The Sunday Times posted this on Twitter overnight:
Ed Miliband gave a Powerpoint presentation to the shadow cabinet on his revolutionary energy policies, speaking excitedly of the hope and change he believed they would bring
His reception from Sir Keir Starmer, however, was decidedly lukewarm https://t.co/7pwaoPaEID
— The Times and The Sunday Times (@thetimes) July 9, 2023
My sources suggest that this is likely to be true. There seems to be rift a mile wide between Miliband and his successor but one right now. That is not personal - although if Starmer feels overshadowed by Miliband he should be as Ed now seems to have all the gravitas and skill he needed when leader, but lacked back then. Instead it is ideological. As someone close to the scene put it to me, Ed Miliband is now the most left wing member of the shadow cabinet, by some way.
I stress, I do not think Ed Miliband that left wing.
I do think Ed Miliband is doing something Labour as a whole should be engaged in, which is the creation of new economic and policy thinking about the issues we now face as a country.
Doing so he will come up against Starmer and Reeves. I noted this not long ago on Twitter, having noted what Reeves said on the Sophy Ridge programme:
Rachel Reeves has just said “We have to respect economic institutions”. The comment was about the Bank of England. What she's saying is that even though it is ruining people's lives and driving us towards recession we must respect it. That's absurd.
— Richard Murphy (@RichardJMurphy) July 9, 2023
Reeves is telling us to toe the line. We must accept the ‘wisdom' of the powers that be. Ours is not to protest. Instead, we must suffer our fates. And we should do so, unquestioningly. We are plebs, after all.
And this is the attitude of a prospective Labour Chancellor who questions whether we can afford to save the planet because it is instead better to crush the well-being of millions with unnecessary interest rate rises.
Reeves says she and Starmer are as one on issues. I suspect that for now that is true. It is deeply dangerous that such a reactionary pair are in that position and are described as the Opposition when it is so apparent that their goal is perpetuation of the status quo.
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For all of my adult life the idea of voting Tory has been a complete anathema – something I would never, ever contemplate, even for a millisecond. It would be like selling my soul. Out of all the others it was a pragmatic choice of the least bad party, or the one most likely to beat the Tory. Nowadays, however, the Labour Party are doing their best to get me to stick them in the never-ever box. The options for the progressively minded are very limited – if the Green Party would sort out their policy offering along the lines discussed on this forum in the last few days they would make a good rallying point. But do we have time to play the long game? The need for change is so great, but the possibility of achieving that so small. I will always continue to vote, but will be likely to do so with little hope that any good will come of it.
It’s one thing to intone they are as one on ‘the issue’ – but they just won’t discuss ‘the issue’. In this sense it isnt an ‘issue’ – jut a carved stone tablet.
🙂
I’m becoming more and more convinced that it’s no longer ‘Lions led by Donkeys’ and more ‘Lions led by Hyenas’.
https://emea01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.opendemocracy.net%2Fen%2Fbank-of-england-bosses-accept-pay-rise-wage-restraint-economy-inflation%2F&data=05%7C01%7C%7C5a50f1f9949b486fcdf508db80630d91%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C638244935139421965%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=5fwek6zBXwTJ8NaBF5znFjJzk39mpqXNqJFIbPzYgBc%3D&reserved=0
@AndrewN Thanks for the opendemocracy weblink. Andrew Bailey had the power to block these pay rises or significantly reduce them! Where is Keir Starmer on this or any other party leader? Missing in action!
Cometh the moment, NOT-cometh the man (or woman) that we need.
What we’ve got with Stymied and Reeves is a safe pair of hands for capital with Rupert Murdoch as the bridesmaid.
Reeves – what is she thinking? She sounds thick when she talks and she is thick – you have a job to do something with it don’t you – not cower before it and ‘respect’ the economy.
What are Labour going to ‘respect’ next? Famine? Pestilence? Rising air and sea temperatures? Massive unemployment? Zero hours contracts? Lordy!
I’ll say this about both of them – the know how to respect their funders and the establishment that made them, damn them.
I love that picture of stymied BTW. It has that ‘When I became labour Leader I didn’t think we’d have a chance of winning and I’d have to sort all this shit out’ sort of look about it.
