Labour-led govt an achievable objective, but we take nothing for granted
Issued : Saturday 3 July, 2010
Speech by Eamon Gilmore TD
Leader of the Labour Party, Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs & Trade
Last year, the theme of the Tom Johnson Summer School was 'Achieving a Labour-led Government'. I committed then, in unambiguous terms, that my ambition was to put Labour in the driving seat of the next government.
I said then that there were a number of conditions that needed to be satisfied if Labour was to achieve that goal:
That we had to believe, ourselves, it was possible;
That we, as a party, must do everything necessary to win;
That we must persuade those who lean towards Labour, but who don't always vote Labour, to commit to us at election time;
And that we must demonstrate how a Labour-led government would be different and better for the people, and for the country.
At the time, I think it is fair to say, that ambition was not universally shared, and even considered by some to be beyond the realms of the possible.
Twelve months later, things have changed. Thanks to the hard work and progress that our party has made, Labour's ambition to lead the next government is seen as both credible, and achievable.
The opinion polls have been consistent. Support for the Labour Party is growing, because a Labour-led Government would mark a real break from the past. Not just a new Government, but a new approach to Government.
A Government that acts in the interests of all the people
A Government that is prepared if necessary, to change the way Government itself is conducted.
But we take nothing for granted. What we are offering is the opportunity to lead a Government. It will take every possible effort to build on what we have achieved so far, and to turn our objective into a reality.
As a party, this will be the toughest contest we have ever been in. It is a contest that will require discipline; confidence in ourselves, and in our objectives; willingness to robustly defend our party from attack.
More will be expected of our party, and we, in turn, must expect more of ourselves: a higher level of party activity; a drive to grow our movement; a membership that is confident acting as ambassadors for the party in their communities. Party representatives who defend and promote Labour on good days, and in difficult times.
I am under no illusions that Labour's growing strength is universally welcomed. Challenges to power are rarely well received by those who have been protected by the status quo, and we can expect to come under increasing criticism and attack from some quarters as the prospect of a Labour-led government draws nearer.
There is a salutary lesson to be learned from the recent experience in Australia. There, a proposal to tax the mining industry led to 'a very Australian coup', when Kevin Rudd was unseated as Prime Minister following a hundred million dollar advertising blitz by the mining companies, aimed against his Labour government. A Labour government here should also prepare to be challenged by the commercial interests that have propped up Fianna Fáil for so long.
The road to winning the next election is a difficult one. There are those, anxious to protect their interests, who will not want us to succeed. And they will deploy every means possible to block us. We must therefore steel ourselves to engage in the most challenging political battle in Labour's long history. To win the election that will shape the future of our country, possibly for the next quarter century.
And we must push ahead with our preparations for what we will do in Government. Over the past year, I have set out what Labour's objectives in Government will be.
They are:
Jobs; getting people working again. Not only is it anathema to the Labour Party to see people deprived of the opportunity to earn a living wage, and to provide for themselves and their families, but any strategy to fix the public finances that ignores jobs is doomed to fail.
Getting treated when you are sick. We are committed to introducing Universal Health Insurance - a way of funding our health system that is both more efficient and more equitable. It is not rocket science. The evidence that it works is there. And we will do it.
An education system that liberates. That means, at a minimum, every single child in Ireland leaving school able to read and write. It means taking a fresh look at what schools are for, what we teach, and how we teach it. It means building a knowledge society, so that no one is left behind in a knowledge economy.
Public services that work, that people can have faith in, and that public servants can be motivated by. But reform cannot be confined to the public service. As a country, we have to change the way we do our business - and that includes fixing the failures in corporate governance that has so damaged our country, and our reputation abroad.
A sustainable environment. In the 21st century, the only sustainable economic growth is that which factors in our need to reduce our carbon emissions, and grow our energy independence.
Finally, we are committed to changing government itself. To opening up power, and putting people at the heart of decision-making.
