Two of Labour's leading policy figures, who previously authored competing 'manifestos' for Andy Burnham and a centrist grouping, have joined forces to help forge new ideas for a future government. Mathew Lawrence and Mark McVitie, whose essays were once seen as visions for a Burnham- or Wes Streeting-led government, said Labour urgently requires a serious intellectual debate about its direction rather than merely a change of personality.
Call for Debate Beyond Tribalism
The intervention comes after a week in which senior Labour figures including Burnham, Streeting, and Keir Starmer responded with their own essays to a highly critical intervention by Tony Blair. Blair urged the party to reject workers' rights reforms, net zero targets, and allow far greater market freedoms. Lawrence and McVitie said Labour must reject the idea of 'tribes' – such as blue Labour, new Labour, and soft left – and find common ground in opposing high everyday costs and predatory capitalism.
Lawrence, director of Common Wealth and author of the Manchesterism essay, argued for sweeping new public control of essential utilities. He said the 'false calm' in which dissent was crushed while the party sought to win an election had hindered government operation, and now was the time for robust debate that should not be seen as pure factionalism.
Emerging Consensus
'Forging that agenda requires the robust testing of ideas and a spirit of pluralism and open debate that was missing. If Labour is to successfully reset, it needs that now, more than ever,' Lawrence told the Guardian. 'But that is not a recipe for damaging division or indulgent introspection. The hidden truth is there is an emerging consensus that shares a diagnosis of Britain's stagnation and a prescription for renewal: Britain pays too much for the basics because it is too hard to build, and the state has lost control of the foundations ordinary life and enterprise depend on.'
McVitie, director of the Labour Growth Group (LGG), whose chair Chris Curtis had endorsed Streeting's leadership, said the next phase of Labour in government should reject old tribal arguments. 'The last week has shown how quickly a serious debate about the country's future gets pulled back into Labour's old tribal arguments,' he said. 'Mat and I think those arguments are exhausted, and we're interested in what comes next. We came from different starting points and arrived at the same place, a politics built around cheaper essentials, a capable state and rewarded work. Something new is forming here, the underpinnings of a serious political and economic project, in our work and elsewhere. The question for the party will be whether it grasps hold of that or digs in to fight yesterday's battles.'
Joint Essay in New Statesman
Lawrence and McVitie published a joint essay in the New Statesman on Tuesday, where they said that Labour's future would emerge by taking lessons from both of their arguments: from the LGG about building a state that could restore the value of hard work leading to the reward of a better life, and from the Manchesterism vision of the state bringing down the costs of life's essentials. 'Our diagnosis is the same. Britain pays too much for the basics because the state has lost control of the foundations ordinary life and enterprise both depend on,' they wrote. 'Market fundamentalism versus blanket state control is the last war. Those who would refight it are wasting time this country simply does not have. The old loyalties were made for a world that has gone. The opportunity before us is to leave them there and build something new, equal to the moment and worthy of the British people.'
