I interviewed Stella Creasy, one of the most interesting of the 2010 Labour intake, for Ethos Journal. She talks so fast that we had space for only a small fraction of what she said during our hour’s conversation, so I shall post a longer version here in parts.
This first part covers the broadening of her argument for capping payday loans to consumer empowerment in private and public sectors. I thought she made the case for changing the rules of the free market to achieve egalitarian outcomes rather better than Ed Miliband ever has done, and made a more convincing case than he for people-powered reform of public services.
So much so that at one point I said: ‘So you’re a market socialist?’
So was Adam Smith. So was Karl Marx, actually. Sometimes people see individual rights and collective rights, and don’t recognise that the two are connected. Individually you have limited options in a market; collectively you can change the terms of reference. And that is good for business too.
Here is a transcript of the rest of this part of our conversation:
Stella Creasy: We have to restore a sense of what empowered consumers do to markets. The energy debate and the payday lending debate have [much] in common in questioning the idea of how markets work. It is a recognition of where you’ve got asymmetries and cartels. And where you haven’t got competition and consumers lose out, you start thinking about, ‘Where are the functioning markets?’
JR: Tesco?
An interesting one about the markets in food production and food selling: two different things. Looking at insurance, pensions, housing, my role in the Consumer Rights Bill is to try to thread all that together for a story about how consumers make markets work. That to me is quite exciting ideologically, and campaigns-wise you can start seeing the number of things coming up. If we are bolder about the rights we give consumers, markets will work better and people will have more choice, more competition, more freedom. One of the things that happens is that we deny people choice by not making markets work. Individual choice and collective choice are good things. They help you personalise things, they help you interact with things, they make services work for you.
In the energy debate, people say, ‘There are the big six and there are all these smaller providers therefore there must be competition.’ No. They are not the same. If a provider can’t get bigger that’s not competition. The customer loses out, not just on price but on innovation.
Is Labour’s case that the big six are colluding?
You could argue that there is unconscious collusion.
Are they making excessive profits on the generating side?
The wholesale market price in Germany is 50 per cent lower. The German energy market is really interesting when you look at how it works.
We haven’t seen the levels of investment in green energy that are justified. That’s what is so frustrating about Cameron saying, ‘Cut the green crap.’ None of the green crap is happening, mate. For our long-term security, let alone our long-term economy, we need to get this stuff right.
When you’re able to sell to yourself that is not an incentive to innovate in the service you provide or to keep your costs to a competitive level.
The fact that there are big and small but not medium should be a big marker in terms of, ‘Is this a competitive market?’
I blame Ed Miliband. He created the big six.
What you blame Ed Miliband for is a – screed.
How can you tell whether a market is working or not? And are they creative? You want innovation. We can see different markets that have better information sharing, therefore more competition and better choice for consumers, and their prices are more competitive. Starting to think through, ‘What are the things that get us to that point?’ That is the campaign I’ll be running and the work I’ll be doing as part of the BIS [Department of Business, Innovation and Skills] team.
It’s not just me. There’s a lot of us, recognising, ironically, the argument in the 1960s that Michael Young made in the Chipped White Cups of Dover [1960], his argument for why we needed to set up a separate consumers’ party to take on producers. His point then becomes even more salient now, about how to make sure the needs of the people are the start of the conversation not the end. Every MP knows this too well, because a lot of our casework is when public services don’t meet the needs of the public. You spend your time trying to put right, trying to address concerns people have, about how services should be running rather than are running.
For a government that is committed to localism, and even talked about co-ops –
Jesse Norman [Conservative MP for Hereford] wrote a pamphlet about the Conservative co-operative movement.
A whole pamphlet. I read it. A nerd like me will always read this stuff.
How do you find the time?
You make time for this. Because these are the challenges of our era. I was in my local hospital six weeks ago, getting the new CCG [Care Commissioning Group], the hospital lead, the social care lead and the mental health lead around the table talking about the fact that we have 56 people sat at Whipps Cross hospital who are medically fit enough to go home but they haven’t been discharged. That costs 15 grand a day. Huge. And actually, it’s a pretty horrible experience to be sat in hospital when you could be at home. Bad outcome. Expensive outcome.
These four were arguing and squabbling about how they might join up their services, and I said to them (a) there is a whole range of other actors who are part of this, so let’s bring sheltered housing into the equation, but (b) you can make all these decisions about a person but are you then going to present it to them as a fait accompli? If a patient says, ‘No, I want something different,’ what then happens? If I’m honest sometimes it feels in healthcare more than education, the idea that the patient or the pupil has a secondary role to the outcomes, which frankly made sense in the 1950s, when you set up a healthcare system designed to deal with infectious diseases. Well, the last home infectious disease was in the 1980s. Now, when people have lifestyle diseases, there is a very fundamental question for the left, which is, ‘Is our purpose to make sure we have services for when people get sick or to keep them well?’ I happen to think that the more progressive outcome is to be trying to keep people well and enjoying the quality of life that they want. And to therefore reconfigure services around that proposition.
The RSA has done some really interesting studies of the impact of different interventions in dealing with lifestyle conditions, looking at things like drug addiction. Identifying that family and friends have a stronger impact on people’s relapse than professionals – that’s a really interesting and challenging line. If you’re talking about long-term conditions, about things that are so heavily affected by lifestyle, what helps prevent them deteriorating is a different set of resources. And just as I don’t want 56 people who could go home sat in Whipps Cross, I don’t want to wait until people are so sick that you have to cut their feet off, which is what happens when you get diabetes type 2 conditions. That we spend 10 per cent of our entire NHS budget on our failure to deal with diabetes and not just diabetes itself but on diabetes-related conditions is for me a challenge, that says it is not just about saving money, it’s about the person having a better quality of life.
