... Apart from enabling a basic level of economic success, sufficient to pay for food, health and education, the purpose of government is to minimise the amount of mental illness by creating a benign society ... Blatcherism has done the opposite ... [OJ]

Oliver James' concern as to rising levels of mental illness is confirmed by the LSE Report, which has ramifications for the bi-partisan policy of Welfare to Work

This policy is predicated on the widespread assumption that

• people with mental illness are workshy scroungers, and



• that there is no connection between incidence of mental illness and the increasing precarity of the workplace under the terms of the Washington Consensus.

So, if the first duty of government is to avoid policies which cause stress, its first aim would be to work for the end of neoliberalism, and a return to full employment - more widely defined to include communal activity funded by a citizens' income.

However, New Labour has pursued a range of policies designed to promote the Washington Consensus.

First, it has facilitated libertarianism, as instanced by cheap alcohol and 24-hour drinking;

Second it has used the cover of the so-called 'war on terror' to viciously degrade free speech, free assembly, and to introduce - or enhance - a range of surveillance techniques which can be used by an assorted collection of snoops and jobsworths to pursue minor anti-social behaviours, and finally it continued the politicization of the police, which began with Thatcher's war on the miners.

The latter was undertaken in pursuit of the destruction of trade union power without which the flattening of wage rates would not have been possible. This objective has also been pursued by unrestrained immigration.

You might wonder how a party that took on the mantle of Pinochet, Reagan and Thatcher would be able to 'renew' itself in the hope of obtaining re-election to office when the coalition breaks up.

An examination of its candidates to succeed Gordon Brown answers the question.

With possible exeception of outsiders like Dianne Abbot and John McDonnell, the 'mainstream' candidates are all tarred by their subservience to Blair and/or Brown, their failure to nationalise the banks when the opportunity present itself, and their introduction of welfare-to-work programmes imported from Republican America.

Systemic Fiscal Reform

The priority for the left is to return to the fundamental dislocation that neo-liberal doctrines brought about.

Neo-liberalism treated people's need for greater justice - whether in the workplace, in the economy as a whole, or in the material conditions of their lives - as less important than the functioning of the market.

This need for greater justice has not disappeared and is likely to be intensified in the next five years ...

A broader renewal of voice requires two basic, and simple, adjustments to address the depth of the challenge now facing the left ...

First, an acknowledgement – a direct and open insistence – that in Britain, for reasons rooted in the increasing power of global markets, we do not right now have effective institutional structures for democracy. The Labour Party has long since ceased to be such a structure. Britain is not a working democracy.

Unless we stop the pretence that it is, no progress is possible.

Second, a recognition that what must be built afresh is not first and foremost a party or an organisation, but a commitment to renewing the connection between people's needs in the economic and social domain, and the forms of political speech and action available to them ...

openDemocracy  17 May 2010

"Collaborators"

Alan Milburn

Clegg defends Milburn's social mobility role

Alan Milburn set for third return to Government as David Cameron adviser

John Prescott: Alan Milburn is a 'collaborator'

Alan Milburn's consultancy company

Onwards and endlessly upwards

Social mobility tsar Alan Milburn to attack Labour

Getting on, getting ahead

David Blunkett

David Blunkett set to join Tory war on dole cheats

Frank Field

Frank Field to head poverty review

John Hutton

John Hutton to head public sector pensions commission

Will Hutton to lead public sector pay review for coalition

Tony Blair's prescription for economy rejected by Labour candidates

Tory Blair - Q.E.D.

David and Ed Miliband distance themselves from former PM's statement of support for coalition's deficit strategy ...

Blair shook the party with his backing of David Cameron and George Osborne's economic strategy to cut the financial deficit.

Blair also backed the government's decision to raise VAT ...

"If governments don't tackle deficits, the bill is footed by taxpayers, who fear that big deficits mean big taxes, both of which reduce confidence, investment and purchasing power," Blair wrote, in sharp criticism of Brown.

"We should have taken a New Labour way out of the economic crisis: kept direct taxes competitive, had a gradual rise in VAT and other indirect taxes to close the deficit, and used the crisis to push further and faster on reform." ...

Guardian  01 Sept 2010    Tony Blair

Tony Blair endorses our economic policies, claim Tories

Mandelson fears Labour U-turn 'electoral cul-de-sac'

Labour would be left in an "electoral cul-de-sac" if its next leader tried to create a pre-New Labour party, Lord Mandelson has warned.

