Though Cowards Flinch

A few months ago, in full pre-election mode, I did a quick top 10 of ‘out of touch’ Tory statements.  It was just a bit of a piss-take.

But increasingly, and like Paul Sagar, I’m struck not just by how out of touch with the reality of life in Britain the upper echelons of the Conservative party are, but how that out-of-touchness is starting to change the very act of government in this country.

Take, the Tories’ proposals, announced in July, to ‘promote’ rural housing:

The government plans to enable villages in England to build homes without seeking council planning permission. The Right to Build initiative aims to provide small numbers of affordable homes in rural areas where high home prices are driving people away.

It is part of David Cameron’s “big society” idea of allowing more decisions to be made locally……..Under the plan villages would be able to form local housing trusts, and hold a referendum to decide if house building should go ahead. A large majority would be needed.

At very first sight this might look OK, and the logical extension of the Tories’ much-vaunted localism agenda. 

But think through for more than a couple of seconds how such referenda might pan out, and a wholly different picture emerges.  This is precisely what the Rural Coalition, which understands something about rural living, has done:

Government plans to hold local referendums on new housing schemes in England could tear village communities apart, rural campaigners have said.

They say plans to require 80-90% of local people to approve new building schemes in villages would create conflict and bring projects to a halt.

The Rural Coalition is spot on.  It’s not rocket science to envisage scenarios where housing development proposed by Parish Councils will be opposed by those people in the area whose property may be overlooked or who may get more traffic past the front door, while others areas of the village support the proposals in view of the need for more property. 

The very reason democratically elected planning committees exist up and down the land is to provide an ‘objective’ forum in which difficult decisions can be made in a way which does not create long-term feuds between groups with opposing views.

Yet the Tories setting out these plans see none of this.  The reality of village dynamics is beneath them; they are interested only in their ideological drive to remove the influence of ‘the state’.

Nor do they notice, it would seem, that legislation has existed in the UK since 1972 which already allows members of the public, if they wish to call a referendum either in support of or against new housing developments, to do precisely that.  

It’s legislation (Local Government Act 1972 (part 3, schedule 12, para. 18, sub-paras. 4-5) which  I used myself in 2005 to protect public housing in my own village.

Had they thought their plans through, they could simply have recognised the existence of this legislation, promoting its use in cases of strong support either or against new housing problems, while leaving the final decision with elected planning committees, who are used to ‘taking the flak’ on committee, and do so precisely because their ‘objectivity’ allows local residents to get on with each other once the decision has been made.

Even more disturbingly, this display of ignorance and dismissive high-handedness from the new Tory establishment came at almost exactly the same time as its plans for council housing in more urban areas were being laid out. 

These proposals are even more out of touch with real lives, suggesting that people who move up the employment ladder should automatically then wish to leave their council accommodation and go and live somewhere ‘nicer’.

This staggering contempt for people in lower income areas, which totally ignores the concept of housing as ‘home’ as opposed to material asset, again reflects the new government’s distance from the reality of most people’s lives.

For this upper-class metropolitan elite, their sense of community is necessarily restricted by the size of their own properties – they don’t actually have neighbours in the sense normal people understand - and by the fact that they are chauffered between their and their colleagues’ properties. 

They are simply not in a position to understand that for most of us where we live, who we live next to and near, and how well we get on with them when we see them, is actually a very significant element in our lives.

It is this crass ignorance of and contempt for the people they have been ‘born to rule’ which is,  I contend, a key motivation for the new ‘hands off’ agenda to government, where they happily engage in ‘high politics’ and ‘statecraft’ within their own narrow social circles, happy to outsource their other erstwhile responsibilities to their ‘big society’ conceit. 

We are seeing a return to 1930s laissez-faire economics, but we’re also seeing the start of re-creation of 1930s social norms, where our rulers make a virtue of not understanding or caring about the working classes.

There are several blog posts in the offing, and all of them seem in one way or another to feed back to a common theme: the direction of Conservative thought and practice. 

They include:

1) An assessment of the Coalition’s plans for referenda on new housing developments in rural areas, which betrays the same remarkable lack of understanding of the dynamics of localities as was displayed just three weeks ago when the Tories came up with the wheeze about time-limited tenancies and people being forced to move house if they get a job.

2) An assessment of Cameron’s support for minimum alcohol pricing and how this reflects not just a lack of understanding about the realities (and prices) of alcohol consumption, but a wider , class-based discrepancy in the way social problems and their solutions are conceptualised, itself rooted in a deeply patrician attitude to the lower classes (cf.  rightwing and Tory responses to the immunization deficit caused by the middle classes).

