Leading “Blairites” plan to publish a modernisers’ manifesto, to “reshape politics on the centre left” . It will be called The Purple Book.

by Sunder Katwala

Looking back at the successes and shortcomings of the New Labour years, it could be argued that, if there was a missed opportunity which set the limits to the party’s ambitions for progress, it came with the 2001 general election campaign.

It was an election which Labour was never going to lose. William Hague’s unpopular populism was never taken seriously across the country. Yet New Labour high command could never quite believe that the party was going to win, and was concerned to close down issues which it feared were resonating.

So the posters were purple – a lot done, a lot to do – in a bid to seek a largely mandateless re-coronation of the then very popular Tony Blair.

The result was a landslide – a slow motion replay of 1997, with almost no seats at all changing hands, but on a much lower turnout in a way that did little to shift the centre of political gravity. In retrospect, Labour’s 1997-2001 term stands up well, with a ream of manifesto commitments taken into office delivered in a way that endures, from the minimum wage to devolution.

What always remained elusive was “renewal” in office, though politicians and think-tankers talked of little else. The 2001 campaign may have a good claim to be the most cautious run by any winning party in the post-war period. (The major themes of the second term had been kicked into the long grass. It was a big deal for Gordon Brown to put up national insurance for the NHS, but it was safely “under review” during the campaign. Tony Blair’s big second term idea was to win the European argument, but he planned to begin it at the TUC conference on September 11th 2001, in a speech never given, rather than to take Hague’s “foreign land” campaign head on at the hustings).

Given that 9/11 came to dominate all else within a few months, perhaps events meant that it didn’t matter. But 2001 was probably the moment at which Labour needed to give its argument and vision more positive content.

Instead, Labour emulated Bill Clinton a few years earlier. It was re-elected, but did not seek to realign the political debate explicitly. It did shift policy arguments, but was less confident than Margaret Thatcher in believing that politicians could reshape the contours of public and political debate.

To be fair, there was perhaps still more political and ideological content in the 2001 campaign than the re-run in 2005. Douglas Alexander’s “Schools and hospitals first” was (sotto voce) an argument about public services and taxation. Alan Milburn’s core 2005 slogans “Forward not back” and “Your family better off” did not in themselves seem to contain anything to suggest “Labour” rather than “Conservative” or “Liberal Democrat” would be the party claiming them.

Still, now out of power, Labour has every reason to be rather more nostalgic about that landslide moment. And so the purple banner is to be revived this autumn, as a chance to recapture those old New Labour glories.

Rachel Sylvester has the scoop in her Times column this morning (£).

Now, the Blairites in the Labour Party are planning to publish their own modernisers’ manifesto that they hope will reshape politics on the centre left in a similar way. It is going to be called The Purple Book.

“Purple was the colour of new Labour”, says one of those involved. “It’s what you get if you combine red and blue. It symbolises the need to stay on the centre ground”.

Sylvester names Tessa Jowell, Liam Byrne and Alan Milburn as having agreed to contribute, along with Spads-turned-MPs Liz Kendall and John Woodcock, to a book due to be published by Progress, with Lord Sainsbury’s support, ahead of the party conference.

“The Purple Book isn’t an academic exercise,” says one of the organisers. “Ed Miliband has said he has a blank page for his policy review and we want to start making some notes on that page. This is about what Labour should be saying in 2015, not what’s happening right now. It’s not the abandonment of New Labour, it’s the next stage of New Labour”.

“It is not yet clear whether David Miliband will write a chapter, although he sympathises with the aims of The Purple Book”, writes Sylvester.

The project organisers say they wish to lay the “Blairite” tag to rest (and it was rather a caricature of David Miliband). All of those identified by name in the Sylvester piece were David Miliband supporters in the leadership election of 2010.

Sylvester writes:

Already, those discussing the project hope that they may in future be known as the Purple Book group rather than Blairites — an outdated adjective, almost two decades after Tony Blair first became leader — just as some Lib Dems are described as Orange Book MPs.

