Three of the very best left-leaning bloggers, Duncan Weldon, ‘Don Paskini’ and Charlie McMemanim have started up, on their respective sites, a very interesting and (I hope ultimately) a very productive discussion on the interrelated questions of:
- what post-crash/big debt Labour economic policy should be; and
- how it should be packaged (to use Charlie’s metaphor) for an electorate which will mostly be getting their ears battered by a Conservative message of Labour profligacy/Conservative austerity and ‘good housekeeping’ (i.e. savage cuts to public services and welfare which hit the poorest hardest).
Can I suggest politely that you go and have a look at the threads and comments (including my offerings), starting with Duncan’s post here for further instruction…………
Right, if you’ve done what I asked properly, you’ll see that the three cornered – four if you count me – discussion is indeed intelligent, grounded in a detailed understanding of the current domestic economic position from a post-Keynesian perspective, but also aware of the electoral strategy issues which face a Labour government a few months short of an election.
This is exactly the discussion that Labour as a party (along with those strategically allied to it in whatever way or for whatever reason) should be having.
Most of the blogopshere, left-leaning or not, is full of crap, and the right-leaning bit of the blogosphere is, as I’ve contested in the first part of this long post, simply not clever enough to have this kind of discussion.
I hope the big boy bloggers, not least Hopi, will help it find a wider audience than that which routinely goes to blogs with an economic focus.
This in itself will not be enough, however. What I’d like to see follow is as follows:
First, for the debate to mature, to gain blog audience, and for key aspects of the argument come to be crystallised in ‘the message’ that Labour should send out to the electorate – a message about an economic policy refocused on the rebalancing of capital/labour relations ,and on income equality, as a sine qua non for sustainable post-crisis recovery (see Graham Turner for further reading).
This should be set alongside a commitment to investment both in new (green) industry AND new governance/institutional arrangements in keeping with new modes of production (see this Carlota Perez article for initial further reading).
This should be Labour’s message about ’new politics’ – the term Compass bandies about so easily without actually any understanding of what it might mean when it comes to actual economic policy.
Second, for this developed and then refined message, about where Labour might go if it retains power (or even when it returns to it), to go beyond the blogosphere, to utilise the new feeling of empowerment that is rising in the grassroots of the Labour party (as exemplified in Peter Kenyon’s call for CLPs to rise and speak forth), and to be transmitted to the Parliamentary Labour Party as the consolidated wishes of the Labour party as a whole.
Conference in September should be seen as the key milestone in this. Gordon Brown’s speech (which I tried to write for him last year, but I don’t think it reached him in time) should the begin:
‘I have heard what the Labour party has said, and I have heard what the public have said, and what they have said will form the backbone of our economic and social policy as we approach the next election.
This policy will have at its heart a renewed commitment to equality of income, a renewed commitment to equality of institutional power between capital and labour, a renewed commitment to a sustainable economy. My speech to you today will spell these three commitments out, and on this basis we will win the election, and the Conservatives will be thrown into the darkness…….’
I’ve not got time to write the whole thing now, but I think you’ll get the drift.
