Memo to Ed: “On UKIP and giving the Tories a really really bad name”

 Ed Miliband, Labour, Tories, UKIP, unclassifiable  No Responses »
May 182013
 

UKIP’s been getting itself a pretty unpleasant name of late.  Holocaust deniers, equal marriage haters, out-and-out racists – the accusations have come thick and fast.  Now much of the political debate, for Labour at least, has centred around how far it needs to triangulate to the right of the British political spectrum.  Especially in the light of political shocks such as this.

There comes a time when principle must come first, however.

However hard the decisions might be, however unfavourable the polls might seem, however tempting that triangulation becomes, however risky sticking with the values of a wider movement may be perceived, UKIP’s success is precisely the reason why Labour should firmly ignore the pressure-cooker venting of political prejudice clearly going on at the moment.

UKIP is, in fact, a perfect opportunity to paint the Tory right with the broad brush of rancid ideology.  The more the rather private British right becomes unavoidably associated with the public witterings of such figures, the more the difference between what we need Labour to be and what the right is becoming revealed as will become clear in the public mind.

It’s time we saw UKIP not primarily as a threat to Labour’s heartlands but as a perfect weapon to sully the Tories’ own attempts at detoxification.  It’s not the Labour Party which should be worried about losing its voters but the Tory Party its room for manoeuvre.  We need to make that happen.  We need to ensure it does.

The good people will come back to a Labour Party which remains firm on this one.

The sad people will bury the Tories one way or another in overbearing prejudices of UKIP’s making.  It’s not Labour’s job to make the sad people happy but make the good people realise they were right all along.

Remember that, Ed.  Remember that, please.

Partisan Mil at Chester’s Labour Live event

 Labour, on a high, One Nation Labour, sorted  1 Response »
May 182013
 

I must admit I hadn’t been to a Labour Party event for quite a while.  The local parliamentary candidate selection process did bring me temporarily back into the fold, and I had this to say about it most recently.  However, a certain Richard Beacham and helpers various appear to be creating an amazing buzz around what I had long felt to be a CLP hitting way below its potential.

So it was I went to what I believe is the first Labour Live event in Chester.  And in five short tweets from last night, here you can see my reaction to the whole affair:

At the Chester Labour Live event. Brilliant first act. Young singer-songwriter from New Brighton. Class young woman. Great songs and voice.

A folk version of Dancing Queen? With audience participation too? Now that is One Nation Labour! :-) Great stuff.

Stuck In The Middle With You plus iPad and stomping local brothers. Now if all GCs were like this …

You Can Call Me Al … or is that Arnie? Can politics really be this much fun?

Not so much Twist And Shout as twist and get them out. You could seriously win elections with such engagement.

And as I added, once back home:

@CllrSDixon ‘Twas an excellent show, wasn’t it? Never been to a GC like that in my life. ;-) @cwaclabour @cllrben

What a contrast to traditional Party occasions.  Yes, of course it involves allowing oneself to give oneself up to one’s emotions for a time, but the music was good, the conversation enthusing and I simply had a jolly good time.  No, I’m not the selfless kind who loves pushing leaflets through letterboxes; I much prefer to push words into the ether.  But I can feel much more positive about the Party more widely by getting out from behind my weapon of choice for the kind of show that Chester Labour put on last night.

There is a lesson in all of this: there is a moment in politics when desperate measures may be called for.  And those desperate measures may mean appealing occasionally to our less rational and thinking sides.  Democratic socialism of the kind I experienced last night – a local community opening its doors to culture and art in the good long-term cause of winning back government from one of the most incompetent administrations in recent times – is the sort of process and ideology we need to promote and develop.

Political parties as enablers rather than leaders; political parties which know how to bring different strands of protest together; political parties which know how to embed themselves in communities in a symbiotic and not parasitical way.

Whilst Pope Francis condemns the cult of money, MPs decide Google & Co do evil after all, modern life – and in particular politics – ignores the essence of ordinary people’s home and work experiences, and even I remember arguing that privatising intimacy was the ultimate privatisation of all, we see that overlording all of the above is an almost certainly deliberate process whereby serious centres of latterday power look to make of us all much more selfish beings.  And yet countering all the previous, surely more and more community acts of creative solidarity such as Chester’s Labour Live event last night can serve to re-establish a natural equilibrium in the way we see those around us.

Where powerful transnational processes have taught us to think only about maximising our individual and familial outcomes, the kind of political party which Labour may be transmuting into can surely, just as deliberately, re-educate us into looking to maximise societal outcomes too.

If Labour can truly learn to give to its potential voters as much as it needs to ask of them – and in that sequence and order in the grander hierarchy of relationships – then perhaps all is not lost to the selfishness that modern capitalism has ingrained in us.

So this afternoon, this is why you read Partisan Mil arguing that a future of human relationships still exists; is still salvageable; is still within our reach.

Don’t believe the Tories; don’t believe their corporate sponsors; don’t believe that money must rule our every transaction.

Live encounters; real events; natural extensions of hopes, fears, ambitions and futures.  All of this and more can be found in a Labour Live performance.

And hopefully, pretty soon, in a Labour Live political party …

Forget Cameron & Co – was One Nation Labour ALWAYS designed with UKIP in mind?

 David Cameron, in a hole, Labour, One Nation Labour, triangulation, UKIP  No Responses »
May 082013
 

This piece from Ian Birrell in the Guardian this morning says mostly what can be sensibly said about our body politic’s shared attitudes to the immigration “issue”:

The overall tone is clear: foreigners are flooding over here and taking our jobs, our benefits, our houses. This is, of course, a panicky response to the rise of Ukip – but it is one utterly wrong on commercial, economic and even the narrowest of party political grounds, pandering to ill-informed prejudice rather than putting the interests of the country first. Already the immigration cap is undermining higher education, one of our few world-beating sectors. Yet Labour, going through its own masochistic contortions on this issue, is unlikely to offer resistance; shamefully, it seems determined to outflank from the right.

Meanwhile, this is what Nigel Farage is responding right now to the Coalition’s programme on immigration for the next parliamentary session:

“The immigration measures in the Queen’s speech don’t tackle important issues on exploitation and illegal immigration.

“We support many of the measures promised though of course we will scrutinise the detail, but it appears their impact will be limited.

“The Government is still not tackling the exploitation of foreign workers leading to the undercutting of local workers. There is nothing to improve enforcement of the national minimum wage, no action on agencies recruiting only from abroad, nothing to improve training for local workers for sectors recruiting heavily from abroad, no action to extend the Gangmasters licensing legislation, and nothing to deal with slum landlords using overcrowded housing to recoup labour costs.

“The Government is also missing the opportunity to tackle illegal immigration which has got worse on their watch. There’s nothing to deal with the failure at the Home Office to deport bogus student cases, nothing to deal with loopholes in student visitor visas, and nothing to give UKBA officers who inspect colleges and workplaces the power of arrest.

“Immigration is important for Britain and needs to be controlled and managed so it is fair for all. That is why the impact on the labour market and the problem of illegal immigration need to be addressed.”

Did I say Nigel Farage?  I did, of course, mean Yvette Cooper.

The problem of course is this “One Nation” terminology.  For starters, it’s manifestly untrue: there are probably hundreds of nations of people who live their lives in latterday Britain.  So what I want to know is why they chose the phrase “One Nation“.  Why not “One State” or “One Country” – or “One Place” even?  Why focus, as they have, on an emotive word such as “nation” with all its historical, colonising and excluding baggage?

Unless, of course, that’s what you mean to do.  Unless, of course, you’d already analysed quite a way back that in a disintegrating social environment, and come 2015, the dynamics of the immigration “issue” would be far more important than the traditional old battle between left and right.

Is there any chance, any chance at all, that the Labour Party’s strategists have just been waiting for UKIP to rear its ugly head?  That the “One Nation Labour” language was never intended to allow Labour to wrest power from the Tories come election time but, rather, more predictably, deal with what would almost certainly be the real opposition five years down the line: those ideas and dynamics, those fascist instincts for personal survival over societal support, which UKIP – and other groupings like it – best exemplifies.

