Liam redux

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“Go left young man” Mirror to Miliband

Kevin Maguire argues that Ed Miliband should “put himself at the head of a national resistance to reviving 1930s misery” in the Mirror. I have absolutely no idea what the main headline is about and really don’t want to know. Ed Miliband was scared of his shadow – or at least the notion of making…

Liam
2–3 minutes

Kevin Maguire argues that Ed Miliband should “put himself at the head of a national resistance to reviving 1930s misery” in the Mirrodmr. I have absolutely no idea what the main headline is about and really don’t want to know.

Ed Miliband was scared of his shadow – or at least the notion of making either Ed Balls or Yvette Cooper his Shadow Chancellor.

So the timid new Labour leader fluffed his first big call and played safe with Alan Johnson.

As a result he missed a glorious opportunity to recast his party’s economic policy and to turn the tables on the Tories.

Public backing for theoretical cuts will vanish when payments are snatched, teachers sacked, taxes hiked.

The uproar over a £1billion child benefit grab was a downpayment on molten fury when the ConDems seize £83bn.

Yet Miliband is mistakenly sticking with the lost Election line about halving the deficit over five years.

A bold, ambitious leader would have put himself at the head of a national resistance to reviving 1930s misery.

The cuts, as Mr and Mrs Balls-Cooper argued, ought to be more gradual to avoid turning recovery into another recession.

Ed Miliband is fond of saying the past is another country. Yesterday we discovered he’s frightened of the future.

The whisper in Westminster is that the new Labour leader was heavily influenced by Blairite supporters of defeated brother David.

To ensure the Blairite rump plays ball, Miliband locked the Brownite couple Balls-Cooper out of the Treasury. His camp insisted their man wanted to set his own economic policy rather than contract it out.

But he hasn’t created his own – he has bought a cautious, secondhand policy past its sell-by date.

Even Alan Johnson is surprised to find himself as Shadow Chancellor.

The former Home Secretary, lest we forget, wasn’t even running for the Shadow cabinet before a change of mind.

Tories will have fun at Johnson’s expense, asking how a pensioner in the last Cabinet fits in Miliband’s new generation.

Well, the Shadow Chan-cellor is one of the party’s most popular, capable and effective figures.

The Labour man orphaned at 12 relates to voters in a way impossible for trustfund Tory "Sir" George Osborne.

The key, however, is not personalities but getting right the policy and politics. Trade unionists sick of Ed Miliband condemning non-existent strikes and Guardianistas yearning for a fresh start now know he isn’t their Red Ed.

Yesterday the Labour leader put the ball over the bar in front of an open goal.

8 responses to ““Go left young man” Mirror to Miliband”

  1. ID Avatar
    ID

    This is likely as good as it gets for the Labour Party. There was a leftward shift forced by trade union members (and to an extent TU leaders also) back to rightist social democracy from outright capitalist politics as represented by Blair and Brown. But the bourgeois faction is still strong in the Parliamentary Labour Party after two-and-a-half decades of purging, marginalising and hammering the left by not just Blair, but Kinnock before him. Most of them were put where they are by Blair and Brown.

    Mind you, there could be some growth of left opposition in the Labour Party as a result of these events – a leftward shift in the leadership contest raising expectations, and then this thwarting by the PLP.

    Johnson is a non-entity on economics, which is why he has been chosen over Balls. He will do what Ed Milliband tells him to. Balls appears to have moved from being Gordon Brown’s right-hand-man in the psuedo-Keynesian bailout of the banks, to something approaching a genuine Keynesian programme of keeping a larger deficit for an extended period to continue funding social spending and promote gradual economic recovery in capitalist terms. This is not socialism, but it is social-democracy – possibly a step too far in Keynesian terms for Ed Milliband, who wants a modified version of Darling’s deficit plan with more tax rises and less cuts. Johnson will be the front-man to promote this, which is probably an advance from being a front man for Blair and Brown, but rather underwhelming.

    And Balls shadowing the Home Office is a terrible idea, given his opposition to rights of labour migration in the EU. His views on this are worse than the Tories (unless he has had some sudden conversion).

    But this is a good as it gets for Labour for the foreseeable future. Our main strategic task is still the building of a genuine socialist party with a broad and democratic ethos – not a bureaucratic sect.

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  2. Donkey Avatar
    Donkey

    Alan Johnson is a joke and is an appalling choice and not so Red Ed has not only missed an open goal but has seriously shot himself in the foot such that he might well wobble over.

    Johnson was a terrible Home secretary and will be a terrible shadow chancellor.

    Red Ed is just pure mush. A merger and mix of Blair and Brown and you end up with wishy washy mush which falls through your fingers and just goes down the drain.

    Juggling Jelly

    Not so Red Ed is jelly on a plate

    Neither Eddie baby or former postice Alan Johnston are even questioning the very basis of the cuts and Johnson by his own admittance knows fuck all about economics.

    As the previous comments says the resistance will come from below and must brush away all this sectarian stupidity and bureucratic blockage within the Trade union movement and the 57 varieties.

    UNITY IS STRENGTH !

    WE ARE AS STRONG AS OUR WEAKEST LINK !

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  3. maeve66 Avatar
    maeve66

    For a brief moment I thought YOU’D written this, and was confused, terribly, by the sport metaphor at the end. Not only because I don’t understand it, but because my mind could not contain the notion of you using sport to speak figuratively. Unless it were someone bashing someone else with a hurling stick. Hurley stick? Is that done? Is that how it’s described?

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  4. ID Avatar
    ID

    Interesting that Diane Abbott has got a job as public health spokesperson though. No way that would have happened under Brown or Blair.

    Its messy, and contradictory in some ways, but there has been a shift leftwards by a notch or two on the political scale. It will take time and some serious discussion for the left to work out its tactics for dealing with a changed situation, with a Labour leadership that looks (just about) social-democratic again, after a decade and a half of ‘left’ Thatcherism.

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  5. David Ellis Avatar
    David Ellis

    `with a Labour leadership that looks (just about) social-democratic again.’

    I suppose the wages of Third Periodism are Opportunism. You’ve got to justify your previous claim that a Tory victory in the last election would be a good thing for the labour movement somehow I guess.

    As it is when this lot came to power they will have imposed the necessary narrative on the movement that will allow them to accept the cuts already made and make a few of their own in welfare that the Coalition hadn’t even dreamed of.

    The political slogan of the day is for a workers’ government to replace this coalition and we need to outline a few of the things such a government would do right off the bat. Chief among these would be the merger and nationalisation of all the banks to create a state monopoly of credit. A program for the socialisation of the commanding heights of the economy by nationalising the means of production, and infrastructure currently controlled by monopoly capitalists. A pledge for full employment based on sharing the productive work and it should champion some constitutional issues around full sovereignty in a volunary federation for all the nations of the UK, renegotiation of all EU treaties along socialist lines and an end to the imperialist relationship of Britain towards the colonial and semi-colonial world.

    In the meantime we must mobilise, mobilise, mobilise in schools, hospitals, offices, factories, communities, and establish new forms of governance and defence based on working class democracy that will lead the struggle against the coalition’s plans for the total evisceration of the real economy.

    What are the plans of Socialist Resistance at the forthcoming COR conference. Do you intend to argue for the adoption of a socialist program such as the one I have outlined above or do you have another or do you intend not to seek to get it to adopt a program at all? Serious question which I think should be discussed. I think if we could get it to adopt a program such as the one above it could become a political alternative to New Labour in the coming period with great potential. If not …

    No doubt anti-political economist types will resist and there will be other who won’t want to frighten the left reformist horses but I think they need frightening and the need to be pulled in and pledged to a fighting response with a clear political alternative that shows the working class not just looking after number one but offering the whole of society a route out of this now permanent state of decay.

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  6. ID Avatar
    ID

    David Ellis

    “I suppose the wages of Third Periodism are Opportunism. You’ve got to justify your previous claim that a Tory victory in the last election would be a good thing for the labour movement somehow I guess”

    Still touting for New Labour, I see.

    “As it is when this lot came to power they will have imposed the necessary narrative on the movement that will allow them to accept the cuts already made and make a few of their own in welfare that the Coalition hadn’t even dreamed of.”

    Well, in the event that Labour runs next time round openly promising these kinds of attacks on the working class, no doubt people like you will be in favour of unconditional votes for them, in effect voting approval in advance for such cuts. I strongly suspect, however, that that is an unlikely scenario given recent developments.

