A media round-up by the Labour List website today suggests that Starmer’s shake-up of his shadow cabinet confirms a further shift to the right—if that were possible. But on the same website today is an intriguing article by loyalist MP Dan Jarvis, which if I’m not mistaken sends a coded message to the leadership—grow a spine and take the Tories on—stop pussyfooting around tweaking Tory policies. Jarvis’s case rests on what to do about the water industry, which as he says has been bled dry (forgive the pun) by mainly overseas companies and loaded up with £60 billion in debt. He says 20% of our bills is to service the debt. How to tackle this crisis, which as reported today by the BBC is leading to multiple raw sewage overflow incidents, even in dry weather?
One answer is to tighten regulations, and I would say do so until the water companies cry for mercy and seek escape. As Jarvis suggests, this could make a future nationalisation cheaper. I may have mentioned this before, but years ago the owners of Yorkshire Water offered to gift the regulated part of the business to some sort of consumer co-operative. But in that case the message would be ‘don’t look a gift horse in the mouth’- this gift would have come laden with debt. Jarvis says ‘My expectation is that public ownership makes sense, can be done at reasonable cost and should happen sooner rather than later.’ To achieve this, ‘We lead and shape opinion rather than fearing and following it. With nationalisation already popular, there is huge opportunity here, and that calculation applies far beyond water – climate being a key example.’ I suspect for many Labour MPs, including some of those who may well be newly elected next year, Jarvis’s view will prevail. After their first few happy months with a new New Labour government, reality could kick in and radicalise them—a little. Perhaps some of them will be influenced by voices Starmer failed to purge. We live in hope.
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Who could possibly blame our Education Secretary of State for swearing about how unfairly she’d been treated after a tough interview about the crumbling state of our schools?
Wasn’t austerity wildly popular? Haven’t we (that is, the Tories) delivered on our holy mission to give more to the wealthy and f*** the less deserving? Haven’t we created the more unequal society our backers so earnestly desired (it’s the only kind of society in which they can get as rich as they do)? And isn’t this agenda almost wholly supported by the opposition, who run scared at the very suspicion that they are not on the same page, with no increase to the top level of income tax, no changes to capital gains tax and a raft of ambitions thrown overboard to please the very same people who the Tories suck up to? There’s no hint how Labour would solve the crumbling schools crisis—Liz Kendall, a newly appointed Blairite Shadow Cabinet member, interviewed this evening had nothing but gooey tasteless syrup to offer in place of actual medicine. We have now entered the domain of what I will call Placebo Politics.* I am sure this could explain why voters may prefer a complete nutter to be in charge. They may think their pill could actually have something in it. *I am alas not the first to coin this phrase. A headline using the words appeared in the Guardian (3/6/2004) atop an article by David Clark. He wrote (better than I could): ‘In the past decade, the main parties have converged around an "end of history" consensus based on the primacy of markets and the limitations of government. The very nature of this consensus undermines the public realm by emphasising market-based solutions as the answer to our problems. If even progressives appear to believe that the private sector is inherently superior to the public sector, it is inevitable that people will come to see themselves as consumers fighting for advantage in an atomised market instead of citizens empowered to act together by the opportunity to vote.’ A generation hasn’t changed much. A global financial crisis and a pandemic didn’t even scratch the surface of the ‘consensus.’ Capitalism doesn’t appear to possess a suicide pill. These days we tend to forget that ‘social media’ is not the only conduit for false information. It’s quite possible that local buses are another. On the No.10 (naturally) bus to Cayton yesterday afternoon I heard an old geezer telling his mate how MPs are paid a salary for life, even after leaving parliament. If only. It was clear this chap was a Wetherspoons regular—he had an encyclopaedic knowledge of Wetherspoons pubs from Scarborough to Newcastle. I suspect his MPs tale has been recounted many a time into the lugholes of receptive boozers. What’s worse is that this is the kind of ‘fact’ which it is simply not worth the effort rebutting if you’re sat on a bus hoping for a quiet ride.
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