Is there any chance that Labour – with its “One Nation” mantra – has all along been triangulating not for a David Cameron (II) at all but, instead, for a UKIP – in one potentially unhappy shape or another?

The resulting plan being to convince all us progressive souls to continue voting as we were – on the understanding that Labour will keep slyly hidden from the rest of the electorate until after the next election its true instincts and values.

Ingenious approach, right?  Even – in the light of disagreeable 20th century history – intelligently, usefully and wisely prescient.

So just forget Cameron & Co, and hope this is the case: that One Nation Labour was always designed with a UKIP in mind.

Because if this isn’t the plan, if this isn’t the explanation for the outflanking wearily quoted in full above, I really do wonder how anyone in my dearly beloved movement expects us to believe that One Nation Labour won’t itself become that UKIP we all fear – but all on its triangulatory and ingenious lonesome.

On me, boring the pants off Labour hopefuls

 Chester, Labour, MPs, on a high  No Responses »
May 032013
 

I’ve spoken to four Labour hopefuls for the parliamentary seat of Chester.  I’m not sure why they keep on coming.  The conversations are always long; and for me absolutely fascinating.  But then I don’t half speak a lot.

For them it must be sheer torture.

A sign of democracy at work, mind.

A good sign, that.

I appreciate each and every visit sincerely, and in the spirit each and every one was intended.

The most recent visitor to my humble abode, unannounced this evening but pleasurably received, shall remain (as with the other three) quite nameless.  There was plenty to talk about, though.  Two things I’d like to mention.

I realise now, as a result of this evening’s conversation, that the following is important for me when choosing a candidate for MP.  Two fundamental approaches.  One involves judging which person might be most faithful to their constituency; which person might be least likely to be swallowed up by Westminster and that black hole of community betrayal.  The other, in a cruelly globalising world, involves judging which person might be most effective for their constituency; which person might be able to set themselves apart from that black hole of community betrayal I mention and use it to engineer greater benefits in a wider picture.

The tipping point towards one candidate or another or another or another will be determined by how sure we can be of their fidelity and competence.  And since people grow as they live their lives, what we vote on now will never be what it becomes.

So we can’t ever be sure of anyone, can we?

Of course not.

But even so, we must take our decisions as people stand before us today.  In a sense, we must determine to what degree we want to risk our futures, and how: is the job of MP a potentially magnificent multiplying of the role of local councillor?  Or, alternatively, is it a far more complex throwing of the conceptual dice, as that big and foreign world out there is seen in terms of its multiple impacts on our much smaller existences?

Is it possible, in the end, to interact with the big – and change it before it manages to irrevocably change us?  I do wonder.  I think, in fact, I’ve wondered all my life.  I think, perhaps, this – above all – is what has stopped me from interacting.

Talking of which, I’d like to come to the second point I wanted to mention in this post.  The subject of One Nation Labour arose tonight: the contrasts it may afford, once decently articulated, between the divisive Tory narrative of turning one sector of the British people against another on the one hand and the collaborative future Ed Miliband’s Labour will probably wish to engineer on the other.  But an interesting phrase, connected to the aforementioned concept, also came up in conversation: a strongly expressed desire on the part of the candidate I spoke to this evening to radically change Britain for the better.  And my reaction was quite subdued; at the very least, we could say nuanced.  Let me explain why.

I suggested that instead of wanting to radically change Britain – which quite easily could be interpreted as yet another prejudice-based obsession to change people where people-change is impossible – we should begin to construct a narrative around wanting to change the structures, companies and ways of seeing and making society that impact on our ability to radically be the people we always have been.  That is to say, One Nation Labour should not end up a fresh-faced rerun of New Labour’s New Britain – forcing square pegs which are happy to be square pegs into round holes they quite vigorously dislike – but, rather, a newly forged adapting to those 21st century realities which involve the engendering of enabling instincts many good corporate organisations now use on a daily basis.

In short, instead of changing Britain, and by extension the people, we should be changing the environment in order to liberate and release the people.

The difference may be one of focus.  The implications would, however, be substantial.

It’s not the people who are at fault – even as the Tories would have us believe this is the case.  No.  It’s the round holes which refuse to place themselves at the service of us incorrigibly square pegs.

Now worked on and fashioned carefully, that would be a tale worth weaving.  If only the progressive souls amongst us would one day accept that the great political actors of the 21st century should focus on adapting environments to people and not the other way round.

Especially as the other way round has already been tried and found terribly wanting.

Electoral success would indeed come to those who might believe in such an approach.

My question running as follows: are we even able to properly comprehend the nature of the challenge?

Why the fruitcake party makes mincemeat of our body politic

 in a hole, Labour, Lib Dems, LibDems, Tories, UKIP  No Responses »
May 032013
 

According to the Guardian this morning, on the subject of UKIP’s gains in local elections yesterday, Labour’s Hilary Benn tells the BBC that:

Hilary Benn, the shadow communities secretary, played down the Ukip threat. He told the BBC: “It is a protest party and not a party of government. Its economic policy does not add up.”

Meanwhile, the same paper reports:

Professor John Curtice of Strathclyde University said Ukip had achieved a “remarkable performance”. In a briefing paper for the Political Studies Association on the local elections, he said Ukip presents the most serious threat by a fourth political force in England since the second world war.

Now it might, as the Tories suggested recently, be that fruitcake party everyone fears.  Certainly, its selection procedures seem to have been found rather wanting (more here), leading many of us to feel that “fruitcake” is exactly the right metaphor for a grouping whose ingredients are so very mixed.

But I think when Hilary Benn says what he says, and especially when he argues its economic policy does not add up, he is being about as lackadaisical as he could be on the threat that UKIP poses to the allegedly “non-fruitcake” parties.

Let’s just summarise what’s happened under the reign of these non-fruitcakes: we discover that bankers, MPs, police officers, journalists, celebrity sex-abusers and a whole host of other citizens have been allowed to continue for decades doing their stuff, in what most of us consider entirely unfair and even immoral ways.

These non-fruitcake regimes have allowed such things to continue happening unchecked: most stones appear to have been left unturned from Thatcher’s days onwards.  What’s more, in a complex society where technocratic experts hold the reins, they have failed the needs of ordinary people mightily.  Billions of pounds-worth of dosh has been transferred from civil society to bankers, from taxpayers to MPs, from people who struggle to get to the end of the month to people who take bribes, and from licence-payers to famous people who sexually assault under-age boys and girls during decades.

And now it would seem that any present or future governments of the non-fruitcakes will continue to force ordinary people to pay for the awful consequences of the acts of the inefficient powerful.  Is it hardly surprising, then, that voters should want to protest?

So maybe Benn is right when he says UKIP is a protest party.  But if he considers this to be “merely a protest party” sort of message, then he and his fellow MPs have got it really wrong.  To date, we’ve seen little organised protest on the streets of England, or the UK more widely.  We’re not like the Spanish or Greeks – we’re not, yet, at the edge of the abyss.  But when Little Englanders change their voting patterns so consistently and so radically, surely professional “non-fruitcake” politicians should be sitting up and paying attention, rather than casually comforting themselves with the idea that UKIP’s idea of an economic environment doesn’t currently add up.

The real issue being, of course: whose does?

UKIP will continue to make mincemeat of our body politic, if politicians of the calibre of Benn continue to choose to defend themselves via a naked appeal to technocracy.  Technocracy has failed us disgracefully: it’s bloody time to protest about the implications!  And if the Tories, Labour and Lib Dems cannot see this for what it actually is, then UKIP will not only make mincemeat of the body politic, it will be able to do so without having to convincingly add up the economic numbers beforehand.

Not that this would make them necessarily ineligible to govern in Westminster.  Right, my non-fruitcake friends?

