by Jonathan Todd
I might be perverse and deficient to have enjoyed finding time during Christmas week to assess what Prospect’s big ideas of 2014 mean for Labour. I worry, though, that this is all the time that anyone in Labour has spent on some of these ideas. Larry Summers may, for example, be asking big questions about monetary policy but Labour still has precious little to say on this economically central topic.
Labour not only needs to get our thinking caps on in 2014 but convince the electorate that we have solutions to the big challenges that will face the UK of May 2015. This is a divided electorate. Between the 99% and the 1%, global London and the provincial shires, and those that see government as the problem and those that see it as their safety net.
Another division emerges beyond some of Prospect’s ideas. Between the doers and the downers. The doers are collaboratively consuming, popping up everywhere and making new news. In other words, seizing for themselves the opportunities of our times. Public policy appears barely relevant to much of this, except perhaps to the extent that it has facilitated the digital revolution. Certainly, politics feels marginal to the doers, who are too busy doing to have much care for it.
In contrast, the downers – those fuelling the politics of rejection – are angry with politics. As they are angry with much else. As the doers grasp fresh possibilities, the downers feel all their possibilities have closed down.
Successful politicians must make themselves relevant to the doers, while pacifying the downers. These are very different people, best suited to very different messages. The doers are only interested in politicians if they can enable them to do more. Maybe extending access to devices of more measured lives, while tackling the new risks identified by cloud sceptics, are some means by which this might be done.
