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Moderation and competence – the building blocks of political credibility

02/06/2015, 09:43:42 PM

by Kevin Meagher

Asked to sum-up his personal credo, the late political theorist Bernard Crick described himself as a moderate socialist. “Small ‘m’ capital ‘S’. Clever and apt, especially as moderation has always been a useful ally for the democratic socialist.

All the more so given the sceptical British distrust political grandiosity and anything that sounds too fancy, which is why Lord Woolton, the post-war Conservative party chairman, insisted on referring to Labour as “the socialists” during the 1950s in order to make the party seem alien and doctrinaire.

Yet here we are again, with Labour cast as dirigiste meddlers with their price freezes, rent controls and nationalisation in an era where people are, broadly, comfortable with consumer choice and free enterprise. Tread softly if you are to venture into this field. Alas, clod-hopping Labour chose to insert its size 12s into the bear trap clearly marked “anti-business”. It is a crude charge for a party, which, on closer examination, is equally committed to “maintaining the most competitive Corporation Tax rate in the G7,” but such characterisations are the stuff of election campaigns and the party should have known better.

Allied with the desirability for political moderation is the need to be credible. If Labour has spent the past five years carelessly forfeiting its reputation for prudence and restraint, it was actively reckless in disregarding the need to be seen as basically competent and trustworthy.‘Don’t Do Stupid S***, warns Barack Obama, yet the party did. Repeatedly.

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Why on earth is Labour convening a “truth and reconciliation” commission?

01/06/2015, 10:07:17 AM

by Jonathan Todd

Do we really need the commission that Margaret Beckett is to lead to look “in a forensic way” at the reasons for Labour’s electoral defeat?

Harriet Harman seems to think that a “truth and reconciliation” commission is needed. She used that phrase in her quote in the Observer story and in her media appearances yesterday.

But what don’t we know already?

For years, polling told us that our leader, Ed Miliband, was behind on best prime minister and our party on economics. No party has ever formed a government behind on both these indicators. We were miles behind.

The leadership contenders are not waiting for Beckett’s findings to distance themselves from Miliband. The haste with which they retreat from positions that they recently defended risks inelegance. But it is required and encouraging.

To get out of a hole, you have to stop digging. And the Miliband years dug some massive holes. The collapse of Scottish Labour, the alienation from Labour in the north, and Labour’s failure to win over the south. We are, as Tristram Hunt put it in his lucid Demos speech, “fighting on three fronts. But micro-targeting policy solutions for each will not work”.

1945, 1964, 1997. Labour owned futures that all parts of the UK bought into. At times prior to each of these victories, it seemed Labour would never win again. But we did. And we can again. By re-crafting for our times, the elements that have always characterised Labour victory: unity and optimism grounded on credible economics.

Miliband might have thought that he was deploying these elements. But his spring rally, for example, was a curious cocktail of divisive pessimism and hubristic piety. It was divisive in identifying parts of Britain that deserved cheers and condemned others to boos. Not even those cheered, however, were thought capable of achieving anything under the Tory yoke, which made it bleakly and surreally pessimistic. All would be mended, though, if we only voted Labour. This coated complex problems with hubristic simplicity, taking the electorate for fools, while feigning high principle.

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Labour’s new revisionists will lead the revival

31/05/2015, 12:15:20 PM

by Alex White

The Labour Party is ‘travelling in strange country, exposed to climatic rigours it had not anticipated and against which its traditional equipment gave little protection’.

It is a damning indictment of Labour’s comfort zone tendency that Richard Crossman’s contribution to the 1952 New Fabian Essays, which he edited, would make a good summary of the party’s current situation.

Crossman was not a revisionist, but the essays he edited are home to the first serious collection of modern revisionist thought; the tradition which would – by way of a titanic struggle between Hugh Gaitskell and Aneurin Bevan – find its strongest voice in Anthony Crosland and its strongest actor in Tony Blair.

Labour Kremlinologists and historians with an eye on the symbolism of Gaitskell versus Bevan may attempt to see something similar in the battle between Andy Burnham and Liz Kendall. It is no coincidence that Kendall’s ‘what matters is what works’ line is the most articulate understanding of revisionism since Crosland’s writing on the distinction between ends and means.

A revisionist has one purpose: rethink the role of the state (the means) to build a more equal society (the ends).

To call this Tory-lite is a lazy attack with an even lazier understanding of Labour history, with the disastrous consequence of surrendering ground to the Conservatives. As Adrian McMenamin highlighted recently on Uncut, revisionism is a movement far wider and richer in history than those who use the Blairite label as an insult understand. It found its way to the 21^st century from Eduard Bernstein’s repudiation of Karl Marx and R.H Tawney’s seminal text on equality, via the brave but unfulfilled leaderships of Gaitskell and Neil Kinnock.

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While Labour is wrapped up with its leadership race, the Tories are moving onto the centre ground

29/05/2015, 04:58:28 PM

by Samuel Dale

The tragedy of Ed Miliband is that he shrewdly identified many of the key problems facing Britain today with his responsible capitalism agenda and focus on inequality.

