David Clark2013-06-19T22:24:01-04:00David Clarkhttp://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=david-clarkCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for David ClarkGood old fashioned elbow grease.What Iraq Says About Labour, Past and Presenttag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.28842352013-03-15T11:55:08-04:002013-05-15T05:12:01-04:00David Clarkhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-clark/
Cook's regret wasn't just about the war itself, although he correctly anticipated the immense human suffering it would cause. It came also from the knowledge of what it said about the kind of party Labour had become. This was no momentary lapse of judgement. The errors that led to the invasion of Iraq revealed the extent to which Labour had adopted priorities and working methods that should have been alien to its instincts as a party of the democratic left.
Countless books, articles and inquiries have detailed the distortions and omissions by which the Blair government presented a false intelligence picture of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities to the British people. But this was always servant to a greater falsehood - the idea that Labour's position had anything to do with Iraq at all. Until George W Bush decided that Saddam had to go, Tony Blair was content to stick with a strategy of containment. It was his desire to position himself as US ally no.1 that drove the change of policy. Had Bush decided to make an example of a different member of the 'axis of evil' - Iran or North Korea - Downing Street would doubtless have produced the case for why that country had to be dealt with.
An often overlooked, but no less important, part of the story concerns the role of the cabinet and the Labour Party more widely in taking Britain to war. It is clear from the Cook diaries that he and Clare Short were not the only ministers to harbour serious reservations about Blair's approach to Iraq as it took shape during the middle part of 2002. Other voices of concern were raised around the Cabinet table only to fall silent as Blair's determination became clearer. As Jack Straw was candid enough to tell the Chilcot inquiry, he suppressed his own doubts out of loyalty to his leader. Something in the culture of the party prevented the checks and balances that define good government from working.
The Iraq War was the culmination of a process that started in 1994 with the rise of New Labour and reflected its heady psychological brew of arrogance and self-loathing. The arrogance came from a quasi-Leninist belief in Labour as the agent of some great historical mission on behalf of the masses - a traditional conceit of Labourism, admittedly. The self-loathing came from the party's repeated failure to fulfil that mission, ending in the crushing disappointment of 1992. The conclusion Labour drew from these competing emotions was that it must win at all costs. Power and truth became entirely instrumental to that goal. Anything that got in the way - policies, principles and people - had to be ruthlessly swept aside.
One particular New Labour innovation was to insist that the pursuit of power necessitated an alliance with the powerful - the financial and business elites, right-wing media barons and the White House (regardless of who occupied it). Labour didn't just have to neutralise their opposition; it had to win their approval whatever it took. The more painful the compromises the better, because it allowed Labour to convince itself that it was finally serious about winning. It became the ideological equivalent of self-harm for a party that secretly despised itself for the failures of the past. Success in 1997 completed the process by infantilising the Labour Party with gratitude to Blair.
These, then, were the essential ingredients of the Iraq disaster: an 'anything goes' approach to the truth, a slavish attitude to the transatlantic conservative elite and a party gripped by a cult of mindless leader-worship.
What, then, has changed to make another Iraq impossible? A fair amount, I would argue. Ed Miliband set out his criticisms of the war in 2010, but has sensibly avoided making it a theme of his leadership. It isn't the point anyway. As ought to be clear, Iraq was a symptom of what was wrong with New Labour, not the cause of it. The greater task is to replace arrogance and self-loathing with the humility and self-confidence Labour needs to be a successful force for change in the future.
I think real progress has been made. Miliband's willingness to set the agenda on press reform would be hard to imagine under another leader. His advocacy of radical banking reform, higher taxes on wealth and a foreign policy made in London rather than Washington are other welcome departures from New Labour. To be fair, the circumstances are much more favourable to this kind of approach than they were in Blair's day. The City discredited itself with the financial crash, Rupert Murdoch did the same with phone hacking and even David Cameron wouldn't touch the Republican Right with a bargepole. Still, Miliband deserves credit for being willing to take positions of principle that conflict with the interests of the powerful.
