. It is the same today with public services, but parliament is
too far removed from the provision of these services to be a meaningful body for
accountability. The
things people care about from time to time, such as hospital waiting lists,
residential care and transport systems, are those that have become too personal
to be satisfactorily dealt with by distant politicians. MPs don’t run
hospitals or trains, but the public pay for them and want from time to time to
influence those that take the decisions that affect them. Consultation without
rights is just a favour – which can be withdrawn as easily as it is given. The
public must feel that they have the right to demand to be heard. The only way to
guarantee this in a capitalist society is to confer rights of ownership on
individuals. Ownership rights in our society are indisputable and offer the only
guarantees that stake-holding is going to be meaning- ful. The time has come for
real community ownership of our public enterprises. Social
justice Soon
enough we will be back to the doorsteps again. Before then we have the
opportunity to use the next few years to turn the language of new Labour into
something meaningful, relevant and attractive, but most of all real. There has
never been a better time to turn to this co-operative socialism. It is rooted in
Labour values. It is not spin or jargon loaded. It simply works. More than that,
it gives us something higher to work for – the genuine empowerment of our
citizens. It establishes a storyline by which we can be judged. It will help our
members to feel part of a movement again and will allow voters to understand
what Labour is for, how it wants to change society. Labour has a real chance to
deliver social justice by sharing power with the people. Peter
Hunt is National Secretary of the Co-operative Party. This article was
originally published in Renewal |