Speaking to the Times in the week that voting begins for a new leader, he appeared to be criticising Ed Miliband ...

BBC NEWS  30 Aug 2010

‘We need to raise taxes for the better-off’

In an interview with The Independent, Ed Miliband claimed New Labour was haunted by three "old ghosts" which shaped its policies when Tony Blair became party leader in 1994.

He said they were a fear of increasing taxes for high earners, a fear of Old Labour's anti-Americanism, which resulted in the Iraq war, and an unnecessary desire to protect the public from the views of Labour members, which led to a "control freak" style of party management and "hollowed out" party ...

Independent  30 Aug 2010    

Mandelson: Ed Miliband 'Wrong' For Leader

Miliband hits back at criticism from Lord Mandelson

Ed Miliband: I'll make capitalism work for the people

Britain's big question of the next decade is whether we head towards an increasingly US-style capitalism – more unequal, more brutish, more unjust – or whether we can build a different model – a capitalism that works for people and not the other way around.

For Labour to change and reconnect with those who turned their backs on our party, this is the project on which we must embark.

It starts with dignity at work.

My proposal that corporate tax cuts should be conditional on the payment of a living wage of £7.60 – not just a minimum wage of £5.80 an hour – acknowledges how we need to change.

We cannot go on with employers pushing so much of the costs of low pay on to the taxpayer.

We must build on the approach we started to follow in our later time in government: action to encourage and build the industries of the future.

High-skill industry and high-quality jobs depend on support for growth industries, unachievable if government is paralysed by an unwillingness to shape the economy.

As part of this, we also need a financial services system which better serves industry.

That is why we should look not just at selling off our stake in the banks, but at creating new financial institutions: mutuals, public-private banks ...

Observer  29 Aug 2010    

Ed Miliband: I'll make capitalism work for the people

David and Ed Miliband turn leadership race into verdict on New Labour

The David Miliband party planner

Sadly the Milipede web link seems to have been removed. Can't think why!

Labour leadership contender David Miliband has produced a six-page guide on how to organise a house party - including making sure you "get the nibbles in" ...

The shadow foreign secretary is attempting to emulate US President Barack Obama, who boosted his grassroots support with local meetings held in supporters' own homes.

The guide - published on Mr Miliband's campaign website - sets out in minute detail how to set up a "house meeting for David".

It advises supporters to invite people over the telephone, as "invitations are best when made personally".

It also instructs party organisers on how to go about getting Mr Miliband or one of his "high-profile supporters" to phone the house meeting personally. Alternatively, they can show guests Mr Miliband's YouTube video greeting.

"Last, but by no means least" the document goes on, "prepare food and drink for your House Meeting - perhaps ask some of the guests to bring or contribute something to the evening. No one can resist a delicious spread of food!" ...

BBC NEWS  20 Aug 2010    

Miliband's supporters get a crash course in dinner-party politics

So you've decided to hold a house meeting for David

A message from David to your house meeting

Time for Labour to be robust opposition

Labour has not given the coalition the hard time it would have under a lean and hungry leader ...

jeremyjames

18 Aug 2010, 9:03AM

A lean and hungry Labour leader?

There's an oxymoron if ever I've seen one.

Guardian  18 Aug 2010    

Who worries Tories the most?

Labour is tantalisingly well-placed to win the next election – or even to govern before it takes place.

The coalition may go the full five-year distance or fall apart long before.

In the latter case, Labour could just about make a go of a rainbow coalition, and its new leader cross the threshold of No 10 within the next couple of years ...

Any candidate able to recast post-Blair Labour could beat this coalition – and there are two ...

The leadership of the people's party, in a triumph of the hereditary principle, is being fought out between two scions of Labour's intellectual aristocracy.

It's tempting to compare and contrast, but the task to be accomplished is within the grasp of either.

Blair said of the Tory 2005 leadership contest that the candidates' backstory didn't matter, but where they were going did. What matters isn't which brother wins, it's whether either can beat this coalition by creating an electoral force with the breadth of the one that Blair used to crush the Tories for 13 years.

