The Guardian has confirmed a trend spotted at the weekend - that Tory support has surged in the last week and Labour's has crashed.
Have the Tories done anything to win this extra support? Candidly, no.
But Labour did go out of its way to alienate its support. The completely bizarre move to the right - saying cuts were inevitable without saying how the issue of reversing that inevitability would be addressed a week ago - has horribly rebounded on the party, as any reasonable political thinker would have expected.
It is the job of the opposition to oppose.
And it is the opposition's job to put forward alternatives.
Labour's far right wing do on the other hand see it as their job to secure the continuation of the Blairite project and since Cameron is the heir as leader of that project it is obvious they are doing their utmost to keep him in power. They're clearly succeeding in their aim. I can see no other reasonable explanation for their actions. And I suspect they're rather pleased with themselves today.
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It usually does go that way.
When an opposition attempts to gain popularity by aping a governmen, the opposition popularity drops.
After all, why should anyone vote for an imitation, one clinging to the “leaders” apron ?
Maybe people will see, now, why Cameron is staying (publicly) to the left of the Conservative party ?
Labour can only go further left, and that route is fraught with risk because the newspapers will immediately start the “labour goes communist” cry.
Either way they have problems.
Maybe you can see why I consider Ed a “caretaker” leader ?
Labour seriously need some original thinkers. Unfortunately they only have “fenced-in” thinkers.
Not to mention Bob Crow, the conservatives best advertisment.
The man most city workers want to see falling onto the tracks.
Bob Crow may be disliked – but not by his members
I talk to them and he delivers what they want
“Bob Crow may be disliked — but not by his members. I talk to them and he delivers what they want”
I’m sure City bankers say the same thing about their organisations – they pay us what we want.
To be honest people like Bob Crow are as bad as the greedy financiers they transport to and from work. Crow and his members are living proof that the sod everyone else, I’m alright Jack spirit is not just confined to worst excesses of the City. I don’t bregudge paying people a decent wage but £50k to push a button (you don’t even have to steer the damn thing) is absurd for the skill level. Someone is being taken for a ride – and that’s the London commuter and taxpayer. No wonder many of us now have to cycle to work. The RMT is too poweful, just as the City is.
Now tell me how such key workers are meant to stay in London without being paid enough to do so?
You can’t buy a flat earning £50,000pa
@Malcolm Maitland
That would be £50,000 a year to arive to work on time in order to avoid mass transport chaos, which implies rather strongly that they need to live within central London. Any idea how expensive it is to live in central London Malcolm? The option may well be their for your average office worker or barrista to live outside of London and commute in, but that option simply isn’t there for essential workers like Doctors, Nurses and (like it or not) transport workers such as train driver. If they turn up late for work because of transport woes, the consequences are dire for the entire transport network (and on a regular basis, not just when the RMT decide to strike; often for legitimate reasons).
Aside: People do like to have a good winge about the train drivers, their strong unions and their ‘excessive’ wages. I’d imagine though that many of these train drivers need to live within central London, else traffic/transport disruption would domino out of control were drivers caught short. So either Transport for London foots the bill in ‘excessive’ wages so that their train drivers can afford to live in London, the tax payer foots the bill via housing benefits or we suffer the consequences of a far less reliable transport network.
On Topic: If the two Eds want to acheive anything, and be seen as anything other than caretakers, they have to tackle the Blairite wing, and I don’t mean pander to their every whim and/or drift ever rightward for their benefit. Labour need a Kinnockian style purge of the Blairite entrists, who over the past 15 years have made Labour a sanguin centre-right joke. They are the personification of compassionate conservativism (the real conservatives have proven incapable of pulling of compassion), but conservatives they are, and they don’t belong in Labour. Maybe they could form their own party, they could call it the Liberal Party. The Orange Bookers could join it too!
Your reasonable explanation is exactly that, I think, Richard. It’s an extremely worrying and disappointing trend, and bodes ill for both Miliband and the country more generally, where the need for an effective opposition grows by the day. A couple of weeks ago I was pretty confident that as Clegg and Cameron were forced into stealing Miliband’s ‘predatory capitalism’ ideas (albeit by the announcement of dubious policy initiatives) we would see Labour increasingly adopting more radical approaches – on pensions, tax, etc. But that was wishful thinking. I’d temporarily forgotten about the Blairites – no doubt supported from behind the scenes by the likes of Mandelson. Tactically I think they see this as a win-win situation for them: let the country go to the dogs; bring down Ed; and then fight the next election on Tory ‘lite’ policies, as they did against Major in 1997.
I know.
My youngest is RMT.
My point is that while in nearly all their disputes they have a valid reason (safety….and we all know how Cameron dislikes workplace safety) those reasons are not communicated well enough…the same can be said about Labour, even if they do get any policies that will deliver us from evil, they have a poor ability to communicate them (those that are not stolen by the Con-Dem coalition)
Well quite. Crow does seem to be a rather old school socialist and his language doesn’t sit will with the population at large. I can still remember his stint on Have I Got News For You, it was cringworthy.
