Clarity, Pride and Principle?

 

David Milliband has praised Keir Starmer’s leadership of the Labour Party: “I am proud to be Labour again. He's brought back clarity, pride, principle to the work of opposition and I think it's been really good to see." He went on to attack Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership as years of ‘vacillation’ and “betrayal’.

His father Ralph Milliband would not have agreed and could have been referring to his son when he wrote “ The Labour Party have always conceived their proposals and policies as a means, not of eroding— let alone supplanting— the capitalist system, but of ensuring its greater strength and stability … Far from seeking to surround themselves with men ardent for reform and eager for change in radical directions (They) have been content to be served by men much more likely to exercise a restraining influence upon their own reforming propensities … Pious references to the Labour Party being a ‘broad church’ which has always incorporated many different strands of thought fail to take account of a crucial fact, namely that the ‘broad church’ of Labour only functioned effectively in the past because one side – the Right and Centre – determined the nature of the services that were to be held, and excluded or threatened with exclusion any clergy too deviant in its dissent.”

Now that Jeremy Corbyn has been summarily excluded and put back in the church pews, David has hinted at a return to UK politics (he was Foreign Sec, pro-war and responsible for collaborating with the US on renditions) At the moment he is in New York as CEO of the International Rescue Committee. Mind you with his $1 million salary he will have to take a pay cut.

 

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What Democracy Looks Like

Ambrose Bierce, the 19^th century American journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and wit, said that politics is ‘a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.’ This is the 'Politics' that you take up as a profession, with its Privy Councillors (yes it did start in the toilet) and, pardon the pun, Standing Orders; the Westminster 'Palace' full of Right Honourables who barrack and ridicule each other, then go off to have cosy lunches together. I remember being on a trade union rally 30 years ago in Hyde Park when one of the speakers called on us to march on Parliament. Someone grabbed the mike and said he wouldn't join it because he didn't believe in disturbing the dead. At one of the massive demonstrations against the Iraq war I was in Parliament Square as a young woman pointed at the people sitting on the grass as she shouted, 'This is what democracy looks like,' then her arm extended in the direction of Parliament. 'That's not what democracy looks like.' But I leave the last word to Milliband. “Of political parties claiming socialism to be their aim, the Labour Party has always been one of the most dogmatic – not about socialism, but about the parliamentary system. Empirical and flexible about all else, its leaders have always made devotion to that system their fixed point of reference and the conditioning factor of their political behaviour. This is not simply to say that the Labour Party has never been a party of revolution ... It is rather that the leaders of the Labour Party have always rejected any kind of political action which fell, or which appeared to them to fall, outside the framework and conventions of the parliamentary system.” Which Milliband wrote this? Ed, Dave? … no Marxist father Ralph. Have you ordered your copy of 'Left Field' yet? Publication has now been set for early 2016.