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Labour should have real solutions for the NHS not just treat it as a 'vote winner'
You can always depend on the NHS. It’s always there for you.
I’m not talking about how the NHS looks after you from the moment you are born to the moment you did. I am talking about the purely selfish way in which the NHS is regarded by some within Labour. They are not a majority, I feel, but a sizeable minority for me to get irritated about.
It’s the school of philosophy which says, ‘We invented the NHS’. If that is taken literally, it may not be true, in that while Labour implemented in the NHS the blueprint from it was from a Liberal, Sir William Beveridge, Master of University College Oxford. At the other extreme, few are advocating embalming the NHS for posterity, or cryogenically freezing it, or any other banal image you wish to think of. It is not a ‘natural religion’, but likewise people who believe in its values should not be criticised for being ‘crackpots’.
While Ed Miliband goes on his walkabout with the air of belle indifference to flying eggs, and while Chris Bryant is not completely sure of the location of his Tesco distribution centre at the centre of his immigration scandal, the NHS is always there for them. Never a topic of debate. Andy Burnham MP will proudly defend Labour’s record over Mid Staffs, and talk about his ‘big idea’, integrated whole-person care. However, as with much policy from Labour in general, no-one knows for certain Labour’s direction of travel on this.
Labour is obsessed about ‘proving itself on the economy’. You sense this is because Gordon Brown was adamant about presenting himself as a ‘serious politician for serious times’, ‘fiscally responsible’. And yet the public perception amongst some quarters is of a manic shopper going mad with his credit card. Labour’s problem is that it is not, as such, thanked for the record satisfaction over the NHS, and many voters think if the NHS is good in their area that they happen to be ‘one of the lucky ones’.
Ed Balls MP is desperate to prove he has something to say on the economy. The narrative had always been ‘you’re cutting too fast and too deep’, and yet he wanted to stick to the same spending plans. And, for his next trick, now that the economy may be on a path of sustained recovery, Balls & Co. wish to establish that the economic recovery is indeed fragile and there has been a precipitous drop in ‘real living standards’. This narrative would be perfectly plausible if there was nothing happening on the political scene, but this is far from true. Disabled campaigners feel that Labour on the whole does not speak for them, some blaming Labour for signing the fated contracts with ATOS in the first place. However, they loathe the current ministers for disability in the Cameron government, so soldier on regardless. Concerns about workfare appear to fall on deaf ears, and Labour are not shouting from the rooftops either about their plans to backpeddle on the ‘Bedroom Tax’.
Apparently. Ed Miliband, as a social democrat, feels a deep sense of justice as a social democrat. Actions speak louder than words. With the decimation of legal aid, and the introduction of private competitive tendering, there has been an armageddon in the legal landscape, to which both Miliband and Sadiq Khan look like ‘silent bystanders’. Miliband and colleagues were also unable to stop the juggernaut of private competitive tendering in the National Health Service, meaning that the private sector would end up taking control and management of lucrative contracts in the name of the NHS. They also do not have a settled position on the continuing financial obligations of NHS Trusts challenged by their PFI loan interest payments. They campaign on, but do not seem to make much headway, on stopping the cuts in nursing which seem to have ideologically resulted from the McKinsey efficiency savings. Any clinician in the NHS involved in frontline care from the last decade will know clinical wards and acute emergency rooms have been stripped to the bone leading to NHS CEOs being effectively rewarded for failure; in some places, dirty and unsafe hospitals, financially keeping afloat (or not as the case might be), in the name of ‘efficiency savings’, while Jeremy Hunt still describes the NHS as ‘scandalously inefficient’. Finally, integrated care could be the New Jerusalem of making healthcare ‘affordable’ while ‘thinking differently'; or it could be a way to fiddle the figures by offering substandard care in a totally unrecognisable form.
Such turmoil has led an umitigated amount of crap to be written and said about the NHS in the last few years. Recently, Keogh and Cummings have called for another set of reforms as the model of the NHS is ‘unsustainable’. Too late. The politicians decided unilaterally to impose a £2bn top-down reorganisation leaving the NHS totally buggered backwards, but allowing private health providers to come into the NHS like true ‘rent seeking’ vultures. The agenda of the ‘hospital standardised mortality ratio’ has been blown out of the water as a means not to look at clinically negligent care, which can only be done through meticulous expert analysis of the case notes. It has been exposed as a mechanism to induce moral panic for the public to become angry at ‘unsafe hospitals’, and their staff, with anger, for them to become foaming at the mouth with vitriol and hatred. The HSMR can be praised for being a ‘smoke detector’ for the worst performing Trusts, but a problem which the regulators themselves do not wish to tackle is why they seem to be so resistant to investigating even the most outrageous claims of unacceptable medical care. The healthcare regulators have only scored a pyrrhic victory by not investigating them, as the individual cases are very vocal indeed on Twitter and elsewhere.
All this feeds into the idea that Labour does not have any vision. It is more concerned about winning elections than having a clear roadmap of where it is going. For ages, inane critics have been saying that it is too early to flesh out any details in policy. These happen to be the same morons who deny any economic recovery at all, simply saying it is a debt-fuelled boom in the housing sector. Labour appears to have divided itself into two camps which are increasingly not communicating with one another. The one camp which feels that Ed Miliband is not providing inspirational leadership and the whole Party should return to its pre-Blair socialist roots. The other camp which feels it’s fine, no panic is warranted, and so long as Labour doesn’t say anything overtly, it’ll win the election. But, even if Labour get that far, it’s what happens next which matters.
Labour has become the Samsung to the Conservatives’ Apple (or vice versa)
You don’t especially need a ‘focus group’ to tell you as many different views as you have participants. “Big data”, whilst flavour of the month, is not necessarily ‘best’. A recurrent theme that Labour regular voters find themselves returning to is the question of why bother voting Labour, when they simply seem to be a “Tory Lite”.
A member of any political party is worth his or her own weight in gold. Patrick O’Flynn, Chief Political Correspondent for the “Daily Express”, recently nailed his colours in the UKIP mast. In his recent speech to party members, O’Flynn’s love of his Party was obvious. A particularly effective line in his speech, which was more than a pithy soundbite, was his remark, “We are not a party of Little England – we are a party of Great Britain.” This in marketing terms known as ‘strategic positioning’, when you think about what your product is offering that is so distinct from other people on the market.
And that’s as far as I wish to push the ‘lessons from marketing’ narrative. Many grassroots members of Labour are totally exasperated about the ‘new lick of paint’ approach to politics, perhaps embodied by Mandelson’s rebrand of “New Labour” or Cameron’s reference to Ronseal. The practical problem that Ed Miliband faces, nonetheless, is that his ‘crisis of confidence’ could be a problem fundamentally with the song (Labour party policy) or the singer (him). As for the singer, attention has been given to his onstage demeanour and singing style, as this might seem like a worthy train of enquiry. The wait for policy details has been exasperating. One suspects there might be less criticism of the singer if the song were better defined. For example, the method of delivery of low-paid workers from Europe undercutting domestic English workers might have been more successful if Miliband had a song with clearly defined lyrics concerning a living wage in the first place.
When you ask people ‘what the perceived problem is for which the solution is the Conservative Party’, some people churlishly say ‘The Labour Party’. This is not as trivial as it first seems, as the idea of bin liners not being evacuated from the streets of our cities is deeply entrenched in the minds of some voters above a certain age. Some voters have genuine concerns about the Unions, and the relationship of the Labour Party with the Unions. Labour is in a position of being damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t. It can have wish to have a dialogue with the voters on hedge funds leading English NHS privatisation behind closed doors, but will find itself ever-frustrated if the media refuse to cover the issue at all.
It could be that Labour has simply lost a sense of its values. The argument that Labour lost the plot, and changed from a socialist party to a social democratic party, is often instantaneously rebutted by the argument that ‘But Tony Blair was the best election-winning machine which Labour ever had.” To which point, many invariably stipulate that Labour began to lose its core support as early as 2002/3, long before Labour finally relinquished office in 2010.
This perceived lack of clarity is linked to Ed Miliband’s performance as a leader. Miliband is quite good doing ‘reactive’, but Miliband often seems at his best when responding to a crisis, whether this is phone hacking or horse meat. The UK does seem to have been a perpetual state of crisis since the General Election of 2010, but Miliband does impressively appear to have ‘called the right shots’. This does not make up for a lack of policy, or ‘vision’. The usual argument that ‘we are two years away from the election’ merely confirms the idea that Labour is in no particularly hurry to outline a clear vision of settled values and principles on which it can progress. It instead confirms a notion of Labour making policy ‘on the hoof’, whether this is, for example, a ‘response’ to a ‘buy to let’ housing policy or a ‘response’ of vans which are allegedly racist.
