I find the likes of Martin Kettle extremely annoying. Displaying extraordinary small mindedness, and a willingness to kow-tow to bankers and economists of the sort Simon Jenkins rightly condemns in the Guardian today Kettle argues on another page of the Guardian today that:
So much now depends on Ed Miliband. Only he can tell the Labour party, in the absence of an international boost of demand which shows absolutely no sign of coming, that a Labour Britain would have to cut its coat according to its cloth. Only he has the authority to tell his party that Labour's general election offer to the voters will involve no net extra current expenditure, and maybe even less. Only he can tell his shadow ministers to focus on radical manifesto ideas that involve no more money. It's an incredibly tough call for any Labour leader. Nevertheless, these are incredibly tough times. Whether Miliband is up to it is unclear. But the task is urgent and unavoidable and it will define him one way or the other.
This is simply not true. I will give my almost obligatory reference to The Courageous State for those wanting a fuller explanation, let's deal with the core of this now.
First, there is a £95 billion tax gap to be tackled. How dare he say there's no money? Of course there's money. What Kettle's saying is that he would rather that money be left with the crooks, the cheats and the straightforwardly criminal than be collected top pay for the services we need. That's a choice by him: a choice to support criminality over public services and a choice that those who are criminal should be rewarded. It's not just lazy to ignore this. it's candidl;y and quite literally criminal to do so.
Second, Kettle reveals a remarkably small mind. Money can be printed. We can print as much of it as we need. We let banks do so to fuel a consumer boom. We can do so to meet social need. There is no risk whatsoever of internally generated inflation of we were to do so: you don't have internally generated inflation when there are falling net wages and 2.64 million unemployed. So he is negligently ignoring a reality here. He is choosing to make people unemployed to avoid a fiction: the risk of inflation. That makes him a friend of the 1%.
Third, Kettle shows he has not the faintest idea about the real economy. People generate wealth, not money. It is labour - the process of people working to exchange with each other, which is the foundation of an economy. It is the job of economics and politics to liberate them to do so. But he'd rather they were forced into unemployment, and demands a Labour government that would do just that, to make sure that the failed edicts of neoliberal economics are supported (edicts that Jenkins has seen right through, to his credit). How dare he suggest that Labour should sacrifice the people of this country to such a failure?
Kettle is the sort of person Labour needs to be rid of. They're LINO - Labour In Name Only.
What we need is a Labour Party that stands up for people. That says it will collect tax owing. That says it believes it is its job to get people back to work - and as people like Krugman, Stiglitz, Wolf and Sam Brittan argue, should borrow to do just that. And it's a party that says the bankers and their friends have got it very, very wrong, as the people of this country instinctively know.
Labour won a by-election yesterday. That's good news, and the swing to them was welcome. But not being the Tories is not enough. Labour has to offer a radical economic agenda to win through for this country. If not we faced decades of despair.
And to start it should be telling people in its ranks like Kettle to go forth and join the Coalition, which is where they belong because candidly the last thing we need is another New Labour regeneration - ever.
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Careful Richard!
I don’t agree at all with what Mr Kettle writes here – in fact he is dangerously wrong – but let’s not indulge in puritannical ideological putsches.
I think there is a strength in plurality of opinions in any Political movement. This is what hobbles the Tories on subjects like Europe. The lack of inflexible ideological consensus is a strength. All Parties are coalitions to a point.
Leave purity for doomed political movements like the US Republicans and other extremist factions.
I am more than happy with plurality – but not when it destroys the chances of the people of the UK
If they’re denied any representation that can give them hope then I’m afraid I can live with some political realignment, which is long overdue
Richard, how I agree with you, and “sickoftaxdoggers” on “New Labour” and its manifest failures.
My wife is Czech, and managed to leave Czechoslovakia in November 1968, ostensibly for a year, but actually potentially for ever, as she intended to stay here in the UK (she did actually get permission to return in 1978 – but only at the astonishing cost of £550 for an “immigration visa”, a sum for which I had to take out a bank loan, as that represented about 15% of my annual salary at that time).
However, that is by the bye – what IS relevant here is that every house should have an Eastern Bloc emigre living with them, as they are so used to reading between the lines, being, if you like “bull-shit-ometers”.
Two examples: a) within a couple of months of Mrs Thatcher’s victory, my wife delivered her judgement: “I smell Police State”; and wasn’t she right? With Blair – and how I raged and quarrelled with her over this – within 3 weeks of winning the 97 general Election, my wife said “Nothing’s going to change!”.
She saw through all the hype and all the accompanying brass bands and grand cries of the heralds and Town Criers bidding us come to the wonder new “New Labour” Three-ring Circus, to see that it was all waffle and deception. Within 6 months I saw she was right, and by 2001 I had resigned from the “New” Labour Party. I came back to the Party just before the last General Election, because I thought Brown was right, and had been the right man in 2008, and was certainly better than the Pip, Squeak and Wilfred Cameroonies on offer from the other side (made even worse now by their woeful Rag, Tag & Bobtail Cleggie side-kicks).
What you say is SO right – NO New Labour regeneration. Instead, New Labour should be rapidly consigned to the knacker’s yard (from which is should never have been spared; indeed, it should NEVER have been brought to birth, as it was always a strange progeny), and Ed Milliband should boldly embrace the principles of the Courageous State – support the public sector in their justified battle for decent pensions; put the private sector carpetbaggers intent on siphoning off the wealth of our NHS, education system on notice that we will take it all back under true democratic control; and above all tell the well-known “wunch of bankers”, that we vigorously pursue unpaid tax, and will nationalise some banks, and in particular the whole system of money and credit creation, so that the banks pay the State interest for the privilege, and not the other way round.
The British people – the 99% – deserve nothing less, and certainly don’t deserve to to be saddled with LINO’s and “Black Labour” supporters like Martin Kettle.
Sounds like common sense to me, not puritannical ideological putsches. I’d like to be able to vote for a candidate knowing that she or he actually supports the party policies that has led me to vote for them. If Labour campaigned for the Green New Deal in conjunction with others who supported it I would start voting for them again.
What would be the point of a Labour party that offered the same dismal right wing economic policies as the Tories? Why bother to vote for a non Tory party if it followed the same neoliberal policies? This of course was where New Labour went so disastrously wrong, even if in a few areas they did produce some decent policies (minimum wage, more spending on the NHS, some, very timid attempts at wealth redistribution).
As you say Richard, we need a truly progressive party that opposes the right wing nonsense being forced on us now, and offers a sane alternative.
Martin Kettle doesn’t even qualify as LINO sadly – he was instrumental in persuading the Guardian to back the Lib Dems at the last election.
LINO is an absolutely huge problem though, Richard – you’re right. There are a large number of people on the right of the party who seem to think that if Labour runs on a policy platform which is an exact clone of the Tories, then they will be very successful. Why on earth would anyone think that? It’s insane.
When was the last time a party last won a UK election from a genuine leftist platform?
It has
That’s all that matters
It is always in time of crisis
That’s now
Again, that’s all that matters
The real issue is whether you tell the public what you think is true or what they want to hear. Most people who vote believe that Labour are a tax and spend party and that they always leave the country bankrupt. You then have 2 choices:
1) The Blair approach: explain that you are very sorry for the past but that you have changed for the better and you win a mandate to do not much; or
2) The Kinnock/Miliband/Balls approach: you try to argue that people are wrong and you aren’t the party they think but you never get elected.
The same applies to the Tories and the nasty tag: it was no use them saying they were never nasty, they only get elected when they admitted they used to be but say “look, we’ve changed”.
But although I am middle aged, I have really only lived through 2 changes of government (in 1997 and 2010). It would be totally rational for me to say that the British elect a single party and stick with them until their sense of entitlement becomes utterly objectionable (the Tory pigs in the trough in the mid 1990s and Brown’s terrible spin and lies in 2009/10 crossing that line for most people). What the opposition does during that time appears to be irrelevant: the same party stays in power for a generation until enough new voters are around who never knew how bad the previous lot were.
But I imagine I am unusual among readers here in that I have voted for all 3 parties in the past.
i fear you are backing the wrong horse with labour – they had years and years in power to do what you want them to do and they didnt do it. they didnt do it then , and they wont do it if they get back in again.
we probably need a new “courageous” political party i suspect
I have always accepted that possibility
And I work with other parties, quite happily
Labour are in bad shape having seemingly not learnt lessons from their time in power. Their refusal to denounce the utter failure of the ‘New Labour’ project is ridiculous.
