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Attacking the Tories is our priority but we shouldn’t be afraid of finding common ground with the Lib Dems

10/01/2013, 04:37:04 PM

by Jonathan Todd

The Conservatives are the fundamental barrier to a Labour government, capable of correcting the division, injustice and incompetence that they have brought us. David Cameron and his party is our enemy. We should target our fire upon him and them.

He must be made to accept responsibility for his misguided decisions, instead of blaming his failings upon the past government, and the gulf in values between our party and the Conservatives should be consistently emphasised.

Attacking the Liberal Democrats is a distraction and suits Cameron. We should call his bluff.

This means focusing our attacks on Cameron and the Conservatives in public and below the radar building bridges and back-channels with the Liberal Democrats. A mature politics should not be scared of acknowledging that many Labour members – like me – share common ground with many Liberal Democrats on issues like the EU, an elected second chamber and wealth taxation.

Labour will be confident in setting out a prospectus for governing the country from 2015. In the event of a hung parliament, however, we would be well-served by having openly acknowledged, well in advance and in a spirit of mutual respect, our points of agreement with the Liberal Democrats.

Jonathan Todd is Labour Uncut’s economic columnist

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On welfare, Labour needs to be the party of work

07/01/2013, 07:59:11 AM

by Jonathan Todd

Labour debating the Conservatives on welfare is not a clash between two settled bodies of opinion. As public opinion evolves, so does internal debate within both parties. Casualties will come from “friendly fire” and the fog of war is thick.

There are those within Labour who think that George Osborne has snookered our party with the welfare uprating bill. In contrast, others think Osborne has overplayed his hand and we will be rewarded for principled opposition to the bill.

The latter are in sympathy with the rhetorical question of John Harris: If every Labour politician cannot oppose Osborne’s strivers and skivers plan in its toxic entirety, what exactly are they here for?

The former both dismiss this as naive and discount the capacity of the more nuanced opposition that Gavin Kelly has articulated and which Labour’s guarantee of a job for those out of work for 2 years is a variant of.

This guarantee seems a step away from the Harris position, which rejects absolutely the welfare uprating bill, and towards a position that argues the bill is unnecessary as there are better means of reforming our welfare system. Taking this step has the advantage of reducing the extent to which we seem to defend a discredited status quo. Equally, it will disappoint those attracted to a more visceral rebuttal of Osborne.

While there is diversity of opinion within Labour, it would be mistaken to think that the Conservatives are united. Indeed, they are at war, if a Peter Oborne piece from just before Christmas is to be believed. Soon after Christmas a cabinet minister was speaking in less than glowing terms about Iain Duncan-Smith’s universal credit. “The information technology for the new system is nowhere near ready. It’s a disaster waiting to happen.”

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Sunday review on Wednesday: the Great Rebalancing, by the Fabian Society

02/01/2013, 07:00:26 AM

by Jonathan Todd

Heavy words are lightly thrown in the Great Rebalancing, the Fabian Society’s new collection of essays on the economy. Three telling examples are “change the rules of the game”, “a mainstream north European economy” and “market failure”. The different interpretations that might be made of these largely undefined terms go to the heart of Labour’s dilemmas.

Twice in Stewart Wood’s relatively short introduction he refers to “changing the rules of the game”. This may tell us that he is putting these words into Ed Miliband’s mouth but I remain unclear as to what exactly is meant.

Does it mean legal and/or regulatory rules, some market intervention to change the dynamics of competition and thus the rules of the market, or the rules formed by cultural and social norms?

Should, for example, the living wage be a legal right for employees, something that is incentivised for employers by tax or other mechanisms, or something that it is considered culturally unacceptable not to respect?

Wood cites Jacob Hacker’s definition of predistribution: “a more equal distribution of economic power and rewards even before government collects taxes or pays out benefits”. Given that this would not seem to extend to incentivising the living wage through tax breaks for employers, predistribution routes to a living wage would seem to encompass enforcing it as a legal right or seeking to make it a cultural norm. The former comes with more risk of pricing workers out of employment and the later is less likely to effectively secure the living wage.

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Labour should not let Christmas cheer go to our heads

28/12/2012, 02:42:25 PM

by Jonathan Todd

As the Justice Collective were securing the Christmas Number One, a new, BBC comedy, Mr Stink, was portraying an aspirant politician as venal and self-serving. At the same time, Labour people were stressing to anyone who would listen – or at least their twitter streams – that Andrew Mitchell swore at the police.

While he admits doing so, and it is unedifying and disrespectful that he did, it seems likely that Mitchell has also been the victim of police conspiracy and perversion of justice. In which the police has been aided and abetted by a capricious media.

The suffering of Mitchell has been sincere and unjustified. It is, of course, nothing as compared with the pain and injustice visited upon the families of the 96 who died at Hillsborough on 15 April 1989. There are, however, some common themes: distortion of the truth by the police, driven by selfish motives and perpetuated by the industry whose failings Lord Leveson has catalogued in detail.

