Something more significant than the move against Andrew Fisher happened on the right of the Labour Party last week. It was Tuesday morning, in fact, and the occasion was Liam Byrne’s speech to the Policy Network.
Of course, MPs, particularly former ministers, give speeches to think tanks all the time and most float under the radar, noted only by the hardest of hardcore politics watchers and professional policy wonks. It’s just a shame this one hasn’t received wider coverage because in it, as one of its leading figures, Liam reads Blairism and New Labour the last rites.
In a nutshell, neoliberalism is dead. The unthinking application of its policies are undermining the health of capitalism, both in terms of destroying the social capital on which market economies depend and proliferating the short-termist culture that goes hand-in-hand with widening global inequality. Hence Labour has to move away from an unquestioning embrace of markets and start thinking another kind of capitalism, or what Liam refers to in his speech as ‘entrepreneurial socialism‘. Continue reading
You might have thought from the Tory tabloid screams at Ed’s conference speech plus the sidelining of the three older Blairites in the reshuffle that the Labour Party was taking a sharp turn to the left. Nothing could be further from the truth: plus ca change, plus la meme chose. The Left has been dropped or shunted out of sight, whilst the Right is everywhere dominant both in the shadow cabinet and in the Leader’s office. If this were a plausible plan for restoring a demoralised party or for winning an election, there might be a case for this.
It now emerges that Labour did a secret deal with the DWP that the latter would set up an independent inquiry into the use of sanctions against job-seekers in return for Labour supporting emergency legislation – the Jobseekers (Back-to-Work Schemes) Bill which passed all its stages in the Commons last Tuesday – which established the government’s right to re-impose mandatory work activity (forcing someone to work for no pay on pain of otherwise having their benefits withdrawn) which had been struck down in the High Court a few weeks earlier.
What is Liam Byrne playing at? There has been exasperation and annoyance that Labour MPs were instructed to abstain on last night’s DWP Commons vote. This was to retrospectively revoke workfare recipients’ right to claim compensation in light of the so-called Poundland ruling. Readers will recall IDS and his minions fell foul of an especially badly-worded set of rules that sanction dole recipients who “refuse” to take up compulsory work experience “opportunities”. It was a classic case of Tory incompetence and the DWP looked set to pay out approximately £500 to 230,000 JSA recipients who had been penalised under the regime. It would have cost a couple of hundred million. 
A few months ago two young workers at Poundland appealed to the courts against being forced to work there for no wages at all or else forfeit all their benefits. The judge in the Court of Appeal decided in their favour, but also ruled that existing back-to-work schemes, of which Poundland was just one of very many, were invalid because the participants were not given proper information about back-to-work schemes.