Freedom. Security. Community.
One year on, Labour needs a clearer story. Rediscovering our lost tradition of liberty is the way to unlock a new narrative.
Whether prime ministers like it or not, politics is a battle of ideas. And as Labour marks its first year in office, the Parliamentary Labour Party has one fervent wish above all others: that our ministers sort out our story, narrative and script about what we’re trying to achieve, where we’re coming from - and where we’re going.
And that is why it’s time to reclaim the ideal that first gave birth to our movement: the ideal of freedom.
Translate it as you like - liberty, control, empowerment, agency, or, as we put it in the New Labour years, ‘opportunity.’ Whatever your choice, the idea of freedom is the biggest idea in politics - and an argument for freedom lets us be very clear about the unique insight of the progressive movement—a clarity best expressed by Franklin Roosevelt back in 1944: that there is no freedom worth its name without security—and security comes from communities that pull together, not stand apart.
Opportunity. Security. Community. These are the watchwords of the progressive movement. Always have been. Always will be. And right now, they need putting front and centre of the government’s project - and perhaps brought alive with a modern - even rhetorical - equivalent of Roosevelt’s Economic Bill of Rights.
Roosevelt’s Example
In January 1944, Washington DC was blanketed with a heavy snow, and a heavy cold had laid up the American President. His doctors were worried. Just home from a draining summit in Tehran, Franklin Roosevelt was forbidden to take the short ride to Congress to deliver his tenth State of the Union. But Roosevelt had a date to keep with the American people. And so, around 8:45 p.m. on 11 January 1944, the 62-year-old, sun-tanned and sunny-natured, self-confident and wheelchair-bound President rolled into the White House Diplomatic Reception Room to deliver—for the first and only time—a State of the Union as a ‘fireside chat’. And he didn’t pull his punches.
The tide of war was turning. There was a sense the end might be in sight. Now was the time, insisted Roosevelt,
“to begin to lay the plans…for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known.”
But this lofty goal, he declared, would prove impossible to achieve if
“some fraction of our people…is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.”
What was now required, therefore, was nothing short of a second Bill of Rights to enshrine the
“one supreme objective for the future” captured “in one word: security.”
This “Economic Bill of Rights,” said Roosevelt, would mean “economic security, social security, moral security.” The United States may have grown “under the protection of certain inalienable political rights,” but, he added, over time,
“we have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.”
And so, what was now required was a new bill to enshrine the right to a job, to an adequate income, to fair prices for farmers, to fair competition, a decent home, adequate medical care, a pension for the old, and an education for the young. It was an extraordinary performance.
That January ‘fireside chat’ was the zenith of decades-worth of thinking, campaigning, and, often experimentally, governing.
In October that year, Roosevelt took to the stage at Soldier Field, Chicago, to deliver one of the single most important speeches of the 20th century. In front of 110,000 people, President Roosevelt spelt out the truth that
“The well-being of the nation as a whole is synonymous with the well-being of each and every one of its citizens.”
Here was the speech that explained how long-cherished American ideals of freedom would need a new foundation for a new post-war world. For freedom to be real in this new world, Roosevelt declared, it would need a new sentinel. A sentinel described in one word: ‘security’—and that security would be delivered by a new Economic Bill of Rights, guaranteed by the country acting together through its appointed agency: a democratically elected government. It was a hell of speech.
But, eighty years on, we find ourselves across the West not in some Elysium of liberty, but in lands where millions of our neighbours feel that life is a lottery. That they live as prisoners of anxiety, trapped by a tyranny of poverty, fear, and insecurity. In an economy where the strong can dictate terms to the weak. And where the rich buy influence denied to the poor at the ballot box.
So, eighty years on from Roosevelt’s speech, and one year into this Labour government, we should rediscover Roosevelt’s clarity—and, with it, the root of the radical tradition that inspired thinkers from Aristotle to Adam Smith, and revolutionaries from Thomas Paine to Thomas Jefferson.
The argument is simple: it is not enough to see the threat to freedom as the tyranny of dire states—and ignore the tyranny of dire straits, the monster which is misfortune or the ogre that is private power.
For decades, the Conservative Party has monopolised the rhetoric of liberty. Yet while they speak of freedom, they practise only privilege. Their notion of liberty begins and ends with the absence of state interference, as if deregulation and tax cuts alone could lift a child out of poverty or deliver the liberty to breathe clean air in our cities. We have seen the bitter fruit of this doctrine: stagnant wages, shuttered high streets, overcrowded hospitals, and a generation of young people priced out of secure housing, quality education, and fulfilling work.
Now, as Labour governs once more, we have a chance—and a duty—to build a better story of freedom. Freedom made real because it’s backed by security. A security that can only come from a community pulling together.
