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Don’t blame Liz Truss. It’s exactly what you voted for.
Enter man of the moment, Jeremy Hunt.
Jeremy Hunt is yet another very wealthy man, who really doesn’t need to be there in the centre of government. Like Liz Truss, Nadhim Zadhawi or Rishi Sunak, he would be able to ‘work from home’, and still draw a handsome salary from various options and dividends. He doesn’t need to lift a finger to ‘help’ the country. He already had plenty of scope to stop social care from haemorrhaging, or to stop the decline of the NHS by introducing a workforce plan. The fact that Jeremy Hunt declined to do so, despite plenty of opportunity, whilst waging war with the junior doctors, still speaks volumes. There is an absurd irrational hope that ‘holding the pursestrings’ to the Treasury he might be able to stop the depravity of NHS and social care funding. Judging on his past performance, I wouldn’t hold your beer.
OK, in the words of Tories doing their faux humility routine, I ‘get it’. Liz Truss said all along that she felt that by reducing the tax load on everyone, she could suddenly magic up growth. Her intention was stated explicitly as getting rid of the NJ levy and by stopping the Sunak increase in corporation tax, I think this stratehy is bananas, but she explained it on many occasions for the hustings she did over many weeks. This was not a surprise. It was her economic policy. She did not ‘go rogue’ at the last minute. The decision to appoint Kwasi Kwarteng came right at the end – but he did not ‘go rogue’ either. His economic ‘scorch and burn’ credentials were known for a long time. The approach was articulated in ‘Britannia unchained’. It was not a surprise that, as a person who had been active in Eton and the Cambridge Union, Kwarteng might be ruthlessly ambitious – a bit like his Oxford Union contemporaries described as ‘Chums’ in the Boris Johnson circle.
The media ‘lobby’ had all the opportunity in the world to dissect this approach. None of them chose to. I am not even sure that any of them are especially literate in macroeconomics;. As far as I know, the leading lights in the Institue of Economic Affairs are largely illiterate in economics too. And yet they profess to be big experts – exactly what is bringing Britain into decline. Michael Gove culturally made a massive mistake in denigrating experts, but maybe this was simply a Trumpian malign influence. None of ‘the lobby’ seemed capable of pointing out that the sums did not add up – borrowing, tax spending or public spending. Sunak knew, but wasn’t given the oxygen to explain himself. No wonder he is keeping his counsel now.
As you can see, I am launching into a ‘blame game’ – this is not particularly helpful now, but simply makes me feel good for ‘doing something about’ the reputation of Great Britain being trashed internationally. The words used to describe Britain now range from ‘farce’ to ‘basket case’. Previously, the ‘lobby’ had put this down to a very focal vendetta from the New York Times, but clearly the game was up when Bloomberg agreed, and then the markets hyperventilated when the ‘not so’ mini-budget was revealed (or rather unravelled). My point is that Liz Truss is a known contrarian. There is nothing there to be especially surprised about. Rishi Sunak was very clear on the arguments, although it is clear that he made some own goals himself, whether it was talking about educational aspiration or ‘levelling up’. The media went for it in attacking him, in their comparisons to Brutus in the Julius Caesar context, or his love of PRADA shoes. None of this post mortem especially helps the person whose standard variable rate mortgage dividends have shot up, or the person who has to put his business for sale as he cannot afford the energy bills. Not all of it can be levelled at Putin. The Tories are a mess.
No amount of bullshit from the Cameron supporters can make up for it. They are all out in force to defend why we had chaos under Cameron rather than competence under Ed Miliband. I feel that the Tories know the game is up, at a number of different levels. There is no sense of national pride, apart from, say, hosting Eurovision. The utilities are indeed now nationalised, except that they are owned by private equity abroad making unconscionable profits at the expense of the tax payer. Public services are not ‘world beating’. In fact, waits to see a GP, despite GPs leaving in droves due to the monstering they receive from hate incitement from the media, or to get to hospital in an ambulance if you have a heart attack, “are a disgrace” as Truss would put it.
There is absolutely no point having low taxes, if public services are on their knees. The Tories have zero reputation in either competence or integrity. I have always felt that their reputation for economic competence was a complete myth. Even now shills from the IEA refuse to acknowledge that the 2008 economic crash was global. They mislead on the circumstances where the IMF loan, quickly repaid, was given at the tail end of the Labour administration under Callaghan in the 1970s. Boris Johnson c completely obliterated the integrity image of the Conservatives. This was, as we were kept ob being told, was ‘factored in’, with him having previously made racist comments along the lines of ‘piccannies’. Partygate only confirmed what we knew along. His government’s approach to care homes spoke volumes, as did his vigorous shaking of hands at the beginning of the pandemic. The Tories saw him as a ‘winner’, but the votes were ‘lent’ on the basis of ‘getting Brexit done’. Brexit has been high risk for no return. There is yet to be a visible benefit from Brexit. Many industries have imploded due to Brexit. The economy is further screwed due to Brexit. Luckily, there is a complete media black out on what is possibly one of the most massive geopolitical and economic disasters in UK history.
The problem is – if you ask Labour what they would do, they religiously and sanctimoniously explain that they are not in government, and they haven’t ‘seen the books’. Labour is trying to look professional as a ‘safe pair of hands”, but many members in the party are equally sick about the fact that they are low on detail on how they might have done things differently. Starmer does not appeal to many, and this could still produce a final reckoning despite a superficial poll lead. It would not be altogether unsurprising if Labour fails to win an overall majority in 2024, and the SNP still command a powerful popular base in Scotland.
Liz Truss’ days are possibly numbered, depending on the success of an ever increasing membership of a collective political suicide pact which now includes Jeremy Hunt. Rishi Sunak for the time being, unsurprisingly, is keeping well away. Expecting Rishi Sunak to come back and clear up somebody else’s mess for the Tory membership would be like handing a dust pan and brush to a vomiting toddler who had just made a massive mess on your expensive rug. The point I’m making is that the Tory membership knew what they were doing when they voted for her, and the Tory parliamentary party knew what they were doing when they offered her aa part of the ‘final two’. The intriguing thing now is that the Liz Truss affair could ‘seal the deal’ for the annihilation of the political career of others.
It could be that this time next week Liz Truss won’t be there. Offering yet another Tory leader with such a dramatic departure from the 2019 general election manifesto would be palpably wrong, and would necessitate a general election.
The overall incompetence of Ed Miliband’s opposition should still raise alarm bells
If you believe in conspiracy theories, Tom Watson’s offering yesterday of a #TrotskyiteTwist was merely a polite way of him chucking in the towel. Like me, Tom has started resorting to posting cute cat pics on Twitter, but #InternationalCatDay might be something to do with that one.
Whatever your views about #Brexit, it’s worth catching Laura Kuenssberg’s documentary on it from earlier this week. And whatever your views about Laura’s reports, I think this documentary was fascinating, and as balanced as could have been given the circumstances. I remember being somewhat surprised at Laura Kuenssberg asking Jeremy Corbyn at the campaign launch himself whether the launch had been rather ‘lack lustre’, and there were clearly grievances about the degree of commitment from the leaders’ office. But taking the shooting match as a whole, Jeremy Corbyn never struck me more than a 7 out of 10. For him to have pitched it at 10/10 would have been ludicrous. Funnily enough, I don’t think being a lifelong friend of Tony Benn had determined the view of the official Leader of the Opposition. Benn’s views on the 1975 referendum are extremely well known, much in keeping with the contemporaneous Brexit campaign of ‘take back control’. Tony Benn himself apportioned credit to himself for having come up with the idea of giving people a chance to take part in the referendum back in 1968. I think there were two defining factors for Corbyn in his dislike of the European Union (mitigated by his support of protective laws and sense of solidarity). These factors were the pretty awful way in which the European Union had treated Greece, imposing a draconian austerity budget. The other issue Corbyn I think resents is the rôle of EU state aid rules in stopping supporting British industries (say the steel industry which can’t compete with the Chinese dumping of coal.)
The #Brexit decision can of course be interpreted at very many different levels, but the ‘Sunderland roar’ firmly pitches a strand of voters in Labour heartlands who felt a strong disconnect with the views of Westminster. Unlike the Labour PLP, Labour membership contains many people who wanted ‘out’. No matter what reassurances were given about potentially providing extra funding to areas with high flow of immigration (a 2010 manifesto Labour pledge, benefit to the economy), there is a perception amongst some that politicians were in it for themselves. Doncaster, where are MPs including Ed Miliband, voted in favour of #Brexit (69% leave), so Ed Miliband in endorsing a second ‘review’ referendum vicariously in his support for Owen Smith is effectively signing the political suicide note on his own seat.
I shared somebody else’s graphic on Twitter on August 7th.
The issue is firmly: Labour needs to come up with a coherent response to globalisation and immigration. Simply shouting at Jeremy Corbyn, or lambasting him over Article 50, is not actually the response desired by many members of Labour. For many, voting ‘out’ was a last resort – and it would be no surprise to people who have zero faith in the parliamentary Labour Party for the response from Westminster to want to assassinate Corbyn politically; quite ironic given that Corbyn might possibly be more in touch with potential Labour voters than the members of his PLP are.
Yesterday, therefore, Owen Smith MP probably needed the news he had just received a glowing endorsement from Ed Miliband MP, as much as he would have needed the news that he has a fresh diagnosis of genital herpes. But herpes he does not have, and Ed Miliband’s endorsement he has. That Ed Miliband feels that his recommendation is in any persuasive is curious, if not frankly delusional. Ed Miliband, Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair all seem to have they have vast influence on the Labour Party, when they haven’t. If you remember Ed Milliband MP’s actual resignation speech on the day after the election on 8 May 2016, you’ll remember a rather childish quip about the launching of the ‘most unexpected cult of Milifandom’. Actually, I don’t care for Abi Tomlinson’s politics in much the same way as I don’t give a stuff about Russell Brand’s youtube video with Owen Jones, but many people felt a profound sense of shock of losing in 2015. It was not just the defeat, but the scale of it. We went down from 41 MPs in Scotland to one – and England’s vote was awful, irrespective of Scotland. So the idea of Miliband lecturing the membership on which way to vote is doubly insensitive, given that he had himself nearly taken the party to destruction.
Ed Miliband MP has of course got a long and distinguished tradition of making terrible YouTube videos, but this was ironically one of his better ones. Ralph Miliband of course might be turning in his grave at Ed’s recommendation – but blood runs thicker than water. Ask Hilary Benn.
In the context of the YouTube video, I replayed to myself his resignation speech. Ed’s tone was generally much more humble in that one, talking about the need for a wide ranging debate within the party to look at what went wrong despite the best efforts of activists. I remember defending Ed to the hilt despite his terrible performances in the TV debate (including tripping over physically), eating that bacon butty, a refusal to reverse the legal aid cuts, and not a peep about PFI. In the video above it is claimed that Owen Smith MP was always having a ‘word in his shell’ about being more radical, but it is well known from the Guardian hustings that Andy Burnham MP’s radical plan for a “national care service” was strangled to death by Miliband and Balls. Burnham said at the time, “I became disillusioned. This party had no vision. This was not the party of Bevan.” Burnham’s reasoning was members of the public, not just Labour voters, did not want to be terrified about future burgeoning social care costs, parallel to how the Clem Attlee government had introduced the NHS to drive out the inequity of having to pay for your own health.
Ed Miliband’s insignificant video also precipitated me to watch the original Jeremy Corbyn leadership videos (from 2015) on YouTube. There’s quite a lot of them. If you get round any irrational hatred of public meetings or rallies, which some happily say should be encouraged as democratising politics, the content of Corbyn’s speeches are interesting. Even if you strongly dislike him, it is hard to disagree with how the Labour Party had lost its way. There’s one phrase that strikes fear even now: “People like me on the doorstep ended up saying we were going to offer cuts like the Conservatives, but nicer cuts.” The fundamental proposition that the Conservatives had presented deficit reduction as a necessary book-keeping procedure, rather than call it what it is which is rapid shrinking of the public services, is as true now as it was then. The irony of the continuation of New Labour under Ed Miliband in that the drive to present the opposition as ‘fiscally credible’, they completely failed to address how various factors under Labour’s watch had made the economy less resilient (e.g. under regulation of financial markets, high personal debt, housing boom). And not just this – they allowed the Conservatives to dominate the narrative, when Ed Miliband could have merely rammed home the message that debt under five years of the Tories had far outstripped 13 years of debt under Labour.
But the issue is that it is clearly a lie that the Ed Miliband opposition was simply merely incompetent on economics. Whilst it is now widely accepted as a result of John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn that austerity is a political choice not economics-driven decision, austerity was used to drive (it is alleged) disabled citizens to premature deaths, libraries shutting, cuts in the NHS and social care, and so on. Do you remember how Labour also promised to end the ‘something for nothing culture’? The Ed Miliband opposition were incompetent across the board – whether on addressing aggressive tax avoidance, the crisis in lack of social housing, the unconscionable debts of the private finance initiative bankrupting the NHS, the internal market of the NHS crippling the NHS, the abstaining on welfare reforms, and so on. Epitomising this disconnect was Rachel Reeves MP declaring, in an interview in the Guardian, Reeves said: “We don’t want to be seen, and we’re not, [as]the party to represent those who are out of work.”
I have no idea whether Seema Malhotra MP has finally moved out out of her office which she was meant to vacate on her resignation, but I have no intention, despite being a member of the Fabian Society, of attending their fringe events this year in conference. The events list is here. In fact, I’d rather stick hot needles in my eyes, or have my teeth taken out without general anaesthetic. Hopefully Seema Malhotra and the other Fabians will swim happily around their goldfish bowl plotting how next to oust Corbyn. If you think Twitter is an echo chamber, I strongly suggest you dip your toes into the worlds of the Fabians or the Socialist Health Association. Despite my experience in dementia policy, the Socialist Health Association insist on asking a select few old male stale crusties to present ‘their view’, not the view of their membership, to ‘speak to power’ at places such as the National Policy Forum. I unsurprisingly agree with Jeremy Corbyn that the decision making of policy within Labour currently stinks, and is for wont of a better word totally corrupt and ‘jobs for the boys’. Needless to say I resigned in disgust from the Central Council of the Socialist Health Association who are about as socialist as Ayn Rand or Frederick Hayek.
On some happy news, well done to Andy Burnham MP for being voted in as Labour’s candidate for Central Manchester mayor elections next May – and well done to Kevin Lee, Dr Kailash Chand and Debbie Abrahams too.
Andy has always been supportive of my work, whatever you think of his politics?
Should politics 'russell re-brand' itself?
Take two people called Russell and Jeremy in a hôtel room in London, and ask one of them to put the world to rights.
Fringe meetings for Labour Party conferences for as long as I can remember have run panel discussions about how we can engage more people in the political process. For virtually of these fringe meetings which I have attended, almost invariably is the fact that political parties introduce policies for which people didn’t vote almost every parliament.
These issues remain dormant on the mainstream media for months on end, and yet continue to enrage people in the social media. Many issues under the umbrella of social justice continue to cause anger and resentment: these include the closure of English law centres, or the NHS reforms. The media continues to be skewed against such issues. For example, the flagship programme on BBC1 every Thursday, “Question Time”, regularly features a candidate from UKIP, a party which as yet has failed to elect a single MP. They have never featured a candidate from the National Health Action Party, and yet the running of the NHS continues to be a totemic issue.
Blaming the media would be like a bad tap-dancer wishing to blame the floor. And yet protest votes are not easily dismissed. Recently, in France, the right-wing National Front has taken the lead in an opinion poll before elections for the European Parliament, in a development that has truly shocked the French political establishment. The survey, which gave Marine Le Pen’s party 24 per cent of the vote, marked the first time that the party founded in 1972 by her father has led before a national election. The centre-right Union for a Popular Movement, which led in the previous equivalent poll, stood at 22 per cent and the Socialists at 19 per cent.
