A disastrous day for the Labour Hard Right

If you're a Guardian reader you couldn't really have missed the news that David Miliband, the Denis Healey (or maybe the Roy Jenkins) of post-Blairite Labour politics, has decided to stand down as an MP to go and work for an American charity called the International Rescue Centre. This news was the top story on the Guardian website for at least half of yesterday, which gives you some idea of the priorities of the Guardian news editors.

I had some sympathy with David's interview with Krishnan Guru Murthy on Channel 4 News where he explained that the main reason he was stepping down was to avoid an ongoing "pantomine" whereby every comment he makes on national politics is interpreted as a coded attack on his brother Ed. That's true, and this move gets David completely out of British politics and gives him a chance to do something completely different - and I'm sure he'll do very well. However, it's important to realise that the reason that David's political commentary has had a "pantomine" aspect to it is because his more zealous supporters - the Blairite Labour Hard Right, known fondly on this blog as "LINO" (Labour In Name Only) - have chosen to raise the stakes to that level.

For two and a half years now the LINOs have been in a state of shock, still unable to accept that David lost. How could it have happened?
Didn't David have the best set of ideas for taking Labour forward? [In my view, no.]
Didn't he have the best funded campaign? [yes - but that encouraged a complacency which was, in the end, fatal.]
Didn't he have the best experience for the job? [yes - but that often counts for little in a leadership ballot. Look at (e.g.) David Cameron vs David Davis in 2005.]
Didn't he have the endorsement of almost all the Labour Party's "big hitters" (Blair, Mandelson, Johnson, Darling, Blunkett, etc. etc.) [yes. Read those names back to yourself and you'll see what the problem was... he wasn't change, he was more of the same.]
Wasn't he stabbed in the back by his dastardly brother?

This is the question it comes down to in the end. "How dare Ed Miliband stand against the anointed elder brother!"

The Labour Party is a strange place for primogeniture to find a foothold as the main ethical principle for allocating a position of power, but that's the principle that LINO are invoking here. Ed shouldn't have stood against David because he's the younger brother.

To which my response is: mile-high bullshit! Any sitting Labour MP had the right to stand in that election regardless of who their brother was and what position in the birth order they were in. We might find it surprising that the Miliband brothers couldn't agree some kind of joint campaign which would have meant only one of them stood (for example, David could have stood, supported by Ed, with the promise of the Shadow Chancellor position - which Ed would have been brilliant at - as a reward). But obviously there was a fundamental difference of political opinion which meant that Ed wasn't comfortable with that. And so, he felt that it was more honest to have an open contest. And why not? It was the most honest thing to do.

And it was all above board. Ed didn't stab David in the back; if anything, he stabbed him in the front. (H/T Chris Brooke on this phrase).

But Ed was a huge underdog and it's a testament to how badly run the David campaign was that Ed managed to get anywhere near him on votes, let alone win. Once again the "bad loser" tendency in LINO is huge when the manner of victory is mentioned. We hear "Ed won with union votes". Yes he did. Did any of these people look at the election rules? It's a tripartite electoral college. Ed took the strategy of trying to maximise his vote in all three segments, whereas David only bothered with two. And apparently he wasn't even that bothered about the PLP... according to Mehdi Hasan and James MacIntyre's biography Ed, David spent very little time over the run-up to the summer recess meeting MPs to get extra support - he just assumed his Big Name status would deliver. Whereas Ed, not the most natural Strangers Bar visitor, was apparently there all the time pressing the flesh.

In the end, David Miliband was The Entitlement Candidate. He felt he didn't need to try very hard to win the leadership election because the arithmetic and the resources of the contest were so heavily weighted in his favour that he was a shoo-in.

Whereas Ed Miliband was The Grafter. It was a long shot from the start but he believed from the get-go that if he put the hours in and made his case he could win.

Given a choice between those two strategies as a template for Labour's 2015 General Election campaign, I know which one I'd choose. I actually think Labour is now further ahead in the polls with Ed as leader than it would be if David were leader. David's personal ratings would probably be better than Ed's but David would have failed to map out any kind of strategy for opposing the ConDems and putting "Clear Red Water" - those all-important dividing lines - between Labour and the Tories.

The "pantomine" and "soap opera" which David Miliband has resigned to put a stop to, started when Ed was declared winner by a narrow margin in September 2010. There was a large group of LINOs - some of them influential (or at least semi-influential) journos - who just couldn't accept the result. And so it was toys out of the pram time... because they couldn't win in a straight fight they hoped to destabilise the Ed regime to the extent that he would step down before 2015. The most ludicrously blatant example of this strategy is the Telegraph blogger Dan Hodges, who attacks Ed in the most clumsy and flailing manner in at least 80% of his columns. But there are others: John Rentoul in the Independent, a misanthropic Tory masquerading as some kind of Labour supporter, is the obvious example.

Perhaps the most insidious attempt to undermine Ed has come from the Guardian's Political Editor Pat Wintour and Chief Political Correspondent Nick Watt. Wintour and Watt have spent large parts of the last two and a half years coordinating a range of Blairite has-beens to launch thinly veiled attacks (or in some cases not even thinly veiled) on Eds Miliband and Balls - mainly arguing that the Eds lack credibility on the economy (even though if one compares Ed Balls's predictions for the economy in 2010 with George Osborne the score is something like Balls 10, Osborne 0). The Wintour/Watt strategy came fairly close to destablising the opposition completely at the end of 2011 and start of 2012 when biased media reports of Cameron's so called "veto" had briefly given the Tories a lead in the polls. In the end Ed was saved by the "omnishambles" Budget, after which Labour opened up a 10-point lead over the Tories which has remained more or less around that level ever since.

It's not clear to what extent David Miliband was involved in these destabilisation efforts, if at all. He played little direct role beyond the odd article here and there calling for Labour not to retreat to its "comfort zone" (although arguably it is Blairism which is the real "comfort zone" which needs to be avoided.) I'm inclined to think that his role was that of an interested onlooker... if Ed had been forced to stand down a la Iain Duncan Smith, David would probably have thrown his hat into the ring again. But crucially, he could not have afforded to have been seen as the man who destablised his brother's leadership... that would have made him look like the guy who knifed his brother in the back, and LINO would have probably abandoned him for another candidate.

But who would that candidate be? One of the reasons that LINO, Progress and all the rest are fighting such a desperate rearguard action at the moment is that they have no obvious Blairite challenger in the event that Ed Miliband falls under a bus next week. The best they can do at the moment is Yvette Cooper, who is only semi-Blairite at best. The two most senior dyed-in-the-wool Blairite shadow cabinet members are Liam Byrne and Steve Twigg, who would be laughable choices for leader (so laughable in fact that they are a liability to Labour and should both be ditched asap). Jim Murphy at Defence at least gives an impression of competence but is too lightweight a figure to challenge for the leadership. And there have been few if any Blairites in the new crop of 2010 MPs.

In short, the fall of David Miliband is just one more staging post on the slow extinction of Blairism in the Labour Party: and for that we can be grateful.

Politics in 2012

I think it's safe to say that 2012 was a disaster for the UK as the ConDem govt continued its insane drive to turn us into a minimal-state, free market paradigm of rampant inequality and skeletal public services. The knock-on effect of this austerity drive, coupled with similar attempts across other European countries, was double-dip recession and suffering on a massive scale. Sadly the 2011 Fixed Term Parliament Act ensures we have 2 and a half years more of this lunacy to endure before some form of sane govt can be restored

Ed Miliband and the Labour Party entered 2012 in a bit of a sorry state. The temporary boost from Cameron's farcical "veto" at the EU negotiations at the end of 2011 meant that the Tories were actually in front, or at least neck-and-neck, with Labour in the polls, despite the insanity of their economic policy and the huge cuts being made to public expenditure. In January 2012 there were the beginnings of an open revolt against Ed Miliband from the far right of the Labour Party, masterminded by the neo-Blairite Progress group and its friends in the media (in particular Guardian journalists Patrick Wintour and Nick Watt, and the Telegraph's Dan Hodges). The centre-right Policy Network think-tank published In the Black Labour (neatly caricatured by Compass as "White Flag" Labour), arguing that Labour should give up the fight and essentially accept George Osborne's economic policy lock, stock and barrel. And in January and February, as Eds Milibands and Balls made high profile speeches arguing that a future Labour government would have to accept all the Tory spending cuts, it looked dangerously likely that the right had won and that Labour was a busted flush.

But then the Tories rediscovered their 1990s ability to self-destruct in spectacular fashion with the "budget for millionaires" in March; the 5p-in-the-pound income tax cut for people earning over £150,000 a year, at a time when living costs were rising sharply for everyone else, showed the Tories' true colours. Coupled with the "granny tax" debacle (a relatively minor tax change which nonetheless threatened to become George Osborne's equivalent of the 10p tax abolition fiasco of 2008) and even weirder controversies such as the "pasty tax", the effect was that Labour suddenly leapt 10 to 12 points into the lead in the polls - and have remained there ever since. I think this was the moment when a large number of people suddenly woke up and realised what the Tories were about all along.

The problems for the Tories were compounded by a surge in popularity for the hard-right UK Independence Party - now hitting 15% in some polls - and the continued weakness of the self-immolating Liberal Democrats (below 10% in most polls, except on ICM polls for the Guardian where Alan Rusbridger has an arrangement with the pollsters to boost the Lib Dem figures so that he looks a little less stupid for endorsing them at the 2010 election). The double-dip recession just confirmed the fact that the Tories are at best incompetent and at worst a destructive and dangerous force.

The immediate upshot of this is that Ed Miliband is safe. No-one (except perhaps Dan Hodges) believes that Labour will get rid of Ed this side of the next election. And it looks likely (although far from certain) that Labour will win the 2015 election, particularly because of the one Lib Dem achievement of the coalition is to block the Tories' proposed boundary changes, which makes it considerably more easy for Labour to win even if only a few percentage points in front. My prediction for 2015 is that Labour will poll in the region of 40% or maybe a little more (gaining probably around half the people who voted Lib Dem last time), with the Tories more or less where they were last time (losing some voters to UKIP but gaining some right-wing Lib Dems). I stuck these numbers into the UK polling report swingometer and the result was a Labour majority of 46 - I think it will be a little less than that because the Tories will fight particularly hard in the marginals, and, as in October 1974 (for instance), may be able to limit the swing in some of those marginal seats by pouring everything into them. So, say a majority of around 20-30 seats for Labour.

The problems start there, really. For Labour to get in with a small majority, no economic policy besides being a pale imitation of the Tories, and a substantial right-wing voting bloc of MPs could be a total disaster. And so we look to the policy review, now led by Jon Cruddas, to produce results in this area. That, I think, is going to be the crucial issue of 2013; does the Labour Party have the wherewithal to produce a modern version of something as radical and powerful as its 1973 economic programme, 20 years on? Or are we more likely to get a reheated version of New Labour? I hope for the former but fear the latter.

Ed Miliband rediscovers what was always there

You lucky kids have not just one but two posts from me this morning, as I'm trying to avoid doing some rather boring work.

Amazing how one speech can turn round perceptions of Ed Miliband. Before Tuesday's Labour leader speech (incidentally why is the Labour leader speech halfway through Conference whereas the other two main parties put their speeches at the end? Is it just so there is a graveyard slot on Thursday morning to bury Steve Twigg?) people were seeing the conference as an awkward potential car crash - the general feeling was that Ed would have done well just to get through it without inviting the oppobrium that got heaped on him after his 2011 speech. (I actually thought the content of the 2011 speech was pretty good, but delivery was awful).

I haven't watched most of the speech this year - last year was just too painful - but I have seen Ed speak without notes, strolling round the stage, before, and he is remarkably effective doing that. In fact it was at the 2008 Compass conference that I first thought "maybe this guy could be the next Labour leader". His speech at the Fabian post-election conference in 2010, where he announced his  candidacy, was another good effort. By comparison, speaking from a lectern Ed just looks stilted and awkward.

This year's big idea - "One Nation Labour" - is designed to underline the fact that the Tories are a party of sectional interest who care only about a small minority of very powerful, privileged people. But this was the case from 1979 onwards anyway. What Dave Cameron and the ConDems are doing is just an extension of Thatcherism. Saying to working people, "you've had too big a share of the cake for far too long and now it's time to put you back in your place."

If the truth be told, Labour was always a One Nation party - it just almost never used the rhetoric (mainly because it was copyrighted to the Tories). But if you look at (for example) the 1974 Labour election manifesto - "a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of working power in favour of working people and their families". Given that "working people and their families" covered the vast majority of people in the UK (and still would do, if we didn't have such high unemployment), this was always a One Nation idea. The Tories, too, were One Nation from 1951 up until the Heath era, as party policy was mainly dominated by centre-left social democrats pretty much interchangeable with the right-wing of the Labour party.

Of course, the right wing tries to paint Labour as a party only interested in promoting the interests of public sector workers. But this simply reflects the fact that conditions in the private sector have deteriorated so badly over the last 35 years that it is now able to play 'divide and rule' in the Thatcherite tradition, playing one group of working class people off against another group of working class people. Fortunately, the 2008 crisis has, to a large extent, blown the gaffe on this fiction; there is now increasing understanding that Capitalism Is The Problem. If not (yet) a clearly articulated alternative (the sterling efforts of Occupy aside).

So "One Nation Labour" - a clever rhetorical move. But the facts on the ground were there all along.

Ed Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Moans

Firstly, many apologies for being inactive on the blog for almost a month. I was on holiday for a few weeks and then it took a while just to get back in the groove of things. I've got a lot of stuff to catch up on, so the next couple of weeks will (hopefully) several posts, and many of them will be on the long side. But increasingly I'm using Twitter for the soundbite stuff and so this blog will be picking up the slack on slightly longer, polemic-style, outings.

So, without further ado.... what a difference six months has made for Ed Miliband. At the end of last year, with the Tories temporarily in the lead in the polls due to David Cameron's ludicrous "veto" in Brussels, you could tell that the Labour hard right were sharpening the knives. This anti-Ed activity was covered in some detail in my previous post "The Bantam Menace" - referring to the rather small size of the threat Ed faced. I always thought it was unlikely that Ed would face a challenge this side of the next general election, even when the Tories were marginally in front, because the Labour right - who have (mostly) hated Ed ever since he announced he was standing for the leadership in May 2010 - had no obvious challenger. The most high-profile right wingers at cabinet level are Liam Byrne, Jim Murphy, Stephen Twigg and Caroline Flint, none of whom look like they could attract enough support across the Labour leadership electoral college to beat Ed. Other torch-bearers for the Labour hard right are mostly in the Lords (e.g. Adonis, Mandelson) or have retired hurt from front-line politics (Milburn, Purnell). Very few of the visible faces in the new crop of MPs look like Blairite right-wingers, either. And the original great hope of "continuity New Labour", David Miliband, crashed and burned so spectacularly in 2010 that it's unlikely he would ever want to put himself through such a gruelling process again.

So in short, it is looking rather desperate for the Labour right in terms of a direct challenge to the leadership, and has done since October 2010, really. Progress (surely the most Orwellian misnaming of a political grouping ever?) realised very early on that, lacking a candidate of their own for the leadership, their best hope was a "Manchurian candidate" figure - a pliable centrist who could be leaned on to be more receptive to hard-right ideas than Ed is. In terms of "big hitters", Ed Balls was out because despite largely agreeing with the Labour right on financial regulation (i.e. we don't really need it, despite everything we've seen since 2008) he's too statist and too Keynesian, and too  arrogant, to be a conduit for Blairism. Also, he performed dismally in the 2010 leadership election Yvette Cooper on the other hand, who had stayed out of the 2010 election in deference to Balls (her husband), was a distinct possibility. And so last year we began seeing a wave of pro-Cooper articles from Dan Hodges and the like. The idea was that the anti-Ed barrage would build to a crescendo if Labour's performance in the local elections in May 2012 was as weak as May 2011, building momentum for an autumn 2012 challenge from Cooper.

The strategy failed dismally, largely because Labour stormed into a poll lead of around 10 percentage points in the wake of George Osborne's extraordinarily botched Budget of March 2012. This laid the ground for a good - although not exceptional - local election performance for Labour. The one beacon of hope for the right was that Ken Livingstone's defeat in the London mayoral contest would prove a big blot on Ed's copybook - but this doesn't seem to have happened, largely because Ken's sheer eccentricity as a candidate this time round has led to him taking personal blame for the defeat, with Ed largely insulated from criticism.

Instead, Ed has been consolidating his position - something that's much easier to do now that shadow cabinet elections have been abolished and he has control over appointments. Key allies in the 2010 intake like Rachel Reeves and Chuka Umunna have been quickly promoted to the shadow cabinet, Balls has been brought inside the tent and is performing reasonably well as Shadow Chancellor, and last month the Blairite Liam Byrne was replaced as head of the unweildy and labyrinthine Labour policy review by leading "soft left" thinker Jon Cruddas. It is this last event that symbolises the intellectual exhaustion and capitulation of the Labour hard right. Reduced to arguing for Labour to become an anaemic "lite" version of the ConDems in pamphlets like Policy Network's In the Black Labour, they have been caught completely unawares by Labour's improvement in the opinion polls, and would probably have started to fade away completely had it not been for the rather ham-fisted intervention of the GMB Union, which attacked Progress at its annual conference, with GMB general secretary Paul Kenny promising to submit a motion to the Labour Conference in the autumn which would "outlaw" Progress as part of the Labour party in its present form. This was, frankly, a daft intervention, which makes Progress look like martyrs being hounded out of the party by the union paymasters. As things stand, Progress is yesterday's organisation. Just as the high point of the hard left within the Labour party was Tony Benn's narrow defeat to Denis Healey in the 1981 deputy leadership campaign, which was followed by a long period of decline for that faction, similarly the high point of Progress was David Miliband's narrow defeat to Ed in 2010. Progress is an organisation on a downward curve. It has considerable funding from Lord Sainsbury and various corporates, but is being progressively marginalised by Ed Miliband, and will probably be only a minor force, with a couple of token cabinet members, in the next Labour government. The GMB's interests would be best served by letting Progress continue its slow decline rather than giving it publicity and a moral high ground it doesn't deserve with comedy motions to "outlaw" it.

Shades of Grey

Which was the 48th episode, and the final episode of the Second Season of Star Trek: The Next Generation,  and essentially consists of about 10 minutes of new footage involving one of the actors lying on a bed in a set interspersed with Clips from previous episodes. It's widely considered one of, if not the worst episode in the entire Star Trek pantheon. I was moved to write by the latest offering from the already mentioned Owen Jones, who, having left the sanctity of the Guardian to move across to the other fount of predictable idiocy The Independent has, in the face of strong competition, produced what has to be the most idiotic article I think I have ever read in any supposedly 'respectable' newspaper.

The articles byline is 'If Socialists really did run the show then working people would benefit' and as already stated the sheer number of inaccuracies and calumnies within an article is, I think unsurpassed in the history of 'quality' journalism. There's probably too many to list not to make this the longest article in the site's history, but I'll do my best:

'When I glanced at the Telegraph's front page later that day – which revealed that multi-millionaire Tory donor Adrian Beecroft had accused Vince Cable of being a socialist – I realised it must have been Karl Marx spinning violently in his Highgate Cemetery grave. The great man shouldn't take it to heart:'

In fairness, it's questionable whether a man should be held to account for crimes committed in his names after his death but I am moved to quote the late Lewis Namier, who was moved to inquire of the brilliant philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin, when informed that the latter intended to compose a treatise on Marx as to why he was studying such a Poor thinker and one so blinded by class and racial hatred. However, given how influential (Disastrously) his ideas have been, to describe him as a 'Great man' (in the sense that Possibly Hitler and Stalin were 'Great men') is not beyond the realms of possibility.

'....it does demonstrate how "socialist" is regarded as the ultimate insult by much of our wealthy elite, who have been in a virtually uninterrupted triumphalist mood since Margaret Thatcher defeated their political opponents in the 1980s'

From reading this you might think (as indeed my co-blogger might well argue) that Thatcher gained her victory through franchise restriction and use, possibly of paramilitary forces to vanquish her and, by definition 'The elite's political opponents'. Never mind she won thumping victories both in 1983 and 1987, winning a majority of voters in the C1 and C2 Sociological demographics,two strata referred to quite frequently (and witheringly, for the most part) by The Guardian as 'Thatcher's children'. I can only assume that from Jones' perspective, these people, often amongst the early self-employed, small businessmen or employees in parts of the Public Sector where Union Leadership had had their restrictive practices curtailed by the Employment reforms of Norman Tebbit , would not be classified according to his eccentric world-view as 'Working people'

'In what was fortunate timing for Thatcher's acolytes, the Soviet empire began disintegrating as her project reached its climax. Although almost all socialists abhorred Stalinist totalitarianism (by the 1980s, at least), these were regimes that described themselves as "actually existing socialism". Their collapse was portrayed as the final discrediting of socialism, and the ultimate vindication of capitalism.'

Given that even the most Conservative estimates of the extent of Warsaw Pact influence within the Public Sector, Civil Service and other prominent parts of British civic life puits the number of COMECON country agents at around 15,000, it is something of a stretch to make the statement that 'Almost all Socialists abhorred Stalinist totalitarianism'. Besides which 'Uncle Joe' had been dead for almost three decades by the time Thatcher came to power. If my blanket use of the terms 'Soviet sympathiser' and 'Sino/north Korean agent' is to be disproved (and I apologise to readers as they have been over-used) then at least one should distinguish between the Stalin, Kruschev and Brezhnev eras. As is so often the case with Journalists of the Left, the absence of historical context is truly shaming and shocking.

'Beecroft's use of "socialism", then, relates to a theory called the "Overton window", which describes what is seen as politically acceptable at a given time. Rather than having to engage in a debate over the merits of bosses being able to dismiss their workers at will, an opponent can be dismissed as a "socialist", which – for Beecroft – is code for "extremist" or "someone with views outside of what is politically acceptable".'

A theory which is used regulaly in debates by (not Jones himself, curiously, which is to his credit) journalists of the Left to circumscribe debate on a whole raft of issues, most prominently race or sexual orientation - almost any mainstream politician daring to question the status quo that we need to do something to put limits in immigration into the UK has to lace such a statement with caveats and platitudes about ' the contribution diversity has made to the country' lest he be branded 'racist'. Similarly on the issue of Climate Change (Or Anthropogenic Global Warming), currently under severe pressure, the term 'Climate Change denier' is regularly bandied about. The issue being that unlike Socialism, neither 'Racism' nor 'Climate Change Denial' can put 90 million dead across two countries in their debit column. Forget Al Gore's vapid meanderings on the state of the planet. This is the real 'Inconvenient truth' that the Left would like airbrushed out of history.

'If socialists really were running the show in Britain, they would be building a society run by, and in the interests of, working people. Our banks – propped by the British people – would be taken under genuine democratic control, forcing them to operate in the interests of society as a whole. Our booming wealthy elite would be forced to pay a fair share of tax (or, in some cases, any tax whatsoever)....'

Again here, he hits on a partial truth - the banks shouldn't have been baled out by the taxpayer, for if markets are to work, however imperfectly, then there has to be the possibility of failure. Sadly it was the previous administration, by firstly propping up Northern Rock for heavily political reasons, then intervening in the difficulties of HBOS and RBS who set in tow the kowtowing to the Banks, who know that whatever their misjudgements, the taxpayer will now act as backstop.

I also like the idea that the Banks under state control would 'act in the interests of society as a whole' - And just who decides what that interest is? Are we going to have referenda on interest rates (for example?) Which well-paid coterie of bureaucrats will decide 'the popular interest'?

'After the disastrous failures of market economics, real socialists would be taking our utilities – such as the railways and rip-off energy companies – into social ownership: not old-style, statist nationalisation, but democratically run by workers and consumers. They would bring down welfare spending, not by kicking people at the bottom, but by building social housing, introducing a living wage, and creating jobs. And they would be reversing the scandalous lack of rights that workers have in the workplace, which is what ensured that wages were declining for many before the crash had even happened...'

What I find amusing here is that Jones (I suspect) is too young to remember the situation in the 1970s, and certainly too young to remember the 1945 to 51 government - which was a genuinely impressive administration, easy to knock with the benefit of hindsight but filled with ministers who had served patriotically during the warf, and with a genuine concern for working conditions and familiar with pre-war deprivation which the modern LEft have, frankly zero familiarity with. The Industries were taken into Public ownership with the intention of running them 'democratically'. That was quickly hijacked by the Unions themselves, who took over acting in the interests of producers, rather than consumers. A quick look at the scene today sees (for example) the London Underground, which is already partly in Public ownership, and under 'Workers control' - a scenario meaning a job that for the most part mechanisation should already have removed is paid a base salary of £59K. Is Jones saying that's the kind of wage levels he wants across the economy? It sounds like a rekindling of Tony Benn's laudable but ludicrous idea of a 'siege economy' to prevent Britain being battered by the then relatively nascent Capital markets, or at worst, something like the reaction of Apartheid South Africa in the face of global economic sanctions - Build up our own industries heedless of what is going in the outside world.

As I said in the previous post on Murphy, I wouldn't normally consider either party worthy of such detailed comment, but as these are two intellectual scions of the Ed Miliband Labour Party, I think it's worth seeing the level of intellectual rigour and total failure to understand historical context or even take a cursory look at history before coming out with suggestions. Ironically one thing both contributors lack is the realisation that things aren't always black and white - and in between, there are many Shades of Grey....

Updated thoughts on today's elections

With many people going to the polls today for the local elections, I thought I'd update my previous advice on the London mayoral race, as well as offering a few predictions of what's going to happen on Friday.

It seems to me that Ken is probably going to lose - which has very little to do with his policy platform, but is rather a combination of two personality-based factors: (1) Boris Johnson appears to have a certain buffoonish appeal to a swathe of voters that disconnects him from national dislike of the Tories, and (2) a proportion of (people who would otherwise be) Labour voters are turned off by Ken to the extent that they won't vote for him.

The 'Boris factor' would probably give Boris a certain boost no matter who he was running against, while the 'Ken factor' would depress Ken's ratings no matter who he was running against. But it's the combination of the two that proves deadly to Ken's chances.

This suggests that Labour would be doing better with another candidate - one with less baggage - and I think that's the case. Oona King, for example, would probably have been in front at this stage, and Boris contemplating a return to Westminster.

The "tax avoider" slur, in particular, has hit Ken really hard. There is some truth in it - to the extent that everyone who sets up a company and pays themselves partially in dividends (which don't attract National Insurance liabilities in the way earnings do) is a tax avoider. In other words Ken is doing the same thing that millions of other people who are self-employed do - paying a lower tax rate than employed people. It's worth noting that even if he were registered as a self-employed sole trader rather than a company, he'd still be paying less tax than if he were an employee, because self-employed National Insurance is considerably lower than employee plus employer rates. In his current employment situation, the only way Ken could pay tax rates equal to what he'd pay as an employee is if he paid out all the income from his company (Silveta) as his earnings rather than dividends. But this logic would suggest that anyone who takes dividends rather than earnings is a tax avoider - so the Tories are left arguing the Marxist line that the return to capital from the production process should essentially be zero, and the return to labour should be 100%. It's a funny old world. Of course, if we had a system which was neutral between the taxation of earnings and dividends, then this issue wouldn't arise. But there you go.

My previous post indicated that if I were in London I wouldn't vote Ken. That's still true on first preferences, but on second preferences, with the race so close, I think I'd have to put him second, despite my misgivings. The guy is severely flawed, but at the end of the day, the priority is to keep Boris out. My first preference would be for Jenny Jones of the Greens.

My predictions overall are for Labour to get around 500 seats, for Ken to lose, and for Labour to lose Glasgow council to the SNP. The latter two will be treated as calamitous by the Blairites in the media (Wintour and Watt, Rentoul, Dan Hodges etc.) who have had thin pickings for their "Ed is crap" campaign of late; but the fallout from London and Glasgow is unlikely to damage Ed, simply because he's had little to do with either fiasco. Ken Livingstone was chosen as the London mayoral candidate before Ed even became Labour leader, and his poll slide is the result largely of unforced errors by Ken himself, coupled with a hugely hostile media - nothing to do with Ed. Similiarly, although I am no expert on Scottish local politics, as far as I can tell the Glasgow problem is also a result of serious problems in the local Glasgow Labour party which are very much below Ed's pay grade. I mean, if the loss to the SNP in the Scottish Parliamentary elections last year didn't result in a putsch against Ed - at a point where Labour was doing much worse in the polls than it is now - it's hardly likely that Glasgow council elections are going to precipitate some kind of uprising now, is it?

I also predict that any fillip to Cameron from a Johnson win will be short-lived - the Johnson/Livingstone duel is a one-off, with no real relevance to national politics except that it establishes Johnson as a formidable operator and campaigner who will move one step closer to being the next leader. But that factor could weaken Cameron in the long run a lot more than it helps him. If Dave looks like a surefire loser in 2015 we can expect to see Boris campaign for a parliamentary seat in the May 2015 election (amazingly, the Mayor is allowed to serve as an MP at the same time, as long as it's for no more than 6 months), get elected and then resign the mayoralty to stand for Tory leader. And given the collection of duffers currently jockeying for position in the Cabinet, it seems unlikely he won't get it, should he want it. Interesting times indeed.

The Gamesters of Triskelion

Having been off the airwaves for what seems like an age, a warm welcome back to those readers who have had nothing on the page to read that haven't fled for more fertile pastures. Regrettably the significantly smaller and more rapid-fire interaction available on Twitter has taken up much of my limited spare time whilst some of the rest has been taken on some winter vacations down to parts of the American South West. If 'A week is a long time in politics' is something of a trite expression, then four months seems like an eternity. Indeed last week revealed one of the most inept budgets I can recall in recent times, certainly since the heyday of the 'Iron Fist' or 'Man who saved the World' (sadly not a bastardised David Bowie reference but this man)

The title post refers, as always to a Star Trek episode, which I thought was going to be something of a tricky fit (I'm waiting for a John Redwood related story to try and fit in 'Spock's Brain') when coming up with the concept of posts encompassing all 79 episodes of the series, but the budget appears to me to show a worrying lack of political sense and direction. As Telegraph (!) blogger Iain Martin put it:

'At least Gordon Brown's budgets used to take a day or so to unravel'

This budget basically was two fingers to almost every sector of society, beyond the primarily London-based Super-rich. When even notorious Blairite blogger Dan Hodges wades in to the morass to condemn it and, to my great surprise even praise Ed Miliband, (whose Budget riposte, although perhaps not as much of a tour de force as certain Sino/North Korean collaborators in the Guardian would have liked certainly saw him have much the better of the exchanges.) You've got to know you've badly misjudged the public mood.

Indeed the reaction of the many UKIP and Ultra - Libertarian bloggers on Twitter has been one of almost total disbelief. As one, the irascible @Jim_Watford put it:

'I never thought he (Cameron) could lose to Ed Miliband but that's what's going to happen'

'Fuel Duty being raised again. does anyone in this government have a clue?'

So why does the Budget attract, in my opinion such justified opprobrium? For me, three measures stood out as politically naive or plain idiotic:

1/ Failure to scrap plans to increase the Fuel Duty by 3p a litre. Whilst the Green opposition has actually been relatively neutral on this, it had the effect of seriously annoying The Sun and by extension it's 3 million plus readers, many of whom are converted Conservative voters the party needs to win if it is to have any chance of retaining power after 2014 (although I have to say a 2015 election is looking likely if the current polling trends continue) I can recall (and more on the 'Second Petrol crisis' to follow, time permitting) the 2000 'Fuel protests' which took place when Petrol was hovering around the £1.00 per litre mark. Diesel is already hitting over £1.50 without the tax rises, and for most dwellers outside London, Public transport for grocery shopping simply is not an option. Indeed, Osborne needs to be looking to cut further into the Labour client state with a view to reducing Fuel Duty rather than increasing it!

2/ As both 'Stalinist state' advocate Richard J Murphy quite eloquently and Ken Livingstone, in typically racist fashion, have pointed out, and I have also understood, the threat of people moving from London to Dubai, Singapore or Sitzerland is typically overplayed. Thus at a time when living standards are stagnating, it seems insane to cut the top rate of tax. And even assuming that, as stipulated this was a revenue maximiser, then why cut it only to 45p - The political lack of nous is truly breathtaking. I'd certainly not have advocated cutting the rate to 40p, but at least such a move would have been intellectually coherent.

3/ By 'Freezing' the age-related allowances for pensioners Osborne appears to have reintroduced the famous 'Stealth tax' narrative into British Politics. As the CPS pointed out, even by 2004, Labour had, through this method, introduced 75 Stealth taxes. I, for one, didn't elect a Tory government just to see them do exactly the same as the 'Clunking fist'. Furthermore, the elderly comprise the overwhelming majority of Tory activists and much of their vote. As I have pointed out before, the kind of people who are manning the barricades at 'Right to work' protests, 'Occupying' Private property, or 'Marching for Alternatives' aren't going to vote Conservative no matter how much you try and appease them. Why, thus, put in a measure likely to alienate your base, especially at a time when due to the massive fiscal profligacy of the previous administration, elderly savers have been the victims of an almost ZIRP (Zero Interest rate policy) for nearly two years of this government, and 2 of the previous?

In short, the Budget was almost enough to push me, in Millenarian style, into the Miliband camp, if only to see if following five years of Hard Leftism, something reasonable might arise from the ashes. It seems I'm not alone, and recent polls now put a ten point gap between Miliband and the Tories. The by-election result alluded to in my colleagues earlier post seems, superficially to have been a respite for Cameron, only if we ignore that whilst the Labour vote was badly hit, the Tory vote collapsed to under 3000, losing their candidate her deposit. Thus the Tories face the very real prospect of being the next 'Heath government' with Miliband cast in the role of Harold Wilson - the parallels with the 1970s look more and more apt with each passing day!

I shall have more to say on this matter in February...

...and so it turned out, that just after I'd dismissed the anti-Ed Miliband faction as a "bantam menace", Ed started to get into real trouble when he was (to quote the old Magazine song) "Shot By Both Sides" - getting it from the left as well as the right.

Fortunately, the Stephen Hester bonus fiasco seems to have saved Ed for now, at least - but this one will run and run. I've been too busy to post during the second half of January, but will hope to get back to regular posts in February. Keep it real people.

Ed Miliband Episode 1: The Bantam Menace

(episode 1 in a series of "Star Warped" Ed Miliband posts)

Part of the fun with the recent gaggle of "Ed Miliband is under attack" media stories is how lame the hacks writing this shit are. If you have a look at them, what have you got?

• Dan Hodges: ex-New Statesman blogger, dropped by that august outlet for repeated hysterical and incoherent attacks on Ed during Labour Party Conference. Now part of the gang of right-wing payroll bloggers at the Daily Telegraph.
• John Rentoul: Independent columnist, Blairite among Blairites. One of these guys who think you can stick a red rosette on any Tory nonsense and it suddenly becomes a sensible Labour position.
• Wintour and Watt: the Guardian's "dynamic duo" of political lobbyists. Specialise in lazy rewrites of any statement made by anyone you've ever heard of in the Labour Party (and many you haven't) so that they look like attacks on Ed.
• The brain-dead politics hacks at the BBC (particularly Nick Robinson) who take orders from Tory HQ, on pain of the BBC losing even more funding than the 16% it's already being cut (in nominal terms) over the next 5 years.
• whoever it was at the Sunday Times who thought it would be a good to run a poll on whether Ed Miliband is too ugly to be PM.

It's a good job for Ed that the people writing his political obituary week after week are so lightweight.

What's more, the potential challengers in the Labour party for the leadership are chicken. If no-one was prepared to get rid of Gordon Brown when Labour were 15 points behind the Tories, what's the betting that anyone will get rid of Ed Miliband when Labour is ahead, or at least level pegging, in most polls? As has often been pointed out, historically Labour is much more crap at getting rid of leaders in mid-term than the Tories are. Even poor old Michael Foot was allowed to soldier on until the 1983 election.

That's why I call the plotters against Ed The Bantam Menace.

Stay tuned for more in this ongoing series.

Ed Miliband: skating away on the thin ice of the new year?

(with apologies to Jethro Tull)...

news is rather thin this new year, so it must be time to put the boot into Ed Miliband. The usual suspects have been at it of course: for example the celebrated 'false flag' blogger Dan Hodges is barely able to write about anything else (although he did produce an excellent blog on the Lawrence killer sentences this week).But the new specialists in anti-Ed propaganda is the Guardian, which has been orchestrating a series of attacks on Ed that are as blatant as they are clumsy in their distortion of what political commentators are saying about the poor guy. Two obvious examples of this tendency, just so you don't think I'm making it up:

1. a Policy Network report by centre-left academic Ben Jackson and Labour pensions spokeman Gregg McClymont which presented the evidence from previous Labour election defeats in the 1930s, 1950s and 1970s as a cautionary tale for Labour today was spun by the Guardian as an attack on Ed's leadership.
2. an article yesterday in the New Statesman by Labour peer and Ed 'guru' Maurice Glasman which, if anything, was criticising Ed Balls rather than Miliband, and not very coherently at that, was, similarly, spun by the Guardian as an attack on Ed (Miliband)'s leadership.

Crappy journalism like this lowers the Guardian to the 'broadsheet gutter' zone of journalism occupied by the Times, and maybe below that, to the mid-range gutter of the Mail and Express. I was naive enough to believe that the departure of arch-Tory Julian Glover from the Guardian to Cameron's speech-writing team earlier this year would mean a significant reduction in the amount of pro-ConDem, anti-Ed bias in the paper's editorial line, but sadly the opposite seems to have been the case.

Although well known ConDem sympathiser Martin Kettle may have some role in this, I think the main instigators of the Guardian's anti-Ed vendetta are Chief Political Editor Nicholas Watt and Political Editor Patrick Wintour. This "dynamic duo" have recently embarked on a mission to oust Ed Miliband at any cost. It may be that they have been against Ed from the beginning; they may be on the payroll of the very well-funded LINO pressure group Progress; or David Miliband may have promised them advisory jobs in his private office after he replaces Ed (in his dreams!) Their precise motivations are (for the moment) a mystery, although I am working with contacts at the paper to find out what I can.

So is Ed Miliband on thin ice? I honestly don't think so. Labour's poll ratings have been improving (albeit slowly) over the last month as the Cameron "veto bounce" fades. I can't remember a single instance of a leader getting the boot if their party was in front in the polls. Certainly when IDS was forced out in the autumn of 2003, the Tories were miles behind Labour. The normal rule of thumb is that, to be replaced mid-term as an opposition leader before even getting the chance to fight an election, you've got to be doing really badly. And Ed is doing just... so-so. In fact, on some measures he's actually doing rather well; Labour is currently running at about 12 percentage points above its share of the vote at the previous election. 18 months into a parliament, I can't remember a Labour opposition leader ever doing as well as that; not Foot in 1980, nor Kinnock in 1984, nor John Smith in 1993.

What's more, the "critiques" of Ed are either not really critiques at all (e.g. the McClymont/Jackson Policy Network report, which is actually quite supportive of what Ed is doing), or they're critiques of Ed Balls rather than Miliband (to the extent that I can make coherent sense of it, the Glasman article falls into this camp), or they're right-wing LINO or ConDem hackery with no real traction in the Labour Party (Hodges, Rentoul, Kettle). There has not been any mainstream Labour voice saying Ed is crap. As Eoin Clarke of the excellent Green Benches website points out, Ed has probably lost some grassroots support by not delivering on to the (slightly) radical stance of his leadership election campaign. And my belief is that if he were more radical he would do himself a big favour. But none of that has any bearing on whether he survives in the job or not.

For better or worse (I think overall for the better), Ed Miliband is safe in the job. Ignore any hack who tries to tell you otherwise.

Ed Miliband: 2012 HAS to be better than 2011

The last few days of the year seem to have passed extraordinarily fast and I'm now conscious of the fact that 2012 is almost upon us.

For followers of the left the year could best be described as frustrating. About the best I can say for UK politics is that Ed Miliband is still in the job... and likely to remain so, despite ongoing mutterings about the quality of his leadership. He is vastly helped by the fact that most of his critics are unable to organise a piss-up in a brewery, as the "vote Labour - get Tory" LINO pressure group Progress proved with their completely inept contribution to the Yes To AV Campaign. Other maverick anti-Ed LINO forces like Dan Hodges do Ed a favour on balance by catalysing support for him more than they damage him - leading to my continuing belief that Dan is secretly in the pay of Ed's office. The classic "useful idiot".

However, just because Ed is still in the job doesn't mean he's doing a particularly good job in it. The hope with Ed was that we would see finally someone getting the Labour leadership job who combines the drive and single-mindedness (if not quite the charisma) of Tony Blair with the ideological backbone of previous Labour greats like Attlee and Wilson. What we have had so far, instead, with some honourable exceptions, is a slightly more approachable rehash of the Gordon Brown leadership style - i.e. not leadership at all; more just sitting in the middle of events waiting for something good-ish to happen. There is a memorable sequence from James MacIntyre and Mehdi Hasan's autobiography Ed where Ed goes on a radio phone in (maybe Radio 5 Live?) sometime in the new year of 2011, and the only thing callers are really interested in talking about is how he "knifed his brother in the back" to become Labour party leader. Twelve months on, if Ed were to go on the same phone in show, I'm sure much the same would happen. And after 12 months of these insane ConDem austerity measures and economic failure, that's simply not good enough. Labour ends 2011 in no better a polling position than it began - indeed, in the wake of the "veto" farce, Cameron's personal ratings have actually improved substantially. This is, to put it mildly, bad news.

To turn things around, Ed needs to observe one very simple maxim of politics; it's hard for a leader to be successful unless he/she is prepared to get out there and bloody LEAD. I have heard a story - which could be apocryphal, but it rings true, so I'll tell it anyway - that when Alan Johnson resigned as Shadow Chancellor Ed locked himself in his office for 2 hours not talking to anyone because he was so depressed that he'd have to give Ed Balls the job. Apparently because Ed Miliband is scared of Ed Balls. What does that tell us, if true? It tells us that Ed Miliband needs a kick up the backside and to grow back the spine that was so in evidence during the summer 2010 leadership contest. Listen son, Ed Balls is a washed-up also-ran in leadership terms. Tony Blair was scared of Gordon Brown because the two of them chose a stitch-up deal over a leadership contest in 1994 - enabling Brown to argue, however implausibly, that he had been denied the crown that was rightfully his. By contrast, Ed Balls fought as a candidate in the Labour leadership election - and was absolutely f***ing WALLOPED, finishing a very poor third. This guy, in Labour leadership terms, is HISTORY. I can understand Ed M being worried about a possible leadership challenge from his brother David, still sullen and watchful on the sidelines. But Ed Balls? No bloody way.

So Ed (M) is the leader... and so he needs to lead. That means not being scared of Ed Balls and it means refusing to bow down to the inflated paper tiger that is Progress. In practical terms, what does this mean Ed should do in the new year?

Firstly, he should make a number of keynote speeches fleshing out his very promising but underdeveloped ideas from the 2011 conference speech for a (much) better capitalism - squashing predatory businesses to open up space for the real producers. That has to mean a much smaller financial sector and much more for manufacturing, green jobs, the creative industries, and hugely underfunded sectors like social care. Together with a tax and corporate governance system system focused strongly on redistribution of income, wealth and power in favour of working people - the "squeezed bottom and middle", ambitious moves to increase gender equalities, and subsidies for education and innovation. Basic, obvious, centre-left stuff, articulated well by the left pressure group Compass, the Green Party, and academics like Martin O'Neill of York University. If Labour can't support a moderate social democratic programme along these lines there really is no point whatsoever in the party.

At the same time, he needs to accuse Progress of being a right-wing analogue to the extreme-left infiltrators of the 1980s - Militant et al - whose main objective is to destroy the Labour party. If this results in a handful - or even a few thousand - of the most ardent right-wing LINOs jumping ship to the Coalition, oh happy day! Labour's hard right is a huge albatross around its neck and probably the biggest internal hurdle to its return to power.

Thirdly, Big Guns need to be fired at the Coalition on a pretty much daily basis. This is happening a bit at the moment but in a far too reserved manner. Tony Blair had some good lines of attack in the mid-1990s which can be dusted off here - the weird thing is that although New Labour was largely a failure in policy terms, the rhetoric 1994-97 was actually pretty good. For example, "tacking the bills of social and economic failure" is a phrase that resonates completely with Ed Balls's critique of the Osborne austerity measures - which are fatally damaging Britain's economic capacity.

Lastly, there desperately need to be some big policies which the Labour Party can hang its message on. Again, New Labour had some totemic policies despite being weak on detail - windfall tax on privatised utilities, minimum wage, smaller class sizes, etc. The Labour Party policy review seems to have produced nothing of value so far and with Liam Byrne at the helm that was always the risk - indeed I now believe that the whole operation was a ruse by Ed to divert the energy of the Labour right into the minutiae of policies that would never see the light of day while he ran a parallel operation in his own office. But if that is what has happened, the parallel operation needs to produce concrete results very soon. As far as I can see there are two reasons that few people trust Labour on the economy; firstly because they presided over the worst recession since the 1930s (in fact recent data show that in the UK it's actually worse than the 1930s), and secondly because Labour has given no indication of how things would be any different in future if they were returned to power. Giving a clear indication of how Labour would do it differently this time round is an absolute prerequisite for standing any chance of winning the next election; and the greatest failure of Ed Miliband is that, over a year into his leadership, almost nobody has any idea how a Labour government would make life better for people in the UK or elsewhere. That is something he has to address in 2012. If he doesn't, I think he'll still survive in the job until 2015; but he'll be out on his ear after an election defeat.

(note: reading this back I'm very conscious that there are no links etc., mainly because it was stream of consciousness stuff and I had to motivate myself to write fast, or not at all. I'll try to put some links in tomorrow... if I get time. Otherwise, you know where Google is.)

Labour post-"veto": the Kool-Aid drinkers return

Jeez Mick, if you want a bunch of professional doom-mongers, go to any Labour party blog and hang out there awhile. 72 hours after an initial euphoria at the stupidity of David Cameron's "veto" on the EU treaty, bloggers on the left are now doing their usual Kool-Aid act. Of course we'd expect to find ultra-LINO Telegraph blogger Dan Hodges doing his normal anti-Ed wail ("Miliband stranded in the middle of the English channel" indeed), but we've also got relatively sane people on Twitter - e.g. Sunny Hundal of Liberal Conspiracy - saying that Labour's been outmanoeuvred by Cameron.

Is this correct? I identified this possibility pretty early on, and I wasn't sure. I'm still not sure, but overall I think probably Ed Miliband is actually in a much stronger position than his critics, although Cameron certainly could get lucky out of this.

The truth is, the veto has achieved nothing in concrete terms at all for Britain as long as we remain in the EU. Some kind of deal will proceed with Britain excluded from the negotiations. The terms of the treaty on issues like financial regulation will cover Britain as an EU member. There will be some more legal shenanigans but the EU will be able to negotiate these. Cameron achieved no concessions or quid pro quos whatsoever. In short, as a negotiator Dave was a disastrous flop. Ed pointed all this out - very effectively - in the Commons today.

But as political theatre, Thursday's "veto" was a brilliant stroke. It gives Cameron, not a very popular PM to start off with, a big political boost based on the rabid anti-EU print media reporting that he's fighting for Britain's interests - the old "bulldog" line. Dave's doing no such thing of course: he's fighting for the rogue state which is the City of London, and none too effectively at that. But a poll for ComRes apparently shows that 57% support the PM's "veto" decision (I'd like to link to that but it was an unlinked source from Twitter). John Harris quotes similar statistics in an excellent Guardian article.

That backs up what I said in my last post - anti-EU jingoism is popular. At least, initially. John Harris's line is that Europhobia is now the mainstream majority position. On headline polling, yes: but I'm not sure people really give a shit enough about it one way or the other to turn out in droves and vote the Tories in with a majority based on this one issue. If that is the case why isn't UKIP way out in front in the polls rather than on about 7% max? The post-"veto" polling shows a small swing to the Tories but based on a transfer of support from UKIP rather than any wider movement of support - which is what I'd expect. And given that most of the business community appears to think the "veto" was crazy, in an election campaign I'd expect centrist support to fall away from the Tories - leaving them with William Hague's rump vote of 2001 once again.

There is one situation where Dave might see long term benefit from "the veto": if the Eurozone falls apart, and maybe the EU with it, Dave can say "I told you so" and become a kind of visionary. That would be a powerful argument. But I think it's still a long shot, although possible; more likely is that treaty change will force the ECB into becoming a proper central bank prepared to do QE to save the Eurozone, combined with fiscal union further down the line.

In the meantime, Ed Miliband can strengthen his position by coming off the fence and openly saying he would have signed the treaty - and then worked within the treaty framework for Britain's interest. That's what all previous PMs including Thatcher and Major would have done and it's a strong line which effectively exposes Cameron as a seat-of-the-pants amateur. Ed could also add that getting on board with the treaty is the UK's best chance of helping avoid a Eurozone breakup, which gives him the opportunity to say to Dave, "it's your fault" if the Euro does fail.

But yeah, I'm beginning to wonder whether I should send leading Labour bloggers boxes of anti-depressants - and I'm not even a Labour party member or supporter. Cheer up guys, for f***'s sake.

The High Ground

Which was the title of Star Trek: The Next Generation's 60th episode, but an appropriate one for the response to prize clown Jeremy Clarkson's highly contentious comments on an early evening chat show yesterday, where he called for the Striking workers to be 'taken out and shot' in front of their families. This has caused the customary furore, no better illustrated than my co-blogger pressing for Clarkson's prosecution for 'Hate Crimes', amongst a variety of 'Twitterati, New Statesman bloggers and Guardian journalists, as well as the Unions behind yesterday's industrial action. In fairness to him, he confesses to 'severe misgivings' over hate crime legislation, and in the wake of UNISON deciding to use its membership fees to press for police action against the presenter, he has ceased the action.

There are, however, strange Double standards at work for the Left here. One of the most prominent Leftist 'Twitterati' member is the New Statesman blogger Sunny Hundal, who in this entry bemoans the fact that the remarks 'weren't comedy' and parrots the line that the BBC 'is overwhelmingly right wing'. Given Star Trek's Liberal use of alternative dimensions and parallel universes you could be forgiven for thinking you've stumbled into one here. Possibly in comparison with the
KCNA website, their output might be characterised as right of centre but otherwise it's certainly well to the Left of any political spectrum bar, perhaps an ILEA one of the mid 1980's wherein Trotskyites were defined as 'the Right'. Perhaps, most telling, is his comment that 'Let's not have Tories complain about 'PC gawn mad' and 'have a sense of humour' when they get so uppity at 'small jokes' themselves'.

This echoed my reaction on this blog to the interview given by mayoral candidate Ken Livingstone to Total Politics magazine where he equated the coming mayoral election with World War Two: (and implicitly, if not directly, Opponent Boris Johnson to Hitler) Strangely Hundal was noticeably silent on that issue. But why stop there? Prior to that point, Livingstone had also compared his rival's chief of staff to Serbian War Criminal Ratko Mladic , and subsequently, he remarked to Hammersmith and Fulham councillors proposing the redevelopment of a Council Estate, that they should be 'burned in hell with their flesh flayed by demons for all eternity', and called for the execution of Chancellor George Osborne. That's the trouble with this kind of thinking, it invariably escalates, and for the Left, the trouble as I tried to point out in my post on the Johnson/Hitler comparison, is that if you take vicarious offence on behalf of every 'minority' and try to censure the terms of the debate, then you'd better be pretty secure on the moral high ground or you'll come tumbling down. As it stands, all they've done, really is to make themselves look both priggish, petty, small-minded , and probably increase sales of 'Top Gear' DVDs by about 100,000 heading into the Xmas period.

It is worth quoting arguably one of the greatest politicians of the last 30 years, Lord Tebbit, who gives a sense of how both sides of the political fence today come across as Latter-day Neros - the fact that Mr.Ed sought to force Cameron to 'disown' the ludicrous Clarkson remarks, is on a par with Hague and Blair in 1998 debating the fate of Soap character Deirdre Rachid.:

'There are plenty of other matters crying out for attention. Despite all the promises and protestations, immigration is unchecked. While the Left wrings its hands at the appalling unemployment figures, it hides its face from the truth. Last year the number of UK nationals in work fell by 280,000. The number of foreigners rose by 147,000.

Perhaps it is time we asked why our own people are not finding work when people from overseas do. Is it our schools that are failing to produce young men and women with the skills, aptitudes and self-discipline needed to find work? Is it that the benefits culture has become so deep-rooted that idleness is the preferred option?

Whatever it is, the cost is appalling and stretches out into the future. Not just the economic and social costs of those unwilling or unsuitable to work, but the huge cost of providing infrastructure to support an ever increasing army of immigrants and their dependents. Schools, hospitals, roads, water and sewage works, power stations – none of which we would need if our own people took the jobs that are there for the taking.

The papers, but not the BBC, report on a daily basis the bizarre decisions of judges who fail to punish criminals with long records of crime, and others who think it is their duty to ignore the interest of we taxpayers who pay them. They’d rather allow foreign criminals to stay here to pursue their lives of crime.

Wherever one looks, be it Parliament, the Civil Service, the judiciary, local government or indeed the top management of public companies, the hired help behaves as though it were the owners, not the servants of the true owners, of the institution that pays their wages.'

In the context of the litany of woe above, a man known as someone 'whom the Hard Left feared'(and I would say, still fear) spells out the real issues facing us. Is it any wonder people like Sunny Hundal would have us worry about trivial, ridiculous comments?

Ed Miliband - pissing off the right people (most of the time)

As was the case last year, Ed Miliband's Labour Party conference speech just keeps getting better the more I look at the reactions to it.

One outcome of the speech (and in particular the very warm reaction that Ed's line "I'm not Tony Blair" received) has been that the Blairite hard right of the Labour party is utterly demoralised. After the disappointment of their assumed shoo-in candidate, David Miliband, losing to Ed last year, the hard right had hoped that Ed's poor personal approval ratings would somehow contrive an Iain Duncan Smith 2003 situation where Ed would be persuaded to fall on his sword to be replaced by David, or another Blairite (if they could find anyone suitable). The phone hacking scandal, and now Ed's gutsy speech, has made his replacement a very remote prospect this side of an election. You could still - just about - argue that Ed might be vulnerable if Labour does badly in the 2012 local elections, and in particular if Ken Livingstone fails to beat Boris Johnson in the London mayorality rematch; but this is clutching at straws for the Blairite hard right, who seemed to spend most of the conference crying into their beer as they realised the game is up for them.

Typifying this resignation among the hard right was an interview I saw on Channel 4 News last night with the preposterous right wing New Statesman and Labour Uncut maverick blogger Dan Hodges, and the shadow transport minister John Woodcock - who appears to be a cross between Andrew Adonis and a mannered automaton. Hodges was desperate - "Ed's embarked on a suicidal strategy", he wailed. This is very good news. The downbeat mood (reportedly) at the hard-right Progress rally at the conference was very good news. The fact that pain-in-the-ass uber-Blairite journalists like John Rentoul don't like Ed is also very good news. Demoralisation, ceasing and desisting, and - hopefully - leaving the Labour party altogether, would be the best things that could happen to the handful of Blairite ultras who have been trying to orchestrate a coup to take back the Labour leadership for the last 12 months. Note that most of the people who backed David Miliband for the leadership last year are not uber-Blairites and are happy to fall into line behind Ed's strategy. We're talking about a handful of people - just as damaging in their own way as the Trotskyite Militant tendency were in the 1980s. They are demoralised and they are on the way out. All Very Good.

That said, Ed doesn't always piss the right people off - sometimes he pisses off people he needs in the tent with him. This was most evident in the ludicrous part of his speech which attacked disabled benefit claimants as if they were all scroungers - a simple piece of Blairite triangulation totally at odds with the rest of his speech. Tim Nichols of the Child Poverty Action Group has a brilliant post on Left Foot Forward totally demolishing this part of Ed's speech - he badly needs to develop a new progressive narrative on social security (NOT, for F***'s sake, this godawful US word "welfare"), or risk alienating millions of benefit and tax credit claimants whose votes he needs to win next time.

But in general, with some severe reservations, I'm a lot more optimistic about the future of the Labour party now than I was a week ago. Hey, if Ed dropped the bullshit about demonising benefit claimants I might even rejoin, having not been a Labour member since 1992 when I resigned claiming that John Smith(!) was "selling us out". I'm in the Green party at the moment - ideally I'd like to be in both the Green party and the Labour Party, and perhaps it would be useful if such a facility could be introduced. F*** tribalism, yes to pluralism.

Some quick reflections on Ed's speech

Van Patten has actually done a remarkably good and fair minded job on Ed Miliband's speech already, and I'm pushed for time, so I will just offer up a few "thunks" in the manner of BHappy:

1) delivery started well but fell off rapidly. I tweeted in the first 5 minutes of the speech that Ed was far more assured than last year, but that was only true for those first few minutes. After that, his pacing was glacial, and too often he sounded like he was reading the phone directory. I've seen Ed give some barnstorming speeches at places like the Fabians and Compass where he's spoken without notes, walking around the platform, and I think he should do that next time. As Cameron has shown, it's just a far more relaxed style of delivery.

2) there needs to be a proper investigation into what went wrong with the live TV feed. Apparently someone plugged a kettle in where they shouldn't have, it fused the electrics, and the whole thing went down. Why was no back-up available? And was it Blairite sabotage? Questions need to be answered.

3) the basic idea - that the current economic system was unacceptable - was sound, although it needs a lot of fleshing out.

4) nonetheless, too many concessions to the Tories. there needs to be an end to demonisation of benefit claimants, more commitment to reverse most of the ConDem cuts, and the commitment to sell off the banks is dangerous IMHO - it will just get us back to exactly the same problems we had in 2008. The problem at the moment is that Ed is reaching for a new broad vision - but on specifics he's still very timid. This will result in huge inconsistencies as we get nearer the election unless it's addressed.

5) The speech pissed the right people off. For example, if John Rentoul doesn't like what Ed's saying, he's definitely saying the right thing. Likewise Dan Hodges in the New Statesman.

6) Nice to see some attacks on Nick Clegg. Some commentators have said that Labour is focusing too much on hitting the Lib Dems and not enough on the Tories. I think it needs to hit both hard, but the Lib Dem vote is softer, and so hitting them gets more "bang for the buck". Remember that if Labour gets (say) 12% of the electorate transferring from the Lib Dems to Labour next time, while the Tory vote is unchanged, Labour wins the election by 5 percentage points. It's as simple as that. The Glib Dems are fair game, and emphasising that the only way to get a left-of-centre government is to vote Labour is exactly the right political strategy.

So: 7/10 for content, 4/10 for delivery. Not great, but a better average than your average Tony Blair speech (0/10, 9/10) or Gordon Brown (4/10, 2/10). Ed was also helped by the fact that the delivery of most of the other platform speakers this week has been even worse (Ed Balls and autocue: never the twain shall meet.) But yes, better delivery next time, please.

The horse that talks the talk - but can he walk the walk?

For those diehards watching the Party conference season back in the UK (and a slight dose of a winter virus has left me tied to my NYC abode - no sympathy expected), today it was the turn of Ed Miliband to step up and deliver his keynote address. Reaction has been somewhat muted, ranging from predictable responses from right wing commentators in the blogosphere , and the usual suspects in the Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph . Further criticism has been forthcoming from what my host, Hal Berstram tells me are equally habitual moaners in The Guardian and the New Statesman.

By common consent, the weakest Political Leaders in the last three decades, (at least excluding the Liberal Democrats) have been Michael Foot, William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith (IDS). For many on the Right, Ed Miliband was the heir to that tradition, and indeed his public persona has been one that has struggled, for me to look Prime Ministerial. I am reminded, by a most unlikely source, that a number of previous Prime Ministers have struggled to gain credibility with the media. Indeed arguably the two 'greatest' post war Prime Ministers (and for Leftists I'll sub the word 'influential' for the latter) would in one instance as Toynbee points out, have been a non -starter (Clement Attlee) and in the other instance the Lady concerned struggled to the extent that she had her own party calling for her head as late as 1977. So the pundits calling this Ed's 'Quiet man' moment can safely I think either be accused of playing to the gallery, at least for the Mail and Telegraph contributors, or in the case of Glover and Hodges, as my man Hal Berstram posits, having an ulterior motive.

Nevertheless, it's worth looking more closely at what Ed's speech contained. For me, he is not a natural orator, and often looks ill at ease, at least in comparison with Blair, or indeed Cameron. As Hal points out, it's possible that Cameron is much more about style than substance, and indeed Ed has done rather better in the set piece exchanges at Prime Minister's Question time than I thought he might have. the worry for Labour Party supporters is that Hague, in particular, regularly trounced Blair across the Dispatch box only to come out with one of the worst electoral performances in history

So to the speech itself, and it started with a couple of somewhat flat jokes. However, for me, more worrying was the lack of content. In comparative terms, the Conservatives first term in opposition was defined by Ken Clarke's comment on Hague's obsession with how he was perceived: 'Where's the beef?' in terms of looking for clear policies with which voters could connect. Reading through the speech, we can come up with the following:

1/ Education - a priority of the Blair years, and it seems Miliband wants to cap the tuition fees at £6K rather than £9K. Furthermore we will see a concerted effort to ensure that people from the lowest achieving and most difficult schools are guaranteed a place at one of the UK's 'Top 30 universities'

2/ Social policy - it seems that Social housing will be allocated in the first instance to people who are working, rather than on the basis of need. How in line with the Human Rights Act this is, I'm not sure, and it seems to sit ill with contending to care for the poorest and most vulnerable.

3/ Health - it seems that Labour will reverse the NHS reforms, because the 'Tories can't be trusted' - in terms of the details, er.... that's it?, unless by the credit card reference he means the nationalisation of the Private Sector - that would be genuinely radical!

4/ The economy - an introduction of employee representatives to decide boardroom renumeration. In fairness, works councils involving employees are a staple of several continental economies - but it's not a tradition the UK has. Also, the differentiation between producers and 'predators' with the former being supported and the latter penalised. Quite who decides what is what is not made clear but it's true this might strike a chord with people who have been the victims of some of the more unscrupulous Private equity forms operating in the murkier sector of the Financial Services industry.

Beyond that, much generalisation about certain values he wishes to embody, but on Europe, an issue for me of the utmost importance, only one sentence, which given how much of our legislation comes from it, is deeply concerning.

So, a train wreck? - not really, indeed for a conference speech, which of late have tended to shy away from concrete commitments precisely for fear of offering hostages to fortune, I thought it wasn't a bad effort. However, as the old saying goes, the Devil is very much in the detail, and I think when he delivers his speech next year, assuming his poll numbers remain steady, I'll expect much more detail of just how a reversion to almost a pre 1979 vision is going to extricate us from the very real issues facing us. Nevertheless, 'the worst speech in 20 years?' - do me a favour!

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!

Stop bugging me man - I'll kick your F**%ing teeth in...

Or so said the character Nick Curran (played by Michael Douglas) in the Paul Verhoeven film from 1992, Basic Instinct. Thus bugging or hacking into phones for the purposes of providing journalistic exposes has become one of the most momentous (to paraphrase Hal Berstram) events in the country's recent political history. The rapid collapse and closure of the country's largest selling newspaper, the News of the World in a desperate attempt to forestall further fallout was truly stunning. Indeed it appears that the scandal continues to claim victims, with Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson following News International Senior executive Rebekah Brooks in resigning.

Over at 'Comment is free' they appear, to paraphrase Agent Albert Rosenfield from Twin Peaks:

'to have been snacking for too long on the local mushrooms'

and we see the frenzy in full force. What does it portend for the future of British democracy? A trip through the Guardian's comment pages appears to be reminscent of a trip through one of Star Trek's parallel universes. David Cameron's political obituaries have been written by various ex-Soviet sympathisers and veteran fellow travellers, and opposition Leader 'Miliband E' or 'Mr Ed' (named after a 60's American show involving a talking horse) is suddenly touted as a 'man of courage' for his sudden conversion (after being part of two administrations who shamelessly courted News International for the previous three elections) to greater transparency on media ownership. Prize chameleon Nick Clegg adds to his reputation for principle and veracity by shamelessly exploiting the scandal to try and shore up his collapsing vote. All we need now is something from Chris Huhne and the confusion will be complete.

So, is the Coalition finished and more importantly, is the phone hacking affair the figurative 'end' for Cameron? I think not but would agree that I had reservations about using as tarnished a figure as Andy Coulson in any kind of advisory capacity, especially given that the phone hacking scandal has been running in 'Private Eye' for at least the past eight years. Whilst I wouldn't want to see public policy dictated by Ian Heslop and co (they probably would be less than enthusiastic than I am) even a cursory glance at this journal would have raised (or should have raised) serious question marks about his suitability. Nevertheless, Coulson is no longer in position. The question becomes whether Cameron knew that he was involved in phone hacking when he hired him - at the moment that doesn't seem the case and I do not see how the pro Sino Guardian can have any indication otherwise.

The alleged phone hacking incidents took place during the period between 2004 and 2008, which unless I am very much mistaken, saw a Labour government in power. (and one of the worst ever seen in the country's history, of which 'Mr.Ed' was a key part) Thus the nauseous eruptions from Mr G.Brown esquire, returning to the Commons after a year's sabbatical rank as some of the most hypocritical ever put on the record in Hansard, as in deference to the Guardian's staff some of them have recognised.

Is the scandal damaging to Cameron, and by extension, the coalition? for sure, but a quick read through 'Comment is free' or indeed the BBC website will reveal the real significance of the scandal. Neither the Guardian nor the BBC have ever been enamoured of the greater circulation and currency of the News International publications. This is seen as an ideal opportunity to circumscribe the debate and significantly narrow the range of right wing viewpoints available to people. In a wider context, I'd argue the significance is in fact far greater, potentially in the US, where the New York Times (which I read most days over here)and, by extension the Obama White House, are sharpening the knives for Murdoch's Fox News channel. If, as has been speculated, there was hacking of 9/11 victims, then the consequences could be even more far -reaching than they currently are. However, in a UK context, let us not delude ourselves this is more than an aberration, and not an opportunity to limit political discourse to amicable discussion between acolytes of the Guardian and BBC.