There is possibly no single more significant policy plank than the UK economy over which there is genuine concern as to whether Labour is following or leading. It is possible that the economy is making a feeble recovery, over two years after it was also feebly recovering in 2010. It is possible that this new recovery is being fuelled by a temporary housing boom in London. There are many events which can be identified as to why the UK economy has been given a turboboost in the opposite direction by the Coalition. Ed Balls’ policy is perceived as ‘cutting not as deep, and not as fast’, and yet Balls seems fully signed up to a path of austerity. Balls seems as if he wishes to ‘have his cake and eat it’, criticising the Coalition’s economic policy while simultaneously supporting it.
If the economy does go into a sustained recovery, it is possible that the Conservatives will receive a ‘bounce’ for being more trusted on the economy. Voting data do actually provide that both the Conservatives and Labour Party are equally mistrusted on the economy. Labour seems to have been wishing to act ‘butch’ on the economy, hoping that voters will ‘learn to love’ Labour on the economy. This doesn’t add up. The Labour Party, in the style of an overcomplicated Oxford tutorial or Cambridge supervision, have failed overwhelmingly unconvincingly to establish a need for a £860 billion bailout. This failure means that the Conservatives still have some mileage with the fraudulent message, “Would you return the keys to the people who crashed the car?”, blaming the State for the global financial crash not the bankers in the City.
Labour’s problems are further compounded in that it doesn’t seem to offer anything much distinctive. Labour has become the Samsung to the Conservatives’ Apple (or vice versa). Labour supports PFI and Nicholson’s “efficiency savings”. The Conservatives do. Labour appears to support generally free schools or Academies, partly depending on what day it is. The Conservatives do. Labour seems to support acting ‘tough’ on illegal immigrants. The Conservatives do. Labour seems up for ‘modernising’ public services, and privatising what it can from them. The Conservatives do.
The truth is that politics, like the market which it has tried to copy, has become alarmingly homogenised. There is an illusion of choice, but there is a cigarette paper now currently between the main English political parties. When will Labour reverse “the Bedroom Tax”? And so it goes on. The frustration with Ed Miliband is as contrived as is the frustration with David Cameron. It’s a general malaise about the political process, though people generally are very articulate and passionate about many societal issues conversely. Labour’s approach appears to be to ‘play safe’ so that people think it’s ‘safe’ to vote Labour, rather than offering anything exciting or distinctive. If it pursues this strategy, it is more likely to find itself in ‘hung parliament’ territory rather than having a large working majority. But Tony Blair had a huge majority in 2007, and his legacy is still being fiercely debated.
CV here
How talk of the Unions went very Pete Tong for David Cameron
At first, nobody knew what he was going on about. David Cameron appeared to have some weird pathological obsession with Len McCluskey of UNITE, like somebody who acts oddly around someone that find deeply attractive. It is of course a tried and tested weapon of the Conservative Party; the notion that the Unions have secret ‘beer and sandwiches’ in Number 10, and they periodically hold the country to ransom. And yet, the truth is that David Cameron is quite unable to party as if it is 1979. Cameron’s attempts to capture the atmosphere of a Nation at ease with itself was simply returned with derision, as no-one clapped for him, in contradistinction with other names, when a long list was read out at the Wimbledon Gall Ball this year. The ‘Cameron brand’ has, despite the best attempts at mitigation against re-toxification, been tarred with the corruption brush, in the perception of many, with the close relationship between News International, Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks. Cameron has kept reminding us he saved this country from the brink of bankruptcy, when the fact is the economy has done extremely badly in the last three years. This is all about the political process and the economy.
Conveniently enough for Ed Miliband, the political process and the economy constitute two thirds of Jon Cruddas’ extensive policy review for Labour (the third leg of this tripos being society.) Whilst Falkirk was bad, the public is not altogether pleased with the extensive lobbying which appeared to culminate in the Health and Social Care Act. Private US ‘not for profit’ “health maintenance organisations” appear to have infiltrated the language of senior health policy wonks, and yet the problems of trade unions in private healthcare providers have not gone unnoticed. The main problem for David Cameron is not many people actually object in principle to the idea of democratic representation through Unions, and as for the idea of groups of people ‘holding the country to ransom’, the effect of the 1 Trillion Pound bailing out of the investment backing sector is not a trivial one. Boris Johnson and others proudly continue to ‘defend the competitive advantage’ of the City, with the Serious Fraud Office visibly impotent to deal with alleged LIBOR fraud offences in the City’s own back yard.
It is not so easy to argue that there should be a no special relationship between Labour and the Unions, as Labour historically was invented as the vehicle to represent working class citizens in parliament. Members of Unions can of course ‘opt in’ to any political party they wish, but why should they wish to have the protection of the Unions in the first place? David Cameron would be onto a winner if Unions were unpopular, but the unpalatable fact for him is that Union membership is actually on the increase. The protection of employment rights, with the Unions in a pivotal rôle to bargain for the rights of workers, has never become more relevant. With the eligible time period for unfair dismissal having gone up form one year’s continuous service to two years, and with the quantum of the unfair dismissal having gone down, there has never been a better time to protect the worker. The worker is of course part of the ‘One Nation’ economy that Ed Miliband wants, it is part of the notion that we all have something to contribute to society in One Nation, and the process of participation politically of members of Unions (not whole Unions) has been approved.
Unions matter because they can speak up for the living needs of workers, whether this is the national minimum wage, or the living wage which is widely predicted to form part of the 2015 Labour manifesto. Members of Unions are much more accountable than the private equity shareholders who have profited through the rent seeking opportunities of the Health and Social Care Act. Unions could also be pivotal in bridging the gulf between the most extremely well paid and the worst paid. By having members of Unions on the renumeration committees in public companies and private limited companies, there will not only be an apparent perception of participation of the workforce, but there will also be active participation of the workforce in decisions promoting the ‘success’ or profitability of a company. This has already been working well in Germany, and Ed Miliband and Lord Stewart Wood are already most familiar with this aspect.
To be honest, this was a ‘cheap shot’ for David Cameron and it was inevitable it would explode dramatically in Labour’s face. While the BBC’s Nick Robinson will wish to chuck water on frying oil, his case is weakened by Tony Blair’s remark that Ed Miliband has shown remarkable leadership; and we know how much ‘they’ love Tony Blair. As usual, Ed Miliband will be called ‘weak, weak, weak’, but fundamental to all this is that the “political class” grossly underestimate the level of insight which ordinary voters have. It does not matter how this is all packaged by the BBC any more. Labour members think the way the country has been run stinks. Even hardcore Conservative voters are finding it hard to learn to love Cameron any more. Cameron’s in deep shit. And he knows it.
@Ed_Miliband’s speech on the Unions and party funding, 9 July 2013 [full text]
Ed Miliband MP, Leader of the Labour Party, said:
Let me start by saying how pleased I am to be here at the St Bride’s Foundation. Only a few hundred yards from where the Labour Party was founded over a century ago. And especially to be here with so many community organisers and Labour Party members from right across the country.
I am here today to talk about how we can build a different kind of politics. A politics which is truly rooted in every community of the country and reaches out to people across every walk of life. That is what I mean by One Nation. A country where everyone plays their part. And a politics where they can. It is about a politics that is open, transparent and trusted.
Exactly the opposite of the politics we’ve recently seen in Falkirk. A politics that was closed. A politics of the machine. A politics that is rightly hated. What we saw in Falkirk is part of the death-throes of the old politics. And the reason why Falkirk is so damaging is because it comes against growing mistrust in politics. People thinking politicians are in it for themselves. Not to be trusted. Not to be believed. And every time something like Falkirk happens, it confirms people’s worst suspicions.
And as the Labour Party – the party of working people – we have a special responsibility to stand for a better politics. So I want to build a better Labour Party. A better politics for Britain. And that is what we will do. And we will do so by shaping a Party appropriate for the twenty-first century not the twentieth century in which we were founded. Understanding we live in a world where individuals rightly demand a voice, where parties need to reach out far beyond their membership and where our Party always looks like the diverse country we seek to serve, representing the national interest.
Building a better politics starts by building a Party that is truly rooted in every community and every walk of life.
A hundred years ago the Trade Unions helped found the Labour Party. Decade by decade, from Neil Kinnock to John Smith to Tony Blair, we have been changing that relationship. And in this generation, to build the new politics, we need to do more, not less, to make individual Trade Union members part of our Party – the three million shopworkers, nurses, engineers, bus drivers, construction workers, people from public and private sector.
The problem is not that these ordinary working men and women dominate the Labour Party. The problem is that they are not properly part of all that we do. The vast majority are not members of local parties, not active in our campaigns. We have to turn that round. Working people should be right at the heart of our Party.
Our relationship with individual Trade Union members needs to change. Trade Unions have political funds for all kinds of campaigns and activities as they choose. These funds are governed by law, passed in the 1980s, and there are arrangements where their members can opt-out from that fund if they do not want their money spent on political activities, activities covering a whole range of campaigning issues.
We do not need to change that law on the right of Trade Unions to have political funds. But I do want to change the way individual Trade Unionists are affiliated to the Labour Party through these funds. At the moment, they are often affiliated automatically. I do not want any individual to be paying money to the Labour Party in affiliation fees unless they have deliberately chosen to do so. Individual Trade Union members should choose to join Labour through the affiliation fee, not be automatically affiliated. In the twenty-first century, it just doesn’t make sense for anyone to be affiliated to a political party unless they have chosen to do so. Men and women in Trade Unions should be able to make a more active, individual choice on whether they become part of our Party. That would be better for these individuals and better for our Party. It could grow our membership from 200,000 to a far higher number, genuinely rooting us in the life of more of the people of our country.
I have a message to the millions of Trade Union members currently affiliated to the Labour Party: with this change I invite you to be at the centre of what this Party does, day in day out, at local level. Together, let’s change our communities and change our country.
Moving to this system has big and historic implications for both the Trade Unions and the Labour Party and they need to be worked through. But I am clear about the direction in which we must go. I have asked Ray Collins, former General Secretary of the Labour Party, to lead work on how to make this a reality and he will look at the other Party reforms I am proposing today as well. So a new politics starts with the vibrancy of our Party.
And it also needs candidates for election who are properly chosen and truly representative of our country. That is what we are doing as a Party. It is why we have taken steps over the last few years to seek more candidates from backgrounds that are under-represented. It is why I have put an emphasis on also getting more ordinary working people as candidates. It is why we have All Women Shortlists which have transformed the representation of women among MPs, now at 33% Labour and rising.
I am incredibly proud of so many brilliant candidates who have been selected for the Labour Party. Those who have served in our armed forces, our health service, successful entrepreneurs, school teachers, shop workers, all selected for the next election to represent Labour. People from almost every walk of life. But we need to make sure that every selection process happens in the fairest way. That’s not what we saw in Falkirk.
So we will have a new code of conduct for those seeking parliamentary selection. Observing this code of conduct in the selection process will be a condition for moving forward to being a parliamentary candidate for our Party. Also as a Party which believes so strongly in equal opportunity, we cannot have any part of the Party being able to stack the odds in favour of one candidate over another simply by the spending of money. We will not allow this to happen. That is why we will also urgently agree new spending limits for Parliamentary selections to include for the first time all spending by outside organisations. And the same goes for future selections to the European Parliament and future leadership contests.
So a new politics involves a diversity of candidates, from all backgrounds, selected in a fair way. It also involves ensuring trust in Members of Parliament. Just as I am proud of our new candidates, so I am proud of our Members of Parliament. All of them serve their local parties. All of them owe their allegiance to their constituents and to our country. That is the way they behave.
Many constituency Labour parties also have agreements with Trade Unions. These agreements help local parties campaign on issues that really matter to local, working people. I want it to be absolutely clear that there is a proper place for agreements like these, enabling people to campaign locally from everything from violence against shopworkers to promoting apprenticeships. They help keep our Party connected to the needs of working people. What a contrast to the Conservative Party that stands for a few out of touch people at the top. But these agreements need to be properly regulated. So henceforth, the Labour Party will establish standard constituency agreements with each trade union so that nobody can allege that individuals are being put under pressure at local level.
And there is another issue that all parties must confront if we are to rebuild trust in politics. And it is time we talked about it again. That is the pursuit of second outside jobs, sometimes paying higher salaries than the job of an MP itself. Decades ago being an MP was often seen to be a second job. The hours of Parliament starting in the afternoon, so people could do other jobs in the morning. We have changed that. But there remains a problem, as recent episodes involving lobbying and outside interests have shown. The vast majority of all MPs have performed their duties properly within the rules. And raising this issue casts no doubt upon that. But we should question the rules. The question of MPs second outside jobs has been discussed but not properly addressed for a generation. The British people expect their MPs to be representing them and the country not anyone else. They understand that Members of Parliament need to keep connected to the world beyond Westminster and will always write articles and give speeches. But can it be right that the rules allow MPs to earn hundreds of thousands of pounds from private legal practice while they are supposed to be an MP? Or from outside corporations without any real form of regulation?
We will change things in the next Parliament. That is why I believe that at the very least there should be new limits on outside earnings, like they have in other countries and new rules on conflict of interests too. The British people must be reassured that their MPs are working for them. Being an MP should not be a sideline. It’s a privilege and a duty. And the rules must reflect that. And I urge other party leaders to respond to this call for changing the system.
So we will do everything we can to have diverse local parties, candidates selected in a fair way, and we will make clear that MPs’ allegiance always being to their constituents and our country. But as we make these changes, we must also recognise that a new politics must always reach out to more people. We live in a totally different era than when the Labour Party was founded. People in Britain today are less likely to join political parties. They are more likely to focus on single issues and they are rightly demanding an open rather than a closed politics.
That is why Labour is increasingly becoming a community organisation, leading and participating in individual campaigns, from the living wage to library closures to campaigns against legal loan sharks. I know so many of you here today are pioneering that work and I applaud you for it.
As we reshape our Party for the future, we must always value the role of Party members. And I do. But valuing Party members cannot be an excuse for excluding the voice of the wider public. Since I became Labour leader, we have opened up our policy making process and opened up the Party to registered supporters, people who do not want to join Labour but share our aims. But I want to go further. If we are to restore faith in our politics, we must do more to involve members of the public in our decision making. We must do more to open up our politics. So I propose for the next London Mayoral election Labour will have a primary for our candidate selection. Any Londoner should be eligible to vote and all they will need to do is to register as a supporter of the Labour Party at any time up to the ballot. And Ray Collins will examine how to pioneer this idea elsewhere too.
Such as in future Parliamentary selections where a sitting MP is retiring and where the local party has dwindled, and a primary could make for a more properly representative selection process. I want to hear what local Labour parties think about this idea because we all know there are parts of the country where our Party could be reenergised as a result.
To build trust, we also need to change the way that our country’s politics is funded. I repeat my offer that as part of a comprehensive set of changes we should set a cap on donations from individuals, businesses and Trade Unions. I urge the other party leaders to reopen talks on how we can clean up the way we finance our politics and if they won’t, the next Labour government will start that process anew. What I have proposed today are big changes in the way we do our politics. There is no place in our Party for bad practices wherever they come from.
I am determined that we have a Labour Party that operates in a fair, open, transparent manner. I am determined we uphold the integrity of our Party. And that reaches out to the country.
These reforms though are not just putting right what has gone wrong in our Party. It is about much more. Political parties are too often seen as remote from people’s lives. As somebody who deeply believes that the Labour Party can be a force for good, we must change that. We must change it with a Party not of 200,000 but of many, many more. We must change it with candidates from diverse backgrounds, accountable to their constituents. And we must change it by reaching out at every opportunity to the people of Britain, including through primaries. These changes are about making it possible for us to change Britain for the better. All of our history shows that change does not come just from a few people at the top. It comes when good people come together to demand change. But to make that happen we need those people in our Party and we need to reach out to others outside our Party too, to genuinely build a movement again, a movement that makes change happen in communities across the country, and a movement that changes Britain.
That is what I believe. That’s what the founders of our Party knew. That is what these reforms are about. That is the Party I want us to build. That is how we will make Britain One Nation again.