3) Tying these and other threads together, there’s a post to be written as a response to Carl’s interesting, though I think flawed, contention that Conservatism may at a point of ‘epistemic closure’.

Rather, I will argue, the new, self-imposed ’operational codes’ of Conservative policy implementation (especially around localism and the narrative of the overbearing state), combined with the ruling class backgrounds of Conservatism’s main protoganists, are leading it – unwittingly perhaps - towards a strange, twisted re-creation of the High Tory political culture of the earlier part of the 20th century, in which there lay a clear distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ (administrative) politics (see here for the key, but now largely ignored) interpretation by the Tory political scientist Jim Bulpitt).

More generally, and though it might be a little premature to say so in the absence of Dave Semple – wherever he’s got to – both Carl and I get the sense that Though Cowards Flinch is going through a period of transition. 

I think both Carl and I agree that a blow-by-blow account of  the Coalition’s latest thuggery adds little value to a blogosphere in which many of the better time-resourced blogs get there first anyway, and are only worth covering here if there are themes (as above) which warrant drawing out.

In addition, the time for writing about resistance to the cuts is gone.  I was one of the first out of the blocks in setting out what I thought needed doing (and coordinating) at local levels of manageable scale, but anything I said was ignored, largely in favour of more histrionic calls to action/preachings to the converted. 

If I am to blog a well-founded ‘I told you so’ post in about 18 months. as the coalition crumbles and the Tories are forced into ignominious early election  defeat, my efforts are best directed to the the real world of making it happen, then recording it, rather than whining on here about the way no-one listens to my great wisdom built of experience of actually getting things done.

So, from me anyway, people can expect less posts, but more carefully themed when they come, and perhaps moving back towards TCF’s earlier penchant for political theory.  A smaller readership beckons, perhaps, but clarity of thought leading to clarity of action in what remains of my activists days is more important than number of hits.

Meanwhile, I’ll be putting in the hours not just on local resistance, but on – and I still have to pinch my little old self for this – developing the book of the blog and trying to convince someone to publish it. 

There’ll be a crowdsourcing post about that soon, when I’ve passed some stuff by my better-known collaborator (and I hope co-author, what with me needing someone clever).

In the meantime, here’s one I wrote earlier for Labour Uncut about the vainglorious and deluded Alan Milburn.  It’s not as good as Paul Sagar’s, but then I was only given 300 words to play with (I cheated a bit).

In fact I kind of agree with Hopi that Milburn’s hardly worth the effort, except for noting that John Prescott’s vitriol is in marked contrast to his silence on the even more ‘collaborative’ Frank Field. 

But heh, when you’re starting to think about earning a living from this writing mullarkie, it’s important to write any old pap if it makes you the ‘go to’ person for comment about any old pap.  

At least I think that’s how journalism works.

Bangladesh Cyclone Aftermath 1991

I’m not surprised at the announcement of yet another cut or broken promise by the Coalition government. The news in today’s Observer that it’s going to renege even more on aid commitments than it was going to renege last week is not a shock. 

After all, what’s the education of 72 million children, or the death of 21 children a minute from preventable diseases, compared with the need to look really, really tough on the deficit? 

The Coalition can clearly now safely set to one side what it said about international aid in its own ‘policy green paper’ as a pre-election lie to the liberal woolies: 

 The global downturn – which is a hammer blow to the world’s poorest families – makes the need for well-spent aid even more urgent. 

All that’s to be expected. This is the Coalition Tories we’re talking about. 

What really, really makes me want to howl with frustration is the media-orchestrated public reception to these broken promises, reflected in first few Observer comments: 

Oh my God, at last some common sense. We need to look after our own, about time too. Never send money to the Third World, it will just disappear. If you want to help ask them what they need, and then send it via ship or plane. We’ve been sending money for decades, where did it go? …….

 Developmental Aid to Africa is a misnomer to rank alongside Tony Bliar, Middle East Peace Envoy.

Many more of the same ilk will follow, on this and other more trolled media sites, and the same old themes will be there: all the money is wasted, development never happens anyway, ’charity begins at home’. 

And the usual rightwingers will be right now writing up their own versions of this, just as they have done previously:

We all know there is massive wastage on some of the projects supported by DfID and this must be rooted out.

