"Labour's core narrative should be the opposite: "Fairness doesn't happen by chance" - it depends on what governments do." says Sunder Katwala as he discusses the core issue of fairness in public policy.

The Prime Minister told the Fabian New Year Conference in January ago that “this isn’t an election for a fourth Labour term; it’s the first election of a new global age”. That creates a challenge to his party to present a clear argument about the vision and values which will underpin the campaign arguments about the different choices being put to the electorate.

 - To take stock of both the achievements and the lessons of over a decade of Labour in government.

- To help us to bring more clarity to what is at stake between different visions of our society at this General Election

- And to begin to imagine new futures which can respond to the scale of economic, environmental and political challenges that we now face.

The battle of ideas is very much joined at this election. Labour’s problem is not that the Conservatives claim to have changed: it is that the Conservatives have clearly not changed very much in ideological terms. The Conservatives have conceded arguments on NHS spending and on international development – but they are offering that as a guarantee of moderation and modernity to the electorate in return for a “doctor’s mandate” everywhere else. 

Balancing future budgets will be an important test of priorities for every party. But the relish with which many on the right advocate the fastest and deepest spending cuts possible underpins the continued core belief of most of the emerging Conservative generation, that whoever governs least governs best, that the smaller the size of the state, the more freedom there is in society.

Labour’s core argument will be “fairness”. Its slogan, unveiled this weekend, is “ a future fair for all”. There are three important challenges to an effective politics of fairness.

At the level of ideas, Labour needs to explain its idea of a fairer and more equal society in a way which presents a clear choice between different visions of Britain’s future.

 

There is an issue of means. In policy, we need to have a design and advocate the means which can narrow those gaps in practice.

And there is a challenge of mobilisation and advocacy. We will need a more effective public politics around fairness, to mobilise the support without which a deeper attack on inequalities won't be possible in practice.

The core fairness argument should be this: that we should not inherit our life chances at birth. Labour’s fundamental argument about Britain today is that where we are born and who our parents are still matters far too much in determining our opportunities and outcomes in life. And so our own choices, talents and aspirations count for too little.

The differences are not only about policy choices. There is an underlying disagreement about ideas – and what freedom and fairness should mean in our society. The progressive idea of freedom is about autonomy. The chance to write our own life stories. For our life chances and outcomes to depend on our choices - not to be dictated by what we inherit in the lottery of birth, the circumstances of our parents, the constraints on pursuing a meaningful life placed by the grind of poverty, a lack of resources or capacity; by arbitrary constraints on what women are allowed to do or  whether gay people can be seen and heard.  That is what has inspired the best of the left from Tawney onwards. We promote substantive equality - because we want to spread the freedom to be all that we can be. We should be for the pursuit of equality and the protection of freedom, because more equal life chances are needed for us to be truly free.

 

That is also an argument about means too. Who will say they are against fairness? Not David Cameron and George Osborne. Indeed, the Conservatives have made a virtue of the contradiction with their commitment to shrink the state: they tell us they are now the true progressives on poverty, climate change and development precisely because they know that the government can't address these issues.

Labour's core narrative should be the opposite: "Fairness doesn't happen by chance" - it depends on what governments do.

This must be fleshed out by concrete policy that can test the rhetorical commitment to fairness of political opponents. A core Labour priority should be to protect long-term interventions in fair life chances – universal public services including the SureStart provision for the early years and education spending; the Child Trust Fund to ensure every adult has a financial stake – which are essential if concern about equal opportunities and stalled mobility. That should include a willingness to defend progressive taxation – particularly inheritance tax, and the higher rate of tax on the highest earners – as essential to funding a politics of fair chances.

That requires a frank and accurate account of Labour’s own record. New Labour’s sustained programme of quiet redistribution has reduced poverty. It has halted, but not reversed, growing inequality. The depressing thought is that most people seem to think that this is likely to prove as good as it gets for social justice for another generation or more. It is easy to see why. Sharp fiscal pressure and calls for cuts now dominate political debate. At the same time, public attitudes towards redistribution and welfare recipients are at their harshest for a generation.

There is a difficulty in defending a record which has involved ‘running up the down escalator’. Given the pressures towards greater inequality, it has taken a great deal of effort even to hold the gap steady. These are intergenerational challenges. It is often said that social mobility has fallen under Labour - though this simply isn't true – and it is used to promote a return to the policies of the 1980s

The lesson of the record is not that redistribution does not work. Ask why there have been very large falls in pensioner poverty, some falls in child poverty and yet a rise in poverty for single adults. It reflects the choices which governments made, just as the increase in inequality and the collapse in social mobility in the 1980s reflected policy decisions in Nigel Lawson’s budgets to redistribute towards the top. So redistribution works – when it is tried. And it matters in which direction governments redistribute too.

But a frank account would also recognise that the post-1997 equality agenda has been too reliant on education, investing in public services, and modest redistribution, to mitigate the impact of market outcomes. We have had a politics of distribution, but we have paid less attention to how political economy determines both the amount and the distribution of growth. The reliance on finance-led growth in the British economy was something of a Faustian pact though, if one looks at the levels of public investment which it made possible, it is not difficult to understand why the pact was made.



So an effective politics of fairness must also ask again what are the scope and limits to markets, if they are to be governed in a way that meets economic, social and environmental goals. Just as the post-war settlement – in a sense saved capitalism from itself after the 1930s – so we again need to argue for a more sustainable capitalism, and make clear that legitimate and sustainable markets depend on maintaining political and social consent.

Sunder Katwala is General Secretary of the Fabian Society (www.fabians.org.uk)