A paler shade of Ed

New Labour started out challenging old thinking but became trapped in its own certainties. That was the message Ed Miliband gave to the Labour Party conference in Manchester in his first major speech since becoming leader of the opposition.

During a week in which much of the media’s attention was focused on the personal interest story of two brothers competing for the same job, the sibling the Daily Mail like to brand “Red Ed” warned the conference that he was prepared to tell them things they might not want to hear; and duly proceeded to tell them everything they wanted to hear against a backdrop of carefully screened students and the neutered melodies of Kings of Leon.

Despite talking during his speech of “taking on established thinking” and, more significantly, a mention of the gap between rich and poor in outcomes rather than solely in opportunities, the speech was relatively lightweight, and more of a standard riposte to the excesses of Blairism than anything approaching an announcement of the impending destruction of the moneyed classes.

After all, can Ed really be deemed “red”? Or, on the back of 30 years of Thatcherism, does merely propounding a modest form of social democracy instinctively attract a beyond-the-pale “red” denunciation?

The focus of the speech was essentially on new beginnings. Not new or old Labour, but a new generation. Ed was at pains to emphasise the importance of not merely occupying the centre ground, but of defining it. He denounced the Iraq war, called for more independence from American foreign policy, and spoke of the importance of business as well as trade union responsibility.

So why is all this considered a swing to the left? Poll after poll in recent years has shown the British public to be in favour of a greater taxation of extreme wealth, a more independent foreign policy, and inclined to believe that Blair misled the country over the Iraq war.

The answer would appear to lie in the media portrayal of anyone daring to stand on even a modestly social-democratic platform; the attempt to write Ed off as “red” represents perfectly the demonisation of those who stray from the post-1970s neo-liberal consensus; and more importantly, highlights that in a post-financial crisis environment it is the right of the Labour Party who are no longer in sync with the British public, rather than those who, as Ed Miliband put it, wish to remain as “optimists” and who do not share David Cameron’s “miserable, pessimistic view of society”.

If the leadership contest is anything to go by, there is no doubt Ed Miliband will come in for rough treatment in the coming months from the British media, particularly the right-wing press. To the average Labour Party member however, it is perhaps a relief to finally have as leader someone who may be more salmon-pink than red, but who one suspects is a far more amiable shade than Blair's pallid blue.

Influential left-wingers

Following the lead of Left Foot Forward and Bob, I've compiled a list of my top five influencers of the left, both bad and good respectively.

The list was based on ideas that are prevalent on the left, as well as on individuals.

Bad influences

. Unite Against Fascism

They claim to march in opposition to far-right extremism yet remain muted when faced with Islamist anti-Semitism. Probably because it would not sit well with these types, who regularly pop up on UAF marches:



No, we are not "all Hezbollah now". Hezbollah want me, and you, middle-class, liberal, non-Muslim whitey, dead.


. Religion

The fetishisation of repressive Islamic practices by effete middle-class left-wingers is possibly the most common form this takes; although the whole "give the Pope a break" shtick, used to beat atheists for criticising the cover-up of mass child-rape, is right up there.

The former is hugely prevalent in undergraduate circles - first time out of the suburbs; your new brown classmates seem exotic and appealing; this Islam thing sounds pretty kooky too; perhaps I'll don a headscarf...and get my labia hacked off?

As the reliably stupid Germaine Greer put it, "If an Ohio punk has the right to have her genitalia operated on, why has not the Somali woman the same right?".

And please, Mehdi Hassan, no more ISLAM: What you need to know editions of the New Statesman.

. The "decent" left

With honorable exceptions, the "decent" left consists of those who some time ago made their peace with free-market extremism yet who wish to keep up a pretence of being on the left out of sheer embarrassment.

There are several individuals I very much like who may be considered as on the "decent" left - Andrew Anthony and Christopher Hitchens to name but a few - yet wholesale revisionism regarding American crimes (of which those mentioned take no part); and a belief that communism still constitutes a greater threat to human liberty than rampant free-market capitalism; together with a veneration of Tony Blair, who presided over the biggest rise in inequality between the rich and poor in the UK since the 19th century, is hardly decent, and certainly not "left".

That lots of the "decent" left came out in support of David Milliband in the Labour leadership contest as the only "credible" candidate just about sums up how smugly satisfied this group are with the status quo nowadays.

Don't be tempted to go for a drink with Nick Cohen either.