 ‘We all know that’.  No need for evidence, no need for facts, just rightwing dogma peddled as incontrovertible truth, that all aid is a waste of taxpayer money.

This kind of shite makes me want to throw my computer at the wall in frustration. 

It makes me want to howl my own truth, a truth based on actual life – a life in which this ‘wasted’ British aid money enabled me and the people I worked with in Asia and Africa save thousands of lives and improve the lives of thousands more. 

Real people, real lives, real deaths. 

But my howl of humanity, in support of our aid commitments, cannot be heard over the howling of the trolls of those who claim compassion, but do not know the meaning of the word.   

American columnists speak at the moment of conservative “epistemic closure” to describe the debasing of modern conservatism’s glorious legacy, first used in this context by libertarian writer and Economist blogger Julian Sanchez as short-hand for “ideological intolerance and misinformation”. The idea is to show that conservatism has hit a wall and is appealing to low, base politics of xenophobia or ad hominem attack, as opposed to its rich, great tradition.

British conservatism has had a fair deal of “epistemic closure” in recent years also, and it’s something for the left to consider when we vent our criticisms on the right wing. When we think of conservatism today we might erroneously think of Thatcher and Major – but they were merely leaders of the conservative party.

Those in the conservative camp of the Conservative party who believe the primary lie of neo-liberal capitalism – that it opens up a space for us all to become a little bit rich, and turns the fixed triangle shaped class system into a flexible circle of freedoms – would’ve hated what Thatcher was doing by listening to those woolly Austrian and Chicago-school libertarians.

We know now they had little to worry about.

But the Thatcher/Major legacy, truth be told, will be less seen in the scheme of things as expressions of conservatism, and seen more as a new and epochal means to counter working class empowerment and intolerance of the foreign other.

For this reason I had some respect for Respublica and Phillip Blond. Aside from all bloated, first year philosophy course, flower eating nonsense that he talks about on virtue and politicians, what Blond did succeed in doing was to show that conservatism in this country was not the sum of the Thatcher/Major epistemic closure, but something that could be committed to community and civic participation, and not simply at the beck and call of the markets (which is rightly seen as a perversion of conservatism of the type Disraeli would have aligned himself to).

Cameron was keen to pal-up with Blond in the early days, with that timeless gag about voting blue was to go green. Though with Blond to vote blue was to go “red”. With Blond’s hat-tipping to one nation conservatism, and Cameron’s “progressivism” (by which has always meant an emotional relationship with the NHS, and therefore informing the decision to keep it) the Tories had the chance to sweep up the centre ground and remain Europhobic enough to keep the right from joining the UK Independence party. In short, drop the nasty party image.  Cameron had five years to do that before the election – and he failed.

The right wing of his party, Redwood for example, might be silent now, but give it time.

If I was interested in politics to score points then I, as a Labour supporter and socialist, would not care a hoot about conservatism. But this is not the case. Conservatism is not the sum total of xenophobia, big business and nastiness; this is its own expression of epistemic closure. But what almost five years of David Cameron as leader of the opposition and leader of the Conservative party has shown is that the return to real conservatism has botched. And this does not bade well considering the conditions in which that project was tested – 13 years out of office, a melee of leaders of all shapes and sizes, a global recession, and still they couldn’t exploit this enough – to think everyone in their camp assumed it would be a walkover.

I’ve been out of radio contact for a few days.  I’ve been learning to use a semi-automatic. 

No, really. 

This one. 

What strikes me most on my return, and a quick catch up with the news, is that I’m not really struck by anything when it comes to the Tory cuts programme and the response. 

So there’s more cuts announced.  I was expecting that.  So there’ve been some articles saying this is bad, and people should object.  No big surprise there, either. 

Heh, at least there’s consistency.  The Tories act like thugs, the LibDems act like twats, and the Left says it should get its act together, definitely, some time soon, though not too soon.

Not much to blog about there then.  I mean, this blog thrives on rooting out inconsistency, on highlighting hypocrisy.

Well, at least there’s Cameron’s views on minimum alcohol pricing.  Yup, nudge theory is grand, except when it’s convenient for it not to be.

Might blog about that.

Kenan Malik has been on my mind lately. I recently read his book From Fatwa to Jihad and I have learnt that he will be speaking at Westminster Skeptics early next year.

Today I thought I’d search his name on YouTube and was thrown up a video of a Newsnight episode on which he appeared with Tariq Modood, Ekow Eshun and Germaine Greer.

The latter guest, Germaine Greer, is often thought to be one of those annoying feminist, liberal, middle class bastards!

She once stood accused of asking Salman Rushdie to apologise for writing his book The Satanic Verses and offending. Though on Newsnight, she denied having done this, before explaining what she meant when she used “apology”, “Rushdie” and “The Satanic Verses” in the same sentence.

Below is the video of that episode of Newsnight where Greer says:

I don’t care if people burn books, my books have been burnt, as long as they pay for them they can do whatever they like with them, but I do think that nobody should die for a book, and that if you think you can prevent anymore people dying for the book – we all know how the book was manipulated – and all you have to do is apologise, go on your knees to Mashhad or whoever, then do it to save your life, you shouldn’t die for your book either

(09.56 – 10.29)

If you have had your head buried under rocks you may also have upset Iran, the most important part of the Rushdie affair occurred on February 14, 1989 when Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa calling on all Muslims to execute all those involved in the publication of the novel.

At the time, an Iranian religious foundation called the 15 Khordad Foundation offered a reward of $US1 million or 200 million rials for the murder of Rushdie.

Greer in the above video, recognises some necessity in Rushdie apologising to Mashhad, a very holy city in Iran, but adds an important clause: to save his life and the lives of other publishers and people involved in the publication of the book in other countries.

The question becomes harder I feel at this point: should Rushdie have apologised to people who feel it justified to kill people on the grounds that they have offended them, or, since he knows these people will stop at nothing, should he have apologised to save the lives others?

Even more tricky: because to apologise, or not to, is a choice that Rushdie had to make, at what point would he have been responsible in the event of a death (Greer notes later in the programme that “the thing was Salman was the safest person around. It was everybody else who was at risk, and nothing was done about them”).

For me the answer is simple: Rushdie should not have apologised because to do so would be to give credibility to the idea that when someone is offended by something, the obvious reaction should be to kill that person – that is all it comes down to.

But not everyone agreed at the time. Tory tabloids pictured Rushdie as someone who purposely put national security in jeopardy; mainstream politicians talked about at what stage something should no longer be protected under the banner free speech.

I think when people believe Rushdie should have apologised because other people were in danger, they themselves are in danger of not recognising that those who call for the murder, or those whose desire it is to carry out the murder, are not making a choice, and that they are acting on some uninterruptible compulsion over which we can have no intervention.

Also I often wonder what motivates this view. Many people once felt that there was a causal link between poverty and terrorism, but this does two things: first, it doesn’t take note of the facts; people who have had otherwise stable backgrounds, university educations and decent jobs have committed terror acts (such as the 7/7 bombers), while not every person who experiences poverty commits terror, so it doesn’t follow ipso facto that terrorism is a determinant of poverty. Second, it assumes people of a certain class, or I dare say race or nationality, are simply automaton not able to think for themselves and act upon the sort of compulsion that Greer assumed those who wanted to kill Rushdie did.

Drawing this back to Rushdie, by blaming him for not apologising gives credibility to the murderous bastards that wanted to kill him or anyone involved with the book he had written on the grounds that they did not like what he’d written (or they’d heard from someone else that they wouldn’t like what had been written – Malik in his aforementioned book made note that Khomeini had definitely not read the book before forming an opinion on it).

By pretending certain people cannot form opinions or carry out actions without their being some obvious symptom is to allow the opinion that people are stupid. Since Muslims were involved in the Rushdie affair, I’ve little doubt that to blame Rushdie for the desire of certain Muslims to kill Rushdie is to assume Muslims are stupid.

After reading this excellent pamphlet from Red Pepper at the weekend, I again got wondering about the need to explain why the cuts wont work.

We’ve devoted plenty of time on this page to attacking the reasoning behind the tightening of fiscal policy, but perhaps the time for such lines of arguments have passed. The cuts are coming now, and I think the main task in the battle ahead is going to be one of making sure that people realise how they are being negatively affected by this particular political decision.

On the doorstep during the election, I realised just how difficult it was to try to communicate a case against the cuts from an economic point of view. I don’t think the average voter was too keen on being given an economics lesson by a young chap with a clipboard whilst they were trying to catch up on Corrie.

It was always very difficult to shift the discussion from the menacing shadow of concerns about public debt, and sadly, lots of people do share the right’s list of priorities when it comes to reducing the deficit.

In my opinion we do need a strategy for communicating a challenge to the unnecessary prioritization of the deficit as a primary economic concern, but I think this will take some time to roll out in an electorate friendly manner.

But we may yet actually see a situation where this hysteria surrounding public debt could be of use to those of us who wish to challenge the cuts.

In an excellent paper that was published recently (The economic consequences of Mr Osborne), Prof Victoria Chick and Ann Pettifor, take a look at an extremely interesting dataset, showing relations between changes in public spending and public debt since 1909.

The main thesis of the paper, is that as well potential negative impacts upon employment and growth, fiscal consolidation can have upward effects on public debt.

As the table below shows, a fairly modest reduction of public spending between 1931 and 1933, led to an increase of 10% (again as a share of GDP) in the public debt;And as the next table shows,an expansion of public spending by over 10% of GDP, between 1933 and 1939, led to the public debt decreasing by 42%;

If you want to get a more detailed view of the various factors behind this data then I’d highly recommend reading the full paper, and the entire dataset can be found near the bottom.

The typical line of attack from the left, such as the one in the Red Pepper pamphlet, has focused on the cuts not working in the context of restoring economic activity.

Whilst I certainly believe this to be true, the data in this paper shows us that there is a real possibility that the cuts might not work in the context of the Tory narrative either, i.e. that the cuts are necessary to resolve, what they perceive to be, a debt crisis.

It would be irresponsible for me to assert that this will definitely be the case, but going off the data provided by Ann Pettifor and Professor Chick, it’s certainly a possibility.

If the cuts do lead to both poor economic performance and higher debt, the lines of attack will become much more effective. The government will quickly find themselves on the backfoot, battling accusations of economic incompetence, as well as trying to explain why their supposedly common sense approach to  tackling the public deficit has failed.

Like I said, it would be over ambitious of me to guarantee such an outcome. Definitive economic analysis is a touchy subject amongst experienced economists, nevermind someone such as myself who hasn’t even finished my degree yet. So, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

Update: After a couple of people pointed out that relying on figures from the 1930′s isn’t really good enough, I thought I’d add some more recent examples of similar trends.

I should probably clarify that I was just extracting one example from the Chick/Pettifor thesis, which has also been linked to.  But I suppose it would be wise to include one of the more recent trends too;

So, if we pick two more recent periods to study, we do indeed see a similar trend. I’ll take these two periods from the complete dataset from which I took the above charts. The full dataset can be found here, just go to page 21.

It’s important to note that the thesis laid out by Ann and Victoria isn’t as profound after 1976. They give some reasoning for this in the paper.

But even if it’s not quite as profound, the trend still seems to be that debt comes down as spending is increasing.

So in 1979 public spending was 22.9% of GDP and public debt was at 46% of GDP.

By 1997, public spending had been reduced to 19.4% and the debt had risen to 53%.

If we then look to 2007 before the cost of a response to the financial crisis starts to get factored in, we can see that spending was again at 22.9% of GDP and the debt had decreased to 44%.

Obviously this still isn’t definitive ground for a prediction of what effect the current governments cuts will have on the level of public debt. But it certainly provides food for thought.

Recent commentary by Liberal Conspiracy and the New Statesman on the Con-Lib “u-turn” over whether or not to abandon free milk for nursery school kids seems to have missed how suspicious the whole thing looks. Or maybe I’m being overly cynical.

Why do I think it was a stunt? The evidence is circumstantial at best, and requires the addition of a deep sense of skepticism as regards the government’s relationship with the press. But I’ll do my best to present it.

The letter that health minister Anne Milton sent to the Scottish executive is declarative, that there is a Tory proposal to scrap free milk for the under-5s. It doesn’t waffle, it doesn’t suggest this is a trial balloon. It says that the Tories want to press ahead with it and want the opinion of the other three home-nation governments.

A timeline for the transmission of information from government to government is as close as August 18th.

Why does this have an impact? Something as controversial as this will have had higher approval. It doesn’t have the feel of an errant minister floating tentative ideas, which is what Tory spokesperson Stephen Dorrell subsequently claimed. So either the Tories were genuinely proposing this or it was floated in order to be smacked down.

There are plenty of reasons to do this. Importantly, it defies a Thatcherite precedent of cutting school-age milk, and is a sop to legislation that formed part of the original welfare state (a fact mentioned in both the letter, where such a mention feels oddly out of place and in the subsequent retraction by more senior Tory figures).

Anne Milton’s letter presents justifications typical of both Tory Right and Tory Centrist thinking. Fiscal discipline must come first, runs one line of argument, and it would be cheaper to do something else (the efficacy of which, the letter admits, is untested). The second is that universal measures are inherently unfair – what money is spent should be targeted only at the poor. This is a principle New Labour held to also.

