Let me begin with a tweet:
@ChukaUmunna: @Ed_Miliband and @edballsmp have made absolutely the right decision on @UKLabour's economic policies...
I guess it's hardly surprising that a member of the shadow cabinet supports his party leader, so that's not why I have quoted this tweet from Chuka Umunna. My real concern is something quite different, and that is that actually neither Ed Balls or Ed Miliband have said what Labour's economic policy is. If they had we wouldn't be seeing the conflicts we are this week.
I've already said - and it is as far as I'll go in accommodating Ed Balls' statement - that it's reasonable that Labour cannot say now which cuts it will reverse in 2015. That's obvious. I think Len McCluskey agreed with that. Anyone would.
And it's also reasonable that Labour cannot say now precisely what agenda it will put forward in 2015. Again, since we cannot know and possibly even imagine what mess the Tories will have created by then that is again fair.
But what's now very clearly going on is something that is much more significant than that. There is very obviously a coordinated effort to ensure Labour is forced to be a right wing party where singing the bankers' tune and following the neoliberal line is the core of the party's policy.
That is clearly the Guardian's agenda - overtly driven by Patrick Wintour who has been writing aggressively anti-Ed Miliband commentary for some weeks now.
And there's clearly been a coordinated attack by the right-wing of Labour, including Jim Murphy, Liam Byrne, Stephen Twigg and the Black Labour movement. This attack is well coordinated and well funded - some guess Mandelson is behind that; I wonder if Blair is.
The important point is all these people share a belief in common. I describe it in the Courageous State:
The economic crisis we are now facing is the legacy of Thatcher and Reagan because they introduced into government the neoliberal idea that whatever a politician does, however well-intentioned that action might be, they will always make matters worse in the economy. This is because government is never able, according to neoliberal thinking, to outperform the market, which will always, it says, allocate resources better and so increase human well-being more than government can.
That thinking is the reason why we have ended up with cowardly government. That is why in August 2011, when we had riots on streets of London we also had Conservative politicians on holiday, reluctant to return because they were quite sure that nothing they could do and no action they could take would make any difference to the outcome of the situation. What began as an economic idea has now swept across government as a whole: we have got a class of politicians who think that the only useful function for the power that they hold is to dismantle the state they have been elected to govern while transferring as many of its functions as possible to unelected businesses that have bankrolled their path to power.
A plan for#growth: close the tax gap; green quantitative easing; 25% of pension contributions invested in job creation. Go for it#Labour
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Richard, as you know, it is a case of following the audit trail of the funding and the two conduits you mention are likely to be involved.
Your point about the funding is an extremely significant one. There is a lot of ‘investment’, in all senses of the word, to force Ed Miliband away from his very modest proposals to harness the City, the energy companies and tax havens.
The #spartacus movement have demonstrated real success in making the government back down over welfare reform, and the unco-ordinated broad left could be doing the same to support Ed Miliband’s LP against the right wing pressure to move back to New Labour. Unfortunately, the left do not trust Labour politicians after Blair. Perhaps, the original conspiracy theory about Blair, being co-opted by unknown US sources to destroy the LP, has very real legs.
But where are those two parties deriving their funding ?
Altruism is alien to both.
They had the choice when in [UK] government, help people or help themselves.
At the Fabian Conference Chuka stated (and I hope I have remembered his exact words) that we need to exploit developing countries (in the context of trade) for the benefit of UK people. Well frankly I consider that we have exploited developing countries too much in the past (for example slavery in Africa) and his statement completely ignores the fact that much trade is now ‘South South’. This really does reveal the paucity in Labour’s economic thinking. Along with other comments in the last couple of days (pay cuts etc.) it is not surprising that the trade unions are agitated and ordinary people feel that no party represents them.
If the government invested just a tenth of the QE money it is putting into the banks, it would have an immediate effect!
£27.5 billion invested in the construction sector would no doubt create a multiplier effect and help kick-start growth.
Especially as the dole queues have grown by around 56.000.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the change of stance:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/92d7c504-8fa0-11e0-954d-00144feab49a.html#axzz1jtaVB3Ov
Lack of donations from business could be the reason. This is because like Lord Sainsbury, they do not like Ed Miliband because he is seen as left wing. Maybe Ed would do better to be even more a man of the people by attracting more members, and getting the money that way.
Having our politicians caught in a finance trap is something that is very serious for democracy. Bill Still in the USA in his special report 36 describes the US situation in which the governance of the United States is captured by the banks, and so making monetary reform, and probably tax reform very difficult.
http://www.youtube.com/user/bstill3
Let’s also remove (or at least curb) tax reliefs (eg interest relief) for non-productive financial activity, and cancel (or at least reduce) NI contributions to encourage employment and at the same time put more money in people’s pockets.