Stella Creasy has won a great victory; just three years after becoming an MP, she has changed government policy.
I met her at the end of last year, shortly after George Osborne announced on Radio 4’s Today programme that the government would legislate to cap the cost of payday loans. This is something for which Creasy had been campaigning ever since she was elected Labour MP for Walthamstow, east London, in 2010. She herself appeared on the programme an hour earlier, to welcome the government’s U-turn and to say that she would be examining the detail closely. She didn’t speak to the chancellor, though. “For some reason, Radio 4 felt the need to separate us – most unfair.”
As we talk in the House of Commons, she goes straight into the arguments she’s been making with such persistence for so long. She is more persuasive than Ed Miliband in making the case for intervening in the free market, linking her campaign against “legal loansharks” to Miliband’s policy of freezing energy bills while the Labour Party rewrites the rules for the market in generating electricity. “Ed is prepared to challenge the perceived wisdom of how markets work,” she says, loyally. Meanwhile, Creasy has a specific plan for capping the cost of credit backed up by behavioural economics – a plan the chancellor now seems to have adopted.
Moreover, she claims the authority of a tradition of moderate left-wing thinking going back to the social engineer Michael Young, author of Labour’s 1945 manifesto and later founder of the Consumers’ Association, publisher of Which? magazine. She cites Young’s 1960 argument for “a separate consumers’ party to take on producers”.
Talking very fast (I have to ask her to speak more slowly a few times) she explains why she favours capping the total cost of payday loans rather than capping the interest rate; because it would be more effective at changing the incentives on lenders to rely on repeat business. The aim is not to fix prices but to change behaviour. Creasy has quick and persuasive answers to my free-market objections: would more regulation not simply drive the payday lending underground? “All the evidence from other countries is that the reverse is true,” she says, citing details from similar initiatives in Japan and Australia.
At the reshuffle last October, Miliband moved her from a Home Office brief into Chuka Umunna’s Shadow Business team. She is leading for Labour on a new consumer rights bill which is now going through parliament. “My role is to thread together a story about how consumers make markets work. That to me is quite exciting, ideologically. If we are bolder about the rights we give consumers, markets will work better and people will have more choice, more competition, more freedom. We deny people choice by not making markets work properly. Individual and collective choice are good things, they make services work for you.”
“So you’re a market socialist?” I ask. “So was Adam Smith. And 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; while collectively, you can change the terms of reference. And that is good for business too.”
Choice and voice
Creasy is a member of the One Nation Group of young Labour MPs, who are loyal to Ed Miliband and who have ideas about intervening in markets; she mentions Liz Kendall, Tristram Hunt, Luciana Berger and Gregg McClymont. They have been discussing progressive politics that “prevent rather than ameliorate injustice,” she says, “because there is the greater gain to be had, not just in austerity. And actually, it is the right thing to do.” She says that the idea that consumers need to be empowered to challenge producers “cuts across both public and private sectors”, and that “every MP knows this only too well, because a lot of our casework reflects inadequate services that don’t meet the needs of the public”.
Yet, while her politics are firmly rooted in the lives of her constituents, Creasy insists: “I’m not here with a magic wand! The Left isn’t here to be a customer complaints desk. We are here to shape the world so that everyone can benefit from its potential. But we don’t always talk like that, which is why some people don’t realise how aspirational we are.”
Promoting consumer rights throughout public services is her ideal. She tells of a meeting at her local hospital where she got the professionals to discuss the fact that there were 56 people there who were medically fit to go home, but who hadn’t been discharged. “That costs a £15,000 day. And actually, it’s a pretty horrible experience to be in hospital when you could be at home. Bad outcome, expensive outcome.”
Labour has, says Creasy, traditionally been “very good at the concept of choice, but not so good at the concept of voice – we thought it meant more meetings”. As a former local councillor, she went to a lot of meetings where “I wanted to chew my own arm off!”
“Voice is about participation. It’s about shaping services. It’s about your ability to affect what’s happening to you and to other people. Personal budgets are a great idea – but not if you have only limited options. I had a constituent who’s disabled, with twin baby daughters, a single mum, and she wanted to use her personal care budget to pay for childcare on Thursday afternoons, which for her was respite.
They wouldn’t let her, they said that this would be for her, not her children. So we have to find a way of truly giving people the power and the capacity to exercise their rights. You can’t have choice without voice, and vice versa. But if you put the two together, then that becomes a revolutionary force for everything from education, healthcare and policing to local housing.”
A hyperactive campaigner
Stella Creasy revels in her self-assessment as a “political nerd”. And indeed, during the course of our conversation she refers to a pamphlet by Tory MP Jesse Norman laying claim to co-operative values, activist and campaigner Michael Young’s pamphlet on consumer power (‘Chipped White Cups of Dover’), the diaries of social reformer and economist Beatrice Webb, and the writings of Gustav Ichheiser, “the great sociology theorist”. She is a hyperactive campaigner and was the third most active MP on Twitter last year. Not only has she changed government policy on payday lending, she also said years ago that Labour ought to adopt zero-based budgeting – justifying all public spending from scratch – to convince voters that it is careful with taxpayers’ money. Just before Christmas, shadow chancellor Ed Balls announced that he would do just that.
Another cause Creasy supports is that against everyday sexism. She was subject to a horrific campaign of sexually explicit and violent Twitter abuse, along with feminist and journalist Caroline Criado-Perez, which caused public outcry and led to the perpetrators being jailed in January. Unsurprisingly, Creasy has strong views about being a woman in public life. Tom Newton Dunn, political editor of the Sun, commented on what she wore when she challenged the prime minister about nudity in the daily newspaper.
(Newton Dunn, tweeted, “Boldly, @stellacreasy has just asked the PM to justify Page 3 while wearing a bright blue PVC skirt.” She responded, “Look forward to your commentary on Cameron’s shiny blue tie too.” He had to back down, tweeting: “I fully support ALL equal opportunity; yours to wear what you want – and p3 girls to express themselves as they want.”)
The night before our interview, she had spoken at a meeting and, “Somebody in the audience commented on what I was wearing. I snapped back, absolutely,” says Creasy, “because I have a quiet anger – and sometimes not so quiet – that this stuff goes unchallenged. If men were clever, feminism would be their top priority because societies that are equal are more prosperous. The Commons is rife with sexism, and it’s no different in wider British society. I’ve done debates here where, when women have spoken, they’ve been called emotional or irrational. And I think, ‘You’ve not said that to the men – and believe me, I’ve been just as boring as them’.” She pauses. I'm still scribbling.
“Sorry, I talk too fast. It’s who I am.”
This article has been published in
Ethos Journal
, and is written by John Rentoul, chief political commentator for The Independent on Sunday.