It’s become worse than embarrassing. Even with an open goal, Labour insists on aiming for the crossbar. The economy couldn’t be worse, people are experiencing massive social injustices, the workforce is going to be easier to sack in future, more disabled citizens are having to appeal just to keep their benefits, the NHS is being privatised, and yet Labour has taken months to complete a policy review. On top of this, people are now calling for Liam Byrne to be sacked. He has failed to mount an effective opposition on disability benefits, and three friends of mine only yesterday quit the Labour Party to join the Greens.
Labour is a horrific mess. It supported this week rushed legislation to legitimise what for many is socially abhorrent a policy goal. The problem facing activists is that if they leave the main Party the resulting party will be occupied with people like Liam Byrne. John Healey might as well have gone to Barbados for a year while the Health and Social Care Bill was being discussed. We are now about a fortnight away from the NHS being privatised. Ed Balls was ‘correct’ on the economy, yet it is a sign of George Osborne’s confidence (or arrogance) that he feels able to talk about ‘an aspiration nation’.
The general perception now amongst many Labour members is that Labour could not really give a shit about its core membership, or even core values. Legislation is currently being proposed where workers can apply for ‘shares for rights’, thankfully throttled by Lord Pannick QC in the House of Lords; or where it is easier to make workers redundant. Coupled with this, there is a sense that Labour is complacent, and take their real core membership for granted. This is extremely worrying, and will turn out to be fatal for the Labour Party if unaddressed. The failure of Labour to stop the privatisation of the NHS is possibly the most humiliating failure of the modern Labour Party. On the economy, Ed Balls is right to an extent to say that a reason that people mistrust Labour on the economy is that the economy has not been fairly represented in the media, but Labour does not address other issues which matter to its membership; such as law centres being shut down, meaning that ordinary members of the public do not have access to legal advice about housing or employment issues, for example.
This really is an open goal for Labour, but the workfare abstention this week was nothing short of an own goal. If Ed Miliband doesn’t complete a ‘root-and-branch’ review of why Labour has lost his way as part of the policy review, he does not deserve to be leader of the Labour Party. It is completely inadequate for Labour to say it will repeal the Health and Social Care Act in 2015, if only four people will only sign the early day motion for the new set of regulations to be scrapped. Maybe Andy Burnham is waiting for Liz Kendall to take up the policy, or Liz Kendall is waiting for Andy Burnham to move onto something different, but a lot of people have a lot of faith in Burnham compared to Healey, and yet the privatisation of the NHS legally complete. There is an onrunning philosophy that many things are a ‘fait accompli’ – for example, we’re stuck with an austerity agenda until 2018, and there is nothing we can do about it.
The danger is that people will simply stop engaging with politics altogether, or stop voting. They will not feel any more shafted than they are at the moment. However, people currently feel angry, and very upset that they have been disenfranchised so much. Of course, the response has been that anyone is free to participate in the website offering a wikipedia approach to policy formulation, but this does not explain why the Labour Party abstained on workfare. To have abstained on Workfare was an endorsement of a working principle which is a complete anethema to the values of workers, and which is a Godsend for corporates who wish to find cheap or free labour to maximise shareholder dividend. For Labour to have supported this was morally bankrupt, and highly offensive. It is not a victory that Ed Miliband wished to spend all night discussing Leveson, talking about the victims of press hacking. Many more people are victims of a failing economy, and are about to sacked more readily if the Government is able to pursue this policy, even though there is no correlation between economic growth and employment rights (in fact there is an inverse correlation.) Labour is in a shambolic state, and the seeds of much of this failing policy can be seen in New Labour. The Conservatives can point to Labour’s support for workfare in defending their stance on workfare. In yesterday’s Prime Minister’s Question, David Cameron simply fielded the question from Dame Ruddock about the Lewisham Hospital situation by saying that Labour had introduced the PFI policy in the first place. This is correct – while the Conservatives and their accountancy friends in the City initiated this policy, this was pursued at full throttle by Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. This is a difficult situation Labour finds itself in.
Labour is not in this horrific situation because it has not apologised enough. It has apologised for everything, including recently immigration. Whilst Labour feels embarrassed about its immigration policy, getting positive words about the value that Asian citizens contribute to the NHS for example is like getting blood out-of-a-stone. Bloggers, while occasionally mounting campaigns, remain loyal to failing planks of policy, and often offer unreasonable deference over issues which are clearly incorrect in the pursuit of social justice. It is left only to a handful of MPs, like Ian Mearns, Ian Lavery and Grahame Morris, to keep the red flag flying, and frankly without them the soul of the Labour Party would be dead. Under such circumstances, Labour does not deserve to win an election, let alone be in a hung parliament. It is frankly an embarrassment.
