The Vision Thing


Dan Hodges concludes in this piece from The Telegraph that the 'vision thing' as far as the Labour Party is concerned has been reduced to support for a bigger state and unreformed public sector - in which trade unions defend sectional, vested interests through politically motivated strikes.

In other words, the more things change the more they stay the same which I agree with I have to say, because all this One Nation business that Ed Miliband goes on about from time to time is clearly just political mumbo jumbo.

Or, put more plainly, a whole load of pretentious, meaningless old bollix.


Strikes and state ownership – is this really Labour’s fresh vision?

By Dan Hodges - The Telegraph
The post-2008 party had radical ideas to devolve power and shake things up, but it’s all gone stale (Photo: PA)

In 2010, I attended a meeting at David Miliband’s house in north London. His leadership campaign was faltering. The former foreign secretary remained the favourite, but was struggling to generate momentum.

In response, he said he would re-address the fundamental issues facing the Labour Party and the country. The 2008 crash represented a political watershed, he believed, on a par with 1945 and 1979. Labour would need radically to reassess where it stood in a changed world. In particular, it would need to deconstruct precisely what it meant to be a party of the Left at a time when the concept of the Big State was no longer economically or philosophically viable. In other words, the sort of political existentialism of which he and his brother are very fond.

When the meeting was over one of his campaign team asked me what I thought. “OK,” I replied, “but is it going to give him the differentiation he needs? Is his analysis really all that different from Ed’s?”

And of course it didn’t, because it wasn’t. In the aftermath of Labour’s defeat a consensus had formed. Everyone recognised that the world had changed. There was, as Liam Byrne had memorably pointed out, “no money left”. Labour needed to find a way of securing meaningful social reform without breaking its back on the rusting levers of government.

In the speech that launched his own leadership bid, Ed Miliband bravely acknowledged this, telling his audience the following awkward home truths: “We need a new way of thinking about the state… The powerlessness of people is as much an injury in our society as lack of income or wealth… We need to show we are the people who can reform the state to make it more accountable and give power away.”

Last week Ed Miliband announced what this giveaway of state power would look like. A future Labour government would renationalise the railways.

Of course, Ed Miliband being Ed Miliband, it wasn’t presented in such black and white terms. Labour would wait for the existing passenger franchises to expire, and then bid for them. How the government competing for its own franchises would represent fair and transparent competition wasn’t clear. And the rail unions and broader Left expressed predictable outrage over franchising continuing at all. But the principle is clear. Ed Miliband wants the state to get back into the business of running rail services.

Let’s set aside the fact that there is no great operational imperative for returning the railways to public ownership. A recent KPMG report found the cost of running the railways is broadly the same now as it was a decade ago. Indeed, government funding per passenger journey is 29 per cent lower than it was in the first full year of privatisation, and lower than in seven out of the last 12 years of the old British Rail.

Precisely where does a renationalised railway fit into Ed Miliband’s brave new post-crash world? Where does the state find the resources to put together a framework to bid for, and then operate, dozens of new rail franchises, when there’s supposedly no money left? And how, on anyone’s definition, does any of this amount to a radical devolution of state power?

This Thursday, the public service unions embark on a “summer of resistance” (in my day they used to go by the more prosaic name of strikes). The catalyst for this summer of discontent isn’t entirely clear. But it seems to include the Michael Gove education reforms, the Andrew Lansley health reforms and anything Iain Duncan Smith has so much as passed comment on.

Obviously, this action doesn’t enjoy the overt support of Ed Miliband or his shadow cabinet. But Miliband has a habit of channelling his inner Thomas More at moments like this, subtly embracing the principle of qui tacet consentire videtur – “he who is silent is taken to agree”. Meanwhile, the slogans of protest emanating from the picket lines will be uncannily similar to those regularly emanating from the Labour front bench at health, education and social security questions.

Again, where is Labour’s great post-2008 vision? Tristram Hunt’s devolutionary zeal appeared to vanish amid the recriminations about Trojan Horse schools. “Gove has gone off the rails,” he recently told The Guardian. “He sees every school as an island. It’s chaos with free schools landing in the middle of nowhere.” As opposed to landing where the state decides they should land.

Andy Burnham has pledged to repeal all major reforms of front-line NHS services, claiming they represent a “fast-track to privatisation”. Rachel Reeves’s vision of welfare reform is nothing more than a series of vacuous homilies about getting people “back into work”.

What happened? Why did a consensus, shared by standard-bearers on both sides of Labour’s ideological divide, fracture?

Ed Miliband’s supporters blame his opponents. Unwilling to accept the young usurper’s victory, the Blairite Right refused to provide him with the political cover to advocate genuinely meaningful reform. One pointed me to the announcement last week of a National Infrastructure Commission. “That’s a Gordon Brown policy. It’s not an Ed Miliband policy,” they said.

The Blairites counter by saying the younger Miliband’s decentralising instincts were ditched when he saw the opportunity of centralising power in his own hands. “Ed reawakened all these old feelings in the party that had laid dormant during the Blair years, and used them to win,” said one. “It’s a problem all of his own making.”

Either analysis could be right. But frankly, it’s irrelevant. All that matters is that any major downsizing of the role of the state is now off Miliband’s agenda. Even the centrepiece of his devolution programme, the removal of £30 billion in funding from Westminster to the regions, is merely an internal money transfer between tiers of government. A shift of power from politicians wearing £600 suits to politicians wearing £300 suits.

In 2010 Labour had the opportunity to reassess where it stood in a new world, but found it more convenient to turn its back on that world. Rather than respond to the crash of 2008, Ed Miliband decided to respond to the crash of 1929 instead. Pump-priming of the economy. An expansion of state bureaucracy and control, at both national and regional level. A declaration of war on “selfish big business”.

Last week someone asked me: “Do you think it would have been different if David Miliband had won?” And the answer, of course, is: “Yes.” Things would certainly have been different. The real question is whether they would have been better. And no one really knows the answer to that.

But one thing is certain. When I left his house that afternoon in 2010, radical reform of the state – and by radical reform I mean a significant reduction in what the state does, and how much money it spends doing it – was not the battleground. Aside from a small Bennite rump on Labour’s Left, and an equally small Brownite rump on the party’s Right, there was a consensus that the days of the Big State were over.

This week, as the arguments about rail renationalisation begin, and the strikes against the Government’s public sector reforms bite, it has become the battleground once again. It’s not a battleground from which the Labour Party will emerge victorious.

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