For national sovereignty and a covenant with the British people
The return of Donald Trump to the White House, the war in Ukraine, the threats of big power politics, and conflicts around mineral and hydrocarbon resources, have provided a catalyst for a Labour story about national and economic security.
However, there can be no durable national security, nor per capita economic growth that restores economic security, without reducing social disaffection, restoring popular trust in our democratic institutions, and winning popular consent for a Labour government.
In recent years it has sometimes felt as though Britain is coming apart at the seams. The basics of life are increasingly out of reach. Infrastructure is crumbling or non-existent and our town centres lie neglected. Energy is expensive and we do not produce nearly enough of it. Rent and house prices are eye-watering.
Utilities have been privatised, state capacity outsourced and industry offshored. The courts assumed ever more power and decision-making was transferred from the arena of democratic politics to distant bureaucrats and judges. Lacking political vision, politicians turned instead to mass immigration, the easiest lever to pull.
These are not just abstract policy failures. The primal matter of human life – the work we do, our connection to the places to which we belong, and our relationship to our country and those that we share it with – has been neglected.
The unprecedented changes in the economy and demography of Britain means that we must make the country anew, restoring local community life, forging social unity and politically renewing our unwritten constitution which is a living covenant between Parliament and the people.
Labour must renew this covenant with the British people, a bond of mutual responsibility to create a country in which work provides a decent living with which you can buy a home and raise a family in the place that you live.
To undertake this task government must reconstruct a national economy which gives dignity to working people across the country, and restore the integrity and sovereignty of the British state and our democracy.
Labour must rebuild our national economy.
1. Britain must reverse decades of deindustrialisation, to rebuild working-class communities and secure our national security in a new era of global uncertainty. There can be no rearmament without reindustrialisation, and no reindustrialisation without cheap energy. We need cheap, clean energy to bring down industrial energy prices, industrial policy to support industries of critical national importance, and regional policy to ensure all of Britain benefits.
2. Austerity was a disaster that hollowed out our state capacity and left communities abandoned. Years of historically low interest rates were wasted by Tory governments who refused to invest in the future and we are now paying the price. We should scrap the fiscal rules, in which economic sense and democratic politics are subordinate to faulty OBR forecasts, and invest in infrastructure and the public realm.
3. Successive governments have sold off our public services and national assets and utilities, leaving us vulnerable and dependent on others. Privatisation has all too often led to extraction, mismanagement and waste. We should reconsider public ownership for public services like rail, utilities like water, and critical industries like steel.
4. Buying an ordinary family house has become a struggle for even those on good salaries, excluding many young people from adulthood and parenthood. We have not built nearly enough houses, while immigration has radically increased demand. Government must enable more housebuilding, with the explicit objective of reducing house prices and rent as a proportion of incomes.
5. Our tax system needs reform to reflect new realities, including that most value is tied up in land and assets rather than income. We should consider taxes on assets, and updating council tax bands to ensure it no longer disproportionately hits those in poorer parts of the country.
Labour must restore the integrity of the sovereign nation.
1. Immigration is not a distraction or a culture war issue; it is the most fundamental of political questions, a cause of social fragmentation, and the basis of our broken political economy. We should drastically reduce immigration, reducing low-skill immigration by significantly raising salary thresholds; closing the corrupt student visa mill system; and ending the exploitation of the asylum system, if necessary prioritising domestic democratic politics over the rule of international lawyers.
2. Crime and antisocial behaviour are contributing to a sense that public order is breaking down, with working-class communities usually the victims. We must restore the trust and authority of our police force, clarifying its increasingly blurred mission, so that it can focus on the small number of repeat offenders who are responsible for the vast majority of crime.
3. We are proud of our multiracial democracy and we utterly reject divisive identity politics, which undermines the bonds of solidarity between those of different sexes, races and nationalities. We should legislate to root out DEI in hiring practices, sentencing decisions, and wherever else we find it in our public bodies.
Labour must restore the integrity of the state.
1. The government does not run this country. We have handed over too much control to unaccountable QUANGOs and increasingly powerful courts with the power to block government policy. We should return decision-making to parliament, limiting the endlessly expanding power of judicial review and reforming or closing QUANGOs which make decisions which properly belong to the realm of democratic politics.
2. The British state is bigger but less effective than ever. The prime minister is right that the civil service is sclerotic and needs reform, but we also need to end the scam of consultants ripping off the government and wasting huge sums of public money. We should restore state capacity by reforming our civil service and ending the corporate commissioning and consultancy racket.
Labour’s covenant begins with these three political tasks. Their achievement will define the government’s ‘decade of renewal’ and shape the future of the country.