Is it just me, or did the cutaways during Ed Miliband’s first speech as Labour leader reveal a squirming, rueful conference audience? Is it just me, or did those expressions read: Dear God, what have we done?
Clearly a lot of those present had supported Ed’s leadership campaign. And those who hadn’t will now get in behind him for the good of the party. But whichever camp they had been in, it looked as if it was suddenly dawning on all of them: David would have to go, and the Labour front-bench would lose its most charismatic player.
Some of them will have been thinking: we need the break from the past that Ed offers us. Others will have thought we may not have needed it, but let’s take it anyway and draw some lines under Blairism, Brownism, Iraq. But mostly I reckon they were thinking: what have we done?
It’s as if Labour had always assumed it would be able to have both Milibands on the team. It could have had Ed under David. But it could never have had David under Ed. Did nobody think that through? I know I didn’t, but that’s because I thought David would walk it.
Ed won it on the 5th round, and on the union votes, not those of the PLP or ordinary members. When we see Ed speaking for Labour, we’re going to see a man who is there because of the unions. That is not undoable, and it is an electoral handicap. It will identify Ed with the forthcoming union resistance to the Coalition’s cuts, which in turn will make a nuanced Labour position on the deficit impossible. The Conservatives, who have succeeded in keeping the argument binary – you either cut or you spend – could not have scripted a better outcome.
When we see Ed speaking for Labour, we’re going to see the man who denied us David; the man who got where he got by stabbing his own brother in the back. Ed’s supporters can argue all they like that he had the right to stand, even the duty to stand. Of course. But the reality is that Ed’s success required the political assassination of his brother, while David’s did not.
Ed seized his chance. He had seen his own brother dither, and he wasn’t going to do the same thing. (Although it’s said that Ed helped persuade David not to stand against Brown, ironically.) In the end Ed’s was a winning decision, and you can’t take that away from him. But was it thought-through? Rumour has it that, when he learned of his victory, Ed turned to Sadiq Khan and asked, “What have I done to David?” Whether that rumour is true or not, the victory already seems Pyrrhic, the stage already lacklustre without David’s presence.
The ‘Harman moment’ (in which David rebuked her for applauding Ed’s anti-Iraq stance) proved that David had no choice but to retreat to the back benches. Labour’s only hope is that this retreat will work, that the man whom a thrilled Hillary Clinton described as “vibrant, attractive, vital” can melt into the political background. That is Ed’s only chance of a ‘clear field’ in which to define himself and ‘NextGen’ Labour.
I’m pleased to say that, pretty much, my prediction was wrong, and the press and broadcast media did not embarrass themselves by misrepresenting the OBR report. No shock horror headlines.
The front pages were varied, covering the imminent Bloody Sunday report and the BP debacle, alongside Nick Clegg’s ugly assault on public sector pensions.
The Daily Mail succumbed to a front page diatribe, screaming about the OBR’s “devastating analysis” but by and large, nobody was fooled by the spin. Indeed, some commentators were saying that the OBR’s figures were “too rosy”, which I think means they didn’t discredit Labour in the way that some had hoped.
None of which stopped George Osborne shaking his fists and saying, “never again will a government be allowed to fiddle the figures.”
Comments like that, in the teeth of the evidence, are going to seriously undermine Osborne’s credibility. They’re also old, old, old politics. There is still room for Labour to answer the public’s call for more decency in the way Westminster goes about its business.
Which is why we need a new Labour leader now, not in September.
Speaking of which, there was much complaint online about Newsnight’s poor production values, and Paxman’s chairmanship of the Labour leaders’ debate. Ed Balls was surprisingly winning. Andy Burnham was cruelly described online as looking like a Thunderbird puppet (Troy!). Diane is Diane, and if you like her, you’ll still like her after that performance – but if you don’t, you’ll be feeling unmoved. Ed M looked like somebody’s younger brother, and I know how that feels. David Miliband is the next leader, that is very clear. At one point he spoke, quite effortlessly, on behalf of the whole panel. He’s just got it.
The prospect of months of further hustings fills me with dread; there is no need for prolonged introspection. Look how fast the Coalition moved to get itself into No 10. With a new leader, Labour can move fast too. In these crucial months, while Labour wonders who said what to whom in Cabinet, and the candidates mess about on swings, the Coalition is getting away with murder.
The OBR report didn’t do it, but there IS a new report out which damns the Government. But it damns the new Government, not the old one. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) was forecasting unemployment of 2.65m this year. In the light of the Coalition’s emphasis on public sector cuts, they have revised their figure upwards to 2.95m.
Between friends, let’s call it 3m. Unemployed. This year.
When I helped Labour with this Eddie Izzard video for the election, I worried a little about the baldness of the ‘same old Tories/Thatcher’s Children’ line. I felt the Tories were probably a bit more reconstructed, a bit more compassionate, than they were being given credit for. I confess I was sold, just a teeny bit, on the notion of the ‘modern Conservative Party,’ as David Cameron kept calling it. I wondered how right it was to hark back to the folk-memory of the 1980s. Was the retro attack necessary?
It’s good to talk
On Monday, Mr Cameron stood up to warn us just how bad things were going to get, cuts-wise. I liked one aspect of it. I liked the fact that he wants to have a dialogue with the nation about economics. That has to be a good thing. Mind you – without checking the media forensically – it seems to me that there isn’t much debate going on about overall economic strategy. There is, however, quite a bit of chat about ‘what could go’; micro-debate which tacitly accepts that the overall argument for austerity measures has been won, and focusses instead on whether or not ministerial walking to work actually saves money, or whether the St George flag can be run up the flagpole during the World Cup for minimal cost.
At least David Cameron entertained the macro debate on economic policy, and we don’t get much of that in the UK. But, while it’s good to talk, unfortunately, the content of his argument – as opposed to the fact of it – really bothered me. And, though I was planning to comment less on politics, as this dismal week rolls on, I’m feeling more and more bothered.
Do you really want to hurt me?
Cameron harangued Labour again. So much for the New Politics the Coalition promised us. Every time these guys open their mouths, it is to slam Labour. Is it that they really want to hurt us, or is it that Labour are a soft target at the moment? I’m beginning to wonder whether it was right to create such a long campaign window for the leadership election. We need a new leader to marshall a proper Opposition, fast.
Gold!
Mr Cameron gave the impression that, now he’s looked under the bonnet, the country is in a bigger mess than he realised. He said hitherto unpublished Treasury figures revealed Britain could be facing an annual interest bill of £70bn on debt in 2015. He struck gold finding that figure. Has anybody got the detail on it? It probably has a dozen assumptions built into it – e.g. borrowing continuing to grow, interest rates rising, blah blah. Especially as this was the only new figure he revealed, we need the detail behind it. I haven’t seen anybody explaining or challenging this number. But I’d bet the Treasury has any number of worst-case forecasts for 2015, and that this is only one doomsday scenario. And there may well be any number of rosy scenarios too, in the same Treasury vaults.
In the absence of detail for a projected figure, it’s a shame he made no mention of the latest actual figures, which showed that borrowing in fact came in many billions less than forecast. See my earlier comment. Nor did Mr Cameron mention that growth results came in (slightly) above forecast.
What he did say was that the impending cuts are going to be very bad, and would affect every man, woman and child in this country. It was sobering stuff, and gave some commentators the willies. Playing sweetly into the Tories’ hands, they asked “does this mean all bets are off? All the ring-fencing you promised during the election – all those promises? You can’t keep them now, can you?”
I’m sorry, but I want to see more evidence than this putative “£70bn in 2015” figure before I let anybody off the hook on their election promises.
You’ve got an -ology!?
Once he had frightened us all with the £70bn figure, Cameron relaxed into his ideological position, repeatedly quoting the contraction in the private sector relative to the public sector.
“And while private-sector employment fell in this period (since 2007) by 3.7%, public-sector employment actually rose. So it has been, if you like, a tale of two economies: a public-sector boom and a private-sector bust”
For Cameron, this is self-evidently wrong. The private sector, in his world-view, is the ‘real’ economy, and the public sector is somehow phoney and unreal, even immoral. The public sector crowds out the private one. It is a cancer that needs to be cut out. Just like a cancer, it needs early radiotherapy:
“And now, today, we’re all paying the price because the size of the public sector has got way out of step with the size of the private sector. We’re going to have to try and get it back in line and that will be much more painful than if we had kept things properly in balance all along.”
Cameron really thinks this is truth, not ideology.
“We are not doing this because we want to. We are not driven by some theory or some ideology. We are doing this as a government because we have to, driven by the urgent truth…”
But anyone who has even a basic knowledge of the dividing lines between economists will know that it is indeed a question of ideology. Any economist will tell you that in a recession the private sector will contract faster than the state sector; that is inevitable. Any Keynesian economist will tell you it is also desirable – it is beneficial that the state sector stays large to compensate for the private sector running scared. Indeed the same economist is likely to tell you that the goverment should deliberately expand its spending for the same reason. It’s nothing new. It’s called fiscal stimulus. When markets collapse, guess what? We need governments to intervene.
Cameron would have us believe that government is, axiomatically, the problem. It’s a story that only really plays for the fit, the strong, the economically self-reliant. Fine if that’s you. Fine if you’ll always be that way and never need help. Fine if you live in a gated community away from others not so lucky. For the rest of us, it’s a horrible and frightening piece of ideology.
Ashes to ashes
The ‘sovereign debt crisis’ is the perfect excuse to abandon the compassion the Tories espoused under Cameron in opposition. It has an ash-cloud quality to it; it feels as if it is some external thing we have no choice but to respond to; it is the unavoidable reality of the international market in government debt. Chin up, Dunkirk spirit; we can’t fly for a bit, but we’ll survive. Where Labour failed to convince the nation that the global economic meltdown was exogenous, despite it being true, the Coalition seems to be able to appeal to the global markets and get away with it. They are defter politicians than Labour under Brown. They seem to have convinced us that unless we cut off our own legs, the global financial markets will do it for us, and take our arms for good measure.
“The global financial markets are no longer focusing simply on the financial position of the banks. They want to know that the governments that have supported the banks over the last 18 months are taking the actions to bring their own finances under control.”
I’m not entirely sure it’s true. Whilst my friend in the hedge fund game tells me the markets fear that if governments aren’t reliable, ‘there’s nowhere left to run’, I can’t help wondering what will happen if all Western economies vie for pole position in the self-flagellation stakes. Investors have to invest somewhere; assuming we all take the same action, relatively speaking nothing will change. It’s only if other nations do it and we don’t that we’ll become relatively less attractive. There’s an element of ‘satisfying the markets’ that’s like a financial nuclear arms race; cripplingly costly, and hard to justify to our children.
What’s true, and terrifying, is that the mood in Europe, the mood of the G20 and the IMF – until now laudably pro-stimulus – is beginning to swing towards panic and retrenchment. (Notice, by the way, how the Tories seize upon this shift – exaggerating a modest change of language in Osborne’s favour at the Korea meeting – without realising they are exposing just how isolated they were on the economy only weeks ago.) Nerve, it seems, is not going to be held. If everyone caves and rushes to slash their budgets in an austerity race, nobody will be able to export their way out of recovery. Other countries won’t be buying. At the same time, domestic demand will contract as net government spending reduces. No one to sell to, home or abroad. The interlinked economies of Europe and the Western world will wilt together like so many flowers in a field.
Do you really want to make me cry?
Presumably, if the Tory ideology is correct, this won’t matter. As long as the dirty bathwater goes – that nasty, polluted, immoral state spending on doctors, nurses, hospitals, child tax credits, Sure Start, pensions, tv licences for the over 75s – flush all that away, then the pain will have been worthwhile.
The 1980s are back. Be afraid, as Eddie Izzard says. Be very afraid.
Alastair Campbell argues in his blog post today that the real story of the election so far, untold by the media, is that after months of leading the polls, Cameron’s support is only the same as Michael Howard’s was five years ago.
How did it happen?
The reason for Cameron’s decline is that his support was bolstered by voter disaffection, which inevitably harms the long-term incumbents more than their rivals. But this was never solid pro-Tory support, merely folk wanting change.
42% of respondents to a Populus Poll for the Times on April 12 – before the first debate – said “it seems like ‘time for a change’ FROM Labour, but I am not sure it seems ‘time for a change’ TO the Conservatives.” The nation has not actually swallowed Tory values.
Clegg is now the focus for that big chunk of disaffected electorate. The tragedy is that the nation hasn’t swallowed LibDem values either – they don’t really know what their policies are. Even the pundits had to re-read the LibDem manifesto after the first debate to remind themselves what the LibDems stood for.
So the real election story is not just that Cameron has squandered his lead. It is that if Labour doesn’t pull something out of the bag, we run the real risk of ending up with Tory values the nation doesn’t actually share, or LibDem values the nation doesn’t really understand.
The ‘Harman moment’ (in which David rebuked her for applauding Ed’s anti-Iraq stance) proved that David had no choice but to retreat to the back benches. Labour’s only hope is that this retreat will work, that the man whom a thrilled Hillary Clinton described as “vibrant, attractive, vital” can melt into the political background. That is Ed’s only chance of a ‘clear field’ in which to define himself and ‘NextGen’ Labour. 
complaint online about Newsnight’s poor production values, and Paxman’s chairmanship of the Labour leaders’ debate. Ed Balls was surprisingly winning. Andy Burnham was cruelly described online as looking like a Thunderbird puppet (Troy!). Diane is Diane, and if you like her, you’ll still like her after that performance – but if you don’t, you’ll be feeling unmoved. Ed M looked like somebody’s younger brother, and I know how that feels. David Miliband is the next leader, that is very clear. At one point he spoke, quite effortlessly, on behalf of the whole panel. He’s just got it.