Those objectives are clear. And they will not waver, because they are based on the deep and enduring values of our party.
But achieving those goals will not be easy.
The economic circumstances facing the next Government will be extraordinarily difficult.
And even as the economy eventually recovers, the State itself will be encumbered by an appalling legacy from this crisis.
Over 450,000 people on the live register, or more than one in every eight people in our labour force looking for full-time work.
A whole new generation of people graduating from college straight to unemployment, or Dublin airport.
A Labour government will inherit a blighted banking system, propped up by the State.
And we will inherit NAMA - or the biggest punt on the property market in history. The state was the loser on the loans it bought to go into NAMA. And it is likely to be a loser on those same loans when it sells them on. To add to our problems, there is the prospect that NAMA will act as a bureaucratic drag on a large portion of the economy.
Then there is the two-pronged debt crisis: some €70 billion in direct aid and NAMA bonds just to sort out the banks; while the State itself has a deficit of around 20 billion that will take several years, and more difficult budgets, to correct in order to curtail our rising debt.
Finally, we must deal with the reality that there were profound failures - failures of governance, failures of oversight, failures to properly distinguish between the private interests of the very wealthy, and the public interest - overseen by Fianna Fáil, that have undermined confidence in the apparatus of Government.
It is not just Brian Cowen who is to blame for this catalogue of disasters. Every single minister who sat at the Cabinet table for the past thirteen years bears personal responsibility for the damage that has been caused to our country.
Any one of these problems alone would be extremely challenging. Together, they are a colossal burden.
The stark fact is that cleaning up this mess will absorb the attention and energy of the State, political and administrative for years to come. However, it is equally true that we cannot put our society in the deep freeze, while we sort out our economy.
Rather, we have to re-think, not our values or objectives, but how we go about achieving them. It will require us to be innovative and inventive. To challenge accepted thinking.
One of the most outmoded political debates in Ireland, for example, centres on how big the state should be.
As though politics can be reduced to how large taxation or public expenditure are, as a share of GDP.
As though all political argument can be reduced to more public spending, or less public spending.
Not only is that argument dated, but it misses the complexity and texture of many of the challenges that face Government in the modern world. A world where there are deep currents of economic and social change, and where the idea that the State can pull a single lever to fix a problem is long gone.
The irony is that, if we are successful in the next election, we will be taking up the reins of a state with a bigger role in the economy than it has had at any other stage in history. It will be our task to navigate the State out of boardrooms we never sought to occupy.
Once, the apparatus of the state had only two functions: to wage war, and to raise money to pay for war. The Second World War demonstrated that the state could, in fact, be used to get a range of things done, and the social and economic settlement that emerged after it relied heavily on the state as an agent of change. For more than 30 years, the neo-liberal right has relentlessly attacked that concept, and the left has defended it.
That argument must now change. Across Europe, progressive political parties will have to ask themselves: 'how can we achieve our aims, when public sector debts have to be reduced, and when the state is lumbered with the costs of the banking crisis?'
This struggle about the role of the state is also at the heart of the paradox of the global financial crisis: why, when global capitalism collapsed in on itself, did conservative, economically liberal parties across Europe benefit, at the expense of social democratic parties? Could it be because 21st century populations are no longer convinced that the state can protect them from all of modern life's insecurities?
Yet, one of the reasons why we, as a people, come together to govern ourselves is to spread security. And the reason why social democrats, like ourselves, want to govern, is because we think that through that security - through that solidarity - we can build a fair and progressive country.
In short, we are clear about what the Government wants to do, but it is imperative that we re-think how it can do it.
What does this mean in practice? In the area of housing policy, for instance, the State is now, through NAMA, responsible for tens of thousands of empty homes, that will have to be occupied or pulled down. At the same time, we have around 60,000 households on the housing list.
The implication is obvious. But does the State have the capacity, financial or administrative to turn empty NAMA houses into thriving communities? On its own, it does not. It must involve community. Part of the solution to our housing crisis could be to give housing associations and partnerships, together with local communities, a greater role in social housing.
