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Gordon Brown did not bankrupt the economy, like Andrew Mitchell perhaps did not say some things as alleged
Whilst it is for Andrew Mitchell ‘to clear his name’, with the help of the Tory-led media, it is perhaps time to right another wrong. And that is that Gordon Brown did not single-handedly cause a global recession. Whilst the newspapers are full of Andrew Mitchell’s rigorous defence, it is perhaps time, especially ahead of Christmas, to knock on the head what has been the biggest lie of all time. That due to the Labour government led by Gordon Brown Britain nearly became bankrupt.
A reminder from Hansard from 22 April 2009 reminds us of the magnitude of the problem facing HM Government’s at that time,
Meanwhile George Osborne had wished to meet the spending commitments of Labour – and in fact exceed them, as he proudly boasted in front of the Tory-led BBC one breakfast morning.
The “deficit myth” is of course well rehearsed elsewhere. See for example this now seminal outstanding article by Ramesh Patel which has been shared more than 5000 times on Twitter, which establishes some of the main points. Indeed, yesterday the Guardian provided (again) the data in all their full clarity, demonstrated in this graph here. This graph shows that the Tories ran a formidable deficit themselves during the tenures of Norman Lamont and Ken Clarke, and that the deficit did explode as a result of the global financial crisis (to repeat, a global financial crisis not caused by Gordon Brown).
Well does it matter? Of course it matters hugely. The whole raison d’être of this “wretched coalition” is “to sort out the mess that Labour left”. When most people are asked why they don’t blame Labour for the state of the NHS during their period of office, when indeed it has been reported that there was a record level of patient satisfaction, many people apparently respond that “they were one of the lucky ones”. Quite often, at this point the line of attack then changes to personal attacks on Gordon Brown, “selling off gold”, completing ignoring the issue that George Osborne’s record on selling gold is not spectacular itself.
And it clearly does matter, given that borrowing continues to be a problem in the UK, and whilst the Coalition inherited an economy which was growing – albeit in a fragile way in May 2010 – it then entered double-dip recession, which a period of temporary recovery, boosted by some creative accounting. George Osborne and his media team obviously did not take too kindly to Evan Davies’ excellent questioning of George Osborne over the use of the 4G [future] receipts in presenting the GDP figures. The evidence indeed now points towards a “triple-dip recession“.
Indeed, the line of attack has always thus far be to compare us to Greece, and how we are at risk of losing our ‘gold-plated triple A rating‘. However, Downing Street has hard to embark on a propaganda war saying how because of the Eurozone crisis it might be inevitable we will now lose this rating, with bad news ‘which keeps on coming’. The risk to our triple A rating, as is widely known, long predates the Eurozone crisis, with eminent Keynesian economists, who know considerably more about economics than the Chancellor, warning about the dire consequences of pursuing a lack of growth. Such economists have of course included Prof Paul Krugman, Prof David Blanchflower, Prof Joe Stiglitz, and Lord Skidelsky (two of whom have won the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in economics).
And of course the ‘parlour state of the nation’s finances’ provides the raison d’être for the ‘slash and burn’ failed economic policies of the UK government since May 2010. I remember very clearly when Sunder Katwala, Director of “British Future” but at that time Chair of the Fabian Society, with speakers including John Denham MP, told a packed breakfast meeting at a fringe meeting in September 2010 how, even if the reduction of the deficit in the UK went successfully, there would be an invitable aftermath of social destruction which would be hard to remedy. Since then, the Government has embarked on a £2bn (estimated) reorganisation of the NHS amongst opposition from the BMA and the Medical Royal Colleges, libraries have been shut, withdrawal of “education maintenance allowance”, and the welfare reforms have been a disaster (with 30-40% of “fit-for-work” claim decisions overturned on appeal).
So before we lose too much sleep over Andrew Mitchell, it’s perhaps time to think about another wrong that should be righted, as we tell this current lot to “get on their bike” in 2015.