Rediscovering our roots
Now, as it happens, the argument for liberty is the fountainhead of progressive thought. From the Levellers at Putney to the creators of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the British tradition of liberty is a legacy of struggle—against kings, monopolies, exploitation, and poverty. Our forebears in the Labour movement—Bevan, Attlee, Tawney—all understood that without economic security, there is no freedom worthy of the name.
Clement Attlee was especially proud of Labour’s role as part of the ‘freedom-loving movement’ that was so important to the long Anglo-American tradition. Speaking to Congress after the Second World War, Attlee was clear:
“We, in the Labour Party, declare that we are in line with those who fought for Magna Carta, habeas corpus, with the Pilgrim Fathers and with the signatories of the Declaration of Independence.”
But like John Lilburne, Tom Paine, and Fergus O’Connor, Labour’s founding figures knew that freedom for the many required the collective guarantee of security; to defend the many against exploitation, against poverty, against life’s rolling waves of chance.
Liberty for some could not mean licence to crush the liberty of others. Just as the old Leveller Richard Rumbold declared on the gallows that
“none comes into the world with a saddle upon his back, neither any booted and spurred to ride him,”
so, centuries later, Roosevelt declared in 1944, “true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.”
Today, that insight rings more true than ever. We inherited a country where 14.5 million people were living in poverty, a quarter of a million were homeless, and one in eight workers earned too little to lift their families above the poverty line. This was not freedom. That was quiet, grinding tyranny.
Reclaiming freedom
It is time we said so, and offered a story about just how Labour is going to restore liberty, freedom and opportunity to our country - not as something theoretical, but as something real because it is backed by the security of collective action.
How would we articulate this? In my recent Fabian pamphlet, I posed the question: what would an Economic Bill of Rights look like today? I offered ten ideas—the essentials for a good life—grounded in the traditions of Magna Carta, the Levellers, and the Universal Declaration—but fit for the digital, decarbonising, decentralised world we now inhabit. These rights are not abstract. They are practical guarantees of liberty:
Everyone has the right to liberty, security of person, to live free from fear of crime and to access justice. No one shall be deprived of his liberty save in accordance with a procedure prescribed by law.
Everyone has the right to work, to gain a sufficient living by work, freely chosen or accepted, to just and favourable conditions of work, equal pay for equal work and to protection against unemployment with the right to form and join trade unions.
Everyone has the right to an adequate standard of living, including adequate food, clothing and an adequate home of their own.
Everyone has the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment.
Everyone has the right to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.
Everyone has a right to education, directed towards their full development including access to technical and vocational guidance and training programmes.
Everyone has the right to respect in their personal, public professional and digital lives and for their private and supportive family life.
Everyone has the right to be part of a strong, active community and to freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
Everyone has the right be able to move around and access different places easily, enabled by a universal basic mobility.
Everyone has the right to aspire to and to enjoy a continuous improvementof living conditions as material conditions allow.
These ideas are not new. But what is new is the audacity to assert them as the core purpose of government in the 21st century. They provide a moral compass and legislative backbone for our work ahead: from rebuilding public services to tackling inequality, from rebalancing our economy to restoring trust in politics.
Would we enshrine these in an actual Bill of Rights?
Well, maybe—but that comes with problems. And remember, what Roosevelt was seeking, says biographer Cass Sunstein, was a “near-constitutional sturdiness” and a “sense of entitlement.” We should aim for the same. It could be a framework for new Treasury public service agreements with departments. It could be a way of developing the ‘missions’ that help guide government work. It could be a way to help us steer what we want local government to do.
And of course, any such ‘rights’ must be coupled with a stronger language on ‘duties’—something we seem to have stopped talking about…
The rights we enjoy reflect the duties we owe
Setting out ‘duties’ is a fraught business. When the last Labour government consulted on this, many feared a list might fast become a wish list of duties to the state, when—as the Archbishop’s Council for the Church of England worried
“The exercise of responsibilities to others should be worked out… first in the family, next in the local community and, only where these levels have proved inadequate, in the actions of the State.”
But the same consultation revealed a list of duties could galvanise active citizenship. So, what are the choices that might be included in a list?
We could perhaps divide the list into (a) the ‘widely accepted’ and (b) the ‘bound to inspire controversy’. The truth is that over the last 10 years we have not made much progress in bottoming out many of the debates that were triggered when the Green Paper was published (Are duties judiciable? What are the sanctions for breach? Are the duties owed to each other, rather than the state?). But here first is perhaps the least controversial:
1. Everyone has a duty to obey the law and, in the exercise of their rights, to respect the rights of others and contribute to the upholding of the King’s Peace.
