Why Ed Should Stay Red

It didn't take long for the knives to come out for the new (note the significant small 'n') Labour leader Ed Miliband (or MiliE, as some of the less kind Conservative press have dubbed him.)

Within hours of his appointment, he had acquired several nicknames, with perhaps 'Red Ed' being the most insidious. The suggestion was made in several of the more militant Conservative newspapers that Ed was 'in the pocket of the unions'. Well, it was certainly their votes that put him in charge and consigned his brother to the political scrapheap.

It seems like every time that unions are mentioned in the mainstream press, we harp back to the winter of discontent, rubbish uncollected in the streets, miners being mercilessly crushed by Margaret Thatcher. Never mind that the reality - an odd hour or two's delay on the London Underground or at an airport in the name of safety and entirely deserved wage equality - is very different in the modern era.

And yet, it was Ed himself who was quick to distance himself from those who had pushed him over the line. He was, he said, very much his own man - the cannier amongst us might well see this as an attempt to distance himself from the Blairite days of Brown and Mandelson as much as an association with blood-red socialism. Then, days later, Ed admitted that he wasn't against cuts on principle, just the speed with which they were being proposed. The unionites who voted for him must have been spluttering into their morning tea.

Why then, have we absorbed the idea that red is bad? After all, we are not America, with its dyed-in-the-wool fear that socialism will destroy the 'free' part of the free market. Socialism remains one of our country's proud traditions, it being representative of the staunch backbone of England, the van-driving, street-sweeping, hospital-cleaning working classes. Union membership in this country numbers in the millions and militancy is at its highest level for years.

Their efforts are having an impact too. Chris Huhne, a liberal minister and economist yesterday admitted that planned public sector cuts may be 'scaled back'. This is political speak that the coalition have used a few times in the past week, and smacks of there being more public opposition to their plans than they expected.

William Dove in the International Business Times makes the point that Labour being affiliated to the unions invites the same derision that it would if the Conservative Party were to affiliate itself with private businesses. Certainly the Byzantine, undemocratic methods that the Labour Party uses to pick a leader should be revised - the current system sees individuals with multiple memberships of affiliated organisations getting multiple votes, and that does indeed call the outcomes into question.

Still, I feel that Dove misses the point somewhat. The Conservative Party was not born of big business in the same way that the Labour Party was girded from the loins of the labour movement. The Tories are more than capable of looking out for their own interests, while the Labour Party was created by necessity to give a voice to those who had none. Furthermore, given the donations received from businesses and the behind-the-scenes lobbying conducted by senior business figures, it is not a large leap to imagine that big business still has direct and influential access to ministerial ears.

The real challenge for the Labour Party and its followers is the need to evolve with the people who have made it so successful in the past. New Labour pitched itself firmly in the ground between the benefit recipients who drained it so thoroughly of strength and impetus and the nouveau riche who shouted proudly that they were still working class while also doing everything in their power to ensure that little Emily and Joshua got into that nice public school on the village green. By chasing two rabbits, they effectively lost both.

Remember that without the Liberal Democrats, this government would be struggling to achieve anything by majority. Ed Miliband can afford to wait for the cuts to do their damage to public confidence, and then like a master surgeon he can take a scalpel neatly to the clear divisions within the coalition. Best of all, he doesn't have to betray his faithful followers in order to take the party back to the people - he simply has to identify with their needs and struggles while acknowledging their concerns and their hard work, and he can do all of that while still proudly waving a red flag.

What a Difference a Week Makes

I don't quite know why it is that I've needed such a long break from the blogosphere, but for those of you who have missed my input, I have decided to sum up events during my absence with a few brief bullet points. They are as follows:

1) Miliband the Younger wins Labour leadership contest, mainly due to support from the trade unions.

2) Miliband the Older throws his toys from the pram, giving up Cabinet politics at the time that his party needs him the most.

3) Coalition government continues to tell lies about the necessity to make swingeing cuts in any local government department that looks at them funny. They ringfence defence spending (contractors make fat profits, and it's a glorious throwback to colonial days to have British soldiers swanning around the globe) and also health spending (because cutting that would be unpopular.)

4) Gideon 'George' Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer and beneficiary of a trust fund estimated to be worth £4 million pounds, proposes cuts to child benefit. At the party conference, evident panic at the child benefit backlash causes David Cameron to hint that there will be forthcoming tax breaks for married couples, regardless of earnings.

I'm drawing attention to this little policy idisyncracy, as it clearly benefits the middle classes and the rich over the poorer members of society, who are more likely to be single parents and low earners.

Osborne will hold centre stage for the next couple of weeks in the news, at least until the inevitable bad news is released in the comprehensive spending review on 20th October 2010. Incidentally, Guido Fawkes ran a piece in his blog in August which stated that George Osborne was the most popular Tory Chancellor in modern history. I'll be running another piece about Osborne in the near future, as he is also currently topping the Old Statesman 'Smug, Dictatorial Rich Politician Most in Need of a Slap' poll.

Very Civil Disobedience

'Unrest on the streets!' cry the newspapers, discontent is the watchword of the day, and with a heavy heart I realise that once again, Britain is set again for a period of exceptionally civil disobedience.

Make no mistake, I am a union man and a very proud one. But when you hear TV channels spinning words like 'attacks' and 'militancy' (so very close to military, with all its attendant connotations) and you are subjected daily to multiple video slots of people stranded at airports, holidays untaken, it all becomes a little bit much. Trade Union Congress is underway in Manchester, and both sides of the domestic cuts debate are slinging mud at each other like there is no tomorrow.

The unions are handicapped somewhat by their close relationship with Labour, who are themselves handicapped by the fact that they cannot decide if they are Old Labour, New Labour or New New Labour. It looks increasingly likely that the next leader of the party will be named Miliband, but the ongoing saga of the leadership battle threatens to overshadow the union agenda, which can be summed up nicely with the phrase, 'Cuts? Not bloody likely!'

In place of grand schemes, there is rhetoric. The normally reserved general secretary of the TUC, Brendan Barber, compared the forthcoming spending review to a second poll tax. Dave Prentis of UNISON pointed out that working people were not responsible for the unprecedented situation that the country finds itself in. RMT leader Bob Crow, fresh from a stint irritating commuters on the London underground, insisted that unions needed to work together to 'face the same enemy'.

Meanwhile in Westminster, as the economy continued to run despite the best efforts of bankers to stop it from doing so, hooded coalition generals cackled and trimmed zeroes from already pared budgets. If the trains weren't running, people shrugged and went to work on the bus instead. Hospitals are still dirty. Social care remains underfunded and underappreciated. The welfare state continues to provide for those in need and for a reasonable proportion who aren't.

Somewhere in the midst of this, a Liberal Democrat peer is expected to declare later this week that if the Inland Revenue could only reclaim the amount of tax lost each year due to evasion and avoidance, the country would not even be running at a deficit. Most likely, no-one will listen. The modern British spirit is not one of resistance, but indifference.

I very much suspect that there will not be a winter of discontent ahead. The unions will agree plans to work together on key issues such as coordinating strike days, and those strikes will then take place. People will be inconvenienced, but despite the hysterics seen daily in our national media, the country will not suddenly come crashing to a halt.

A budget for austerity need not be a bad thing if it really does cut away the deadwood that seems endemic in key areas of our society. Equally, the prudent agenda should not be used as a stick with which to beat public services for purely ideological reasons. There is still a convincing argument for increasing the taxes of the highest earners, and also increasing regulation to ensure that the behaviour of banks is more carefully scrutinised so that reprehensible profit-chasing behaviour does not threaten our future prosperity.

Tomorrow the papers will once again be full of battle cries as the respective combatants wheel out new angles and quote statistics that support their viewpoints while simultaneously obscuring the real underlying issues. Both sides need to get perspective and realise that we have more to gain by working together to find solutions to our problems.

Truthfully, we should recognise that while some cuts are inevitable, there are other options for tackling the financial crisis and it is high time that these were explored. Sadly, opportunity may well be buried in newspaper headlines. It is perhaps the greatest shame of our time that a battle for hearts and minds is not fought on facts and well-reasoned logic.