I think you can start applying that logic – and it’s not just me, lots of us, there is a whole group of MPs in the One Nation Group, as is Liz Kendall, Tristram Hunt, Luciana Berger on public health, Greg McClymont on pensions. All kinds of discussions about how do you make progressive politics about preventing rather than ameliorating injustice, because that is the greater gain to be had, not just in austerity but actually it is the right thing to do.
But what would be the motor of change in public services?
At the heart of that is your ability, your right. One of the injustices is not just if the largest wallets win out but if the loudest voices do. So how do you give everybody a voice? One of the criticisms you can level at the last government was that we were very good at the concept of choice, but we were not so good at the concept of voice – we thought voice meant meetings. I can tell you, as a former local councillor I was at an awful lot of them where I wanted to chew my own arm off to leave early. Unfortunately as an MP I still get invited to too many of them now.
We thought about voice as a question of accountability; it’s not. Voice is about participation. It’s about shaping services. It’s about your ability to affect what’s happening to you. And to be part of affecting what’s happening to other people. Personal budgets are a great idea but if you have only limited options – I had a constituent who was disabled, she had two twin 18-month-old daughters, single mum, she wanted to use her personal care budgets to pay for childcare on a Thursday afternoon, which for her was respite. They wouldn’t let her. They said it was for her not for her children.
So we have a way to go in really, truly giving people power and capacity to exercise their rights. You can’t do choice without voice and you can’t do voice without choice. But if you put the two together, that is a revolutionary force. From education, health care, policing, local housing. That’s what being a Co-op MP means to me, that’s what mutual movement at its best does. We don’t have many models in British society where everyone is an equal member.
John Lewis and the Co-op, and that’s in trouble.
John Lewis isn’t a co-op. John Lewis is an employee-led [company]. Truly mutual user-led co-ops are quite inspiring.
But very rare. Doesn’t that suggest that they don’t work?
No. No, no, no. That’s always interesting. Where’s the counterfactual? There are some amazing ones around social care. Preventive ones in Birmingham looking at isolation as a precursor to mental illness. That’s the sort of argument I had with Jesse Norman. It’s not a process it’s a purpose. Look at New Harmony: Robert Owen went to America to set up New Harmony. They set up schools and hospitals and libraries. After 25 years, it all fell apart because they all hated each other. Unless you have the mindset about mutual shared interest, it ain’t going to work.
That sounds very drippy. People should be nicer to each other. It’s what Sidney and Beatrice Webb said: socialism requires a ‘change of heart’.
Oh no. Nowhere near. I’ve read Beatrice Webb’s diaries.
What? ‘Greed is good’?
Profit and wanting to better yourself are the most successful drivers of progress in history. It’s what you said in the New Statesman. World poverty has been greatly reduced by capitalism.
It has also been brought down by choices that have been made. That’s the reality. There are choices that we make about trade and infrastructure that are changing the capacity of those countries to grow, and we should welcome that.
Your point about what motivates people is interesting, because there is a presumption that self-interest is only manifested in profit. So the left has to make an argument that is not a deficit one. The thing that pisses me off is that people say that Walthamstow is an area full of problems, saying we have to invest in these communities, otherwise they’ll be havens of unemployment and crime. Waltham Forest invented the iPad. Jony Ive came from Waltham Forest. I go into schools and tell that to the kids: their eyes light up. We have one of the top performing economics departments in the country in George Monoux College.
We have bags of potential. What we don’t always have are pathways for that potential to be realised. When those kids don’t realise their potential it’s not just them that loses out it’s us. One of those kids could cure cancer, if we push them absolutely to be aspirational. We should never let the CBI say that aspiration is not progressive, but we also have to recognise mutual self-interest.
That’s why I wrote that article. Because if we are pessimistic about the world – The world is really exciting. There are all these amazing technological innovations taking place. It’s the Tim Berners Lee thing. This is for everyone. Boris Johnson’s model rules out Tim Berners Lee.
It is true that Boris was also banging on about grammar schools.
All the evidence is that grammar schools miss out on potential. I don’t just say that from personal experience. I failed the 11+ the first time I took it. I took it in Manchester for the streaming for the comp I was going to go into and then my mum got a new job. [She passed the 11+ the second time in Colchester.]
The problem with the Conservative party is that they cut off 50 per cent of the discussion about how you get the best out of everyone. The problem with the left is that we’ve always thought we have to mitigate injustice first and then deal with opportunity. So we’ve ended up [saying] we’ll fight for services for people rather than work with them.
Why on earth would you turn up in a place which is Hogwarts gone wrong where people are angry with me about their bins and their broadband and water leaks.
I’m not here with a magic wand. I’m not here to be a customer complaints desk. The left isn’t there to be a customer complaints desk. We are there to shape the world. We are there so that everyone can benefit from its potential. That we don’t always talk like that is why some people don’t realise how aspirational we are. Grammar school is a funnel that narrows down our opportunity to get potential out of people from the bottom up.
Yes, but under David Cameron the Tories ditched the idea of extending selection: Labour should celebrate that.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t hold this Government to account for an education policy that is focused on structures not standards.
[To be continued.]
Eagle Eye 