Miliband - by our rights we will know you

| | | | | | | |

Claire O'Brien joins the OK debate on Labour After Brown by expanding the challenge to David Miliband (initiated here by Sunder Katwala) and his claim to the 'fusion' of social democracy and radical liberalism.

"Move over, Gordy,” was what I said in May. The Prime Minister, I suggested then, would never come back from his decision to abolish the 10p rate of income tax, and he has not. That decision, and the complicated and the costly compensation package introduced in its wake inflicted irrecoverable damage to the Prime Minister’s credibility that had already in October been so seriously compromised.

In May, I also suggested David Miliband as the best person to take over from Brown, both on the basis that Labour now needs a generational shift, as did the pre-Cameron Tories, and because Miliband, amongst the contenders, appeared most likely to recognise the task that must now form part and parcel of the Labour leadership. To address the root cause of its recent electoral floundering, Labour must renew itself ideologically (and so I agree with Gerry Hassan, the party’s current crisis is an existential one). If, in May, I thought such renewal inconceivable under Brown, its impossibility with him at the helm is now crystal clear, regardless of what new policies may be wheeled out in September. The same goes for other members of the original New Labour squad still stuck in the ideological amber of post-Thatcherism.

Now that he has waved if not yet raised his standard, it is right to ask again, can Miliband really deliver a new, distinctively progressive course for Labour? Today the Conservatives proclaim their dedication to “progressive social goals in all their nobility”, as Michael Gove put it recently. Miliband, amongst others, have rejected such claims as vacuous. Yet what would Labour under Miliband have to say to justify its continuing claim to the progressive mantle?

Three months ago, I argued that constitutional policy could prove critical in defining a new progressive mission for Labour. Labour should commit, I said, to a fresh vision of citizenship to make explicit the basic social and economic entitlements that are prerequisite in today’s world to achieving individual autonomy, in any meaningful sense, and our collective security, economic and environmental, as well as physical. Such entitlements, I suggested, included access to lifelong education and training, to decent work and adequate leisure; proper recognition of the value of parenting and caring roles, and access to the means of living healthy and sustainable lifestyles, and to culture, in addition to our traditional civil liberties and formal rights of political participation.

Yesterday, the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights published its report on a UK Bill of Rights (floated in Brown’s Governance of Britain White Paper published last July, though scarcely talked about by him since). The Committee’s MPs and Peers, under the chaimanship of Andrew Dismore MP, have concluded in favour of a new, aspirational, statement of UK constitutional rights, to include social and economic alongside civil and political rights, and the development of its text through a bottom-up, deliberative democratic process.

The report also gives recognition - at long last – to the fact that core economic and social entitlements are an integral element of British constitutional heritage (consider, for example, a century or more of national insurance and half a century of free public health care, and schemes for relief from destitution dating since the reign of Elizabeth I). For this, and for seeking to give these entitlements higher public profile and greater political traction, the Joint Committee’s report unquestionably marks a step in the right direction. To that extent, the Committee’s report should now be loudly applauded by all UK human rights organisations.

On the other hand, of course, the specifics of the Committee’s proposals for the content of a UK Bill of Rights, and methods for its oversight will demand close scrutiny and active, critical engagement, as well as the widest possible public debate – a task which Guy Aitchison will begin to address here on OK tomorrow.

Before that debate kicks off, however, one important point should not be lost. For Miliband, a new constitutional vision embracing the economic and social dimensions of our collective life in the UK, and innovative means for their democratic entrenchment, could provide the lynchpin of a distinctive progressive framework that meshes with his own ideas, while also holding potential to make tangible its benefits for individuals and communities. Here is why.

Miliband has characterised his own views with reference to the two intellectual traditions of social democracy and radical liberalism, taking the former to be concerned with equality through redistribution and the welfare state, and the latter with individual autonomy. Neatly setting these up as thesis and antithesis, Labour’s task now, Miliband claims, is to synthesise. Committed to both liberty and equality, it must assess the achievement of each in terms of the other. While the motivation here is right, there is a clear risk of circularity (not to mention a now unhelpful echo of the Third Way). Social and economic citizenship entitlements, by contrast, knit together the twin instincts for equality and empowerment in a more coherent way.

For early liberals, markets were radically and inherently democratic. They fought for individual rights (as Miliband recalls) not only out of a concern for some abstract Enlightenment ideal of freedom but (which he does not) just as much, because they recognised individual rights as the essential foundation of equality in market access and participation. And so they still should be. But, as I have argued more extensively elsewhere, to fulfil this function under globalisation’s conditions of social and economic complexity demands a broader and more flexible set of entitlements than the basic civil and political guarantees we started off with.

Second, while Miliband has described social democracy’s historical goal as that of the “equal or just distribution of resources”, this tag seems more apt to socialism, or indeed communism, and a rather incomplete, if not actually misleading, way to describe the former. A more accurate characterisation of the animating principles of social democratic welfare states, and certainly their more enduring legacy, lies first, in the principles of the socialization of risk, through universal benefits on one hand and high quality public services on the other; and second, in the progressive taxation needed to underwrite it. In social democracies, such principles give rise to economic and social entitlements. These may be implicit, but they are rights nonetheless, merely anchored in institutions and expectations instead of statute and legal practice. Pluralism and localism, it should further be underlined, have been integral to the growth and development of European social democracies and remain in rude health in them today (Scandinavia offering the usual case in point).

As the airwaves start to register Govite messages about social capital, the limits of narrow economism, the state’s essential role in supporting the quality of personal relationships, and healing the breach between rich and poor, Miliband will need to go much further in translating his ideological approach into concrete policy commitments with radical, transformative edge, if he is to win back to Labour those who have been disappointed. Crucial for Miliband, then, and I agree with Sunder here, is to explain, and quickly, what concrete goals and policies are to come out the other end of his social democratic–liberal fusion black box. What, sceptics will ask, has constitutional policy, of any stripe, to offer here?

Today social and economic rights, and inequalities in their enjoyment, are eminently measurable. Through, for example, Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum’s “capabilities approach”, they can be locally determined (though of course still within the framework of universal human rights and constitutional standards) by the individuals, communities and groups who own them – an exercise that is at once empowering, pluralist and democratic. With measurability, comes accountability and control (as in rights-based budget analysis, for example). Measurement also offers an important support for movement towards greater social justice, as national and local government priorities can be contested and achievements compared.

Social and economic rights, matched up with such approaches, should then have something to offer those, like Gerry Hassan, who are rightly concerned with the lacuna where Labour visions of community and place should be. An important additional strength, in these times of transition for the Union, is that, if embedded in a local framework, processes and policies driven by such rights could continue, whatever happens to the north and west of the metropole.

Going back to Miliband, he himself has variously voiced support for “basic minimum standards to avoid disparities”, a revival of the 19th century civic tradition, and much greater localisation of power and responsibilities. Does he mean what he says, and is he really committed to moving beyond ‘New Labour Mark I, and into “a radical new phase”? If he does mean it, and he truly wants to be the person who leads Labour and the country into the post- post-Thatcherite era, then the goal of transformational constitutional reform, to empower us as individuals and deliver more equitable and sustainable social arrangements, should surely find a place on a Miliband agenda.

| | | | | | | |

This article is published by OurKingdom, , and openDemocracy.net under a Creative Commons licence. You may republish it free of charge with attribution for non-commercial purposes following these guidelines. If you teach at a university we ask that your department make a donation. Commercial media must contact us for permission and fees. Some articles on this site are published under different terms.