Firstly, I do think it is a good thing considering the alternative (David Miliband): The New Labour generation has been left behind and, assuming he remains party leader for at least four years, looks unlikely to come back. So irrespective of his prospects of becoming PM (and my hunch tells me he won't win), it is at least a good thing to have - in a way - sidelined the Blairites and New Labour.
But still, it is remarkable the way in which he is being presented as the left-wing candidate. Perhaps in relative terms he is 'left-wing' (in the same way that, say, John McCain might be described as left-wing compared to Sarah Palin) but in real, concrete terms, what does he advocate that is so left-wing? He advocates a living wage (of roughly £7), but is that really what makes someone left-wing? As far as I can see, he has located Labour's votes not among Tories (so he's not targeting the right) but among LibDems and non-voters. But this is hardly left-wing.
There is very little on neoliberalism and the creeping privatisation of Britain and its public spaces and services. In fact, reading his pledges (very content-light) there seem to be endlessly confused messages of supporting the working class, business, competitiveness, about being against both traditionalists and the new traditionalists New Labour. Here is his confused quote:
In the early 1990s some Labour people thought of themselves as traditionalists defending the Labour cause against Tony Blair and the modernisation of New Labour. Today our danger is to defend traditionalist new Labour solutions on every issue because this will consign us to defeat. It is my rejection of this New Labour nostalgia that makes me the modernising candidate at this election.
So is he advocating a 'fourth way'?
Where this notion of Red Ed comes from is from the support he has received from the Trade Unions. It's presented as some kind of shadowy deal, which is contrary to any democratic processes and understanding. Every media gimp repeats this ad nauseam, but of course what this constitutes is a real representation of the working class and employees. Moreover, since individual members vote on the issue, it is even more surprising that these votes are presented as somehow detached from the 'real world'. Yet our Big Business-obsessed media depict this as shady, undemocratic, fundamentally wrong. He is 'in the pay of the unions', they claim. It is a daft claim and says very little about his policies (about which no one really knows much and those that are known look rather more mainstream to me).
On foreign policy, it is somewhat of a break with the past, but it must be qualified, too. Unlike his brother and Andy Burnham who voted very strongly for the Iraq War, Ed Miliband has distance between the foreign policy crimes of New Labour and himself. Unlike his brother David, his hands aren't sullied by torture. But he has voted against an investigation into the Iraq War and for New Labour's anti-terrorist measures. But he (along with Diane Abbott who always had the cleanest record on most issues) has made some encouraging noises about moving away from the imperialist, aggressive nonsense of New Labour.
So on the whole, he isn't left-wing, but perhaps enough non-New Labour to expunge or at least neutralise that particular part of the party.
UPDATE:
Julian Glover is against Ed Miliband, so it cannot be all that bad.
Neil Clark offers a very good analysis on the myth of Ed's redness.
16 comments:
Hi olching
Great article as usual...
The fact that Miniband is presented as Lefty whilst Maxiband was somehow Righty and consequently new leader Miniband is drawing Britain backwards is...well...bloody hilarious...
...personally I think it's also hilarious that the claims that "Red Ed" is a union stooge have been shouted from the media rooftops from almost the second he was (barely) victorious...and hence that (this faux) democracy has somehow been undermined...without even the slightest whiff of irony that such a claim can be made entirely at the whim of the Right-wing stooge press...
...my stooge is bigger than your stooge!!!
On CiF...it's been so reactionary that the old days when we all moaned how reactionary it was seem like a golden age!
Hi Lester,
As you say, the very idea that Ed M. is a lefty is hilarious.
And you know what the most annoying part in all of this is?
Everybody knows that it's nonsense; everybody: Those journalists, commentators, politicians who make the claim, as well as those seriously retorting the nonsensical claim.
When Nick Robinson makes this claim on the BBC news, he does so knowing that it's utterly removed from reality, knowing that those watching will know this too. Yet somehow it's become a serious matter for debate.
Is Ed really a socialist? Is he in the pay of the communistic-quasi-fascist-and-child-eating unions?
But it also shows how incredibly right-wing our environment is. Imagine if Ed Miliband were all that was thrown at him (i.e. union friendly, and leftish): So what, or rather, good for him. But instead we know that if someone were indeed to espouse, say, solid social democratic ideas, s/he'd be treated as if s/he were introducing torture (which of course isn't deemed that bad, whereas being critical of unfettered neoliberalism is...).
It is a step for the better - no more than that but I am inclined to accept small mercies these days!
When you say the claims about Milliband being Lefty are utterly removed from reality and that everybody knows this you've perfectly encapsulated one of the core deceits of western politics...
