Yanis Varoufakis is, I know, a controversial figure. Anyone who changes things is, almost by definition. This week the Conservatives have mocked Labour for talking to him. Well they've mocked Labour for talking to me as well, and as Varoufakis makes clear, talking to Labour does not make him Labour, anymore than it did so with me. But he did have this to say in Newsweek:
The Labour Party has an instinctive urge to protect those left behind by the long years of uneven private-debt-fuelled growth and its austerian aftermath. This is good and proper. However, it would be a mistake to waste Labour's energies on tirades against austerity. If I am right that austerity is a symptom of low investment (and of a government keen to push the inevitable burden on the weaker citizens), Labour should concentrate on policies that will shift idle savings into investment funding, engendering new technologies that produce green, sustainable development and high quality jobs.
Such an economic program will require the creation of a public investment bank that issues its own bonds (to be supported by a non-inflationary Bank of England quantitative easing strategy targeting these bonds), but also a new alliance with enlightened industrialists and parts of the City keen to profit from sustainable recovery. Labour, I believe, will only overcome its infighting, and the toxic media campaign against its leader, by escaping into a Green, investment-led British Renaissance.
Unless I am mistaken that is very explicit backing for the Green New Deal, Green Infrastructure Quantitative Easing, or People's Quantitative Easing as Labour call it, and a bond issuing National Investment Bank; all of them ideas used as the basis of Corbynomics that originated on this blog.
What is more the logic of business and government partnering each other is part of my cappuccino explanation of how to build a good economy that I talked about at the British Chambers of Commerce conference yesterday.
I am pleased we're on the same hymn sheet, controversial or not.
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Reading between the lines (but not too much I hope) is that he is also suggesting that Labour starts to work in coalition with other smaller parties on similar agendas in Parliament.
Now that would be a refreshing change for Labour – less tribalism and more cooperation to defeat a common enemy.
I don’t think you have to read too much in to see that
What the survivors of New Labour have trotted out ad nauseam over the last few months is that is no use having principles if you don’t have political power. And those who elected Corbyn were/are chided accordingly…
And yet it seems to be stating the proverbial bleedin’ obvious to say that if you remain true to your principles then some people will find that an attractive trait. And if you then talk to people with broadly similar principles and find broad themes that you can agree on (vide that ‘group hug’ by the leaders of the Greens, SNP and Plaid) then you might just, by working together, arrive at a consensus and form a broad coalition which will bring an end to the grotesque neoliberal experiment which started in the mid 70’s ( I include New Labour in this). Less tribalism, more co-operation indeed.
I endorse your view – as summarised in the last sentence
The problamatic elephant in the room here concerns the question of are those self styled grandees and their fellow travellers in todays Labour Party, to be found in parties within parties like Progress, singing from the same hymn sheet?
Are they so committed to maintaining and ensuring the continuation of their Thatcherite legacy that they would rather see the Labour Party totally disappear than have it offer a real alternative to what they have committed themselves to psychologically as individuals and the Party they have infiltrated collectively?
The only thing I don’t think Yanis has got right is this statement:
“The Labour Party has an instinctive urge to protect those left behind by the long years of uneven private-debt-fuelled growth ”
There wasn’t that much sign of that ‘instinctive urge’ in the last election after it took them a year to decide to oppose the ‘bedroom tax’! That ‘instinctive urge’has now returned but still exists only in homoeopathic quantities and as a force from the members (including me now). Most of the MP’s are still myth-bedazzled austerians and there is no way forward until that changes.
I think Yanis was referring to Labour-proper and not the Blairite vehicle known as Nu-Lab
In that case it’s a hopeless abstraction as that Labour party doesn’t exist as yet.
I wonder if any of you saw this in the Independent? Varoufakis’s and Paul Mason’s replies;
http://indy100.independent.co.uk/article/george-osbornes-mickey-mouse-jibe-at-labour-just-massively-backfired–byCc7BryyW?utm_source=indy&utm_medium=top5&utm_campaign=i100