Blairites on the march as Miliband falters

Political turmoil is not just engulfing the Tory Party over an in/out referendum on Europe. It is about to break over Labour in a big way as its Blairite wing gears up for a massive push against what they consider a weak Ed Miliband leadership.

Progress, the unashamedly New Labour pressure group, is not affiliated to the party but exerts considerable influence. So much so that the GMB union once tried to get the party conference to ban Progress.

That move came to nothing, but the trade unions still consider Progress as a “party inside a party”. They are not far wrong there. Chairman of Progress is shadow education minister Stephen Twigg, whose policies are hardly distinguishable from those of Tory secretary of state Michael Gove.

Twigg is one of four open Blairites inside the shadow cabinet. The others are Douglas Alexander, Jim Murphy and Liam Byrne, whose support for the ConDem coalition’s “welfare reform” is viewed with horror by disability groups and benefits campaigners.

With the prompting stage right of former prime minister Tony Blair himself, David Blunkett and Lord Mandelson, the Progress group want Miliband to take “tough decisions” on the economy to show the electorate he means business.

Of course, while they were in power, the Blairites took the softest approach possible. They encouraged the City of London to run riot through self-regulation and helped to create the conditions that led to the financial crash that began in the autumn of 2007.

Never mind about that. Progress has commissioned a poll which backs up their view that the party is still seen as “nice” but incapable of being “tough” in a crisis. YouGov president Peter Kellner described the polling as "profoundly troubling" for Labour.

He added: "The central fact is that no successful opposition in the past 50 years has gone on to regain power with such a weak image and without achieving much bigger voting-intention leads at some point in the parliament."

So Miliband’s attempt to rebrand Labour as the party of “responsible capitalism” and in favour of “predistribution” whereby employers get money to pay workers a “living wage”, have fallen on deaf ears as far as voters are concerned.

The middle-classes undoubtedly find it all too vague while working class voters struggling to make ends meet as austerity bite hard, are unimpressed for other reasons.

The trade unions who stumped up the cash to get Ed elected over his Blairite brother David should – but probably won’t be – shocked.  They have been pinning their hopes on a majority Labour government coming to power in 2015 and riding to the rescue of their hard-pressed members. That prospect seems more unlikely with each passing day.

Instead, the Blairites are back in business. In truth, they never left the stage. They remade Labour as a party that embraced globalised capitalism and the market-driven economy. For all Miliband’s huffing and puffing, that’s where Labour remains to this day.

It’s likely to get worse. The infighting inside the Tory Party over whether to announce a referendum on European Union membership reflects the growing presence of the right-wing populist Ukip party. Labour is already adapting to Ukip on immigration and will be tempted to respond with a shift on its EU policy. That will only enrage the Blairites further.

All in all, the mainstream political parties are increasingly as discredited as the political system they operate within. The opportunity to create a movement that is fresh and, above all, democratic that can free society from the grip of the banks and corporations should not be passed up.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

McCluskey lets Miliband off the hook

What are we to make of the spat between Len McCluskey, the leader of Britain’s biggest union and Ed Miliband, leader of the Labour Party who in large measures owes his very position to the man he has publicly castigated?

McCluskey wants Miliband to rid his leadership of three Blairite members of the shadow cabinet or risk losing the next election. For his part, Miliband has attacked McCluskey for a “reprehensible” attempt to divide the Labour and of being “disloyal” to the party.

Wary of attempts by the right-wing press to portray him as a creature of the unions, a spokesman for Miliband added for good measure that McCluskey "does not speak for the Labour Party".

The charge sheet against McCluskey was further extended to accuse him of advocating “the kind of politics that lost Labour many elections in the 1980s”. Considering that McCluskey’s Unite provides 20% of the funding for Labour, it’s a high-risk quarrel.

Miliband is surely aware, however, that McCluskey is unlikely to turn his words into actions anytime soon. And here’s where McCluskey is somewhat disingenuous. In his interview with the New Statesman, McCluskey says his recent re-election as general secretary means the union will be checking up on Labour up to after the next election.

But when McCluskey suggests Miliband must spending many an hour worrying about how to neuter the influence of the Blairites, he has got it 100% wrong. Miliband, it is true, has tried to distance himself a little from the Blair-Brown governments, of which he was a member. But in essence, Miliband is no different in outlook.

Under his leadership, Labour has adopted policies and attitudes which Unite is actually opposed to. These include the acceptance of the ConDems’ public sector pay freeze, cuts in services and jobs at local government level, opposition to strike action in defence of pensions, etc. etc. etc.

As Miliband’s statement says, he believes McCluskey is advocating the politics of the 1980s, which Labour has rejected. Instead, Miliband has embraced “responsible capitalism” as a goal, pre-distribution rather than redistribution (I’ll leave you to ponder that one), workfare and reducing the national debt. He is also vying with Ukip and the Tories to adopt anti-immigration postures and has no plans to end the role of the markets in public services and the NHS.

