Mike Phipps previews at Act now: A vision for a better future, by the Common Sense Policy Group, published today by the Manchester University Press.

Common sense is an important feature of any election narrative. One of the ways in which Labour’s brilliant 2017 manifesto was able to dominate that electoral campaign and deprive Theresa May of her majority was to emphasise its common sense credentials – that austerity wasn’t working, that the definition of insanity was sticking with it and hoping for different results and that it was time to try something new.

This obvious point allowed Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour to rightly appear as the purveyors of common sense democratic socialist solutions and portray the Tories as swivel-eyed ideologues wedded to the stale dogma of failed neoliberal economics. By 2019, the Tories had swapped austerity for Johnson’s boosterist and ultimately fraudulent ‘levelling up’ agenda and Labour’s tactic of continuing to attack austerity was less effective, to put it mildly.

Keir Starmer may present himself as a common sense politician but you don’t have to delve too far into the Labour manifesto to realise its solutions fall short. Its main aim seems to be to make Labour as inoffensive to vested interests as possible. As a result, the ‘solutions’ presented to the multiple crises Britain is facing have been diluted and triangulated to such an extent that they barely scrape the surface of the problems we face.

Today’s new Report, compiled by a prestigious team led by Northumbria University’s Professor Matthew Johnson and including the prolific Professor Danny Dorling, North of Tyne Mayor Jamie Driscoll, We Own It Director Cat Hobbs, Compass Director Neal Lawson, health campaigner Professor Allyson Pollock and a dozen other academics and activists, has some excellent suggestions to fill this vacuum. These include:

• A basic income for all that would provide an essential safety net, an idea supported by nearly 70% of the population.
• A properly funded green new deal and nationalisation of energy and water, essential to producing national wealth. Two-thirds of the public support a green new deal and over 78% favour pubic ownership of utilities.
• Health and social care made cost-effective by being nationally owned and operated. Social care in particular saw local authority spending fall by half between 2010-11 and 2016-7, with poor quality care and low pay rife in the dominant for-profit sector. The Report also calls for an end to NHS outsourcing, private provision and subsidies. These ideas, along with the reintegration of social care into the NHS are also overwhelmingly popular.
• Early years and educational investments which are critical to reducing pressure on the criminal justice system and increasing productivity to support the transition to a new economy. Beyond funding, the authors also emphasise  a balanced curriculum, democratically accountable structures and a level playing field in Higher Education, pointing towards free provision for all.
• A national building programme to tackle the housing crisis – overwhelmingly popular – while gradually removing the state-led transfer of wealth to private landlords and speculators. Ending Right to Buy is central to this, and it should be noted that in Scotland and Walkes where this policy has been introduced, there has been no backlash at all.
• Infrastructure transformed through targeted, regional control of transport. Three-quarters of voters favour this policy.
• Democratic reforms to control lobbying and corruption. These included a fairer electoral system and a second chamber that would represent the nations and regions of the UK.
• An expansive programme of change through wealth, carbon and corporation taxes, increasing the tax base, yield and productivity sufficiently to carry through the programme outlined.

The authors believe the scale of the problems the UK faces requires a response which matches the ambition of the 1942 Beveridge Report. This tackled the five evils of idleness – through a programme of full employment; ignorance – by universal, free, compulsory secondary education; disease – through the establishment of the NHS; squalor – by a massive council housebuilding programme; and want – by a comprehensive benefits system.

Today all these achievements are undermined by the deliberate return of mass unemployment, the underfunding of schools and increasing costs of higher education, the relentless part-privatisation of the NHS, the selling off of public housing and swingeing benefit cuts.

To challenge this, the Report envisages a changed role for the state as a representative of the people rather than the interests of capital and a new emphasis on equality and community wealth building.

Greater equality is central to this endeavour, as recent studies reviewed on Labour Hub repeatedly underline. The Report states: “All of the ways in which children in the UK are worse off than children in other rich countries are strongly associated with the high level of income inequality in the UK.”

To address the scale of Britain’s economic decline, something which the Labour manifesto palpably fails to do, the authors propose a new economic approach on a fully costed and funded basis. At the heart of these reforms are a new National Investment Bank, a fairer tax system including a wealth tax and a combination of Basic Income and Universal Basic Services.

Will the Labour front bench listen to any of this? Probably not voluntarily. But the evident impatience of voters for drastic change stands in stark contrast with the timidity of Keir Starmer’s team, so any honeymoon an incoming Labour government hopes to enjoy is likely to be very short. As the leadership’s remedies to tackle the climate, cost of living and public services crises fall short of what’s necessary, the ideas in this Report can form a basis for united campaigning by trade unions and other social movements seeking real solutions to the mess we are in.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.