Why Britain needs a Labour government tomorrow

It’s been a long, gruelling five years in British politics, but on Thursday, we once again go to the polls.

The coalition’s record

We’ve seen the formation of the first coalition government since the war, which was immediately taken as a betrayal by many young or centre-left voters who had plumped for the Lib Dems, as they forced to watch their chosen party commit to breakneck austerity and a tripling of tuition fees that it had purported to oppose. As a result, Labour is now the second opposition in Nick Clegg’s traditional Lib-Con marginal seat of Sheffield Hallam, and will at the very least run him close on election night – this is a sign of how strong the disaffection with the Lib Dems, the one-time agents of change and purveyors of “new politics”, now is. In my old stomping ground in Bermondsey & Old Southwark, where I will be spending May 7^th pounding pavements for Labour's fantastic local PPC Neil Coyle, Simon Hughes MP has merrily transformed himself from a standard-bearer of the social liberal tradition to someone who has voted for the bedroom tax eight times and works under odious, book-banning Justice Secretary Chris Grayling (in violation of previous pledge not to join the coalition frontbench, I’d add). His once-impregnable majority is now too under threat, Lord Ashcroft's polling found.

The speeding up of deficit reduction came at a substantial and avoidable economic and human cost, slowing the fragile recovery Gordon Brown had handed David Cameron stewardship of. This happened because he and George Osborne felt that Labour’s original plan to halve the deficit in this parliament wasn’t ideological enough for their purposes, insisting instead that eliminating it in five years flat was an unquestionable necessity (or they thought that in 2010, anyway – having now only managed to halve the deficit, Osborne has moved the goalposts in order to pat himself on the back). Tory incompetence cost the UK our AAA credit rating, something Osborne had asked us to judge his record by. As this government draws to a close, UK growth stands at 0.3% - it was 1% when Brown left office. And yet despite all this, we’ve had to endure the smugness of a Conservative party willing to drone on and on about its “long-term economic plan”.

We’ve seen the NHS undergo perhaps the biggest reorganisation in its history, despite a pre-2010 Cameron pledge of “no more top-down reorganisations”, overwhelming opposition from the medical profession and warnings from health policy experts, even those on the political right. The reorganisation wasted valuable time and billions of pounds of public money at a time when money was suddenly scarce and the NHS needed to be straining every sinew to make efficiency savings, under the QIPP drive launched by Sir David Nicholson in 2009. There’s been little evidence that handing control of local NHS budgets to GPs has improved NHS services, and while provider pluralism within the NHS is not necessarily an inherent evil, the prescriptive design of the Health and Social Care Act 2012’s competition rules has thwarted innovative efforts at service integration.

As a result of all this incompetence, the health think-tank King’s Fund reports that NHS standards have now slipped back to early 1990s levels. The NHS also faces a severe funding crisis, and while the Tories have pledged to put in £8bn by 2020, they are unable to specify where that will come from. Maybe that means cuts elsewhere, tax increases or another broken deficit pledge, but I fear another possibility. The drumbeat on the right for the introduction of NHS charges has been getting louder in this parliament - a policy which would represent incremental privatisation of the costs of healthcare and undercut the equitable basis that stands the NHS in such good stead in international health comparisons. Two of the three Tory MPs who stood for the chairmanship of the Commons Health Committee last year openly backed charges for GP visits, as does David Cameron’s special advisor on health, Nick Seddon. Dr Mark Porter of the British Medical Association recently asked “could a future government be tempted [to introduce NHS charges]? Yes, they could”. Porter rightfully added that “they must resist that temptation”, but I have doubts about the ability of a Tory government to do so, or even of the Lib Dems to “moderate” this particular instinct given the poor job they did of keeping the Tories honest on the NHS this time around.

We’ve also seen the coalition push through harsh cuts and reforms in welfare, not only limited to the aforementioned bedroom tax. I’m all for welfare reform, as are the public, but it does have to be done humanely, and in a social and economic context where it is workable. The government should not contract Atos (or Maximus now, but with the same medical director) to coerce the sick and disabled into work. Sanctioning people who missed JobCentre appointments because a learning disability impairs their time-keeping or because they had a funeral to attend is the furthest thing I can imagine from the mark of a fair society. A civil service report leaked to the Guardian gave some insight into where the £12bn of further welfare cuts the Tories are pledging might come from, suggesting they would hit the “sick, poor, young and disabled”. This reminds us that Neil Kinnock’s words on the eve of Thatcher’s re-election in 1983 still ring true today: “if [David Cameron] wins on Thursday, I warn you not to be ordinary. I warn you not to be young. I warn you not to fall ill” (though unlike in Kinnock’s day, you can at least now “grow old”, perhaps  – for fear of offending a loyal voting bloc, the Tories are protecting benefits for even the wealthiest pensioners).

Above all though, welfare reform works best in a balanced and prosperous economy where the carrot of a fair wage for a good days’ work is always bigger than that stick the Tories are so fond of using. Cameron’s “recovery” has been an hourglass economy, where most jobs created are at the very bottom or very top of the income spectrum. The Tories have failed to tackle zero-hours contracts, despite them being the near-antithesis of allowing people to experience the dignity and security of work, and in any case, a cost of living crisis has also meant that wages haven’t kept pace with inflation. This all badly needs to change.

And lastly, as Britain’s two-and-a-half party system has fractured – with UKIP rising to become a competitive electoral force across swathes of England and the SNP taking Scotland by storm in the final stages of this parliament - the Conservative response has been telling. First, the Tories swung right in order to combat the UKIP threat. It’s not so much the EU referendum pledge that bugs me – I nit-pick that more on ‘when’ rather than ‘whether’. But the hardline right-wing positioning on immigration, the ditching of the so-called "green crap" (and other early Cameron-era liberal policies) and the open admissions by several Tory frontbenchers that they might well vote to leave are all worrying. Worse still has been the Tory response to the SNP in recent months – a party still registered with the Electoral Commission as the 'Conservative and Unionist Party' has effectively been talking up a separatist party in order to weaken Scottish Labour on the one hand and inflame the passions of English swing voters on the other. Despite last year’s 55% No vote in Scotland, the prospect of an SNP near-monopoly on Scottish Westminster representation on around half the Scottish vote is severely destabilising to the union, and short-term political game-playing has only made that worse.

All that, and more, is the miserable legacy this government hopes to continue. And it could yet be replaced by an even worse one – one more beholden to the Tory backwoodsmen and their allies in UKIP.

The alternative - Labour

My party has not had an easy ride of it these past five years – oppositions, especially when recently thrown head-first from government, rarely do. We’ve had to think hard about why the public couldn’t trust us in 2010, and learn those lessons. We’ve had to look at some of the failings of the New Labour era, while still getting a word in edgewise about its successes. And since the rise of UKIP and the SNP, Labour has even had to fight to hold on to voters who backed us in 2010, but have since become disaffected with Labour and with mainstream politics in general.

But Labour has risen to the challenge. We’ve admitted the mistakes of our previous time in government – Iraq, immigration, bank deregulation, failure to balance the economy, and overuse of the central state to achieve (well-meaning) aims. We have crafted a better plan, to radically decentralise both the economy and the state in order to place power in the hands of individuals, families and communities once again. We will use devolution to secure the identities of Britain’s four unique nations within our United Kingdom. We will reform the welfare state in order to renew public faith in it, while also striving to make work pay. We will reform the banking sector to prevent another financial crisis, and take on monopolistic utility providers and transport companies that rip off British consumers. And Labour has moderated its approach to immigration and the EU, recognising that while both may still contribute to Britain overall, Labour never should have tried to pretend they were all-upside or have ignored public opinion.

Labour has also been acutely aware of public perceptions of the party’s economic record. While apologising on bank regulation, the party has rightfully ignored the Tories’ economically illiterate and politically opportunistic demands to ‘apologise’ on spending as well – the pre-financial crisis deficit was small, was incurred in order to invest in the public services Thatcher and Major had so badly neglected, and was backed by George Osborne at the time. The post-crisis deficit was large, but governments run up deficits at times of economic turmoil – John Major’s post-Black Wednesday deficit (which he hadn’t abolished by the time Tony Blair took the helm in 1997) was a case in point. But Labour’s 2015 manifesto has been clear in its intent to eradicate the deficit, through a budget lock and a combination of spending cuts in non-protected areas, tax avoidance measures and incremental tax rises levied only on the very richest. This is because even debt created for sound reasons in the short-term cannot be sustained - a fiscally responsible centre-left party knows that our economy must be built on sound foundations.

Similarly, to make clear its desire to work with business to foster a strong economy, Labour will cut business rates to the tune of more than £1bn, and will reform the energy market to bring down excessive bills that hit SMEs hard. As an alternative to high street banks that have failed to lend to Britain’s intrepid entrepreneurs, Labour will establish a British state investment bank. And massive devolution to nations, regions and localities - including fiscal powers - will better enable officials and businesses to work together and meet the real needs of their local economies. As in Tony Blair's time, Labour will govern as a pro-business, pro-aspiration party.

Finally, we’ve also had to justify again and again the decision we made in 2010 to elect Ed Miliband as our leader. I’ve defended him on this blog repeatedly in the past two years, most notably in an extended blog last August outlining his vision for Britain and suitability for the office of Prime Minister, and he has always led David Cameron in polls on honesty and being in touch with the average person. But since the start of the short campaign, the ‘Ed4PM’ case has become much clearer than it was even a few months ago, as strong debate performances have allowed him to speak directly to the public, rather than being filtered through a hostile press. The real Ed has proven himself passionate, personable and capable. Here’s what drives him, in his own words:

Because of all this and more, Labour is once again ready to govern, and a Miliband-led government in Downing Street is sorely needed. But as Steve Coogan said in his PEB for Labour the other day, “this election is on the knife-edge”. The Tories’ much-prophesised “crossover moment” in the polls doesn’t seem to have materialised, and both parties are deadlocked at around 33% of the vote apiece. Its unlikely Labour will have the luxury of governing with a majority, and I’ve blogged about how I hope Ed Miliband will approach a hung parliament. But at the end of the day, I have faith in his judgement - I can’t say the same of David Cameron, or of his likely allies of necessity, Nick Clegg and Nigel Farage. I hope for the right result on May 7th, so that we can rebuild this country on progressive foundations. So hell yes, I'm voting Labour.