Durham Big Debate: A resilience test for the North East

Last month I had two distinctive engagements at the Durham Book Festival: the first being the furthering of my nefarious plot to re-infect the modern world with Late Victorian Gothic (for a report on which see here); the second the presentation of an essay commissioned from me by the Festival and addressing the prospects for the economy of North East England in the depressed years that lie ahead. That essay was published locally as a pamphlet, and its text is available online here.
I discussed the essay's various arguments in a panel event on Saturday October 22, chaired by the FT’s Chris Tighe, at which I was privileged to sit down and reason alongside Chi Onwurah, Labour MP for Newcastle Central, Paul Woolston (chair of the North East Local Economic Partnership) and Professor John Tomaney from the Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies (CURDS) at Newcastle University. I found the session very energetic, with some good pointed contributions from the floor, though inevitably more dimensions to the debate were opened up than could be adequately explored within the time-slot.
I spent several months mulling over/interviewing for/writing up the essay, an absorbing experience. Can I summarise my findings? Well, I suppose I came to my brief feeling – as I had when I last addressed the subject for Prospect back in 2008 – that the North East is blessed by its industrious heritage, its natural resources, and its people, with all their rightly legendary qualities of resilience; and yet also beset by its particular and substantive share in Britain’s long twentieth-century decline. Even in 2008, as one sensed the tide going out again, it was easier to feel buoyed by the benefits the region had enjoyed from new kinds of jobs, urban regeneration, better living standards. Today, with UK PLC in such a hole, one has to worry for a region under a government that undervalues its strengths and doesn’t believe in ‘regions’ anyway; a government, moreover, that is offering a ‘growth plan’ not unreasonably described by David Miliband (that’s the MP for South Shields) as ‘risibly, depressingly thin.’
We’ve known for long enough that British business needs to innovate more in profitable new growth sectors and to export more of that innovation to emerging markets. Apparently our main innovation goes in the fields of market research, advertising and branding, management consultancy... Not what my granddad would have called ‘proper work’, though a living, for sure. But if your chief skills are selling hot air and processing bullshit you can’t claim surprise if your former ‘emerging market’ then becomes your master.
The thing people in the South East especially like to forget about the North East is that it still makes stuff and exports it: fine and bulk chemicals and pharmaceuticals; tracks and cast armour for tanks; diggers, and a whole lot of cars at Nissan. The North East’s subsea sector has had global stature for three decades. (The transoceanic fibre-optic cables that enable our keen use of the internet are there thanks to seabed trenching technology originated at the firm of SMD in Wallsend.) Hitachi is readying to turn out bi-mode train carriages in Durham; the blast furnace at the former Corus steelworks in Redcar has re-fired under new ownership.
Lest people be unaware, the North East now does both metal-bashing and key-pushing. (Witness the FTSE-measured success of the Sage software group, an inspiration to the region’s recent rash of digital technology start-ups.) It has several world-class universities capable of translating research into commerce, most impressively in life sciences. In all the North East has notable comparative advantages, skills that aren’t so prevalent in the rest of the world; not to mention indigenous raw materials, gold beneath its feet, an entirely plausible claim to be the hub of any future low carbon/clean energy economy.
True, the region is deficient in financial services (but then lately that sector has stuck us with its own ‘dependency’, and attendant strife.) The North East has rather weightier assets, which could yet make a hefty contribution to ‘rebalancing’ the national economy.
The challenge for North East business is how to be sufficiently nimble and entrepreneurial at a time when a state-dependent outlook appears forlorn. Traditionally the region has viewed entrepreneurs as rather rare birds. Throughout the last century the done thing for North Easterners was to work for someone else, whether the Coal Board or British Steel, ICI or the Department of Work and Pensions. And yet it wasn’t ‘working for someone else’ that begat the North East’s great industrial heritage: the entrepreneurial honour-roll of Armstrong, Palmer, Merz, Reyrolle – inspired engineers who made big things happen out of little, beginning with a wager.
Heavy industry has its own fiery kind of historical romance; yet in the era of The Apprentice we know that business innovation can take lighter but still lucrative forms. Consider the more recent North East success story that is Greggs (est. 1951), which chose not to remain a ‘traditional’ baker, pleasant as that may have seemed – and a good job too, otherwise the big supermarkets would have eaten it alive. Instead it was Greggs that did the consuming, of other smaller companies, and built a new brand as a first-rate seller of takeaway food that still does a fair bit of baking.
Much as I enjoy a sausage roll, I don’t propose that the Greggs business model has universal application. But I do believe Greggs offers a useful model of ethos and drive, of seeking out the best available niche in a market that could do with a bit of entrepreneurial development, ‘a properly-engineered solution.’ Spare capacity in our economy is there to be unleashed within our Small-to-Medium Enterprises (SMEs). But one can’t wag one’s finger at them, demand that they speculate to accumulate, adapt or else die. Innovation is expensive, and rarely yields a fast profit. Hiring and training aren’t cheap either, and in the North East as around the UK the skills employers require are not being readily met by the labour pool.
Right now it would seem only government can provide the impetus to the far-sighted investment in innovation and infrastructure that we know we need. Adam Posen, the American economist on the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee, has made eloquent calls for a state investment bank that will bypass our tarnished banking sector and lend directly to businesses. Training (and re-training) schemes in hi-tech engineering, digital and green energy vocations would not be wasted. And renewed claims for infrastructure spending, good old-fashioned ‘capital projects’, have force to them: they will create jobs, and remedy a long national deficiency. From transport links to power lines to superfast broadband... we are going to need these things if we’re to have any sort of future.
A Conservative-led government is always liable to be leery of ‘industrial policy’, with its connotations of Labour, a pre-Thatcher era and a North where it has few friends. But I believe a forward-looking Tory ought to think fully on what the state can do as an engine for economic growth, not merely a dispenser of hardship funds. And as a potential engine room for such growth, the North East is fully stocked with tools and resources.
Then again, the excellent analyst/blogger Chris Dillow has been brave enough to propose that maybe no policy fix is possible, since long-term growth “is determined by factors which governments cannot control, such as entrepreneurial spirit or the rate of monetizable innovation.” But it’s those very ungovernable factors in which one is therefore forced to invest whatever hope one has lying around spare...

The taste of Labour

(Sighs...) I suppose now that the New Generation (TM) has truly got its feet under the desk, a tired hack like me needs to get a life, move on etc, from the dismal events of a fortnight ago. It's hard, though, to spit out the rancid taste of that spectacle, those grim cheerleaders for 'change', that result that could have been cooked up by some demoniac scientist in a laboratory, his intention to make everything about Labour look backward and third-rate and full of spleen... As someone who only came round to Blairism about 10 years too late I can't be regarded as a genuine tribalist or a reliable guide to 'the soul of Labour' (an expression you'd expect to see in any Gordon Brown peroration, and one I'd like to club to death with a baseball bat). Still, hard to bear, son...
My fellow college/student-paper alumnus Peter Hyman wrote in the Times the other day that "only victory at the next election will justify Ed Miliband's leadership bid." Even I - finding 'Death Ray Panda' hard to look at/listen to, and agreeing vehemently with Hyman's withering assessment on Newsnight last week - would say that's setting the bar too high. A Labour leadership candidate can't promise that sort of sway over the wider electorate, he can only hope to impress his congregation, work the ridiculous electoral college system, and so jump the hurdle in front of him - which for DRP was defeating his brother. And, you have to say, no prospective Labour leader can hope to ascend without having reached at least a hand-shake settlement with the trade union leadership, even though that settlement will, of course, be broken by said leader over time; and the failure of David Miliband and his footsoldiers even to get to the foot of the hill in this respect will always count as a serious demerit. For want of a nail...
A great political party doesn't die overnight, though the annals show it can slip into suspended animation or, if you like, aggravated nostalgia. For instance, my pre-Labour-leader-result prediction about the impending return of Neil Kinnock, the consummate Labour career-pol and parader of principles he would later junk in the hope of favour - proved grotesquely accurate, and gave David Cameron an easy joke for his Conference speech. As for the shadow cabinet, I would never seek to patronise Alan Johnson, but really, and nervously, I have to wish him the very best of luck for his new posting. In the words of their last elected PM, I will still be wishing Labour well, wanting them to win, since they are the future now... But I'm still reaching for the full-strength mouth-wash, looking for something to like about the new dispensation.
(Cartoon above by Steve Bell, of course.)

Good old common sense in the FT

Because I agree with him, I must say that Phillip Stephens talks customary good sense in the FT on the already wracked state of the ConDemNation, and the resultant opportunity for Labour:
ConDemNation: "Britain’s coalition government set out its plans to eliminate the fiscal deficit in the bright sunlight of certain conviction. A couple of months later, it confronts the chilling realities of shrinking the state...Nick Clegg protested the other day that the spending cuts drawn up in Whitehall were “not dramatically different” to plans laid by the previous government. This softening in the language of austerity says it all. The Liberal Democrat leader once thought “savage” reductions were vital to repair the nation’s finances. Now he must weigh the political costs..."
Labour: "David [Miliband] is the choice of those at the top of the party, who are keen to return to power. Alone, he has talked about rebuilding the coalition that won the party three election victories from 1997. His handicap is that this tags him as the Blairite choice... Ed, the younger Miliband, who could yet win as everybody’s second choice, has offered mostly mush – policies and promises calculated to make the party feel good about itself and about his candidacy... By choosing David Miliband, Labour would be saying it wanted to win back England’s aspirant classes – that it was still serious about power. But the party’s heart could yet rule its head. Mr Clegg – and Mr Cameron – are cheering on the younger of the two brothers."

Labour's choice, final strait, horses for courses...

The New Statesman was, I think, first out last night with the very welcome news that Jon Cruddas is endorsing David Miliband for Labour leader. Apparently Cruddas was very taken with DM's Keir Hardie Lecture a few weeks back (also noted here.) "What was interesting to me about this", Cruddas comments, "was when he started talking about belonging and neighbourliness and community, more communitarian politics, which is where I think Labour has to go." Hear, hear.
The Staggers itself has come out for Ed Mili today, declaring that he is somebody they feel could, conceivably, become a "bold, charismatic, compassionate and visionary" leader. I'm still left wondering which meeting I missed where the younger/shorter Miliband brother offered such powerful evidence of these inchoate qualities. John Rentoul today describes the sanctimony, the small-meeting-room populism and evidently mounting peevishness that many of us associate more readily with Miliband Junior.
The NS is careful to make a secondary case for David Miliband, however heavily they count against him what they call "his mistaken support for the catastrophic invasion of Iraq." But they see him as the darling of "the right-of-centre commentariat" whereas their man Ed is the "change candidate"; and so they hope that DM, if defeated, will remain in politics as "his brother's lieutenant-in-chief." This would require extraordinary stoicism on David Miliband's part, if it turns out that what his brother is selling really is what most Labour voters want... and I only hope we aren't forced to witness such a fraternal job offer being made in the first place, much less the ghastly spectacle of its acceptance. The differences between these candidates are clear now, and only one, it seems to me, would not be utterly wasted in a backseat capacity.

YouGov rates Labour: as you were, then

Richard Darlington clearly has an important role at Demos but I don’t know whom he thinks he’s admonishing with this piece at Labour Uncut, wherein he laments a YouGov poll suggesting Labour is now thought ‘‘weak’ (73%), rather than strong (16%) and ‘divided’ (72%), rather than united (19%)’, also ‘out of touch’ and representing ‘‘the past’ rather than the future.’ That’s just what happens when you lose after 13 years in power, your beaten leader resigns, and you slouch over to Opposition benches, usurped by both larger parties that formerly sat there. No Labour leader could reverse these shallow, obvious perceptions right now, even if he or she were indubitably the one to lead the party to the new policy dawn Darlington rightly hopes is coming, but only after what will first have to be a long, slow dusk. Frankly, as an admonition I prefer the simple formulation of the Sun's "disenchanted Labour voter" cab-driver Grant Davis (46): "Whoever wins is going to have a massive job on their hands making Labour electable again." Grant is for Andy Burnham, as it happens, but that's a reasonable position to hold, if not my own, as you know...

'Come, let us reason together.'

Further to my last... on the Guardian site today a theology lecturer called Luke Bretherton picks up and expounds on David Miliband's 'community' platform, pointing out some useful elements of the relevant British social history (also some things I never knew about 1930s Chicago...) and speaking very warmly of the CitizensUK organisation as a modern-day exemplar of grass-roots organisation. I don't quite agree with Bretherton that Gordon Brown's pre-election speech to Citizens London, drawing on 'his Presbyterian and Labour roots', was especially good or noteworthy, other than to the solid Labour faithful, who had surely heard sermons from Brown before, and to the Labour apparatchiks who'd been twisting and waiting in agony for the PM to get his game face on... But given Phillip Blond's coverage in recent months, clearly Labour needs some articulate theology lecturers on its side. The picture herewith is of the New Bearpark Lodge colliery banner, taken 27 July 1951, courtesy of Beamish Museum and the Durham Miner Project website.

David Miliband and common cause

'DM' gave a speech in Wales last week in honour of Keir Hardie, and I found the transcript impressive and well worth reading for numerous reasons. There are just two bits I want to comment on:

1. I owe to the excellent South Shields-born historian Robert Colls my conviction of recent years that the Independent Labour Party missed a trick (or else managed a sleight of hand) back in its formative years. To simplify Colls' arguments hugely (and I apologise for having mislaid the source reference): the late 1800s/early 1900s, certainly in the North of England, saw an extraordinary foment of working class culture and social-minded endeavour, based on the principle of 'the free union of individuals for the attainment of a common object.’ Colls cites 'the nonconformist and Methodist chapels and Sunday schools, the Cooperative Wholesale Society and Cooperative Union, and the national friendly societies, and after them, the allotment societies, the brass bands, voluntary bodies, sporting clubs, youth organizations and the like - which drew their members from the streets but which also projected their activities out on to a wider, civic world.' For Colls this foment wasn’t expressly 'socialist', but certainly socialistic. And, as he puts it, 'seen in this light, the emergence of a Labour party and a parliamentary road to socialism looks less like the culmination of an existing working-class politics and more like the beginning of a new, and rival, form. Nevertheless, the Labour party was nothing without the associations...' In other words, you might say, the working class had been getting on fine with organising itself, short of the Westminster representation bit...

Now then - here is David Miliband on the podium in Wales:

"The Independent Labour Party was self-organised. It brought together the co-operative movement, the building societies, the trade unions, all shades of faith communities into a broad based alliance for the common good… I don’t wish to simply be leader of the Labour Party. I seek to renew the Labour Movement – in idea and in organisation. Building relationships and a common life through common action for the common good in communities across the country. That is why part of my leadership campaign is the drive to train 1000 community leaders around the country – whether they vote for me or not..."

You see the problem(s)... First up, does an initiative to 'train 1000 community leaders' give any heartening sense of the pulse of 'common action' out there in the country? Or is it not the case, as Colls has often contended, that we talk all the more of community these days precisely because it's lost to us? More generally: is the Labour Party and its leader always and forever the best or most appropriate leader of 'the labour movement'? Pragmatically I'm used to saying yes, but when Miliband re-opens the annals in this fashion one does feel that slight and regrettable sense of entitlement within the belly of the Party beast. If DM thinks this 'renewal' he's proposing is a good idea in itself then good on him; doubtless he's aware it's not in itself going to refashion Labour as an electoral powerhouse, so that alone suggests he's doing it for love. Moreover would a Labour Party led by DM expect to be earning or inheriting the votes of all these communities he wants to link in with? But again, if he's not even bothered whether they vote for him then presumably he's not taking anything for granted.

2. This is just funny, if gratuitous:

"Why did Hardie refuse an alliance with the Liberals? Why did he insist that Labour had to be an independent party? It was not because he rejected the great causes of liberty – of freedom of the individual – but because he considered it vital that when the national interest is considered, the interests of working people are considered to be part of that. So that those who were then exploited and excluded could take their rightful place in the body politic and in the governance of our nation. Hardie said, repeatedly, that although there were many things that we can agree on with liberals, when it came to the conflict between capital and labour, between the banks and the real economy, they would always side with the Conservatives. He didn’t have a crystal ball, but he would have predicted that Nick Clegg would be busy defending a Conservative Budget over 100 years after he was elected MP for Merthyr Tydfil and Aberdare..."

Living through ConDemNation (cont.)

Last week I was chatting to an old friend, one of the most brilliant men I know – a Communist in his youth, undoubtedly a man of the Left thereafter – and he couldn’t have been more pleased about the ConDemNation, essentially on the grounds of Ken Clarke letting out the prisoners, fixed-term parliaments, having a capable Old Etonian in Number 10, and (my friend fondly imagines) the prospect of Tony Blair in the Hague for having ordered David Kelly’s death. ‘All my friends voted Lib Dem’, he told me. ‘Don’t tell me you voted Labour…!?’

John Rentoul would think my friend a certain psychological type (‘Blair-Hater’), though there are issues on which the two of them would agree: ‘Labour’, my friend scoffed very accurately, ‘spend their last months writing cheques they knew would bounce’ – and so, goes the argument, Labour must be mindful of how they criticise those doing the harrowing now.
Still, Labour’s task is easier when George Osborne reneges on the pledge to preserve capital spending. The spiffy Michael Gove didn’t look too 'progressive' the other day, halting all those school builds and riposting to Labour, ‘What would you cut?’ Labour’s current mouthpieces famously don’t always have a ready answer, but I think they can be trusted for a sensible view on rotting Nissen huts that continue to serve as schoolhouses. (I’m more and more bewildered too as to why the NHS was ring-fenced. I don’t know 'what I would cut', was I President of Freedonia, but presumably a lot of it would be done line by line, and I’m pretty sure I'd know how to start there with the NHS.)
Labour have it easier still when the slavering Tory blogger Guido Fawkes freely derides Danny Alexander as 'Beaker' while cheering on 'Beaker''s doltish but concerted axe-wielding. Thus your actual ideological Tory: let’s cut now, hard as humanly possible, it’ll hurt all the right sorts and come 2015 we’ll have the world turned rightside up and a ‘proper’ tax-cutting Budget.
To this tumescence are the Lib Dems the soapy handmaidens. Veteran Commons sketch writer Simon Hoggart had some good sport with Clegg the other day, saying that he ‘often has the air of a schoolboy who has spent too long in his bedroom, working out plans for an imaginary country that exists only in his head.... an ideal state in which justice, fairness and sheer practicality fight each other for position.’

I think Hoggart astutely skewers a certain sort of Lib Dem sanctimony, but misses the actual nastiness of Clegg, so evident in his snide grin – not the debating society nerd, rather the seemingly dull but straight-arrow chap who secretly fancied being the Bully of Upper Sixth. For the moment I can’t think of a more risible, self-impressed figure in high-level British politics within my lifetime than Nick Clegg – and yes, I’m including John Prescott in that. It’s just the appalling inverse ratio of votes to status that goes on offending.
During Clegg’s brief and imaginary ‘popularity’ prior to polling day, Christopher Hitchens (for whom Clegg once interned at The Nation, and who seemed to find him likeable) observed that ‘British society is actually a three-party system stitched and corseted into a two-party duopoly.’ I think, though, that the coalition exposed that notion as folly. Steve Richards argued today that ‘[a]s some of Cameron's allies recognised long ago, there was no gap between them and Clegg on the central issue of the economy, public spending and the role of the state. On the other side of Clegg's party are those who are closer to being social democrats…’ But the lesson is: it’s a duopoly really, all that matters is to which wing the Lib Dems peel off on the big issues once they have to; and once Clegg had compared the unions to non-dom Tory potentates like Lord Ashcroft then we knew for sure what way he peeled.

Many a pundit has thrown back at Clegg his pre-power conviction that the AV voting system would be ‘miserable little compromise.’ In response Clegg usually offers a lecture on the duties of power and leadership, which often involve miserable little compromises (Nick in his own person happening to be one such...) But I’m interested to be having a vote on electoral reform next May, though I’ve never been a fan of the notion, and I’ll wait to see how the arguments by those wiser than me stack up.
The hopeless Mary Riddell wrote lately that for Labour ‘[to] vote No would be a move against progress and a sign that Labour is a disunited, foot-dragging party, committed to the broken, first past the post system for tactical reasons.’ Oh, the dishonour! Tactical reasons! Simon Jenkins, whom I generally like not one bit, calls it right when he says AV is no sort of ‘progress’, merely a redistribution of a man’s honest vote, ‘away from liking towards ‘not disliking’’. Jenkins continues:
‘Clegg is for AV because it helps his party, and Cameron and Labour will fight it at a referendum because it does not help them. The electorate is bored by the topic. Clegg is almost certain to lose, which will enrage his party and leave him with a bloodied nose and the coalition weakened.’
Good show. I can’t say I don’t like the sound of those tactics, or that imagined outcome. Presumably Mary Riddell thinks Labour need some more of that thrusting New Politics dynamism we’ve all heard so much of, until we vomited. Well, Mary, a week is plenty long in politics, and the time remaining before Labour elects a new leader still stretches in the distance, but the next election is still aeons away, during which time you and the rest of us should try to keep thinking. For now, Labour should attack the coalition partners whenever they see fit. Let’s see where we’ve got to in a few years.
And finally, what news of my man David Miliband? It’s rumoured the Unite union are working out who to back (which ‘Stop David’ candidate) expressly in order to frustrate the hopes of the ‘Blairite’ candidate. Elsewhere DM put his name to a fairly blah column about Englishness in the New Statesman and gave a not-bad Telegraph interview (to Mary Riddell…) wherein he properly regretted the Iraq war’s ‘toll in British and Iraqi life’, properly abhorred the prospect of the coalition’s ‘constitutional gerrymandering’ and reasonably marked his priorities as education, crime and anti-social behaviour. In short, it's like Blair were in the room, a little humbled by recent history, nonetheless feeling its hand on his shoulder...

David Miliband: Make Mine Music

I’m almost sure that some ostensibly hip and politically active writer for the NME or maybe The Face circa 1983/4 availed himself of the view that what Labour needed for its leadership was ‘a funky politician’ – presumably meaning some Brother or Sister whose record collection ran from Nile Rodgers through to Gil Scott-Heron. What Labour got that year was Neil Kinnock cameoing in a Tracy Ullman video. But the prescription was wrong anyway: politicians shouldn’t be funky, there’s always far too much for them to be getting on with. What they need is to be able to unwind at the close of the day with a loved one and some nice Easy Listening. That’s what David Miliband does, presumably, no funky politician he – there’s can hardly be any other excuse for his selection of 'Desert Island Discs' as requested by Labour Uncut, which are:
Sting – Englishman in New York
Elvis Costello – Oliver’s Army
Fritz Kreisler – Liebeslied
Sibelius – Violin Concerto
Shostakovich – Symphony No.10
James Taylor – How sweet it is (to be loved by you)
Elton John – Your Song
The Beatles – All you need is love
Still, mark you some meanings, intended or otherwise. He picks the symphony that Shostakovich unveiled in safety once Stalin was finally six feet under, and the Costello track in which the great man waxed sardonic on ‘visions of mercenaries and imperial armies around the world...’

