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Ed Miliband needs Labour to have a "differentiation strategy" of its own
Peter Hoskin in January 2012 famously in the Spectator published his version of the Richard Reeves’ famous “different strategy” of the Liberal Democrats as this parliament progressed.
When I tweeted briefly yesterday evening that David Cameron had acquired Obama’s advisor, Jim Messina, my followers who are UK Labour supporters were distinctly underwhelmed. They certainly did not share the naked excitement of Allegra Stratton, the BBC Newsnight’s political editor who was behaving as if she’d won the National Lottery. My followers instead loyally to took this to mean that more people were needed to clean up after the shambolic implementation of policies, such as #RacistVan. Many stuck to the reasonable line that the number of electoral advisers is not strongly correlated with coherence of political ideology, nor indeed electoral success. That of course will be good for Ed Miliband, who currently has no official electoral “campaign head”, although he has a strong policy steer from Lord Stewart Wood. The media are obsessed about the scalp of Lynton Crosby, and some extent they have already obtained the scalp of Tom Watson MP. However, Owen Jones on the BBC ‘Any Questions’ debate last night was quite correct to identify that, even if he personally does not agree with it, the main thrust of the Conservative Policy is in fact very clear: e.g. chucking out of the country illegal immigrants, or being tough on those people who don’t believe ‘it pays to work’. The implementation of both of the policies of course has been cack-handed, in that the Home Office continue to use the #immigrationoffenders hashtag completely ignoring the issue that suspects only become convicts if tried with due process in a legal court of war. In fact, the use of the hashtag not only offends the legal presumption of innocence, but it also potentially runs into problems with ‘contempt of court’. Nobody likewise fundamentally disagrees with the ‘it pays to work’ idea, but resent of course the scapegoating of unemployed citizens, deplore the attitude of ‘zero hours contracts’ as alleged for multi-national companies, with an abject failure to understand the ‘work credits’ policy. However, the Conservatives are ably assisted by a BBC which maintains that it maintains editorial standards upholding ‘accuracy, balance and lack of bias’, even in the face of high profile failures such as the John Humphrys decision. The Government can get away with a huge amount of misrepresentation, particularly ironic in their ambition for transparency and openness, as the debacles concerning the NHS funding and Iain Duncan Smith’s department demonstrate.
What Owen Jones has identified is that the Government appears to have a ‘vision’. Margaret Thatcher had a ‘vision’ too, which many people still profoundly disagree with. ‘Being Ed Miliband’ is pretty predictable though. For Ed, some things go well, some things go not so well. For example, his 2010 conference speech on ‘responsible capitalism’ in Liverpool was widely panned to be to a bit of a ‘turkey’, but many argued that he called it right in fact on the illegal phone hacking allegations of corporates. To give him credit, the wider ideological battle has been progressing well with him, in that policies such as workfare, where corporates abuse their power, curries favour with the public. The public also have taken to the outsourcing scandals like ducks to water, fully resentful against G4s, A4e, and Harmoni for their widely reported problems. The slight poll-lead of Labour one could argue could be greater, but it is easy to overestimate the amount of disunity in the Conservative Party. The Conservatives have had a good few months, having parked the issue about the EU referendum for now, and most importantly with the UK economy having appeared to have turned a corner at 0.6% growth. Ed Balls always had a substantial problem with the fact that he had signed up to the austerity agenda, which appears to be delivering (despite the fact that the UK economy is much more crippled than it otherwise should have been, had it followed the lead of Barack Obama). The Labour Party appears to have been voiceless over the attack on employees’ rights (in unfair dismissal claims). On the Bedroom Tax, it gives a muddled message where it appears to object to it, but does not quite commit convincingly to repealing it if it were to come into office and power on its own in May 2015. As for disability issues, many disabled citizens are left utterly confused on what Labour’s precise stance about ‘universal credit’, and how it does not seem to have any opinions on the steady stream of citizens who have committed suicide on the distress of their benefits decisions.
There are two things to form a strategy for. One is Ed Miliband, and one is Labour, though their relative fortunes are necessarily linked. You can have a reasonable ‘go’ at branding Ed Miliband as the ‘decisive leader’ on the left, despite the usual predictable reports that he can’t make up his mind what type of wine to drink (he has to drink rosé as he can’t make up his mind between red and white). This is all rather reminiscent of how Gordon Brown was also alleged not to be able to make up his mind over what type of coffee biscuit to eat, though ultimately the ‘dithering’ mistake which ultimately cost Brown his career was not this coffee biscuit problem but a problem concerning when to hold the 2010 general election. For me, the fundamental problem is that Labour does not have a clear “differentiation policy” of its own. One massive lack of differentiation remains the economy, where Ed Balls somehow has to concede ‘success’ for the Conservatives while saying that he would like to do something differently. However, Balls does not seem to wish to do anything markedly differently, as he has signed up to the same ‘austerity cuts’, not particularly winning him friends in the Unions with low pay conditions. Labour can of course remedy this by saying that it will fundamentally redesign the economy anyway such living standards are a top priority, such as with implementing a national living wage (either through law or not). However, Labour’s determination not to ‘tax and spend’, and not particularly to wish to do anything aggressive on the rich-power divide which has been bad in all governments since Thatcher to varying degrees, might fundamentally undermine this potential argument for ‘fairness’ many desire. Also, on the NHS, Ed Miliband is not actually signed up to anything fundamentally different for the NHS. Andy Burnham MP is the man who ‘is driving the Conservatives round the bend’, according to Isabel Hardman from the Spectator, because all attempts to smear him have gone belly up. However, Burnham also knows that he is not fundamentally signed up to anything vastly different when it comes to efficiency savings or PFI. The Government could of course potentially get the big four accountancy firms to advise on how it could creatively avoid tax to salvage £20bn in efficiency savings before 2020, or could decide to stop allegedly illegal wars abroad, to make up this ‘funding gap’ in the NHS. However, apart from repealing the Act which builds on the direction of the NHS competition boards set up under Labour and reducing the private income cap of s.164(1)(2A) of the Health and Social Care Act, Labour does not have a drastically different offering on the NHS apart from repeating the tired mantra that “Labour is the party of the NHS”.
Actually, as a Labour voter, I don’t actually really care whether the Liberal Democrats self-destruct or not. I am vaguely interested in whether they might wish to go into a Coalition with the Labour Party 2015, but I suspect this would not be a popular move amongst many members of the Labour Party I know. Anyway, I don’t think it’s going to happen with Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander in the higher echelons of the Liberal Democrat Party. Vince Cable for them can be easily ringfenced as a one-man protest party, so I do not expect him to have much influence and power in that party, unless his guru Lord Oakeshott can go into turbodrive with a campaign should Nick Clegg decide to fall on his sword. On the other hand, people do tend to have very short memories in politics, so ordinary voters might have somewhat forgotten about the closure of libraries, the NHS reforms, the education support allowance, welfare reforms, the economy, all decent policies where the Liberal Democrats have well and truly shafted members of Labour (and the more left-thinking members of their own party.) On the other hand, another factor governs the fate of Labour apart from the performance of Ed Miliband. That factor, whether the Liberal Democrats can rise like a phoenix from the ashes, could yet produce a problem for Labour, but while this Liberal Democrats seem totally signed up to crackpot policies such as #racistvan and lack of plain packaging cigarettes, there is no sign that the Liberal Democrats wish to leave their suicide pact yet. They know full well that if they do, David Cameron will be ecstatic, and their party meanwhile is fucked.
Ed Miliband needs Labour to have a "differentiation strategy" of its own
Peter Hoskin in January 2012 famously in the Spectator published his version of the Richard Reeves’ famous “different strategy” of the Liberal Democrats as this parliament progressed.
When I tweeted briefly yesterday evening that David Cameron had acquired Obama’s advisor, Jim Messina, my followers who are UK Labour supporters were distinctly underwhelmed. They certainly did not share the naked excitement of Allegra Stratton, the BBC Newsnight’s political editor who was behaving as if she’d won the National Lottery. My followers instead loyally to took this to mean that more people were needed to clean up after the shambolic implementation of policies, such as #RacistVan. Many stuck to the reasonable line that the number of electoral advisers is not strongly correlated with coherence of political ideology, nor indeed electoral success. That of course will be good for Ed Miliband, who currently has no official electoral “campaign head”, although he has a strong policy steer from Lord Stewart Wood. The media are obsessed about the scalp of Lynton Crosby, and some extent they have already obtained the scalp of Tom Watson MP. However, Owen Jones on the BBC ‘Any Questions’ debate last night was quite correct to identify that, even if he personally does not agree with it, the main thrust of the Conservative Policy is in fact very clear: e.g. chucking out of the country illegal immigrants, or being tough on those people who don’t believe ‘it pays to work’. The implementation of both of the policies of course has been cack-handed, in that the Home Office continue to use the #immigrationoffenders hashtag completely ignoring the issue that suspects only become convicts if tried with due process in a legal court of war. In fact, the use of the hashtag not only offends the legal presumption of innocence, but it also potentially runs into problems with ‘contempt of court’. Nobody likewise fundamentally disagrees with the ‘it pays to work’ idea, but resent of course the scapegoating of unemployed citizens, deplore the attitude of ‘zero hours contracts’ as alleged for multi-national companies, with an abject failure to understand the ‘work credits’ policy. However, the Conservatives are ably assisted by a BBC which maintains that it maintains editorial standards upholding ‘accuracy, balance and lack of bias’, even in the face of high profile failures such as the John Humphrys decision. The Government can get away with a huge amount of misrepresentation, particularly ironic in their ambition for transparency and openness, as the debacles concerning the NHS funding and Iain Duncan Smith’s department demonstrate.
What Owen Jones has identified is that the Government appears to have a ‘vision’. Margaret Thatcher had a ‘vision’ too, which many people still profoundly disagree with. ‘Being Ed Miliband’ is pretty predictable though. For Ed, some things go well, some things go not so well. For example, his 2010 conference speech on ‘responsible capitalism’ in Liverpool was widely panned to be to a bit of a ‘turkey’, but many argued that he called it right in fact on the illegal phone hacking allegations of corporates. To give him credit, the wider ideological battle has been progressing well with him, in that policies such as workfare, where corporates abuse their power, curries favour with the public. The public also have taken to the outsourcing scandals like ducks to water, fully resentful against G4s, A4e, and Harmoni for their widely reported problems. The slight poll-lead of Labour one could argue could be greater, but it is easy to overestimate the amount of disunity in the Conservative Party. The Conservatives have had a good few months, having parked the issue about the EU referendum for now, and most importantly with the UK economy having appeared to have turned a corner at 0.6% growth. Ed Balls always had a substantial problem with the fact that he had signed up to the austerity agenda, which appears to be delivering (despite the fact that the UK economy is much more crippled than it otherwise should have been, had it followed the lead of Barack Obama). The Labour Party appears to have been voiceless over the attack on employees’ rights (in unfair dismissal claims). On the Bedroom Tax, it gives a muddled message where it appears to object to it, but does not quite commit convincingly to repealing it if it were to come into office and power on its own in May 2015. As for disability issues, many disabled citizens are left utterly confused on what Labour’s precise stance about ‘universal credit’, and how it does not seem to have any opinions on the steady stream of citizens who have committed suicide on the distress of their benefits decisions.
There are two things to form a strategy for. One is Ed Miliband, and one is Labour, though their relative fortunes are necessarily linked. You can have a reasonable ‘go’ at branding Ed Miliband as the ‘decisive leader’ on the left, despite the usual predictable reports that he can’t make up his mind what type of wine to drink (he has to drink rosé as he can’t make up his mind between red and white). This is all rather reminiscent of how Gordon Brown was also alleged not to be able to make up his mind over what type of coffee biscuit to eat, though ultimately the ‘dithering’ mistake which ultimately cost Brown his career was not this coffee biscuit problem but a problem concerning when to hold the 2010 general election. For me, the fundamental problem is that Labour does not have a clear “differentiation policy” of its own. One massive lack of differentiation remains the economy, where Ed Balls somehow has to concede ‘success’ for the Conservatives while saying that he would like to do something differently. However, Balls does not seem to wish to do anything markedly differently, as he has signed up to the same ‘austerity cuts’, not particularly winning him friends in the Unions with low pay conditions. Labour can of course remedy this by saying that it will fundamentally redesign the economy anyway such living standards are a top priority, such as with implementing a national living wage (either through law or not). However, Labour’s determination not to ‘tax and spend’, and not particularly to wish to do anything aggressive on the rich-power divide which has been bad in all governments since Thatcher to varying degrees, might fundamentally undermine this potential argument for ‘fairness’ many desire. Also, on the NHS, Ed Miliband is not actually signed up to anything fundamentally different for the NHS. Andy Burnham MP is the man who ‘is driving the Conservatives round the bend’, according to Isabel Hardman from the Spectator, because all attempts to smear him have gone belly up. However, Burnham also knows that he is not fundamentally signed up to anything vastly different when it comes to efficiency savings or PFI. The Government could of course potentially get the big four accountancy firms to advise on how it could creatively avoid tax to salvage £20bn in efficiency savings before 2020, or could decide to stop allegedly illegal wars abroad, to make up this ‘funding gap’ in the NHS. However, apart from repealing the Act which builds on the direction of the NHS competition boards set up under Labour and reducing the private income cap of s.164(1)(2A) of the Health and Social Care Act, Labour does not have a drastically different offering on the NHS apart from repeating the tired mantra that “Labour is the party of the NHS”.
Actually, as a Labour voter, I don’t actually really care whether the Liberal Democrats self-destruct or not. I am vaguely interested in whether they might wish to go into a Coalition with the Labour Party 2015, but I suspect this would not be a popular move amongst many members of the Labour Party I know. Anyway, I don’t think it’s going to happen with Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander in the higher echelons of the Liberal Democrat Party. Vince Cable for them can be easily ringfenced as a one-man protest party, so I do not expect him to have much influence and power in that party, unless his guru Lord Oakeshott can go into turbodrive with a campaign should Nick Clegg decide to fall on his sword. On the other hand, people do tend to have very short memories in politics, so ordinary voters might have somewhat forgotten about the closure of libraries, the NHS reforms, the education support allowance, welfare reforms, the economy, all decent policies where the Liberal Democrats have well and truly shafted members of Labour (and the more left-thinking members of their own party.) On the other hand, another factor governs the fate of Labour apart from the performance of Ed Miliband. That factor, whether the Liberal Democrats can rise like a phoenix from the ashes, could yet produce a problem for Labour, but while this Liberal Democrats seem totally signed up to crackpot policies such as #racistvan and lack of plain packaging cigarettes, there is no sign that the Liberal Democrats wish to leave their suicide pact yet. They know full well that if they do, David Cameron will be ecstatic, and their party meanwhile is fucked.
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.
What more can Labour do?
There’s an old adage that a third of all the people who know you will love you, no matter what you do, a third of people will hate you, no matter what you do, and the rest will simply be indifferent. It’s only one day every few years, but there will be millions on 7 May 2015 (if that’s the actual date of the General Election) who literally won’t be arsed to go down to their local election headquarters, because they feel their vote will not make any difference.