Ed Miliband has proved himself to be a spineless fool, completely out of his depth and still looks like a rabbit caught in the headlights after a year as leader. He must have known that he was never going to make it to the general election so why couldn’t he have just stuck to his apparently left-leaning ideals and given Labour a fresh start. I suppose its good that he didn’t because he’s not someone people can relate to or believe in so those ideas would have been damaged by association.
I wonder how long they will give it before replacing him, they have plenty of ammo to go at the conservatives, and a new leader with a fresh left-wing manifesto will see them shoot up the polls.
But will they just sell out again? Who can trust the word of any politician? It’s a process of the tories pushing the boundaries to the right and labour following along in that direction. It seems like it will keep repeating until we are like the Americans with two parties that are well to the right of centre giving the population no choice and no representation. Two sides of the same coin.
It’s depressing, what can be done about it? Politicians will never give a damn about the people while it is so easy for the corporations to grease their pockets.
Talking of LINO, have you seen this from Liam Byrne? An attempt to out-nasty the Tories on social security (or, to use the American term our politicians have appropriated in a bid to replicate the rabid Tea Party mindset that prevails over there, “welfare”). Absolutely sickening stuff which will no doubt turn off a lot more potential voters than it attracts.
Ah, Martin Kettle has betrayed the cause and must be punished. I suspect he was trying to inject some reality into Labours politics on the basis on the recent falling polls, appalling Ed Miliband performances and total failure of Ed Balls economic attacks.
Looking to get results he probably realises that being correct on the economy or morally righteous is worthless unless you get elected!……..And that the public want to hear about responsible spending even if Richard Murphy hates the idea.
However I am sure you are right and he is wrong, he is after all from the Judean Peoples Front!…….Splitters!
On th day of an 8% swing to Labour
Facts pass yo by don’t they?
What is Richard no-name (not you Richard) on about? If he consults the UK Polling website at http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/voting-intention he will see that the Tories have been in a negative position in the majority of the polls since 27th September 2010, when Ed Milliband was declared the winner of the Labour Leadership poll, and they have held that negative position, with Labour ahead, in nearly every Poll this year, until the recent display of “Little Englander” behaviour from Boy Dave. Frankly,
Boy Dave’s behaviour strongly reminds me of a classic moment in Eisenstein’s great film “Skanderbeg”, when the hero speaks of one of his opponents:”The mouse has pssed in the sea, and proudly says ‘Look what I have done!’ ” – that’s all Dave has done, leaving the UK on the sidelines, and the idiot Little Englanders cheering him on.
Meanwhile, Ed Milliband scored a near mortal blow on the whole Murdoch affair, changing the rules of engagement (and probably thereby bundled “Boy Dave” into his ridiculous bluster), while Ed Balls is playing the long game, and letting the public see just how threadbare Osborne’s Plan A is.
Where I do agree with both Richards is on the need to Labour to step up to the mark now, and start telling it how it is – and that does NOT mean caving in to the Tory narrative, which is the failed narrative of the whole neo-liberal experiment, as espoused by Martin Kettle and “Black Labour”. “More of the same” is just what we do NOT need, and politicians have a duty to try to speak real truth to the electorate, and not continue with the poisonous fairy tales of the last 30+ years of Thatcherite untruth.
Boy Dave, of course, has opted for just the oppposite – more untruth, and more poison, and further “irresponsible spending”, since upping our deficit and welfare spending (the direct result of their clueless policies) really IS throwing good money after bad, in defiance of Gresham’s Law.
The two Ed’s need to go for the jugular on this, and spell out the real consequences of the Coalition’s policies. Have to grade them “Could do better”, but they are at least moving in the right direction. And who would Richard “no-name” like to see replace Ed M? WOuld be interesting to hear his views.
David Cameron has separated us from the EU in order to protect the Financial Services Sector (FSS).
He now says he wants the UK to abide by true Christian principles which will, naturally, mean doing away with the FSS.
The poor fellow really doesn’t seem to know what he’s doing !
If Labour can’t beat this lot it is a pretty awful indictment.