David Miliband exits stage right

David Miliband is packing his bags and slinking off across the pond to take up a new job with International Rescue. So who’s he going to be? Virgil? Gordon? Or that other fella… wotshisname? Oh yeah, Brains. Oddly enough, this was supposedly his nickname when Blair plucked him off the backbenches and took him under his wing. Blair… there’s another one.  He’s doing all right for himself and I expect Miliband will also make a decent wedge for himself in the States.

The Labour party may have lost one of its arch-Blairites but that doesn’t mean the parliamentary party is shifting to the Left any time soon. Baby brother, Ed, has the unemployed in his sights and seems happy with the government’s attacks on the working poor of this country. His frontbench team is composed largely of disciplinarian headbangers like Liam Byrne and lily-livered cowards like Stephen Timid Timms.  They are out of touch with the lives of ordinary people whom they spit on from the lofty height of their ivory tower. Don’t be fooled by the brand spanking new One Nation Labour brand either: it is really little more than New Labour Mark 2. Mr Ed despises so-called Old Labour and he told us so in his speech back in January.

David Miliband’s South Shields seat is now vacant and a by-election has yet to be called. It’s a safe Labour seat, so there’s little danger of the party losing it… unless, the real Left can get its act together and snatch it from them. As for the Tories, they have about as much chance of taking the seat as I have of becoming Pope. Capiche?

I read a terribly naive tweet a few hours ago that went something like “ordinary need to join Labour and take it back from the Right”. Good luck with that, I thought. Loads of people have tried and failed. The parliamentary Labour party needs more than a few dedicated Left-wingers joining it in the vain hope that they can seize the party from the grip of the Blairites. It needs a complete overhaul from root to branch. It needs to welcome back the socialists it expelled in the 1980s and 1990s. But I don’t see that happening. Do you?

The Miliband speech: one crumb of comfort in amongst the neoliberal detritus

Picture courtesy of the Daily Mirror

Well, it’s really nice of Ed Miliband to stand up for tenants who are being screwed by unscrupulous private sector landlords. Thanks for the warm words, Ed, they mean so much. And yes, I’m being sarcastic. That is my wont.

Labour has not pledged to reverse any of the Tory cuts, indeed if they won the next general election they will continue cutting, slashing and capping. I had a look at Miliband’s speech he gave to the Fabian Society (the fact that he spoke to the Fabians should tell you all you need to know) on Saturday and there was nothing to get excited about. In his speech he apparently fleshed out his “One Nation”, er, vision.

I will quote some of the speech, starting with this extract.

New Labour rightly broke from Old Labour and celebrated the power of private enterprise to energise our country.

You will notice how he uses the Tory-coined phrase “Old Labour” here. It’s as if to say that anything the Labour Party did before the arrival of Kinnock and Blair was bad or wrong. What about the National Health Service? I could list other achievements but the NHS is certainly a great achievement for a country that was, ostensibly, broke. The celebration of “the power of private enterprise” led to the disastrous reliance on the Private Finance Initiative, which effectively led to the wholesale destruction of the NHS. It licensed carpet-bagging on a massive scale. In short, it was a failure. The only thing it “energised” were greedy businessmen.

It helped get people back into work, and introduced the minimum wage and tax credits to help make work pay.

And it used tax revenues to overcome decades of neglect and invest in hospitals, schools and the places where people live.

The National Minimum Wage (NMW) was seen as a great achievement by the New Labour government but it wasn’t a living wage and was never going to be. Of course, the Tories opposed the NMW and continue to do so. Many Tories, especially of those of a free-market bent want to scrap the NMW altogether and force people to accept sweatshop wages with no workplace protection.  Speaking of workplace protection, New Labour refused to reverse the draconian anti-trade union legislation introduced by the Thatcher government. Workers continue to find themselves under attack by a ruthless and venal government that pits worker against worker and dares to offer them pitifully worthless shares in return for compliance. if it could get its way, the Tories would take us back to the 19th century… and Labour would let them.

The word “responsibility” appears several times during the speech. This word is much beloved of neoliberals and is, more often than not, applied to those at the bottom.

To turn things round in Britain, we all have to play our part.
Especially in hard times.
We are right to say that responsibility should apply to those on social security.

This language is no different to that used by the Tories. The suggestion here is that those on social security are universally “irresponsible” rather than victims of circumstance – which is often the case. But he throws in the following decoy to distract those who would seek to pick holes in his argument.

But we need to say that responsibility matters at the top too.

