Labour needs to go far deeper than a Cameron-type strategy of superficial repositioning. We must set out a national mission
I said when I became leader of the Labour party that the first stage of my task was to go out and listen. That is what I have done. What I have heard is that people want more than what politics has been providing. I hear it wherever I go in this country. People see a growing inequality between those at the top and themselves. They ask why it is so hard to make ends meet and why this squeeze is getting tighter.
They worry that their children will have a harder life than they had. They see what I call the promise of Britain – of generational progress – under threat as young people struggle to get on the housing ladder or get a good job. And they see the things that matter beyond the bottom line, such as time, family, place, under strain as never before.
It is these forces that explain why people believe the country is heading in the wrong direction and why it has been for some years. The task for the Labour party is to do what we have always done when we have succeeded: to set out a clear national mission .
To those who say Labour should provide louder and prouder opposition, I reply that is not enough, because it fails to address the reasons why so many people left us. The public will not return to us until we show that we get it, and acknowledge the last government made mistakes – not them.
Equally, some Cameron-type strategy of superficial repositioning is wholly inadequate. It is why I have resisted those who say I must find my version of hug a hoodie – or a husky.
To do so would fail to understand a deeper truth about what happened at the last election. We lost not just because we made mistakes – on individual issues such as immigration, welfare, banking or even Iraq – but for a much deeper reason. We stopped providing answers to these big concerns. And our message was far too weighted to fear, not hope. It was never enough to inspire victory, or to give people a sufficiently clear and positive vision of this country. By the end of our time in government, we had lost the ability to chart the future.
So our challenge now is to respond to people's desire for a bigger politics and shape a national mission that speaks to their lives. To meet that task requires deep, genuine, lasting change.
This new inequality may be getting worse under the current government, but it began long before. We need a different kind of economy, fairer to the lowest paid and demanding greater responsibility from the higher paid; broader-based, less reliant on financial services. A better capitalism.
We need change too because our planet is being exploited, the next generation is being burdened with too many costs and shut out of affordable housing. The strains on family and community – from the high street overrun by unaccountable market forces to the hours people work – represent a further set of issues, beyond the bottom line, which must be at the core of Labour's future.
To address all these concerns requires a level of ambition that an opposition can sometimes lack. But here is Labour's opportunity.
David Cameron may have become prime minister a year ago, but he failed to win the majority or the mandate he desired. That was because he did not have a story about our country that addressed these concerns. And every day in government he offers a more pessimistic, austere prospectus for the future.
We could just fight on his ground and accept the terms of debate set by him. But that would fail. It would allow Conservative pessimism to shrink our ambition. At the next general election, we must be the optimists, the party with a positive, patriotic mission for our country. When we have won great victories – in 1945, 1964, 1997 – it has been by defining a new national mission. That is what we can, must and will do again.