Principles, not mechanisms: Lisa Nandy MP.
| Author | Stafford, James |
| Position | Interview |
Post-referendum prospects for 'One Nation'
What lessons can Labour draw from the referendum in Scotland? Can 'One Nation' really now be an appropriate theme for the party's policy and campaigning?
The question arising from the referendum is how is it that we came to be on a different side to other socialists, other working class socialists quite often, who had the same vision of Britain that we do: a society based on social justice, a much less individualistic and materialist society. Those are some of the things I talked about in the Compass lecture to do with freedom: collective freedom as opposed to purely individual freedom. A lot of people who voted Yes in the referendum had very similar ideas about the kind of country they wanted to build. So I think we as a party have a lot of work to do: we'll always have more in common with those socialists who said Yes than with the Tories who said no. We've got a lot of work to do to build that movement. But that's what 'One Nation' was really about--saying that there are common ties that bind us, within the UK, and outside; we need to work harder to find that, and find that social glue that holds us together, where we recognise our responsibilities to one another, and work together to raise ourselves up together. The national side is not the point.
But it raises a pretty urgent question about what the boundary is of the collectivity or the community that's being raised up. For lots of people, and not just in Scotland, the UK simply isn't a relevant community anymore.
This is where I think the work Jon Cruddas has been doing is really important. Obviously he's been running the policy review for a few years, but before that he was working on themes of power and identity, across the country and across communities. However you carve it up--whether you say it's the nations of the UK, or the One Nation of the United Kingdom, or you take an international perspective; whatever way you carve it up, there's a tension, something that Labour has always recognised, about how much more remote things become from people's lives as you work together in bigger and bigger units to try and bring benefits to people.
Michael Young wrote this pamphlet, which I discussed in the Compass lecture (Nandy, 2014c), called Small Man Big World (Young, 1949); it's exactly that conundrum that many communities are facing today. This is the sort of thing that UKIP are trying to tap into and exploit: this feeling of disconnectedness and uprootedness, not having a lot of power and control over things that really matter in your life--your workplace, your family, your public services. And the work that Jon's done is a recognition that that's always where Labour has been. We forgot during 13 years in government that the state is only as strong as the people who can participate. When Cameron first talked about the Big Society, which later became a sham, and a disaster--that was initially a really important recognition that between the state and the market there's this thing called society where a lot of people are, and where people are doing a lot of the really important things and taking part and exerting control. That's where the interesting, creative stuff is coming from.
Why would any government wish to multiply opposition to itself?
I agree with you that's the big challenge--parties talk about this sort of thing in opposition and then struggle to take it into government. But for Labour, in particular, it's the only way: the vision that Cruddas has put forward is the only thing that can take us forward. In here, in four and a half years, I've spent a lot of time watching Coalition ministers pull levers with no strings attached; tinkering with legislation, shuffling around money, writing letters to local authorities demanding that they do certain thing. It's like the Emperor's New Clothes: everybody sees that it's not working, the power isn't here anymore, if it ever was. It's dispersed in the community, and our job is to break down those barriers and make sure people can exercise it.
This problem is going to be particularly severe when you have a government that might not have much of a majority, implementing fairly heavy spending cuts.
I think that what people want from politics has changed. A lot of the public debate feels very early-90s; a lot of people saying you've got to find ways of cobbling together some kind of coalition of voters who are going to get you over the line, get you into power. I don't think people are remotely interested in politicians who are going to try and talk about electoral gains, and think about politics like that. I don't think they're really interested in triangulation--the immigration debate is a really good example; we like refugees but we hate asylum seekers; this type of migrant good, that bad... They're not interested in that. When Margaret Thatcher died, and Tony Benn died, people took to the street both for and against. It's really hard to look at politics now...
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