It is also good that Labour is now being led in a much more collegiate style. Given the circumstances of the 2010 leadership election, it might be argued that this was a necessity. But it also seems to reflect Miliband's personal preference. He doesn't marginalise and brief against colleagues that get in his way. He engages with them and tries to find common ground. This is a significant shift from the control-freakery of the past and the main reason why Labour has been able to defy its history by remaining united in defeat. It is essential if Labour is to govern more effectively in the future.
Labour still faces plenty of problems in coping with the legacy disintegration and decline that started with the Iraq War. But the lessons of the past are in the process of being absorbed. It's a great pity that Robin Cook didn't live to see the changes that are now being made. I think he would have been heartened by them.]]>Can the UK and Russia Achieve a Strategic Dialoguetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.28593582013-03-12T09:12:20-04:002013-05-12T05:12:01-04:00David Clarkhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-clark/
Achieving a UK version of the 'reset' with Russia was one of the priorities William Hague brought with him to the Foreign Office three years ago. After the nadir of the Litvinenko affair, he had cause to believe that things could only improve and that a change of government would help to clear the air. The two countries might not become close allies, but a relationship based on trade and mutual regard for each other's interests might at least be in the offing. The Russians clearly hoped so too, hence the efforts of their London embassy to cultivate a Conservative Friends of Russia group in the hope that it would lead to closer ties with fewer strings attached.
The results so far will have been a disappointment to both. The 15% growth in British exports to Russia last year looks healthy enough until you consider that annual growth averaged 21% in the preceding decade, despite often fraught relations. BP has signed a major agreement with the state-owned oil company Rosneft, but it falls short of the partnership model initially envisaged and involves handing over its existing joint venture, TNK-BP. In effect, BP has been obliged to concede technology transfer as a junior shareholder rather than a joint partner. Meanwhile, the controversy about the Conservative Friends of Russia initiative shows that most Conservatives remain just as wary of Russia's credentials on democracy and human rights as anyone else.
At the top of the agenda tomorrow will be Syria where the UK and Russia seem no nearer to a common understanding of what needs to happen. William Hague is now exploring options for providing military aid to the rebels and clearly envisages a future without President Assad as the only acceptable option, while the Russians are still determined to keep their ally in place and have repeatedly blocked action on the UN Security Council that might compromise their objective. A formula of words will be found to gloss over these differences, but the reality is that the two countries want different things.
Perhaps just as worrying is the continued erosion of democratic standards in Russia itself which is now impacting on the country's external relations in a way that is becoming impossible to ignore. Unnerved by the rise of the protest movement that accompanied his return as president, Vladimir Putin has chosen to repress the opposition and smear it as a tool of western interests. New steps to stop foreign financing of NGOs have been accompanied by an increase in hardline official rhetoric aimed at exposing alleged western subversion. At a meeting of senior officials from the FSB last month, Putin raised the spectre of foreigners "meddling in our internal affairs" and said "no one receiving foreign money may speak on behalf of Russian society". The Putin elite lives in fear of an Orange Revolution scenario and is determined to prevent it by any means available.
Mostly this is aimed at America, despite the fact that President Obama has taken steps to minimise areas of disagreement with Russia. But the UK is inevitably drawn into campaigns aimed at fostering anti-western paranoia as a leading NATO power and the original 'main enemy' of Tsarist and Bolshevik propaganda. At the moment the person taking the brunt of this is Denis Keefe, the UK's deputy ambassador in Moscow, who finds himself under siege from Russian journalists following media allegations that he is a British spy. The real source of resentment appears to be the fact that Keefe is responsible for maintaining relations with the opposition and the hounding of him looks similar to the sustained harassment experienced by the UK's former ambassador, Tony Brenton, a few years ago.
The fact that the UK remains a preferred destination for many Russians, including those who wish to put themselves beyond Moscow's reach, is another point of ongoing tension. The decision to grant political asylum to Andrei Borodin, the former president of the Bank of Moscow who fell foul of the authorities, will be taken by the Kremlin as another hostile gesture. The attempted assassination of another out of favour Russian banker, German Gorbuntsov, in London last year and the suspicious death in Surrey last November of Alexander Perepilichnyy, a key witness in the Magnitsky case, are further indications that more than six years on from the Litvinenko affair, Russia's problems still have a habit of reaching our shores.
