Labour - where now?

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
Obvious question - what happens next?

Best case scenario seems to be a hard rethink on stuff like civil liberties and social justice and reemergence in a few years when lib-con (con-dem?) falls apart as a genuinely progressive party that's still palatable enough to middle england to actually get in when the Cameron honeymoon period wears off (current estimates suggest next thursday) and the cuts start to bite.

But I have no idea what the factions and players are and can't help guessing that we're likely to end up with the same old same old with a smiley new face fronting it.
 

crackerjack

Well-known member
Obvious question - what happens next?

Best case scenario seems to be a hard rethink on stuff like civil liberties and social justice and reemergence in a few years when lib-con (con-dem?) falls apart as a genuinely progressive party that's still palatable enough to middle england to actually get in when the Cameron honeymoon period wears off (current estimates suggest next thursday) and the cuts start to bite.

But I have no idea what the factions and players are and can't help guessing that we're likely to end up with the same old same old with a smiley new face fronting it.

Labour will stay centrist with some of the neo-liberal cocksucking trimmed, but not abandoned. Civil liberties stance should improve. But there'll be no return to 80s factionalism. Next leader will be a Miliband, though don't know which ( pref Ed)
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Labour are surprisingly strong; it's interesting how many Labour MPs agreed that a Lib-Lab deal would be a larger disaster than opposition. This is the best opposition position we could hope for, all things considered: core vote firm, extremist and small parties mostly smashed by Labour candidates, all the key leaders still in place (no Portillo or Mellor moments), very little factionalism (Cruddas is a pretty benign left-of-centre candidate, Ed Balls has softened around the edges, Blairite ultras are almost an extinct breed, etc.). The biggest things to sort out are: party funding; party-union relations (not simply repairing them); and, I guess, the consitutional make-up of the party needs re-alignment, after the battering it took by 13 years of centralising, Presidential-esque power.
 
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Slothrop

Tight but Polite
Economic centrism is kind of to be expected. I guess from a personal point of view, my big issues with labour have been
* belligerent foreign policy
* dreadful record on civil liberties (ID cards, detention without trial, religious hatred legislation, increased police powers in the name of stopping terrorists[1], retention of DNA from innocent people etc)
* Poor progress on social justice (obviously not something you can do overnight or for free, but their approach to education seems to have been pretty counterproductive for starters).

All of these are things that I'd expect the traditional labour party to do better on, so I guess I'm asking
a) How have these tendancies even got into the labour leadership?
b) Are they likely to be identified as things that need to be changed before the next election?
c) Which of the current factions and potential leaders are going to want to change them and which are going to want to keep on the same track?




[1] or peaceful protestors
 

hucks

Your Message Here
Economic centrism is kind of to be expected. I guess from a personal point of view, my big issues with labour have been
* belligerent foreign policy
* dreadful record on civil liberties (ID cards, detention without trial, religious hatred legislation, increased police powers in the name of stopping terrorists[1], retention of DNA from innocent people etc)
* Poor progress on social justice (obviously not something you can do overnight or for free, but their approach to education seems to have been pretty counterproductive for starters).

Re: social justice - do you mean higher education fees? Agree with you on that, tho I don't think the rest of their edcucation policies have been poor from a social justice perspective.

I work in the area (I research poverty stats, basically) and the retrospective assessment will probably be quite positive. Overall, changes to the tax and benefits system distributed towards the poor and away from the rich. It's The Rest of Capitalism that has resulted in the gap between rich and poor not shrinking.

The overall approach was totally centrist and top down, though. You can imagine Brown in the Treasury with a big graph going, "If we add 25p to working tax credits, 250,000 people will come off beenfits and go into work...". Very little room for local variation, hugely bureaucratic systems...
 
