I know there are those who do not like me questioning Labour when it seems very likely they might be the next government. I, however, think that is precisely the reason why I should do so.
But let me be clear, I would not be questioning Labour if I did not have good reason to do so. And that reason exists. Take this from late last week, when Nick Ferrari on LBC interviewed Wes Streeting, Labour's shadow health secretary:
Labour's Shadow Health Secretary stating he doesn't support junior doctors' strike action pic.twitter.com/u7XfAUHiWB
— j (@jrc1921) March 24, 2023
The discussion was on the junior doctor's strike. The junior doctor's are striking for three reasons as I see it. They are:
- To demand an appropriate current pay offer.
- To demand that past erosion of their pay be corrected.
- To demand increases investment in the NHS, which they know is failing.
Staggeringly, Streeting does not want them to strike about these issues.
No doubt he thinks doctors will be responsible for the resulting disruption and deaths in the NHS that this strike will cause.
Streeting appears to want to ignore the massively more significant disruption and resulting number of deaths the Tories have caused.
But, most importantly, as is normal for Labour at present, Streeting cannot say what he does want. Nor can he say how he will solve this dispute or the underfunding of the NHS given that he cannot spend the supposed gains Labour will make from scrapping the non-dom rule again as it would appear it has already spent them seven times over, and it has no clue that taxes do not fund government spending anyway.
So, Labour opposes working people who are being offered a terrible deal but has nothing to offer them as an alternative. No wonder I am baffled, and cannot endorse what Labour is doing. And with election mood now in the air they cannot even claim this is clever or necessary anymore. It just looks like the prevarication of the incompetent.
So, a quick poll, as I could be wrong:
What do you think Labour is doing?
- It is Tory-lite. There is nothing to work out. What you’re seeing is what you will get (60%, 683 Votes)
- It’s so terrified of being called left-wing before an election it’s denying any suggestion that it is but will change its spots when elected (13%, 153 Votes)
- It is in denial because it knows it will deliver austerity and does not want to say so (10%, 117 Votes)
- I don’t know, but show me the answers anyway (8%, 95 Votes)
- It’s playing a clever game, keeping its cards close to its chest until an election (4%, 46 Votes)
- It is prevaricating (3%, 35 Votes)
- Don’t ask, because asking helps the Tories (0%, 5 Votes)
Total Voters: 1,134
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I don’t like you questioning Labour….. as a Party member it makes me most uncomfortable. Keep it up!!
Labour needs to reverse the thinking from “we can only have the public services we can afford” to “we cannot flourish (economically or otherwise) without the public services we need”. Without that change of thinking we will get nowhere.
Completely agreed
Not just “we cannot flourish without the public services we need” but also “anything we can do we can afford”.
Labour’s lack of vision and ambition is so dispiriting. The only reason is, I think the recognition that a party has to be in government to implement any policies – although Labour has moved to the right so much that the Conservatives are now able to shamelessly stealing their clothes.
Indeed. We really must use the phrase “anything we can do we can afford” as often as we possibly can everywhere we can. It is short, pithy and true.
It gives rise to the questions:
– What can we do?
– What should we do?
– What do we forego, if need be?
– How do we do what is needed that we cannot do?
Not to contradict your point in any way, but I’d add that we need to see good public services, mostly obviously health, social care, and education but you could add housing, transport and basic utilities, as an investment in both the present and future, of both the economy and society. Not to mention the environment.
At present they are only seen as costs to be minimised or shrunk.
Follow the money Richard, Streeting & Sir Starmer have accepted contributions from John Armitage, a Tory donor with links to despicable U.S. health firm United Health.
Not just Labour with links to the US health companies. I presume you have all seen this.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/palantir-peter-thiel-nhs-england-foundry-faster-data-flows/
I was torn between the denial / austerity and tory lite options
Every faltering interview I hear from any of the front bench makes my heart sink..
Streeting – Labour’s Matt Hancock!…
Sunak made the point about Starmer having spent his Non-Dom tax seven different ways so surely Labour know that, come the election, they will be called out again on ‘B-but how are you going to pay for it?!’
It’s high time the ‘Nation’s Broadcaster’ did a series (or at least a programme!) on national debt (ours…and others’), on tax burdens and on public spending so that ‘we’ can see how Germany has higher wages, lower taxes, lower property prices and ?twice as many? hospital beds.
Or Starmer could simply state that wealth has gone from the poorest to the richest for 40 years whilst the burden of paying back the nation’s debt has fallen disproportionately on those who can ill-afford it. In future those who believe they’re worth £10,000 a day will be bearing that burden – starting with a…I dunno…40% Capital Gains Tax, and no ceiling on NI?!
