New Labour's Faustian pact with the City used its taxes to fund public services and help the poorest. That's over, so where now?
It took the Conservatives more than a decade after 1997 to seriously start asking why no one would re-elect them. Labourites, by contrast, aren't willing to wait that long. Over the past 18 months a range of different coloured groups have launched to articulate what went wrong by May 2010, and what lies ahead.
But do Blue Labour, the Purple book, the Red book, and most recently Black Labour add up to anything other than Factionalism 2.0? Why should anyone pay attention? Are there any more colours in the offing? Rather than try and summarise them all, I'll get to the crux of the debate. While they broadly agree that the country cannot go back to the economic model of the 90s and 00s, they disagree or are unclear about what this new future looks like and how to get there.
New Labour made a Faustian pact with big business to stay out of their way, using their taxes to fund public services and help the poorest. Call it their brand of "neoliberalism" if you will. That pact is now effectively dead. The golden goose of the City is wasting away before our eyes.
How does the government get back those tax revenues? Is that even possible again? Purple and Black Labour say government revenues will be much lower in 2015 and beyond, so Labour has to explore ways to deliver its goals in other ways. In other words: how could Labour be effective if there was much less money to spend on public services and promoting equality?
Blue Labour takes a different approach, arguing that Labour's highly consumerist approach to public services alienated people and made it difficult for them to relate to the welfare state. Spending money isn't the issue, it says, instead demanding that Labour re-imagines how public services work. Many point to alternatives in different areas.
But this demands the question: is there really no money left?
That assumes there aren't ways to raise revenue. Red Labour argue that taxes should be raised on the rich and point out that they are historically under-taxed. Besides, why should tax avoidance and tax evasion be taken for granted? Furthermore, they argue, "fiscal conservativism" has always been used to cut spending from poorer areas without making richer people feel the pain too.
If we want good teachers to teach our children, police offices to protect us, soldiers to defend us and carers to look after our elderly, then we have to invest in them. Or we can choose to let our infrastructure crumble and eventually become a third-world country.
On the other hand, it is also fair to say while New Labour's model of redistribution and funding public services made a huge difference to public services, the impact on equality, worklessness and poverty was marginal. A bolder reorganisation of our political economy is required, and that can't mean going back to the 70s either.
This is the perhaps the biggest weakness with Purple and Black Labour: they don't convincingly explain how their goals can be hard-wired into the economy without needing to spend less money, and whether those solutions can actually work.
And what if it isn't actually possible to tackle poverty and inequality without spending money? We might again end up with declining public services as ineffectual schemes make little difference from the sidelines.
One point is obvious: once voters start demanding answers and solutions from Labour again (and they will soon), the party had better offer a bolder vision of the future. Harking back to the glory days of the late 90s is no longer an option.