Miliband's praise for Thatcher says it all

Following Ed Miliband’s speeches is a thankless task for a number of reasons. They are more often than not vague and full of phrases devoid of any obvious content. But dig a little deeper and you will find an agenda that promises a reactionary continuity in British politics.

The assault on British society that began under the Margaret Thatcher governments was carried further by New Labour from 1997-2010 and has subsequently been deepened by the ConDems. Miliband has signalled he will continue that work should next year’s election send him to Downing Street.

Last night’s lecture at The Guardian positioned the Labour leader in a line stretching all the way back to Thatcher’s governments. He praised the most destructive of prime ministers for her “sense of purpose” in driving through change, although he declined to spell out what that meant for communities all over Britain.

Miliband then outlined a programme of “public service reform” that the Blairites will be cheering. Their “reform” consisted largely of outsourcing vast areas of public spending and decision-making to the private sector in a one-sided “partnership” with the state, where the corporations always win out.

In education, this took the malign form of “academies”. These schools are essentially run by private companies outside of local authority control and are but one step away from being driven by profit making. So Miliband’s promise to give parents power to call poor-performing schools to account is nonsense because the academy system will be left in place under a future Labour government.

So too will the wrecking policies of the ConDems with regard to the National Health Service. Instead of reversing them, a future Miliband government would simply add local people to the commissioning groups of GPs that now hold the purse strings and are busily handing out contracts to the private sector.

And so it goes on. As for the surveillance state developed by New Labour and finessed by the ConDems, Miliband simply wants a “US-style debate” – whatever that is – on the gathering of personal data by the security agencies. Well, they’ve had the debate in the US and the official line is that Edward Snowden is a traitor who has betrayed his country through his whistle blowing while Chelsea Manning is locked up in prison.

Lest anyone thinks that Miliband is a threat to the state with his call to make it “accountable”, his remarks about the role of the British intelligence agencies will clear that up. He said: “My starting point in this is the intelligence services do an important job. As somebody who wants to be the prime minister of this country I know that they do an important job in seeking to keep us safe.”

That’s alright then. A little more “oversight” and we’ll all feel happier while safe in our beds at night. Meanwhile, the surveillance will continue to target legitimate protests and actions against government policies.

Only last week, Miliband won support for changes to the party’s relations with the trade unions that were a deepening of the project launched by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown back in the early 1990s. The collective approach has given way to the individualism first championed in a serious way by Thatcher.

This week he has pledged political and financial continuity, reaffirming last night that a future Labour government would make sharp spending cuts in line with ConDem budget plans. So when it comes to next year’s general election, an application of the “consumer choice” approach will invite us to hang on to our votes rather than wasting them on any of the mainstream parties. The argument that One Nation Labour will be better than the Tories is shallow and totally unconvincing.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Getting beyond dead end parliamentary politics

Positioning yourself to the left of One Nation Labour, as it now prefers to be known, is an easy enough task. Building a new party that can mount a successful electoral challenge to Ed Miliband’s austerity-lite “responsible capitalism” crew is more fraught.

Left Unity, launched at a weekend conference, has set out along a parliamentary road which many others continue to tramp. It’s a crowded space that already includes the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, Respect and the Socialist Labour Party.

An initiative launched by former members of Respect, leading ex-members of the Socialist Workers Party and other organisations, with film director Ken Loach, Left Unity has expressed the desire for a change and a way out of a political logjam.

The impasse is not, however, simply the result of the convergence of the three mainstream parties around the imperatives of the capitalist market economy, which stubbornly remains in recession. The blockage is also a constitutional one, with the parliamentary state a clear obstacle to further social progress.

Disengagement, dissatisfaction, distaste, despair, disgust – they all express the degree to which a majority of new generations and a substantial minority of older people have switched off from the present political process. You can’t say it often enough but that’s why Russell Brand’s tirade against the system has had 10 million views on YouTube.

Although couched in negative terms, these sentiments present an historic opportunity to advocate a revolutionary political roadmap. It’s a moment to put forward new forms of real democracy, participatory and direct, that go beyond the compromised representative system and to debate how we get from A to B.

Left Unity, unfortunately, passed up that chance. A clear majority favoured a “broad left”, non-revolutionary approach that sidelines the vital issue of the state and political democracy. The new party hopes, instead, to capture votes from disillusioned Labour supporters at the next election. Some even see the party as a the “left’s Ukip” in its potential to win votes from the disaffected.

This is a fundamental misjudgement of where we are today. Instead of reinforcing the parliamentary status quo by proposing a “left” version of what we have already, this is a historic opportunity to put forward alternatives for a different relationship of state to people. That means a different kind of state altogether. Not of voters who have no power – a democracy in name only – but where people can determine their own futures within a new constitutional settlement.