If it walks like democracy and talks like democracy then in today's projected reality we can only assume its a kind of symbolic representation...which would be fine if there were any other kind of democracy...but the perverted representation has become the only reality - there is no longer anyone who can be persuaded by the boy who cries the Emperor is naked because somewhere we all know he's naked but we have grown either more comfortable with or more terrified of the lie...
...It's a brilliant deception because it renders attack obsolete...in precisely the same way that a sane person incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital can never convince his captors of his sanity as everything he says is immediately seen to be generated by his presumed insanity...there is no purchase for argument against a universal lie...
...and it's brilliant because it's truly disheartening...before argument can even be fairly had insurmountable correction of the agreed parameters has to be made...(and in doing so one sounds as mad as the unfortunately incarcerated sane person!)...the very isolation of having a "dissenting" view is so fatiguing that one just gives up...
Unless Red Ed (I actually like that name - it sounds like a compliment to me!) starts to frame his arguments outside of the Right Wing narrative that we're all incarcerated in...(which he won't)...we've essentially got another Emperor with a whole new set of no-clothes...
Hello Olching. Spot on article.
To get an idea of Ed’s redness, you need to mix a pin prick of blood into six litres of dulux white emulsion. ‘Ed’s Redness’ is symptomatic of the Westminster playground where, wholly detached from reality and ideology free, they can play at conviction politics as if the left/right axis still existed.
Ed’s a cosmopolitan, bureaucratic cog in the liberal democratic political machine who will espouse the usual bland platitudes about ‘making capitalism better for everyone’ whilst kowtowing to the media and the corporate sector. Plus ca change.
Instructive also is the way he made a great play in his first speech that there will be no ‘lurch to the left’. The pejorative use of ‘lurch’ with ‘left’ tells us exactly Ed’s political vision vis a vis true Social Democracy.
The fact he’s the ‘Unions man’ and therefore left wing is laughable too. The Unions are a busted flush. Since the austerity measures were announced, the TUC and Unite made great play of the fact that they will not consider Industrial action. They’ve had secret talks with Francis Maude and invited Mervyn King to address the TUC congress. In the last week, the language may have become slightly more hard line but I will be astonished if this lot if Union leaders will actually stand up for their members interests as the cuts begin in earnest.
So Red Ed is a great appointment for the Unions- “we’ve destroyed New Labour and got our man, aren’t we still a force?”, the Conservatives- “Oh, look the spirit of 1983 is back and alive in Westminster, it’s time for conviction politics, wonderful” and the Right wing press- “Edward Scargill, McGahey, tolpuddle martyr, donkey jacket, Aneurin Bevan, KGB, General Strike Milliband was elected leader of the British Communist Party formerly New Labour yesterday in scenes reminiscent of the storming of the St Petersburg winter palace in 1917….."
Where it leaves the country desperate for an alternative to the corporatist model of democracy, well, who knows.
Completely agree with this piece, Olching, and posted something not dissimilar on cif yesterday:
The accusation that Miliband's victory puts him in the pockets of the 'union barons' is obviously nonsense, partly because as this piece explains it was individual union members who were casting votes but also because he won by virtue of his accumulated total across the three sections - the fact that he didn't win within two of the individual sections is as irrelevant as saying that a government is illegitimate because it doesn't win in every region of the country. And for that matter, even if he had owed his win to union leaders, now that he has won he would no longer be beholden to them and his position depends primarily on keeping the confidence of the PLP.
Anyway, all this is by the way. The real issue arising from the debate about his election is the way that within a very short period of time - say a couple of decades - the space of what is deemed 'acceptable' within British politics by the media and commentators has become such a tiny section of the political spectrum. Ed Milliband is by no stretch of the imagination a figure of the far left. Indeed he is probably in many respects to the right of, say, Heath or Macmillan never mind Wilson or Healey, or for that matter of the SDP. There are plenty of reasons for that (the structure and nature of media ownership, for a start) but at least one is the legacy of the false diagnosis of the New Labour 'project' which decreed that any significant dissent from the Thatcherite settlement would render Labour 'unelectable'. That diagnosis - formed from the experience of the 1980s and perhaps especially 1992 - was wrong in 1997 (when the Tories were so unpopular that almost any version of Labour would have got in) and it is particular absurd, given the manifest failure of the Thatcherite settlement when the financial system blew up, that it should still inform political thinking in 2010.
Rather than ponder the democratic qualities of the Labour leadership election, those who really care about democracy should consider the limitations of a national politics in which the only real choice on offer is between two management teams presenting minor variants of the same failed strategy. [end of CiF post]
But as you say Olching what is also extraordinary is that everyone calling him 'Red Ed' does indeed know that it is nonsense and yet somehow it is established as the hegemonic narrative.
Peter G.
George Galloway is rathre bullish about Mr Ed in the Record -
http://blogs.dailyrecord.co.uk/georgegalloway/2010/09/ed-must-ride-the-tide-to-downi.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheDailyRecord%2FGeorgeGalloway+%28The+Daily+Record+-+George+Galloway%29
As ever GG has to be edited back but he has a sharp nose for the wind and there are some shrewd points in there among the purple foliage
@Duke:
Yes, you are right about the language used in all of this. The 'lurch' can only happen to the left, while in the other direction politics shift (either to the centre ground or to the right). It's a sad state of affairs we have arrived at.
@Peter:
Agree completely with your comment. It truly is a damning indictment of the parameters of political discourse and policy.
The mere suggestion of doing something that isn't slavishly pro-business - misanthropically so - is pounced on as 'red' (or hard left as it is often referred to - Duke, there's another nice use of language: Why is it always the left that is referred to as 'hard' (even when it really isn't equidistant to the centre as the far right), whereas the right is 'far', i.e. in a non-pejorative, quasi-objective, geographically descriptive way).
@Edwin:
I think George Galloway is right to make the point that of those who could win, he was the least bad option...though it's tragic to have to make that point anyway.
'October', starring Ed Millipede as Lenin, Hattie Harperson as Rosa Luxemburg and Ed Ballsup as Leon Trotsky. Music by Andrew Lloyd-Webber. Lyrics by John Prescott. Produced by Simon Cowell.
I can see this show being cancelled after the first night.
- questionnaire
Another thing about the language of all this. It's noticeable how those on the right - most noticeably with Blair's third way - are very keen on saying that 'right' and 'left' are outmoded terms for political dinosaurs. (What they mean, of course, is that 'we are all right-wing now'). Yet, when it seems as if tactics demand it they flip instantly to deploying just these 'outmoded' terms to castigate supposed leftists such as Ed Miliband.
As Lester said, the shame is that Miliband has immediately allowed himself to be positioned with terms defined by the right.
Anyway, I have no great hopes of the whole thing, unless that hope is that he might very slightly shift away from New Labour's worst features (that will be easier on foreign policy than on economics, I would think). Mind you, since the 'coalition' came to power I've been slightly nostalgic even for New Labour. But that's how the fuckers get you, isn't it? Jesus, I even felt a little uplifted by Brendan Barber's speech at the TUC Conference, so that shows how low the benchmark is.
On the political spectrum thing. When I was a politics undergraduate about a million years ago we were taught this thing vcalled 'the economic theory of democracy' developed by, I think, Samule Downs. The idea was that in a 2 party system politics coalesced to the centre so that a party could get just over 50% of the vote assuming that preferences were normally distributed. Well, it was self-evidently a putrid little theory - economistic, rationalistic, abstracted from any real political analysis and so on. But what strikes me now is that (in the UK, anyway) it is as if a whole segment of Downs' political spectrum has been eviscerated within popular debate so that everything between, say, Vince Cable and Trotsky has just been airbrushed out. And with the far (or should I say hard) right re-designated in Tebbit fashion to 'really' being the far left, everything is corralled into a tiny space somewhere betwen Nigel Farage and Nick Clegg. Can this spectacular contraction of politics be overcome? My own feeling is that it will only occur if there was a huge, dislocating crisis. But what the outcome of such a crisis would be I don't know - but I suspect unpleasntly Hobbesian rather than deliciously Rousseauian, to put it in those terms.
And hi to questionnaire - I wish you would come back to cif!
Peter,
I suppose one can always fling the same abuse of language back at them and about them.
Yes, it is strange how quickly the goal posts shift. As you say, even aspects of New Labour feel - within just a few months - positively leftish, which of course they never were.
@Questionnaire:
Yes, though you forgot to cast Cameron, Osborne, and Clegg as the impoverished, victimised kulaks, and the classic right-wing trope of Gordon Brown as Stalin. Blair could be the Moscow Patriarch. Only then would our neoliberal tragicomedy be complete!
"My own feeling is that it will only occur if there was a huge, dislocating crisis. But what the outcome of such a crisis would be I don't know - but I suspect unpleasntly Hobbesian rather than deliciously Rousseauian, to put it in those terms."
Or Spinozan. Hobbes was wrong to posit a brutal 'state of nature' just as Rousseau was wrong to posit a noble one. Whilst culture can ennoble us, on the other hand only culture can produce the fearful symbolism that drives human beings to brutality, either the physical type or the insidious sublimated type that pervades Thatcherism. At some point near the end of a disruptive crisis, strangely, the fearfulness subsides; after all, we're in the thick of it now, yet we survive. Our experience activates what Spinoza called 'conatus', that part of our psyche which seeks peace and homeostasis, which we then politicise and institutionalise ... for as long as we can. The post-war Labour government was the child of conatus. My own observations of life tell me that in a 'state of nature' most people are pretty lazy, sociable and good-humoured; there is no natural propensity to brutal interpersonal competition. If a disruptive crisis can discredit the competitive symbolism of a former cultural era whilst leaving the better parts intact we can move forward; 'goodbye to all that'. Perhaps we need crises. Without their justification for action we're all hot air.
- questionnaire
Lenin's "the worse, the better" eh?
Indeed, only borderline psychopaths, such as Lenin himself, or the neoconservative architects of the Iraq war (who are of course his ideological descendants, by way of Trotsky) could possibly think of "chaos" in such purely abstract terms, as a means toward an end, ignoring the fact that for the vast majority, "chaos" means insecurity, suffering, and death.
It is a common trait of radicals (of both left and right) to fantasise that the existing order must collapse in order for something better and more beautiful to emerge from the ashes. However, even if we could guarantee such a "favourable" outcome, it could still never justify what this chaos would actually mean to those who are constrained to live through it.
We're not building blocks - we're human beings.
I always thougt that Mao's "there is great disorder under heaven, the situation is perfect" was more lyrical than Lenin's terse phrase.
It's no fantasy. It's history. The truly psychotic and dangerous fantasy is yours; you dream of the incremental continuity of an exhausted, corrupt tradition. You are like the madman endlessly repeating failure in the hope that it will work out in the end. Alongside revolutionary terror, most of the truly brutal responses to crises have arisen out of attempts to continue or restore traditions in situations of exhaustion (Spain, Nazi Germany - 'bankrupt shopkeepers dreaming of Seigreid') or expand them and impose them on others by means of colonisation and military interventionism (South America, Africa, Iraq, any imperialist adventure, take your pick ...). Yours is just an alternative - and a more certain - path to suffering and death.
You naturalise and essentialise things, Pat. It's not chaos that's brutal, it's the response to it, the manner in which order is created. Some degree of crisis is inevitable - perhaps not the full-blown chaos of war or social implosion, although they are always possible - but it's the response that's important.
We are indeed human. All too human. We cannot live in constant fear of the immanent and the inevitable. We must learn to respond to crises and dislocations in creative and humane ways.
Pat
Jarad Diamond suggests an interesting theory about the complexity of societal collapses which include human environmental impact (destroying resources) and micro/macro climate change, relations with neighbouring societies and relations with hostile societies, the political economic and cultural factors that enable societies to perceive and solve their problems...or not...
He suggests that collapse and the character of collapse are dependent on the various intricate relationships between the above points allowing all collapses to have their own personality...
One specific point he makes is where the short term interests of an elite and the long term interest of a society as a whole clash collapse is much more likely (especially if the elites are able to insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions)...
Another is the conflict between long term values held by the society and their oncoming difficulties whether it be physical or economic or political and the ability of these values to adapt to the changing relationships...
These are quite abstract terms and yet they very sanely predict that our present situation is non-sustainable (if we want society to appear anything like it currently does)...and that chaos is inevitable...
Chaos is inevitable because increasing complexity is inevitable...this isn't the fantasy of radicals...but as Q suggests the outcomes of chaos are unpredictable...and as he says it is not chaos that is brutal but responses to chaos...
I'd agree that our current value system truly disables us from a healthy and wise response to our predicaments - some people find imaging the end of the world easier than imagining the end of Capitalism...
Rather late in the day, but in response to Pat Davers one thing worth saying is this. The most influential of present-day advocates (and architects) of chaos/crisis/collapse are actually the corporate moguls who have taken to themselves a (bastardized) version of radical politics in which they champion a kind of Trotskyite managerialism of permanent revolution in which 'change is the only constant' and a kind of Pol Pot commitment to Year Zero in which all past practices must be destroyed and organizations re-built from scratch.
Yet unlike political revoloutinaries, there is no end game in sight; on the contrary, these transformations are an end in themsleves, not a means to an end - they don't even make companies more profitable; this managerialism is, in the true sense of the word, nihilistic.
The guiding impulse of contemporary capitalism is very much as Marx & Engels described it all those years ago: a world in which "all that is solid melts into air".
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