Ed Miliband, predators & producers...

After yesterday's mauling of Andy Burnham trying to explain Labour's new policy on moral capitalism, a germ of enlightenment today from John Denham talking to Andrew Neil. Apparently it's not about 'predators' or 'producers' - despite the explicit wording of yesterday's speech - its about reinforcing the 'right' process in business activities onto a more moral plane - whatever that may be.

This is increasingly looking like an ill thought-through initiative fast unravelling under intelligent analysis... But underneath the stupidity of politicians picking 'good' and 'bad' company's according to how much they like their business practices (isn't that how Fred Goodwin got his knighthood?) I'm increasingly reminded of David Cameron's early speeches on corporate responsibility. At the time he was talking at a smaller scale - products aimed at sexualising young girls, inappropriate placing of sweets around the till - but increasingly Cameron broadened that line to encompass the whole panoply of what has become known as The Big Society. And as Cameron deepened the debate - though few took him up - the more radical 'localism' agenda became deeply entwined.

Today at the labour party conference Yvette Cooper - ever on the Fabian side of democratic accountability - argued against elected police commissioners. Many disagree. I'm very pro-Big Society writes Labour MP Tristram Hunt, and I think it's the Labour tradition, the co-operative, mutualist tradition and I think we need to be doing more of that. And he is not wrong. Perhaps the sub-text of what Ed Miliband awkwardly spoke of yesterday, contains the germ of an idea with which both Cameron and his Coalition allies can run. After all, who could object to company's getting tax breaks for apprenticeship schemes?

People First for the Coalition

Or Labour can carry on being what it is now: risk-averse, ill-defined, dull and complacent in its assumption that the failings of the other side will coast them to power. Well, that worked a treat in Scotland, didn't it? suggests Andrew Rawnsley in the Observer, less than seven months after Ed Miliband became Labour's bright new leader.

Meanwhile, a salutary piece from Tim Luckhurst in the Mail as Labour's top-down, producer-interested elite prepare to take on the bottom-up reforms of the Coalition designed to put ordinary people at the heart of public services. As Lord Hutton - once at the centre of the New Labour cabinet that led similar reforms under Tony Blair - answers to the question what was New Labour's great achievement in public service reform?

The important achievement we had across a range of public services was to get through this very fundamental idea that introducing new providers (the private sector), zero tolerance for failure to deliver, for failure to perform, for poor outcomes, that we weren't just going to focus on who provides, we were going to represent first and foremost not the providers but the consumers of public services - that's the platform now which I hope the present government can build and can start really proper reforms of the public services.

Whether its academy's, welfare dependency, free schools, elected police commissioners or the NHS, Labour now finds itself on the side of producer interests and against the interests of the people with every major reform being proposed - despite the fact that most provide an evolutionary fit with New Labour's Blairite agenda. And with Clegg's big idea since super Thursday seemingly to oppose any reforms in the name of 'muscular liberalism', the LibDems, whose localism agenda provided the glue on which this Coalition's reforms were created, look perilously close to following suit.

As Tim Montgomery points out in an excellent piece in today's Telegraph over the past year, Clegg had appeared to reject the politics of the lowest common denominator, and backed bold reforms. Iain Duncan Smith regarded the Deputy Prime Minister as a decisive ally in his battle with the Treasury in overhauling welfare. The Lib Dems were also radical in switching the balance of educational funding from university to a child's first few years, when investment can make the biggest difference. On other issues, too – such as pensions, local government or lifting the poorest out of the income tax system – there was something exciting about the Coalition, and their contribution to it.

He concludes: Spending the next few years sniping at colleagues, navel-gazing about poll ratings and blocking vital reforms won't impress voters. Moreover, it will harm that other great hope of the Liberal Democrats: that experiencing the benefits of hung parliaments and coalition government will at last end the public's reluctance to vote for Britain's troublesome third party.
 
 

Ed Miliband and leadership...

Interesting polling analysis from PoliticsHome.com.

Labour's promises to the next generation

My Labour party... enables people right across the country to get on and do better... which crucially improves the chances of the next generation says Ed Miliband in an interview with Evan Davis on Radio 4's Today program. He continues ...only 9 per cent of people in this country actually think the next generation will do better than the last.

What Ed Miliband needs to explain is why Labour spent 13 years building a vast array of public sector projects - hospitals, schools, roads and railways - on PFI? Labour calculated that those staggering sums - £155bn at the last count - could be repaid by the next generation. Long after Gordon Brown and his cronies have retired with gold-plated pensions to the House of Lords.

How exactly does burdening our children's generation with the bills of this one, promote improving the chances of the next generation?

Labour's blank sheet of paper

I can make no commitment to do anything differently says Ed Miliband  at a press conference designed to launch new economic policy initiatives yesterday. Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls went further Ed Miliband and I are clear on this; no commitments to reverse these changes, they would be irresponsible.

So, hold on. With all these cuts, all this noise, all these headlines, all these policy launches, Labour can make no commitment to do anything differently writes Matthew Hancock. Why, then, should we listen to a word that any Labour frontbencher says? After all, they can make no commitment to do anything differently.


The Government meanwhile, is embarked on radical reform. Things may appear difficult right now, as each vested interest makes their voice heard. But the Coalition are dealing with a huge number of long-standing problems in the national interest - a record deficit, reforming welfare, education, health, pensions, the police, supporting enterprise, and taking millions out of income tax. These reforms are not easy. The benefits will be felt over time. But the contrast is stark between the empty opposition of Labour, and the Government taking on the difficult challenges we face.
 

Riddell, delusion and hypocrisy

You really could not credibly make up the hypocrisy of it. Take a look at the comments below David Laws' article in the Guardian supporting the Coalition's economic policies. Six of the first twenty five comments have had to be removed by the moderator. This is visceral hatred driven by pure ideological malice. The type that

ends with the words 'ethnic cleansing' and 'final solution' being written by so-called serious commentators who really should know better. It is blind prejudice. Just the sort of language Democrats in America suggest engenders political violence.

Meanwhile over at the Telegraph Mary Riddell - long an apologist for Gordon Brown's disastrous government and after eight months of attacking the LibDems, week in week out, for forming a radical Coalition government - suggests Nick Clegg and his LibDem colleagues should now be cosying up to Ed Miliband as his natural ally to form a 'progressive alliance'. An alliance of hatred no doubt. She concludes any political courtship between Mr Clegg and Mr Miliband may prove, for the Prime Minister, to be a very dangerous liaison. I am just staggered by the sheer delusion of it; the deep hypocrisy.

Miliband, deceit & Labour's legacy

Denying all responsibility for the deficit is a serious political error says Philip Collins replying to Ed Miliband's assertion that the Coalition is deceiving people when they suggest the deficit was caused by chronic overspending rather than a global financial crisis that resulted in recession and a calamitous collapse in tax revenues. Don't blame us for the financial disaster Mr Miliband protests, it happened to everyone else as well, making it perfectly acceptable. I doubt the electorate will see it that way.

The 1997 Labour government were bequeathed a national debt of around £300bn and left it thirteen years later at £900bn. And thats without including PFI deals which have kept a further £267bn of additional government spending, Enron-style, 'off balance sheet'.

Even with the Coalition halving the deficit within this parliament - which Labour is fighting at every opportunity to stop - that debt will actually rise to more than £1.5 trillion.

This staggering level of debt left by Labour will take a generation to repay. A generation who were not responsible for spending it and whose use of the word 'fairness', might legitimately be very different to Mr Miliband and his Labour cabinet ministers who signed off the spending.

By any measure an apology would be appropriate.

Opposition & Labour

Even with incredulous-looking poll ratings Ed Miliband's position seems tenuous. Labour blusters furiously for a couple of hundred million ring-fenced for school sport whilst its MP's practise the new sport - bullying the Liberal Democrats. Meanwhile, the most radical government for a century takes apart - brick by brick - the old centralised, bureaucratic state that built Labour. 

The opposition have yet to realise just how radical this Coalition really is. The largely spent and thinly typecast cries of 'Thatcher's children' betray the irrelevance of Ed Miliband's position - testament only to his continuing politics of the twentieth century. A futile clinging to the nakedness of old labour's tax & spend that brought us to near destruction. A leader of vision is needed to move Labour on, engage and begin to contribute to the new political settlement.

The glue that binds this Coalition is a smart, de-centralised, bottom-up agenda that unifies the Cameron/Liberal tradition across the full spectrum of government. Even the Thatcherite right - so hated in Labour's caricature of laissez-affair and social stigma - remains mercifully irrelevant.

Ed Miliband increasingly finds himself on the wrong side of each radical reform - the latest being tuition fees, without which universities have no long term future (thanks to Labour's deficit) whilst the settlement is both progressive and enhances fairness - despite the obviously selfish arguments of the 'kettled generation'. What is more interesting is how vociferously students reject debt when it belongs to them. In the public sphere, only Labour it seems, so dismissively believes in debt.

This Coalition is effectively beginning to question the reason behind Labour's existence. The central tenet of the Coalition's agenda - progressive fairness - coupled with putting people at the heart of government, will become increasingly and deeply compelling, the further it progresses. Labour needs to be there.

Ednostic therapy

Vacuous was the term that came to mind at Ed Miliband's performance this week, both at Labour's National Policy Forum in Gillingham and his attempted promotion in the media, but the description Ednostic - used by Observer journalist Rafael Behr - will do. Matthew d'Ancona describes him less charitably as Gordon Brown 2.0

Why would anyone think this guy was a reformer? Ed Miliband is neither compelling in his oratory, nor does he display the intellectual or passionate conviction of a committed reformer. This man is a healer, an agnostic - one without the 'fierce urgency' implicit in the zeal of true reform. In one word, Ed Miliband offers therapy, not leadership - a succinct comment made by Charles Powell this week. In Tony Benn's well used phrase, he is a weathercock not a signpost.

And every ditheringly contrived performance reminds me that this is not a believer, but an agnostic - one who doubts the possibility of ultimate knowledge.

The colour of Wednesday has changed

Labour’s woeful cockup of the public finances is now demonstrably more toxic than Cameron’s marginal involvement in Norman Lamont’s day of shame. So it’s official. The ghost of Black Wednesday has been exorcised writes Lloyd Evans reviewing PMQ's for the Speccie blog. 

He refers of course to Ed Miliband's jibe at Cameron in PMQ's that, as a young spad on Black Wednesday, the Prime Minister was responsible for the momentous events which took place. As if.

But the more interesting view comes from the comments below the blog, where 'tb' points out that had it not been for Black Wednesday, we'd be in the Euro by now. Ouch.

John Rentoul on Ed Miliband

Excellent piece by arch Blairite John Rentoul in the Independent on Sunday.

On every single issue, the Prime Minister is on the side of the voters, and Ed Miliband, when he is visible, is on the wrong side, defending the sectional interest of benefit claimants, rich parents, Labour MPs or students. David Cameron and George Osborne ought to be vulnerable. They look too pleased with themselves, too much as if they are enjoying the student politics of it all. But, on the evidence of Miliband's first five weeks, they have nothing to fear.

Well worth reading

PMQ's

So looking forward to Ed Miliband's first PMQ's this afternoon - one of the great theatrical rituals in politics. And one that terrified Tony Blair, despite consistently being one of its greatest performers.

David Blackburn writes an excellent preview in Spectator blogs, but I feel Miliband will need to strike a much more original line to stand out and appear with any gravitas.