Gesture politics, platitudes & a leadership election‏

Rarely has there been a more self indulgent internal political process than the extended leadership election taking place within the Labour Party. The PLP nomination process started on 24 May and the result will not be announced until 25 September.


The protracted election timeline has coincided with:

· Chancellor George Osborne unveiling £6.25bn of immediate spending cuts

· The Queen's Speech 2010 in which the Coalition Government launched 22 legislative Bills including school, welfare and budget reforms

· The newly established Office for Budget Responsibility’s first pre-Budget forecast

· The appointment of former Labour Minister John Hutton as chair of an independent commission on public service pensions – Prime Minster Cameron is on the record admitting that the pensions of existing public sector workers will be cut with employees expected to pay more and get less on retirement than they expected

· The June 22 Emergency Budget – of which the Institute for Fiscal Studies has said working families on the lowest incomes particularly those with children were the biggest losers

· The leaking of Treasury data that George Osborne's austerity budget will result in the loss of up to 1.3m jobs across the economy over the next five years – of which 600 000 will be in the public sector

· Education Minister Michael Gove’s botched axing of Building Schools for the Future

· NHS management pressing ahead with plans to implement NHS white paper

· The announcement that NHS Direct is to be scrapped

As the leadership ballot finally gets underway the merits of the career politician candidates are belatedly receiving media attention. Seumas Milne argued in the Guardian on Thursday that, of the front runners, Ed Miliband offers more progressive potential as ‘he has at least begun to absorb the lessons of New Labour's failure and rejected its triangulation, social authoritarianism, embrace of flexible labour markets and support for tuition fees’:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/25/labour-leadership-ed-miliband-david-miliband

It is understandable that UNISON along with Unite and GMB see him as preferable to his Blairite sibling, although a Morning Star reader yesterday offered a timely reality check on Ed Miliband’s democratic credentials reminding us that he ‘voted for ID cards, for the 42-day counter-terrorism clause, against an inquiry on Iraq and for stricter asylum laws. He also wanted greater EU integration and for Trident to be replaced’‘:
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/news/content/view/full/94544

In terms of union political strategic thinking it hard to take seriously this weekend’s headline grabbing comments in a Daily Telegraph interview by GMB General Secretary Paul Kenny. In response to a question about the withdrawal of union funding if Ed Miliband lost the election he said that "if the new leader offers us more of the same, many unions — including our own — would have to consider where we are at. Ed Balls and David Miliband represent where we’ve been. They are not without talent. I would not rubbish them. But if the direction of the party went off chasing some right-of-centre ground…’:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/labour/7969112/Union-threatens-to-withdraw-funding-over-Labour-leadership-battle.html?

In the same Telegraph report Ed Miliband sets out his political prospectus: "Traditional New Labour solutions won't work, and that is why I am the modernising candidate in this election. New Labour fell into the same trap as Old Labour, clinging to old truths that had served their time. We got stuck with old certainties, bad policies and became out of touch. The New Labour modernisers became the New Labour traditionalists – and that's why we need to modernise again."

It would be interesting to hear from Paul Kenny why these meaningless platitudes are so indispensable to justify breaking the Union Labour link?

Putting aside the relative merits of the leadership candidates, it is ironic that GMB of all unions has been quickest off the mark to oppose electoral reform in next May’s Alternative Vote system (AV) referendum and defend first past the post which favours established parties (FPTP):
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/gmb-joins-tory-right-in-campaign-against-vote-reform-2040853.html

Any serious strategy for union political influence beyond Labour (and social progress for that matter) must embrace electoral reform.