Budget 2010: Make the best of us, not the worst

For me as for many, I suspect, the merchant bankers snagged by TV news cameras supping in Corney & Barrow last night (could have been any C&B, didn't matter) looked altogether too relieved and thirsty and ready for the weekend. Not that I didn’t want the markets to approve the ‘Unavoidable Budget’™, you understand – au contraire. I was just fantasising that the markets' handmaidens might have to feel as sober and filled with foreboding as the rest of us, at least for an evening.
Because I have no imagination I couldn’t foretell any of yesterday’s Budget except for what had been leaked, plus the surety that Nick Clegg would be talking it up weasel-style in front of a camera and his imaginary legion of fans. I almost didn’t want to buy outright the Krugman thesis that we are on the brink of a historic error, austerity in a time of weak demand. And I didn’t fancy going along automatically with Alastair Campbell’s tribal reading of the runes: “...George Osborne puts the fragile recovery at risk with his ideological onslaught on public services, by pretending the economy is worse than it is, and using the quisling Lib Dems as political cover.”

However, it seems clear today that the poorest areas and people in this country have been disproportionately hit by Osborne’s cleaver. As Tory minister Bob Neill put it with such candour a few weeks back, "those in greatest need ultimately bear the burden of paying off the debt." (Eh?) Anthony Painter gave a strong response today: “any group that disproportionately relies on benefits will be marginalised, plunged into poverty, and facing despair. This is not the way it’s meant to be. Not in a decent, relatively wealthy society. The basic post-war compact on support and advancement for all in exchange for doing the responsible thing was broken yesterday. Not only lone parents, but also those who are poor, mentally impaired or incapacitated, the disabled, certain minority groups, and anyone relying on benefits to get by.”

Now, to say quickly - I do appreciate the rebuttal that to live 'disproportionately' on benefit is not right for any capable and able-bodied person, and in those cases should not be encouraged/tolerated. I agree that the public sector contains waste (and by that I include the NHS) and that Labour was going to have to cut big too. I’m not in fear of 'Bankrupt Britain' but I can feel the horror in the concept of interest on national debt exceeding the economy’s growth rate. I just haven’t ever trusted the Conservatives to do the harrowing – they’ve never been notably skilful at it. But I agree with Hopi Sen that it’s not a case of 'whether' but of ‘whose public sector pensions and pay should be cut.’ (Even John Redwood seemed to show some appreciation of the case for exemption of the low-paid public servant on Newsnight last week.)

And still, the thought of 25% less spending by government departments is stomach-churning. Surely paying more tax would be cheaper? This blog favoured the D. Miliband ratio of spending cuts to tax rises (2:1) rather than what looks like the 77-23 split of G. Osborne. That would be what’s properly called ‘a progressive alternative’, if the tax rises were sensibly applied to some of the sorts of ‘middle and high-income earners’ who were feeling so cheery round the bars of Broadgate and Exchange Square last night. But, but… I also acknowledge and defer to what John Rentoul described the other day as: “a strong “tree” bias (“Don’t tax you, don’t tax me, tax that man behind that tree,” as Andrew Dilnot, formerly of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, once surprised me by chanting in a television interview).” And if everyone with taxable earnings between £37K and £150K is to be taxed at 40%, and at 50% above that, then that’s about as much income tax as I would have thought proper or permissible.

I do understand the thinking and appeal of a firm smack from government so as to teach that Britain should ‘live within its means.’ But the other day John Redwood did that quaint Tory thing of comparing the nation’s economy to a domestic household knuckling down to unavoidable frugality: ‘I know it is asking a lot for an outbreak of commonsense by public sector CEOs in councils and quangos. But can they spare us the crocodile tears and the parade of the bleeding stumps? Can they do what any household or company does when faced with a few percent off their income? Just get on and manage it in the least damaging way possible.’ Redwood’s analogies, however, were all drawn Margaret-style from good Grantham housekeeping: (‘You can holiday nearer at home… eat in more than in the local restaurants… draw some money out of the savings account... buy more of the value items at the supermarket, and put more vegetarian dishes into the home menus.’)
I’m sure a great many Britons have come to terms with the end of their excessive consumption based on borrowing, and so would fit Redwood’s model. If you are a company, though, then you just have to fire a proportion of your staff. And if you are someone who never earned enough to have significant savings, or weren’t reared on a middle-class diet, and did all your eating indoors on ‘value items’ anyway… What commonsense homily has John Redwood got to tell you then?

Labour has to offer an alternative, of course. No sitting on the hands. I further agree with Hopi Sen that this alternative ‘needs to be built on creating growth’, ‘we need to create jobs to grow’, and so we ‘need to be talking about measures to support private sector job creation and these can’t be simply extensions of State Aid.’ For sure, with all these benefit cuts we’re looking at a big reserve army of the unemployed. But, really, where will the jobs come from? Can anyone say? They’re hardly going to emerge blithely when people are afraid to spend, businesses afraid to invest, and our imagined export markets are outbidding each other in the austerity stakes, Germany 'leading by example' etc.

Over to you then, D. Miliband...

Labour's Newsnight hustings, and a clear choice

Wanting to assess the performances of the Labour leader candidates on Tuesday’s Newsnight, I had to struggle to see past the truly wearisome MC-ing of Jeremy Paxman, who managed to be snide, peremptory, and unclear – who also, in the chief scripted bit of ‘humour’, thought it witty to characterise Diane Abbott as some sort of high school cheerleader. Eh bien, nice work if you can get it.
Still, moving on. It seems the main thing people say for Ed Balls is that he would be a 'combative performer' at the despatch box. Cameron will be dreaming of such combat, with a man who has the tense, breathless quality of bluster, and is now completing the feat of talking out of both sides of his mouth.
I confess the apparent popularity of Ed Miliband For Leader has so far been a mystery to me and, having had my head sunk in my hands through most of his contributions last night, I only hope it ends up proving a mystery to 'EM' too.
Andy Burnham did better, got in some sharp points with seeming conviction. A caveat for Andy, though: I’m a proud northerner too, and I (and, I believe, others) wouldn’t vote for you solely or even partially on those grounds. Pack it in, eh?
On the subject of Diane Abbott, nothing occurs to me, other than in respect of her curious attribution of the ‘seeming’ public concern over immigration to an actual concern over housing and jobs – as if immigration were not an actual factor in the actual pools of the latter resources. I guess Diane must feel the working class of England continue to labour under false consciousness.
So, to Diane’s champion, and my pick, David Miliband. He said many impressive things and said them impressively, on the need for economic growth, for hard choices in foreign policy, for keeping a cool head on civil liberties and about the size and role of the state. We glimpsed a touch of prideful stiffness in this seemingly irreducible need to don the mantle of Anthony Crosland, but it’s quite forgivable, especially when Paxman (who attended Cambridge and whose own public service amounts to 30-odd years of sneering at elected politicians from a padded BBC chair) leapt in to thumbnail Crosland as some sort of sad ‘intellectual’ loser. Again, nice work, Jeremy. Rave on, our David.

