Aspiration is incredibly important. My late father came to this country £10 in debt, and then did nearly 30 years successfully as a Doctor in the NHS. He is a totally self-made man. If there were ever a better ‘advert’ for ‘education, opportunity, aspiration’, it is he. All three are critical ingredients that help take people out of poverty and help create new products that make a contribution to humanity. But we definitely need to add to that genuine aspiration the concession that people are frightened by real threats in their everyday life, like never before, and therefore a change in emphasis in policy may be needed; relying on aspiration alone is poverty of aspiration in itself, if it does not acknowledge citizens’ concerns such as employment rights, housing, or immigration. By not appearing to adjust to the changing political landscape, Labour dangerously either gives the impression of being stuck in a time-warp, or perseverating on ‘transmit mode’. However, all is not lost. There are some people who use the social media brilliantly in Labour. They are individuals, including councillors, MPs, supporters and members, who ask questions, listen to answers, engage in the debate, or produce solutions, even if they are operating within the narrow bandwidth of one-hundred-and-forty-characters of Twitter.
Before I go onto explain what I would like the discussion to embrace as well as aspiration, I should like to submit humbly that being stuck on transmit mode is dangerous. It means that you can send out a message, and concentrate so much on whether it is being communicated well, that you do not listen to the answers. “The Big Society”, from Lord Wei, Steve Hilton and David Cameron is a good example of that. The idea itself was not clearly explained, including to the Third Sector, of why it was not yet another reincarnation of volunteering. Whilst massive efforts were made into interacting with potential stakeholders, explaining “The BIg Society” reached an impasse on numerous occasions. Many of us used to poke fun at the ‘focus groups’ idea of Lord Mandelson and Philip Gould, or the idea that the Conservatives use polling data to form policy (it is alleged), it is definitely worth ‘listening to the voter’, in the same way that Laennec advised ‘listening to the patient’. True innovators are not only keen to observe which ideas are successfully adopted, where, why and how, but they are exquisitively sensitive to the environment around them. Aspiration is a good example of where Labour policy makers have gone wrong.
Ed Miliband is said to like the aspirational approach of Baroness Thatcher, and indeed this infectious ‘setting free’ of the hopes of citizens in the UK was massively successful. This possibly may even be akin to David Cameron wishing to protect the ‘strivers’. But hold on guys. Aspiration was the “low-hanging fruit” for when the economy was doing well, and indeed growing. Too easily this debate can become framed as Blairites versus the rest of the world, but that is a cop-out. Ed Miliband, who is not a card-carrying Blairite, has embraced ‘aspiration’, but without thinking through the consequences. There is of course nothing wrong with unemployed citizens, or citizens in work with low income, being aspirational; indeed this is to be encouraged. In marketing, it is impossible to treat the market as a single mass, that’s why professional marketing professionals talk about ‘market segmentation’. If you take a similar approach to doing market research in a political capacity, you soon arrive at the (obvious) conclusion that aspiration for a CEO earning £100,000s in a multi-national company in the City is different from aspiration from a public-sector lowly-paid nurse in Wigan. Whilst it may be appropriate to target aspiration at the former, through not imposing a 50p tax rate or cutting the rate of corporation tax, different mechanisms are needed for the latter; and, in fairness, through a Liberal Democratic success in lobbying, the threshold for paying income tax has been increased yet again.
Aspiration, whilst clearly very important, remains as a key issue for a country, but there are now other factors at play (and they may have always been there to some extent during the “boom” years): for example, it is thought to be about to enter a ‘triple-dip recession’ or lose its coveted credit-rating. Whilst many voters apparently seek to establish that the economic performance of the Conservative Party has been poor, the same individuals apparently feel that Labour were reckless with the economy. It has proved impossible to explain how ‘saving the banks’ had involved spending money, worsening the deficit, and the Conservatives are willing to advance the notion of how Labour ‘won’t say sorry’. Security, in my opinion, is the critical issue. This encapsulates a plethora of different issues. One has to be about the NHS, seeing some NHS Foundation Trusts going into administration, or become privatised. In a privatised NHS, it is unclear how a comprehensive health service can be provided, when the legal imperative is to maximise shareholder dividend, and it is further unclear who is accountable or to blame when anything goes wrong. For those who are lucky enough to be in employment, this Coalition has started an ideological onslaught on providing basic employment rights, even having the audacity to launch a ‘shares for rights’ scheme which has been universally panned by virtually all major business and financial stakeholders in the UK. Furthermore, it is very hard for the Conservatives to be on the side of the ‘aspirational’, when their cabinet is comprised nearly exclusively of millionaires. It is therefore advisable in my view for Labour to change ‘mode’ from a narrative about aspiration to a dialogue about security. It will be perceived as ‘out of touch’ if it bangs on about aspiration when people are increasingly feel that they can take nothing for granted. The reason that there are increasing numbers in employment is because there are more people in flexible, part-time jobs with absolutely no job security – this is certainly not anything for the UK government to boast about.
Why is security or insecurity relevant? Thousands of disabled citizens are finding themselves removed from disability living allowance due to a re-calibration of the welfare benefits system, so their concern will be less about aspiration and more about security. This disability living allowance is not an employment allowance, it is a living and mobility allowance, so removing it from disabled citizens who remain disabled is an ugly disgrace. If you’re a pensioner, you will have been totally cobbled by the low interest rates, so to talk about aspiration to them is utterly inappropriate. David Cameron’s government is not one of ‘aspiration’, it is one of ‘expectation management’. The Conservatives are already talking about how they might be losing their triple A rating, when having talked about they had managed to retain the AAA rating as a result of their ‘successful’ policies. Their ‘successful’ policies included murdering all infrastructure investment (including ‘Building Schools for the Future’), and killing off consumer demand (through increasing the rate of VAT). It is indecent for Cameron to talk about aspiration, and equally indecent for Ed Miliband to wish to emulate it, when their basic incompetence in running the economy has seen the aspirations of many individuals in the UK utterly annihilated.
If Labour takes itself off ‘transmit mode’, there is a chance it might be able to listen to workers who feel insecure in their jobs, or disabled citizens who are worried about their life in general. Whilst Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were possibly appropriate leaders for their time, Ed Miliband needs to take a lead, but acknowledging that he is in a materially different world to the one they were in. The alternative is that ordinary voters will continue to be disinterested and disenfranchised in UK politics, and this would be the ultimate tragedy. Labour has risen confidently to challenges in the past, and I am confident it will do so again.
