Politics
Vote Labour for a jollier life
Published 29 January 1999
More riverside cafes, later pub closing hours: Mark Leonardsuggests that ministers can push more cheerful themes than electoral reform
Another day, another profile of Alastair Campbell. It's not that I have anything against the guy, it's just that for a policy wonk such as myself there is nothing more depressing than watching the press sink all of its energy and resources into uncovering gossip about government press officers when there is a whole world out there waiting to be changed.
But it is not just wonks who are disheartened; the past few weeks have been pretty depressing for anyone who is serious about politics. We have sat helplessly on the sidelines - like a distraught mother watching her baby drown at sea - witnessing the scope of our politics being shrunk. All the excitement and ambition has gradually been squeezed out, replaced by tedious arguments about personalities, spin-doctors and personal sleaze. And the death-bed attempts to resuscitate political debate will do little to re-engage the public.
Seizing on the driest and most mind-numbing elements of political debate - Liberal Democrats and electoral reform - the media have managed to send the last few listeners to sleep. In the narrow world of the House of Commons press gallery, what passes for politics is not only irrelevant to people's lives, it is thin and mean to boot.
But this week we will be given a timely reminder of what politics can be about. In a new collection of essays, Crosland and New Labour, (published by Macmillan, £14.99, and edited by Dick Leonard) the intellectual father of new Labour makes a posthumous appearance to remind us of how ambitious a progressive political project can be. Phillip Dodd's essay on "Crosland and Culture" acts as a real antidote to the depression of the past few weeks.
Rereading Crosland's famous passage on "liberty and gaiety in private life" is the political equivalent of cocaine - it can send high-octane pulses coursing through our veins and remind us what progressive politics should be about: "We need not only higher exports and old-age pensions, but more open-air cafes, brighter and gayer streets at night, later closing hours for public houses, more local repertory theatres, better and more hospitable hoteliers and restaurateurs, brighter and cleaner eating-houses, more riverside cafes, more pleasure gardens on the Battersea model, more murals and pictures in public places, better designs for furniture and pottery and women's clothes, statues in the centre of new housing estates, better designed street lamps and telephone kiosks, and so on ad infinitum . . ."
Crosland insists that though the media has erected an iron curtain between the real concerns and worries of people's lives and the self-serving trivia of political debate, politics itself inevitably creeps into the deepest and most private corners of our existence. It is not just that politicians worry about the quality of our relationships, argue about how much leisure time we should have (and how we should spend it), discuss what programmes we should watch on television and legislate for our sexual mores. It is that politics can define the mood of a country.
What is depressing is that we have to go back to the 1950s to see what is at stake today. Crosland quite rightly saw the Labour Party's mission as making Britain "a more colourful and civilised country to live in". Today the Labour Party does not just have a few flagship projects (the Millennium Dome and the 2006 World Cup bid), it has an overwhelming popular mandate and a full policy programme to make Britain a happier and better place.
The euphoria that swept through the country on 1 May 1997 was not about a minimum wage, an elected House of Lords or a better-managed economy. There was a tangible sense that people wanted Britain to change. The Labour victory was a statement that we have become a nation at ease with itself and its past. This is what pundits miss when they talk about Labour's "historic opportunity to change the electoral system". New Labour's historic opportunity is not to change narrow political structures, it is to change the fabric of the country, our culture and the way we lead our lives. Constitutional reform is important because our political structures carry and express some of the ethos of the country. But it is only a small part of it. The new Labour project has to be about giving people a broader sense of what politics can be. In short, its aim has to be making people happier.
Already the government has made tentative steps to encourage voters to judge them on improvements to their quality of life, with attempts to devise indicators that map our well-being as a nation, as well as our economic performance: tracking the migration patterns of birds, levels of rainfall and so on. There has been a slew of policies on the family - from parental leave to free counselling - to allow us to construct the relationships we want, and give us the time and support to nurture them. Michael Meacher and John Prescott have been hyperactively seeking to improve our physical environment. But the most important shift has been in the government's changing attitude to culture and fun.
This is the first government in Britain to take the creative industries seriously, both as creators of wealth and as the artisans of our national identity. It is more than ministers appearing at London Fashion Week, and musicians popping up at Downing Street receptions, it is a fundamental shift in approach. Leisure is seen as a right for the many, rather than a privilege for the few. The Arts Council is no longer allowed to separate fine art (big grants) from popular culture (no grants). We are gradually beginning to shed the assumption that increasing access is the same as dumbing down. And, very tentatively, the government is cutting the umbilical cord that sends us to bed at midnight and regulates when we can enjoy ourselves. Our ludicrous, draconian licensing laws are gradually being dismantled.
And then there's the Dome. As Dodd points out, Crosland would undoubtedly have been a fan. The Dome marks an ambition to create a new type of public event, one that will be as inclusive and exciting as the Royal Jubilee - only the focus will be the British people themselves rather than their royal family. Creating the first post-royal public experience, forcing ourselves to confront who we really are as we approach a new century, and having fun to boot - Crosland would not have seen this cultural project as a distraction from real politics, it is as real as politics gets.
But our transition to happiness will not be an easy one. Back in the 1950s, Crosland warned us that "the enemy in all this . . . is not only dark Satanic things and people that now bar the road to the new Jerusalem, but also, if not mainly, hygienic, respectable, virtuous things and people, lacking only in grace and gaiety."
The enemies of the Dome in the 1990s bear a striking resemblance to the ones Crosland feared. First the enemy within, the life-hating left who disapprove of fun on moral grounds (described by Crosland as "more orthodox than a bench of bishops"); extremist environmentalists who can't stand consumption; church leaders and the "keep-Sunday-special brigade"; and the Tories, of course - who else?
The argument about whether we should have the Dome is becoming the barometer for our politics and its new dividing line: far more significant than that between the Third Way and the British Way, Blair and Brown, or PR v first-past-the-post. It goes right to the heart of what politics is about. It is the difference between those who think that politics can make us happy, and those who think that it should just concentrate on keeping us healthy, wealthy and wise. It divides those who have a full conception of what politics can be, and those who have a minimalist attitude towards it. The battle lines for the next election are emerging: "Vote Labour and be happy, vote Tory and be miserable." Beat that, Alastair!
The writer, who formerly worked for Demos, is now director of the Foreign Policy Centre, an independent think-tank
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