HSBC’s tax dodging could pay 40000 nurses, 30000 firefig… on Twitpic.
Labour needs to take a look in the mirror on civil liberties
This morning, Nick Clegg made a speech on civil liberties, the sound of the left gloating as the deputy prime minister stumbled over control orders drowning out his critique of Labour’s authoritarian instinct; Mike Harris, a contributor to Big Brother Watch’s ‘The state of civil liberties in modern Britain’, reports
The gloating is an instinct I remember well when I worked for a Labour MP as our government attempted to bring in 90 days’ detention. Even my meagre bag-carrying at the time made me feel complicit in something immoral. Labour friends would shrug their shoulders in bars as we discussed where it all went wrong: the party who had Roy Jenkins as home secretary also managed to accommodate former Stalinist John Reid.
But Labour was possessed by a group-think that imagined the civil liberties agenda was a minority pursuit by a radical Hampstead fringe; that to be in favour of protecting liberties against baser gut instincts was, in itself, a sign of moral weakness: of political frailty.
The reference to John Reid’s Stalinism is deliberate. Many of our friends in the Labour movement’s politics arose not from Methodism but Marxism. Their vision for government was not as a regulator or provider of goods, but as a totality, the State as the rational omnigod. As Francesa Klug said at last year’s Compass conference this
“… intellectual tradition never really saw the problem with the state – provided it was in the right, or rather left, hands.”
It was Ed Miliband’s dad, Ralph, who warned socialists of the danger that the state had it in the potential to be an oppressive force in ‘The State in Capitalist Society’. Whilst Labour did much in government to make Britain more tolerant, we also made painful mistakes.
Clegg opened his speech with a powerful salvo, which is worth reading:
“Ed Balls has admitted that, when it comes to civil liberties, Labour got the balance wrong. Ed Miliband has conceded that his government seemed too casual about people’s freedom.
“But there was nothing casual about introducing ID cards. Nothing casual about building the biggest DNA database in the world, and storing the DNA of over one million innocent people.
“Nothing casual about their failed attempts to increase the time a person can be detained without charge from what was then 14 days up to 90; something Labour’s new leader voted for.
“They turned Britain into a place where schools can fingerprint your children without their parents’ consent… Where, in one year, we saw over 100,000 terror-related stop-and-searches, none of which yielded a single terror arrest.
They made Britain a place where you could be put under virtual house arrest when there was not enough evidence to charge you with a crime. And with barely an explanation of the allegations against you. A place where young, innocent children caught up in the immigration system were placed behind bars. A Britain whose international reputation has been brought into question because of our alleged complicity in torture.”
In the last year of a Labour government, 1,000 children of asylum seekers were imprisoned. Yet, as a party there is no mea culpa. Many of the myriad special advisers and ministers who advocated ever more authoritarian powers are still in place. I still hear, “they aren’t talking about it in the Dog & Duck”, as a catch-all phrase that is fairly sinister.
People don’t focus on their human rights until they are taken away. The majority of Belarusians are currently getting on with their lives in Europe’s last dictatorship. It’s the 28 in solidarity confinement in a KGB prison in downtown Minsk for whom human rights are important.
There’s no doubt that Nick Clegg’s attempt to demonise Labour today was political posturing. He ignored Labour’s introduction of the Human Rights Act; that Labour were in office after the talismanic episode of 9/11; that civil liberties are dependent in a democracy on public support (which often wasn’t there). But rather than receiving Nick Clegg’s speech with jeers, Ed Miliband needs to reappraise the party Labour ought to be.
As I wrote before for Left Foot Forward, Labour is toxic to many of the people it ought to be a natural bedfellow of. Many Muslims in places like Oldham East and Saddleworth voted Liberal Democrat not just because of Iraq, but because they felt victimised. Many of the much-derided ‘Hampstead liberals’ are some of the five million votes Labour lost between 1997-2010.
Newspapers that ought to be on our side turned against us. It’s no coincidence that it was a liberal party, the Liberal Democrats, who opposed our authoritarian streak who made the largest electoral gains in 2005 and 2010. And it’s a surprise that we didn’t take this lesson on board. For Labour to win the election in 2015, we need to take a look in the mirror.
Latest attack on Ed Miliband not backed up by the facts
As the cuts debate rages, and strategies for campaigning against them are discussed at today’s Netroots conference, Tony Dolphin looks at whether the latest critique of Ed Miliband’s economic policy is justified
Phil Collins took Ed Miliband to task in yesterday’s Times (£) for not confessing to the hubris that he says afflicted the Labour government ahead of the financial collapse and recession. His charge is that Labour was too optimistic about economic growth at the time and, thus, too optimistic about government revenues. As a result, government spending was too high and the deficit problem that the country now faces is, in part, due to this misjudgement.
There is an element of truth in this analysis – though it must be said that Labour’s hubris was shared by most leading economists and by David Cameron and George Osborne, who promised to match Labour’s spending plans.
In 2007, the UK economy had experienced 15 years of uninterrupted growth, unemployment had fallen by 1½ million from its peak in 1993, inflation was close to its target rate and interest rates were at historically low levels. Things do not get much better than this and if ever a government should have been running a surplus on its current budget, the UK government should have been in 2007.
But, according to the figures in the June Budget documents, the cyclically-adjusted deficit on the current budget – the measure that George Osborne targets to be zero by 2015-16 – was just 0.6 per cent of GDP in 2007-8. If Labour were guilty of fiscal profligacy, it was hardly on a grand scale. There is little doubt that the vast bulk of the deficit problem is the result of the financial collapse and recession.
Ed Miliband is right, therefore, to counter Tory talk of ‘Labour’s deficit’. How much blame he should accept on behalf of Labour when doing so (he did say in his conference speech that Labour was wrong to think that there would be no more boom and bust) is largely a political judgement – and one on which he and Phil Collins clearly disagree.
What matters more, though, is whether the diagnosis of the problem affects the remedies put forward to cure it. The Conservative (and post-election Liberal Democrat) view is that the deficit is too high because public spending is too large relative to revenues.
Their solution, therefore, is a drastic deficit reduction programme tilted heavily (77:23) in favour of spending cuts. Deficit reduction under Labour, if their last budget plans are any guide, would also be achieved largely by spending cuts (accounting for over 70 per cent of the total), though these would be spread out over a longer period.
Both parties, therefore, appear to accept to a large degree that the problem is excessive public spending. But why not increase revenues more?
The Tories, supported by their Lib Dem allies, want to reduce significantly the share of government spending in GDP, Labour’s plans would produce a similar outcome; who, then, will make the positive case for taxation to fund excellence in the state provision of health, education, defence and other services?
Of course, the best – and least painful – way of boosting government revenues, and thus ensuring support for public spending, is to increase the growth of national income. Once it is accepted that the deficit has arisen largely as a result of the recession, it should be clear that more effort needs to be put into public policies that promote economic growth.
George Osborne has spoken about the need to rebalance the economy and generate more growth through investment spending and exports, but he seems largely bereft of ideas to bring about this about.
The failure of the government to come up with enough measures to fill a white paper on growth suggests a new form of hubris has overtaken the Treasury: a belief that deficit reduction, and admittedly some cuts in corporate tax rates, are all that is required to place the economy on a path of strong and sustainable growth. Sadly, this is unlikely to be the case.