That’s the essence of One Nation Labour.

It shares New Labour’s insight about our obligations to each other.

And it learns the lessons of what New Labour didn’t do well enough, ensuring responsibilities go all the way through society from top to bottom.

Here, Miliband appears to suggest that his One Nation Labour brand is an extension of the New Labour brand. If you thought Miliband’s Labour Party was any different to Blair/Brown, think again. The ingredients on the label are exactly the same but with a couple of new additives… and the new brand name.

New Labour began with a bold agenda for the distribution of power in Britain.

And it stood for a Labour party not dominated by one sectional interest, but reaching out into parts of Britain that Old Labour had never spoken to.

Again, Miliband distances himself from so-called “Old Labour”, that’s the same Labour Party that legalized homosexuality and abortions under the rather right-wing Labour Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins. It’s been said that if such proposals were put to the Commons today, they would be voted down.

Miliband came from a relatively a privileged background. He went to Oxford and like many of those who were intent on a career in politics, he read (they don’t study at Oxbridge) Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE). He tells us that the Labour Party will be

Recruiting MPs from every part of British life: from business to the military to working people from across every community.

With most of Britain’s mines and factories closed, it’s hard to see how Miliband can recruit more Dennis Skinners. It sounds like a load of guff to me.

All in all Miliband’s speech was crafted to appeal to the Fabians and placate those so-called floating voters whose  political allegiances change with the wind. Fabians believe that they can reform capitalism. They are mistaken and have been wrong for more than 100 years. Their gradualism has led them to betray the working class and the labour movement time and time again.

On the one hand, Miliband is a hostage to the Blairites and on the other, he’s running scared of the Tory press (ably assisted by Hatchet-job Hodges in the Torygraph), who pore over his every word, hoping to find a way to paint him as a closet Commie. It’s quite laughable and, at the same time, it’s tragic.

There really is nothing Red about Ed.

One Nation Ed, the darling of the right-wing press

It was all “One Nation” this and “One Nation” that. That was all there was to Miliband’s keynote speech. His vision, such as it was, was more astigmatic than 20-20. One thing though, it looks like he’s taken performance lessons quite possibly from Edouard Izzard, who was present to smile and applaud. Kinnock was there and although I didn’t see Blair, he was there in spirit. Socialism? You’re not going to get that here. But did you expect it, dear readers? The absence of any mention of socialism certainly pleased the right (along with our new masters, the markets). The speech, rather predictably, attracted the qualified plaudits of the Right-wing press and this cannot be a good thing.

Political Scrapbook has more.

The Torygraph’s Janet Daley told us that Miliband “Repudiated class war”, but it still isn’t enough for her,

All told, I would give Ed a score of  six out of ten for content, and eight out of ten for delivery. The speech was about ten or fifteen minutes too long but it was better in its substance  – and more attractive in its delivery -  than the one given by his Shadow Chancellor yesterday. And I suppose that’s what counts.

Yeah, that delivery, it looked for all the world like he was enjoying the jokes. I mean, this is showbiz. Right? But “class war”? Did he “repudiate” it as she says? Well, not really and that’s because he never mentioned it.  Daley is correct about one thing: there was no real substance and this is something that we have come to expect from the modern party conference with it’s fancy lighting, glitzy graphics and razzmatazz. Where have you been, Janet?

But if the speech gets warm support from such journalistic luminaries, then here’s a tip Mr Ed: if the right-wing press loves your speech, you’re appealing to the wrong voters but I don’t need to tell you that, you probably know that already and if you do know it, then why do you do it? It’s those floating voters, see? They’re the ones who take their political cue from the Tory press.

But it’s his co-option of the Disrealian phrase “One Nation” that interests The Cat.  This is revealing, because by appropriating the Tory left’s (for it is they who love it so) touchstone phrase, it shows us today’s Labour Party for what it is: a former party of labour that is more interested in performing handstands and cartwheels to please the Tory media. Though, in all fairness, this nonsense goes back to Kinnock. Tellingly enough,  Tim Montgomerie said,

[...] I was most reminded of early Tony Blair rather than early Cameron. Blair was at his best when he raided deep into Conservative territory. By repeatedly deploying the timeless Tory ideal of “one nation” that was what today’s Labour leader was also trying to do. Stood on a stage that was deliberately bathed in blue, Miliband mounted a strong defence of the union with Scotland and paid big tributes to the armed forces.