Moreover, these problems are likely to get worse before they get better. The Russian protest movement has not gone away and the government seems incapable of framing a serious reform agenda, so discontent will probably continue to grow. London, as an important centre of Russian life and a haven for dissent, cannot avoid being drawn in. Next year's elections in Moscow look certain to provide a flashpoint where the interests of the elite and the aspirations of the public once again prove impossible to reconcile. President Putin, who has signalled his determination to cling to power at all costs, will continue to choose repression and denounce any pressure to compromise as a foreign plot to undermine Russian sovereignty. This, of course, is all part of the unspoken subtext of tomorrow's discussions: for Syria, read Russia; for Assad, read Putin. When Sergei Lavrov says regime change is unacceptable, he isn't just talking about the Middle East.]]>Is Labour Doing Well Enough?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.26454022013-02-08T08:56:08-05:002013-04-10T05:12:01-04:00David Clarkhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-clark/analysis of Labour's electoral prospects at the weekend. Based on a specially commissioned YouGov poll, it concluded that Labour's support has been boosted since 2010 by the addition of 2.3 million Liberal Democrat defectors, 1.4 million people who didn't vote and 400,000 Conservatives.
This last finding led the Observer to report that "Ed Miliband is failing to repeat Tony Blair's success in winning over former Tory voters", a familiar argument of those who question whether Labour is doing well enough to stand a chance of winning the next election. They argue that Labour's 10% poll lead is soft because non-voters are unreliable, and as for Lib Dems - well, we don't like them, so their votes don't really count. It is only by copying the New Labour playbook and tacking right in a single-minded effort to win over Conservative voters that Labour can hope to govern again. Anything else is a foolish distraction.
There are a number of reasons why this doesn't stack up as an argument and why Ed Miliband deserves much more credit for the progress he has made so far in putting Labour back in contention. Let's start by challenging some of the faulty assumptions about New Labour and the 1997 election that tend to skew this debate.
First, Labour won in 1997 by adding 1.96 million votes to its 1992 tally, yet the Conservative vote fell by 4.4 million. Most Conservative defectors therefore either stopped voting or went to third parties (the Referendum Party and Ukip polled 917,571 between them as new parties). When you consider that the Liberal Democrat vote also went down by 756,659 and the Green vote fell by 108,316 (most of which undoubtedly went to Labour, tactically or otherwise), plus the natural turnover of voters leaving and joining the electoral roll, Blair probably won the votes of around a million Conservatives in 1997. That was a major achievement, but a more modest one than most people seem to remember.
Second, the Conservatives won 14 million votes in 1992 and only 10.7 million in 2010. The simple fact is that there far fewer Conservative voters for Miliband to target today than Blair had in 1997 - 3.3 million fewer of them to be exact. We can also plausibly assume that they are less soft in their support for the Conservatives. By extension, there are more Liberal Democrats (836,642 extra) and many more non-voters (almost four million extra) to target compared with 1992-97. Then there's the bit no one likes to talk about - the additional half a million plus votes for the BNP since 1992. The fragmented character of the modern political landscape makes the task of putting together a winning electoral coalition much more complex and difficult for Miliband than it was for Blair.
Third, Blair had a crucial and often forgotten ally in the shape of good old Father Time. After eighteen years of Conservative government, enough people had forgotten how badly Labour fumbled in the 1970s, while the Conservatives had made enough mistakes of their own to transform perceptions of competence. Eventually, two recessions, the poll tax, Black Wednesday, Back to Basics and turmoil over Europe came to overshadow the IMF crisis and the Winter of Discontent. Miliband is fighting with Labour's mistakes still fresh in the memory against a Conservative government that continues to get some benefit of the doubt.
Against this very challenging background, a gain of 400,000 Conservative votes at the next election would bear favourable comparison with the one million Blair gained in 1997. So would a win among former non-voters. Remember, one common criticism of the 'Five Million Votes' approach of targeting those who stopped voting as well as those who deserted Labour for other parties is that non-voters are often more similar to Conservative voters in their views on issues like welfare, immigration and the economy than they are to Labour loyalists. There is some truth in this, so if Miliband is leading among former non-voters in general - a much broader group that includes people who previously supported the Conservatives - this would obviously disprove the suggestion that he is failing to reach beyond Labour's core support.
I wouldn't pretend for a minute that everything is perfect or that Labour is anywhere close to being a sure bet at the next election. The party's lead in the polls is tentative and provisional, of course it is. How could it be otherwise given the drubbing it took less than three years ago? What amazes me most about the self-styled "realist wing" of the Labour Party is how hopelessly unrealistic most of their expectations are about what can be achieved and how to achieve it. It assumes that a majority would be Labour's for the taking if only the party's leadership would adopt the correct tactical positioning: "support Tory spending plans"; "be tougher on welfare"; "hug a banker". But the idea that we can treat the next election like a replay of 1997 is frankly delusional.
Labour can only win by going where the votes are, and they are not in the same place that they were in 1992-97. There are far fewer Conservatives, quite a few more Liberal Democrats and BNP supporters, and many more non-voters. The implications of this are being explored in the work being done by the Fabian Society and in an eminently sensible and balanced report written by Lewis Baston for Progress last Autumn ('Marginal Difference: Who Labour Needs to Win and Where'). It eschews the simplistic answers proffered by Labour "realists" as well as the narrow advocates of a "progressive majority" and sets out the choices and challenges for Labour in putting together the kind of diverse electoral coalition required to win.
How can Labour appeal to disillusioned Liberal Democrats and leftish non-voters concerned about social division and the hollowing out of public services while at the same time reaching out to voters who have deserted Labour because of concerns about immigration and public finances? It is difficult, but not impossible. After all, the Thatcherite revolution was carried through with the support of just such an implausible alliance of economic liberals and social conservatives, of blue collar workers and bankers. By setting out a One Nation vision that fuses egalitarian concerns with an ethic of patriotic endeavour, I believe that Ed Miliband has given Labour a chance to achieve something similar. There is a long way to go, for sure, but the evidence suggests that he is making good progress. Labour should build on it instead of dwelling on past glories.
The post originally appeared at Shifting Grounds.]]>Israel Needs a Strategy for Peacetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.22188842012-12-02T19:00:00-05:002013-02-01T05:12:01-05:00David Clarkhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-clark/
The first was highlighted by a BBC interview with an Israeli woman who had just arrived in Britain with her family to get away from the indiscriminate rocket attacks launched from Gaza. Sixty-four years after the State of Israel was established to provide Jews fleeing persecution in Europe with a safe refuge, Israelis find it necessary to flee their homes to find safety in Europe. The inability to bring the conflict with the Palestinians to an end has become a major challenge to the founding logic of Israel itself.
Of course, Israeli's are not about to give up on their state or the idea of communal self-defence on which it was built. Any policy based on the belief that they might would be doomed to fail. But the question does need to be asked why the aspiration to build a secure homeland for the Jewish people remains so elusive after all this time. Changes taking place within the region and beyond mean that the situation is likely to get worse rather than better without a significant and historic shift in Israeli national policy, of which there is no sign.
The second tragic feature of the conflict is the inability of Israelis to see in the Palestinians a reflection of themselves; a proud and determined people whose will to prevail grows stronger with every blow inflicted on them. Many still cling to Golda Meir's view that the Palestinians don't exist as a people distinct from Arabs in general and hope that the Palestinian Diaspora and parts of the occupied territories will gradually merge into the surrounding Arab countries over time.
If there was any truth in that there would have been no fighting in Gaza because the conflict would have petered out years ago. The Palestinians have not faded away. If anything, the experience of dispossession and occupation has strengthened their sense of identity and national feeling, just as the pogroms in Russia gave rise to the Zionist movement on which Israel was founded. Israel's unwillingness to come to terms with that is an ongoing source of its own insecurity.
Tragic also is the extent to which the rejectionists on both sides continue to work in tacit alliance with each other while moderates find themselves increasingly marginalised. It is hard to imagine that Hamas was under any illusions about how Israel would respond to its rocket offensive. We must reasonably conclude that it was part of their plan, not that this seems to have troubled the Israeli government. The result is that Hamas emerges strengthened, as do those on the Israeli side who insist that a stronger military response will be necessary next time. Hamas can also be expected to benefit from this in due course.
Excluded from consideration is any initiative to restart talks on a two-state solution. This is dismissed as a "reward for terrorism" despite the fact that we are constantly reminded that what Hamas actually wants is the destruction of Israel, not a two-state solution that would recognise Israel's existence. In the absence of a peace process that offers moderate leaders the realistic prospect of a just settlement, militant and extreme elements will remain in the ascendency.
The final tragedy is that Israel continues to focus on its strategy for war when what it really needs is a strategy for peace. Necessity and the Darwinian principle of survival of the fittest have turned Israel into a formidable military power. It has the most advanced weapons and some of the ablest commanders and military thinkers of any country in the world. Yet these attributes have failed to give Israel the security it desires. Moreover, it will never be able to change that reality on the basis of military strength alone. The hardest lesson for Israel to accept, given its history, is that real and lasting security can only be built with the cooperation of others.
Change is becoming even more important because geopolitical and diplomatic trends are going to make Israel's position harder to sustain over time. A demographic shift is on course to make the Palestinians a majority in the land comprising Israel, Gaza and the West Bank by the end of this decade. This will change the moral as well as the material balance of power to Israel's disadvantage. How can it control land in which Jews are a minority and hope to remain a state that is both Jewish and democratic?
Then there is Israel's growing isolation within the wider Middle East. This is partly a consequence of the Arab Spring. It will be more difficult for Israel to do business with elected Arab leaders facing pressure from below than it was with biddable despots like Hosni Mubarak. It is also a product of Israel's failure to develop a countervailing "alliance of the periphery" with non-Arab forces in the region. Attempts to build a partnership of convenience with Iran foundered in the 1990s. The same thing has now happened to Israel's alliance with Turkey.
Compounding all of this is a changing global balance of power and the relative decline of Israel's principle ally, America. Preoccupied by the rise of China, the loss of economic competitiveness, its mountainous deficit and the need to reduce existing commitments, America may not have the will or means to provide the kind of diplomatic, military and financial support it has extended to Israel in the past. By contrast, the rising powers of China, India and Brazil have already extended state recognition to the Palestinians.
The one positive to come out of the Gaza conflict was that Israel drew back from a ground invasion. The failure of Operation Cast Lead to solve its Gaza problem four years ago will have weighed heavily on that calculation. But Israel remains a long way from recognising the futility of war, never mind embracing a new realism about the necessity of peace. Whether it does so while there are still moderate Palestinian leaders to make peace with is another matter again.]]>This Presidential Election Is About One Issue - American Declinetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.20649942012-11-02T11:34:54-04:002013-01-02T05:12:01-05:00David Clarkhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-clark/
I still care about the result, but not in the way I used to. A decade ago America was the "indispensable nation", the world's sole remaining superpower, the country around which the entire post-Cold War international order had been built. Decisions taken in the White House were life-changing events of global significance, as the War on Terror showed. But all of that is now for the history books, because the unipolar moment has passed and America is now a country in decline.
I need to be clear about what I mean. America's decline is relative, not absolute. Despite the blow of the financial crash, it is not about to stop growing, inventing and trading. The point at which China overtakes it as the world's largest economy is now as little as a decade away, but America will remain the wealthiest country per capita for a long time after that. Its military dominance is assured for the foreseeable future and it will continue to be a pole of attraction on the strength of its values and its openness for longer still.
What has gone is the pre-eminence that allowed America to write the international rulebook according to its own design. The mighty dollar is now balanced by the financial and manufacturing power of China and other emerging economies. The G7, IMF and World Bank, the traditional instruments of American economic hegemony, have been downgraded in favour of the G20. America's ability to deal with rogue states like Syria and Iran now depends on multilateral diplomacy, not unilateral force. If we consider the rise of Asia and the revolutionary changes sweeping the Arab world, it seems that the most important world-changing events today are happening in spite of America, not because of it.
Two things changed to make that happen. The first was the War on Terror itself. Intended to bolster American power by emboldening allies and demoralising enemies, it achieved the opposite by undermining confidence in the wisdom of American leadership and exposing the limitations of American military power. The greatest beneficiary of the Iraq War turned out to be Iran, while Afghanistan shows signs of reverting to Taliban rule once America leaves. The $3 trillion costs, effectively underwritten by the People's Bank of China, have contributed to record US national debts and become a textbook example of 'imperial overstretch'. America continues to enjoy an immense preponderance of military strength, but it no longer seems able to translate it into favourable political outcomes on the ground.
The second thing to have changed is that the financial crisis has put an end to the Washington Consensus as the ideological basis of globalisation. Ten years ago George W Bush boasted that American-style capitalism constituted the "single sustainable model for national success". Today it no longer looks either successful or sustainable. While America has been struggling to find the road to recovery, China has been busy developing bilateral economic ties and expanding its portfolio of global investments. Angela Merkel has made two trips to China this year, hoping that its deep pockets will part-fund a solution to the eurozone debt crisis. Earlier this year the African Union unveiled its new $200 million headquarters, built and paid for by China. The financial crisis didn't create these trends, it merely accelerated them; so economic recovery will not mark a return to the status quo ante. Political influence follows money, and just as surely as the fall of the Berlin Wall ushered in the unipolar moment, the fall of Lehman Brothers drew it to a close.
American decline is an established reality and Barack Obama and Mitt Romney offer competing ideas about how to respond. Obama the realist wants to reconfigure American power and manage the process of decline in order to preserve as much American influence as possible in a multipolar world. He is reducing military commitments and spending, prioritising Asia over Europe, minimising points of unnecessary conflict with countries like Russia, taking multilateralism seriously, strengthening America's soft power potential and emphasising the need to rebuild economic competitiveness.
Romney the idealist wants to reverse decline and restore American primacy. Believing that power is a matter of will alone, he calls for a return to the assertive foreign policy of Bush the Second, a more adversarial relationship with China, the designation of Russia as "number one geopolitical foe", higher military spending and a willingness to use unilateral force against rogue states. But these are fantasies divorced from any understanding of real world. Take his idea to contain Russia by developing closer ties to the countries of Central Asia. These countries do indeed want to balance their relations with Moscow, but it is to China that they now look as their balancer of choice. Likewise the faith in American military leadership. It is impossible to imagine any major ally overruling public opposition to fight alongside President Romney, as Blair did for Bush.
It is the manner of America's decline, rather than its dominance, that makes Tuesday's election important to us. An America that remains globally engaged and powerful, albeit in reduced circumstances, under Obama, is very much in Britain's interests. We and the rest of Europe are also in relative decline and we will need to work more closely with each other and America in the future to preserve a broadly liberal international order. President Romney would pull the old levers of American power only to find them break in his hands. The reaction to disillusionment could easily be a reversion to a Republican tradition far older than neoconservatism - a narrow and resentful form of isolationism. That would make the world a more difficult and dangerous place for all of us.
In the two decades following the end of the Cold War, US presidential elections became, in effect, contests to elect the President of the World. Many of us without a vote hated that fact, but it was a fact nonetheless. Those days are gone forever. The result on Tuesday still matters, but it is now only one factor among many determining the course of global politics. If you are looking for an event that is likely to impact directly on our interests over the next decade, we should probably pay more attention to next year's Bundestag elections. Can someone please tell me who Germany's Nate Silver is?]]>Six Reasons Why Miliband Has the Edge Over Camerontag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.19779592012-10-18T06:21:21-04:002012-12-18T05:12:02-05:00David Clarkhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-clark/Telegraph writer Iain Martin after the 2010 Labour leadership election, it subsequently became an in-joke among Miliband's detractors before being taken over and renamed the Don't Unseat Ed Miliband Association. The joke has now rebounded spectacularly following Miliband's barnstorming performance in Manchester and David Cameron has been effectively forced to re-launch the original DUEMA.
Conservative strategists who assumed that the leadership question would hand them a decisive advantage at the next elections will be hoping this is a flash in the pan. Here are six reasons why they are likely to be disappointed and why Miliband now has the edge over Cameron.
1. Miliband has the temperament of a winner.
A vital characteristic of leadership is the ability to cope with setbacks and move on. Dwelling on disappointment is not only a waste time and energy; it clouds judgement. Whereas Gordon Brown allowed his premiership to descend in a spiral of blame and frustration, Miliband's motto is 'Keep Calm and Carry On'. I saw him a couple of hours after one of his first outings at PMQs had misfired, expecting to find him in a bad mood. His attitude was cheerfully dismissive: there would be many other encounters at the dispatch box and his task would be to ensure that the good far outweighed the bad. As he showed again yesterday, he is meeting that goal. Cameron, it is said, reacts badly to setbacks, playing the blame game and surrounding himself with people who tell him what he wants to hear instead of what he needs to know. These are real sources of vulnerability in a leader.
2. Miliband knows what he wants.
It was pointed out recently that we seem to know less about what David Cameron stands for the longer he is in power. Compassionate Conservatism increasingly looks like an empty slogan while the Big Society has lost any focus it once had. The Government is identified almost exclusively with an austerity plan that is failing on its own terms. The opposite is true of Ed Miliband. He has defined his purpose by calling for a more responsible, productive and equitable form of capitalism; essentially a British version of the German/Nordic social market economy. Even those who disagree with that aim find it hard to fault the clarity and scale of its ambition. Critics demand more detail, but it is worth remembering that many of the policies we came to associate with Thatcherism weren't enacted until her second term. Thatcher knew that politics is first and foremost about big ideas. Miliband has one and Cameron does not.
3. Miliband is ahead of events.
Responsible capitalism isn't just a big idea; it is one that happens to be pushing with the grain of events. Critics rounded on Miliband a year ago when he drew a distinction between predators and producers. But the Libor rate-rigging scandal, the row over Stephen Hester's bonus, the rise of legal loan sharking and the G4S Olympic fiasco all proved him right. Polls show that voters agree. With living standards likely to be squeezed for the foreseeable future, energy and food prices set to rise and the bonus season not far off, anger at the behaviour of the business elite will not be going away any time soon. Perhaps even more significantly, Miliband is also about to be vindicated on borrowing and the deficit when the OBR reports ahead of the Autumn Statement that the government is on course to miss one and possibly both of its fiscal targets. Events have a habit of swinging the Labour leader's way.
4. Miliband has seized the ideological initiative.
Miliband has successfully shifted the national debate from a narrow focus on the pace of deficit reduction to the question of how the burden ought to be shared. The Conservatives have been trailing since he pounced on their decision to cut the top rate of tax in the budget. More than ever they are seen as the party of the rich, out of touch with the concerns of ordinary people. Miliband's appropriation of the 'One Nation' label was a clever way of consolidating his hold over that terrain. It allows Labour to campaign as the party of egalitarian patriotism and reach beyond its natural constituencies of support. Cameron is belatedly trying to contest Labour's claim to the 'One Nation' tradition, but he is unable to do so at more than a rhetorical level. All of the Conservative Party's instincts about how to get the country moving suggest more incentives for the business elite and more pain for everyone else.
5. Miliband learns and adapts.
Miliband's performance at Labour conference surprised people who had written him off as a poor communicator. That's because he shares with Margaret Thatcher the ability to improve through force of will. In her early period as Leader of the Opposition, she was dismissed as wobbly and unconvincing. But through trial and error, not to mention a bit of coaching, she found the style for which she later became famous. Miliband knows that political leadership is a craft that has to be worked at and talks admiringly in private about the effort Tony Blair put into perfecting the performance aspects of his job pre-1997. His own hard work is now paying off and he has found new confidence in his ability to project himself effectively on the national stage. The prime minister remains a formidable communicator, as anyone who saw his statements on the Bloody Sunday and Hillsborough reports knows. But the Cameron you see now is the finished article. Miliband will carry on improving.
6. Miliband has united his party.
Cameron clearly wants to contest the next election on the centre ground, but his party shows no sign of being willing to let him. Conservative backbenchers remain deeply unhappy, convinced that Cameron's weakness and Liberal Democrat treachery are all that stand between them and their ability to sweep the country on a tough and uncompromising right-wing platform. They find it almost impossible to disguise their yearning to replace Cameron with Boris Johnson. Miliband, by contrast, no longer has a serious rival for the Labour leadership. The success of his Manchester speech certainly helped, but his ability to manage the party behind the scenes is the under-appreciated success of his leadership so far. By patiently winning over colleagues in private and impressing the rank and file in public, he has created a united party over which he now has a free hand.
The only downside is that even his enemies can't fail to have noticed that the game has changed. The ranks of the Don't Underestimate Ed Miliband Association are swelling and things can only get tougher.]]>We are all Plebs to the Class Warriors of the Righttag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.19536502012-10-10T06:05:56-04:002012-12-10T05:12:02-05:00David Clarkhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-clark/
Unsurprisingly, people were incensed to discover how much these powerful men look down on them in private. But did we really discover anything from these unguarded comments that we didn't already know? If we look closely at arguments routinely made by right-wing politicians in public, we find many of the same attitudes hiding in plain view.
When Nick Clegg recently floated the idea of new wealth taxes, the Conservative MP Bernard Jenkin attacked it on the grounds that it risked "strangling the goose that laid the golden egg". The same argument has been used to justify cutting the top rate of tax in the Budget and oppose measures to restrain runaway executive pay. 'Wealth creators' should be entitled to hold on to as much of their wealth as possible, even if they end up paying lower rates of tax than their cleaners. Any effort to make them accept their fare share of the burden would damage us all by driving the wealthy away and depriving society of their entrepreneurial talents.
This strain of modern conservatism has effectively inverted the labour theory of value. In common with Marxism, it sees society as a pyramid structure. But instead of workers exploited by greedy bosses, it sees a small, dynamic, wealth creating elite exploited by a large, dependent mass of dullards and parasites underneath. The idea that anyone outside the business elite might deserve to be thought of as a wealth creator simply doesn't occur. Employees, even those working in the private sector, should be factors of production; disposable assets to be hired and fired at will, preferably with little or no legal protection.
As for public sector workers; well, it goes without saying that they represent an unproductive drag on the entrepreneurial capacities of the nation. The police officers who catch thieves and protect property, the teachers and lecturers who educate the workforce of the future, the doctors and nurses who keep the population fit and healthy. None of these people could possibly be helping to create wealth, unless, of course, they were doing it to turn a profit for themselves.
We have become so accustomed to hearing conservative politicians speak in these terms that it's easy to forget what a radical departure this brand of new right politics represents. Older traditions of conservatism regarded society as organic and indivisible. They believed in social hierarchy, of course, but one based on interdependence, mutual obligation and respect between the classes. They cherished non-market values and upheld an ethic of public service.
Over the last 30 or 40 years, those traditions have been bulldozed to make way for a doctrine of economic brutalism based on a vulgarised, survival of the fittest version of Darwinism. The most extreme exponent of this view was, of course, Ayn Rand whose most famous novel, Atlas Shrugged, reads like a plutocrat's revenge fantasy. She describes an America disintegrating under the strain of collectivist policies that restrain enterprise by raising taxes and imposing government regulation. The men and women of talent eventually respond by going on strike and establishing their own free market utopia separate from the rest of society. The morality tale ends with complete social breakdown as the hero-entrepreneurs return to save the day.
The impact of Rand's ideas on the right extends far beyond those who have read her. They furnished the emerging neo-liberal and libertarian movements with moral righteousness and a new form of class consciousness. As Hayek's mentor, Ludwig von Mises, wrote to Rand after reading Atlas Shrugged: "You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvement in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you."
The problem is that no politician hoping to win a democratic election could ever admit to holding such opinions. So the new right long ago became skilled at disguising its purpose with a populist appeal to the expanding middle class based on lower taxes and scapegoating the poor. This underlying tension could be seen at the Conservative conference yesterday where all the rhetoric was aimed at the 'strivers', but the real hero of the day was Adrian Beecroft, the venture capitalist who wants us all to strive harder on pain of dismissal.
This represents an opportunity for Labour. Voters remain concerned about welfare bills and the growth of benefit dependency, probably more now than ever before. But they have lost the deference towards wealth that made the new right a politically viable movement. In the aftermath of the crash, the idea that our financial elite represents a superior caste of humanity is palpably absurd. People now realise that merit and reward have become hopelessly misaligned with those at the top paying themselves out of all proportion to their true economic contribution.
There is a myth that class politics died when it was disowned by the mainstream left. In reality, it was taken up and prosecuted more effectively in a covert form by a new breed of right wing class warrior. But the world they created has unravelled under the pressure of economic failure. The way is open for Labour to tackle their legacy of social division in the name of one nation values of merit and fairness.