No more new Labour: my radical challenge to Brown
From today's Times:
Politics is in a curiously disorientated state in Britain today. On one side, old-style Toryism was voted out in 1997, and has now been replaced by a soft veneer of environmentalism and family-centredness that contrasts sharply with the excesses of private equity capitalism. On the other, the persistent shifting to the right under new Labour has now blown itself out, as the polls indicate, leaving a large segment of political space occupied by mainstream Labour opinion and probably a majority of the electorate as a whole largely disenfranchised.
This key part of the spectrum urgently needs representation to give it fresh direction — not old Labour either, but a modern progressive politics addressing the big issues now being ducked and championing key groups now being marginalised.
First, we need a change of direction to heal the divisions that are increasingly straining the fabric of our society. The Government has made some progress in reducing poverty, but not nearly enough. Inequalities are actually increasing. The average pay of the chief executives of the top FTSE 100 companies is now £46,150 a week, 250 times the minimum wage and 500 times the state pension, while at the same time there are still 12.5 million people, including more than 2 million children, living in households below the Government’s poverty line. This matters because reducing inequality leads to less violence, better health, longer life expectancy, lower teenage birth rates and higher educational attainment.
We need a new approach to cutting crime if we genuinely believe in being as tough on the causes of crime as on crime itself. It’s not sensible to go on banging people up even faster than we can build new prisons without tackling much harder the causes of criminality, and putting much more emphasis on reducing recidivism. Despite unprecedented increase in the use of custody, reconviction rates have soared. The hardline policy isn’t working.
We must drastically reduce the prison population, confining it to violent and dangerous offenders. We should provide instead secure units in the community where lesser offenders are required to attend compulsory courses on anger control, money management and parenting, and also to receive education and skills training and treatment for drug addiction and mental health needs, and are made to do unpaid work to repay the community.
Probably the best crime reduction value for money comes from parenting programmes and youth inclusion panels, bringing together local services to focus support on 8 to 13-year-olds at highest risk. Of course there are increased costs involved in intensive rehabilitation, but if prison places and reoffending costs can be significantly reduced, there should be a substantial net saving in public expenditure.
We need too to arrest the overcentralisation of power in this country. Key decisions, such as the replacement of Trident and the restoration of nuclear energy, should not be taken without consultation of the Cabinet, Parliament and public opinion.
Indeed, the most direct way to win back public trust and reconnect with the electorate is for the Government to be seen as genuinely accountable, listening and being prepared to adjust in the face of strong public demand.
It also means Parliament reasserting its authority by taking the right to ratify (or not) nominations to the Cabinet made by the Prime Minister, by appointing committees of inquiry where the Government refuses to do so (as over rendition flights), by ending the Royal Prerogative whereby the Prime Minister can unilaterally declare war and authorise military action, and through its select committees tabling its own motions for debate and voting on the floor of the Commons. Giving the public the right to initiate legislation through referendums is another issue to explore.
We also need much more vigorously to tackle the greatest threat facing the world today: climate change. It must permeate every policy area of Government — not just energy, but transport, industry, building, agriculture, public expenditure and taxation, and foreign policy. It is not enough merely to talk of the end of oil dependence when our electricity generation from renewable energy is, at just 4 per cent, by far the lowest in Europe.
We need an overall plan to meet the scientists’ target of reducing carbon emissions by at least 60 per cent by 2050. It is a colossal challenge, but a win-win-win-win scenario. It will increase energy efficiency hugely, create large savings for industry and some of our poorest households, protect our economy against sudden destabilising external shocks and safeguard us from climate catastrophe.
Finally, we must stop being subservient to the US. We can’t go on being America’s glove puppet, as we have been over Iraq and Lebanon, and, most worryingly, Iran. We need a foreign policy that robustly reasserts our own essential British interests and our commitment to the UN. The first demonstration of that should be strong opposition to any potential US or Israeli attack on Iran, and insistence that the nuclear impasse must be resolved by negotiation or by UN sanctions, not by violence.
We should take the advice not of the US but of British military commanders on the spot in speeding up our troop withdrawal from Iraq. And we should push for a wider international peace conference for a joint settlement of interconnected Middle East issues that cannot be solved one by one. The latest reports of a US change of heart about talking to Iran and Syria make this now a serious possibility.
It is because I believe that radical new policies of this kind would reenergise politics in this country that I am standing for the leadership of the Labour Party.