No, he doesn’t need Alan Johnson to push it. He needs to kick Alan Johnson overboard and have Yvette Cooper push it. Unfortunately, he can’t do that for at least another 11 months without looking weak and stupid (which, let’s face it, he was) for having appointed Johnson in the first place – meanwhile, the Tories have essentially a year shooting at an open goal.

Sunny – I commented on Dan’s article on Labour Uncut. He’s fighting a battle inside the Chamber which has no national resonance and he’s wrong.

However, we must be quick to respond to this new “growth” offensive the Tories have launched on today. There’s nothing new in it, it won’t work because the sheer financial mountain it has to climb and yet, again, it will create the impression of some kind of strategy. Labour cannot sit by and wait for bad numbers to come in to disprove the Tory plan.

The message on growth must be clear – the country needs money to grow and only through growth can the deficit come down. Tory flim flam on “encouraging entrepreneurs” is whistling in the wind in the face of ideological savagery which will suck the economy dry.

Surely the figures from May, where the deficit fell by £10bn because of additional growth is a useful example. “Invest in growth and the deficit falls”. Compare this to September figures where the deficit was higher than expected because growth has dropped off due to cuts. The data are there to support a simple growth message – Labour must use it.

They may as well kiss good bye to a number of elections, after the next election is lost the hunt will be on for another Blair or is that Thatcher.

But right now Miliband has gone missing I suspect he is tired after fighting his brother, I expected Labour to come out fighting and what did we get well we must mot just attack the Tories about cuts if the cuts are right,. we will back the welfare reforms.

In that case then I may as well vote Tory. why bother voting Newer labour, if your basically the same dam party

“People aren’t listening partly because Labour has only now honed its message, and partly because it had a leader who couldn’t communicate to save his (political) life.”

People aren’t listening to them because they don’t trust them, and are unlikely to do so for quite a while.

I’m particularly unconvinced that they HAVE a coherent message, let alone one which is “honed”…. if only!!

Browns manifest failure as a communicator were only a part of your problem, and not even that big a part. He could have had Clintonesque skills and you’d still have crashed to defeat given the policies you were pedalling at election time and the track record before then.

I actually agree with your conclusion about differentiating yourselves from the Coalition policy; whether Johnson and Miliband Minor are the ones to sell it must be open to huge doubt.

Ed Balls IS right and Osborne is wrong. And it will do Labour no good to try to neutralise the issue by saying they agree with the Tories. Because if the Tories are right and they get the economy recovering, they will win the next election anyway.
Sometimes in politics you just have to tell the truth.

All this is a bit silly. Either Osborne’s plan will work or it won’t. If it does all the talk about “too deep, too quick” and “double-dip” will be seen as rubbish and the LibCons will be back. If it doesn’t the Tories are out for a generation. Economics is not an exact science, we just don’t know. The real issue is the size of the state. The LibCons are talking about a public sector taking about 40% of national income. To have civilised services and benefits it needs to be nearer 50%. That, unfortunately, cannot be done by borrowing or by just taxing “the rich”; it means higher taxes for everyone on or above median income (about £23000 a year). That is the line that Labour needs to be taking if it is serious about being an alternative government. It is by trying to attack the coalition on every tactical point that Labour is confusing its natural supporters.

If Labour have it wrong why are Labour ahead in the polls ,people are starting to realise that the Tories are deficit deceivers ,please listen to me you are really hated up in Scotland for helping the Tories to get their cuts through, ie just listened to Cameron going on about capital spending ,he named 5 projects 4 of them are in the south and one in Liverpool ,nothing for Scotland our cs has been cut,nothing for Wales or Ireland not much for the North either.Once Mays elections are over we will see how you all get on once a few Lib Dems see their seats are in danger
andy edinburgh

Um, andrew, this website isn’t Nick Clegg.

Labour ahead in the Polls, ah yes the famous Polls. problem is of course only one Poll puts labour ahead the other three puts labour behind by as much as six points, so reading into the polls is a silly game.

The new ESA medical for example now being spouted as an evil Tory plan is of course labours, today I hear a chap dying of bowel cancer has been ordered back to work because he is expected to live longer then six week.

The problem for Labour is proving it has a reason to be voted back in, right now it does not, because it’s not telling us what it will do, perhaps it’s scared or perhaps it has no plan.

And there won’t be any jobs created for years – even their friends admit this privately.

What on earth does this mean Sunny? Two and half million jobs are created on average every single year. Are you really suggesting that this figure will fall to nil?

You don’t cut drastically during a recession.

Um, OK. How about 18 months after you come out of a recession? The UK came out of recession in the first quarter 2010. The cuts aren’t scheduled to begin until mid 2011, by which point the UK economy will have been growing for a year and a half.

Has it been growing, we are told the new figures which are coming out will show the UK is not growing but in stagnation.

Ye Gods! Why do some progressives still talk as if Labour are the only horse worth backing? Haven’t the varied crimes of misgovernment committed by Blair, Brown, Straw, Harman, et al. not put you off them for life? There are other political parties out there with a great deal more credibility to their economic, equality and environmental policies.

10 Tim J

It’s not just about the number of jobs created though is it? If a goodly proportion of the jobs created are McJobs replacing “proper” jobs, then they aren’t likely to provide us with much of a motor do accelerate out of recession are they?

Similarly, a lot of the jobs created in the recent past were in the finance and service sectors…. not sure we’re going to be able to rely on that for a while!

Where where are those other parties, it’s not the Tories and it’s not the Liberals, who then the greens the BNP, because for sure right now Tory labour and Liberal should come together and make on party they are all so dam close you’d not notice the difference.

We do have a plan ,to half the deficit in 4 years,which the Markets were ok with as bond borrowing started going down. To make the Banks pay more than disabled and vulnerabile people do ,You know the plan as your party backed it before the election then changed their mind over a WEEKEND still don,t know Nicks reason for this .What i do know is Lib Dems had the books before the election they new the amount of debt.No one voted for these cuts but Nick would have said or done anything for the car and red book,what have the Lib Dems getting out of this not one proper cabinet job or one policy fully implemented .The Tories are laughing at you ,using you as their fall guys.

12 Latest quarterly figures show +4.7% on previous quarter. Central estimate for 2011 is growth of 2.6%. We’re certainly not in recession, or even stagnating – even industrial production is up.

13

Oh come on! We’re hardly spoiled for choice are we?

Realistically my choice has been narrowed down to the Green party, (although I’m pretty unconvinced by their policies in lots of areas…!); I would never vote Tory, New or Newer Labour are just about as bad, and the LD’s have lost any chance they had of me voting for them even as a protest or “keep the Tory out” vote.

“You don’t cut drastically during a recession.”

Worked for America in the early 1920s and Britain in the early 1930s.

19

Yeah, and of course the 1930′s are a great advert for the kind of society we’d like to see…..

…sheesh.

Similarly, a lot of the jobs created in the recent past were in the finance and service sectors…. not sure we’re going to be able to rely on that for a while!

Why not? The ‘service sector’ covers a vast array of the private sector, and even the financial sector is growing and hiring again. The point is that it’s impossible to provide a central plan for how the private sector ‘should’ create jobs – the mechanisms aren’t there, and it’s just not possible for a government to have the sort of knowledge and expertise required. The government’s job is to provide economic stability and the correct tax and regulatory atmosphere (balancing between the various opposing requirements) not to provide some sort of rigid framework of job creation.

However, we must be quick to respond to this new “growth” offensive the Tories have launched on today. There’s nothing new in it, it won’t work because the sheer financial mountain it has to climb and yet, again, it will create the impression of some kind of strategy. Labour cannot sit by and wait for bad numbers to come in to disprove the Tory plan.

Labour is right to tear this ‘strategy’ apart, but unfortunately the willingness of the media to parrot the Tories on everything means they will have to wait until the bad numbers to come through before it starts getting challenged

Couple of things, firstly, I wonder how many of the Labour types calling for ,pre fiscal tightening have actually tried to come up with actual figures. I had a go a while back and found that you just couldn’t really make any signifigant savings without doing some seriously unpopular things.

I would suggest that those who suggest we move closer to the Tories on the deficit actually try, as an exercise, listing the cuts/ tax rises they would make and ask themselves whether they themselves would feel comfortable making them and also whether could sell those cuts to Labour members.

Second thing is that I’m concerned right now about the call for us to match the Tories on the deficit is due to a desire for instant gratification in the polls. A lot of Labour’s rhetoric is focused around the damage cuts will do to the economy, but this is a long term strategy it’s only really going to bear fruit one to two years down the line, attempting to change that view now will only make us confused and inconsistent.

All in all then, I agree with Sunny.

I would suggest that those who suggest we move closer to the Tories on the deficit actually try, as an exercise, listing the cuts/ tax rises they would make and ask themselves whether they themselves would feel comfortable making them and also whether could sell those cuts to Labour members.

Andreas – exactly. I’d love to see how they’re going to sell this to anyone, least of all the Labour voters who are very angry at this.

I’m afraid the attempt to create a dividing lines if Labour signs up to Osborne’s plan is moot. It’s like being Libdem and signing up to tuition fees rises – may as well call yourself a Dodo.

Amazing how Labour and their friends in the media have become so good at talking down the economy, exactly the point they rightly criticised the tories for doing when in government.

