An Agenda for Britain. Frank Field
First there is the question of why Labour must get itself into a credible position to challenge for power. I cannot impress enough the importance which the fear of losing power has in checking abuses of government. Take any one week of John Major’s Government’s existence and examples can be found of what I mean. It appears that anything is now permissible and nothing is so serious as to warrant resignation. Being a spectator for the last fourteen years leads me to the conclusion that it is a fear of electoral defeat which is the most powerful check we have in our democratic system. Offering programmes of constitutional change, however exciting they are to the political élite, is no substitute for winning power. Indeed, the constitutional caravan which now meanders over British politics is itself largely a product of Labour’s failure to win power. Without winning power, constitutional plans remain mere plans.
The issue on which I want to focus is Labour’s traditional commitment to the poor and the underdog. For two reasons it is now more not less important to see that these views are effectively represented. It is of course a harder job now. The poor are in a minority, and the terms ‘poor’ and ‘working class’, used for so much of Labour’s existence as if they were synonymous, are no longer.
The poor are out there on their own. I will not stress the figures here; I set them out in the next chapter when I look at the opportunities for Labour which come as a by-product of Tory policy. Few doubt that the gap between the poor and what is called the average family has widened decisively under Mrs Thatcher’s stewardship. It would be surprising if it hadn’t; it was, after all, an object of government policy.
Towards the end of her long life Beatrice Webb was asked what was the most significant change she had observed during her lifetime. Unhesitatingly she replied that it was the disappearance of beggars from Britain’s streets. Beggars are now back in force once again. But they are not an isolated social group. They are the tip of a huge social iceberg. The beggars are part of a continuum embracing literally millions of our fellow citizens, many of whom are hidden from our sight. The Thatcher Government went about the largest redistribution of wealth to the rich that has ever been recorded in this country. As a result of this redistribution, rising unemployment, the reduction in benefits for some and outright abolition for groups of teenagers, we should not be surprised that beggars are now very much in evidence. As Mrs Thatcher might have said, you cannot buck all these moves by government and survive.
Never before have the needs of the poor required greater representation than now, and never before has Labour been less able to fulfil this role. To do so Labour has to win, and that brings us back firmly again to policies which meet people’s aspirations. In the following chapters I deal with this in some detail. Here I wish only to emphasize the importance of a political programme.
Programmes Matter
Elections in the past have of course been won without any definite programme being put forward by the winning side. But since Labour is no longer seen by the majority of the electorate as a serious competitor for power, the importance of a programme to win over new voters is crucial. Only by remoulding itself around a programme which raises hopes and aspirations and is seen to work with, rather than against, the grain of human nature, does the Party stand any chance of increasing its share of the vote at the next election. In creating that chance, policy has a fundamental part to play.
We need here to take a leaf out of Mrs Thatcher’s book. In inducing voters into a new mould, Mrs Thatcher designed a programme targeted to that end. The liberal intelligentsia may have viewed Mrs Thatcher’s Conservative Party with disdain, but large numbers of voters did not. It is often forgotten now, but in 1974 commentators saw Labour as the natural party of government and were busily writing off the Conservatives as a totally spent political force.
From 1975 onwards Mrs Thatcher went out to remould what the Conservative Party stood for. In those crucial four years prior to the 1979 contest Mrs Thatcher and her team began to build a programme which created the politico-intellectual sea change which only in the closing stages of the 1979 Election campaign Jim Callaghan realized was about to engulf him and the Labour Government. If Labour is to have any chance in staving off a fifth successive election defeat similar determination, vision, and simple hard work must now, at this stage of the parliament, be undertaken.
Here Labour’s Commission on Social Justice comes into view. That Labour should be undertaking the most wide-ranging review of social policy is not in question: the timing is. The Commission is working to a two-year timetable. Though it will be publishing papers and reports along the way, its findings will not be published until well into the second half of this parliament. The ideas it proposes will then have to be discussed with rank and file members before the Party can adopt and campaign around a new strategy.
If the commission comes up with radical proposals they will need selling to the electorate. A strategy that leaves the new policy under dust sheets, so to speak, and unexplained to the electorate, is unlikely to work. Not only is the electorate likely to feel that it is being hoodwinked by such a strategy, but such an operation misreads the task before the Labour Party. We are not attempting to regain power after a temporary relapse. The party has suffered not one but a whole series of major rebuffs at the hands of the electorate. In Sans Everything the old man is being shaken by an angry nurse. He replies: ‘It take time to die nurse, it takes time nurse.’ Similarly, it takes even longer not to prevent a political death but to stage a successful comeback. Policy changes this time round are not about picking up a few floating voters along the way, welcome as this would be. They need to be about convincing political opponents amongst the electorate that the Party has fundamentally changed, which takes time and much explaining. That is precisely what Mrs Thatcher did and she was duly rewarded. In contrast, Labour appears to be adopting an approach in which policy will be unveiled at the last possible moment.
The US Example
The third issue I want to consider is what lessons can usefully be learned from the United States. Much nonsense is talked about whether Labour has anything at all to learn from Clinton. On this I make one comment. If an international seminar on political success were being organized, Clinton would receive an invitation, Labour would not.
Learning from the United States takes the discussion onto reforming the Labour Party itself, which has to accompany any change in the programme the Party puts forward. In drawing on the US experience it is important to underline the differences between our two political cultures. But these differences, significant as they are, should not swamp the similarities, the most important of which was that in 1992 the Democratic Party was, as the Labour Party is, a party with a tradition of losing elections.
It is important, of course, not to misread or misunderstand the basis of Clinton’s election success. There is the crucial economic difference in the performance of the American economy in the run up to the 1992 election and the economic background to the last three Conservative victories in this country. Although real disposable income fell in this country between 1990 and 1991, it had increased by seventy per cent over the previous twenty years. In contrast, the standard of living of many Americans, and particularly the Democratic Republicans, which was one of the keys to the Reagan and Bush victories, suffered a decline. For all but the richest fifth, incomes stagnated in the 1980s. Families with below-average incomes actually saw pay-packets shrink by almost three per cent in the second half of the decade. Such a decline was unheard of and the dent it put in millions of Americans’ aspirations contributed crucially to the Democrats’ win. In Britain, by contrast, wages and salaries generally kept above the rate of inflation.
But Clinton did not sideline himself, or his party, waiting for an economic crisis to win the election. One is tempted to believe that, while the Major Central Office team was busy advising Bush on his electoral tactics, Mrs Thatcher was similarly getting Clinton to understand the basis of her success. Unlike any previous political leader, Mrs Thatcher went out from the very start in 1975 to convince the electorate that she had turned her back on the record of previous Tory administrations, not least that in which she was one of the biggest spenders. The strategy worked. As the voters came up to the election tape in 1979 enough saw the Tory Party under Mrs Thatcher as having discarded what was seen by many as the discredited concensus politics