The Tories have never had any ideology, so it's not surprising they've run out of steam
A lot of mileage can be made out of the ‘story’ that the Coalition has “run out of steam”, and this week two commentators, Martin Kettle and Allegra Stratton, branded the Queen’s Speech as ‘the beginning of the end’. There is a story that blank cigarette packaging and minimum alcohol pricing policies have disappeared due to corporate lobbying, and one suspects that we will never get to the truth of this. The narrative has moved onto ‘immigration’, where people are again nervous. This taps into an on-running theme of the Conservatives arguing that people are “getting something for nothing”, but the Conservatives are unable to hold a moral prerogative on this whilst multinational companies within the global race are still able to base their operations using a tax efficient (or avoiding) base. Like it or now, the Conservatives have become known for being in the pockets of the Corporates, but not in the same way that the Conservatives still argue that the Unions held ‘the country to ransom’. Except things have moved on. The modern Conservative Party is said to be more corporatilist than Margaret Thatcher had ever wanted it to be, it is alleged, and this feeds in a different problem over the State narrative. The discussion of the State is no longer about having a smaller, more cost-effective State, but a greater concern that ‘we are selling off our best China’ (as indeed the late Earl of Stockton felt about the Thatcherite policy of privatisation while that was still in its infancy). The public do not actually feel that an outsourced state is preferable to a state with shared responsibility, as the public do not feel in control of liabilities, and this is bound to have public trust in privatisation operations (for example, G4s bidding for the probation service, when operationally it underperformed during the Olympics).
It is possibly this notion of the country selling off its assets, and has been doing so under all administrations in the U.K., that is one particular chicken that is yet to come home to roost. For example, the story that the Coalition had wished to push with the pending privatisation of Royal Mail is that this industry, if loss making, would not ‘show up’ on the UK’s balance sheet. There is of course a big problem here: what if Royal Mail could actually be made to run at a profit under the right managers? Labour in its wish to become elected in 1997 lost sight of its fundamental principles. Whether it is a socialist party or not is effectively an issue which seems to be gathering no momentum, but even under the days of Nye Bevan the aspiration of Labour was to become a paper with real social democratic clout. One of the biggest successes was to engulf Britain in a sense of solidarity and shared responsibility, taking the UK away from the privatised fragmented interests of primary care prior to the introduction of the NHS. The criticism of course is that Bevan could not have predicted this ‘infinite demand’ (either in the ageing population or technological advances), but simply outsource the whole lot as has happened in the Conservative-led Health and Social Act (2012) is an expedient short-term measure which strikes at the heart of poverty of aspiration. It is a fallacy that Labour cannot be relevant to the ‘working man’ any more, as the working man now in 2013 as he did in 1946 stands to benefit from a well-run comprehensive National Health Service. Even Cameron, in introducing his great reforms of the public sector in 2010/1 argued that he thought the idea that the public sector was not ‘wealth creating’ was nonsense, which he rapidly, unfortunately forgot, in the great NHS ‘sell off’.
The Conservatives have an ideology, which is perhaps outsourcing or privatisation, but basically it comes down to making money. The fundamental error in the Conservative philosophy, if there is one, is that the sum of individual aspiration is not the same as the value of collective solidarity and sharing of resources. This strikes to the heart of having a NHS where there are winners and losers, for example where the NHS can run a £2.4 bn surplus but there are still A&E departments shutting in major cities. Or why should we tolerate a system of ‘league tables’ of schools which can all too easily become a ‘race to the bottom’? Individual freedom is as relevant to the voter of Labour as it is to the voter of the Conservative Party, but if there is one party that can uphold this it is not the Conservatives or the Liberal Democrats. No-one on the Left can quite ignore why Baroness Williams chose to ignore the medical Royal Colleges, the RCN, the BMA or the legal advice/38 degrees so adamantly, although it does not take Brains of Britain to work out why certain other Peers voted as they did over the section 75 regulations as amended. But the reason that Labour is unable to lead convincingly on these issues, despite rehearsing well-exhausted mantra such as ‘we are the party of the NHS’, is that the general public received a lot of the same medicine from them as they did from the Conservatives or the Liberal Democrats. Elements of the public feel there is not much to go further; the Labour Party will still be the party of the NHS for some (despite having implemented PFI and NHS Foundation Trusts), and the Conservatives will still be party of fiscal responsibility for some (despite having sent the economy into orbit due to incompetent measures culminating in avoidance of a triple-dip).