The standard idea put out is that 500,000 jobs will be lost by the public sector and another 500,000 jobs as a result of the knock-on effect on the private sector. Fair enough if that’s your analysis. But the same analysis predicts 1,500,000 new private sector jobs in that time, and assuming the 1:1 knock-on effect (for consistency), that’s 3m new jobs gross or 2m net.

Or is somebody seriously going to try and say that whilst a public sector job lost leads to knock-on effects, a private sector job gained doesn’t?

“Or is somebody seriously going to try and say that whilst a public sector job lost leads to knock-on effects, a private sector job gained doesn’t?”

But those 3m jobs will have knock on effects… so we’ll have 6 million new jobs… wait! Those 6 million jobs will have knock on effects, and to be consistent we have to assume a 1:1 ration, and that means that pretty soon there are more jobs than people!

Do you see? Do you?

I think you’ll find it’s a little more complicated than that.

I am still hoping that Labour are going to come out with some more detail on which of the Coalition’s cuts & revenue raising measures they support, & what they’d do differently. The Tories have an open goal for as long as they can accuse Labour of opposing cuts they’d have to make themselves; & Labour have an unacceptably vague message for as long as they support cuts but won’t say which ones.

I’m not saying they should produce a detailed shadow spending review, but would it really hurt to spell out roughly *how* they think the deficit should be halved in four years?

Do they support the Coalition’s aim of raising £4bn by restricting pension tax breaks? How about raising £7bn by tackling tax avoidance & evasion? Roughly how much do they think could be saved by tackling benefit fraud & error, & how much by reforming welfare? How much more do they think they’d collect in taxes, and how much less do they think they’d spend on welfare, due to higher growth under their plan? And how much would they cut, roughly, from departmental budgets?

I don’t see the need to dodge such questions any longer. If the Tories say they want to cut Council budgets by 7% a year, why not just come out and say ‘actually we think 3% a year is the most that could be achieved without harming essential services’ – and so on, departmental budget by departmental budget? The alternative is just to gesture towards their cuts being roughly half the Tories’ – but why be so vague?

My hunch is that there’s an appealing and credible story to be told here – action on tax avoidance & the banks, higher growth, & moderate reductions in the welfare bill & departmental budgets, achievable without the Tories’ mass redundancies & frontline cuts – and I just wish Labour would start telling that story.

You don’t cut drastically during a recession.

1. The government is not cutting drastically during a recession.

2. In nominal terms, spending is predicted to go up.

3. In inflation-adjusted terms, spending will go down only slightly, over the next five years.

4. The deficit will, hopefully, be reduced mostly by the increase in the governments revenues as the economy expands.

5. However, the government will have to increase the amount of money it spends on debt service. It has chosen to greatly increase spending on the NHS, and pensioners.

6. It follows that it will have to greatly decrease spending on everyone else.

7. Mostly this will cost public sector workers, for whom everyone else cares little, and benefit claimants, for whom everyone else cares hardly at all.

8. The government has also cut spending on the young: baby bonds, education support allowance, child benefit, and student grants.

9. The government could have chosen to cut spending on pensioners, and increase it on children; instead it has done the reverse.

10. I would say that the best attack on the Tories is that they are trying to buy the votes of the old with their grandchildren’s money.

19. Richard

“You don’t cut drastically during a recession.”

‘ Worked for America in the early 1920s and Britain in the early 1930s. ‘

Hmmm.

Britain in the 1930s
Public expenditure Nominal GDP Public debt Real GDP growth Unemployment
1931- 575m 4359m 173% -5.1 21.3
1932- 538m 4276m 177% 0.3 22.1
1933- 514m 4259m 183% 1.1 19.9

The National Government between 1931 and 1933 cut public expenditure by around 10 per cent. Nominal GDP fell by 2.3 per cent, and public debt grew because the economy was smaller.

1934- 535m 4513m 177% 6.8 16.7
1935- 591m 4721m 168% 3.8 15.5
1936- 668m 4905m 162% 3.1 13.1
1937- 782m 5289m 150% 4.3 10.8
1938- 937m 5572m 147% 3.0 12.9
1939- 1359m 5958m 141% 3.9 9.3

You have all sorts of issues around correlation and causation. Since I am a monetary guy I attribute the growth in the 1930s economy to taking Britain off the moronic gold standard rather than the expansion of government spending. However, the expansion of government spending clearly did not inhibit growth. Whereas in the earlier period the contraction of public expenditure did inhibit growth and public debt rose. Moreover, the 1930s illustrate that you reduce public debt by growing the economy. Only the ‘ government budgets are just like a household ‘ brigade can’t seem to get that into their heads.

Other than we need more monetary stimulus I am not sure the 1930s tells us anything other than illustrate debt dynamics. However, it certainly does not demonstrate the lesson that you think it does.