There are two ways of looking at yesterday’s big speech by ED Milliband. You can be positive and you can be negative.
On the positive side it is a sound idea (actually proposed by Lord Heseltine) which diverts money from the financial sector, which is London based, and redistributes it to the regions which are closer to industry. It also transfers decisions from Whitehall to local government. It restores ownership to people who will be benefit. It builds growth from the bottom up, not the top down. As a policy it has the support of this Blog. But is it a Big Idea?
Perhaps it is for suits, but not for overalls. And it is to overalls that Labour must appeal, its own grass roots, to be sure of a majority in 2015. The risk to Labour is not from the Tories, or from the Lib Dems who are in a period of electoral freefall, but from apathy; feelings that ‘they’re all the same’ and ‘nobody speaks for ordinary people’. In that frame of mind people may have in the past voted for the Lib Dems or the BNP. Now some may vote for UKIP, but mostly they will not vote. That will help Cameron.
A major problem for Labour is that in its flight from the looney left under Blair, it is no longer a party of the left at all but a party of the centre and the centre is crowded out with too many parties and too few voting. This is where UKIP is picking up support, not because of its policies which nobody has a clue about, but because of its anti-establishment rhetoric and populist focus on simplistic answers to complex questions. For example whatever the problems of being in the EU, they are as nothing to the period which would follow withdrawal, while the trading, regulatory and legal systems were reconfigured, for which nobody has anything other that the vaguest plans.
In a balanced democracy one party or grouping should speak for capital and the other speak for toil. These two elements should be constantly in productive tension, without one achieving absolute ascendancy over the other. We now live in a society where capital dominates, because Labour no longer speaks for toil. It must start to reconnect with its mission. If it does not, who knows what could step into the vacuum. History has some very bad examples to show us. The alarming truth is that the modern economy, based on asset inflation and financial services, makes the rich richer and the poor poorer in an unsustainable spiral, more toxic that at any point since the start of the industrial revolution.
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