The Left chooses sometimes the wrong battles to fight viscerally
John Maynard Keynes, an outstanding mathematician and economist from King’s College Cambridge, died on 21 April 1946. In the same year, William Beveridge, Master of University College Oxford, became a life peer. On On 1 December 1942, the government, also a coalition but this time in war-time, published a report entitled ‘Social Insurance and Allied Services’. It had been written by Sir William Beveridge, a highly regarded economist and expert on unemployment problems, and a rightly-celebrated Liberal. The Beveridge Report quickly became the blueprint for the modern British welfare state. Dr Jose Harris, fellow of St Catherine’s College and widow of the great Prof Jim Harris, Chair of Jurisprudence at Oxford, has written a brilliant biography of Beveridge if you wish to chart the development of Beveridge’s ideas.
The Labour Party eventually adopted the Beveridge proposals, and after their victory in the 1945 general election, proceeded to implement many social policies, which became known as the welfare state. These included: the National Insurance (Industrial Injuries) Act [1946], National Insurance Act [1946], National Health Service Act [1946] and the National Insurance Act [1949].
To answer the question whether these are “good” laws, perhaps one has to consider what is the purpose of law or jurisprudence. Today, Richard Dworkin is the Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law and Philosophy at New York University and Emeritus Professor of Jurisprudence at UCL. Notably, Dworkin appears to argue that moral principles that people hold dear are often wrong, even to the extent that certain crimes are acceptable if one’s principles are skewed enough, being a vocal critic of Hart’s legal positivism.
Patrick O’Flynn (@oflynnexpress) in the Daily Express gives this account this morning:
The next day the Daily Express told the story of Stephanie Fennessy-Sharp and Ian Sharp and their combined brood of 10 children. Neither adult was in employment and yet the benefits system gave their household an income of more than £49,000 – the equivalent to a pre-tax salary of £72,000. “We’re taking advantage of the system but that’s the system’s fault,” said Mrs Fennessy-Sharp. Mr Sharp claimed: “If I work more than an hour I feel ill and get stressed.” Scanning the list of the family’s benefits to see how the £49,000 was arrived at, all the usual suspects were there: £20,400 in housing benefit for their five-bedroom home, £8,320 in incapacity benefit, £4,524 in child benefit, £1,200 in council tax benefit. But one item stopped me in my tracks: £14,456 child tax credits.
Later in the article, Patrick explains the following:
A spokesman confirmed that there is no rule stipulating that you have to work in order to get child tax credits. In fact the more children you have and the less work you do, the higher the amount you are entitled to tends to be. The Revenue simply pays regular large sums into your bank account.
The Working Tax Credit (WTC) is a state benefit to people who work on a low income. It is a part of the current system of refundable (or non-wastable) tax credits introduced in April 2003 and is a means-tested social security benefit. In addition, people may also be entitled to the Child Tax Credit (CTC) if they are responsible for any children. The idiotic thing is that despite their name, tax credits are not linked to a person’s tax bill. The WTC can be claimed by working individuals, childless couples and working families with dependent children. The WTC and CTC are assessed jointly and families remain eligible for CTC even if where no adult is working or they have too much income to receive the WTC.
The Left might validly ask where did this ludicrous system come from? And yes indeed they might. Dawn Primarolo was responsible for implementation for the tax credits, under Tony Blair’s tenure as PM with Gordon Brown as Chancellor. The Left do themselves a massive disservice by not upholding the principles of the Beveridge report which they enacted. This should be one of the things that the Left does apologise for; given that Ed Miliband has been apologising for virtually everything else, it seems ludicrous that he should not admit that this was a major failing of the Blair/Brown regime. Furthermore, at a time when there are genuine debates to be had about the chaos in welfare funding (for example for disabled citizens), rather than James Purnell and Liam Byrne pandering to a media agenda about how Labour supports ‘tough welfare’ whilst perhaps concentrating somewhat on their own careers, this is a tragedy. And yes it is a tragic legacy of a Blair Labour government.
Glowing Professorial reviews of 'Beyond the Crash' by Gordon Brown
The book is a fascinating view from one of the inside players. Gordon Brown was one of the first people to recognise there was a problem with how the banks evaluated debts. In dealing with the debt of Africa in 2005, he became aware of this problem in Gleneagles in 2005. American banks underestimated the huge amounts of bad debt. After 2008, when the crisis was beginning to blow, Gordon Brown was the first to realise this crisis and he recapitalised the banks. The banks had gone in for easy money, but worldwide co-operation would have made the situation easier. If we play the game – and Gordon Brown’s book is a huge contribution – global development can be managed in a co-operative way, and the crisis can be finished soon. If the lessons are not learned, this will linger for a long time.
Prof. Amaryta Sen, Professor of Economics at Harvard University, Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1998
Watch the video here.
This is an intense book with few revelatory moments. The reader would not gather that while Brown was busy saving the world, his domestic political position was crumbling. For an instant account of the Brown premiership, you will need to turn to Anthony Seldon’s and Guy Lodge’s Brown at 10.
Still, what Brown chooses to reveal is illuminating. He likes statistics because he sees “stories behind numbers”. He tells how he prepares for “huge challenges” by reading widely, consulting the cleverest people available, and then thinking through the consequences of alternative decisions. This orderly intellectual preparation is in stark contrast to his chaotic administrative habits. The book is infused with a subdued moral passion. Deficiency of aggregate demand is “not an abstract question but a profoundly moral one; to my mind it is simply wrong to leave people without jobs and the ability to build a better life for their families when there is work that needs to be done”. Brown blames the bankers not just for their incompetence but their lack of morals.
Brown follows other fallen leaders in being more admired abroad than at home. He came to care more about poverty in the developing world than in Britain, a right priority for a statesman, but fatal for an elected politician. At a summit in Italy, he brought tears to Berlusconi’s eyes and a more practical response from Obama with the story of a boy tortured to death in Rwanda.
Prof. Robert Skidelsky, Emeritus Professor of Political Economy, Warwick University, Guardian, 12 December 2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/dec/12/beyond-the-crash-gordon-brown-robert-skidelsky
A devalued Prime Minister of a devalued Government: where's Hannan now?
History has a knack of repeating itself, and after the razzmazztazz of Cameron in Zurich, we can now sense that ‘all that glistens is not gold’. The state of the UK economy has been pathologically weak for some time – only helped by some ‘ionotropic’ economic medicine dished out by chief physician Dr Gordon Brown, with capable Specialist Registrar Mr Alistair Darling. The Consultant Brown knew that the currency of Britain has been devaluing for some years now. In an article entitled “David’s Cameron cost-cutting echoes of Thatcher’s last government”, William Keegan writes,
Now the obsession of what increasingly seems like a born-again Thatcher government is with the budget deficit rather than inflation or the trades unions. True, as a result of the massive devaluation of sterling in the past few years, inflation has crept up slightly. But it is still at a historically low level and the main concern of both the Bank of England here and the Federal Reserve across the Atlantic has been fear of deflation, or falling prices.
His patients have been looking on with eagerness. The Specialist Registrar spoke of ‘forces of hell’, which the media loved of course because it detracted them from talking about real issues. A fierce critic of Dr. Brown, Mr. Daniel Hannan, famously used the phrase, “A devalued Prime Minister of a devalued Government”, in this speech, making specific reference to how Gordon Brown should not have spent money on public services, but instead should have paid off the national debt. In my opinion, this mismanagement of the economy proposed by Daniel Hannan, while pompous and elegant, does not acknowledge that economic policy needs to be long-term not short-term. Why then did Gordon Brown not pay off the debt to reduce the deficit, to avoid paying lots of interest in the long-term? Another little cited point is discussed by William Keegan:
The theoretical justification for the attack on public spending in the early 1980s was the putative link between public sector borrowing and inflation, via the impact on the money supply. But, as we have seen, even Friedman, the apostle of monetarism, acknowledged the stabilising influence of public sector deficits in time of recession.
Now, with inflation negligible and the unions long since emasculated, the theoretical justification for the obsession with deficits is the supposed difficulty of financing them. But, as figures in the latest annual report of the Bank for International Settlements show, the UK is top of the league when it comes to the length of time before its debt has to be refinanced, with the average maturity of its debt at 14 years, compared with under nine years for the US and Germany.
The whole speech is here.
If Britain is so terrible, then which country does Mr Hannan admire? Iceland. In 2004, Mr Hannan wrote a polemic in The Spectator magazine praising the country for pursuing a “Thatcherite agenda that is off limits to EU members”. He added: “That attitude has made them the happiest, freest and wealthiest people on earth.” The fact that Iceland’s binge on cheap debt has left its financial system bankrupt and seeking entry to the EU has done little to dim his enthusiasm. In a recent blog, Mr Hannan wrote: “Don’t do it Iceland. Your current status gives you the best of all worlds. It made you rich and free.”
This is completely laughable, given how events panned out for Iceland according to the BBC website:
“Iceland’s economic difficulties became evident in the autumn of 2008 as conditions tightened in the global credit market. Icelandic banks owed around six times the country’s total Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and when the world’s credit markets dried up, they were left unable to refinance loans”
This is simply serial pathology, of the Conservatives trying to replace economic realism with populist fantasy. In 2006, George Osborne was equally “looking and learning” from Iceland. Osborne confidently wrote,
“A GENERATION ago, the very idea that a British politician would go to Ireland to see how to run an economy would have been laughable. The Irish Republic was seen as Britain’s poor and troubled country cousin, a rural backwater on the edge of Europe. Today things are different. Ireland stands as a shining example of the art of the possible in long-term economic policymaking, and that is why I am in Dublin: to listen and to learn.”
Like an Icelandic volcano, the dust has settled, but here’s not to say we’ve got rid of the tremors.
It's even more clear Gordon Brown is man of integrity
Gordon Brown’s book ‘Beyond the crash: Overcoming the first crisis of globalization’ will be on sale next Monday. To order it, please use this link.
Gordon Brown’s book will give an account of the events that led to the fiscal downward spiral and the reactions of world leaders as they took steps to avoid further disaster to build a sound economic future; it is anticipated that this work will help readers to understand what really has happened to the UK economy. Brown believes that we now live in a world of global trade, global financial flows, global movements of people and instant global communications. Our economies are connected as never before, and it is Brown’s central thesis that global economic problems require global solutions and global institutions.
I am particularly struck by the title of Gordon Brown’s book because of its uncanny similarity to ‘Beyond the Crisis’, written by Prof Amarytna Sen, who indeed was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics. Prof Sen was the Master of Trinity College Cambridge, and is a Emeritus Professor of Economics, like the Labour peer Lord John Eatwell.
It is plainly obvious that George Osborne is clearly out of his depth in comparison. Gordon Brown has held his beliefs in strong leadership, despite formidable criticism. It is clear now he is a man of enormous integrity. For example, he did not make cheap political points regarding Gary Mackinnon. Whilst David Cameron and Nick Clegg have already achieved some coverage over this, Wikileaks has revealed some ‘behind-the-scenes’ work of Gordon Brown that nobody knew about. Gary McKinnon’s mother, Janis Sharp, is due to testify to Vaz’s committee this morning as it launches a hearing into the extradition demands. Brown made his unsuccessful direct intervention in August 2009, according to a secret cable from the US ambassador in the UK, Louis Susman, to the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton.
Some broadsheet journalists indeed deserve a very bad press
The arrogance and self-opinionated, badly-evidenced, garbage of some broadsheet journalists beggars belief. I should like to keep Mary Riddell out of this, whose article on the branding of David Cameron I think was the best piece of journalism this year, and Polly Toynbee, whose views on social democracy are far stronger than me but whose articles are always erudite and thought-provoking. Provoking I suppose is another word for the other end of broadsheet Fleet Street, such as Victoria Coren and Paul Waugh, whose ramblings seem insightful prima facie, but actually border on prejudiced and imbalanced on frequent occasion: more inciteful than insightful. Please don’t get me wrong; there’s a lot of brilliant investigative journalism done by the red tops and others, which enriches the accountability of people in power and influence.
I suppose my wrath was first incurred by Andy Marr’s latest contribution in the Guardian:
“The BBC’s website has nearly 100 blogs and invites its readers to “have your say” on an enormous range of topics, from Westminster to the weather.
But one of the corporation’s most familiar faces, Andrew Marr, has dismissed bloggers as “inadequate, pimpled and single”, and citizen journalism as the “spewings and rantings of very drunk people late at night”.
Marr, the BBC’s former political editor who now presents BBC1’s flagship Sunday morning show, said: “Most citizen journalism strikes me as nothing to do with journalism at all.
“A lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed young men sitting in their mother’s basements and ranting. They are very angry people,” he told the Cheltenham Literary Festival. “OK – the country is full of very angry people. Many of us are angry people at times. Some of us are angry and drunk”.
For Andy Marr, this surely is a case of “don’t bite the hand that feeds you”. The relationship between blogging and the mainstream press has recently surfaced, for example at the top of the Gherkin.
Could it possibly be that the only reason that Andy Marr feels so bitter about blogs is that he has trouble in getting superinjunctions of them? Meanwhile, top blogger Iain Dale makes a very valid point that the news about William Hague MP was not ‘mainstream’ until the Foreign Office had issued a statement on it, and that was only because Guido Fawkes had successfully raised the issue in the blogosphere. I remember the abuse on Twitter thrown at Andy Marr by my Labour friends and colleagues when he mooted with Gordon Brown the notion that he was on the anti-depressant. His sources? I can find no mainstream source of this, prior to the blogosphere. My Tory friends have been making much hay of this, as if it’s a very central public isssue. It really is not – people should not stigmatise mentally ill people who lead successful lives, in much the same way that homosexuals go about their business in professional life with enormous skill and ability.
Broadsheet journalists should not have the monopoly of informed opinion. They incessantly go on about the disabled and bankers, like Mary Riddell did today. However, as a disabled person, I would like my views to be taken account. For that matter, as a person who has six real degrees to a high level in both undergraduate studies and postgraduate studies, I have well informed opinions about the graduate tax and student finance in general. For example, I have an opinion about ‘making people pay back more’, given that I personally have not been in salaried employment since 2006, which is an enormous strain for me and my parents with whom I live in Primrose Hill. I don’t want to read journalists pontificating about this everyday – but let’s face it this is how they sell copy. Likewise, when I was in medicine, I don’t remember people asking underpaid immigrant nurses for their views about living in a more globalised UK, and the thorny issues of insecurity, aspiration, and fairness. Get out of your ivory towers. I am disabled. I live in the real world, with only my disability living allowance as a regular source of income. I find your articles patronising, and it’s obvious you haven’t spoken to the people involved? Talk to the bankers whom you intend to impose your levy on, but for heaven’s sake keep discussion of them outside discussion of me (the disabled). I understand totally, however, your predicament of considering us ‘in the round’ as we are all part of the Big Society, notionally, but our problems are different to theirs!
Dr Shibley Rahman
Queen’s Scholar, BA (1st.), MA, MB, BChir, PhD, MRCP(UK), LLB(Hons.), FRSA
Director of Law and Medicine Limited
Member of the Fabian Society and Associate of the Institute of Directors
A view point from Timothee Defaramond as to why David Miliband should be leader
Many thanks to Timothee Defamond for the account below of why voters should strongly consider putting David Miliband down as their no.1 choice for the Labour leadership.
There is one thing that David Miliband doesn’t seem to get nearly enough credit for – his radicalism. And yet it is this very radicalism that makes him the right person to take Labour forward, not only to the next election, but beyond that too. David is the candidate with the vision and ideas that can make Labour once again a party sure of purpose and clear about its priorities, a candidate that can give serious meaning to the left in Britain, and go beyond opposing the coalition’s unfair cuts.