In the area of healthcare, Fianna Fáil, wedded to out-dated dogma, are determined to privatise the VHI. Yet, we know from other countries that having a not-for-profit insurer is essential, if we are to deliver high quality, universal healthcare, at a manageable cost. One option we should look at, therefore, could be mutualisation of the VHI - turning it into a non-profit organisation separate from the State, but belonging to its hundreds of thousands of members.
The question we have to ask is not just more state or less state. The question is, what kind of state? There are some areas where, it is clear, the state will have to take a far greater role. Labour's proposal for a Strategic Investment Bank is an innovative response to the present banking crisis. But we are also clear that the need for a State-led involvement in providing investment finance will continue for the foreseeable future.
But are there areas where the state would achieve more acting as a partner, rather than a sole provider, similar to the examples I have mentioned here?
This is a conversation that has barely started in Ireland, where we have been stuck in crisis-management mode. It is disheartening how little debate there has been on the 'why' of public spending, as opposed to the 'how much'.
It's worth looking at how other countries have dealt with their fiscal crises. For example, faced with a debt of 67% of GDP in the early nineties, the Canadian Government directly addressed the question of what is it that the State should do, by systematically reviewing all Government programmes and budgets.
In each case, the first question they asked was, is this spending in the public interest? The Canadian process, which was led by Government ministers, stands in stark contrast to the inadequacies of the McCarthy report here, which was essentially an exercise in cheese-paring.
That process sought only to cut back the State - not re-invent it. But why should we simply settle for less of an already creaking, inefficient, and unresponsive State?
There were far more interesting questions Mr. McCarthy could have asked of State spending - not least, what is it supposed to do. For example, despite hundreds of millions of euro being spent on educational disadvantage, particularly over the past fifteen years, why have child literacy levels not increased since 1980? Or why, despite much-lauded increases in social welfare spending in the boom times, does Ireland have one of the highest levels of relative poverty in the European Union?
You cannot get a fair picture of a country just from its public spending - you have to look at what that spending achieves. For Labour in government, the key test for State spending, and State involvement, will be the outcomes:
Are we achieving our objectives?
Is it in the public interest?
Is it fair?
And are we getting good value for money?
These questions will also drive our approach to public sector reform, and the reform of how Government works.
The ambition we have set ourselves is to lead a profound change in the political life our country. To achieve nothing less than a democratic revolution.
Labour has shown, again and again, that we are different.
We refused to endorse the blanket guarantee for the banks, because we put the country first, when Fianna Fáil capitulated to the banks.
We proposed nationalisation of the banks, because that was in the public interest, when Fianna Fáil set up NAMA to protect the developers.
We have refused to scapegoat public servants for a crisis that was not of their making.
And again and again, we have made the argument for jobs, because unless you have a strategy that puts people back to work, fixing the public finances and sorting out the banks will be to no avail.
Now we are asking the people for the opportunity to lead a Government with a difference. A Government led by a party that is, and always has been, driven by our ideals, and our ideas.
Those ideas - of solidarity, of personal freedom bound up in service to the community, that we can all achieve more when we work together, that Government and politics should serve the interests of everyone, equally, not the special interests of a special few. Those are ideas are timeless, and now their time has come.
The goals are clear. Jobs, reform, fairness. Achieving them wont be easy. But this is a great country. I know - I travel up down it every week. I know the great strength and resilience of its people. I know the capacity of the Irish to deal with adversity, the capacity for compassion, the strong spirit of community. I know the capacity we have for innovation. For thinking and working our way out of difficulties.
What Labour can offer, is to lead a Government that we will harness those capacities. That will pull people together, not push them apart. To get through this recession, we must come together as one Ireland, and afterwards we must remain one Ireland. A fairer, better country, with a better Government and a better way of doing Government.
Let others talk of recovery. Our goal is progress.
Thank You.
