I write this blog for one reason when it comes down to it: because I want to change the well being of ordinary people in the UK. I know where I come from and I observe how ordinary people are treated in our society and in our economy and I don't like it. I write to effect change, mainly within the economy and particularly though what tax can deliver as a mechanism for change, but I do it all because I believe a fairer, more equal, more sustainable and more respectful society would be better for everyone in the UK.
As a result of what I do many think I am political and in the sense that al of life is political that is, of course, true. But I am not a member of a political party and do not harbour ambition to hold political office: I think I know my own limitations. I do however observe the political scene, as many will have noted, and cannot help but wish for better representation for what I call ordinary people - which is the majority of people in this country. That is why I despair when Labour, which should logically, within our system, be best aligned with those people, seem to deliver on their behalf.
In this context I note what Suzanne Moore says in the Guardian this morning:
My advice to Labour is simple. Speak like common people. Have something to say.
The first may be obvious, but from the Westminster bubble seems to be so hard.
The second, right now, seems to be impossible.
But as Suzanne Moore says, why is it so hard for Labour to say that bankers caused the crash?
Why can't it say it ran very low deficits with very modest debt until 2007 - and even repaid debt for four years, unlike the Tories?
Why can't it say that pushing people off benefits when there are no jobs is a guarantee of desperate poverty?
Or that forcing people put of their homes destroys communities, families and the education and hopes of tens of thousands of children?
And that it's no good talking the cost of living; it's how to provide the pay to meet it that matters?
Or that taxing wealth is a pre-requisite to providing dignity for all in old age?
Why can't it say that redistribution through taxation is a good thing - but does not happen right now?
Why won't Labour say trade unions are there for the common good - and without them we'd all be a lot worse of now? Or that it believes in collective bargaining?
And is it really so hard to say markets can't deliver in some cases - like health and education - when the evidence is so clear that they cannot?
I genuinely do not know why they cannot say such things. I wish they could.
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Richard
The reason that Labour do not say the things you set out is that the Leaders listen to opinion polls and PR gurus and follow fashionable old fashioned Reganomics. The more fundamenal problem is that no one trusts political parties. Even you put in your blog that you are not a member of any party to add value to your message. This reinforces the popular belief that all party members are not to be trusted.
Not in my case
I respect a lot of politicians – from more than one party and am committed to working with any who want to ask
Being a party member would not help my work in that case
Very True but these are the main points activisits like me talk about on the doorstep
The answer’s pretty clear: Labour front-benchers aspire to holidays on yachts and a lucrative retirement as directors on Group4, Serco, and anyone else they can help out with the job of imposing rents on ordinary people’s lives.
One level down, the Parliamentary Labour Party is so obsessed with the ‘Swing’ vote of middle class suburbanites that they’ve forgotten everyone else. Or, maybe, they never knew anyone who wasn’t from their caste; and they are unaware that their little world of middle-class security is closed to everyone under forty and rapidly shrinking.
Oh for a George Lansbury, or a Keir Hardie! Or even a Clement Atlee, who really did “get his hands dirty” working in the East End, after having got them diry in quite another way, honourably fighting, and being wounded, in the Gallipoli Campaign.
There simply aren’t any such moral giants anywhere on the horizon in any of the three main Parties, with the honourable exceptions of Michael Meacher and Dennis Skinner for Labour, Sir Peter Bottomley for the Tories, and from the Greens, Caroline Lucas.
We really DO need MP’s that have DONE something, before entering the incestuous snake-pit of Westminster. How to find them? I would suggest that that is JUST what UNITE was after – a shop steward who has had to negotiate with the management on behalf of her or his workforce will know a DAMN sight more about real life, and the cost of a pint of milk, than Dave “my Dad made his dosh by card-sharping” C, or my ineffable MP, the inglorious Chloe Smith, who was shuffled after being Paxmanned, and who went straight from Westminster intern to Parliamentary Candidate and MP. Not people you’d be willing to trust if your life was on the line, unlike the examples I gave above.
Totally agree. All many have done is go to school (often public schools and there seems to be a lot of old Etonians!) gone to university and then straight into politics. No experience of real life, and working for a living. I am not sure I count working for a political party as doing a real job – I suspect some may disagree but hey that’s my view.
Mind you all I’ve ever done is work in an office since university so probably that doesn’t consitute ‘real’ work in some people’s eye either 😉
I agree with Nile. First and foremost politicians are interested in gaining power. The current Labour leadership is also weak, having allowed Osborne and Cameron to set the terms of debate, Labour leaders now only react to polls and surveys. Miliband would rather look ‘tough’ on benefit claimants than talk about the collapse in wages.
I blame Labour for facilitating our country’s shift to the right. The Tories have only got away with everything they’ve done because we have had no opposition to them.
Richard, I believe that the Labour Party is remaining silent on these issues because so many of them are still neoliberals. Until the party offers a different narrative there will be more silence and more incoherence. It is absolutely pointless to offer Tory- lite policies and the present leadership (especially Ed Balls) is incapable of anything different. Where is the policy review from John Cruddas which was heralded as the new dawn? Paradigm shifts take time to bed in and time is running out for the Labour Party.
Makes you despair, doesn’t it.
But, like the other main parties, Labour is moribund. Having discouraged activism by circumscribing the means by which ordinary members influence policy and political direction (an initiative which started as a way to marginalise the ‘loonier’ voices) they have lost the ‘authentic voice’ which would ensure their continuing relevancy.
Activism starts to drop off from the 80s onwards for all parties – we then see the rise of politics run by managers and spin doctors and policy driven by media-backed polls.
When your political representative appears to be in it only for themselves (the expenses fiasco?) and when no amount of rebuttal of this will convince the electorate that the corrupt or indolent are a tiny minority of the dedicated committed majority, then you end with the situation as is.
Unfortunately, Ed Milliband never was a Leader. The misguided reasoning of the unions (Unite the Union and McLuskey in particular) have delivered a pup (though who was there amongst the candidates who would have performed any differently…).
An ineffective communicator would have difficulty enough where there was a political message to convey – but there’s no message. And Milliband is self-evidently not the man to create it. He doesn’t know or understand his constituency. There is no connection with those who might vote for him and his party. There’s no articulation of clear credible goals. No coherent policies. No Manifesto for political action. No energy. No intelligence. No direction.
Calls for the ‘return of the big-hitters’ – Darling et al – increase the appearance that it’s a bunch of well-intentioned but naive 6th formers from the affluent chattering classes who’re in charge.
As a Labour party member I thought my despair could not get deeper – and then I watched the grossly incompetent handling of Bryant’s ‘Immigration’ speech and subsequent events. Ah dear. Incoherence; absence of understanding of the arguments; errors and inaccuracies; failure to speak to workers who could have provided informed comment; and then the egregious volte face – the slithering from the scene.
By failing to defend their record whilst in power they allowed the Right to dictate the narrative, to write the script. With every apology, every ‘we got this wrong when we were in power’ they consolidate the Right’s position. When they swallowed the Right’s narrative re the economic situation they condemned themselves to this ineffective, ineffectual nothingness. And deprived ‘ordinary people’ of a voice.
This Labour Party’s elected representatives are wholly incapable of seeing beyond that ‘squeezed middle’ and too afraid of the press to say anything that might possibly be presented as ‘mildly controversial’ and therefore a potential turn-off.
You may have hit the nail on the head when you said
“He doesn’t know or understand his constituency. There is no connection with those who might vote for him and his party”
Not only do we have MPs who are career politicians, but career politicians who have never lived or worked in the communities they are supposed to represent!
Your commentators seem unaware of the current battle for control within the LP. Jon Lansman on Left futures describes it very well:
http://www.leftfutures.org/2013/08/the-blairites-strong-arrogant-and-oblivious-to-the-wishes-of-labour-members/
The legacy of Tony Blair/ Mandelson is a PLP which is overwhelmingly unrepresentative of the grassroots membership. Any applicant to be a PPC, who expressed any opposition to the New Labour line, was ruthlessly blocked… and Ed Miliband himself, found himself ostracised when he didn’t follow the unregulated ‘free-market’ route at the DECC.
Ed Miliband, notwithstanding his own views, is attacked on all sides with very little support from within an overwhelmingly New Labour cabinet. I think that EM is also afraid of an SDP-type walk-out because it would certainly seem that the Blairites would rather see Labour lose the GE than risk losing control of the LP.
IMO the ‘dithering’ largely stems from trying to balance the imperative to replace this extreme and destructive government and testing the water as to how far the rightwing Labour elite will move to the left.
I agree
It’s not just PPC applicants who are frozen out. I know a married couple who have been councillors in the past, one being leader of the council and holding other important positions, who have been rejected on the basis that they said they couldn’t promise always to obey the whip if it was against their conscience. The CLPD is really our only chance and it is important that we persuade as many CLPs to affiliate as possible (although mine refused :o( ).
The Left Futures article is very good and illustrates the scale of the problem that the Progress hard right poses for any Labour leader who wants to pursue a radical policy. Having said that, even if Progress didn’t exist I have severe doubts that Ed Miliband would be pursuing a radical policy. It says something about Ed’s leadership that the guy who pelted him with eggs a couple of days ago made a more coherent statement than anything we’ve seen from the Labour front bench in recent weeks.
