In a rather indecent way, people are well known to be sympathetic to the Blairite cause have taken to the TV studios effectively to undermine Ed Miliband, including Dan Hodges, John Reid, Alan Johnson, and David Blunkett. They claim not to be anything other than positive about Labour, but their appearances have been cringeworthy and unconvincing for many true Labour supporters. They persistently bang the ‘Elections are only won from the centre ground’ drum, but that does not reflect the reality of the majority of Labour voters. If anything, they despair at the fact that Thatcher’s legacy seems to have engulfed the achievements of Labour, say in founding the principles of the welfare state or building the NHS. They, at worst, lack confidence that Labour can do much to protect workers from austerity, and feel that Labour will be unable to stop the tide of rampant privatisation in the NHS. I still remain convinced that, whilst it is possible that elections can be won from the ‘centre ground’, a Labour support could vanish if its core voters do not feel included in their journey. I also believe that, with George Osborne having taken Europe to court over the financial transactions tax this week, we are not ‘all in together’, and that overpaid investment bankers or top-income CEOs do not constitute the ‘centre ground’ either.

Lord Stewart Wood this week, on Thursday, looked at ‘One Nation Labour’ at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, the day after the funeral of Margaret Thatcher, from a historical, philosophical and policy perspective. According to Wood, Thatcher spotted “the exhaustion of an old settlement”. Wood calls this new construct a ‘social democratic ambition’, not dependent on spending, more familiar to social democratic parties in Europe. It also forces to think about building new institutions, including ones that bridge the markets and states, in a more organised economy and society.

Wood argues that this is a moment when such a challenge will be richly rewarded, and can be articulated in “One Labour”. He argued that five core ideas characterise this.

Firstly, it is a commitment to building a different type of economy, “a supply-side revolution on the left”. The neoliberal problem has not worked, according to Wood. Many steps, reducing taxes on the well-off and deregulation of services, have not worked. The “trickle down” effect has not worked, with inadequate regulation of too powerful financial services. The skills gap in our population has not been addressed. Secondly, to compete in the world, we need to compete on high skills, high productivity and high wages, in a sense “there is no alternative”. But to raise our game on the productivity front, according to Wood, there needs to be a fundamentally different approach to wealth creators, a “trickle down approach” has to be explicitly challenged to avoid a ‘race to the bottom’, “the only real wealth creators are the ones with those with most wealth” and “everyone who is wealthy is a wealth creator”. Wood therefore emphasises his central doctrine, “it is pro-wealth to criticise that wealth is produced by the few, and not the many”; this means that we need to have banks competing with each other, so that they can provide capital for innovation, and supporting industries. Secondly, Wood wishes to address growing inequality, and this does not question being pro-business. Growing inequality has demonstrated that ‘trickle down’ is not working in the post-1979 settlement, that “the freeing up of the top will lead to the benefit of the many”, which has not happened patently. The share of GDP going to wages has fallen by 10% in the last 40 years, and a Government’s rôle has been to support incomes at the bottom (asset-bubble and overleveraging at the middle are also key failures) has contributed to these problems. A ‘One Nation’ approach looks to a more equal distribution of economic power, revisiting the wisdom of the ‘tax and spend’ philosophy of previous governments, through for example incentivisation of the implementation of the living age, or a ‘mansion tax’.

A third branch is to encourage ‘responsibility’, not in terms of expectations of those who rely on state support, but applies to all members of all society including those who have the most. Responsibility, according to Wood, should be at the heart of the welfare state, and that “the contributory principle is more resilient and robust”. A fourth element is “protecting areas of our public life”, including public spaces and arts can contribute, and encouraging community stability, meaning a toleration of diversity in what people value. Finally, Wood wishes to challenge the ethic of the post-1979 settlement. He feels that this is the most challenging. There would be a new consensus on a different set of ethics, embracing the importance of individual freedom, but rejecting the idea “that individualism pursued by each magically generates the interests of all”. This too fundamentally rejects that a metric of value is the market price of something. Wood remarks that a fundamental problem is ‘restoring faith in politics’, and the belief that politics, even from the left, can transform the lives of people is important.

In this week’s Labour Party Political Broadcast (PPB), “Made by the Many”, many of the themes were further explored in terms of the “forgotten wealth creators”. “We teach, we build, we sell, we look after our mums and dads, we know we’re not the most powerful, we don’t run the banks, but we keep the country running… while tax cuts go to the millionaires, do they think the country can succeed without us?” say a myriad of voices introducing this PPB who claim they lie at the centre of the economic recovery. Miliband’s voice then comes in to say that he would be introducing a ‘Mansion tax’, a jobs guarantee, stopping those big companies which ‘rip people off’ and abolishing a tax cut for millionaires. Whilst this may seem a somewhat simplified version of the message above, and it may sound more populist, this is a message which does strike at ‘the centre ground’. As the Office for National Statistics prepares to tell us the latest GDP estimates, indicating to us whether the UK has avoided a “triple dip” (and bear in mind the economy was growing in May 2010), isn’t time the loudmouth disenchanted Blairites belt up?