Wednesday 4 February 2015

Optimism and Relationships

Jonathan Todd writes:

The British economy is growing because of the hard work and ingenuity of businesses and workers.

Crime remains in a long-term decline. Some public services are improving because of the efforts of public servants like those interviewed by Liz Kendall and Steve Reed in a new Progress publication.

The economy improves in spite of George Osborne, while Theresa May benefits from a trend toward falling crime that predates her time in office.

Osborne’s attempted fiscal consolidation has lacked strategic direction: cutting deepest where resistance was thought weakest (local government, welfare), instead of recasting the relationship between public, private and third sectors to secure maximum combined impact.

Pockets of public service innovation are, nonetheless, discernible, even if this strategic direction is lacking. 

Kendall and Reed delve into these pockets: Frontline, a programme designed to attract some of the country’s highest achieving graduates into social work; Newcastle city council’s response to the government’s ‘troubled families’ programme; Oldham council, experiencing a threefold rise in residents’ satisfaction under Jim McMahon’s leadership; Participle, an organisation that designs and helps to launch projects to demonstrate what the next generation of public services should look like; and the use of personal budgets to empower people to manage their health and wellbeing in ways that best suit their particularities.

“It might be tough for those of us who love politics to face,” as Hopi Sen noted, writing for Progress about a Policy Network pamphlet published at the end of last year, “but politics is primarily a secondary function in society. Real change is being created and developed elsewhere, and politics seeks to manage, regulate, anticipate and ameliorate those changes in the interests of the people”.

Real change in the economy is about risk-taking entrepreneurs and determined workers, not Osborne.

Real improvement in crime figures is about complex and subtle social advances, not May. Real public service improvement is about the coalface pioneers unearthed by Kendall and Reed, not Francis Maude, who this weekend announced he is standing down as an MP and received garlands for the public service improvement he has supposedly secured ensconced in the Cabinet Office.

James Forsyth reported in the Mail on Sunday on Maude and also on one shadow cabinet member worrying that Labour offers voters only a ‘mantra of misery’.

Labour should not, however, be miserable.

We should be confident in the capacity of businesses and workers to grow the economy, social change to continue crime’s downward trajectory, and public servants to work with service users, families and communities to better outcomes.

It is not that nothing good can happen under a Tory government. Of course, good things can and do happen under Tory government.

But Tory government is incidental to these things, as it is in the nature of a free society that government does not determine everything.

Labour’s case isn’t best made by the curmudgeonly and disingenuous claim that these good things cannot really be happening due to the persistence of Tory government.

Instead, Labour’s case should be founded on the optimism that more of these things would be enabled through a government creating the kind of people-powered public services that Ed Miliband looked toward in his Hugo Young lecture, a lecture that Kendall and Reed recall in their introduction to the pamphlet.

The importance of relationships is a recurring theme in the interviews that follow.

Frontline works to bring about change within families, which are the nexus of our most crucial relationships. Such relationships are also a priority for the families programme in Newcastle, which deploys a whole family approach with named key workers and sustained support.

In Oldham renewing relationships has also been vital to better social care, as service users have received longer appointments at times of their choosing, allowing them to develop deeper relations with social care staff at times that do not intrude on their commitments to others.

Personal budgets, meanwhile, according to Sarahlee Richards, commissioning lead for NHS Nene and Corby clinical commissioning group, are “about people being part of their community”, another tapestry woven from the interplay of relationships.

And the work of Participle, claims Hilary Cottam, its founder and chief executive, “starts [by] having Sunday lunch and playing bingo”, integrating themselves into these tapestries.

This speech, said Jon Cruddas last week, is a plea to put fraternity back into our politics.

Given the stress on relationships, Kendall and Reed might also have conceived their pamphlet as such a plea. Cruddas is more closely associated with the Blue Labour movement than any other senior elected Labour politician and Progress continues to be seen as keepers of the New Labour flame.

In the shared concern of Cruddas, Kendall and Reed on relationships, we perhaps glimpse the contours of the New-Blue movement – a fusion of the New and Blue Labour variants – that Rafael Behr last week wrote was forming.

More than three years after I argued on Uncut that such a cocktail would work.

I’m not bitter that it has taken so long for the world to catch up. I’m optimistic about all the possibility, unlocked through strengthened relationships, that Kendall and Reed showcase.

And which ought to form leitmotifs and inspirations to a party with optimism in a better tomorrow, grounded in the potential of today, in its DNA.

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