David Miliband

Damn it Miliband, D!
what am i to do now eh?
first cruddas comes out in support of him, then i listen to DM on the guardian podcast.
i've never liked David Miliband, and he's been in 4th place. but the faults and inexperience of the other 3 have always left the door a bit ajar for him.
whilst i didn't like much of what he said, the bit at the end when they got onto the really serious stuff impressed me. he was talking about balancing torture again human rights and i think he was very good. i personally am more on the side of security than human rights provided certain conditions are met, e.g. ticking bomb or certainty. if, for example, you are certain someone is a terrorist i have no problem with them being tortured as i believe someone who sets out to indiscriminately kill innocent people is a far greater risk to freedom than upholding freedom through torture, personally.
Miliband wasn't nearly so up front as that, but he certainly didn't rule it out and made the case for that sort of progmatism in light of the necessities.
the alternative is the risk that innocent people die and terrorists have their rights to do this upheld

Jon Cruddas is right (and so is Boris)

Damn that's good analysis.

Margaret Thatcher's toxic legacy | Jon Cruddas and Jonathan Rutherford | Comment is free | The Guardian

There has been no significant private investment in the deindustrialised regions. They have still not recovered their social fabric or productive economies and are now sustained by government spending
True that

Financial deregulation turned the housing market into the centre of a casino economy that grew on asset bubbles and speculation. Dynastic levels of wealth grew alongside some of the highest levels of poverty and inequality in Europe
Ouch

"Low- and middle-earning households borrowed to sustain their standard of living, creating unprecedented levels of personal debt."
You can stick water in front of a horse. The tone, part of quote removed, is that it's the Tories fault and these people are poor innocent bystanders. Well it takes two to tango.

"When the private sector won't invest, the government must"
Exactly. Like it or not



"The future is Labour's to win. The challenge is to recover its campaigning role by building a new covenant with the people: a minimum income entitlement, for example, through the guarantee of a living wage and a citizen's pension; a referendum on constitutional reform; a crusade to build homes and reform the housing markets; a government industrial activism for the new green industrial revolution.
The longer-term goal is to reverse the transfer of wealth and power from the many to the few, and create a more reciprocal society of freedom and security."
All very nice, not about to happen under this government. Even if they did, it's a topic of debate whether the best poklicy programme in the world would be thrown out with the bath water because Gordy is so unpopular. We'll never know, but probably

Gordy's future

Apparently, there are plots afoot.
My source down the pub (not to be confused with my sauce down the pub) tells me the following:
Gordy won't go of his own accord.
It would probably take the whole cabinet to take him down, or at least a significant lot of them.
There is no left candidate because Cruddas won't stand.
The options will probably be Miliband and Johnson.

I'd probably go with Johnson of those two whenever it comes, though it seems age will be Johnson's problem if it's after the election so could be someone else.

After 12 years, where are our heavyweights to pick from? That's a problem, Blair and Brown seem to be surrounded with so many of 'their people' that there is no real spread to choose from

James Purnell on Labour's future

Now, there are some who think Purnell is more Tory than some Tories.
I don't tend to disagree, but i noticed this very interesting passage:
"Third, we need a more ambitious concept of security. One of the reasons we have lost voters is that people no longer believe the welfare state will protect them from the forces of globalisation.

The solution to that isn't to stop globalisation, it's to make the protection real and the outcomes fairer. That should include extending the government's jobs guarantee so that everyone is guaranteed to find a job within, say, a year. And it means thinking about how people who work hard can be guaranteed that they won't be in poverty."

a government job guarantee. That is good and lefty, that's for sure. I like that.
He references Amartya Sen, who i like too. So there is some hope. If he's the most right Labour is going to get, then i suppose that's not too bad.

"Cruddas's speech was important in making sure that the debate about renewing the Labour party is pluralist, civilised and committed. It also shows that there's intellectual energy on the left. The task now is to try to cohere the different strands of thinking in the Labour party in to an effective and convincing argument for a better society."
the problem could be that we're trying to do that from opposition. I hope that if we loose the next election (almost certain) then we need to be ready straight from the off to be a government in waiting, to balance putting pressure on the Tory gov. straight away but not peaking too early

Cruddas

Well, the blogosphere is all of a blogger over Cruddas' proposals, here, and here.
Other than the fact that they are uncosted, they work very well as principles:
"1 - establishment of a High Pay Commission;
2 - greater tax justice, including closing tax havens and more equal distribution of income and wealth;
3 - index link benefit levels, pensions and the minimum wage to average incomes;
4 - replacing tuition fees with a graduate solidarity tax;
5 - a Fair Employment Clause in all public contracts;
6 - windfall and transaction taxes and resetting capital gains tax;
7 - a new covenant with the military, including more investment in mental healthcare, equipment, housing and support for veterans funded by scrapping plans to renew Trident and re-deploying the money saved within the Minister Of Defence budget;
8 - a Green New Deal, to include scrapping the third runway at Heathrow;
9 - remutualisation of the finance sector;
10 - a credit card bill of rights for consumers."


it would certainly energise Labour's base/core vote, which has been neglected by the recent leadership in favour of swing voters. That is now coming home to bite them on the bottom.
Lots of nice lefty proposals, which i'm all in favour of.
There is one thing that divides Tory from Labour and Tory from Tory: Europe. Let's hear something on that too.



I've got a sneaking feeling that the FT quite fancy Labour, and might just try to get their number in moments of weakness:
"Some of it may sound radical (scrapping Trident and tuition fees and doing more to prevent grotesque pay in the private sector…and what does he mean by a new “windfall tax”?). There is much here which is likely to play well in the Compass “leftie” heartland. Interestingly, you might also argue there’s little in there that wouldn’t also appeal to the aspirant working classes which are increasingly tired of Labour."