Exactly right on both ends.

Even if he were wrong on the principles of welfare (which I don’t think he is), those slamming him need to consider what they want – a welfare state that does some things they don’t like (eg reward contribution, like those horrible right-wing places Germany, or the UK in the Beveridge era), or a welfare state that is everything they would wish it to be, but doesn’t in fact exist, because people didn’t value it and voted for parties that abolished it.

What Ed M lacks in natural charisma he makes up for in intelligence and a ruthless determination. Thus this speech reflects two things, firstly the beginning of the results from Labour’s long policy reviews are coming in. And the recent media attention that demands he takes direction.
Being on the left wing it saddens me that he is now endorsing a Blue Labour/New Labour vision and politics. But this may reflect the surest strategy to get elected in this country (at least in the South East of England).
Ed M is extremely malleable and sensitive to what is needed. He has perhaps over estimated peoples’ patience in waiting for him to define himself but equally he needed to buy time so that when the need to define himself arrived, he could do so in a style that is most electorally winnable (as I now think he is beginning to). Its sad; but this is the way the modern left seemingly has to be. Obama is another example of similar political behaviour.

“Exactly right on both ends.”

Are you going to do your welfare reform article which you were talking about on twitter – treat this as a request if you hadn’t decided!

On the contributory principle, I’ve got an open mind, but it is going to be hugely expensive to do things like pay people a percentage of their former salary or other elements of the Frank Field plan. Given the choice, I’d rather (for example) allocate the resources for an employment guarantee scheme than for ramping up welfare spending on the recently unemployed.

As for the housing announcement, it’s fine as far as it goes (as Ed M says, a number of local authorities do it already), but talking about allocations policies is the housing policy equivalent of shuffling deckchairs while the ship goes down. Labour does need to address public concerns, but it also needs to keep an eye on tackling some of the worst social problems – how to reduce homelessness and overcrowding, how to cut child poverty, how to guarantee a decent life for people who are too sick or disabled to work, how to provide more support for people with caring responsibilities, how to reduce unemployment and poverty pay…

And as for Liam Byrne’s bonkers idea of wasting money on requiring unemployed people to visit the jobcentre weekly – which services are we going to cut or which taxes are we going to raise to pay for that little wheeze?

Yeah it’s in the pipeline but, well, life keeps getting in the way. I don’t disagree, but we have a policy already announced to increase housing supply, particularly affordable housing, don’t we? On the one hand that might have been made something of in the speech, on the other, there’s something to be said for a simple message.

Hmmm…a housing and welfare policy run on the basis of morality and social conduct, rather than economic need? That’s going to be fun. I can foresee the moral equivalent of a credit rating agency calibrating who is the more deserving on the basis of how many hours’ volunteering they’ve put in (which of course ceases to be voluntary if it’s either that or sleeping rough) or their willingness to lend a cup of sugar. And how does someone with an Asbo (which I thought had gone) ‘pay off’ their poor moral standing so they can get back on the housing list? Oh, and what exactly is Miliband’s policy on more social housing?

I also notice that the summary gives no indication of the sanctions to be imposed on the rich if they continue to receive ‘excessive’ pay. No change there then.

Back to square one on the welfare blogpost, I think. Tim Horton has said 90% of what I was going to say, and a bit more besides.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/13/ed-miliband-speech-welfare-responsiblity

So when exactly did Ed get the medical degree and the access to the putative disabled benefit claimant’s medical records? I’m disabled, I know a considerable amount about disability and I wouldn’t dare to make a judgement on another disabled person’s ability to work, nor would most of the disabled people I know. Yet someone who knows less feels able to?

Meet me and you see I walk with difficulty, which rules out a small segment of jobs, but you can’t see that standing, sitting, and sometime even lying down lead to rapidly increasing levels of, ultimately mind-numbing, pain, which overwhelmingly limits the jobs I can do, as does the pain and loss of coordination which come from any repetitive arm or leg movement. Yet all you can see when you meet me are the crutches.

The public, and apparently now Ed, are convinced that they can identify ‘genuine’ disability at a glance, yet much disability is invisible, or counter-intuitive. The only people qualified to judge what jobs they can do, if any, are the disabled people themselves and their own medics. Yet Ed now thinks himself justified in feeling able to brand a disabled person as irresponsible on the basis of a brief encounter.

And where Ed leads, others will follow, using him as the example to justify their discriminatory attitudes. I and other disabled people spent Monday getting the worsening attitudes to disabled people and the disabled hate crime that results into the headlines in London and the South East, and trying to get message across that this is being caused by the unending stream of DWP press releases and the disablist bile spewing out of Cameron, IDS, and Grayling, and then transformed into black propaganda/outright hatemongering by the Tory Rags.

And then along comes Ed and jumps on their bandwagon, not ours. People who might have resisted the hatemongering from the Daily Heil or the Vexpress, because they realise it comes with a Tory seal of approval, now find Ed and Labour legitimising the view that disabled people are universally irresponsible, scrounging, fraudsters and worthy of their scorn, or worse.

Thanks Ed.