    Critical support for Labour in elections is a tactic. It depends on the Labour Party promising some real reforms to the working class in order to be worth anything at all.

    If Labour stands in elections promising to be no better than the Tories, or as it did last May promising cuts more savage than under Thatcher, then you may as well call for votes for the Tories. There is no difference between calling for votes to New Labour as the Tories.

    Voting Labour in such conditions means approval of their reactionary programme. In the real world, as opposed to the dreamworld of idiot Trot Jesuits. That’s why five million former Labour supporters could not stomach voting for the bastards. They were right.

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  7. David Ellis Avatar
    David Ellis

    Liam: how about it? What will be SR’s approach at the COR meeting?

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  8. ID Avatar
    ID

    Just on this, I think a reasonable overview of the situation in the aftermath of the Labour leadership election is now possible.

    The bottom line is that, having marginalised the unions and promoted the growth of a layer of business-connected neo-liberal politicians in the Labour Party under Kinnock and then Blair, Labour fought the last four General Elections as an openly privatisating, anti-worker party, known as New Labour, whose main leaders were Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. It fought politically as a centre-right party, as a Tory Party Mark II, with the support of Rupert Murdoch for three of the four elections (it only lost that support when it was clear it would lose the fourth election). As such it was completely unworthy of any support from socialists – only its left-oppositional fringe deserved any support.
    Indeed, so blatant was the political shift of New Labour to the centre-right that the Liberal Democrats, a classically bourgeois ‘centre party’, moved to their left. Or rather, it would be more accurate to say that it was the Labour Party who moved politically to their right. The Lib Dems began to be seen by many as somewhat left-wing by comparison. As indeed they were – by comparison. However, the Lib Dems had not changed – they were still a bourgeois centre party. Though they did develop something of a social-democratic fringe through winning over refugees from Labour, which largely accounted for their growth in the last period.

    Now there has been another shift in volatile British politics. The Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats have changed places (again!) on the political spectrum. This took place as a result of the deserved defeat of New Labour in May 2010, and inconclusive outcome of that election. The Liberal Democrats, going into coalition with the traditional parliamentary bourgeois right (Tories), have been wrenched to the right and now de-facto are acting as a centre-right party, similar to New Labour before May 2010, implementing the Tory Party’s radical cuts programme.
    New Labour, on the other hand, at least in its old form, is no more. Labour is now acting as a bourgeois centre party, roughly in the same position as the Lib Dems before the 2010 election. A rebellion of trade unionists put Ed Miliband in power, after he made apparently serious points about a ‘crisis of representation’ of Labour’s traditional working-class base in his election campaign.

    Insofar as his politics are social-democratic, they are similar to the (now largely vacated) social-democratic positions of the pre-election Lib Dems. In those terms he aimed to win back those ‘progressive’ and/or working class voters who had defected to the Lib Dems, or simply abstained, in the General Election and indeed previous elections where Labour’s support had also declined.

    But events since the leadership election also show the limits of union power in the LP. They have some traction in an actual leadership election, but once that is over the party reverts to the stewardship of the MP’s and other functionaries with their business links and media positions. Hence the leftward thrust from the unions in electing Ed Miliband has been checked, and Labour landed right in the middle of the political spectrum.

    What is still blatantly missing is any party in any sense to the left of the political spectrum. Labour is a cross-class coalition of trade unionists and a significant bourgeois layer with direct material links to big business, forged during the Kinnock/Blair/Brown years. (This is different to the classic model of a bourgeois workers party, where the leadership is pro-capitalist but derived fundamentally from the labour bureaucracy. In Labour today the labour bureaucracy only occasionally gets any say, and the connections of the ‘political’ bureaucracy with big business are just as strong if not stronger than those with the labour bureaucracy) .

    The relationship between those components has been shaken up and modified a bit, but it still exists.
    In that sense, the political space still exists for an independent working class alternative to Labour, for a genuine party of the broad, working-class left, to represent independent working class interests. However, we need to be aware that there may be further struggles in the Labour Party as well, as some in the unions seek to re-create working class representation through the LP. There will be some finely judged tactical questions to be addressed as result of this, and both opportunist and sectarian dangers exist in dealing with them.

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