Jeremy Corbyn Is My Leader Part 2

Oh dear. I have just reread a post I wrote straight after the General Election defeat. How depressing. Here's the last paragraph:

As it is, Balls is out of the picture and with his departure so goes probably the most high profile figure with a clear connection to the Blair/Brown/Iraq War/Financial Collapse Labour government that so many people obviously found so toxic, even if unfairly. Perhaps now, the decks are clear for a new beginning and an abandonment of the ‘AusterityLite’ economic policy. One question remains. Are Labour Party members, politicians and the unions capable of identifying someone who is capable of gaining traction with the public sufficient to win the next General Election and, even if they were, would they be willing to give them the job? Or, when it comes to electing leaders, is the Party’s natural response to pick people whose greatest talent is the ability to concede defeat gracefully?

Jeremy Corbyn Is My Leader

When it comes to modernity in general and the Labour Party in particular, I usually find myself out of step with popular sentiment. So, it came as no surprise to me that, when the results of the Labour leadership election were announced last weekend, I found out that I had backed the candidate who had come last. I am now officially one of the '4.5 percenters', that is, one of the 4.5 percent of people eligible to vote who backed Liz Kendall. It didn’t end there. Predictably, I backed losing candidates for the deputy leadership and the London Mayoral elections, Caroline Flint and Tessa Jowell respectively. I don’t wear my facility to gravitate towards minority positions with pride, rather with a sense of bemused resignation. The reason I put up the 4.5 Twibbon was not an act of defiance, but just a small act of solidarity, like turning on a torch in a dark landscape. The purpose is not to create a signal to steer by, but just to let others know that you are there and that they are not completely alone.
 

I didn’t support Liz Kendall because she was the right wing candidate. I supported her by a process of elimination. I thought that the Shadow Cabinet of 2010-15 were woefully disappointing. I have written a number of posts bemoaning the fact that Labour didn’t defend its record on running the economy in the Blair-Brown years and didn’t oppose self-defeating Austerity. So I wasn’t going to give my first preference to any former member of the Shadow Cabinet. That left Kendall and Corbyn and, not being someone of the far left, I felt Liz was my natural choice. I pledged my support for her early on, as the anti-Labour establishment, centre-right, at least to the right of Jeremy Corbyn (which granted isn’t saying very much!) candidate. However, I soon became exasperated as her attempt to appeal to Tory and Ukip voters manifested itself as being more down on the deficit than George Osborne and endorsing the crazy idea that we need to run a surplus on the public finances in this parliament. Indeed, I told a Liz Kendall campaign worker, who rang me up asking for my support, in a very theatrical fashion (it had been a long day), that under no circumstances would I support a candidate who talked what I considered to be a load of rubbish about Austerity and running surpluses. To which he replied that he knew it was rubbish as he had studied economics, but it was felt that this was the politically sensible thing to say. How depressing, I remember thinking.

Meanwhile, Jeremy Corbyn was busy going around opposing Austerity and the deficit fetishism that cuts public infrastructure spending at a time when it should be increased. A lot has been written about ‘Corbynomics’ and Corbyn’s ‘People’s QE’. I would simply say that you can’t dismiss the idea that the Bank of England should print money and give it away to ordinary people to help stimulate a flagging economy because it’s put forward by a mad, bearded leftie, when the idea has been endorsed by such doyens of the left as monetarist economist beloved by Thatcher, Milton Friedman, economist and former Chair of the Federal Reserve Bank, Ben Benanke and former chair of the FSA, Lord Adair Turner, to name but a few. So as the campaign progressed, I found myself in the deeply ironic position of supporting the most right wing candidate whilst agreeing with the most left wing candidate on matters of economic policy.

Well, as we found out last weekend, Jeremy Corbyn won the leadership election by a landslide and we are still experiencing the reaction. Former Shadow Cabinet members were queueing up to announce that they wouldn’t serve under Corbyn, or what Diane Abbot quite cleverly described as their rejection of job offers they hadn’t received. The Tories are working out how best to publicly engage with New Left Labour. The media are alternately poking fun, manufacturing outrage and causing embarrassment and discomfort. Fair enough. Other ordinary Party members, including many elected councillors who owe their position on councils up and down the country to their support of the Party, who were part of the Anyone But Corbyn fraternity, together with many Labour voters, are considering what to do next. 

I was particularly struck by this piece from Nick Cohen in the Spectator who announced that following Mr Corbyn’s election as leader of the Labour Party, he was resigning from the Left. It was a very interesting and engaging piece, written with real passion. He was particularly exercised by what he considered to be the hypocrisy of Corbyn and those who supported him. He cited their supposed commitment to equal rights for women against they unwillingness to speak out against the oppression of women in Muslim countries. He also raged against the fact that, in his opinion, despite their anti-racism, they are friends with anti-Semites, presumably because of their Pro-Palestinian/Pro-Arab idealogical position.

However, when I finished this piece I found myself thinking, ‘well, how many ordinary Tory and Ukip voters would care about any of this stuff?’. I use the phrase, ‘care about’ as shorthand for meaning, ‘if asked by a reputable polling company how many floating voters would rank any of these issues in their top 20, let alone their top 10, list of matters that most concerned them’. Or, alternatively, ‘would you decide who to vote for based on what the parties said on these issues alone’. I think that, at best (or worst, depending on your point of view) we could say concerning the issues of gender equality, the Middle East and 9/11, that people when deciding how to vote, would describe them as matters for consideration rather than determining factors. So they are not issues on which Labour can win an election. But they are the issues an obsession with which can prevent Labour from winning a General Election as it demonstrates to people just how out of touch and downright weird the Party is.

For the people of Britain to decide at the recent General Election that they were safer in the hands of the Bullingdon Club than the Labour Party should have been an incredible achievement. Labour’s lack of relevance seems to make it look like it was inevitable with hindsight. We will have to see how successful Labour under Corbyn is at turning this around. Sadly the first signs are not good.

PS. I just wanted to say a word about the promotion of Heidi Alexander, MP for Lewisham East, to the role of Shadow Health Secretary. I have known Heidi for well over 15 years, even before she was first elected to Lewisham Council. Heidi is not of the Corbyn left. It must have been a difficult decision to accept the call to join the Shadow Cabinet when it came, especially when other more experienced people were deciding to spend more time doing other things. Heidi is not a giver-upper, to quote my Father-in-law and she possesses a steely determination. She also has a huge sense of responsibility. I know that when a call came to do a difficult job, she would be the last person who would say that she was washing her hair. Everyone in Lewisham who has ever had anything to do with Heidi knows that above all her talents one thing stands out and that is her genuine concern for ordinary people. She has a big heart and I wish her well at this difficult and challenging time. One thing’s for sure, I wouldn’t want to be in Jeremy Hunt’s shoes.

Three Cheers For Yvette Cooper!

Or, 'I am an Economist and I am here to help'.

 

This week I was pleased to hear Labour leadership contender, Yvette Cooper, cautioning some members of the Party against ‘swallowing the Tory manifesto’. This is being interpreted as a criticism of rivals Andy Burnham and Liz Kendall, who appear to be keen to admit to Labour’s past mistakes in office in an attempt to capture the electoral centre ground away from which Ed Miliband moved the Party.

I have written before about how disappointed I have been by Labour’s unwillingness to defend its record on managing the economy and the public finances during the Blair-Brown administration against Coalition charges of profligacy (‘failing to fix the roof when the sun was shining’, etc). I was consequently shocked when potential leadership candidates appeared to be falling over each other to criticise Labour’s poor economic management and embrace the new Tory fiscal orthodoxy. Here’s Andy Burnham saying that Labour ran deficits that were too high. And here’s Liz Kendall going even further, declaring that Labour should run a budget surplus in future. There can be little doubt that if Chuka Umunna was still in the contest he would be saying much the same, as he was reported to have received the ‘hairdryer’ treatment from Gordon Brown when he criticised Labour’s economic record in office and accused the Party of being in ‘deficit denial’ in September last year.

Perhaps Cooper wasn’t focussing on this when she made her ‘swallowing the Tory manifesto’ jibe, but had in mind the calls from some in the Party for an EU referendum, more talk of aspiration and less defence of those at the bottom on benefits. Maybe I will be confounded when she comes out and says we need to run a budget surplus to keep the public piggy bank topped up for a rainy day. I say confounded because, unlike her leadership rivals, she did study Economics. In her case it was PPE at Oxford. This is in contrast to Andy Burnham, who read English at Cambridge, Liz Kendall, who read History, again at Cambridge, and Mary Creagh who read Modern Languages at Oxford (Chuka Umunna studied Law, not at Oxbridge, so I don’t think he would have been allowed to be Prime Minister anyway).

Sadly, it now seems that you can’t say you studied Economics, like I did, and expect people to think you know anything that they do not. This is in contrast with people who studied sciences, Law, Medicine, Accountancy or Engineering. People may have a low opinion of English and History but they would expect Andy Burnham to know about some books that they hadn’t read and Liz Kendall to know some stuff about a particular bit of the past that they didn’t. What’s worse is that most people seem to think that what Economics teaches you is wrong and should be ignored. Which is not surprising, because so much of what you learn is counter-intuitive and appears to contradict common sense. Moreover, it can be an affront to what people believe to be morally right. For example, Economics teaches you can generate a better outcome for society if polluters pay for the right to pollute, rather than if they are fined when they do, providing the money goes to compensate those who suffer the harm.

The debate on economic policy has been almost entirely captured by those who advocate the paradigm that the public finances are just like that of a household. You can’t spend more than you earn indefinitely. You cannot keep on borrowing. You will have to pay your debts back eventually or you will go bankrupt. If you spend more than you earn, then you need to cut your spending. This was the orthodoxy that prevailed before WWII and prolonged the economic crisis after the Wall St Crash in 1929, creating the Great Depression of the 1930s and brought Hitler to power in Germany. The great triumph of the economist John Maynard Keynes was to get the Very Serious People to accept that this household pocket book approach to running the public finances was wrong. To do this, he identified the concept of the ‘Paradox of Thrift’. He demonstrated that although thriftiness, or saving, was generally accepted as being a good thing, in certain circumstances it could have bad consequences. This was because if the economy was depressed, then savings wouldn’t get spent on investment so the more savings rose, the less people would spend. This meant that as one person’s spending is another person’s income, the economy would just get more depressed. He argued that in these circumstances, that is, in recessions, Governments needed to keep their spending up to take up the slack in the economy until such time as private sector confidence returns and people start spending and investing again. This ‘counter-cyclical’ view of Government fiscal policy held sway from after WWII until about 1980, when it was supplemented by free-market monetarism. The triumph of this new free-market credo which, incidentally, ushered in a period of slower growth and rising inequality, culminated in the private sector banking crisis that led to the Great Recession in 2008.

It should be said that Keynes thought that Governments should generate budget surpluses when times were good to offset the deficits it needed to run when times were bad. Perhaps he was being too cautious. The ratio of UK Government debt to GDP stood at around 240% in the late 1940s as a result of the costs of the war and then the setting up of the Welfare State by the post 1945 Labour Government. This ratio was brought down to less than 50% by the mid-1970s, not by successive Governments running budget surpluses, but by the eroding properties of inflation and economic growth.

In fact, despite what common sense may suggest and moral outrage demand, it is possible for the Government to run a Budget deficit indefinitely whilst at the same time reducing overall Government debt as a percentage of the economy. Here’s an example:

Year 1 GDP = 100 Govt Debt = 50 so Debt to GDP ratio is 50%. Govt is running a deficit of 1.

If we assume that inflation is running at 2% and real GDP growth is 3%, then the economy will grow in money terms by 5%. If the Government continues to run a budget deficit of 1, then:

Year 2 GDP = 105 Govt Debt = 51 so Debt to GDP ratio has fallen to 51/105 = 48.6%.

If this trend continues, then

Year 3 GDP = 110.25 Govt Debt = 52 so Debt to GDP ratio has fallen to 52/110.25 = 47.2%.

If this continues, then by

Year 10 GDP = 155.13 Govt Debt = 59 so Debt to GDP ratio has fallen to 59/155.13 = 38%

If these deficits are going to finance much needed public investment in infrastructure that expands our productive capacity thereby enabling the economy to keep growing at a healthy rate, 3% in the example above, what is there not to like?

I fear that the current obsession of seeing the running of the public finances as an extension of managing household budgets will, rather than protect our children from being saddled with our debts, burden them with a colossal bill for rectifying the problems caused by years of lack of investment.

Is The Labour Party Waiting For Forgiveness, Memory Loss And Death?

In the run up to the Election, the Oxford economist, Simon Wren-Lewis, wrote an excellent series of blog posts entitled, ‘Mediamacro myths’, where he drew attention to the false claims made by the Tories and their supporters about Labour’s record in office and their own economic policy achievements. These include the charge that Labour was financially profligate between 1997 and 2008 and that Austerity has worked. So I was surprised to read a more recent post in which he questions whether Labour in general and Ed Balls in particular had any choice but to commit to reducing the Deficit by making cuts in public spending now, now, now! As he put it:

Some, like Robert Skidelsky for example, describe these movements, and a failure to extol the virtues of fiscal policy under Labour, as a mistake. However, I suspect that if Labour’s shadow Chancellor Ed Balls could ever speak the truth, he would say that he did not want to gradually acquiesce to the austerity line, but the evidence from focus groups was overwhelming. Defending Labour before the financial crisis was pointless because it just reminded people that the Great Recession happened under their watch, and that Labour (like everyone else) gave finance too free a hand. The ‘too far, too fast’ line just sounded feeble when the news was all about the Eurozone crisis. In the end, Labour just had to be ‘tough on the deficit’.

Do we have to be so pessimistic? After all, the Labour Party had 5 years in which to develop and sell its own narrative about its record in office. A story could have been told about all the achievements of the Blair-Brown era - the minimum wage and increasing funding for the NHS up to European levels to name but a few. This could have been followed by an explanation of how this period of progressive improvement was brought to an end by the worst Recession in 300 years. The Recession was the result of a crisis in financial markets that was conceived, designed and delivered by the private sector. There could have been a mea culpa about how Labour in office was seduced, along with all other governments in the developed world, by the argument that markets needed only light touch regulation. The Great Recession showed how the public needed protecting from what the drive for profit maximisation will create in a free market that is left to its own devices. Once you have established the case for the State as regulator and protector and that this role has to be more interventionist and robust than previously accepted, you could go on to talk about other things that the State can do to benefit everyone, not just the poor and needy. For example, the economist Mariana Mazzucato, who wrote the book, The Entrepreneurial State, in which she shows how the technological innovations that made the iPhone possible were created by state-funded research programmes, has suggested that we should be talking about the State as a major wealth creator.

Is this just too fanciful?

One of Ed Miliband’s achievements as Labour Leader was to make inequality an issue. I remember initially when he and other Shadow Cabinet members started talking about the ‘Squeezed Middle’, people laughed as it conjured up images of people walking around in varying degrees of discomfort because their trousers were too tight. But gradually, as the points being made were based on the facts, the issue, re-presented more snappily as ‘The Cost Of Living Crisis’, gained traction in the public mind and in the media. The proof of this was that during the last part of the Coalition government, the Tories found that they had to try to counter this issue. Thus, in February this year, we saw David Cameron telling bosses to give workers a pay rise. Then in March, an IFS paper that explained that since 2007/8, living standards had fallen for everyone except those over 60, was spun as proof that living standards had risen. Most bizarrely of all, the approach of deflation which is generally understood to be a bad thing (otherwise why does George Osborne charge the Bank of England with the job of keeping inflation at 2% rather than zero??!) was hailed as a brilliant policy achievement as it was argued that it would raise real incomes even as nominal pay remained subdued.

So, it was possible to set the policy and campaigning agenda, even if the attempt met with a less than enthusiastic reception initially. The problem with Labour’s decision to embrace Austerity economics was not just that it meant a refusal to rebut the argument that it had been spendthrift in office, but that it seemingly led to an unwillingness to defend anything about its record in office. Does anyone remember the 18 month hospital waiting lists that were normal under John Major, of Gordon Brown’s achievements on Third World debt forgiveness? Talking of forgiveness, it seems to me that if Labour continues to refuse to defend its record in government then it will have to rely on the Electorate’s willingness to forgive it for all its supposed failings before it can be re-elected. Or, of course, wait until everyone who was around in the Naughties either forgets or dies. I, for one, would like to put my trust in something a bit more inspiring than this.

It's 1992 All Over Again

As I stood alone outside a primary school in Deptford yesterday giving out ‘Vote Today’ leaflets, as bidden by our organisers, I was able to reflect on Labour’s national General Election Campaign strategy.  Why had we totally failed to stand up for the economic record of the last Labour government?  Why had we failed to rebut the claim that the deficit was due to Labour’s profligacy and why had we failed to stand up against Austerity and instead decided to go to the polls offering Austerity with a smiley face?  As I stood there wishing the minutes to pass so I could move along, I realised that I was outside a school that was fairly newly-built and part of a innovative new building that combined the school with a public library, café and community resource.  As I looked at the school, I had my back to a leisure centre and swimming pool that had been improved and expanded just a few years before.  Both these projects had been built under the last Labour government, a government that had reduced the national debt before the Great Recession from the level it inherited from the previous one.  So much for the charge that Labour spent its time in office pouring scarce taxpayers’ money down the drain.

Perhaps the greatest opportunity provided to Labour by yesterday’s Election disappointment was the defeat of Ed Balls.  He must bear a large share of the responsibility for the party’s campaigning performance on the economy over the last 5 years and the message it put to the electorate yesterday.  In truth, as Shadow Chancellor he should probably bear a larger share than Ed Miliband himself.  To be honest, I rejoiced when Alan Johnson gave up the job and Miliband appointed Balls.  I remember saying to our Mayor, Steve Bullock, how pleased I was to hear the news because I thought that he would prove to be a ‘pitiless assassin’ when it came to ‘kebabbing’ Chancellor George Osborne.  I thought Balls would make mincemeat out of him and his ridiculous claims that the UK was bankrupt and about to go the way of Greece and then pour it on when Austerity inevitably sucked the life out of an economy that had been recovering.  Instead I looked on with growing surprise, frustration and anger as he increasingly appeared to resemble a striker who suddenly found himself with the ball at his feet and facing an open goal but succumbing to stage fright. 

But sadly, there is more to it than this.  I listened to Balls speak in the flesh twice and both times I came away with my view of his competence dented for reasons that may surprise.  The first was at a local constituency fundraising dinner when he made a speech in which he completely mangled a punchline to a funny story.  The second was at an event for business people in London.  Then he was introduced by Ed Miliband who said he was going to hand over to him to tell us about Labour’s policy on the economy.  Balls then said that before he did that he would just like to tell us what was obviously meant to be a crowd-pleasing, amusing story.  He then proceeded to mangle this one as well.  He appeared to verbally lose his way, come to a juddering halt and forget why he was there.  We all stood there and realised that revelation of Labour’s view on the economy had been postponed.  At the time, I thought these experiences oddities rather than symptoms of inadequacy.

However, Balls’s greatest difficulty was that the more his new high profile job thrust him into the public eye, the more the public decided they didn’t like him.  I don’t want to dwell on this.  Suffice to say that in order to be a successful politician you have to be popular or inspire confidence, preferably both.  You are at something of a disadvantage if people take an instant dislike to you and think you untrustworthy, especially when the impression is reinforced by further exposure.

Why am I putting the boot into the vanquished Balls?  It does make me feel rather uncomfortable.  My point is that when I raised my misgivings about him with party insiders I was told that I was wrong, he was very effective and, what is more, everyone who had worked with him in the Party, even if they didn’t agree with him politically, liked him.  In fairness, it has to be said, he did come third in the 2010 Leadership contest.  Yet if he had won, is there anyone who would confidently say  that his personal poll ratings would be higher than Ed Miliband’s?  There can surely be no doubt that, if Balls was still in Parliament, he would be making his run to be the next leader.  Even if this wasn’t the case, he would probably remain a leading figure in the next Shadow Cabinet.  Can a political party really expect to win elections when its internal democratic processes allow individuals that are so unpopular with the public to ascend to national leadership positions where they have so much exposure to the, er, public?

As it is, Balls is out of the picture and with his departure so goes probably the most high profile figure with a clear connection to the Blair/Brown/Iraq War/Financial Collapse Labour government that so many people obviously found so toxic, even if unfairly.  Perhaps now, the decks are clear for a new beginning and an abandonment of the ‘AusterityLite’ economic policy.  One question remains.  Are Labour Party members, politicians and the unions capable of identifying someone who is capable of gaining traction with the public sufficient to win the next General Election and, even if they were, would they be willing to give them the job?  Or, when it comes to electing leaders, is the Party’s natural response to pick people whose greatest talent is the ability to concede defeat gracefully?

My London Marathon Homily, 2015

Once again I ran this year’s London Marathon for the Lavender Trust. Many, many thanks to all those who sponsored me. Donations can still be made here:

https://www.justgiving.com/paul-maslin15

In my albeit amateur opinion, conditions on Sunday were perfect. The weather was a bit chilly with a fresh wind but the rain held off so that once you got a few miles into the race you were cool and comfortable. I suspect this helped a lot of runners from the mass starts to put in good personal times. Alas, I wasn’t one of them, finishing about 4 minutes slower than last year in a time of 3 58 28. As I said last year, sub 4 hours is a pretty respectable time. I always said to myself that I wouldn’t really feel that I had ‘run’ a marathon until I had done it in under 4 hours and I only succeeded at my fifth attempt. It’s worth pointing out though that my performance was only average for my year group, men between the ages of 45-49. Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England, stormed round in 3 31 35 and he is in the 50-54 age group.

My performance against older age groups was even more disappointing than last year. For the record:

I was beaten by 186 men in the 60-64 age group, the 186th being the wonderfully named Terry Onions who managed a time of 3 58 22.

I was beaten by 61 men in the 65-69 age group.

I was beaten by 17 men who were 70 or over. This is 9 more than last year. This year 150 70+ men finished the course compared to 138 last year.

I was beaten by 21 women in the 60-64 age group.

I was beaten by 4 women in the 65-69 age group.

Once again, happily, I managed to hold of the challenge from the 70+ women. However, the fastest 70+ lady was only about 6 minutes behind me and this year, there were 44 70+ women finishers compared to 33 last year.

It would be interesting for someone to go through all the London Marathon results going back to the very first one in 1981 and chart the increased participation and improving performance of the older age groups. I remember that the media made much of the late great Madge Sharples when she completed her first marathon in 1981 (was it London?) aged 64. She carried on running into her 70s and often featured in the publicity that went along with the build up for London. Thirty-odd years on such an achievement is not worth a special mention, so ubiquitous has it become.

In October 2014, the NHS published its Five Year Forward View. In this document, it set out the challenges facing the NHS in the coming years and outlined its proposals for meeting them:

‘we live longer, with complex health issues, sometimes of our own making. One in five adults still smoke. A third of us drink too much alcohol. Just under two thirds of us are overweight or obese.’

It goes on to make clear that the NHS will not be able to meet these challenges, even assuming the most optimistic future funding envelopes, unless it starts to take prevention seriously.

So at a time when the London Marathon saw more entrants than ever before and with the breaking of 3 world and 6 course records, the country is facing the ticking time bomb of mass preventable ill-health which threatens to overwhelm our tax payer funded, free at the point of need, Health Service. Clearly we are a nation divided, with some cohorts never being healthier and fitter and some, because of bad diet and lifestyle, destined to die younger than their parents. Bearing in mind that a disproportionate number in the latter category inhabit the lower echelons of the income distribution, many of the solutions to the problem will lie with policy to tackle poverty, poor educational outcomes, poor housing and rising inequality. For those of us engaged in this noble pursuit, it is worth remembering that, although some problems are very big and may take a long time to solve, we can set a small example with our own lives. After all, it is better to light a small candle than rage against the darkness.

The Failure Of Austerity - A Lewisham Perspective

A few people have asked me about the speech I made during the debate on the setting of Lewisham Council’s Budget at last week’s Council Meeting. I tend not to write down my speeches so I give below my best recollection of the main points I made.

Prior to the election in 2010, Council Officers were working on three potential cuts scenarios for the 2010-14 Council administration, depending on who won that Election. The optimistic scenario involved £20m worth of savings, the middle was £40m and the pessimistic, based on a Conservative victory with its pledge to eliminate the deficit by 2015, was £60m worth of cuts. However, as was known since the 1930s, Austerity in the public services during a recession when the private sector is on its knees is self-defeating, as one man's spending is another man's income. And so it has proved to be under this government. If you want proof that Austerity has failed, look at the Council's Budget. Because the Tory-led government deficit reduction plan has failed, George Osborne has had to increase public spending cuts year after year. For Lewisham, this has meant instead of making £60m worth of cuts in 2010/15, we have had to find £93m worth. For 2015/16 we need to find a further £40m. Then, between 2016/18 we need to find another £45m. That's £178m in total, or almost three times the original amount. This is more than we spend on Adults and Children's Social Services combined. Yet despite this lamentable failure of Tory economic policy, we in the Labour Party have been made to feel ashamed of our own record of managing the economy when we were in office. We now believe the myth that the deficit was caused by our profligate spending. So, in this General Election campaign, we seem almost embarrassed to ask the electorate to vote for us. We approach voters apologetically, asking them to give us their votes because we can be trusted more on the NHS than the Tories and if they are willing to turn a blind eye to our record on the economy, we will throw in the abolition of the bedroom tax as a bonus. Rather than pouring money down the drain when we were in power, we invested wisely in our hospitals, schools and other public services, putting right years of neglect under the Tories. And it comes as a surprise to many, even in our own party, that debt as a percentage of GDP was lower in 2008 than it was in 1997. Debt was lower under Labour going into the Great Recession than it was when the Tories left office. Yet many will recall how leading Tories in the early years of the last Labour administration claimed credit for Labour's early economic achievements, claiming that they had left Labour a wondrous economic legacy. The fact is that the deficit was created not by Labour's unfunded spending plans, but by the collapse in tax receipts that followed the Great Recession, an economic disaster that was conceived, designed and built by the private sector. So let us not approach the electorate hoping that they will forgive us our past sins and take pity on us. Instead, let us fight this election with confidence, proud of our record on the economy. Let us tell the voters that a Labour government will not just build a fairer, kinder Britain, but a Britain that is dynamic and prosperous as well.

Will Austerity Cost Labour Dear?

It appears that the rise of the SNP in Scotland is going to cost Labour seats at the forthcoming General Election. Scottish voters don’t want Independence from the rest of the UK, but they appear to want to be governed by a party dedicated to bringing this about and to send its members to represent them in the Westminster Parliament. Maybe some are doing this out of guilt because they just couldn’t bring themselves to vote Yes in the referendum, even though a sense of romantic nationalism made them feel that they should have done so. If former Scottish Labour voters planned to vote SNP in May out of a combination of nationalism and guilt, they now have an added motivation. A few weeks ago SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon attacked Westminster’s ‘morally unjustifiable’ Austerity policy. Her intention was to focus the spotlight on Labour for not being anti-Austerity enough, arguing that with a hung Parliament being the most likely outcome of the Election, a strong SNP presence in Westminster was the only thing that would force Labour to break up the ‘cosy consensus’ around Austerity that existed amongst the major parties. With the SNP now campaigning on an anti-Austerity ticket, one wonders what Jim Murphy, Labour’s leader in Scotland, can do to create a Unique Selling Point for the party north of the border.

But the SNP is not the only anti-Austerity party causing problems for Labour. Although the SNP is threatening 20 Labour seats in Scotland, south of the border it’s the Greens that are the headache. A surge of support for the Green Party, Natalie Bennett’s media meltdown notwithstanding, amongst disaffected former Lib Dem voters and other left leaning people, especially the young, students and first time voters, could prevent a Labour victory in 22 seats.

Why has the Labour Party got itself into this position? Ed Balls' current pronouncements on Labour Economic Policy stand in stark contrast to his 2010 Bloomberg Speech, a speech to which the economist David Blanchflower tweeted the link a few weeks ago, hailing it as one of the most sensible things anyone has said about the Great Recession. Anyone who read that speech, entitled ‘This is an alternative’, (here, still on his own website, or here if you fancy watching the man in person delivering it on YouTube) could reasonably be forgiven for expecting a more anti-Austerity policy from Labour in Opposition when Balls became Shadow Chancellor.

Many independent commentators describe the plans of political parties to implement more cuts in the next Parliament as unfeasible. My favourite description is the one used by the blogger @FlipChartRick who says that those who believe that these proposed cuts are deliverable are living in 'LaLa Land'. I am sure this will prove to be so.

The Labour Party has made much of the fact that the Coalition has made sure that the cuts to Local Government fall disproportionately on the neediest communities, such that a list of those Councils experiencing the worst cuts reads like a roll call of the most deprived places in the country. These are, of course, Labour areas. Those of us who are elected Labour politicians tasked with delivering local services would like to know, having raised this issue, what a future Labour Government plans to do to address it?

It seems that few people in national politics know very much about Local Government finance, DCLG included. Few people understand that we are responsible for delivering the second pillar of our national care service, social services. The UK is the only country in the world where this is the case. In Lewisham, in common with many other authorities, we spend half our budget on adults' and children's social services.

In a recently published report entitled Financial Sustainability of Local Authorities, http://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Local-Authority-Full-Report.pdf the NAO, with mild understatement, essentially concludes that the DCLG don’t know enough about the finances of individual Local Authorities to understand their capacity for implementing further cuts. They highlight the consequent risk of what they euphemistically refer to as 'service pressures'

The House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts goes further. In their recent report of the same name, Financial Sustainability of Local Authorities 2014, http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/public-accounts-committee/news/report-financial-sustainability-of-local-authorities/, they say,

'Furthermore, if funding reductions were to continue following the next spending review, we question whether the Department would be in a position to provide assurance that all local authorities could maintain the full range of their statutory services.'

Lewisham Council’s Chief Executive, Barry Quirk, has an insightful take on this here, http://www.lgcplus.com/Journals/2015/01/16/y/d/s/not-even-wrong.pdf

In short, if the next government does not call a halt to the further Austerity planned for Local Government, at least in the short term, Adult and Children's Social Care Services will fall over. Pretty much everyone, it seems, working in this sector, officers and politicians alike, understand this. This will mean that elderly people will not receive the basic care they need and will not be able to provide for themselves and that children will not get the Child Protection Plans they need. I think that every Authority in the country is like a car heading towards a cliff edge. We are all desperately trying to slow down but know we can't stop. All we can hope for is that we are not the first one to go over the edge. Yet we are in the moral dilemma of wishing that one of our neighbours goes over the edge soon because this is the only way we believe that common sense will prevail and the cuts will be reversed.

