On his walkabout in South London on 14th August Ed Miliband said “Labour has a plan for economic recovery”. Intrigued by this claim I went to the Labour Party website where, apart from the latest ministerial sound bites, there is nothing answering to that description. For policy matters one is pointed to Labour’s Your Britain website.
The Your Britain website was set up as a “discussion hub” for the purposes of Labour’s Policy Review and its policy making processes. I searched this website and found no “national plan for economic recovery”. There are items on tax avoidance, revitalising vocational education and training, green investment, a British investment, all of which would no doubt be elements of a plan for economic recovery. But there is nothing on the website which brings all the elements together in an overall plan.
Believing that the claim to have a plan for national economic recovery must refer to something more than a mere assertion made on a walkabout, I phoned Labour Head Office.
As soon as I put my question (“Ed Miliband said yesterday that Labour has a plan for economic recovery. Can you send me a copy please?”) the man on general enquires immediately sensed that this question was outside of his brief and gave me the phone number to Ed Miliband’s office.
I phoned Ed Miliband’s office and put the same question. I was told that “The 2015 election manifesto is not ready yet”. I explained that this was not an answer to my question and that the Party leader had said that the Party has a plan i.e. referred to it as something existing. I repeated that I would like to see it or have information about it. I got another answer about the 2015 manifesto.
Sensing that continuing this exchange was not going to be productive. I said “So, what you are saying is that although there is a plan there is nothing down on paper that you could let me have”. This time I got a clear answer: “No”. I thanked the person on the other end of the line, and ended the conversation. I suppose that I was thanking her for being bothered to talk to me since it was very clear that I was not going to get any help in my quest for Labour’s plan.
Labour is not doing well in the polls. At this point it should be riding high fuelled by one government cock-up after another and by problems generated by the restructuring and increasing privatisation of health and education. In particular Labour does badly in the polls on management of the economy.
Ed Balls traded on constantly repeating that the government cuts went “too far and too fast” for the first two years or so of the Coalition government. More recently he has branched out into discussing elements of an economic plan such as green investment. Nowhere in his speeches, or writings, can one find anything that could be by any stretch of the imagination be called the Labour Party plan for economic recovery.
In fact, Labour’s failure to present an analysis of Coalition policies, or to question the assumptions on which they are based, have been key to the success of the Government’s line that there is no alternative to austerity. This has resulted in a collapse of any serious resistance to the austerity approach when the two Eds explained that they would accept Osborne’s cap on welfare spending from 2015. The excuse offered by their supporters was that they had failed to convince the public that the austerity plan isn’t working.
Failed to convince? Of course they failed to convince, they didn’t even try. And it is not for want of good and expert advice. Ed Balls claims to be a Keynesian. So why hasn’t he made use of the detailed critique of auterity offered by economists like Paul Krugman (in his book End This Depression Now!)? Why to people like Robert Skidelsky find themselves obliged to offer the most elementary advice encouraging Labour to come out fighting on the economy?
Ed Miliband has told us that Labour has a plan for national economic recovery. Now we need to see it. The idea that it is being withheld for the release of the 2015 manifesto cannot be taken seriously.
So Ed, where ‘s your plan? If you don’t come out of your corner soon, fighting on the economy supported by soid analysis and clear alternatives to Coalition policy, then Labour will not capture the public imagination. Waiting for the Tories to fall on their faces is not a valid strategy. Given Labour’s weak performance the government can even present failures as successes. Labour needs a plan and it needs to tell us what it is.
Good stuff, David.
It’s not just the grand plan for national economic recovery that’s missing, it’s also the policy statements with which to address day-to-day matters that will be decided before the general election.
This became apparent to me a few days back, when an item was posted to this blog suggesting that Labour would oppose the privatisation of the Royal Mail and not just respond with “vague platitudes”.
I searched wide and narrow through LP sources on the net but could only come up with a Labour petition in favour of a 6 day a week doorstep delivery, and a few vague platitudes. And of course, the doorstep delivery can be accommodated after privatisation.
I doubt very much if the Progress-heavy PLP will object to privatisation of the Royal Mail or the NHS – they wanted to do the same when in office.
So if you want to know what Labour policy is just take a look at what the Tories are doing.
I’ll believe we’ve got policies when I see them. Very worrying when from Left and Right of the Party everyone is exasperated and wondering where these ‘policies’ are. Rod is right, we are being palmed off with vague platitudes. In the good old days we had an armful of policies, more policies than hot dinners. These days waiting for Ed’s Policy is like waiting for paint to dry.
Why is there a pressing need for Labour to divulge a plan that while satisfying your impatience, will either be used by this Govt or derided by the media. Two years before a GE is NOT the time to show our hand. We are living in different times, polls mean nothing and the public will not remember a plan given now rather than in 2015. I cannot for the life of me understand what difference it will make to a 2015 election, if the plan is disclosed nearer the time rather than now, at least that way, we will have a chance. The only ones desperate to know what Labour intend to do are our enemies, anyone else will have patience and wait.
@Alex
Plans for organisation of the economy are so central to what politics is about that it is difficult for me to make sense out of the idea that a leading political party’s approach to the question is something that they might consider not divulging.
It’s going to be interesting few months and the next two years will I suspect see how Labour can come back and battle back if it does not, Thatcher period in power will look like nothing.
I like this article as far as it is a critique of Labour’s present position.
However, if I was the Labour shadow chancellor I would not be reading Paul Krugman. If you read this link from Michael Hudson,
http://michael-hudson.com/2012/05/paul-krugmans-economic-blinders/
and follow Steve Keens war with Paul Krugman,
http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/keen-versus-krugman-great-debate.html
you will find that he does not understand fully the nature of debt.
He believes that debt is money owed by borrowers to savers. This makes his analysis of what needs doing rather wrong.
This is all crucial to a proper left wing response to the economy. Money is created as debt by banks.
They create credit/debt to excess when they are allowed to by neoliberal politicians who are rewarded by banks for these favours. (Deregulation). Excess debt on mortgages becomes a feudal rent paid by the poor to the rich. The total debt of around 2.4 triilion in the UK exceeds the money supply. It is all owed to wealthy bankers who created it, not to savers.
Attlee had the right idea – nationalise the Bank of England and gain the seniorage on cash. If done now it would have to be electronic money, as cash is less than 3% of the money supply.
To understand further study the Positive Money website. (Supported by Michael Meacher who has a speech recorded on same website).
Then what is needed is massive tax changes (we are losing 120bn per year according to tax justice uk).
Then we need to have a debt jubilee as recommended by Michael Hudson and Steve Keen, to undo the effects of debt creation by banks that have blown up asset prices – mostly houses, which have been priced beyond the reach of most young people.
A debt jubilee is required for student loans as well.
This is what it would take to return us to a situation where government could start spending money on the economy without creating more debt, and releasing the poor and middle classes from crippling debt. This is the road to equality and more jobs.
The banks and rich would hate it and it would cause a vicious back lash in the Tory press.
Even if Ed was thinking of some of these reforms it would be difficult to advertise. When Attlee got a landslide, people understood the basic need for housing, jobs, and they knew the NHS would be a godsend, because people died for want of money in the thirties, or sold their furniture to pay for a doctor. It was tangible. But do people today really follow that the banks are crippling them with debt, and that they do not benefit from rising house prices? Do people reeally know that the rich are raking it in when they monopolise the utilities, health, and railways? Would they support natioanlisation and monetary reform, which is what is needed?
When Bryan Gould spoke of renationalisation and monetary reform he did not even get the leadership.
The present leader ship does not even know if the public would support such reforms.
If we want action, we must understand the problems ourselves and the campaign and lobby for them. I do not think will get them unless we ourselves fully grasp what is needed and then insist that the Labour Party deliver it. If I were the leader of the Labour Party, and I knew that I needed to stand up to enormous and wealthy organisations, with a wealth of money and power behind them, with the best will in the world, I would prefer that I had a massive and well informed mandate behind me.
The only two clear policies Miliband as are to support the Con-Dem’s austerity and military strikes on Syria.
@Sandra Crawford.
Thanks for your comments with which I largely agree. I did not put a lot of thought into my Krugman reference but meant it to indicate that Labour is just not with economic debate. In other words it does not even reach the level of Krugman’s criticisms. I am very happy with the idea that we need to go beyond Krugman and that there are serious limitations to his approach.
I strongly agree with you when you say “I do not think will get them unless we ourselves fully grasp what is needed and then insist that the Labour Party deliver it. If I were the leader of the Labour Party, and I knew that I needed to stand up to enormous and wealthy organisations, with a wealth of money and power behind them, with the best will in the world, I would prefer that I had a massive and well informed mandate behind me.” And that was really the central point I wanted to make.
I followed both of your links and found them both very helpful (despite the interviewer on the TV channel whose manner would normally make me switch off).
Great to see references to Michael Hudson and Steve Keen, and I completely agree with Sandra Crawford when she writes:
‘If we want action, we must understand the problems ourselves and the campaign and lobby for them. I do not think will get them unless we ourselves fully grasp what is needed and then insist that the Labour Party deliver it. If I were the leader of the Labour Party, and I knew that I needed to stand up to enormous and wealthy organisations, with a wealth of money and power behind them, with the best will in the world, I would prefer that I had a massive and well informed mandate behind me.’
My great concern is that Ed Balls is spending the summer conferring with Larry Summers about the way forward! As a commentator on a Guardian thread wrote:
Summers?
The “don’t regulate Banks, for growth”, Cost Harvard $2billion in vanity investment Summers?
The ‘protect insider trading’ Summers? Really?
The Larry Summers who famously – and aggressively – denounced Greenspan’s critics as “Luddites.” As the 2008 crisis clearly proved, critics like Raghu Rajan were absolutely right about the risks in the system and Summers was absolutely wrong about the benefits of “financial innovation”.
In 2010 someone called Larry Summers “warn[ed] against the creeping cost of government” and “approvingly quot[ed] Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s argument that increased government involvement in the health care sector is a risky idea.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/jul/21/ed-balls-larry-summers-economic-growth?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487
The LP should be looking to MMT, Steve Keen, Ann Pettifor et al not to NeoKeynesians like Summers and other crypto neocons.