2. Everyone has a duty to pay the taxes they owe.
3. Everyone has the duty, when summoned, to serve on a jury.
4. Everyone has a duty to tell the truth under oath.
5. Parents have a duty to safeguard and promote the wellbeing of children in their care, so that all of our children might flourish.
There are then potential candidates for duties that would undoubtedly inspire more controversy. The usual candidates for this list are as follows:
Voting: Many countries have positive obligations to vote, while others simply express this as a civic duty.
Crime reporting: During the 2009 consultation on duties, there was a rich discussion on whether we should enshrine something along the lines of “Everyone has a duty to report a crime to the appropriate authority and never jeopardise the impartiality of our judiciary.”
Loyalty and national security: The Treason Act, espionage legislation, Official Secrets Act and the new National Security Act all effectively enshrine duties to desist from “acting for, on behalf of, or with the intent to benefit a foreign power and knows, or ought reasonably to know, that their acts would prejudice the safety or interests of the UK.” But the Constitution of Poland goes further and declares: “Loyalty to the Republic of Poland, as well as concern for the common good, shall be the duty of every Polish citizen.”
Learning English: In our citizenship laws, everyone is asked to learn English. So why would we not enshrine a duty such as this one: “Everyone has a duty, if they are able, to learn English or the language of their nation”?
Duty to work or contribute if one can: The Italian constitution includes the provision that: “According to capability and choice, every citizen has the duty to undertake an activity or function that will contribute to the material and moral progress of society.”
Why This Narrative Wins
Some will ask: why freedom (or opportunity)? Why not lead with justice, or fairness, or security? The answer is simple: freedom is popular. It resonates across class, culture, and creed. It speaks to the deepest instincts of our democratic tradition. And it exposes the hollowness of the Conservative narrative, which defends the freedom to pollute, to exploit, to hoard—but not the freedom to thrive, to flourish, or bluntly, the freedom to be you.
By placing freedom (or at least, ‘opportunity’) at the heart of our politics, we do three things:
We unite, around a shared moral framework that cuts across the divisions of left and right.
We expose the failures of the Conservatives, who promised liberty but delivered insecurity.
We lead, by offering a hopeful vision of a country where people have real power over their lives—not just the right to vote once every five years.
As it happens, the government has made a good start in building new foundations for opportunity, security, and community—rebuilding the opportunity economy, a place where it is easier to get on in life after the wilderness years of the Tories.
For example;
We began to rebuild the ladders of opportunity by giving more children a flying start in life with more school breakfast clubs, school-based nurseries, and free school meals for over 500,000 more children. For young people, seeking a trade to earn a good life, we ear-marked over £1 billion for construction skills to give a new generation the chance to make a life rebuilding our country, and begun the task of reforming the apprenticeship system. For those seeking the freedom to earn a good life, we raised the minimum wage for over 3 million people - a £1,400 pay boost for full-time workers. Real wages have grown more in the first 10 months of this Labour government than during the first ten years of Tory governments since 2010 and for the future, we set out a new Industrial Strategy that’s been widely admired by industry, to help create the industry and jobs of the future helping open new freedoms to flourish in the years ahead
And it’s not just the freedoms that come with better jobs and better wages that we’ve helped create; we’re building new freedoms to get a place to call your own with a £39 billion Affordable Homes Programme that’ll deliver 1.5 million homes - and we’ve sorted out the planning system so those homes will be faster to build. Oh, and if you’re buying a home with a mortgage, you’ve now got more freedom to spend more of your money on other things because because we brought inflation back under control, helping make it possible for the Bank of England to cut interest rates four times, easing household mortgage costs.
We have backed these new freedoms with real security. In an uncertain world, Labour has quite rightly taken the steps needed to secure the country in a far riskier and more uncertain world. We’ve committed to the largest sustained rise in defence spending since the Cold War, increasing defence spending to 5% of GDP by 2035, and alongside, that eased trade with allies - vital for a trading nation like ours—with new trade deals with the EU, US, and India.
You’ve got more security at work because we introduced an Employment Rights Bill that’ll ban zero-hour contracts, end “fire and rehire,” and improve sick pay.
And there’s now the hope of greater peace of mind that the NHS will be there when you need it, because £29 billion extra has gone into the NHS—which has already delivered 4.2 million extra appointments. Waiting lists are already down by nearly 250,000, the lowest in two years.
Finally, there’s a real hope that communities can begin to get stronger because they will soon be safer—thanks to 13,000 new neighbourhood police officers and guaranteed patrols in high streets and town centres.
Freedom. Security. Community. Labour can offer a sharper, clearer account of our work if we sort out our narrative. And for that, we need look no further than our history. You can read my Fabian pamphlet here.
You must refresh the memories of those on your front bench with this.