As usual, all of the nation’s woes and triumphs will be distilled into an election campaign, where you can sure that some things will be blown up out of all proportion, and other things won’t be discussed. Because of the short attention span of the media, and possibly even some readers/listeners, many issues will be distilled into soundbites. Remember the ‘tax on jobs’ debate we had last time in 2010 when the economy was actually recovering, prior to any discussion of ‘double dip’ or ‘triple dip’. You can rest assured that there’ll be no debate about A&Es closing, or the GPs’ out-of-hour contracts. Immigration is likely to be a headline though, not least because of Nigel Farage whose party has yet to get a MP elected to Parliament. However, the debate won’t go anywhere near how migrant workers are needed to keep the NHS alive, or the inevitability of globalism.
All Councillors I know are incredibly passionate about their ‘doorstepping’, and the general impression that I get is that the general public is generally more clued in than one might expect. However, because of the nature of politics, it’s going to be as usual pointless voting for certain parties in certain constituencies. Last time saw Nick Clegg being propelled into the limelight, with his famous tuition fees pledge. If there is to be another battle of the personalities, it is likely that Nigel Farage will be invited this time. Some gimmick like the “worm” will be back, and we’ll all be none the wiser until polling day.
So does this mean that politics doesn’t matter? Probably yes, as long as politicians fail to inspire potential voters. Many people on the left wing are just totally uninspired between a choice between Tory and Tory lite, and do not see a Labour leader leading on issues such as disability, a state-run NHS, or an economy which doesn’t take workers for a ride. Is there much Labour can do? Possibly get a move on, as people are totally sick to death of waiting for the climax of this neverending “policy review”, which many suspect will not answer certain fundamental issues, such as the fate of NHS Foundation Trusts. We seem to be waiting an eternity to find out what else will accompany ‘The Living Wage’ as a major manifesto issue, and if Labour didn’t do as well as they had wished for in the local elections it was simply because many voters did not consider them to be offering a valid alternative.
This is dreadful, when you consider quite how disastrously this current parliamentary term has gone for the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. Clearly, ‘One Nation’ is going to run into trouble, if voters in the South of England only feel as if they have a choice between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. If the Greens are becoming increasingly popular, it is because many people believe they deserve it: for example taking a strong stance against the Bedroom Tax. Labour indeed seems to be populated by ‘big personalities’, but there is no coherent strand to their philosophy at the moment. Their narrative appears to be a collection of sparse streams of consciousness, and this does not constitute a useful sense for direction.
It is not too late for Labour to remedy this. The reputation, deserved or not, that Labour is “fiscally incontinent” is going to be difficult to shift. Whether or not Labour was right to increase the deficit through recapitalising the banks as an emergency measure is not going to be a battle to be won now, ever. If anything, the Coalition have already won that battle, as they still cite the deficit for the reason that they are governing ‘in the national interest’. Labour can take the lead on a NHS which is universal and comprehensive. It can decide to push for an economy where workers have some security and long-term prospects in their job. It can also decide to represent the views of disabled citizens, many of whom have felt demonised by this Government.
Or else, despite great Councillors, it can carry on being… well… very bland.
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.
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.
I'm a Labour member who despairs over our leadership on welfare; and I'm not the only one
So what’s new? This is yet another article about Labour and welfare. George Osborne wanted a debate about welfare, but he wants people to be united against ‘shirkers’ staying in bed while good citizens go out-to-work.
I don’t want even to go into that tired debate about working tax credits, and how the people Osborne appears to be targeting are low earners in society. I don’t wish to go into the billions of other arguments concerning this huge part of the budget, for example whether the “millionaire’s tax” would have ‘covered the costs’ of the “bedroom tax”. But increasingly I sense an overwhelming impression from Labour members like me an engulfing sense of despair. This is not about the top 15 things that Labour has promised to repeal or enact on gaining ‘power’, although virtually all of that list has to be cautioned against the state of the economy that any government will inherit in 2015. There are certainly too many variables and unpredictable externalities on the horizon, which makelife difficult. Labour is undergoing a complex review, and indeed people can contribute to the policy discussion through their website. However, there is simply a sense that the Labour Party has lost its identity, and that many people would simply like to quit and “up sticks”. Much of this is that Labour sets out to be a social democratic party, not a socialist party, so therefore has a real ideological problem with saving failing hospitals in the NHS; it paradoxically does not appear to have a problem in saving banks, increasing the deficit, creating billions of bonuses for some bankers in the cities. It engaged in ‘buy now, pay later’ behaviour which meant NHS hospitals, in the name of public infrastructure investment, being put on commercially-confidential contracts lasting decades at interest rates which most agree are competitive.
