‘And this reminds us that faith in a life to come served not only as a consolation to the poor but also as some emotional compensation for present sufferings and grievances’ 
 — E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class

The Labour Party is a moribund force in British politics; not just bereft of new ideas but devoid of any real understanding of social and economic forces which are shaping the world around us. It has a leadership which veers from incompetence to immorality, but the problems go far beyond Jeremy Corbyn.

These problems are many but they coalesce around an entrenched conservatism. Like many forms of conservatism it is the output of a trapped institution struggling to come to terms with the radical change happening around it.

This is common enough to suggest Labour will stumble on a bit, then die — states, big businesses, even football teams; there is no great institution immune from rapid falls triggered by living too long on earlier successes, rather than building on them.

Labour has a specific problem, namely: how does the party combine the security offered by its 20th century successes with the new freedom offered by the 21st century? Embracing the future, and embracing these new freedoms by extension, is therefore Labour’s only route out of its depression.

An anecdote from an insightful Jonathan Reynolds piece is emblematic of this problem:

I remember a meeting of senior personnel in the last Parliament where, after the collapse of a well-known retail business, we discussed how to get an intervention around the embryonic ‘responsible capitalism’ agenda into the news. The best anyone could come up with was re-floating an old policy from our manifesto, that takeovers should require a 75 per cent threshold of shareholders before going through.

The policy idea was both bad and old; it relied on an outdated hierarchical model of power in which Labour directs ‘fixes’ to the market from a Whitehall department. Equally, there was no attempt to come to terms with understanding why institutions fail (Labour should take an urgent interest in this point).

Intellectual weaknesses like these are easily dismissed as unimportant in the face of daily political processes but even the most adept leader will fail to build a new left project without overcoming them.

It is true that Labour did not defend its legacy after 2010, but the party is equally guilty of relying heavily on vaguely defined past glories: we are the party of the NHS, the Tories are out of touch and bad, for the many not the few. Soundbites are palatable but not when they are all you have. Corbyn’s leadership is merely an extreme example of this; it’s just that his idea of what constitutes success is different from what someone elsewhere in the party might think.

This post from Owen Jones, covering Podemos, confirms that the rejection of the conservatism of the old left is haunting socialist parties across Europe. I haven’t studied the debate about what there is to learn from Podemos beyond this obvious fact: the less Labour understands the world as it stands today, the more importance it places on past achievements, and subsequently drifts further and further away from the people.

For Labour this is certainly a cyclical problem; it is repeating again Richard Crossman’s warning in the 1950s that, after achieving important social reforms, Labour was ‘travelling in strange country, exposed to climatic rigours it had not anticipated and against which its traditional equipment gave little protection’.

This cannot continue if Labour is to meet the challenges that are coming.

Labour was founded to deal with the excesses and exploitation brought about by turn-of-the-century capitalism; to not overthrow capitalism but to provide a more equal set of outcomes. But poverty and inequality were entrenched by the time the party arrived. If, as seems likely, we are on the brink of change on a similar level, Labour must anticipate the challenges and opportunities of a world changed by new technology, new attitudes to mass participation, and the instability of flexible employment. As Progress’ recent responsible capitalism series has made clear, it means the opportunity to ‘have fairness hardwired into it’.

Labour must, then, embrace the future with everything it has left and bend it toward a fairer outcome. But first it must understand the challenges of the future, and how the world will be, not how we want it to be.

I think there are two significant and connected, trends which Labour must understand if it is to embrace the future in this way.

New technology and employment instability

New technology is hard-wiring both flexibility and instability into employment.

For example, Etsy, the peer-to-peer commerce platform, may still take a share of the capital produced by its users, but it has increased the freedom an interested citizen has over their income. Its current attraction is a source of income on the side of regular employment, but the proliferation of similar platforms for flexible employment makes it easy to see why some make the case for a new left modernity which encourages a society envisioned by Marx where it is:

…possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic

But I don’t think it is unreasonable to say that this, for now, is Utopian thinking. In the short-term, supplementing income with other sources is less about having the freedom to do so than having a need to.

Employment in this sense is increasingly precarious, which Labour knows full well having campaigned on some of these issues. 6 million workers are paid less than the living wage. Household debt is rising. Exploitation of zero-hour workers is common. This is what Guy Standing calls the precariat, an emerging social class where ‘everything is fleeting’ and workers lack the community networks previous generations of the working class relied on.

These problems will grow significantly as new technology disrupts how we work; automation, for example, is both a huge threat and opportunity for employment.

Knowing that self-employment accounts for a high proportion of new jobs, Tom Watson’s speech to party conference understood this; talking about micro-businesses and the need for new institutions to protect them. But there have been precious few suggestions in Labour, outside of the Deputy’s office, of what those might look like.

Micro-businesses are, of course, in existence outside the industries affected by new technology. But the proportion of precarious employment which is affected by disruptive technology is growing daily.

Labour should reject its default response to disruptive change, which I wrote about in September in the context of Uber. I said then that the party’s decision making was best summarised as: ‘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.’

The problem is that it has absolutely no idea how to protect those who are losing out apart from supporting strict regulation to kill off new platforms for employment. That is conservative, unsustainable and puts centre-left public policy at a disadvantage at the precise moment when the emerging sharing or ‘gig’ economy is still being shaped.

What should offer the left some comfort is the point made in this RSA report on the sharing economy; making the distinction between a disruptive process and a disruptive outcome. The author writes that Uber is actually a sustaining innovator — it has improved how we get a taxi, it hasn’t replaced it.

So Labour could operate within that framework until it is bold enough to think bigger. It can do what it has always done and focus on giving workers improved rights without having to shut down an entire company. It could do some big thinking on reforming legislation for independent workers.

On Uber in particular, it could work with its union colleagues to offer black cab drivers the same freedom and flexibility in how they find work. Labour in local government could provide more flexible licensing for part-time, gig drivers. Sadiq Khan, who is running an otherwise excellent campaign in London, could work on building a co-operative for Uber drivers to boost their employment rights.

These are not entirely radical suggestions, but they are a start based on principles and mechanisms Labour already has access to.

Mass participation

What are the underlying cultural shifts which make it not just possible but desirable to use new platforms to push the boundaries of employment? One is, to tweak a phrase borrowed from Adam Lent, a new age of empowerment.

My expectations of how I live my life are significantly different to how someone my age would have done so even two decades ago. I want more choice, more freedom over what I consume. But I also want a more responsive society which reacts to my needs.

An important article in the Harvard Business Review about new power defines this expectation as: ‘an inalienable right to participate’. It goes on:

For earlier generations, participation might have meant only the right to vote in elections every few years or maybe to join a union or religious community. Today, people increasingly expect to actively shape or create many aspects of their lives

Tony Benn said that winning the vote was important for working people because it counterbalanced the financial power the wealthy have. That is no longer enough.

By mass participation, I should be clear, I do not mean sitting in a tent outside St Paul’s waiting for capitalism to die. It means opening up the institutions we have so that they are ready to be engaged with as and when they are needed.

For Labour that challenge traditionally lies in public services. Services should encourage cooperation and collaboration to constantly improve, rather than fit users to a set of ready made processes. To borrow from Uber again, look at how users and drivers interact to shape future behaviour; I rate my driver and they rate me. That is partly so that bad drivers get marked out, partly so that bad passengers are regulated out of the platform. The prompt to offer feedback — already in use in some charity services — builds resilience into the system and makes future behaviour more suited an outcome the user wants.

Why these mean transformations, not transactions, are needed

These changes won’t happen overnight. But Labour has an opportunity to balance these three disruptive forces, rather than allowing them to negatively disrupt the lives of the workers the change will envelope. Building structures and institutions which ensure future employment (or even, eventually, a post-employment agenda) is both secure and flexible will be possible if the left thinks big enough.

Yet it rarely does. One of the reasons the basic income (The RSA report by Anthony Painter is compelling, here) is quickly dismissed by conservative opponents on both left and right is perhaps because it is — by the standards of modern government — a significant transformation. Not a significant transformation just in how we think of welfare policy, but in the make-up of the relationship between citizen and state. While its form is financial or material, basic income represents a far more valuable transfer of power.

The more I read about it the more I am convinced it could be considered a pre-emptive strike against some of the aforementioned emerging social and economic problems; we might come to think of it, for example, as a platform in its own right for allowing citizens to fully engage with the creativity and flexibility afforded to us by the peer-to-peer or ‘gig’ economy. That, plus the fact it is universal and not means-tested, means it is much more radical than simply giving money away.

It is not hard to extend a centre-left argument based on this idea of the state as an enabling platform, rather than overbearing bureaucracy — a smarter state of the Left’s own making, perhaps. For example, Tristram Hunt has suggested a universal childcare system to tackle inequality, which if flexible enough could presumably be built on the principle of the state being there to enable both children and parents to achieve the outcome best suited for them; from early years intervention to help the disadvantaged, to relieving pressures of employment on parents. There are certainly co-operative mechanisms which could give civil society and communities a stake in this, resulting in more responsive childcare.

But rarely do politicians want to give power away, unless they calculate they are in a position of weakness; both historically, such as extension of the franchise, and recently, such as ‘the vow’, are linked to this. The spread of populism and nationalism within Western democracies and declining engagement with traditional processes might yet persuade them the time for a further democratisation of British society is now.

Labour is in such a position of weakness. It relies on a form of social democracy which has stagnated to the point of becoming a mere compensation service for those pockets of society which are on the wrong side of stronger vested interests in business, government, and politics. Both left and right of the party is stuck in the habit of offering limited forms of social democracy which can be rapidly undone by the Conservative governments which succeed Labour in office.

Redistribution of wealth, the tool which British social democracy has depended on since 1945, can and has conquered social ills but it is highly susceptible to these economic and political cycles, unless it is also tied to transfers of power. Otherwise the best Labour can achieve is generational fixes, not permanent ones; and when the world is shifting dramatically around us it is permanent structural changes we should be focusing on.

While the gains Labour in government made were vast improvements to public life after 18 years of Conservative waste, the focus on redistribution of wealth rather than power meant New Labour left a legacy to be deconstructed with relative ease after the financial crash.

Both internal and external forces were able to not just declare it dead, but win and advance their own agenda by doing so — with a bit more competence on the Chancellor’s part, tax credits really would have gone.

Power, in contrast to redistributed wealth, is harder to take back from the people.

Conclusion: Reclaiming the future by reclaiming freedom

The transformations mentioned above have a form of freedom as a mobilising force, and distribution of power as its result.

Labour has had a complicated relationship with freedom, a value it must now revive.

Lisa Nandy’s excellent 2014 Compass lecture argues that the right has been allowed to successfully capture liberty and freedom as a rallying cry for its politics; but in a narrow sense that as long as I am left alone, I am free. It says we are free to do what we like within the rule of law — which is true in theory — but places to one side material and economic restrictions on achieving those goals, as Nandy explains:

Instead we have allowed a curiously limited version of freedom to prevail, not just limited but corrosive to our lives and our social relations. It’s an individualist view that ignores the systematic barriers that collectively hold us back, based on the premise that if I can do it, so can you.

Nandy goes on to explain that the freedoms we have — often expressed by politicians, especially New Labour, as ‘choice’ — are not meaningful ones. Steve Hilton uses the example of education to make a similar point in his book More Human: choice between a handful of schools (state, private, academy, or free) is no choice at all. Even free schools, still controlled by Whitehall, offer little of the freedom their name suggests, and Hilton advocates a greater quantity of smaller schools built around creative learning, in order to push the boundaries of freedom over how children learn.

Hilton’s agenda can be dismissed by the left for its libertarian leanings, but we would be wrong to do so because freedom in this manner — allowing for more responsive services and employment — has an important place in Labour’s future.

Crosland said that in ‘the blood of the socialist should there should always run a trace of the anarchist and the libertarian, and not too much of the prig and the prude’. Roy Hattersley built on that with the still excellent Choose Freedom, which offered Labour a route out of it’s 1980s malaise.

Now shifting attitudes to engagement and innovations in technology mean Labour has to extend freedom to public services and employment in a way it never has before. Mere agendas of ‘choice’ will not be enough.

Leaning how Labour’s political economy can extend a traditional socialist case for empowerment while also retaining the flexibility of new forms of employment, which bring economic benefits to who Labour represents. But it is nearly always the road not travelled. Revisiting freedom must make up a broader intellectual renewal for the party.

Labour may be staring over the precipice, but there is still time for renewal. If it is going to work towards a more equal society in the 21st century as it did for parts of the 20th, it is going to have to provide a modern platform for the people to be as free — and secure — as they want to be.