So, Ed the Leader has spoken.<\/p>\n
It was one of those speeches that I\u2019ve got too used to as a member of the Labour Party where our representatives say some sensible things but then wrap them around a wad of stupidity calculated to appeal to the centre even as the right (Labour and Tory) and their sympathisers in the media succeed in dragging what is perceived to be the \u201ccentre ground\u201d of British politics so far to the right that soon only people with Stretch Armstrong limbs will be able to comfortably reach it.<\/p>\n
I have been a Labour Party member since 1988 \u2013 joining not long after I came to England \u2013 and I remain proud of my membership. I don\u2019t care if people call me tribal. I am tribal. I think my tribe has done great things in the past and will do great things again.<\/p>\n
I know there are liberals and greens and real <\/em>socialists and libertarians who consider themselves \u201cprogressive\u201d who look on the Labour Party with disdain because of the compromises it makes. But I look at them and wonder what their ideals have delivered for the working people of this country in the last 60 years? And then I look at the record of the Labour Party and I think they can keep their pristine idealism \u2013 I\u2019ll take the NHS, the welfare state, the minimum wage and the thousands of schemes like Sure Start and the Education Maintenance Allowance and the youth employment scheme and Child Tax Credits and winter fuel payments and free museums and free nursery places, all of which aimed to do (sometimes small, sometimes massive) things to give people greater self-respect, new opportunities and better lives.<\/p>\n Because even the most compromised of Labour governments \u2013 one that doesn\u2019t achieve anything like as much as it should have \u2013 can make dramatic differences to people\u2019s lives.<\/p>\n Why am I rehearsing these tired old stories?<\/p>\n It\u2019s a reaction to listening to the Blairite rump of the Labour Party up at conference telling every friendly journalist and blogger who will listen that the days when governments could actually \u201cdo\u201d things are over. That we should give up on a century of progress and leave the job of trying to make society better to KPMG, Tescos and the Women\u2019s Institute.<\/p>\n It used to be just professionally world-weary idealists \u2013 the kind who couldn\u2019t bear to get their hands dirty with the low business of politics because it never delivered their idea of the perfect outcome \u2013 who told us politics didn\u2019t make a difference.<\/p>\n Now even the politicians are starting to say that it doesn\u2019t matter who you vote for, everything turns out the same.<\/p>\n Apologise, they say, for your past attempts to support the weak.<\/p>\n Give up your desires, they say, for ambition will scare the voters.<\/p>\n Abjure government, they say, and abase yourself before the market.<\/p>\n Feed the rich, they say, for only they can create wealth.<\/p>\n Bollocks, I say. Bollocks to it all.<\/p>\n There was a time when New Labour had a purpose \u2013 the Labour Party needed to be kicked in the teeth to remind it that it didn\u2019t just exist to secure the purity of a field full of ideological sacred cows but was for the practical business of making lives better for ordinary people. But gradually \u201cthe project\u201d came to confuse pandering to wealth with promoting entrepreneurship. They forgot that the market should serve, not determine, society\u2019s needs. And they convinced themselves that their failures to act were due to the insuperable powers ranged against rather than their own timidity.<\/p>\n Oh those brave souls!<\/p>\n For more than a decade Blairism defined itself not so much as New Labour but as not-quite-Labour.<\/p>\n And now the Labour Party seems stuck in that rut. There were good things in Ed Miliband\u2019s speech yesterday. Reforming the tax system and legal framework that supports our corporate structures to favour companies who trade ethically over those that chase the maximisation of short term profits regardless of the costs to the wider community seems a basic first step in returning the market to its proper place in our society.<\/p>\n But, just when you think that maybe Ed\u2019s onto something, he slaps you in the teeth.<\/p>\n Benefits will come with tests of a recipient\u2019s purity of heart. Social housing will be allocated to those who demonstrate their worth. In the \u201cnew bargain\u201d (a piece of language so soul-suckingly vacuous that it made me physically retch) we will demand \u201csomething for something\u201d \u2013 you will be judged.<\/p>\n The labour movement, social democrats and democratic socialist, have fought the Victorian notion of the \u201cdeserving poor\u201d for something approaching 200 years.<\/p>\n It is an odious idea, not just because it implies that those in positions of wealth, influence and power have access some unique insight that enables them to judge their \u201cinferiors\u201d (though that that is odious enough) but because those judgements rarely effect only those \u201cguilty\u201d of misbehaviour<\/p>\n If we judge an adult, say a father, undeserving because he has not done enough to find a job, cutting his benefits doesn\u2019t just hurt him \u2013 it hurts his family. His partner \u2013 who might or might not be \u201cdeserving\u201d \u2013 nevertheless finds the household income cut. Their children \u2013 who surely should not be made pay for the sins of their father \u2013 are judged guilty with him.<\/p>\n If we build new houses and provide them only to the deserving \u2013 those judged to have made acceptable contributions to the betterment of society \u2013 where will the undeserving go? They will be crowded together into the undesirable places. Once again the children of the rejected will find their opportunities reduced. But this time the damage goes beyond the family of the undeserving miscreant. By stripping out those with the drive and commitment to improve their society you impoverish the communities they leave behind. By constructing ghettos of the disconnected and the dispossessed your create areas of deepening crisis \u2013 which may make things much worse for anyone innocently living amongst those judged undeserving.<\/p>\n If we return to a state in which those who have the least owe any hope of an easing of the burdens of their poverty to the largesse of the more fortunate, we undermine any pretence of equality in our society. The consequences of that could be disastrous.<\/p>\n It was the iniquities in the welfare system based on moral judgement during the great depression of the 1920s and 30s that lead to Beveridge\u2019s report and the creation of the welfare state built on the notion of shared contributions and common entitlements.<\/p>\n And yet, it seems, I have lived long enough to hear a Labour leader \u2013 in the midst of the greatest economic crisis since the 1930s \u2013 surrender to the worst instincts of Daily Mail Britain, that vile country in which everyone on benefits is a scrounger, a cheat, a chavs and a thief.<\/p>\n \u201cBenefits are too easy to come by\u201d Ed said, as he sought to balance his attack on the \u201cfast buck\u201d economy of the super-rich and the corporate raiders. As though the payment of housing benefit to a single mum was, in some way, equivalent to the tax-dodging of the rich<\/a> and major companies<\/a>. As though the \u00a33.1 billion lost every year in benefit fraud and official error<\/strong> were somehow equivalent to the \u00a342 billion[ii]<\/a> lost in unpaid taxes (see here<\/a>).<\/p>\n Its bullshit.<\/p>\n And it depresses me to have to listen to a Labour leader \u2013 especially one who, from the available evidence, seems to be a decent human being with a genuine desire to do the right thing \u2013 speak those words.<\/p>\n The long wilderness of the Thatcher years and the Blair miracle have convinced too many in our party that we can no longer win by being Labour.<\/p>\n They watched Blair\u2019s not-quite-Labour trick and Brown\u2019s electoral failure and they have come to one of two conclusions, either:<\/p>\n We should abandon any pretence of being a left-of-centre party \u2013 embrace the unfettered free market and offer it to people with the weirdly gurning mask of Hazel Blears pasted to the front.<\/p>\n Or<\/p>\n We can only sneak progressive policies past people if we hide them behind stuff that panders to the worst instincts of the Daily Mail-reading morons who we think will vote for us if we demonstrate clearly enough our willingness to kick in the face anyone who offends their hair-trigger sense of moral outrage.<\/p>\n I refuse to believe that these are the only options.<\/p>\n Like many people I owe all the best things in my life to the provisions of the state. I discovered reading in a council library. I passed my A-Levels at a state school. I met my wife at a state-funded university which I could only attend because of a grant (yes, I\u2019m that <\/strong>old) and loans from the state. When our daughter was born prematurely it was the care of nurses and doctors in a state hospital that kept her alive.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t see the state as an enemy.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t see the state as a failure.<\/p>\n I believe in the enabling state \u2013 the state not just as a safety net but as a ladder that can lead people to opportunities that they could never have reached otherwise. Everything that raises the quality of life in our nation above the bestial is the product of communal effort and much of that is held up by the strong skeleton of a state that provides the basic structures (and often much more) necessary for cooperation.<\/p>\n The short-term solutions to our current economic crises do not lie in eviscerating the state. How many times does it have to be repeated that it wasn\u2019t government spending (in the UK, Ireland, Greece or America) that caused our current woes but a burst of speculative insanity in the market? On the contrary, only governments are capable of the contra-cyclical spending to boost demand that can prevent this crisis turning into a decades-long, Japanese-style slump.<\/p>\n The long-term solutions to providing security, opportunity and growth for the many in our society don\u2019t lie in a state that abandons its people to the whim of global economic tides. Markets are a conversation that uses money as its tool of communication, but its vocabulary is limited: it can say \u201cwant\u201d and \u201cdo not want\u201d. But we live in societies that are more complicated than that. We have responsibilities and needs and aspirations that cannot be articulated in binary terms.<\/p>\n It\u2019s time for the Labour Party to get up off its knees.<\/p>\n It\u2019s time to stop apologising for the things we didn\u2019t do.<\/p>\n It\u2019s time to start talking about the great things we\u2019ve done and the great things we\u2019re going to do.<\/p>\n This is not an appeal for the Labour Party to look backwards \u2013 the challenges facing us aren\u2019t going to be solved by nationalising railways or calling General Strikes \u2013 it\u2019s an appeal to stop us always imagining we\u2019ll find the answers by looking right. I\u2019m sure there are still those in the Blairite wing of the Labour Party who believe they are being radical \u2013 that they are doing Labour a service fighting for policies that abandon our traditional values.<\/p>\n But ask yourself, how radical is it when your response to every policy question appears to be: \u00a0\u201cSssh! Be quiet and do what the Tories do!\u201d?<\/em><\/p>\n\n
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