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  • The art of politics
  • Jon Cruddas, Ben Little, Doreen Massey, and Michael Rustin

Is it possible to overcome the tensions between big ideas and electoral contingency?

Michael

Let’s start by going back a little bit and talking about your experience in the Labour Party Policy Review - what do you think went right with it and what went not so right?

Jon

Well, from a personal point of view I had a fantastic time! In 2011, when Ed first invited me to take a look at the policy review, the discussion had been largely within the shadow cabinet rather than the broader party, but we then widened it to include the wider party. So changing the process was an important first step. But the main task was to take some of the ideas and frameworks Ed was developing - predistribution for example - and to build a contemporary policy agenda from those; to try and turn the page from New Labour, if you want. And in the early days there was a real freedom to set up all sorts of different independent commissions and projects. The strategy was to have the One Nation Framework developed throughout that period and then in 2014 to deliver a substantial piece of work to consolidate as national policy for the party and then the manifesto. So we commissioned a lot of projects - there were about 25 different commissions or reports. And the discussions they produced were fascinating. However, the problem was that all this always rested uneasily with the campaign priorities, and the 24-hour media cycle. The day-to-day pressures around parliament, and the hand-to-hand combat of day-to-day politics, meant that over time the room for manoeuvre got squeezed by the orthodox politics around Westminster. And the problem became worse at the point when Osborne produced his omni-shambles budget of 2012. At that point a lot of the analysts around Labour thought that they [End Page 18] could detect a route-map to victory, which they now felt did not need to include a lot of this heavy lifting on policy or ideology. So there was a tension within the party between the policy review and the more instrumentalised, retail, day-to-day politics of policy development. And this led to a lot of missed opportunities. But on the other hand, the process gave me some really interesting insights into what modern social democracy is, and questions of power and democracy in the modern age. There were lots of new ideas about modern economic policy, and questions of radical democracy and citizenship, and social policy.

Michael

Perhaps as a result of these difficulties, at the end of this process we still finished up without a very convincing political narrative during the last two or three years. So what happened?

Jon

That is a fair criticism.

Michael

So the question is: what is the space for these new ideas inside the modern Labour Party?

Jon

Well, one example of the problems we come up against was what happened with the One Nation project. I thought the 2012 conference speech Miliband gave around One Nation Labour could be seen as being within the New Left tradition, as a national popular attempt to create a different sort of drumbeat politically, to contest some of the orthodoxies around neoliberalism - to look at really quite radical questions around nationhood, and to find an interesting framework within which to discuss these issues. For me the One Nation idea goes with the grain of Labour in 1945, 1964 and 1997, times when Labour has been popular, and electorally significant, and has contested orthodoxy. But that gradually changed through 2013, and it all ended up being couched within a cost-of-living framework. The ideas were residualised into fairly instrumental policy offers. They found some expression in the proposals for capping energy prices and rents, and minimum wage increases, but basically they became quite shrunken and residual. And the story lies with how that shrinking came about. Somewhere in those processes there occurred a defeat of the policy review - and a lot of the deeper work was more or less parked. Some of the reports never really...

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