“We need an open and honest debate,” said Harriet Harman as she launched the Labour leadership contest in the wake of the catastrophic election results in May. This week, the Guardian has asked some of its columnists to contribute to that debate by raising the questions the party ought to wrestle with in the final month before voting begins in mid-August. It is always tempting to refight the last election in order to shape the debate about winning the next. But what Labour needs if it is going to reach beyond its core support is a clear sense not of past defeats but of future challenges: who the party speaks for, and – in an age of individualism – how; a description of a progressive welfare state and the balance to be struck between affordability and extent; what work will look like in five years, what skills young people need in order to prosper in an age of technological upheaval, and what economic policies will best achieve prosperity and sustainability. And perhaps above all, what new language Labour can find to tell a story to those turned off and tuned out from politics altogether.
In hustings that have been conducted largely in front of Labour sympathisers, the four leadership contenders have struggled to escape the constraints of old disputes and narrow differences. Her supporters say that frustration at the absence of a more creative response to defeat explains why Ms Harman, having been studiously impartial for weeks, suddenly launched a unilateral declaration of independence and used a BBC interview to announce that the party would not block the welfare bill, accepting both a lower household welfare benefit cap and the limiting, from 2017, of child tax credits to a couple’s first two children – a stance she sought to soften somewhat on Monday night.
It is impossible not to acknowledge her central argument, that Labour has lost two elections because the party is not trusted on the economy and until that changes, it will not win an election. She is right to worry that Mr Osborne’s attempt to paint Labour as the party of welfare and the Tories as the party of work must be confronted. He must not be given the chance to make it received wisdom in the way he successfully pinned the blame for the bankers’ recession on the Labour government. She is right that Labour must listen to the voters. She was right too not to question the chancellor’s call for a high-wage economy. But it was a terrible misjudgment to suggest that Labour should meekly accept cutting the in-work benefits on which millions of low-paid families rely before there was any real improvement in pay.
Unfortunately her intervention will have achieved the reverse of what Ms Harman hoped. She has provoked a howl of outrage from Labour supporters across social media. Her “policy” has been disowned by all the leadership candidates except the one who has put challenging the party at the heart of her campaign, Liz Kendall. As a result, what will linger now in the memory of the post-budget period, just as the chancellor hoped, is that Labour is the party that is set on resistance to all cuts to welfare. The actual story, that Labour will probably vote against the budget resolution, abstain on the welfare bill, and press for exemptions from the household benefit cap for carers and the disabled, will never break through. And that will make it all the tougher to regenerate the confidence and the spirit of solidarity on which any system of welfare has to be based.