____________________

Update to this post: final results for yesterday’s elections have come my way concisely via Twitter just now.  As follows:

RT @Tom_Waterhouse Final seat tally: Con 1,116 (-335), Lab 538 (+291), Lib 353 (-123), UKIP 147 (+139), others 208 (+28) #vote2013

Andy Burnham’s NHS challenge: the socialisation of health vs the medicalisation of everything else

 Andy Burnham, Labour, sorted  No Responses »
Apr 202013
 

I was in Manchester this morning, attending an NHS Policy Forum with Andy Burnham.  He gave us a fascinating lesson in political matchmaking, which clearly serves to cement his position as a tactician of considerable importance in Labour’s chances at the 2015 general election.  My objective in this post is to explain why I believe this to be the case.

Most of what he said today, and it took nigh on fifty minutes to do so, can be found here at the moment over at the Labour Party website, in a speech he gave previously to the King’s Fund in January of this year.  I suggest you read this before we continue.

Essentially, he proposes pulling together physical, mental and social care into one £120 billion integrated and unified budget.  He referred early on to the World Health Organisation definition of health, and it bears quoting again:

Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.

The correct bibliographic citation for the definition is:

Preamble to the Constitution of the World Health Organization as adopted by the International Health Conference, New York, 19-22 June, 1946; signed on 22 July 1946 by the representatives of 61 States (Official Records of the World Health Organization, no. 2, p. 100) and entered into force on 7 April 1948.

The Definition has not been amended since 1948.

In order to make this “whole person” approach work in a free-at-point-of-use dynamic, he suggests bringing together not only what we might term as the “medical” professionals and services in the three areas mentioned but also other areas of specialist support such as housing, early years’ delivery and infrastructures etc, under the umbrella of single point-of-contact access.  And in a sense, this does makes sense: anyone who’s had to live in mould-ridden poor quality housing for example, whether social or private, will have experienced having their confidence undermined; their health attacked; and their sense of autonomy diminished – all of which lead to physical, mental and broader social care challenges likely to generate costs and fracture in these latter areas.

What better way, then, to deal with an ageing population and its very special social care needs (Alzheimer’s, physical infirmity, reduced mobility, mental unhappiness and so forth) than to take the bull by the horns, make a virtue of a necessity and suggest we extend, not reduce, the reach of the National Health Service?  In essence, re-engineer its original values for a 21st century of quite different circumstances, where a care crisis of unhappy proportions is advancing on us all.

Now there was little detail, it must be said, in the proposals themselves: but that wasn’t the purpose of the process in question at this stage.  As he clearly flagged up, he was looking to provide a framework and see how Party input could then flesh out such details.  One thing he did suggest was a, say, ten percent levy (I’m sure this was a bit back-of-the-envelope, but no less interesting for that) on people’s estates to pay for that free-at-point-of-use social care late in life – and it’s not as if this isn’t already happening via the private sector, as our grandparents struggle to fund rising healthcare, accommodation and general living costs, especially as pensions and savings are hit from all sorts of economic broadsides.

In a round-table discussion, held afterwards in groups across this extremely well-attended policy forum, someone suggested Burnham was doing little more than give priority to a highly fragmented social care provision as it currently stands: given that it’s the responsibility of councils, this view of Burnham’s real drivers would argue he had identified a highly powerful constituency – the greying group of citizens we are all becoming – and was looking to prioritise the needs of such a constituency for general electoral reasons.  If this were true, of course, we’d have a politician of Mandelson-like proportions: the Machiavellian nature of this approach could hardly contrast more fiercely with the straightforward and straight-talking image Burnham has I think quite rightly acquired.

And I don’t think Burnham is only playing politics here.  Of course, he’s looking for big and bold policy to lever Labour’s return to power – and who wouldn’t?  Especially with the complex brief – at the centre of the Labour Party’s very soul, as I think he alluded to – which he is having to sustain and drive forward in a political environment clearly infused by a savage, cunning and long-planned privatisation already well in hand.

I think he truly believes in a more humanistic medicine – a more holistic national support system for all our needs, in fact.  And I think the ambition is well worth pursuing too.  I do have some initial reservations, of course:

  • a single-point-of-contact for all our “whole person” services would require the sharing of vast amounts of parallel data with the implications this might have for our data security and privacy
  • such a system of access would require a whole new level of professionals upskilled in coordinating vastly different specialisations – and in truth, throwing even more managerialism and support services at the NHS would hardly be the first thing to make you popular in the eyes of the public
  • for patients, service-users, children, parents, tenants and “customers” various to perceive the services thus delivered in a seamless way would require those delivering the services behind the scenes to acquire similar cultures – not an easy thing in times of crisis or massive change as anyone who has been through, for example, a corporate merger will bear witness to
  • homing in – as I think was also suggested – on the home as the unit of primary focus, instead of on the hospital as the significant and principle local infrastructure, could lead to the withdrawal of such community-based delivery some way down the line, where any change of political colours in local or national government took place, or when any rising political star needed to make a name for themselves: in much the same way as it’s easier to remove a bus service than it is to remove a tram, so a hospital would almost certainly remain where a fleet-of-foot “whole person” approach could simply end up dismantled by the next cohort of bushy-tailed Tories
  • finally, the NHS is hardly known for democratic accountability: putting the “whole person” budget into one massive pot would, therefore, require very careful analysis – a priori, surely – of how to ensure useful democratic oversight in a meaningful way without incurring, once again, those top-down New Labour managerialist tendencies of overarching targets and tick-box exercises at the expense of the more humane approach I think Burnham wishes to pursue

There is, in fact, a sense that the cradle-to-grave aspect of the proposal could simply reignite fears about Blair’s nanny state: inspecting the health of your children from the day they are born; inspecting the food you give your children; inspecting the schools that deliver the education judged appropriate; inspecting the degree to which you as an adult follow the rules of good personal healthcare; inspecting the degree to which you are properly housed; inspecting the moment at which you are considered worthy of preventative medicalisation; inspecting and acquiring the resource to give everyone the right to social care.

But what are the alternatives to such a proposal?  Burnham, after all, proposes nothing less than the socialisation of health: the opportunity not to be fearful of old age but to live it for as long as possible with points of familial reference in one’s own home and surroundings.  The opportunity, if you like, to die in one’s home wherever humanly possible – without being abandoned to the vagaries of lonely decay.

For it is surely clear that social care, right now, in its fragmented state, is too much a case of “malnourished users” and “minimum-waged workforces”.  And this will be the future of the NHS too, if we don’t do something now to correct the errors of the ways of too many governments past.

And if we choose not to run with this socialisation of health I perceive in Burnham’s proposals?  Then we will run the risk of the reverse happening anyway: via the corporate forces that wish to medicalise us everywhere: in everything we do, in the costly services they sell us, in the residential homes they build empires on the backs of, in the outsourcing agreements they wrench from their commissioning groups, in the tendency modern medical mindsets and infrastructures have when they make so grand and big and imposingly different the first, second, third, fourth and last ages of all our lives.

If for no other reasons than these, then, Burnham’s “whole person” approach – even with the caveats I mention above – does sincerely deserve both our attention and our time.  To make the support of our wider humanity the flagship of Labour thought over the cruel and deliberate monetisation of suffering – its turning of human beings into little more than units of profit-generating resource – is surely both a vote-winner as well as a re-establishment of key beliefs too many of us have carelessly unattended to in sad recent times.

One final thought.  Whatever you do, however you structure it, let this be the clearest clarion call Labour makes: free-at-point-of-access support for every key definer of equal opportunity in our often kindly, occasionally cruel and generally variegated lives.

We cannot completely eliminate risk from our lives – but we should do everything we can to eliminate fear.

And so that is where we’re at: a 21st century reworking of socialism itself – driven by a strikingly self-effacing top-flight politician such as Andy Burnham – which just might end up dropping into the lap of a furiously modernising Labour Party.

A Labour Party – barely five years since it showed signs of an awful creeping political amnesia – just looking for a way to prove itself healthy and fighting fit all over again.

And able to do so with a long-term strategy which just might do the same for the rest of us too.