Ah yes, Blair, who has become filthy rich upon leaving office.  He’s been hanging around Mr Ed since he came back to the UK in July and announced that he wanted a role in British politics. Blair is now one of Mr Ed’s advisors. We are also reminded of Nu Labour’s watered-down Tory policies. Is this Mr Ed’s Nu big idea? To steal the Tory Party’s clothes? To camp his, er, tanks out on their lawn?

The Cat can see the fingerprints of Fabianism on this speech too. The Fabians are a timid woolly bunch. In fact, Fabianism is probably better described as Webbism, after the Fabian Society’s husband and wife core. These hapless folk suffer from an affliction known as reformism. This affliction causes its members to swing about like weathervanes and mutter vague bollocks about distribution and other stuff. They talk about the evils of rail privatization but are too spineless to find a way to address the problem (re-nationalization). Instead, they would much rather patch up, what is in effect, a dying man and send him back out to fight… well, harass, actually, because Fabians don’t engage in head-on battles. That stuff sounds too much like revolution for their sensitive ears. But if you want real change, then you have to be prepared to think like a revolutionary. Thatcher described her policies as revolutionary, why should Labour be so shy of thinking like revolutionaries? Well, that’s down to Fabianism and later, its ugly bastard child, Blairism.  These tendencies currently dominate the leadership’s thinking. You’ll notice I said “leadership”. I don’t think everyone in the Labour party shares the leadership’s views. There are some decent people (Luke Akehurst isn’t one of them) but while the party is in the grip of weak-willed nobodies and narcissists, then all that we are likely to get from the Parliamentary Labour Party is the thin gruel of watered-down Tory policies.

Oh and did I mention Distributism? We’ll save that for another time.

So what’s Miliband got to say?

Hey dude, where’s my vision?

In a nutshell? Not a lot. Well, nothing that anyone on the left wants to hear. I found this blog in today’s New Statesman, in which Mr. Ed is quoted as saying,

The Government’s economic failure means that whoever wins the next election will still face a deficit that needs to be reduced. The redistribution of the last Labour government relied on revenue which the next Labour government will not enjoy. The option of simply increasing tax credits in the way we did before will not be open to us.

We need to care more about predistribution.  Centre-left governments of the past tried to make work pay better by spending more on transfer payments.  Centre-left governments of the future will have to make work pay better by doing more to make work itself pay.  That is how we are going to build growth based not just on credit, but on real demand.

I think this is a centre-left moment. Why might you think it’s a centre-right moment? Well, because of issues of fiscal responsibility, which is why we must be strong on that. But for me it’s a centre-left moment because people think there’s something unfair and unjust about our society. You’ve got to bring the vested interest to heel; you’ve got to change the way the economy works. That’s our opportunity.

Straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. So if Labour gets into power at the next General Election, we can expect to hear things like, “the country is broke” and “tough choices have to be made” repeated at every opportunity. But what is this “predistribution” idea? It’s a non-word that PPE types love to coin in the absence of real ideas.  If Mr. Ed is serious about “making work pay” then everyone needs to be paid a living wage. I’ve heard little from him about that. What he seems content to do is carry on with the bankrupt idea of negative income tax  Friedmanite bollocks tax credits.

The rest of the interview carries on in a similar vein. Lots of platitudes, loads of “I feel your pain” type stuff.  We also find out what books he took with him on holiday [sighs].

If you were any doubt that Mr. Ed’s Labour Party is a different beast to Lord Snooty’s Tories, think again. This is the same beast but it speaks in warm words and wears a sickly smile. It still has its neoliberal claws and fangs, they’re sheathed… for now. Here’s another snippet,

On welfare and benefits, the Labour leader insists that some form of contribution from the recipients of welfare must replace what Liam Byrne, former head of the Labour policy review, called “unearned support”.

“I do think we need a society where people make a contribution,” Miliband says. “You build a successful society out of people showing responsibility. That’s an important principle at the top, it’s an important principle elsewhere. But people at the top have a particular responsibility because they help define the ethic of the country.”

These words could have been said by Cameron, the only real difference here is the tone. The word “responsibility” is deployed as a buzzword.  It’s one that makes disciplinarian ex-bankers like Liam Byrne drool with uncontrolled anticipation.