The case for the trade unions to withdraw their funding from the Labour party and start to fund either the Green Party or some other alternative on the left looks increasingly strong to me. I think Labour has deteriorated to the point where it’s so far in hock to neoliberalism that it’s unsalvageable.
I increasingly share your view
Absolutely! Thanks for adding this. I’m only sorry I failed to mention it in my own comment.
The ‘ruthless’ culling of dissent extends back to the pre-Blair Kinnock/Mandelson years with ‘modernisation’ and centralisation of control within the party. It’s always been the case however that the PLP has never been quite as leftist as its membership – and that there have always been in-house power struggles and fights for control of the LP.
New Labourites have a Blairite ‘belief’ in the ‘rightness’ of their cause. They are fighting their own version of the crusades.
They have no idea what to say
No idea what to do.
No idea how to rectify the above.
When “Ed” was elected leader I thought he looked a drip, and events since then have convinced me that he is, indeed, a drip.
A poor communicator, not a natural leader, and no ability to learn to be a leader.
And he is poorly advised.
The conservatives must be thanking their lucky stars Ed got to be labours leader.
He has got to be worth at least 10 seats to the conservatives.
labour is dithering as the walls of cowardice close in on them as they attempt to continuously shapeshift to the perceived vox populi. We’ve lost the old school who had moral vigour and intellect to post-modernist chancers. The good news is that all parties are losing members and shearing away from their grass roots which means, hopefully the lot of them are on the wain. The corrupt moral dustbin will take a lot of cleaning and it will have to be done from the ground up. The man who through eggs at Milliband expressed himself with crystal clarity, unlike the party:
“”They should stop giving favouritism to the banks. They do nothing. The Government do nothing. The shadow government do nothing,” he said.
“I don’t believe him at all. If you are poor, you are considered a burden. All they care about is the banks.”
They don’t say them because they would be afraid of not getting elected and they would probably be right
Part of the reason is that the press is so hostile that you cannot get out any story which doesn’t fit the currently fashionable line.
And the current line is that the country is doing great….
Of course the question then becomes why don’t we dominate the “line”?
Sorry, I find referring to us in the working class as the ‘common people’ or the ‘ordinary’ people to be patronising, as if we are one giant homogeneous mass who are too stupid to know what’s good for us, and need the professional elite to ‘observe’ us like zoo animals and tell us what’s good for us.
There are no ‘common’ people. Only unique people.
I am not sure you’re in touch with what we need. Tax avoidance? Not in the Top 100 issues.
Here’s one thing we need: low inflation. I know in the recent past you’ve advocated higher inflation. Yikes!!! For us on low wages, its effectively a pay cut.
If this is the kind of advocacy for the working class you propose, please, do us a favour. Not in my name.
The union movement seems not to agree with you on tax
Or Labour
Or people like Owen Jones and Ellie Mae O’Hagan
But we could all be out of step
And as for inflation – I advocate wage inflation
Are they out of touch?
As I discussed on this site earlier this week, there are several groups or tribes within the left.
There is the urban, metropolitan elite. You identified yourself as part of that. Jones and O’Hagan write for newspapers that appeal to that tribe. I don’t read those papers and don’t know anyone who does. The upper echelons of the Labour party and the union movement have been taken over by this tribe.
Tax avoidance is your tribe’s issue. So is banning the Page 3 girl, smoking in pubs, and minimum alcohol pricing.
For those of us in the working class, we’re a different tribe. 100 odd years ago our forebears started a party to give us political representation. This party has been effectively occupied by strangers who pretend to care about us, but gets their satisfaction in telling us what to do.
We are just common people after all.
And why is the TUC even getting involved in corporate tax issues? It is contrary to the objects of its own constitution to get involved (see here http://www.tuc.org.uk/the_tuc/tuc-19495-f0.cfm for the constitution and please explain if I am wrong).
But do the top brass care? To heck with the rules, they can do what they please. If there is anything that proves the gap between the tribes, this is it. The unions were set up to do X, now they do Y. It’s a takeover.
Sorry to be so blunt.
You may be so blunt
I disagree
So would most on the left, I think
And the TUC is involved because Congress decided to be so
Georgia, I don’t want to come over as one of the condescending Group 1 “strangers” who have taken over your Party and are banging on about issues that don’t feature highly on the radar of your perceived group (Group 2 I think you called yourself – apologies if I’ve got that wrong) but it really ISN’T a matter of middle class “chatterati” behaviour to go on about tax dodging. Richard has shown that the annual Tax Gap is around £120 billion a year, or over 50% of the Welfare annaul spend. And Tax Justice Network estimates that there are some £13 triilion in secrecy jurisdictions.
Assuming 25% of that is UK money, that COULD be taxed, then there’s some £3.5 trillion that could produce tax for the revenue. If we could get only 1% of that per year, it would raise £35 billion, or something like 30% of or NHS annul spend.
In light of the above, and the cruel effects of the Government’s unfair, cruel, ineffective and counter-productive cuts, it is clear that stamping out tax dodging should be at the top of EVERYONE’s campaign objectives – for to ignore tax dodging is to consign the poor and marginalized to yet greater poverty and marginalization.
Andrew
I seriously doubt the UK proportion is 25% but your logic is entirely right
I make no apology for promoting this issue in that case
Best
Richard
Yes, the left would disagree.
But the left you describe is represented by Labour, Guardian, TUC Congress (which interprets the objects of its constitution so broadly to let it do something it wants, not in keeping with its express objects – the spirit if you like), Owen Jones, the Guardian, etc.
The ‘left’ is a substantially different entity from the working class – that’s my point. They have often had different life experiences (professional, middle class etc) and are interested in quite different things.
This difference goes some way to answer your question at the top of the post.
The fact the left patronisingly thinks of us in the working class as some great homogeneous pot of ‘ordinary people’ desperately in need of the left’s salvation tells you at least in part why there is some discord.
Respectfully – it’s you who is being rude and divisive
I have to say that I think the left a broad church based on concern for the well being of all people – yes, I mean all – based on a belief that all are equal and the greater the equality the greater will be well being for all
You clearly don’t agree
But I am not sure what you are trying to achieve by not doing so
I am confused.
You write a blog here asking at its headline (with good reason) about division within the left. Yes, there are a number of divisions.
Now, 24 hours later you’re saying we’re actually a big happy family and it is rude, divisive and unproductive to talk about division, simply because you’ve had something pointed out that makes uncomfortable reading for you.
To respond to Andrew above: I am not saying the issues have no merit. All I am saying is that these are issues discussed in the salons of Islington, not in the pubs or caffs of Huddersfield, Sunderland or Hull. Most of us don’t understand it.
There are issues that do get discussed, but the ‘chatterati’ aren’t interested (and in some cases are embarrassed by the issues – eg immigration, patriotism, the decline of the country etc). And there are other simmering resentments within our communities – between generations, between those in low paid work and those who never want to work, as examples. But the metropolitan elite don’t want to know, and prefer to brush it under the carpet.
My point is that the ‘chatterati’ like to assume that the issues that interest them as the same as those that interest us, as the so-called ‘common people’ (an offensive expression that makes my skin crawl).
Georgia
Your point is made and I am sure it is right, at least in part
But what you also seem to be suggesting that someone like Nye Bevan, who like thousands of others educated himself on the issues of the day was wrong to do so
Why?
The Labour Party is/should be the party of labour. Labour owns its own labour (in the absence of slavery). Labour is the only active factor of production and which thus is rightly due a return. The return to land (inanimate) is rent. Land is inanimate and the owners of land do nothing to earn rent. This should be socialised via land value tax (land rent for public benefit). The return to capital is profit or interest. (Financial) capital is an unnecessary intermediary; it is in effect money making money. The only reason to own land or capital is to use them. If only …
I have some sympathy with what Georgia about the often unintended tone that can come accross from the ‘middle-class’ who often are not the one’s feeling any type of pinch. However, it doesn’t help putting people in boxes here. The main reason why people are in lumber is because of the atrocious disaster of housing and housing costs which have, literally, robbed the poorest of us. I’m not sure the idea of a working class that just wants a pint and a game of darts ( I used to do that myself!) exists anymore. I personally find middle class values, with the obsession with personal security, their own corner, houses in nice suburbs but bugger anyone else, polite chit chat and smiles as long as the ‘portfolio’ is doing well in the background, utterly repulsive. Our society needs to become more generous and feel itself part of one body. Putting ourselves in conceptual boxes won’t help.
its an interesting questions. I suppose there are several complex answers. Simplistically it might be because they don’t agree with you, although cynically, its not about what they believe but rather which side of the argument they think will “win”. Strangely Ed Jnr has spent his time as leader in getting on the wrong side of all the arguments. In terms of being on the “right side”, of course Brown and Blair lost the last election with most commentators, of both sides of the argument, accepting this was a judgement on the economic competence of Labour. And of course, saying it like it is is pointless if no one is listening.