Gavin Kelly, former adviser to Brown and Blair, suggests a whole Labour generation must unlearn its old model of politics
Ed Miliband has been urged by a former senior Labour adviser to embark on "a far bigger and blunter conversation" about future spending and tax choices facing the UK.
Gavin Kelly, deputy chief of staff in Downing Street between 2007 and 2010, said Labour could not evade difficult choices on the deficit just by asserting in general that state spending will have to be constrained for at least a decade.
Miliband is to expected to use a major speech on Tuesday to argue that social democracy has to be rethought for a period of long-term austerity.
Kelly, formerly an adviser to Gordon Brown and Tony Blair and now chief executive at the Resolution Foundation thinktank, wrote on his blog on Sunday night that in these future debates "there will be no prizes for sounding more hawkish in the abstract and dovish whenever it comes to specifics".
He suggested that the new agenda will require "a scary transition" in which a whole generation of Labour politicians unlearn how they used to conduct politics – using steadily rising spending to win over competing groups of the electorate.
Posting on his New Statesman blog, Kelly wrote: "Today's Labour leadership perhaps unsurprisingly has been caught between the realisation that this model of politics is over and an instinctive reluctance to embark on the new and far harder course – one which accepts, sooner or later, the need for clarity about who will be the winners and losers from Labour's fiscal decisions, and the need to build widespread public consent for these choices.
"Outraged representatives of the groups who feel let down will appear on our TV screens. It's tough to handle this in government, harder still when in opposition with few friends. But unless and until Labour makes this mental shift it will continue to be stuck in a largely defensive posture; defined more by its opponents than by its own positive choices. That is a position it must break out of long before the curtain falls on 2012."
Kelly's piece is a contribution to the debate on how Labour strategy evolves in the wake of the coalition's admission that austerity will continue until after the next election.
He suggested Labour officials have recognised that politics in the wake of the autumn statement may not have developed as they had hoped.
He wrote: "The pressure for more fiscal resolve over the longer term is reinforced by a mood among Labour strategists that they have so far failed to turn the coalition's Autumn statement, with its admission that cuts will now extend into the next parliament, into a new chapter in the debate on the deficit in which Labour gains credit and then moves beyond a sole reliance on its immediate 'too far, too fast' critique.
"The risk now is that the Labour leadership moves from talking about the short-term case for stimulus to talking about longer-term deficit reduction without having a strategic account of what this would mean for the state: what it should do less of, more of, and differently, given the realities of the next decade and beyond."
Kelly pointed out that even once the nasty decade ends, the UK will be bumping into "the towering fiscal cost of an ageing society".
"Any party that wants to win in 2015 with a claim to the future will have no choice other than to speak directly to challenges like these," he wrote.
"All of which reinforces the view that a far bigger and blunter conversation about future choices is needed than the one that Labour has so far embarked upon with the public. What does a plausible Labour cuts agenda look like for 2015; what are real priorities for the future where Labour should seek to increase investment; and what does a Labour tax agenda for 2015-2020 look like?
Saying Labour must set out some clear directions of travel rather than detailed policies, he proposed Labour offer less generous support for affluent baby boomers in terms of universal benefits at the same time as it puts in place a proper Dilnot-esque system of social care, overwhelmingly paid for by the ageing generation itself rather than their working age counterparts.
He also proposed more help for childcare and less support for the affluent in building up pensions. Labour should also back capital investment in areas such as housing, even if it means "a longer era of low or no growth in current expenditure".
He warned: "If Labour can't muster the resolve to consider these shifts – or alternative ones conjured by wiser minds – then it isn't going to persuade a sceptical public that it is distinctive or has what it takes to govern in the tough decade ahead. The alternative is a slide towards a soggy, cautious politics in which the leadership feels boxed in by a left that cries 'betrayal' in response to any proposed cut, and a right that screams 'deficit denial' at any new consideration of collective action."
Kelly also said the party cannot ignore new ways of raising tax, adding he finds it a mystery why Labour has opted to cede the rhetorical argument about taxing wealth and property to the Lib Dems. "Any new property tax will of course be fiendishly complex to design in a way that raises serious money without being politically toxic," he noted.