About the most British I have ever felt was when I attended the 2016 Eurocities conference in Milan. The moment I became inescapably aware of my own lack of continental bona fides was when the chair called for a moment’s silence for European values. One of them was “solidarity”.
I’m sure there are rooms in Britain where you do hear that word, the same ones in which activists un-self-consciously call one another “comrade”, and it’s a mark of my own shortage of radicalism that it struck my ears as strange. In the mainstream of British political debate, however, nobody uses such language. A quick search of Google News brings up usages in foreign media, in reports about specific campaigns generally relating to the Middle East, and in the Morning Star. But “solidarity” is not an idea that often pops up in British newspapers, even to deride it. It’s no exaggeration to say that I have heard the word used more often in reference to a 1980s Polish trade union than as a value we might or should hold.
All of which is starting to feel like a problem. Consider, if you can stand the excitement, the fiscal situation we find ourselves in. The British state, after 14 years of Tory misrule, is both literally and figuratively crumbling. Fixing that, as the government keeps reminding us, is going to take time. It is also going to take money.
But ministers seem remarkably cautious about acknowledging this latter point. In his last year as chancellor, Jeremy Hunt made two different cuts to National Insurance, in effect knocking 4p off income taxes for what everyone understood to be short-term electoral reasons. Rachel Reeves declined to reverse them, with much the same motive. Instead she raised the business contribution, which raises less money, risks depressing employment and wages, and is now being blamed for suppressing growth. I’m not sure that’s terribly fair – growth seemed pretty suppressed for a decade and a half before Reeves got anywhere near it, and the newspapers out for her blood today then seemed entirely indifferent to the problem – but nonetheless, it’s not gone particularly well.
An alternative, surely, would have been to take all the pain up front, and reverse Hunt’s tax cuts. To do that, though, Reeves would need to make the argument that rebuilding the state requires a national effort, that we have responsibilities to one another. Such language is alien to both the modern Labour Party and to British political life. And so, general taxation remains too low for the demands we place on the state.
Being more willing to speak the language of solidarity would be useful to the government in other areas of policy, too. In explaining why Reeves made the hard choice to cut the winter fuel allowance (because rich older people, who had done well under the Tories, were now going to have to increase their contribution). In resisting, rather than surrendering to, the constant and unquenchable pressure to cut already meagre benefits (because it is in all our interests that nobody suffers avoidable poverty that stores up more problems for later). In combating climate change (because we’re all going to have to make some changes we don’t like, otherwise our children – perhaps even we ourselves – are completely and utterly stuffed).
There’s a danger, I’m aware, I’m sliding into one of those columns that can basically be parsed as, “It’s time for the government to do what I’ve wanted all along.” So I will note, too, that the language of solidarity (“It’s in all our interests for everyone, especially families, to have secure and reliable homes”) is probably a more productive way of discussing the housing crisis than my own “yelling abuse at Nimby selfishness for clicks” strategy. In the same way, the best argument for the sanctity of the pensions triple lock, no matter how annoying that younger people find it, is “nobody wants pensioner poverty”.
We don’t talk in those terms, however. Generosity to pensioners is framed as “they’ve done their bit”, not “it’s in all our interests, and will benefit us sooner than we think”. The housing debate is framed as a matter of two competing sets of self-interest, while questions of tax and benefits are framed as those of who does the work and how much they get out of it. The idea we should all contribute and all stand to benefit – that any one of us could find ourselves down on our luck, and in need of support, one day – doesn’t feature even slightly.
Without finding a new language that takes in duty and sacrifice it’s only going to get harder to make the case for the welfare state or public services in a world of increasingly transactional politics. And really – who else is going to do it?
[See more: The battle for Labour’s soul]
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