. Stop the War Coalition

Andrew Murphy, Chair of Stop the War Coalition, is an "admirer" of the Stalin Society, who in 1999, on the 120th anniversary of Stalin's birth, queried in the Morning Star, why "hack propagandists abominate the name of Stalin beyond all others" and admitted to the former Soviet leader merely using "harsh measures".

He has also said: "Our Party has already made its basic position of solidarity with People’s Korea clear".

Identity Politics

Everything is seen through the prism of identity politics. It's like top trumps. Black, brown, gay, lesbian, disabled, immigrant - the more boxes one ticks, the higher a priority one becomes under identity politics ideology. And since this became a matter of public policy, is it any surprise to find that the people who lost out most under it - white working-class men, failed by Labour's education system and ignored by the people they've always supported - should be radicalised?



Good influences

. Johann Hari

In my opinion, consistently the best left-of-centre commentator in the written press over the last 5 years.

. Richard Dawkins

For confronting the very modern and individualist idea that the mere holding of an opinion gives the opinion itself validity. For challenging science teachers who shy away from contradicting "deeply held beliefs", and as a consequence who seem to imply that scientific truth is neither here nor there.

For highlighting the way religion as a totalitarian idea attempts to assert itself into other people's lives while claiming special exemption from criticism in the process.

For all this, Mr Dawkins, I salute you (even if you are a little moderate for me at times;))

. Evo Morales

I have to agree with Bob on this one. Proof that a redistribution of wealth and a move away from the neo-liberal orbit are possible in Latin America without Chavez's Fidelista populism.


. One Law for All

An organisation that is opposed to Sharia and arbitrary "culturally specific" justice while being untainted by far-right nationalism.

A simple yet enduring concept - that we are all equal under one law - that stands in stark contrast to those who dismiss such enlightenment notions as "culturally imperialist" or "racist", yet who's own arguments boil down to a view of ethnic minorities as fundamentally "different".

. Zigmunt Bauman

There is far more to life than buying "stuff". Although you wouldn't think it were you to turn on the television, pick up a popular magazine, or traipse down the high-street on a wet and windy Saturday afternoon.

When I feel alienated from this overarching aspect of our society, I pick up a copy of Bauman.

The end of the 'new man' in Cuba

In the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Fidel Castro, looking reluctantly to liberalise sections of the Cuban economy, apparently 'obsessed' about not making the same mistakes as the Soviet leadership made during Perestroika.

The modesty of the Cuban 1990s liberalisation was its defining characteristic, with the government maintaining tight control of around 90% of the economy and only allowing highly regulated enclaves of private enterprise in the form of weekly farmer's markets and private house rental, as well as joint projects with foreign companies in tourism. After Hugo Chavez came to power in Venezuela in 1998 and began providing Cuba with subsidised oil, many of the reforms of the 1990s were rolled back and the state once again took on the defining roll in Cuban economic life.

A decade on, and coming on the back of reports that the Cuban economy is in dire straights after the global financial crisis, as well as an off-hand remark made by Fidel to a visiting American reporter that the Cuban economic model 'no longer works', President Raul Castro is attempting to free up Cuba's sclerotic economy once more, with plans released by the CTC - Cuba's only legal trade union - detailing the laying off of up to a million workers from the state payroll and a move away from the universal system of benefits to a reliance upon an increasingly means tested method of welfare distribution.

Since taking power in 2008, Raul has implemented modest reforms at a typically Cuban pace, recently handing a number of state barbers over to their employees and allowing farmers more control over their own budgets. Not everyone in Havana jumped at the chance however - like Gilberto Torrente, a 68-year-old barber, who decided to remain on the state payroll at his shop in Old Havana, and remarked 'At my age, I don't want to lie down, with my head on the pillow every night, and worry about how I'm going to make my living'.

The French political thinker Alexis De Tocqueville once remarked that 'the most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform.'

While Raul Castro is reportedly an admirer of the Chinese model, the Cuban leadership are said to view Chinese and Vietnamese reforms as having gone too far, and, like Gorbachev coming to power some 25 years ago, are seeking to 'improve socialism', - modestly introducing market-incentives to the workplace with the aim of making the economy more productive, albeit without the democratic reforms - rather than do away with it.

Without wishing to invoke the repeatedly trotted out attempt at prophecy with yet more plagiarised prose about the 'beginning of the end of the Cuban Revolution', - appearing as they do at least once every six months in publications of both the left and the right - one must still ask whether this really is the long-awaited acknowledgement of the failure of Cuba's state-planned economy by the leadership itself, and if the statement made by Fidel Castro last week distancing himself from Cuba's Iranian ally Mahmoud Ahmadenejad, as well as the island's economic model, were not the actual but palpably real beginnings of a tentative move in from the cold war freeze, if not quite the start of an immediate and flowering spring.