One of the cornerstones of the Labour movement is the idea of equality. But what does equality mean for our society today, and why do we seek to achieve it? In many of these speeches David has tackled this head on. At the heart of our belief in equality is that idea that we should all have the ability to lead a life that we can authentically call our own. To achieve this individuals need power – and empowering individuals and communities is what should be at the core of our commitment to reducing inequalities. Furthermore, it means allowing individuals control over the public services they receive. That is the opposite of the top-down Labour state some party members have come to fear. Finally, we need to remember that we all have a stake in the success of the lives of each other, and that we’ll get the best results through cooperation rather than competition. David’s ideas are incredibly powerful, and putting them at the heart of policy making will make Labour the party that wins the next election.
David is also radical in his approach to the party. He promises to transform it to build “a movement not a machine”. For too long we have ignored the grassroots of the party and as a result lost touch with the very people we are representing. David promises to buck this trend by putting the leader of Labour’s councillors in the shadow cabinet. Furthermore, through the Movement for Change, David wants to allow Labour to be more involved in communities through community organising. Over 700 community organisers have already been trained as part of the Movement for Change, and their successes already show that the Labour movement can be effective even when the party is out of power.
All five candidates in this election are strong, and all will have a bearing on the future of the party. A Yougov poll this week showed David as the public’s favourite choice by far to replace David Cameron. Whatever happens to the coalition, we must be ready to persuade the country it is in their interests to vote Labour, and only one candidate can achieve this: David Miliband.
Tony Blair – The Journey : A failure to tackle inequality is a dangerous precedent for Labour
Actually, reading a book with such a careful index is like reading the abstract of a scientific paper. You can easily miss out the best bits, and get such a soupçon that you totally miss out on the real flavour. This could be the detriment of understanding Tony Blair, or possibly be an advantage. Despite my protestations which principally come from the Andrew Marr interview on the BBC, I went into the journey with an open mind, I hope..
The thing I instantly liked about “The Journey” is that it is easy to underestimate the nadir from which Labour actually came at the height of Margaret Thatcher’s popularity. I remember in my 20s what a disaster the Conservatives had become internally, and how they had virtually imploded on the issue of Europe (a topic which still threatens their infrastructure today). So, it was for me as Blair described indeed, having lived through the experience that Tony Blair talks about. I feel that I can actually empathise with his account, even though I have zero emotional intelligence, arguably, myself.
I had got used to defeat myself, I didn’t expect Blair to win, when I was at the age of 23, having experienced so many defeats in the past for me during the Thatcher generation. Quite early on in the book, Tony Blair seems to have an acknowledgement of not making his writing too self-congratulatory. Whether he’s actually succeeded on this I feel is a very tough call. His prosaic style varies from being candid emotionally, to being rather unemotional, as if he is talking in ‘legal speak’. However, the sense of excitement is there, as well as some sense of expectation management.
Some things in the book are pretty predictable. For example, the glowing reference of Alastair Campbell shines through. However, I find Blair very unclear on obvious certain failures of domestic policy. For example, I don’t feel that Tony Blair really tackles head-on the equality (inequality) divide. An epiphenomenon of this is that neither ‘poverty’ or ‘inequality’ are words are in the index, which I am sure that Tony Blair didn’t compile. There is an appearance of lip service to the Fabian Society, on a somewhat academic footing, with a surprising acknowledgement of Tony Benn and Tony Crossland at the University of Oxford. Blair seems to identify the problem:
“Once so altered, [Benn and Crossland] became staunch advocates of social action and of the party of the trade unions and the working class whose lives had to be liberated from the conditions of poor housing, poor education and poor health care.”
Critically, there is no explanation – or even an attempt at an explanation – of whether improvements in social indequality were achieved. However, it does seem that the culture of Blair, with the emphasis on September 11th, Gordon Brown, Alastair Campbell Iraq and Islam, seems to have somewhat overshadowed all this, and this really shows in the book. These topics have been described extensively elsewhere, so I won’t mention them. However what I did find incredibly interesting that a much publicised move was that of Gordon Brown to reduce the capital gains tax to a rate of 15%. Even Blair calls this move by Brown as heralded by politics than any real conviction, so the overwhelming impression for the reader like me is that Gordon Brown deliberately wished to court the city against any notion of anti-business rather than having thought carefully about the social and economic sequelae. Robert Peston has indeed cited this as a reason where the Blair/Brown axis failed, and I agree. Was the Labour government successful on this single issue, irrespective of Iraq or Afghanistan, more school and nurses, etc.? No.
