Problems of predistribution…..

If nothing else, Ed Milliband has got people within the Labour Party talking with the announcement that ‘predistribution’ will form the cornerstone of Labour’s new economic strategy. Rob Marchant takes aim at the proposals over on LabourList while Eoin Clarke vigorously defends them here. Meanwhile, Mark Feguson has expressed some trenchant and relevant points here. Essentially, Mark is right, there is no space within the predistributive agenda for those who are not in work. It almost assumes full employment as an a prirori fact. However, we do not live in a economy with anything close to approaching conditions of full employment. Indeed, we live in a country with a labour market that is skewed too heavily in favour of employers and is heading in the opposite direction to being a full employment economy. Because the fundamental premise of predistribution is that you use market mechanisms to distribute wealth, if the labour market is in its current condition there is absolutely no chance of predistribution having anything other than a nominal effect on those in work and those out of work, as we have already said, are essentially excluded from the process.

On a related point, predistribution does nothing to establish the real root cause of such uneven wealth distribution in the British economy, namely private ownership. The point here is that while private ownership remains the norm, you can haul those at the bottom up all you like, they will still be an increasing distance behind those at the top. Labour, and indeed advocates of predistribution need to talk an awful lot more about the social nature of wealth creation and the necessity of its social ownership and distribution. This would also bring them in-line with core Labour values as well and give them a much stronger hand to play against economic hawks like Mr Marchant.

Mr Marchant is taking aim at the idea from the right. He wants us to adopt a dry economic plan which would be little better than Osborne-lite (incidentally, it would also do nothing for the economy). However, there are serious questions that predistributers need to properly answer. If they dont it is going to end up being just another empty buzzword, that will eventually be cast to the side when something potentially more sexy is conjured up.

Liam Brynes crazy-juggling

Mark Ferguson writes on LabourList that a benefits cap is a good idea but not if it includes Housing Benefit. Liam Bryne seems to be attempting a similar kind of crazy-juggling, on the one hand saying Labour won’t vote against the cap but will introduce amendments a go-go to this dreadful piece of legislation.

All well and good you might argue. Nuanced and sensible. This illusion lasts till you realise that the benefits cap itself is a utterly worthless piece of legislation unless Housing Benefit is included in the cap.

Who on this earth is going to make £26,000 a year on Job Seekers Allowance, for example? You get roughly £65 a week on JSA – so you’d have to defy the laws of basic mathematics to even worry 10 k let-alone 26. Listen carefully, for I will say this only once – the whole point of the benefits cap is to cap Housing Benefit. So, saying you support the cap but not the HB element is a position that is to be utterly blind to the logical implications of what your actually saying.

Housing Benefit is well known to take up the biggest slice of the welfare cake. Its a cost the government could reduce massively by capping private rents and building some more homes. This is what I like to call a win-win. Families get homes, the government rakes in more tax from the jobs etc created – the only people who lose are parasitic landlords. A policy that drives down rents and creates a greater supply of cheaper and affordable housing would also benefit the working poor.

If Labour is serious about opposing these reckless changes it will have to vote against the benefit cap in its entirety. In its execution it will be as shambolic as the equally barking cap on immigration and its our poorest that will suffer the most.

Why the Osborne story matters….

Mark Ferguson has a piece on LabourList calling the current swirl of stories around George Osborne’s private life a “distraction”. Normally, i’d be inclined to agree with Mark’s basic premise – that what Osborne did 20 years ago is of no relevance to the here and now of what he is doing to the economy. However, this case is a little different. For me, there are two broad case scenarios when it is acceptable and in the public interest to make a politicians private issue;

a) when their private actions contradict or call into question directly the sincerity of their public statements on an issue. For example, if in public you are calling for a return to ‘family values’ but in private are conducting an adulterous affair behind the back of your wife and 2.4 children then you should expect to be held to account for that. Your private life in this instance is made ‘fair game’ by your public proclamations and prescriptions for others.

b) when your private life or circumstances within it lead you to abuse the position and power you hold, either in preferencing others or using it to buy the effective silence of scrutiny of your current or past actions. In other words, when you abuse your position and therefore public trust (as those in a do as well) because of factors in your private life. David Law’s antics are a good example of this, it’s not the fact he’s gay and wanted to hide it, it’s the fact that he pilfered from the public purse to do so.

There are shades of a about the Osborne case, after all, his government has moralised at us about ‘broken Britain’ and the ‘feral underclass’. However, the importance and relevance and, crucially, the legitimacy of using the Osborne story as a political weapon are mostly located in b. Specifically, the importance of this story is the new light it sheds on the reasoning behind Mr Osborne’s promotion of and close ties with both Andy Coulson and Rebecca Brooks. Did he promote Coulson in order to hush-up stories about his previous coke and cane antics? If so, did he do so with full knowledge of Coulson’s alleged criminality and proceed despite that? If he did then that definitely is an abuse of his position and powers of patronage.

It is also something i’d happen to be immensely ticked-off about if I was his boss, David Cameron. I do believe politicians have a right to a private life, and they have a right to not being flayed alive for doing things that many of us do, however when they use and abuse their position of privilege and power to cover that up, that is when there private lives should be opened up to scrutiny and they should expect judgment for that abuse of power. It is not what Osborne did in his youth that is the issue, he may well be forgiven that, but what he has subsequently done to cover his actions-up that is the real issue and his insipid links with Andy Coulson and News International. This is why the Osborne story matters, and this is why it’s legitimate for Labour to ask the questions that arise from it.

Dan Hodges is a symbol of all that is wrong with the left….

‘We are the left’ says Dan Hodges on LabourList, ‘we stop Nazi’s marching, we don’t campaign for it’

Many people will raise an eyebrow and Hodges claim to have leftist credentials here. Reading many of the things he writes on the New Statesman, it truly boggles the mind to imagine him even clenching his fist to the Internationale, but, be that as it may, he still stands in this article as a flag-carrier for all the flaws of the left. He says it is the left that stops the EDL marching. Theresa May, I am sure, has been accused of many things, but I would imagine ‘being the left’ or even left-wing has never been amoung them.

Dan, of course, has totally missed the point. Saying the EDL march should not have been banned by the state is not the same thing as actively campaigning for it. He is deliberately misrepresenting the position of those people who support community self-organisation as opposed to state action. I could write plenty of fine words in riposte to Mr Hodges, but instead of that I will merely point the readers to the heroic actions of RMT workers in Liverpool, who stopped the EDL assembling, as proof-positive that the far-right can be stopped without fawning and pathetic letters to a Conservative Home Secretary.

However, I will say that Hodges, like the rest of the left, has totally lost the essence of what left-wing politics should be about. We should not be about appeals to ‘strong government’, we should be about making the people stronger, by organising them and awakening them to their own potential to control their lives. At the heart of this dispute is a schism between the stinking corpse of the established left, which is lost to progressive politics, which has failed to change society so many times we have lost count and the rest of the left which remembers what it is that makes left-wing politics progressive. They remember that what makes it so is that we see the governance of our society, the shape of a better future society as being one where people have ever greater control over their destinies, where they are the architects of the future. Dan Hodges doesn’t want that, he doesn’t want a society where people control their own lives and their own communities, he wants a Conservative Home Secretary to do it for him, he wants the smack of firm government because ultimately he doesn’t trust people to run their lives in the way the left should. He is a remnant of a shattered and broken past, a place where the left lost fight after fight and a present where people turn more to the far-right than the left because they simply don’t see the left having any vision of a better future. He is everything the left needs to cast aside if it wants to rehabilitate itself as a progressive force in society, the only decent place for the politics of Hodges, and the established left, is the dustbin of history which ultimately is where it belongs.

The last thing Labour needs is its own ‘Tea Party’….

Although, as anybody who reads this will know, I am left-wing and want Labour to enact left-wing, socialist, policies, I do recognise that our constant contarians on the right, the likes of Tom Harris, Dan Hodges, and Luke Boizer are a crucial part of this Party. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t agree with them one inch, but nonetheless they play a key role in the melting pot that is Labour and we are better off for having them than not, even though they exasperate and annoy frequently. Sometimes they even cross the line and we wonder why, oh why, they carry a Party card but the Party would ultimately be poorer if they didn’t.

All of which brings us to Luke’s latest piece on LabourList. His basic riff is that Labour has been fiscally reckless and should say so;

” let’s get real – the reason there’s a deficit is because tax income didn’t cover the high public spending before the credit crunch/banking crash”. 

Fine, let’s get real. Any discussion of the real would have to take into account the decades of underinvestment that blighted our public services during the Conservative years who starved them of cash. ‘Getting real’ would also involve acknowledged that one of the principal reasons tax revenues did suffer is that we are burdened with a tax system which has more holes than your average Swiss cheese – so, the rich pay nearly not as much as they should in tax and the burden is shouldered by those lower down the scale. The same people who in fact have been afflicted by a collapse in real-terms income. We squeezed and bled these people until we could no more, yet we let the rich simply get away with it, because we still needed for literally decades of under-investment in public services.

Luke, unsurprisingly, doesnt have an awful lot to say about all this. Like most ideologues of the right, he is oh so opposed to our debt, but unwilling to accept the real causes – which are a) the structural necessity of debt for capitalism to function and b) the bleeding of money out of the system by those at its very apex. The brutal facts is that the concentration of wealth, undemocratically, in the hands of those we were happy to have ‘filthy rich’ is what has destroyed this system and brought this debt down on us.

So, maybe we should take responsibility, but not for the debt per se, but for allowing this to happen on our watch – for the light-touch regulation, for the billions upon billions of our money taken off-shore to tax havens by the very rich and powerful. For saying it’s ok for people to be ‘filthy rich’ and not contribute their fair share back. The last thing Labour needs is a blinkered, zealotry shower of utter morons, which is what the Tea Party actually are, what we need is to take the right kind of responsibility and return to our founding values.

Labour and Enterprise – A reply to Alex Smith and Luke Boizer…..

This post on LabourList by Alex Smith and Luke Boizer caught my eye this morning. Not least because it starts with this eye-popping statement:

Despite its faults, capitalism is the single most successful system in history at creating opportunity, freedom, expression and happiness.

I’m genuinely not sure how the comrades measure this or even hope to prove it. I would say its one of those statements that it’s probably impossible to concretely prove or disprove. Having said that it evidences the kind of ‘i’m all right jack’ conceited attitude which pretty much plagues ideologues of the capitalist system. It’s a bit like the overwhelmingly privileged citizens of Rome writing a fantastic eulogy about how happy they are and how they had spread that happiness to an unparalleled number of their citizens – forgetting, of course, the ones they brutally slaughtered, repressed and kept in a state of permanent servitude and squalor.

Having started off in a thoroughly unbalanced and one-sided way (the people for whose capitalism’s faults are crippling are deemed inconsequential by implication) the post never really recovers. In fact, it collapses into a gibbering mess of intellectual self-contradiction having told us how brilliant capitalism is making life for everyone it goes onto say this:

Jobs will not come easy in the future; nor will they always be secure. Entire business models will come and go, and the business cycle may shorten, rather than lengthen. In this type of economy, those with capital will have a built-in advantage over those without. So if the government is encouraging the right to enterprise it is important it also fulfills its responsibility to provide a robust safety net in such a high-risk environment.

So, peoples working lives are going to be become more unstable and this is a good thing? You see it might be a good thing to write about, bracing and thrilling even but I suspect the actual people involved might take a different view – especially if they happen to fall down on the losing side. Life isn’t a game of Monopoly, its deadly serious, and its pretty feckless and irresponsible of LabourList commentators to behave like it is really, especially when by their own admission the stakes for people are so high.

What would be even more reckless and politically disgusting would be for Labour to pretend that it was – to suddenly refuse to be the party of those dispossessed by this social system. Not only is that morally wrong but it will create a permanent black hole at the centre of our democracy which will eventually corrode it by creating a chronic crisis of representation where more and more people simply no longer have a voice within conventional political discourse and therefore no longer have a stake in its preservation. Before writing such pieces I would suggest that comrades consider both sides of the equation – not just the winners but also the losers and remember that Labour has a responsibility to represent the latter, probably more than the former because it is they that most need a voice for otherwise they are voiceless. Labour should not be the ‘party of enterprise’ – it should be the party of consistent democracy and social justice and that involves a recognition that capitalism is far from the promised land for many more billions than it is.

 

The leadership question just wont go away….

LabourLists most recent State of the Party survey doesn’t make particularly good reading for Ed Miliband : –

Last month we told you that Ed Miliband had seen a decline in his popularity amongst LabourList readers, with only 47% believing that he had done an Excellent or Good job. This month there has been another slump – now only 41% of you think that his performance has been better than fair, and 32% of you think that his performance has been either Poor or Very poor.

I have to be honest; these are not good numbers for a leader when the surveyed are the party faithful. Like it or not the leadership question wont go away for Labour. Why? Well I have to say, his initial actions in appointing a shadow cabinet to buttress his own position rather than take the Party forward said from the very off that his mentality was one of desperate consolidation rather than striding forward to lead the Party.

Electoral success seemed to steady the ship but for every step forward there is two back. So, in May what should have been a Roman triumph for the fresh-faced Miliband turned into something of a disaster as two campaigns he had tied himself personally too – Labour’s Scottish Campaign and the Yes to AV campaign went disastrously wrong. His performances at PMQ’s are variable although generally he has the upper hand over Cameron it has to be said, but this matters not a jot in terms of kudos with the wider electorate.

Labour is a Party in transition – it’s in the process of awakening from the long slumber imposed on it by Blairism and on a journey whose end has yet to be determined. The danger for Miliband is that his leadership will become part of the same process; that when Labour has emerged from this period more self-confident and self-aware, it will find his leadership a burden and cast it aside at the appropriate juncture. The leadership question is one that will not go away from some time, if at all….

A reply to Anthony Painter on UK Uncut….

Anthony Painter has now written two pieces for LabourList on UK Uncut. The first one I found myself broadly (though not totally) agreeing with because I think UK Uncut was wrong to stage actions on the day of the March for the Alternative. However, in his second one, Anthony edges across a line and is in danger of entering ‘throwing the baby out with the bath water’ territory. In fact, his finger-wagging attitude is not helpful and unconstructive in the current context.

It’s clear to me, not least from Prime Ministers Questions this week but also from the glut of negative media coverage that there is now a concerted and highly orchestrated attempt to ‘get’ UK Uncut and totally discredit it. Why? Well, I think Wes Streeting provides the answer in another LabourList piece:

UKuncut has been one of the most successful vanguard actions against corporate greed we’ve seen for years. At a time when public services for the poorest are being hit hard, they have been incredibly effective at exposing the hypocrisy of a system that sees the richest shirk their social responsibility through tax avoidance, while the poorest have no option but to fulfil their civic duty because they can’t afford a fancy accountant. Through peaceful, non-violent direct action they have raised public awareness, increased pressure on corporations to pay fair taxes and have inspired similar movements elsewhere, notably in the United States of America.

Like Wes, as should be clear from my comments above, on a tactical level I do not agree with everything UK Uncut does. Nonetheless, we need to be quite clear that when it comes under the sustained attack it has from Conservative backbenchers, (although one seemed to be attacking an unknown organisation called Uncut UK), the Prime Minister and the media; we are their friends and will defend them while always remembering that the best kind of friend is a critical one, because those ones tell you how it is, not just what you want to hear.

So, its right to call for UK Uncut to distance itself from the Black Bloc, etc. Its right to say that UK Uncut needs some kind of coherent and democratic structure to grow, it needs structures which are flexible for sure but also in which people can be held accountable. Saying ‘I don’t know because we all do our own thing’ wont wash at all and it has to stop.  In short, it needs to protect itself from the coming onslaught which I expect only to intensify and get worse. This is not an ‘attack’ but serious advice – if UK Uncut starts to regard even well-intentioned critical remarks as an aggressive act then it will wither and die; vanishing into the murky cul-de-sac of social irrelevance where the hollowed out husk of the far-left lives.

Interestingly, Anthony doesn’t call for any of this and I suspect this is because he has now written UK Uncut off entirely. In doing so, he is writing off an organisation which as Wes describes has been an inspirational success in so many regards purely on the grounds of one mis-step and that is just plain silly. He may well be right about the legal details but the police have been reluctant to act on them up to this point, precisely because UK Uncut has been such an inspiration with its committment to non-violent direct action. They now have the excuse to take a much harder line; an outcome I expect was planned in advance. UK Uncut now needs to make a cultural leap of faith and realise that some structure and organisation is a necessary evil and will in fact enhance, not weaken, its campaigning. The March for the Alternative was a testament to the power of organisation with even a much-diminished and storm-battered labour movement mobilising 100’s of thousands in an impressive show of force.

We should not make the mistake Anthony does and write-off UK Uncut. They still have much to offer this movement and Labour should be their very-best (and therefore critical when it is necessary) friend.

Desperation thy name is the Liberal Democrats….

So, Labour won the Oldham East and Saddleworth by election with a majority of over 3,500. You might think this would be a time for sober reflection within the huddled ranks of Nick Clegg’s diminishing yellow army. In fact, most have taken the opportunity to bury their head much more firmly in the sand. Understandable in a way; the reality is obviously far too much for these fragile souls to bear. Traumatised by double-crossing themselves and the increasingly hacked-off people who voted for them the last thing they now want to deal with is the slow, painful, extinction of the party they are clinging for dear life too.

However, that is what is happening. Yes, the Lib Dem vote *share* went up 0.3% in Oldham East and Saddleworth. Two things caused  this though; neither of which will ever be repeated again. One was understandable residual sympathy for Elwyn Watkins who was somewhat unfairly deprived of his moment of glory by a racist bigot who was economical with the truth. The second thing is the tactical votes of Conservatives.

The first thing wont last for ever, even if Elwyn runs again. He lost fairly and squarely this time around. Besides, what are you going to do? Take every Labour candidate up-and-down the land to court so you can play the martyr in every corner of the country? I think not.

Now, I have a little puzzle for our yellow friends.  I am loaned £1 million am I a millionaire? Obviously not but according to the tortured logic of the Lib Dem desperados I obviously am. For the slow-of-thinking let me explain this simple truth – those Conservatives wont vote for you at either the local elections elsewhere or the next general election whenever that may be. You lost over a 1/3rd of your vote to Labour in OES and that was with the ’empathy for Elwyn’ cusion. What do you honestly think is going to happen elsewhere?

Still when all else fails there is always the ‘blame game’ and as LabourList reports it seems to be the new Lib Dem ‘strategy’. One that is so complex it seemingly can be contained on a roughly A5 size piece of card.  The Lib Dem high-command obviously does think their voters are stupid. So stupid in fact that they will forget who is in national government and who is slashing the grant from central government to councils with abandon. Maybe this is an extension of the pathetic whining that is always used to excuse a Lib Dem poor performance – lack of media coverage and exposure (this laughably started to appear as soon as the LD poll rating started to plummet).  The Party which holds the Deputy Prime Minister post and senior ministerial positions simply must be starved of media coverage. The poor lambs. Maybe they do wish they could vanish into thin air but guess what? We wont let them.

Incidentally, after 5 years (or however long) of countering this garbage I would expect no Labour member with an ounce of self-respect to want anything to do with this pariaiah party – led by Calamity Clegg or not. The demise of the Liberal Democrats as a political party will not just rid of us those risible bar charts but also bring the frankly alarming state of high self-delusion amoung Liberal  Democrats to a cruel but necessary end. Sometimes cruelty is kindness and these people deserve at least to be put out of their misery and be allowed to take their place in the real world.

Labour cannot wish the AV debate away….

Mark Ferguson has a good post on LabourList speaking up for a third side to the AV debate; they may not be the most vocal but the ‘AV agnostics’ are probably the largest group within Labour. They are also likely to find themselves the subject of an awful lot of attention from both sides of the debate as time roles on because, as I have said, the simple truth is that whichever way Labour voters split will most likely determine the outcome of the AV Referendum. Mark’s central point; that Labour is ‘hopelessly divided’ over AV would be easily confirmed by anybody who even cast a casual glance at the Labour Twitterstream today.  Add onto that the 114 Labour MP’s who have today spoken out against AV and you can see this division clearly afflicts the Party at all levels.

It’s understandable on one level why comrades want to try and wish this away but with the stakes so high this simply can’t happen. Both sides are also passionately invested in their cause as well so not only can it not happen but it wont either. However, apart from that maybe we should pause for a moment and wonder whether it is right to want to forget about this.

As a Party I feel it would do us good to have a raucous debate. We have become far too timid; far too scared of sharp and, yes sometimes bitter debate, and this simply isn’t healthy when it comes to cultivating a democratic culture. Harsh debate and bitter polemic does not just light our collective way but it also makes us stronger and more united when a course is finally chartered. This has simply been forgotten and this is exactly why the electorate turned on us because, brutally, as far as they were concerned we became a dried out husk of a Party incapable of offering a uplifting vision to a nation that needed one.

A vigorous debate about AV which cuts to the chase of some fundamental issues (like, for example,  how we view our democracy and how we make it better) would go along way to dispel this view. Furthermore, the sight of comrades taking opposing views but, nonetheless, of course uniting to fight for Labour in the local and national elections would look very impressive indeed. It would show maturity but also that the contrarian spirit of a Party which should thrive on this is alive and kicking.

I make no apologies for opposing AV and I do so in the name of democracy. This pathetic reform shows what happens precisely when we leave reform to politicians and trust them to solve problems which they cannot possibly solve. No electoral system is perfect and the fact that the pro-AV camp pretends it is manna Nick Clegg rained from heaven by doing a deal with the devil should tell us all we need to know about its numerous and inexcusable imperfections. Furthermore, these comrades have abandoned the cause of real change, as was shown when the Liberal Democrats duly voted down an amendment calling for more options. Real, lasting democratic change will not arrive via this rotten plebiscite but will be won through the struggle of the growing anti-cuts/fees movement.

Labour as a Party should not be shy of this debate, if it wants to show the electorate it has changed and learnt from the General Election then rather than try and skirt round the issue it should plunge headlong into it with confidence it will safely emerge the other side.