Entrench Labour policy in law

By Mike Smith

The Government needs to expand on Yvette Cooper's announcement last week and start to entrench our values and policies in law to stop a potential Tory government undoing Labour’s achievements of the last decade. One of the aims of the Labour project in the 1990s was to secure consecutive terms in office to change the landscape of British politics. If Labour could shift the ‘centre ground’ of political debate left, the Tories could never again starve the NHS and education of funding, ignore the suffering of swaths of the country in the name of economic efficiency and abandon the most vulnerable. 

For a while it could be argued this approach had worked. After 3 election defeats, David Cameron was forced to move Conservative policies away (or at least give the illusion of moving away) from the traditional Tory right wing comfort zone by committing to Labour's public spending plans, accepting civil partnerships, expressing his concern over environmental issues and even ‘hugging a hoodie’ in recognition of the leftwards shift in the expectations and priorities of the electorate.

What a difference a crisis makes. Riding high in the polls in large part due to the Government's seemingly endless leadership 'crisis' has given the Tories the political space to use the economic crisis to renege on the commitment to match Labour’s investment in public services and retrench to a traditional conservative comfort zone of cuts and ‘thrift’. With the confusion and infighting at the top of the Labour party, there is now the possibility that Labour could lose the next general election without a real discussion about what a Tory government's policies (or lack thereof) will mean for Britain.  

We must, of course, do everything we can to win the general election, but if we lose there is no limit to what the Tories could do.  Parliamentary sovereignty means that the British people have no fundamental rights and there are no laws which parliament cannot change or abolish with a simple majority. Given this, the Tory response to this ‘unprecedented’ crisis could be truly terrifying and hugely damaging.

During the next year or so in power, the Government should pursue a twin approach of setting out our vision for a fourth Labour term if elected, but also entrenching the gains made so far under a Labour government. The proposals announced by Yvette Cooper to introduce a legal duty to tackle child poverty could provide a model to embed the gains made over the last 12 years. Of course, the Tories could always overturn these laws if in government. But at the very least this would force a debate and vote – with the scrutiny from parliament and (perhaps more significantly) in the media and the public. Such an approach could include for the NHS a requirement to provide certain levels of care, perhaps in the form of a ‘constitution’ for the health service. Similarly, a statutory requirement to provide pre-school education could secure the sure start programme and an independent body to scrutinise and enforce levels of the minimum wage could help prevent a constant downgrading of the wages of the poorest workers. 

We must fight the Conservatives on the issues and our vision for the future for the right to continue to govern, demonstrating the positive changes since 1997 which simply would not have happened under a Conservative government. But in the year before the most dangerous general election for Labour in recent decades, we must also focus on how we secure and entrench the gains made so far, to ensure the Tories can’t undo these without a fight.