Road to Nowhere


I'm sure that Ed Miliband believes in equal pay as a philosophical concept, as a good thing which in theory at least would make the world a fairer and happier, better place.

But the problem is that the Labour leader has no idea how to achieve something as worthy as equal pay because the truth is that he fails to understand how the real world operates.

How else to explain what has been going in Labour-run councils such as North and South Lanarkshire where a ferocious battle for equal pay has been fought for years in the teeth of opposition from local Labour politicians.

Labour-run councils have also failed to act in an open and transparent manner, turning the principle of Freedom of Information (FoI) on its head by refusing to release important details about their local pay arrangements - including the huge pay differences between male and female dominated jobs.

In the case of South Lanarkshire Council this information was only published after a long battle which went all the way to the UK Supreme Court where five judges agreed, unanimously, that I was entitled (and therefore the public was entitled) to know what traditional male jobs were paid.

Meanwhile the Labour supporting trade unions look on from the sidelines very often, fearful of criticising Labour-run councils because far to many of the key players, on both sides, belong to the same political party which many people, including me, believe has lost its way.

So when I read this opinion piece by Philip Collins in The Times I thought to myself, "He's right, you know", but more than that Labour deserves to lose because the Party has betrayed important values it once stood for and instead of being an 'open goal' equal pay has become a mess of Labour's own devising.       


Labour’s had all the luck, but it’s going to lose

By Philip Collins - The Times

The excuses are coming out, but the brutal fact is that Ed Miliband has not convinced voters that his party is electable

Starting his speech yesterday with the erratic German philologist Friedrich Nietzsche, Ed Miliband remarked that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”. The line comes from Twilight of the Idols, an elusive book whose sub-title How to Philosophise with a Hammer tells us more about Mr Miliband’s predicament than the untrue fortune-cookie maxim he cited.

The plotting against Mr Miliband has not killed him but has certainly made him weaker. Mr Miliband rates lower than any leader on record, lower even than Michael Foot, the usual byword for hopeless. Only 13 per cent of the nation think he should be prime minister. As for the Labour party itself, at 29 per cent in the polls, it is right back to where it was in 2010. Labour has taken the scenic route to nowhere.

And it has indeed been a scenic route. Mr Miliband has many faults but being empty is not among them. Yesterday in London University’s Senate House, the building that Orwell had in mind when he created the Ministry of Truth, the Labour leader gave a speech with a clear governing idea. Mr Miliband believes that Britain is “a deeply unequal, deeply unfair, deeply unjust country”. He believes the privileged hoard all the opportunities to the cost of the rest. In his speeches he has a nightmare, like Nietzsche’s in Twilight of the Idols, of a society collapsing under the weight of its own decadence.

He also has specific plans to arrest the decline. Labour, in fact, offers a prospectus of some ambition, which imagines a refashioned capitalism that works, as Mr Miliband puts it in his Sly and the Family Stone way, for “everyday people”. It is rubbish to say that Mr Miliband needs to be clearer or bolder. He has a fair claim to being the clearest, boldest leader of the opposition there has been. The problem is not that Mr Miliband has no philosophy. It is that he sounds to the public like he is philosophising with a hammer.

A year ago Labour enjoyed a healthy poll lead. Now it does not. Every time the public looks up and thinks briefly about the Labour party, its support falls all the way to a Tory lead. Slowly, a truth is crystallising, a truth the Labour party is always slow to learn. Mr Miliband’s speech at the Ministry of Truth contained nothing for anyone on middle income or above and there is no majority to be assembled in this country for a campaign aimed only at the bottom third of the income scale. That may be a regrettable fact but it is a fact all the same. The plan to win a left-wing mandate on core support is cracking under pressure from the SNP in Scotland and Ukip in England.

It is crucial to register this point because, in the absence of a postman to deliver victory, the fight to define election defeat is starting already. The phantom culprit is that hydra-headed monster “the media”. The classic case in Labour’s media demonology is 1992, the truth of which is that it was Neil Kinnock what lost it rather than the tabloids what won it. Any Labour supporter tempted by this too-easy excuse should recall the last time a coalition government ended. It was an era in which newspapers were the main tribune of news. The Daily Express and the Daily Mail between them had a daily circulation of five million. Their red-scare coverage of the Labour leader was trivial and unedifying, relentless and unfair. It made no difference. The year was 1945 and Attlee spoke for Britain in a way that even Churchill did not.

The next definition of defeat is the claim that plotting against the leader is the cause of his unpopularity rather than its consequence. The Labour party is, in truth, in the throes of buyer’s remorse. A substantial minority of Labour MPs who voted for Ed as their leader now regret doing so. The impressive unity that the Labour party has maintained since 2010 has ruptured but it is not the Blairites who are the agitators. It is often said that the main item in the credit ledger of Mr Miliband’s leadership is that he avoided recriminations after a crushing defeat in 2010. In truth, the credit for that discipline is owed to the essential decency of those MPs and party members who voted for David but have given Ed a fair chance. It is by no means obvious that the same courtesies would have been observed by the formerly Brown side of the party if the elder Miliband had won.

This is the litany of excuses that is being offered up early. They are all distractions, all excuses of varying degrees of plausibility. The truth is that this is an election that Labour ought to win but will not win. In Tony Blair’s last conference speech there was a line about the Tory party that was planted as a deliberate hostage to fortune: “If we can’t take this lot apart in the next few years we shouldn’t be in the business of politics at all.” Mr Miliband echoed that line yesterday when he said: “Friends, I say we can take this lot apart and it is time we did.”

Labour faces a coalition that has had to make unpopular cuts to services led by a prime minister whose recent political judgments, notably on immigration and the EU, have alerted even his friends to something that has been forever apparent to his foes — he is not very good at politics. The best testament to that is Mr Cameron’s loss of constituency boundary reform, which means that the bias towards Labour in the electoral system has yet to be corrected. Support for the Liberal Democrats collapsed on their entry into the coalition and much of that came to Labour, unsolicited. Ukip has fractured the political right and induced panic in the Tory party, which it hopes to deprive of victory.

It is hard to imagine a more perfect storm of good fortune for the Labour party and for Mr Miliband. No, if they cannot win with the help of that lot, then they really should not be in the business of politics at all. Labour is about to throw away a winnable election because its leader cannot fathom that he needs to convince us he will take care of our money and because he is convinced, whereas nobody else is, that the crash of 2008 created a market for his bromides about equality. This is not a mess that has been visited on Labour from the outside. This is a mess of its own devising.

Nietzsche’s German title was Götzen-Dämmerung, an allusion to Wagner. Rossini said that Wagner had some great moments but some awful quarter hours. His speech yesterday was one of Mr Miliband’s better moments but his leadership will be measured by some awful quarter hours. The twilight of his false gods is close upon him. Six months to go before Labour pays the price for spending a term trying to philosophise with a hammer.

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