In Scotland, the constitutional issue has come to the fore as a result of the independence campaign, which Steve Freeman pointed out in moving his Republican Socialist platform. A movement has emerged around the referendum which is faced with what kind of constitution Scotland should have if it is to achieve an independence which is anything more than a transfer of power to another elite.

Throughout Europe, the capitalist state has enforced austerity, sometimes relying on the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank to browbeat elected governments. Repeated general strikes in Greece and elsewhere have failed to dent this arrangement. Coalitions of the left like Syrizia in Greece (which Left Unity sees as an example to follow) have failed to distinguish themselves .

The plain fact is that support for all political parties is plummeting, partly because they are identified with the status quo. Increasing numbers clearly feel that the existing parliamentary parties have little relevance to the realities of their life and that voting will not change things.

This has created a crisis of legitimacy for the existing political structures and therefore for the state itself. That process was behind the formation of the Occupy and movements in Spain, Brazil, Turkey and the Arab Spring itself.

The major challenge for all of us, not just Left Unity, is to deepen our understanding of where we are in history, analysing the diverse impacts of corporate-driven globalisation on politics, the economy and the eco-system and demonstrating how a return to the Labour of 1945 is impossible.

We have an obligation to put forward comprehensive alternatives whose content is a transition beyond capitalism. Thinking about and working on what kind of democratic, networked organisations are needed to reflect these aspirations and support their achievement is where we should direct our energy.

Corinna Lotz and Paul Feldman

Tax breaks for 'living wage' will reinforce inequality

If Ed Miliband believes that giving employers a tax break to pay the “living wage” will restore, in his words, the broken link between “growth and prosperity”, he is even more cynical and opportunist than we thought.

The first thing to say is that the Miliband proposal is a direct transfer of wealth from taxpayers to bosses who pay paltry wages. They would get a get a tax refund if they agreed to pay the living wage rate. This is state-sponsored and funded capitalism at our expense.

Whether you can actually live on £7.65 an hour, which is the new rate outside London, is questionable. More like a subsistence wage than a living one. Even the £8.80 an hour rate in London won’t get you very far after housing, energy and transport costs.

Leaving that aside for the moment, Miliband bemoans the disconnect between increased economic wealth and living standards as if this was something new, or the result of the economic storm clouds that that broke in 2008.

Yet this process of deepening inequality has been going on for much longer than the three years – it seems like a lifetime – that the ConDems have been punishing ordinary people with their austerity policies.

Miliband has borrowed the idea of a tax incentive for employers from the Resolution Foundation, which researches into low pay. But in a report last year, the organisation’s Commission on Living Standards notes that even in the boom years leading up to 2008, incomes were “faltering for a broad swath of

working households”. The report adds: 

“GDP growth was strong, employment was high and inflation was moderate. Yet from 2003 to 2008 median wages flat-lined, average disposable incomes fell in every English region outside London and spikes in the prices of essential goods squeezed family budgets. What happened in these years broke the familiar rhythm of growth and gain for ordinary working households.” 

This “pre-crisis stagnation”, as the report describes it, was echoed in other countries, most notably the United States where wages have been stagnant for a generation, while even in Germany and Canada they’ve barely risen while the share of national wealth going to profits soared. Shifts in the nature of inflation – with energy and staple food goods hitting the average earner hardest – have intensified the cut in living standards. 

“By the time the crisis struck, these shifts in the nature of inflation meant that low to middle income households were typically paying a £400 premium on their annual shopping bills compared with those on higher incomes.” 

What the Resolution Foundation is describing is the impact of the credit-driven, low-wage period of corporate and financial globalisation. During this period from the late 1980s onwards, trade unions were weakened, wages driven down, jobs exported and many public services contracted out to the private sector.

The easy availability of cheap credit and house-price inflation disguised what was happening, until the bubble burst. Now it’s pay-day loans, charity and pound shops and two or three low-wage jobs to make ends meet. Miliband, of course, was a member of New Labour governments whose policies helped create these appalling social consequences of rampant capitalism.

Without the slightest acknowledgement of his own responsibility for where we are, Miliband has set himself the task of saving the system from itself should his populist, pro-capitalism One Nation Labour win the 2015 election.

But anyone with the slightest acquaintance with economics will know that employers will take a tax break and pass on any extra costs in price rises. And if wages rise in this way, the low paid will face a reduction in various state benefits.

The reality is that inequality in Britain is worse than ever because a system in profound post-globalisation crisis knows no other way. Super-exploitation is here to stay until we find a way to go beyond capitalism itself.

  

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Move over Ukip, One Nation Labour is the real deal

Move over Nigel Farage and your eurosceptic-patriotic Ukip outfit. If you want real social populism (as opposed to social-ism), Ed Miliband and his One Nation Labour are the better brand, or so he would like you to believe.

If you think that “Britain can do better than this”, Miliband will lead the way. In fact, he used the phrase no fewer than 17 times during his speech yesterday.

One Nation Labour is to become a party of small business and angry consumers, raging at the energy corporations (while leaving them in control), threatening land owners and praising the armed forces.

Above all, it’s British. So the Scots have to join in, and forget dreams of independence which, if achieved, would prevent Britain from “doing better than this”.

After setting out to overturn the roots of the party of labour by severing its formal connections with the trades unions, Miliband is on a rebranding exercise which must have his Marxist father turning in his grave.

And - we must presume from the rapturous standing ovation greeting his confident, hour long speech - he has the agreement and support of the majority if not all of the delegates present.

The emphatic turn to nationalism was already evident way back in 2007 in the days of Gordon “British jobs for British workers” Brown. But Miliband’s One Nation Labour is frankly breathtaking. The word xenophobia comes to mind.

Just so we all know where his allegiances lie, Miliband opened with a heartfelt tribute to “our troops” and “our brave police”. Hundreds of thousands of former miners who battled the police in 1984 in defence of jobs will take note.  

Now the new “mass membership” party stands up for 1.5 million small businesses (good) against the strong, vested interests identified as Rupert Murdoch, and the six big suppliers of gas and electricity (bad).

Miliband’s view is as narrow and blinkered as it is possible to be. The world outside the United Kingdom consists only of the unmentioned, unidentified “others” who are to be defeated in the “race to the top”, plus cheap labour shipped in by recruitment agencies and gangmasters. Does he mean China? The US? Germany?

How the race to the top victory is to be achieved without driving wage levels to the global minimum must remain a mystery. All that’s proposed is a mandatory charitable donation from big to small businesses and a form of barter, trading apprenticeships for immigrant labour.

Somehow, exports will increase and Britain will become great. Again. Rule Britannia.

The One Nation populist appeal is clearly designed to outflank Ukip – way out on the right wing. It’s a real mystery why some are attempting to label Ed as “red”. Just for proposing to regulate the energy market?

What was missing from the speech was much more interesting than what we actually heard.

Apart from the slow pace of “recovery”, no mention of the global crisis, no mention of Europe, the US, China, Africa, the Middle East, anywhere at all. And no mention of capitalism, naturally.

Nothing about the majority of non-tax paying global corporations who laugh in the face of national governments, of which Amazon and Google are just the most famous.

And, bizarrely missing from the demagogic message, was anything bar a passing favourable mention of the banks, some of whom it seems pay a living wage!

Nationalism? Support for the little man, the small business? As the Financial Times noted in assessing Miliband’s speech: “There is whiff of Poujadiste populism about all this.” Pierre Poujade led a briefly successful right-wing populist movement of small traders and peasants against the Paris elite in the 1950s.

One Nation Labour is in a naked bidding war for votes, playing the nationalist card to rally a disillusioned public, in a shameless effort to win the 2015 election with policies snatched out of the air.

With the electorate’s disdain for Westminster, big business and the rich growing at a rate of knots, Miliband wants to cash in on widespread discontent. Be warned: One Nation Labour populism is a dangerous road to go down.   

Gerry Gold

Labour in race to the bottom over immigration

Ed Miliband says he wants to halt the “race to the bottom” in wages, jobs and employment rights. Fine sentiments, except that when it comes down to policies, Labour is in its very own race to the bottom over immigration.

On Friday, Nigel Farage, the leader of the nationalist-populist Ukip, blamed migrant workers from Eastern Europe for many of Britain’s woes. He ludicrously claimed that “Romanian crime gangs” were at the centre of a London crime wave. Farage demanded action to prevent the free movement of Romanian workers into Britain from January 1 under European Union rules.

Less than 48 hours later, Miliband and his immigrant spokesperson Chris Bryant were at it. Trailed in the media as a policy that offered “a Brit job for each foreign worker hired”, Miliband was quoted as saying: “Any firm that wants to bring in a foreign worker from outside the EU will also have to train up someone who is a local worker."

In a rambling interview with Andrew Marr, the Labour leader added: "I do want to get low skill immigration down and therefore overall immigration down, yes. In our first year in office we will legislate for an immigration bill which has secure control of our borders, cracks down on exploitation of workers coming here undercutting workers already here.” For good measure, Bryant in an article for the Huffington Post, warned about the dangers of a “growing reliance on overseas workers”.

All this is pandering to the most reactionary point of view, that workers’ wages have been driven down by cheap labour from other countries. This is nationalism pure and simple, looking for a scapegoat when the causes are to be found in the economic system itself.

Miliband – first generation British, by the way from a family that fled Nazi persecution – implies that if low skilled workers are blocked off, wages would rise in proportion. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. How, for example, does Labour explain that in earlier periods of mass immigration to Britain, in the 1950s and 60s, wages did not fall and unemployment was relatively low?

