What I got right

All wings of the Labour party which support the notion of Labour as a party aspiring to govern — rather than as a fringe protest movement — agree on the tragedy of the Labour party’s current position. But even within that governing tendency, there is disagreement about the last Labour government; what it stood for and what it should be proud of.

The moral dimension of Labour tradition has always been very strong, encapsulated in the phrase that the Labour party owed more to Methodism than to Marx. When I became the opposition spokesman on law and order in 1992, following our fourth election defeat, I consciously moved us away from a ‘civil liberties’ paramount approach to one that started with the rights of the victim, their pain, their suffering, and put first our moral responsibility to stand with them. Of course the two shouldn’t be in conflict. But nonetheless — tonally at least — I shifted our position and did it for moral as well as political reasons.

I also revitalised the notion of community, of the importance of family ties, things which in the 1960s had become more associated with the Tories, but which actually had strong roots in Labour working-class communities. When we rewrote the party’s constitution, we put as the central tenet: ‘By our common endeavour we achieve more together than we do alone.’ We retained the ‘social’ part of socialism, but effectively discarded the ideological one. We distinguished between state and social action.

So the values of New Labour were very well articulated. Even today, many of those who did not agree with the later actions of the Labour government like this moral stance — even if they came to believe that over time we lost that imperative. So having asserted the importance of public services, we then — they say — became obsessed with introducing the market to them, thus diluting their values.