The same old story... and the same old mistakes

It's part conference season over in the UK, and following the so-called 'Fib Dems' last week, it's the turn of Her Majesty's official opposition, whom following a successful campaign from the last conference to get their stalking horse candidate in, now find themselves fronted by a talking horse.

A post on Miliband has been 'in the works' for several months now, and to Conservatives he remains the coalition's greatest asset, although the redrawing of the electoral landscape under the previous government, due to a huge increase in the Public Sector workforce, unlimited immigration and a significant increase in the number of welfare claimants, means he actually stands with a healthy lead in the polls, as Hal Berstram takes great pleasure in reminding me. More on him later, for sure, but pending the arrival of Compass latest offerings, it's time to examine another blog from the Democratic Left, Left Futures

It's an interesting name, given that for many the Left has no future, but the latest post in response to the Shadow Chancellor's remarks made yesterday, is worth looking at, if only to point out to people opposed to the anticipated 'cuts' in Public expenditure, some of the logistical issues with their preferred solution. The speech by Balls was, it has to be said, something of a tour de force, quite brilliantly summed up by one of the men who is under no illusion about the dangers posed by the Hard Left, Norman Tebbit here. I've never been overly enamoured by Balls ever since he was memorably skewered by then Deputy PM Michael Heseltine, with the memorable line, 'It's not Brown, it's Balls', and even in a political age where Chutzpah is a stock in trade, the speech took some beating. Arguably the most outrageous claim was made when he blames the many issues caused by immigration, which was deliberately encouraged by his government for political purposes (to 'Rub the right's faces in diversity') on one country in particular, Poland.

Now, at this point , I must declare an interest, my previous employer's workforce profile was very much geared to take advantage of the previous government's decision to 'open the borders' in 2004 to the 8 former Warsaw Pact countries which joined the EU in May of that year. I would hazard that around a third of the workforce, even 7 years on, remains Polish, with healthy minorities from the Czech Republic, Latvia, Slovakia, Hungary and Lithuania. I'd probably now number around 40 of those former colleagues as people I would consider reasonably close friends, all from Poland. Having some contact (usually in the form of insults) with the extreme right, I'd hazard Eastern European immigration is somewhat less objectionable than many other types, due to the ethnicity, religion and background of those immigrants. They are primarily White and Christian, but Balls, deeply conscious of previous statements from Conservative Leaders that were described by members of his own Party as 'the road to Auschwitz' and 'having the whiff of the gas chambers about them' chose instead to demonise people from Poland, rather than the somewhat more concerning, from an integration perspective, immigration from the Islamic world. As I said, shameless courting of the lowest common denominator.

Nevertheless, taking that consideration aside, the Left futures blog post posits the issue with Balls' prescription is that it doesn't go far enough! The core 'solution' provided in the blog is not new, but once more the details are wanting. Let's examine the core text.


'The key problem is not indebtedness, it is lack of demand. The Tory government policy of massive cuts in public expenditure and benefits, plus the VAT increase, is drastically worsening the problem of lack of demand without hardly reducing the deficit at all because of falling tax revenues and rising unemployment. The alternative – the only way to get out of slump when the private sector contracts – is a public sector-driven jobs and growth strategy, getting people off the dole and thus hugely reducing the cost of benefits, and into work so that regain their independence as well as then being able to contribute to tax revenues.

Keeping a million people on the dole costs £7bn a year. For the same amount of money 400,000 jobs could be created. And the country gets a double whammy: jobs are created in areas where they’re urgently needed in housebuilding, in improving transport and energy supply, and in creating the new green, digital economy. And the deficit is cut faster as growth slowly but steadily begins to take off again.'

This prescription, as already mentioned is reminiscent of the film Groundhog Day. there's the uncanny feeling we've been here before. Let me just state for the reader's benefit, that my background is in Logistics, which, simply put is the 'art' of ensuring resources are in the correct places. So what logistical difficulties does this plan present?

I agree a demand stimulus would certainly help the economy. As Tebbit posited when commenting on Balls' original speech, had the previous government not created a coterie of 'Non - jobs' for its own placemen, it's arguable that the necessity to cut wouldn't be there. The problem for Balls, and by extension the Labour Party, is that such people are almost to a person Labour voters, so to jeopardise that constituency would almost certainly mean losing the next several general elections. That would be suicidal, so the bloated payrolls of Local authorities (of all hues, incidentally) and his power base in the non-productive Public Sector remain untouched.

Let's now examine the proposal to create 400,000 jobs , which the blogger suggest will be in housebuilding, transport, infrastructure, and creating the new 'green,digital economy'. Let's deal with the last of these first, shall we? The one thing adepts of the Green economy fail to tell me is what this new 'Green,digital' economy will comprise. It's adherents, men like Chris Huhne , and people like Caroline Lucas, specialise in the production of prodigous quantities of hot air so my first thought was that, but in all seriousness, what are these 'creators' doing - if it's simple IT related tasks, then Ok, there might be sufficient unemployed with those skills to simply get them into a job, but I haved some reservations. Being charitable, let's assume its in the role of facilitation, and thus creating perhaps new cabling and broadband infrastructure, a key 'enabler' if britain is to gain widely based prosperity geographically.

The issue I find fault with, and it's not the first time I've pointed it out is that the writer seems to have zero understanding of either the construction industry or the logistical difficulties faced in facilitating this work. A cursory tour of the few remaining building sites in the South East will quickly reveal:

A/ That the job is skilled not unskilled - you can't just shoehorn 400,000 people into jobs as carpenters and bricklayers. The training even to get to a basic standard is at least six months and for more skilled workers like electricians or engineers a good deal longer than that! I believe this wider ignorance about almost any aspect of either Public Sector 'frontline' or Private Sector Production, Distribution and Construction industries is partly a function of the increasingly narrrow field from which many potential political figures come. That's as much true of the Coalition, as it is Labour.

B/ That, in a great irony, it is Poland that provides a huge number of these workers. This is due to a strong traditional work ethic, and also, as many of my colleagues have said, the need to engage upon massive reconstruction after the devastation of the Second World War. Ironically, the legacy of a command economy is that there were significant numbers of skilled workers, a tradition which due to an almost Stakhanovite work ethic seems to have been passed to a younger generation. These workers manage to undercut indigenous Labour and, as many will testify, manage to do the work to a much higher standard. So unless the Labour Party is willing to echo it's former Leaders call for 'British jobs for British workers' , which would be illegal under EU law, the expenditure welcome though it may be, is likely to be dissipated by some of the money being sent in the form of remittances to Szeczin, Rzesow, Wroclaw, etc

Leave aside the merits of the funding in the penultimate paragraph, with the discredited Tobin Tax again posited , and a move to the Dennis Healey levels of taxation circa 1979, we're not left with much of substance. Sadly, reality hurts and I think the road ahead will be long and somewhat painful!

Firing on all cylinders (finally)

Great news about Ed Balls - who should really have been Shadow Chancellor in the first place (although I'd argue there was also a strong case for either Yvette Cooper or Andy Burnham).

As a naturally cynical individual my first thought when Alan Johnson said he was quitting the front bench for personal reasons was, "he's been told to jump or be pushed". But in this case it really does seem to be for personal reasons - marriage break-up. Whatever the problems he's had as Shadow Chancellor (and much of that may in fact be because he's had a lot of other stuff on his plate to deal with), I wish Alan all the best - he's a good guy and has made a huge contribution to British politics over the last decade.

What remains, though, could be the best shadow front bench Labour has ever had. Although much of the media will be hostile to Balls, his knowledge of economic policy makes George Osborne look like the cheap sneering punk that he is and, to paraphrase Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Ensign, Labour's chances of winning the next election may have just doubled. Already - just a few hours in the job - Ed B was sounding more convincing on fighting the cuts than Alan managed to be in three months.

The fact that Balls has many critics on the Blairite wing of the party and commentariat - Rentoul, Kettle, Blair, all the usual suspects really - just makes him even more credible and likeable.

One is beginning to feel that the ghost of Blairism - the dreadful tendency to say "I'll vote for any right wing crap just as long as it's got a red rosette on it" is being exorcised. However, to win the next election, the ghost of Brown - or at least the quasi Blairite neo-liberalism of the Brown years - need to be exorcised as well. What needs to remain is the good side of Brown - a passionate commitment to social justice and the good society. Brown - unlike Blair - was always a walking contradiction and so there are several different ways to interpret his legacy. Now that the key positions in the Shadow Cabinet are all held by Brownites, I just hope they can choose the correct way to go forward.

Labour leadership showdown on C4 News

I tuned in to Channel 4 News last night expecting more revelations about Blair's A Journey (they didn't have much: my friend Chris of Virtual Stoa has done a far better job of digesting the interesting bits of the book via his twitterfeed) and maybe something about William Hague as well (they had even less on that). I'll post on Hague soon as it looks like he's been the victim of a vilification campaign by right-wing bloggers and although I'm no great fan of the guy, he doesn't deserve that.

But one interesting thing on C4 News was an interview with all 5 leadership candidates - Jon Snow called them "the Final Five" which must be some sort of coded Battlestar Galactica reference. Why, I'm not sure.

Anyway, on this performance, the smoothest two - the guys who could slot into PMQs and immediately start massacring Cameron and Clegg - are David Miliband and, perhaps suprisingly, Andy Burnham. Both were slick as hell. Ed Balls wasn't quite as smooth but he was razor sharp on policy. Neither Ed Miliband nor Diane Abbott were in any way slouches but I don't think they managed to get their points across quite as well.

I'd still vote for Ed M, though, because it's not just about smoothness. After all, Tony Blair was (and maybe is still) smooth as f***; but he managed to win 3 elections and delivered - well, more than nothing, but nowhere near as much as he could have done. (And the reason why, it turns out, was that he was basically minding the ship for the Tories to get back in).

I think Ed Miliband has a vision of where Labour should be at the time of the next election and more importantly, what to do if they win. David Miliband may have that as well, but as yet I'm not convinced. And the Blairite backing for David (which he has admittedly tried to distance himself from) shows the real risk of right-wing influence on his candidacy.

The main thing that came across, I think, was that the two Eds could work very well together as their policy platforms are quite similar. It's, if you like, a sensible soft left version of Blair/Brown; Ed M providing the public face and overall political strategic thinking while Ed B handles economics (minus immigration policy, where I still can't work out quite what he's saying about Central and Eastern European migrants but could he please change it as it sounds like a half-baked version of UKIP?)

So, if - as I expect, Ed Miliband wins the leadership, Ed Balls would be a good option for Shadow Chancellor. Osborne is a good political operator but an economic incompetent and will be regularly slaughtered at the dispatch box. Andy Burnham is certainly capable of taking one of the major shadow portfolios, as indeed is Diane Abbott (if she wants to do so). The real question mark is what will happen to David Miliband if Ed wins. Because of the inquiry into renditions and torture that may have taken place on his watch, it would be inadvisable, to say the least, to keep him in the Shadow Foreign Secretary platform; but anything else would feel like a demotion.

Decisions, decisions...

Some thoughts on the Labour leadership election

I should be getting into a zone where I'm able to do a bit more blogging over the next few weeks after a very quiet July, so it's time to take another look at the Labour leadership election. FWIW here is my .02 Euro (can't get the Euro key to work under Linux - what the hell?) on each candidate:

• Andy Burnham: the blog post which said "there is a token candidate for the leadership - his name is Andy Burnham" says it all. A nice guy, but hopeless.
  
• Diane Abbot: not as bad as many people have been saying, and will probably pick up more votes than most pundits realise. She's unlikely to win, though.
  
• Ed Balls: good, hard-hitting soundbites attacking the coalition's economic policy fatally underlined by a neanderthal stance on immigration, as previously taken apart on this blog. Also not the most popular flavour in the jelly bean pack with voters... in fact probably the hardest sell of all 5 candidates. (Diane has a lot of voter recognition through being on the TV a lot, and who the hell could dislike Andy Burnham? He's the Ronnie Corbett of Labour politics. But if you remember Ronnie in Sorry! that's what Burnham would be like as leader... a bit of a laugh.
  
• Dave Miliband: now we start coming to the real contenders. He has been steadily trying to move away from his 'microBlair' days with a spirited pitch to the soft left on some issues, interspersed with splashes of the old Blairite rhetoric. In short, a little something for every voter in this leadership contest - and therefore maybe tickling all the bases and not nailing any of them. His campaign team is good and features some real radicals, the delivery is smooth and assured, but I still can't quite convince myself that Dave really means it. I just sense the dead hand of Tony Blair lurking round the corner. I'd be happy to be proved wrong, but I'm sorry Dave, I couldn't vote for you even if I was eligible (and unless I join the Labour Party I'm not - more on that later). Also, what is the government's enquiry into torture going to come up with? As Foreign Secretary at the time, did Dave knowingly go along with extraordinary rendition? If he knew the British state was complicit in torture there's no way he should be anywhere near the Labour leadership. Or indeed anywhere at all, apart from a prison cell.
  
• Ed Miliband: for me, the obvious choice. A smooth soft left pitch with maybe a dash of something harder in the mix. Can be smooth, like Dave, or more of a rottweiler, like Balls, depending on what's required ("the emissary from planet f***", he was nicknamed by members of the Blair entourage when he was a Brown special adviser). Also has enough cabinet experience to avoid looking like a novice but is a recent enough entry into Parliament to still seem pretty fresh (and wasn't in Parliament during Iraq, which helps A LOT.) If I do end up joining Labour my vote will be for Ed.
  

The interesting thing about this election is that no-one has a bloody clue what's going to happen really. Will Straw has a good go at predicting the result on Left Foot Forward, with the ambitious "LFF model" suggesting that the Milibands are neck-and-neck on first preferences, with Ed likely to draw ahead on second preferences. This is sketchy analysis to be sure - there's no proper polling of the people who are actually going to be voting (the YouGov poll of the electorate and a ComRes poll of business leaders, both of which favoured Dave, mean f*** all because almost none of those polled - perhaps literally none at all! - are eligible voters in the election.) But it's the only analysis of any quality at all we've got so far, and I think it's about right. Dave may come out slightly ahead - maybe by 5 percent or so - on first prefs but I think that second prefs will favour Ed and put him over the top - maybe not by much.

And that in my view, is A Very Good Thing. Perhaps we should be nervous though that Simon Heffer, of all people, is suggesting that Ed could be prime minister within a year. Now one school of thought is that support is a good thing wherever it comes from. But when it's the Heff, that seems crazy. I haven't read the article in any detail yet.. it was linked from LFF. I'll read it in a minute.

So anyway, carry on Ed. You can do it. Just don't f***ing let us down if you do win. I'm already minded to join the Greens... not because of anything Ed or the other candidates have done, but because there's no way Caroline Lucas is gonna sell anyone out. And in these days of duplicity, double dealing and splintered manifesto commitments, I find that reassuring.

New Balls, please? No thanks

Michael Heseltine is not, and never will be, one of my favourite politicians, despite his legendary status in some quarters. Like Kenneth Clarke, he is a dodgy misanthrope sheltering behind a warm and cuddly public image. (Although to be fair, Clarke at least enjoys jazz, which counts for something).

However, Heseltine did produce a classic quote in the mid-1990s with his attack on the mention of "post-neoclassical endogenous growth theory" in a Gordon Brown speech. The line had been provided by Ed Balls, and Heseltine produced the classic putdown: "it wasn't Brown, it was Balls". Great days.

Ed has since gone on to produce a lot of Balls in his own right, but reached new heights of cheap right-wing punkishness with an extremely unpleasant Observer article where he says that:

Within the EU, free movement of goods and services works to our advantage. But free movement of labour is another matter entirely.

Why's that, Ed? Apparently because:

There have been real economic gains from the arrival of young, hard-working migrants from eastern Europe over the past six years. But there has also been a direct impact on the wages, terms and conditions of too many people – in communities ill-prepared to deal with the reality of globalisation, including the one I represent. The result was, as many of us found in the election, our arguments on immigration were not good enough. We faced rising anti-European sentiment with small parties claiming they could seal the borders.

Really, Ed? Has there been a massive negative impact on wages, terms and conditions of people? If so, how come every single empirical study of the impact of migration from the EU on UK wages and/or employment has found almost no impact - and in some cases positive impacts? I know this research extremely well - I've done some of it, in fact - and I also know that Ed Balls is talking out of his arsehole on this issue. Ok, the local level (Super Output Area) data is poor and there may have been adverse effects in a few areas. But if it was that widespread it would show up at regional or local authority level, or at local authorities - and it simply doesn't.

For sure there are some people experiencing poor working conditions - but that's nowt to do with migration. That's due to failure to regulate the labour market properly - for example failure to implement the EU agency workers directive (which Ed does mention to be fair.)

Migration has also caused pressure on public services in certain areas - but that's because the funding formulas are based on population size and demographics in previous years and don't respond quickly enough to population shifts. Again, Balls is shooting at the wrong target.

But I'd wager that his intention here isn't to present a balanced evidence base anyway. Instead, he's trying to exploit the meme that's emerged since the election that Labour lost because it wasn't tough on immigration (and welfare claimants). And trying to turn Labour into a reactionary Sun readers football-hooligan parody of what a left-wing party should be. It's not dropping all the way into the cesspit of the British National Party to be sure. But it is dipping a foot into that stinking morass of hatred and xenophobia.

In any case, free movement of labour is a cornerstone of the EU. Some countries (e.g. Bulgaria, Romania) are subject to temporary labour movement restrictions to be sure (in my view, unfairly - if a country's ready to enter then it should be a full member from day one). But the restrictions are meant to be just that - temporary. I'd have more respect for Balls if he was trying to go for a left-wing version of UKIP - suggesting leaving the EU. I wouldn't agree with him but at least it would be consistent But of course he doesn't have the balls to do that - he'd rather play to the galley in the most disgusting way possible.

Balls - and Andy Burnham, who has said very similar things - can go f*** themselves as far as I'm concerned. We have to hope and pray (even as atheists) that Eddy Miliband wins this leadership campaign. If not, I'm off to the Greens and fuck the Labour party. It can kiss my ass. This kind of reactionary shit from Balls is what no-one needs right now and particuarly the deprived communities whom he professes to be on the side of.