Labour Party leadership

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'Socialist' Labour Rivals Call For Change
September 05, 2010
Ruth Barnett,
Sky News Online

The five contenders vying to become the next Labour Party leader have all said they want to move on from the Blair-Brown era during in a Sky News debate. David Miliband, Ed Miliband, Diane Abbott, Andy Burnham and Ed Balls spoke at the live televised hustings in Norwich. They called on the party to focus on the future rather than the years under former prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, which were dominated by internal fighting. The contenders also described themselves as socialists, which would arguably have been seen as a damaging admission to make under New Labour.

They were united in their ambition to provide effective opposition to the coalition Government, but differed on how best to approach the challenge. David Miliband, the shadow foreign secretary, said he was the "unity candidate" who could beat Conservative leader David Cameron at the next election. The shadow foreign secretary said the most dangerous threat to Labour would be the failure to defend its record over the past 13 years. He disagreed with his brother Ed over whether a graduate tax would be a fairer way of paying for higher education, warning it would not be acceptable for someone studying for a short course to help fund another student's four-year degree.

But the younger Miliband, the shadow energy secretary, has placed the idea at the centre of his campaign and said it would ensure the highest earners gave the most back. Asked what his toughest decision had been, Ed Miliband cited the decision to enter the contest and run against his brother. He told the audience the party must have the "courage to change" and move on from New Labour. This could be seen as a reference to the shadow foreign secretary, who has been endorsed by many of the Labour figures who served in the last cabinet. New Labour architects Mr Blair and Lord Mandelson have both hinted that David Miliband is their preferred candidate.

Shadow health secretary Andy Burnham said he was best placed to move the party on beyond the arguments of Old versus New Labour, as he had been loyal to both and never part of the "Londoncentric elite" which has dominated in recent years. He won praise from his rivals on his idea to use a levy to pay for care for the elderly, citing his distress at having to put his grandmother in a home a decade ago. Mr Burnham went head-to-head with backbencher Diane Abbott on the question of immigration, saying he had not been able to defend on the doorstep the idea European migrants could send money from benefits back to other countries.

Ms Abbott said Labour must never scapegoat immigrants like her mother, a nurse, who had worked hard for Britain. To those who dismiss her as an outsider in the race, she highlighted her years as a councillor, trade union worker and as a single mother. In the 21st century, "this might be what a Labour leader looks like".

Ed Balls said only he had set out a "credible but radical" plan for creating jobs and tackling Britain's housing crisis. He also won applause for warning the coalition's plans for freeing more schools from state control posed a threat to social cohesion. The shadow education secretary said Labour had to better understand "middle England" - he said Mr Blair once guessed a middle income to be £40,000 - £60,000, when it is half that.

The five candidates took questions from Labour supporters, independent audience members and each other. All said they would call themselves socialists and would not ban the burka. Sky's political editor Adam Boulton, who chaired the debate, also posed quick-fire questions and a quiz set to test which candidates are most in touch with the concerns of ordinary voters. On these, David Miliband and Mr Burnham scored three out of five, correctly guessing the price of a Euro millions ticket (£2) amongst other questions. Mr Balls and the younger Miliband scored two out of five and Ms Abbott scored zero, stating she does not know the price of a litre of unleaded petrol because she does not drive.

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they can call themselves socialists all they like - I won't believe it until all the energy companies are nationalised.

[luke]

Mark Steel: Socialists? You've got to be joking

Everyone seems to agree that the Labour party is better off having the polite contest taking place now, rather than its old ideological fights. But the result is a series of debates about nothing, with no one daring to say anything, let alone disagree with the nothing someone else has said.

It's so predictable that if an interviewer asked the candidates what they thought about while masturbating, you know that David would say, "I think about the future", his brother would say, "I too think about the future, but also a bit about the past", Diane would say we mustn't forget what we used to think about, Andy Burnham would say reconnecting with the voters, and Ed Balls would utterly refute the rumours that he did it on Tony Blair's desk to annoy him as he was preparing notes for the Cabinet.

The lack of wit, imagination and purpose seemed most obvious when they were all asked if they considered themselves to be a socialist. David Miliband said he was a socialist, "because what we can do together is more than what we can do separately". And that's socialism is it? Even Sarah Palin and General Franco would agree with that. But presumably the founders of socialism worked this out. Maybe Karl Marx suddenly turned to his friend Engels and said, "Friedrich, I've noticed that if I wash and you wipe we get through these dishes quicker than if I do it on my own. Once we've finished the cutlery we must start an international movement".

The younger Miliband added that he was a socialist because "we must be free to criticise the injustices of capitalism". So everyone in the world's a socialist, except people who think that if someone says "Ooh those bankers are greedy so-and-sos", they should be arrested.

Next time he'll say, "I am very much a socialist in as much as I believe it's very important that there are people. I believe strongly that if there were no people, and the world was just rocks and some fish, that could prove highly damaging to our economy and seriously affect our ability to compete in a global market, and in that sense I am, yes, a socialist".

If they said they disagreed with socialism, or felt it was no longer relevant, they would at least be making a statement, but to reduce it to some meaningless phrase that would be rejected in a 12-year-old's homework suggests they're incapable of discussing any ideas at all. Someone should ask them if they're a Hindu, and they'd all say something like, "In as much as I would modernise the Post Office to bring it in line with other industries I am a Hindu, yes".

Ed Balls answered that he was a socialist because "together we are stronger", which could suggest a hint of socialism, depending on who we means by "we". As a slogan for a trade union or campaign against a military dictatorship it would fit, but as his government meant Bush and Blair together with Murdoch and Berlusconi it's probably not what the founders of the Labour Party had in mind.

To mean anything, socialism has to be a desire for the means by which society produces things to be held in common, by the whole of that society, rather than by a clique of people who become very rich. But Labour's potential leaders have no idea what they stand for, to the extent that they daren't say they don't agree with the socialism they've clearly rejected. To pick an example at random, if your party has been in government and boasted that it's reduced regulation on bankers to a historic low so they can pay themselves record bonuses and arse up the country in the process, that errs gently away from the socialist model.

Similarly the statement, "I am intensely relaxed about people who are filthy rich", as said by Peter Mandelson, is not entirely socialist in an orthodox sense, just as an organisation that claimed to be Christian while one of its leaders said, "I am intensely relaxed about the Devil", and then went on holiday with the Devil on his boat, might be in danger of contradicting itself.

Even so, the New Labour era came close to the old constitution's aim of "securing the fruits of society's wealth". It's just that instead of going to the masses, most of it's been secured by their ex-leader and his wife.