These themes transcend party politics. They char at the heart of what we are as a country: equal before the law; respectful of truth and justice; fundamentally decent.

It is virtually a truism to observe, as John Stuart Mill did, that the worth of a state, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it. If we do not have police officers that serve justice, a media that seeks truth and politicians that hold police officers and journalists to these tasks then we have a citizenry of diminished worth, failing to uphold the most essential of British values.

To quibble over a misplaced curse in these circumstances is to confuse the crudely tribal woods with the trees that form the bigger picture. It is to give in to the tendencies that characterised the mendacious and superficial candidate on Mr Stink. Nothing would have got in the way of some personal or party advantage, no matter how small, for this sharp-elbowed sort and her equally unattractive party leader.

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Everything else is a sideshow to economic growth

18/12/2012, 07:57:19 AM

by Jonathan Todd

Once you start thinking about economic growth, as the economist Robert Lucas famously said, it’s hard to think about anything else. The British paradox, however, is that, while almost all policy questions come back to growth, our politics so lacks serious thinking and debate on growth.

In 2008 Barack Obama was the new kid on the block, Rafa Benitez and Fernando Torres were loved in Liverpool and reviled in Chelsea, and Gordon Brown was mid-premiership. It was a long time ago. Yet the British economy remains 3 percent smaller than it was then. The economies of emerging Asia, in contrast, are 30 percent bigger.

We recovered more quickly in the halcyon days of the 1930s. We have had our first double dip recession since 1975. We may still have our first ever triple-dip recession.

We are progressively poorer in real terms as inflation persistently outpaces growth. The less cake there is to share the quicker we are to point the finger at those who did not prepare it; whether these are global coffee chains that do not pay their taxes or “shirkers” that do pull their weight.

The longer the cake takes to bake the more austerity we are promised. It was meant to last until 2015 and now until 2018. We are halfway through this parliament and we have five years of promised austerity ahead of us – as we did at the start of this parliament. If growth does not improve and neither the doctor nor the medicine are changed then the current rate of progress and inflexible strategy will have us facing another full parliament of austerity at the end of this one.

In fact, current trends have us facing endless austerity. Without growth we can cut as much as we like and not reduce the deficit. The longer this persists the more invidious the spending choices will become. Only the organs of the state remain when cuts have already gone to the bone.

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In yesterday’s debate, George Osborne had a clear script, Ed Balls didn’t

06/12/2012, 10:00:08 AM

by Jonathan Todd

“It was just like a budget”. This was the immediate reaction of the ever perceptive Nigel Lawson when the Daily Politics sought it soon after the Autumn statement. Ming Campbell – the only other participant on a very balanced panel – concurred. That said; they had a point. Not only was the stagecraft familiar. The content was too.

The Conservatives have a script, you see. China is rising but the skivers aren’t, so further welfare reform is needed to prevent China eating all our dinners. The global race will be won by strivers, not drunken layabouts. And reform of our schools will create a nation of strivers. That’s if Johnny Foreigner and his euro don’t do what the last government and our “mess” could not quite do and do for us good and proper.

This script has been obvious since Conservative party conference. It has, in its own parlance, stayed the course. It is no surprise, therefore, that it was served up again yesterday. That’s the thing with political scripts. Politicians disembark on one that feels right, feelings which polling confirms. Then they keep saying it and saying it and saying it some more. Finally, maybe, it hits home with the electorate. By which time, certainly, they have bored themselves and the lobby into a stupor.

It was never really in doubt, consequently, what Osborne’s key messages would be. Any sentient political observer should have long known. We know its villains: the last government and the bed we made; welfare recipients and the beds that they lie in; the rest of Europe and their siesta.

But Osborne’s heroes shun and abhor all such lazy, flabby, debt-sodden indulgence. It is the strivers that have doubled exports to major emerging economies since 2009 and created over a million jobs in the private sector since he became chancellor.

Politics is the ceaseless clash of narratives: many half-baked, most never reaching a real terminus but the endless grafting of perceptions unto realities. So, what story did Ed Balls tell in rebutting this tale of striving heroes and shirking villains?

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The debate on Osborne’s Autumn statement will, once again, ignore what really matters

04/12/2012, 07:00:37 AM

by Jonathan Todd

Is the national scandal David Cameron’s lack of inclination to implement Leveson or his failure to facilitate a similarly forensic investigation and debate on the culture, practices and ethics of the financial sector?

The central reality of Britain in 2012 is that our national wealth remains more than 3 percent below its pre-crisis peak. The Autumn statement should tell us precisely how far George Osborne’s debt and deficit targets are off track. But the core truth is obvious: our anaemic growth makes it ever harder for us to sustain the public services and quality of life we would like.

