Ed Milliband and Labour
Ed Milliband is right when he says New Labour lost its way and it is time to move on. This is important because a vibrant democracy needs an effective party operating left of centre. The trouble is that nobody seems to be sure where left actually is. It is where it always was, at the less fortunate mass of society, seeking greater equality and an end to injustice, exploitation and deprivation. This is where Labour has to be. There is no party there at the moment, just lip service and waving, as, caught up in the endless chase for wealth, now called aspiration, shallow politicians dash past.
Labour has to look at and question big time, our economic model which sucks money through debt from the poor to the rich. It has to find a way of bringing discipline to energy markets which fries speculators and warms the old and cold. It has to regain a model of public ownership through taxpayer shareholding, without creating flabby state monopolies. It has to turn the welfare sate upside down so that a depleted cash flow goes to need.
It has to understand that creating a public sector of more than half the county’s GDP and twice that of communist China, is a break on growth and a fuel for poverty. It has also to understand that public borrowing to excessive levels cannot be sustained and achieves nothing of value. It is folly, as New Labour did with such gleeful abandon, to cut income tax and increase spending. If you want to splash out on a vast bureaucratic infrastructure of quangos, regulators and busybodies, you have to tax to the level to pay for them and if you do that you will never be elected.
You can relieve poverty with benefits, but you can only get rid of it by creating real jobs which earn money and build wealth. You will not do that unless you set people free. How to do that without setting bubbles, booms, greed and selfishness free and holding the good, decent and hard working back, is the question. If Ed Milliband and his re-focused Labour Party can answer that, they will win. If they cannot, they will not. Moreover they will not deserve to.
The Labour Party has a lot to do in the next two years. Time to get cracking.