Part of David Cameron’s problem is that the initial friendship towards his Conservative Party was lukewarm to begin with. The intervening years (2010-2013) have seen a Party which just appears ‘out of touch’, which makes Sir Alec Douglas-Home look trendier than a hip-hop artist. But likewise, Russell Brand is not a ubiquitously popular man himself. Whilst some people feel he stands up for their views, irrespective of his reported wealth, others find him narcissistic and nauseating.
Russell Brand is however successful at being famous, and this is a peculiar British trait. He often begins his set by talking about his love for fame: ‘My personality doesn’t work without fame. Without fame, this haircut is just mental illness.’ He has found his way of getting his name in the news, and in the tabloids. His comedy is not even that popular, but at least he has the ear of the British media. The National Health Action Party would have loved ten minutes with Jeremy Paxman, although it’s quite unlikely a ten-minute video with Clive Peedell would become an instantaneous viral hit.
Meanwhile, in a parallel universe, the UK Labour Party almost seems to have re-discovered its mojo. The triangulation of the past appealed to those in Labour who felt they could win simply by appealing to floating Tory voters. But it is a strategy that ran out of steam in 2010, leaving abandoned Blairite commentators to become embittered and self-consumed in a passion of self-destruction, while spitting bullets at Ed Miliband. Labour’s traditional supporters did not come out and vote, while floating voters saw through the cynical vote-grabbing exercises. Labour did not appear particularly ‘socialist’ any more.
Russell Brand didn’t mention the deficit once. Russell Brand did not have to appeal to his fans to say that there will be no return to the days of lavish spending. He did not have to say that he had learnt lessons from the past.
And yet deep-down voters do have excuses, if not reasons, not to vote Labour. There are some people who believe that Ed Miliband will need to identify Labour’s mistakes – the blind eye to a City running wild; an over-reliance on both high finance and a house-price bubble; or being ‘weak on welfare’.
And yet we are in a society which is absurdly superficial. Should Russell Brand have to bite the bullet for riding the crest of this banality? This strange Universe is not just occupied by reality TB stars. Many famous people are famous for being famous. Nicole Kidman is famous for being famous. Arguably, Nicole Kidman famous for divorcing Tom Cruise. At the same time when Russell Brand was selling what he sells best, that is Russell Brand, Cher was on BBC1 on ‘The Graham Norton Show’. And nobody sane can claim that Cher is the world’s best singer.
This does not necessarily mean that Labour should ignore the polls, although Labour will invariably say it ignores the polls when they are bad. From level-pegging to an 11-point lead in 10 days, Labour has plainly had a good conference, in terms of public opinion polling. After a difficult summer, YouGov’s poll put Labour at its highest level, 42%, since June. 30% now said Ed Miliband is doing well as party leader – his best rating since May. When people were asked who would make the best prime minister, Miliband (25%) was now within three points of David Cameron (28%). That was the narrowest gap since Miliband became party leader three years ago.
Ed Miliband is the one who keeps on saying that he wants ‘to tell you a story’. After the recent coverage of Ralph Miliband, paradoxically people appear to have warmed to the narrator as much as the story. In Russell Brand’s case, there is a curious mixture of some people liking the narrator as well as the story.
And yet for all of Russell Brand’s themes, such as global warming, inequality, or dominance of corporatism, for Brand it is simply entertainment. For many viewers, it is simply entertainment. Life is far from entertaining from some who have deeply suffering in this Government. Social injustices, such as in the personal independence payment or Bedroom Tax, have literally taken their casualties, and the myth of ‘the record number in employment’ has been blown out-of-the-water.
Russell Brand can be thanked for his form of escapism. But at the end of the day it is superficial crap, and not the solution to more than thirty years of failed triangulation in UK politics.
Even the figures suggest Labour is more trusted on issues to do with the economy
It’s taken me a few days to think about the data which John Rentoul reported on a few days ago in the Independent. Aside from the headline figure that the Labour lead is only of the order of a few % points, the poll results make interesting reading even for those people like me who are normally totally uninterested in such rough population statistics.
As a disabled citizen, I am always quite touchy about the rhetoric of being ‘tough’ in the benefits system. This is because it took me approximately two years for my own disability living allowance to be restored, and this was only after I appeared in person at a benefits tribunal here in London. And yet the lead which the Conservatives have on benefits is massive: “Be tough on people abusing the benefits system: Conservative lead 39 points”. Here, I think usefully Labour can distinguish between people who deserve disability benefits for their living and mobility, whom they should be proud to champion, and people who are clearly free-loading the system. To try to get to the bottom of this, I tried to ask a 64-year-old friend of mine from Dagenham whether this notion of ‘benefits abuse’ is a real one. She explained ‘too right’, citing even that the council estates in Barking and Dagenham appeared to be stuffed full of immigrants who had somehow leapfrogged the social housing waiting list. I cannot of course say whether she’s right, but this is her perception. She went on to say that there were blatantly people around where she lived, who were making use of schools and hospitals, “to which they were not entitled.” The truth and legal arguments surrounding this feeling are of course longstanding issues, but the margin of the Conservatives’ lead on this is not to be sniffed at.
The finding that, “Keep the economy growing: Conservative lead 14 points”, is not of course particularly surprising. This is also a fairly robust finding. I suspect most people are still unaware of the enormity of the challenge which the last Government find itself confronting, such that Gordon Brown describes having to consult a few Nobel prize winners in economics at the last minute about his plans for bank recapitalisation (in his memoirs “Beyond the Crash”). How the £860 billion contributed to our famous deficit has been played out ad nauseam on Twitter, but such a discussion does not appear to have dented in the minutest sense the mainstream media. When Conservatives are faced with the question what they would have ‘done differently’, most do not even offer any answer, though true libertarians argue that they probably would have done nothing learning from the ‘Iceland experience’. But certainly one of the greatest successes of the political landscape has been converge all issues to do with the economy on the question, “Who do you trust on the economy?” The facts do actually speak for themselves, even though somewhat unclear. We may dispute we have had a double or triple recession since May 2010, but there is absolutely no doubt that the economy under this Coalition since May 2010 has done extremely badly (when the economy was indeed recovering in May 2010). That the economy may be dethawing a bit when the latest GDP ONS are released on Friday may not be a bad thing for Labour either. If voters are ‘grateful’ for an economy in recovery, and ‘trust’ Labour sufficiently, they may ‘hand over the keys’ to the Ed Miliband.
But would you like to give the keys back to the people who “crashed the car”? We, on the left, know that Ed Miliband, Ed Balls and Gordon Brown, did not single-handledly (or indeed triple-handedly), “crash the car”. Only, at the beginning of this week, JP Morgan was handed an eye-watering fine by its regulator over securitised mortgages. Nonetheless, this IS the public perception, and there are no signs of it shifting yet, given the sheer volume and brilliance of the lies from professional Coalition MPs. When you turn to issues to do with economy, which face, “real people”, the poll results produce an altogether different narrative. Whilst the media and Westminster villages enjoy GDP figures and “the scale of the deficit”, most hardworking people in the UK don’t go to work thinking about the deficit. Car drivers may think about the cost of filling up a tank of petrol in their car, or worry about the monumental scale of their energy bills.
This is why in a sense it’s payback time which Labour intends to take full advantage of. The Conservatives are clearly hoping for ‘analysis through paralysis’, where voters will be bored to death over what is exactly causing such high bills, including ‘green taxes’. The fundamental problem is, arguably, reducing the competitive market from 14 to 6, in part, but the public appetite for blaming Labour for this appears to be surprisingly weak. The public appear to have gone somewhat into “I don’t care who caused it, but please do sort it out” mode. Therefore, the poll finding, “Keep gas and electricity prices down: Labour lead 20 points” is striking. The market is not anywhere near perfect competition. It is an ‘oligopoly’ as it has too few competitors, which means that they can arrange prices at a level suitable for themselves. This is called ‘collusive pricing’, and it’s notoriously hard to regulate. That’s why the ‘price switching’ approach is so banal. As soon as you switch from one energy provider, you can land with another energy provider who is teetering on the brink of putting up energy prices themselves. They can do that. The latest intervention by Sir John Major provides that Ed Miliband has identified the right problem but arrived at the wrong solution. The irony is that Major himself has probably himself arrived at the right problem, but many disagree with the idea that a ‘windfall tax’ will ultimately benefit the consumer because of the risk of taxes and levies being indirectly handed down to the end-user. Nonetheless, it will make for an interesting Prime Minister’s Questions at lunchtime today.
The poll finding, “Protect people’s jobs: Labour lead 16 points”, also represents another powerful opportunity. The finding that there is a ‘record number of people in employment’ has always had a hollow ring, but Channel 4’s “Dispatches” programme managed to explain lucidly how millions were being duped into jobs with poor employment rights by multinational companies seeking to maximise shareholder dividend. The use of ‘zero use contracts’ has also raised eyebrows, as well as the drastic watering down of rights for employees under the unfair dismissal legal framework of England and Wales. And yet these are fundamentally important issues to do with the economy. Political analysts who do not comprehend this idea, in perseverating over their question “Who do you trust with the economy?”, are likely to be underestimating the problem which Cameron and colleagues face on May 7th 2015.
Whatever the public’s eventual ‘verdict’ on who runs the economy or issues to do with the economy better, the Conservative-led government is clearly running out of time. In a week when they should be fist-pumping the air over the GDP figures, three years down the line, they are bogged down in a debate over ‘the cost of living crisis’. That is, because all of his ‘faults’ in leadership, Ed Miliband has managed to choose which narrative he wishes to discuss. Whatever the precise understanding of voters over complicated issues of economics, this Conservative-led government are proving themselves to be excellent at one particular thing. They appear confidently self-obsessed and ‘out-of-touch’ with ordinary voters. Recent announcements, also relating to the economy, such as the decision to build a new nuclear power plant and the privatisation of the Royal Mail, have merely been interpreted as Cameron and ‘chums’ looking after his corporate mates rather than having the interests of consumers at heart. Whereas the Independent poll did not examine the issues to do with the NHS, it is clear that Jeremy Hunt’s relentless smear campaign has not even produced the slightest dent in Labour’s substantial consistent lead. With an imminent A&E crisis over Winter, actions will speak louder than words anyway.
But for Labour things appear to be ‘on the right track’. Even the figures suggest Labour is more trusted on issues to do with the economy, even if the answer to ‘who do you trust more on the economy?’ does not appear to be at first blush in Labour’s favour. What is, though, interesting is that Labour appears, at last, to have some ‘green shoots’ in a political recovery after one of its worst defeats ever in 2010.
It's all too easy to dismiss Miliband's attack on energy prices. It fundamentally blasts Thatcherism.
Virtually all attacks on Ed Miliband regarding energy prices begin with the statement ‘Ed Miliband is right but…” That the Conservatives might be wrong on their basic economics is politically very worrying. And yet Ed Miliband has not sought to frame the article like a convoluted Oxbridge economics tutorial. Long gone are the days of Gordon Brown using logical inferences to explain why financial recapitalisation was needed to avert an even bigger global financial crisis. Nobody seemed to care. What did George Osborne wish to do exactly about Northern Rock. He didn’t say, and it didn’t seem to matter. Labour, the allegation, spent too much, and yet staggeringly George Osborne wanted to spend as much more. When asked to identify what it was about Labour’s economic policy which was so fundamentally awry, Tory voters invariably are able to articulate the answer. When further pressed on how the Conservative Party opposed this fundamentally awry policy, there’s a clear blank.
Ed Miliband and his team can explain how the market has failed, perhaps going into minutiae about how competitors end up colluding, except nobody can prove this. They therefore rig the prices, it is alleged, so that they can return massive shareholder profit, while the prices endlessly go up. The Tories will counter this with the usual reply that the profits are not that bad, and it was Miliband’s fault for introducing his ‘green taxes’. Anyone who knows their economics at basic undergraduate level will know the problem with this. It’s all to do with the definition of ‘sustainability’. Sustainability does not simply mean ‘maintained’, although you’d be forgiven for thinking so, on the basis of the mouths of PPE graduates from Oxford. It’s all about how a company can function across a time span of very many years, acting responsibly in the context of its environment.
It’s instead been framed as ‘the cost of living crisis’. The problem with the national deficit, while a useful tool in giving people something to blame Labour for supposedly, is that when somebody goes out shopping in a local supermarket he does not tend to think of the national deficit. Likewise, much as I disagree with the ‘Tony Blair Dictum’ that ‘it doesn’t matter who provides your NHS services so long as they are free at the point of need’, voters will tend not to care about NHS privatisation unless they have a true ideological objection to it. NHS privatisation as such makes little impact on the ‘cost of living’.
Energy prices are an altogether different bag. It is perhaps arguable that the State should not interfere in private markets, but surely this acts both ways? Should the banking industry, and more specifically bankers, be ‘grateful’ that they received a £860 billion bailout from the State as a massive State benefit to keep their industry alive? Or did they not want this money at all? Even you brush aside the need of the State to interfere legitimately with prices, it is commonplace for the State through the law to interfere with unlawful activities to do with competition. The prices are the end-product of an economic process of faulty competition, poorly regulated.
And there’s the rub. Ed Miliband’s ‘attack on energy prices’ is not just a policy. It is actually a political philosophy. It is more tangible than responsible capitalism or predistribution, although one may argue that it bridges both. The attack on energy prices, on behalf of the consumer whether hard-working or not, is indeed a political philosophy. Margaret Thatcher may have gone to bed with a copy of ‘The Road to Serfdom’ by FA Hayek under her pillow, and all credit to her for fundamentally believing, most sincerely, that the markets could be ‘liberalising’. With this attack on energy prices, Miliband effectively in one foul swoop demolishes the argument that markets are liberalising. In Thatcherite Britain, consumers are suffocated by the business plans of big business. Miliband’s discourse is not a full frontal attack on any business; it specifically targets abusive behaviour of corporates. And the energy prices are symbolic of much of what has proven to be faulty many times before. Andrew Rawnsley concluded his article at the weekend, advancing the theme that the current Conservative-led government is a bad tribute band to Thatcherism, by saying simply that we know what happens next. It’s not just gas; it’s everything which has been privatised, including water, telecoms, and so it goes on. Authors in the right-wing broadsheets can go on until the cows come home evangelising how privatisation is a ‘popular’ concept, but the criticism of the abuse of privatisation is far more popular.
And Ed Miliband doesn’t want to issue ‘more of the same’ as before. John Rentoul is so exasperated he is now left to write articles on how being called ‘Blairite’ is not actually a term of abuse. But these are yesterday’s battles. The battle over energy prices is a massive explosion in the world that the market knows best. Its shock waves are to be felt in how Labour conducts itself in other policy domains, putting people primacy ahead of shareholder primacy. And there’s a plenty of evidence that this is the Most Corporatist Government yet – ranging from the reaction to Leveson to how to allow ‘market entry’ in the newly privatised NHS. The public were never offered an antidote to the Thatcherite poison from Tony Blair, and, even after 13 years of Blair and Brown, many Labour members had been left mystified as to what happens next.
The beginning of that answer definitely seems to be end of Thatcherism. The answer seems to involve a new post-Thatcherite ‘settlement’ about politics, society and economics. Whilst distinctly populist in feel, it fundamentally blasts Thatcherism to the core, and is highly deceptive. Whilst easily dismissed, it intellectually is a lethal weapon.
It's all too easy to dismiss Miliband's attack on energy prices. It fundamentally blasts Thatcherism.
Virtually all attacks on Ed Miliband regarding energy prices begin with the statement ‘Ed Miliband is right but…” That the Conservatives might be wrong on their basic economics is politically very worrying. And yet Ed Miliband has not sought to frame the article like a convoluted Oxbridge economics tutorial. Long gone are the days of Gordon Brown using logical inferences to explain why financial recapitalisation was needed to avert an even bigger global financial crisis. Nobody seemed to care. What did George Osborne wish to do exactly about Northern Rock. He didn’t say, and it didn’t seem to matter. Labour, the allegation, spent too much, and yet staggeringly George Osborne wanted to spend as much more. When asked to identify what it was about Labour’s economic policy which was so fundamentally awry, Tory voters invariably are able to articulate the answer. When further pressed on how the Conservative Party opposed this fundamentally awry policy, there’s a clear blank.
Ed Miliband and his team can explain how the market has failed, perhaps going into minutiae about how competitors end up colluding, except nobody can prove this. They therefore rig the prices, it is alleged, so that they can return massive shareholder profit, while the prices endlessly go up. The Tories will counter this with the usual reply that the profits are not that bad, and it was Miliband’s fault for introducing his ‘green taxes’. Anyone who knows their economics at basic undergraduate level will know the problem with this. It’s all to do with the definition of ‘sustainability’. Sustainability does not simply mean ‘maintained’, although you’d be forgiven for thinking so, on the basis of the mouths of PPE graduates from Oxford. It’s all about how a company can function across a time span of very many years, acting responsibly in the context of its environment.
It’s instead been framed as ‘the cost of living crisis’. The problem with the national deficit, while a useful tool in giving people something to blame Labour for supposedly, is that when somebody goes out shopping in a local supermarket he does not tend to think of the national deficit. Likewise, much as I disagree with the ‘Tony Blair Dictum’ that ‘it doesn’t matter who provides your NHS services so long as they are free at the point of need’, voters will tend not to care about NHS privatisation unless they have a true ideological objection to it. NHS privatisation as such makes little impact on the ‘cost of living’.
Energy prices are an altogether different bag. It is perhaps arguable that the State should not interfere in private markets, but surely this acts both ways? Should the banking industry, and more specifically bankers, be ‘grateful’ that they received a £860 billion bailout from the State as a massive State benefit to keep their industry alive? Or did they not want this money at all? Even you brush aside the need of the State to interfere legitimately with prices, it is commonplace for the State through the law to interfere with unlawful activities to do with competition. The prices are the end-product of an economic process of faulty competition, poorly regulated.
And there’s the rub. Ed Miliband’s ‘attack on energy prices’ is not just a policy. It is actually a political philosophy. It is more tangible than responsible capitalism or predistribution, although one may argue that it bridges both. The attack on energy prices, on behalf of the consumer whether hard-working or not, is indeed a political philosophy. Margaret Thatcher may have gone to bed with a copy of ‘The Road to Serfdom’ by FA Hayek under her pillow, and all credit to her for fundamentally believing, most sincerely, that the markets could be ‘liberalising’. With this attack on energy prices, Miliband effectively in one foul swoop demolishes the argument that markets are liberalising. In Thatcherite Britain, consumers are suffocated by the business plans of big business. Miliband’s discourse is not a full frontal attack on any business; it specifically targets abusive behaviour of corporates. And the energy prices are symbolic of much of what has proven to be faulty many times before. Andrew Rawnsley concluded his article at the weekend, advancing the theme that the current Conservative-led government is a bad tribute band to Thatcherism, by saying simply that we know what happens next. It’s not just gas; it’s everything which has been privatised, including water, telecoms, and so it goes on. Authors in the right-wing broadsheets can go on until the cows come home evangelising how privatisation is a ‘popular’ concept, but the criticism of the abuse of privatisation is far more popular.
And Ed Miliband doesn’t want to issue ‘more of the same’ as before. John Rentoul is so exasperated he is now left to write articles on how being called ‘Blairite’ is not actually a term of abuse. But these are yesterday’s battles. The battle over energy prices is a massive explosion in the world that the market knows best. Its shock waves are to be felt in how Labour conducts itself in other policy domains, putting people primacy ahead of shareholder primacy. And there’s a plenty of evidence that this is the Most Corporatist Government yet – ranging from the reaction to Leveson to how to allow ‘market entry’ in the newly privatised NHS. The public were never offered an antidote to the Thatcherite poison from Tony Blair, and, even after 13 years of Blair and Brown, many Labour members had been left mystified as to what happens next.
The beginning of that answer definitely seems to be end of Thatcherism. The answer seems to involve a new post-Thatcherite ‘settlement’ about politics, society and economics. Whilst distinctly populist in feel, it fundamentally blasts Thatcherism to the core, and is highly deceptive. Whilst easily dismissed, it intellectually is a lethal weapon.
CV here
The article by Rachel Reeves MP is a 'two fingers' at disabled citizens, and will lose Miliband the election
It is actually massively upsetting.
For many citizens, hardworking or not, Ed Miliband was finally beginning to show ‘green shoots’ in his leadership. His conference speech in Brighton was professionally executed, and it largely made sense given what we know about his general approach to the markets and State.
Amazing then it took fewer than a few weeks for his reshuffle to ruin all that.
Parking aside how Tristram Hunt MP had changed his mind about ‘free schools’ such that they were no longer for ‘yummy mummies’ in West London, Rachel Reeves MP decided to come out as a macho on welfare. She boasted on Twitter that she was both ‘tough and fair on social security’.
Rachel Reeves’ article was immediately received by a torrent of abuse, and virtually all of it was well reasoned and fair.
Yes, that’s right. In one foul swoop, we managed to conflate at one the ‘benefit scroungers’ rhetoric with an onslaught on ‘social security’.
Being ‘tough and fair’ on the “disability living allowance”, in the process of becoming the ‘personal independence payment’ is of course an abhorrent concept. I only managed to be awarded my DLA after a gap of one year, after it had been taken away by this Government without them telling me. At first, it was refused through a pen-and-paper exercise from the DWP. Then, it was successfully restored after I turned up in person at a tribunal in Gray’s Inn Road.
This living allowance meets my mobility needs. My walking is much impaired, following my two months in a coma. It also meets my living requirements, allowing me to lead an independent life.
I don’t want to hear Reeves talking like a banker but as if she doesn’t give a flying fig about real people in the real world.
For once, the outrage on Twitter, and the concomitant mobbing, was entirely justified. I had to look up again what her precise rôle was – yes it was the shadow secretary for work and pensions, not employment.
Many members of Labour were sickened. A spattering of people, would-be Councillors in the large part unfortunately, didn’t see what the fuss was about. They reconciled that ‘the sooner we face up to this problem, the better’.
The media played it as ‘the hard left of the Labour Party are upset’.
The “Conservative Home” website played it as a sign that the Labour Party were belatedly adopting the Conservatives’ narrative, but it was too little and too late.
Like Ed Miliband being booed at conference, a backlash against Reeves’ article can euphemistically be indicative of Labour’s success at ‘sounding tough’.
At yet, this is ‘short term’ politics from a national political party. The social value of this policy by Labour is not sustainable. In the quest for instant profit for headlines, it will actually find itself with no income stream in the long term.
For all the analysis with Labour marketing must have done through their ‘think tanks’ and ‘focus groups’, it is striking how Labour have missed one fundamental point. That disabled bashing in the media is not populism from the Left, actually.
Conversely, it could LOSE them votes from their core membership.
If they learn to love disabled people, they could WIN votes.
Simples.
So what’s the fuss about? She didn’t mention disability. Well – precisely. Disabled citizens of working age are known to form a large part of the population, as Scope reminded us this week in their session on ‘whole person care’ with Liz Kendall MP, so why did Reeves ignore them altogether?
Is it because she has only been in a brief only a few days? Some of us in life have taken the bullet for incidents in life which have lasted barely a few minutes.
What will it take for Labour to ‘get it’ on disability and welfare? Possibly, the final denouement will be when Labour finally realises it can’t ‘out Tory’ the Tories.
The Twitter defenders of the indefensible cite that ATOS are being ‘sacked’ – well, yippedeeeday. ATOS, who were appointed by Labour, are finally being sacked. When negotiating a contract in English law, the usual procedure is to ensure that there are feedback mechanisms in place to ensure the contract is being performed adequately? You can bet your bottom dollar that Labour wishes to do a ‘Pontius Pilate’ on that, like it does on all its crippling PFI contracts it set up for the NHS.
This is a disastrous start by Reeves, but ‘things can only get better’. It’s not so much that Rachel Reeves is Liam Byrne in a frock that hurts. It’s the issue that shooting the messenger won’t be the final solution in changing Labour’s mindset on this.
It is all too easy to blame the ‘subeditor’, but the subeditor didn’t write the whole piece. Any positive meme from Reeves, in a ‘well crafted speech’ to “out-Tory the Tories” (such as scrapping the ‘Bedroom Tax’), has been instantaneously toxified by the idea of people ‘lingering on benefits’.
The most positive thing to do was to explain how people might not be so reliant on benefits, such as work credits, if we had a strong economy.
Reeves chose not even to mention pensions, which is a large part of her budget.
Because the article was hopeless from the outset, it could not even get as far as how to get the long-term unemployed (or the long-term sick) safely back to work.
It was an epic fail.
It is, in fact, an epic fail on all three planks of Ed Miliband’s personal mission of ‘One Nation': the economy, not recognising the value of disabled citizens of working age to the economy; society, not recognising disabled citizens as valued members of society; and the political process, totally disenfranchising disabled citizens from being included in society.
It is no small thing to wish the Labour Party to fail as well as a result. But this may now be necessary, and Reeves should take the bullet for that if she doesn’t improve.
How the quiet man Ed Miliband managed to turn the volume up
For Ed Miliband, this particular conference speech was a ‘coming of age’. It’s somewhat bemusing that political journalists have described Ed Miliband as “disappointing”, or “singularly unimpressive”, but Miliband does not need to impress these people who’ve got it wrong before.
Most people will converge on the notion that David Cameron gave a horrifically dull speech, more akin to a newsreader reading out a corporate’s executive summary of an annual report. The pitch of Nick Clegg, that he could permanently be Deputy Prime Minister, was frankly risible. UKIP managed to propel Godfrey Bloom into the limelight for all the wrong reasons, in their pitch to make cleaning behind a fridge more relevant than the ‘cost of living crisis’.
Ed Miliband’s moral triumph is that he can genuinely say he is going into the election, to be held in the UK on May 7th 2015, having tried his best to piss off the key players in the print press. The BBC’s news coverage, whether it includes not reporting the National Hospital Sell-off following the Health and Social Care Act (2012), or not reporting the closure of law centres in England, or not reporting a march against NHS privatisation in Manchester involving approximately 60,000 people, has become astonishingly irrelevant.
The ‘coming of age’ of Ed Miliband politically is an intriguing one. Whilst Miliband has really struggled, initially, to convince others of the need of ‘responsible capitalism’ or indeed ‘predistribution’, he managed to produce a populist synthesis which was strikingly popular.
Phone lines are typically inundated in any radio phone-in with callers moaning about how their utility bills have shot up. The ‘free market’ has not offered choice or competition, but has become a gravy train for greedy companies.
There is not a single truly ‘free’ market. Virtually all free markets have needed some degree of regulation, to stop customers being abused.
It has become much easier to fire employees on the spot, and access-to-justice evaporated. Virtually all free markets have needed some degree of regulation, also to stop employees being abused.
Whilst then the ‘One Nation’ concept may seem a bit pie-in-the-sky, an economy and society which works for its citizens ‘for the public good’ is a worthy one. It is a bit of a stretch to make this sound like a return to 1970s socialism. It is entirely about making the State protect the interests of its citizens.
The media have long been gleeful at the personal ‘poll ratings’ of Ed Miliband being dire, but David Cameron impressed as a dodgy double-glazing salesman this week. Nick Clegg, having led his party to voting for NHS privatisation and the decimation of legal aid, has become a laughing stock with his argument that he is a ‘moderating force’.
Many people will therefore say begrudgingly that Ed Miliband had by far the best conference season. This was not because he had ‘rote learned’ a script rather than reading an autocue. This is because, whether it was synthetic or not, struck a chord with the concerns of ordinary voters not corporate directors.
The Westminster Class is clearly going to take a bit of time to readjust to the new mood music. Miliband has, whether they concede it or not, has been able to change the narrative from the deficit to the ‘cost of living crisis’.
The ‘cost of living crisis’ is a genuine one, with the cost of living outstripping real wages for the vast majority of the term of this government so far. It is shocking perhaps it is taken so long for the political class to realise that this is an issue.
This is not, of course, a rejection of the market in any Marxist sense. It is merely an acknowledgement that voters do not intellectually masturbate any more on the allegation of Labour singlehandedly bankrupting the global economy.
The bankers are the baddies, like the energy companies. They have failed to regulate themselves, and have been the beneficiaries of ineffective regulation from the State. The Unions are rapidly no longer becoming “public enemy number one”, not because there has been a sudden conversion of a mindset to valuing employees’ rights but because votes find disgusting the idea of faceless hardnosed hedgies and venture capitalists determining public policy behind the scenes.
And there’s finally the rub. Ed Miliband has managed to shove the volume up, when he was perhaps so quiet that people were wondering if he ever had anything useful to say. And he somehow has managed to make his ‘One Nation Economy’, ‘One Nation Society’ and ‘One Nation Politics’ seem relevant to many people who had previously given up on politics.
This is actually no mean feat.
Thanks to @labourmatters for correcting a factual misstatement in an earlier version of this blogpost.
Nick Clegg is bound to defend the Tory record, as he's a Tory. It doesn't matter to us.
It is beyond delusional that Nick Clegg is proposing to the voters of Britain that British voters are better off with a coalition government, with him as a permanent fixture as the Deputy Prime Minister. It may be spun that ‘behind the scenes’, he is known to favour David Cameron as he has worked with Cameron, but seriously? You must have surely worked with people that you’ve come to hate? It is, rather, well known that Nick Clegg is a Tory. He is utterly spineless, and has no liberal principles of his own. That is why many people serious about Liberal values have left in droves – or rather hundreds of thousands. Liberal does not mean snoopers’ charters. Liberal does not mean control orders. Liberal does not mean secret courts. Liberal does not mean propelling competition to be the overriding principle of a NHS which outsources as much as possible to the private sector, when the Liberal Democrat’s own constitution emphasises the principle of collaboration.
The question is: what will it take to get rid of Nick Clegg finally? Thanks to the legislation of the fixed term parliament, we already know that he will have to honour his promise to go the full distance. Vince Cable may offer sunny uplands in the form of the Coalition early, but it is merely a mirage. Many activists are worried about armageddon, which is widely predicted for the European elections. Oakeshott will be there to tell you he told you so, and Nigel Farage will yet again be the new messiah. However, none of this fundamentally changes anything. Nick Clegg is a Tory, and what he wishes to do after May 8th 2015 is utterly irrelevant.
Do people really care whether he wants to be in a Coalition with Ed Miliband? I strongly suspect Ed Miliband doesn’t wish to work with Clegg in a million years. The practical issue is inevitably how Nick Clegg is going to lead his party to vote with Labour to reverse a series of legislative steps from the present Coalition. It is inevitable that Labour will have to repeal the Health and Social Care Act (2012), and given the strength of feeling one cannot conceivably imagine LibDem MPs will now be whipped to vote against the legislation they originally delivered. Whilst it is common currency that most politicians are ‘professional’ and do what they are told, irrespective of what the country feels, Norman Lamb had no problems in implementing a £3bn top down reorganisation of the NHS when the political priority should have been to implement as soon as possible the Dilnot recommendations over the future of social care.
Say you’d submerged the Concordia, would you attempt to take credit for lifting it out of the waters? Say you’d driven a high speed train in Spain off the tracks, would you attempt to take credit for finding the ‘black box’ recorder? Nick Clegg incessantly criticised the economic policy under Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling in the dying days of the the final recent Labour government, and did his best totally to misinform the public. It could be the case that Labour did a dreadful job in explaining how the £860 billion was deemed ‘necessary’ in keeping the banks afloat, whilst maintaining a record level of satisfaction in the NHS. However, Nick Clegg, Simon Hughes and Danny Alexander did a splendid job in a coalition of lies with George Osborne and David Cameron in arguing that Labour had bankrupt the UK and we were close to the Greek situation. It is therefore not a great achievement that we have a feeble recovery. The argument that ‘Ed Balls does not even agree with Ed Balls’ has not reached lift off despite the best peddling from Tim Farron and Nick Clegg, and the BBC, because the facts speak for themselves. Whilst they proudly boast that the UK economy did not have a double dip or triple dip, it is incontrovertible that the UK economy had actually been recovering in May 2010.
