There were two big winners on 3 May. Not Ed Miliband and Boris Johnson but ‘disenchantment with party politics’ and ‘politics with a personality’. The results were clearly great for Labour, far surpassing expectations. There is no doubt that it is now conceivable that Labour really can win the next election.

But we need to be honest that there was no enthusiasm for Labour – or for any party or politics in general – in the elections. Turnouts were appallingly low right across the board. The government is in crisis, becoming increasingly incompetent, and a toxic combination of cuts and tax rises are hurting families. And yet a massive majority of voters just could not see the point of voting.

Throw in the rejection of directly elected mayors and it all adds up to further evidence of the seemingly inexorable decline in trust that voters have in politicians and the big political parties. This disconnection produced some strange results. On the whole, where there was no one else on offer, Labour benefited from ‘stay-at-home Tories’ and the votes of those who wanted to give the government a kicking. But where there was a more colourful, less mainstream, option, then plenty of voters took that. Respect in Bradford and Johnson in London in particular, but, across the country, the Greens, UK Independence party and English Democrats saw their votes go up. In fact ‘others’ got 15 per cent of the projected national vote.

The hard reality is that Labour’s victory was built on the votes of between 12 and 13 per cent of the electorate. Only 27 per cent or so of people voted for a big party at all. The way that the main parties do politics is failing voters. There is a cosy assumption that everyone is fascinated by political life, an elitism and arrogance in all parties that they know best, and a sense of a system designed to deliver jobs for the boys and occasional girls. Most voters hate it.

Yet at election times we think that if we send voters lots of glossy leaflets that tell them we really care, and promise them something that they want, they will believe us, be grateful and vote for us. What patronising nonsense. People do not believe the parties will deliver when they promise things because their experience is that they do not. We might like to taunt the Conservatives that ‘we’re not all in it together’ but the uncomfortable truth is that voters think that the cap fits Labour equally well.

There will be huge rewards for the first party that breaks this mould. That means running election campaigns that are more than simply the industrial-scale production of clever election material, however well it is targeted. Elections should be about personal contact, social media, partnerships with other local interest groups and local advocacy. We must decentralise power. It could be Movement for Change or something else, but party politics has to start being experienced by voters as something useful.

Our politics must become open and stop being elitist. Advocacy will only happen if people choose to be part of our campaigns. Never again should we select candidates or leaders without directly involving voters. We must stop debating the introduction of primaries and introduce them as a matter of urgency. The primary should be a key starting point of our campaign, an opportunity for us to build a supporter base beyond our membership. Campaigns themselves should become more local and less corporate, with candidates encouraged to be individuals. It will feel messy at first and less controlled. But that is the point. The voters will love it. It will encourage innovation and begin to break down the wall between the majority and the tiny minority of political activists.

If the first winner on election day was ‘disenchantment with party politics’, the second was ‘politics with a personality’. If anyone ever doubted that personality really does matter, the last few weeks should have persuaded them otherwise. George Galloway won Bradford West because voters connected with him and liked him, even though they did not particularly dislike Labour. In London, Johnson outpolled his own party and people from across the political spectrum voted for him. They did so on the whole because they liked him and did not like Ken Livingstone. It may not suit our preferred rational view of the world but it is how voters operate. Livingstone offered cheaper fares and Johnson swore his way through the campaign. People liked the fare cut and preferred a candidate with a big personality.

At the next general election voters will have a general sense of what the two parties are all about. A small minority will vote the way that they always do. But swaths will vote instinctively on the basis of who they feel will do best, who they feel safest with and who they like and are inspired by. The uncomfortable truth is that people still do not trust Miliband and do not see him yet as a prime minister. And Labour’s leader himself sensibly acknowledged this when, as the results were emerging, he promised to ‘work tirelessly between now and the next general election to win [the] trust’ of those who did not vote Labour or turn out at all.

We talk about the need to build trust, but trust is a feeling, an emotion. Labour can win midterm elections or by-elections on the back of the government’s unpopularity. It can have all the policy answers to the country’s problems but if Miliband cannot develop a sense of connection, a sense of trust from voters over the next few years then Labour will lose. Put simply, Labour cannot win a general election unless and until voters look at its leader and are willing to trust him as prime minister. More than anything else Miliband’s job, and the party’s job, is to project him so that trust is built.

Labour’s leader is at his best when he is talking to people and doing question and answer sessions. He should stop making speeches, where he looks wooden, and focus on interaction. Cancel the set-piece conference speech and instead have a series of conversations with audiences. His aides should not worry too much about the questions because he is good at handling people. It will allow people to get to know him, to like him and it will stop him veering off and sounding like an out-of-touch policy wonk. Miliband’s big strength is his human side so let it shine. He should also work on the language used to describe his vision and practise looking relaxed in formal situations. If this sounds like superficial advice, it is not. This matters.

Labour has earned the right to be heard again but has not yet earned the right to be trusted. To do so it needs to abandon the ‘command-and-control’ party politics that so turns voters off. And it needs to understand and accept the increasing importance of the personality of its leaders. But the prize is that the now conceivable prospect of a Labour victory at the next general election might just become a reality.

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Peter Watt is a contributing editor to Progress and former general secretary of the Labour party

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Photo: lewishamdreamer

He offers an interesting path for Labour to take, if it is to continue the modernisation of both the party and the country which was brought to fruition under Tony Blair. He is relentless in driving the message that ‘evidence, not dogma’, should form the basis of our education policy.

He is entirely right, of course. The day the Labour party becomes a true natural party of government is when it becomes comfortable with being a natural party of government. Those (usually on the unelectable left) who wish to cling to ‘ideological purity’, rather than vote-winning policies, will perhaps never be comfortable with Stephen’s push on education.

Does that mean he has sold his Labour values in order to win votes? Such is the cry from the stubborn groups in the party any time a Labour politician calls for modernisation. This attitude comes from those who are so blinded by their calls of betrayal that they fail to see our first loyalty should be to the electorate.

