From Philip Stephens in the FT this morning:
Business leaders are “filling their boots”. Second-rate executives are “ripping off” shareholders and consumers. Hefty rewards for failure “make people's blood boil”. It's time to throw out “crony capitalism”. David Cameron could scarcely have been plainer. It cannot be too long before the prime minister is pitching up with his tent to join the Occupy protesters on the steps of St Paul's.
Don't you just wish Labour would be as clear?
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Are the third rate tapeworms being forced down the the NHS’s throat a suitable choice for Cameron’s ire?
The labour leader is quite plain this morning in relaunching his party as the conservative party, vainly trying to wrest the deficit rhetoric from the conservative government, and as a consquence becoming a silent partner in the coalition.
Surely the most disappointing thing about his radio 4 appearance was that he concurred that the deficit was the problem rather than “a consequence” of the banking crisis. Labour always seems to let the media “run the agenda” rather than help create the agenda – then we have the pompous political editor Nick – all mention of the UK’s financial decline, the disproportionate nature of the cuts, the regional differences, the massive unemployment , the serious narrative of what is happening gets drowned out by the BBC’s metropolitan media silly circus of this or that personality or is he seen as good or bad etc., Out in the real world people are involved in a completely different game of survival. Labour needs to get hard.
Isn’t this all just TOO depressing! There’s a Fabian Ideas publication – number 629 – authored by one Stephen Beer, which I received late last year, as being a member of the Fabians. This rejoices in the wonderful title “The Credibility Deficit – How the Rebuild Labour’s economic reputation”, and its key them is that Labour lost control of public spending, and was (implicitly) to blame for the enormous deficit. Frankly, if you come up with that lline of reasoning, then you’ve already lost the battle: the Tories can simply say “You got us in this mess, and now we’re struggling to do what’s best for the ocuntry, by getting us out of the mess you caused”.
Indeed, that is exactly what they have – to VERY great effect – been saying, despite the fact that enough has been published on this blog – especially that excellent bar chart a couple of days ago, which showed that 60% of our borrowing (amounting to 600% of our GDP!!) was down to our casino banking and finance sector – to demonstrate that this is complete twaddle: Labour did NOT lose control of spending, and the deficit IS the child, the monstrous progeny, of a failed economic model that only works for those who have, by robbing from those who have not!
You may have guessed that I have issues with Mr Beer – who is apparently well qualified, since he is a senior fund manager with the Central Finance Board of the Methodist Church – and indeed I do. For he is the same person who, in 2006, as Vice-Chair of the Christian Socialist Movement, to which I then belonged, masterminded, and pushed through a revision to the aims and objectives. We CSM members pledged ourselves to “pray, give and work” for a number of objectives, one of which – the one which drew me to the Movement – read “the common ownership and democratic control of the productive resources of the world.”
Oh dear me – the Blairite Thatcher-lite leadership of CSM couldn’t take such “socialist” ideas, goodness me, no! So they changed this – despite a fierce fight at the AGM, at which I was seconder of a motion to retain this as an objective – to the bland phrase: “the sustainable use of the Earth’s resources for the benefit of all people, both current and future generations”. Mere warm words that entirely skated over the issue as to WHO owns the productive resources of the world. Of course, the warm words allowed, and allow, the bandits to come in, stake a claim to e.g. the Amazonian forests, or the rich timber forests of the Philippines and Indonesia, and then to assert that “possession is 9 tenths of the law”. And who can dispute that, without a “fundamental law” that says that all the resoruces belong, by default, to us all, and that you have to buy the right to exploit those resources from the owners = from us, the people!
If we, the people, do not assert this, then we are only in the position of a fore-lock tugging peasant, in the presence of his feudal Lord = the bandit who has come in and “enclosed” the common for himself.
Such is Mr Beer; such, apparently, is Ed Millliband; such also, at base, was Tony Blair, who sought to become one of the feudal Lords, as the recent blog about his opaque financial arrangements makes clear.
For myself, I resgined from CSM, and have told them I won’t be returning until they re-instate that objective about the productive resources of the earth coming under common onwership and democratic control.
Andrew
Well said
As usual, I am in agreement
Richard
Of course David Cameron (who equates himself as the CEO of Great Britain Ltd) likes to depict himself as a philanthropist (in the business of persuading people to vote for him anything goes) and his recent comments about greedy “business leaders” and “second-rate executives” who “rip off” shareholders and consumers may also help soothe his conscience .
But in reality Mr.Cameron is a fully paid-up member of the “City Club” that he criticises.
It is his raison d’etre and he is so inflexibly entrenched in it that to denounce it now is both impossible and totally dishonest .
Disparaging friends, no matter how disgusting, is not what a gentleman does.
Mr Cameron would be better employed addressing the problems which force thousands of UK pensioners to choose between death from hypothermia or starvation.
Until then he will remain one of the UK’s leading hypocrites.
Pitching up his tent with the “Occupy” protesters would crown him the biggest!
Robin, you are so right about Cameron. How can he consider himself to be a chief executive when he has never held a proper job in his life. His inflated sense of his own importance is matched only by Clegg. How this stranglehold at the top of politics is to be broken is anyone’s guess. In some countries of course this type of situation does not end well, and when people are pushed to the limit they can take drastic action. I hope that this does not happen here, but to tolerate the current and increasing level of youth unemployment is a disaster waiting to happen.
Unfortunately, when denied any ability to be either heard of paid attention to, as in this current form of “funny-handshake” democracy that we have in the UK, there are few options remaining to gain attention from our “elected representatives”.
As a police”person” told me: “when they start driving things into us instead of throwing things then we’ve lost”
Cameron might be uttering the right words but I doubt that he means them, remember his soundbite that the Coaltion would be the greenest government ever. Miliband needs to sharpen his profile otherwise the Labour Party will be finished for more than one decade. Why is the party so timid on these issues when it is obvious that large sections of the population are unhappy about crony capitalism and understand what is happening? As yet I have not listened to Miliband’s latest speech because I find him so uninspiring. I am attending the Fabian Annual Conference on Saturday and I just hope that I come way from that feeling more animated about the response from the Left.
Hi Teresa. I’ll be at the Fabian conference too. You might see me at the Q&A sessions raising the usual land issue. I’ll sell you a copy of our pamphlet Land Values … for Public Benefit if you’re lucky!
At the next election Labour, under Monsieur Milliband, will lose. He has no “electable” personality.
Mr Brown did well, considering he also had a dour personality.
The trouble with Labour is that the Cons have invaded the territory they held in 1997.
People, led by the nose by the tory vichy press, do not believe Labour. All it takes to sway peoples opinion is a page three nude and a right-wing editor.
This from a lifetime Labour voter and union member: Me.
The following is from the excellent book “The Price of Civilization” by Professor Jeffrey Sachs. It is a detailed study of matters good and bad within the USA.
He quotes a dark joke from the waning days of the Soviet collapse. “Comrades, we are at the edge of the cliff, and we’ve just taken a giant step forward”.
Sachs adds “a few more tax cuts for the rich and we’ll be in a position to say the same.
With the whole of neoliberal capitalism laid bare for torching, it seems that the lynchpin of Labour’s brave new world is means-testing winter fuel payments. After 30 years of voting Labour (and union membership), enough is enough. Traditional Labour voters are going to need a party to adopt and I’ll be reading this blog for clues.
New Labour have relied heavily on our anti-Tory vote. They may find the next election disappointing.