Cabinet Office Secretary Ed Miliband promises he will involve parliamentary colleagues and the wider Labour movement in drawing up the next manifesto, he tells Hannah Jameson. Care and mental health look like being far more prominent on the political agenda as well as youth services. Miliband sees youth services as 'the progressive answer to a lot of the problems that we face in our society', linking together the twin concerns of opportunity for young people and the strength of community.
Ed Miliband wants to generate 'excitement' and 'buzz' about the next manifesto, he tells Hannah Jameson in an interview for the Fabian Review. He wants a sense of 'dynamism and ownership' amongst the party, but he knows that a successful manifesto will have to go beyond this to 'give a real sense of what the effects of the manifesto are going to be on real peoples' lives.'
Appointed by Gordon Brown this summer, Ed Miliband is the cabinet office minister tasked with ensuring a manifesto is ready for when the Prime Minister goes to the country. Miliband though, with characteristic self-effacement,is keen to stress the collaborative nature of the process, steering away from comparisons with previous Labour manifesto authors such as Michael Young.
'Look, the work of the policy commissions and the policy forums will shape the bedrock of the manifesto, it is very important to make that clear' he says. Yet Miliband's appointment was no accident; he has been at the heart of the Brown camp, firstly as an adviser and then as an MP, for over 13 years and is as familiar as any with Brown's thinking.
Brown, it seems, is as focused on the process as the content of the manifesto. There is plenty of talk of involving the wider Labour movement, of Labour and Fabian members feeding in ideas to Miliband and the policy commissions and engaging the wider public by making the process interactive.
Brown has already given hints about what these new areas might be. He spoke to the NCVO conference in early September about care and mental health being far more prominent on the political agenda. Miliband adds youth services to the list. These, he describes, not as a shift in focus in existing provision, but as 'new frontiers of the welfare state'. Miliband sees youth services as 'the progressive answer to a lot of the problems that we face in our society', linking together the twin concerns of opportunity for young people and the strength of community. Making Labour new again will mean speaking to the concerns of those who feel the political system currently does little for them.
Youth services may well address many of these concerns, but Miliband's desire to frame them as the progressive solution exposes another of the challenges of creating new out of old. Not only have youth services been neglected for over 25 years, including on Blair and Brown's watch, but New Labour has also seen, and contributed to, an increasingly punitive narrative around youth policy.
Trapped between the entitlement of the child poverty rhetoric, and the rights and responsibilities of adult employment policy, youth policy has missed the progressive train.
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