Or he could do a Corbyn and say ‘We didn’t spend enough!’. I think when the BBC’s ‘More or Less’ purported to look at this they concluded that the truth is that the National Debt WILL never be repaid, that QE etc will be quietly rolled over/kicked into the long grass and that it’s generally accepted that there really IS a ‘Magic Money Tree’/that money IS just called into existence. If this IS the truth then we need a grown-up discussion about it before Starmer and Streeting are asked ‘How…!?’
I wish such a genuinely informed programme was possible
You have (one has!) to ask ‘Why isn’t it?!’. It seems to this seeker after truth to be the fundamental question…(of the age!)
As you’ve said – before and often! – Richard, it’s really simply a question of what you choose today (with the outer limits if those choices being obvious/constrained – see Truss! Q:was she ‘not wrong’ in what she was proposing by way of stimulus but simply chose to give the proceeds to the wrong people?!)
Alan, In my humble opinion there are two reasons why such a discussion is not happening.
1) Too many influential people do not want it and they veto it out. Despite this I read about the alternatives more frequently now than even five years ago. This must make them more worried. The vested interests see it as a challenge to their power and their narrative of how the economy works. Andrew Bailey perhaps, being one.
2) the power of defunct ideas to persist. It is now over 90 since the UK was on the gold standard and fifty years since the dollar was no longer defined by the price of an ounce of gold. Yet even economics reporters and politicians still speak in those tones. Perhaps they fear censure?
Richard’s book of a decade ago was called the Courageous State. He correctly put his finger on what was and is required. Leaders with courage. (and vision)
Starmer continues a strategy of pursuing pulled-right voters, and ignoring his traditional base, much like the Tories did. He clearly thinks it’s the only way to power in the FPTP system he appears to prefer. The Tories have ended up stuck as a UKIP/BNP party. Who’ll fill the centre left in England if Labour gets stuck as a centre right party? The Scottish parties are centre left, so it will simply reinforce their support.
The Greens?! I have to say that whenever Caroline Lucas speaks she’s the same voice of reason…so who on earth (ho ho) would vote for that?!
‘…sane…’! (Doh!)
I doubt he is being evasive – that answer was pretty straightforward to me…
It’s unlikely it would change its spots from being terrified of being called left wing either – They are getting called left wing anyway and have been for years.
More likely we’ll get something more akin to Blair’s government, which is effectively Tory-lite.
I think the struggle is that if you start to assume that Labour is a trojan horse for genuine socialist policies then you are relying on your imagination rather than what they are actually saying and this seems insane. I do not think it is reasonable to apply your imagination to a situation where the public pronouncements are very clear and opposite in direction if not in substance. Labour will continue to give us the illusion of a democracy, you can change the governing party, you cannot change the governing policy. Secondly, many of us will remember that we thought Tony Blair was going trojan horse some socialist policies in, he was merely making the party more electable in an environment which had been changed by Thatcherism, but the writing was on the wall with the abandonment of clause 4. The adherence to US neoliberalism should not have been a surprise to us. It was plain to see. WYSIWYG.
I have signed nomination papers for my local Labour candidate (sitting town councillor and activist) despite me having left the party following the undemocratic reforms of declaring free discussion no longer admissible business. He agreed that the national party is failing to lead with positive policies, but like so many of our local councillors/members, argues that local focus is more important. He had no more info than me on policy, and could not defend the local CLP moving back from all-member meetings to delegate-only. Basically, he had no excuses.
The party machine, firmly in the hands of Starmer apparatchiks, has severed most of its connections to activism in favour of old Soviet-style ‘democratic centralism’ and in doing so showed that Labour is no better than Tory-lite. So sad.
Compare & contrast wrt strikes; Germany. Note what is being asked for in terms of pay rises & what German posties got. (keep in mind energy price rises were very similar all across Europe).
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/27/millions-of-germans-face-transport-disruption-in-cost-of-living-mega-strike
Liebore, is no longer the party for working/salaried people – that went in the B.Liar years. It is now about managerialism – with an eye on a post-politics careers – witness B.Liar and his bagman The-Liar-Mandelson. Thus we have the WYSIWYG party who would regard me as “a Trot” for the views that I hold (& I say this in all seriousness). Oddly, I knew a number of CDU politicians (Lander), we shared a large number of common views and political positions, that’s not so say I was/am a supporter – but they seemed somewhat like Labour of the 1960s (oddly the real nutters in Germany, in my view, are the FDP). So by extension, that would make the CDU, in the eyes of the imbeciles that purport to run Liebore, “Trots”. That’s how far politics has moved in the United Serfdom.