David Cameron slapping down these arguments is a bone to the Liberal Democrats at a time when their members and backbenchers are unsettled, as the impact of cuts become clear and economic perspectives are revised downwards.

This is why the program’s status as part of the original welfare state is key, and, if one had a suspicious mind, why it is mentioned prominently by Milton and Dorrell: Lib-Dem figures (e.g. Ms Featherstone) like to make a song and dance about the fact that Beveridge was a Liberal and it was his eponymous report (not Labour’s massive landslide victory) which was the basis for the welfare state. Left-Lib-Dems have the same affection for this as the actual Left. Defending it is a Good Thing, in their eyes.

Dorrell’s phrasing in explaining the u-turn seems to endorse this view; it is heavy on allusions to protecting the least well off etc. If it does bolster Lib-Dem support, it’s a tactically smart move – and incidentally, from the point of view of any Lib-Dems inclined to take this view, allows them to continue pretending that they can blunt the worst Right-wing excesses of this government simply by being visible on Cameron’s political radar.

I certainly don’t buy Mehdi Hassan’s view at the New Statesman that the reversal was a “humiliating…climb down”, and that is one reason why. Another reason is that the climbdown happened too fast, it was too pat. The BBC article was up for maybe an hour before it was amended to include the turn-around.

Perhaps I give the Tories too much credit, but without a whiff of opposition having time to develop, this policy is suddenly dropped. I don’t think the Tories are gun-shy just yet. The long list of protests currently in planning stage will prove that. Thatcher’s approval ratings see-sawed with the wind but that government pushed onwards.

Milton’s letter even mentions that opposition is expected from “media, parents, nurseries, childminders and the dairy sector” as though lining up exactly the justification that Dorrell subsequently uses to explain the u-turn; too much moo for too little milk, as it were. It feels too neat to be the sort of gaffe which Labour figures like Ed Balls are jumping up and down about.

The only element that I can find to substantiate the view that it was a gaffe was the reaction of David Willetts, who was described by the BBC as “floundering” after being informed live on air that the measure had been ruled out, just while he was defending the measure as one of “a whole range of option”. Far from floundering, Willetts too made an appeal that would likely sound good to Lib-Dems, affirming the retention of free milk as “progressive values”.

On the other hand, the vast weight of the political class disagrees with me, it seems, and they know this stuff better than I do.

"You want me to what now?"

All through this year and last year, as strike after strike was brought down by employers’ opportunistic legal attacks – on any grounds they could possibly muster, whether those grounds had any material effect on the situation or not – I said that laws governing strike ballots were draconian and poorly constructed, failing to fulfil their stated aim of protecting the democratic rights of workers in trades unions.

Employers’ group, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, have underlined my point with a recent demand that the government tighten laws on strike ballots, and consider banning strikes altogether and introduce compulsory arbitration in “key” industries. There’s no pretence that tightening laws will respect the democratic rights of workers now, it’s simply naked aggression towards anyone who disagrees with the cuts and will act to stop them.

Naturally the CBI, the Confederation of British Industry, is not far behind. In a document with a title that would make Orwell worry, they’ve announced that the government should impose a 40% quorum for strike action on the balloted workforce. Making Britain the Place to Work also, ironically, proposes to shorten the statutory consultation period for firms making more than 100 people redundant from 90 days to 30 days.

Here, of course, there is the usual pretence at defending the interests of ordinary people – as John Cridland, CBI Deputy Director-General stated when launching the document, “Strikes cause misery. They prevent ordinary people going about their daily lives, whether it’s getting to work or getting the kids to school.” To which the obvious answer should be, guess what? Mass unemployment and encroachment into the terms and conditions of a workforce cause misery too.

The CBI document contains a lot of other worrying ideas as well. A key one is the attack on TUPE – the transfer of undertaking (protection of employment) regulations, which essentially protect workers’ terms and conditions if a company is transfered from one owner to another. The CBI want any new owner to be able to ‘harmonise’ a newly acquired business with a previous one, paying workers the same; i.e. less.

Contained in the document is also a demand for the American system of workforce voting for union recognition instead of the Central Arbitration Committee having the power to simply grant workplace recognition to a union, if that union has gained over 50% of the members of the workplace. This takes place in the context of businesses which simply refuse to negotiate with unions, even when their whole shop is unionised, provoking strikes simply to get recognition – which is not in the interest of workers, who lose pay.

