David Miliband and Me
I spent the best part of a couple of hours last Wednesday evening, 18th August at a question and answer session with Labour Leadership contender David Miliband in Swindon and I came away impressed with a lot of what he had to say. David spoke about rebuilding the Labour Party from the grassroots up rather than a top-down approach much criticised of the way Tony Blair ran the party, he spoke eloquently on the subject of creating a fully elected House of Lords – something I’ve agreed with for many years, and while David Miliband has been my preferred choice for Labour Leader since the race began, I am starting to question if he will be radical enough in bringing about the changes I would like to see if and when Labour are returned to government.
Charismatic and charming he certainly is, and any potential leader needs those qualities but I’m looking beyond just the leadership of the Labour Party and trying to imagine how each of the candidates would lead the country should they eventually become Prime Minister; I am slightly torn with David Miliband – on one hand I think he would unite the party and the country, I believe he has the capacity to reach beyond the Labour voter and encourage Tory and Lib Dem voters to vote Labour, and I also believe he would create a stable path back to economic stability, but on the other hand I also think he would probably be a continuation of what has gone before and I think we need a radical and really fresh approach not just to politics; but to the policies that a potential government can implement.
I was a strong supporter of Tony Blair, he did a lot of good things in government – I know he has his detractors and there are many things which I disagreed with him over as well, Iraq being the most obvious but he took the party to three consecutive election victories after two decades in the wilderness, like him or loathe him that didn’t happen by chance but the one area where Tony Blair could have and should have been revolutionary was with the economic policy of this country, instead he simply implanted the Thatcher economic doctrine at the heart of Labour and rebranded it New Labour, and so the gap between rich and poor was destined to grow wider and greed once more was good – at least that was his theory but certainly not mine. The type of revolution I would like to see in this country is one where capitalism is challenged fundamentally, not by replacing it with something else – I’ve studied this subject for a long time and even I find it hard to come up with a suitable alternative; capitalism is good, greed is not!
There needs to be a fundamental shift in the way capitalism operates; it is a wealth creator and that’s a good thing, but it creates huge wealth in the hands of a few and hardship in the hands of the many – it’s that principle which needs change and only someone with a revolutionary insight could bring that about. So many parts of the capitalist project could easily be changed to put it on a new path, a path that is much fairer and less divisive. Supporters of capitalism and free markets argue that competition creates choice and lowers prices, that’s true in the early stages of a products life or when a new company wants to challenge market share, but once the dust settles and we’re left with a handful of companies competing for the same customers everything becomes very stayed and predictable and the only competition we see then is which company will increase their prices first before the others follow suit. The energy market is a prime example, at one time we only had British Gas and Margaret Thatcher privatised it and eventually opened the markets to competition, naturally competition blossomed – for a while, until market share was established and then routine set in and prices continued to rise and rise. If competition really worked, this should be the time when customers benefit but instead within days of one energy company announcing a price rise, the rest follow suit. That’s not competition, that’s a monopoly. Petrol and diesel is another example and this is where capitalism loses its credibility and all sense of perspective, consistently aiming for greater profits instead of a steady consistent turnover without putting hundreds, sometimes thousands of jobs at risk by propagating greed until the bubble finally bursts.
Be satisfied with an established revenue stream instead of putting the company and the workforce at risk and if you’re intent of increasing revenue for your shareholders, reinvest sensibly and innovate research and development to improve your product line and invent new ones, instead of playing roulette with peoples jobs and come to think about it, remove shareholders completely from your business model and allow the workforce to own the company, incentivising them to take greater pride in what they do and to be rewarded financially when the business succeeds.
There are many nuances around the capitalist project that could be changed easily, and others which would require a little more effort, but it is the capitalist structure that at its heart is dragging this country into the abyss and creating this never ending cycle of boom and bust, rich and poor and them and us, and until we see a leader of a political party prepared to challenge that core problem, I fear this country will eventually self-destruct and it will be the generations underneath us who will be left to pick up the pieces, when we had every opportunity to set a brighter future for them but for our own selfish reasons, decided not to!
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