One assumes that Boris Johnson would never talk to Rupert Murdoch like this? Is this person to be trusted encouraging corporate investment in London, including the City?

Of course, one assumes that David Cameron would never talk to Rupert Murdoch like this, despite Murdoch’s age. Many MPs, including Tory MPs, were simply disgusted.

Nor would Jeremy Hunt, one could imagine.

But maybe James Naughtie had it right the first time?

It is many years since I set foot in a hospital as a Doctor (in the early 2000s). The last decade however has taught me a huge amount about being a patient in the NHS, mainly from the time I completed accelerated neurorehabilitation after a six coma due to bacterial meningitis in 2006, which left me physically disabled.

In a nutshell, there’s no “ifs, ands, or buts”. Doctors, nurses, OTs, speech and language therapists, physios and health care professionals, I firmly believe, should be amongst the highest valued members of society.

However, Sue Marsh has just written a blogpost in the famous blog ‘Diary of a Benefit Scrounger’. This single blogpost has reminded me what an absolutely wonderful profession medicine is.

It is really an honour and privilege for those who work in it. Sue’s blogpost explains the importance of Doctors listening to the patient, and making use of all possible clues in making the correct diagnosis. They say that most of the history can be obtained from the history, even before examining the patient. Sue’s blogpost is a brilliant description of that. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, more famous for having written the Sherlock Holmes detective novels, was a leading physician in his day-job, and a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians.

Sue’s blogpost also should also remind Doctors that, instead of grabbing for the notes, it’s always worth listening to the patient directly. And above all the patient is always right, and knows more about his or her own condition that you do (if you’re a Doctor).

In a parallel universe, it would have been interesting to ask either Gordon Brown or Nick Clegg if they would ever contemplate a coalition with David Cameron.  All parties of course would tell the voters that they are not canvassing for anyone apart from themselves, and they wish people to believe in their policies.

So imagine waking up on May 8th 2015, finding out that by voting for Nick Clegg or Nigel Farage, you’ve actually ended up with a Coalition government – again a repeat of the Clegg-Cameron Years (weren’t they fun?) or a new departure with the Tories-UKIP? Would UKIP be able  to foster a coalition with 1922 die-hard Tories to encourage a split from Europe? Of course, none of us would have voted for a split from Europe, but the Tories and LibDems have been good at enacting the NHS Act which we didn’t vote for either?

The reality is that Nick Clegg has made the Liberal Democrats utterly unelectable. However, Ed Miliband has to do sufficiently well to ensure that he isn’t in the firing line. Ed Miliband could however be a casualty if Labour loses the election, irrespective of whether the Tories win it or not. This brings me to the position I have warned about all along – the death of the LibDems politically could mean a lurch to the right after all. This time it could bring an exit from Europe.

Whilst there is outrage amongst many voters at the privatisation of the NHS, it is still unclear whether this is a ‘deal-breaker’. Labour has done well to make the arguments, not helped by the BBC which has been attacked in the social media for its lack of balance by many tweeps. It would be interesting for the BBC to be transparent about the number of complaints which they have received on this matter.

The Conservatives’ reputation as a party of economic credibility is about to blown to smithereens. Projects such as ‘Building Schools for the Future’ were scrapped, and the slow-down in the construction sector at the end of 2010 was toxic to the UK economy. Together with the increase in VAT which saw a temporary influx of tax receipts, consumer demand slumped. It is now widely expected that the UK will soon be announced to be in recession, once the ONS  figures are released officially. With exports falling, and the construction sector reporting figures unparalleled since 1963, the Conservatives economic policy, if predictions are correct, will be in tatters.

The rhetoric over Labour’s purported mismanagement of the economy is well known, with false allegations that the UK was about to become bankrupt. Whether these allegations were actually fraudulent requires one to know the mind of George Osborne. Add to this the billions which have spent on the NHS reforms so far, and a lack of clarity as to whether there was a competitive bidding process for the management contracts, as described on Dr Eoin Clarke’s blog “The Green Benches”, there is plenty of scope for Labour to go for the jugular.

In law, you have to show there was a duty-of-care, then there was a breach which caused an event. Here, Labour has to show that the Conservatives were trusted with the economy (nobody cares what the Liberal Democrats believed any more), the Conservatives breached this duty-of-care, which caused the economy to contract for the first time since the General Election. That’s in tort of course. Or else the Conservatives had a contract with the voters over the economy, and in an ideal world the voters now would sue them for the breach of contract.

Real Liberals obviously include John Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge.