This is Blairism Mark II, the hunt for the so-called “centre ground” in British politics, which is now overcrowded with politicians from the all the mainstream parties putting forward more or less the same policies.

McCluskey must know this. Indeed, he refers to the dangers of Miliband going into an election with “austerity-lite” policies. But by choosing to attack Blairites like Douglas Alexander, Jim Murphy and Liam Byrne, he evades the reality of Miliband’s own leadership and what Labour has irrefutably become.

McCluskey claims that Labour is “at a crossroads” when in fact it passed them a long time ago. Neoliberalism isn’t, whatever McCluskey might suggest, a product of Blairism. Rather, it was the other way round. Blair, like Thatcher before him, responded to the changes in the capitalist system.

Globalisation demanded deregulation and open markets. States and governments fell into line because, ultimately, they serve the same master – the bottom line. The era that went before – top-down state ownership, heavy bureaucracy, capital controls, regulation etc – was swept aside and cannot be reproduced.

Miliband is no fool and he knows this. Having seen what’s happened to Francois Hollande across the Channel, where attempts to rein in capitalism have floundered, Miliband is not about to go down the same path. So when McCluskey says that if Labour fails to emerge as “the authentic voice of ordinary working people” his union would reconsider its position, he is a long way behind what’s already happened.

Unite stumped up the cash to get Miliband elected ahead of his brother after the last election. The political return on capital invested is so negligible that his membership must wonder why they continue to fund Labour. McCluskey is undoubtedly feeling the pressure from his rank-and-file. That’s why he’s spoken out. Now he owes them a debate about where their money goes right now, not at some distant point in the future.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Beyond New Labour's civil war

The thing about the civil war that is now consuming New Labour is that it is absolutely impossible to take sides. For not even the most powerful microscope in the world would reveal a microbe of a principle in any camp.

On the one side there are the Brownites, whose protagonist is congenitally incapable of leadership or clarity. His policies shaped the first decade of New Labour, with its mixture of privatisation, unworkable means-tested benefits, rising inequality and worship of global markets.

On the other side are the Blairites, who brought us privatisation, the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, the “war on terror”, rising inequality and worship of global markets. They oppose Brown because he is not Blair and want more extreme pro-market policies. Having watched Brown plot against Blair, they are giving him the same treatment.

And yet these are the people who daily promote “choice” as the way forward! And if there is to be a leadership contest, both sides will no doubt unite to prevent John McDonnell, the lone left-wing voice, from getting on the ballot as they did last year.

The background to the crisis is, of course, the fact that former loyal supporters and the electorate in general, have rumbled New Labour for what it is and the party is facing oblivion. That was the message from Glasgow East, where some of the people most left behind by New Labour turned in despair to the nationalists.

Blair/Brownism is Thatcherism by another name, only deeper and much more dishonest. New Labour has gone where the Tories did not dare in NHS privatisation, the break-up of comprehensive education, attacks on benefits, witch-hunting of asylum seekers, student fees, post office closures and the elimination of human rights.

No amount of leadership changes or revamped policies can disguise this agenda, which has gone a long way to creating a market state in place of the welfare state that, ironically, Labour in its previous incarnation established after World War II. Nor is all this simply the result of policy “mistakes” but is the reflection in politics of the deeper process of corporate-driven globalisation which has eliminated the basis of reformist politics.

New Labour’s demise is truly the end of an era in British politics and if you doubt that, just look at what is happening in Scotland. Brown is nominally the leader of the party in Scotland as well as England. But you wouldn’t think so, judging by the battle to become New Labour’s leader in the Scottish parliament.

Tom McCabe, a former minister, yesterday called for the next leader to have "complete control" of the Scottish party, including Labour's MPs at Westminster. Adopting policies promoted by the Scottish National Party, McCabe said council tax should be abolished and the Edinburgh parliament be given tax-raising powers.

McCabe added: "For too long, there have been Scottish Labour politicians at local government level and at Westminster who have been resentful, and even contemptuous, of the Scottish Parliament. That behaviour needs to stop now." What McCabe is proposing would end Labour’s historic form as a unified party covering England, Scotland and Wales.

As to the leadership contest itself, bitter in-fighting has erupted between the three candidates’ rival camps. A senior member of the Andy Kerr team launched an attack on Cathy Jamieson, dismissing her as a left-wing “cave woman”. Nice.

While the break-up of New Labour is not a time for weeping, it provides a unique opportunity for discussion about how the aspirations of the disenfranchised majority can be reflected in new political forms. Added urgency is given by the onset of recession, combined with soaring utility bills and a housing crisis.

Some unions like the RMT transport workers and the firefighters in the FBU are no longer affiliated to New Labour but are opposed to the Tories coming back. These unions have an obligation to get together with John McDonnell and others and organise this debate now.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor