For a short period in the 1990s, it seemed that Labour would launch a communitarian counter-revolution to bring the curtain down on the Thatcher era. Listen to a youthful Tony Blair in 1996, addressing the Women’s Institute: “At the heart of my beliefs is the idea of community,” said Blair. “I don’t just mean the villages, towns and cities in which we live. I mean that our fulfilment as individuals lies in a decent society of others. My argument to you today is that the renewal of community is the answer to the challenges of a changing world.”
That zeal for a politics which challenged the individualism of the age did not last. As the Labour MP Jon Cruddas ruefully noted in his recent book, The Dignity of Labour, in power Blair and his party swerved off in a different direction. Choice, individual aspiration and the imperative to adapt to the consequences of globalisation became New Labour’s guiding themes. The party lost its focus when it came to protecting the self-esteem and interests of places in its post-industrial heartlands, although it did its best to keep many of them financially afloat. Disillusionment and a sense of anomie grew, paving the way for the red wall Brexit vote in 2016. Damaging divisions – cultural as well as economic – emerged between more prosperous, younger cities and declining, ageing towns; between the highly educated and those without a degree, and between an asset-rich generation and those who would never own their own homes. Faith in a social contract that bound the nation together – and in Labour’s ability to secure it – faded.
Cruddas believes it could have gone differently. Last month, delivering a speech on the concept of the common good at St Mary’s Catholic university in Twickenham, he confessed to his audience: “To me with hindsight, 1996 is a story of paths not taken, of missed opportunities.” The result, he argued, “was a sense of powerlessness that people feel, of exclusion and estrangement, a lack of participation; a lack of virtue in our institutions and our politics”.
Could the Labour party now resume the mission that Blair abandoned? Suddenly, the early 2020s have begun to feel a little like the mid-1990s. Like John Major’s government a quarter of a century ago, Boris Johnson’s is beset by scandal. The prime minister is a wounded, diminished figure. While Major suffered byelection humiliation in the safe Tory seat of Christchurch, Johnson has endured Chesham and Amersham, and North Shropshire. And, as last week’s underwhelming “levelling up” white paper laid bare, Johnson’s own version of a communitarian project – designed to consolidate the new red wall intake of Tory voters – is being starved of cash by a party that no longer trusts him. If he is replaced between now and the next election, none of his potential successors (other than possibly Michael Gove), have an authentic instinct for the concerns of the northern Labour voters who helped deliver an 80-seat majority.
There is an opportunity here for Keir Starmer that goes beyond the outcome of the next election. Johnson’s essential unseriousness – and his party’s faithfulness to the Thatcher legacy – means that he is destined to squander the chance to forge a genuine Tory One Nation response to a divided country. But multiple signs of our times suggest that a yearning persists for a vision which recognises that “our fulfilment as individuals lies in a decent society of others”.
In Labour’s tradition, this sense of the “we” being as important as the “I” used to be expressed in the collective solidarity and self-help movements that drove the working-class politics of the industrial age. It was found in the commitment to the idea of the common good which was taught from the pulpits of “Labour churches”. In our liberal, secular and more atomised age, it is the inner meaning – the overlapping DNA – of phenomena as apparently disparate as the rise of leftwing Scottish nationalism; towns that yearn for the restoration of civic pride; the desire for a dignified social care system; pride in the armed forces and the British flag; the consistently strong support for enhanced forms of public ownership, and the solidarity shown by communities towards key workers and vulnerable members during the Covid pandemic. The root intuition, sidelined for 40 years, is that as political, social animals we are about far more than the pursuit of self interest, and our mutual dependency defines us as much as our individual liberties.
How can Labour open up this ethical seam in the landscape that was so vividly glimpsed by the early Blair? Some ideas are offered in Labour’s Covenant, an ambitious pamphlet released last month by the Labour Together group in which Cruddas is involved. The essay is a precis of two years’ worth of discussions with academics, policy experts and Labour MPs, mayors and councillors. Covering the piste from the future of the union to foreign policy, its scope is wide. But the essential spirit of Labour’s Covenant is local. Proposals range from the promotion of regional banks and vocational colleges to drive local economies – and to give young people options to stay in places where they grew up – to the need to invest in locations where people from different backgrounds meet, talk, argue and laugh – the “post offices, pubs, community centres, art galleries, parks, nurseries, hospitals and schools”.
The abstract term for this kind of thing is “social infrastructure”. It requires far more investment in people and institutions than the Conservatives’ levelling up programme is offering. And if places and regions are truly to be empowered, Whitehall will have to give away revenue-raising powers and resources to an extent that no government has contemplated in the past. But as the Conservative party reverts to type, Labour should draw on its own rich heritage to do the job of “renewing community” properly and with conviction. In a society that knows itself to be fractured and divided, this task can unite red-wall and blue-wall aspirations and appeal across the generations.
Seeking to claim one-nation politics for the left in 2012, Ed Miliband brought the philosopher Michael Sandel to the Labour party conference. In an address that proved startlingly prescient given the Brexit psychodrama that would soon unfold, Sandel told delegates: “Democracy does not require perfect equality. But it does require that citizens share a common life. What matters is that people of different social backgrounds … bump up against one another. Because this is how we come to negotiate and abide our differences.”
This was true then and remains so now, and Sandel’s insights were heavily drawn upon by Germany’s new chancellor, Olaf Scholz, in the Social Democratic party’s election campaign. A radical politics of place can enable a renewed common life to flourish and prosper. The Tories will not deliver it. Labour could.
Julian Coman is a Guardian associate editor