This is a big deal, because parties tend to lose when they systematically alienate groups of people. I noticed this with Margaret Thatcher first of all, but I have latterly felt that Gordon Brown and Tony Blair did this with the working, middle and upper classes. “Somethings got to give” as Marilyn Monroe said, and it must before the next election, in addition to Labour formulating a coherent response to the effect of cuts on the economy and real people.
Is he a great leader? Well, he certainly achieved a lot, but it’s a moot point whether he made his domestic policies so toxic so as to make them rather uninspirational. Thankfully, there are other features of a good leader, such as intelligence, passion, focus, risk-taking and enthusiasm, and you can conceivably argue that Blair had all of these in abundance.
I will vote for David Miliband if we move on from New Labour
I know that the title sounds incredibly petty, but many including the Mirror wish him to become leader, and the Tories apparently terrified for him. I’m seeing Ed at Haverstock Hill School on Sunday in one of his last hustings, but if this is true I will take it seriously.
Dear Shibley,
I respect both Tony and Gordon deeply. But their time has passed. Their names do not appear on the leadership ballots. And now we need to stop their achievements being sidelined and their failings holding us back.
I’m sick and tired of the caricature that this leadership election is a choice between rejecting or retaining New Labour. It does a disservice to all of the candidates and, even worse, a disservice to the thousands of members who’ve been participating in this contest over the last few months and working hard for years.
To those trying to trash our past and those trying to recreate it, I say enough is enough, it is time to move on.
I joined the Labour Party back in 1983 because I believed then, as I do now, that we are stronger when we stand together. And that has never been truer than when applied to our Party.
I believe that this election is about pulling together all the talents of our Party. It’s about teamwork, mutual respect – and a rejection of the tired old Westminster games of closed door briefings, posturing, attack and rebuttal. I want to change the way we do politics.
Because I want to lead a government not a gang, a movement not a machine, where honest debate can be a source of strength, not a sign of weakness.
And we do this for a simple goal – because we want Labour to be the Party that enables hard working people to achieve their aspirations.
That means building a new economy – to drive down unemployment right across Britain. It means ensuring work pays with a living wage. It requires tackling the too wide gap in life chances.
In politics, moments matter. So as your ballot papers land on your doorstep in the next few days, I humbly ask for your vote for Leader of our Party.
If you’re planning to vote for me as your first preference or second preference please let me know by clicking here
Or if you’re still undecided please click here and a member of my team will be in touch
Together we can cast the old play book aside – we can once again reflect the lives, the communities and the best hopes of the British people.
The first 100 days of the Coalition Government has shown their creed – and made our task all the more urgent. There are millions of people who need Labour to win again to deliver them a fair chance in life. And I will not let them down.
I am ready to lead. But at this crucial moment I need your support to make the Labour Party the change Britain needs.
Please vote for me as your first preference.
Thank you,
David Miliband
Election night
This is my brand new blog. I am hoping to keep a record of what happens to Labour during the term whether or not they are in government. Whatever the result tonight, I suspect Labour will finally ‘put up and shut up’ if Cameron or Clegg are in power. Labour only have themselves to blame, and I personally consider it is a massive achievement that Gordon Brown has got this far. Impressive, given all the media apart from the New Statesman and Mirror hate him, and the Conservatives had a formidable advantage. They were able to pay for 100,000 text messages (we still don’t know how they got the private phone numbers of individuals) or a giant advert on the front page, on Tube. At least we had something truly brilliant and authentic, and it is with a heavy heart that I say that I am disgusted to live in the UK tonight – disgusted because the Tories truly disgust me, whether it includes Warsi’s offensive comments on Muslims, Stroud’s offensive comments about the mentally ill or Grayling’s offensive comments about homosexuality. This has now received over 100,00 hits gratis.
