Brown needs to return to familiar language

At last year’s Labour Party Conference in Bournemouth, Gordon Brown laid out his pitch to the nation. Like any good salesman, he picked his audience carefully, and the buyer of brand Labour for a fourth Labour term was Dudley woman. It’s widely assumed that Brown’s PPS, Ian Austin, wrote large segments of the speech, and so as Dudley’s MP, this Midlands suburb featured large.

Brown made it clear he wanted to reassure the aspirational middle classes with a heady punch of patriotism, family values and Stakhanovist emphasis on hard-work. It struck a clearly different tone to Blair’s speeches, far more conciliatory, and much less ideological. It was down to earth and rooted in understandably British values, not Blair’s more internationalist agenda. But Dudley woman is angry, fears for the future and thinks the government has lost its way: can Cameron capture the agenda, or could Brown’s speech provide a blueprint for a new governance that could capture the mood of the nation?

Britain is gloomy. Not since the early nineties have the storm clouds gathered so quickly. The pound in your pocket is worth little against the Euro, inflation is biting, and house prices have begun to fall. Brown needs to return to his core theme, that if you work hard, the government will be ‘on your side’. Anger at the City is growing, there’s a palpable sense amongst the middle classes that they’re not getting their fair share of the cake: that the workless are taking too much at the bottom, and the feckless are getting too much at the top. Brown’s narrative about working hard and playing by the rules makes sense to people in the middle: the 10p tax cut didn’t.

Brown needs to return to this story – by slashing tax for everyone at the bottom with a large increase in the tax-free threshold for earnings, and a new top rate of tax of 45p in the pound for earners above £150,000. It must be done simply – every penny raised at the top, must go down to the bottom. None must be diverted to tax credits, even if this means the money is less well targeted – the economic down turn affects everyone.

Further to this, Labour needs to think the unthinkable about unemployment benefit. It isn’t progressive to allow people to linger on the dole with declining mental health, and a declining sense of worth for years on end. The dole should be restricted to a maximum of 18 months before it is cut off. Extra funding should be provided to charities who work with the unemployed: not to provide financial assistance, but to provide training for work. Although few people take benefits willingly, a tiny minority abuse the system: racists point to work shirkers and ask why we need immigration when healthy young men stand idle. Both proposals should be announced simultaneously – the work ethic must be at the heart of what Labour stands for, for it contrasts with the Tory record of mass unemployment.

Brown also needs to rediscover his radical side. No Labour government has ever won a fourth term, and sadly at the moment it looks unlikely that Brown will either. So, rather than spend two years outlining plans for a fourth term, Brown should unveil radical reform that can pushed through Parliament in a year. Serious House of Lords reform would split the Tories and re-establish in swing voters minds why they voted out the reactionaries in the first place.

The house building programme unveiled by the government must be made more radical still: with the housing market in meltdown it is unlikely private contractors will be in any position to build new homes. The government should announce an intention to sell off a million Council houses, and also an intention to provide capital to housing associations to replace every one of those Council houses with low-rent properties (rent-fixed for a decade). Giving Council tenants a stake in their estates is good for communities, and proved popular under Thatcher.

The Tories have no response to the failures of the housing market, except to provide subsidies to middle-class mortgages which would do nothing to increase our housing stock. Let’s place the emphasis on building and securing mortgages, and enter the next election with cranes on the landscape of British cities providing work - “Homes for heroes” won Labour votes in the 40s, market failure in our decade could provide a platform for a 4th term Labour government.

In London, on the doorsteps voters who turned out for Labour mentioned Ken’s 50% affordable housing pledge. The London Mayoral elections showed that much of Labour’s core vote held, in all but two GLA seats Labour’s vote rose – and in 6 it rose more than 5% (including traditionally Tory Merton and Wandsworth).

Project Labour hasn’t collapsed, this isn’t ’97 for the Tories yet: but in London there was a clear Labour agenda, this needs to be returned to nationally. Dudley woman worries because her children can’t afford to get on the property ladder, wants decent schools, and wants her hard work recognised. The two Etonians running the Tory party with their emphasis on the polar ice caps, hugging hoodies, and increasing the inheritance tax threshold to £1m give her absolutely nothing to vote for. The Tories’ current platform makes them an upper-middle class irrelevance. They’ve nothing in their basket of goodies for families who though aspirational, still want the state to provide their education, healthcare and pension.

Cozy nineties Blairite centrism is dead, anger at the filthy rich is rising fast. Brown needs to wake up to the new reality, set out a radical stall, and not flinch. He needs to find courage, and fast.