As always in Cuba, only time, and plenty of it, will tell.

The 'decent' left?

Is there such a thing as a 'decent' left, the self-adopted name used by those who oppose political Islam, anti-Semitism, and clerical and totalitarian fascism in all its forms?

Aside from being cringingly conceited and resembling the suggestion made by Richard Dawkins that atheists nominate themselves as 'Brights', - in opposition to their monotheistic rivals - there is a fundamental truth in the defining of one's self as 'decent' when compared to those who, over recent years, have done everything from appeared on the state television channel of a tyrannical Iranian dictator, to carried placards in London declaring their support for Hamas and Hezbollah, the former who, in its charter, calls for the obliteration of the state of Israel and flirt with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Whether it be Yvonne 'Stockholm Syndrome' Ridley appearing on Press TV and talking of the 'poor' Taliban who have been, 'falsely labeled terrorists', to George Galloway fraternising with Saddam Hussain, calling for a Jihad against British troops on Al Jazeera, and saluting 'his excellency' Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, there is something to be said for wishing to appear poles apart from such shady characters for those of us who consider ourselves both on the left and relatively decent.

For many, the revulsion felt at the mainstream left's loss of backbone in confronting sadomasochistic tyrants was typified by the reaction to 9/11, where, as Christopher Hitchens put it,

'If there is now an international intervention, whether intelligent and humane, or brutal and stupid, against the Taliban, some people will take to the streets, or at least mount some "Candle in the Wind" or "Strawberry Fields" peace vigils. They did not take to the streets, or even go moist and musical, when the Administration supported the Taliban. But that was, surely, just as much an intervention? An intervention, moreover, that could not even pretend to be humane or democratic? I had the same concern about those who did not object when the United States safeguarded Milosevic, but did protest when it finally turned against him. Am I supposed not to notice that these two groups of "anti-interventionists" are in fact the same people?'

While the confrontation with clerical fascism remains at the forefront of international relations with Iran on the verge of acquiring a nuclear weapon, it would appear that what began as a 'decent' left, defined by its opposition to the appeasement of tyranny, has for some morphed into a full-blown acceptance of unrestrained free-market economics, a denial of real American imperialist crimes, and for others, a borderline pathological hatred of Muslims.

This is exemplified by Harry's Place, where a strange community has evolved comprising far-right EDL sympathisers and former left-wingers who have made their peace with neo-liberal capitalism. The two tendencies unite in drawing attention to the real threat posed to civilisation by 'Trots', the BBC's 'Islamist agenda' and 'potential murderers' stood on street corners selling copies of the Socialist Worker. The typical discourse at Harry's Place brings to mind the late Isaac Deutscher's description of an ex-communist who, having disembarked from the locomotive of history, is 'haunted by a vague sense that he has betrayed either his former ideals or the ideals of bourgeois society,' and who 'tries to suppress his sense of guilt and uncertainty, or to camouflage it 'by a show of extraordinary certitude and frank aggressiveness'.

A post at Harry's Place by Michael Ezra (who has, it appears, climbed onto the locomotive of history in a quite different direction - destination the 'End of History') recently took issue with the accuracy of a Wikipedia entry on the overthrow of democratically elected Chilean president Salvador Allende: because it said that the US-backed coup was...US backed! He based his conclusion that this was inaccurate subterfuge on a book called Hostile Intent: U.S. Covert Operations in Chile, 1964-1974, by Kristian Gustafson. The revisionist gist of the book is that the Nixon administration should have taken an even more aggressive stance on Chile and, according to Marc Becker of the Department of History at Truman State University,

'In his (Gustafson's) mind, Allende was a dangerous communist who needed to be removed...he never considers the advances his government made in social policy. Even as the vicious and repressive nature of the Pinochet government became apparent, the Nixon administration continued to favor a fascist military dictatorship rather than an elected, democratic, leftist government. Gustafson dismisses opponents of this policy...as conspiracy theorists (pp. 91, 203)...Gustafson does his readers a disservice by presenting his argument as growing out of a neutral position, especially since his conservative and pro-imperialist perspective is blatant throughout the book.'

It scarcely matters that the overthrow of the democratically elected president of Chile was not carried out directly by the US military; the CIA had a clear hand in both the destabilisation of the Chilean economy and society as well as in the channelling of funds to the political and military opposition to Allende inside Chile.