“The Forgotten Wealth Creators of Britain”

 Ed Miliband, Labour, on a high, One Nation Labour  No Responses »
Apr 192013
 

Last night, I posted rather dispiritedly on the future of representative democracy:

This would appear not to be only morally wrong but also economically and socially disastrous.  So are we saying that an equilibrium of forces in democracy is bad for society?  The legislative log-jams you get in the US would seem to indicate, at an anecdotal level, that this might be the case.  But if the paper I quote from above correctly supports Kath’s assessment of the dynamics behind 1970s’ British politics – that is to say, an example of appeasement pure and simple – it’s a pretty poor road and destination ahead for the idea of trying to represent anyone.  In a more fractured and niche-like age, if we aim for a responsive environment, then we will only get pulled in separate directions – with the results Kath’s 1970s brought us; with the results that latterday American governance generates.  Meanwhile, if we aim for a more prescriptive environment, little more than an encroaching fascism of private largesse will emerge – a private largesse where powerful centres of control and understanding impose their will aggressively on the multitudes.  In much the same way as is happening right now.

I thought about this post for about twenty-four hours, but only wrote it after a local branch AGM and nomination meeting to vote for our preferred candidates to go forward in the Chester Labour Constituency Party prospective parliamentary candidate (PPC) election process.  I suppose I felt obliged not to describe the details of the meeting itself, and instead spoke about my wider thoughts on the apparent futility of current representative democracy.

Not that the latter reflects my feelings of the evening with any degree of accuracy.  I am thinking more widely now, and found myself with a desire to write something yesterday.

Positively, however, one of the candidates who did get nominated brought my attention to the video below.  It’s about the forgotten wealth creators of Britain, and is obviously – why not? – a Labour Party broadcast.  Watch it first, and then we’ll discuss my reactions below.


http://youtu.be/i6j27pG4M-8

My reactions then?  It has a tonality and photography, a mise en scène, which so reminds me of so many series about World War II.  You can almost breathe the cream-coloured walls, the greens and browns of khaki-uniformed soldiers, the smell of working sweat – and the oppression of a Colditz-informed injustice, as powerful forces impose their will on ordinary working-people caught up in a wider conflict they barely – even now – comprehend.

If this is One Nation Labour, it’s a concept of nationhood which is beginning to be understood through the dynamics of war – perhaps, in particular, those dynamics of Fifth Column activists: the enemy at home clearly being the Tory Party and its hangers-on.  Or more accurately still, the Tory Party’s paymasters on whom the venerable organisation so clearly depends: for its funding, for its policies and – ultimately – for its soul.

And although I still find culturally two-dimensional, where not entirely inaccurate, the idea of a One Nation Labour which aims to contain all the nations of our islands, I can also see the potential power of the message: this video is just one element of the process, as the idea of the societal value of ordinary people working together gathers an undeniable weight through the presentation of undeniable evidence.

This is Ed Miliband’s Labour doing an updated Ronald Reagan: speaking to the people directly over the heads of the unrepresentative opinion-formers, in a language which does not simplify or reduce but – simply – uses the sophisticated visual markers which in a televisual age we are all used to and understand.

Good stuff.

Like it very much.

More please, along these lines.

Bloodless technocracy ain’t the solution – so what is?

 Ed Miliband, Labour, LabourList, New Statesman, on a high, revolution, Third Way, Tony Blair  No Responses »
Apr 112013
 

The idea of yet another third way (or more grandiloquently put, yet another “The Third Way”) rears its ugly head again.  Whilst Tony Blair re-emerges from the ashes of Thatcherism, and asks us to “oppose smartly and govern sensibly” (personally, I think it revealing he didn’t choose “oppose sensibly and govern smartly”) in a piece headlined “Labour must search for answers and not merely aspire to be a repository for people’s anger”, it would appear that Ed Miliband’s Labour is already working out how to be both a repository for people’s anger (though not always in the way they’d prefer) (more here) and its channel, aiming as it is to weave the enthusiasm-winning patterns of community-organisation and policy-empowerment structures:

[...] If all goes according to plan, Graf’s system will transform the Labour Party from a centralised, rusty machine for mass leaflet delivery into a thriving ecosystem of grassroots campaigners. The key, Graf tells me, lies in giving ordinary members ownership of the policymaking process. Then they become not just cogs in a mechanism but evangelists for a cause. [...]

So whilst Mark Ferguson rightly condemns the bloodless technocracy of Blair alongside its all too memorable results (in both the good it stealthily obtained, as well as the bad its legacy became precisely through such stealth), and as we discard Tony Blair’s intervention in a debate already too stale, what answers (to use his terminology – ah, so maybe he does have a point!) do we look for next?

Bloody revolution is clearly no option at all.  Not for moral reasons either – the violence of violent property is causing unhappy pain in the streets of Europe, Africa, the US and elsewhere as it is.  Unnecessarily so, too.  If we went down the bloody route again, the negative outcomes would just pile up on all sides.  And on our watch.

In everything there must be balance.  And so managing change of the nature we have before us must involve managing change in a balanced way.

As I pointed out recently, evolution has had its day.  The only alternative now left us is to revisit a revolution of a kind: not the blood-soaked opposite of the bloodless technocracy which Ferguson rightly finds repellent in his post, but an alternative, carefully couched and parallel process of disruption.  A “positive disruption” is how some are now terming it.  A revolution which recovers its moral right to exist, via 21st century tools which recover its ability to be ambitious of objectively-measured success.

Just imagine a French or Bolshevik Revolution aligned with the techniques of modern business.  Yes.  If Labour is looking for “The Third Way” again, it could do worse than investigate such a way.  It would automatically find itself able to draw on a huge body of practical implementation in the corporations that already sponsor political parties – and yet, at the very same time, be able to rework the tools in question for a community-based infrastructure of Party organisers.

How about it then?  Neither cold-hearted technocracy nor hot-blooded revolution – but, instead, a society-metamorphosing disruption of an entirely bloodless nature.

Bloodless but not blood-free.

There’s the key to it all.

Why Ed Miliband’s Labour lets Liam Byrne strut his stuff

 a con, Ed Miliband, Labour, Liam Byrne, welfare, Welfare State  2 Responses »
Apr 072013
 

The Observer reports this morning on Labour’s blinking first in its face-off with the UK’s ruling Coalition.  As a justification for the changes now in the pipeline of “progressive” politics, Byrne is said to have claimed the following:

The shadow work and pensions secretary, Liam Byrne, writing in the Observer, commits Labour to a return to the “old principle of contribution” championed by William Beveridge after the second world war. “There are lots of people right now who feel they pay an awful lot more in than they ever get back,” Byrne writes. “That should change.”

As a “senior party source” in Ed Miliband’s Labour seems delighted to point out (the bold is mine):

[...] “The problem at the moment is that you have a person aged 50 who has worked all his life and then becomes unemployed getting much the same as the person next door who has never worked. It is about linking what you take out to what you have put in,” said a senior party source.

Well.  I’m sorry.  That’s not what it’s all about.  There are millions of people with all kinds of support needs out there who need to be prioritised before such decisions are taken.  That they are not being prioritised – ie that we are becoming an uncivilisation unable to see the less cruelly ambitious, or simply less able, as little more than irritants in a socioeconomic environment of self-confidently alpha men and women – is something which should make us think far more than twice about the direction we’re taking.

So let’s take that telling phrase apart just a little, shall we?  “‘It is about linking what you take out to what you have put in,’ said a senior party source.”  For starters, this is clearly Ed Miliband’s Labour speaking.  So let us have no doubts about that.