Ballots introduce a plethora of questions. Would it only be held once? Could it be forced any time employers were having difficulty negotiating with a particular union? Would there be a particular threshold to trigger union recognition? In the US, these laws are used to stymie union recognition – even to the point of employers creating and promoting their own unions for workers to join, just to screw with the recognition of other unions.

The CBI document states:

“People at work should always be empowered to decide for themselves if they want to be represented by a union or take the opportunity to use other routes to communicate with their employer. The law should be amended so ballots should always be held to enable employees to demonstrate whether or not they support recognition of a trade union to speak on their behalf.”

People at work are always empowered to decide for themselves if they want to be represented by a union; they can join one or not. The problem here is not with the accurate representation of workers, it’s with the voluntary nature of union recognition. And I don’t see the CBI bemoaning the failure of businesses to accept the decision of their workers to be represented by unions.

This leads me to suspect that the CBI have other motives than empowering workers.

With the (half-) victory of a Conservative government, it would be surprising if employers’ groups weren’t gearing up to attack unions and further impose regulations on the one area of employment law where regulations seem tolerable to bosses; that area where the worker gets to give force to his opinion. We need to be aware that a victory in this field will make life all the harder later on, when unions are finally forced into action against the cuts.

We should also recognise that these are only opening salvoes from bosses’ organisations. As with Thatcher’s government, once they know they can get away with this, they will try and take away much more.

Having come out in support of Ed Balls’ Labour leadership bid, I find it incumbent upon me also to take on the role of campaign manager.  

In this guise, I can now announce Ed’s 10 point plan for winning the Labour leadership election when he gets back from holiday.  Ed’s support team is required to take note and draw up a detailed action plan in time for his return. 

A number of the points will also assist Ed Miliband, who is currently my recommended second choice on the ballot sheet (I am not constrained in the same way as Ed Balls from providing this guidance on other preferences).

Ed Balls’ 10 point plan

1) Ed will openly acknowledge that both his robust stance on BSF/Academies and his narrative around the Coalition’s cuts have made him more popular with left-leaning Labour members than many had thought would be the case at the start of the campaign. 

While he will not ‘court’ the leftwing vote as such, he will be seen to be pleased that lefties are getting behind him, and to describe this in appropriately humble terms as a ‘turn up for the books’, given the revulsion that many of those same members have felt for his part in the ‘New Labour project’. 

He will also accept gracefully the fact that, while some left wingers are moving towards him on the basis of his recent track record in opposition, others with fairly similar leftwing views cannot bring themselves to see any value in his candidature because of his part in New Labour’s track record while in government.  

He should note that this produces a somewhat strange state of affairs whereby some left wingers are considering him as number one on the ballot sheet, while others will put him at the bottom of the list.

2) Ed will accept with grace the current verdict of many Labour members that he may make a very good leader of the opposition, but has a long way to go before he can be thought of as a future Prime Minister, if ever. 

He will pick up on the argument that the jobs are very different, and go about emphasising his suitability for the opposition role. 

He will also develop the argument that the public may react well to a Labour party strategy of selecting a potential PM around a year out from a general election, while retaining the right to move straight into the PM job if he is part of a movement which brings down the Coalition or the Tories earlier than 2015.  This argument will indeed go down well with the public, who will see in both due humility and a commitment to tackling the Coalition’s excesses over and above ‘preparing for government’ at what, for many people, is a very distant point in the future.

3) Ed will talk openly about this leadership campaign has not just been an opportunity to display his talents to the membership and the wider public, but how it has also been a genuine learning opportunity for himself, it being the first time in many years that he has not been bound by loyalty to New Labour. 

He will suggest strongly that this learning experience has helped him rediscover elements of socialist thinking that he had lost during the later 1990s and 2000s.

He will make clear that he is recognising distinction between the ‘listening to members’, mantra  adopted by all candidates, and taking on board what they say and adjusting his actions and ideas accordingly after a period of reflection (see als 4 and 5 where he should evidence this).

4) He will fulfil his promise, made in this early campaign contribution:

It would be an irony if, having said the Party needs to listen more and open up, that I then offered my own detailed prescription and asked members if they agree with it.

I want to hear from party members and supporters about how we should improve this process. Over the summer I will publish more details on how we could do this through my campaign website.