Starmer and Reeves are economic and political Luddites for the very simple reason they’ve bought it into the overly simplistic line of thinking of the historical Quantity Theory of Money or Milton Friedman’s now discredited Sado-Monetarism. Here’s my line of reasoning as comment on one of Peter May’s posts on his blog:-
http://www.progressivepulse.org/economics/promising-a-lack-of-fulfillment/comment-page-1#comment-15784
Starmer should practice listening to what will likely become his own civil servants – some of whom are tearing their hair out trying to get through to the lot of ’em:
” Whilst ‘Black Swans’ (a commonly used metaphor describing the disproportionate effect of previously unobserved, high impact, hard to predict and rare events) often grab the headlines, ‘Black Jellyfish’ and ‘Black Elephants’ may have greatest impact. ‘Black Jellyfish’ are issues we think we know about and understand, but which turn out to be more complex and uncertain, sometimes with a long tail and nasty sting in the end. ‘Black Elephants’ are a cross between a ‘Black Swan’ and ‘the elephant in the room’, these are challenges visible to everyone, but which no one wants to deal with. They are, in effect, blind spots, where due to cognitive bias, powerful institutional forces, short sightedness, or failure (or unwillingness) to read the signals we avoid the unpalatable, potentially at significant cost. A state’s inability to identify, understand and implement policy to deal with these issues will increase the risk that they will manifest into large-scale or acute issues with much larger latent cost. This risk often appears more applicable to Western societies where democratically elected governments are less likely to be decisive on highly political issues…”
Global Strategic Trends: the Future Starts Today
Ministry of Defence, 2022
Well argued
“I hate tree huggera” eh? This has relevance to a de-carb policy how?
Broadly speaking gov de-carb policy splits into 3 parts: energy efficiency (mostly to do with buildings), generation (mostly to do with wind and PV, possibly a bit of biomass/biogas) and networks (gas and elec).
Generation is self-funding (if I want to build a utility-scale PV plant – I go to the bank – cos the project has a business case).
Energy-efficiency could be self-funded – provided the right financial structures are in place – matching up-front capital costs with long run returns through less energy use.
Networks are something of a problem. The Greens estimate that spending of perhaps £250bn over the next 10 – 15 years will be needed to integrate RES systems into existing networks. I’m not convinced by this for a range of, mostly, technical reasons. Putting this to one side, it does seem that the capital spend will be much greater than the current worth of the various networks. Thus raising an econometric question: why not nationalise so that instead of allowing private companies to make a packet from the investments – the goverment and the country do instead – they have a valuable asset.
Sad fact of the matter is: Starmer or Reeves are functionally incapable of understanding the above. One can speculate on the reasons why, but it is now clear that they are out of their depth. Anybody voting for liebore needs to take a hard look in a mirror.
Thanks
Miliband was no dounbt talking about this ort of thing….that’s wat is so worrying
Given her background I might have hoped for some practical action from Rachel Reeves to make life better but it seems I am to be disappointed
I went on iplayer to get the Kuenssberg program but didn’t start in the beginning . I got John Kerry saying the climate change news is getting more terrifying by the day, We do have -potentially- the technology and ideas to confront it but then when I listened to Rachel Reeves, I felt profoundly depressed.
Yesterday Stephen Mitchell said, correctly, we had been here before with a Labour govt. which compromised its ideals to fit in with the ‘There Is No Alternative’ demands of the City in 1931. They were in a weaker position than Stephen led us to believe. They were in a coalition with the Liberals. They had no majority. There was a run on the pound and the first loan to stabilise things was used up. The May report was watered down but even so the further loan from the US was dependent on the May report being implemented. The consensus of the day was against them and Ramsey McDonald probably thought the ‘laws of economics’ were like the laws of physics. I don’t wish to be an apologist for Labour but truth matters.
We did eventually recover from the Great Depression but if we don’t slow climate change, that might not be possible or only possible in a much longer time span with the permanent loss of species and land due to rising sea levels.