Then the phrase and thesis itself: for in order to fashion such a link between “putting in” and “getting out”, we assume several things:

  1. The criteria we use to determine what we consider appropriate to value as an input: economic contribution; social; familial; scholarly … the list is obviously fairly complex and really should be debated first.
  2. The starting-point at which everyone finds themselves: essentially, how privilege and post-code lotteries are barriers to or catalysts of societally approved (see number 1) definitions of progress … it’s manifest, after all, that if you start off with millions, you’ll be able to contribute more financially to society (or, alternatively, pay someone to avoid/evade such contributions, if that’s what floats your boat).
  3. The natural justice or not of defining people only in terms of their financial and economic profiles: this, truly, is the monetisation of life to the power of a thousand (see number 1, where I’m sure it’s only going to be the first item in my list which’ll interest our beloved number-crunching politicos; see number 2 for how we so easily justify the felicitous, or otherwise, accidents of privilege) … and something I have spoken about, in fact, on already far too many occasions.

In reality, then, it’s not about “linking what you take out to what you have put in”.  If we’re going to be truly progressive about the matter, we’d do well to remember the story of the widow’s mite:

In the story, a widow donates two small coins, while wealthy people donate much more.[2] Jesus explains to his disciples that the small sacrifices of the poor mean more to God than the extravagant, but proportionately lesser, donations of the rich.[2]

So where, in Ed Miliband and Liam Byrne’s “progressive” universe, does the widow of biblical proportions now fit?  Where are the mechanisms to define people in terms of how far they’ve come and under what adversity?  Where is the intellectual desire to understand in all its complexity the actions and efforts of all human beings – whatever their personal journeys, whatever their own hopes and miseries – across the nation they claim to represent?

For that, really, is the issue.  The problem isn’t whether Labour has blinked first or not.  The problem is how many people will no longer find representation under this democracy.  As is clear since 2009, both left and right political parties across the OECD world have catered only to the very top of society.  We should hardly be surprised, as a result, when Labour unleashes such ideas as Liam Byrne loves to represent.  The stats would seem to suggest it’s been happening everywhere, anyway.  And Labour’s history over the last fifteen years hasn’t really led to any long-lasting revolutions in political behaviours.

Two final points:

  1. A hard power observation: linkage may be a good idea under certain circumstances – but only where not gamed in favour of the privileged in society, and only where we do not use nakedly economic outputs to determine the value each person is able to add to a community.
  2. A soft power observation: linkage needs to be carefully, and sensitively, implemented in a world where conditional relationships are destroying our ability to work together to a common good.

And one final question, before I finish writing my political suicide – this time, directly for Ed Miliband’s Labour itself.

Last night I argued that the Coalition government was not just looking to reduce the cost of the Welfare State in its “propping up” of the 99 percent who don’t abuse the system but that it was also looking to increase the amount of public resource that ended up in the pockets of the most privileged.  In effect, as I termed it, the privatisation of the Welfare State.

My question, then, for Labour this afternoon – a political party I am a member of, after all – runs as follows: does Labour also plan to continue primarily supporting the interests of the top 6 percent by shifting even more public resource over to the already wealthy?  Or will it, one day, ever consider measuring and supporting its voters in ways that do not automatically lead to further enrichment at the very top?

A start vs an end: the means to a new kind of democracy

 Anthony Painter, Good Democracy, Labour, Peter Levine, political innovation, political parties, politics, sorted  No Responses »
Mar 302013
 

There are many kindly things which Anthony Painter is careful to say today, in order to couch his cautious welcome to potentially new ways (at least, that is to say, in England amongst the major parties) of carrying out political activity.  If you read his piece, I’m sure you’ll see what I mean.

Three things he says in particular which I’d like to focus on this afternoon (the bold is mine in both paragraphs).  The first two, here:

The major risk is that Labour simply rides a wave of resistance politics and cites this as evidence of change and the founding of a ‘new movement’ while actually changing its power structures very little. This explains my anxiety about claims of fundamental change and a ‘new movement’. Both locally and nationally, the Labour Party remains extremely closed and narrow both in terms of access to political position and to policy influence. It’s a party that still fears pluralism; its core value is loyalism. Diversity is seen as about representation of certain groups rather than a complete opening out. It is still more a phalanx than a network.

And the third:

To be serious about change and ‘transformation’ there are far tougher questions that have to be asked about power. The conversation we are having is about organisation ultimately – though it is often dressed up in the language of power. The conclusion on this level is that there are many brilliant initiatives taking place but much of political sell around is, well, political sell. Until some vested interests not just in the Labour Party but British democracy more widely are cracked, however, transformational change will remain elusive.

All three observations are music to my ears – and really need no expanding.  I commented a few days ago on how the newly-formed and so-called Coalition of Resistance should’ve really been named something along the lines of the Coalition for Recovery.  It seems to me the left always foolishly – or at the very least, rather unfortunately – makes the mistake of defining itself in terms of reactive processes, rather than looking to take the vanguard.

Paradoxically enough, maybe, when we consider the internecine histories of socialist and Communist parties.

That the Labour Party fears pluralism is also self-evident in my experience.  Tribalism of a most closed and blocking kind is definitely a driver for those who claim to truly believe.  Of course, this is almost certainly due to real suffering and hard experience – but it doesn’t make political advancement and communication any easier in a latterday world of collaboration, connectedness and flat hierarchies of teamwork.  The instincts here, of openness to new ideas and new ways of thinking around subjects, do not come easily to those whose very life journey has taught them to be suspicious of strange bearers of gifts various.

Painter’s other point, about the need to crack vested interests “not just in the Labour Party but British democracy more widely” could easily become a motto for any new movement in any political grouping, where the aim was to properly and coherently recover our democracy.  The job ahead of us is much more profound than sorting out Labour: Labour, after all, is like it is because when you choose your competition, inevitably you become just like it.  Monolithic and tribal trades unionists, political thinkers and councillors are as they are because they are faced by powerful and expanding forces of Big Money which present exactly the same profile to the world.  After all, how on earth can any worker consider facing down a transnational without the support of an equally transnational network of informed and connected activists?

So the objective ahead must be democracy itself.  A democracy in and of a society where the concept is breaking – and if not breaking, then stumbling certainly.  A Good Democracy (more here), as per Peter Levine: a democracy which is simultaneously inclusive and efficient.

The task ahead, to create a truly sustainable politics, where people renew and inform and communicate ad infinitum, means understanding the process more as a start than as an end: a start which – on the back of different ways of organising ourselves – not only never ends but also serves as a means to a different kind of democracy.

The one, in fact, we always assumed we had a right to.

David Miliband: A Charitable Turn Of Events

 David Miliband, Ed Miliband, Labour, Labour leadership campaign, unclassifiable  No Responses »
Mar 272013
 

Such is the latent paranoia politics engenders in one that on hearing the news David Miliband was stepping down as MP, I tweeted the following:

Careful! What if this is a Progress plot to focus attention on Ed M? Get rid of D, next on list is E. Then once E has gone, D comes back!!!

If truth be told, I have good memories of Mr Miliband (D).  I once attended, on a very hot London evening, an Intelligence Squared debate in which he participated.  He was very Blair-like, it is true, in his delivery – but his delivery seemed rather more searching and childlike in its desire to get at some truth than Blair ever managed to achieve.  Perhaps I was seeing him earlier on in his trajectory; perhaps Blair was more solidified and fixed by the time I lived under him.  I was, after all, still in Spain until 2003.  And two elections are bound to take their toll on the ability of a top-flight politician to continue in that childlike mode of discovery I, even now, associate with people like Miliband (D).

That Miliband (D) is still on a journey of discovery is, however, made manifest by last night’s news.  As the title to this post says, a charitable turn of events.  The fact that the charity in question is called International Rescue didn’t half bring to the surface a flood of Miss Penelope and Brains jokes.  The fact that an ex-Foreign-Secretary should be taking up a global responsibility in New York doesn’t half make me wonder about succession planning and the role of General Secretary to the United Nations!

Though only idly.  After all, Louise Mensch has also moved to New York …  (There’s competition in such company, I think; a city full to the waterways of the aggressive.)

What’s absolutely true is that the attention lavished last night and this morning on Miliband (D)’s departure from these shores far more than matches the attention lavished (not) on those ordinary Labour Party members and supporters who cut their connections with the Party over the workfare debacle recently.  And perhaps, in such moves, we could inscribe Miliband’s journey also: it’s arguable he’s doing nothing more than following many other political activists of firmly held opinion from the arena of multi-issue political parties into far more satisfying, focussed and pointedly charitable single-issue environments.

