How Labour Can Win Again

Everyone's probably seen or heard about this report from Demos by now. Much of the media and blog comment has focused on the spin Demos has given the results, which claims Labour lost the election because it was too leftwing and wanted to save public services. The way back into the electorate's good books, it argues, is to embrace the Big Society and join the Tories in butchering the public sector.

You could be forgiven for thinking Demos were attacking the Labour manifesto of 1983, not that of 2010. While it may not have been to the taste of the Tories, for whom the deficit and the Big Society are foils for bombing Britain's welfare provision back to the stone age, by any measure A Future Fair For All was no radical break with the status quo. It was an amalgam of Brown's late conversion to Keynes-lite, a dose of creepy illiberalism, interesting stuff on arts, communities, and the environment, and rounded off with a superficial dusting of mutualism.

Nor could the election campaign be described as leftist (or even leftish). I did not imagine Brown's defence of Trident or competition with the Tories to see who could be most beastly to immigrants. I *wish* I had hallucinated Alistair Darling's claim that cuts under a re-elected Labour government would be worse than Thatcher's, but I didn't. For all intents and purposes this was a campaign fought on the centre ground of the neoliberal consensus, which is a terrain far more congeal to the Tories and LibDems.

My intention however is not so much to pooh-pooh the Demos recommendations, but pre-empt its reception among the more right wing elements of the party. You can almost hear the arguments now as triangulators and technocrats fall over themselves offering leadership contenders (and anyone who'll listen) the same advice that has seen party membership, standing and support tumble over the last 13 years. This is the worship of accomplished fact at its most stark, of the (contradictory) flipside of New Labour's arrogance and elitism, that ultimately we must bow to the wisdom of the crowd.

I don't accept this for one second. Beatrice Webb is said to have noted "there is no such thing as spontaneous public opinion. It all has to be manufactured from a centre of conviction and energy". Even if we accept the Demos findings as gospel (and I do not), it also means acknowledging this is the product of the social and political changes of the last 30 years. It rests on the realisation that public opinion can be changed. Setting out alternatives to the cuts, renewing the trade unions, active campaigning at the community level, attacking the Tories' 19th century agenda, rebuilding, reorganising ... all of these things and more is what we need to do for Labour and the labour movement to win again. Labour shouldn't follow public opinion: it should seek to *lead* it. That's the path back to power, not pandering to prejudice or tailing received wisdom.