A Labour party to stand up for the poor

There is the moment in an election campaign when I crave a choice, not an echo. That moment is now. For starters, I want a real Labour party. I know what the Tories are about. I have watched them at it for years. But against them, the nation surely deserves a party of what is conventionally called the Left. Where is it?

The new politics suggests we focus not on policies but on groups, tribes, interests. The American political psychologist Jonathan Haidt regards voters as “deeply intuitive creatures whose gut feelings drive out strategic reasoning”. They no longer look just to their wallets. They seek comfort in identity, personality, above all security for themselves and their families. Gut feelings find resonance in region, occupation, religion. But guts should be reflected in ideology, ultimately in practical policy. For Labour, this surely means a language and a programme that answers to the welfare of the poorer half of the community. That is where the left customarily positions itself and to which, in times of introspection, it returns. This is not socialism red in tooth and claw. As the cliche says, it is a matter of values.

Such a party, a real Labour party, would unashamedly tax the rich heavily on their marginal income, and do it globally, like the Americans. It would aggressively redistribute that “surplus wealth” to those who need it most. Real Labour would not just meddle with a cosmetic charge on rich London mansions. It would tax living space in all its forms to encourage its more efficient allocation.

A talisman of this is higher bands of council tax, perhaps savagely higher. Real Labour would not abandon a bedroom tax but would see it as a sensible basis for redistributing housing assistance to those who really need it, not to those who inherited a need that has expired. Real Labour would support higher rents for more space, in the public sector as in the private. Indeed, the neediest now tend to rent privately, awash in “bedroom taxes”.

Such a party would address the transport needs of the poor, not the rich. That means buses, coaches, roads and motorways. It would improve them and not pledge billions on premium railways. Real Labour would be the party of the 95 per cent who do not use trains or planes, rather than of the business travellers and construction industry lobbyists.

Real Labour would put the disadvantaged at the forefront of its programme. It would therefore regard university students as the lucky half whose future is relatively assured. Except for the poorest, it would not think of subsidising their fees. The other half, the mostly poor whose further education and training are dreadful, better deserve its support. Real Labour would have no truck with middle-class exceptionalism.

Such a party would attack special interests on behalf of consumers. It would stop Britain’s National Health Service pandering to restrictive practices by general practitioners and consultants. It would revert to round-the-clock surgeries and local clinics, instantly relieving the A&E crisis. Real Labour would embrace means-tested charging as the only way to avoid the two-tier health service now in prospect — one of insurance for the rich, and free but rationed care for the poor. It would vigorously champion local council tax ballots to prevent cuts in old people’s care.

Real Labour would acknowledge the price of Britain’s antiquated drugs laws. It would castigate the cost that drug criminalisation places on courts, hospitals and prisons — above all on the poor. It would recapture Labour’s reformist radicalism of the 1960s, when the party smashed the taboos on divorce, abortion and homosexuality. Real Labour would revel in reviving those good old days.

The party would get the point of Jon Cruddas, whose bold re-examination of Labour policy Ed Miliband has largely ignored. Cruddas sees Britain’s overcentralised state as creaking and privatised at every joint. To him it should reassert accountability, not least to local Labour electors, in the spirit of the Poplar and Clay Cross martyrs. It would let Labour’s local flowers bloom, even risking a few ugly weeds.

Full-blooded real Labour would flatly reject the Brown-Osborne response to recession. It would be the party of an inflationary demand side, not of a deflationary supply side. In 2008-09 it would have nationalised the banks and told them what to do. Unreal Labour backed the “quantitative easing” of vast sums into the pockets of banks, which meant into their bonuses and on to their balance sheets. It borrowed money for the people but it printed far more for the bankers.

Real Labour would do the opposite. It would end the liquidity squeeze by doling out money, with Christmas bonuses, green scrappage schemes, benefits premiums and living wages paid for by printing cash, not borrowing it. It would reject banker terrorism about monetary inflation. Plenty of reputable (indeed conservative) economists support this. New Labour was in thrall to bankers; Real Labour would be in thrall to the people.

Abroad, Real Labour would recapture its old conviction as the party of disarmament and peace — a conviction smothered by Tony Blair’s rush to war. It would honour the record of CND and scrap Trident missiles, submarines, aircraft carriers, manned fighters and the extravagant paraphernalia of the arms lobby. It would reject global force projection and treat defence as defence, not attack. It would rejoice as the generals howled.

Real Labour would be a party of soft power, of reconciliation and detente. It would reject economic sanctions as war on the poor. It would stop aid that merely stuffs the pockets of dictators and consultants. It would campaign for Greece and the Mediterranean to be liberated from the austerity of the Deutschmark/euro. It would stop Miliband pining for an audience with Angela Merkel and kowtowing to the gnomes of Frankfurt.

In a nutshell, Real Labour would see through the politics of fear that now dominates British politics and international discourse alike. It would ignore Theresa May’s paranoid securocrats. It would recant the illiberal legacy of Labour home secretaries, of Charles Clarke, Jack Straw and Jacqui Smith, and reassert individual rights against the surveillance state. It would not leave it to a Tory, David Davis, to speak up for civil liberty.

A new book, Mammon’s Kingdom, by the elder statesman of the Left, David Marquand, serves as a manifesto for real Labour. It accuses the party’s current leaders of resting authority not in central or local democracy but in a “corporate elite colonising Whitehall”, one that “abandoned the distinction between public and private interests”. Through rampant privatisation, new Labour had “sabotaged the public realm,” says Marquand, a realm that was once the party’s home and hearth.

I do not advocate a vote for such a party; I merely suggest it as a true opposition to the ideology of the Right. It would recall the radicalism of the Left. Yet, remain within the bounds of modern electoral plausibility.

Elections should be between real options, not between leaders who disguise their fear of radicalism with waffle about transformative authenticity, realism and delivering change. Real Labour would be a beacon, not a guttering candle. Political choice has become a meander across a landscape of echoes. Real Labour would restore contact with real politics.

Next week, we look at Real Tories.

— Guardian News & Media Ltd