What you and you and you and you did last week in relation to your support for Labour, and as a result of attitudes and behaviours you really didn’t approve of, Mr David Miliband has decided to do today in much the same way.  We all, after all, have our markers in the sand.

Is this the beginning of the end of political parties?  It may be.  Fragmentation may inevitably be the pattern from now on in.  On the back of Mr Miliband’s sonorous resignation, others may follow suit; others may even cross the floor of the Commons.  Not a sudden decline; not one visible to its actors; just a slow and steady fall into an uncertain abyss where one’s voters simply begin to ignore one.  As one tweet which flitted past me last night seemed to say: “And why should the David Miliband story affect me exactly?”

A mainstream journalist (either the Telegraph or the Mail) even seemed to suggest that the change of role in question was more a “non-job” than a “dream job”.  I think, perhaps, more than anything else, this shows how complicitly foolish those in the Westminster bubble have become.  If, as I suggest, Miliband is following millions of other human beings out of party political activity, this doesn’t mean he is necessarily abandoning the political process itself.  Governments less and less exert power over how we do stuff.  More and more they are tied up by their unspooling obligations.

It may be that Miliband is as ambitious as always, but has seen that parochial little Britain really just doesn’t shape up any more.

And the future for Labour?  I’ve already said what I think.  And I’ll summarise it all with a final tweet from last night:

Labour’s leadership doesn’t need this or that figure. What it needs is hundreds of thousands of such figures. They’re called members.

Compass, “A Social Security For All” and a middle-class waverer’s final stand

 Coalition, Compass, Labour, latterday capitalism, latterday socialism, on a high, social organisation, social services, welfare, Welfare State, wellbeing, Western civilisation  No Responses »
Mar 252013
 

A while ago, I was very cross with Compass (more here).  Part of what brought the Tory/Lib Dem Coalition to power was a broader miasma which led to the organisation’s dallying with the very idea of what the Lib Dems represented at the time.  Which is not to say that New Labour didn’t lose the election; didn’t bring this catastrophe upon them(and our)selves.  But Compass, along with the Guardian newspaper, certainly got their fingers all filthy in some amazingly grubby pies of half-baked confection.

Over the past year or so, however, an alternative to sincere but hardly transferable barricade-climbing (I did suggest in all good faith that a Coalition of Resistance backed by sixty-three economists should really have been named a Coalition for Recovery) has, in parallel to other more grassroots movements, been emerging from the thinkers who now seem to be interfacing with this grouping.

Which is not to underplay the importance of all the organisations which attempt to battle with the wily beast that is Tory/Lib Dem uneconomics.  It’s just that one day, some time, the rainbow must either disappear – or find its crock of gold before it’s too late.

Anyhow.  To the reason for this post.  Today, as an interested subscriber to their email list, I received notice of a briefing on how to defend and construct a powerful narrative around the concept of social security: deliberately, I think, recovering its original denomination to recover its original integrity and sensibilities.

Welfare has been hurt so unhappily of late – not only by Cameron’s lot but also by the internecine Blue, Black, Purple and Red Labour boots which have bruised their way across a wider Labourism.  So it’s no wonder Compass are finally looking to reframe that debate.

You can find the briefing in question here, if you’re interested.  Some quotes which caught my eye below:

1. Social security cannot be separated from economic security.

If we are to deal with causes and not just the symptoms of our social recession then we need an economic model that provides security and social justice through fair wages and decent, more evenly distributed work. Having overworked and stressed people existing side by side with those that are desperate for work makes no sense.

And this in particular:

Through new institutions, built by people and not remote bureaucrats, we create the spaces in which progressive values of equality and democracy are reinforced.

Which reminds me of my piece on the potential for a positive Latin-Americanisation of Europe, as well as some of the things I highlighted today on how democratic institutions have been hijacked by the top 6 percent.

Some other choice phrases in no order of preference:

  • The widespread nature of an aging population and ill health due to modern lifestyles and endemic job insecurity means costly-targeted systems should be replaced by services that are open to all in a way that is universally preventative; this means providing services for everyone to reduce harm to us all.
  • The renewal of the welfare state starts with a refusal to believe the worst of our neighbours, colleagues, friends and family and seeks to rebuild it by believing the best in people. No one was born wanting to live their lives on the couch, avoiding not just work but the opportunity to make the most of their life, and very few do so. We are only fully human when we are creative and engaged in society with other people. Yet we must be given the space and opportunity to be a part of and add to our society- whether that be through paid work, caring for a family member, running a household, or being a part of our community.
  • Language is vital. You may have noticed we have used the term social security in this document, this is because welfare has become contaminated by its association with a US-style residual poor relief for people of working age. We need to reclaim and own the phrase social security as not simply a bureaucratic means but representative of an end to which society aspires; a society that provides security. It expresses the desire to achieve, insofar as is possible, genuine economic security for all through social means.

There’s a lot of good stuff in there – certainly a lot of good intentions few would find it in themselves to disagree with.  I can hardly see Nick Clegg’s Lib Dems agreeing to any of that, mind.  And the current Tory leadership, in your dreams.

At the moment, I have to say we are simply cannon fodder in a wider battle we really did not know we were signing up to.  And perhaps I was wrong, after all, to argue for a Coalition for Recovery – perhaps, right now, it’s one of Resistance we do indeed need.  With the wise initial steps of this gentle document on narrative, coupled with the intellectual vigour of a People’s Assembly backed by those who know all too well what resistance is like, the time to resist may be much closer than we think.

No.  The Tory/Lib Dem Coalition haven’t quite become evil Nazi-types for the moment.  But they have chosen to take the fraudulent 0.7 percent of the welfare budget and paint 99.3 percent of poor people’s behaviours in its light.  It was they who chose to employ a tiny number of Britain’s inhabitants as a battering-ram to clobber down the doors of thoughtful, and supposedly sovereign, voters everywhere.  And in their thirst for continued power they will continue in such a way – until, I suppose, they ultimately run out of further objects to demonise.

At which point, who knows what they might do?  Any ideas? Do you know? Have you any notion?

And – as one last thought – once we arrive at that moment, will you finally be ready to take a middle-class waverer’s final stand? *

____________________

* Acknowledgements to Tom for such a perfectly nutshelled idea.

How sad globalisation will never be happy internationalism (or Labour, business and bollocks)

 globalisation, internationalism, Labour, latterday capitalism, latterday socialism, New Labour, One Nation Labour, Peter Mandelson, rebranding, revolving doors, Rob Marchant, unclassifiable  No Responses »
Mar 222013
 

Rob makes an interesting point at The Centre Left yesterday:

The issue is this: Labour’s internationalism tends not to be the internationalism of today; of the internet, of international business, travel and communication. It too often harks back to the internationalism of solidarity, of comrades-in-arms. The internationalism, rather, of the Internationale. It is touching, and it strikes a chord with many of us. But it is an inward-looking,backward-looking definition.

The reason? Because practically none of its leading lights has the first clue about the internationalism that most of us see. Yes, they have visited other countries, on academic placements or political missions. But they have never, for the most part, worked in the private sector, that most international of environments. There is a blind spot there.

One Nation Labour was ever thus misconstrued.  Fatally flawed as it is from the internal contradiction of bemoaning “local” nationalisms and yet arguing, in a multi-culture world (where not multicultural), that single nation vocabulary is going to send out the right international signals, the internationalism Rob incompletely describes has simply served as the anteroom of such singular approaches to globalisation.

But whilst most of what he says seems the acceptable face of “responsible” capitalism – which is to say, pragmatic business lives pragmatically lived – I have to take issue with some of his underlying assumptions.  Especially when he says things like this:

How often do you hear a Labour MP talk about the “Asian century”? How many have visited Shanghai, the new hub of that continent? How many, dammit, even have dealings with continental Europe, if it is not to exchange political pleasantries with some European politician with an equally limited view?

