Dan Hodges smells of garlic and fish.

The people at the top of the Labour Party aren’t tub-thumping populists, and would look ridiculous if they pretended to be. But an approach which involves listening to people and then figuring out how to come up with concrete, achievable ways of sorting out problems and making things better is one which plays to their strengths.

Oh come on. When has Labour ever been good at this? Blair was obsessed with Focus Groups, it is true, but then he was also obsessed with spin – not doing something, but being seen to be doing something.

If only.

Don,

Haven’t they had an awfully long time to “set out their stall” since the GE? The immediate post election leadership contest and navel gazing about the crushing defeat of the vile NuLabour project can’t be used as an excuse anymore.

Where is the new thinking, the radical and progressive paltform which differentiates Labour from the Coalition, and indeed from Blairism and Brownism?

Nowhere to be seen.

What we get instead is a weak opposition led by a bunch on nonentities. Their basic approach seems to be that they’d do much the same as the Coalition, but to a slightly different timescale. Not only has the ghost of NuLabour not been laid to rest, it continues to infest the party; am I the only one who thinks that the two things might be related?

@2 although considerably better than the current government which has had more U turns than most of us have had hot dinners, wrecking the NHS without mandate, wrecking legal aid without understanding its function and enormous benefit and throwing countless kids below the poverty line. But at least we now have a big society where the rich are equaly feeling the pinch.

4. Man on Clapham Omnibus

@2 although considerably better than the current government which has had more U turns than most of us have had hot dinners, wrecking the NHS without mandate, wrecking legal aid without understanding its function and enormous benefit and throwing countless kids below the poverty line. But at least we now have a big society where the rich are equaly feeling the pinch.

You really can’t see why this is irrelevant? It is probably not even true. As if the Labour Party isn’t as bad. But even if it was, the point is Labour has to stand for something other than holding office. That is what the Tories are for. Ed needs to find something. His problems go deeper than who to listen to.

I suppose we now get the type of politics we have been demanding for the last twenty years.

Every time you get an audience, vox pop or a talk show host and ask ‘the people’ what they want, you get the same answers, ‘we want them to listen to us’, ‘we want them to tell the truth’.

But what if what the public are saying things that are not true? What most people want is not ‘the truth’, they want their politicians to reinforce their prejudices.

You see it all the time. Once the ‘public’ get something stupid into their heads it becomes ‘fact’.

The huge number of NHS ‘non jobs’. Right Wing myth, I am afraid. And everyone connected to the NHS knows it, so when you attempt to cut these jobs, in most cases you are cutting vital people and losing vital services. But the public know the ‘truth’ so it has to be done.

The best way Labour can counter this type of thing is not to go along with them at the outset and try and keep an eye out for things that are appearing on the Radar and dispel those myths. When the Tories started their attacks on the disabled, Labour seemed not to care too much. These Tories were playing silly games, no one would attack the disabled as the public would react badly, but once the ‘scrounger’ myth got traction, it was too late, ‘everyone knows’ that anyone who is not in a wheelchair is making it up and any attempt to say otherwise is pandering to the lazy.

Milliband can simply go with the crowd because if we actually want our political leaders to tell the truth, we need to defend the truth, rather than ignore lies.

@6 Or as some say, Democracy is all about giving the people what they asked for, good and hard.

@5

As I think my first post indicated,the Tories dont stand for anything other than total confusion and ignorance,which granted may be widespread in the UK.

“At a time when distrust with politicians is at its height, Dan argues that Ed Miliband needs to persuade a majority of people …………………. So how’s he going to do that, then?”

You identify here one of the key conundrums in politics today. We’re all aware that a lot of politics is just spectacle yet we’re not supposed to say so. We’re supposed to say that Party X is keeping us safe because their councillors and MPs have their photos in the local press with the Police, and Party Y is “soft” because its leaders don’t take part in photo opportunities dressed in Hi-Viz jackets looking for illegal immigrants at Dover. New Labour tried this and found that there were diminishing returns. The public knows that this is eyewash so the question arises as to whether you do more and more of this (with diminishing returns) or abandon the strategy.

The risk of going further down this road is that you end up shooting passing electricians, locking people up without trial and taking part in illegal invasions. Because of an anxiety to appear to be keeping people safe, New Labour ended up anandoning some basic principles of a democratic society (and opened itself up to attack from political opponenets that it was careless with civil liberties).

An alternative approach would be much greater honesty with the public about the risks we face and the costs (in money or civil liberties) in dealing with them. It would have to be a long-term strategy, of course, it is the only way to regain public trust.

Hi Jim,

I think there are two separate things here:

1. When the Tories and their surrogates develop their right-wing myths, I totally agree that we need to get sharper at knocking these down before they get traction.

2. Politically, I find it striking that people just don’t raise this stuff about non-jobs and scroungers when I’ve been out campaigning over the last year or so. There is an enormous gap in both tone and content between the things which politicians talk about and the things which people on the doorstep raise.

One anecdote as an example – the Right have poured tens and hundreds of millions of pounds into persuading people of the need to shrink the state. Yet in Lord Ashcroft’s focus groups, not a single person knew what the aim of ‘shrinking the state’ was, and one person hazarded a guess that maybe it was something to do with cutting off Cornwall.

The political priority for Labour, therefore, is (a) spending more time on the things which people raise when asked ‘what do you think would improve your local area’, and (b) developing workable and effective policies for government, e.g. by talking to disability campaigners about how to reform and improve the welfare state.

@ 10 Don

The trouble is though Don, people aren’t always “rational” in the way they think these things through; they can and often do agree at the same time with a lot of the crap that is spouted by the right wing press and take it at face value, and then when it comes to local issues especially, support radically different or even totally contradictory positions.

Labour under Ed hasn’t addressed your first point any more than it did under Blair and Brown. Why not? Just a wild guess… but perhaps because it isn’t a party of the progressive left of centre any more, still less a radical force.

I think you are right that there is little public appetite for the Big Society, or shrinking the state per se. However there is public concern about their taxes being “wasted” by throwing money at problems, even if some of the criticism is over-done or inaccurate. Labour aren’t going to win power back by being a pale imitation of the Coalition, or saying that they’d do pretty much the same but not as quickly.

However if they can convince enough people that they do offer an alternative, they might actually get somewhere…. otherwise we’re headed for another hung parliament with the rump LD’s propping up Newer Labour offering us more of the same.

Don’t know where to start with this, Yes Labour did hire lots more police to cut crime, as this is what the public whnted, is this a bad thing New laobur did ,that Ed should distance himself from, as for not listeining to dan hodges, do you really feel that Ed for all his “anti Iraq” “new labour is over” quotes would have done anyithing different, and the Comment of David milband shooting looters was silly.

Gordon Brown did stick to Tory spending plans but if the Public believed he was breaking that promise it was only because he repeatedly misrepresented his spending to make it look much larger than it was . ” The Gord Giveth ” was the Sun headline when he announced £20 billion of cash for the NHS that was a fiction

You are being disingenuous , take a real example .Most people think it is unfair that the Union backed Public Sector have pensions the private sector dream of and yet they are going on strike.
Ed Milliband did not support the strike, no Labour leader has ever done that , he was ,however , evasive about it and both late and weak with his perfunctory distancing remarks .

Given that we all know he was elected with Union money and votes against the wishes of the Parliamentary Labour Party this is a colossal problem . he clearly cannot be trusted on tax and the Public Sector.

On immigration the Labour tin ear quickly reasserted itself after endless door step rants during the losing election. Labour did loosen the marriage qualification and this has been the source of the most difficult immigration.
Can anyone think of one thing Labour has had to say to the squeezed middle except that they exist, any tax cuts, any help ?
As we see very clearly on this blog the tax payer is literally despised by the left and as for small business …well I need hardly say .

“There is a leftie response is that this is a load of unprincipled, right-wing rubbish, and that if that’s what it takes to win an election, then Labour is better off losing.”

Indeed – better to stand by one’s principles and lose than to abandon them and therefore basically liquidate the party.

The key lesson to be learnt from this is that Labour has nothing to gain from taking on the Tories on the Tories’ terms. 1997-2010 is an example of what happens when Labour does that – a better government than the Tories would have provided, of course, but not what a Labour government should be in terms of workers’ rights, equality and changing the balance of power in society. Labour has to provide a counter-narrative that can force the Tories to debate on our terms.

Don @ 10

About five years ago, I was working for an electronics firm. One of my colleagues and I got into a discussion regarding the public services where he informed my with all the authority you would expect from a top academic who had studied the subject in great detail over a number of years, that public services were top heavy in management and you could easily sack half of them and nothing would change. All the NHS needed to do was sack every manager about a given level and hey presto, everything would be solved.

Of course, when challenged he couldn’t come up with a single job that did not need done. He conceded that they would still need personnel departments and of course he didn’t want surgeons and consultants answering phones all day, nor did he want nurses sending out appointments or stuck in offices, either. He did say that there should be ‘less paperwork, what kind of paperwork, he wasn’t sure, but even though he hadn’t seen any of this paperwork, he was sure you could rid of it.

Okay, he is a ‘small state’ man who believed that improvements come from efficiency. The thing is, his wife was the breadwinner. She was earning three times his wage. Rather inevitably, she works in the public sector in the prison service. Not as a warden, but as a manager, dealing with ‘paperwork’ all day. Not ‘any old’ paperwork, of course, but paperwork vital to running a prison. Not patrolling the cells or the walkways or anything as trivial as that but making sure invoices got paid and inventories were kept up to date. Could any of her jobs be downsized? Nope, they would have no idea of the costs and what the current stores levels were. Couldn’t she be replaced by a couple of wardens doing some stuff at the end of the shift, but who would be accountable? Couldn’t they just cut the wages and replace her job with someone less qualified? That was stupid because having less trained staff would been the job would done a lot worse. On and on and on. So about the NHS, do you Still think you could cut jobs, paperwork and wages and have no effect on patient care? Yes, yes, yes because there are too many managers in the NHS but not the Scottish prison service.

@13 Everyone is a taxpayer, so to say ‘the left’ despises ‘the taxpayer’ is to make quite the extrodinary claim. Unless you’re using ‘taxpayer’ to mean something else entirely.

Don @ 10

1. When the Tories and their surrogates develop their right-wing myths, I totally agree that we need to get sharper at knocking these down before they get traction.

I cannot watch political programmes any more without getting absolutely incandescent, not only at the Tories scoring political point with previous ‘lies repeated often enough become truth’, but the new ones going completely unchallenged.

I am close to exploding with rage as the ‘taking the poor out of tax’ shite gets hawked around the TV and radios completely unchallenged by the Left.

The tax burden is being shifted from progressive to regressive taxation and heaped onto the backs of the poor. For most of the poor, the VAT rise will more than make up for the few quid they will gain from the rise in allowances. Yet for some reason, the Left are absolutely silent on this issue. The knock on effect being that IF Labour gets into power the income tax base will be shot to pieces and any attempt to raise tax will be stymied. One of Labour’s big problems last time was that they were forced to raise regressive taxation, bar a NI raise. Labour and the Left have allowed the ‘income tax cuts are aimed at the poor’ myth to get in to the public conscience via default. Not by clever marketing by the Right, but sheer fucking laziness and blazing stupidity as well.

Dan Hodges is dreadful.

Cyclux – Everyone is also a load of proteins and salt and water but they do not identify themlselves as such or consider this a revealing description.
Labour despise the tax payer because to identify yourself as one is to assert that your own money belongs to you albeit that you pay for certain state managed services .
That is not the left wing conception which at bottom assumes money is created by blind forces, belongs to no-one and is optimally distributed by a collectivley representative state ( at best).
That is why there is no left wing tax payers alliance
( ….anyway the Public Sector don`t really pay tax do they…)

I can see no change in Labour – the same party who (as the article says) began the process of demonising claimants. But the Condems are refining this attitdue into merciless hatred, and I just don’t get the impression that Labout are angry, or prepared to re-instate those benefits which were wrongly and callously lost or abolished. Practically Ed Milliband’s first statement was ‘…we are the party of grafters.’ Not representing those who cannot find jobs in the downturn Brown’s light-touch regulation created is not going to win them votes. I get the impression that Labour agree with cuts, and won’t overturn them if they regain any hold on government. And that is what I want from them: banking regulation (and housing/renting reforms) not education/NHS/welfare slashing. But I can dream.

@19 So, yes, you are using it to mean something else entirely. Glad we sorted that one out!

The problem here is the strange concept that the party is more important than the ideals. The issue that seems to being debated here is not what do we stand for? Nor is it what is best for the country? It is simply how does Labour get into power? Power for what purpose? Perhaps that should be what is needed – if Mr Milliband could bring Labour to a purpose (and if they already have one, perhaps use it…) then he might get somewhere. Otherwise he is just another career politician, and given the choice between him and David Cameron, most people in the country will chose Mr Cameron who comes across as more compotent and smarter (nice or approachable don’t matter).

18 constructice criticism can’t beat it,

A few points:

1. Capitalism is the only show in town: the ‘socialist society’ is a utopian, quasi-religious notion, which has never existed and never will exist. To my mind, the point of a left-of-centre party is to manage and regulate capitalism better than any right-of-centre party can, implementing redistributive policies that go just far enough to avoid killing the capitalist goose that lays the golden eggs.

2. So many people on here believe that benefit fraud is a right-wing myth. When pressed, all they can provide as evidence for this are less-than-credible internal DWP estimates provided by civil servants who have a clear interest in minimising the level of benefit fraud when reporting to their political masters. Meanwhile, epidemiological studies have apparently convinced this government and the last that the incidence of some illnesses and disabilities is considerably less than the number of benefit cases suggests. The vast majority of people in this country want benefit fraud minimised; and spittle-flecked posts on here denouncing anyone who agrees with this as a Nazi are bizarre and risible.

3. There is a rather dark, anti-democratic undertone to some of the posts on this thread – eg @ 6 and 7 – which reveals a contempt for the choices of ordinary people. I’m half-expecting some idiot to pop up and say our system is a only bourgeois democracy in which the people cannot see their real interests because they bewitched by consumerism and the popular press…*yawn*

4. The sort of policies that Labour could adopt if it wanted to be really radical are: cutting corporation tax to 12%, cutting income tax to a similar level, introducing a wealth tax, increasing VAT dramatically on everything other than the basics…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/economics-blog/2011/dec/19/corporation-tax-cut-europe

At a time when distrust with politicians is at its height, Dan argues that Ed Miliband needs to persuade a majority of people that he’ll send home the immigrants, cut public spending, sort out the scroungers and use water cannon on the rioters.

So how’s he going to do that, then?

Well, he could try demanding that the current government cut immigration, cut public spending, sort out the scroungers and use water cannon on the rioters. He could say that the governments cuts in public sector pensions do not go far enough. He could demand cuts in benefits, instead of opposing them. He could demand harsh punishments for thieves, muggers, rioters and so on. And he could have the entire party back him up on this.

In short, he and the Labour Party could do all the things they would do if they genuinely wanted those things to be done.

I’d say that the reason Labour finds it difficult to persuade people that it wants to do those things, it that it does not really want to do those things.

Well said. I would actually argue that reading Dan Hodges and doing the opposite is close to the truth…

26 redshift yeah, like tony been when he people said the 83 manifesto was the longest suicide speeech in history, he said that Laoubr lost then as “it’ wasn’t left wing enough”

@27 Well if the Labour party has to become more like the Tory party in order to win elections, then perhaps we should just dispense with elections altogether and just have an unelected Tory tyranny. Saves time, and achieves the same result.

