New Labour

Toughness

New Labour, UK politics
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Chris Bertram is annoyed with Ed ‘N Ed:

In an attempt to demonstrate their credentials as the takers of “tough decisions”, British Labour leader Ed Miliband (whom I backed as leader) and his shadow Chancellor Ed Balls have been telling the world that a future Labour government can’t guarantee to reverse Tory public expenditure cuts, and favour a public sector pay freeze, and even pay cuts for public sector workers (to save jobs, apparently). Well it is a funny world where a sign of your toughness is your willingness to pander to the right-wing commentariat.

Toughness in political jargon has always been about how much you are willing to screw the defenceless and poor, how much ship you’re willing to heap up on those at the bottom of society. It’s never about taking on multibillionaire newspaper owners, or forcing harsh new taxes on banks that threaten to move out of the City if their directors have to pay so much as a parking fine or anything else that actually takes guts. Instead we get this whole charade in which a supposedly leftwing politician has to regretfully acknowledge that it’s no longer realistic to expect that…, that the current economic climate makes it imperative to rethink…, that the challenges facing the country leave him no choice but… all to appear realistic and tough to an audience that, as Chris dryly notes, is not his friend in the first place.

It’s easy to see what the rightwing wurlitzer gets out of it; the pre-emptive nobbling of a rival to their champion; while for “impartial” journalists it’s at least a man bites dog story even if this particular man has bitten more often than even the most aggresive rottweiler has managed in its lifetime, but why does an Ed Balls or Milliband join in?

Obviously because they’re not as leftist as their supporters would like them to be and this provides good covering for them to move rightwards; it’s not that they want to move, it’s that they’re forced to. Whether or not anyone believes them is unimportant: it’s the appearance that counts, the willingness to participate in this theatre.

Labour’s strategy: don’t oppose

New Labour, UK elections, UK politics
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Lenny riffs on Dan Hind’s observations on the need to break the ConDem coalition before the next election, and Labour’s role in this:

I would guess he rightly judges Labour’s position, which is that the last thing they want at this point is political power. The Blairites are convinced that they would have to implement the same cuts as the Tories are doing, (ex-chairman Peter Watts has even bizarrely claimed that opposing cuts is hurting Labour), and that it would be much easier to allow them to get on with it. The Labour soft left doesn’t yet have a coherent alternative, or at least not one they’re able to articulate or willing to fight for. Neither side really wants to re-open an old civil war, though the Right are better placed to wage it if it comes. So, they are sitting it out, passively awaiting the Tory meltdown and their dream ticket in 2015. Their strategy would involve striking the correct poses in the face of catastrophe, while nonetheless doing little to prevent it. (Dan does not say, but we should note, that this has significant consequences for the conduct of the labour movement’s resistance to austerity. If the trade union leadership subordinates its actions to the objective of getting ‘their’ party in government, then that most certainly entails an attempt to keep the lid on militancy).

If that sounds familiar it’s because it’s the exact same strategy as the Democratic Party followed during the Bush era. Over the years I’ve explained that the failure of the Democrats to meaningfully oppose Bush was a feature, not a bug. The party leadership knew that sooner or later the voters would return to them as the only real alternative, once they were sick to death of Republican mismanagement. At the same time the leadership wasn’t too unhappy with what Bush and co were doing anyway, even if their base was. And once the disgust with the Republicans was large enough and the Democrats did have a charismatic presidential candidate their strategy was validated – they got their cake and ate it too. And in the meantime they dissipated a lot of the grassroots militancy that sprung up in the wake of the War on Iraq and the like.

Whether or not Labour is consciously following the same strategy, or is just too divided at the moment to meaningfully oppose the coalition doesn’t really matter. The fact of the matter is that Labour too has shown itself not to be trusted when in power, to no longer be a meaningful leftwing party, if perhaps still slightly better than the LibDems are now. Bringing them back into government won’t solve anything, unless Labour is returned to its roots as a true socialist party.