The RMT does need to communicate its position better, although it needed to avoid the excesses of spin that Labour and the political class utilise. To the extent that they speak alot, and yet say absolutelt nothing of value.
How are they supposed to communicate better when the media outlets are determined to misrepresent all things left or union oriented?
And it must be said: He is disliked as much by Labour as he is by the ConDems.
Perhaps, although surely this is as much a symptom of Labour move ever rightwards and its seeming inability/unwillingness to take the bull by the horns and construct a valid alternative to the neoliberal concensus that so plagues us, as it does Crows various shortcomings as a communicator.
Still, he gets the job done. Which is more than I can say of Labour, after 13+ years in power. 🙁
The worst thing that happened to the West and the world in general was this obsession with the centre, whether Clinton’s “Third Way” or New Labour in the immediate aftermath of Reaganism and Thatcherism. Instead of reversing the havoc wreaked by unashamedly rightwing policies popular left-leaning govts in US and UK squandered in seeking for the elusive consensus. There will always be left and right and the obsession with consensus will always favour the right. Politics is war by other means so the left shy away from at their peril. The establishment won’t give an inch without a fight.
The obsession with concesus will always favour the right purely because the right isn’t obsessed with concencus. So whilst the left is busy bending over backwards to meet the right, all the right has to do to achieve its objective is swerve ever rightwards, pulling the left along with it. Just look at the budget terrorism practiced by the tea party in the US, and the feeble way the Obama administration acquiesced with the ‘supercomittee’ (which invariably failed; giving the more sane wing of the Republican party precisely what they wanted) in spite of the fact that they held the executive and half the legislative brance.
The left (not that I would consider the US Democrats left in any meaningful sense of the word) needs to grow some backbone and develop a viable alternative to neoliberalism, and more importantly, the confidence to pursue it without looking back to the neoliberal concensus as if it were the answer to all known ills. Markets aren’t the answer to everything, they’re afflicted by irrational human behaviour for one.
You will note that the Waily is now on the side of benefit claimants.
Not all, just those working.
Strange.
Oh, and those overpaid tube drivers work shifts, and not regular shifts either but staggered and irregular…..often highly so.
And many don’t live in london, although they do get free travel.
And 50K isn’t that much.
many don’t stay too long, the average length of employment is a bit more than 5 years….must be lonely sitting there in the dark.
“And 50K isn’t that much”
Even in London £50k will put you in the top 10 per cent of earners.You are out of touch.I am sure most unemployed people, when they see RMT members on strike, would bite off a hand to earn £50k for pressing a button.
I don’t dispute £50k is relatively high
But not enough to now maintain a family on and buy a home
Which shows how mad the economy has become
22 weeks in-house-on-the-job training.
Like most things, people seem to think that because the job looks simple it is.
Drivers on mainline trains do a years training, with examinations at stages. And re-testing and training throughout their career.
The regulations, and memorising same, takes the time.
Apart from the free travel to work they get no “perks”.
Contrast that with a young person in a city law office I know…….free mainline travel to work….a free two-weeks holiday each year……company pension…..etcf etc..
Frequently, the salary is not the first consideration.
And 50K is not much, it seems about average for low-end city employment. Certainly not enough for a mortgage in that esteemed world centre for tax fiddling and dodgy financial transactions !
This is a slightly leftfield suggestion from Eliot Spitzer but i like it, and its something i’ve often wondered about why its never been done before (i’ll stand corrected if it has in the UK).
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_best_policy/2012/01/state_of_the_union_president_obama_should_scrap_his_hour_long_speech_and_deliver_a_10_minute_powerpoint.single.html
Perhaps longer than 10 minutes but something EdM should try in the Autumn – i’ve seen some very informative graphs on here and elsewhere the last 12 months – some quite shocking. Sometimes they can very neatly distill an issue in peoples minds more than 30 minutes of waffle and rhetoric ever can. There are risks it might exacerbate the nerd tag with the redtops, but quite frankly who cares what they think anymore.
He needs to articulate the story of what’s gone wrong, where we are now and how we get out of it whilst keeping it digestible for a lay audience, not easy granted, but triangulation and spin won’t wash anymore – at the moment he’s simultaneously blamed for the past and lumped in as the ‘same’ as the coalition. He’s on a massive hiding to nothing at this rate unless he gets radical with policy and how he communicates it.
COMPASS sent out a recent e-mail to its members – I’m one – which says it well, both on what went wrong, and what needs to be done. Here it is – for me to add to it would be otiose, except to heartily endorse the sentence “The Tories then skilfully and relentlessly repositioned the crisis as one of the state not the City of London.” and the whole paragrpah in which that sentence sits.
