Left thinkers warn Ed Miliband against safety-first election manifesto

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/mar/24/left-ed-miliband-manifesto-thinktanks-labour-party

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Ed Miliband's vision of bringing down the cost of living is insufficiently bold for the country, according to one organiser of a letter from thinkers on the left warning Labour against playing it safe in the party's election manifesto.

Neal Lawson, chairman of the thinktank Compass, said Labour needed to "shape up [and] be bolder and more radical" with its policies, especially by devolving more power to people.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4, Lawson went further in criticising Miliband than other signatories to the letter, which tells Labour not to fight the election with a manifesto aimed only at exploiting Conservative unpopularity.

In the letter, published in the Guardian, 19 leading figures from groups including the Fabian Society, Compass, Policy Network and Progress express unease at the prospect of Miliband failing to secure a mandate for the kind of change they believe Britain needs.

It has been signed by thinktanks from the party's left and right, as well as other progressives, and was drafted before the publication of weekend polls showing the Tories making ground after George Osborne's budget.

Polls from YouGov and Survation showed the Conservatives neck and neck with Labour, with Labour's lead narrowing to one point.

The letter's authors argue that Britain needs "transformative" change. They say: "If Labour plays the next election safe and hopes to win on the basis of Tory unpopularity, it will not have earned a mandate for such change."

The intervention suggests Miliband will face significant pressure over the coming months to send out a distinctive, clearly defined political message as the party makes its final policy decisions.

Jon Cruddas, the Labour policy review co-ordinator, has been one of those pressing for the party to reject a safety-first approach. Several policy reports due in the next four months can, he hopes, be welded together into a strong story of how the country needs to change the way it is governed.

The letter to the Guardian reflects a behind-the-scenes debate that has been going on in the party for months about whether Labour can win by focusing on the drop in living standards and attacking the coalition's broader record, in the hope of giving the Conservatives relatively few targets.

The letter is particularly striking given that some of signatories are on the party's centre right, in groups such as Progress and Policy Network, while others are from organisations on its left, including Compass and Class.

Other signatories include Maurice Glasman, a former ally of Miliband who has turned into one of his harshest critics, and policy experts from the New Economics Foundation, the Fabian Society, Shifting Grounds, Labour List, the London School of Economics, OpenDemocracy, the ACT! Alliance, We Own It, Changing London, the Green New Deal Group and the Global Sustainability Institute.

The thinktanks argue that the country needs a bolder approach. They suggest Britain needs a Labour or Labour-led government to meet unprecedented challenges, saying: "A financial system still too big to fail, austerity causing unnecessary hardship to those already at the bottom of massively unequal society, climate change flooding people's homes, and a democratic system that seems pretty irrelevant to any of these problems."

But it warns that the party "must take into the election a vision of a much more equal and sustainable society and the support of a wider movement if these formidable challenges are to be met".

Chuka Umunna, the shadow business secretary, said on Sunday the front bench would not get "obsessed" with polling. "Polls go up and down. We've seen them fluctuate and, frankly, if we obsessed with polls, we wouldn't be doing our job properly," he told BBC1's Andrew Marr Show.

Labour's falling lead in the polls appears to have shaken some of the party's backbenchers, with some feeling that Miliband struggled with his response to Osborne's surprise budget announcement on pensions in the Commons last week. Only a few Labour MPs have gone public with complaints in recent days. Among those is John Mann, MP for Bassetlaw, who said the Conservative resurgence was a "warning shot, and it would be naive to think otherwise".

"I think the message is that we need to be much clearer and, I think, simpler in putting across what our alternative is and what we stand for," he said on Sunday , directing his remarks at the whole shadow cabinet.

Simon Danczuk, MP for Rochdale, who has previously criticised Labour's message, echoed these complaints, telling the BBC's Westminster Hour: "I think our communication has to be much stronger … I think we have to move beyond abstract concepts like 'one nation'. I thought it [Miliband's budget response] was a good speech, but we have to talk less to ourselves and more to the wider public.

"We're sometimes seen as just talking about the public sector, just talking about the state. I think we need to cut the soundbites and really talk more about small business, about entrepreneurialism, about people's aspirations."

The party is also facing disquiet over how far it should back the chancellor's pension reform allowing people to take out large lump sums. Labour this weekend said it would support the move in principle, as long as the changes were fair and cost effective and good advice was offered.

Prominent backbenchers including Tom Watson, Miliband's former election organiser, Dame Anne Begg, chair of the Commons pensions watchdog, and the shadow chief secretary, Chris Leslie, have warned of some of the dangers in the coalition's proposals that may not have been properly thought through.

The strong focus of Monday's letter, largely organised by Compass, is the disruption of the existing power networks in society by handing power to more local institutions and public service users.

They say: "National government has a continuing strategic role to play but the days of politicians doing things 'to people' are over. The era of building the capacity and platforms for people to 'do things for themselves, together' is now upon us."

The thinktanks instead suggest state institutions have to "give away power and resources to our nations regions, cities, localities and where possible directly to people". They also suggest the focus of public spending needs to shift decisively to prevention in areas such as health and the environment.

Some of these themes emerged in Miliband's recent Hugo Young lecture, but there is an appetite to make a power shift central to how Labour will deliver public services in another four years of austerity.

Some of the big policy decisions ahead for Labour include rail nationalisation, the extent to which councils will be able to borrow for new housing, the new forms of accountability for education, the financial system, and public spending decisions at a time of austerity

In one new policy announcement due on Monday, Vernon Coaker, the shadow defence secretary, will call for the next strategic review of defence to take more account of the growing threat of cyber warfare, with a possible requirement for private companies to report serious web attacks threatening national infrastructure.