This
week I returned from nearly five days in Brighton for Labour’s annual
conference – only my second, and the party’s first with Jeremy Corbyn as leader.
It was marked by events with varying vibes and meet-ups with people I’ve met
across the Labour party over the years, and returning to daily life in London
after being suspended in such an oddly intense political bubble is an adjustment.
But here’s some thoughts and impressions on my experiences.
Mental health
I’ve
spent the last few days helping out on stalls for two very different causes in
the party – promoting a pro-business agenda with the Labour Finance &
Industry Group (LFIG/Labour Business),
which I’ve been active with for about 18 months, and fighting against stigma
and for parity of esteem with the Labour
Campaign for Mental Health, a new-ish
organisation I’d only just found out about. I’ve spoken to more people I can
count in a matter of days on both issues, explaining why both should be at the
forefront for Labour’s agenda and seeking to get more people involved. I’m also
happy to say that both these causes also got top billing at conference.
As
well as being highlighted in Jeremy Corbyn’s first speech as leader on Tuesday,
mental health was a big focus on the final day of conference – it was the
subject of a supportive motion on the final day and of a speech by the holder
of Labour’s brand-new shadow minister for Mental Health post, Luciana Berger.
One in four suffer from mental health conditions, including severe anxiety and
depression as well as bipolarity and PTSD. Many still can’t speak up to get
support, or find it available even if they do, and the biggest killer among
younger males is still suicide. Mental health is 15% of the disease burden, but
only receives
5% of the funding, and has been hard-hit by cuts in the last five years. During
Jeremy Corbyn’s first PMQs exchange with David Cameron, the prime minister claimed that his government had
sought to end the status of mental health as a ‘Cinderella service’ in the NHS,
but all this serves as a reminder that this is far from the reality. I hope the
Labour Campaign for Mental Health will be a valuable ally of Luciana Berger’s
in keeping this issue high up the agenda.
Business
On
the business front, perhaps the most compelling part of the stellar and
wide-ranging speech Tom Watson gave at the close of conference was his defence
of the self-employed and ‘0-to-9ers’, the micro-businesses that make up 96% of
businesses and a third of the private sector workforce. He issued a clear
warning to Labour that if it doesn’t stand for these people, it stands for no
one, while also admonishing the Tories as a party of the 1% that in practice
disdains the self-employed ‘white van man’ they often claim to champion. LFIG’s
Philip Ross led an event focusing on these issues, which was attended by former
small business owner Toby Perkins MP. LFIG was also able to host an event with
Fujitsu with the leaders of larger enterprises, where it was heard loud and
clear that staying in the EU – an area where Labour still has a clearer policy
offer than the Tories – was vital if Britain was to continue to attract trade
and inward investment.
Labour and the Third Sector
As
someone who works in the sector, I was also interested to attend a joint
ACEVO-New Philanthropy Capital event on the not-for-profit sector’s role in delivering
public services. Former MP Hazel Blears made an impressive, passionate plea for
cooperative principles and public service reform, speaking about the poor
social care her mum received and the need for new forms of accountability. She
also spoke about her experiences battling opposition from both the fringes of
the statist left and libertarian right to pass the Social Value Act, which aims
to ensure that public commissioners include social outcomes in the criteria
they use - some on the left see even the involvement of not-for-profit
organisations in service delivery as privatisation, while the right saw the Act
as meddling in the free market. Dan Corry, former Labour special advisor and
director of sector think-tank NPC, echoed Blears’ call for Labour not to see
delivery of services by not-for-profits as simply more “outsourcing”.
Also
on the panel was Tony Lloyd, “the most powerful man in Greater Manchester”
after a settlement that promoted him from elected Police & Crime
Commissioner to acting mayor, and Neil Coyle, the newly-elected MP in
Bermonsey, where I campaigned in the run up to the election. Coyle warned about
social care cuts and rising demand for foodbanks, and noted that the design of
schemes like the Work Programme hadn’t benefited the sector enough. I was also
glad to read that at other events in Brighton, two other rising stars elected
in May made splashes of their own – Wes Streeting
warned that too many MPs ignored the campaigning role of charities, while
Brighton & Hove’s own Peter Kyle warned about the strain the Charity Commission is under. Labour must
continue to work to defend and nurture civil society, and the last few days
have made clear that the class of 2015 will do so.
The Trident row
I’m
an oddity among Labour moderates in that I’m fairly sympathetic to the case
against Trident renewal (here’s a blog I wrote
on it in July 2013 - Blairite Dan Hodges once wrote much the same in the Telegraph in 2012). But from a standpoint of strategy, I’m still
deeply concerned about the position Corbyn took on Trident at conference. I’m
glad conference voted against the motion to debate Trident renewal – it would
have been divisive and distracted from issues that are of greater priority for
the public, such as the economy and housing. But in the spirit of that, Corbyn
should also have avoided the issue altogether in his leader’s speech and stuck
by existing norms of nuclear use when asked by reporters. This has now become the main story of conference, which is a bad result
for Labour.
Any
eventual change in Labour’s position on Trident would need to be well-timed and
presented in a manner that will still offer the public assurance and security,
which is the first duty of any prime minister of either party. Left-wing
unilateralists like Corbyn have a bad habit of trying to frame the issue as
defence versus social spending (the CND stall at conference had a big “Books,
Not Bombs” sign, I noted), whereas an effective message would have to be around
fiscal prudence and the relative merits of different defence spending choices.
Labour would need to pledge to invest the money saved in conventional defence
and domestic security measures that would better confront 21st
century threats (intelligence, counter-extremism, light rapid-reaction forces
etc). Alternatively, a phased approach that paired renewal with a reduction in
the number of subs or missiles might have represented a compromise. Labour
would also need to be speaking from a position of maximum credibility on
defence in order to make a pivot on Trident, which unfortunately isn’t neccesarily the
case with Corbyn - his past statements about reducing the armed forces and inability
to name any situations in which he’d deploy them count too much against him. Corbyn’s assurances that the industry jobs threatened by the loss of
Trident would be protected by other means did show some understanding
of the gravity of this issue, but ultimately, this wasn’t the time for this
debate.
The leader’s speech
The
high points of Corbyn’s first speech as leader were his direct calls to David
Cameron to intervene in two pressing cases – the imminent execution of young
political prisoner Ali Mohammed al-Nimr in Saudi Arabia, and the threatened
closure of the Thai-owned SSI steel plant in Redcar, which threatens 1,700
jobs. It’s notable that the few strongest moments of Ed Miliband’s leadership
were those where he shifted the national narrative and put pressure on the
government (energy market reform, phone hacking), and Corbyn could score early
wins for himself if he keeps the pressure on over these two issues. If Cameron
intervenes, the narrative will be that Corbyn forced his hand. If he doesn’t,
the prime minister will be seen to have failed.
Elsewhere
though, I had concerns. There was some good self-deprecatory humour, but Corbyn’s
delivery is not yet calm or consistent. The theme - “a new, kinder politics” -
was vague, and seemed contradicted by the more tribal speech delivered by Tom
Watson the next day (in which Corbyn’s deputy mocked the Lib Dems as “a useless
bunch of lying sellouts” and called on Labour to “kick these nasty Tories down
the road”). And the now-frequent denunciations of the press he included in the
speech were counter-productive. Many will have sympathy with some of the gripes
Corbyn expressed (the tendency of reporting to dramatise disagreements as
“splits”, compromises as “capitulations” etc), but he at times gives the impression that he doesn’t accept the role of the media in providing
legitimate scrutiny, when this is a basic and vital part of politics that no
leader can be above.
Blue Labour
In
terms of what Labour should do and can be, however, probably the most
interesting experience I had at conference was attending ResPublica’s event on
Blue Labour, held on the Tuesday in the Grand Hotel. ResPublica’s director
Phillip Blond opened proceedings by describing the event as “counter-cultural”,
which was apt. The room was rowdy at times, while others were more sober or
even sterile, and it was packed with Labourites from further afield with a
culturally small-c conservative bent. Two outspoken backbench MPs from this
tradition, John Mann and Simon Danczuk, on the panel (another who recently
resigned frontbench, Hyndburn MP Graham Jones, asked a question from the
audience). Also on the panel were Blue Labour editor Adrian Pabst, founder
Maurice Glasman and recent mayoral candidate David Lammy, who praised Blue
Labour but criticised its name. The death of Labour’s white working-class
support and the need to tackle immigration were major themes, along with moving
away from Labour’s default language of rights (which I heard plenty about in
other fringes) and towards a relational language that stressed obligations as
well. It was a very different atmosphere from the rest of conference, but I
couldn’t help but feel that if the Labour mainstream sounded a bit like that
room in the Grand, we’d have done far better in much of England on May 7th.
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