Transforming Britain’s Economy
This is a pivotal moment for our country. A debate is stirring about the nature of our economy and therefore our society. Yesterday the Prime Minister made a whole speech about re-moralising capitalism. It follows Ed Miliband’s much discussed speech on predatory capitalism at the Labour Party conference and his recent interventions about so called ‘responsible capitalism’.
This week Labour has talked about ‘rip off Britain’, going after (amongst others) the energy and train companies. They have also begun to look at tax havens and takeover rules. Meanwhile the Government are trying to work out which parts of the High Pay Commission they are going to back whilst the Labour Party says it will support implementation of all of it.
This is our debate. By ours we mean the ethical socialists, social Liberals, Greens and greens, radical democrats, trade unionists, cooperatives, producers and many SMEs. The historic debate about a Good Society is coming back to life. Some of it may be cynical, much of it half thought through but it’s a Pandora’s Box whose lid we need to prise open and keep open.
To do that we have to focus on both sides of the same coin; the economy and the state. We have to reform capitalism in a way that makes it work for the whole of society and the planet, and to do that we need a state that is legitimate, efficient and popular. It must become our state. Then we draw the right dividing lines between those who want a good society and have the courage to try to make it happen and a tiny elite whose interests lie literally in business as usual. This was the point of the Compass ‘Plan B’.
But to make the most of this once in a generation opportunity, Labour in particular is going to have to get its lines clearer on the role of the state, in particular the need to regulate certain parts of the economy more effectively and on public spending. To achieve that it must start with a fuller and more honest reckoning with its recent past and link its position on the deficit to the transformation of capitalism.
In government Labour thought economic growth would go on forever. They would skim off some of the growth to lift the floor for those at the bottom but the faster rising ceiling for those at the top would be ignored. The state would both help prepare us for a world of free markets (through education) and clear up the mess caused by free markets (the strong state). That model was always flawed, a truth revealed by the 2008 crash.
After the crash and at the last moment Labour used the state brilliantly to intervene and save the country from the havoc caused by banks that they had set freer than even Thatcher dared. In so doing Labour saved then reflated the economy but broke the financial back of government. The Tories then skilfully and relentlessly repositioned the crisis as one of the state not the City of London. The conflation of individual or household spending with the state superficially at least rang true — ‘we had all maxed out on our credit cards’. Now in opposition Labour, rightly, tried to keep the focus on jobs and growth as the economy flatlined because of Tory austerity measures. Yet Labour never really admitted the scale of the mistake on the banks or the pressure they put the state under in order to bail out the free market.
It is little wonder then that a majority of the public currently back the Tories on the economy — not because their line is right but because their line is at least consistent. Labour toughed out the right message for 18 months and just as the public mood looks like it’s turning, as benefits and services are cut and the deficit grows because of the rise in unemployment, Labour awkwardly adapts its position. As a consequence Labour hearts sink across the country and Tory spirits rise. Public spending is the only issue and the banks get away with it.
But the bigger debate that Miliband, and in his wake Cameron, are moving onto — about what sort of capitalism we want (out of myriad versions and not just one narrow form of reckless neo-liberalism) allows for a more credible story to be told.
Labour can say tough choices are going to have to be made, especially because any new government will inherit much of the mess the Coalition are making of the economy. But it is much more credible to say ‘we know why the crash happened — because of the banks – which the Tories were demanding we deregulated still further while they were in opposition’. So Labour now needs a more aggressive line on regulating the banks which means going much further and faster than Vickers. It also needs to get behind a European Financial Transaction Tax, to stop predatory dealing, help rebalance the economy and widen the tax base.
Then it can argue that it will use the state to stop the free market wrecking the economy in the first place, investing efficiently in upstream measures to stop social injustice where it can, rather than spend expensively on downstream symptoms to clear up the mess. Finally — it can revolutionise public services through their co-design — deploying the skills, insights and commitment of users and producers to make services popular and efficient.
Of course Labour can’t promise to reverse every cut but they should be much clearer about what they might cut, we suggest Trident for starters and on the question of where the burden should fall, we suggest those with the broadest shoulders. Either way, Labour should not be putting itself in a position where it cannot oppose unfair cuts to essential public services.
Furthermore their position should not simply be a cap on public sector pay. The very least they should say is that restriction should be placed on those who can best afford them, those already paid the most. Better still, Labour could explore the German model whereby government, employers and unions negotiate counter cyclical policies so that jobs aren’t lost in a recession — but pay fluctuates to keep people working, going down in bad times and up in good. Agreeing to put a worker in remuneration committees is the start of this new model.
There has to be a better choice than the wilderness now or the wilderness later via another turn in office on terms that are bound to fail. Indeed there has to be a better way of operating than making big positioning announcements out of the blue that no one but a small clique knows about. It will take an alliance of forces to create a better capitalism — the many not the few.
In 2008 the game changed. The repercussions of the crash will continue to ricochet through our economy and society. We must seize the opportunities and have the confidence to shape the debate in a way that builds the more democratic, equal and sustainable good society — turning by day our dreams into reality