So what Nick Clegg wants is irrelevant. In as much politics can be politicised, Clegg has become a figurehead for anger amongst a wide variety of issues important to Labour voters. While Clegg maintains his stuck record mantra of ‘lifting people out of poverty’, the list of cock ups from Clegg is truly lamentable. It is impossible to know where to start – but you could try the UK economy, the scrapping of the employment support allowance, the shutting of libraries, the scrapping of Sure Start, the scrapping of ‘Building Schools for the Future, and the destruction of the network of legal centres in England. Clegg’s horrific, even if he is a ‘great reformer’ of sorts. He represents all that is fundamentally sick with unprincipled, undemocratic politics. He is a sickening ‘career politician’ who built a brand of ‘no more broken promises’, while breaking a promise he publicly signed a pledge for regarding tuition fees.
Ed Miliband continues to be slagged off by the Liberal Democrat hierarchy, though less so by some on the left of the Liberal Democrat Party. Why should he particularly wish to embrace them as part of the progressive left? The reason he might is that Ed Miliband is a social democrat who doesn’t particularly mind standing up for principles he believes in, even if this means antagonising the Blairite press such as David Aaronovitch or John Rentoul. He called out ‘irresponsible capitalism’ in an universally panned conference speech in Manchester in 2011, much to the ire of the Blairite critics (surprise surprise), but nobody can dismiss how this important concept, passported from the seminal work of Prof Porter at Harvard, has taken root. The ‘transformation’ of ‘reforming’ the public sector in outsourced services has been incredibly unpopular with the general public, who are much better informed than the Coalition politicians would like to believe. You’d have to be on Mars not to be aware of the fraud allegations of A4e, Capita, Serco or G4s.
The public will not give credit to the Liberal Democrats for the economy. They might conceivably give some credit to the Conservatives. And yet the picture of the UK economy is not clear. The total number of people in employment has been rising consistently for many years now, irrespective of who is government. The Conservatives will have real problems in establishing living standards, as the cost of living has risen exponentially due to privatised utilised creaming off profits in the utilities industries. These utilities industries are typical ‘oligopolies’, where the product is virtually the same for the end-user whoever the provider is, prices are kept artificially high by all the providers (but proving collusion by the competition authorities remains virtually impossible), and shareholder profits are shamelessly high. Norman Tebbit have dug out a trench in no foreign ownership of Royal Mail, but there is no such legislation about foreign ownership of the utilities nor indeed the NHS.
Nick Clegg may have been the future once. But he’s now finished.
Ed Miliband's speech to the Fabian Society: full text #fab13
Fabian Society Annual Conference: Next State is taking place today Saturday January 12th and this year’s special guest is Ed Miliband. It is being held at the Institute of Education, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL. It has been fully sold-out.
The chair of the Fabians is Jessica Asato, @Jessica_Asato, also PPC for Norwich North.
The full programme is here on the website of the Fabians.
This is the text of Ed Miliband’s speech, which is clearly built around the three major planks of Labour’s ongoing policy review: the economy, society and political process.
It is great to be here at the Fabians.
Today I want to talk to you about the idea of One Nation.
The idea of a country which we rebuild together, where everyone plays their part.
It is not an idea rooted in Fabian pamphlets.
Though I bow to nobody in being an avid reader of them.
It is not an idea either rooted in academic studies of Sweden or any other country.
Though as some of you know, again I can talk at length about these subjects too.
It is an idea rooted deep in British history.
Because it is rooted deep in the soul of the British people.
Deep in the daily way we go about our lives.
Our relationships with our family, our friends, our neighbours.
We know this idea is a deep part of our national story because we have so many different ways of describing it.
“All hands to the pump.”
“Mucking in.”
“Pulling your weight.”
“Doing your bit.”
And every day we see it at work in our country.
On Christmas Day, I helped out somebody down the street from me who makes Christmas lunches for elderly people in the area living on their own, it’s that spirit.
The same spirit we saw last year in the Olympic Games.
Now because this idea is so much part of who we are as a nation, of how we think of ourselves, all politicians try to embrace it.
But its real potential, and what I want to talk about today, comes when we understand the deeper lesson for the way we run our country.
Turning this spirit of collective endeavour, of looking out for each other, from something we do in our daily lives, to the way our nation is run.
That is what One Nation Labour is about.
Taking the common decency and values of the British people and saying we must make it the way we run the country as well.
And why does this idea – the idea of One Nation – speak so directly to the state of Britain today?
Because we are so far from being One Nation.
While a very few people at the top are doing well, so many people feel their prospects diminishing, their insecurity rising.
They feel on their own.
Not part of a common endeavour.
You know, a young woman came up to me recently and told me she had decided to go to University in Holland because she said she couldn’t afford to do so in Britain.
Believe it or not, to a government minister her departure will seem a success because if more people leave the country it will help them meet their net migration target.
But it doesn’t feel like a success to me to have talented young people fleeing abroad.
In Britain that young woman doesn’t feel part of a country where she can play her part, she feels on her own.
And it’s not just our young people who are finding it so hard to do their bit.
There are so many people across Britain who want to play their part but don’t feel they can.
Those running small businesses are struggling just to keep their business afloat in the face of rising energy bills and banks that won’t help.
They don’t feel part of a Britain we rebuild together, they feel on their own.
And then take all the people struggling to make ends meet, to pay the bills, doing two or three jobs, they feel on their own with nobody on their side.
So what do so many people in Britain have in common today?
They believe the system is rigged against them.
They believe that the country isn’t working for them.
And you know, it’s not that any of them thinks Britain owes them a living or an easy life.
All they want is a sense of hope, they want to believe there is a vision for a future we can build together.
And that is why One Nation is such a powerful idea right now: because it is about our country and what it faces.
Can David Cameron answer this call for One Nation?
This week shows yet again why he can’t.
What did they call it on Monday?
The Ronseal re-launch.
But what did we discover?
The tin was empty.
And they have no vision for the country.
And what have we also seen this week?
The appalling attempt to denigrate all those who are looking for work.
To pretend that a Bill that hits 7 million working people is somehow promoting responsibility.
And all the time an attempt to divide the country between so-called scroungers and strivers.
To point the finger of blame at others, so people don’t point the finger of blame at this government.
Nasty, divisive politics which we should never accept.
It should be the first duty of any Prime Minister to be able to walk in the shoes of others.
This week he has shown he just can’t do it.
No empathy.
And no vision either.
So my overwhelming feeling in looking at this government is simple:
Britain can do better than this.
I have said what it means to be a One Nation Prime Minister.
To strive always to walk in the shoes of others.
But One Nation tells us more than that.
It tells us that we need to bring the country together so everyone can play their part.
And let me explain what One Nation is about in our economy, our society and our politics.
Let me start with the economy.
One Nation Labour is about reshaping our economy from its foundations, so that all do have the opportunity to play their part, not just a few.
And to understand what a One Nation economy means, we need to recognise how it differs from what New Labour did and also how it differs from the current government.
New Labour rightly broke from Old Labour and celebrated the power of private enterprise to energise our country.
It helped get people back into work, and introduced the minimum wage and tax credits to help make work pay.
And it used tax revenues to overcome decades of neglect and invest in hospitals, schools and the places where people live.
There are millions of people who have better lives because of those decisions.
It is a far cry from what we see today.
We’re back to the old trickle-down philosophy.
Cut taxes for the richest.
For everyone else, increase insecurity at work to make them work harder.
In other words, for the 99 per cent: you’re on your own.
Sink or swim.
For the top 1 per cent: we’ll cut your taxes.
We don’t need a crystal ball to know what this will mean, because the last two and a half years have shown us.
Business as usual at the banks, squeezed living standards, a stagnating economy.
No plan for rebuilding the British economy.
But the One Nation Labour solution is not to say that we need to go back to the past, to carry on as we did in government.
