I was depressed by Ed Miliband on Marr yesterday. He said that every spending commitment will be costed with indication of where the cash would come from.
That's ludicrous: the Tories are borrowing record amounts. Why didn't he say so? And why didn't he say we'll only get out of this mess when we borrow to invest as it's the only possible avenue left to us now?
Balls is as bad: as the Guardian notes:
The shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, will unveil plans on Monday to stimulate the economy by using a £3bn windfall from the sale of the 4G mobile phone spectrum to build 100,000 affordable homes, rather than to reduce debt, should Labour win the next election.
That's just so wholly unnecessary: just say it's being paid for by borrowing. It will be, after all. And be honest about it and say the time has come not to borrow to keep people ou of work - which is the Tory plan - but to borrow to put people into work - which should be the Labour plan. And then trust that people can tell the difference. It's not hard, but whilst the Labour Party leadership continues to insist playing on the Tory playing field they're going to carry on making these mistakes.
The country deserves better. As the Guardian leader says this morning:
On many of the big policy issues — the economy, welfare, education, industry — where large strategic choices need to be clarified well before any election, Labour policy is still at best ambiguous and at worst inadequate. Labour is a highly effective opposition party. It must now prove it can again be an effective government party too. That is why Labour must be judged by high standards this week.
Or as Larry Elliott says:
The party conference is the start of a crucial few months for Labour. Until now it has been able to think and act like an opposition. To win, it now has to start thinking and acting like a government in waiting.
Or as Neal Lawson says in the New Statesman:
The combination of financialisation and consumerisation destroyed the salience of class politics. Without a homogenous, organised and disciplined working class base Labour has become increasingly lost. It will stay lost until it finds or, better still, creates a new moral politics, new constituencies of interest and finally accepts that it's no longer 1945. The world has moved on and has become more complex and pluralistic. Against the backdrop of the biggest crisis capitalism has ever suffered, Labour just looks tired.
Of course there are those who think otherwise but they're mainly on the neoliberal wing of Labour. No one, including the electorate is in the least impressed by them: they're exactly why people don;t vote any more.
Labour has to move: it has to show it knows what it's for. It has to stop playing to the Tory tune. It has to therefore leave Blair behind. It has to be confident. It has to sell the real economics this country needs.
Or it's useless.
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“…why didn’t he say we’ll only get out of this mess when we borrow …” Because it’s a truth that dare not speak it’s name, surely? Presumably he (Balls, all of them) rightly think that to say so would be electoral suicide, the British public having been very very successfully brainwashed, even zombified, into a sure and certain understanding that it’s debt and borrowing that has got us into the trouble we’re in. I’m sure that in the present climate any such statement would allow the Government parties and the press to drive Labour into the sea. However wrong that would be, however right you are about this. Before you can steer the state courageously, you first have get undisputed control of the tiller. The great dilemma of democracy in our time.
Yes – but Labour is SO to blame in not having FROM DAY ONE = May 11th 2010 – hammered home the fact that Labour did NOT overspend (always keeping revenue ahead of spending and only borrowing to invest, as Richard has amply demonstrated), and did NOT trash the economy, but rather, they SAVED it from catastrophic collapse (again as Richard has conclusively argued).
Instead of hammering this home, day in day out, to counter the asinine Coalition mantras about deficit deniers, and “We’re all in this together”, Labour spent nearly 5 months gazing at its navel to elect a Leader, who could easily have been in place by mid to late June, and who could have spent the rest of 2010 rigorously demolishing the Coalition’s blatant misrepresentation of the facts – aa misrepresentation that was a more than adequate exercise in Goebbels’ adage, in words along the lines of: “If you’re going to tell a lie, tell it big, and tell it often.”
So agree
Yes indeed – no contradiction here, we are where we are, with both Eds lying (uncomfortably, I hope) on beds of their own making.
Just heard last night Jon Snow grillinged Balls outside the Conference Hall –
Snow says “Why should we trust you, given that you made such a mess of the economy last time?
Ed’s answer? Not “Rubbish! We handed on a growing economy, which we salvaged from the crash. Compare this to the Tories, who have knocked the hweel off the economy and are borrowing like there’s no tomorrow, while also cutting not just fat, but muscle and bone!
No, a feeble look of embarrasment on his face! Yeukk! Come on Ed – live up to your name, and grow a pair!
It’s amazing, isn’t it?
Why can’t they just fight back?
This is precisely why people have switched off from politics – politicians are too frightened to acknowledge the evidence before them and say what they believe,for fear of losing votes, and ultimately the ensuing election defeat ending their political careers. Well boo hoo for the politicians.
You need the intellectual courage to tell the truth, despite the public not listening nor understanding why. That’s how great things will get *done* in the long run, not by triangulating, or retreating back into a comfortable dogma you know is not true.
Labour’s biggest issue (in reality) is on credibility – not because of overspending and debt (that argument is bogus and they know it) but because it was in thrall to laissez faire capitalism.
I can only see Balls and Milliband as a firebreak before the next generation come through, untainted by the mistakes of New Labour, this tactic of just waiting for the Conservatives to fail will not work .Paying lip service to this problem in speeches will not make it go away, you have to take practical steps to win – accepting your opponents arguments bar the fine detail is intellectual cowardice, tactically poor and i think will result in defeat .
I hope i’m wrong.
And besides: Labour will [again] continue to divide into factions and stab itself in the back. There are some, quite a few, for who personal ambition is greater than party loyalty.
And again….Labour has only one large circulation newpaper supporting it.
Getting a message across is hard when few will hear/read it.
The BBC has gone “native”, doubtless to stave-off its sale (if the Conservatives win then they’ll find the reason behind then phrase “throat cut”)
Then again….boundary changes….
I recently read an article that contained figures on the extent to which people from KPMG, PriceWatehouseblahblah, etc were currently ‘advising’ the various political parties – and particularly those in opposition. Add to that a fear of any form of radicalism – because it might be seen as ‘left wing’ – and is it any wonder that what Miliband and Balls (et al) say is so pathetically limited.
“You need the intellectual courage to tell the truth, despite the public not listening nor understanding why.”
This is the crux of it, but unfortunately we have endured over 50 years of dumbing down. Look at the BBC of 40/50 years ago – Attenborough, AJP Taylor, Robert Hughes, John Berger, Kenneth Clark all on prime time TV with serious, heavyweight documentaries. People had sufficient basic education and attention span to be able to sit down and listen to a talking head for an hour and follow the argument.
I suspect the left used to believe that with education the working classes would be improved and that improvement would manifest itself by the workers being better able to understand their predicament and take action to create a fairer society. Now, education, whether for rich or poor is simply seen as a means to the end of being rich, and for most people that opportunity is so remote that they believe the most realistic way of improving their status in life is through the X factor.
The truth of the matter is that fear of speaking the truth has led to a culture of passivity. Nobody does anything for themselves, everyone is reduced to a dumb consumer. The media must present things in bite size chunks for fear of being elitist, and so any argument with any subtely or nuance is lost, and any attempt to explain something complex is presented as obfuscation.
Democracy only works if you have a media willing to report arguments in detail and a public willing and able to make the intellectual effort to understand them. In most of Europe this is still the case, but I fear the UK is going down the road of the US where slogans trump policy. And because intellectual argument between the left and right is not possible, elections simply becomes a battle for the middle ground based on the simplest arguments possible (with the real intention of the parties having to remain hidden during the election process).
Depressingly likely to be right
And pretty much circles us back to what I was getting at in #1, back at the start