Empty gestures

New Labour
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Potlach dissects the politics of New Labour hand movements:

Ed Milliband and his thumbed fist

The thumb-press is a straight-forward mode of manual expression, in which the user makes a traditional fist, but then manoeuvres the thumb from its position clasped over (or under the fingers) and lays it gently on top of the index finger as a hint of diplomacy. So easy is the thumb-press, in fact, that lay-members of the public are welcome to use it in every day convesations – but they will experience the bizarre sensation of having morphed into a New Labour politician. Used at a dinner party, it may result in shoulders being turned and mutterings to the effect that “I prefer not to talk about politics, thankyou very much”. As Wittgenstein would have been keen to note, were one to say the words “look – the bus is coming”, while gesturing with the thumb-press, the listener would assume that one were claiming credit for having invested more money in public transport.

Miliband: I have always been against war with Eurasia

New Labour, War on Iraq
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Isn’t it amazing how solidly opposed all the Labour leadership candidates are against the War on Iraq now, seven years after it mattered? Mark Steel certainly thinks so:

David Miliband, the only one lucky enough to be an MP at the time, says he supported the war because of evidence of Saddam’s famous “weapons”, adding he would have opposed it “if we had known then what we know now”. But the only reason people believed Saddam had those weapons was because Miliband’s government was telling everyone he did. So, he’s saying:”If I’d known I was lying it would have been different, but how could I possibly know I was making stuff up? You can’t blame me for fooling myself, as I’m very persuasive.”

A progressive narrative on immigration is not needed

Crisis? What Crisis?, Gordon Brown, Life under Capitalism, New Labour, UK elections, UK politics
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In the wake of the Labour leadership struggle, with various candidates grasping for immigration as the explenation for Labour’s defeat, Sunny aks for a progressive narrative on immigration:

here is the dilemma for the left. The public are not easily persuaded by facts. There’s no way of ‘educating them’. The right-wing media exists and it won’t stop printing false stories. And there are lots of traditional Labour supporters who have concerns about immigration (Labour was about 30 points behind in the polls on the issue).

And there is little evidence that those concerns translated into lost votes. Labour had lost millions of voters even before this election, mainly because of Iraq. Nevertheless, Labour was about 30 points behind. So what would a progressive narrative on immigration look like? How do you deal with people’s concerns without sounding like the English Defence League, the BNP or Andy Burnham? How does that narrative offer solutions and hope without encouraging people to be bigots or making them fearful of immigrants?

What’s the narrative? What do you say on the door-step? Thoughts?

Immigration is a red herring. Labour didn’t lose because of immigration, or of not being tough enough on immigration, or because of anything other than a) the shit economy and b) the general public’s slow realisation that New Labour is such a shower of shits even the possibility of a Tory government is no longer quite horrifying enough to keep on voting Labour, as the latter would just do most of the evil the Tories are suspected of wanting to do anyway. That’s it. Now for Burnham, Balls and the Millibands this reality is one that can’t be acknowledged, as they are all part responsible for this. Hence this ridiculous insistence that it was fear of foreigners that led to Labour’s defeat, when the sole good news of the election was the complete and utter defeat of the BNP and its message.

But we on the left do not need to share this illusion. Burnham et all are trapped by their New Labour assumptions, that mixture of private enterprise fetishism and social authoritarianism — we aren’t. We know that if there’s a conflict between “natives” and “immigrants” about council housing the problem isn’t too many immigrants, it’s too few council houses and the solution isn’t to deport more people, but to build more houses! Labour has had thirteen years to address the housing shortage, but chose to bung money at private developers in nebulous schemes rather than allow councils to build new flats, then blames things on those least able to defend themselves, fanning the flames for the BNP.

So what do we need to do? Sunny is wrong to say you can’t educate people — as the anti-BNP campaigns showed in this election, yes you can. This then is the first thing the left in and outside Labour needs to do, to learn from those campaigns and adapt them for use against Labourite bigots and racialist opportunists. We now have the proof that you can racists without pandering, so let’s us that.

The second thing is to hammer the economics. The crisis was not caused by immigrants, nor by the working classes, but one created by the very people New Labour has been courting in the past thirteen years. The core problem is not the migration of labour, but of capital, that people can live In England, work in England and make tmillions in England but do not have to pay taxes in England. That should be hammered into people again and again, together with the radical new idea that gosh, the state needs not be helpless when people need houses, or jobs, or schools or healthcare, but can actually make sure there is enough for everybody, as long as it is willing to actually do so and use its powers for good rather than for illegal wars and petty bullying.