The UK now has a quasi-fascist party in gov’, an extreme right wing opposition which has just banned Liebore councillors from watching “Oh Jeremy Corbyn: The Big Lie” probably on a “thought crime” basis and which has a set of nonpolicies that would puzzle Marine Le-Pen’s rabble in France. And we are suprised that Streeting does not support poorly paid striking doctors……why?
It would be nice to think that Labour were just going along to get along and get in then- Boom! – the country rediscovers social justice.
Somehow though I doubt it.
The Tories have not been themselves since Thatcher; Labour has not been itself since Blair who was a response to Thatcher.
So our two principle parties no longer believe in government or behave as they once did. And the market fills the gap with dire consequences.
We are governed by politicians who are not politicians who do not practice politics.
Instead, they practice war at home as well as abroad.
That is what Margaret Hilda Thatcher has bequeathed to our nation.
I wanted vote for ‘It’s frightened of appearing Left-wing…’ but on reflection decided ‘It’s Tory-Lite’ is probably the truth.
🙂
In her BBC r4 profile Rachel Reeves was portrayed as bright and nerdy who loved intellectual engagement.
That mythical BBC enquiry into debt and spending would be a real challenge for her as she, along with Starmer, Streeting and the rest is terrified of going beyond ‘taxpayers money’, ‘everything would be fully funded’.
Even from their own perspective – this is such a dead end – boxing themselves in. Even cheer leaders like Alistair Campbell seem to suggest they need to provide some kind of real vision above merely cleansing themselves of Corbynism.
But if they are scared of even discussing debt and spending – they are clearly not up to actually governing.
Personally I cannot see much wrong with Liberty , equality and fraternity.
Freedom, justice and the common good in modern parlance.
The Right represent the market, private property and heredity.
Labour stands for the rule of law, sound money and following what the papers say in order to stay in power.
I wish it were not so.
Labour are being too reactive and are forgetting to lead.
What you see is what you get, of course – what evidence is there to the contrary? I don’t believe Starmer’s LP are are trying to appeal to right-wing voters particularly. Their real focus is demonstrating to the Establishment that they will not rock the neoliberal boat by making any changes that matter.
Slightly tangentially, but still relevant, this ‘Money and Macro’ Youtube presentation interestingly discusses an academic report that shows that Italy’s debt to GDP ratio is much worse than it would have been as a consequence of austerity measures introduced supposedly to reduce government debt. The same obviously applies to the UK:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WezK5HKgiS0
Yet more evidence that the current LP are on a fool’s errand.
I’ve not watched the video, but this is the sort of thing you expect when a government cuts spending on a something with a positive fiscal multiplier. The financial damage in lost GDP is worse than the financial saving in spending/borrowing, so the ratio gets worse. Penny wise and pound foolish.
Interesting, and sad, to see the majority voting for the Tory Lite option. Only thing Labour ensure with this policy stance is that the Tories will be back, and soon.
I voted with the overwhelming majority here – Tory-Lite. I am still a Labour party member, and on the executive committee of our constituency party. At our local level we are fielding candidates in every ward for the upcoming local elections, and are trying to rebuild the grassroots involvement that has been lost over the past 20 years. We have a complacent Tory run council , and no Labour councillors at all, in a town that used to have regular Labour councils.
It’s hard right now. But if you are on the left, where do you go to vote? We believe every voter should have the chance to vote for a candidate that represents what we still regard as Labour values, and that keeps us going.
And whatever you think of the current Labour PLP in opposition, it’s hard to imagine they will be as bad as the Tories in all respects. I remember 1997 and the Blair ascendancy. Whatever Labour did wrong (and there was plenty) they did leave the country in a better state that the Tories ever did.
Thanks
The Tories are really ramping up emotional, knee jerk fear and distrust. Heightened with lack of community funding, infrastructure, pay & jobs etc.
They’re dividing people into ideological camps. A floating/undecided voter may like the idea of better pay and conditions etc for example, and would likely vote Labour…but for the fact that they do not want ‘immigrants’, ‘illegals’, and could possibly vote Tory because immigration is the most important issue to them.
Lot’s of different permutations and priorities.
Labour have to box very carefully!
I guess the eventual manifesto will tell us what they really stand for. (I liked Corbyn’s, but that didn’t manifest in a win).
We’ve yet to see how things pan out.
Hello Richard have you seen the video of M Littlewood on twitter this morning discussing Government access ? I am sure Mark wld enjoy you bringing this subject up next time you debate with him ! All the best . Keep up the good work .
I cannot stand to hear them speak. It fills me with despair. I believe after the next election a left wing pressure party must be formed.
Starmer is a security services plant, he worked with them as DPP, he made his first address as Labour leader with Ruth Smeeth overlooking, someone whom wikileaks identified as a CIA asset. Starmer has been manoeuvred into power to make Labour establishment acceptable.
I seriously doubt such narratives
But he is undoubtedly right wing
This details some of his links with the security services.
https://novaramedia.com/2021/03/02/keir-starmer-is-a-long-time-servant-of-the-british-security-state/
In addition his membership of the Trilateral commission is a massive red flag.
Will Hutton who is often pretty good is writing a book” How the right broke Britain….” sees something else – that Starmer is a radical – in reaching out beyond Labour’s base ‘as did Attlee, Wilson, Blair’ but going much further
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/26/ignore-detractors-keir-starmer-radical-transform-country
He cites
– making the Lords an elected chamber and devolving government
– Reeves committment to £28bn a year green investment
– to be a clean energy superpower – growing fastest in G7
– a public Great British energy company
– transforming from a welfare to a well-being state and transforming the NHS on the way
This seems difficult to accept – if Labour darent even discuss what spending and debt is all about , how on earth are they going to be so ‘revolutionary’ as Hutton sees it? He blames ‘leftism’ for Labour’s failure to govern for more than 33 years out of their 125 year history, including the failure to get workers on company boards etc.
He doesn’t seem to look at Stiglitz’s points as to how disfunctional the modern market economy is with financialisation, monopolisation, rent extraction etc. Yet he puts a lot of faith in public private partnership.
Will is, let’s be honest, pretty Balirite at heart
I have met him several times and nothing has persuaded me otherwise
Yes he is . Nice bloke – at Uni with an ex girl friend.
Apart from the catastrophies of Iraq and PFI , Labour did some good – got NHS back on its feet, minimum wage, Good Friday agreement , devolution etc etc
Excuse me, the NHS doesn’t need to be ‘transformed’ (again). It just needs proper funding.
Will Hutton managed to bankrupt the Industrial Society when he was CEO, and basically destroy it. Pretty rubbish at economics.
Ejecting thousands of left-wing members, parachuting lists of centre-left (at best) candidates in, suspending CLPs if they look a little bit too left-wing, parroting right-wing economic orthodoxy and conservative views on social issues.
It would have to be a bloody clever game if they are just trying to keep their cards close to their chest!
I have been a Labour member now for over a decade. The party likes to appear inclusive, I receive several emails each week inviting me to join various workshops and meetings. However on the three occasions I have contacted the party, once to the Shadow Secretary of State for Defence John Healey, once to Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves and once using the policy contact form. I kept all three as dry as possible, avoiding hyperbole and accusation. I did not receive a reply to any of my queries. I suspect anything ‘off-message’ will be ignored.
In my opinion what is happening is the political equivalent of being prescribed lithium. Sure it smooths off the rough edges and limits swings in mood producing a more socially acceptable individual. What it also does is limit innovation and problem solving. Without the enigmatic, the characters and those whose views might be off centre the organisation stagnates. Thinking stagnates. When big problems occur out come the same old templates and flow charts and everybody runs down the same tunnel. The Labour party are there already without being in power.
I’m not saying everybody has to be fringe or that every idea has to be radical, there is a lot to be said for steady safe thinking. But not when that is all there is.
Thanks
I have responded to their request for input on policy, too. Only in narrow areas where I have expertise and only with genuine suggestions… and I am hardly on the left of the party. But like you, no acknowledgement/questions/discussion.
maybe my ideas are rubbish – quite possible…. but I would like to think there is at least some value in them.
Should that be: WHAT is Labour up to?
Yes
And apparently no one else noticed
I don’t think that is quite fair. I noticed but I quite liked the idea of it. Why is Labour up to had a certain rng to it – anyone could complete the sentence.
🙂
I noticed, but I never see any point in joining in a hand-wringing session about the Labour Party.
I think they see electoral strategy not as the means to an end but as the paramount virtue. They have convinced themselves that other considerations are an indulgence and that their strategic discipline makes them uniquely fit to govern.
They probably disagree among themselves on what to do with the power they seek but those disagreements don’t matter. The strategy is the core belief. It will always come first.
This is what happens when the engineers of political advantage completely dominate a party. It may be ideological for some but I don’t think ideology is a necessary factor. It’s the narrowness of the objective that drives it.
To be abundantly clear the truth is that the ‘taxes fund spending’ argument is no more than a convenient tool to con an ignorant public.
There is always a magic money tree available to fund spending that goes into the private sector as we have seen through COVID PPE, HS2, tax breaks for corporations, banking bailouts, rail operating procviders, and outsourcing public services.
Labour will continue to loot the public purse to benefit their corporate donors. We’ve become a mirror of the US where the choice is between 2 right wing corporate lobbying groups.
Streeting ia an unprincipled, massively over-ambitious weasel.
One of the reasons I left the Labour Party.
For those who have not discovered him, Roy Lilley is an excellent and knowledgeable commentator on health. He worked out ‘Silly Boy’ Streeting a while ago.
https://myemail.constantcontact.com/Anything-to-do-with-it.html?soid=1102665899193&aid=5lguZCFVekE
He is very good
He is one of the numerous authors I subscribe to, and sort through
There is no longer a national health service in England. It was replaced last July by 42 local so-called integrated care systems. The change was inaugurated without parliamentary approval years ago by Jeremy Hunt and the former vice president of United Health of Minneapolis. Alias the then head of NHSE. It became law last July. The systems’ name is a euphemism. They are American accountable care systems and it’s largely American health and data corporations which run them. Every Labour Council in England is collaborating in something which denies care, restricts access, reduces availability, and attacks staff pay and conditions to make profits. In May every English council election candidate should be asked which side they are on. They CAN join the fight to take back the NHS. The struggle is no longer just about funding; it’s for the very heart of an NHS which we need, value and once had. Streeting?
Streeting will be happy
And that’s why – their betrayal of the NHS – they may well lose both locally and nationally.
“There isn’t a lot of redistribution (sic) to go round”.
Lisa Nandy, World at One, Jan 6th.
What more do you need to know?
Labour has now been out of office for over a decade. Despite the incompetence of the Tory Party and the social cruelty of many of it’s policies, it has continued to be re-elected. This has in large part happened because it enjoys the support of the Media. And I am not simply refering to the usual suspects; the Mail, Telegraph and the Murdoch press. The BBC has been almost totally subverted as a source of independent political comment
The Australian Labour party had very much the same problem. It adopted a small target policy of focusing on the failings of the Government and providing only a high level indication of it’s future direction. I believe UK Labour is following the example of it’s Australian counterpart.
I can understand how intensely annoying and disappointing this is to many progressives. But I believe
given the existing state of the media and the nature of the UK electorate, this approach offers the best way of getting rid of the venal shower that have brought misery to so many of our fellow citizens.
No Michael, it’s not largely due to the media, although the increasingly extreme, biased and hysterical right wing press does have some influence, partly through brainwashing the less aware parts of the electorate, and partly through it’s lack of critical apprasal of increasingly corrupt, incompetent and dishonest right wing governments.
Neither has the BBC been reduced to the state you describe, althought it’s certainly been cowed to a certain extent by the licence fee freezes and tory party members put onto the Board by the succession of tory governments since 2010.
The biggest factor behind the tories’ dominance is the labour party itself. It’s refusal to reform the rotten FPTP voting system and its refusal to work with any other parties in any sort of progressive electoral alliance, whether formal or not, is what gives the tories’ their unearned, undeserved and deeply damaging grip on power in Westminster.
I think you could write a lot more about what you think Labour is up to, Richard. I watched you on nottheandrewmarrshow on Sunday morning, and know your wife is a fan of the programme.
I also know that you follow weownit.
https://weownit.org.uk/blog/campaigners-march-against-deaths-due-nhs-privatisation
When I read the title of this thread I thought you meant as far as Jeremy Corbyn is concerned.
They can stop him standing as a Labour candidate in North Islington in the same way as they have stopped a lot of other good left-wing candidates.
They are playing clever by not banning him from the party. If he stands as an independent they can then ban him from the party as it is against the rules.
Not that they care about the rules, as Starmer and Evans make them up as they go along.
I have been a member of the party since the 70s, left when I realised that Blair wasn’t a socialist, joined again under Miliband, then left again because of the way Starmer is treating the party.
Sorry, just seen your previous thread on nottheandrewmarrshow.
Keir Starmer and the right-wing clique around him are essentially Tories: which is why their principal concern is to expel any socialist or left-wing Jewish historian who points out that the version of Jewish history churned out by Zionists is largely fabricated propaganda and marginalise the role of activists, Trades Unions and protest movements.