The Case against… Diane Abbott

A brief series where, for my own amusement (and possibly ensuring I never work for the Labour Party again), I set out the case against each of the Leadership candidates. The eleventh commandment of internal elections is “Never speak ill of a fellow party member”. It gets broken just as regularly as the other ten, but I shall try to be constructive, not merely critical.

I planned to make the entirety of  this post a link to the result of the 1983 General Election.

Thinking about this, I realised I’d be letting my own  rejection of Diane Abbott’s agenda stop me from saying anything interesting.

The truth is, Diane Abbott is not running to be leader of the Labour party.

 She has the support of approximately 15 MPs, is only on the ballot paper because David Miliband’s campaign team wanted her there and has the support of few constituencies and even fewer unions.  This is not a recipe for victory. I have a greater chance of being Labour leader in my lifetime than Diane Abbott does.

The fiction that Diane is running for leader is one that has to be maintained by both her campaign and the media. To do otherwise would make her candidacy impossible to explain in hustings and interviews.

We’re lucky, we don’t have to pretend.

What Diane Abbott is really running for has many names, but no official title. It’s the mantle of Nye, the leadership of the left, the Benn inheritence.

The ambition is to be the face and figurehead of a resurgent, campaigning left inside the Labour party, helping to break the grip the centre and right of Labour have had on the party since the conversion of Neil Kinnock to the path of moderation.

If you’re considering voting for Diane, my guess is that this prospect sounds pretty attractive.

So the case against supporting her has to be that she’d be a diasaster in that role.

The next few years are a major opportunity for the Labour left.

Labour has just lost office thanks to a crisis in capitalism and the failure of the Labour centre-right to respond to that crisis it in an electorate pleasing way.

As a result, we have a government which will run an anti-public services, anti-social spending, anti-housing benefit and welfare agenda, while pursuing policies that will, at the very best, slow the decline in unemployment.

For the first time in a generation, the left could have a coherent intellectual and electoral argument. If the face of the left is Diane Abbott, that argument will be less likely to be seriously.

First, Diane Abbott is grounded in the discredited and failed eighties left. She’s never really managed to graduate from that particular fight. The left needs a leader who isn’t defined by years of irrelevance.

Second, the left needs converts. Diane Abbott is not someone who’ll make many friends inside the Labour party. She’s been an MP for over twenty years, and many of her colleagues, left or right,  dislike her on both a personal and political level.

Third, she’s easily badged as a hypocrite.

Fourth, she’s a dreadful media performer under anything more than light scrutiny. She’s good with the faithful, and gives a good (sometimes even brilliant) speech, but she is abrasive, evasive and hectoring in a tough press interview.

Finally, for the left, the challenge of the next few years is primarily an economic one. The left needs answers on jobs, deficits, pensions, benefits, pay and housing. Diane Abbott offers little other than sloganising on these issues. Compare and contrast Livingstone on housing, or John McDonnell on taxation of the super rich.

There is a major chance for the left of the Labour party to grow, if it wants it.

The old right and New Labour inheritors are divided, a little bemused and comparatively organisationally weak (though Labour first is doing the hard work well, as ever) , while the centre is willing to please the party and listen to it’s concerns.

With the right leaders,  the left could well provide intellectual and organisation inspiration to the wider movement.

Diane Abott is the wrong leader for that role.  In fact, the best thing the left of the Labour party could do is consign the likes of Abbott, Corbyn and McDonnell to the past, honoured and praised but ultimately ignored.

Instead they should focus on developing a new generation of strong voices for whom the chance to stridently oppose the government, challenge their own party to be mor radical and win applause from party members will be attractive. Most of these won’t be in Westminster – they could be council leaders, or trade unionists, or simply fluent, passionate activists.

The challenge for the left isn’t winning this Leadership election, it’s becoming strong enough to ensure that in conference, NEC and Shadow cabinet, it’s people and ideas are taken seriously.

So if you really want a stronger left in the party, why not vote for Ed Miliband, who’ll at least listen to you, and might concede ground on party democracy and policy that is important to you. 

Alternatively, be cynical and vote for David Miliband, so you can look forward to the Bevanite backlash his politics will create.

Please, though, don’t let Diane be the leader of the left. She’ll ruin it for you.

———————————

I’m doing this series in the order of total MP and CLP nominations, I’ve done David Miliband,  Ed Miliband and Andy Burnham, already, so it’s  Ed Balls tomorrow!

One Cheer, One Hearty boo.

Well Done Nick Clegg.

The aim of a negotiation is to maximise what you get out of the subsequent deal. So he was dead right to try and lever as many concessions as he could out of David Cameron. I only wish he’ chosen to get something real out of it, like a better spending policy, rather than a referendum on a “miserable little compromise” (This phrase will be coming to to a Press Conference near you in April 2011).

You Swine, Nick Clegg.

So Mervyn King told you that things had changed, so your entire economic policy had to change too?

Oh, no he didn’t!

Poor Nick, you should have known that this particular Governor of the Bank of England only provides cover to (and agrees to hold press conferences to justify) the fiscal policies of the Conservative party. He don’t need you, so is happy to throw you under the bus.

(To be fair to Mr King, he’s not responsible for fiscal policy, so in return for backing the rising, not setting, sun -on an issue he’s not going to get blame for if it goes wrong-, he gained huge power, so it wasn’t an irrational decision)

The case against… Andy Burnham

A brief series where, for my own amusement (and possibly ensuring I never work for the Labour Party again), I set out the case against each of the Leadership candidates. The eleventh commandment of internal elections is “Never speak ill of a fellow party member”. It gets broken just as regularly as the other ten, but I shall try to be constructive, not merely critical.

Of all the Labour leadership candidates, Andy Burnham could claim to have the most appealing backstory. He’s not the son of a prominent Marxist academic, nor privately educated, nor does he send his children to private school. He isn’t regarded as a factional politician (In either the Blair/Brown or Kinnock/left battles) – but is rather a party loyalist from a working class background who has worked hard and succeeded in politics while staying true to his roots.  His love of football is genuine, not faked.

On top of that, Andy Burnham is attractive, talks less like a politican than most MPs, and is has a focus on the needs and interests of working people that leads him to be sceptical of  fashionable progressive nostrums.  

Nor do I buy that Andy is somehow not “intellectual” enough to be leader. That’s patronising b******ks, quite frankly. He was smart enough to reach the cabinet in his mid thirties, which is good enough for me.  You don’t have to have done three years at IPPR to be plenty bright.

and yet, and yet…

First of all Andy’s biggest problem is that he can’t seem to shut up about his biggest asset. Show, don’t tell.

We really didn’t need to know that Andy Burnham keeps waiting for someone to tell him he shouldn’t be an MP.  I reckon the rest of the country isn’t that sympathetic about self-image problems among ultra high acheivers.

A Leader doesn’t win by telling us how in touch they are with the pulse of the working family of this country, they get points for showing they’ve got their finger on the pulse. 

To be fair, Andy has tried to back that up – he’s talked about housing and the need to open up politics and professions away from the connected elites.

But the problem with it is that it too often sounds like an “Andy Burnham deserves it as good as David Miliband” argument.  See, for example, this interview with Polly Toynbee, where Andy gets very focussed on the question of doors opening up for others, not for him.  I come from a similar background to Andy (State school, Oxbridge, took  job after Uni cause I needed money) and even I was wondering if Andy was maybe a bit to focussed on himself there. 

It’s a pretty narrow demographic, state school oxbridgers who got free school meals and aren’t Prime Minister. Perhaps that emphasis would change as leader - but there’s another problem.

Does an argument based around being in touch with white working class values really have the breadth needed to win us an election? Surely we need to aim a bit broader than that? Real people aren’t only to be found in Leigh.

Second, how will Andy fight the messaging machine of the Tories and the Lib Dems, who would rapidly try to pitch themselves on the middle england middle ground, and paint Andy as a chippy northerner? 

His approach is to define himself as an “aspirational socialist,”, which sounds good, but doubts about how effective he’d be at translating this into campaigning were raised during the election campaign, when the care service agenda was at the heart of a huge fight with the Tories.

Somehow, Andy got trapped in a tussle over whether or not the Tories had signed up to some non-partisan talking shop, while Andrew Lansley ran round the country shouting “DEATH TAX!, DEATH TAX! DEATH TAX!” at the top of his voice. 

I hate to admit it, but we lost that campaign battle (even if we may subsequently win the policy war).  Does this speak to a lack of message and campaigning skill? The Care service plan works well amongst Labour supporters, but Andy didn’t seem able to find a way to sell it to a sceptical public.

So whether it’s a lack of broad appeal or a lack of electoral savvy, there’s a good case that Andy Burnham’s not right (or not ready) to lead.  He seems like half a great leader, but something seems… missing.  

That said,  my heart’s not in this. 

Andy Burnham has his flaws as a leader candidate but he’s suffered from a sort of soft bigotry.

The media pay Ed Balls, Ed Miliband and David Miliband the compliment of taking their candidacies seriously. Andy Burnham’s had to fight the whole campaign at a strategic disadvantage – the first thing anyone says  is “well he can’t win”. 

Fighting against that perception is a huge handicap which defines his whole campaign strategy. You have to fight to even be heard.  It seems unduly harsh to then criticise his candidacy in the same terms as candidates who’ve not had to jump through the “you can’t win” hoop.

This charge is unfair. Andy’s at least as strong a candidate as the two Milibands, and he’s been brave on issues like the deficit and the change we need in our political system. He deserves to be taken seriously.

But the charge is also true. With the support of only 33 MPs and no unions, Andy can’t win. Wishing it wasn’t so doesn’t make it any less true.

You get the sense that this is almost a campaign for a right to be taken seriously, for a seat at the top table, for the right not to be ignored in the calculus of the future of the party.

If that’s the case, then Andy Burnham deserves to succeed. He’s won the right to be at the forefront of the Labour movement. His 40 constituency nominations are proof of that.  As Brian Clough would say “these are my O-levels, these are my A-levels”.

But for this election, the fundamental problem for Andy Burnham is that he can’t persuade enough people to take him seriously as the next leader.

This may seem like a catch 22, but it isn’t.

To win, he needs to persuade people that he’s more than a boy from Leigh made good.  His campaign musn’t be about his backstory, but about our future.

Whatever the obstacles that have been placed in his way, I’m not sure Andy has cleared them-

- yet.

————————

I’m doing this series in the order of total MP and CLP nominations, I’ve done David Miliband, and Ed Miliband, so it’s  Diane Abbott and  Ed Balls next

The “vote for me” bit.

Yes, it’s time for the Total Politics Blog Poll thingummy again.

Look, I know these things are stupid and unscientific and silly. Couldn’t agree more. But if I come near the top, I get asked to go on the Telly Box as a leading Labour blogger, and people bow and scrape and genuflect to my wisdom while nodding seriously at my great wisdom insights.

I’m sure you’ll agree that’s very important, and more of that sort of thing is greatly needed.

So vote for me, Hopi Sen, and make the world of political commentary a better place (for me, Hopi Sen)

This time I need your votes more than ever, since as well as Auld Enemies Tom Harris, Labourlist and Luke Akehurst, there’s all these good new left wing blogs, like that swine John Mcternan, and those scum at Labour Uncut, and the evil crypto-trots at LeftFootForward, and known idiots like Anthony Painter, Rob Carr and Political Scrapbook.

These blogs are all my deadly rivals, and must be crushed – Do not vote for these revanchist pigs, or any similar good left wing blogs. Especially not that Alistair Campbell. He’s such a nobody I’m not even going to link to him. Anyway, you can’t even read his blog on an Iphone. So why vote for him, eh?

So, to sum up, you can vote for me, Hopi Sen, simply by clicking below and following orders.

Alternatively, if you’re a wild free spirit, just email toptenblogs@totalpolitics.com with an email containing a list of five to ten of your favourite blogs*, ranked in order of preference. It should probably look something like this:

1. Hopi Sen.

Note: The above bit is important. Make sure to get it right, otherwise your vote will be disqualified for wrongness

2. www.Lesser-blog.com

3. www.Some-scribbler.co.uk

4. www.Probably-alright-blogger,-if you-like-that-sort-of-thing.org.uk

5. www.Again,Not-as-good-as-Hopi-who-is-practically-a-genius.org

6. www.guadrian.co.uk/Probably-gets-paid-for-doing-his-blog,-which-Hopi-doesn’t/

7.  www.there’s-millions-of them-on-this-group blog,-yet-they’re-not-as-good-as-Hopi-Sen.biz

8. www.pale-imitator-of-Hopi-Sen’s-unique style-but-still-eightth-best-blog-in-Britain.org

9. www.Good-but-doesn’t-talk-enough-about-shoppingchannels-on-twitter-for-my-taste.org

10. www.pah-sometimesdoespostsoflessthana1000words-lightweight.co.uk

So, as you can see, it couldn’t be simpler to vote for me, Hopi Sen, and help get me, Hopi Sen, on the Telly, and radio, and so forth.

Surely, that’s change we can all believe in**?

Also, if some of you say you’ll vote for me, I’ll do a “The case against.. Hopi Sen” post.

It’ll be better than this rubbish, I promise.

* thinking about it, on a game theory basis, in order to maximise support for me, Hopi Sen, you should vote for me, Hopi Sen, and then the minimum number of alternative blogs.

**Mandatory tired Obama reference by third rate British political hack who is about as far from Obama as it gets.

The case against… Ed Miliband

A brief series where, for my own amusement (and possibly ensuring I never work for the Labour Party again), I set out the case against each of the Leadership candidates. The eleventh commandment of internal elections is “Never speak ill of a fellow party member”. It gets broken just as regularly as the other ten, but I shall try to be constructive, not merely critical.

Ed Miliband. First off, the lads got guts. Can’t be easy deciding to run for leader.

Forget that the leading candidate was his brother, that’s just psychodrama, better suited to a Andrew Rawnsley sequel than hard headed political analysis.

No, Ed Miliband’s real problem was that it was hard to see what ideological and political space a putative Ed Miliband campaign could occupy.

After all, here’s a man whose entire professional life has been spent at the service of New Labour (Brown variant), a Treasury special adviser who got a safe seat (though he had to fight for it), and then a rapidly promoted golden child charged with developing the policy agenda for a fourth Labour term.

Not much space for building a new political movement with that CV. Jon Cruddas he ain’t.

But he did it.

Of course, there were those who saw him as a possible leader some time ago. They saw in him a personally engaging man and a potential candidate who believes passionately in social democratic values, someone not afraid of givign the Labour party a bit of that old time religion that inspires and lifts and causes the believers to shout hallelujah.

But for his old muckers in spaddery and Cabinet the Ed Miliband who has emerged over the last few months - the Iraq war oppossin’, New Labour attackin’, Union lovin, ‘  Manifesto slammin’ Miliband - has come as a shock, and not a pleasant one.

These differences can be overstated. As the reliably centrist Luke Akehurst has said, Ed Miliband is committed to Trident.  He is basically yet another moderate Sweden adoring social democrat. If Ed Miliband is positioned to the left of the other credible candidates, it’s by a notch, not a country mile.

So you might be suprised to discover that despite my own flaming centrism, I don’t think the case against Ed Miliband can be built around perceived leftism.

If that was the case, then any candidate who ever tacked one way to get selected and another to get elected would be verboten. Elections are for winning, and I don’t blame the younger Miliband for doing what he needs to to win.

No, the case against Ed Miliband is built on the question of what happens after he wins.

The energy and drive in Ed Miliband’s campaign comes from his passionate call for a return to Labour values.  Specific policy pledges are part of that (Living wage, and so on) but it’s stylistic too.

Ed Milband is the candidate of votes at conference, more consultation, more internal democracy, more of a voice for the unions in policy making and a more consultative, collaborative leadership style.  He’s been courageous and bold in setting that agenda. (I think it’s because it’s what he really believes, freed of the constraints of subservience to patrons.)

As Luke says, this means Ed is the candidate acceptable to everyone. That is an ambiguous position. It has a lot of negatives to it.

In order to win Ed has had to assemble the support of union general secretaries, former Brown advisers (No 10 seems to have decamped en masse into the Ed Miliband campaign team) and virtually everyone on the soft left of the party.

In other words, an Ed Miliband leadership will owe a lot of favours.

Well, so does any leader, you might say. True enough. But the Leader of the Labour party in opposition is remarkably weak, structurally. They don’t control the shadow cabinet, they don’t control the national executive, they don’t even control Conference – even Tony Blair wouldn’t have got new clause four without bringing John Prescott and the Unions with him.

And here’s the rub. The party hierachy, the unions, the office of Deputy Leader are all in a very different place than they were in 1994.

It’s not that they’re more left or right wing*, it’s that they’re more confident, more assertive, more willing to make use of their rights and powers.

We haven’t lost three elections in a row. Nor, unlike the eighties, is there an obvious, internal radical force to unite the soft left and right against. Derek Simpson is not Derek Hatton. Compass is not Militant.

Ed Miliband as  leader of the Labour party will largely owe his election to people who rather agree with Unite and Compass. He’s acceptable to everyone. Equally, he’s confronted no-one.**

As a result, the new leader of the Labour party might well find himself constrained, circumscribed, hemmed in by his supporters and allies.

So the question about Ed Miliband is –  how will he lead? Won’t the boldness and radicalism of his leadership bid prove to be what limits him as leader -binding him to a soft left political strategy?

In other words – Can Ed Miliband lead the party in any direction it doesn’t want to go in already? Could such a platform really be electorally successful?

It’s easy to promise votes at conference, but what happens when you lose?Imagine Ed Miliband, two years hence. He believes that without a clear policy on subject X , he can’t win the general election.  His advisers tell him that the unions are dead against, and the Conference vote will certainly be lost.  What then?

In short, the case against Ed Miliband is that even if he is personally bold,  his political strategy means he will end up not being a Leader, but a figurehead for the desires of a Party he cannot master.

Now there are two counter arguments here.

First, any Labour leader would be constrained. Tony Blair was, and John Smith, and Neil Kinnock. At least Ed Miliband would have the benefit of warm, close relations – and the ablity to persuade. That’s true.

But other candidates will have clearer mandates to lead. Whether Ed Balls or Andy Burnham, they can point to an agenda that is their own. They could use the power to use a referendum of membership to go around opposition on key policy issues. Ed’s agenda is that of the soft left centre of the party, and it’s hard to see how he can back away from that agenda now.

The second argument is that Ed’s soft left political position could well be popular. New Labour is as much of the past as Militant or the CLPD, and the party needs to change- reach out and renew. Issues that Ed has touched on, often mocked as intelligensia issues, are really touchstones for those we’ve alienated that will help us renew. Again, this is true.

I think a social democrat, soft left strategy will be popular.

I’m just not sure it’ll be popular enough. It will be too easy for us to take pleasure in being at 37-40 in mid term polls, when we will need more to secure a majority, or even to force the Lib Dems to deal with us***.

Being in the high thirties will feel like success – we’ll win back lots of councils and Scotland, and probably London. But will it be enough?

We’ve fought a lot of elections under Soft left banners. Some of Ed Miliband’s team have been key advisers in such fights.

We usually lost.

Why would it be different with Ed?

Welfare for the Rich: a pervasive Myth?

My criticism of the Taxpayers’ Alliance report on Welfare reform has sparked some response from right wing blogs – a good thing too, since I don’t want to spend all my time criticising Labour leadership candidates.

Yesterday the folks over at “Burning Our Money” posted a long post on Welfare reform. Now, I’m not au fait with the right blogosphere, so I’m not quite sure what relationship exists between “Burning Our Money” and the TPA. I’m not being snippy -  I say this because the anonymous author keeps using “we” to refer to articles up at TPA, and it’s likely I’m missing something I should know about who is who over there.

As well as criticising me (fair enough), they make a very big deal about welfare for the wealthy.

Welfare for the Wealthy?

Here’s a quote:

“These days, welfare is paid to pretty well everybody. Even Jonathan Ross and those plutocrats on the Wharf get welfare. It doesn’t matter how rich you are, there’ll usually be some way of getting your snout into the welfare trough. From Child Benefit, to free bus passes, to the winter fuel allowance, the opportunities are there. If you want some, you can get some.“

They have a handy graph (right) to prove the point. It’s the sort of graph that I can imagine turning up in rightwing briefing papers, or be used to tell the Sun how crazy the benefits system is.

See that money going to the top ten percent of annual incomes? That’s £1,328 a year, going straight to the richest people in the country.

It’s enough to make you mad, isn’t it?

Well, it certainly made me mad, so I took a look at the data.

The ONS report “Burning Our Money” took their chart from is here. The table they get their data is table 16, which also provides a handy breakdown of where that £1,300 in cash benefits comes from.

Now, an important thing to understand here is that the survey in question ranks households by their annual income.

So If I earn £200,000 a year at my job, but get sacked in June, My annual income of £100,000 is still enough to put me in the top income decile. It’s also done by household. So, say I earn £80,000 a year at the age of 64, and my wife has retired and is claiming her pension, her pension will turn up in our household income. Or if my aged grandmother comes to live with us, her pension gets counted in our household income.

So, where does that £1,328 of welfare for the wealthy come from?

£596, nearly half, comes from contributory pensions.

Why are pensions going to non retired households? Well as the survey authors say “By no means all retired people are in retired households: about one in five households comprising three or more adults contains retired people, for example, and households comprising one retired and one non-retired adult are often classified as nonretired.”

So it’s either one person working, other not, or an aged parent staying with family and claiming their pension. I’m sure that even the harshest Conservative doesn’t want to take contributory state pensions away from such people.

Next, £222 is Statutory maternity pay. Can’t imagine much hunger to cut that.

So that’s £818 of the £1328.

£510 to go. Another £100 of welfare payments to the wealthy are likely caused by changes in circumstance  – people getting sacked or sick and – so Incapacity benefit (£30) housing benefits (£32), income support (£3), government training (£1) disability living allowance (£34). You can’t turn away someone for help just because they used to be a good earner, that’d be vile discrimination.

£410 to go.

Should we exclude Contributory Widows benefits? That’s £20. Same for invalid and attendance allowance? that another £11.

So after excluding the things I doubt most Tories would be interested in cutting, we’re left with £379.

This is made up of three things.

First – Child Benefit – £263 per household. I think most on the left would accept there’s a case for looking at how child benefit goes to high income households, but it’s at least incredibly simple to administer. But OK, let’s put that on the table.

Second, there’s £28 for tax credits. It’s not very much, but most of it is already gone, since the family credit taper is now being applied. (Some will still remain, for the household variability reason I mention earlier – if the main earner loses their job, their partner might well be suddenly eligible for tax credits.)

Finally there’s the £83 for other non contributory benefits. These are generally benefits paid to the elderly (they’re worth a great deal more to retired housholds). Winter fuel allowances, free TV licence,  free eye tests, and so on. The Coalition is clearly pledged to protect all these, but again, let’s say there’s at least a case for examining whether grannies who live with wealthy children should get the Winter fuel allowance.

So out of the £1,324 “welfare for the rich” we discover that only £346 is worth looking at.

For perspective, These same households pay £24,000 a year in Income Tax and NI. It’s at least arguable that it would be easier to reclaim the £346 of child benefit and Winter fuel allowance lucre through increased tax rather than fiddling with complex benefits changes.

After all, do we really want to send snoopers round to check if granny is illicitly living with her wealthy children?

In other words, If the tories want to make huge savings in the Welfare budget, they’re not going to find it amongst the rich, no matter how pretty the graph looks.

The case against… David Miliband

A brief series where, for my own amusement (and possibly ensuring I never work for the Labour party again), I set out the case against each of the Leadership candidates. The eleventh commandment of internal elections is “Never speak ill of a fellow party member”. It gets broken just as regularly as the other ten, but I shall try to be constructive, not merely critical.

David Miliband has the fund-raising ability, the biggest group of MP and CLP nominations and the highest public profile of the Leadership contenders. He was promoted quickly by both Blair and Brown and has been a key figure in the development of the modernised Labour party since his days on the Social Justice Commission set up by John Smith.

David’s an unabashed intellectual who is admired and liked by those who’ve worked with him.

So why wouldn’t he be the right person to lead the Labour party?

First, there’s the accusation that he lacks the popular touch. Whether it’s being photographed with a banana, or his tendency to talk to an audience as if they were a particularly enthusiastic tutorial group, he has not mastered his own image. When he does try to do “popular”, it can come across as toe curling. So he quotes Yeats to say “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire“, and then says there’s a hill to climb to light the fire. This put your humble correspondent more in mind of Jack and Jill than great poetry. 

Alternatively, he sets up some sub-Blair soundbite like his “op-pose, exp-ose, prop-ose” line or a series of progressive adjectives. Generally, these lines aren’t very good. Sometimes they’re toe curlingly bad.

Someone once suggested to me that when David tries to be popular, he’s conscious he’s explaining very complex ideas to the audience in simple language, and that the audience can sense that they’re being talked down to.  There’s something in that. Conversely, David can be at his best when he’s at his spoddiest. You get some real fire then, and it can be truly impressive. 

David Miliband is a man who knows the world is a complex place with problems that are often multi-faceted and intractible.  This does not lend itself well to the clarity and simple certainty we often demand of a leader of the opposition. 

The second charge against David Miliband is that he lacks the ruthlessness needed to be a leader in a tough time. He is attacked for considering a challenge against Gordon Brown at least twice, and for considering, equivocating and then ducking the challenge.

This is a little unfair, as challenging the Prime Minister and splitting the Labour party is no small matter,  but what is certain is that David allowed the speculation to build to the point where it became toxic, and only then pricked the bubble of hype. This left him looking both weak and disloyal.

A clear choice of total loyalty or rebellion would have been better, and stopped him being adopted as Prince over the Water by the incompentent backbench “Blairites sans Blair” faction, a role which damaged him immensely, as he’s since been defined by that role.

Some have said that if someone’s political team (or they themselves) lacks the judgement to spot such an obvious consequence of allowing rumours to coalesce, they are going to have problems in future.

Another point on lacking ruthlessness. David Miliband had a very brief window in which he could have tacked to the left on a couple of key issues after the close of MP nominations. If he had done this, he might well have denied Ed Milibanthe political space he has subsequently leapt on to great effect*.

You can look at this two ways. The first is to salute admirable straghtforwardness and honesty. The second is to say that election are about winning, and you do what you need to do to get it done and worrty about what happens afterwards later.**  David, despite his many advantages, has not done that.  

Another example of this can be  seen in the way that David’s parliamentary gladhanding is efficient but late – there were already MPs  who thought of him as dis-interested in their problems during his rapid ascent up the party hierachy (and not a few who were plain jealous). 

These MPs were thus in the mood to be sceptical of proclamations of a new, more open, less patronage based way of doing things. I imagine Roman senators were equally dubious of pledges of republican equality by the dying Emperor’s adopted son.

All of which leaves you with the feeling that despite his impressive campaign team, undoubted intellect and strong sense of strategic direction, David Miliband is a curiously unpolitical politician.

This, in essence, is the case against David Miliband.

Does the Labour party want a leader who, while equipped with intellectual insight, a strong policy agenda and who can lay claim to the political centre ground that Labour has always won on, is somehow… not party political?

That political doubt strikes at the essence of David Miliband’s case for the leadership – that even if you disagree with him, he is best able to win a general election for Labour.

That sense of some lack of political nous has been highlighted both by the contrasting campaigns of Ed Balls, who has been punchy and vigorous, and that of Ed Miliband, who has been totally focussed on winning the leadership at all costs. In image terms, both the “straightforward Northerner” pitch of Andy Burnham and Diane Abbott’s left populism show up David’s considered thoughtfulness.

This explains why David Miliband went to Gillian Duffy’s house for a cup of teas at the close of nominations. He needs to show Labour supporters that he does have that popular touch, the ability to score partisan points, and is a skilled campaigner who can win elections. 

He must prove he is  a Wilson, as much as he is a Crosland.

The Taxpayers’ Alliance respond..

The Taxpayers’ alliance have responded to my (not particularly flattering) analysis of their Welfare reform report.

First of all, it’s good of them to respond. They could easily have not bothered.

Moving to the content of their response, it’s basically – “Yes, but what would you do?”. They confirm the points I make about the impact of their redefining the median income as a baseline, say (which I don’t think they mention in the report) that this would save about £20-30 billion and point out that this would then be redistributed to reduce marginal tax rates for those entering low paid work. They then say I don’t have any positive proposals, and say that the job of welfare is to reduce absolute poverty, not relative.

“Our proposed solution is to redefine the poverty line from its current 60% of median income back to 50%, which is where it originally started out. We calculate that would save £20-30bn pa, which would then be available to substantially reduce those high marginal tax rates. In fact we calculate that we could afford to cut them to a uniform 55% – still too high, but a vast improvement on the current situation.

“Unfortunately, while he slams our proposal, Sen offers no alternative. Like the left in general, he doesn’t say where he’d get the money from.”

To which I have three responses.

First, If the proposal would save 20-30 billion, it’s a bigger redistribution than even I thought. We really need to see who the losers would be to truly evaluate the policy and poverty consequences. My guess is that it’s familes earning over £12-15k, especially those in private rented accomodation.

Second, in terms of alternative suggestions from the left, I think it’s perhaps a little unfair to highlight one bloke with a lap-top as symbolic of the wider left. I’d certainly agree that I play no constructive role in the policy process, but that’s ’cause I only have about an hour a day to contribute. People like the Fabians, JRF, IPPR have lots of ideas about this, so pretending they haven’t made a meaningful contribution is a little strange.

Third, alright then, here’s an alternative, off the top of my head. Want to hold down the cost of the benefits budget while not spending more money? Well, let me put myself in shoes of someone who wants to both reduce poverty and taxes.   For starters, I wouldn’t exclude pensions from consideration. That’s just silly if you’re thinking about poverty as we give an awful lot of money to quite wealthy pensioners.

Next, there is room to reduce universal benefits paid at the top end. The definition of what’s “top end” is variable though. A family with three kids in London earning a household income of £35,000 probably finds the current support available to them very useful -especially Child benefit and Child tax credit. So there’s room for quite significant change here, as long as you’re sensitive to real incomes.

Another route would be to exclude those with significant assets from support. I genuinely don’t understand why helping the asset-rich but income poor should be a priority, as the TPA report suggests. All of those moves would provide significant funds to use for extra help for the working poor.

As for the TPA’s absolute poverty point, well, fine. If you believe that poverty is absolute, not relative, I doubt a blog post is going to convince you. Sadly, very few of the people who believe this have adopted the lifestyle of a family just above the poverty line in the the thirties to prove their point. How could they be poor today? Some of them even have two bedrooms and a coal fire! I’m sure it’s only a matter of time, though.

But of course, all of this is hypothetical. In any real welfare debate, we have to contend with the Treasury, who under George Osborne want to reduce welfare, not merely redistribute it.

If and when IDS tries to sell a TPA style programme to Osborne, the response will be along the lines of “Alright then, but give us half of the savings up front by defining poverty even lower”. Do that, and see how badly low incme families are squeezed. I hope that the TPA will be at the front of those protesting at the unfairness of any proposal along those lines.

After all, those people are taxpayers. Just not rich ones.

Did Climate Change make Cameron PM?

A thought (only partly inspired by Mr John Rentoul’s series “Questions to which the answer is No”):

A major point in the 2010 General Election campaign was the announcement of Q1 2010 GDP growth on April 23rd. Labour strategists had been hoping for a strong GDP growth rate to underline their message of “don’t put the recovery at risk”*

Unfortunately for Labour, GDP growth came in at only 0.2%, substantially below forecasts.

Looking at the very strong Q2 GDP figures released this week, we can see that much of the Q2 growth was construction deferred from winter to spring due to the extremely cold weather in January and February. If the weather had been warmer in January and February, we’d have seen much stronger economic growth announced on April 23rd- perhaps even above expectation – at 0.5 or 0.6%.

Stronger economic growth would have given Labour a huge filip in the election campaign – underlining that the recovery was underway, and that a change of government would put that at risk. It would also have led the Lib Dems to focus some fire on Tory Economic policy.

If Labour had been able to win another dozen seats as a result of a stronger economic message in the last weeks of the campaign, a Labour Lib-Dem coalition would have commanded a majority in the House of Commons.

This would have requaired a shift of only a few hundred seats in each constituency. Thurrock, Stockton South, Morecombe and Lunesdale, place like that). With a majoirty, a deal could credibly have been done, and David Cameron might not have been Prime Minister**.

So, can David Cameron thank our unusually cold winter for his residence at number Ten?

Probably not, but it’s fun to imagine.

*To the extent that the Labour election campaign had a message, this was it – or should have been.

**Actually, a more likely prospect would have been that the Tories and Lib-Dems would have still done a deal, but a much more uncomfortable one for the Lib Dem party

With one mighty leap?

I’ve been reading with interest this week’s “Taxpayers’ Alliance” report on Welfare.  The “Taxpayers’ Alliance”, if you don’t know, is a right wing campaigning group/think tank that aims to set the political weather in favour of lower taxes and spending always and everywhere.

Think of it as the provisional wing of the Institute of Economic Affairs. More populist than analyst.

That populism makes their decision to explore the murky and complex area of welfare refom an interesting one, and speaks of tensions within the Conservative movement about how best to tackle welfare and poverty.

The Centre for Social Justice, the IDS think tank, has issued a number of reports which while harshly critical of the current system of Welfare, solves these problems by spraying money at them, while claiming that this will save money in the longer term. For obvious reasons, spending billions on welfare bills, even with a dose of morality to explain the price tag,  is not something many conservatives are keen on, especially now.

Yet there is a problem – simply imposing lower welfare budgets would increase poverty, and throughout the conservative movement, a genuine concern for poverty has become a badge of the new conservatism.

So the Taxpayers’ Alliance report reads as an attempt to solve the following problem: “How do we reduce poverty, while cutting (or at least, not increasing), the amount we spend on Welfare and family support?”

Once you strip away the pages of blather, the answer comes back as follows -“We can reduce ‘poverty’ while not increasing welfare spending by redefining ‘poverty’ at a much lower level, then reducing the support given at points above that level “

This is done in three steps–

First, the level of Median Income is reduced. Median income is what is used by the OECD to calcualte relative poverty. Most analysis of median income includes state benefits. The TPA decides (on P36) to exclude them. This obviously has the impact of reducing the median income considerably, as even in the median quintile state benefits account for c17% of income.

For some reason the report doesn’t spell out the numerical impact of their changes, but the effect of excluding benefits seems to be to reduce the equivilised median income by about a £900 a year.

The 2007/8 Housing Below Average Income Survey put median incomes for working age families at  £20,453 (and so 60% of median is £12,272, or 236 a week). The TPA calculates median incomes for working age households at £19,526.

Second, the definition of poverty itself is moved downwards - from 60% of the “Including Benefits” Median Income to 50% of the “excluding benefits” median income. This further drives down the Income level that defines poverty.

For working age adults families in 2007-08, the equilvalised “old” poverty was £12,272, or 236 a week. (This then gets varied according to household size etc).

The new, shiny TPA poverty income level was….. £9,969.

So “poverty” is suddenly £2,300 a year less than it was before, Easy when you know how! This represents a reduction of almost £40 a week in what constitutes poverty.

Finally, armed with this new, lower definition of poverty, the TPA proposes to give an income to every household, tapering it away at a rate of 55% once the person is in work.

In return, thugh they don’t spell it out exactly, there are no more Tax Credits, Child Benefits, Job seekers allowance, Income Support, housing benefit or Council Tax benefits.*

What would the impact of something like this be? Well, the TPA admit that “some people would be worse off” but don’t go into any detail about who they might be. Being a suspicious sort, this makes me think the answer would be… uncomfortable.

It’ll need a bunch of Parliamentary Questions to work out, but, on general assumptions, it looks like it would be absolutely awful for families a little above the current poverty line  who would lose much of the support they currently get and recieve very little in return. This is an awful lot of people – and most of them work.

It might also be very bad for those not in subsidised housing, who would lose housing benefit, and for those living in expensive areas generally. These are, of course, the areas the government wants people to move to.

Conversely, it might actually be quite good (or not as bad, rather) for non working people in very low cost housing areas.

I am not entirely convinced this would be a good thing to encourage.

If you’re the Taxpayers’ Alliance, the way to cut the gordian knot of Welfare reform without spending any money seems to be to redfine poverty to a much lower level, reduce support for those a little above that level, and abandon pretty much all support for those on medium-low incomes.

In other words, if you’re near the current definition of poverty, struggling to get by, and find tax credits and child benefit and income support useful- Watch out.

They’re coming to get you.

*Though the TPA report fudges Housing benefit. Their maths assumes abolition of Housing benefit, but then they suggest it might need a regional element to replace it, (Presumably, as otherwise, London would not function.