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

Labour is Coalition Lite

So the race to the bottom continues as Labour and the Tories try to outflank each other by getting tough with the unemployed, the disabled and “benefit scroungers” in general. How will the readers of the Daily Mail and other right-wing papers distinguish between the two?

It’s a question made more difficult by today’s announcement by Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor and his colleague Liam Byrne. Balls, who devoted his time in the New Labour government to deregulating the banks, says the long-term unemployed will have to take a designated job or lose their benefits if his party is returned to power.

The private sector will be given the money by the state to employ people for six months at the minimum wage. Labour would fund the scheme by reducing pension scheme tax deductions claimed by high earners. Labour’s workfare proposal is a variation of schemes already in operation by the Coalition government under which many claimants have to work for their benefits.

Labour is, in essence, Coalition Lite.

Balls’ scheme has nothing to do with solving unemployment as a social question and everything to do with impressing “swing voters”. Demonising vulnerable groups like the jobless and the disabled who depend on state benefits is always considered good for a few votes.

Labour's shadow work and pensions spokesman Byrne said the long-term unemployed needed to be "working or training and not claiming". Ah, music to the ears of Angry of Surbiton. "There is a vital principle at stake here," he added. Yes, there is Byrne. It’s called taking out on the poor and disadvantaged.

Not that Labour needs an economic crisis to launch its reactionary ideas. During 13 years in government, the Blair regimes set about “reforming welfare” along the lines they had picked up from the Clinton administrations in America.

Social security as a percentage of GDP fell. Many benefits for lone parents were terminated. Out went the Department for Social Security in favour of Work and Pensions, relegating the concept of the welfare state to the past. Directly in the firing line

were people claiming disability benefits.

In 2008, New Labour introduced the employment and support allowance (ESA) in place of disability benefits and instituted the dreaded work capability assessment (WCA). Firms like Atos have been paid millions since, with the incentive of forcing the disabled into work. Naturally, the ConDems picked up on all these initiatives and reinforced the attack. Iain Duncan Smith, the current work and pensions secretary, won’t be satisfied until he’s buried the welfare state for good.

Leaving aside the fact that Labour appears to have already earmarked cuts in pension tax relief for another policy, it is clear to anyone who cares to think about it that an Ed Miliband government would be just as reactionary as the present one.

The recent “one nation” rhetoric is a thin mask for another great deception. If elected, Labour would continue to make the cuts to reduce the budget deficit and appease the money markets. Miliband’s vision of a “one nation economy” is one where employers and workers collaborate in a kind of a corporate state.

Britain is a low-wage economy in the midst of a systemic global economic and financial crisis. That fact goes unsaid by Miliband and his party. Better to attack an easy target than identify capitalism itself as the problem. Which makes you ask again, what is the point of Labour? What is the point of electing a party whose policies are in essence indistinguishable from those of the Tories or Lib Dems? They are all in it together and we should have no truck with the whole sordid business of traditional party politics.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Miliband's New Labour Mark II

There are some in and around the Labour Party who believe – or perhaps imagine – that the election of Ed Miliband opens up the prospect of a qualitative break from the Blair-Brown years. After reading his first major interview as party leader, you have to say they couldn’t be further from the truth.

New Labour Mark I may be over but watch out for New Labour Mark II, is Miliband’s essential message. In his interview with The Guardian today, Miliband talks about going “beyond New Labour” without ever repudiating the way his predecessors transformed the party into a cheerleader for market and corporate-driven globalisation.

In fact, Miliband praises much of what New Labour did, saying: “Don't knock it, because it achieved a lot, like the rebuilding of the public realm, tackling poverty.” He omitted to mention the downsides like increased inequality and encouraging an economy dominated by finance capitalism, which contributed to the 2008 meltdown.

Although Miliband claims he is starting with a “blank sheet” in terms of policy, it is clear what direction he wants the party to travel in. Sounding not unlike David Camerons’ New Tories, Miliband says the main task is to examine "how you can create greater social justice in the economy without having to rely only on redistribution and the welfare state.”

What does this actually mean, you may ask? This is Miliband saying that the idea of using the state to redistribute wealth is over. No doubt one reason is that the state no longer has the money to pay for things like tax credits, which were a feature of Brown’s policies. And his criticism of the welfare state uncannily echoes Cameron’s attack on “welfare dependency”, which is behind the Coalition’s plans to dismantle what is a safety net for millions of people in terms of housing and benefits.

Miliband explains: “"However, I think it's very clear that as we are reformers of the market – we should also need to be reformers of the state. I don't consider myself a sort of statist. The top-down idea of the state is as much of a problem as an idealised view of the market and in a way they have their similarities. Both treat people not as people but as kind of objects."

So how is the aim of “social justice” to be achieved? If it’s not through the state, then it can only be via capitalist markets and corporations. There Is No Alternative – within our present political and economic framework, that is. What Miliband is burying is a central principle of what was Old Labour in order to come to terms with the financial crisis that broke in 2008 and that shows every sign of exploding once more.

And that means cutting the budget deficit. Miliband may disagree with the Tories’ rate of attrition, but admits that Labour would be making deep cuts in spending if they’d won the election. In fact, Labour is already preparing to make massive cuts at local council level, from Manchester to Lambeth, and at town halls across Scotland and Wales.

Labour councillors say they have no choice because the instructions to cut are coming from Whitehall and, by law, they have to make a balanced budget. In other words, they are just carrying out orders. That’s never been an acceptable excuse at any time in history. But for Labourite councillors and leaders, it’s all water off a duck’s back.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor