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  • Ed's friends – who needs enemies?
  • teamhurtmore
    Free Member

    At least the idea that giving someone a peerage guarantees future favours can be scrapped:

    …these look like bad times for Labour and for Ed Miliband’s leadership. There seems to be no strategy, no narrative and little energy. Old faces from the Brown era still dominate the shadow cabinet and they seem stuck in defending Labour’s record in all the wrong ways – we didn’t spend too much money, we’ll cut less fast and less far, but we can’t tell you how.

    Labour is apparently pursuing a sectional agenda based on the idea that disaffected Liberal Democrats and public-sector employees will give Labour a majority next time around. But we have not won, and show no signs of winning, the economic argument. We have not articulated a constructive alternative capable of recognising our weaknesses in government and taking the argument to the coalition. We show no relish for reconfiguring the relationship between the state, the market and society. The world is on the turn, yet we do not seem equal to the challenge.

    …Labour stranded in a Keynesian orthodoxy, with no language to talk straight to people….

    …The biggest problems with New Labour’s inheritance were an excessive reliance on managerialism in both the public and the private sectors, a disregard for the workforce and an unhappy and abusive relationship with the unions…

    …The problem with Brownite political economy is that, even though it was true that a 3 per cent deficit was not excessive in the context of economic growth, it was debt that was growing at the time, rather than the real economy. A vast, sustained expansion in private debt fuelled the financial sector throughout Brown’s tenure as chancellor and then prime minister. There was not enough investment in the productive economy, not enough private-sector growth.

    The financial sector and the welfare state were the public-private partnership that underwrote the wealth of the nation, and this needs to change. The heavy reliance on tax receipts from the City of London was not accidental, but spoke of a fundamental dependency on invisible earnings that was only exacerbated by the growth of the virtual economy….

    …Endogenous growth, flexible labour-market reform, free movement of labour, the dominance of the City of London – it was all crap, and we need to say so. Stanley Baldwin had a far more robust industrial growth strategy than Brown and Mandelson could conceive of, let alone Cable and Osborne.

    New Statesman article from Labour peer Maurice Glasman. Some tough love there but at least he ends with a nice one for the spin meisters:

    So far Ed has honoured his responsibilities but has not exerted his power. It is time that he did so. And we all need to show him love and support in return. I’m backing Ed Miliband.

    Does that mean he has my full and unequivocal support…oh, dear!!

    teamhurtmore
    Free Member

    Good to see that Uncle John has come to the rescue!!

    “Glasman. You know sod all about politics, economic policy, Labour or solidarity. Bugger off and go ‘organise’ some communities!”

    Quality

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