This analysis allowed him to set the political weather at times because he could capture the public mood on booming energy prices or tax avoidance.

But his progress came to a shuddering halt when he outlined his crude solutions. Freezing energy prices and controlling rents were a fundamental misunderstanding of how markets and business works.

He alienated friendly business that would have supported changes and the voters did not believe him. So he failed.

And now to the real tragedy. The victorious Conservative party is stealing his analysis and coming up with their own solutions.

Centrist Tory projects and groupings such as the Good Right and Renewal are seeking to tackle the excesses of private companies and a wealthy elite. A responsible capitalism.

Former Number 10 head of strategy Steve Hilton’s new book More Human could almost have been written by Ed Miliband in its calls for radical change. He criticises big supermarkets, banks and other “private sector bureaucracies” for the way they treat customers, workers and suppliers.

Cameron clearly buys into these ideas too after reclaiming the One Nation mantle on May 8. He has also, significantly, appointed Robert Halfon as deputy chairman.

Halfon is one of the most interesting Conservative MPs with calls for the party to attract trade unionists alongside successful campaigns to cut fuel duty and the way companies treat customers. He has even flirted with renaming the Tories the Workers Party.

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I am a revisionist, not a right-winger

28/05/2015, 05:42:09 PM

by Adrian McMenamin

Eduard Bernstein is not a name heard much in Labour circles today – a social democrat and a communist (he would not have seen these as antithetical) – he shocked and scandalised many more orthodox members of the Social-democratic Party of Germany (SPD) by daring to “revise” Marxist thinking, to account for societal developments, in his “Premises of Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy” in 1899.

Fundamentalists have a tendency to regard their favourite books as unchallengeable eternal truth, rather than human works created in a given society at a particular time. That applies even when these fundamentalists are supposedly the most stringent enemies of superstition or religion – as the SPD’s hard-line Marxists claimed to be. For them the very idea of suggesting that Marx’s works were other than sacred and fixed was unthinkable. No method of theory revision for them, no matter how “scientific” they claimed their socialism was.

“Revisionism” thus quickly became, and remained, a term of abuse on the left – even, as in Mao’s China, a suitable reason to put someone to death: imagine that, a movement ostensibly at the pinnacle of the enlightenment ends up killing people for impure thoughts.

To be a revisionist is to be a traitor, an unbeliever or an apostate.

The Labour leadership election has been a case-in-point: the commonest piece of abuse thrown at Liz Kendall for daring to suggest, for instance, we should not be knee-jerk hostile to parents who want to improve the outcome of the state education system by setting up challenger schools, is that she is a Tory.

There are plainly a lot of Labour party members who think there is no difference between us – the revisionists – and the Tories. Beyond the obvious question of why, if someone really is ”a Tory”, they are wasting their time in an impotent and defeated party, as opposed to exercising power and influence in the real thing, there is the issue of historical experience. For surely it is us revisionists – from Bernstein on – who are those seeking victory for the left most keenly.

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Parliamentary notebook: Cameron’s wafer-thin majority belies the Tories’ Queens Speech triumphalism

27/05/2015, 07:00:08 AM

by Jonathan Ashworth

Today, us MPs will be summoned to the other place to hear Her Majesty’s Gracious Address, the first Queen’s speech by a majority Conservative government for almost 19 years.

Later, in the Commons, jubilant Tory MPs will wave their order papers and cheer the returning triumphant prime minister Cameron to the rafters. His every (lame) gag will be met with guffaws as if he’s now the Tory answer to Peter Kay. Every snide put-down of an opponent will be met with much whooping and exaggerated slapping of thighs.

As the prime minister exits the chamber and heads for his customary glass of claret in the members’ dining room, ambitious Tory MPs will queue up to shake his hand. And let’s face it, given the scale of our defeat who can blame them?

But although our defeat in the country was resounding the parliamentary arithmetic that has consequently been thrown up offers even the most pessimistic Labour Uncut correspondent some hope.

Five years ago when Harriet Harman spoke for the opposition in the Queen’s speech debate she faced government benches with a working majority of 83. Today she will be opposite government benches with a working majority of just 16.

In the last Parliament, government MPs rebelled in 35 per cent of divisions. In those votes where the opposition defeated the government we won often because Tory MPs – many of whom have just been re-elected to the Commons – routinely voted against their own side.

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Labour needs to harden its line on immigration

24/05/2015, 07:56:25 PM

by Robert Williams

Labour’s defeat feels even more crushing a couple of weeks after the election. There have been any number of reason postulated to explain why we lost. Too new, too old Labour, too left wing, too right wing.

Certainly on the right, many believe the reason Labour lost is because its agenda was far too left wing. This argument is summed up by Tony Blair who claimed last year that when “a traditional left-wing party competes with a traditional right-wing party, you get the traditional result”.

Before the election the consensus view was that UKIP would cost Labour votes, and the Tories seats. That was one of many predictions the political class got wrong. Labour’s vote share in seats across the Midlands, seats it should have won, and also in the ones it lost, generally went up slightly or didn’t move. Neither did the Conservative vote share. The LibDems collapsed completely and UKIP saw their vote soar. They are now second in over 100 seats. Of course, in individual seats there are different stories, but this is accurate as a trend. We are nowhere near recovering the trust of Middle England and we have lost a large segment of the White working and lower middle class vote.

