Ten years to save the Labour Party

Labour would do well to accept that it will be out of power for at least the next ten years. This may prove to be a blessing in disguise if it handles this reality properly. The upcoming May series of elections may help the party to understand its predicament (predicament is a kind word). It seems to me it must now take a number of steps to survive in the long term: 1. The party will have to split. The new left, ’Corbynite’ grouping must be uncoupled from mainstream centre-left Labour. 2. The new centre-left party (probably called Social Democrats, leaving the title ‘Labour’ for the left wing rump of the party) must amalgamate with the Liberal Democrats. It would be ridiculous to have two parties with an almost identical ideological stance competing against one another. 3. This new Social (Liberal) Democrat party will have to make common cause with the Greens, Plaid Cymru and the SNP, stopping short of amalgamation, as these other three parties need to retain their identity. This would prevent them allying with the old Labour left. 4. The new party will have to identify early those people who are potential future leaders. The discredited ‘not so old guard’ of the likes of Burnham, Cooper, Watson etc. must be marginalised in favour of a new cohort, perhaps the likes of Jarvis and Kinnock. 5. The new party would have to accept all the errors made by Labour under Blair and Brown and simply state it will not repeat them. 6. It should concentrate on a few absolutely key issues for the electorate. Among them should be : • Saving the NHS – its principles and its funding. • Increasing spending on education, especially to improve opportunities for school leavers. • Tackling effectively the inequalities in the tax system, especially the affairs of large companies and wealthy individuals. • Reducing taxes, local and national, on small and medium sized businesses. • Introduce the ‘citizens’ income’ now being trialled in Finland • Guaranteeing a generous living wage for all. • Outlawing most zero hours contracts. • Investing in infrastructure, especially outside the South-East, using quantitative easing. • Locking itself into fiscal restraints • Guaranteeing more effective controls over non-EU immigration, while accepting a fair share of asylum seekers and genuine refugees. • Taking steps to disengage the UK from the affairs of the Middle East and North Africa. • Restore spending on policing to pre 2010 levels. • Preserve the BBC as a high quality public service broadcaster • Dedicate more resources to care of the elderly That’s fourteen policies that conform to Labour’s traditional ideology and which can be supported by the vast majority of the people of the UK. There are trickier issues on constitutional reform, defence and welfare, for example, but a clear message on these core key issues would restore much confidence in the party that should occupy the centre ground of politics in the UK. The Beckett approach – keep on with the old policies but present them more effectively - will not do. Nor will burying the party’s head in the sand over its past errors. Whatever one’s own political preferences, it is vital that the UK returns to having an effective second party both to ensure government is accountable and to provide a realistic alternative.

My Country Right Or Left revisited.

Jeremy Corbyn would do well to have a look at George Orwell’s celebrated essay, My Country Right Or Left. Orwell argued in all his works that socialism was and should be a visceral sentiment. In this work, written in 1940 just as world war two threatened to overwhelm the country, he also asserted that without a sense of passion, socialists will simply not have the guts to carry through their ideas into practice. More controversially he argued that patriotism is a vital emotion even for socialists. If one does not have pride in one’s own country, how can one have sufficient motivation to establish socialism in it? This is how he puts it : ....but I would sooner have that kind of upbringing [with patriotic ideals] than be like left wing intellectuals who are so ‘enlightened’ that they cannot understand the most ordinary emotions. It is exactly the people whose hearts have never leapt at the sight of a union jack who will flinch from revolution. Orwell is careful to point out that patriotism is not the same as conservatism, though the two are often hand maidens. The desire to preserve those things that make us feel ‘British’ (Orwell preferred the term, ‘English’) is not necessarily reactionary, it can simply be the product of our upbringing or a desire to improve the lot of our fellow citizens. Even international socialists (and Orwell was one of these too) can justify patriotic feelings, provided, of course they involve pride in values that we would wish to see adopted throughout the world, values such as social justice, tolerance and a love of liberty. Though these may not be associated with Britain’s colonial history, they have certainly become part of our post colonial identity. In his many warnings about the dangers of totalitarianism, Orwell has also reminded us that, without patriotic feeling, love of one’s country becomes love of the state and that road leads to the dystopia he describes in Nineteen-Eighty-Four. Jeremy Corbyn and his cohort may well be falling into the trap of failing to distinguish between country and state.

Labour talking to itself - again

I was interested to read the summary of Margaret Beckett’s recent analysis of why Labour lost the last election. Before commenting on it I think it worth noting that the errors made by the opinion polls were almost certainly a contributory factor in the surprise result, with people fearing a hung parliament and a Labour-SNP alliance, so something needs to be done about the polls to ensure they are carried out more accurately. I could introduce the idea of a conspiracy here because all the polling organisations seem to have made the same basic error – strange that, but, like most conspiracy theories, it is probably wrong. Moving on: The causes of Labour’s defeat are predictable enough – Miliband’s performance and image, perceptions of Labour’s economic competence, fear of an SNP coalition etc. – but that is not really the point, I think. The point is that Beckett’s report is making a classic error. It is an example of politicians talking to each other rather that to the country. Above all the report seems to say that it was perceptions of Labour that were wrong and there was no real substance to them. This implies that the fault for Labour’s defeat lay with the voters’ misconceptions, rather than Labour’s own failings. Take Miliband’s leadership. There is a suggestion here that Miliband actually did well and would have been a good prime minister but that the voters didn’t realise this. Now, most of us who are neutral and can take an objective view , would agree that Miliband did not do well and showed every sign of being a weak prime minister. If we had any doubts, his support for the idea of the ‘tombstone’ of Labour policies proved his poor judgment. I think it was Berthold Brecht, commenting on the East German communist regime, who suggested that the regime would have liked to change the people before it would allow any form of popular democracy and, being unable to do that, it could not allow the people to have any influence. In a mild form, the Beckett; reform suggests the only way Labour could win is if the people themselves were reformed and could ‘see the light.’ The world is not like that. The people are the people, the media are the media and politicians have to live with them. It will not do simply to bleat that ’nobody understands us’

Dishonourable honours

I am far from alone in thinking this years’ honours list a disgrace but let’s start with a quiz. Look at the following honours available and work out what they letters stand for. Having done that, place the honours in order of merit, starting at the bottom. Before you start it is worth noting that the actual lowest form of honour is an invitation to the Queen’s garden party. There you would get a cup of tea, some sort of cake and sandwiches and you are unlikely to meet the Queen herself, though you will have a chat with one of her servants. Sadly you pay your own fare to London. A relative of mine has received this honour this year. She is a Work and Pensions civil servant in Leeds and for over thirty years she has been a major organiser (voluntarily – no pay) to the sporting and recreational life of the offices up there. This involves her in many hours of selfless work week after week so how delighted she must be to be offered a cup of tea and a sandwich and a possible distant glimpse of the Queen in recognition. Now for the honours. See how many you can get : CH, OM, Kt,DCB,KCB,CB,DBE,CBE,OBE,MBE,BEM. A clue is that if you take the official order then turn it upside down you will probably have an accurate rank order of how much the recipients deserve their honours. As a tiebreaker question, what does the E stand for and can you explain where the E is? If there is still a tie explain why bubbly Carry On actress Barbara Windsor has been made a dame for services to acting (sic.) and charity (she does a bit), whereas Benedict Cumberbatch, who works tirelessly for charities and is arguably Britain’s greatest current actor in a strong field, is not granted a knighthood. The eye watering absurdity of it all is plain to see even without thinking about Lynton Crosby and the head of HMRC and serial failure, Lin Margaret. And we haven’t yet considered peerages. Their waters are even murkier. So what can we put in place of the honours system? There are two answers. One is do away with them all. The other is to introduce a single honour like France’s Legion d’Honneur which is reserved only for services to the community outside of a persons’ normal occupation. Sorry A.P McCoy, Denis Law (Denis Law????) and the lady who does Taekwondo but they are your normal occupations so you’d be out. Fortunately there is no money in it (apart from peerages) so anyone who has ‘bought’ their honour, more fool them. By definition, if your vanity is so highly inflated that you want to spend money on it then you don’t deserve it anyway, the honour is hollow and you know it, a bit like playing golf alone and cheating. Does it matter? Probably not but it is REALLY annoying isn’t it? And I am not saying that because I didn’t get one yet again. Go on honours committee – give me one just to prove me wrong. I’ll take an OBE.