I want to talk about what the changed political environment means for the Society’, and how we try to pursue our values and ideas now. 

 

Our research, publications and events have given us an important voice in some key debates. The Solidarity Society, from our major project with the Webb Memorial Trust, was one of the most important pieces of research we have done in recent years: it was important in informing the very live debate about the value of universalism which became very central several months later. We helped to create the space within and around the party to debate the lesssons of the election and Labour’s period in power, including helping to ensure the party had a leadership contest which engaged members and supporters. And, after the election, the original research for the TUC on public spending has been an important contribution to inform debate on cuts and the deficit.

 

Above all, the Society has shown that it is an important, thriving forum for political engagement. I would like to thank everybody who has played a part in achieving that, including Sadiq as Chair and the elected Executive, and especially everybody involved in voluntary activity for the Society. David Chaplin has led the Young Fabians in their 50th year, going from strength to strength, and Adrian Prandle has talked today about their plans: it’s an astonishing range of activity that is all done on a y voluntary basis. The Fabian Women’s Network is establishing itself as a key part of campaigns around gender and equality. Many of you involved with the Local Societies are the reason that the Fabian Society has something none of the other Westminster think-tanks can match – a living, breathing presence across the UK in over 60 Local Groups, with several more starting up, and in our individual membership. Like the Young Fabians, we have also tried to ensure that we reach new people by having a presence and voice in political engagement online.

 

We should be proud that Fabian membership is now higher than it has ever been in our 126 year history. In the annual report, individual membership was 6540 at the end of June, a record total, 300 up on the year. Even better news is that it is continuing to rise – up another 400 to over 6950 now in just three months. 

 

It is really good that Labour party membership is also now rising, after falling steeply in recent years. What is striking that Fabian membership is rising now, having held up and risen across the time Labour was in power. We had just over 5000 members (5093) in May 1997 so we managed to end the 13 year period 20% higher overall. It is only a few years ago that Young Fabian membership hit 1000 for the first time: and is now 1700 and rising. Individual Fabian membership had previously fallen when Labour was in power: from 5000 to 3000 during the Attlee governments, for example. I expect it would surprise many people to know that Fabian membership today is more than twice what it was then. We should be confident in encouraging more people to join us, and its great that we have both new and old members with us here today.

 

***

 

That ability to engage people matters, because this has also been a disappointing year for many of us.

 

Politically, the Labour Party lost the election and left office. Many Fabian members will have been involved with successful local party campaigns – including Sadiq’s impressive effort in Tooting – but several other Fabian members were among Labour MPs and candidates to be defeated.

 

And how that has affected the causes we have been working for can be seen in several of the early policy choices made by the new government. The biggest policy decision has been about the scale and speed of public spending cuts, where we have studied the detail. But there have also been important setbacks for equal life chances in the detailed choices made. I would have wanted to see the Labour government do much more on wealth inequality, it was a great shame that the one new policy – the Child Trust Fund - did at least guarantee some assets for every child, and which went from Fabian pamphlet to government policy, seemed to be the first and easiest cut.

 

As the world in which we work has changed over the last year, I want to point to three lessons from Labour’s time in government, the election argument of the last year, and from its aftermath, which I think should help Fabians to think about the challenges that we face now.

 

Firstly, a lesson from Labour’s record in power.

 

It is important to have a frank and honest assessment and debate what the Labour governments got right and wrong. The record was mixed. Many good things were done. It is important to acknowledge that, because it shows that political progress is possible. For the first time in British history, pensioners are less at risk of poverty than other adults. The Labour governments achieved more in reducing child poverty than was done in any other major democracy in the period, though we wanted them to go further and faster. The legacy could and should have been stronger. The Labour governments did not reduce inequality. Inequality was held in check, and modestly reduced, across 90% of society. But there was runaway inequality in the top 1% - and the drivers of that inequality at the top turned out to be one major factor in bringing a historic economic crash for everybody else too.

 

The important lesson about the record is that Labour’s legacy endures most strongly where we fought and won a public argument about values, but that it can be much more easily wiped away by political opponents where we did not.

 

So New Labour was always nervous about tax. But at least once - influenced by Fabian research - it did make a transparent case that, if the public wanted more NHS spending, it had to be paid for. The penny on national insurance to raise £8 billion for the NHS was the most popular Labour budget. Now, we have a Coalition government which says it will increase health spending in real terms.

 

Nobody wants to pick fights with business lobbies or regulate for its own sake. But the one issue where we took on vociferous opposition from the CBI and political opponents was the minimum wage – we were right about the evidence that it would not destroy jobs, and it turned out to be the most popular thing the Labour governments did. So now everybody who argued against it now accepts that the idea is part of a civilised society, giving us the chance to campaign further on the idea of fair pay.

 

On the one issue where we did most to mobilise a broader civic movement – debt and development – we now have Conservative ministers also championing more spending on aid, saying they will continue the work to reach the 0.7% aid target, even in the face of opinion polls and media pressure to cut aid spending.

 

In other areas, we struggled, and the argument and public agenda shifted to the right. But on these issues we shifted the agenda our way. We could never do that again when, by the end, we seemed to limit our aspirations for ‘change’ to issues where the consensus already existed. We too often lacked confidence in our ability to challenge and change the political centre again.

 

Secondly, a lesson from the election campaign.

 

The hung Parliament shows that Labour was often effective when campaigning on the risks posed by the Conservatives: on tax credits, unemployment, dropping NHS targets. Fear and uncertainty about whether the Conservatives had really changed helps to explain why nobody won the election. But it was not enough. Labour lost because Labour had no positive account of its own future vision and agenda that people could understand.

 

Why didn’t we have much positive to say about the future by 2010? 

 

Because we talked about renewal in government, but we failed to do it. List the things we were most proud of after 13 years – minimum wages, devolution, Northern Ireland and many others – and see how many had happened in the first five years.  

 

Why did we fail to renew? A big cause was the culture of how Labour did politics in power. There intense debates between small factions within Downing Street, most other voices marginalised or excluded, and a fear that any open debate would lead to disunity. 

 

On some of the biggest public issues – including economics and tax – all debate was locked down. If emerging issues were not central to debates between Blairites and Brownites, then we were very slow to respond to the rising importance of housing, or the environment, or the way our political reform agenda stalled after 2001. 

 

We were too closed. This proved a powerful forces for defensive, status quo thinking. They prevented us representing ‘change’.

 

Thirdly, a lesson from the election aftermath.

 

After the election, Labour was easily the worst prepared of the three parties, despite a hung Parliament being the best result we could realistically have hoped for. I don’t think that was just about circumstances of being in government, or the exhaustion of the Parliamentary Party after 13 years. That might not have decided the outcome, but it told us something too about the culture and instincts of our party.

 

We can often be the party which is instinctively least comfortable of all with multi-party politics, cooperation and pluralism. That is a strand among Conservatives too. If David Cameron surprised people in how quickly he pursued a Coalition, he was operating on enduring Conservative instincts: to pragmatically work out what they needed to do for power, and to do it. 

 

Whatever criticisms people will want to make of the choice the Liberal Democrats made to form the Coalition, or the choices they have made within it, one thing is clear: it helped the LibDems that they had a democratic culture and structure in their party when they made it. The conventional media and Parliamentary wisdom is that internal democracy divides parties and make leadership impossible. The LibDems have remained more united than anybody expected – despite the scale and substance of some of their u-turns – because the party’s internal democracy meant its members felt they shared the ownership for the decision that was made in May. That is an important lessons for Labour as it seeks to rebuild a culture of democracy and debate.

 

Labour is now the one main party of opposition – and there will be advantages in that. But the future of our politics is likely to be more plural, not less. Multi-party politics is the reality in Scotland, Wales and London, because of Labour’s constitutional reforms, and often in local government too. At Westminster too, even if we keep the current electoral system, all of the evidence about long-term electoral geography makes it unlikely that the 2010 Parliament will prove a once-in-a-century occurrence.

 

Challenges for the future

 

The last six months have been about providing a forum for some of the debates around the election result and Labour’s defeat, the inquest into the record, and to providing a forum for the 

 

* What approach should the Fabian Society have to the Coalition government?

 

* How can we best play a role in shaping alternatives to it?

 

There are likely to be many reasons to challenge the Coalition’s agenda. It will also important to understand the ideological drivers of different elements of government policy, over major issues like the role of government.

 

Overall, I think we will be most effective when scrutiny and advocacy is serious, credible and evidence-based. The best way to do this is for Fabians to scrutinise, in good faith, the evidence on some of the core “fairness tests” which the government has set for itself.

 

Both Coalition parties have adopted the language of equal life chances and reducing inequality. They have committed to testing tax and spending decisions so they are progressive not regressive, to meeting the targets to reduce and end child poverty. Those are goals we have long held. We should pursue them by holding the government to these commitments, assessing whether they are doing so or not, and setting out how they could meet them, just as we did when Labour was in power.

 

The evidence of the budget and spending review is that the government will fail these tests without changing course considerably. It still changes the political terrain that they are their tests as well as ours. That should help us both to inform opposition to the Coalition and, wherever we can, to work with critical supporters of the Coalition who want to persuade the government on these issues.

 

There are also going to be important issues – climate change, prison reform and civil liberties, Europe, development, rebalancing growth and the regional economy, political reform – where there will be divisions within the Coalition, and within all of the major parties as well as within them. I think it was good that we worked with a wide range of groups to debate prison reform at each of the major party conferences this year. On these issues, we need to start from our values, provide an important space to scrutinise Labour’s internal disagreements on some of these issues, and to recognise that – say, on climate change – will demand that we build effective alliances both outside and across party boundaries to succeed.

 

How do we create alternatives?

 

Over time, the most important task will be to play the biggest possible role in shaping effective alternatives. Opposition can be important in politics. But, however strongly we might disagree, where arguments are lost, the future agenda is not going to be one which seeks to put as much as possible back to how it was five years ago before the government. Whatever the pros and cons of the type of politics and economics we had from 1997 until the 2008 crash, the future is going to be different to the past, because it won’t be possible to recreate the economy as it was, even if people thought that was a good idea.

 

(1) To demonstrate that ideas and values matter to political outcomes - and to put debate about values at the heart.

 

Values in politics matter more than most people think.

 

Take what David Cameron says about the NHS: "It's not to do with ideology, or philosophy, or any abstract political theory. It is the simple, practical, common sense, human understanding of a fantastic and precious fact of British life".

 

It’s great he thinks so. If it is just simple British common sense, Beatrice Webb might wonder why it took 40 years for the idea of the NHS to become a reality after the Fabians first proposed it. I expect Nye Bevan might be surprised, and wonder what his ferocious battle to establish the NHS was all about too. Barack Obama might raise an eyebrow too, especially when he even has right-wing Brits  like Daniel Hannan flying out to help his opponents.

 

Values and ideology shape and change what we think of as the common sense of our societies. At a time of crisis – in 1945, in 1979, and today - the battle of political ideas can shape the politics of the next two or three decades.

 

We have to make Labour a values-based party. Fabians should put the debate about fundamental aims and values central to the party’s rethinking over the next couple of years. The test is that values are not just something we talk about internally, as an exercise in political philosophy, but that they go on to have a grip on the public arguments that we want to make and the policies that we create.

 

We have been asking “is equality fair?” because the argument about how we resolve potential clashes between intuitions about equality and fairness - between competing ideas of need, merit and entitlement – is crucial to the identity of the left, and to defining the pro-equality projects we need. For me, reciprocity is a central value for the left. Addressing this tension is also how we will find the arguments and policies for reducing inequality and poverty that will command strong majority support, and prevent “fairness” grievances being set against an agenda to narrow the gaps in our society. 

 

We also need to restore the value of liberty in Labour thinking. So we should return to the fundamental debates about freedom and equality, whether they are in conflict and how they can be combined. If our fundamental purpose should be to spread the value of liberty – the power to – across our society, what does that mean about power, the individual and the state?

 

(2) Fabianism has been effective in connecting values and practice.

 

Robert Kennedy is famous for capturing the idealism of those who want political change by saying "Some men see things as they are and say, "Why?" I dream of things that never were and say, "Why not?". We can certainly claim this for the Fabians, since he was quoting George Bernard Shaw. We need to capture that spirit of "why not" and to assert that alternatives are possible. If this seems daunting, we should reflect on how much more unlikely the advocacy of a modern welfare state was in the age of the Workhouse. But Fabianism has been effective when it has combined the spirit of "why not" with answering the question about "how". Denis Healey said that "the early Fabians found socialism wandering aimlessly in Cloud Cuckoo Land and set it working on the gas and water problems of the nearest town or village. The modern Welfare State is their monument".

 

If we dig into these debates about values, we should be able to show that they have important real world consequences.

 

The attempt to combine freedom and equality should help us to understand the value of government as well as the limits of the state. 

  

An approach to fairness and equality should help us to define a vision of the welfare state we want to advocate, and what the idea of contribution and mutual insurance means in the 21st century, which has been what The Solidarity Society has tried to begin.

 

We need to understand what values of fairness and equality mean for scarce resources. We need to think about social justice across generations, if we are to deal with demographic change or our responsibilities for the planet and to future generations.

We also need to apply those debates about fairness – fair outcomes and fair processes – to understanding the scope and limits of markets. 

 

And we should understand that these are now common debates for centre-left parties across Europe and internationally: we are working with partner organisations to link these similar debates in different countries.

 

(3) That we shift the culture of how we do politics. 

 

We will also need to understand how politics must itself change if we are to advance the possibility of change in an often anti-political age.

 

We need to be a more open, more democratic and more pluralist party. Labour will need to be more confident that it is rooted in its own political values if it is to make common cause with movements and allies outside political parties, and successfully engage with a more plural political environment.

 

An important part of this will be looking at how we can use power from below. 

 

That means using power in local and national devolved government, and using this as a laboratory for progressive change.

 

It also means thinking about power in a different way, including reconnecting to debates and traditions of mutualism and cooperation, and what they could mean in the economy and public services today.

 

It is not necessary to be in government to frame and shift public debate: we saw that often enough in right-wing advocacy on issues including Europe, immigration, taxation and public spending in the last few years. 

 

***

 

We should not try to do everything in the Fabian Society. The new Executive will have to think hard about priorities. 

 

The lesson of the last few years – particularly in the attempt to put inequality back on the political agenda, and to then develop - is that the more that we focus in specific areas, the more impact we can expect to have.

 

We will have to think about on which issue we can do most of value to interrogate the Coalition’s agenda against the fairness tests; about which issues we can do most of all to produce constructive, credible alternative approaches from the left. 

…

 

So we are still only six months on from the election. The future script has yet to be written. This year needs to be about getting the foundations right.

 

The party will need to debate policy and politics, but it needs to ensure there is space for how debate about fundamental values. 

 

We should show that Fabianism offers a good example of how to do this – and how to make it matter – and seek to engage with and lead those debates.

 

The influence of Fabianism across the century is founded in its pluralism: its rejection of dogmatic claims that any of the  many varieties and traditions of socialism and social democracy should claim to be the one true faith against the heresies of the others, and its ability to be self-critical – including debates between Fabianism from above and Fabianism from below; of the importance of the state and its limits. 

 

Revisionism has always been an important part of the Fabian tradition: that should be important as that now means thinking beyond the New Labour era. 

  

Revisionism works – and avoids becoming empty – when it is rooted in something.

The revisionist tradition of revisionism shows that we can draw on and learn from history without fearing getting stuck in it; that was the fear which sometimes led New Labour to cut itself off from its own historical and intellectual roots which could and should be an important source of Labour’s renewal.

 

So aims and values matter as we begin to open up a new phase of debate: they help to define what the discussion should be about. For Fabians, that has always been in different forms quest for the fairer and more equal society, and how we connect questions of poverty to ideas of citizenship and solidarity right across society; and, crucially, how we get there, a concern to create the institutions and movements that can advance the agenda and make it a reality. 

 

That mission of change remains as important as ever and the challenge over the next year is to bring that to life in what we do now.