An Agenda for Britain

COPYRIGHT

Fourth Estate

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First published in paperback 1993

Copyright © Frank Field 1993

Frank Field asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780006382263

Ebook Edition © JUNE 2016 ISBN: 9780008192044

Version: 2016-06-03

DEDICATION

For Nick and Cathy Warren

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

The Vision Thing

1 Reinventing the Traditional Party of the Opposition

2 Reclaiming Labour’s Natural Constituency

3 The Emergence of Britain’s Underclass

4 The Other Side of the UK

5 Labour: the Party of Work, Wealth and Opportunity

6 The Forgotten Goal of Full Employment

The Vision Thing Again

Sources

Index

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

PREFACE

While I have added a substantial amount of new material, this book began life as the University of Durham’s Bernard Gilpin’s Pastoral Lectures for 1993. My first thanks goes to the Department of Theology who invited me to Durham. The magnificence of that city was matched by spring weather and the hospitality of Sheridan Gilley, the Chairman of the department, Meg Gilley and Sheridan’s colleagues.

A second wave of thanks goes to four people. Jill Hendey worked on the manuscript in addition to all her other work. Matthew Owen did likewise, as well as trace material and discuss with me the book’s line of argument. I am particularly grateful to them for absorbing the considerable amount of extra work that producing a book entails, and doing so in such a way as to make working with them such a pleasure. Damian Leeson went through the whole document and sharpened both the prose and presentation. In Rebecca Wilson I was the beneficiary of being given by HarperCollins an editor whose talents were matched by a dedication to a production of books of the highest technical quality.

John Grigg, Lord Bonham Carter and Calum MacDonald read through the first draft of the introduction. I am grateful to them for their comments. In addition, Mark Bonham Carter read through the original lectures, commented upon and encouraged me to publish them. He also kindly thought of the book’s title. Robert Twigger, Robert Clements, Richard Cracknell, Adrian Crompton, Richard Dewdney, Nicola Chedgey, Ed MacGregory, Mahmed Nawaz and Jane Dyson of the House of Commons Library produced a number of statistical papers, and Dora Clark and Andrew Parker traced innumerable sources for me. MPs are blessed by having a library research staff whose qualities are unsurpassed. While I am grateful to all these people who helped produce this volume, its opinions are my responsibility, as are any errors which have escaped their watchful eyes.

The book is dedicated to Nick and Cathy Warren. Nick worked with me as solicitor to the Birkenhead Resource Unit and Cathy too worked for the Unit in a voluntary capacity. During Nick’s twelve year’s stewardship my constituents received a Rolls-Royce legal service. His standing in the town is testament to that, as was my vote at general elections. Due largely to the happy fallout from Nick’s work, of which I was the beneficiary, Birkenhead was turned into one of the safest seats in the country. The book’s dedication is, therefore, a small but public means of thanking Nick and Cathy for the care they lavished on so large a number of my poorer constituents.

FRANK FIELD

June 1993

The Vision Thing

Poor old George Bush got it right. Stumbling through the presidential election campaign he realized what was missing. In true Bush style he blurted out that he was short on ‘the vision thing’. What was true of the defeated Republican campaign is also true for a defeated Labour Party.

The ‘vision thing’ affects both Government and Opposition parties. That the Government is almost bankrupt of ideas is not surprising. Four election wins in a row and fourteen years in office is enough to convince any group of human beings that they are destined to remain there to the end of their days. Winning, after all, is the major test, so why worry too much if Cabinet Ministers cannot spell out in precise terms what the Government is trying to achieve? And yet?

In times past the pendulum has always swung back. So why won’t it next time? That must be the worry at the back of the mind of every Government supporter. It is, however, far from the back of the mind of Labour activists. In order to talk up morale a political law of averages reigns in Labour Party thinking. No swing back on the last three occasions makes it more, not less, certain that the swing will occur next time. It is a belief of all gamblers that their chances improve the more they lose. This is not the case, neither in the casino nor in the election arena. Political memories are inevitably short. No member of the current House of Commons was elected to the 1945 Parliament, so that the pendulum years appear to most politicians as the natural rhythm of politics. But such a pattern does not fit the decades before 1945 when the Conservatives were rarely out of power. The dreadful thought which ought to be stalking the Left is that the close fought elections of the early 1950s and mid-1970s might prove to be the exceptions rather than the rule.

Fundamental changes have been taking place which make a regular sharing of power between the two main parties a less, rather than more, likely future turn of events. For one thing, the swings which do occur, and which would have swept the board for the Opposition party, now merely reduce the overall size of the Government’s majority in the House of Commons. The 2 per cent swing gained last time by Neil Kinnock would have been enough to land him in Downing Street if only the election had been held in the 1950s rather than in the 1990s. It is the size of the Government’s lead amongst voters on election day, combined with the disappearance of the traditional marginal seat, which is part of the stumbling block. The clear polarization into ever more safe seats presents a microcosm of what is happening across the country.

The nagging doubt of many Labour activists is that the change in British politics is more fundamental than this. Two forces are at work. The first is that the social groups from which Labour’s traditional support has come have shrunk, are shrinking and look set to shrink further. It is as though Labour is trying to advance on a downward moving escalator.