Labour today would be in a stronger position and there would be much more popular support for green measures. I saw Yr 11 students making a Friday protest a few years ago, having walked out of school to make their voice heard. They would be around 20 now. I don’t believe young people are apathetic.
We are not helpless in the face of climate change. We have ideas; we have new technologies; we can see what sort of changes we have to make.
What we can do we can afford. But when I see the probably future Chancellor thinking the ‘iron fiscal rules’ are a badge of virtue, I am tempted to despair. But despair is no answer. To refer to a recent blog of Richard’s about anger, channeled anger is a better one.
On a lighter note I remembered a quote of the 1931 era.
Two politicians had an alternative agenda. David Lloyd- George and Sir Oswald Moseley who was a Labour minister. He put forward a sort of Keynesian program of economic recovery. The party did not accept it so he formed the New Party -not the best branding exercise-which failed and we know where he went next.
He pointed out that some socialists had long forecast the collapse of capitalism. It seemed to be happening yet their reaction he described as “like a band of Salvationists, who confronted with the second Coming of Christ, turned tail and fled.”
A very telling phrase. We have heard a lot from all parties about the dangers of climate change and even ‘world beating programs’ to confront it. Yet our political class seem to be turning tail when the real costs are discussed.
Vote to put Starmer and Reeves in charge and come the next pandemic will they be telling us the country hasn’t got the money to do anything about it and that we can’t afford to tackle it? That it will just have to burn itself out with thousands of deaths? Well isn’t climate change a major threat like a pandemic threatening many lives? Do you really want to put such morons in charge of your country whose only policy response is the Quantity Theory of Money or Sado-Monetarism? Do you personally actually understand what can affect the creation of money in relation to real resources? Here’s some pointers to consider I posted on Progressive Pulse:-
http://www.progressivepulse.org/economics/promising-a-lack-of-fulfillment
Here’s an accessible link (no pay wall) to read about the childish tantrum Keir Starmer threw when Ed Miliband presented his climate change policies to the shadow cabinet. It shows what Starmer is really like behind closed doors:-
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-green-climate-change-starmer-miliband-b2372012.html
Shocking, candidly
From that article: ”Sir Kier…. said he wasn’t interested in hope and change”
Well, for me that just about sums up everything that is wrong with the Labour Party in 2023. Other parties could get a lot of mileage out of that crass statement come the General Election campaign.
Greens step forward – this is your time!
(But please have a word with RM about your economic/fiscal ideas first).
That was a staggering comment
Starmer and Reeves need to come clean and tell the British people they’re big supporters of Milton Friedman’s Sado-Monetarism that destroyed much of Britain’s industry when Thatcher adopted it and applied it when she first came into office. We’ve been there done that and it sucks as the Americans would say!
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/07/philip-pilkington-the-new-monetarism-part-i-the-british-experience.html
Agree with Keir Starmer and don’t think much about tree-huggers? Check the following out:-
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/07/extreme-weather-heat-tsar-biden-temperature
https://www.heat.gov/
Can somebody send Keir Starmer the following publication “Planning for Urban Heat Resilience” it’s free and doesn’t involve spending any UK government money but it does explain the importance of trees in creating heat resilience!’
https://www.planning.org/publications/report/9245695/
I don’t subscribe to the suggestions that Starmer and Co are just Tories in disguise – I do believe that they are a long way in their values from the far right, UKIPy Tory party of today.
However, I just don’t see any sign that they have the courage or imagination to put those values into practice. Despite her backstory, Reeves seems to be no better than Andrew Bailey in her conservative economic mindset and that is a killer for any serious efforts to tackle the UKs many challenges. Are they just scared of frightening either the conservative voters that they are trying to woo, or the dreaded ‘markets’? Or just incapable of moving on from neoliberal economics. Or just lack any imagination at all to envisage how things could and should be different.
On so many big issues they seem to be backing away from making serious proposals – climate change, Europe, PR, NHS, water and utilities – or any proposals at all. The suggestion that Starmer was dismissing the need to offer any ‘hope and change’ might be media hype but it rings true. Blair at least managed that when he first won.
If their aim is to keep expectations low, they are certainly succeeding. They might be so successful that people can’t be bothered even to vote for them.