Est-ce-que je suis Charlie?

In the first few days after the terrible murders at the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, there seemed to be pressure for everyone who is against Islamic fundamentalism to show this by declaring, 'Je Suis Charlie' and calling for certain of its cartoons to be reprinted. A failure to respond in this way was seen as a failure to stand up for free speech and evidence of surrendering to terrorism. As time has gone on, thankfully, responses have become more thoughtful and measured. I say, 'thankfully' because I cannot have been the only person who felt uncomfortable with the idea that unless you declared your unequivocal support for people's right to be gratuitously offensive, then you were not standing up for freedom. Worse, such an unwillingness to stand up and be counted didn't seem to be regarded just as a failure of nerve, but as playing into the terrorists' hands. It appeared to demonstrate a lack of push-back that surrendered ground to the Jihadists in their fight to establish a Caliphate in Europe.

So I was very pleased to hear a discussion of this issue on last week's edition of The Media Show on BBC Radio 4 hosted by Steve Hewlett. The programme began with Hewlett asking various representatives of a number of news organisations if they had published the controversial Hebdo cartoons or not and on what they had based their decision. I was interested by a point made by Emma Tucker, Deputy Editor of The Times, who said that the tradition of satire in France was very different from the tradition in the UK. Here, cartoon satire tended to be more about teasing and being amusing, whereas in France it is much more brutal. She went on to say that ordinarily The Times would not print the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, or anything like them at any time. The implication was that her paper wasn't in the business of going out of its way to be deliberately offensive just for the sake of it.

The call for the republication of the cartoons seemed to me to be a rather fundamentalist response in itself. What type of republication would be sufficient to prove that you were not giving in to terrorism? Should it just be UK newspapers and magazines? Some people have tweeted the images and some have used them as their profile photos, thereby making us see them if we wish to continue to follow them and compelling us to disseminate them if we wish to retweet something on a different subject that they are bringing to our attention. Why stop here? Shouldn't the state show its support for freedom? Why doesn't it fund a billboard campaign to publish the cartoons nationwide? Should every local authority in the country republish them on the side of their refuse lorries to advertise their commitment to ...er... what exactly?

There was another interesting discussion on another BBC Radio 4 programme last week. In Unreliable Evidence, Clive Anderson was talking to a number of distinguished law experts about the so-called Good Samaritan Law. In some countries, the citizen is compelled in law to give assistance if he sees someone in trouble. In others, like the UK, there is no such requirement and the citizen is permitted, like the priest and the Levite in Jesus's parable, to walk by on the other side of the road, ignoring the dying man, and face no prosecution. When asked if this situation was acceptable in today's Britain, the judge on the panel, Lord Hoffmann, drew the important distinction between what the law allows and what one's conscience permits. The fact that the law allows a person to ignore another person's dire need of help, does not prevent the moral citizen from going to his aid. He is not compelled by the law to refuse to help.

I was interested that, even today, the law looks to the Bible for understanding and explanation. As a lapsed Evangelical Christian and the son of a preacher man, I often find myself going back to the Bible to find guidance for dealing with vexed questions. In 1 Corinthians 10 v. 23, the Corinthian Christians say all things are lawful, to which the Apostle Paul responds, yes but not all things are helpful and not all things are constructive. The moral citizen cannot content themselves with what is allowable under the law because they are called to meet a higher standard. It must be the memory of this teaching that makes me feel uneasy when I hear people defending their freedom to act in a certain way. 'So far, so good', I think, 'but not really far enough'.

But what is 'far enough'? St. Paul helps us out in the very next verse where he says, 'Let no-one seek his own good, but the good of his neighbour'. Our objective should be to seek the public good. But our obligation does not end there. Writing to the Christians in Rome, who were a persecuted minority at the time, Paul encourages them to, 'If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all' (Rom. 12 v. 18). So if you want to live in peace with your neighbours, pursue it by having regard to what's in their best interests and avoid giving any unnecessary offence.

A multicultural society will be in a very precarious place if the act of giving offence ceases to be just something that is permitted under the law and becomes the only credible evidence that you believe in 'freedom'.