They do not include Nick Clegg and members of his Shadow Cabinet.

They are certainly ‘in it together’. The Liberal Democrats in government are like a giant political suicide pact. Local LibDem activists will be bear the brunt of their national policies – and quite right too. Without LibDems voting in Government with the Conservatives, they would never have been able to enact the NHS Act or the Welfare Reform Act. Liberals shouldn’t be “big” on snooping, but many of them surprisingly are.

When I mean “spinning”, I mean PR “spinning”, though. As soon as the demolition of the LibDem activist base is announced, the BBC and other vocal media outlets will be pointing to the re-election of Boris Johnson (which they hope for). They will also use distraction tactics to say “didn’t UKIP do well”. In other words, anything to divert the public’s attention from the privatisation of the NHS or the demise of the Liberal Democrats.

This is the state of the media currently in the UK, and some would say a proportion of the public deserves.

Vote Labour!

I’ll leave with a powerful message from Lord Winston, a Labour Peer.

Tribal politics are ugly. We’re told that the general public hates it.

Like any religion, it’s probably more sensible in reaching your conclusions on the basis of the actual teachings rather than the quality of followers. That said, I respect many people in all the major political parties, including the Green Party.

In Labour, I feel that we cannot afford to be judgemental, almost to the point of blaming the public when they don’t agree with us. I have an issue with how Labour has failed to explain why it spent so much money on the banking sector, to recapitalise its debts. But more than that, I have an issue with why some of the public have an impression that Labour misused taxpayers’ money. A consistent observation amongst various polling organisations is that people trust all parties equally poorly with the running of the economy, but they view Labour to be worse. However, also interesting, is that many members of the public consider themselves to ‘be the lucky ones’ when commenting that public services in their locality have been good. Peter Kellner has often referred to this NIMBY aspect, and it’s particularly relevant as it implies that many in the public do not perceive a link between spending money on public services and improved quality (even if their public services happen to be good).

I consider myself to be libertarian too, in that I strongly believe that the State should not be obstructive to the aspirations of its citizens. However, I feel equally passionately that the State has been allowed itself to have its reputation smeared, together with some poorly-paid and hard-working members within it. This is why before Labour starts attacking the Liberal Democrats on their record it is essential that Labour concedes its poor record in its draconian, authoritarian approach to civil liberties, possibly precipitated by 9/11. Furthermore, Labour did not particularly appear to value well for immigrant workers, it is felt by some; and furthermore it paved the way for the commodification of the NHS, but obviously not to this degree.

And we’re nowhere near 7 May 2015 yet. I think my colleagues who cite a “wipeout” of the Liberal Democrats in local and national elections should be careful what they wish for, as it is very likely a “pure” Conservative government would have been ever worse (hard though that might seem to be.) The demise of a Liberal force in the UK would be dangerous if this handed the Conservatives its first ever majority in over twenty years. It could be that the Tories and UKIP hold the ‘balance of power’ in 2015 anyway, and, together with the boundary changes, we are in unchartered waters.

I do not blame the Liberal Democrats for wishing to make use of this term in government at all, but I feel some LibDems should be mindful whether this has been make or break for them as an opportunity to become “the third party”. The problem is that the Liberal Democrats have always had a tendency to turn things into a ‘one-in-a-lifetime opportunity’ – it will be sad if Labour blame them for changes in the social infrastructure ultimately which Labour started, and which paradoxically only leads to a Conservative majority.

It may be sexy to be at each other’s throats, but the only people who benefit from a divided Labour are the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats.

I have often referred, latterly, to how Labour must find itself rejuvenated in 2012, but facing the challenges and opportunities of the modern UK.

I have indeed often criticised New Labour, in the fact that it is my personal academic belief that Tony Blair was incorrect not putting value at the heart of negotiating the commodfiication of public services (given that he desired to pursue this agenda at all). Blair, together with other Prime Ministers, have relied on the perfect competition model of the market, comparing cost and price.

We, in Labour, have much bigger fish to fry. This is not about which young political personality is an up-and-coming star of the future, nor which political journalist has the most Twitter followers. It’s simply an urgent need to recognise that market failure should provide the opportunity for Labour to re-establish core support; not cultivate an environment where people are scared to turn to ethical socialism.

That the utilities are a privatised oligopoly where it is far too easy for shareholders to cream off massive shareholder dividends without returning a vastly improved service possibly may be a driver for the renationalisation of certain strategic industries. That there are certain illnesses and diseases that will not flourish in a privatised NHS means that we should not put all of health and social welfare into the private sector; the same argument holds for certain (relatively) unprofitable legal services, like immigration or asylum.

The easy option has been for some in Labour to produce turf wars about Blair versus Brown, without negotiating the principles or values of Labour. People who know little about marketing have tried to launch campaigns for Labour, which has led to a stronger sense of incompetence. However, simply understanding that not all of society can be optimised through the maximisation of shareholder dividend should be a fundamental principle for Labour to move forward in the 21st century.

What has been known as ‘ethical socialism’ thus far is precisely what international business holds dear. Corporate social responsibility means that ENRON shook up the U.S., and Goldman Sachs have to be mindful of where they invest money, for example. Social enterprises are respected by the mainstream political parties, because they reconcile community investment with the need to be financially prudent; but not being profitable at the expense of the stakeholders. The business models are complicated, but indeed much studied in the world of management.

The ‘Occupy’ movement has seen a galvanisation of the public against greedy and cynical capitalism, and much of this has brushed off against their political masters. Would it be any wonder then that George Galloway offers such an attractive escape plan, save for the fact that his plan for government might not be that realistic?

Labour needs to learn fast why the public are rejecting all the major political parties at the moment. With the Liberal Democrats unelectable, if Labour does not produce ethical socialist policies, David Cameron will be handed his first real majority. Ironically, if Ed Miliband articulates a coherent vision of ethical socialism, he will have ideologically produced a political miracle of uniting his predecessors Tony Blair and Clement Attlee. It has previously been noted that Tony Blair believed that the Labour Party ran into problems in the 1960s and 1970s when it abandoned ethical socialism, and believes that the Labour Party’s recovery required a return to the ethical socialist values last promoted by the Attlee Labour government.

Now has never been a better time to implement ethical socialism in the UK. Labour Left are Labour’s largest think tank.  At its core are a group of thinkers who generate policy which they hope will be considered for inclusion in the 2015 Labour Party manifesto.  The group present themselves as a home of ethical socialism, set up in 2011 explicitly to help Ed Miliband become the next Prime Minister: I for one support them, and I hope you will too.

I was going to entitle this post along the lines that Labour is too London-centric.

However, that may not be true. I have a niggling doubt over Ken Livingstone winning the London Mayor race. I can’t put my finger on it. It possibly is due to a ‘feel good’ factor which might engulf London due to the London Olympics. It certainly isn’t due to the sheer volume of unproductive road works in London, reducing the number of workable road lanes to one or two in some hotspots (for example Regent Street).

I asked a London cabbie why he wouldn’t be voting for Ken. In fact, the cabbie alluded to the fact that it wasn’t actually in his opinion any refusal of Labour, it was just that ‘there must be fresh faces who should be given a chance instead of Ken’. Good point – is Ken the only man for the job? Labour would benefit greatly from having a presence in London at a senior political level – and my gut feeling is that it will lose this opportunity this time around.

Maybe it’s simply that Labour is Westminster-centric. This possibly may be true if Rachel Reeves MP is described as a ‘research assistant to Ed Balls’ on a primetime political programme, and they are both seen on a spontaneous photoshoot buying a pasty. I’m tempted to think that Bradford West is a ‘flash-in-the-pan’, though I agree with the Respect Party in that this election was not won by ‘The Muslim Vote’ in the ‘Bradford Spring’. There are good reasons mooted for why Labour lost it – namely, assumption of an agenda which appears to support cuts and austerity.

While Ed Balls can claim a Tory-lite ground of ‘cutting less deep less fast’, the issue is that I bet my life that he would embrace further cuts in 2015, when the deficit is probably two or three years away from being eliminated. So Ed Miliband has announced that he would like to govern for the whole nation. This runs into problems if Labour doesn’t make inroads in London.

It’s an even bigger problem if Labour doesn’t win Glasgow. This would be highly symbolic, particularly given the Scottish independence discussions, but also whether Labour still has not recovered from its long-lasting ‘Southern Discomfort’ problem.

Despite widespread “opposition” to library cuts, NHS Bill, tuition fees, withdrawal of the education support allowance and jobs fund, legal aid cutbacks, welfare reform, there is something still pathological with Labour. The evidence is not there yet that people trust Labour more with the economy, and this is despite the fact that the deficit nearly doubled in February 2012 due to decreased tax receipts and greater expenditure on unemployment benefit, for example.

Nobody can accuse Labour of peaking too soon, but it’s going to take a lot more than the Conservatives losing the 2015 election for Labour to win a majority.

Labour has failed to articulate a clear policy yet. It should now develop further the philosophy behind ethical socialism, and reject a society based entirely on shareholder dividends when there are so many clear market failures. In many senses, Labour is still like a multi-national company that has failed to go Glocal.

As an ideological movement, New Labour did not amount to much. The problem is that Tony Blair was a good salesman for a faulty product. His understanding of economics was spectacularly limited – he saw a need to convince the general public of Labour’s economic credibility, but he continued the commoditisation of public services.

This is a faulty ideology as it ignores a central component of behavioural economics – even more important than price or cost, some might say. That is the notion of value. It’s fundamentally why all the major parties will ultimately fail to deliver the promise of public services run purely on market principles; it’s why rare dementias or leukaemias, or immigration or asylum, might get elbowed out in the new-look NHS or legal services climate, as they might secure the maximisation of profit for shareholders in the short-term.

As a marketing exercise, New Labour was even more faulty. Many like me would say it was a retrograde step for Labour. Labour fundamentally should be standing up for the workers, represented by the Unions. The Unions are democratically standing up for the rights of workers, which are in fact mostly protected by statute law of England, such as health and safety of those who drive tankers. Demonising the Unions is a very cheap political trick, but as long as Labour can ‘reconnect’ (awful word) with its brand values and brand identity, i.e. protecting the stakeholders, it has a chance of being credible.

That is why ethical socialism is so important as an ideological force. It means that we have an ideological basis for not having the NHS owned and run by private equity companies in China, or schools or hospitals being run for the main purpose of maximising shareholder dividend. It means we have something to say about large corporates which lay off thousands of jobs while making millions of profits.

If Labour can rebrand itself close to 2015, as, you guessed it, as Labour, but maybe with a new visual trademark, so that anyone looking at a logo knows beyond reasonable doubt that Labour stands up for the workers, both born here and those who were not (like countless nurses and doctors in the NHS), Labour has a chance of being a very credible force, I strongly feel.

One look at the Liberal Democrat Party, which is neither democratic (i.e. their criticisms about the NHS counted for nothing ultimately) or liberal (see the recent proposals to read e-mails and the known refusal to publish the Risk Register), you can see why brand values can become so utterly laughable.

I think it’s good to have a  ’cards on the table’ approach. On January 2nd, 2011, I wrote the following in LabourList:

Is government debt like a credit card debt?

David Cameron and Nick Clegg have consistently likened government debt to credit card debt (like paying for your weekly groceries). This is a plausible common-sense approach based on the electorate’s instinct for belt-tightening, and the hardships they will be experiencing in difficult times. The analogy is clearly weak, but analysis of that is way beyond the scope of this article. Given that the public appear to like this comparison, it might be useful to explain also what might go wrong in such terms. The biggest threat for the UK in 2011 is that unemployment goes up and therefore benefit payments go up, while tax receipts go down. This would be like credit card bills beginning to “flood in”, while you are unable to deposit any money into your bank account.

Interestingly, this is what was written about midday today in an article entitled “UK’s budget deficit doubled in February”:

The UK’s budget deficit almost doubled in February due to a drop in tax receipts and increased spending. According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), public sector net borrowing, excluding public sector interventions, hit a record for the month of February. It jumped to 15.183 billion pounds last month from 8.875 billion pounds in February 2011. The pound fell immediately after this announcement early in the morning. The ONS said that the increased borrowing was driven by a 2.7 percent drop in tax receipts on the year, while government spending climbed 8 percent. Income tax alone dropped 12.4 percent on the year in February, while benefit payments rose by 11.2 percent. This announcement leaves Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne little room to meet his full-year goal as he prepares to announce the UK’s annual budget later today.

Indeed, what I even alluded to at the beginning of January 2011 emerged as a theme in an influential blog today in the Telegraph:

Then there was the vague promise to find another £10bn annually in welfare cuts by the end of the parliament. I couldn’t get my head around that one. Is this in the deficit reduction programme or not? The Chancellor will probably get away with it as far as the markets and the credit rating agencies are concerned, but the big picture is that Plan A no longer really exists. Much lower growth than expected and the political compromises of Coalition have blown it off course.

Well, I hate to tell you, as a Keynesian, but … I told you so! My other prediction is in the absence of a full Eurozone crisis I don’t expect this budget deficit to be paid off by 2015, and Labour is going to have ‘put its cards on the table’ as to whether it will maintain the cuts agenda, and how.