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scottdisco

rip this joint please
the retrospective assessment will probably be quite positive. Overall, changes to the tax and benefits system dsitributed towards the poor and away from the rich. It's The Rest of Capitalism that has resulted in the gap between rich and poor not shrinking.

hucks otm. i repeat myself when i note Lane Kenworthy saying that

In a Financial Times op-ed, Matthew Engel says

This month, it was revealed that the UK’s Gini coefficient, measuring inequality between rich and poor, had reached its highest level on record — after the longest period of Labour government ever. You do not have to be a Labour voter to wonder what, then, has been the point of it all.​

I wouldn’t want to offer a full-scale defense of the Labour governments’ strategy (see ch. 11 of this book for my views), but there is a reasonable response to this particular challenge. Inequality of market incomes has been increasing almost everywhere. Arguably, it has risen less, and government has done more to mitigate its impact, under Labour than would have been the case under the Conservatives. It’s impossible to know that for certain, of course, but the following data on inflation-adjusted income growth during the most recent periods of Conservative and Labour rule are consistent with this assertion.

didlabourfail-figure1-version1.png
 

crackerjack

Well-known member
Economic centrism is kind of to be expected. I guess from a personal point of view, my big issues with labour have been
* belligerent foreign policy
* dreadful record on civil liberties (ID cards, detention without trial, religious hatred legislation, increased police powers in the name of stopping terrorists[1], retention of DNA from innocent people etc)
* Poor progress on social justice (obviously not something you can do overnight or for free, but their approach to education seems to have been pretty counterproductive for starters).

All of these are things that I'd expect the traditional labour party to do better on, so I guess I'm asking
a) How have these tendancies even got into the labour leadership?
b) Are they likely to be identified as things that need to be changed before the next election?
c) Which of the current factions and potential leaders are going to want to change them and which are going to want to keep on the same track?




[1] or peaceful protestors

Good points, can't disagree with much there.

1) was a conflation of various things (White House warmongers, messianic PM, genuine fears re terrorism) that are unlikely to be repeated, at least for very long time. Unless you're not just talking about Iraq. Personally I have little or no problem with interventions in balkans, C. Asia and W Africa (which isn't to say i'd endorse everything that happened there).

2) Is still baffles me how Labour got this so completely wrong. It seems like every HO policy was designed on a fag packet with the righting tabloids in mind.

3) This is the big one. Whoever can square the circle of grwoth and better social mobility should be the next leader. Hopefully for a long time.
 

scottdisco

rip this joint please
as Keith Best of the Immigration Advisory Service once said, Labour's asylum and immigration policies genuinely seemed to be designed to appeal to Daily Express readers. sorry, i just thought of that old quote w what Cracker said about back of fag packet tabloid courting...
 

vimothy

yurp
So that means the rich got poorer under Labour?

No, definitely not. Real incomes increased across the board 2% per annum on average, IIRC. This chart just shows govt redistribution from rich to poor (pre measure of real income change)--as in, govt policies resulted in a loss to top decile of about 8% of net income over term of Labour's rule. That's quite different to the rich getting poorer. More like richer less fast.

Duh: the data is right there in hucks' graph!
 
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sufi

lala
as Keith Best of the Immigration Advisory Service once said, Labour's asylum and immigration policies genuinely seemed to be designed to appeal to Daily Express readers. sorry, i just thought of that old quote w what Cracker said about back of fag packet tabloid courting...
interesting character; ex tory mp, dumped for insider dealing, seems to have rehabilitated himself, has recently quit the ias & is now heading http://www.torturecare.org.uk/
 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
Re: social justice - do you mean higher education fees? Agree with you on that, tho I don't think the rest of their edcucation policies have been poor from a social justice perspective.

I work in the area (I research poverty stats, basically) and the retrospective assessment will probably be quite positive. Overall, changes to the tax and benefits system distributed towards the poor and away from the rich. It's The Rest of Capitalism that has resulted in the gap between rich and poor not shrinking.
I guess social mobility is what I had in mind.

Higher education fees combined with the drive to get more people into higher education - thus turning university into a way of making sure that only middle class people get middle class jobs - is a big thing.

