The spin doctors are at work

LesAbbey on January 18, 2012 — 15 Comments

Playing the spin doctor's game?

I am posting a comment I made on David Osler’s blog earlier today. It’s about the recent statements made both both Ed Miliband and Ed Balls followed by the response of some union leaders. To me the Labour leadership is making a serious mistake and it has the smell of their press Svengali Tom Baldwin about it. This guy must be the most unsuccessful spin doctor since we have employed them in British politics. Time is well past when he should go. We would be better off with no one doing this job.

Or are we all just playing some Labour spin-doctor’s game. Remember not that long ago Tom Baldwin ‘instructed’ the Labour front bench not to mention the BSkyB deal while talking about phone hacking.

This has the smell of one of these marketing gurus saying we can undercut the Tory attack on the Eds by showing how they are not ‘spend and tax’ monsters the media is making them out to be. That then some union leaders join in the attack is probably looked upon as a positive by these people.

The problem isn’t what is being said, it is in playing the game. The Labour leadership is following the story line that both the Tories and the Blairites want it to follow. The alternative was to start proposing policies which change the argument. It shouldn’t be about how much money there is to spend, but about how what money there is available is divided. It’s about turning back the changes in the mixed economy that have been implemented since the Regan/Thatcher economic policies. It should be about income equality (the GINI coefficient) and the use of income tax policies to make a fairer society. Why for instance has the top rate of tax declined so much since the 1970s? It should be about what tools we could use to reward and punish ‘productive and predatory’ companies. How about using corporate tax rates to do this?

And yes let’s see if we can do better by allowing the workers to decide how jobs and pay are balanced. Let councils go to their workers and say this is how much money we have so what should we do. Let workers councils be part of the decision making process. Better this than some six-figured salary council executive deciding by himself.

We should be talking about empowering the citizens of Britain. It’s not just council workers, it’s parents at schools that don’t want to be made academies, it’s postal workers that don’t want to become temp workers for TNT or Tesco checkout workers replaced by automatic tills. Sometime in the future we should be able to look forward to lower working week hours and an earlier retirement age. This is what technology promised us in the 1960s. That it hasn’t happened is the result of those neo-liberal economic policies.

Anyone born since the sixties has been cheated out of their birthright by both the Tory and New Labour governments.

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  • Julie

    Yep, me too a little bit concerned as to what is going on here – I did not want another blair style party and why oh why, just a tiny tiny detail, does ed always seem to be wearing a blue tie???????

    • LesAbbey

      Julie, it’s not a tiny detail. I too wonder why they no longer wear red ties. It does show loyalty to an idea and to Labour history. Mind you he was wearing red on the Marr show on Sunday.

  • Anonymous

    You talk about empowering citizens in a backward looking or divisive way. 

    “It’s parents at schools that don’t want to be made academies” – discounting the parents who do and opposing change rather than looking for a better one.

    “Tesco checkout workers [that don’t want to be] replaced by automatic tills” – You can’t stand in the way of technological progress when customers want it. Otherwise you would be insisting we still defend horse whip makers or steam locomotive fireman, both trades that on a large scale have disappeared due to their obsolesence, replaced by something better. I’ve often seen people in Tescos use automatic till when there are staffed checkouts free. Since staffed checkouts are faster it must be that those customers prefer the automatic tills. Do you think we should prevent people having what they want?

    Just because we were promised something in the 1960s doesn’t mean we are entitled to it, though I would point out if we were happy with the standard of living in the 1960s (including standards of healthcare/environmental protection/ no central heating/ boring food etc) then we could all have shorter working weeks and retire at 50. Since we want a 21st century standard of living then we have to earn 21st century wages and that requires we work hard.

    • LesAbbey

      But DevonChap you manage to ignore the main point that the reason we have not seen what we thought was going to come with the advances in technology is that equality has gone backwards and wealth has been concentrated in fewer hands. The Gini coefficient tells the story.

      • Anonymous

        The Gini co-efficent is relative. Poor people in a rich country that has high wealth inequality can be much richer absolutely than the rich in a poor country with low inequality (which is compare the UK of 2011 with the UK of 1965). The UK is over 3 times richer than it was in 1965. Yes the richest 10% own a lot of the wealth than in 1965 but the total wealth is so much higher that even the poorest are better off absolutely.

        The Gini co-efficent therefore has very little to do with the fact the promsed land of the 1960′s futurists hasn’t given us loads of leisure time. It is down to the fact all the technology today costs more. Consider a 1960s car to a 2011 model. No airbags, no computer, no crumple zones, no radio (certainly no Bluetooth connectivity), no ABS, no GPS and be far more polluting with much lower fuel effiency. If I were to use modern manufacturing technology to make a 1960s car it would be very cheap, certainly much less as the percentage of the average working wage than a modern car, or that car would have been in 1965.

        Equality has nothing to do with standards of living. Ask the Chinese if they prefered Mao’s equality in poverty to today’s far higher standards of living with vast inequality. I don’t think they are wringing their hands over the Gini co-effiecent.

        • LesAbbey

          Again DevonChap you are avoiding the point. The worsening in the Gini coefficient in Britain since the sixties was caused by the Thatcher taxation policies that have never been rescinded.

          The ideas of a better future in the sixties, although possibly over optimistic, didn’t foresee the benefits of technology mostly accumulating as wealth with the richest.

          Ah trickle-down is not dead. The argument that everyone is better off now than they were doesn’t negate that everyone could have been in a far better position. Why is it not so? The politics of greed would be my answer.

          Regarding China, a country I know fairly well, it’s maybe better we have that conversation another time. It’s not as simple as some may think and although there was very little to praise in communist central control, the present day inequalities could well end up leading to something similar to the ‘Arab Spring’.

          • Anonymous

            I’m not avoiding the point. You are failing to explain why income inequality is the cause of the failure of 1960′s optimism. A smaller slice of a bigger pie is still more cake.

            To argue that everyone would be in a better position if there were less inequality is to assume that the economy would have grown as or more strongly without the incentive for the successful to become richer than their compatriates. Now I think will disagree on that.

            The benefits of technology haven’t accumulated mostly to the rich. In the UK if the poor fall ill they have access to MRI scanners, hip replacments and modern drugs. You can buy a mobile phone for £20 at Tesco when 50 years ago a fixed line would be unaffordable for most. I can go on and on.

            I hold no candle for the Chinese Communist Party and would regard a Chinese Spring as the likley outcome of their current path, though not against inequalty, but because the growing middle class will want a say in the running of their country, as has happened in many other countries as they developed (such as South Korea and Taiwan). That growing middle class is as a result of capitalist economic growth based on allowing inequality.

          • LesAbbey

            Of course the benefits have accumulated with the rich. That’s what the Gini coefficient tells us. That’s what the numbers say. Trickle-down economics started the coefficient moving in the opposite direction.

            Sure the standard of living of almost all improved but the improvement was more loaded to the very richest. Let’s see what dreams from the sixties we missed out on.

            Where is the extra leisure time, the shorter working week and early retirement? Do you remember how the robots in factories were going to make our lives easier, not to put millions on the dole? How much better could it be if we hadn’t veered so far off the road.

            The cars, MRI scanners and mobile phones were coming anyway. They were not dependent on inequality for their invention or manufacture.

            As I said knowing China fairly well it would take far more time than I really want to give it right now to look at the question of equality in China today. You can find information yourself on some of the contentious issues right now. There are peasant farmers fighting both the communist party and the new capitalist class over the land grabbing that’s been going on. There are workers in some of the new industrial areas that no longer feel that the communist party represents their aspirations.

            And if you really want a good example of neo-liberalism gone wild you should look at Cambodia today and the corruption it has bought. (It’s that same corruption that upsets so many in China today.)

            So just to wind up –

            A smaller slice of a bigger pie is still more cake.

            Yes but an equal slice is even more cake;-)

          • Anonymous

            One point as to where the early retirement has gone. We could have had the earlier retirement if we hadn’t insisted on living longer. Average male life expectency in 1961 was less than 70, today it is nearly 80. So we get 10 years more retirement, just at the other end rather than all retire at 55.

            Logan’ Run was published in 1967, maybe that was the futurists plan…

          • LesAbbey

            That must be it DevonChap, we are living too long. It should be only the rich who are allowed to do this. Still good news, hasn’t life expectancy taken a downturn recently for the first time since the war?

            Now a good Tory would blame it on bad personal diet choices while myself I would blame it on the under-regulation of the fast food industry.

            Still DevonChap we have seldom agreed on much. Remember our argument over rules on press ownership regarding Murdoch. This was before the extent of phone hacking scandal was known.

            I feel I was proved right and hopefully Leveson will look at ownership. I hope yesterday’s admissions in court by News International will at last put the nail in the coffin of this man’s political power.

          • http://thepeoplesflag.blogspot.com/ Andy Williams

            It’s not Capitalism.  It’s State Capitalism which is an entorely different beast.

  • http://thepeoplesflag.blogspot.com/ Andy Williams

    The Labour leadership has been making a serious mistake since the mid 1990′s.    Blair  taking power basically on the public’s desire for change just reinforced their wrong thinking.

    They are were they are because that’s where they deserve to be.  I’ll go further – the next Prime Minister will be Cameron with an overall majority. Not because they picked the wrong leader, but because they picked the wrong creed.

  • Anonymous

    We have been informed shock  horror the spin doctors behind Miliband are non other then Mandy and Campbell, hey ho and a happy New labour

  • swatantra

    However good a spin doctor is, they can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.
    The Tories seem to be hijacking many of Labours ‘policies’; the latest on worker participation on Management Boards. The Higher Pay Commission which COMPASS campaigned for; co-operatives and social enterprises. The Big Society also a Labour idea on devolution localism and epowerment.
    In fact I’ve been re-reading the COMPASS and FABIAN SOCIETY tracts which Ed and Chukka seem to have taken on board pretty much wholesale. There’s still more in there Ed which the Tories haven’t pinched, yet; so get in there quick and promote them before Dave gets in.

    • Anonymous

      That’s politics Blair did it when he was in every time the Tories  thought up something Blair took it. What do you want to do make it against the law, perhaps labour should think up some really good ideas to help the poor , then let them steal that.

      At the moment Labour is jumping onto the Tories band wagon then the Tories are stealing from labour, we back that, we back that, we  back holding down wages, great somebody on £65,000 backs the bloke on £14,000 not having a pay rise, and when this is over the government will say well look poor old MP’s will need an above inflation pay rise as Blair did with his 60% pay rise.

      Problem is of course if labour brought in some really good policies then I’m sure the Tories would run a mile