It’s no secret that things haven’t been great for the trade union movement in recent years, but sometimes it’s easy to forget quite how bad things are until you realise that so many apparently intelligent people in public life don’t even have the faintest idea of what they are or how they function. This was illustrated pretty well by the recent uproar over Len McCluskey’s Guardian interview last week when he dared to suggest that strike action during the Olympics might be justified.

Take Nick Clegg’s reaction, for example:

‘I just think people will be gobsmacked, appalled, that someone thinks that at a time when we are finally hosting one of the greatest events in the world, he is calling for civil disobedience,’ Mr Clegg said.

‘I know he is the sort of paymaster of the Labour party but I hope Ed Miliband will rein him in.’

Or, responding to Clegg’s comments, David Mitchell in yesterday’s Observer:

The problem here, I said on [10 O’Clock Live], is that Unite is Labour’s biggest donor, so it’s like Rudolph trying to rein in Santa.

Nevertheless he tried, condemning McCluskey’s remarks just like the government had told him to. But Cameron scented blood and called for Labour to “start turning back the money” that Unite provides. Obviously that can’t happen – Labour utterly relies on it. But the request reminds everyone of the party’s financially compromised position in relation to trade unions (something the political right somehow manages to portray as more embarrassing than their own reliance on business interests and expat plutocrats).

To David Mitchell’s credit, he does at least acknowledge that Labour’s financial support from the trade unions isn’t morally equivalent to that of the Conservatives’ reliance on the financiers and businesspeople who bankroll them. (Unlike Clegg and the Lib Dems, who tend to be only too happy to present themselves as the only party not beholden to ‘vested interests’, quietly overlooking the fact that their own biggest donor is a convicted fraudster.)

Even Mitchell, though, takes for granted that the fact that Labour relies on trade unions for funds means that the party is “financially compromised”, which is a flagrant non-sequitur. Do trade unions exert influence on the Labour party because of the funding they provide? To some extent, although when you consider things like Ed Miliband’s refusal to support the November 30 strikes you have to wonder whether they’re getting much for their money. But is having a say in how a political party is run because you’ve donated money to it necessarily illegitimate? Do Clegg, Mitchell and their ilk also think that individual party members who pay a subscription fee to join the party should also be excluded from deciding on what the party does? The whole point of joining a political party is that by doing so you play a democratic part in deciding what it does. Parties aren’t companies, their policies aren’t products being sold in a marketplace, and their members shouldn’t be treated like customers. Democracy is not consumerism.

But perhaps this is a caricature of Clegg and Mitchell’s position, and that what they really mean is not that people having influence on a party is a problem per se, only that trade unions have a disproportionate influence on the Labour party. That sounds more reasonable on the face of it, but still doesn’t actually make any sense when you unpack it. The decision about whether to donate money to Labour isn’t made by trade union leaders alone, but by every member of the union when they join – you as an individual have to decide if you want a portion of your subscription fee to go to the Labour party, so union bosses wield a lot less power in the whole process than is commonly portrayed.

Even if it was true that union leaders had total control over whether and how much money to give to Labour, however, it’s still wrong to equate this with contributions of comparable value from individual donors. As Unite General Secretary, Len McCluskey is the elected representative of more than a million workers who are members of his union. As such he’s accountable to and has a democratic mandate to act on behalf of those members, including donating money to political parties in a manner in which he and the rest of the union executive judge to be likely to be of benefit to them. And if those members don’t like what he’s doing with their money, they can vote him out. I’m not claiming that democratic processes in unions are anywhere near perfect or totally representative, but there’s clearly a massive difference between the elected representative of a million people giving a million pounds of their money to a political party and one rich person donating the same amount. Trade unions, for all their flaws, are probably the most democratic organisations in British civil society. The idea that they somehow impede or distort democracy simply by playing a role in the political process is ludicrous.

Cross-posted from Left Outside

I don’t think Labour really know that the game has changed. We will have an election in 2015 and there is very little chance of one before that. The move to fixed term parliaments means that Ed Miliband et al find themselves in a totally different position to someone like Cameron circa 2005 or Blair in 1994.

In 2005 Cameron suspected the next election wouldn’t be for five years – and he turned out to be right. But he nearly had to fight an election in 2007 against a newly inaugurated Brown. This is something he had to expect and prepare for from the day he was elected Tory Leader, because we all knew some sort of hand over from Blair to Brown was imminent and that this may have been followed by an election.

This meant that Cameron spent a lot time and effort trying to appear electable, trying to appear “in-touch” by visiting the arctic, liberal by hugging hoodies and as a better heir to Blair than Brown could ever be. All this was essential when Labour could have called an ambush election at any point.

Tean Miliband seems to be employing a similar tactic. Liam Byrne is fighting to appear tough on benefits claimants, Ed Balls is trying to sound more fiscally conservative, even Diane Abbott is doing her best to swiftly cover up her gaffes. The commetariat are also playing along, they want to know if he is too ugly to be prime minister etc. Cameron moved left while Ed is moving right.

All of this is stupid. As Sunny has been documenting, not only is nuance from Labour Wonks confusing the public, those who aren’t confused couldn’t care less anyway. I have a better plan for Ed, to be in operation for the next three years or so, or at least until a year before the election date. Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition should officially and unequivocally object, to everything, even good ideas, loudly and often.

First of all, this is essential to good governance. A noisy opposition ensures that a Government has to advance the strongest arguments for its policies and ensure the sharpest execution for fear of being lambasted. If all Tory mistakes are leapt on with gay abandon then the Tories will make sure they screw up less. Remember the incorrect list of schools Gove released last year? That is what happens when people are not terrified of screwing up.

Even where this policy would be a trap it is good policy. For example, Miliband will gain almost no votes by opposing capping benefits at £26,000, but he won’t lose any votes either because, and this is important, nobody is voting until 2015.

Any damage supporting bad policies or opposing bad policy while in opposition can be shrugged off because the opposition won’t have done anything because they can’t. Wrong calls can be disowned and vote winning stances embraced as manifesto fodder. A manifesto which won’t need to be published until 2015 because, I repeat, that is when the next election will be. Plus, by being the voice of opposition Labour would be able to build an activist base which will be important in getting out the vote and campaigning come election time.

By playing the old game, where an opposition has to be constantly on the alert for an election Labour are strengthening the Tories, and doing damage to people’s lives. They need to shape up and realise the rules have changed.

Fancy living on 62p a day? Thousands of families are going to have to do exactly that if the government’s Welfare Reform Bill becomes law, and the benefit cap comes in. Never mind the 100,000 children who’ll fall below the poverty line, or the projected 20,000 people who’ll be made homeless by it. Never mind that the spiralling cost of welfare has practically nothing to do with the behaviour of those on benefits and everything to do with the dearth of both private rented and council housing allowing profiteering private landlords to make their fortunes from tenants on Housing Benefit. Never mind that across the country there are between 5 and 6 unemployed people for every job vacancy, so trying to change the “psychology” of people in long-term unemployment (the avowed aim of the Bill) is unlikely to get very far in getting them into work while the economy’s still in the toilet. And never mind that £26,000 for a couple with three or more children (and who were almost certainly able to afford to have that many children until the financial crisis hit and drove the unemployment rate through the ceiling) really isn’t much when you’re living in a high cost area (like, say, the whole of Southeast England), and only seems generous when you disingenuously compare it with the individual – as opposed to household – income of someone in employment and don’t take into account any in-work benefits, as this innumerate moron does here.

No, none of that matters. And no, I’m not being ironic; that’s what the polls are saying. I wish they weren’t, but they are. There really is a lot of popular resentment at benefit recipients getting what they see as overly generous welfare payments. Dave Osler asks why the big three political parties (and Labour in particular, one assumes) aren’t full-bloodedly opposing the Bill and just tinkering around the edges with amendments. Polls like the one I link to above are almost certainly a big part of the answer. Labour’s response (and in particular that of Liam “are there no workhouses?” Byrne) to the Bill has been decidedly lukewarm, but if people don’t tend to take into account things like the varying cost of living in different regions of the country when they’re thinking about how generous a “fair” benefits system should be, then it takes political courage to try and get public opinion onside by talking about the real, deep-seated systemic problems which underlie the current high cost of benefits rather than simply capitulating to it. Mark Ferguson at LabourList makes a good start, but he’s not (yet) holding elected office, so it’s perhaps not so hard for him. Until the Parliamentary Labour Party regains a political backbone and realises that being Conservatives-lite isn’t going to get meaningful political change, proper opposition to bills like this within Parliament will be in short supply.

Paul Kenny is right. The Tories will be rubbing their hands with glee at the current spat between Labour and the unions. But they won’t be doing so simply because Ed Balls’ now-notorious speech to the Fabian Conference is a sign that Labour support the government’s cuts agenda – while neither the speech itself nor Balls’ economic policy more generally are music to the ears of the left (Andy Newman has a good response to it), he didn’t say anything anywhere near as austerity-friendly as he was made out to have done by the papers, a point which Carl makes painstakingly clear.

No, what will be making Conservative Central Office very happy is the prospect of the week’s political news being dominated by Labour and the unions airing their dirty laundry in public, on the back of several previous weeks of rumours and gossip-mongering about Ed Miliband’s leadership. In the short term, that means less public and media attention on our still-screwed economy or the effects of the cuts on the vulnerable. In the longer term, and more seriously, it raises for the Tories the enticing prospect of a divided, weakened opposition.

Labour is currently around £10 million in debt, according to the latest available figures, and of the £3.5 million they received in donations in the third quarter of 2011, over £3.1 million – around 90% – was from trade unions. That figure might be higher than usual for Labour, but it’s pretty clear that the party relies very heavily on the unions for money. ( “Sources” apparently claimed to the Guardian that the real figure was less than 50% – but even if it was, a share of – say – 40% would still be pretty damned essential for a party as cash-strapped as Labour.)

So if Unite or the GMB (the largest and third-largest unions respectively) were to decide to disaffiliate from Labour, as seems possible, then Labour would – without wishing to get too technical – be financially screwed. So they’d be less able to effectively oppose the government (and yes, I’m well aware they could have been doing a hell of a better job anyway, but that’s by the by) and in particular less well-placed to campaign at the next general election, making it more likely that the Tories will win. If Labour takes a more leftwing line which placates the unions (which is most likely Len McCluskey and Paul Kenny are hoping their sabre-rattling will achieve), this will be the cue for the rightwing press to wheel out all the old clichés about Ed Miliband being the unions’ puppet (because adopting policies which please the millions of working people who voted for you and democratically choose to fund your party is tantamount to craven surrender to Bolshevism, naturally.) And if Labour doesn’t adopt a leftier economic policy and the unions still don’t disaffiliate, then we’re left with the status quo, only with the unions looking weaker and Labour having pissed off just a little bit more of their core vote. It’s not a cheerful trilemma.

So today brings news that former Labour Party official Luke Bozier is defecting to the Conservatives. Many people will be asking “Who the hell is Luke Bozier?”. Those who know of him may ask “Why did he defect?”. Meanwhile, those who’ve read his remarks about joining the Tories will be asking “On what planet does Mr Bozier reside?”.

In explaining his decision to swap sides, Luke tells us where labour has gone wrong:

I became a member five years ago, in the final days of Tony Blair’s leadership. Back then, New Labour was still the intellectual heart of the party. A pro-business attitude and a commitment to revolutionising our creaking public services made sense to me…

…Gordon Brown, unsurprisingly, turned out to be a terrible driver of the New Labour wagon. Most of his three years as leader and Prime Minister were spent defending his own position. As a result, we wasted the opportunity to continue Tony’s reforms and we were punished for it at the ballot box.

I mean, wtf? Clearly there is a debate to be had about why labour lost the last election. I may not agree with those people who believe it was all about the deficit but they do at least have a position which makes some sense. The deficit, after all, was a major issue in the last election. Personally I think the collapse of the economic system over which New Labour had presided, with the consequence that 2.5 million people were left without work, might have been a rather large factor at the last poll.

But to suggest that labour’s great electoral liability was its failure to push ahead with public sector reforms? I mean, really? And this from a supposed strategic genius! I can honestly say that I have not met anyone who stopped voting labour because they want, say, more schools with academy status. If anyone else has I would really, truly love to hear from them. I would, to say the least, be very surprised to encounter any activists who found that bringing choice and competition into the public sector was a big issue on the door steps.

On all sides of the party, there is a tendency for people to believe that the policies they support are also the policies that are necessary in order to win elections. Luke however takes this to a bizarre extreme. If this is the extent of his strategic prowess, then I am more than happy to see him teaming up with the Tories.

Shut the door on the way out Luke. And don’t forget to take out the garbage.

To contact Reuben email reuben@thethirdestate.net

Today was my first day in Wapping. Moving there from Green Lanes was something of a culture shock. Gone were the less-than-salubrious kebab shops, the ubiquitous fried chicken places selling sumptuous heart attacks and the 95p store. In their place, riverside bars, Fitness First and a Waitrose. Walking into the supermarket earlier today, I realised the moment I saw the price tags how much I was going to miss Iceland’s delicious £1.50 pizzas. Little did I know how much more of a shock I was about to receive when I approached the newspaper stand to see David Miliband’s apeish mug on the cover of the Independent on Sunday, apparently poised to replace his brother as Labour leader.

My first thought as my eyes rolled into my skull was that we’ve seen it all before and that the last thing Labour needs, if it is to capitalise on the country’s growing anger over cuts and fees and pull in thousands of righteously betrayed Lib Dem voters,  is a return to the vapid infighting of the Blair-Brown years, tearing itself apart over nothing that mattered in any way at all.

I soon realised I was wrong, however. The last thing the Labour Party needs is David Miliband. David Miliband is a vacuous turd shat out by the arse of New Labour as its muscles slackened in death. He offers nothing but a pretty speech, a few well scripted words and a smattering of charisma his brother lacks. Fundamentally, he offers nothing new. Labour needs to reconnect with its ideological roots. It needs to offer a true alternative to the Coalition as it slashes corporate taxes and public services. It needs to forge a distinct identity that could make mainstream party politics interesting to a switched-off electorate rather than chase the centre ground as the Tories drag it rightwards, or the ghost of a dead political movement based on sacrificing ideas for image.

Is Ed the right man for the job? Possibly not. But David is not the answer to Labour’s woes. If he is manouvered ino leadership, then Labour will have learnt nothing from the Blair years. Labour must never again sacrifice ideology for a media-friendly face and action for a little casual charm.

Alan Johnson announced he’s resigning as Shadow Chancellor for family reasons. Reading between the lines, could it be because he knows nothing about economics, frequently clashes with Ed Miliband and is just a little bit shit? Let’s hope Ed picks someone a bit more suited to the role next time, who’ll really go for the coalition’s jugular.

Edit (by Owen, not Salman): Miliband’s picking Ed Balls, which could be good. He was pretty effective at attacking the Coalition’s economic policy when he was standing for leader, and given his support for control orders, it’s an added bonus that he won’t have the Home Office brief any more.

There is mold growing on my bathroom wall. A couple of weeks back I engaged in a spot of serious cleansing and triumphantly declared that it had been been vanquished. Yet when I went downstairs this morning I noticed that, for the umpteenth time, it had reappeared. All of which brings me to the matter matter of Tom Harris, who declared a couple of months back that he was giving up blogging, but who has recently been spotted publishing his arch-Blairite opinions over at Labour uncut.

In a characteristically entertaining piece, Tom instructs Ed Miliband to remember that Labour members “are not normal”. In other words, he should be well prepared to ignore the politics of the membership because, in Toms opinion, it is so far to the left of the general population. The evidence he offers for this is interesting, since he can’t quite decide whether or not one should take heed of opinion polls. Thus he notes that:

A recent YouGov poll of ordinary voters concluded that the three main reasons were Labour’s record on immigration, the damage the recession did to our economic credibility, and the personal unpopularity of your predecessor, Gordon Brown.

However, YouGov asked the same question of Labour party members, and the answers were significantly different. Neither Gordon Brown nor immigration figured prominently in their responses; instead they cited becoming out of touch with ordinary voters and failing to do enough to help its natural working-class supporters

Yet further on in the article he warns Ed:

Don’t become too reliant on polls telling you that the electorate think higher taxes are just a super idea. There’s a huge difference, not only between what people tell pollsters and what they actually believe, but also between what people see as desirable and what will persuade them to switch their votes between parties. Yes, everyone agrees that mega-multi-millionaires have it too easy and don’t pay enough tax. Which is probably true. But would those same voters be willing to change their vote as a result?

In other words, what Ed needs to do is ignore the membership and take notice of opinion polls, unless those polls happen to suggest that New Labour’s love in with the super rich might have been an electoral liability.

Yet what is most illuminating about this article, is not what it says about the general public but what it says about Labour members. Like much of the Labour elite, he appears to see the Labour as more of a supporters club than a party. Those at the top of Labour have long seen party members as canvassing fodder rather than partners in a collaborative political project. Yet Tom makes this explicit like nobody else.

Activists he notes, will come out on a Saturday morning to “shove leaflets through people’s doors”. And “Thank goodness they do” he says.    ”Neither you or I [Ed] would be MPs if it weren’t for our volunteer army of activists; they’re what keeps the party machines – and democracy itself – going. But as a source of reliable strategic political advice, they’re at best a bit hit and miss. And the problem with too many party activists is that they spend far too much time talking about politics – full stop”

To contact Reuben email reuben@thethirdestate.net

So, according to the Honourable Member for Falkirk at Labour Uncut, politicians lie because the electorate lies too, so we shouldn’t be so hard on poor benighted souls like Phil Woolas when they get caught out. It’s not that they’re any worse than anyone else; they’re just under more scrutiny, that’s all – and who among us can honestly say that we  haven’t falsely accused someone we didn’t like of pandering to religious fanatics at some point?

As you can probably guess, I don’t find Eric Joyce’s claim very convincing, since most of his supporting arguments are either unsupported assertion (for example, his claim that people are unwilling to pay as high a rate of tax as they say they are), obviously flawed (if the BMA doesn’t believe poor students will be put off studying medicine by high tuition fees, how exactly is it supposed to benefit by claiming that they will?) or just plain non sequitur (I’m still trying to work out where the obsession with ‘stranger danger’ is meant to fit in to the rest of the argument).

But even if you buy his line that the voting public are just as mendacious as the average politician, going down the road of ‘you’re just as bad as we are’ – as Joyce does with his sarcastic suggestion that everyone who’s ever criticised a politician must be a paragon of moral virtue – doesn’t actually get you off the hook. If anything it does the opposite, since it entails a tacit acknowledgement that you’re actually at fault, which would be why it’s a logical fallacy. Yet denouncing your political opponents as hypocritical seems to be generally accepted as a way to dismiss their arguments out of hand, across the political spectrum. Labour MPs who campaign for higher taxes on the wealthy often get criticised because Labour didn’t do much to raise such taxes when in government, for instance, but this is irrelevant to the question of whether or not higher rates of tax for those earning more would actually be a good idea. Attacking politicians for bringing in tuition fees because their degrees were funded by the taxpayer is another good example. The question is whether higher education now should be free. How higher education was financed several decades ago, when far fewer people went to university and costs were far lower as a result, isn’t particularly relevant to that. One could perfectly consistently believe that state funding for higher education is affordable if 5% of people go to university, but not if 40% do. I don’t agree with that view, but there’s nothing incoherent or hypocritical about it.

Without wishing to sound too much like a contributor to Thought for the Day, I think this is partly down to the rise of moral relativism; for various reasons people are often (though by no means always) reluctant to directly attack the deeply-held beliefs of others, so instead they look for inconsistencies and criticise people for that.

This is a mistake. We’re none of us perfect, and criticising someone else doesn’t mean that we think we are. If no one ever pointed out flaws because they were scared of their own failings being highlighted, nothing would ever improve. People can certainly be slow to recognise their own faults at times, but that doesn’t make it a good idea to stop recognising those of others as well.

“Middle and working class parents stumbled across this ‘tough love’ approach where you put clear boundaries, but within those boundaries you are totally child-centred. You nurture them, love them and journey with them to adulthood.

“But that, for all kinds of reasons, has got fractured. It is a wish for young people to know how to get back to that.” (From the BBC website: http://bbc.in/bRwHEq.)

What to make of this?

Well the first thing to be said is that what we now see rather nostalgically as ‘tough-love’ was very often just ‘tough’. And if a lack of such a parenting style contributes to poor development by school-age, why do the children of middle class liberals do so much better than the children of poor parents?

Let’s take one example. It has been shown that the very vocabulary of young children is affected by class. Children of middle class parents actually know more words than children of working class parents. This dramatically affects the ability to read later. And the differences are disproportional: some of the poorer parts of our country have 40% of children reading below their age. The result should be simple: working class parents must make a strong effort to flood their children with spoken language in every way they can. Yes, and they must do this while working two jobs, or worrying about losing on, trying to find one, worrying about how this month’s bills will be paid, all the while living in modern squalor and totally unsure of their current means of life. These people really must try harder.

‘Hand-outs’, Field has assured us, can’t solve everything: “Money alone will not give people the space, the abilities and knowledge to be the good parents that most want to be.”

No, but the money helps.  His statement that he would rather see child benefits slashed than support for parents scaled back is seriously antiquated: rather than society bringing the working class up to a civilised level (well within our ability) they must attend parenting classes and work their own way out of the situation in which they have been placed.

This would be forgivable if Field wasn’t giving his status as an egalitarian to a government actively concerned with increasing inequality. Cameron will now be able to point to Field whenever he is asked a tough question on the gap between rich and poor. “Don’t look at us, we’ve got Frank Field on the case. And his report concluded that we should bring back caning and Latin…”

Parental failure needs to be discussed in this matter, but to lose sight of the real problem – inequality itself – and aid a pro-inequality government in this manner is far less than should be expected of a social democrat.