David Miliband: Not what you'd call an operator

Good grief… The ill tidings came by Twitter this afternoon: “Good news re Dianne. Thanks to my supporters who helped put her on ballot. Important day for debate and diversity in party.”

This blog wants David Miliband to win the Labour leadership contest, and hopes DM wants DM to win it too, because one could be forgiven for doubting as much, given his weird keenness to force an additional opponent onto the ballot paper.

DM’s nominating of Diane Abbott and urging of some of his own followers to do likewise seems to me a weirdly unimpressive stroke. If DM really believed Abbott had a deserved claim to lead the Party then I expect many supporters of his might reconsider their view of his own worthiness for the job. If DM believes Abbott will hive off first-preference votes from his brother and from Ed Balls, and/or that Abbott’s fan club will suddenly look on him favourably as a second choice then I wish him all the best with that manoeuvre, but find it somehow off-putting. And if DM believes that a female and/or non-white candidate is essential in any contest of this sort then I reckon he’s listening to the wrong sort of sanctimony, i.e. that of Labour NEC chair Ann Black (“If the choice is between three or four white male ex-ministers in their 40s, however able, it will be seen as lacking the full range of diversity which Labour seeks to reflect.”)
One wants Labour’s genuine diversity to be apparent, sure, but a leadership contest is not meant to be proportionally representative - leadership skills aren't distributed that way, and leaders aren't people who need a leg-up or a fix to get on the playing field. Your Party leader must emerge as someone who could impress the country at large as a potential Prime Minister, whether the job started tomorrow or in 2015. But then my troops may be overcommitted on this score, so to speak, as someone who admired David Miliband’s performance as Foreign Secretary, and who didn’t vote for Diane Abbot back in 1997 when she was my local MP. (She didn't seem to me the most socialistic candidate, only the most otiose.)

The fact that the Tories are loving this nonsense doesn’t stop them from making worthwhile points, the Spectator’s James Forsyth noting that Abbott ‘will spend the contest making jokes at the expense of the four white male Oxbridge special advisers turned politicians she is running against.’ That would be fine if we could trust that a commensurate number of gags will be had at Abbott’s expense – her career has been risible in some notable ways – and yet somehow I doubt any of them will have the nerve, stifled both by the rules of the game that allowed Abbott in and the fear of being seen to beat up on the media-friendly underdog.
Still, any ‘I Agree with Diane’ tendencies will, I hope, be resisted. For one thing, you will never be sure if Diane Abbott means what she says: the evidence to date is not good, but one also hopes that conclusive proof need never be furnished. For the meantime, though, I second Hopi Sen’s query about whether or not ‘ the chance to look noble on Twitter was really worth it.’

Vote Labour, all ye penitent sinners...

Gordon Brown’s determination to behave as though he were a character invented by Dostoyevsky – rather than forged at the foot of a stern Scots kirk, the personal back-story Brown prefers – is the big news again. Yesterday’s carnival of reaction had me thinking back to the moment 20-odd years ago when I discovered Dostoyevsky as my ‘favourite writer’, a status he’s more or less retained. One of the scholars whose writings were helpful to my discovery of his work was Professor John Jones of Oxford, who also introduced me to Kafka’s defence of the typical Dostoyevsky hero as a man not utterly deranged but merely ‘incidentally mad’ – in the same manner as the rest of us. Jones was certainly with Kafka on this point, arguing that we all mutter to ourselves when we think we’re alone, cursing under our breath, ‘F**k me!’ or ‘I’ve got him!’ or suchlike. ‘We all do it!’, Jones insisted.
Well, ‘I’ve got him!’ would certainly sum up the current, gleeful view of the Tory commentariat in respect of Gordon Brown, following his inadvertently 'on-mic' dismissal of the woman he met in Rochdale. It’s schadenfreude, of course, but, even if we do indeed ‘all do it’, it’s fair to say that only three of us are currently running for the office of Prime Minister. We are back in ‘psychologically flawed’ land again.
This PM is an unlucky general, for sure. But we do make our own luck in life to a large extent, and Gordon Brown has been stumbling through a veritable thicket of bad karma for years now. His apology was pulpit language – ‘a penitent sinner’, indeed – but the forced grin on his face as he pronounced himself ‘mortified’ was indeed worthy of one of Dostoevsky’s internally divided anti-heroes. Or, to summon another literary spirit – ‘I went on sinning every hour, and all the while most strenuously warring against sin...’ Thus Robert Wringhim, he of James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), the classic text of Gothic Scottish Calvinism.
All I would say to Brown’s happy detractors is: beware that karmic redress, for it is certainly coming down the pipe at us all. We all say hard words when we think no-one’s listening - sometimes even for the amusement of other ears, if we're sure the company is entirely congenial. Had I the misfortune (say, on election night…) to step into some room populated wholly by the Tory commentariat – say, the likes of Benedict Brogan, Fraser Nelson, the guy who calls himself Guido Fawkes, etc, etc – I do suspect the air in the room could probably be condensed down into a draught fit to turn the noble Dr Jekyll into the gloating Mr Hyde.
In any event, this blog is voting Labour on May 6. It will be a ‘lost vote’ in my case, as Hornsey and Wood Green – captured by the Lib Dems in 2005 in a wave of protest against the ousting of Saddam – is not looking remotely likely to change its mind this time. (This likelihood, though, has not converted me to electoral reform…)
I can’t say I’m hungry for 5 more years of Gordon Brown in Number 10: I have for some time wanted Alan Johnson or David Miliband in that job. I do, however - and for my sins - prefer Mr Brown to the other contenders. More pointedly, in the short-term, I want Alastair Darling to stay Chancellor, Miliband to stay Foreign Secretary, Johnson to stay at the Home Office. Anyone who wants Osborne, Hague and Grayling in those jobs has my very best wishes for a swift recovery. (I couldn’t actually tell you whom the Lib Dems would put up for those positions, but I don’t feel a great loss.)

Helmand/Panther’s Claw: Our Watches, Their Time?

And so Operation Panther's Claw, the five-week mission that cost the lives of ten British soldiers, has ended in Afghanistan, with our forces claiming success. An area 'the size of the Isle of Wight' has been cleared of insurgents ahead of the elections on August 20. The MoD says British troops will remain to secure the area won for three-to-six months. ‘I’m very proud’, Gordon Brown hads said, ‘of what our forces have achieved over the last few weeks – indeed for all the time they've been in Afghanistan.'

The funerals of those servicemen killed in Helmand have been a sombre fixture of our news so far this summer. There was something uncommonly grave in the coverage of the interring of Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Thorneloe: the most senior British officer to die in action since the fighting on Goose Green during the Falklands War. That gravity was embodied in the deeply dignified bearing of the widow, Sally Thornloe (pictured above in Shaun Curry’s striking photograph), required to manage that unanswerable sorrow of which I suppose the greatest empathetic version we have is Andromache’s lament for Hector in The Iliad (‘… for you did not die in bed, and stretch your arms to me, nor tell me some last intimate word…’)

Currently we are having a passionate national debate about the worth of a soldier’s ultimate sacrifice in respect of ‘our mission in Afghanistan’: a phrase that came to made to sound either dutiful or scornful depending on from whose lips it issues – for instance, those who don’t want to see the recrudescence of a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, breeding and exporting global jihad in concert with a nuclear/jihadist Pakistan; or, alternatively, those who say that Afghanistan is merely a notorious graveyard of imperial hubris, now occupied merely for the sake of America’s longterm strategic interests in the region. (Whatever side one favours, it's possible to believe that the craggy ungovernable vastness of Afghanistan will devour more lives and efforts than are truly worthwhile - or as one Taliban commander supposedly said, 'They may have the watches, but we have the time.') Personally, I can see the case for both arguments, but if one has to state a preference (and one does) then I’m in the former camp, supportive of 'the mission', as dangerously stretched and implausible as it can often seem.

Last week Paddy Ashdown defined that 'mission’ as one that has migrated from ‘the limited military aim of driving out al-Qa’ida’ into ‘another full-scale attempt, in a far-away country, to create a state of which we in the West can feel proud.’ This analysis is echoed whenever General Stanley McChrystal, head of the NATO force, speaks of 'fighting for the population.' Today David Miliband has tried to confirm that sense of a worthy endeavour: 'In Helmand, we are working to help build schools, provide clean water and electricity, surface roads and support agriculture...'

In this context the grisly fight in Helmand was part of a clear military strategy known as ‘Clear, Hold and Build’: that is, to take ground into which constructors and committed democrats can move and start to work peacefully. Today that clearing of Helmand is supposedly done, ground taken from the Taliban in the area between the economic hub of Gereshk and the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah. This was an intense fight with, inevitably, a high risk of casualties. Alan Mallinson described it as ‘very like the ‘break-in’ phase of any offensive battle in conventional war.’ And so British soldiers were killed, at a rate that I suppose would be commensurate with losses sustained during the Falklands campaign.

But people of conservative instincts contend that in the Falklands there were material British interests at stake, it wasn't in the name of ‘good projects’ or ‘nation building’ or humanitarian windiness. Moreover, in both liberal and conservative media alike you can now read the charge that our forces in Afghanistan are lions led by donkeys, armed for the task by a lying miserly government.

As far as I can see, what really matters right now is what the Army thinks: lose the morale of the troops and you’ve lost the war. The British Army seems to be holding its course, though its commanders would - to say only the least - like more helicopters. Clearly helicopters allow faster action or response, they aid force protection, assist supply lines, evacuate casualties quicker. Our options would be enlarged if we had more. And yet Paddy Ashdown (one of the few politicians the general public respect on military matters) believes the real issue is ‘having enough ‘boots on the ground’ to do the job.’ Allan Mallinson agrees, citing ‘a bluff saying in conventional warfare: the more you use, the less you lose.’

It's hard, though, to be sanguine about such 'losses.' And clearly a significant swathe of the British public are fed up with it and want us either to do the job by remote control or get Our Boys out of it altogether. Of the former party, those who simply call for more choppers must surely be aware that helicopters too can be shot down in spectacular and deadly fashion by forms of ordnance available even to cave-dwelling mujaheddin. Some people believe our mission can be accomplished better by safe removal of ground troops and occasional bursts of heavy ordnance, laser-guided aerial bombing. If they seriously believe that, they must be ready for the accidents: the collateral-damage annihilation of wedding parties.

Those who want us to wash our hands of The Mission altogether are never going to be convinced by the argument that we are doing Good Works out there, and so the Government has a tough case to make. Miliband is clearly trying his best when he says, ‘We are not fighting in Afghanistan because girls were not allowed to go to school, but helping them do so will lead to a better future for Afghans.’ Paddy Ashdown too stressed the element of self-help: 'The key principle through all this should be not to seek to do things 'for' Afghanistan, but to increase Afghan capacity, especially at the local level, to do things for themselves.' As such it's no surprise that the UK is subtly and carefully shifting the focus to whether or not the Afghan Army has the will and calibre and capacity to do the 'holding' stuff, and whether Afghan people and their politicians will 'build'. (One notes the care with which the text of Miliband’s speech has been entitled, ‘How to help Afghans defeat the insurgency.’)

The hope is that the main way Afghans will be helped is by legitimate local politics. It’s hard to be dewy-eyed about Afghan democracy when the main choice on offer is the compromised and placeman-packed Karzai government. And one can’t shoot one’s mouth about a renaissance of women’s rights when the young female Afghan politician Malalai Joya makes clear she thinks things are no better in that respect. Joya wants the West to clear off, and her voice clearly rhymes with the message of any Stop The War platform: ‘The Afghan people want peace, and history teaches that we always reject occupation and foreign domination.’

Well and good, but I just can't see that there's any prelapsarian choice available here. Our fortunes are all tied together now: we are the world. When it comes to the rights and wrongs of one’s country at war I try not to mouth off too confidently from the comfort of my swivel-chair when it’s not my backside that’s getting shot at. But I'm on the side of 'good projects' and against the Taliban. And as Christopher Hitchens puts it, ‘Might we not be able to shape events in Afghanistan nearer to our heart's desire without making ourselves responsible for the running of the whole nation and society?’

David Miliband, Man of a Thousand Faces

Out of all the thousands of photos snapped during big moments at events such as political party conferences... well, I can't say I understand why some images are more widely disseminated than others, and a select fewer picked out from within that first selection for widespread reproduction in media outlets...
But I think I can say with some certainty that a lot of people who are involved in such selections for the purpose of illustrating this year's Labour Party conference are people who don't like David Miliband very much - or indeed wish him plenty harm. Because everywhere I look on the web tonight there are people reporting Miliband's conference speech alongside photos of him looking like Goofy.
Meanwhile the BBC are very pleased with themselves because they can report that Miliband was indiscreet within their earshot while chatting to an aide after his speech: ‘I couldn't have gone any further. It would have been a Heseltine moment.’ We'll have to see about that - the wisdom of avoiding 'Heseltine moments', that is, as opposed to the wisdom of teasing/charming a frankly less-than-adoring half-full conference hall. None of this is terribly convincing for Labour supporters of any stripe. The proper measure of it will come when the Tories meet in Birmingham next week. I'll see you there.

Saw the BBC News today, oh boy...

On BBC2's Newsnight earlier Kirsty Wark succeeded in giving George Bush’s edgy press secretary Dana Perino a much stiffer and ruder talking-to than she handed out to the seasoned (male) charge d’affaire of the Russian Embassy in London. Manners and predispositions, I guess... As part of the same lead item Newsnight gobsmackingly gave airspace to some young Russian twerp of a journalist, in a shiny jacket and shinier t-shirt, who tried to sound a lot bigger than he looks in dismissing the views of the British government as Washington’s poodle, etc, yawn.
Miliband did well today. The Telegraph reports his saying that "the sight of Russian tanks in a neighbouring country on the 40th anniversary of the crushing of the Prague Spring has shown that the temptations of power politics remain." But check out the Telegraph readers’ posted comments (scroll down) if you want to get yourself massively dispirited: thin streaks of would-be testicular contempt for Miliband and ‘Bliar’-‘Nu’ Labour/pseudo-sophisticated hatred for the faltering US imperium/veiled admiration for far-flung Russian ‘toughness’.
Cameron has applauded Miliband for going to the Ukraine but tried to up the ante in talking to BBC News: "I think the only language a bully understands is when somebody stands up and says, 'Look, what you've done is wrong...' Prime ministerial, do you think? Sky News further report him as saying “Having Russia as member of the G8 at a time when her troops are still on the sovereign soil of another country I think is inappropriate.”
The 10 O’Clock BBC News decided to follow David Davis and 'shadow immigration minister' Damian Green in giving Neighbourhood Wardens a hard time, soberly repeating the Tory allegations of ‘cheap policing’, with a slight implication of the advancing horrors of the so-called surveillance state. The focus seemed entirely upon the punitive potential of wardens, not on their value to those local people who might know them as individuals, trust them and welcome them. Personally I have observed these Wardens to be of plenty good use to the deprived wards of Scotswood and Benwell in West Newcastle. (One Stewart Carse from Co Durham was the Warden the BBC hit upon to make his case in less than ten seconds.) Online I see the BBC reporting Damian Green to the effect that ‘the government should be freeing up regular police to tackle serious crime.’ Okay then, if you’re running on a law and order auction, you Tories, I look forward to your bids.

Having cast doubt on the government’s concern for our ailing urban 'communities', the 10 O’Clock News then offered some plaintive noises about people who invested in buy-to-rent barely-built second properties in Spain – now suffering from the catastrophe in the building trade which has followed the credit crunch as night follows day. For sure, I hope these punters get out of the hole they dug for themselves, just for their own sakes, but honestly, how many of us – in turning on the nightly national/world news at a time of geopolitical turmoil, only to hear about such essentially private misfortune – could give an effing toss?

David Miliband: Invitation to a Beheading?

The Times reports, "Mr Brown may garner some encouragement from a YouGov poll in today’s Daily Telegraph, which records that Labour support would decrease from 25 per cent under Mr Brown to 24 per cent under Mr Miliband. With Tony Blair back as leader, Labour would leap to 32 per cent against the Tories at 41 per cent. Mr Brown faces an acute dilemma about what to do with Mr Miliband in the reshuffle... [A] senior figure added, however, that the “nuclear option” of dismissing Mr Miliband had not been discounted."

None of these stats or mutterings make warm and fuzzy reading for Mr Miliband, though Mr Blair might feel a rush of the old self-sustaining pride in his blood. As for Mr Brown, it would be a risible thing to see if he now did to Miliband what Blair as PM always lacked the ruthlessness to inflict upon his grousing Chancellor.