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.
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.
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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