@27 Well if the Labour party has to become more like the Tory party in order to win elections, then perhaps we should just dispense with elections altogether and just have an unelected Tory tyranny. Saves time, and achieves the same result.

Or maybe it just reflects the Labour party and the socialist ideal has served its purpose and had its day, and it is time for a different sort of left-wing position that can represent the wishes of the population better.

Because what stops you winning elections is not being unlike the Conservatives. It is simply not attracting enough votes. There must be a liberal-left-wing alternative that can be developed and offered to the people, because at the moment Labour has the baggage of its past and the power-hunger of its present, but no vision for the future.

“Oh come on. When has Labour ever been good at this? Blair was obsessed with Focus Groups, it is true, but then he was also obsessed with spin – not doing something, but being seen to be doing something.”
If only.
Why are you bothered you tory troll ?
Also Tories have never been obsessed by polls or spin
Saatchi bothers were a waste then

I agree with watchman
What is the point of having the same policies as the coalition ?

Capitalism is the only show in town: the ‘socialist society’ is a utopian, quasi-religious notion, which has never existed and never will exist. To my mind, the point of a left-of-centre party is to manage and regulate capitalism better than any right-of-centre party can, implementing redistributive policies that go just far enough to avoid killing the capitalist goose that lays the golden eggs.
Excellent point. The Labour party has never been a socialist party more akin to the methodists.
It’s most radical time , after the war was a case of implementing the ideas of a left wing liberal

2. So many people on here believe that benefit fraud is a right-wing myth. When pressed, all they can provide as evidence for this are less-than-credible internal DWP estimates provided by civil servants who have a clear interest in minimising the level of benefit fraud when reporting to their political masters. Meanwhile, epidemiological studies have apparently convinced this government and the last that the incidence of some illnesses and disabilities is considerably less than the number of benefit cases suggests. The vast majority of people in this country want benefit fraud minimised; and spittle-flecked posts on here denouncing anyone who agrees with this as a Nazi are bizarre and risible.
True but it is not the major economic problem we have.

3. There is a rather dark, anti-democratic undertone to some of the posts on this thread – eg @ 6 and 7 – which reveals a contempt for the choices of ordinary people. I’m half-expecting some idiot to pop up and say our system is a only bourgeois democracy in which the people cannot see their real interests because they bewitched by consumerism and the popular press…*yawn*
I think that is unfair.

4. The sort of policies that Labour could adopt if it wanted to be really radical are: cutting corporation tax to 12%, cutting income tax to a similar level, introducing a wealth tax, increasing VAT dramatically on everything other than the basics…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/economics-blog/2011/dec/19/corporation-tax-cut-europe
Good points but will it not be unpopular especially in reagrds to taxes on food and fuel.

A radical approach maybe is turn utiliies into old type of building societies. Charitable, non government, and indpendent. All the profits are distibuted into improving the infrastructure and pay dividends to all citizens in there is a bumper year.

28@ the tories were wrong on Fox hunting the Poll tax, the Selling of council homes so cheap without replacing them,gay rights ,apartied the lack of investment in education, and seeing people homeless in cardboard city was socially accpetable. In the Late 80′s, that’s why I joined labour then,

but we had to ejext things like Leaving Europe, Unilateralism, the closed shop, bringing Back the GLC renationalisation, or scrapping riot police, restoring flying pickets secondary picketing, and support the Tories on the Temporary measure prevention of terorsim act, that why labour went from 30% at the 87 election to 35.3% at the next one and aprt from the upper rate 50% tax rate there wasn’t that much difference between the 1992 election and the ’97 one, the Tories are swing right now and taking the centre ground with them, How long before John Redwoods back proposing a flat tax.

But seinging laobur to the left and putting it out of power now ,maybe a moral victory. to some ,but not for me

Ed Miliband should remember that Dan Hodges’ cynical misanthropy is matched only by the low quality of his political advice. Machiavelli he ain’t.

Ed Miliband reminds me of William Hague saying back me or sack me, that he’s right everyone elese is wrong and after the election he’ll be proved right