All three conferences show how poorly politics is…

Waiting for David Cameron’s no-doubt doom leaden and no-doubt, economically speaking, lemming-like speech it struck me that each of the three main Party conferences have, in their own way, been pretty dire. One common theme that has through them all is the lack of genuine debate and the fact that these have less been conferences – more rallies.

I expect at this point, Liberal Democrats will leap-in. It says something about the demoralisation of activists that most Conservative and Labour people would probably accept the above point is broadly true – however, Lib Dems always insist they are different. However, if they are so different then they will have to explain to me why, when it came to the NHS vote, over 50% of those present voted for a wider debate but it still did not happen. Don’t kid yourself Lib Dems, your Party and your Party Conference is just as stage-managed as the rest of them. Even the dissent is largely manufactured – carefully calibrated to preserve the appearance of a living and vibrant political organisation awash with fresh ideas and controversy.

People are disengaging from politics and when you look at what has been on-show over the last few weeks it’s hardly surprising. Put simply, these theatre shows are profoundly boring and disengaging. Nothing exists to stimulate the grey matter and get people talking. Don’t get me wrong – I am sure it’s great to be their – to network, meet old comrades and attend the fringe events which, I suspect are much more lively and interesting than the set-piece events but nobody really sees that and this is where the media is also somewhat to blame.

What the last three weeks have shown us is a Liberal Democrat Party putting a brave face on the fact its hanging over the edge of a very sheer electoral drop, a Labour Party whose opposition to this disastrous government is confused and muddled and is weighed down with an unpopular leader and a governing Conservative Party that literally is clueless about what to do about the situation the country finds itself in except, of course, retreat into the comfort zone of the same dogma that thirty odd years ago sowed the seeds of the current bad harvest of crippling debt and rampant social inequality.

Passion, intensity, controversy and great debate is all absent and at a time when the country desperately needs the light that such heat generates to shine a way forward that should worry us all, not just those who are already passionately political but every single one of us.

 

Ed doesn’t get it but Labour needs too….

I am a little surprised, from what I have seen in any case, that the sudden power outage that interrupted Ed Miliband’s speech being broadcast to television news stations hasnt been used more widely as a news hook. Before we get to what Ed said we have to understand one fundamental thing as a Party – what Ed says doesnt actually matter, he can make the most brilliant proclamations in the world and it simply doesnt matter. He isnt Prime Ministerial material, the voters have already decided that and wont elect him to be as such. The Party knows as such as well, deep-down and that is why it is fragmenting so badly, the right never liked him in the first place and even that timid soul, Dave Prentis has had enough of him on his left flank. He doesnt have the gravitas to command respect so people simply flake away and pursue their own agenda.

In a vain attempt to compensate for this he is becoming increaseingly authoritarian. I have it on good authority that members of the National Policy Forum, you know the body that is actually supposed to make our policy, have been told they can say nothing about policy. Shadow Ministers and Miliband himself are however, it seems, free to promote whatever hair-brained policy pops into their head at that particular moment. Usually these are ones that they think will play well on the evening bulletins.

Now to what he said. His lines on welfare were, as has become usual, shocking and quite clearly are informed by nothing more than his own ignorant prejudice. Ed simply doesnt understand the issues surrounding welfare and therefore his remarks are carefully calibrated not to address what is right in mind but what he thinks will garner the most votes. When it came to talking about re-balancing the economy and the need for more industry and innovation he was on safer ground and indeed ground Labour should be on.

Having said that though we are returned to the main point – that what Ed says is irrelevant. Ed understandably doesn’t get this – who would want to deal with that truth – but Labour and especially its left needs too because the fundamental task of the next few years is that we rise above the limitations having Ed as leader imposes on us and for the left, our task is to avoid being sunk with his leadership so we must shape and promote our own independent agenda. If we don’t we will go down when this leadership does and our fears about what will follow will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Our economic narrative has just much more muddled…….

Opinion seems to be divided over the dictum of Ed Balls that no Shadow Cabinet Minister will be allowed to commit to rescind Coalition cut-backs. Some think it’s a tactical masterstroke – others, like me, are less convinced. In fact, I think this ‘tactical masterstroke’ is actually a torpedo that has been launched by Balls right into the soft and tender bits of our economic narrative. Having said that, it’s the kind of tactical ‘genius’ that smacks less of Balls and more the bumbling incompetence of Tom Baldwin.

You can imagine the conversation:

“Look fellas, we seem to be lagging a bit when it comes to economic credibility in the polls”

“Didn’t we have this problem before? What did we do? Oh yes! We pledged to stick to the Conservative governments spending plans and look what happened!”

“Landslide!!!”

“Ok, let’s roll with that then! Now can we get back to playing some hard-ball table football”.

Except, of course, we weren’t at that time faced with a nose-diving economy which was being destroyed by those Conservative spending plans and this is the rub. It’s a bit much for Balls to turn round and say the austerity madness of the government  is bad and a disaster for the economy, which it is, and then in the next breath, we are going to stick with it. It introduces a logical dichotomy which will just confuse the voter, understandably so, and actually make us look more incompetant and a bit like a troupe of colour blind hedgehogs struggling to find our way out of a wet paper bag.

The truth is that some cuts will be reversed because they are damaging; some wont be because they cant be and some that should be made perhaps will be; for example, we should not be wasting money on Trident. However, with some cuts the question is how you make them. For example, if less was being spent on welfare because more people were in gainful employment which paid a real living wage, i’d tend to think that’s a good thing. This is no way means I approve of the brutal and barbaric cuts being inflicted on our most vulnerable by this government – far from it. However, it does mean that we need to have a rational, not ideological, approach to this debate. Sadly, the politicking behind the Balls commitment moves us further from, not closer to that goal.

Why I have decided to seek election to Labour’s NEC….

I watched yesterdays debate on Refounding Labour with a growing sense of despair. The treatment of Islington North’s motion really did set the tone, it was submitted correctly, according to due process, but the Conference Arrangements Committee still decided it would be considered after the vote had been taken on Refounding Labour. This of course rendered the motion pointless because it pertains directly to Refounding Labour.

So it was that the underlying problems with Refounding Labour did not come to a head in the main debate itself but in the debate on the Conference Arrangements Committee report; three speakers got up to criticise the procedural mechanisms for deciding upon the document and received hearty applause. The first speaker in the main debate voiced Unison’s concerns and then that was it, it was a procession of people ‘urging conference to vote yes’.

So, a ringing endorsement then? Well, not really, Islington North CLP’s motion was not the only one spiked; others were submitted calling for more time to be taken on the debate and the vote to be broken down into individual sections. You would think these un-threatening enough and indeed reasonable enough demands but the leadership obviously found them so threatening that it felt it necessary to deny their claims.  This tends to suggest all is not well with Refounding Labour and a considerable amount of people are in fact disenchanted with how it has been foisted upon the Party in an entirely unacceptable manner. As if to confirm this, LabourList, has published a poll which shows 40% of respondents have negative feelings about Refounding Labour.

I am not surprised and no amount of official optimism can conceal the real problems with the document and its implementation. In some areas it tinkers – like the electoral college, which should be abolished, and makes things worse – in other’s it does make things better, or at least it should. However, the problem is not so much the contents anymore but how it has been brought into being.

Regardless of that we now have the future to think about. Watching the debate persuaded me I would like to seek nomination and election to Labour’s National Executive. I don’t want to do so out of expectation I will be elected but because I care passionately about this Party and the direction it takes and want to add something to the conversation within Labour. Democracy, better treatment for Labour members matters to me an awful lot along with putting our values at the heart of our policies.  I have distinct ideas about how this Party should be shaped in the future; I want to see the end of the electoral college and its replacement with a system of one member, one equal vote. I want a big and generous offer to be made to new members to come to our conference so we welcome them to the Labour family with open arms. More CLP places need to exist on the NEC itself.

Oddly, for a left-winger, I find myself uncomfortable with the union bloc vote. The orthodoxy tells me I should defend it but deep down I know it is democratically wrong and feel we do need a democratisation of the link. Having said that, I consider myself a staunch ally of the trade unions in most other things and think we should be proud of our association with them. Politically, I dont intend to spell out an explicit agenda here (I write plenty here and elsewhere). I want to do this to start a conversation but above all to encourage other rank and file members to engage with and be involved with the running of their Party and not feel like exiles in their own political home – despite the machinations of the leadership and the bureaucracy. What can I offer you, the Labour member, as an NEC rep? Well I will always speak my mind but above all, though I may not agree with you, and will probably try and persuade you, I would always put the Labour members first and representing them before even my own views because it is their cause that is closest to my heart.

The limitations of ‘ethics’ – a reply to Ed Miliband

Ethics and politics are a highly volatile and potentially toxic mix. It may well be that the person making the ‘ethical’ proclamations is a pure-blooded saint (although that still is highly unlikely) but if your in a leadership position than the odds are stacked heavily against the rest of your team being the same. Making these kind of judgments on the lives of others is thus a open invitation to the press to bite you where it really hurts because there is nothing the press loves more than to gorge itself on the hypocrisy of politicians, something that frequently covers its own.

So, it was with some natural caution and weariness that I approach Ed Miliband’s ‘ethical’ constructs. Weariness becomes actual alarm when he talks about ambitious projects to “change human behaviour”. This wrongly assumes that human behaviour is the problem in the first place. It generally isn’t (though in some cases it is), the problem is the way society is structured. Furthermore, it becomes potentially tyrannical in its implication that state activity should be used to form and shape ‘human behaviour’.

In fairness to Ed, in the last complaint he is doing no more than reflecting a general problem with the left which sees state as the first port of call when anything is wrong and seems to have given up the pretense of even trying to empower people and extend and deepen democracy. The choice is not ‘the state or the market’; there is a third camp of people and democracy that the left should choose. Even in the areas where the state does need to control it should not do so in a bureaucratic but in a democratic manner. Co-op’s, mutuals, workers councils are all bodies and forms of organisations that should be promoted by a left committed to extending peoples control over their lives and see the state merely as a means of wresting that control back from the market ; not as an end in itself.

Ethically critiquing capitalism isn’t enough because it is blind to problems and issues of structure (and consequentially, how these structures shape human behaviour) and rarely encourages you to seek policies that address problems at their root cause. So, we see with the raft of policy suggestions that Ed has made that they are limited by this flawed starting point and therefore of dubious value.  He identifies problems (high energy/rail prices, tuition fees and their effect on students from poor backgrounds) correctly enough but proposes solutions that don’t really solve the problem.

For example, the reason energy/rail prices are high is because of the fact that both are in the hands of private enterprises with no clear chain of accountability to their consumers and workers. So, creating a pooled energy resource which they all can draw on won’t really change anything – in fact, it will encourage them to ratchet-up the cost to the consumer in other areas either by levying additional surcharges or some such other device and they will get away with it because that chain of accountability, of democratic control, will still not exist. In real terms, it might even end-up driving prices up as the companies claim the cost of producing this pooled energy back.

Democratic critiques of capitalism are better because they address themselves directly to how society is structured and lay the blame for societies problems at the door of that issue, not at the door of ‘bad apples’. It also eschews the frankly logically mind-bending contortions that an ethical critique of society goes through when it falsely and factually incorrectly lumps the problems caused by the banks in with the problems caused by benefit fraudsters. It also solves both by positing the democratic redistribution of social wealth as the solution because it recognises both issues are ultimately rooted in how society is organised and the undemocratic concentration of socially produced wealth in the hands of the few, as opposed to the many. This is the giant elephant in the room of Ed Miliband’s ‘ethical’ critique of capitalism and its one that his policy solutions and rhetoric are blind too and ultimately it is not an elephant that either Ed Miliband nor Labour can afford to ignore if they are serious about building the new society that both claim to want to see.

Labour in Liverpool….

It is fitting that Labour is having it’s conference in Liverpool this year. In the north Labour has started to claw it’s way back, mainly at the expense of the Liberal Democrats. People who deserted Labour in disenchantment at the direction of the Blair/Brown years have had their trust soundly betrayed by their ex Lib Dem suitors and naturally enough, people are returning home. However, we need to avoid committing the sin of complacency, taking people for granted is something Labour became too good at in government and in opposition it is definitely something to be avoided. The hard times, the lean times that years in opposition always are should remind Labour of the value of a strong core for without one, a blip can become a terminal slide into political oblivion.

Ed Miliband, in many ways, has a bigger job in Liverpool than the actual Party does. He had a good innings over Hackgate but since then the feeling of drift and unease has returned. His enemies on the right, the Blairites, seem to have abandoned a strategy of directly attacking him and now seem determined to make mischief by meddling in his relationship with Ed Balls. Furthermore, they seem determined to eradicate any vestiages of a Keynesian approach to the crisis and this is the new focus of all their efforts. Douglas Alexander’s pre-conference of interview in The Guardian is a good example of this new strategic orientation by the Blairites. We should defend Balls over this especially and need to support him in articulating a better approach to the trade unions than Mr Miliband has shown.

Mr Miliband has other problems as well. It is absolutely true, both anecdotaly and from polling evidence in my eyes that he has failed to convince people that he is an able leader with a clear vision of where he wants Britain to go. This all means peoples tolerance for rhetoric or policy they dont like is much diminished. I would be just as angry about his attacks on the unions were he roaring ahead in the polls but the fact that he isnt compounds that anger because it seems even more pointless investing in him. The blunt fact is that consistently the poll ratings of the Party leaders are a better guide to their respective party’s electoral prospects than the ratings the Party themselves receive. If people can’t imagine/dont want Ed as Prime Minister then Labour won’t win the next election, it really is as simple as that.

A final word has to be said about Refounding Labour, which has epitomised the dichotomy between rhetoric and delivery under this leadership. I remain hopeful that Conference will, if not flatly reject the document then at least remit it for further consideration by the Party. I wish Labour well in Liverpool. I wish I was there. We have big challenges ahead of us both as a Party and as individuals within that Party, and ultimately, even if individuals like Ed Miliband cannot rise to the occasion then I am sure the Party will.