By their deeds (or lack of them) shall ye know them

It was good to hear Ed Milliband admit that three of his political heroes, Lloyd George,Keynes, and Beveridge, "were not members of our party," (though he couldn't quite bring himself to admit that they were Liberals) and that he is going to vote for AV. But the main burden of his speech was to dissociate himself and the "New Generation" Labour Party from all the errors of New Labour.

On the previous day Brother David had given an enumeration of Tory foreign policy failures from 1979 to 1997:

• halving the aid budget,
• standing to one side while tens of thousands were slaughtered on the edge of Europe,
• fighting and losing a beef war with the EU.*

What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. For 13 years New labour had a substantial majority and, in the early days at least, substantial good will. Yet in this period they:

• toadied to the most right wing American president in recent history and illegally invaded Iraq,
• failed to give the opportunity for electoral reform (in spite of a manifesto promise),
• introduced only half-hearted political reform,
• further reduced the powers of local government,
• were relaxed about people becoming "filthy rich" and failed to implement a fairer tax system,
  
• burdened future tax payers with the cost of the absurd PFI system,
• presided over an increase in inequality,
• further eroded our civil liberties,
• continued the Tories' prescriptive policies in education,
• debased politics by their obsession with spin.
  

An article on religion which I read recently claimed that repentance and forgiveness are merely a desire to achieve a happier past. Liberal Democrat campaigners should make sure that Labour is not allowed to wash its hands of its past, and Liberal Democrats in government should remember that the same will apply to us.

* As reported in the Guardian, 28/09/10

To play, or not to play...

Men and women go into politics as a career, and in order to transform society according to their ideals and beliefs. These are complementary motives and not either/or choices, but surely, at least for "left of centre" politicians, the second should predominate. Even if David Milliband is not, after all, to be leader of his party, he still has ample opportunity to contribute towards the creation of what is left of the socialist ideal. If he decides not to do so then he will seem like the playground footballer who refuses to play unless he can be captain.

The most urgent task of the present parliament, for all parties, not just the coalition, is to restore respect for politicians and confidence in the political process. If David Milliband decides to quit, that will add to public cynicism rather than restore respect. Service under a younger sibling may mean that a certain amount of pride has to be swallowed. I can't think of any exact parallels, but there are several examples of politicians continuing to serve under former juniors. Alec Douglas Home continued as foreign secretary under his former junior Ted Heath, as does William Hague under Cameron.

If David Milliband decides not to continue in front line politics he will confirm the suspicion in many people's minds that politicians are "only in it for what they can get." I hope that he will decide to stay and put what remain of his principles first, however misguided I believe them to be.

A post script: a young man in our Co-op appears to be reasonably interested in politics, and, I believe, represents the staff on a regional committee. When I asked him yesterday how he was, he replied that he was worried about where Ed Balls might lead the Labour Party. With a recognition factor like that Ed Milliband needs all the help he can get.

Two Liberal Democrat "prizes."

On Tuesday mornings at 9 am there is a Radio 4 programme called "The Brown Years." This week's was largely devoted to the inside story of whether or not to call an election in the autumn of 2007. Both private and published opinion polls were pored over and apparently the crucial factor in making the decision not to call an election was that not enough southern middle class voters were thought not to be likely to vote Labour. Now that the coalition is to introduce fixed term parliaments the gross unfairness, and time consuming burden, of allowing one contender to choose the date of the election at a time thought to be most favourable to his own party is now rightly consigned to the dustbins.

I am reading the second volume of Chris Mullin's diaries ( a fascinating read, as is the first.) On page 158 (15th march 2007) he records: "...I heard the other day from someone in the Lords, that David Cameron has privately told the Tory peers that Lords reform is a 'third term issue'. So the Tories new found love of democracy in The Other Place is, after all, entirely bogus." Gossip, I know, but given that Cameron's pragmatism rivals that of Harold Wilson, I have no reason to suspect Mullin's judgment.

That a wholly or largely elected second chamber is now firmly on the agenda of this parliament' is another "prize" for Liberal Democrats in coalition.

Those of us distressed by Liberal Democrat complicity in the Tories' obsession with cutting back the state through the bogus need for immediate "savage cuts" should not forget the the triumphs of achieving these long overdue constitutional reforms.

Inudstrial democracy

Vince Cable's statement of the obvious truth that "markets are often irrational or rigged" has produced injured bleats from the CBI et al about over-emotional language with might frighten the horses (by which they seem to mean foreign investment.) How does the right reconcile its belief that trade unions should be hedged aground with all sorts of regulations which restrict their activities, while capitalists should be free to do as they like?

Actually I'm not necessarily a great fan of trade unions. In the 1960s we Liberals had all sorts of ingenious plans for industrial democracy and worker participation. One I liked was that boards of companies over a certain size should comprise one third shareholder representatives, one third employee representatives and one third community representatives. No single bloc would therefore have a majority. These imaginative plans, which, had they been implemented could have transformed the British industrial scene and avoided the horrors of the eighties, were always opposed by the trades union movement, which saw them as a threat to their power base. They preferred confrontation to co-operation.

I am pleased to see hints of a revival of potential co-operative ideas in Vince's speech: mentions of an employee shareholder scheme for the Royal Mail, and the promotion of mutual ownership by Ed Davey. I should like to see ideas about industrial (and commercial) democracy return to centre stage. We shall not obtain a fair society until power is exercised in the interests of all, rather than one "side" or the other.

234 year old revelation makes news

One of the many things that annoy me about present-day society is the way the media devote so much time in the so called "news" programmes on speculating on what is going to happen or be said rather than what has actually happened or been said. So Vince Cable hasn't actually said it yet, but is allegedly going to say:"capitalism kills competition when it can."

Why this statement, familiar to any student of "A" level economics (it's an aspect of what is now called "market failure") should cause consternation is baffling. Adam Smith was possibly not the first person to recognise this truth, but probably expressed it most vividly when over two centuries ago he wrote:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." (Wealth of Nations, Published 1776, page 116 of Everyman's Library edition.)

(It is perhaps a sign of the times that more recent sixth form studnts seem to have been less interested in the economic significance of the observation and more in the exact form the "merriment" might take. I suggested pork pies and brown ale, but their conjectures were more exotic.)

So Cable's comments are not Marxist, as some commentators on the BBC's "Today" programme are claiming, but from the mouth of the economist now claimed as the guru of the right. The Adam Smith Institute is highly selective in the prescriptions they choose to adopt from the master.

Just as it was, to Jane Austen, "(a) truth universally acknowledged , that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in search of a wife" it is universally recognised by impartial observers of the workings of the market that entrepreneurs prefer collusion to competition. In the 21st Century and the days of massive international corporations (News Corporation?) it is more than ever the government's responsibility to regulate not just the banks but the market itself to ensure where appropriate that producers and providers practise the competition they vaunt but do their best to avoid.

All power to Vince's elbow.

Fellow traveller II

Another unpublished letter to the Guardian. I sincerely hope that both Phil's conclusions turn out to be wrong, but he poses two very real dangers.

19 September 2010

Dear Editor

As a long standing member of the Lib Dems, a lot fell into place when I read the feature about Danny Alexander, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, in the Guardian (Friday 17 September). On moving into his office, we were told, he took down the portrait of John Maynard Keynes and replaced it with one of Gladstone. Gladstone was a great Liberal prime minister, but his slogan of ‘peace, retrenchment and reform’ included retrenchment which meant cuts. The Victorian era was marked by recurrent slumps leading to a bigger one in the 1920s and a still bigger one in the 1930s. It took the genius of the great Liberal economist, Keynes, to grasp the counter-intuitive truth that you don’t cut your way out of a recession, you spend your way out. In a slump you’re not poor because you lack productive resources, but because you’re not deploying them.

A recession will inevitably worsen government finances, because more unemployed people means more dole paid out and less tax pulled in. If the government misguidedly responds as if it were an individual, by economising, it may balance the books in the short term. But the extra unemployment this causes will widen the deficit again, by increasing dole claimants and shrinking the tax take. So in Keynesian terms there will be a new equilibrium, but at a lower level of output and income. The economic illiteracy of rejecting Keynes’s analysis looks set, I regret, to smash the Liberal Democrats and put the country through the needless agony of the 1930s all over again.

Yours sincerely

PHIL PAVEY

A left-of-centre alternative to Labour

Nick Clegg is reported last week to have written that "there is no future for the Liberal Democrats as a left-of-centre alternative to Labour." If this is true, and I haven't actually read the alleged article, then I believe he is profoundly wrong.

My analysis of British politics assumes that there will always be a Conservative party, a party which believes it is born to rule, is happy that the already comfortably off should prosper, that those not comfortable may benefit from the "trickle-down" effect, and those with a bit of gumption at the bottom of the pile will be able to climb out of the mire, (or, as RH Tawney so brilliantly put it, like "intelligent tadpoles, reconcile themselves to the inconvenience of their position by reflecting that, though most of them will live and die as tadpoles and nothing more, the more fortunate of the species will one day shed their tails, distend their mouths and stomachs, hop nimbly on to dry land, and croak addresses to their former friends on the virtues by means of which tadpoles of character and capacity can rise to be frogs."* ) Or, these days, maybe win the lottery.

Against this, parties of the left will try to promote fairness and equality, the statist left, Labour, with a top-down, authoritarian approach, and the libertarian left, Liberals, with a decentralised bottom-up approach, committed to equality while at the same time giving priority to liberty.

So there'll always be Tories, Nick, but there are different ways of changing society for the better. Our job is to replace the failed statist approach with our own vision of Elysium.

* R H Tawney, Equality, Allen and Unwin edition, 1931, p142