Miliband's 'epiphany' clear victory for Mammon

And Mammon spoke. Let there be just one party that worships me. And lo and behold, the ConDemLab party came to pass. Some people were astonished and many declared in a firm voice: “We will not vote for this party. But who will represent us now?”

Who indeed. Ed Miliband’s acceptance yesterday of ConDem budget cuts for 2015-16, Labour’s refusal to restore child benefits to all, the attack on older people’s fuel allowances and the party’s plan to cap the overall benefits bill is clear enough.

Having previously stated that child benefit is “an important bedrock of our society”,  Miliband said it would not be a priority to restore it to higher earners. This not only accepts the ConDem cuts but just as significantly abandons the principle of universalism in favour of means testing.

The demonising of the unemployed will continue. Unemployed people with children aged three to four will lose benefits if they do not prepare for work.

RIP Welfare State.

Miliband’s capitulation is, essentially, to Mammon, to the financial markets that dictated first the formation of the Coalition in 2010 and that since then have threatened just about every government running a budget deficit that wasn’t cutting fast enough.

So the Labour leader pledged to match Tory plans to cut the welfare bill. Speaking in one of the poorest parts of Britain in East London, he declared: “The next Labour government will have less money to spend . . . Social security spending, vital as it is, cannot be exempt from that discipline.”

Incapacity and housing benefit spending will be targeted while employers would be offered a state subsidy to encourage them to pay higher wages. This is “responsible capitalism” at the taxpayers’ expense. What a joke.

So you will not be surprised to learn that the Financial Times, the official mouthpiece of Mammon, welcomed Miliband’s conversion on the road to the money-lenders’ temple. Its editorial talked of Miliband’s “epiphany”, adding: “The Labour leader has made a welcome step towards credibility. He still needs to do more.”

And from the Blairite think-tank Progress, there was praised from co-founder Paul Richards, who said there had been a new “re-engagement with reality”. The Blairites, who never really went away, have their mouthpiece in the shape of Miliband as well as several cuckoos group in the shadow cabinet nest

Which leaves Miliband’s main backers in the trade union bureaucracy with eggs all over their face. Only the other week, Ed McCluskey, the leader of Unite which bankrolled Miliband’s election as leader, was raging against the Blairite influence in the party. Miliband rebuked him and yesterday McCluskey rolled over like the pussycat he is.

In an obviously pre-prepared statement, McCluskey claimed that Miliband’s speech “offers hope that there is an alternative to George Osborne's punishing experiment with the national economy”. He must have been referring to some other secret speech we know nothing about.

And Paul Kenny of the GMB union, who has also been critical in the past, lauded Miliband’s policy for “dealing with the housing benefit scandal”. The real scandal here, however, is that social housing rents soared under New Labour. Council rents in London rose 60% and housing association rents in the capital almost doubled between 1997-2010. This was entirely the result of government policy. In the end, you had to be on benefits to be to live in a property charging £400 a month.

When Miliband was elected in 2010, some people told us there was now a unique opportunity to “recapture” the Labour Party from the Blairites and win back the support of working people. How wrong was that scenario!

Labour under Miliband has reaffirmed its commitment to markets, capitalism, austerity, the cuts, extending the pensionable age, public sector pay freezes and a variety of other ConDem policies. In 2015, the electorate will be offered more or the less the same by the mainstream parties within a pretty rotten, undemocratic political system.

This is truly an historic crisis of political democracy as well as economy which we have to address with bold, revolutionary ideas and policies.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Crisis in the cathedral

The resignation of the dean of St Paul’s over the occupation outside his front door tells us a great deal about the deepening ideological crisis inside the establishment and the fragility of its institutions.

Graeme Knowles quit because he simply couldn’t bear the criticism that followed the cathedral’s decision to align itself with the medieval City of London Corporation’s legal moves to clear the area of tents and people. Last week he lost his canon, Giles Fraser, and another senior cleric who took an opposite stand.

The dean is so elevated in the church hierarchy that whoever fills the position requires the approval of the queen herself. So Knowles’ decision to quit is no small matter, leaving a vacuum temporarily filled by the hard-line bishop of London.

St Paul’s wanted to look both ways. Being adjacent to the stock exchange, from which the occupation movement was barred, and within spitting distance of a financial artery of global capitalism, it tried dialogue between God and Mammon.

But the accumulation of wealth is not and will never be a moral question, not principally one of greed or corruption – although they play their part. The financial system has deeper structural foundations in the nature of capitalism itself, in the relentless, unstoppable drive for profit.

The dialogue has come to an abrupt halt. The cathedral is with Mammon, as historically it always has been. The Church of England is the established church for good reasons. It has, with a few dissenters along the way, sanctified monarchy, privilege, war and colonialism in its time.

“What would Jesus do”, reads one banner outside St Paul’s. He certainly wouldn’t have built great monuments like cathedrals to hold people in awe and watch while the church became part of the established order. But that’s another story.

No doubt the benefactors of St Paul’s in the shape of the City’s institutions played a role in preventing publication last week of a report by the cathedral into corporate and financial excess. It would have only inflamed the occupation.

Nevertheless, the right-wing press is enraged by the laughing stock St Paul’s has become. First it shut its doors on secret “health and safety” grounds; then it reopened them to tourists willing to cough up £14.50 to get in. Now the dean can’t stand the heat and has departed.

As Mark Field, Tory MP for Cities of London and Westminster, remarked: “The whole thing is farcical. You couldn’t make it up. It’s gone from the sublime to the ridiculous… Ironically, the only capitalist organisation that has lost out is St Paul’s. I suspect that these resignations will only ensure that these protesters become more entrenched.”

The disarray at the top of society is to be welcomed. Every crack, every rupture weakens the ideological edifice that helps to hold people in check, to convince working people that life is fate, that capitalism is the centre of the known universe and will remain so eternally. Amen.

We are pushing at an open door and the occupation movement should lift its horizons to take advantage of the tumult within the state and its institutions. This furore is the product of a profound, historical crisis in global capitalism which august bodies like the International Labour Organisation fear will produce social confrontation in many countries.

As the occupation at St Paul’s originally insisted, the system is unsustainable and undemocratic. Even if you could – and it’s a big if – open up the way the City of London Corporation functions, for example, what difference would that make? None.

The way forward is through the people’s assemblies concept, turning them from street meetings into permanent structures in every community that can eventually become the basis of a new sovereign, democratic power. Our focus has to be on deep-going structural political and economic change that takes us beyond capitalism and profit.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor