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Milburn
Local Government Chronicle
Is there a New Politics out there- and if so what is it? The New Labour modernisers certainly think so. Their central premise is that current political structures increasingly leave the people feeling disenchanted, disaffected and disconnected. The only way to address this is by re-empowering the people to take control of their lives. Let service providers live or die by the vote of the people. Let communities and local voluntary organisations run neighbourhood services. Give individuals their own budgets to purchase health or care services.
The cries of alarm from the “progressive” wing of politics are becoming more urgent. The Power Commission, chaired by Lady Helena Kennedy, an often dissident but respected and articulate voice on the left, and financed by the Rowntree Foundation, is the latest to promote both the diagnosis of disillusion and the remedy of empowerment.
Alan Milburn, self-appointed keeper of the Blairite torch and aspirant to following Tony Crosland’s footsteps as pathfinder for the ascent of the “progressives” has set out the challenge of what he calls the “Me generation,” people who are more aspirational than ever and want to take control of their lives.
“They may feel empowered as consumers but not as citizens. The gap between politics and public is growing. People are becoming disengaged because they are disempowered. A less deferential more democratic world is threatening a crisis of legitimacy for the active politics that is the hall-mark of the left. If we are not careful the beneficiaries will be the right,” he wrote recently in The Independent, which is New Labour’s house magazine.
Milburn is not the only one to fear that the Conservatives have spotted the need to win a race to the base. The Guardian recently carried a long review of the book The New East End: Kinship, Race and Conflict by Geoff Dench, Kate Gavron and Michael Young (Profile). The book’s key message, derived from some 12 years of interviews in Tower Hamlets, was that white working class felt betrayed by a welfare state which was no longer a system of mutual insurance, to tide people over rough patches, and based on past contributions but had been transformed into a system of entitlement and rights. It was seen as unfair and biased towards ethnic minority communities, adding to racial tensions.
The reviewer, Madeleine Bunting, began with the words: “Here is a book that will infuriate and bewilder the progressive left. It is also a book that David Cameron’s Conservatives need to study closely.” And the strap-line pushed the point home: “A social study from the heart of the left could be a blueprint for a Tory take on communities, family and the welfare state.”
So the renewed debate on empowerment is not just a passing phase revisited. Not is it necessarily a pre-emptive strike by Blairites fearing that Gordon Brown will renounce the “progressive” agenda in favour of a more conventionally socialist approach: indeed, Brown is saying that he endorses the need for decentralisation. The difficulty, as always, lies in translating diagnosis into policy.
The “Progressives” already have one battle on their hands in the education bill: that, after all, is supposed to be about empowerment but to the (presumably) non-progressives (not all dinosaurs of the Frank Dobson genus) the problem is that it empowers the wrong people and curtails opportunity for others.
David Miliband has invented “double-devolution” to express the linked policy of decentralisation (to representative bodies) and popular empowerment (which by definition is not representative) but has failed get beyond virtuous generalities. He suffers from the suspicion that, insofar as the policy has substance at all, it will take the form of de-empowering councils! The Lyons recommendations on local government finance will present the Government with tough decisions, however much they are cloaked in a broader landscape of local authority functions and structures.
This debate lies at the heart of the belief by Labour Blairites that the party has to renew itself. It lies at the heart of their perception of where the political battleground will lie. It needs to be at the heart of the Tory programme of re-invention. It is an inescapable component of any attempt to help politics catch up with the empowerment modern information technologies have brought to the citizen – the “internet democracy” perhaps.
Milburn could just be right: there is a New Politics and victory will lie with those who annex it most plausibly to their name.
© Local Government Chronicle
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