After Allende's 1970 election victory, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Richard Helms, and John Mitchell met on September 15, 1970. Helms came from that meeting quoting the line by Nixon that what was called for was action that would include a military coup and a broad-based destabilization effort that would 'make the economy scream.' Following on from this the CIA helped finance truckers' strikes in 1972 and 1973, probably through the International Transport Workers Federation, and may have had a hand in funding, training, and arming the Patria y Libertad, a Chilean quasi-fascist political party. CIA money also subsidized a strike of middle-class shopkeepers and a taxi strike in the summer of 1973 - those seen to be already hostile to the Allende government. The economic boycott did not however include aid to the Chilean military. On the contrary, military aid to Chile, which had always been substantial, more than doubled in the 1970-1974 period when compared to the previous four years.

One might also point to Situation Report No. 2, from the Navy Section of the United States Military Group in Chile and written by U.S. Naval Attache Patrick J. Ryan, in which he describes his close relationship with the officers engaged in overthrowing the government, hails September 11, 1973, as 'our. D-Day,' and assuredly claims that 'Chile's coup de etat [sic] was close to perfect.'

While this is enough to have a fairly clear understanding of the situation existing in Chile in the early 1970s, almost all of what happened during the 1973 coup and subsequently under the regime of Augusto Pinochet continues to remain under the seal of United States national security.

Rather than focusing on the thousands tortured and assassinated by a genuinely fascist regime, Mr Ezra chooses to focus on a Wikipedia entry that is, considering the thesaurus-like quantity of evidence available to support the motion, completely accurate if not something of an understatement.

When did a prerequisite of being 'decent' become the denial and downplaying of the crimes of the powerful?

The return of Blair should remind every Labour member of the importance of the leadership contest

Cash for honours, holidays on luxury yachts with Silvio Berlusconi; the sucking up to his 'good friend' Colonel Gaddafi; the throwing of reactionary tit-bits to the Murdoch press on a daily basis; the Bernie Ecclestone affair...

How soon some people forget.

Just as thousands of Labour leadership ballots are sitting in Royal Mail depots across the country on their way to party members, there is the reappearance of the perma-tanned Tony Blair: bright-eyed and bushy tailed, having some years ago completed the transformation from leader of a European social democratic party into a bizarre mid-Atlantic hybrid who tours the world as a 'social entrepreneur' - the modern guilt-free mantra adopted by the super-rich whereby one can sidestep the nagging feeling of unease in the pit of the stomach while continuing to enjoy all the swagger and luxury of the wealthy of old.

The media some time ago attempted to offer up the Labour leadership contest as a formality, with David Milliband expected to effortlessly pick up the mantle of 'heir to Blair'. It has in actuality entered it's final phase with an unscripted twist - the only credible candidate that rejects New Labour's servitude to extreme wealth is at the fore and breathing down the neck of his unremittingly 'New' Labour elder sibling.

While foolish to paint Ed Milliband as some kind of radical 'Bennite', as certain sections of the press have attempted, - though it is perhaps telling that in 2010 to advocate a top rate tax of 50% for those earning over 150,000 classes one as a Bennite! - it is important to stress that what the younger Milliband does represent is at least an acknowledgment that being 'intensely relaxed', as Peter Mandelson once said, about extreme wealth, does not always endeavor to create a genuinely big society: a society where the life chances of the poorest, and by default, the wealthiest, are not decided solely by accidents of birth.

The crossroads at which Labour finds itself is exemplified by the fact that after 13 years in government the wealth gap in Britain between those at the bottom and those at the top is now wider than at any time since the Second World War. Which begs the rather obvious question: What is the point of the Labour Party if not about greater equality?

Ed's championing of the living wage campaign, together with his call for a private sector high pay commission to create a mechanism whereby the most highly paid person could not earn a certain percentage more than low-paid workers, represents everything Labour once stood for, and represents a successful break with the rotten electoral liability that opinion poll after opinion poll has shown New Labour to have become.

The return of the man who brought 13 years of electoral success to the Labour Party at a time when the Coalition are hastily setting in motion the undoing of many of the modest gains that came out of those years should speak volumes to those thinking of voting for style over substance in Labour's leadership election. Is power for it's own sake really worth it? Or, is it perhaps important to remember that there was once a time when Labour represented at least a modest attempt to put the life chances of the very poorest on an equal par with those of the very privileged, however utopian or 'unrealistic' the naysayers may like to have branded the attempt?

It becomes a very sad day when one finds so many of the defeatists sitting on one's own side of the party divide.