Be honest, Labour modernisers. These are failed Tory ideas

[T_i_B]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/20/labour-modernisers-tory-purple-book

Where did we hear these ideas before? Devolve power from Whitehall, leave the big state behind, elect mayors with powers over policing, abolish the Department for Communities and Local Government. Or this on education: get private providers to compete where schools are thought to be failing, provide education credits for parents to move their children to other schools, make all schools autonomous like academies. Or this on public services: use "successful" foundation trusts as the model to provide primary care, allocate social housing on the basis of rewarding allocate social housing on the basis of rewarding good tenants, use "hasbo" eviction orders against bad tenants. Yes, they're all Tory ideas – being presented as the face of Labour's modernisers in The Purple Book.

They will simply push Britain further down the path to a free-market, deregulated, privatised, profoundly unequal country – which is precisely the problem, not the solution. It was light-touch regulation that enabled bankers to run amok, crash the economy, costing taxpayers hundreds of billions of pounds. The private finance initiative was a colossal waste of money, and even Tories are now turning against it. And as for free schools, the Swedes – who originally championed the idea – are now having second thoughts.

If there's one belief that unites virtually all the country, it's opposition to further privatisation of the NHS, let alone extending it by marketising the public's trusted relationship with GPs. And social housing isn't a reward for good behaviour; decent housing is a fundamental human right denied to 1.8 million households (about 5 million people) on the waiting lists.

No political programme can be complete – or relevant – without tackling head-on the mammoth inequality now starting to reproduce the Edwardian class system (perhaps why Downton Abbey is so popular?). The average pay of FTSE-100 chief executives is now £86,500 a week: 220 times the median wage in Britain today, and 390 times the minimum wage of £220 a week

[LeftishBrit]

1. EXCELLENT article! And badly needed.

I admit that I'd been a bit 'off' Michael Meacher, due to his seeming links to David Ray Griffin and the troofers. But in this article, he's saying so much of what really needs to be said! Much of Labour are letting the Tories set the agenda, and trying to modify it just a bit. What is needed is a totally different agenda, such as the one given here.

[ikri]

2. The Purple Book

Like the Lib Dem Orange Book, the Labour Purple Book appears to be written by a bunch of right-wing cretins who should be far more at home in the Tory party but aren't in the right class to be in that clique.

The authors of The Purple Book include current members of Ed Miliband‘s frontbench team Liam Byrne, Douglas Alexander, Caroline Flint, Tessa Jowell and Ivan Lewis and former Cabinet Ministers Peter Mandelson, Alan Milburn, Jacqui Smith and Andrew Adonis. They are joined by a host of the party’s rising stars including Jenny Chapman, Rachel Reeves, Liz Kendall, Stephen Twigg and John Woodcock. Others include Cllrs Paul Brant, Patrick Diamond and Steve Reed, Paul Richards and Progress director, Robert Philpot.

A few names there recognisable from abhorrent New Labour laws that helped them lose millions of voters. I'm not entirely convinced by Ed Miliband yet but anyone who has to put up with that list of right-wing arseholes on their front bench team deserves some sympathy.

[T_i_B]

3. That's what it looks like....

...reheated Blairism. Not something that's going to turn me onto Labour with a few nods towards the Orange book mob who've been sucessful in ruining the Liberal Democrats.

Labour does need good attractive new policies, but they are far from that at the moment.

[non sociopath skin]

4. I like Ed Miliband and had hopes for him ...

... but this does not bode well.

Clearly, too many in the Labour Party have learnt nothing from the Blairite debacle.

I am reluctantly coming to the conclusion that we need a new party of the centre left ... just as the Americans do.

There has to be an alternative to avaricious and incompetent neo-liberalism.

The Skin

[LeftishBrit]

5. Alan Milburn in particular is scum.

He helped to lay the ground for the current government's privatization of the NHS, and recently even criticized them for not being RW *enough* on the issue!

As for the Purple Book as a whole, some may like the Grauniad's 'Pass Notes' on the subject:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/sep/14/pass-notes-3044-purple-book