Certainly, when Labour MPs are leaders or front-benchers of their Party, they don’t even exchange pleasantries with their own damn members.  They force us to swing from one cuddly but painful extreme (as defined by Rob) to another, far more cruel (as defined by Ed Miliband’s outrider, Liam Byrne).

I also find this quote revealing in its slightly dismissive tone – the “of course” is pregnant even where not pronounced; and is, of course, a bit of giveaway:

The fact is that there is a global race. It is not, as some Labour members would have it, a “race to the bottom”, in wages and protection for workers, although those things are important to safeguard. But merely pretending the race doesn’t exist is not an option, either.

It may, of course, be true that Labour and business must find different ways of getting on with each other – but the business bollocks that is revolving doors, unpaid workfare schemes and other marvellous examples of Labour’s pleasantries on behalf of capital surely has to change.  Yes.  New Labour successfully fashioned an electoral platform on the basis of triangulation – but in the process it’s pretty clear now that the job of government, what previously could have been described as a process of enabling the needs and rights of both ordinary voters as well as transnational movements of all kinds, has gradually made it indistinguishable to the job of corporate CEOs themselves: maximise revenues, outputs and market share of very specific interest groups at the expense of an awfully peaked employment.

Finally, today, I’d like to quote from a post I stumbled across yesterday before I went to bed.  It related Peter Mandelson’s speech to the CBI dinner last night (currently only available via Google webcache).  Remembering that Mr Mandelson was a key architect of New Labour, I’d like to simply list a few of the phrases he came up with (this is not a comprehensive summary of his thesis):

  • [On the eurozone crisis] we are seeing the relative competitiveness of the southern euro states – their unit labour costs – going in the right direction. It’s important that their fiscal consolidation and structural reforms continue because they have a long way to go.
  • But this is not either/or. It would be a mistake to argue for growth at the expense of continuing structural reform and improving competitiveness and productivity in Europe.
  • Rises in wages unlinked to increases in productivity in some countries have been a big part of eurozone’s problems, as are rigid product markets in many services.
  • [On the British crisis, the] banks will be re-building themselves for years to come. There remains uncertainty surrounding our main trading partner in Europe. Energy prices are not helping us. The way back is going to be long, costly and painful.
  • I believe government has responsibilities to help create a one nation society. But as a country I believe we need to make bigger choices than the ones being offered today. The next election deserves to be won by the party that has done the hard thinking and policy development not just on maintaining public welfare and re-distributing the cake but on how we expand and re-invent the cake, by transforming what we produce and how. And also where we sell it.
  • Britain needs to be deeply committed to exploiting the opportunities in the fast growing markets of the world – where I placed my emphasis and priority as Europe’s Trade Commissioner – but – and this is a big but – without ignoring the huge market on our doorstep.
  • [On Britain's relationship with Europe, it] seems insane to me, at a time when we have in our country so many other deep seated problems to grapple with, we should want to add to them by starting an entirely artificially generated argument amongst ourselves about whether or not we want to remain in the European Union.

Underlying all the above is the belief that getting structures right is more important than empowering people themselves to explain and engineer – themselves – what they need.  And it chimes most unhappily, too, with Rob Marchant’s globalisation “light” (my take a few posts ago on a related subject here): real people who travel to real countries and buy real raw materials.

In essence, if political parties are not to become more and more irrelevant, they must understand that broadcast politics – broadcast discourses in general – are not the way of the future.  There must be a far more collaborative approach which doesn’t simply involve the dreary one-way “listening” of professional politicos from so many halting times past but, rather, looks to involve and engage – through politics – voters and other interested citizens in all kinds of socioeconomic decision-making processes.

If Labour is to convince all its constituencies that there is still a place for it in the modern world, it mustn’t simply – nor gaggingly – hang onto the coattails of the internationally globe-trotting opinion formers of Marchant’s post but – also – realise, in its grandest traditions, that it has a pedagogical responsibility to lead such opinion.  And no rebranding exercise – whether that which renames “globalisation” as “21st century internationalism” or that which renames “Labour” as “New Labour” and, then, rather breathlessly, as “One Nation Labour” – will ever excise from the memories of millions the fact that in the economic equation which is flesh-and-blood finite lives versus eternal corporate structures the Labour Party is called to defend the former from the veritable abuses of the latter.

A final final thought: Labour does need to constructively interface with capital.  But where this needs to take place is at an empowered grassroots.  The elite, the slightly irrelevant European politicians Marchant mentions (presumably not referring here to Peter Mandelson), have made the mistakes they have made for one of two reasons:

  1. because they’re too far removed from the realities their policy-making impacts on – unsatisfactorily inefficient elites we could call them;
  2. because they’re deliberately using austerity to nakedly transfer wealth from the poor to the rich – brazenly efficient elites we could call them;

Either way, Labour needs to recover its former role of enabling the interests of voters and citizens above all.  If not, anything else will simply lead us not to a 21st century internationalism but, instead, to a very 21st century return to fascism.

And I’m sure no one in the Labour Party would deliberately argue in favour of that kind of globalisation, whatever the rebranding exercise in question.

____________________

Update to this post: Progress, on whose server Peter Mandelson’s speech was originally hosted, is back online.  You can now find the full text, as per my Google webcache link above, by clicking here.

Talking of Ed (Miliband, that is)

 Blairites, Disraeli theory, Ed Miliband, in a hole, Labour, Liam Byrne, New Labour, One Nation Labour, one-nation conservatism, revolution, workers, workfare, working-class  No Responses »
Mar 212013
 

Following on from my rather widely read post on Labour’s unhappy relationship with workfare (now why don’t you read me when I talk of bloodless revolution?  Sign the bloody sustainability manifesto, for goodness sake!), there have been quite a few comments on Facebook.  In reply to one which suggested that Liam Byrne was acting as a result of Ed Miliband’s (otherwise admirable, for sure) collegiate leadership style, I made this comment:

Collegiate style is positive, as you say. But you have to ensure there exist principles which guide too. Here, Ed is maybe a little loose still.

I then went on to point out that:

I don’t, however, think it’d take the scalpels of a neurosurgeon to work out that a party called Labour shouldn’t believe in making people who have little power work for nothing because the top brass have mucked up their socioeconomic policies.

And finally laid out my uncertainties at the moment in this way:

Byrne knows what he’s doing and for whom. What I really am worried about is that Ed, actually, likes the idea of using him as an outrider. Now if that’s the case, I’d be questioning Ed’s position.

For all the last decade’s talk of Labour values versus rolling change – how to keep the heart and soul of the Party at the heart and soul of everything we do, even as what we do involves upending some of the tools we’ve traditionally used to achieve our goals – Blairism was finally little more than a cuckoo in a fairly selfless nest of good-hearted workers.

Ed (Miliband) should realise this.

I’m sure he does.

What I’d really like to feel comfortable about is that he realises another cuckoo – in the shape of One Nation Labour (the comparisons between the language of the latter and the original “New Labour, New Britain”, if you think carefully about it, simply don’t bear contemplating) – really isn’t what the country needs right now.

So if One Nation rhetoric is to mean anything at all, let it not mean Blairism Mark II.

Liam Byrne would be its standard.

And we clearly don’t want that.

Time, dear Ed, to define behind whose flag you wish to march.

Why I really fear Labour’s abstention on workfare

 in a hole, Labour, workers, workfare  2 Responses »
Mar 192013
 

I can’t possible transmit effectively or accurately how most people on my Twitter timeline who’ve expressed an opinion have reacted to Labour’s abstention today in relation to workfare-related issues.