One Nation Labour learns the lessons of the financial crisis.
It begins from the truth that New Labour did not do enough to take on the vested interests and bring about structural change in our economy.
To make it an economy that works for the many not just the few.
From the banks on our high streets to the City of London to the big energy companies.
Now, New Labour did challenge the old trickle-down economics by redistributing from the top.
But again it didn’t do enough to change our economy so that it grew from the middle out, not from the top down.
One Nation Labour is explicitly about reshaping our economy so that it can help what I call the forgotten wealth creators of Britain.
The millions of men and women who work the shifts, put in the hours.
Who are out to work while George Osborne’s curtains are still closed.
And are still out at work when he has gone to bed.
Those who have gone to university and those who haven’t.
The people who don’t take home millions or hundreds of thousands, but make a hard, honest and difficult living.
These are the people on whom our future national prosperity truly depends.
So what do we need to do today?
We need to reform our economy.
To take on the vested interests that block the opportunities for our small businesses and for all the other forgotten wealth-creators.
We need a new deal for our small businesses who have been let down by the banks.
We have to tackle short-termism in the City to enable companies to play their part to contribute to long-term wealth creation.
We have to work with business radically to reform our apprenticeships and vocational education, so we use the talents of all young people, including the 50 per cent who don’t go to University.
And we have to promote a living wage to make work pay.
That is the way that we rebuild our economy.
From the middle out.
Not from the top down.
That’s what One Nation Labour is about in the economy.
So we learn the lesson of New Labour’s successes, embracing wealth creation.
We learn the lessons of what it didn’t do well enough, reshaping our economy and creating shared prosperity.
And we recognise there will be less money around because of the deficit we inherit.
That’s why Ed Balls rightly came to this conference last year, to say if we were in government today we would have to put jobs in the public sector ahead of pay increases.
And in a way that we did not have to be under New Labour, we will have to be ruthless in the priorities we have. And clear that we will have to deliver more with less.
So One Nation Labour adapts to new times, in particular straitened economic circumstances.
And the power of the idea of One Nation also shapes the kind of society I believe in.
One Nation Labour is based on a Britain we rebuild together.
That means sharing the vision of a common life, not a country divided by class, race, gender, income and wealth.
And that’s so far from where we are in Britain today.
We can only build that kind of society, where we share a common life, if people right across it, from top to bottom, feel a sense of responsibility to each other.
Now, New Labour, unlike Old Labour, pioneered the idea of rights and responsibilities.
From crime to welfare to anti-social behaviour, it was clear that we owe duties to each other as citizens.
It knew we do not live as individuals on our own.
And it knew that strong confident communities are the way that you build a strong confident nation.
All of this is so far again from what we have seen from this government.
This government preaches responsibility.
But do nothing to make it possible for people to play their part.
They demand people work, but won’t take the basic action to ensure that the work is available.
They talk about a “big society”.
But then it makes life harder for our charities, our community groups.
But here again the answer is not simply to carry on where we left off in government.
New Labour was right to talk about rights and responsibilities but was too timid in enforcing them, especially at the top of society.
And it was too sanguine about the consequences of rampant free markets which we know can threaten our common way of life.
Learning from our history, One Nation Labour is clear that we need to do more to create a society where everyone genuinely plays their part.
A One Nation country cannot be one:
Where Chief Executive pay goes up and up and up and everybody else’s is stagnant.
Where major corporations are located in Britain, sell in Britain, make profits in Britain but do not pay taxes in Britain.
And where at the top of elite institutions, from newspapers to politics, some people just seem to believe that the rules do not apply to them.
To turn things round in Britain, we all have to play our part.
Especially in hard times.
We are right to say that responsibility should apply to those on social security.
But we need to say that responsibility matters at the top too.
That’s the essence of One Nation Labour.
It shares New Labour’s insight about our obligations to each other.
And it learns the lessons of what New Labour didn’t do well enough, ensuring responsibilities go all the way through society from top to bottom.
And what does One Nation Labour mean for the way we do our politics?
It starts from the idea that people should have more power and control over their lives, so that everyone feels able to play their part, not left on their own.
New Labour began with a bold agenda for the distribution of power in Britain.
And it stood for a Labour party not dominated by one sectional interest, but reaching out into parts of Britain that Old Labour had never spoken to.
Inviting people from all walks of life to join the party and to play their part.
It wanted too, to open up our system of government and oversaw the biggest Constitutional changes for generations, including devolution to Scotland and Wales.
The contrast with this government is clear.
The way they operate, the high-handed arrogance of their way of doing things.
They cannot claim to be opening up politics.
And they certainly cannot claim to be rooted in the lives of the British people.
But once again we have to move on from New Labour, as well as from this government.
Because although New Labour often started with the right intentions, over time it did not do enough to change the balance of power in this country.
That was true of the Labour Party itself.
Of our democracy.
And of our public services.
By the time we left office, too many people in Britain didn’t feel as if the Labour party was open to their influence, or listening to them.
Take immigration.
I am proud to celebrate the multi-ethnic, diverse nature of Britain.
But high levels of migration were having huge effects on the lives of people in our country.
And too often those in power seemed not to accept this.
The fact that they didn’t explains partly why people turned against us in the last general election.
So we must work to ensure that it never happens again.
And what is the lesson for One Nation Labour?
It is to change the way that power and politics works in our own Party right away.
That is what you will be seeing from One Nation Labour in 2013.
Opening up in new ways.
Recruiting MPs from every part of British life: from business to the military to working people from across every community.
Seeking support in every part of the United Kingdom, across the South of the country as well as the North.
Building a party that is dedicated to working with people to help them improve their own lives—even before government.
So for example, Labour Party members going to door to door offering people practical to help switch energy suppliers and cut their bills.
Creating a policy-making process that enables people directly to shape our policies so that they reflect their own concerns.
Jonathan Primett from Chatham wrote to us recently, complaining about rogue landlords at a time when the private rented sector is growing fast in our country.
Today I want to respond to him.
Britain is in danger of having two nations divided between those who own their one homes and those who rent.
If we are going to build One Nation, people who rent their homes should have rights and protections as well.
That’s about rooting out the rogue landlords.
Stopping families being ripped off by letting agents.
And giving new security to families who rent.
So we will introduce a national register of landlords, to give greater powers for local authorities to root out and strike off rogue landlords.
We will end the confusing, inconsistent fees and charges in the private rented sector.
And we will seek to give greater security to families who rent and remove the barriers that stand in the way of longer term tenancies.
That is a real example of how a One Nation Labour Party, by opening up our politics, is responding to the new challenges that the British people care about today.
One Nation Labour is also practising a new approach to campaigning—through community organising—which doesn’t just seek to win votes but build new relationships in every part of Britain.
For example, taking up local issues from high streets dominated by betting shops to taking on payday loan companies.
And, of course, a One Nation Labour government should open up too.
If devolution to Scotland and Wales is right, so it must be right that the next Labour government devolves power to local government in England.
And reforms our public services so that the people who use them and the people that work in them, feel as if they have a real chance of shaping the way they operate.
That’s the way to ensure we can all work together, to rebuild our country, with everyone playing their part.
That’s what One Nation Labour is about.
It learns the lesson of New Labour’s successes, seeking to reach out to parts of Britain that Old Labour ignored.
It learns the lessons of what it didn’t do well enough, of where New Labour left people behind.
And it recognises that in 2013, as the world has changed, politics has to change with it.
I talked about it in my Labour Party conference speech a few months ago about why I came into politics.
It was because of my personal faith.
A faith that we are better, stronger together than when we are on our own.
A faith that when good people come together they can overcome any odds.
For me, that’s what One Nation Labour is all about.
This faith isn’t unique to me.
It is deeply rooted in our country.
One Nation Labour is different from the current government.
And from New Labour and Old Labour too.
It will take on the vested interests in order to reshape our economy in the interests of all.
It will insist on responsibility throughout society, including at the top so we can build a united, not divided, Britain.
It will strive to spread power as well as working for prosperity.
We must build One Nation.
It is what the British people demand of us.
And, together, it is what we can achieve.