But why is Labour on a down escalator in the first place? Here lies the second and more deadly of the two forces working against the Party. A large number of people raised in Labour-voting homes have simply walked away from the Party. In fairness many of these people would argue that Labour has simultaneously been marching off in a different direction anyway. These voters compare their past loyalty to Labour to the bonds which they used to have with their school friends. At the time, few people could be more important. However, even in the most stable of circumstances people can grow apart. Britain, far from being stable, has seen not merely the collapse of its traditional manufacturing base but of new strains throughout its social fabric. Partly as a result of this, but also because of rising living standards, people are on the move. A third of all households moved during the last decade. Old ties and friendships are thus broken, commitments reduced to memories which are valuable as part of our past, but definitely no longer of present significance. As with the ties of friendship, so too with political parties.

It is as though the country has been shaken up in a gigantic political kaleidoscope. Many of us, with different aspirations, have settled down in different places and are relating to different areas and people. Class loyalties have been loosened and in many instances have simply disintegrated. The political kaleidoscope might well be shaken again; the Government could simply fall apart. Whilst it came close to doing so in the twelve months after winning the 1992 election, the Opposition cannot rely upon it doing so again. The Government may lack vision but it enjoys exercising power which it will not give up easily. The Government may be divided over Europe, but John Major is no Peel. His indentureship in Mrs Thatcher’s Whips Office should not be forgotten: if his apprenticeship there taught him anything it was how to hold a party together in the roughest of political hurricanes.

The shaking of the political kaleidoscope has changed many people’s perspective of the Labour Party. This is not simply because voters remember the rule of the bullies in the early 1980s. It is one thing to have one’s life run by a series of barely competent Governments. Incompetence is a widely shared human failing, we are all incompetent in different ways. It is quite a different ball game to think of electing a party that has cowered before political extremism in its own ranks. Those images of supposed Labour Party supporters ranting and screaming at Labour leaders have become too much part of the folk memory of all too many voters for an easy accord to be again struck between the ruled and those wishing to rule. And there are still examples – though fewer, thank goodness – of this behaviour at a local government level. But each time there is an exposure of such an instance the scar tissue which the national party has been so carefully growing is ripped off.

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.

The market economy must be embraced without reservation. It works too well for too many people for too much of the time for any alternative to be practical politics. It is responsible for the highest standard of living known to mankind. It is inextricably bound up with a free society. Why then, if the advantages of the market economy are so obvious, is Labour diffident about embracing its principles?

Here again the answer is quite simple. For the whole of my political life Labour has espoused a view of human nature which is simply wrong. The self-regarding side of the human character has been ignored or suppressed. The result has meant a shaping of politics which not merely ignores self-interest, but goes out of its way to punish it. Self-interest is one of the most powerful of human characteristics and practical politics has to be built around that simple but fundamental fact. Moreover, it is through a market economy that self-interest can operate most easily to greatest effect and for the greatest common good.

That doesn’t mean that the exercise of an unadulterated self-interest is always edifying, let alone acceptable, or that self-interest is the only consideration which society must take into account. What it does mean is that radical politics is about channelling self-interest wherever possible so that it also promotes the common good.

The agenda for radical politics for the next decade or more is one of attempting to deal with the unacceptable faces of the market economy. What those unacceptable faces are is dealt with at some length in this book. Instead of exhibiting a body language which most voters read as an expression of opposition to the market, Labour should embrace the market and spend the whole of its effort expressing its disapproval of the market’s unacceptable faces – particularly its inability to tackle unemployment and its power to punish the poor and the least strong. The radical agenda is about eradicating these unacceptable faces without undermining the essential principles of the market. Here Labour’s ethical tradition of socialism can come to the fore.

That ethical tradition has always consisted of two clear strands. The first, which has often been overshadowed, has been about the opening up of opportunities so that individuals (rather than classes) can develop and use their talents to the full. The second strand of the tradition is concerned with the protection and enhancement of the poor, the weak and the disadvantaged. It is here that Labour can play its strongest card. For the market economy left to itself is at best amoral. Labour’s ethical tradition, built around the importance that should be attached to each individual member of the community, can provide the moral framework within which a more just market economy can flourish.

Merely to espouse the first principle – of ensuring the widest possible extension of opportunity to individuals to use their talents to the full – immediately suggests a whole range of policies, from action against unemployment right through to education reform. It is important that the development of policies on these fronts should be within the moral framework which is part of the Party’s heritage. The emphasis on each individual will give a coherence to the Party’s manifesto, while at the same time presenting the policies themselves with a much clearer cutting edge. The attack on unemployment, for example, is not urgent merely because of the lost production which results from it, or the added social problems which undoubtedly arise because of it. The task is urgent because unemployment is an attack on the sacredness of each unemployed individual. The existence of unemployment is a reminder of another important political fact. Contributing to, as well as receiving from, society must be given its proper weight in public policy. Today’s unemployment prevents millions of people from making their rightful contribution to society, thereby gaining equal status to those in work.

Tackling unemployment effectively is at the heart of the ‘vision thing’ for British politics.

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