This may look only like a shallow “rebranding” if the voices come from what is seen as one pre-existing faction. The project could look rather a narrow one, at least in the embryonic form described by Sylvester in the Times. I would have thought the book’s organisers could well have a better chance of more influence in framing party debates beyond the core of their own faction if they were to involve a broader range of voices, perhaps including senior supporters of Ed Miliband such as John Denham, and thoughtful voices who did not vote first for either Miliband, such as John Healey.

And declaring an intention to emulate the Orange Book LibDemmery of David Laws and Nick Clegg doesn’t sound like the most plausible platform from which to persuade Labour opinion – not just on the left and centre of the party, but also on its social democratic centre-right.

The purple book is not the only “purple” project in the Labour debate. A broader and perhaps more promising “purple” project involves some of the same voices formerly known as Blairites, but attempting to forge a new alliance with the emerging conservative communitarian left which calls itself “blue Labour”.

These are not natural alliances – combining an economically liberal post-Blairite wing (and especially its more socially liberal voices such as Phil Collins and James Purnell) with Blue Labour which is hostile to market liberalism from an egalitarian perspective, and has a communitarian critique of social liberalism too.

That anti-market instinct might give this project a better claim to the “red + blue = purple” banner than the Progress group themselves – though it could be argued that Maurice Glasman is perhaps providing most of both the red and blue in the mix in that case.

These two tribes have been exploring their common ground and differences in a series of seminars in London and Oxford. Phil Collins wrote about this in an interesting Times column, republished by Progress on the “new and blue” synthesis. They can find a common enemy in a (somewhat stylised and occasionally caricatured) critique of the Fabian state, often drawing on the critiques of Fabians like GDH Cole to make it, and an interest in an emerging politics of reciprocity and mobilisation from below.

Other good, sympathetic critiques of blue Labour have been published recently by Michael Merrick, seeking the positive account of the state which is needed to go with the critique of excessive statism, an important challenge to both sides of the “new plus blue” alliance – and by Dan Hodges of this parish, who combined a sympathetic engagement with good advice which went beyond presentation.

One year after a heavy election defeat, it is a sign of health for the party that predictions of a factional civil war have proved absurd, and there is instead, at the outset of the policy review, a serious high-level debate about ideas, though not one yet translated into language which would engage broad public audiences.

There is also a challenge here to the leadership. Ed Miliband does have a strategic sense of where he wishes to take the party, but needs to build on his arguments about the squeezed middle to articulate how he believes the party’s public argument, as well as its organisation, should change.

Beyond the three or four most significant set-piece leader’s speeches, there has been little from others.

Maurice Glasman has provided a strong sense of intellectual and political challenge across the party, talking about this as “a completely agitational idea to provoke a conversation about what went wrong with the Blair project”. (Again speaking to Progress, in an interesting forthcoming interview which has been prominently reported for rather loose language in asserting that Labour “lied” about immigration, unwisely extending the popular mythology of a conspiracy theory that this endlessly noisy debate has been silenced from above). Glasman has certainly widened and enriched the conversation, while signalling an intent to ensure there is some grit in the Labour oyster. The leader should make these insights part of a new synthesis, but nobody, including its advocates, thinks that this is is likely to involve swallowing blue Labour whole.

Ed Miliband is a pluralist, comfortable at engaging across the spectrum of opinion in the party. He also needs more “outriders” for his own argument.

Putting Stewart Wood into the House of Lords was a good move, to give one of the key thinkers around the leader a public voice too. Back in the leadership campaign, there was a strong case for giving greater public prominence to John Denham, who was doing long-term policy thinking for the campaign. This would have helped to challenge and destroy the rather silly “Red Ed” caricature at an early stage, and flesh out what are the motivating themes for the leadership – themes including reciprocity and contribution, and the politics of fairness which can connect with what has become known as the “squeezed middle”.

After a knife-edge contest, Ed Miliband has demonstrated his naturally collegiate instincts.

He will doubtless engage with the purple prospectus too. But he and his supporters do also now need to do more to ensure that they frame and shape debates about the direction which the leader wants the policy review to take.

Sunder Katwala is general secretary of the fabian society.

Tags: Blairites, New Labour, purple book, Sunder Katwala

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