Guardian  29 July 2010    

Paul Goodman

Ed Balls twice hitched a lift in Lord Black's jet

There's no renewal with Balls

The former education secretary, who has criticised Tory opponents for "private jet-setting and helicopter hops", confessed that he had twice flown as a guest in the peer's private jet after both had attended meetings of the shadowy international organisation the Bilderberg Group.

Mr Balls's involvement with the Bilderberg Group, a secretive collection of influential politicians and businessmen, opens him to charges of elitism at a time when he is attempting to persuade almost 170,000 Labour Party members to elect him as their next leader.

It emerged yesterday that the huge union Unite had overwhelmingly decided to endorse his rival, Ed Miliband ...

Independent  25 July 2010

Ed Miliband may soon be in No 10. Believe it

Why Jon Cruddas is backing David Miliband

In which John Rentoul offers quotes from David Milliband's Keir Hardie lecture at Mountain Ash.

If you can hear a feint whirring noise, btw, that'll be Keir Hardie revolving in his grave.

"We have always pursued the common good and were prepared to compromise. But in order to compromise you have to be organised and know your interests. To act together sure in the belief that human beings and nature are not commodities to be bought and sold at the best price. Neither are we units of provision to be effectively administered by the State. The Labour Party alone understood the peril posed to the working people of our country by an unregulated market and an interfering state, a system which banned trade unions and imposed the Poor Laws."

Independent  10 July 2010    

Keir Hardie Lecture 2010

Where does the Labour party go from here?

Good stuff from Neal Lawson and Andrew Simms, but could it be sold to the party's MPs?

As the Labour leadership campaign begins in earnest, nine leading leftwing thinkers suggest policies and ideas that the party should embrace ...

Neal Lawson
Chair of Labour-aligned pressure group Compass

The crucial things are how you regulate the market, and how you democratise the state. If you're serious about regulating the market, there's a lot of stuff you have to make happen at a European level.

At the moment, the financial markets can play one country off against another – so if any government does anything to move on the power of the market, it gets punished, as happened recently when Germany tried to ban short-selling.

We need to push for the introduction of modern capital controls. And there are equivalent things Europe needs to put in place: a European-wide minimum wage and tax on bonuses and high pay. If you're serious about this stuff, that's the level you have to get to.

On the state, we should go for directly elected education boards, responsible for school standards. That's the way to make the people in charge of local schools more popular, more accountable and more responsive.

Local health authorities should be merged with councils, which has been tried in a few places, to good effect. These methods of engaging people are both better than the so-called "choice model", of people voting with their feet and using sharp elbows to get to the front of the queue.

The other thing is a 35-hour week – that's the big game-changer, in terms of redistributing time and money, and creating the space for people to be citizens and not just exhausted producers and consumers. You can't have a big society without shorter hours.

Andrew Simms
Policy Director of radical thinktank the New Economics Foundation

We need a universal banking obligation. It would mean that everyone, by right, would have access to the full range of banking services – whereas at the moment, one of the great fights with the banks has been the way they've chosen customers to maximise profitability and created finance deserts for poor communities.

On the ground, it propels people into the hands of vulture lenders with baseball bats.

We also need a green investment bank. The big question is how it should be funded. Some suggest creaming off the proceeds of the European Emissions Trading Scheme, or you could have a windfall tax on the fossil fuel companies, or carbon bonds – there are lots of ideas. And here's one that could be a poetic test case: the Royal Bank of Scotland used to advertise itself as the Oil and Gas Bank. Given that RBS is now in the hands of the taxpayer, why not turn it into the Royal Bank of Sustainability?

Finally, Labour should aim at launching a competition inquiry into the big banks, and breaking them up. The great paradox of what happened after the crash was that banks that were already too big to fail got even bigger. Major action is needed to stop banks holding the country to ransom.

Guardian  10 June 2010    

A progressive movement can still make history

... Labour has lost its purpose.

The candidates start as they mean to go on, carefully calibrating how to look different, humble and new, while still playing it safe.

This is a cautious generation of politicians who succeeded through a combination of parachutes and patronage – and the habits of a lifetime are hard to shake off.

But it's not their fault, and we shouldn't blame them. They are a product of their time; an era of defensiveness and decline for the left.

Marx said: "We make history but not in conditions of our choosing."

The collapse of existing socialism, east and west, means that these have not been fortuitous times for progressives. But we still "make history".

