Political centre is shifting, says Milburn

Monday, 27 September 2004 12:00 AM

Labour's new head of campaign strategy, Alan Milburn, has said that the political centre in the UK is beginning to shift.

He told Progress' fringe meeting at the Labour Party conference in Brighton that activists should "be confident" in Labour's achievements in its two terms, notably investment in the NHS and increasing third world aid, saying he believed Labour was "beginning to shift the political centre of gravity" in the UK.

Mr Milburn said that a third term should focus on social mobility, and called for "a new One Nation politics" in which the government redistributed opportunity so that it was in the hands of the many, not the few.

The liberalisation of each individual's potential should be at the heart of a third term government, he said, arguing for the party as a whole to embrace "ambition for the country, aspiration for the individual"

Giving a hint of the shape of the election manifesto to come, Mr Milburn said: "The job of progressive politics is not just to beat poverty, it's to help people realise their ambitions," he said.

Another key policy area is likely to be choice in the public services. Despite some in the party's unease at the idea, Health Secretary John Reid told delegates that there could be no retreat from the choice agenda. Dr Reid warned that if Labour could not find a way of replicating within public services the experience that people had as a consumer - that of being a valued customer - then as they became more affluent they would simply desert the public sector.

On law and order, Home Office Minister Hazel Blears indicated that there would be no liberalisation of antisocial behaviour policies. She told the same meeting that a "platform of security and safety" for all had to be at the heart of the next manifesto. She warned that without that platform no other policies would be able to take root. And it was not enough to simply prove that it could manage services better than the Conservatives, she added.

For the third term, Ms Blears called for a reinvention - not of the Labour party but of Britain. She said decency should be the core value, as it was a "vital quality" of human relations, and politics was all about human relations and how we interacted with each other.

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