Three documents, then, to bring you up to speed.  Labour’s Liam Byrne, Iain Duncan Smith’s opposite number in more ways than one it would seem (the two of them were acidly described as being like two bald men fighting over a comb), wrote this today in Huffington Post.  Caroline Lucas, of the Green Party, countered with this piece.  Meanwhile Sunny Hundal, in Liberal Conspiracy, had already set the scene quite critically here:

[...] the concessions [Byrne claims to have extracted from Duncan Smith] won’t stop those wronged by the DWP’s blunder to get compensation. Stopping them from getting compensation is the sole purpose of this emergency bill. Liam Byrne counters that if the DWP was forced to pay out these fines then it would have to make more benefit cuts elsewhere. But that still betrays the job-seekers who have been exploited by the system thus far.

Yesterday, Unite the Union also released a statement slamming the government’s rushed attempts to shore up unworkable Workfare schemes.

It’s time the unions also pressed Labour to take a stronger line against IDS’s Workfare schemes.

My attention was also drawn this evening to a Hansard description of the unhappy proceedings in question.  In particular, to this exchange:

Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP):

Will the right hon. Gentleman therefore explain to claimants, trade unions and everybody who has looked at this Bill why the Labour party will be abstaining today? If this Work programme is no better than no work programme at all, why on earth is the Labour party sitting on its hands?

Mr Byrne:

I will address that point directly, as the answer is very simple: because this Bill restores the general legal power of the DWP to issue sanctions. It is a broad sui generis power that has been in place since 1911. I will be interested to hear later the hon. Gentleman’s argument on why he thinks the power to issue sanctions, which has been in place since 1911, should now be struck down for the period in question.

The worst aspect of all this is that the Secretary of State was warned that he was heading for a failure not simply in this House, not simply by commentators opposed to his plans, and not simply by people who had a profound disagreement with him, but by the very specialist Committee he set up to advise him on these questions. This is what the Social Security Advisory Committee said about the 2011 regulations:

“SSAC ask why the Department did not opt to narrow the scope of the original regulations”,

Indeed, it was, of course, their broad and unspecified content that the Court of Appeal objected to.

In essence, Byrne – and by extension Labour and the movement it represents – believes that a legal technicality overrides the need to defend a basic human right: the right to be paid and remunerated for work done.  And whilst – via the miasma that is Parliament, the legal profession and everything associated with lawmaking – the outsiders we are perceive that stuff isn’t as simple as it might seem at first glance, there is, at least for me, a serious question left hanging in the turgid atmosphere of this affair: what does Labour’s abstention really mean?

For if I am to remain a part of this party of labour, of this movement of labour, of the party that takes its name from the flesh-and-blood side of the economic equation, I need to know the answer to the following question: why did Labour really abstain?

Was it:

  1. in order to resolve a hiatus in a law which Parliament has seen fit to maintain since 1911?
  2. in order to continue a relentless battle for voter turf as per Labour’s triangulatory instincts of yore?
  3. in order to re-establish, in the guise of One Nation unity, a Brand New Old New Labour comeback?

That is to say, did Labour abstain because it was process-driven by insensitive technocrats, tactically-driven by inept strategists or ideologically-driven by power-crazed sub-Blairites?

In any of the above, I have to say I’m inclined to reserve my judgement.  But if it comes to light that Labour really did abstain not because it was playing silly political buggers at all but, rather, because it was too bloody embarrassed to come out and honestly admit – in the fading light of a bad March evening – that it actually believes in a “something for nothing culture”, then I’m really afraid it’s going to be curtains for very many people.

And when I say “believes in a ‘something for nothing culture’”, I do of course mean the process whereby:

  1. a person loses their job as government austerity cuts run deep, whilst the incompetence of our political class destroys infrastructures various
  2. a person goes spare, whilst unable to find another job
  3. a person is finally obliged to go on a workfare scheme in order to continue receiving benefit
  4. a person, just maybe, ends up in a very similar job to the one they used to do before – only this time being compelled to do that workfare-inscribed “something for nothing”

Meanwhile, a corporate sponsor or two or three or a thousand find themselves benefiting from a double societal whammy: on the one hand, escaping what would be fair and equitable tax burdens through tax avoidance schemes, whilst simultaneously taking advantage of a nation’s taxpayer-funded infrastructures; and on the other, being able to employ an ever-increasing queue of people at the mercy of these “something for nothing” ideologies – ideologies which Byrne, and Labour more widely, appear to share so strongly with their counterparts in the Coalition.

So Labour.

What’s your answer then?

Did you sit on your hands because your strategists fucked up – or did you sit on your hands because your strategists fucked us?

Time Ed Miliband gave David Cameron a helping hand

 Coalition, Coalition capitalism, Coalition cuts, Coalition economics, Coalition U-turns, David Cameron, Ed Miliband, Labour, latterday capitalism, latterday socialism, New Labour, New Toryism, on a high, One Nation Labour, one-nation conservatism, Tony Blair, Tories  No Responses »
Mar 112013
 

Paul Burgin asked an intriguing question this afternoon.  I retweeted it and answered it thus (for those of you not familiar with Twitter’s syntax, you have to read the second part first and the first part second):

What Ed M is doing right now? Rock boat, but not too much. RT @Paul_Burgin: What does it take to ensure that Cameron remains PM until 2015?

Is it, in fact, time that the leader of the Labour opposition, Ed Miliband, gave David Cameron, the Tory Prime Minister, the helping hand it would appear he so desperately needs?  After all, this judgement of Cameron’s efficacy and historical potential is biting – and eye-opening:

My friend writes:

“I’m struggling to get the incredulity of the commentariat regarding leadership threats to Cameron. Why should anyone expect that a Party leader who failed to win an unlosable General Election, did nothing with being PM, and apparently has no chance of winning the next General Election would survive unchallenged?”

Ouch. And, as he points out, it is often forgotten that later this year Cameron will have been leader for eight years.

“Eight years after becoming Conservative Party Leader … Thatcher had got inflation from 22 per cent to 4 per cent and beaten the Argies. Heath had joined the EU. Churchill had won World War Two. Baldwin had seen off the General Strike and the Great Depression and broken both the Liberal and Labour parties, utterly. (No other Conservative leader lasted eight years post World War One). Cameron, on the other hand has … well, there’s … umm …”

Now I’m not entirely sure that in that poverty-stricken “umm” everything is necessarily lost.  Blair’s abiding achievement, after all, was a bloody conflict in Iraq.  It may have been the case that history was cruel to him – but the energy, resource, financial weight and body count which the conflict in question required of us leads me to wonder if a cipher of Blair wasn’t exactly what we were looking for in Cameron.  So did Cameron really fail to win an “unlosable General Election” – or was it, rather, that he instinctively comprehended the British people’s need to tether just a bit more definitively their next leader to their evermore parochial kennel?

Sometimes, the closed system that is politics has its own karma.  You give up a country’s sense of itself to a foreign power such as the US, however apparently justified at the time the deal may have appeared to be – and the next leader but one who comes along has no alternative but to reverse the ship of state.  No more foreign adventures for the moment – no more Falklands, no more Kosovos, no more Iraqi conflagrations.  If you must lie to the people, then divide the country cruelly up into deserving and non-deserving; get your communications paid for by the viewers via the TV licence fee; and tell those huge lies as hugely as you can, whilst history – or at the least the next general election – remains firmly on your side.

But whether Cameron is the cipher we needed or not, I think it’s pretty clear we in the Labour Party now need him to remain.  We need his frantic straddling of supposedly detoxified Toryism on the one hand and the lurching to the right which UKIP’s current bounce presages on the other to continue for as long as it might.

And it is in Paul Burgin’s original question and in Iain Martin’s perspicacious friend that I think I finally discover the reasons behind the modest approach which, to date, Labour’s Ed Miliband has taken.  Miliband has had Cameron’s measure since the very beginning.  After all, Miliband was an MP under Blair – had the opportunity to observe at close quarters the very man Cameron has surely modelled himself on.

In both Cameron’s strengths as a professional obfuscator and his manifest weaknesses as a professional salesman, Miliband will have seen it all before.

Miliband knows Cameron’s laying his own traps.  He just has to be there for him – with the kind of helping hand all enemies proffer.

Enough rope to keep him hanging on.

Not too much to hang him.

Not yet.

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