Ed Miliband is due to give his conference speech at the Labour Party conference this afternoon.  Seven years ago, on the same occasion, Tony Blair said this:

I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer. They're not debating it in China and India. They are seizing its possibilities, in a way that will transform their lives and ours… The character of this changing world is indifferent to tradition. Unforgiving of frailty. No respecter of past reputations. It has no custom and practice. It is replete with opportunities, but they only go to those swift to adapt, slow to complain, open, willing and able to change.

Unless we "own" the future, unless our values are matched by a completely honest understanding of the reality now upon us and the next about to hit us, we will fail. And then the values we believe in, become idle sentiments ripe for disillusion and disappointment.

Odd then, that this year’s conference was prefaced with a speech from Harvard academic and author of What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Market, Michael Sandel. His arguments are not groundbreaking – markets, and market values, increasingly spill out into areas of life where they don’t belong – but they are particularly timely. A 45-minute lecture on Sunday was apparently well received on the conference floor, and Sandel has been much feted on the conference fringe.

What does it mean to have Sandel preaching this message at a Labour Party conference? True, the average party member would see the world in exactly the same way as Sandel, but his argument barely connects with Labour’s actual record in power. Rightly or wrongly, in the years 1997-2010, market forces were constantly applied in the cause of improving and investing in public services. In theory and practice, this is often at odds with Sandel’s argument that there are some things that should not be bought and sold.

The other half of Sandel’s message is that we need to reassert the primacy of politics over economics. According to him, we can decide together how much scope to allow them. It’s a matter of debate, of agreeing what constitutes the common good: “The question of markets is really a question of how we want to live together”. 

For Blair in 2005, any such debate was redundant. Ironically, his argument was a complete rejection of the idea of politics. Negotiating different visions, debating, arguing and acting became irrelevant - not surprising then that the role of Labour conferences in shaping the policy and the direction of the party has been much curtailed. What mattered was what worked, and what worked was an open flexible liberal economy. Globalisation took on a god-like quality – all there was to do was recognise and surrender to its power. It was resisting change that was irresponsible, negligent, even immoral.

Critics have argued that Miliband is being self indulgent – that the role of the party conference is to speak to the public at large in terms they can understand, about things that they care about and that Michael Sandel is hardly the man to do that. In the short term, they might be right. In the long term, I think that the Labour Party is repenting of its sins. Of all parties, it was Labour that said that the global free market was the central reality to which we must all adjust. Now, it’s starting to think differently.

In 2008 we learnt that, manifestly, that an open liberal flexible economy did not, on its own, work at all. That’s not to say that markets have no place, but just that they should have no life of their own.

Economic activity cannot solve all social problems through the simple application of commercial logic. This needs to be directed towards the pursuit of the common good, for which the political community in particular must also take responsibility. Therefore, it must be borne in mind that grave imbalances are produced when economic action, conceived merely as an engine for wealth creation, is detached from political action, conceived as a means for pursuing justice through redistribution.

Caritas in Varitate, paragraph 36

Paul Bickley

Nick Spencer's interview of Michael Sandel and his review ofWhat Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets can be read here and here.