One of the many oddities in the current febrile political situation is that those broadly on Labour’s right wing have never been more powerful. At the same time they seem more ideologically rootless and insecure than their less powerful equivalents in previous generations of Labour politicians. On the whole, it is the right of the Labour Party that has commanded the political stage for several years and we still await a coherent set of ideas to surface from it. We hear much about “change”, “reform” and sometimes references to the “Blairite reformers” coming to the rescue, but these terms are at best imprecise and vague.
There appear to be no big figures in Keir Starmer’s government to compare with the likes of Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Shirley Williams and Roy Hattersley. They not only had big ideas but were able to articulate them compellingly, always at the heart of vibrant debate even when they were sometimes on the margins of the Labour Party or out of it altogether. Their elegantly articulated views on Europe, equality, ownership, and much more sustained them and their party (or parties) through all the impossible challenges of British politics. Above all they were always interesting, filling readable books and columns with their insights. Indeed their influence continues, in some cases posthumously. The Times’ columnist Patrick Maguire, revealed recently that Nigel Farage spent part of his summer reading one of Jenkins’ biographies, Mr Balfour’s Poodle. I suspect Jenkins would have been pleased rather than horrified at this revelation. However sensible and decent they are I cannot imagine anyone clearing time this summer to read the collected speeches of Darren Jones or Pat McFadden. It is hard to imagine a book written in the future called Mr Jones’s Spreadsheet.
There is though a contemporary figure slightly closer to the tradition of Labour’s past titans on the right and she happens to be standing to be deputy leader. She is by no means fully formed as a public figure but like her mighty predecessors Bridget Phillipson dares to be interested in ideas as a way of making sense of policy. This is quite unusual in this administration.
A couple of years ago on my podcast I mentioned a long forgotten but illuminating book written by Roy Hattersley in 1987. The book was called Choose Freedom, an attempt by Hattersley to seize the term “freedom” from Margaret Thatcher who had deployed it like a weapon to turn voters against the state. From the mid 1970s Thatcher vowed to “free” people from the clutches of the stifling state. As no voter is against being “free” she won election after election. In the book Hattersley sought to reverse the argument, showing that the state was an agent of freedom, liberating people to fulfil their potential whatever their backgrounds.
After the podcast Phillipson got in touch with me to say she had bought the book and was much taken by the arguments. Tracking down a copy of the book was an achievement in itself. I have noticed in her subsequent speeches she frames education policy around the idea of government being an agent of freedom, a term that also features in the short mission statement in her department. The framing helps to make sense of policy. She never suggests that because she came from a poor background and went to Oxford any child can do so. Instead she stresses the role of the state to free children to flourish whatever their circumstances.
Those that prefer to carry light or no ideological baggage might argue that Hattersley’s case did not get him anywhere. When he was deputy leader Labour got slaughtered in two elections. But when he wrote Choose Freedom it was too late for that era of politics. Thatcher had owned the concept for more than a decade by then. The Labour Party was still only just keeping its show on the road. Hattersley might as well have written the book in Latin for the attention it got. The time to have challenged Thatcher over “freedom” was in the late 1970s but the then Labour prime minister, Jim Callaghan, was wary of the battle of ideas. The terrain was hers.
The context is unrecognisably different now compared with the late 1980s. Since the financial crash in 2008 institutions and voters have turned to the state as a saviour, triggering a change in the political landscape. From the right Theresa May hailed the “good the state can do.” Boris Johnson described himself as a “Rooseveltian” in his hunger for state spending. Sometimes Farage feels the need to sound like a combination of Arthur Scargill and Jeremy Corbyn in his enthusiasm for state intervention. May got sucked up by Brexit and never had the space to pursue her theme. So did Johnson. Farage struggles to be convincing as he pitches to the left. The terrain marked “freedom” is available.
Phillipson is on it. She has followed through in government, stressing that her priority is improving state education when newspapers scream in fury about VAT on private schools. Although ultra loyal to Keir Starmer and his team she has been briefed against over her modest and necessary reforms to inject some greater accountability over city academies, schools that now take more pupils than any other type in England’s fractured system. The accountability is aimed at improving standards for pupils and not diminishing them. Hattersley was passionately committed to comprehensive education and making it work. In some respects and navigating a different world I sense Phillipson is close to his politics, part of a Labour right that believed in the benevolent power of the state to set people free.
I write before the formal start of the deputy leadership contest, assuming there is one. Whatever happens on that front the forbidding ruthless discipline that marked the early Starmer era is over. Once dissenters have spoken out they will not be silenced. Phillipson is a loyalist, but like the growing number of internal critics she recognises that politics must be about more than technocratic delivery. That recognition was the common bond that used to link both left and right of Labour, if nothing else did. The bond matters more than ever. The pitch against Reform cannot be a technocratic one or Nigel Farage will win. Out of power he cannot be tested by policy implementation. He has only words and will deploy them to woo across the political spectrum. That ultimate contest with Farage must be about values, ideas and the detailed policies that arise from them. In such a battle Reform is much more vulnerable than it currently seems.
Steve Richards presents the Rock N Roll Politics podcast. His biography of Tony Blair is published this week.
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