Helen Goodman MP argues today that Labour should adopt policies that enhance liberty and equality. She says the party allowed its "bossy tendency too much free rein".
Labour MP and former pensions minister, Helen Goodman, argues today that, as it considers how to respond to the coalition government, Labour should adopt policies that enhance liberty and equality. Labour, in power, allowed its “bossy tendency too much free rein” and allowed other parties to “outflank us rhetorically and criticise our record on equality”.
In a new paper, published by Left Foot Forward, “Stuck in the middle? Should Labour lurch to the left or stay on the centre ground?“, Helen Goodman – who is supporting Ed Miliband in the leadership race – uses a liberal/authoritarian axis and an equality/inequality axes to argue that:
“There now seems to be a growing consensus (which I share) that we need to become more “liberal”…
“[We also need] more energetic policies to deliver social justice and better communications [of those policies].
In relation to civil liberties, Ms Goodman says:
“we gather that in the coalition negotiations AV and the abolition of the DNA database were offered. On reading this, many of us were left wondering why we’d had them in the manifesto anyway! …
“there is also a good case for arguing that actually the last government did allow Labour’s bossy tendency too much free rein – and not just on the big issues like ID cards – also in allowing the development, especially at local authority level of a risk minimisation culture which is self-defeating.”
On equality, Goodman asks:
“How was it that despite the fact that our policies in government and our prospectus for the future (minimum wage, tax credits) were way more distributive than those of the opposition parties (inheritance tax cuts etc.) they were able to outflank us rhetorically and criticise our record on equality?”
Download the full paper here.
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27 Responses to “Should Labour lurch left?”
Bhaskar Dasgupta
Should Labour lurch left? http://is.gd/cvudN lol, sign of times when Labour has to ask if it should move left. #ukpolitics
Rupert Read
Come off it, Guido; Ed Balls would hardly be a shift to the Left! Balls, like Brown was, is trueNewLabour.
The whole discussion here is prejudiced by the term ‘lurch’. Why not consider the possibility that some genuine Leftism – some genuine interest in equality as a value, for instance – might help Labour to recover some sense of what it stands for, after the disastrous hollowing-out process of New Labour.
Be confident in this: If Labour elects a right-winger – a New-Labourite such as Balls or one of the Millibands – as its new Leader, it will be challenged strongly FROM the Left. By Caroline Lucas MP, among others. The Green Party believes in equality as a value, and as a guide for evaluating policy-instruments. Check out our manifesto from the General Election, if you want to know more about what I mean.
The graph above is hopelessly crude, in that it represents liberty as one thing. But liberty is an incoherent value: it can mean everything from abolishing inheritance tax to opposing ID cards to introducing a basic (or ‘citizens’) income. Are the poor freer in a society where inheritance tax has been abolished, or where there is a decent basic income for all?
If you play the game of opposing liberty to equality, you are playing into the hands of right-wingers. In which case, you will indeed think of any move to the left as a regrettable ‘lurch’.
Bernard Randall
RT @leftfootfwd: Should Labour lurch left? Unravelling the strategic dilemma http://bit.ly/9mrCF8
NormalBloke
Liberalism is where the coalition is at – liberal on social issues, liberal on economics. And there is the conundrum- how can labour make its self of value – could it move further left and thus away from enabling wealth creation and closer yet to entrapping people on benefits or by moving to the right – oops the middle liberal ground is already occupied! The progressives are on the right of the Liberals and the Left of the Conservatives. The Labour Party are struggling to find an answer because they have the legacy of 13 yrs of misrule big govt , spin lies and deceit to contend with. So another question – how can Labour build trust – remove mandy, campbell, Balls and Draper would be a good start – there has to be a move from the past.
Harry Barnes
It would be an advance in the Labour Party if it accepted that the expression of democratic socialist views and influences were acceptable within its ranks – including there having a legitimate role to play within the PLP. This would be aided by the democratisation of the Labour Party itself and greater parliamentary freedoms for back-bench Labour MPs (which is aided by being in opposition, one of its few advantages). The left itself has responsibities in furthering such a pattern. The Socialist Campaign group needs to look beyond its bunker and those with a soft left/labourite past need to put their heads back up above the parapet.