Labour’s fundamental problem is that it has fallen into the ‘bear trap’ of following not leading. 62% of people think that spending is too high, and indeed Philip Gould, Alistair Campbell and Peter Mandelson are reputed to be fond of ‘focus groups’. However, 99% of Sun voters are reputed to ‘back the Death Penalty’, and no-one is seriously proposing that Ed Miliband should ‘back the penalty’ to get elected. There is a sense that Ed Miliband will jump on any fast bandwagon going, but to give him some credit he has in fact caught a national mood over certain issues such as press regulation. However, many Labour voters feel that Ed Miliband does not share this passion over certain key issues.
Ed Miliband exhibits ‘a stuck gramophone syndrome’ when speaking about “vested interests”, which appears to be Miliband’s contorted way of reassuring the public that the Unions are not round for ‘beer and sandwiches’ every other day. But Ed Miliband simply has to emphasise, as he has tried to do to some extent, that it is the members of the Unions who, uptil now, have backed him not “the Unions” as neolithic organisations per se. Miliband has failed to make clear the essential democratic nature of the Unions, and if he has any sense of history of the Labour Party (which he does), he will wish to emphasise this. If he wishes to make the party wholeheartedly social democratic, he will not care. Surely members of Unions, such as “hard-working” (to use that tired word) nurses and teachers, will wish to have an input into nursing and teaching policy as much as private equity companies who are literally lobbying behind close doors on education and teaching policy? Labour is caught in a trap of advancing neoliberal policies of setting off hospitals against hospitals and schools versus schools, so has totally lost sight of its socialist sense of solidarity. It is currently, on welfare, allowing the debate to be ensnared and enmeshed into a discussion over ‘lazy shirkers’, and one person with 17 children setting fire to his house, but do not wish to establish basic truths about welfare for disabled citizens: that is, the living and mobility components of the current ‘disability living allowance’ do not constitute an employment benefit, but are there to help to allow disabled citizens cope with the demands in life: to use wonk speak, “to allow them to lead productive lives”.
Ed Miliband is also following not leading on the economy. The semantics of whether we should analyse the nature of the boom-bust cycle as FA Hayek would have wished us to do rather than the drawbacks of Lord Keynes’ “paradox of thrift” do not concern the vast majority of voters. However, workers who are being paid pittance, and certainly those below the statutory minimum wage, do not hear Labour screaming out from the rooftops about this achievement, which even happens to be an achievement of a Blair government. Ed Miliband has somehow managed to screw up discussions of ‘a living wage’, not in terms of allowing living standards for workers and employees, but through a convoluted discussion of ‘pre-distribution’ and the academic career of Prof Joseph Hacker (called Mr Hacker by David Cameron in ‘Prime Minister’s Questions’). Workers and employees are concerned that they can be ‘hired and fired’ below the minimum length of service (which this Government is set on reducing anyway), and that any awards for unfair dismissal will be less in future. Voters want some sort of protection through the policies of a Labour government, to curb the excesses of multi-national corporates for example, not a protracted list they can retweet at length on Twitter of the top 15 things Labour would repeal in 2015. This is basic stuff, and it is galling of a Labour opposition not even to do their fundamental job of opposing. Virtually everyone agrees that a strong opposition is essential for English parliamentary democracy.
Labour simply exudes the impression of a political party that has lost its direction, will say or do anything to get into power (while spouting platitudes such as ‘we don’t want to overpromise and under-deliver’), and is totally cautious about what offerings it possibly can supply to the general public in future. Nobody is expecting them to have a detailed manifesto, but a sense of the ‘direction of travel’, in other words people saying that disability living allowance is not an employment benefit, or that Labour would seek to curb his ‘hire-and-fire culture’ and discuss with the Unions how to go about this, would help enormously. Another critical problem is presented by the sentiment conveyed in Adnan Al-Daini’s tweet this afternoon: “If the #Labour party is going to mimic the Tory party at every step what is the point of it? Same policies different rhetoric! #hypocrisy”. Labour, at an increasing number of junctures it seems, appears to be quite unable of opposing convincingly because of its past. I am the first person to promote rehabilitation, but this is genuinely a problem now. It is claimed that Labour introduced the equivalent of the “bedroom tax” for the private sector, so themselves should not be aghast that this has been proposed on an ‘equal playing field basis’. I happen to oppose strongly the “bedroom tax”, as it appears to discriminate against sections of the population, such as disabled citizens. The NHS is another fiasco. Labour ‘as the party of the NHS’ can offer to repeal the Health and Social Care Act (2012), but this is a symbolic (and rather vacuous) promise. The problem with Foundation Trusts still in a ‘failure regime’ will exist, the issue of hospitals paying off their PFI loans on an annual basis will still exist, and it was Labour themselves who legislated for an Act of parliament managing procurement (the Public Contracts Regulations Act); through a long series of complex cases, NHS hospitals have become enmeshed in EU competition law, but Labour had, whether it likes it or not, set in motion a direction of travel where hospitals would be caught in the ‘economic activity’ and competition law axis of the EU.
What Labour obviously did not legislate for was to allow up to 49% of income of hospitals to come from private sources, nor to make the legislative landscape most amenable for private providers to enter with the lowest barriers-to-entry; it was a policy decision of the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats not to give the NHS any unfair ‘protection’, meaning that the NHS would of course be expected not to provide anywhere near a universal, comprehensive service. However, as the marketisation of the NHS and privatisation has been accelerated, but one in which Labour to a much lesser degree did participate, it is hard for Labour to provide convincingly a narrative on what it wants to do next. Labour seem very eager to produce apologies at the drop-of-a-hat, such as on immigration (which came to a head with the Gillian Duffy altercation after Gordon Brown forgot to remove his clip-on microphone and Sky happened to take a recording of it). It has tried to apologise for the emergency spending on the banks during the global financial crisis, but experts are far from convinced about why the banks were not allowed to fail; it is an inherent paradox in the Labour narrative that it seems content with allowing NHS hospitals to fail, but seems reluctant to allow banks to fail (meaning shareholders and directors of banks can be rewarded, and Labour gets blamed for the exploding deficit).
Against the backdrop of a false security of poll leads perhaps, Labour’s performance is floundering because it just appears to be opposing for the sake of it; it is now a rational accusation of the Coalition to say that Labour opposes virtually everything (except for Workfare and the “benefits cap” perhaps), but does not appear to have constructive policies of its own. Despite its rhetoric on “vested interests”, it seems perfectly happy to honour the contracts it started with ATOS over the disastrous outsourcing of welfare benefits (which has seen 40% of some benefits overturned on appeal, and some claimants reported to have suffered psychological distress through the benefits application process), yet, apart from a handful of excellent MPs such as Michael Meacher, seems rather limp at criticising this particular ‘vested interest’. It is a problem when the public perception of Labour protecting multi-national vested interests overrides its ‘loyalty’ to the Unions. It is also a problem when two years into the leadership of Ed Miliband the media are unable to report the closure of law centres or the problems of the NHS privatisation process but can only report how to self-litigate and what to expect from your GP in this new NHS landscape. Ed Miliband’s fundamental problem is that he gives the impression of being a follower not a leader. Miliband appears like a TV newsreader, nicely a product of “make up”, but whose autocue is suffering a technical fault. Labour does not currently inspire confidence. If it is the case where the best Labour voters can hope for is a ‘hung parliament’, despite glaring incidents of an #omnishambles government, something is very wrong indeed.
