The Progressive Premium
May 5, 2008
‘The London exception to Thursday’s dire results shows that Labour can only win back Britain with Livingstone-style progressive policies,’ writes Seumas Milne.
Once the scale of Labour’s national May Day meltdown became clear, it was obvious that even the political alchemy of Ken Livingstone wouldn’t be able to survive such a collapse in the party’s vote. It’s true he ran a poor campaign, steered unnecessarily close to an unpopular government, faced a lavishly-funded Tory machine in the suburbs and was subject to the most poisonous political media onslaught for a generation.
But even without all that he would have struggled to bridge the 20-point Conservative lead – 44% against Labour’s 24% – in local elections across England and Wales on Thursday. Livingstone was, after all, the Labour candidate in London.
But what’s striking is how much better Livingstone (and to some extent Labour on his coattails) did in London than the party in the rest of the country: on first preferences Livingstone scored 36% to Boris Johnson’s 42%; on second, he reached 47% to Johnson’s 53% – with BNP voters helping to see the Tory home and dry. Livingstone’s 12% advantage over Labour’s national score – a sort of progressive premium – has important lessons for the party nationally as the battle over its future direction heats up.
Of course local and personal factors mean there can be no straight read-across from London to the national stage, even though the capital traditionally tends to mirror the wider electoral balance. But it’s also clear that the kind of progressive coalition and policies that Livingstone favoured – on transport, housing, privatisation and redistribution – are a good deal more popular with voters than the rudderless triangulation currently on offer from Gordon Brown.
Blairites will object that it makes no sense to shift leftwards if voters are haemorrhaging to the Tories. But politics is more about interests than labels.
The evidence piling up from last Thursday shows Labour was hammered especially hard in working class areas, in Harlow as well as Merthyr Tydfil (a pattern already clear enough in last weekend’s News of the World ICM poll of marginal seats).
That’s scarcely surprising in the wake of the 10p tax increase. But it also highlights the dead end New Labour electoral strategy has now reached. The abolition of the 10% rate was a classic New Labour policy – cutting middle income taxes at the expense of voters who supposedly had nowhere else to go – which has spectacularly backfired.
Labour’s working class supporters can no longer be taken for granted, any more than the suburban voters needed for electoral victory. And both are now facing the impact of increased fuel, housing and food costs – while swelling corporate profits and boardroom bonuses remain untouchable.
It’s only through a clear change of political direction – which restores its core voters to the heart of a new electoral coalition – that Labour can now pull itself out of this crisis.
With such a woefully superficial political analysis as this drivel from Milne no wonder the print industry is in steep decline.
The piece starts from the wholly fatuous assumption that Livingstone was a progressive Mayor of London.The idea is unsustainable.
The only thing remotely progressive about Livingstone was his willingness to use his corporate backers and the legal system to extort progressively huge sums of money from escalating fines on motorists.
Because the road-pricing scam operated by Livingstone bears no resemblance neither in its high rates or mode of collection to any other scheme in the world and because the charge was made deliberately difficult for motorists to pay and comply with-it now rakes in 70% of its total revenue not from the Charge at all but from the fines.
The fines are collected by Capita from unmarked offices well away from the capital at Prologis Park in Coventry.Staff who renege on confidentiality clauses in their initial contracts report that the entire modus operandi is to use the photographs taken of vehicles corralled by corridors of No Right Turn signage to identify road-users who are most likely to pay the fine imposed from those from whom it will be difficult or expensive to recover the monies.
In other words the scam seeks to extort monies from the most law-abiding drivers.Those who have paid their insurance and vehicle tax and hence made themselves easily identifiable are most vulnerable to the predations of the scam.
Moreover many drivers caught on the cameras are those from outside the capital who have no idea the authoritarian scheme requires them to notify Livingstone’s Enforcers prior to travelling.These drivers often as not have only decided to drive because they fear the post-7/7 security risks on the capital’s transport networks.
With his Appeals tribunals wholly funded from the corporate profits that accrue,Livingstone’s fines are always upheld.Such has been the level of greed and eagerness to extort the fines that the tribunal system is thoroughly clogged up.
Notwithstanding there being abundant evidence that the scheme had made no impact on congestion levels and the vocal objections of Londoners themselves,Livingstone pressed ahead with his vast westward extension of the zone in early 2007.This was a cynical ploy to catch drivers coming into London on the M40/A40 corridor.
Although it seems to have escaped Milne’s notice, Livingstone’s career trajectory bears uncanny resemblances to that of former NY Mayor Giuliani.
Livingstone has picked up fines for his corporate backers as quickly and as slavishly as Giuliani picked up and shipped out the debris at Ground Zero after 9/11!
Like Rudi,Livingstone reaped huge corporate media approval for the support he gave police and security operations,even the most bungled ones,in which they were susequently found to have endangered the public.
Like his US partner in crime,Livingstone has been useful to corporate elites intent on building national security states by means of black propaganda and state-sponsored terror operations.
Boris Johnson’s election suggests that,like Giuliani,Livingstone has now outlived his usefulness.Indeed,Johnson is reported to have already contacted NY Mayor Michael Bloomberg,another Schwarznegger-type Felix Rohatyn placeman mooted to be on the point of a forthcoming corporate-backed Presidential election bid.
That the rarefied parallel universe inhabited by the establishment left leads them to want to portray Livingstone,in reality nothing more than a useful tool of corporate elites,as a friend to the working man bespeaks the abjectly superficial level of what passes for political comment in such circles.
Its patently clear to everyone save those imbeciles from New (fascist) Labour that the shift in policy to the right in the misguided expectation that they will win over (and retain) middle England voters has been refuted without doubt. The policices that were followed only served to aid and abet a tory victory. The Labour machinery could not see the wood from the trees. The more inhumane their immigration policies became; the virulently xenophobic statements made by ministers; the inflammatory remarks against muslims, the unwarranted fears generated by central government ‘anti-terrorism’ laws that are effectively covert apartheid type laws; the forcible removal of asylum seekers in some cases from hospital beds while receiving treatment for life threatening conditions; the complicity in the extra-judicial kidnapping and torture of individuals at third nation locations; the sale of peerages and honours; the knowing acceptance of illegal donations to fund party campaigns; the execution of an innocent on the London underground and the attempted murder by the police of a muslim family in forest gate; the genocidal destruction of Iraq, a defenceless soverign state and the subsequent refugees crisis of 4.2 million displaced people, the total destruction of their infrastructure; the occupation of another defenceless and wretched country of Afghanistan and the continued murder of their populations; the failure to speak out and condemn racism in society, in institutions, in British Airways; their determination to introduce internment for Muslims only (by any other name); their failure to condemn in the strongest terms and take meaningful action against the Jewish colonisation of Palestine, especially so,….and on and on and on… will all serve to hand the reigns of government to the conservatives on a platter. The affluent tory will never vote labour, not even while Labour became more right wing and nationalistic. That has been their cardinal error. But the seeds of their destruction was laid in their foolish decision to slavishly follow the United States into the Iraqi inferno with the zionist pide pipers leading the way, on both side of the Atlantic. The lag has been 8 years but that is often the case in participatory politics where failed and destructive policies translate into the ballot box until much later when the consequences become apparent for all to see. Now they (and the rest of us) must reap what they have sown.