Why did Labour lose? Ed Miliband was part of it, certainly. Savage attacks in the media over five long years didn’t help, but it is also true that he is part of an Oxbridge metropolitan establishment that has dominated the Labour Party for years, and is absolutely out of touch with voters. We lost because, outside London, we are seen as more out of touch than the privately educated millionaires in a Conservative cabinet. That is no mean feat.

We lost, too, because Labour is still blamed for the unprecedented increase in immigration over the last decade and a half, and for ignoring the concerns of voters. Whether mocking tweets of “white van man” and his St George flags in Rochester, comments about bigots in Rochdale (yes, memories are long when it comes to insults), all the way up from Kent and along the M1 corridor from Hendon to Leeds, Labour was perceived as elitist, obsessed with identity politics, gay rights, minority rights, rights without responsibilities.

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Camped in our comfort zone, Labour poses no real threat to the Tories

22/05/2015, 05:02:38 PM

by Simon Danczuk

‘Time is running out to save the NHS’. This was the polling-day message thrust through thousands of letterboxes early in the morning by an army of Labour volunteers.

Every Labour MP and member should find one of these leaflets and keep it in a drawer. Forget the Ed stone, these are the real monuments to Labour’s defeat.

It’s a simple rule of politics that the party that wins is the party that owns the future. That’s why Bill Clinton chose Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow” as his campaign song.

People want a government that can sell them a vision of a better tomorrow and map out how to get there. The fact that Labour went into the final day relying a scare story about the NHS shows how far we were from offering that positive vision.

Those leaflets are a window into the comfort zone where Labour has been firmly camped for the last five years. For all the seminars and lectures, re-launches and re-brands, we ended up basically where we started; opposing ‘Tory cuts’ and warning of the doom to come if David Cameron was elected.

This is essentially the same message we were pushing in 2010. It’s an argument that warms the hearts of Labour activists, but leaves the public cold.

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Labour needs to stop re-fighting the 2010 election

22/05/2015, 11:05:08 AM

by David Ward

As the leadership candidates set out their stalls, the party’s focus must be on the future, not the past.

Too often in the last five years it’s felt like we’ve been trying to rerun the 2010 election result all over again. Now the people have told us – they prefer 2015. We can’t make the same mistake next time.

Firstly, whether people are feeling the recovery yet is now immaterial, we should assume by 2020 things will feel for many like they are ticking over again. At some point Osborne, tactician to the core, is sure to move away from austerity and use renewed growth to distribute its proceeds. Labour need to be considering how we help people get on in this scenario, avoiding accusations of ‘tax and spend’, and bringing business groups along with us.

Second, things are never quite as bad as they seem when you’re losing. Take sport. In 2013 the Australian cricket team lost the Ashes 3-0 in England and were roundly criticised, while England batsmen like Ian Bell scored 500 runs in the series. At Christmas the same England side faced an only slightly changed Australia and were comprehensively outplayed 5-0. The Australian players were zeroes then heroes in the space of a few months, but they were only as good as before. So there will be some things we need to salvage.

Ideas like increasing the minimum wage, increasing competition in utilities and other industries, and a focus on social mobility. These are all still good policies, but they can’t be all that voters hear. In our heartlands outside London, and in the seats across the north and midlands we need to win, people want to hear more.

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As usual, the Blairites bring a knife to a gunfight

20/05/2015, 05:44:50 PM

by Kevin Meagher

It’s not fair. That seems to be the message from Blairite veterans at how the nascent Labour leadership contest is shaping up. A seemingly co-ordinated attempt to appeal for offside is underway, with complaints about the leading candidates’ campaigning efforts and the role of the trade unions in the process.

Former health secretary, Alan Milburn, was at it on Newsnight the other day, saying that for “one or two candidates being assumed to be the font of all wisdom in this race is just not right.” He wants an open field, which is code for anyone but Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper.

Lady Sally Morgan, Tony Blair’s former political secretary, also weighed in, claiming it’s both “arrogant and plain wrong” for there to be only two candidates in the frame.

Barry Sheerman, the Huddersfield sage, has come over all Inspector Renault and is shocked – shocked – that “Unite’s merry men” have the temerity, as an affiliated organisation for the past 100 years, to have their say in the process.

Meanwhile John Hutton, former DWP secretary, is equally sniffy about union involvement, pointing out that only a ”tiny proportion of the population are in trade unions.” (Not, though, in the Barrow shipyard he used to represent in Parliament, presumably?)

Moaning that Labour MPs – who are free to back whomsoever they wish – are currently breaking cover in greater numbers for either Yvette Cooper or Andy Burnham is like complaining that rain is wet. Indeed, for a wing of the party committed to consumer choice, it’s a strange gripe to have.

The Blairites – if, indeed, such a description still has any coherence – should perhaps have been better prepared for the possibility that Labour might have ended-up having a leadership contest in the latter half of 2015.

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