But how does Miliband intend to make people more responsible? If making people work for their benefits is considered to be a mark of their “responsibility”, then he has some serious moral and ethical questions to answer. What about dignity and respect?  In effect, Labour’s support of workfare would be tantamount to giving a nod and a wink to the further erosion of worker’s wages, which have declined in real terms for the last 20 years.  My, wouldn’t Gaitskell be proud of this lot? Ramsay MacDonald too. In fact, this is a party in which even Twinkletoes Cable would feel at home these days.  Maybe that’s the point: to appeal to the SDP lot in the Lib Dems should the coalition fall. Then again, maybe it isn’t. In fact, I think I’m being too generous on Mr. Ed and his crew of weak-willed snivellers. In truth, they haven’t got the guts to offer hope to a nation that’s crying out for it. Instead of doing anything that could be described as visionary, the former party of labour takes another sharp right-hand turn into a ditch.

UPDATE 6/9/12 @ 1758

Mr. Ed fleshed out the “predistribution” idea that I mentioned earlier in a speech to The Policy Network.

The BBC has the story,

“Predistribution is about saying, ‘We cannot allow ourselves to be stuck with permanently being a low-wage economy and hope that through taxes and benefits we can make up the shortfall.’

“It’s not just, nor does it enable us to pay our way in the world.

“Our aim must be to transform our economy so it is a much higher skill, much higher wage economy.

“Think about somebody working in a call centre, a supermarket, or in an old peoples’ home.

“Redistribution offers a top-up to their wages. Predistribution seeks to go further – higher skills with higher wages.

Yay! Higher wages! How? Anyway, it seems I got it wrong vis a vis the tax credits. That was one of Gord’s ideas… well not really, it originally came from Milton Friedman, who was neither a socialist or a social democrat.

The BBC article also notes that Miliband is having text with Twinkletoes (what did I say?).

The FT has this rather interesting story here.  Here’s a snippet,

Mr Cable told the Financial Times in July he did not “exclude” a run for the party leadership and polls suggest the business secretary, who is a former Labour councillor, is more popular than Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister.

But behind the mischief, Mr Miliband is making another calculation: that Labour may need to work with the Lib Dems in the event of a hung parliament in 2015 and that Mr Cable may hold the key to a Lib-Lab deal.

How’s life in that ditch, Ed?

So who will speak up for the unemployed?

Have you ever noticed that when politicians – and I include Labour here as well as the Tories and Lib Dems – talk about the unemployed, they do so only to speak ill of them? If they aren’t speaking ill of them, then they’re telling us how they’re all too lazy to “find work”. We’ve also had a newly coined expression enter the Tory vocabulary: “job snob”. This government is great at formulating new insults but not so great when it comes to policies.

Politicians like Iain Duncan Smith and Liam Byrne tend to use the unemployed for target practice.  Why? Because they’re easy to attack. They have no political voice inside Westminster Palace. Yet none of those politicians who guardedly speak of the unemployed as “scum” think of them as people;  real people or as voters. I would wager that there are a large number of politicians, Tories especially, who would deny full citizenship to the unemployed if they could get away with it. Whereas Labour simply offers the same Tory approach but couched in different language.

Being unemployed in Britain is no picnic. I know. I’ve been there. You get £67.50 a week and Housing and Council Benefit – if you’re lucky.  The benefits system, far from what is commonly claimed by the right-wing press, is less than generous. The process by which you claim benefits is dehumanizing. You’re stigmatized and excluded. Some local authorities will do their utmost to ensure that benefit payments are delayed and Jobcentres will trick people into losing their Jobseekers Allowance to meet targets.

The current government is doing all it can to make sure that the unemployed pay for the economic crisis. The benefit cap and The Quiet Man’s Universal Credit are two means by which the unemployed will be further punished. The Tories’ allies on Fleet Street do the  rest by producing a near endless stream of stories about “dole cheats”.

When this government took power in 2010, they immediately signalled their intention to wage war on the unemployed.  Ministers like IDS, Grayling and Gove told us how unemployed people were living the life of luxury at the expense of the taxpayer. They told us how these people were living in “expensive houses” and even produced sets of figures that were designed to impress us. But it is all a massive distortion. The real villains continue to enjoy special privileges under this coalition. And the Tories wants them to continue to enjoy these privileges at our expense.

Ministers have told us how they want to “cut red tape” in order to “stimulate” the economy.  What they’re really saying is how they want people to work more hours and for nothing. They also want to remove any workplace legislation that protects workers – so that companies will be absolved of any responsibility to provide hazard-free working conditions – safe in the knowledge that the Health & Safety Act no longer applies to them.

To date, not a single politician from the 3 main parties has said how unreasonable it is for the unemployed to exist on less than £68 a week and how this needs to change. Of course not. They would rather use the jobless as a scapegoat. Furthermore there isn’t a single MP on the government benches or the opposition benches who has been unemployed, therefore they will never understand what it’s like to scrape by. They will never be able to comprehend what it’s like to be stigmatized and excluded; to live without dignity. Unemployment for these people is “God’s punishment” or something like it. It was the same in the 19th century and little has changed in the minds of our political leaders, who continue to circulate the same stale ideas ad infinitum.

Benefits for the unemployed need to be increased. It’s as simple as that. The cost of even the most basic of foodstuffs has increased exponentially in the last year. Rents have increased and travel costs, which are the highest in Europe, are prohibitively expensive.  Many unemployed people cannot afford the fares and are tempted to dodge, for example, train fares. So not only are the unemployed being scapegoated, they are often forced into criminality. This suits the government narrative of a mass body of unemployed ‘parasites’ who are draining an otherwise healthy, virile country of its life-force.

Even if you are lucky to have a job, the chances are it is not one that pays enough for you to live comfortably. Wages have remained stagnant for the best part of 25 years, while the cost of living has spiralled. People are encouraged to supplement their income by taking on debt through credit cards and loans (in some cases, many people have to resort to using loan sharks). None of this matters to those in the Tory Party who are, without exception, well-off. I mean, have you ever encountered a Tory politician who didn’t have independent wealth that comes from either a trust fund, dividends, shares or rents? No, I haven’t either. They don’t need to supplement their income with credit card debt, they just ratchet up their rents and get their tenants to subsidize their income.

IDS told us that he wanted to “make work pay”. I can’t see that happening either for the unemployed or for those who work. If this government wants to make work pay, perhaps they should introduce a living wage and consider price-capping. But we know that won’t happen. This government wants to wind the clock back to 1862 and the mythical age of classical liberalism.

Given that the 3 main parties continue to regard the unemployed as beneath them, I would suggest that the jobless move their votes to a party that is prepared to speak up for them. The Socialist Party, for example. There are others too.

The Tories complained that”left-wing militants” and “Trotskyites” have derailed their “work experience” scheme. But this denies the fact that the government’s scheme was a sham from the start and most sensible people could see that making people work for nothing was nothing more than a form of slave labour. Furthermore, such a scheme has the effect of undercutting wages and those who perform menial tasks for the minimum wage could find themselves eventually joining the dole queue.

In 1986, Tory MP and former National Democratic Party member, Piers Merchant spent a week on the dole to “see what it was like”.   Yes,  just a week [rolls eyes].  These days,  no Tory MP, let alone a Labour MP, would dream of doing such a thing. They’re far too used to their comforts for that.

Scapegoats and brickbats: the government’s assault on the public sector

The Tories need a scapegoat. They always need scapegoats. In the 1980′s the scapegoats were Labour-controlled local authorities (dubbed ‘Loony Left’ by the Tory press), the trade unions, gays, lesbians and ethnic minorities. These days, the scapegoats are public sector workers and the public sector generally. Trade unions still come in for flak from the Tories. This morning they were unwittingly helped by Labour’s Ed Balls, who chipped in by urging (if that’s the right word) the unions not to walk into the government’s “trap”.  The Labour Party clearly hasn’t learned the lessons of the 1980′s and when Balls produces nonsense like this,  it’s easy to see why Labour are out of power (hands up, who wants Blue Labour?). What Balls has done is to express cowardice. Rather than face down the government, Balls and the rest of the front bench try to avoid confrontation and in doing so, make themselves look weak and pathetic. Anyone would think that they didn’t want the votes of trade unionists.

The government and its allies in the media have been quite keen to misrepresent public sector workers. Perhaps the most popular myth in circulation is the one that claims that all public sector workers are well-paid and will get extremely generous pensions when they retire. The fact of the matter is that, as with most other wages, public sector pay has been stagnant for years. Forget what you’ve heard about council chief executives’ salaries, those who do all the dirty work on the frontline are being paid a fraction of that. Many public sector workers are on the National Minimum Wage and can expect to recieve pensions of around £4,000 and yet this government wants these people to pay more towards their pensions (which will decrease in real terms). Why? Because they need someone to blame. They need to hammer the public sector so that they can press ahead with their plan to privatize those social functions that are left. Only today, Cameron revealed the following plans to give people more “power” (sic). The Sunday Times (which I cannot quote because it’s behind a paywall) claims that Lord Snooty wants to give people  “individual budgets” so that they can “buy” services. From The Independent,

Allowing the elderly to choose how money is spent on their care;

Enabling people with long-term health conditions to choose their own therapies;

Giving parish councils powers to take control of local parks, playing fields, parking and traffic restrictions;

Allowing parents of children with special needs to make their own decisions about schooling.

What all this amounts to is a further assault on the public sector. Soon local authorities will only exist to rubber stamp the diktats of private providers. But this is only the tip of the iceberg: before we know it, education will subjected to the same treatment with schools being forced into the voucher system. As for empowerment, this is noticeably absent. Giving real political power to people is something that this government is keen to avoid. There is no way that the government wants to allow us plebians a say in how decisions are made. That would be too much like real democracy.

So what happens when you run out of funding? Well, the government hasn’t thought that far ahead.  Given the number of hare-brained ideas that trip from the lips of ministers, some might say that the government isn’t capable of thinking at all. In today’s Telegraph, Danny Alexander reiterated the government’s position,

Mr Alexander insisted that ministers wanted a ”constructive dialogue” with the unions – but indicated that this would be restricted to the detail of how the changes would be implemented.

Nowhere Towers believes that the government has behaved high-handedly towards the unions by telling them that they will only negotiate  when the unions accept the government’s plan. This is the wrong way to go about negotiations. In the same article, former Labour pensions minister and closet Tory, John Hutton added his thoughts,

”They are the basis on which we want to go forward and reform public-service pensions, but of course in these discussions we need to look at the detail of how that works, about how these things are implemented,” he told the Murnaghan programme.

”What we have to get to is a situation where, yes, people have to work a bit longer and contribute a bit more, as we have put forward, but that we maintain the quality of their pensions into the future.”

Reform is the word being used here but reform almost always means cuts, redundancies and unwanted and unnecessary changes to working conditions.  The unions have no choice but to go on strike. If they didn’t strike, they would be failing their members and, for that matter, all those working people who aren’t fortunate enough to be able to earn a living from rents, dividends, shares, trust funds and daddy’s allowance.

The largest one-day strike since the General Strike of 1926 will take place on 30 June. Doing nothing is not an option.

A word about Labour…

As regular readers of this blog will know, I am not a fan of the Labour leadership and I haven’t been since Kinnock delivered that speech. This does not mean that I am against working with individual Labour members to fight the cuts.  I am prepared to work with anyone who is fighting the ideologically driven cuts that this Tory-led government (whose own mandate for such cuts is dubious)  is currently implementing. Indeed my local Labour MP, Andy Slaughter, is pretty decent and the local party is doing the right things (though, some years ago, I had a serious disagreement with the former Labour MP, Iain Coleman, over the Iraq invasion).

In recent weeks, the Tory press has printed stories about how unions are planning to go on strike during the royal wedding.  We know why these papers have printed such stories and the word that I have in mind begins with the letters “s” and “m”. Last Sunday, Ed Miniband chipped in with his twopenneth worth on the Andrew Marr Show,

Labour leader Ed Miliband has said he is “appalled” by the idea of trade unions planning strikes to disrupt Royal Wedding celebrations.

He told the BBC such a plan of action would be “absolutely the wrong thing to do” and a “sign of failure”.

The Daily Mail led the charge with this article on 30 December 2010. They quote Mark Serwotka of the PCS union as saying,

Unless you look like you want a fight, they won’t negotiate. The Government has to see we are serious.’

He added: ‘Actions around Easter have quite an effect because so much is happening at that time of year.

‘The end of April, beginning of May would be best. The royal wedding would not be a factor in our planning but nor would it be a factor to avoid.

The wording here is vague, yet the pair who wrote this claim to have some kind of ability to see into the future as well as the hearts of men.

No union leader has actually called for strikes during the royal wedding. Yet, Miliband appears to have fallen into a trap laid for him by the Tory press by condemning the action in advance.

This article from the Press Association says,

In a warning shot to union bosses, Mr Miliband said that strikes were a “legitimate last resort” in industrial disputes, but he did not want to see them used in a co-ordinated attempt to undermine the coalition Government, insisting that this was not the way to bring about a change in power.

It’s that last sentence that sticks in the mind like a splinter. What Dear Ed seems to forget is that parliamentary opposition is limited to what the Labour front bench decides or doesn’t decide to do. What Miniband wants us to do is to submit to their [lack of] leadership. Here he summons up the ghosts of the 1980′s.

He insisted there must be no going back to the divisive and politically-driven disputes of the 1980s, such as the miners’ strike led by Arthur Scargill, which divided the nation and presented Labour with a hugely-damaging challenge to its credibility as a potential government.

The Labour leadership offered tepid support for the miners and others who went on strike during the 1980′s. Kinnock was more concerned with pleasing the Tory press than with supporting those people who had voted for Labour. It seems as though the current leader is thinking along the same lines. This comes as no surprise to us here at Nowhere Towers because of Kinnock’s endorsement of Mister Ed during the leadership contest.

So I am not against the Labour Party per se, just the leadership that has consistently failed to er, lead.

The end of upward social mobility?

Leaders from monarchs to presidents to prime ministers have all feared the latent power of the masses. There are two ways in which states deal with the masses: the first is to provide diversions, as the Romans did, offer them panem et circenses – bread and circuses. The second way is to oppress them and smash them when they stir from their slumber. This is the method that was chosen by the Emperor Justinian when he perceived the Nika Riots in 532 to be a threat to his regime. He sent his trusted general, Belisarius and the eunuch Narses to the Hippodrome to confront the mob which included some senators. Narses’s job was to divert the attention of the mob producing a bag of gold pieces while Belisarius charged in and massacred the lot of them.  Admittedly Justinian thought of leaving Constantinople but his wife, the Empress Theodora persuaded him to stay with these words,

“Those who have worn the crown should never survive its loss. Never will I see the day when I am not saluted as empress”.

The third way is hardly mentioned and generally avoided by right wing parties: education.

Universal education was introduced in Britain in the middle of the 19th century for the purpose of preparing young people for the world of work. The extant public schools were founded with the intention of providing education for the poor of their area. The educational emphasis of the public school was based on classical models of pedagogy. The pupils who went to such schools were expected to go in to the clergy or the civil service. The working class were expected to stay in their place; the chance of upward mobility was remote and therefore the education they received was basic: reading, writing and arithmetic.

And so it remained until the 20th century when the Education Act of 1944 opened the doors of the country’s universities to the working classes. In the 1950′s and 1960′s, working class admissions to universities rose by 25%.

Those working class people who went to universities between the 1950′s and 1980′s will tell you what an experience it was. Many will also tell you that for the first time, they were exposed to new ideas,  some of those ideas would form the core of their political beliefs. Indeed many activists in the 1960′s were students who came from working class backgrounds. This no doubt alarmed the Conservatives who were concerned that the newly educated working classes now had the tools to take apart their arguments and press for greater social equality. Those students could also go on to educate others in ways that ran counter to the dominant ideology.

By the 1980′s, the Thatcher government embarked on a war against the working class. To curb them, she would first attack their institutions: the trade unions, seek to limit their access to higher education and try and buy them off with the dream of home and share-ownership.  She would also identify the National Union of Students as a hotbed of student activism; another form of resistance to her rule. Thatcher wanted membership of the NUS to be voluntary rather than automatic upon enrolment. The Conservatives openly attacked the NUS and used its Federation of Conservative Students (FCS) as a sort of column to counter them. The FCS was not affiliated to the NUS and received funding from the Freedom Assocation. Its members could often be seen wearing T-Shirts with the words “Hang Mandela” and many of its members were also members of The Monday Club.

I went to a polytechnic in the mid-1980′s. Polytechnics were introduced by Wilson’s Labour government in the 1960′s with the aim of providing vocational courses at tertiary level and thus put higher technical qualifications on a par with academic ones. I went to Newcastle upon Tyne Poly because I realized that I could not afford to throw more money away on audition fees to the various drama schools that I’d applied to. I figured that having a degree would be better than having a diploma from some drama school and I might even learn more at a poly than a drama school. I also thought (wrongly) that both my working class background and my American education would preclude me from going to a university. So Poly it was.

Towards the end of my undergraduate years, Thatcher announced wide-ranging ‘reforms’ to higher education one of which ended the maintenance grant that was paid to students and the other proposed that polytechnics could become universities that had the power to award heir own degrees. Enacted after her departure from office, The Further and Higher Education Act (1992) also meant that FE colleges were taken out of local authority control and were formed as individual corporations. These college-corporations would reduce adult education in order to get more ‘bums on seats which means more funding as a result (each enrolled student is equal to  a unit of funding).   The introduction of student loans had the effect of reducing numbers of working class entrants to university. The numbers further declined when Blair introduced tuition fees in 1998 and top up fees in 2004. This ended Labour’s commitment to a system of higher education that was open to all. This also ended any ideas of upward social mobility that working class people had.

The Blair government also went one step further: they placed universities under the aegis of the Department for Business Enterprise and Skills. This was a clear signal from the Blair government that it wanted to transform universities from places of learning to factories that produced workers for largely service sector-oriented jobs, as well as those in the financial sector.

Given the coalition government’s penchant for slashing anything that requires public funding, higher education is, in future, likely to be accessible only to those who have the money to pay for it. For all their talk of ‘fairness’ it is clear that this is nothing more than empty rhetoric. The government can introduce and presumably find the money to fund the so-called free schools but they are reluctant to provide access to higher education to those from poorer backgrounds. The free schools, incidentally, are likely to be run by private companies rather than pushy parents.

It is clear that the Tories have been opposed to the working classes gaining access to higher education. For them, education beyond the formative years must be paid for. They regard educated working class people as dangerous and subversive. This is the reason why the Bible was written in Latin until the 16th century and interpreted only by those who had knowledge of that language. Slaves in the US were forbidden to read and write and anyone caught instructing a slave could face harsh penalties. The reasons why were glaringly obvious.

For all their talk of freedom, the government seem intent on granting freedoms to their own class and denying it to those below them.

The shadow cabinet: no change

As I look down the list of those MPs who have been elected to the shadow cabinet, I see no change in Labour’s direction. For those who had hoped that Labour would redsicover socialism or, at the very least, social democracy, well too bad. The party is full of Nu Labour types who aren’t that interested in socialism.

The Hon Tobes was quick to complain that it was “overwhelmingly white, privileged and male”. Which is rich coming from someone who supports a government that is overwhelmingly white, privileged and male.

So much for social diversity. What about ethnic diversity? Not a single Briton of African-Caribbean origin was elected and the UK’s black and minority ethnic population is represented by just one man, Sadiq Khan. No Welshmen in the Shadow Cabinet either.

A quick scan of the government front bench reveals similar statistics. Who are you trying to fool, Tobes? Hey, didn’t your father coin the word ‘meritocracy’?

One name that caught my eye was that of The Model: Caroline Flint. Snaggle toothed Flint is a ghastly woman, a ‘Blair Babe’; a true Nu Labour type. Given her penchant for posing for the camera, Nowhere Towers wonders what portfolio she’ll be given.  Shadow Home Secretary perhaps? That way, she’ll be able to face the Tory’s er, model, Theresa May.

Does anyone else care about the Miliband soap opera?

Oh how the media love a soap opera! As soon as Ed Miniband’s victory was announced, the press immediately began producing speculative story after speculative story about the future of failed leadership candidate David Maxiband. Despite his star turn at the opening of the conference in which David told the party how his brother was a “special person” and how the party must make him a “special person” to the British people, the soap opera rumbles on.

The talk coming from the usual telly news providers tells the same story: David Maxiband will resign; he will take his bat and ball and walk off the pitch. Apparently David can’t cope with playing second string to his kid brother…I mean, just look at his face when Ed is speaking. And did he really say to Harriet Harman, “Why are you clapping?  You voted for it”?  I have to say, there are some bloody good lipreaders working in telly journalism these days. And look! All the signs are there too: Maxiband appears outside his home, dressed casually and looking chipper. Surely this is a sign that he will walk?

Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t.

To tell the truth, I am neither interested in nor bothered by the Miliband drama even if the media finds it fascinating. But it’s a diversion; the coalition government are about to announce the biggest raft of public spending cuts for a generation and all the BBC can talk about is ‘Will he or won’t he”? The Labour Party conference has been overshadowed by this story but what of the conference itself? Miniband talked of a “new generation” in his speech but this new generation that he talks of smacks of the neupolitik that Cleggeron keeps talking about.  Self-confessed Labour supporter Terry Christian nails it on the head in this clip from the BBC’s Politics Show.

I agree,  I detect no lurch to the left here and given Miniband’s lightly-veiled challenge to the unions not to strike, the chance of the Labour leadership supporting the workers and backing any strikes that may happen is as likely as me waking up tomorrow morning as a born-again Tory.

UPDATE:

Maxiband has taken himself off to the backbenches from where he will be free to engage in Blairite rearguard actions…maybe even plot a coup. He says he’s doing it to “recharge his batteries”. Usually the excuse is to ‘spend more time with one’s family’.