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Ed Miliband will need to engage a different spirit in 2015, seventy years after that needed for 1945. The Conservatives have become the presentational unit of multinational corporates, and many citizens of the United Kingdom resent this. Whereas instead decades ago, the Unions could be validly criticised as ‘holding the county’ to ransom, now it is the bankers. There is no proof for any ‘trickle down’ effect, where allowing millionaires to keep more of their income and wealth benefits the county at large. David Cameron strikingly did not win the General Election in 2015, meaning that he has been reliant on the Liberal Democrats ditching any principles to vote for legislation which is clearly totally illiberal, such as secret courts. Rather than working in the national interest, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats have been operating entirely in their own self-interest, doggedly pursuing policies which serious commentators have long criticised for being a perfect recipe for producing economic turmoil. Members of this Coalition confront serious issues with extreme arrogance and disregard for the facts, as demonstrated by Baroness Shirley Williams and Lord Clement-Jones in the recent section 75 NHS regulations debate in the House of Lords.
Labour has been blasted for not having any policies. This changed today, but don’t expect the BBC to cover any of them well, in the same vein as how they totally ignored the changes in legal aid and the NHS the point of absolute ridicule. Labour’s idea of a “Jobs Bill”, which introduces a Compulsory Jobs Guarantee, a paid job for every adult who is out of work for more than two years, is a serious way of addressing the problem of youth unemployment. Generally, unemployment has been creeping up under this Coalition, and the only reason there are so many in employment is that they are many more with very little employment rights, doing short term contract work to try to pay the bills. There is absolutely no economic case for the tax cut for millionaires, but the political case of nudging them into voting for a discredited Coalition is quite potent. The idea of requiring large firms getting government contracts to have an active apprenticeships scheme that ensures opportunities to work for the next generation is a very attractive one, and is very much in keeping with an idea very popular in the United States of making corporates behave like ‘responsible corporate citizens’. Indeed, Ed Miliband introduced this idea to an unconvinced general public in his now famous Labour Party Conference speech of September 2010 on ‘responsible capitalism'; this was clearly before we’d all even heard of ATOS and welfare benefits, corporates and phone hacking, fires, explosions and collapses in Texas and Bangladesh.
Also, a “Banking Bill” is much needed. The aim of this is to reate a real British Investment Bank on a statutory basis, at arms length from government and with proper financing powers to operate like a bank. One of the persistent criticisms of the current government, which Nick Clegg had criticised of Labour in 2010 but subsequently totally failed to address himself, is the issue of how to get banks lending to small businesses. Project Merlin is well known, and the purpose of this intended legislation by Labour is to support small and medium sized businesses, including across the regions of the UK through regional banks. Labour intends to provide a general backstop power so that if there is not genuine culture change from the banks they can be broken up, to put in place a “Code of Conduct” for bankers, and to toughen up generally the criminal sanctions against those involved in financial crime. Furthermore, Labour’s idea of an “Immigration Bill” is very noteworthy, given how Gordon Brown was caught famously unawares by Gillian Duffy in the now famous “Bigotgate” incident. Labour intends to double the fines for breaching the National Minimum Wage and give local councils the power to take enforcement action over the national minimum wage, extend the Gangmasters Licensing Authority to other sectors where abuse is taking place, and change NMW regulations to stop employers providing overcrowded and unsuitable tied accommodation and offsetting it against workers’ pay.
There is now a crisis in social housing, not least because the Thatcher government sold off valuable social housing stock during her period of government. However, unfortunately, we can’t ‘turn back the clock’ to his very socially divisive period for the UK. The economy has become too much on the side of exploitative private landlords, and Labour intends to introduce a national register of landlords, to allow local authorities to root out and expel rogue landlords, including those who pack people into overcrowded accommodation. Labour also intends to tackle rip-off letting agents, ending the confusing, inconsistent fees and charges, and to seek to give greater security to families who rent and remove the barriers that stand in the way of longer term tenancies. Labour fundamentally does not know to what extent the UK will be recovering by the time of the General Election in 2015. The public are already sick to the back teeth of the trite “the economy is healing” pathetic PR by the Coalition, particularly since the economy WAS healing in May 2010 before the Coalition totally destroyed it. Labour’s proposed “Finance Bill” would reintroduce a 10p rate of income tax, paid for by taxing mansions worth over £2m, stop immediately the cut to the 50p rate of income tax for those on the highest incomes to reverse cuts to tax credits, reverse the Tory-led Government’s damaging VAT rise now for a temporary period – a £450 boost for a couple with children, and provide a one year cut in VAT to 5% on home improvements, repairs and maintenance – to help homeowners and small businesses. Courageously, Labour intends to put in place a one year national insurance tax break for every small firm which takes on extra workers, helping small businesses to grow and create jobs
There is a growing feeling that the economy is fundamentally imbalanced towards the interests of shareholders in fragmented oligopolies, rather than the concerns of the general public. Labour wishes to introduce a Bill where it would abolish Ofgem and create a tough new energy watchdog with the power to force energy suppliers to pass on price cuts when the cost of wholesale energy falls. This would be a very popular move with many in the general public, not just traditional Labour voters. This legislation would require the energy companies to pool the power they generate and to make it available to any retailer, to open the market and to put downward pressure on prices, and force energy companies to put all over-75s on their cheapest tariff helping those benefiting to save up to £200 per year. The railway industry is another fiasco of the utterly discredited privatisation doctrine of the Conservatives. Labour intends to apply ‘strict caps’ on fare rises on every route, and remove the right for train companies to vary regulated fares by up to 5 per cent above the average change in regulated fares, and to introduce a new legal right for passengers to the cheapest ticket for their journey. Finally, many members have become increasingly irritated by the propensity of the Conservatives to call pensions ‘welfare payments’. Labour now has concrete plans to tackle the worst offending pension schemes by capping their charges at a maximum of 1 per cent; and to amend legislation and regulation to force all pension funds to offer the same simple transparent charging structure so that consumers know the price they will be paying before they choose a particular scheme.
So finally we are getting a sense of the direction of travel of Labour, and this is in stark contrast to the hapless ipeptidude and incompetence of the Liberal Democrats, UKIP and the Conservatives.
How Dr Eoin Clarke has done a huge amount of good in a short space of time
I have never written this post for a reason. That reason is that Twitter and Facebook are full of people, in my own party and beyond, who try desperately hard to belittle the hard work and sincere dedication of members of the Labour Party. At the age of 39 in two months time, I have no idea why people behave like this. Often people harbour very naked ambitions for themselves, or vicariously wish to promote certain people. But enough’s enough. I have had experience of being bullied a long time ago, and sometimes you’re expected to say nothing. This is not that time.
I first met Dr Éoin Clarke on Twitter some time ago, at roughly the same he was establishing ‘The Green Benches’, before I attended a meeting at his invitation at Portcullis House. I enjoyed this meeting enormously. I was immediately struck with the precise way in which he constructed arguments, which at the time was a very rare quality. There were only a handful of people in the blogosphere who merited recommendation on that basis, including Sunny Hundal who continues to be extremely influential in the blogosphere. I have witnessed Dr Éoin Clarke as he has simply grown from strength-to-strength, and his commitment to discussing issues has been rarely been in any doubt. He has embraced difficult issues such as the Bedroom Tax or NHS reforms, and not been frightened to raise awareness of such matters in a way that inspires people at large.
There is absolutely no doubt that the Liberal Democrats are pathetic beyond belief, advocating a ‘strong economy’ and ‘fairer society’, when they have been utterly useless at both. Even so-called ‘Liberals’ find their stance on secret courts weird, and Keynes would certainly be turning in his grave by how the Liberal Democrats have brought the UK economy to its knees in the space of three years. People like Nick Clegg and Simon Hughes continue to ignore, remorselessly, the case of how bank recapitalisation was necessary as an emergency measure but led to a worsening deficit, but they are professional politicians. Totally principleness, and thirsty for power.
The Conservatives’ economic plan has been a disgrace, with everyone hoping that the economy will not further deteriorate. They only have managed a record number of people in employment, by giving workers the worst employment rights they have ever experienced. They have shut down libraries, withdrawn infrastructure spending, brought in a whole raft of policies to help their corporate cronies, totally shafted disabled citizens in the UK, and are behaving as if they won a massive majority in 2010. They didn’t, all the more pathetic as they had all the media virtually on their side. The Conservatives not only lack strategy and direction, but their operations management and tactical performance remain abysmal.
What goes around comes around. I look forward to Labour Left going from strength-to-strength, including the hard work of Dr Éoin Clarke, Mags Newsome, Grahame Morris, Brian Moylan, Bev Clack, Steve Walker, Richard Murphy, Michèle Paul, James Leppard, Andy Hicks, Rhiannon Lockley, Seema Chandwani, Val Hudson, all the MPs who’ve supported Labour Left from the beginning, and many more.
I know they are extremely dedicated to this important cause, and I wish Labour well in the local elections.
Ed Balls 'trending' doesn't mean Keynesian policies are suddenly popular
from one of the Ed Balls spoof Twitter accounts today.
There are reasons, of course, why people or things tend to trend on Twitter. In my experience, never having read an official study on this, this tends to be when people die, or are reported to die. Or else, something a bit defamatory-worthy has occurred, and people are ‘intrigued’. Or else, something very minor has happened on BBC Question Time, BBC Any Questions, BBC Any Answers, Britain’s Got Talent, or the X Factor. It is nonetheless interesting watching the phenomenon of people jumping on bandwagons, and a sense of collective excitement, such as when Barack Obama was re-elected. Or else, there is a sense of genuine shock at sudden news, such as death of Baroness Thatcher.
There can be a temptation for all of us to read too much into things we observe in the social media. Hundreds of photoshopped images about George Osborne or Iain Duncan-Smith do not cause a change in direction of travel over the economy or universal credit. Why then do people devote so much time to doing them, as well as posting pictures of cute kittens? Why do people also put in so much time and emotional into having passionate debates on Twitter with well-known journalists? There is an element of narcissism which pervades all our society, where we often do things not for the benefit for anyone apart from ourselves. However, this culture is also pervasive in the politicians who seek us democratically. Many people as they become older become jaded about what politics actually achieves, and, whilst they find the topics themselves actually quite interesting, find the actual political process quite rank and stifling.
Today was “Ed Balls Day”. Ed Balls, it is reputed, accidentally tweeted his own name, leading to thousands of people re-tweeting it. It has become a viral meme, and the subject of an affectionate joke. What does this do for Ed Balls’ popularity? Not much, of course, in that most people have either heard of him as someone who helped to wreck the economy under Gordon Brown, or a brilliant Keynesian economist who trained at Oxford and Harvard, or somewhere in between. Have people used seeing the Ed Balls tweet to seek to discover what the Labour economic policy is or isn’t? No. Granted, there are going to be people who have re-tweeted Ed Balls’ name not because they love him, but because they loathe him.
All of this feeds into the apparent paranoia of politicians who feel that politics has become irrelevant. Seeking out the reasons for the millions of people not bothering to vote has become almost obsessional. Already, the post mortems have begun about why the section 75 NHS regulations vote was lost in the House of Lords. Various theories abound ranging from the relative success of the sales patter of Baroness Williams and Lord Clement-Jones, the fact that elderly Labour peers could not find suitable accommodation in London that night, or an insufficient number of Crossbench peers were unconvinced to vote against the Regulations. And so it could go on, but the issue remains why do people not bother voting. I have also noticed a trend where people find not only politicians boring, but the generally tribalist partisan nature of debate. The legislative process, like the judicial one, is adversarial, and is therefore based on competition not collaboration. The end result is that people end up being hostile to each other, exaggerating their differences, but not drawing attention to the similarities. This, of course, leads to a very distorted manner of taking policy further. For example, the Labour Party have amplified policy differences in procurement to the point of arguing that the privatisation rollercoaster has accelerated, but it is of course Labour which introduced NHS Foundation Trusts (which some believe are the ultimate ‘units’ for a privatised secondary care system) and the previous procurement regulations in the form of the Public Contracts Regulations 2006. Supposedly, the Conservatives are ‘building on’ the legacy of New Labour in “free schools”, and much to the embarrassment of Labour, Baroness Thatcher is reputed to have said that her greatest legacy was Tony Blair or New Labour. The Conservatives have attacked the attack on the Bedroom Tax (or “Spare Room Subsidy”) by arguing that Labour introduced something similar for the private sector, and now this idea is being extended to social housing, despite being a socially divisive policy and incapable of generating much revenue.
So the idea of Ed Balls ‘trending’ is of course neither here nor there, and utterly irrelevant to the political discourse today. It doesn’t make Ed Balls any more popular, and doesn’t get round the popular anti-Keynesian attack of ‘How can the solution to borrowing be yet more borrowing?” That meme, while not viral, has been very successful in conveying a popular idea held by some that a Keynesian solution to an economy recovery is to pour fuel on the fire, or to have the ‘hair of the dog’ while suffering from a hangover due to the night before. However, it is incredibly hard to think of a punchy meme in reply to that line of attack which has been successful in the USA today. Another popular meme is, “Why would you hand the keys of the car back to the people who crashed it in the first place?” A reasonable answer to this would be to identify who actually crashed the car – was it the bankers/banks or the State, and were the problems due to the crash per se or due to ‘lack of regulation’ in the lead up to the crash? Nonetheless, both memes focus the mind on the more negative aspects of Labour’s tenure in government, and the public seem to be generally unpersuadable on the economy. The Labour Party, likewise, feel that they are still the party of the NHS, despite the well documented problems in Mid Staffs, though there is a genuine debate about the extent of morbidity and mortality even after two voluminous reports.
Many in all parties feel of course let down by the media, and it might appear that all parties feel equally let down. For example, most recently, some people feel that the coverage of the NHS reforms has been poor, and the media are hopeless at explaining how we have come to have just escaped a ‘triple dip’ recession when the economy was in fact recovering in May 2010. Whether you buy into the idea that ‘the economy is healing’, or this Government would like ‘to make work pay’, it is crystal clear that, whatever the nature of debate (whether it is Afghanistan or welfare), people have a markedly varying understanding of the issues – but have an equal say in the democratic process. Ed Miliband always spoke of ‘building a movement’ in the Labour Party, and by this it means that he would like to capture a sense of national pride and trust in the politics of Britain. He feels that ‘One Nation’ is the best way to do this, and the results from his detailed policy discussions are yet to emerge into the sunlight. When I used to ask my late father to cheer up, he used to say, “What do you expect me to do, Shibley? Dance?” This is in a sense the main problem faced by Labour today, one of expectation management. The discussions of the ‘legacy’ of Baroness Thatcher were at times as finely focused on the purported successes of turning Britain around ‘from a basketcase’ to the social and economic distress (illustrated by the damage done to local communities), pursuant to the closure of coalmines in Easington. People are now muttering again, “I am to be honest very disillusioned with Labour, but this current Government are terrible”. Part of this disconnect with Labour is that people simply don’t trust them to do what they say on certain key issues, such as repealing the Bedroom Tax, or repealing the Health and Social Care Act (2012). And to be blunt, Labour’s “got previous” on this. As a result of the general election in 1997, Labour did not abolish the market in the NHS as they had promised. And yet, Labour does have a reasonably loyal ‘fan base’, and people who genuinely like Ed Miliband as a person. Miliband has always been mindful of being the guy who ‘promised too much but delivered too little’, but it will exasperate even his loyal followers if he turns out to be the guy who in fact ‘promised too little and delivered also very little.’ Ed Miliband can always play the ‘we don’t know how the economy will be in two years’ time’, and get his shadow cabinet to argue that making impossible promises would be reckless, but in the meantime Ed Miliband needs a steady trickle of bits of evidence suggesting that he is heading in the right ‘direction of travel’. For example, the idea of incentivising businesses to implement ‘the living wage’, in a socially inclusive policy which is not overtly ‘tax and spend’, is a useful one, and one which Miliband can legitimately campaign on.
It is hard for Labour members to tell why members of the public dislike them so much, but this is of course the challenge for Labour in the next two years. In the meantime, the challenge is to work out how many people who vote for Labour in the local council elections are doing so, not only because they are protesting against this government, but also find the offering of Labour feasible. These local elections are a timely reminder of how barmy UKIP actually might be, in promising more austere cuts than currently being offered, or what actually differentiates the Liberal Democrats from Labour in a meaningful way. The social media, it can be argued, is a great way for people to write on and discuss the issues that concern them. Without the social media, a meaningful discussion (away from the BBC) about the section 75 NHS regulations would have been impossible. However, as Baroness Williams provided in her speech last week, Twitter can easily be discredited through referring to the wealth of misinformation ‘out there’. From my own personal experience, I feel I can tell what the reaction will be from Labour members towards Baroness Williams, on issues pertaining to the NHS, before she has opened her mouth. Whilst the Ed Balls meme might be equally divorced from real debate, and, whilst it has become a popular past-time to criticise ‘armchair activists’, the role of technology in political movements cannot be ignored. Used responsibly, it can override some of the cynicism we all share, as long as a small minority of bloggers do not persuade themselves they are speaking on behalf of all of us. And possibly the “Ed Balls meme” reminds us of one very important thing relevant to all of us: we should be less obsessed about our image (but not in an irresponsible way), and should from time-to-time take ourselves less seriously.
Bankers or top-income CEOs are not "the centre ground" either
In a rather indecent way, people are well known to be sympathetic to the Blairite cause have taken to the TV studios effectively to undermine Ed Miliband, including Dan Hodges, John Reid, Alan Johnson, and David Blunkett. They claim not to be anything other than positive about Labour, but their appearances have been cringeworthy and unconvincing for many true Labour supporters. They persistently bang the ‘Elections are only won from the centre ground’ drum, but that does not reflect the reality of the majority of Labour voters. If anything, they despair at the fact that Thatcher’s legacy seems to have engulfed the achievements of Labour, say in founding the principles of the welfare state or building the NHS. They, at worst, lack confidence that Labour can do much to protect workers from austerity, and feel that Labour will be unable to stop the tide of rampant privatisation in the NHS. I still remain convinced that, whilst it is possible that elections can be won from the ‘centre ground’, a Labour support could vanish if its core voters do not feel included in their journey. I also believe that, with George Osborne having taken Europe to court over the financial transactions tax this week, we are not ‘all in together’, and that overpaid investment bankers or top-income CEOs do not constitute the ‘centre ground’ either.
Lord Stewart Wood this week, on Thursday, looked at ‘One Nation Labour’ at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, the day after the funeral of Margaret Thatcher, from a historical, philosophical and policy perspective. According to Wood, Thatcher spotted “the exhaustion of an old settlement”. Wood calls this new construct a ‘social democratic ambition’, not dependent on spending, more familiar to social democratic parties in Europe. It also forces to think about building new institutions, including ones that bridge the markets and states, in a more organised economy and society.
Wood argues that this is a moment when such a challenge will be richly rewarded, and can be articulated in “One Labour”. He argued that five core ideas characterise this.
Firstly, it is a commitment to building a different type of economy, “a supply-side revolution on the left”. The neoliberal problem has not worked, according to Wood. Many steps, reducing taxes on the well-off and deregulation of services, have not worked. The “trickle down” effect has not worked, with inadequate regulation of too powerful financial services. The skills gap in our population has not been addressed. Secondly, to compete in the world, we need to compete on high skills, high productivity and high wages, in a sense “there is no alternative”. But to raise our game on the productivity front, according to Wood, there needs to be a fundamentally different approach to wealth creators, a “trickle down approach” has to be explicitly challenged to avoid a ‘race to the bottom’, “the only real wealth creators are the ones with those with most wealth” and “everyone who is wealthy is a wealth creator”. Wood therefore emphasises his central doctrine, “it is pro-wealth to criticise that wealth is produced by the few, and not the many”; this means that we need to have banks competing with each other, so that they can provide capital for innovation, and supporting industries. Secondly, Wood wishes to address growing inequality, and this does not question being pro-business. Growing inequality has demonstrated that ‘trickle down’ is not working in the post-1979 settlement, that “the freeing up of the top will lead to the benefit of the many”, which has not happened patently. The share of GDP going to wages has fallen by 10% in the last 40 years, and a Government’s rôle has been to support incomes at the bottom (asset-bubble and overleveraging at the middle are also key failures) has contributed to these problems. A ‘One Nation’ approach looks to a more equal distribution of economic power, revisiting the wisdom of the ‘tax and spend’ philosophy of previous governments, through for example incentivisation of the implementation of the living age, or a ‘mansion tax’.
A third branch is to encourage ‘responsibility’, not in terms of expectations of those who rely on state support, but applies to all members of all society including those who have the most. Responsibility, according to Wood, should be at the heart of the welfare state, and that “the contributory principle is more resilient and robust”. A fourth element is “protecting areas of our public life”, including public spaces and arts can contribute, and encouraging community stability, meaning a toleration of diversity in what people value. Finally, Wood wishes to challenge the ethic of the post-1979 settlement. He feels that this is the most challenging. There would be a new consensus on a different set of ethics, embracing the importance of individual freedom, but rejecting the idea “that individualism pursued by each magically generates the interests of all”. This too fundamentally rejects that a metric of value is the market price of something. Wood remarks that a fundamental problem is ‘restoring faith in politics’, and the belief that politics, even from the left, can transform the lives of people is important.
In this week’s Labour Party Political Broadcast (PPB), “Made by the Many”, many of the themes were further explored in terms of the “forgotten wealth creators”. “We teach, we build, we sell, we look after our mums and dads, we know we’re not the most powerful, we don’t run the banks, but we keep the country running… while tax cuts go to the millionaires, do they think the country can succeed without us?” say a myriad of voices introducing this PPB who claim they lie at the centre of the economic recovery. Miliband’s voice then comes in to say that he would be introducing a ‘Mansion tax’, a jobs guarantee, stopping those big companies which ‘rip people off’ and abolishing a tax cut for millionaires. Whilst this may seem a somewhat simplified version of the message above, and it may sound more populist, this is a message which does strike at ‘the centre ground’. As the Office for National Statistics prepares to tell us the latest GDP estimates, indicating to us whether the UK has avoided a “triple dip” (and bear in mind the economy was growing in May 2010), isn’t time the loudmouth disenchanted Blairites belt up?
Some within Labour should not become a sub-party of opposition, particularly given "The Spirit of '45"
Many people in politics are ‘glass half full‘ people rather than ‘glass half empty‘, so the death of Baroness Thatcher last week provided a useful juncture of all parties to look at themselves to see where they’d got to. There has been much rewriting of history by the Conservatives to suit their political purposes. For example, the need for privatisation is explained because “the UK was a basket case” and “we even had a national removal vans company called Pickfords.” The Conservatives will need to look at ‘actual facts’ or their level of denial and lack of insight will ultimately kill them politically. A recent poll by ComRes, reported by Tom Pride at the weekend, has revealed that now, in 2013, the electorate are generally unimpressed with privatisation. And why should they be? Grahame Morris MP, MP for Easington, explains succinctly the problems in “The Red Book” (version 1, 2011):
“Of course, energy companies claim that they are only reflecting the vagaries of the international markets in coal, oil and gas. However, their increased profits and continued price increases suggest that not only have they made no attempt to insulate people from any increased costs but that they are making money rather than working in the best interests of their customers. The reason is that the energy companies are well aware that the idea of the well informed consumer is largely a myth. People are often confused by the proliferation of similar sounding deals or are reluctant to get involved in changing supplier.”
Perhaps “Ding Dong, The Witch is Dead”, as the popular song which reached No. 1 in the Scottish singles chart yesterday provides. As a weird antithesis of the sad death of Baroness Thatcher’s, Labour’s own ambassadors of New Labour have been touring the national TV and radio studios to consecrate the legacy of the Tony Blair government. These three ambassadors are Mr David Blunkett, Mr Alan Johnson, and Dr John Reid. It is widely reputed that New Labour was considered to be Baroness Thatcher’s ‘biggest achievement’ (or that could have been Tony Blair himself; the reporting of this is a bit unclear in the wide-ranging tributes which have ranged from hagiography to hate-ography). These three ambassadors are not of course to be compared to “The Three Witches”, described by Wikipedia thus:
“The Three Witches represent darkness, chaos, and conflict, while their role is as agents and witnesses. Their presence communicates treason and impending doom. During Shakespeare’s day, witches were seen as worse than rebels, “the most notorious traitor and rebell that can be.” They were not only political traitors, but also spiritual traitors as well. Much of the confusion that springs from them comes from their ability to straddle the play’s borders between reality and the supernatural. They are so deeply entrenched in both worlds that it is unclear whether they control fate, or whether they are merely its agents. They defy logic, not being subject to the rules of the real world.” Of course any resemblance of these three ambassadors to “the three witches” is totally a matter of pure coincidence as the old disclaimer goes, but their exact purpose is far from obvious. It makes sense for them to wish to appear that they are ‘building on the foundations” of Margaret Thatcher, but many believe that these foundations themselves are part of the problem and not the solution.
John Cooper QC rightly asked on ‘BBC Any Questions’ why Tony Blair had offered his advice in public rather than private. We have long been told about New Labour members ‘meeting in secret’, in organising some sort of crackpot renaissance just in case Ed Miliband fails, but I’m too old for conspiracy theories. Tony Blair can possibly compare himself to Margaret Thatcher in that he more-or-less told his party what he wanted to do, preferring to lead by conviction rather than consensus. As Owain Gardiner in “The Red Book” notes, “As Ed Balls memorably put it in his Bloomberg speech in the winter of 2010, politics is about shaping public opinion, not bowing slavishly to it“. However, the funeral of Baroness Thatcher in a ‘weird twist-of-fate’ has coincided with the birthday of Robert Croker or Noonan, otherwise known famously as Robert Tressell, author of the famous “Ragged Trousers Philanthropists”. It has nearly also coincided with the launch on DVD of ‘The Spirit of ’45’. The description of the film is as follows, “An impassioned documentary about how the spirit of unity which buoyed Britain during the war years carried through to create a vision of a fairer, united society. 1945 was a pivotal year in British history. The unity that carried Britain through the war allied to the bitter memories of the inter-war years led to a vision of a better society. The spirit of the age was to be our brother’s and our sister’s keeper.” Of course, the Liberal Democrats in 2013 aspire for ‘a fairer society, and a stronger economy’, but after a term in a Tory-led government which has seen the closure of many libraries and law centres and a double-dip recession (thus far), one has to wonder how this compares to the attempts of Labour in building a fairer society of its own. Of course, there is a temptation of Ken Loach to give his version of history as rosy as the Thatcherite version of her society, but it is ubiquitously conceded that there is a social housing crisis now (with many council houses, built through infrastructure investment, having been flogged off in the 1980s), a disastrous privatisation of the railways industry (leading to a fragmented service with death of a collective, public-sector ethos), and closure of coal mines which has led to destruction of whole mining communities.
A triumph is that “Labour Left”, formerly known as “GEER”, produced in 2011 its first version of ‘The Red Book’, edited by Dr Éoin Clarke and Owain Gardiner, and which is as relevant today as it was when it was first written and published.
At the time, Labour was still recovering from “New Labour”, and Prof Bev Clack sets out very nicely the background: “Seen in this way, socialism has little to offer western liberal societies that take as given the importance of fostering individual creativity. In shaping left-of-centre politics, one solution to this apparent mismatch has been to avoid using the “S” word. We are now “social democrats” or followers of “the Third Way”. As Peter Kellner notes, the word “socialist” first appeared in 1827 in the Co-operative magazine of Robert Owen. For the visionary Owen, a socialist was “someone who co- operated with others for the common good”. By defining socialism in this way, Owen directs our gaze to the individual who seeks to act ethically in society. This notion of the practical socialist challenges bureaucratic accounts of what socialism entails; but it also highlights the need to think again about the neo-liberal model of the “self” that has dominated the political scene for the last thirty years.”
It is currently vital that Labour is inclusive to the views of all members of society, especially the “working poor” who may feel very disillusioned with the route taken by Labour during the “New Labour” years. Looking forward to the future over coal, Ian Lavery MP is clearly looking forwards, not backwards: “There are other reasons why CCS/Clean Coal and the opening of new Coal Mines on which we could build new Clean Coal Stations that can provide a stop gap in our energy mix until renewable energy is able to fully meet the UK?s energy needs. Employment lost as a result of the closing of the pits in the 1980s was never replenished, and as a result high levels of worklessness exist in the coal mining regions of the UK today.” This is clearly then not just an economic argument, where Thatcherism could have been the first manifestation of true globalisation as Michael White argued in last week’s Guardian politics podcast; it is a genuine societal one, and the resentment is deep, as indeed the reunion of the Durham miners in Trafalgar Square this weekend demonstrated. Meanwhile, Rhiannon Lockley has been a member of Labour Left since its formation. She is a FE lecturer in the West Midlands in Psychology and Sociology. The disenfranchisement of the working class vote is a serious one, and a noteworthy impediment for Labour reconnecting with ‘lost voters’. Rhiannon writes,
“One of the most difficult problems facing the left in 21st century Britain is the need to reach and move forward from the understanding that huge numbers of working class voters are psychologically distant from their political objectives. This distance is much more complex than assumed in the traditional model of the unenlightened masses, where the message of socialism is viewed as providing the power to radically transform the workforce – the message is of course out there, but the resistance to it in the minds of the very people who should benefit from it the most is multi-faceted and robust.” There is an evident problem that Labour under Ed Miliband has to embrace, which is rebalancing society, as well as rebalancing the economy. Austin Mitchell MP, MP for Grimsby, establishes a clear narrative of facts which we know well: “The first deep problem is that the recession is deeper, harder and more serious in Britain than in any other economy. It will take more time and tougher measures to recover. Where Germany invested, restructured and formed close relationships between capital and labour to keep wages down and investment up, Britain, because of its overblown financial sector, has squandered the good times on a huge debt bubble which leaves everyone: families, companies, government, with a bigger collective debt burden than most.”
Members of Labour apparently did support the sale of council houses in the 1980s, but it is clear now that there is a shortage of council houses. Curiously, the link between a societal need for social housing and a desperate “kick start” for the economy appears to have been disconnected. Viewers of “The Spirit of ’45” will also be surprised to see Aneurin Bevan being secretary of state for both housing and health. And yet the link between health and housing is even more relevant under the new Health and Social Care Act (2012), as the new Act gives great emphasis on a need to reduce inequalities in health, and poor housing is a leading cause of illness and disease. In the red book, Dr Eoin Clarke interestingly observes,“The number of social houses built under John Major declined steeply, as did the number of council sales. But if one looks closely they can see that sales began to exceed builds under Major. This was an unsustainable path, and meant that it was inevitable council housing shortages would arise. Sadly, Tony Blair only intensified this folly, the number of council sales under Blair dramatically increased and the building of social housing halted.” Furthermore, there is little doubt that Labour’s narrative on tax is potentially confused. Labour has yet to forge clear policies on redistribution as well as predistribution, and yet there is a populist thirst already for a tax mechanism which seals off tax loopholes in corporate tax avoidance. Part of the drive for this perhaps has come from the perception of the lost money to the revenue through corporate tax avoidance, which makes the attack on ‘benefit scroungers’ look rather pathetic. This is definitely then work in progress, but Richard Murphy observes as early in 2011 in the “Red Book”, that, “Labour has apologised for tax for too long. Tax works. Tax is a good thing. Tax transforms people’s lives. Tax can be legitimately collected. If tax is not collected, when it is due, then injustice results. Labour has to embrace these ideas, and act on them. That is possible. Now is the time to do it.Though its detractors have characterised Labour Left in a number of ways, including „far left loyalism? (the loyalty being to Ed Miliband), the truth is that if Labour Left?s values of equality, redistribution and fairness are perceived as “far left”, then something has gone very wrong in the Labour movement as a whole..”
From midnight tonight, Mid Staffs NHS Foundation Trust goes into administration. This can be considered symbolic of a failure at Mid Staffs financially, and it is a decision taken by Monitor given the responsibility of regulating a neoliberal approach to the NHS, further advanced by the Health and Social Care Act (2012). One of the many reasons given for the poor performance at Mid Staffs through the Francis Reports is how this Trust “lost its way”, and gave up on being part of its local community (particularly dangerous when you consider that Foundation Trusts are thought to benefit from ‘autonomy’). And yet David Taylor-Gooby as early as 2011 identifies a crucial problem here: “Public Involvement does not simply mean going to meetings with nice lunches, as some NHS managers seem to think and approving decisions which have already been made. It means genuine involvement in the decision making progress, being made aware of facts and able to participate in decisions. Thus if difficult choices have to be made, such as closing a hospital, which may well happen when there is more community-based treatment, then people are involved in the debate at the beginning. It is when the public are confronted with a decision to close a facility without much warning that people become incensed and politicians jump on the bandwagon.”
Labour still has a real risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but this would be a huge mistake given the real talent and intellectual rigour within Labour. Tony Blair warned against finding false comfort in the past, however there is much in the socialist legacy of Labour that Labour should be proud of. Tony Blair should watch with some degree of pride, “The spirit of ’45”, thinking about how the “working poor” pulled together to create a country that we can all be proud of. Likewise, he can also think about how he really has lost touch with the voters who hold the key for Ed Miliband to 10 Downing Street in 2015. Who knows, Ed Miliband as PM may have to make the arrangements for the political funeral of New Labour while he is in power, even.
The BBC and 'Ding Dong – The Witch is Dead'" – Thatcher, the state, free market choice and competition
It is of course a favourite of Christmas pasts, present, and possibly future?
Currently, this video of “Ding, Dong – The Witch is Dead” has had 1,173,398 views.
The BBC has got caught up in a huge row, regarding what to do with the playing of the single, “Ding Dong – the Witch is Dead” tomorrow, as described here:
“The Wizard of Oz song at the centre of an anti-Margaret Thatcher campaign will not be played in full on the Official Chart Show. Instead a five-second clip of the 51-second song will be aired as part of a Newsbeat report, Radio 1 controller Ben Cooper said. Sales of Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead have soared since the former Prime Minister’s death on Monday, aged 87. Mr Cooper called the decision “a difficult compromise”. The song is set to take the number three spot in Sunday’s countdown, according to the Official Charts Company.”
Nick Cohen (@NickCohen4) was seething in the Guardian today:
“The worst that can be said of the Tory press and the BBC is that they have now sunk to the level of the Chinese Communist party. Since MGM released The Wizard of Oz in 1939, few have found the Munchkins’ chorus – “Ding dong! The Wicked Witch is dead/ Wake up sleepy head, rub your eyes, get out of bed” – obscene or subversive in the least.
But Britain’s surreal conservatives did not want the BBC to ban the song because its words were libellous or a breach of the criminal law. They hated the song not because of what it said but because the intention of the left wingers who bought it was to celebrate the death of Margaret Thatcher.
The silencing of the Munchkins must rank as one of the most inept acts of censorship Britain has seen. The days when the Radio 1 playlist made or broke a song’s chances went with the invention of the web. Neither the Daily Mail nor the parliamentary Conservative party appeared to know that if you want to ban a single today, you need to compel YouTube and iTunes to take it down.”
As part of the airbrushing of the Thatcherite approach to life generally, Ken Clarke has been touring the studios to imply that Mrs T stopped him from implementing some of his more “radical reforms” of the NHS in the 1980s. The implication of this is that Thatcher would have balked herself at the current outsourcing of the NHS through section 75 of the Health and Social Care Act, taking the NHS a step further along the route of privatisation? Yet, the regulations of section 75 Health and Social Care Act have been hastily rewritten to give a camouflage of integration for drafting which essentially says that all contracts must be put out to competitive tendering except for the generally unlikely of situations. The legal profession is currently with their ‘backs to the wall’, with the introduction of competitive tendering. As the NHS continues in its subtle draining of resources compared to increasing demands of the population and of technological developments, ‘free choice’ in the NHS has been cushioned with the sweet pill of ‘we cannot pay for everything’, meaning a competitive market where there are winners. And there are losers.
That is choice in action. None of this fluffy saving your local hospital, as you might have been enticed to believe through legislative instruments such as the Localism Act. A choice when money talks; the customer is King. Never mind the fact there are some services in medicine, NHS, which can’t be cherrypicked as readily as others, such as hernia operations. Sod the fact that mergers and acquisitions of a plc is more profitable than an immigration and asylum case from Zimbabwe, that is the market in action. Get real.
Of course, I am being utterly ironic, in case my sarcasm does not convey well through the medium of the blogosphere. But here we an ideology of the market talks driven by money, where it is hard to get in the way of consumer choice. The BBC we keep on being told is not actually part of the State, and is independent from the State. And yet, we have this perplexing situation where the BBC does not cover legal aid cuts, apart from a noddy guide right at the end on how to self-litigate, and does not cover the NHS reforms, apart from a completely unhelpful guide on how you can be relieved that your GP will not ‘look any different’.
So, if the BBC is not part of the state, why is it given “special treatment”? The Conservative ethos is about parity, rather than “equality” which is a rather left-wing word. To use the NHS analogy, why has the Government not made more of an effort to remove “barriers to entry” for competition? Why does the BBC retain the “licence fee”, which in any other sector would be considered a “state subsidy”? If it is not actually the State, is there not a danger that the BBC has become too close to the state, even if it is officially independent?
The problem is that the “Ding Dong – the Witch is Dead” is not defamatory across all jurisdictions in this age characterised by globalisation of media. It is a central tenet of English law that freedom of expression is a qualified cherished human right. Nor can a convincing case be brought to my knowledge that it contravenes the Public Order Act in this jurisdiction – you can for example freely play the video from YouTube above, download it from iPlayer, play it on Spotify. It is tricky for invoke the ‘moral outrage’ argument, as there is arguably substantially a greater degree of moral outrage that 40% of work capacity decisions made by ATOS have to be overturned on legal review. It may be a song which is in “very poor taste”, but we have only very recently visited how the English law does not sanction affairs which are in such taste (see for example the Twitter joke trial).
If any publicity is good publicity, is it possible that this decision by the BBC has made more people about the existence of the song than otherwise would have been possible. By playing 3 seconds of it is to deny genuine choice of the consumer, of this neoliberal market which, despite the recent airbrushing, Thatcher was most definitely fond of. Thatcher was in favour of a smaller state, which makes the pill that “the nation’s broadcaster”, the BBC, has decided not to play the song in full so ironic. If this were a test of Thatcherite principles, the single would have been played in full without any questions asked. And if people didn’t buy enough “I love Margaret Thatcher” copies to displace it, that’s tough.
My personal response to Tony Blair's "advice"
This is a response to “Labour must search for answers and not merely aspire to be a repository for people’s anger”, by Tony Blair, published in the New Statesman on 11 April 2013.
Fundamentally, Blair is right in that Labour cannot merely be a conduit for ‘the protest vote’, but the issues raised by heir to Thatcher are much more than that to me. Blair argues that, “the paradox of the financial crisis is that, despite being widely held to have been caused by under-regulated markets, it has not brought a decisive shift to the left.” I am not so sure about that. Whilst I have always felt the taxonomy of ‘left’ versus ‘right’ largely unhelpful in British politics, I think most people in the country today share views about bankers and the financial services ‘holding the country to ransom’ (like the Union Barons used to be accused of), the failures of privatisation, the failures in financial regulation (PPIs), for example, which might have been seen as ‘on the left’. Tony Blair had a good chance of coming to power in 1997, and ‘the pig with a Labour rosette might have won at the 1997 General Election’ is not an insubstantial one. To ignore that there has been no shift in public opinion is to deny that the political and social landscape has changed to some degree. Whilst ‘South Shields man’ is still living with the remants of the ‘socially divisive’ Thatcherite government, what Michael Meacher MP politely called yesterday “a scorched earth approach”, voters are indeed challenging flagship Thatcherite policies even now.
Some Labour councillors and MPs did indeed embrace the ‘right to buy’ policy, but likewise many MPs of diverse political aetiology warn about the currentcrisis in social housing. Blair is right to argue, “But what might happen is that the left believes such a shift has occurred and behaves accordingly”, in the sense that Ed Miliband does not wish to disenfranchise those voters who did happen to embrace New Labour pursuant to a long stretch of the Conservative sentence, but we have a very strong danger now of disenfranchise the core voters of Labour. They are rightly concerned about workers’ and employees’ rights, a minimum wage (a Blair achievement), and a living wage (possibly a 2015 manifesto pledge by Ed Miliband.) Nobody wants to re-fight the battle of ‘left’ and ‘right’ of those terms, but merely ‘building on’ the purported achievements of Margaret Thatcher has to be handled with care.
Blair further remarks: “The Conservative Party is back clothing itself in the mantle of fiscal responsibility, buttressed by moves against “benefit scroungers”, immigrants squeezing out British workers and – of course – Labour profligacy.” Of course, Blair does not address the growth of the welfare dependency culture under Margaret Thatcher, but this is essential. Blair has also airbrushed the core of the actual welfare debate, about ensuring that disabled citizens have a ‘fair deal’ about their benefits, but to his credit addresses the issue of pensions in his fourth question. However, Blair falls into the trap also of not joining up thinking in various arms of policy, in other words how immigrants have in fact contributed to the economy of the UK, or contributed essential skills to public services such as the National Health Service. This is indeed a disproportionate approach to immigration that was permeating through the language of Labour ministers in immigration towards the end of their period of government. Blair fundamentally wishes to fight this war – indeed battle – on his terms and Thatcher’s terms. This is not on – this debate is fundamentally about the divisive and destructive nature of policy, of pitting the unemployed against the employed, the disabled against the non-disabled, the immigrant versus the non-immigrant, and so on. Part of the reason that Thatcher’s entire hagiography cannot be a bed of roses is that there exists physical evidence today of this ‘divide-and-rule’ approach to leadership.
Blair, rather provocatively at this stage, refers to the ‘getting the house in order’, which is accepting the highly toxic meme of ‘A Conservative government always has to come in to repair the mess of a Labour government spending public money it doesn’t have.’ However, the economy is in a worse state than bequeathed by Labour in 2010, and therein lies the problem that the house that the Tories ‘is getting in order’ is in fact getting worse. Acknowledgement of this simple economic fact by Blair at this juncture would be helpful. Blair’s most potent comment in the whole passage is: “The ease with which it can settle back into its old territory of defending the status quo, allying itself, even anchoring itself, to the interests that will passionately and often justly oppose what the government is doing, is so apparently rewarding, that the exercise of political will lies not in going there, but in resisting the temptation to go there.” Like all good undergraduates, even at Oxford, this depends on what exactly Blair means by the “status quo” – the “status quo” is in Thatcherism, and the “greatest achievement” of Conservatism, “New Labour”, so a return to listening to the views of Union members, ahead of say the handful of wealth creators in the City, is in fact a radical shift back to where we were. In other words, a U-turn after a U-turn gets you back to the same spot.
Blair then has a rather sudden, but important, shift in gear. He writes, “The guiding principle should be that we are the seekers after answers, not the repository for people’s anger.” This is to some extent true from the law, as we know from the views from LJ Laws who has described the challenges of making dispassionate legal decisions even if the issues are of enormous significance in social justice. Blair, consistent with an approach from a senior lawyer remarks, “In the first case, we have to be dispassionate even when the issues arouse great passion.” But then he follows, “In the second case, we are simple fellow-travellers in sympathy; we are not leaders. And in these times, above all, people want leadership.” Bingo. This is what. Whatever Ed Miliband’s ultimate ideology, which appears to be an inclusive form of social democracy encouraging corporate as well as personal citizenship, people ultimately want a very clear roadmap of where he is heading. The infamous articulation of policy under Cruddas will help here, but, as Ed Miliband finds his feet, Miliband will be judged on how he responds to challenges, like Thatcher had to respond to the Falklands’ dispute or the Miners’ Strike.
Blair fundamentally is right to set out the challenges. In as much as the financial crisis has not created the need for change per se, to say that it has not created a need for a financial response is ludicrous. The ultimate failure in Keynesian policy from Blair and Brown is that the UK did not invest adequately in a period of growth, put tritely by the Conservatives as “not mending the roof while the sun was shining”. Mending the roof, to accept this awful image, is best done when the sun is shining. Therefore, Labour producing a policy now is to some extent not the best time to do it. Blair had a great opportunity to formulate a culture in the UK which reflected Labour’s roots in protecting the rights and welfare of workers, but it decided not to do so. Tarred with the ‘unions holding the country to ransom’ tag, it decided to Brown-nose the City quite literally, leading to an exacerbation of the inequality commenced under Thatcher. Blair skirts round the issue of globalisation and technology in a rather trite manner, one assumes for brevity, but the wider debate necessarily includes the effects of globalisation and technology on actual communities in the UK, and the effect of multi-national corporates on life in the UK. Even Thatcher might have balked at the power of the corporates in 2013 in the same way she was critical of the power of the Unions throughout all of her time in government.
Whilst “Labour should be very robust in knocking down the notion that it “created” the crisis”, there is no doubt that Labour has a ‘debate to be had’ about how the Conservatives did not oppose the legislation of the City at the time by New Labour (and even advanced further under-regulation), why George Osborne wished to meet the comprehensive spending review demands of the last Labour government, and how the Conservatives would not have reacted any differently in injecting £1 TN into bank recapitalisation at the time of the crisis. The idea of spending money at the time of a recession has been compared to supporters of FA Hayek as ‘hair of the dog after a big binge’, but unfortunately is directly relevant to Blair’s first question: “What is driving the rise in housing benefit spending, and if it is the absence of housing, how do we build more?” Kickstarting the economy and solving the housing crisis would indeed be a populist measure, but the arguments against such a policy remain thoroughly unconvincing. The second question, “How do we improve the skillset of those who are unemployed when the shortage of skills is the clearest barrier to employment?”, is helpful to some extent, but Blair again shows that he is stuck in a mysterious time-warp; two of the biggest challenges in employment, aside from the onslaught in unfair dismissal, are the excessive salaries of CEOs (necessitating a debate about redistribution, given Labour’s phobia of the ‘tax and spend’ criticism), and how to help the underemployed. The third question is, course, hugely potent: “How do we take the health and education reforms of the last Labour government to a new level, given the huge improvement in results they brought about?” Fair enough, but the immediate problem now is how to slow down this latest advance in the privatisation of the NHS through the Health and Social Care Act (2012), and for Labour to tackle real issues about whether it really wishes to pit hospital versus hospital, school versus school, CCG against CCG, etc. (and to allow certain entities, such as NHS Foundation Trusts, “fail” in what is supposed to be a “comprehensive service”). The other questions which Blair raises are excellent, and indeed I am extremely happy to see that Blair calls for a prioritisation of certain planks of policy, such as how to produce an industrial strategy or a ‘strategy for growth’, and how to deal with a crisis in social justice? There is no doubt that the funding of access-to-justice on the high street, for example in immigration, housing or welfare benefits, has hit a crisis, but Blair is right if he is arguing that operational tactics are not good enough. Sadiq Khan obviously cannot ‘underachieve and overpromise’ about reversing legal aid cuts, but Labour in due course will have to set out an architecture of what it wishes to do about this issue.
Ed Miliband knows that this is a marathon, not a sprint. He has the problem of shooting at a goal, which some days looks like an open goal, other days where the size of the goal appears to have changed, and, on other days, where he looks as if he runs a real risk of scoring an ‘own goal’. It is of course very good to have advice from somebody so senior as Tony Blair, who will be a Lord in the upper chamber in due course, and Miliband does not know yet if he will ‘squeak through’ in the hung parliament, win with a massive landslide, or lose. Labour will clearly not wish to say anything dangerous at the risk of losing, through perhaps offending Basildon Man, and, whilst it is very likely that South Shields Man will remain loyal, nothing can be taken for granted for Ed Miliband unfortunately. Like Baroness Thatcher’s death, Tony Blair’s advice at this stage was likely to rouse huge emotions, and, whilst the dangers of ignoring the advice might not be as costly as Thatcher’s funeral, it would be unwise to ignore his views which, many will argue, has some support within Labour. However, it is clearly the case that some of the faultlines in the Thatcher society and economy have not been healed by the New Labour approach, and Ed Miliband, many hope, will ultimately forge his own successful destiny.
What will a Miliband-Thatcher brand achieve?
Characterising the leadership of Margaret Thatcher is difficult. The problem is that, despite the perceived ‘successes’ of her tenure of government, her administration is generally accepted to have been very socially divisive. For many, she is the complete opposite of ‘inspirational’, and yet listening to current Conservative MPs talk there is a genuine nostalgia and affection for her period of government.
What can Ed Miliband possibly hope to emulate from the leadership style of Margaret Thatcher? Thatcher’s early leadership can definitely be characterised as a ‘crisis’ one, in that full bin liners were not being collected from the streets, there were power blackouts, Britain was going to the IMF to seek a loan, for example. However, the crisis now is one which does not have such visible effects. Miliband can hope to point to falling living standards, or increasing prices due to privatised industries making a profit through collusive pricing, but this is an altogether more subtle argument. A key difference is that people can only blame the business models of the privatised industries, not government directly. Whether this will also be the case as an increasing proportion of NHS gets done by private providers is yet to be seen.
It is perhaps more likely that Thatcher’s leadership, in the early stages at least, migth be described as “charismatic”, involving both charisma and vision. Conger and Karungo famously described five behavioural attributes of charismatic leadership. They are: vision and articulation, sensitivity to the environment, sensitivity to member needs, personal risk taking, and performing unconventional behaviour. In a weird way, Thatcher in her period of government can claim to have provided examples of many of these, but it is the period of social destruction at the time of closure of coal mines which will cause doubt on sensitivity to the environment. While ‘Basildon man’ and ‘Ford mondeo’ man might have been looked after, apparently, ‘Easington man’ was clearly not. A ‘One Nation’ philosophy promoting one economy and one society might not be a trite construct for this, after all. The problem is that ‘Basildon man’ has himself moved on; the ‘right to buy’ is the flagship Tory policy epitomising independence, aspiration and choice for the modern Tory, as resumed by Robert Halfon, but there is ultimately a problem if Basildon man is not able to maintain mortgage payments, or there is a general dearth of social housing.
In a way, looking at the failures of Thatcher’s leadership style is a bit academic now, but still highly relevant in reminding Miliband that his ‘political class’ cannot be aloof from the voters. It is a testament to the huge ‘brand loyalty’ of the Thatcher brand that there are so many eulogies, and one enduring hagimony from the BBC, to Thatcher. Jay Conger provides a way of understanding how charismatic leadership is to be maintained, and the “Poll Tax” is symptomatic of Thatcher’s failure of these aspects. Conger identifies continual assessment of the environment, and an ability to build trust and commitment not through coercion. Miliband likewise needs to be mindful of his immediate environment too: his stance on Workfare disappointed many members of Labour, causing even 41 of his own MPs to rebel against the recent vote, and upset many disabled citizens who are members of Labour. What happens when charismatic leadership goes wrong can be identified clearly in the latter years of the Thatcher administration. These include relatively unchallenged leadership, a tendency to gather “yes men”, and a tendency to narcissism and losing touch with reality. I still remember now (and I am nearly 39), the classic, “We have become a grandmother” and that awful Mansion House spectacle when Mrs Thatcher proclaimed that ‘the batting had been tough of late’ whilst maintaining a quasi-regal ambience.
I personally disagree with the notion that elections are won from the ‘centre ground’, particularly because I conceptually do not find the classification of ‘left’ and ‘right’ helpful (especially if you, like me, wish to embrace “One Nation Labour” with genuine goodwill). To use the market analogy, I think it’s like making an offering which looks and functions like an iPod, but which has some of the features missing; you might as well buy the real thing. A more sensible strategy for a competitor to the incumbent is to offer something really disruptive; in other words, something which offers some of the good qualities of the current market leaders, but which adds useful value. Ironically, enough time has passed since the airbrushing of socialism from the mainstream UK political system occurred with the advent of New Labour for Ed Miliband to give this another go. You can argue until the cows come home, and many mere mortals who are management theorists have given it a go, about whether charismatic leadership needs both charisma and vision. Despite Denis Healey’s famous doubts about whether Ed Miliband has charisma, it seems that Fraser Nelson has latterly judged Ed Miliband to be quite personable. Certainly, Ed Miliband to come close to becoming a charismatic leader himself needs to have an extremely clear vision. He may have to “think the unthinkable”, and make an unrealistic promises such as a NHS which is ‘comprehensive, and free-at-the-point-of-use’ (still miraculously, though, in the current NHS constitution). However, to borrow George Osborne’s phrase, “there is a debate to be had”, about whether the deregulation of markets under the Conservatives and New Labour did lead to a climate which encouraged the global financial crash to spread to the London markets. There is also a debate to be had about the ‘market failures’ of privatised industries. Sure, nobody is wishing ‘Thomas Cook’ to become a state-owned travel agent, or you to wait a month to have a phone line fitted by the State. But this is to present outdated, prejudiced, ‘Aunt Sally’ arguments. There is a debate to be had instead about whether we wish certain national services, like utilities or railways, to be fragmented, at relatively high prices, and where there is clearly a substantial benefit to shareholders and corporate directors but little benefit to consumers. Nobody wants to see the Unions ‘holding the country to ransom’, but it is a triumphant failure of Tony Blair and New Labour that this demonising malicious memes have been allowed to remain alive almost forty years on. Nearly all people, instead, firmly believe in the idea of democratic representation, and this has now become vital in abuse of the workforce by certain employers. We hear stories all-the-time of powerful corporates using ‘zero hour contracts’, and it is this Government which has seen the dilution of employment rights of workers and employees (reduced eligibility for unfair dismissal claims, and a lower quantum of award.) And, finally, there is a debate to be had about what exactly underlies the ‘maximum number of people in employment’ claim; is it for example an increased number of part-time, flexible workers who are under-employed, or is it an artefact of migrant workers from Eastern Europe who are doing temporary jobs in the UK?
Ed Miliband has often many times remarked about his thoughts have been ‘shaped’ by Margaret Thatcher, despite the fact he is very clear he disagreed with many of the views of Thatcher. We need, however, a frank discussion of where Britain goes from here. Frankly, a pig with a rosette could have won certain Labour seats in Scotland, but those days are over. Labour’s membership started to go into decline from around 2002/3, long predating the fall in membership after the Iraqi war. The ‘paying of respects’ to the late Baroness Thatcher has allowed some Tory ideology to go unchallenged, such as the importance of the Unions in society, or the failure of privatised industries. However, what Ed Miliband can hope to emulate is a precisely articulation of a vision. Miliband has to prove that he is the right person for the right times (2014/5), like Blair, Thatcher and Cameron/Clegg might have been. If Labour is to be given the honour of a mandate in 2015, it needs to have an extremely clear idea of what it hopes to achieve, and for whom.
I'm a Labour member who despairs over our leadership on welfare; and I'm not the only one
So what’s new? This is yet another article about Labour and welfare. George Osborne wanted a debate about welfare, but he wants people to be united against ‘shirkers’ staying in bed while good citizens go out-to-work.
I don’t want even to go into that tired debate about working tax credits, and how the people Osborne appears to be targeting are low earners in society. I don’t wish to go into the billions of other arguments concerning this huge part of the budget, for example whether the “millionaire’s tax” would have ‘covered the costs’ of the “bedroom tax”. But increasingly I sense an overwhelming impression from Labour members like me an engulfing sense of despair. This is not about the top 15 things that Labour has promised to repeal or enact on gaining ‘power’, although virtually all of that list has to be cautioned against the state of the economy that any government will inherit in 2015. There are certainly too many variables and unpredictable externalities on the horizon, which makelife difficult. Labour is undergoing a complex review, and indeed people can contribute to the policy discussion through their website. However, there is simply a sense that the Labour Party has lost its identity, and that many people would simply like to quit and “up sticks”. Much of this is that Labour sets out to be a social democratic party, not a socialist party, so therefore has a real ideological problem with saving failing hospitals in the NHS; it paradoxically does not appear to have a problem in saving banks, increasing the deficit, creating billions of bonuses for some bankers in the cities. It engaged in ‘buy now, pay later’ behaviour which meant NHS hospitals, in the name of public infrastructure investment, being put on commercially-confidential contracts lasting decades at interest rates which most agree are competitive.
Labour’s fundamental problem is that it has fallen into the ‘bear trap’ of following not leading. 62% of people think that spending is too high, and indeed Philip Gould, Alistair Campbell and Peter Mandelson are reputed to be fond of ‘focus groups’. However, 99% of Sun voters are reputed to ‘back the Death Penalty’, and no-one is seriously proposing that Ed Miliband should ‘back the penalty’ to get elected. There is a sense that Ed Miliband will jump on any fast bandwagon going, but to give him some credit he has in fact caught a national mood over certain issues such as press regulation. However, many Labour voters feel that Ed Miliband does not share this passion over certain key issues.
Ed Miliband exhibits ‘a stuck gramophone syndrome’ when speaking about “vested interests”, which appears to be Miliband’s contorted way of reassuring the public that the Unions are not round for ‘beer and sandwiches’ every other day. But Ed Miliband simply has to emphasise, as he has tried to do to some extent, that it is the members of the Unions who, uptil now, have backed him not “the Unions” as neolithic organisations per se. Miliband has failed to make clear the essential democratic nature of the Unions, and if he has any sense of history of the Labour Party (which he does), he will wish to emphasise this. If he wishes to make the party wholeheartedly social democratic, he will not care. Surely members of Unions, such as “hard-working” (to use that tired word) nurses and teachers, will wish to have an input into nursing and teaching policy as much as private equity companies who are literally lobbying behind close doors on education and teaching policy? Labour is caught in a trap of advancing neoliberal policies of setting off hospitals against hospitals and schools versus schools, so has totally lost sight of its socialist sense of solidarity. It is currently, on welfare, allowing the debate to be ensnared and enmeshed into a discussion over ‘lazy shirkers’, and one person with 17 children setting fire to his house, but do not wish to establish basic truths about welfare for disabled citizens: that is, the living and mobility components of the current ‘disability living allowance’ do not constitute an employment benefit, but are there to help to allow disabled citizens cope with the demands in life: to use wonk speak, “to allow them to lead productive lives”.
Ed Miliband is also following not leading on the economy. The semantics of whether we should analyse the nature of the boom-bust cycle as FA Hayek would have wished us to do rather than the drawbacks of Lord Keynes’ “paradox of thrift” do not concern the vast majority of voters. However, workers who are being paid pittance, and certainly those below the statutory minimum wage, do not hear Labour screaming out from the rooftops about this achievement, which even happens to be an achievement of a Blair government. Ed Miliband has somehow managed to screw up discussions of ‘a living wage’, not in terms of allowing living standards for workers and employees, but through a convoluted discussion of ‘pre-distribution’ and the academic career of Prof Joseph Hacker (called Mr Hacker by David Cameron in ‘Prime Minister’s Questions’). Workers and employees are concerned that they can be ‘hired and fired’ below the minimum length of service (which this Government is set on reducing anyway), and that any awards for unfair dismissal will be less in future. Voters want some sort of protection through the policies of a Labour government, to curb the excesses of multi-national corporates for example, not a protracted list they can retweet at length on Twitter of the top 15 things Labour would repeal in 2015. This is basic stuff, and it is galling of a Labour opposition not even to do their fundamental job of opposing. Virtually everyone agrees that a strong opposition is essential for English parliamentary democracy.
Labour simply exudes the impression of a political party that has lost its direction, will say or do anything to get into power (while spouting platitudes such as ‘we don’t want to overpromise and under-deliver’), and is totally cautious about what offerings it possibly can supply to the general public in future. Nobody is expecting them to have a detailed manifesto, but a sense of the ‘direction of travel’, in other words people saying that disability living allowance is not an employment benefit, or that Labour would seek to curb his ‘hire-and-fire culture’ and discuss with the Unions how to go about this, would help enormously. Another critical problem is presented by the sentiment conveyed in Adnan Al-Daini’s tweet this afternoon: “If the #Labour party is going to mimic the Tory party at every step what is the point of it? Same policies different rhetoric! #hypocrisy”. Labour, at an increasing number of junctures it seems, appears to be quite unable of opposing convincingly because of its past. I am the first person to promote rehabilitation, but this is genuinely a problem now. It is claimed that Labour introduced the equivalent of the “bedroom tax” for the private sector, so themselves should not be aghast that this has been proposed on an ‘equal playing field basis’. I happen to oppose strongly the “bedroom tax”, as it appears to discriminate against sections of the population, such as disabled citizens. The NHS is another fiasco. Labour ‘as the party of the NHS’ can offer to repeal the Health and Social Care Act (2012), but this is a symbolic (and rather vacuous) promise. The problem with Foundation Trusts still in a ‘failure regime’ will exist, the issue of hospitals paying off their PFI loans on an annual basis will still exist, and it was Labour themselves who legislated for an Act of parliament managing procurement (the Public Contracts Regulations Act); through a long series of complex cases, NHS hospitals have become enmeshed in EU competition law, but Labour had, whether it likes it or not, set in motion a direction of travel where hospitals would be caught in the ‘economic activity’ and competition law axis of the EU.
What Labour obviously did not legislate for was to allow up to 49% of income of hospitals to come from private sources, nor to make the legislative landscape most amenable for private providers to enter with the lowest barriers-to-entry; it was a policy decision of the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats not to give the NHS any unfair ‘protection’, meaning that the NHS would of course be expected not to provide anywhere near a universal, comprehensive service. However, as the marketisation of the NHS and privatisation has been accelerated, but one in which Labour to a much lesser degree did participate, it is hard for Labour to provide convincingly a narrative on what it wants to do next. Labour seem very eager to produce apologies at the drop-of-a-hat, such as on immigration (which came to a head with the Gillian Duffy altercation after Gordon Brown forgot to remove his clip-on microphone and Sky happened to take a recording of it). It has tried to apologise for the emergency spending on the banks during the global financial crisis, but experts are far from convinced about why the banks were not allowed to fail; it is an inherent paradox in the Labour narrative that it seems content with allowing NHS hospitals to fail, but seems reluctant to allow banks to fail (meaning shareholders and directors of banks can be rewarded, and Labour gets blamed for the exploding deficit).
Against the backdrop of a false security of poll leads perhaps, Labour’s performance is floundering because it just appears to be opposing for the sake of it; it is now a rational accusation of the Coalition to say that Labour opposes virtually everything (except for Workfare and the “benefits cap” perhaps), but does not appear to have constructive policies of its own. Despite its rhetoric on “vested interests”, it seems perfectly happy to honour the contracts it started with ATOS over the disastrous outsourcing of welfare benefits (which has seen 40% of some benefits overturned on appeal, and some claimants reported to have suffered psychological distress through the benefits application process), yet, apart from a handful of excellent MPs such as Michael Meacher, seems rather limp at criticising this particular ‘vested interest’. It is a problem when the public perception of Labour protecting multi-national vested interests overrides its ‘loyalty’ to the Unions. It is also a problem when two years into the leadership of Ed Miliband the media are unable to report the closure of law centres or the problems of the NHS privatisation process but can only report how to self-litigate and what to expect from your GP in this new NHS landscape. Ed Miliband’s fundamental problem is that he gives the impression of being a follower not a leader. Miliband appears like a TV newsreader, nicely a product of “make up”, but whose autocue is suffering a technical fault. Labour does not currently inspire confidence. If it is the case where the best Labour voters can hope for is a ‘hung parliament’, despite glaring incidents of an #omnishambles government, something is very wrong indeed.
The 'bandwagon effect' and language of welfare reform
“Bandwagon” is one of the most common techniques in both wartime and peacetime, and plays an important part in modern advertising. Bandwagon is also one of the seven main propaganda techniques identified by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis in 1938. Bandwagon is an appeal to the voter, who is perhaps feeling mixed feelings of “aspiration” and “insecurity” to follow the crowd, to join in because others are doing so as well. Bandwagon propaganda is, essentially, trying to convince the subject that one side is the winning side, because more people have joined it. The subject is meant to believe that since so many people have joined, that “victory is inevitable and defeat impossible”: in a sense, “success” becomes a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’. Since the average person always wants to be on the winning side, he or she is compelled to join in.
When confronted with bandwagon propaganda, we should weigh the pros and cons of joining in independently from the amount of people who have already joined, and, as with most types of propaganda, we should seek more information. Thankfully, there are prominent disability campaigners, such as Sue Marsh and Kaliya Franklin, who have a very good, accurate command of the actual DWP data (as reported). In layman’s term the bandwagon effect refers to people doing certain things because other people are doing them, regardless of their own beliefs, which they may ignore or override. The perceived “popularity” of an object or person may have an effect on how it is viewed on a whole. Hence, it is entirely fitting that George Osborne should wish to give a speech on welfare reform to a group of employees in Sittingbourne, who “all share his concerns” about the small proportion of people in the population who are freeloading. This effect is noticed and followed very much by youth, where for instance if people see many of their friends buying a particular phone, they could become more interested in buying that product.
The history of this concept is interesting. A bandwagon is a wagon which carries the band in a parade, circus or other entertainment. The phrase “jump on the bandwagon” first appeared in American politics in 1848 when Dan Rice, a famous and popular circus clown of the time, used his bandwagon and its music to gain attention for his political campaign appearances. As his campaign became more successful, other politicians strove for a seat on the bandwagon, hoping to be associated with his success. Later, during the time of William Jennings Bryan’s 1900 presidential campaign, bandwagons had become standard in campaigns, and “jump on the bandwagon” was used as a derogatory term, implying that people were associating themselves with the success without considering what they associated themselves with. Often political commentators will say something which captures this derogatory nature like, “Ed Miliband has jumped so fast onto this moving bandwagon, that he’s likely to fall off it.”
The government is increasingly using value-laden and pejorative language when discussing benefits and welfare, something poverty charities warn is likely to increase the stigmatisation of poor people. The findings show that the work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, has spoken of a mass culture of welfare dependency in every speech on benefits he has made in the past 12 months. The analysis came after complaints that the government is using exceptional cases such as that of Mick Philpott, the unemployed man jailed this week for the manslaughter of six children, to justify its programme of changes to the benefits system. The problem of using single cases to make a general point was highlighted by Diane Abbott who, this week, warned about drawing general conclusions about Austrian villages from the Josef Fritz case and Owen Jones who, also this week, warned about making unreliable inferences about inheritance tax from the Stephen Seddon case. Indeed, an examination of Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) speeches and press notices connected to benefits in the year to April 1 shows a significantly increased use of terms such as “dependency”, “entrenched” and “addiction”, when compared with the end of the Labour government. Fraud, which currently accounts for less than 1% of the overall benefits bill, was mentioned 85 times in the press releases, while it was not used at all in the final year of Labour. In the 25 speeches by DWP ministers on welfare over the year, “dependency” was mentioned 38 times, while “addiction” occurred 41 times and “entrenched” on 15 occasions. A comparison of 25 speeches on the subject by Labour ministers saw the words used, respectively, seven times, not at all, and once.
Whatever the ultimate success of the Coalition’s war of words against “scroungers” and “skivers”, casualties of the ‘bandwagon’ will continue to attract attention. This use of language is, unfortunately, of huge concern. In previous years, there has been documented reliably a rise in hate crimes against disabled people, police figures for England, Wales and Northern Ireland show. For example, more than 2,000 such offences were recorded in 2011, up a third on 2010. Police said this was partly due to an increased willingness to report crimes. Strikingly, this statistic was in the context that, overall, hate crimes linked to race, religion, sexual orientation and disability fell by 3,600 to 44,500.