It doesn’t seem that Labour is particularly up for discussion about much. It gets easily rumbled on what should be straightforward arms of policy. For example, Martha Kearney should have been doing a fairly uncontroversial set-piece interview with Ed Miliband in the local elections, except Miliband came across as a startled, overcaffeinated rabbit in headlights, and refused doggedly to explain why his policy would not involve more borrowing (even when Ed Balls had said clearly it would.) Miliband is chained to his guilty pleasures of being perceived as the figurehead of a ‘tax and spend’ party, which is why you will never hear of him talking for a rise in corporation tax or taxing excessively millionaires (though he does wish to introduce the 50p rate, which Labour had not done for the majority of its actual period in government). It uses terms such as “predistribution” as a figleaf for not doing what many Labour voters would actually like him to do. Labour is going through the motions of receiving feedback on NHS policy, but the actual grassroots experience is that it is actually incredibly difficult for the Labour Party machine even to acknowledge actually well-meant contributions from specialists. The Labour Party, most worryingly, does not seem to understand its real problem for not standing up for the rights of workers. This should be at the heart of ‘collective responsibility’, and a way of making Unions relevant to both the public and private sector. Whilst it continues to ignore the rights of workers, in an employment court of law over unfair dismissal or otherwise, Labour will have no ‘unique selling proposition’ compared to any of the other parties.
Likewise, Labour, like the Liberal Democrats, seems to be utterly disingenious about what it chooses to support. While it seems to oppose Workfare, it seems perfectly happy to vote with the Government for minimal concessions. It opposes the Bedroom Tax, and says it wants to repeal the Health and Social Care Act (2012), but whether it does actually does so is far from certain; for example, Labour did not reverse marketisation in the NHS post-1997, and conversely accelerated it (admittedly not as fast as post-2012). No-one would be surprised if Ed Miliband goes into ‘copycat’ mode over immigration, and ends up supporting a referendum. This could be that Ed Miliband does not care about setting the agenda for what he wants to do, or simply has no control of it through a highly biased media against Labour.
Essentially part of the reason that the Conservatives have ‘run out of steam’ is that they’ve run out of sectors of the population to alienate (whether that includes legal aid lawyers or GPs), or run out of things to flog off to the private sector (such as Circle, Serco, or Virgin). All this puts Labour in a highly precarious position of having to decide whether it wishes to stop yet more drifting into the private sector, or having to face an unpalatable truth (perhaps) that it is financially impossible to buy back these industries into the public sector (and to make them operate at a profit). However, the status quo is a mess. The railway industry is a fragmented disaster, with inflated prices, stakeholders managing to cherrypick the products they wish to sell to maximise their profit, with no underlying national direction. That is exactly the same mess as we have for privatised electricity, or privatised telecoms. That is exactly same mess as we will have for Royal Mail and the NHS. The whole thing is a catastrophic fiasco, and no mainstream party has the bottle to say so. The Liberal Democrats were the future once, with Nick Clegg promising to undo the culture of ‘broken promises’ before he reneged on his tuition fees pledge. UKIP are the future now, as they wish to get enough votes to have a say; despite the fact they currently do not have any MPs, if they continue to get substantial airtime from all media outlets (in a way that the NHS Action Party can only dream of), the public in their wisdom might force the Conservatives or Labour to go into coalition with UKIP. There is clearly much more to politics than our membership of Europe, and, while the media fails to cover adequately the destruction of legal aid or the privatisation of the NHS, the quality of our debate about national issues will continue to be poor. Ed Miliband must now focus all of his resources into producing a sustainable plan to govern for a decade, the beginning of which will involve an element of ‘crisis management‘ for a stagnant economy at the beginning. The general public have incredibly short memories, and, although it has become very un-politically correct to say so, their short-termism and thirst for quick remedies has led to this mess. Ed Miliband seems to be capable of jumping onto bandwagons, such as over press regulation, but he needs to be cautious about the intricacies of policy, some of which does not require on a precise analysis of the nation’s finances at the time of 7th May 2015. With no end as yet in sight for Jon Cruddas’ in-depth policy review, and for nothing as yet effectively Labour to campaign on solidly, there is no danger of that.
Together
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.
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.
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.
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 precise 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.