We’ve had the debate on free schools before, but it’s worth making one more point. The shadow education secretary was right to suggest we wouldn’t oppose them. His policy move wasn’t about free schools. It never was, until it became a stick with which to hit a Blairite shadow cabinet member for daring to offer a realistic stance on education.

His policy was about enshrining the core value for the Labour party in 2012 – that policy is not about party politics or outdated ideology. It should be about looking at what works, what doesn’t. We won’t know the outcome of free schools for quite some time. That means we should remain open to them. Will a voter put a cross in the box of a Labour candidate if we have promised to undo the work that led to a better education for their child?

I have next to me the notes which Stephen kindly gave me following his talk at Progress annual conference on the direction Labour should head in on public sector reform. The words in capitals under the title ‘value for money’ should form the basis of our 2015 argument – ‘VITAL WE OCCUPY THIS TERRITORY’.

This is precisely the commonsense policy direction the Labour party needs to head in. If we are to make a success of the next general election it is right that we face up now to the challenges of 2015 and beyond. The economy is faltering, the coalition’s plan has failed. That doesn’t mean we can open up policy debates to those who want to spend our way back to economic competence. We will have question marks over our own spending for a generation.

One more interesting thought to take away from Progress annual conference was whether 2015 would be a hope or fear election. We can’t predict it, but it’ll likely be a mixture of both. Hope for stronger public services, fear for stagnation in our economy.

The calls for ‘evidence, not dogma’ on which to base policy are a fundamentally good thing for the Labour party to take into both types of election. The new head of the policy review, Jon Cruddas, would do well to listen to his colleague.

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Alex White is a member of Progress, writes for the Young Progressives column, and tweets @AlexWhiteUK

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Photo: athena.

A Aircraft Carrier

The government’s defence review in 2010 axed 7,000 soldiers, 5,000 personnel from the RAF and 4,000 from the navy. But most media attention was focused on the decision to leave Britain without an effective carrier strike capability – a working aircraft carrier equipped with fighter jets – until 2020 at the very earliest. Harrier jump-jets were scrapped in 2011 and the F35 Joint Strike Fighters replacing them will not be available for another decade, leaving Britain’s aircraft carrier to patrol the high seas without any planes. While our allies deployed Harriers from carriers during the conflict in Libya, Britain could not do so. Its sole carrier has recently been taken in for repair, leaving us with no operational carrier at all, and the date for the new jets entering service is unknown.

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B Big Society  

The most elusive of policy beasts. Rare glimpses show it is the prime minister’s ‘passion’ for a smaller government and more engaged citizenry. However, detailed study reveals policies that tax wealthy people’s charitable work and centralise policy to the point that national citizens’ service and community organiser programmes are devised, funded, and controlled from Downing Street itself. Go figure.

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C Nick Clegg

The free-market libertarian

Nick Clegg is essentially a wealthy Dutch liberal, by parentage and outlook. His mother is Dutch, his family very well-off, his education elite private (‘prep’ school then Westminster School), and his career until becoming an MP based largely in Brussels. He is a classic liberal on libertarian and constitutional issues. He is internationalist, pro-European and multilingual. He is socially progressive. But he is on the right on economics, favouring a smaller rather than a larger state or even the status quo. And he does not have much – if any – understanding of the toiling mainstream or what he termed ‘alarm clock Britain’.

The recent biography of Clegg by Chris Bowers quotes a number of his friends. ‘I think of him more as a continental liberal than perhaps a mainstream British liberal,’ says his former European parliamentary colleague, Chris Davies. ‘If the Conservative party had been how it used to be under Edward Heath, Nick would be a Tory, albeit a natural liberal, pro-European Tory like Chris Patten and Ken Clarke,’ argues another, Andrew Duff. ‘He didn’t like Labour at all and didn’t like the Conservatives enough [to join either]. He was very unhappy with the Conservatives’ European policy,’ suggests Leon Brittan, for whom Clegg worked at the European Commission.

The tuition fees episode sums all this up. To Clegg and his family, £9,000 is neither here nor there. I doubt he has any real understanding of how much this represents even to middle England, let alone to students from working-class families. So having bitten the bullet on the principle of fees – which Bowers’ biography says, tellingly, he had wanted to do before the election, but he deferred to his party conference – he had no difficulty in going straight to £9,000. This means around £50,000 of debt for a full university education. I know, with near-certainty, that Tony Blair would not have gone near such a figure, for all his modernising and marketising instincts. He would have instinctively felt this to be more than middle England would or could bear.

Clegg’s free-market libertarianism is common in liberal parties on the continent well beyond the Netherlands. However, it is out of step with the British 20th century left-of-centre progressive tradition which dominated the Liberal party and its successors from Asquith, Lloyd George, Keynes and Beveridge through to Roy Jenkins, Paddy Ashdown and Charles Kennedy. It is also out of step with the Liberal Democrat mainstream, and herein lies Clegg’s problem and the seeds of all the difficulties he has, and will continue to have, with his party.

Ask Clegg privately what he has achieved in government and he will probably tell you that he has ‘stopped the Tories from being far worse’. But look at what he ‘stopped’ and the nature of his liberalism is revealed. He has stopped the abolition of the Human Rights Act, any reneging on existing European treaties, and (perhaps – let’s see) the ditching of the Tories’ own commitment to an elected House of Lords. But he has not stopped any notable aspect of George Osborne’s pre-election economic plan. He has not stopped the scrapping of the 50p tax rate or the health reforms. And he did not stop those £9,000 fees, which are likely to be his greatest memorial.

Andrew Adonis is chair of Progress

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D Iain Duncan Smith

Fighting the last war

Under Iain Duncan Smith, the coalition has narrowed the social policy ambitions it inherited from the Labour government in two important ways. First, it has focused the concept of fairness almost entirely on social mobility for children on free school meals, thereby passing over the aspirations of the broad range of low- and middle-income children, as well as adults already in work. Second, it has reduced the definition of social justice to what used to be called ‘social exclusion’ or ‘entrenched poverty’. Wider inequalities in social and economic relations, such as rising top pay and the squeeze on real wages and household incomes for working families, do not feature in its account. Only the very poorest are in its line of sight.

These normative shifts translate directly into a retreat from a majoritarian welfare state. Tax credits, child benefit, child trust funds, and education maintenance allowances have all been cut or scaled back. Welfare cuts would have happened if Labour had been re-elected, but the coalition has chosen to retreat from policies with wide population coverage and to abandon universalism in key areas like child benefit. Its approach is inconsistent, however. It promotes work while cutting work incentives in the tax credit system. It promotes dual-earner families in the universal credit, while tapering out child benefit for better-off couples where both are at work. Universalism is cut for the young and those of working age, but strengthened for the over-65s.

Some of Duncan Smith’s policies have real merit, nonetheless. The universal credit is a long-overdue simplification of the benefits system. Early intervention for vulnerable children is vital. Intensive, sustained help for troubled families is the only way of tackling multiple disadvantages.

Yet he is in danger of fighting the last war, rather than taking a strategic approach to the future of the welfare state. The work programme is a flexible version of Labour’s New Deal, but it is being overwhelmed by the rise in long-term unemployment. Only a job guarantee for those out of work for more than a year can stop sustained damage to people’s lives. The universal credit improves work incentives, but childcare tax credits have been cut, despite the fact that countries with the highest employment rates have universal, affordable childcare systems. And the middle classes are losing welfare entitlements just when their support for the welfare state is most needed. The 70th anniversary of the Beveridge report would be a good time to bring in a national salary insurance system to pay decent replacement wages to the unemployed.

The fiscal position is getting worse, not better, so Labour will have to switch spending out of benefits that do little substantive or political work, like the winter fuel allowance, and tackle unjust tax reliefs that enable higher-rate taxpayers to accumulate assets at the expense of services for the majority. Priority should go to a universal childcare system. Child poverty targets should be focused on the under-fives. The government has abandoned the targets set out in Labour’s Child Poverty Act but has not formally admitted it. Nor has it suggested a new framework to replace it. It is urgent that a fiscally credible plan for reducing child poverty be developed and agreed, preferably on a cross-party basis.

Nick Pearce is director of ippr
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E Economy

Economy blues

The coalition’s economic policy was born in the frenzy of negotiations in the days after the 2010 election. While two parties came together, the outcome was an economic policy that owed more to Conservative proposals and instincts than to the Liberal Democrat manifesto. In the run-up to the election our economic establishment allowed itself to get nervous about an early phase of the Greek debt crisis. Would there be a run on UK government bonds? The answer was ‘no’ but it seems the Treasury and Bank of England supported a new fiscal orthodoxy and this pressure, combined with the instincts of the Orange Book Liberal Democrats and the attraction of power, helped seal the deal on the coalition.

The coalition agreement recognised the deficit as the most urgent issue facing the country and committed the government to ‘accelerate the reduction of the structural deficit’, mainly by cutting spending rather than raising taxes. An emergency budget set the scene for the spending review a few months later which convinced Standard & Poor’s to keep the UK on a AAA rating. The new Office for Budget Responsibility made forecasts and assessed Treasury plans. The coalition was right to focus on market confidence, but UK borrowing costs remain low compared to previous interest rates and to eurozone government bond yields. The OBR was a welcome innovation because confidence in Treasury economic forecasts in particular was low, yet it does risk tying future governments to prevailing economic orthodoxies.

The OBR estimated that under Labour’s plans the annual deficit would fall rapidly over five years but net debt would continue to rise, to 74 per cent of GDP by 2014-15. After the coalition’s budget in June 2010, the OBR predicted that net debt would be 69 per cent of GDP in 2014-15 and falling, with the structural deficit eliminated in time for the next election. An important factor in this were cuts to welfare spending, an area previously avoided by all parties, which helped define the regressive character of the coalition’s fiscal policy.

However, the OBR assumed a rapid return to economic growth which has yet to occur. For example, it predicted GDP would grow 2.3 per cent in 2011 but the actual figure was 0.7 per cent. In November last year the OBR revised its forecasts substantially. Growth estimates were revised down and the structural deficit was revised up. That new forecast suggests the government will not eliminate the structural deficit until two years after the election. Net debt is now expected to peak at 76 per cent of GDP in 2014-15. George Osborne survived this severe blow to his economic policy relatively unscathed. This might be explained in part by the lack of a clear alternative view at the time from Labour. The comparison with eurozone countries also helped.

During the financial crisis, the UK economy took a significant hit and GDP fell sharply. But it rebounded quickly, too. However, by mid-2010 the economy seemed to have stalled. To some extent, talk of austerity must have dampened economic confidence. The coalition’s attempts at growth plans have been woeful because they have not met the reality of the situation. Financial crises require clear government commitments to growth because economies take so long to recover unaided. The eurozone debt crisis also hit confidence, leading to a mini slowdown at the end of 2011. Initial estimates of GDP growth in the first quarter of this year suggest the UK is back in recession, or at least going nowhere. The lack of growth, together with spending cuts, has pushed up unemployment. The result is an economy limping along with government debt plans supported by ‘jam tomorrow’ forecasting by the OBR as it hopes growth will pick up strongly a few years hence. However, growth forecasts rely on business investment picking up strongly which has also yet to happen. Every new concern about the financial system encourages companies to be their own banks and hoard cash. The coalition government has been largely absent when leadership has been required. The contrast with the economic activism promised by the Liberal Democrats is stark. There is no sign, for example, of the United Kingdom Infrastructure Bank they advocated before the general election.

During the recession unemployment did not rise as much as had been expected. Labour market flexibility was evident in reduced hours worked rather than mainly through redundancies. Yet the unemployment level plateaued and later increased – with slower growth coupled with public sector redundancies a cause. In addition, Labour’s efforts to reduce youth unemployment, in the form of the Future Jobs Fund, were scrapped by the coalition, only to be later reinstated in similar form. A Liberal Democrat voice in government, which could have argued for the young persons’ workplace scheme the party promised before the election, has again been largely absent. Meanwhile, inflation has remained above wage growth, thereby eroding living standards.

Public anger against the banks has simmered since the general election. The Occupy movement was one manifestation and a reminder that the issue has not gone away – banks themselves have played a part with their continuing commitment to excessive pay awards. The sector has proved unable and unwilling to reform itself. The coalition’s Independent Commission on Banking was therefore important, even though it compensated for lack of policy in this area. However, the commission gave too little attention to the case for splitting banking activities and did not advocate the Liberal Democrat manifesto promise to ‘break up the banks’. It did suggest a form of separation, with retail banking requiring special protection, which should help prevent another crisis or dampen its impact. However, these measures will not be implemented until 2019 and the coalition has not succeeded in other efforts to change bank behaviour. Executive pay schemes remain excessive despite public anger, and the power of the banking sector remains. Efforts to boost lending to small businesses remain paltry.

The UK economy has not collapsed into another deep recession and unemployment still remains below three million. Businesses are hiring and our banks are healthier than many in the eurozone. These are blessings we should cherish; it could be worse. Yet two years since its formation, the coalition is facing a serious test of its economic credibility. Its original deficit reduction plan has failed and it has neither growth nor even a credible growth strategy. In 2010 the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats recklessly compared our economy to that of Greece. Today, the risk is that the UK follows Spain in an austerity death spiral in which low growth leads to higher deficits and more spending cuts, which themselves hit future growth.

Stephen Beer is senior fund manager and UK strategist at the Central Finance Board of the Methodist Church. He is also chair of Vauxhall CLP and author of The Credibility Deficit. This article represents his personal opinion

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F Forests 

When you manage to unite Annie Lennox, Dame Judi Dench and the Archbishop of Canterbury against you, you are probably doing something wrong. And they were. Plans to flog off 258,000 hectares of state-owned woodland in England were unceremoniously dumped by a ‘sorry’ Caroline Spelman in February 2011.

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G Gerrymandering

In return for the AV referendum, the Liberal Democrats gave the Tories a boundary review that aims to cut the number of parliamentary seats from 650 to 600. ‘Schizophrenic, unnecessary and haphazard’ is how Liberal Democrat members appealing the changes in the west Midlands describe them. And that is certainly a good description of the new constituency of Mersey Banks, which would encompass communities on both sides of the Mersey river which are not connected by any bridge, and takes in parts of outer Liverpool, the Wirral and Cheshire. The biggest winners from the change will be the Tories, with their coalition partners estimated to lose 14 of their 57 seats, the biggest proportional hit for any party. Who says turkeys don’t vote for Christmas?

H Human Rights Act
It needs to go, says Theresa May. It even stopped an illegal immigrant who had a cat being deported, she lamented to the 2011 Tory party conference. ‘I’m not making this up,’ the home secretary assured us. Turns out she was. ‘Theresa May appears to have fallen for some classic Daily Mail spin,’ concluded Channel 4 News’ ‘Factchecker’, Cathy Newman. May’s cabinet colleague, Ken Clarke, helpfully added: ‘I’ll have a small bet with her that nobody has ever been refused deportation on the grounds of ownership of a cat.’

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H Human Rights Act 

It needs to go, says Theresa May. It even stopped an illegal immigrant who had a cat being deported, she lamented to the 2011 Tory party conference. ‘I’m not making this up,’ the home secretary assured us. Turns out she was. ‘Theresa May appears to have fallen for some classic Daily Mail spin,’ concluded Channel 4 News’ ‘Factchecker’, Cathy Newman. May’s cabinet colleague, Ken Clarke, helpfully added: ‘I’ll have a small bet with her that nobody has ever been refused deportation on the grounds of ownership of a cat.’

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Bookmark this page to catch up with the A-Z of the coalition as it is released over the next few weeks here on this page …

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Photo A: Graham Anderson

Photo B: Leo Reynolds

Photo C: Liberal Democrats

Photo D: Foreign and Commonwealth Office

Photo E: Ewan McIntosh

Photo F: 38 Degrees

Photo G: Boundary Commission

Photo H: Conservative party

Have you heard the one about two Christians, two Jews and two Muslims in a hotel in Iraqi Kurdistan? None of us on the recent parliamentary delegation there devised a witty answer but we did establish that all are welcome in this beautiful region.

The sixth fact-finding report in five years of the all-party parliamentary group outlines considerable progress and examines obstacles on Kurdistan’s journey from genocide and poverty to pluralism and prosperity.

The six members of the delegation were Conservative MPs Robert Halfon and Stephen Metcalfe, Labour MP Fabian Hamilton and myself plus Hanzala Malik MSP and Umbreen Khalid from the Scottish Parliament’s Cross Party Group on the Middle East and South Asia.

Landlocked Kurdistan has long been at the often violent vortex of competing empires. We are always told that it is a tough neighbourhood. When I started going there in 2006 I heard about petulant Turks deliberately delaying trucks of perishable goods at the frontier. A day or two in the baking sun ruins a cargo of pomegranates.

The trade with Turkey is now worth billions with now hundreds of Turkish companies trading in Kurdistan. In a massive symbol of the change, the Turkish prime minister recently joined the Kurdistan region president in opening the swanky new airport in Erbil which has the fifth longest runway in the world and take any type of aircraft.

The developing relationship with Turkey could assist its Kurds and be a lifeline to the region, especially now that the once vague lure of substantial oil and gas reserves is real. The Kurdistan region is in the top ten for oil reserves. It also has gas that could supply its own domestic market, that of Turkey and beyond for a century. With pipelines from Kurdistan to Turkey the region becomes part of the European energy security equation.

Sadly, relations with the rest of Iraq have deteriorated from the high point in 2005 when a federal constitution was agreed by over 80% of the people in a referendum. It enshrined the autonomy of the Kurdistan region and promised a pathway to resolving various disputes over the exact boundaries of the region and the terms of oil production and revenue sharing.

There has been negligible progress on these issues, although the Kurds play a major role in the federal government and put together the deal that allowed a cabinet to be formed after nearly a year of stasis. This drives debate about how the Iraqi Kurds can secure devo max or embrace some form of independence.

In the meantime, the Kurds are getting on with recovering from decades of poverty and isolation. Since their heroic uprising against Saddam Hussein in 1991, they have decided to embrace democracy and a more open economy. Living standards have soared, new housing and services are coming online. Electricity is nearly continuous compared to a very few hours per day in the rest of Iraq. It is certainly a destination for well-heeled business people judging by the number of new five star hotels and luxury housing.

All that is welcome but we also found that public services such as health can be basic when we visited a hospital in the capital, Erbil. The Kurds are very well aware of this and are enthusiastically encouraging links with the UK health sector and universities to overcome such backwardness. They are enthusiastically encouraging foreign investment and trade, not least with the UK.

But their economy is creaking under the pressure of a top-heavy state with insufficient capacity and skills. It is, above all, far too large for a healthy economy with about 80% of the workforce on the government payroll.

Shifting the balance and growing independent institutions are vital to deepening the democratic process. The region has fair and free elections and an opposition, but needs to engage more with a youthful population which cannot live on the successful liberation struggle waged by their parents and grandparents.

The need for reform is understood widely in Kurdish politics but requires greater stability. Kurdistan is much safer than the rest of Iraq, which is why it is seen as a lucrative destination for foreign capital. But change is difficult and the Kurds welcome foreign expertise and experience in furthering reform and building a sustainable economic model that doesn’t entirely depend on energy resources.

They want to develop their plentiful but neglected agricultural base which Saddam effectively killed off a generation ago. They can develop a tourist industry. They are investing heavily in education and links with the UK are speeding up with two or more universities considering the possibility of setting up campuses in Kurdistan. The first group ever of sixth-formers, from Suffolk, just visited the region. Suddenly Kurdistan is on the map.

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Gary Kent is the Administrator of the All-Party Parliamentary group on the Kurdistan Region in Iraq.

The report can be read in full at http://www.appgkurdistan.org.uk/

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Photo: William John Gauthier

The message was an each-way bet. If Livingstone lost, it was his fault alone. If he won, it was the Labour leadership that dragged him over the line by persuading the party’s wavering voters to come out.

Yet, for all the pre-election pessimism, there was a brief flutter of hope in Labour’s HQ as exhausted campaigners waited for the results. Labour had polled better than they had dared hope in the local elections and had won well in councils across the south. As votes were slowly fed into voting machines an absence of information led to a frenzy of speculation. Could Livingstone actually win?

In the end, it was not particularly close. The percentage share of the vote was about the same as François Hollande’s victory in France. But given Labour’s significant success elsewhere the former mayor’s defeat was not the oft-predicted crisis for Ed Miliband, merely a minor whirlpool in a sea of triumphs.

Indeed, Livingstone’s departure creates an opportunity for the Labour leadership. For decades, London Labour politics has been dominated by one man. Whether you are a fan or not (and, for the record, your insider is decidedly not) Livingstone was both popular and politically effective.

Unfortunately, his flourishing meant that few other London Labour voices grew alongside him. With all due respect to Oona King, the fact that she was the only other Labour figure prepared to run for one of Britain’s top political jobs suggests few others thought they could beat Livingstone.

So, where next? Well, Livingstone has not gone. His tight-knit organisation and popularity within the Labour party means he could still play the role of unofficial Labour spokesman for London. He may even have an official basis upon which to do it. Livingstone’s soundbite that his defeat represented his last election is not the whole story. Readers will again see his name on a ballot paper very soon, this time as a candidate for Labour’s National Executive Committee.

If he wins, Livingstone will be on the NEC until September 2014, giving him a powerful platform from which to offer his views on London politics and a way for those close to him to stay on top of London Labour’s political organisation. This matters as Labour’s NEC will have big choices to make over how Labour’s next London mayoral candidate is chosen.

The first is whether to widen the selectorate, either to a primary or to include ‘registered supporters’. The wider the franchise, the less control London Labour’s powerbrokers will have over the result – and the greater the importance of both name recognition and campaign organisation.

The second is when to hold the selection. The later the selection, the more time new candidates have to become public figures.

Why is this politically significant? Because if the success of Livingstone and Boris Johnson teaches us anything, it is that mayoral politics rewards politicians who make news, even if that means having a looser grip on the greasy pole of national preferment.

So who is prepared to gamble their career to be Labour’s next candidate? Right now, no one is in pole position. You might look to local leaders like Lambeth’s Steve Reed or Hackney’s Jules Pipe; Labour’s bright young parliamentary things like Stella Creasy or David Lammy (who is still young, but now quite experienced); or prominent Labour activists with a high public profile, like Eddie Izzard. On the left, Diane Abbott might be the most recognisable London Labour politician, has expressed an interest before, and could run a strong campaign.

All of these, and many others, could be credible candidates, but only if they really want it. Want to know who really wants to be Labour’s next mayor? Then look for a politician brave enough to take big risks.

The wide-ranging report seeks, among other things, to segment the country along the ‘diagonal divide’, a Severn-to-Humber line splitting the country into a greater south which now leans towards Tory-Liberal Democrat races and a greater north which comprises largely Labour-Conservative competition. ‘Scotland is another country’ altogether, it says: most contests here pit Labour against the Nationalists, with a scattering of SNP-Tory battles.

Another way of divvying up the country comes in the form, not of the long-lamented north-south divide, but of an urban-rural gulf: ‘There are 80 broadly rural seats in the north and Midlands,’ it states. ‘The Conservatives hold 57 of them … No northern problem for the Tories there – their problem is in the northern cities.’ But Policy Exchange is concerned this political gulf separating town and country has been insufficiently explored. Progress magazine made its own attempt to do so last December with our ‘rural Labour’ special edition, which looked at how the party has won in the countryside in the past and how it may yet do so again. In that issue, referring to Labour’s preoccupation with ‘southern discomfort’, an ongoing piece of work continued by Policy Network, John Curtice of Strathclyde University noted that ‘this urban-rural gap can only partly be accounted for by demographics … Constituencies in rural Britain are no more middle class than their more urban counterparts’ but ‘some aspects of the rural social environment are typically less conducive to Labour voting’, such as a relative lack of social housing and a greater conscious sense of self-reliance prevalent in country living. Curtice, who readers will know from election night coverage, may have a point: Policy Exchange, in seeking to explain evolving voting behaviour, notes the rising power of the ‘neighbourhood’, where political judgements are formed by what people see happening locally and by word-of-mouth influence exerted by like-minded neighbours.

Strikingly, though, the old familiar north-south divide does come back into play. YouGov polling for Northern Lights found that southern English working-class voters are more likely to vote Conservative than northern middle-class ones. Labour should beware, though: elsewhere class is back with a vengeance. ‘In recent elections there has been a growing “class gap” in turnout,’ the report warns. ‘Middle-class voters have become more likely to vote than working-class voters … Labour voters are more likely to feel “their” party used to represent them, but no longer does so.’

English democracy has also been absorbing IPPR of late. In England and the Union: How and Why to Answer the West Lothian Question, the thinktank swings behind an ‘English grand committee’ system, versions of which have been devised by Tory grandees Malcolm Rifkind and Ken Clarke and which would in part answer the vexed question. But the tank goes further, arguing that this will be necessary but insufficient to give a greater voice to what it has previously called ‘the dog that finally barked: England as an emerging political community’.

But where to locate greater English devolution? IPPR is clear that the 10 standard regions ‘have little local resonance, and in any event their administrative structures are being dismantled. It can only mean local government, perhaps banding together with some additional elected governance (say, a city-region mayor). This has worked for London, and there is no reason why it cannot work for Manchester or Birmingham.’ Progress also backed city-region mayors, though the government spurned this idea. How the drive to localism fits in with the regional and national and proto-federal jigsaw slowly being pieced together is a complex matter, but tanks aplenty are currently working overtime to understand where the voters are, where they might be going and what sort of country they see themselves living in.

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Photo: Chalkie_CC

At its 2012 annual conference, Progress assembled an extremely experienced and well qualified panel to discuss the symptoms and causes of Labour’s current southern discomfort. John Denham MP has always been a voice to be listened to in these debates; he was joined on the panel by one former and one would-be parliamentary colleague – Joan Ryan (erstwhile MP for Enfield North) and Councillor Sharon Taylor (parliamentary candidate for the town in 2010 and 2015) respectively. The pollster Bobby Duffy of Ipsos MORI, completed the panel.

John Denham opened the debate with a somewhat counter intuitive (but nonetheless accurate) proposition: that the ‘Southern Voter’ is a myth. The values of southern voters aren’t really that different to the values held by voters in the Midlands, the north and elsewhere in the UK. The coalition Labour brought together in 1997, and the one it needs to recreate in 2015, just needs to be broader and deeper in the south.

As the Labour leader of Stevenage council, Sharon Taylor’s contribution was a reminder to the audience of the important role that Labour councils and councillors can play in swing and bellwether seats. Even as Labour saw the Conservatives snatch the parliamentary seat from them in 2010, the party continued to use its control of the council to demonstrate how Labour values in action can still help those struggling to cope with the effects of the recession.

Joan Ryan recognised that the recent local election results were good for Labour generally, and very good for Labour in the south. But she offered a note of caution when she suggested that the party was still behind where it was in the polls when compared with a similar period in the 1990s. She counselled against focusing too much political ammunition on the Liberal Democrats as Labour is the second place challenger in only nine of the junior coalition partner’s 57 seats. To win again, Labour needed to focus its energies against the Conservatives.

Ryan suggested that the principal outcome of the local elections had been that Labour had won the right to be heard again: ‘People are willing to listen to us again’. Echoing Denham’s theme, the next step she argued was to start talking about the issues that matter to the voters, not just to us as political activists (Lords reform, anyone?). The way to make this happen was to better connect policy making with campaigning. What we learn about the voters’ priorities when we speak to them on the doorstep should be fed into the policy making process. Policy making should no longer be the preserve of party elites: ‘policymaking is for the many, not the few’, as she put it.

Bobby Duffy’s contribution was to alert us to the prize available to Labour. The local election results were the electoral manifestation of what the polls have been telling us, that David Cameron, George Osborne and the coalition government in general are all experiencing their lowest satisfaction ratings to date. Even more interestingly, the polls showed a significant decline in the percentage of voters who understood what the Conservatives stand for. The Conservative party of the south is vulnerable if Labour can articulate and demonstrate how its values place it ‘on the side’ of southern voters.

With an audience that included Caroline Flint MP, the shadow cabinet’s champion for the south-east, a number of leading parliamentary candidates from the region and activists from Guildford, Brighton, Canterbury, Thurrock and the New Forest, when the debate opened up we were guaranteed some very useful insights and lessons from right across the Political South.

The session ended well as we returned to the need to demonstrate how our values could be better articulated and applied in the south. Labour, it was suggested, should talk more about the importance of responsibility and rather less about fairness. Voters rail against irresponsibility just as much as they do against unfairness: whether it is the irresponsibility of bankers; the irresponsibility of those capable of work but who choose not to; or the irresponsibility of politicians who engage in the wasteful spending of taxpayers’ money. Labour’s responsibility is to demonstrate that we understand this.

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Stuart King is editor of Southern Front

In the 1970s Britain had four prime ministers – Edward Heath, Harold Wilson, James Callaghan and Margaret Thatcher – and the British public voted the governing party out of office in 1970, 1974 and 1979.  Herein lies Ed Miliband’s opportunity to return Labour to office.

The similarities between the 1970s are notable. The 2008 economic crash represented a watershed in both politics and economics in the same way as the oil crisis of the early 1970s broke the post war consensus and led Jim Callaghan to proclaim ‘the party’s over’, that Labour could no longer base its governing strategy on redistributing the proceeds of economic growth.  Phil Collins of The Times put the case that for Labour to win in 2015 the party has to work out what it means to govern with no more money.  He reminded Progress members that Labour’s first term in government was characterised by fiscal prudence.  Labour did not win in 1997 by promising to spend more money.

Labour lost its reputation for economic competence by substantially increasing borrowing such that when the crash hit tax revenues in 2008 there was no money in the government’s bank to cushion the economic storm.    The public do not think the world economic crisis was caused by the Labour government, but they want to see us accept our share of responsibility for not being better prepared for an economic downturn.  We were, after all, in charge of the nation’s finances at the time. As Liam Byrne commented, if people don’t trust you on how you will spend their money, you won’t be elected.

The shadow cabinet have to win the argument as to why a future Labour government will manage taxpayers’ money better than the coalition, but so do all Labour councillors, particularly in towns and cities where Labour is running the council.  That means ensuring that every penny of public money is spent wisely on issues that matter most to residents; people decide what they think of politicians and political parties based on their own experiences.  Businesses will not trust Labour with their money if they have to ring the council three times to correct a missed bin collection; neither will council tenants if three visits are required to complete a simple repair to their property rather than one.

Mary Riddell of The Telegraph thought that while the last couple of weeks had been very good for Labour – the party is now getting a second look – if people don’t see what they are looking for, they will go elsewhere.  Labour still has a huge amount of work to do to tell a compelling story about what difference a Labour government would make to people’s lives.

Andrew Adonis set out an ‘anti austerity, pro growth and pro reform agenda’ for Labour’s 2015 manifesto.  The Tories promised growth and jobs and have delivered recession and unemployment.  All the G7 economies, except Italy, are doing better than the UK economy.  If the UK’s GDP returned to 2008 level there would be an extra £60 billion in the economy.  Labour needs to make the case for an active state to stimulate economic growth – making things matters, and Britain needs an industrial strategy, a national infrastructure plan for the next 20 years and a skills strategy.

Andrew Adonis argued that Labour in government significantly improved education, but further reform and higher standards are needed more than ever as the competitive pressures of the global economy will only intensify.  Yet Labour does not need to wait until 2015. We can demonstrate our values by acting now.  Engaging with business, schools, colleges and universities to promote local economic growth needs to be at the top of every council leader’s list of priorities.  Youth unemployment is a very serious problem, but it is made worst by low levels of achievement. After a decade of investment in education, young people should not be leaving school with no qualifications.  Head teachers need to be held to account by governors and councillors for their school’s performance.

If there are parallels with the 1970s for Labour to draw on, there are also striking differences that Labour will need to address.  In February 1974, Edward Heath called a general election on the theme of ‘Who Governs Britain?’ Despite being held on a dark, wet Thursday, 79 per cent of the electorate wanted to answer this question.  In 2010 only 65 per cent of people voted and in the 2012 local elections the turnout was a frightening 32 per cent.

Liam Byrne articulated the strong anti-politics mood he encountered on the doorstep.  People were boiling with rage about the trashing of their values that they hold dear such as parents being penalised for working by losing up to £40 per week in tax credit, but their strategy is to disengage from politics rather than to rush down to the polling station to express their anger.  The task for Labour is for Labour to be the party of old fashioned values – thrift, hard work, looking out for people – and reform.

How to achieve the political winning combination of being true to one’s values whilst championing reform was brilliantly argued by Peter Kellner of You Gov. Peter argued that Tony Blair was stunningly successful in winning elections because he articulated Labour’s vision in terms of ‘reassuring radicalism’.  Risky radicalism doesn’t win elections; reassuring radicalism does.  Tony Blair understood this to his political fingertips.

Blair sought to sooth and reassure people who had never voted Labour in their life that he understood their values and would deliver on the issues that mattered to them.  Blair offered reassurance to the business community that enabled Labour to deliver Britain’s first minimum wage; his ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ message reassured people that Labour would put victims first, not criminals.  In office Blair was radical on the need to dramatically improve school performance, particularly in deprived communities by creating academies, to reassure parents that their priorities were his priorities, regardless of what the teaching unions thought.  In 2015, people will want to be reassured that Labour won’t duck difficult decisions on banking reform, utilities, excessive pay and tax avoidance.

The general election of 2015 will be fought and won on the economy. Labour can win this election by convincing the majority of the British people that they are more likely to be in work and have higher living standards under a Labour government than a majority Tory government.  To do so Labour will need to persuade people that we will use their money wisely, that we invest in promoting economic growth and we are prepared to make difficult decisions to reform not only the public sector, but the private sector too.   Reassurance and radical reform must be our guiding principles.

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Sally Prentice is the Cabinet Member for Culture, Leisure and Olympics in Lambeth

This created a profound and unwelcome disconnect from the real economy, or ‘Main Street’, and the lives of citizens both in this country and across the globe. Central banks have facilitated a climate where there is effectively an implicit taxpayer guarantee because the unthinkable scenario of ‘too big to fail banks’ falling would cause a massive global systemic collapse.

The IMF recently released its ‘Global Financial Stability’ report in which it warned of a crunch where EU banks would, by continuing existing policies, shrink their balance sheets by $2.6tn (a contraction of seven per cent) by the end of 2013. Only an ‘improved policy response’ would help mitigate the consequences of this scenario, by which they mean further quantitative easing (or QE).

While some will argue the cause of our current predicament can be traced back to the ‘irrational exuberance’ of the Greenspan era, others will cite the defining epochal event which was Nixon closing the dollar window in 1971, severing the dollar backing to gold. This is a discussion for another day.

This week we had a woefully anaemic Tory-Lib Dem Queen’s Speech which did not address the kernel of the problem, namely generating sustainable economic growth and jobs, and yet overlooked an area where it could have reviewed the rules of the game.

While the need to strengthen the financial sector was acknowledged, specifically by introducing legislation to enact the Vickers Commission recommendations, the government did not consider how the Bank of England’s quantitative easing policy could more directly act as a catalyst for the ailing economy.

Briefly, over the last three years the bank created ‘new money’, an additional £275bn, which has been used to purchase existing government debt held by commercial banks and pension funds, which in turn have free cash, as well as profits from their gilt sales.

The public debt purchased from the banks and pension funds is now held by a wholly owned subsidiary of the Government, the Asset Purchase Facility, which will receive interest from the Debt Management Office, also an arm of government, creating a circular arrangement.

In the Prospect magazine (October 2010) Bank of England Governor Mervyn King admitted that he could not tell ‘exactly…the scale of purchases [needed] in order to reach our objective.’ And he added that ‘our objective is clear: to see an increase in the supply of money in the economy, so we can see a level of spending return and a beginning to economic recovery.’

So when George Osborne suggested the Tories were ‘fiscal conservatives and monetary activists’ he did so without regard to the inherent injustice resulting from the effect of the monetary component of this twofold strategy.

The reality of quantitative easing as it is being pursued by the Bank of England, with the chancellor’s effusive endorsement, means the value of the currency is being steadily debased and so there is a transfer of wealth from the many to the few.

When the commercial banks are relieved of their government stock, as described above, they have not supported initiatives on the scale required in the real economy to reignite growth and restore confidence.

So take for example Joe the small businessman who has just registered his fantastic groundbreaking patent for a new formulation of graphene with a rare earth metal, which has tremendous applications and promises to create many skilled jobs in the future. He really needs to secure capital from investors with foresight but the traditional banks (who make up over 90 per cent of lending to SMEs) are not interested.

It seems, however, these banks would rather take a punt on the latest anticipated bull market in a sector of the commodities market using some exotic instruments, the type which contributed to the unstable global financial we now face.

Why doesn’t the Asset Purchase Facility for example use the billions created by QE and invest it in special bonds issued by a putative National Investment Bank for Innovation.  This way the real, innovative, job creating economy would get a sustainable boost and the Bank of England would also meet its own objective as Mervyn King states above.

This monetary activism as currently practiced, with its implied negative real interest rates, also hits Mr and Mrs Smith who recently retired after working hard for years, looking forward to a happy retirement. On top of their pensions, they have some national savings and building society investments. But the QE policy is destroying the purchasing power of their pound over time and will lead to pensioner poverty, a point forcefully raised by Ros Altmann, the pensions expert and director general of Saga.

So whether it is the entrepreneur, inventor or light engineering firm looking to expand, the student wanting to boost their transferable skills or those needing to live off their capital, this policy is a pernicious attack on their capacity to achieve their respective aims. Not only does this form of QE lacks accountability and transparency, it will not compliment a proper fiscal strategy and worst of all it represents a transfer of wealth today and tomorrow from those with little to those with more than enough.

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David Phillips is a former research scientist, parliamentary candidate and member of Progress.

To make change happen we must take power away from the people who provide public services so we can share it more equally with the people who use them. This requires a major change in how our public services are designed and run. Making services directly accountable to the people who use them is the key to making this shift.

Although this is not a cuts-led agenda, it will deliver better value for money because the closer involvement of users means public services will do more of what people want because it works, and less of what they don’t want because it doesn’t. That’s a real efficiency gain.

Let’s take three different services to illustrate how the power-shift can happen. For many people living in council housing, the quality of housing management is inadequate, leading to dissatisfaction with basic services like repairs, re-letting empty homes, or dealing with anti-social neighbours. The people who run these services tend not to live on estates like the ones they are managing. They don’t live with these service failures like the residents they are working for.  The way to change this is to put the tenants in control.

Tenant-managed estates involve residents electing a representative board that appoints an estate manager who oversees the other staff who run the various housing services. The manager and the staff are directly accountable to residents through the board.  On estates like Blenheim Gardens in Brixton this approach has transformed their estate by creating more effective and responsive management and happier tenants. It also delivers better value for money than many traditionally-run estates.

Targeted youth services are intended to offer support to young people who are drifting into a life of crime, aiming to steer their lives back on track before they damage their own futures and the community they are part of. These services do not work well enough because, on many of our inner-city estates, violent youth crime continues to rise and violent gangs predominate. Yet there are examples of communities coming together to make change for themselves, running activities like football leagues, setting up informal mentoring programmes, supervising spaces where young people can socialise safely. Communities like the Myatts Field Estate in Brixton end up doing these things because the services provided by the state are not effective enough.

So, in Lambeth, we are setting up a youth services trust. Any member of the community can join the trust, and they will elect a representative board to oversee the management of youth services by professionals. Using a model of community engagement that involves training residents from affected neighbourhoods to engage with the wider community, we will gain an understanding of local needs and then help the community to procure the services that will meet those needs. It will create services tailored to the needs of individual estates, and will harness the insights and capacity of the community itself instead of side-lining them. Instead of fighting the system in a futile attempt to make it listen, residents can now use their energies to fight the problem because the resources they need will be at their disposal.

Home care services are frequently in the news because of the scandalously low quality of services being delivered to vulnerable older and disabled people in their homes. In part, this stems from the appalling conditions that care workers are forced to operate under. Pay is at rock bottom, care workers may not be paid for time travelling between one client and the next, and they are under pressure to get in and out of each home as fast as possible. This leaves no time for the normal human interactions that are so important to isolated people, it piles stress on the worker and it can lead to substandard or even dangerous levels of care.

Sunderland Care Home Associates have found a better way. They have set up a mutual co-owned by everyone that works for the organisation. Profits are shared. Terms and conditions are better. Both staff and their clients are happier, evidenced by the fact that staff turnover and levels of sick leave are far lower, and customer satisfaction is higher.

The real impact of this empowerment agenda is when it’s applied across a wide range of public services. By doing that we can change people’s experience of the state from something that is done to them to something that is done with them. By giving people back control we free them from dependency, unlock self-reliance and uncap aspiration. The impact is greatest for the poorest communities that are reliant on more public services. The point is not to roll back the state but to change the role of the state so it’s firmly under the control of the people who rely on it.

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Steve Reed is leader of Lambeth council