Labour’s Uber problem

Here are two contradictory things to pick up from the last day of Labour party conference.

One, Tom Watson’s excellent closing speech which championed new technology, micro-businesses, and the self-employed. Watson said:

These people need a voice in our democracy: the outsourced self-employed, the web workers who crunch data and information as consultants, the dairy farmers reliant on a few powerful retailers — they all need a collective voice and they need organising.

Two, Sadiq Khan’s tweet welcoming TfL’s plans to restrict the use of Uber in London:

Welcome news of new proposals to regulate taxi and private hire vehicles. We must ensure we protect Londoners and our historic taxi trade.

I am not sure the comparison between the two is entirely fair as Watson wasn’t talking about Uber (though he has before), but Labour is deeply confused about the transformational nature of technology.

Watson’s point, though, is that Labour’s purpose is to tackle vested interests. Whatever else our divides, it is accepted across the party that the point of the Labour Party is to be ‘on the side of workers’ and to give them power. You don’t get to pick and choose which workers you support.

The problem arises when Labour’s lack of imagination — and trust in others — prompts it to use that power on behalf of others. Sadiq’s tweet may have only been a tweet, but his position on Uber falls into the old ways of facing the economy. There is disruptive change. Some people will lose out. So Labour will protect those who lose out even if that means the wider common good loses out too.

I think Uber is a benefit to the common good — it lets me get where I want, when I want, in a more flexible manner. Written down, it doesn’t sound radical. I am the son of a taxi driver, and I understand the pressures on them of not having regular work.

But Labour’s natural reaction to these changes is unsustainable. It is a trend in Labour politics and policymaking to react to transformations in the economy by extending the reach of old, failing institutions that are themselves often the trigger for outside challenges.

Labour in government did the same — promoting choice in public services but offering very little; setting central targets and limits on resources.

If Labour’s job is to protect exploitation from failing market forces, then fine. But Uber is not a sign of failing market forces, and Labour’s job really is not to help failing monopolies and vested interests play catch up. While it is sensible to continue to argue for proper safety measures for Uber, Labour cannot hope to understand the future by shielding the present from it.

Khan is a man who wants to lead a city with huge potential to offer and benefit from rapid technological change. Rejecting progress is not just counter-productive, it goes against Labour’s best traditions as a party: from mutualism, cooperatives, and even the brief fling with stakeholder capitalism in the 90s. All of these embrace new ways of thinking and doing politics and policy.

Sadiq Khan would do well to rethink. There are ideas out there, not least embracing Uber as a new collective force of workers, or looking at new institutional changes such as the better networks for self-employed workers that Watson spoke positively about the need for. Anthony Painter has suggested a hybrid category of worker classification is needed, for example. Stella Creasy has worked extensively on empowering citizens to cope with change. Even a mayor-commissioned cooperative for taxi drivers would protect their interests and promote innovation without unnecessarily blocking outsiders from joining the market.

As Adam Lent has argued, we are seeing ‘those making wide use of new technologies [are] struggling against the laws that served the interests of those who run the more centralised and closed economy of public corporations and large companies’.

Understanding that is Labour’s job now, and it should welcome it.

P.S. I am writing this on Medium, which is an argument in itself: it is quicker than getting it published elsewhere — like getting an Uber when there are no taxis near you!