Which way for Labour?

Anyone who has read my comments on here will know I am no fan of Citizen Dave or the Tories but, in fairness it has to be conceded they fought the borough elections well and the resul reflects some disturbing realities for Labour. The biggest of these is that Miliband and the party hierarchy are not getting the message across that Labour offer a real and effective alternative to the 'cut and burn' approach of the Tories.

Secondly, although electors should vote on local issues, we know they use it to endorse, or protest aganst a sitting government. Since last May, Citizen Dave has presented a slick and statesmanlike behaviour as prime minister. Compare this with the meagre attempts by Ed Miliband and there is further cause for concern. No wonder Labour didn't sweep away many vulernable Tory councils.

Nor was last night's substantial vote against AV good for Labour. The party has historically opposed PR and its recent conversion to AV came as a shock to many die-hard lefties. Miliband hung his colours on the "Yes" campaign and with a vote of 2 to 1 against, it brings a further dent to his leadership.

Labour now need to reflect on these results and question why they are not in control in Scotland or Wales. They also need to look at the role of Andy Burnham as campaign manager - a job he handled with anonymity and without passion. Similarly, the autopsy should question the leadership style of Ed Miliband. His "I want to appear as unfazed and likable" approach isn't working and it obviously isn't convincing the electorate.

The Lib Dems are in disarray and it will take them months, perhaps years to recoup after their recent defeats. This isn't the case with the Tories and labour will need to work swiftly if they want to be seen as a credible opposition force.

Wherefore art thou Labour?

I am totally convinced that if you called an election today and at the same time hog-tied David Cameron and Iain Duncan Smith, laid them on a bed of fraudulent expense claims in a seedy brothel and then called every national newspaper, Labour would still find a way to lose the election!

Take yesterday for example. Labour had it made – Spelman had to return to the House of Commons and apologise because she got the forestry sale wrong. In the same day, Iain Duncan Smith was forced to back down about the housing benefit reduction for long-term unemployed.

Did Labour come out fighting and baying for blood? Of course not – first they sent in Mary Creagh to waffle on endlessly about how Labour were bigger and better tree-huggers than the Conservatives. By the time she had finished, half the elected members were cheerfully snoozing away and all you could hear in the chamber were gentle snores coming from one or two of the leading lights in the 1922 Committee.

Labour didn’t even get excited when Iain Duncan Smith presented his welfare reform bill to parliament – this is despite the fact that many will suffer. Clause 51, for example, contains proposals, as yet scarcely noticed, that seriously jeopardise the income of many disabled people. Consider a stroke victim, who may have paid national insurance for decades before incurring a severe impairment from which there is no prospect of recovery. If they have even a low-paid working spouse, the bill will cut their money off cold the moment that 12 months have passed.

According to forensic analysis by Tim Leunig, an economist at the London School of Economics who has recently been appointed to the leading liberal think tank Centre Forum, it could leave large families even in deeply unfashionable corners of the capital trying to scrape by on £3 per person each day. And the entire bill is underpinned by a recasting of the rules on indexation, which will steadily make the poor poorer. Instead of being pegged to the total cost of living, benefits will in future be pegged to the cost of shopping, thereby stripping the rising price of keeping a roof over one's head out of the general calculation.

But did the Labour benches howl, rant and scream? Nah – they sat there whimpering, like a dog with a cut paw. They looked and behaved in a way that suggested they felt impotent and in many respects they are. Ed Miliband has proven to be almost laughable at PMQs – a guaranteed butt for the jokes and sarcasm pouring from David Cameron’s drippingly wealthy lips. As for the rest of them? Well Ed Balls has been something of a non-event – many predicted fire and brimstone. What we have had so far is more akin to tepid and mediocre. Yvette Cooper, supposedly one of the key brains in the Shadow Cabinet and a possible future leadership candidate, has been conspicuous by her silence. Not that there has been much going on in the world for her to talk about – Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Iran Bahrain, and of course, Afghanistan.

Then of course there is Liam Byrne. You may know the name but not remember why – he is actually the shadow secretary for Work and Pensions. Now, this week they announced the unemployment figures and the statistics made for pretty unpleasant reading - 2.5m people unemployed, the number of people in full-time work down 5,000 on the previous year, 2.2m people economically inactive because they are on long-term sick leave and 15% of people work part-time do so because they can’t find full-time work.

If the overall statistics were bad, they were dreadful when it came to the 16 to 24 year olds – 965,000 are out of work, a rate of 20.5%.

Against this, Chris Grayling emphasised there had been an increase of 40,000 new job vacancies in the three months to January. What he didn’t tell the House was these figures include openings for those taken on temporarily to conduct the 2011 census. If you exclude these vacancies, the actual increase was a meagre 8,000.

Now I may have blinked, but I don’t recall Byrne savaging the Tories about these results. Oh sure, they grunted a little and made polite moans in the appropriate places, but very few Tories would have felt a need to quake in their boots.

If Labour is going to have the audacity to call themselves the Opposition, they need to do just that – oppose. This doesn’t mean languishing on the green leather of the House of Commons chamber dozing off. It means vociferously and actively standing against all legislation attacking working class people.

It demands they stand against the government when they want to squeeze the poor, whilst dishing out £2bn to multinational corporations to run the Community Payback scheme.

If Labour is going to have any chance of impacting on the Tories it needs to re-evaluate its entire approach. This will mean dropping the “Mr Nice Guy” image and becoming tougher and more willing to resist. A number of Labour activists are already active in anti-cuts groups, but this need to seep through the sytem to the party leadership. Labour must take a more vital role in the Coalition against the Cuts and the Right to Work movement.

Has Ed Miliband got what it takes to lead such a party? This morning I am not so sure.

Cameron v. Miliband - who will win?

Another week of PMQs is over and, as usual, Cameron reduced the debate to personal snipes against the Labour leader. It is a regular tactic and he as applied it on many occasions as a mechanism to deflect attention away from himself and back onto the opposition.

It adds little or nothing to the debate, but it has been a useful tool to silence Miliband. It is therefore not surprising the Guardian reports that polls suggest only 25% of the population thought Ed Miliband would make a better prime minister. Not that Cameron should feel too smug, because only 38% voted for him.

The polls also indicate support within the Labour party isn’t overwhelming for EM. Indeed, if they are to be believed, 38% of Labour members – and 42% of people who backed the party are uncertain about Miliband as a possible prime minister.

By any stretch of the imagination these aren’t welcome statistics. Of course, we know psephologists and number crunchers love to play games and polls are seldom a true reflection of the national picture. What they indicate is that young Ed isn’t doing as well as he would have perhaps hoped.

Naturally, some opponents are already saying things would have been different if his brother had been elected. Perhaps, but would the soul of the Labour party have been safe in his hands? On reflection, I doubt it – what we would have seen is a continuation of New Labour, but with different labelling.

At PMQs today, Ed faired well and managed to score a few decent broadsides into Cameron’s hull. However, the good ship Conservativism is far from sunk and EM will need to dramatically up his game if he hopes to play with the big boys.

One rain doesn’t make a monsoon, but I hope that at least it heralds the start of the rainy season. At the moment I am left with the niggling doubt EM was given a good result on a platter. He will not be so fortunate in the weeks to come and will need to show a far hardier, earthy quality in his responses.

He might like to take a few lessons from Ed “rottweiler” Balls in this respect – a little thuggery in EM’s delivery would go a long way to push the party forward and reinforce his position as the leader of the loyal opposition. Add to that more spontaneity and you may find the electorate will warm to him, and find him less wooden.

One thing is for sure – Ed Miliband cannot continue the way he is going and that opposition to Tory cuts alone will be enough to win the next General Election. May 2010 demonstrated we have become far more media-centred when it comes to party leaders. Labour tried to paint Gordon Brown as a man with knowledge, wisdom and the courage to take Britain through this crisis. He may have had all those qualities, but the electorate were unconvinced and found Brown stiff, aloof and unapproachable, whilst Clegg was seen to be likable and trustworthy.

Time has shown the latter to be incorrect, but it still doesn’t give the Labour party the excuse to repeat the same mistakes with EM – he needs to be groomed (and quickly) to become far tougher, far more forceful and far more clearer in his delivery.

He has a long way to go.

Why the Tories feel safe

Since May 6th, the Conservatives (I largely discount the Lib-Dems now, because they are now part of the Tory machine) have been in power and have already made savage swipes at our welfare system. Although the Tories once insisted frontline services would not be affected, we are regularly hearing each day of redundancies in our schools, hospitals and police forces.

Despite this, a recent MORI poll for the Economist showed the public viewed Osborne’s Budget as one of the six best since the 1970s. Even more disturbing is that fact that now the Tories are languishing on a 40% share of the voteand Labour is largely unchanged since the election – even though our public services are now seriously under threat.

Several reasons spring to mind to explain this bizarre situation. Firstly, it seems the public are satisfied to bury their heads into their hands and assume “if it’s not affecting me, then it’s OK”. So, if you aren’t unemployed, or living on little more than a basic living wage, then you may feel you are not being dramatically affected by the recent austerity measures. Indeed, evidence from a number of think tanks suggests large numbers of people now classified as middle class will only experience a minor change to their standard of living, so there is some truth to their analysis.

What these people fail to see is how the next round of cuts, expected in the autumn, will affect us all. All pointers suggest the cuts, along with VAT increases, will substantially change the way many of us live our lives. Our hospitals will be less efficient, our schools will have more children in each classroom as the number of teachers is reduced, with less police officers on patrol there will be more crime. Oh ... and the skill level of our workforce will deteriorate as the government and private sector fail to invest in training and skill development. All of this happening in a nation with constantly rising unemployment.

Now you may wonder why Labour hasn’t been doing more to expose this to the electorate. After all, there is a leadership election on and it offers an ideal time to flaunt our more radical policies as we expunge ourselves of the New Labour project. Unfortunately, the entire election process has been taken over by the ‘management team’ at Victoria Street, leaving most party members and, it seems, the broader public disillusioned by the entire process.

If you don’t think the candidates are being stifled by the party machine, then ask yourself why is it the candidates are either absent, or silent at PMQ every Wednesday? It’s all very well each of them organising a petition to oppose some aspect of Tory policy, but why are they not shouting from the rooftops – this is wrong! A few tweets each day and the odd television appearance are pretty half-hearted measures.

Instead, we are forced to endure another three months of Harriet Harman as acting leader – a political lightweight by any stretch of the imagination. Thank goodness parliament goes into recess in a couple of weeks – at least we won’t have to face the agony of watching Cameron systematically destroy her. Her pleas of “he isn’t answering the question ...” are starting to bore even the most dedicated Labour party member and I am almost beginning to assume it will never get better.

I was one of those people who argued for a long debate over the summer to decide on our future leader, but I am starting to question whether I was right. The hustings are a joke, offering no real chance for the candidates to debate the issues and instead they only allow them to roll out bland ‘non-statements’ of where they stand politically.

David Miliband is fighting for the centre ground and seems destined to win, so is already being crowned by many, even before the vote. Ed Miliband is vying for the soft left vote with his “I wasn’t in parliament, so you can’t blame me” approach – pretty weak as he was and adviser and then later a member of parliament during the period – so his hands are just as tainted as any of the other candidates. As for Ed Balls, well he hasn’t really said very much, other than how he wants to blame all those nasty immigrants for taking our jobs – a bit unfair perhaps, but it isn’t far off the truth. Poor old Andy Burnham seems to have already acknowledged he is one of the runners-up and hardly makes a peep in the hope he can appear the strong, silent type.

Good old Diane Abbott was set to carry the mantle of the left and if she is the best we can offer, then we had all better pack up and go and play dominoes. Let’s be frank, her defence of sending her child to a £10,000 per annum private school is indefensible, even though we may understand why, as a parent, she felt it necessary. More importantly, raising the subject at every husting is dreadfully boring – and seems to achieve very little. If only she would just shout out mea culpa and be done with it.

With all this in mind, is it any wonder Cameron feels confident? If Labour fails to get its act together in the next few weeks, we can look forward to the Tories being in power not only for the full term of this parliament, but for the next as well. So, our MPs and leaders must be held to account. We should be asking why there is no real debate in the election hustings. Why are the candidates not attacking Cameron at PMQ? Why are MPs not joining with our brothers and sisters in the trade union movement to mobilise opposition to the cuts? And how can we rescue the party before Harriet Harman and all the old guard from the New Labour era edge us towards disaster?

Above all, we must see RESISTANCE!