The movement of workers is an expression of the globalisation of the capitalist economy that has happened largely at the expense of wages, conditions and jobs in every country, including the United States. Here, average weekly earnings are still 14% below their peak achieved in 1972, having fallen 40 years in a row.

In Britain, as the power of globalised capital to dictate to governments and trade unions grew, so the share of wealth going to workers actually fell. The wage share of annual national income (GDP) reached a high of 64.5% in 1975, falling to a record post-war low of 51.7% in 1996 and was 53.2% in 2008 – close to where it was more than a decade before

As the 2009 TUC report Unfair to Middling explained: “The declining wage share has been driven by the introduction of flexible labour markets since the 1980s (with the paring back of employment protection rules); economic liberalisation (including privatisation); the increasing constraints on collective bargaining; a reduction in the demand for unskilled labour resulting from technical change; and the global transfer of jobs triggered by globalisation.”

And in another report, The Great Wages Grab, the TUC found that by 2010 the average full time person in work would be paid £7,000 more than they actually were if wages had kept up with economic growth and “if the best paid had not increased their wages at the expense of everyone else”.

And this was after 13 years of New Labour governments!

Miliband’s shameful race to the bottom over race and immigration is already suffering internal contradictions. The original policy of getting employers to offer an apprenticeship to a local person for every “foreign worker” hired has fallen foul of the requirement to make jobs available to workers from all European Union member states.

With living standards for most falling away rapidly – a situation certain to worsen when fuel and transport costs rise sharply in the next few months – Miliband and Labour are looking for anyone but capitalism to blame. One Nation Labour is as reactionary as its new name would suggest.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

   

One Nation Labour is Blairism Mark II

Over the weekend, rebranded One Nation Labour will almost certainly vote for proposals to end the historic relationship between the trade unions and the party they founded over a century ago.

When One Nation Labour assembles in Brighton for its annual conference, they will have before them a slim document from former general secretary Ray Collins. Vaguely worded, it calls for a consultation on changes that are essentially already on their way.

Dubbed as an interim report, Building A One Nation Labour Party is designed to get the trade unions to act like turkeys and vote for Christmas. Behind the bland words about Ed Miliband wanting to “mend not end” the relations with trade unionists, there is another agenda.

The Labour leader can’t be a One Nation politician – he has borrowed the idea from the 19th century Tory prime minister Benjamin Disraeli who claimed he was representing all classes – until he distances himself from “special interest” groups.

These are now seen as including the trade unions, who represent six million working men and women in Britain and their families. Up until now, those in unions affiliated to Labour have had part of their subs transferred to the party, giving them a nominal membership.

Responding to Tory jibes about “being in the pocket of the unions” – in reality, nothing could be further from the truth – Miliband wants to replace this arrangement. In future, trade unionists will have to personally join Labour. No matter that the party will lose up to £9 million a year in subs this way – this is One Nation Labour in practice.

Some unions like the GMB and Unison have expressed their opposition. But what’s the betting they endorse the Collins’ report on Sunday, paving the way for a special conference next March to ratify concrete rule changes?

After all, that’s what they did in 1995, when the then leader Tony Blair and his deputy Gordon Brown told the unions that dropping the commitment to socialism in the party’s constitution would help them to win the general election. Miliband is saying the same thing.

Tellingly, Collins sees the change in the relationship with the trade unions as part of the process that the Blairites began, with his report saying: “Importantly, these proposals go with the grain of the last big reforms of the Labour [Party] 20 years ago.”

In fact, what’s the difference between Miliband and Blair in their approach to politics? Not much in essence. At the 2004 Labour conference, Blair pledged to put “power, wealth and opportunity in the hands of the many, not the few”. For good measure, he added: “It is New Labour that now wears the one nation mantle.”

So when Miliband told the Trades Union Congress that “change must happen” and that this was “only way to build a truly One Nation party so we can build a One Nation country", he was telling us nothing new. He wears a hollow crown.

Either as New Labour or One Nation Labour, it’s the same grand deception. Miliband, like Blair and Brown before him, believes that ordinary people can somehow benefit from a ruthless market capitalism, with a few adjustments made here and there.

Miliband’s One Nation nonsense is founded on his vision of a “responsible capitalism” which will pay higher wages because it’s somehow good for the economy. Yet there are many Britains, many nations: the stinking rich living in luxury homes and ordinary people falling behind with their rent because of the bedroom tax; global corporations and their shareholders on the one side and those on zero hours contracts on the other; the wealthy with their hold on the political process and an electorate whose votes count for little.

None of this will change while we continue to live in a class-divided society.

As Labour gathers, some polls put the hated Tories on level pegging. In the end, you need a microscope to spot the difference between the original One Nation party and the pretenders to the throne.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor