And Another Thing…

opps

You’re in trouble now…

That’s not an elephant in the room.

That’s an elephant in the room…

The elephant in the room

Not sure that you aren’t jumping the gun a little; isn’t it precisely why the NEC opted for a long leadership campaign that this debate can take place, and should it not start at Branch and CLP level, and feed upwards, rather than former Cabinet members telling us ordinary members?

Tom. I may not agree with your politics but yes you are saying what needs to be said. At present I am very happy with the new government but that said parlament needs a strong oposition and as things stanc there is not one. Why don’t you stand???

Yet what can Labour say in response? That cuts are unnecessary?
No.

That if we had held onto power we wouldn’t have imposed the same degree of cuts?
Yes.

What have we got to say about how we ended up here in the first place?
Agreed. We’re all ears.

Was every single spending decision we made in office the right one?
No. Inevitably.

Were we right to adopt a light-touch banking regulatory system?
No, but everybody else was calling for even less regulation.

Was the global recession solely to blame for the catastrophic level the deficit has reached?
Mostly, yes.

Could we have done more to balance the books sooner?
Yes, but only at the margins.

Should we have?
Only at the margins.

What happened to our hard-earned reputation for economic competence?
It died because we didn’t explain what we were doing.

If it has indeed been lost, did we deserve to lose it?
No.

Great post, Tom. One of your best by far – and spot on.

Hi Tom,
You appear, like most of the media, to be ignoring the fact that John McDonnell is also a candidate. You might not agree with his analysis of why the Labour Party has lost support, which is that it has progressively turned each part of the coalition that makes up the Labour Party against it, he has an analysis. Maybe you should have a chat with John yourself and give him your vote, if only to ensure he gets on the ballot and forces the very debate you want.

God has spoken!

Tom Harris, you will stand!

Get it done, or feel my wrath!!!!

Yes, the elephant you speak of is of course fiscal responsibility, something that has always eluded the Labour party.

If Labour are wanting to be taken seriously they will be supporting the cuts made. But they wont. They will scream and shout to gain political capital from the mess they made and someone else now has to clear up.

If Labour want to be electable they’d made to promise that they’ll never let such cuts happen again. And how do they do that? By not being so damn profligate in the first place, by paying down debt, not accumulating it and by running balanced budgets.

I don’t reckon the leadership campagin will touch this issue with a barge poll, because it raises all sorts of horrible questions about Labours fundamental ideology which seems committed to ever higher public spending. This as we’ve seen is not sustainable and leads to a bankrupt country. Labour needs to resolve this conflict, but it hasn’t got a chance of doing so.

I think you’ve echoed what I have read elsewhere (http://blogs.wsj.com/iainmartin/2010/05/24/labour-leadership-contest-weirdly-nobody-is-running-against-gordon-brown/) as regards finances. The interesting thing that the link I have posted is that it shows how it has affected the Labour party and gives reasons for why the current potentials are saying what they are saying.

I will freely admit that I have voted Tory in the last 2 elections. I will also freely admit that if I have had the chance I would have voted for Labour in 1997 and if I have been bothered about politics in 2001 I would have voted Labour then too. I will vote for anyone that offers this country something better than what it has now, with realistic proposals on how that can happen. Labour have put this country into a very large pit and it’s going to take a lot of digging and a lot of cuts to get us out of it, so I would hope that if anyone wants to stand a chance as a realistic candidate they would recognise this and then say both why it went that was before and why it’s not going to be that way in the future. Otherwise it will be yet another generation before they get a chance and it will be at least another election defeat before you have a chance of being taken seriously again.

” What happened to our hard-earned reputation for economic competence? If it has indeed been lost, did we deserve to lose it?”

You were doing quite well till you got to that bit….

Labour has no record of economic competence, never did have. It was all smoke & mirrors. The economic growth was unsustainable and largely based on lie after lie after lie & a property boom and unaffordable levels of personal debt. A complete house of cards.

If Brown knew what was going on the city he was complicit in the disaster. If he didn’t know , as Chancellor he was incompetent. It was his job to know and understand that stuff.

Take your pick, but also refresh your memory on his 2007 Mansion House speech. Its nauseating to read in hindsight.

What was he doing to manage personal debt? Did he think the housing boom would just go on forever?

Golden rules? End of Boom & Bust? Laughable when you look back on all that really isn’t it?

You simply can not run up the level of debts we have and claim to have anywhere near “economic competence”

Meanwhile we are all paying more tax & more dutes on everything – and we are bust.

The list of economic travesties of the last 13 years is endless. There is no doubt Labour was good at spending though and lots of good things got done. The question is not “did you spend lots of money on new hospitals?”, the real questions are “could we afford them” and secondly did we get good value for money?

The answers are “most definitly not” and “not even close”.

You can say New Labour delivered real hope to people if you want, I say they delivered lie after lie after lie and worst of all they set levels of expectation about what people could rely on the state for that are about to be torn up and shattered. People will blame the “bad old Tories” but really they should be looking at who gave them the idea that what we had was in any way normal or sustainable in the first place.

13 years of Economic incompetence of the highest order leaves us with a mess and a half (the size of which most people havn’t even got close to comprehending).

I don’t think the new Gov’t has even begun to lay out the true horror of what your incompetent governement did with out national wealth. But I have no doubt they will – ever single gory detail.

So go ahead and try and put forward the notion that Labour is/was competent on the economy. We could all do with something to laugh at these days, because not much else is funny

FWIW, I think that the main reason that Labour performed so badly was lack of change when Brown succeeded Blair.

During 13 years in office, Labour got a couple of things right: Scottish and Welsh devolution (if we ignore the total failure in the English regions), the minimum wage (disregarding the failure to increase it since); bungled some improvements, e.g. massively increased investment in health and education, squandered by increased bureaucracy and micro-management; and did some terrible things: Iraq, erosion of liberties, etc. Meanwhile, the economy had good times and bad times.

By the time Blair went, the country was exasperated. People were crying out for change. In came Brown, and the government carried on just as before. Idiocy.

I’m not going to pretend that ID cards were the reason that Labour lost the election. But a few quick, easy and high-profile changes – scrapping ID cards, scrapping Son of Trident, maybe a commitment to public ownership of the post office and an elected House of Lords – would have signalled the start of the change that people were crying out for. That would have given the government the breathing space needed to find a new direction and reinvigorate itself while in office.

But Labour failed to do that. Brown stayed committed to the mistakes of the past and the government (and Home Office ministers in particular) carried on blithely following the lead of the civil service and officials instead of listening to the public.

Labour politicians didn’t get involved in politics to impose compulsory ID cards, lock people up indefinitely without trial, facilitate torture or invade other countries. But pandering to the tabloid press with a devotion to headlines instead of hearts and an obstinate refusal to admit major failings made defeat inevitable.

I may be wrong. But I suspect that the Great Repeal/Freedom Bill is a major part of the reason why the Lib Con coalition now seems viable; yet Labour should never have created the need for it in the first place. Authoritarian policies don’t promote equality or help eliminate injustice.

13 wasted years.

It’s a great post. Interesting your point about how proud you were of all that spending. It’s a shame you weren’t sufficiently interested to measure what value it delivered. The recession may be responsible for some of the deficit, but it was impossible for a party which had acted like a drunk with a credit card for so long to pretend that it suddenly cared about fiscal responsibility. The corollary- that spending implies a moral good and hence a moral dividing line with your opponents- also, I think, eventually got up the nose of anyone who isn’t in the public sector, who’ve faced unemployment, crap pensions and pay freezes for years now. The Tory “line” about cutting clothes to match cloth resonated here I think (also explains what happened in inner London too I think).

Those are stronger words than I normally think of in relation to responding to you. Just a measure of the honesty in your post I think. You must get fed up with hearing this but you are by far so much your party’s best communicator (and honest thinker) that the putative leaders ought to be begging you to join their campaigns.

A brave post that I would mostly agree with. I had high hopes for Labour in May 1997 after growing up in Thatcher’s divided Britain.

However, as one of the million Equitable Life victims who waited for 10 years for justice not to be forthcoming from Labour, you will understand why you got my vote in 1997 but probably will never get it again. To shun investors in a British mutual that the government failed to regulate but to bail out investors in foreign (Icelandic) banks for which it had no responsibility is unforgivable.

As for the “sustained economic growth”, it was an illusion created by the increase in the size of the public sector revealed by the slide from budget surplus to ever growing deficit. It could only end in tears and more taxes, where we are now.

I was briefly in agreement with Brown’s “secure the recovery” theory at first, but the deficit problems in Greece, Spain and other countries showed that Britain had to demonstrate clear budget cuts now to avoid damaging criticism from the IMF. So Brown got the big calls right? I don’t think so.

I think you’ll find Tom actually referenced John in his post. And in fairness, even if John DOES have all the answers, there’s no harm in getting everyone talking about those questions.

Very brave of you to voice this concern, Tom

Many activists are having a detailed debate on what Labour could have done better in Govt.

The issue isn’t the message – frank assessments, focus on middle Britain etc. with which I agree – but the messenger. I’m not convinced you have any credibility when your constant anti-GB plotting was the gift that kept on giving to our opponents.

Well – why not begin the debate by offering your view on whay we lost teh election. You can’t be a spectator all the time.

“What have we got to say about how we ended up here in the first place?”

‘Sorry?’ or ‘We were wrong?’

Think This / Taxed to Death

Good points, well made.

The one thing no one in your party appears to understand is wealth creation.
All you have done is borrow to spend, and look what you have done to us.

You are still in denial about it.

The post war welfair state is over, Its a new world where the wealth has run out.

look at the BA strike how ridiculous.

I do not think anyone in the Labour party is capable of dealing with the situation we are now in. The public do not yet understand that a Labour government will make things worse, because they will never understand the very basics of economics, ie. you cannot spend more than you earn.

I think you’ve hit the nail on the head in the paragraph that begins “I remember how great it felt…”. Most of the items your Government spent money on look, in isolation like good things on balance. What happened somewhere between 2001 (when you moved away from Conservative spending plans) and 2010 was that any kind of proportionality got lost, in the rush to show Labour as the “generous” party, and the Conservatives as “cutters”.

Government spending doesn’t come free. When you make a spending committment, you are saying that you will either raise more money that is not yours (backed by the full force of the law) from the population, or that you will borrow money that is not yours and that will need to be paid back (by people who are not you) in the future. This isn’t to say Government can’t spend. Outside of a few wingnuts, the electorate is pretty happy to hand over its money, and to take on debt, to fuel things that it sees as either essential or important.

However, the Government’s job is to identify what is essential or important, and should always bear this in mind when spending. Something might be nice to have, considered in isolation. It might even look like the price is good value for money. But if I walked into… say… HMV and bought everything that I like the look of and that is good value at its price, I’d run out of money (and my own money at that) pretty quickly. When I look around the myriad functions that Government has accrued since 2001, and the number of bodies that have been set up to exercise these functions, it’s clear that your Government fell into this trap.

I suspect part of the problem is that we have such an industry of lobbyists and pseudo-charities these days who are arguing (and in some cases are paid by the Government to argue) that their little patch is desperately important and requires funding or, more toxically, requires legislation to restrict some “minor and inconsequential” right of the majority (often related to freedom of expression). If I were in your shoes, I would be looking for a leadership candidate who claimed to be able to resist such pressures, and to say to special interest groups “what you want might have some positive effects, it might not be that expensive taken in isolation, but it is just not important enough for Government to get involved”.

They really need someone sensible in charge, like you!

Labour Matters – tells everyone not blinded by party political loyalty why labour just lost; and lets be honest, by a far greater margin than the current electoral system lets on.

“That if we had held onto power we wouldn’t have imposed the same degree of cuts?
Yes.”What!!!!

“Were we right to adopt a light-touch banking regulatory system?
No, but everybody else was calling for even less regulation.” well no actually, as if that mattered. labour was in power, labour made the decisions, labour should take the blame and stop the school yard stuff.

“Was the global recession solely to blame for the catastrophic level the deficit has reached?
Mostly, yes.” Bollocks. ask the australians and canadians for a start. ask those countries that left recession while we try and round up the decimal point and pretend we’re back in growth. most of our debt and deficit (2 different things that most of the party don’t seem to understand!)is structural, a relatively miniscule amount isn’t. people are starting to realise that and labour will get the blame as both tories and lib dems will be desperate to make sure they dont.

“Could we have done more to balance the books sooner?
Yes, but only at the margins.” oh my God!!!

“Should we have?
Only at the margins.” Oh my God!!!

“What happened to our hard-earned reputation for economic competence?
It died because we didn’t explain what we were doing.” No it died because a debt/ deficit unheard of outside of world war-catastrophe-end-of-the-world-scenario was foisted upon us through brown’s stupidity. Brown is a keynesian who doesn’t understand keynes. running a massive deficit during a boom time is/ was/ will always be suicide. people have started to twig. Labour “won” its reputation for economic competence by abandoning traditional socialist economic idiocy, then brown went back to type. the economic “expert” who’s highest qualification was a phd in the history of the labour party in scotland. should have been good preparation, shame it didnt turn out that way.

“If it has indeed been lost, did we deserve to lose it?
No.” oh my God!!!! if indeed?!?! No?!!!!what does it take to convince some people that a bear does shit in the woods?

Good post Tom, but you’ve an uphill struggle to convince the cloud cuckoo brigade before you ever tempt back the floating voter. If Labour Matters is anything to go by, you will need every second in opposition. Elephant in the room indeed. More like a herd.

I’m disappoointed, because I thought you were talking about the elephants currently in London:-).

Seriously, though, I’m finding it a bit icky seeing leadership candidates fall over themselves saying that everything from Iraq to ID cards might have been wrong. Too little, too late.

The only one of your leadership line up I would have any faith in at all would be Dianne Abbott. She at least is consistent.

I really don’t think Liam Byrne did you any favours leaving that note because it looks like not only did Labour overspend irresponsibly, but that now you’re pointing and laughing at those who have to sort it out.

It would become you better to play a constructive role in debate about how to reduce the deficit.

Think This: “Yes, the elephant you speak of is of course fiscal responsibility, something that has always eluded the Labour party”

What a load of utter rubbish. Labour actually inherited a massive debt in 1997. The national debt was £87bn in 1979, £193bn in 1990 and £420bn in 1997. In other words John Major managed to double the national debt in his seven years, and the Tories increased the debt by nearly a multiple of 5 in their 18 years. And this was despite the fact they had access to oil money plus the money from all the privatisations (BT, BA, gas, electricity, steel and whatnot).

Labour from 1997 to 2002 ran a very tight ship. By the early part of this century, we were running budget surpluses, plus inflation had collapsed and with it interest rates, and we were able to swap much of the debt issued by the Thatcher Major govts at high coupons (10-15%) for low coupon debt. Which meant the debt interest payments came down sharply.

In 2000-2002, the world suffered a dot.com recession. The Labour govt loosened fiscal policy to offset this at home. But our European trading partners struggled to come out of their mallaise, mainly because they resisted stimulating. France and Germany barely got above 1.5% per annum growth between 2001 and 2005. In the US the problem was the opposite, they over-stimulated and kept interest rates at rock bottom for too long – till 2004 – unleashing a surge of cash that went into the property and commodity markets – which sowed the seeds for the sky-high oil prices and the financial collapse of 2008.

Throughout that period the Labour govt tried to keep things going, waiting for our trading partners to recover so we could remove stimulus.

As for what is happening right now – we have the whole of Europe engaging in cutbacks at the behest of an out-of-control market that only exists because govts borrowed to bail them out. If you have demand reined back sharply in all your main trading partners, and you cut public spending, where is the support for the economy to come from? Who is the private sector supposed to sell to, if everyone is cutting back?

We are in a very dangerous period. If Osborne and Laws send us into a double-dip recession heaven help us, as tax receipts will collapse anew and the deficit will jack right up and we won’t have anything left to re-stimulate the economy with. It will be even harder to come back if our trading partners get themselves into a similar stew.

At last, some questions being asked as to how a Government came in with such possibilities, and left office with the anger of the electorate ringing in its ears.

Nobody much rates the Tories, and we certainly don’t want to give them the same level of executive power as Labour have so disastrously squandered.

We (the electorate) will not forgive politicians for Iraq, the lies, expenses, half-arsed botched private sector projects and many many more…..

Tom, listen to the people…….

The real problem with New Labour was its lack of bravery. You want high spending? Good, but you’ll have to recognise and explain to the electorate it needs paying for. Brown was increasing spending while lowering taxes – or by stealthily raising them by small amounts. Any buffoon with a calculator would soon realise something was up.

In whose mind is it a sign of fiscal competence that the amount going out is growing much faster than the amount coming in?

Tom, here’s a friendly suggestion. Why don’t you stand for the Labour leadership yourself?

Yes, you may be Scottish, but people won’t get everything they want in life. You’re one of few people in the Labour Party who actually has a brain. I think you’d do rather well.

Even though I wouldn’t really want you to, seeing how much I despise your party.

Good post Tom.

I want a strong opposition (although I like the coalition).

However, you need to face up to Gordon’s borrow & spend philosophy.

Gordon’s actions over 13 years added about a TRILLION pounds to the long term national debt.

At most, bailing out the banks accounts for only 20% of this (about £100bn bailouts, plus another £100bn long term interest on that). The rest was due to consistently raising spending way higher than taxes.

Most Labour supporters refuse to recognise this, although the figures stand for themselves. For example, we are not currently bailing any banks out, yet are spending £3bn per week more than we raise in taxes.

We are going to have to raise taxes and cut spending to start living within our means. As an opposition, your plans will be compared with the government’s.

That is, you will no doubt propose higher spending (or smaller cuts). The question is whether you pay for this by even higher taxes, or even higher borrowing.

Until you work this out, you will be silent (and useless as an opposition) on financial matters.

Tom, allow me to quote mine to show you the answers are already in your post:

Q. Was the global recession solely to blame for the catastrophic level the deficit has reached?

A. I remember how great it felt, as a government back bencher, to be supporting an administration presiding over such colossal increases in public spending.

Q. What happened to our hard-earned reputation for economic competence?

A. I refer the honourable gentleman to the answer I gave some moments ago.

Q. Could we have done more to balance the books sooner?

A. I refer the honourable gentleman to the answer I gave some moments ago?

Don’t get me wrong, some of the initial spending increases were necessary, decrepit schools, disgraceful hospitals etc. But, when you get on that feel-good train of spending to solve all of society’s ills you tend to forget that it has to be paid for. The economy goes in cycles and Brown, especially, seemed to be in denial about that.

After Labour felt so good about making things better (and initially they did) they then set about changing laws to make everyone better. Spending our money and then our freedoms to force us to conform to some happy society they think we should be, some state-sanctioned, safety obsessed, politically correct, Orwellian dystopia that only someone blinded by power in their ivory tower could conceive of as ‘good’ in any meaningful sense.

Bullying, smearing, spinning, deceitful, oppressive and incompetent.

Above all – total and utter economic mismanagement……

[...] word of agreement: I fully agree with Danny Finkelstein and Tom Harris. (Actually, I said it first, here and here, so they agree with me! Ha!) It’s early days, but [...]

I believe that Labour lost the election when the billions it poured into its great project the public services did not result in the great improvements that where claimed will happen. The new doctors contracts actually reduced the service provided.

The other problem with the great project is that while times where good we could afford so much being taken from the economy, Now the economy has shrunk and we cannot grow wealth until the world is able to. GB used to state that Keynes theories supported his actions but he only paid attention to the bits that GB liked. Keynes warned that during the good times a Goverment should keep a reserve to spend when things go bust. GB spent the reserve and more.

Of course ID cards, Immigration, The war in Iraq did not help but in the end the economy affects everyone in the country. It is notable that areas like Englands South East have more or less become Labour free zones these are areas where the private economy is strongest.

When did you say the Scottish Elections were?

The parade of waxworks has begun.

Personally I believe that the Miliblands, Balls and Burnham could well have greater toxicity because of their attachment to Brown and the fact that they wouldn’t get rid of him.

It might be fun to see Diane try to squeeze her way onto the front bench pass Harmmen

I do, however, think that the elephant in the room is…the cabinet elections, over which the plp has very little control from the individual voter.

As usual, a strong, authoritive and well reasoned response from snowflake5. You may like to take a look at Tom Piper’s blog today snowflake, discussing apprenticeships and young people, and how they will be severely disadvantaged under this new coalition.
And incidentally, in this age of transparency, modernisation and accountability, is there a remote chance that Mr. Laws, Osborne or Cable will be giving us a breakdown of the costs of today’s ceremony?

Harris for leader

“You may like to take a look at Tom Piper’s blog today snowflake, discussing apprenticeships and young people, and how they will be severely disadvantaged under this new coalition.”

Yet more “Tories are coming to eat your babies!!” crap.

In case you hadn’t noticed (and as Liam Byrne so eloquently put it) THERE’S NO MONEY LEFT!

So go ahead, blame the people trying to clear the mess up & carry on with your petty single issue nit-picking politics.

Time to wake up & get real – and in case you hadbn’t noticed, under a Labour governement the number of NEETs and youth unemployment reached record numbers….

….And that’s just the ones who get counted and weren’t hidden off book & “parked” in higher education. Those who have little in the way of academic rights/qualifications to be there doing meaningless courses.

Add them into the mix and the numbers are truly horrendous. You can definitly give labour credit for that one….

How depressing.

I actually agree with Tom about this.
I’m not certain who would be worried more, Tom or myself.

I know from previous posts that tom believes only a select few care about civil rights. Whether that is right or wrong probably doesn’t matter – it signalled when Labour stopped caring about the majority as opposed to their own vested interests.

And that’s why they lost.

Reputation for economic competence?

Stop laughing at the back please.

We need a Labour party that is honest and committed to the need to tax and spend. To have excellent public services run by well paid professionals and levels of benefits that support human dignity requires government to spend close to 60% of national income. Brown wanted to spend but he didn’t have the courage to tax and this cannot be done on borrowed money. We need taxes that are more like 40% basic and 80% higher rate of income tax. We probably need VAT at 25% with lower earners protected by improved benefits. Once Clause 4 was abandoned Labour struggled to articulate what it stood for. It’s time to be honest and give the voters a real alternative.

Iraq did for Labour.

It removed Tony Blair, the only hope of persuading the majority of this country that Labour would be fair to the middle classes and support the aspirational elements in every part of society.

Immigration did for Labour.

It convinced people that Labour saw our country as nothing more than a great, welcoming, uncovered pot, happily contemplating the day when it would be completely filled.

Centralisation did for Labour.

It seemed to seek remove power from the people on the grounds that they could not wholly be trusted to know what to do with it.

Education did for Labour

Those headlines about the undisciplined illiterati leaving our schools to go on to benefits, eventually struck home. The sense that no matter how bad, no teacher could ever be sacked, no school closed down, no improvement countenanced if private money were offered, or at least only grudgingly accepted, the feeling that producer power, in education and elsewhere, was being propped up by a government in hock to the unions, could not be overcome.

Multi-culturalism did for Labour.

The concept that all cultures, no matter how discriminatory, violent and primitive, have equal relevance and authority in our country neglects to appreciate that culture, not geography, is what defines nations.

Sleaze did for Labour.

This was unfair. Sleaze was all over the House. But the governing Party will always get most of the blame, and Labour did. And greedy, Labour ex-ministers made heroic efforts to sink the ship.

Time for change did for Labour.

And there’s no answer to that.

May I respectfully suggest that the elephant has long since left the building, though it may still be lurking in a confused state somewhere near Bassetlaw. New Labour focused on two key strategies: to encourage social mobility and satisfy aspiration and to shrink inequality through tax and welfare. Both these strategies failed and deserved to fail.
When I was a kid, equality of opportunity was a Conservative slogan and rightly so, because it validates the inequalities needed in a market economy. But however many people get on, half will still be in the bottom half of the income/wealth distribution. Even if half school-leavers go college, half will not. This half should be Labour’s first concern.
The welfare state can cope well with temporary poverty and inability to work. But there is not enough money in the world for it to cut inequality effectively through the likes of tax credits and child trust funds. Any serious attempt is bound to end in fiscal tears.
To misquote Jesus “The economy is made for man not man for the economy” (sorry Jesus as reported was not pc). Rising output is key to raising living standards but success cannot be measured by the number of people in work or GDP growth – only by rising income per head and an economy in which anyone who wants a job with decent pay can find one.
Notoriously, the NHS depends on immigrant labour, even though it faces no price competition. That means wages are too low, keeping living standards down, especially for those in the bottom half. If wages were higher, there might not be so many jobs but investment and productivity would have to rise, reducing inequality. Minimum wages were a great Labour innovation, which it sadly failed to elaborate.
The other big way to help people in the bottom half would be to increase the supply of housing so that there is no longer an absolute shortage. I reckon that we are up to four million homes short, unless immigrants are supposed to live in cardboard boxes. So long as there is an overall shortage (not just in choice places) , the bottom quarter/ third will always be priced out, however much they are helped, however easy mortgages are, because house prices will simply rise to price them out again. Yet none of the parties has anything but a marginal policy on housebuilding. A huge gap for Labour to fill.

Any chance of easing up on the cliches: elephants, levers of government?

I’d offer a more serious commnent but there seems little point as it will be quite some time before Labour occupies the corridors of power again. Smoke-filled rooms for them (in private houses of course) in the meantime and for a long time, assuming they haven’t been entirely consigned to the dustbin of history.

Etc., blah.

Oh, and there’s not a hole in the nation’s finances you know – it’s a black hole. And there was me thinking it was a red one too.

All the arguing matters little. Regardless of what anyone postulates, the marketplace will set the rules. Like it or not, fair or not, someone does not long survive if they spend more than they take in. The same is true of government. Unfortunately, someone who recognizes the fundamental concepts of living within your means and the principals of bankruptcy is not likely to garner the votes required to lead a party, which ought to be looking to reduce the burden of government on it’s people. What’s happened to Greece really rises above party. The Greeks are going to be immeasurably less happy in the years ahead because their governments found it more important to perpetuate themselves than to live within the fundamental laws of the marketplace. I’ll echo some of the other voices, Tom. If you want a discussion, perhaps it’s time you stopped calling for it from the back benches. We can’t always have things the way we’d like them and life is often unfair. Deal with it.

Good post. It is vital that any government has a strong opposition and it could be argued that the Tories didn’t get their act together on that front themselves.
But Labour has to acknowledge that we are where we are – and only they are responsible for the multi-faceted mess we are in, not any other Party. You have to start by understanding you were in charge, you made the decisions – and got so many calamitously wrong.

A few highlights:
“No more boom and bust”. Where do you even start with that? The definition of hubris.
Thinking that spending and investment are the same. Did you never do any audits? What was all the red tape and paperwork for then if it wasn’t accountability? Or was it really just to create useless public sector jobs. I’ve worked for two local authorities and seen the mountains of paper, so I know what I’m talking about.
Then there’s the PPI, off book disaster debt is awaiting my children. And no one even mentions the level of private debt – far and away the highest in developed economies, driven by a public who believed you (and some still will, but not many) when you stopped calling it debt and called it credit instead.
Endless tinkering in education and driving more and more students to take courses in subjects that will never equip them for jobs (plus a horrible sense of entitlement because they’ve always been rewarded for no effort or result). These kids are likely to be unemployable through no fault of their own, having sat flawed exams and encouraged to rack up yet more private debt to keep them off the NEET list. It’s really heartbreaking to see what these poor kids are going to have to face. And the so-called apprenticeships Labour created? Unpaid internships only afforded by the rich (what about minimum wage legislation, eh?) or Macjobs that teach them nothing and lead nowhere.
Iraq – unforgiveable. Not that you’ve asked for forgiveness, and you must.
Immigration. Scandalous. Not just that you didn’t (deliberate or by design? You should admit which) impose transition controls, but that almost every other European country did, meaning vast numbers came here because it was the only option. Then you dismissed concerns about those numbers and the pressure on local services as racism.
Vetting and Barring. Do you really think all adults are potential sex offenders? That’s not a world I want my kids to grow up in. My elder daughter’s school had to cancel the annual French exchange because they didn’t have enough volunteers for the Orwellian procedures they would have had to go through. And your argument? “But it’s free”. No, really, there’s nothing free about it.
Billions spent on benefits that are no longer about need, but want. Are you aware that Job Centres do not help people get jobs, but casually and slowly show them how to fill in forms to get state money, money we don’t have. It’s an absolute disgrace.

All of it, though, is underpinned by contempt. Contempt for the people of this country – particularly the English. Contempt for private pensions. Contempt for those who must have been warning you that you were heading for fiscal disaster. Contempt most of all for those who voted Labour because they believed in social justice and instead got an irresponsible, controlling and economically illiterate bunch of socialist theorists who had no idea how to put their ideas into practice and no longer knew or cared how to connect with the electorate.
I voted for Tony Blair in 1997 – but you’ll have to really understand why you were, and are, still unelectable before you stand any chance of recapturing people like me ever again.

Tom, It’s a shame you get the usual cranks on here who just seem to paint Labour as some economically incompetent satanic mess (yes, there were some fairly hefty mistakes but did any of these match the tories for going into the ERM at the wrong rate or Osbourne’s cries for further financial deregulation of the eve of Lehmans/opposition to Labour’s response to the financial crisis?). I do think the Labour Party (and hopefully we’ve seen the back of ‘new’ labour) need to think hard about what it represents. It should be in favour of electoral reform (AV, PR in an elected house of lords) because first past the post and an unelected house of lords is morally bankrupt. It should be in favour of redistribution (and should not be scared of making the case for it). It should not be scared of saying why we’ve had high recent levels of immigration (a long period of economic growth explains most of it) and why people feel threatened by it (in my limited experience this is due to increased competition for council services – i.e. relative poverty). It should apologise for the Iraq war, and should explain better what afganistan is about. Finally, it should cut the crap about terrorism paranoia (ID cards etc) and it should look for innovative ways of rebalancing the economy in ways that might benefit people in areas like the east end of glasgow, ne england, manchester etc.

@ Jill

Word perfect I think, I couldn’t have said it half as well.

Tom, I think this phrase may well come back to haunt you should you ever seek a position higher than MP:
“I remember how great it felt, as a government back bencher, to be supporting an administration presiding over such colossal increases in public spending.”

How can Labour ever get back into power when this attitude is prevalent in their ranks? How can the people or the markets ever trust a Labour administration that gets its jollies from spending money virtually regardless of what it actually goes on (ID cards, NHS IT system, MoD communications system so botched soldiers use their own mobiles, etc. etc.)

That was kind of the point of what I wrote: contrasting the elation we felt at the time with the harsh reality of the deficit a few years later.

There really was no need for the deficit. It was greed, greed for the common good and slightly for power, that led Labour to spend way beyond what was ultimately sustainable. That was due to a lack of leadership.

Labour started well, but as the economy grew the restraint they showed initially could no longer be maintained and the spending spree started. this led to the public sector being an over-sized part of the economy and, when the economy went pear-shaped, cutting the public sector would have made a bad situation worse. This is what led to the massive deficit, the public sector of the economy not being paid for and yet forcing itself to grow to compensate for the shrinking of the private sector. All based on the good feeling you got from 2001-2006/7 when you massively increased spending without saving for a rainy day.

Ani

Snowflake5 never answered my question from early last year, ‘Can the economy really be ‘going up’ in January 2009, though?’, which I asked on the Labour Home website, as I recall…

>>Hi,

I found this page as a result of Googling the phrase ‘debt as a percentage of GDP’, after hearing the latest edition of Radio 4′s ‘More Or Less’. Looking at the transcript I made below (isn’t it curious how much less articulate commentators seem when you have to type down exactly what they say?), perhaps it should have been ‘as a ratio of GDP’. I’m going to assume they mean pretty much the same thing, though, as I ask: why is ‘as a ratio/percentage of GDP’ such a magic phrase that it gets rolled out so often, if it’s as suspect as the commentator alleges? The relevant part of the programme starts at 26 minutes in and runs for 44 seconds:

‘I mean, if the government says, for example, that he has reduced debt, people tend to believe it, in fact it’s completely not true, but because Gordon… [how can he say it if it's not true?] Because, what Gordon Brown does is, he has increased debt but at a less rate than the economy is going up, as a result the ratio of debt to the GDP has gone down, so when he says ‘I’ve reduced the ratio’, basically… rather he doesn’t say that, he says I’ve reduced debt, and what he doesn’t say brackets as ratio of GDP, now, if you take away that brackets, there is no, by no stretch of the English language, has debt been reduced, this is the reason the economy is in such… the problems that it is, but because Gordon Brown has worked out this immaculate code, of shorthand, he can give a false impression which, if you push him enough, he could technically define away.’

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00gm5zz [out of date]

Actually, I think I get it now. The ‘economy going up’, that’s a good thing, right? But debt is still increasing in totality, or whatever the word is (‘in real terms’ has always seemed like the most meaningless of concepts).

Can the economy really be ‘going up’ in January 2009, though?<<

As I also recall, Snowflake5's M.O. seems to be throwing up a lot of figures, and saying they mean what [she?] wants them to mean, but [she?] wouldn't answer the question about the economy in Jan 2009…

@Tom: “That was kind of the point of what I wrote: contrasting the elation we felt at the time with the harsh reality of the deficit a few years later.”

Is that you (as a Labour MP) admitting that Labour had its head up its backside for the best part of 13 years as far as Economic management is concerned?

(Unless of course you were going to try & suggest that there was no correlation between Gov’t spending and National debt – but then that would be possitivly “Brownian” in its implausibility. )

“but [she?] wouldn’t answer the question about the economy in Jan 2009…”

In Jan 09? And we’re now….
You nursing a grudge or hurt feelings? ;0)

No, I just recall when somebody who cites so many details can’t respond to a very simple question. It’s worth remembering who the statistics trolls are…