We mean power
by Graeme Cooke
What if when politicians talked about empowerment they really meant it?
We mean power: ideas for the future of the Left, edited by James Purnell and Graeme Cooke and published today by Open Left, offers an answer to that question.
We mean power argues that the forthcoming election should be about a big choice between competing visions for the type of politics we need to confront the challenges we face. This would reveal the confusion of today’s Conservative Party, but also pose a challenge for Labour in demonstrating the confidence and clarity to win.
All the main political parties say they want to give people power. But they often don’t start with a clear understanding about the causes of powerlessness.
People can be disempowered if society discriminates against them, if the market impoverishes them, and if the state bullies them – and often by a combination of all three. So people need to be powerful in respect of each, and protected from the overpowering potential of all.
That is much harder to do if, like the Conservatives seem to be, you are confused about the state, indifferent about markets and wishful about society. You end up proposing largely biographical solutions to highly socially-constructed problems.
For Labour, a reluctance to act at the source of market-created problems means it has relied more and more on the central state to alleviate their symptoms. It has been too hands-off with the market – requiring it to be too hands-on with the state. In other words, over reliance on the state as a corrective force has been the consequence of over reluctance to shape the market.
The way forward for Labour lies in the distinctiveness of its own tradition. This starts from a belief that most of what is best in life is relational – whether family, love, work, culture or friendship – and that those relationships work best when they are reciprocal.
Organisation is how we take empowerment out of the seminar room. It makes power real. Power is not a means to an end, it is the end. The process is the goal: to create powerful people, through organisation and action. That is how society is strengthened – not by being a client of the state or a consumer of the market, but by having its own strength, through association.
We mean power argues that the power game needs new rules. It sets out a policy agenda to guarantee work; ensure a living wage; give people control over their public services; abolish child poverty; outlaw usury; foster a shared culture; democratise democracy; re-endow local communities; defend an open and tolerant society; and make citizenship means something.
Robert
I can agree with that 100% problem for politicians they become part of a political bubble in which they lsoe sight
Andrew Preston
Re: James Purnell
His own words on his exit from Parliament. " I have spent almost all of my working life in and around Westminster". Major part of the problem, really... little connection with the real roots of his own party, the lives of ordinary people. Like so many of his senior party cohorts in Parliament.
At least with David Cameron's bunch you can pretty much see where the roots are...., DC..., trust-fund boy, family money sqirrelled away from the City, Cotswold country piles, huntin, shootin, fishin.... the missus an heiress to the Astor family fortune, generated from slum-landlording and peeling the skins off furry animals.
Brilliant, what a democracy.
mike head
You really do not get it do you? I'm afraid that until the whole navel gazing, political elite of left, right and centre get off their fat Oxbridge developed elite bums and exit the world of political research departments to garner the opinions of the real people, it is unlikely there will be any changes in the politics of power in this country.
Believe me millions of people are pissed off with grace and favour politics conducted by a group of privileged ex-public school/ grammar school boys and girls who, in the main, have served time in party research departments and then been parachuted into safe constituency seats (- and the evidence suggests this is unlikely to change in this election). Yes we want power, but that means major electoral reform and which one of you turkeys is going to vote for that one?