The "we" is those still in Labour's ranks and the thousands who left; the nine million who despite everything voted Labour, as well as those who couldn't bring themselves to do so.

It is the millions of Liberal Democrats dismayed at the deal their leaders have done, the Greens, and all who care about sustainability.

But much more, it is the millions living anxious and insecure lives, those who know that they are only one payslip from homelessness.

It is a majority of Britain that no one really represented at the last election ...

usini
8 Jun 2010, 9:17PM

This is disingenuous. As all three candidates have more than enough nominations then if they believed in democracy and an open debate they would be persuading some of their supporters to change to other candidates.

What is depressing is that we are watching another New Labour stitch up. These guys really are Bourbons.

They have learned nothing from losing the election and forgotten nothing about New Labour manipulation of the party.

Obscura
8 Jun 2010, 10:05PM

@georgeloyd..

labour had 9 million votes libDem 7 million....If Labour are dead I reckon LibDem are deader but like a cancer hanging onto power by sucking up to Tories, who, after 13 years of pretty poor gov could only muster a 6% swing...

The labour party started with the cooperative movement and it is here that I think its future lies... strangely enough a bit like the big society... maybe we have an opportunity for the labour party to take onboard the Tories 'freedom' and start to set up 'free schools' run on a secular non-selective basis using the money from more selective 'local' schools... also set up community energy companies whose profits go to provide/produce cheap energy for pensioners.. If labour want to seek power they need to be imaginative and in opposition not just be a campaigning party but a party that can still get things done using the system... it must be a party of proactive action... put bids in and set up support centres using gov money.. etc

nicholasbannister
8 Jun 2010, 11:04PM

The runners and riders are.....A neoliberal who wrote the manifesto, a neoliberal who was chief adviser to Gordon Brown, and a neoliberal who supported an illegal war he now wants us to move on from, and who went to the High Court to defend Britain's right to torture with impunity.

The New Labour project has failed. Labour will need to let this failed experiment go as soon as possible. The political space in Britain is in genuine pro-redistribution pro-public service, help the poor first left wing politics, and that's where Labour needs to go. Unfortunately, none of the current leadership options understand this, and as a result, I won't be voting Labour, and nor will many progressives, for a long time to come.

Guardian  08 June 2010    Reflections on the Renewal of the Labour Party

Labour party leadership

We were wrong to allow so many eastern Europeans into Britain

There have been real economic gains from the arrival of young, hard-working migrants from eastern Europe over the past six years.

But there has also been a direct impact on the wages, terms and conditions of too many people – in communities ill-prepared to deal with the reality of globalisation, including the one I represent.

The result was, as many of us found in the election, our arguments on immigration were not good enough.

We faced rising anti-European sentiment with small parties claiming they could seal the borders ...

Observer  06 June 2010    Global Labour Market

Ed Balls turns on Gordon Brown

Labour's immigration policy hurt wages of British workers

Ed Balls says he’s the one to lead new Labour to victory

... Mr Balls, right-hand man to Mr Brown for some 16 years and at the heart of the running battles between Blairites and Brownites, makes an intriguing pitch for the new Labour mantle.

He takes up the baton from Lord Mandelson, writing in The Times this week, in saying that the party must move on from the label of new Labour but cling to what lay behind it.

“The founding new Labour insight of 1997 is as relevant to 2010 as 1997 ...

... the new Labour brand lost its allure when Blairites used it to tarnish those who opposed his public service reforms such as tuition fees and foundation hospitals in the bitter turf wars of the early 2000s.

Without mentioning the former Prime Minister, Mr Balls said: “In my mind we lost our way in the second term. The leadership gave the impression they would get their definition by internal debate and division — you are either a reformer or not a reformer, either new Labour or old Labour, and we ended up with policies that became very divisive.

“This was a politics of internal definition which ended up, I’m afraid, saying to many party members and trade union members working in the public sector: you are the kind of people we are against.” ...

Times  05 June 2010

Labour plays spot the difference

Andy Balliband, Labour's next leader

Meet the next leader of the Labour Party: “Andy Balliband” a fortysomething Oxbridge-educated white male, who entered the Cabinet during the last Parliament and learnt his trade as a special adviser.

That was the view of one jaundiced party figure yesterday surveying the choice between David Miliband, Ed Miliband, Ed Balls and — if he succeeds in getting the necessary 33 nominations from MPs — Andy Burnham.

The chances of either Diane Abbott or John McDonnell making it past the threshold appear remote. These left-wing outriders have the backing of barely a dozen MPs between them ...

Times  04 June 2010

What does Britain mean to Labour?

New Labour needs to take Ivan Illich on board.

Sorry, I forgot: the man (sic) from Whitehall really does knows best!

The character of the British state and political system has become one that increasingly advances a neoliberal, pro-corporate view of the world.

Most of the left still sees the British state – for all its regrettable acts – as a potential force for good, both domestically and internationally, and don't acknowledge its fundamental morphing into a neoliberal polity under Thatcher and Blair.

There is a widespread silence across Labour and the left on the nature of the British state. It runs from the Labour six, through thoughtful commentators such as Madeline Bunting and Polly Toynbee, even to progressive, enlightened groups such as Compass and most of the centre-left thinktanks.

All of them are stuck in an unreflective story of "Britain" which no longer exists ...

The Labour party and the wider left needs to wake up and recognise the limited, problematic nature of Labour's story of Britain.

This entails ditching both Fabian centralism and New Labour command and control, both of which used the same means for very different ends – the former the "welfare settlement" of the postwar era, the latter pre-bubble "Fantasy Island Britain".

This will require a vision of a very different economy, society and politics from that of the last decade, and a very different idea of government and power ...

CuthbertB
3 Jun 2010, 5:22PM

Someone's being a bit naive if they think they're going to get naked politics out of politicians.

Do you really think the Milibands and Balls have much of an understanding of politics? They're marketing people, they sell a brand.

Their sociological understanding, if any, is not going to be any greater than that of an advertising company. They just want to know which shallow gestures attract most public attention and that's it.

These people become politicians as a career move, not because they want to make any big changes in society out of some idealism but because they want to be big cogs in the machine.

Do you ever see people like these at the bus stop on a morning or browsing in a charity shop on a Saturday?

They live on a conveyor belt which avoids the hoi polloi. They have no big picture other than piling up the votes and seats so that they can sit at the big table. And then they'll make it up as they go along.

When they fail the other lot of advertising men will make it up as they go along. The rest of us can just get on with life.

frangin
3 Jun 2010, 5:38PM

A thoughtful article Gerry, the main premise with which I largely agree. Much can be learned from regional governments, starting with the democratisation of the voting system, which remains as far out of reach at Westminster as ever, and the necessity of which Labour simply won't accept.

But it's England's view of itself that really needs radical re-assessment, and to freely exchange 'Britain' for 'England' is to collude in the illusion. That illusion could not be better expressed than in the belief that we can spend the £130bn Greenpeace believes to be the total cost of the Trident replacement, all to allow England to swan around the oceans flexing the nuclear muscles of a nation hopelessly in hock.

Fur coat and nae knickers, as they say in Glasgow.

Coming to your apparent belief that a new Labour leader will offer a start in addressing your issue, I have to say I can't muster any optimism about that. The miserable list of candidates Labour's archaic leadership election system has managed to produce, individuals tainted by New Labour's idolatry of a failed neo-liberal model, and the front runner even suspected of complicity in torture, suggests that new thinking is not going emerge spontaneously from this contest.

Depressing, I'd say.

Guardian  03 June 2010

New Labour is dead. Long live new Labour

Lord Mandelson writes in Mills-and-Boon mode. Have your tissues to hand.

The new generation of leaders will move on from the term that defined us. But they must never abandon our ideas ...

... although I am not playing a role in any of the candidates’ campaigns, and I have not endorsed any individual candidate, it does not mean that I will not take a view on our party’s — and our country’s — future ...

... I understand why the term new Labour may cease to be used by a new generation of potential Labour leaders who rightly wish to move on from the past, the concept that new Labour represents should not be cast aside so easily.

New Labour is not an affectation or a marketing tool that enabled us simply to win elections. It is more fundamental than that.

It is, and was, a logical flow from the revisionist, social democratic tradition in our party — the tradition that applies the timeless values of our party afresh to new times; that believes the Left should concentrate on the ends — a strong economy, social justice and high-quality public services — but should always be willing to consider new means of achieving those ends.

It is about Labour not being a party of class or sectional interest, but about being a broad-based party of conscience and reform. An outlook that remains in tune with the priorities and ambitions of families across the country. Open, not tribal. Pluralist, not statist ...

Times  03 June 2010

Yet more misleading from Mandelson

A bad, bad man...

What are the Bilderberg Group really doing in Spain?

Labour leadership race: Let in the left

Labour's gene pool now seems uninterested in any leftist critique of the global dystopia, witness 'Deluded' Darling's backing for David Miliband.

It seems D.Milipede will "re-engage Labour with the public".

Will that be a bigger shock for him, or us?

The online nominations ticker last night recorded the leftwingers John McDonnell and Diane Abbott with the backing of six MPs and one respectively.

Even if they pool their efforts, as they certainly should, they will probably fail to reach the hurdle of 33 which must be cleared before ordinary members get a say. The pair can sound naive in characterising public opinion, but on specific issues such as ID cards, Iraq and tax their arguments do not merely resonate on Labour's radical fringe, but across swaths of middle England ...

The prospect of someone called Ed or someone called Miliband prevailing over a namesake is a different proposition. As well as being close ideologically, the leading contenders are united in having spent their adult lives in greater Whitehall.

The words that tend to litter their speech – progressive, reform and aspiration – are words seldom heard beyond its borders ...

Guardian  01 June 2010

Darling backs David Miliband

There can be no short-circuiting Labour's essential backroom stocktake

New Labour was shaped by its purpose to beat one clear-cut rightwing political party. But that is not the challenge it faces now ...

But that is not the only problem Labour now faces in opposition.

Perhaps even more troubling than the questions it can't agree on are the conclusions it has already tentatively reached.

First, that it has no coherent economic strategy. Its model of financialisation plus property boom is well and truly bust. It can't realistically propose returning to 2007.

The caffe-latte/property-development boom was never an effective strategy for regional development. In places such as Salford and Sunderland, the glitzy developments offered nothing but a few jobs as poorly paid baristas to the surrounding estates.

Globalisation, much promoted by New Labour, has only generated anxiety and job insecurity – particularly manifested around immigration – while a metropolitan middle class has enjoyed its benefits: cheap goods, travel and services.

Second, the record on civil liberties was dire and deeply distrusted. Labour's faith in the state as a benign force, an agent for social progress, is simply not shared with a sufficient proportion of the electorate.

The story of incrementalism has worn thin – despite huge investment, nearly one-fifth of kids still leave school functionally illiterate. Whole neighbourhoods are still entrenched in a generational cycle of worklessness ...

Guardian  30 May 2010

Ed Miliband to call for ‘living wage’ of at least £7.14 an hour

Likelihood is that the same people who oppose the miniscule wage also oppose CGT tax harmonisation

He will call for Britain’s five million lowest-paid workers to receive at least £7.14 an hour, instead of the current £5.83 minimum wage ...

He will urge the party to embrace the new wave of community activism of groups such as London Citizens, saying: “I want to lead a Labour Party that campaigns for change in people’s lives, not just for a change of government.” ...

T S wrote:
The minimum wage has already made it impossible for many thousands of young people to find work, this will only worsen things.
May 27, 2010 11:00 PM BST

Times  28 May 2010    Reflections on the Renewal of the Labour Party

David Cameron defends CGT plan amid backbench rebellion

Yvette Cooper: Why I'm not standing for Labour leader – this time

There remain far too few women at the top of politics, whether they have children or not. It's not just too few women like me in their thirties and forties managing the kids and political life. With the notable exception of Harriet and a few others, there are too few women in their 50s and 60s whose kids have grown up in senior positions too.

Guardian  28 May 2010

Well, I've got to agree with that.

However, I wonder if there's a wider problem, a realisation by both men and women that politics isn't what it used to be.

We recently had three appalling weeks watching and listening to politicos of all parties pretending that all was well - which, to be fair, was what most people wanted to hear - and promising lots of goodies when their party got into power.

'Change' I seem to recall was uttered frequently, and to create the impression that change was possible.

It isn't: the banks are still paying out obscene bonuses, the euro is being defended as though it is crucial to the lives of ordinary people - it's not - its defence is crucifying ordinary people and it will get worse.

Politics is now a side show: it's The Market that's in charge, and that excludes 99.9 per cent of us.

As Nick Couldry put in openDemocracy:

...what must be built afresh is not first and foremost a party or an organisation, but a commitment to renewing the connection between people's needs in the economic and social domain, and the forms of political speech and action available to them ...

Where do you stand on that, Yvette?

A style of her own

A glimpse of 'Old' Labour, and a vanished solidarity

I ask Cooper why she went into politics, given that it offers such an uncertain career path. She answers as if slightly bemused.

"Well, if you have that sense of injustice that needs to be addressed, of things that aren't right with the world - then politics is how things happen."

She makes it sound the most natural thing in the world, as if we all wake up each morning concerned about inequality and simply wish to head for the most effective forum in which to achieve change.

Cooper was brought up with that sort of sense.

She grew up under Thatcherism, and the economic devastation wreaked by the Tories on working-class communities had real reverberations in her family.

Her father was a Forestry Commission worker turned trade unionist, her mother a teacher from a family of miners.

At 12, Cooper was taken by her banner-carrying father on the last stage of the People's March for Jobs, alongside hundreds of desperate men and women who feared that industrial change meant they would never work again.

In her household, politics was not theory. It had the power to change - or ruin - people's lives ...

Guardian  07 April 2007

Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper 'flipped' homes three times

Top

David Miliband targets 'immoral' City excesses

This one's worth reading for the the blogs!

As well as welcoming the idea of a cap on extortionate rates of interest charged by banks, Miliband said: "We must address fundamental questions about the causes of the financial crisis and how we build a new era of shared prosperity. That means rebalancing the economy, ensuring fair wages at the top and the bottom, tackling rip-off lending while extending new sources of credit to new businesses, and ensuring a more environmentally sustainable capitalism."

The shadow foreign secretary added: "The explosion of pay inequality over the last three decades, and the continuing scandal of the gender pay gap, is an ethical as well as an economic issue. Mega pay awards and bonuses, linked to activity rather than success, violate basic principles of merit and justice. We need to find ways to re-establish moral norms.

"Unacceptable concentrations of market power, as with unaccountable state power, are not just economically dangerous as we saw in the credit crunch to many in this country, they are also immoral." ...

Guardian  28 May 2010

David Miliband

Top

Why John McDonnell deserves your support

I am supporting John McDonnell for the Labour leadership. Not because I think there is the slightest chance of John winning if he were to get sufficient nominations, but because the party membership in the country need to hear the arguments from across the range of opinions in the Party.

John will raise issues that are important to Labour Party members that the other candidates will be anxious to avoid.

Issues around the privatisation of public services, the wasteful PFI initiatives, the anti-trade union legislation and the continued wooing of big business by the Party are all concerns that need to be raised.

If John doesn't raise them, no-one will, and the other contenders will not have to answer the questions ...

New Statesman  26 May 2010

David Miliband steams ahead ...

Top

We won't forgive and forget Iraq

Ed Balls and the Miliband duo ... seem to believe their past stains will wash off easily and that they can present themselves to the nation all fresh and pristine ...

Balls says he accepts the Iraq invasion was a costly mistake.

Too little, too late for the dead, maimed, gas-poisoned Iraqi victims of our savage adventure, too presumptuous.

The affable Ed Miliband wants to "talk about the gap between the rich and the poor", an issue nowhere in his line of sight when his government was collectively "relaxed about the filthy rich".

He just found his conscience from somewhere in the bottom of his discarded, soiled values.

Now he says he realises there was a "catastrophic loss of trust over Iraq" ...

Brother David ... voted strongly for the war in Iraq ... now claims we '"wouldn't have invaded Iraq had we known then what we know now. Obviously no such decision would have been made if we'd known Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction".

His master Blair told Chilcot the invasion would have gone ahead whatever the evidence of weapons ...

Next,(he) supported the most illiberal anti-terrorism measures and was against any investigation into the Iraq war ...

The Blairite minister denied our complicity in torture and rendition, fought the courts when they demanded more transparency and was forced to apologise to the House of Commons for some of this treacherous obfuscation ...

Independent  24 May 2010

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Here's how to give power back to the people

So what now? The Labour leadership election has spawned much necessary internal contemplation and will produce more rhetoric about empowering the electorate. Here's how we turn the platitudes into policy.

The new government is committed to a referendum on a new voting system. It will contain two options — the current first-past-the-post system and the alternative vote.

It will be the first time in the history of our democracy that its citizens will have a say in how their votes are translated into political power. What possible argument can there be against adding the recommendation of the Independent Commission on the Voting System, AV+ as a third option? It retains the constituency link, extends voter choice and is broadly proportional ...

Observer 23 May 2010

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Ed Miliband wins crucial backing from Neil Kinnock

Kinnock, who stepped down after Labour's election loss in 1992, remains highly influential on the centre-left of the party and among the unions, which will have a third of the votes in the contest.

He says Labour has "an embarrassment of riches" from which to choose Gordon Brown's successor, in the form of four ex-cabinet ministers, the two Milibands, Ed Balls, the former children's secretary, and Andy Burnham, the former health secretary.

He does not believe the leftwingers Diane Abbott and John McDonnell, who are also standing, are serious contenders.

Kinnock describes the younger Miliband as a "modern democratic socialist because he has got strong values and he is very practical". He says he has an ability to "lift" and "inspire" people, but firmly rejects any comparison with Blair's gift for communication ...

Observer 23 May 2010

Andy Burnham's dad is upset with me

He says the former health secretary has a different background to the Miliband brothers and Balls ...

Chris Fitch 21 May 2010 at 12:06 Whether he is from a working class background or not, actions speak louder than words.

It's more the fact that Andy prefers to go to corporate hospitality rather than watch his "beloved" Everton with proper fans, or the fact that he helped prop up and advantage the Premier League when an adviser and Minister which has led to the vulgarisation of football, or the fact that in every other Ministerial job he has held, he has been ineffectual or worse.

That worries me more than where he came from.

New Statesman 21 May 2010

Readers Comments

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Labour must not indulge itself in opposition

NEC decision in favour of long campaign poses threats to the party's standing in the country ...

David Wearing
18 May 2010 at 15:43

There is nothing self-indulgent about a longer contest. In fact, a shorter contest would be highly self indulgent from the point of view of those who think that (branding aside) there's nothing fundamentally wrong with a "New Labour" model that has demonstrably failed.

Labour needs the catharsis of a fraternal but frank debate about what its purpose is - that is to say, its purpose beyond simply regaining power. The leadership has drifted so far to the right and away from the views of both its mass membership and its wider base within civil society that the party's character has become dysfunctional. The Blair leadership took it to the point where it was actively despised by millions of its natural supporters. That is frankly unsustainable. Dealing with this is a big task. The idea that it can be completed to the extent necessary in a few weeks is extraordinarily complacent.

Labour has haemorraged voters (5 million since 97) and members (hundreds of thousands) for a reason. Many of those people did not desert Labour. They were deserted by it. I would venture to say that few of Labour's lost supporters ever hoped that it would one day lock up the children of immigrants, launch a war of aggression that caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the displacement of millions, preside over an unsustainable economic system that increases inequality and entrenches poverty, and frequently appear to govern almost exclusively in the interests of big business.

Labour's friends and supporters have to acknowledge the reality that in many respects its record was utterly disgraceful, and a betrayal of its fundamental values. The party - certainly at the leadership level - has seriously lost its way and needs to sort itself out as a matter of urgency. I do hope the party can face up to this. There is a vast crisis coming, as the Osborne axe comes down, and Labour needs to return to its proper societal role: being a democratic mass movement of ordinary people defending their livelihoods and their values against the aggression of the Tory party and its billionaire funders.

I believe someone once said that Labour is a cause or it is nothing. At the moment, it is not a cause.

18 May 2010

Readers Comments

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David Miliband warns that re-creating New Labour is not the way back

Labour failed to win a fourth term because "we all said we needed to renew but we didn't sufficiently. People felt we were late to the game on issues like political reform. Antisocial behaviour – we lost focus on that. Immigration, late to the game with the Australian points system. Social care, late to the game.

"We were too timid on the role of government in the economy. We were too slow to see that climate change was not an environmental issue. It was an economic, security, foreign policy issue.

"We got told that political reform was a middle-class issue and we basically stopped. We did the freedom of information, human rights act, devolution of Scotland and Wales, London. But we basically got frightened off. It was at best half a political revolution. Maybe a third. We should have done the House of Lords, for goodness' sake." ...

Observer 16 May 2010

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