The vision thing
Labour in government still lacks a positive overarching vision for the future of Britain. Evidence from overseas suggests that voters like visions, and that fairness is a good starting point...
Many column inches have been written about the results of the local elections on 1 May. A common view is that the Labour government isn’t doing a great job of laying out, letting alone selling, a positive vision to the British public. Nigel Farage is seen more favourably by the public than Keir Starmer - not necessarily because of his policies, or because he has a clear or coherent vision, but because he’s better at articulating his values.
There’s a distinction between values and vision, which becomes clear when we think about the fact that Reform are better at articulating the former than outlining the latter. But the Labour Party - and likewise the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats - have yet to articulate either, which opens up the political space for Reform to appeal to voters who are searching for an articulation of any values at all, especially when they are tied to a promise of change from the status quo.
There’s mounting evidence from other countries that politicians who talk about their values - and, ideally, align them to a strong and positive vision for the future - reap the benefits at election time.
Take Australia, as the most recent and obvious article. Marc Stears, Director of the UCL Policy Lab, wrote in the Guardian about the ‘social patriotism’ championed by re-elected PM Anthony Albanese, which is built around fairness, equality and respect:
Albanese agrees that the world is unstable right now. Like Starmer, he knows that this lack of stability creates insecurity, especially in working-class communities, and that the radical right can feed upon this. But his dramatic electoral success suggests he might have found a better solution than just emulating populist parties. That solution refutes the idea that progressives must compete with the populists and nationalists on their own terrain. But it does not solely focus on progressive voters in the big cities, at the expense of a working-class base. Instead, Albanese has pursued a distinctly social patriotism, proudly Australian but grounded in ordinary people’s lives. It is open to all backgrounds, embraces government intervention in the market and recognises that injustices and inequalities hold us all back. Albanese says it is a patriotism with “fairness, equality and respect for one another” at its core.
The Labor Party in Australia took advice from the defeated US Democrats to focus on a positive and concrete economic offer to working-class voters, built around tackling the cost of living and addressing the housing crisis. Climate was a big issue, but was presented in the context of helping to address economic challenges, alongside a package of policies focused on workers’ rights, public services and so on.
Other international examples show that parties that fail to articulate a positive vision are punished at the ballot box. In Germany, the SPD, analysing the causes of their recent electoral defeat, are concluding that the problem is politics, not policy. Their economic policy programme, including a higher minimum wage and measures to improve pensions, failed to resonate with voters because the party had not told a compelling story about what they stood for, or what kind of society they wanted to build. In contrast to the SPD’s cautious incrementalism, their right-wing populist rivals offered a clear sense of change.
The results of the 2024 US election have a similar story behind them, of course. The Biden administration enacted a series of incredibly bold policies, but failed to communicate them in ways that resonated with a population who were simultaneously falling behind economically and suspicious of big government. And although Trump’s policies are starting to generate a backlash across many strands of American society, the Democrats need to build a positive vision that is as powerful as the MAGA sales pitch; they cannot rely on opposition to Trump alone, especially when they are viewed (with some justification) as the party of the establishment.
In Canada, we have just seen the astonishing resurrection of the Liberal Party, which had been expected to lose heavily to the Conservatives but held onto power with an 11 percentage point increase in their national vote share. The re-election of Mark Carney as PM was largely due to the Trump effect, so it’s harder to draw clear lessons for the UK (depending on what you think about the special relationship). But we may well see Carney shedding some of his centrist technocrat image to outline a more values-based vision for Canada. After all, his 2021 book Value(s): Building a Better World for All was described by Will Hutton in the Observer as a “weighty assault on the modern free market”, and in an event that we co-hosted with the KCL Policy Institute in 2023, Carney argued that fundamental problems – such as growing inequality in income and opportunity, mistrust of experts, and the existential threat of climate change – all stem from a common crisis in values.
Coming back to the UK, we’ve just had VE day, and with it, calls for a positive and patriotic vision that learn from these international examples. Writing in The Lead, Zoe Grünewald argued that “the left cannot simply oppose the far right. It must offer a bolder vision of belonging, that tells a story of Britain as a place of fairness, decency, and shared endeavour.”
The policies that accompany this vision need to be developed with input from the public, of course. And the vision needs to be one for the long term, not just aimed at the next election. During the launch webinar for our report on long-term thinking in UK politics, Mission to the Future, Derek Walker, the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales, pointed to the success of Wales’s proactive effort to involve the public in the design of their future generations legislation, including through a ‘national conversation’, The Wales We Want. He argued that people intuitively grasp and support the need for long-term approaches when they are framed as “doing the right thing for our children and grandchildren”, and are based around a positive narrative for the future that gives people agency and a sense of shared purpose.
The big question that remains is - what is the vision? For Labour and other progressive parties, the choice is essentially between a centrist approach or a more radical agenda that is willing to embrace some (but not all) aspects of populism. I argued for the latter recently:
If one of our political parties decided to make a determined pitch for bold economic reform, they would stand to hoover up millions of votes. There is a huge opportunity to blend a clear, evidence-based analysis of the problems and an actionable policy platform to solve them with a strong narrative, which speaks to popular anger while outlining a vision of a good society (based on fairness, naturally) that is aligned with a positive and inclusive national identity. This would not need to take the form of economic populism, because it could choose be honest about the trade-offs involved, rather than promising painless solutions. But neither should it pretend that minor technocratic fixes could ever be sufficient.
Could fairness form the basis of such a vision? I wrote in January about how fairness, articulated in detail rather than used in an abstract sense, can be a useful tool for developing a vision, and identifying and resolving the trade-offs and compromises that are needed en route, as well as then communicating that vision:
Since taking power in July last year, the Labour government has often been accused of lacking vision, or of failing to communicate its vision to the public. I believe that a fleshed-out definition of fairness can form of the basis of such a vision, and can help politicians of all parties to communicate their goals - and the policies that they think are needed to achieve them - to a public that is sceptical of politics but is simultaneously crying out for bold leadership… The five components of fairness [the fair necessities] can act as the basis for a vision of the future, but they can also provide a useful framework for assessing policy options, working out trade-offs, identifying political and implementation risks, and developing a strong narrative to sell a particular policy to the public and to key stakeholders.
Without a clear view of what we mean by fairness, there’s a risk that politicians use the term in ways that reinforce division (by focusing on fairness for one group at the expense of another) or prioritise one aspect of fairness over another (such as fair process over fair outcomes), as we outlined in our report Fairness in the House. There were traces of this in the PM’s immigration speech this morning (for all that a balanced and grown-up conversation about fairness in the context of immigration is long overdue):
I believe we need to reduce immigration significantly. That’s why some of the policies in this White Paper go back nearly three years, [political content redacted]. It’s about fairness.
If politicians were able to talk in a more nuanced but also more direct way about fairness in terms of both their vision for Britain and how they want to make it happen, the benefits could be considerable. Doing so would enable and embolden our political leaders to take, and explain, difficult choices - and would help to ensure that they were the right choices. A vision based around fairness might have led to different policies from the changes to the winter fuel allowance, or the removal of agricultural reliefs on inheritance tax. Or it might simply have reduced the level of public and media blowback, by communicating why those changes were necessary and what higher purpose those sacrifices, alongside other sacrifices made across society, served.
WEBINAR TOMORROW