In so doing, Ed will almost certainly be differentiating himself from the other candidates, who to have a very large extent’ ‘been there, done that’ in respect of intra-party democracy, and have moved on to other areas of their campaign.  This show of reflexivity will stand Ed in good stead with many members, especially on the Left, who are acutely aware that there is a good deal of talk about openness in policy making, but little other than tokenism (e.g. an elected party chair) when it comes to concrete promises.

Ed will therefore be very specific about how we will engage with the NEC to revise the core financial flows which dictate much party and related union activity, and thereby ensure that a genuine ‘bottom up ‘ approach to party organisation is embedded within it.

He will follow my specific guidance on this, in keeping with an explicit promise made to me to ‘reflect’ on what I had to say before I became his campaign manager.

5) He should acknowledge openly, as an example of this learning, that he was wrong in his comments on immigration at the start of the campaign, and that by listening to members  – especially those to the left of him – he recognises that he has himself become prey to the right-wing media narrative about immigration. 

He should set out precisely in what way he was wrong, what brought him to say such things about immigration policy, and set out clearly an alternative message.  He should do this mostly because it is the right thing to do, but also because it is tactically astute in its appeal to the left of the party (see 1 above), a possible unexpected source of votes.

6) Ed will continue to differentiate his approach to the ‘deficit issue’ from the other candidates, and do his utmost to articulate what makes his economic policy preferable to that of his candidates. 

In this, he will build on his recent acknowledgment that the Labour’s pre-election plans for spending cuts were wrong, by setting out precisely, and using his media presence to do so numerically, why we do not need cuts now, and the extent to which the Tories are lying about the ‘necessity’ for cuts.

He will develop an aggressive counter-narrative to the Tories ‘debt crisis’ claims, by invoking MMT/post-Keynesian theory where necessary, in order to start to portray the Tories as liars and cheats when it comes to economic fundamentals.

In particular, he will build on the lessons from this post by Duncan Weldon, as well as the comments that follow (from Vimothy and Duncan) about the need to adopt radical economic logic as part of a socialist counter-narrative.

He will also be gracious in acknowledging the contribution of David Miliband to the debate about how Labour develops an alternative political economy, in recognition that while D Miliband remains wrong on deficit reduction, and bound by New Labour’s orthodoxies, he does have something valuable to say about industrial and ‘real growth’ policy.

7) Ed will deal directly with the Iraq question.  He will stop trying to avoid the issue by saying that he wasn’t in parliament at that time, and acknowledge simply that New Labour got this disastrously wrong, with terrible consequences.

He will not stop, however, with a show of guilt, for this in itself achieves little.  Having acknowledged that New Labour not only betrayed the Iraqi people, but also wilfully ignored its own membership (which left in droves) he will seek to link the whole failure back to the lack of democratic openness within the party, and set out plans to develop accountability structures, which allow the membership to restrain its leadership where necessary.

The objective he will set out here will be nothing less than to establish the Labour party membership as one of two organs – the other being parliament - to which future Labour governments will report, but by which their actions can be restrained.  Only by submitting to such arrangements, Ed will argue, will the leadership regain the trust of the party.

8) Ed will talk consciously of ‘resistance’ to the Tories’ cuts (and other abuses like that proposed for public housing).  In so doing he will distinguish himself as a proper leader of the opposition party, not simply as a MP-long-time-in-waiting.

He will actively encourage Labour members to join with other resistance movements developing, and not to become too sucked into the Labour party’s internal affairs, and to the electoral successes that will come soon enough in local government.

Ed will consciously and openly advocate the move of the party away from its New Labour role as ‘electoral machine’ towards a renewed role at the heart of the Labour movement. 

Five years in opposition is too long a time to be preparing for government.  If the party is to be trusted in five years, then it must show what it is made of now, by being at the heart of the resistance, acknowledging that it is only part of that struggle, but an integral part all the same.

Ed will use his image, already developed, as a ‘fighter’ to get that message over, with a promise that he’ll be at the head anti-cuts marches, and working actively with anti-cuts groups. on the kind of holistic strategy set out here by his new campaign manager.

9) Ed will answer my interview questions in full, and gain a good deal of credit from TCF influential readership for doing so, especially as it looks as though all the other candidates are reneging on their promises.

10) Ed and his team will join West Lancashire Labour activists in the last week of August/early September as we set about battering the Tories in two byelections caused by the untimely deaths of two local councillors.

This is my 10 point plan for Ed Balls’ success.  If he follows it well, he will win. 

If he doesn’t, he will incur my wrath.