There's also an increasing awareness (if not an actual increasing problem) of the social barriers to entry (particularly the need to do unpaid work experience) that mean that areas like media, politics, and journalism have become the preserve of the upper middle class - which seems like the sort of thing that you'd expect a labour government to be doing something about. Maybe this is just my preoccupation, though...
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
I guess social mobility is what I had in mind.

Higher education fees combined with the drive to get more people into higher education - thus turning university into a way of making sure that only middle class people get middle class jobs - is a big thing.

There's also an increasing awareness (if not an actual increasing problem) of the social barriers to entry (particularly the need to do unpaid work experience) that mean that areas like media, politics, and journalism have become the preserve of the upper middle class - which seems like the sort of thing that you'd expect a labour government to be doing something about. Maybe this is just my preoccupation, though...

yes, yes, yes and yes. spot on.

The university system is in many ways a disgrace re social mobility. From interviews I've done recently, it's not just that a degree is considered necessary for many jobs (which is often ridiculous, imo), but the whole method of judging people's suitability for roles is slanted to favour those who have a particular type of formal education. Grinding aptitude all the way. It's a very difficult problem to combat, without reforming the education system from the bottom up, to stop university becoming a middle-class jolly for three years.

From my own experience, journalism/media is a completely closed world on many levels.

Preoccupation = (pre)occupation, in your case?
 
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baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
No, definitely not. Real incomes increased across the board 2% per annum on average, IIRC. This chart just shows govt redistribution from rich to poor (pre measure of real income change)--as in, govt policies resulted in a loss to top decile of about 8% of net income over term of Labour's rule. That's quite different to the rich getting poorer. More like richer less fast.

From something I was reading yesterday, isn't the rich-poor gap now at the same level it was during the '30s, whereas it had lessened considerably from 1950-70 (despite the redistribution under Labour). Sorry, can't find the stats...

Either way, people who think they can't live on, say, £50,000, and NEED more money, need psychoanalysis more than anything else. We have enough wealth in this country for everyone to be very comfortable, which is why I don't understand the preoccupation with growth, as if it's automatically a good thing. It's bonkers (which reminds me of the execrable interview I read with Dizzee this morning...made me wince).
 

vimothy

yurp
Well, I have to disagree with you there. Growth isn't the be-all of existance, but being poor isn't very much fun. I don't even think that it makes sense to be for redistribution and against growth, or against inequality and against growth.

And, of course, if the population is growing but the economy is not, pc GDP is actually decreasing.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Well, I have to disagree with you there. Growth isn't the be-all of existance, but being poor isn't very much fun. I don't even think that it makes sense to be for redistribution and against growth, or against inequality and against growth.

And, of course, if the population is growing but the economy is not, pc GDP is actually decreasing.

OK, misunderstanding - was defintiely not saying being poor is any fun! Nor am I against growth, just against the automatic presumption that it's a good thing, or (more so) the most important thing. And the levels of poverty in the UK have long (always) been unacceptable. What keeps people poor in this country is not lack of growth, it seems, but lack of redistribution: http://www.poverty.org.uk/summary/key facts.shtml (obv, as you said, Labour did some good things in this regard, though not enough). So yeah, resditribution is much more important than growth in as rich a society as ours.

Rather that, as the 4th richest nation in existence (if that's still correct), then there is enough wealth in this country to eliminate poverty, with decent redistributive policies.

Is the population growing that fast (genuine question)?

Ok - http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=950 It's growing, but not super quickly. I agree that there needs to be enough growth to keep per capita GDP stable, but beyond that? ANd what industries is this growth primarily coming from anyways?

Ok, just got the IMF per capita figures from Wiki - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
 
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vimothy

yurp
In a sense, it's a presumption that you are making as well. You want income growth for the poor rather than across the board. But why? Why shouldn't we cap income at the level of the poor? Why does everybody even need £18k a year? It's all totally arbitrary. From there, you can even call the rich a foreign country and stop worrying about them, and then you've gone right round in a circle.
 
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