We have not been through a deeper and longer growth contraction than the notoriously grim 1930s because of Rupert Murdoch. Labour rightly insists that if Leveson is implemented then the indignities and injustices of the press will be reduced. But we have little to offer in terms of policies that will provide comparable certainty that the financial crisis of 2008 will either not happen again or not precipitate such a deleterious effect upon the wider economy if it does.

Labour has made much of Cameron’s reluctance to provide a statutory underpinning to press regulation but the call made by Michael Jacobs and Tony Wright for a judicial inquiry into the financial crash on the lines of Leveson went unheeded. Instead we had the Vickers Report, which Osborne managed to get away with partially implementing, in spite of Sir John’s insistence throughout that his recommendations will only work as a complete package.

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Preview: Tony Blair’s speech on Europe

28/11/2012, 07:00:03 AM

by Jonathan Todd

While Andrew Rawnsley reports that Ed Miliband’s speech to the CBI on the EU “leant heavily against a referendum”, Peter Mandelson recently wrote in the Financial Times that a referendum is “inevitable”. Today Tony Blair will deliver a speech in which he will argue for Britain “to be at the heart of the EU”.

For decades Labour has been pro-EU, while being vague on the role of the EU in securing our goals. Imprecision is increasingly inadequate in a fast moving debate.

Is Miliband ducking a fight that Mandelson thinks is inevitable? Will Blair’s intervention encourage Miliband to be bolder? But what exactly does he mean by “the heart of the EU”? In the Euro and the EU banking union or just leaving the door open to British membership at some stage?

It has been clear from early in this parliament that Europe would be more central to it than throughout the Blair/Brown government. But many unanswered questions remain for Labour. As they do for the Conservatives.

Michael Fabricant, dashing vice chair of the Conservative party, has given Nigel Farage an enhanced platform, much as the leadership debates in the last election brought Nick Clegg to a wider audience, by floating the idea of an electoral pact between his party and their “brothers” in UKIP.

Being a more sensible politician than Fabricant, Farage is holding out for as much as possible. He was on the Daily Politics on Monday; fully twelve hours after Fabricant went public with his cunning plan. He wanted an apology from the prime minister for his comments on UKIP following the Rotherham fostering farrago – a strong showing from UKIP in the Rotherham by-election will help Farage and the fostering issue plays into his hands. He was also pushing Tory troublemakers in the direction of Michael Gove, the member of the cabinet seemingly most sanguine about the UK leaving the EU.

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Sunday Review on Monday: Bill Clinton at policy network

19/11/2012, 07:00:52 AM

by Jonathan Todd

In the closing stages of the US presidential election Joe Klein voiced “the frustration that many informed voters have had with this race: Romney’s proposals for the next four years are ridiculous; the President’s are nonexistent … The vast majority of people in the vast majority of states are irrelevant to the process. The campaigns brag about their ability to microtarget voters. That is precisely what we’ve gotten: a whole lot of micro at a time when macro is sorely needed.”

Now that the Republicans have thrown all they could at Barack Obama, securing less popular votes for Mitt Romney than John McCain managed after the nadir of George W Bush and failing to deny the Democrats another four years in the White House, it seems almost churlish to revisit Klein’s moans.

But Bill Clinton brought them to mind last Thursday night at Policy Network and Global Progress’ launch of a major programme of transatlantic political dialogue. While full of praise for Obama’s hyper-efficient machine, which “knew the names of all undecided voters, the names of their children and their TV viewing habits”, Clinton stressed the continued importance of the macro vision that Klein felt was lost this year.

He argued that tough economic conditions set Obama a testing re-election challenge, meaning that he had to utilise every advantage, including micro-targeting of voters so precise as to outdo the slickest corporate campaigns. Progressives should, however, seek to hold the centre, as this will deliver a majority of support, irrespective of micro-targeting.

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Labour will only win the economic argument when we make it about the future, not the past

12/11/2012, 07:00:02 AM

by Jonathan Todd

The return of the British economy to growth and president Obama to the White House both suggest that Labour will only decisively win the economic argument when it is primarily about the future, not the past.

While welcoming the economy’s recovery, Labour claims output has been foregone due to the government cutting too far, too fast. This frames the economic debate as being about faulty decisions of autumn 2010 by George Osborne and their consequences over the next two years. As much as the celebrated speech of Ed Balls at Bloomberg in August 2010 is vindicated by events over this period, framing the debate in this way invites the question: Why was the government’s fiscal consolidation programme deemed necessary?

Of course, Osborne then cites the reckless profligacy of Labour. Equally obviously, we contend that this programme was unnecessary and the cause of the recession “made in Downing Street”. What may be less apparent is that, no matter how intellectually justified the Bloomberg speech, arguing about past decisions asks the public to reconsider events over which they have a settled mind.

They would have voted differently at the last election were they convinced that Labour had credible and effective plans for public spending. Especially given the pain that government spending decisions have since brought, it is understandable that we find it difficult to concede this. But a strategy for winning the next election predicated upon the electorate reversing a verdict given at the last election rarely works.

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