Who is Liam Byrne?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/1/hi/uk_politics/8393746.stm

Version 0 of 1.

By Richard Reeves Presenter, BBC Radio 4's Political Roots

Liam Byrne is a liar. He is also a bad debtor. But he is both of these things in a good way.

Liam Byrne said he lied about his age to join the Labour Party

"I joined the Labour Party not long after the miners' strike, which was an intensely politicising experience for me," he says in the Radio 4 programme, Political Roots: Labour.

The chief secretary to the Treasury, a former management consultant, recalls his political conversion.

"I remember crying with rage at what I saw on the television of what I saw as police batons charging working communities, who were standing up for their community way of life and for their work.

"It was this rage at profound injustice in the early '80s that motivated me to, I think, actually lie about my age in order to join the Labour Party as soon as I could. I remember borrowing the money off my dad."

LISTEN TO THE PROGRAMME Political Roots: Labour is on BBC Radio 4 on Wednesday 9 December at 2045 GMTThe repeat is on Sunday 13 December at 0545 GMTOr listen after the repeat <a class="" href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00p71ys">here</a>

As far as he can recall, Byrne never paid his father back for that first party subscription.

Labour is facing the likelihood of opposition after the next election, and the passing of the leadership baton down to the next generation.

Byrne is one of the cadre of younger Labour politicians - others include James Purnell (a colleague of mine at Demos), both Milibands and David Lammy - thinking harder about what it means to be on the left, and what intellectual and historical roots a post-New Labour party should draw upon.

Harold Wilson's line about Labour being "a crusade, or nothing" is quoted by government ministers all the time. But what are they crusading for? What does it mean, now, after Labour's longest-ever period in office?

The basic animating impulse of Labour is desire for equality.

I think a measure of equality of income is important Liam Byrne

This is the irreducible core of left-of-centre politics, even though David Cameron has recently been making some audacious raids into egalitarian territory.

Byrne thinks that New Labour did not do enough to narrow the gap between rich and poor, a growing sentiment in Labour ranks: "This is probably where I parted company with Tony Blair, who I didn't think put sufficient weight on the importance of equality of income.

"I think a measure of equality of income is important," Byrne argues.

"In each age, in each generation, people redefine the new boundaries of freedom, and if you are very rich you push those boundaries out. In other words, you begin to stretch what it becomes possible to do.

"And if those possibilities are always and forever and irrevocably beyond the reach of ordinary people, not ever even coming close to them, then I think you begin to create a fracture in society which is simply dangerous."

New Labour renewal

But Labour thinkers want to push ideas of equality beyond the traditional obsession with money.

Byrne told me for the programme that he has made a pilgrimage to Boston to meet the Harvard Professor Amartya Sen, an economist and philosopher who is enjoying something of a revival in Labour circles.

Sen is a liberal, but a liberal who recognises that people need certain capabilities - such as education, health or social relations - to make their freedom real.

Whatever the outcome of the next election, Labour is in urgent need of intellectual renewal.

The last significant piece of sustained thinking by a Labour politician on what it means to be on the left was The Future of Socialism, published by Tony Crosland more than half a century ago.

Despite its three electoral victories, New Labour must now reposition itself

The "Third Way" was a pseudo-philosophy, sufficient to get Labour into government in 1997 but not very robust in helping it to govern since.

As the first Labour prime minister Ramsay Macdonald put it in 1923: "We are the expression of a great uprising of the human spirit, never old, never satisfied, never finding a permanent habitation in any of the stable habitations that men build, but always like the Bedouin, sleeping in tents that he folds up in the morning in order to go on his pilgrimage."

Politics is the art of the possible, a game of manoeuvre and counter-manoeuvre, and an exercise in necessary compromise.

But to continue on a political pilgrimage, it is necessary to know where you have come from, and where you are heading. That is why the often dirty work of politics must also be a labour of the mind.

<i>Richard Reeves is the director of the think tank Demos.</i>

Political Roots: Labour is broadcast on <a class="inlineText" href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00p71ys">BBC Radio 4</a> on Wednesday 9 December 2009 at 2045 GMT and repeated on Sunday 13 December at 0545 GMT