Labour policy figures join forces to forge new ideas for future government

Two of Labour’s leading policy figures, who put forward “manifestos” for Andy Burnham and a centrist grouping, are to join forces to help forge new ideas for a future government.

The authors of the two essays – which have previously been described as competing visions for a Burnham- or Wes Streeting-led government – said Labour urgently required a serious intellectual debate about its direction rather than simply a change of personality.

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, which said the party should reject workers’ rights reforms and net zero and allow far greater market freedoms.

Mathew Lawrence, the director of Common Wealth, who authored the Manchesterism essay, and Mark McVitie, who wrote the Labour Growth Group’s An Honest Day, 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.

They said any future prime minister should grapple with serious policy instead of the “desert of ideas” in Labour while the party was in opposition.

Lawrence is an influential ally of Burnham. His essay, The Productive State, argued for sweeping new public control of essential utilities. He said the “false calm” in which any dissent was crushed while the party sought to win an election had hindered the operation of the government, and now was the time for robust debate that should not be seen as pure factionalism.

“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,” he 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, the director of the LGG, whose chair, Chris Curtis, had endorsed Streeting’s leadership, said the next phase of Labour in government should reject the 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.”

Lawrence and McVitie published a joint essay in the New Statesman on Tuesday, where they said that they believed 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.”