Corbyn's 'austerity lite' claim is a myth
We hear it again and again about the kinder Politics that Jeremy Corbyn’s era will herald in.
No more adversarial politics. No more political attacks. No more grandstanding. But from John McDonnell’s comments about MP’s being ‘f**king useless‘ to the misogyny shown toward female MP’s on social media, the face of the new self-righteous but pernicious politics is emerging.
However, one of the long standing abuses that has gone overlooked is how Corbyn’s team have typecast Ed Miliband as a sell out to austerity, when Miliband, in terms of Economics, was one of the most radical leaders of the Labour Party we have seen since the Foot or even Attlee era.
The anti-austerity agenda did not begin with Corbyn but with Miliband. Manuel Cortes asserts on LabourList that is Corbyn who ‘seized his moment with his opposition to austerity’. But as John Lansman admits it was Miliband who laid the ground for Corbyn.
It was Miliband who took the membership towards the left. If it was not for him, Corbyn would not have won with the majority of the membership in 2015.
Corbyn was eager to court Miliband for support once he won the election but throughout his labour leadership campaign in 2015, he sought to belittle Miliband’s legacy. This quote typified Corbyn and his team’s approach to Miliband during the campaign:
“In the last election we were offering a form of austerity-lite, albeit we did very well on zero hour contracts and a number of other issues, but we were in effect offering austerity-lite”
In the Labour leadership hustings he continues to pedal this myth:
“It’s not good enough to go on the doorstep and say we’ll have less cuts than they will, that we’ll be austerity-lite”.
If we go by this logic, Corbyn himself must be offering austerity-lite as well, because on economics, he’s are standing on the same platform as Miliband. If anything, he’s copied and pasted wholesale from Miliband’s 2015 manifesto.
As Owen Jones forensically points out in his brave and passionate plea for answers from the Corbyn team, all the landmark policies Corbyn is standing on are the same as Miliband’s: the same fiscal rule, the same proposal around railways, the same regarding British investment banks, the list goes on.
In Corbyn’s recent interview with Jones he declared his admiration for the German social democratic model. But interestingly this is the model that ran through the spine of Milband’s policies. Miliband was much closer to the founder of the German Social Democratic Party Eduard Bernstein, than he was to Blair.
The fundamental myth that has been propped up Jeremy Corbyn during his time as leader is that he instigated the anti-austerity agenda. It was only he who could truly stand up to big business and reshape our economy to create security for workers, except it was Ed Miliband that got there first.
Corbyn’s attacks on Miliband, and then his quickness to champion him, show the disingenuous nature of the new Kinder Politics.
If only Corbyn could learn from the Miliband era, that it was his style and lack of coherent narrative that were his failing, not that he was following some quasi-austerity agenda.
Sam Pallis is a Labour member on the executive of his local CLP and an active Young Fabian. Follw him on Twitter.
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19 Responses to “Labour’s opposition to austerity began with Ed Miliband – not Jeremy Corbyn”
Paul Watson
A bit of a nasty little introduction. However Miliband did offer hope of a slow journey to the left eg freeze on energy prices and as such was preferable to other candidates at the time. His big mistake was his (and the rest of the party) non rebuttal to the financial crisis being blamed on previous Labour spending and not the banks.
So in a way the article is partly right but I disagree with the main drift. And now we have JC the real thing.
Steve Mizzy
Ed was on the right track during the GE campaign. Problem was he didnt start his pitch a couple of years out and really got stuck into the Govt. Labour should have seriously challenge the Govt on austerity from day one. Letting the Tories get away with the lie that public spending caused the financial crash was negligent.
Ed’s Labour was on the whole far too timid.
CJ
2015 Manifesto
ECONOMY
We will balance the books without extreme spending cuts
• We will cut the deficit every year with a surplus on the current budget and get the national debt falling as soon as possible in the next Parliament.
• We will make fair and sensible spending decisions, including capping social security spending so that it is properly controlled, stopping the payment of the winter fuel allowance to the wealthiest five per cent of pensioners and capping child benefit rises for the next two years.
• There is not a single policy in this manifesto that is funded by additional borrowing. There are tough decisions to be taken and we haven’t made any commitments that we can’t keep.
• We will make sure that any profits made from returning the bailed-out banks to the private sector are used to reduce the national debt.
• We will save money by reforming old government bureaucracies, devolving power and services to our towns and cities, and redesigning public services.
We will create a fairer tax system
• We will reverse the Government’s top-rate tax cut, so that those with incomes over £150,000 contribute a little more to help get the deficit down.
• We will abolish the non-dom rules so that those who live permanently in the UK pay tax in the same way as the rest of us.
• We will close tax loopholes that cost the public billions of pounds a year, and we will bring in tough penalties for those who abuse the tax system. This will include ending unfair tax breaks used by hedge funds, and cracking down on disguised employment. We will make it harder for tax dodgers to hide their identities by making country-by-country reporting information publicly available.
• We will introduce a lower 10p starting tax rate to help those on middle and lower incomes, which will be funded by ending the Conservatives’ Marriage Tax Allowance. We will not increase the basic or higher rates of income tax or national insurance.
• We will not raise VAT, nor extend it to food, children’s clothes, books, newspapers or public transport fares. This is the tax that hits pensioners and the poorest hardest.
We will make sure hard work is fairly rewarded
• We will increase the National Minimum Wage to more than £8 an hour by October 2019 to help ensure that those doing a hard day’s work are rewarded for doing so.
• We will ban exploitative zero-hours contracts so that anyone working regular hours for 12 weeks or more will have the right to a regular contract. This sort of job insecurity creates an unnecessary strain on family life.
• We will promote the Living Wage by giving a tax rebate to companies that sign up to become Living Wage employers in the first year of the next Parliament. We will also require listed companies to report on whether or not they pay the Living Wage and use government procurement to encourage more employers to pay it, following the lead of Labour councils across the country.
We will fix the broken markets that fail the millions of families who rely on them
• We will freeze gas and electricity prices until 2017 and give the regulator the power to cut bills this winter. We will reform the broken energy market so that families and businesses get a fair deal.
• We will introduce a fairer deal for renters, including a ceiling on excessive rent rises, and we will make stable three-year tenancies the rule, not the exception. We will ban rip-off letting fees.
We will back our entrepreneurs and businesses
• We will build a strong economic foundation, cutting the deficit every year with a surplus on the current budget and national debt falling as soon as possible in the next Parliament.
• We will tackle rising business costs, by maintaining the most competitive corporation tax rate in the G7, cutting and then freezing business rates for more than 1.5 million small business properties and freezing their energy bills.
• We will make it easier for firms to get the finance they need to grow and create jobs, by establishing a British Investment Bank with a mission to lend money to small- and medium-sized businesses and support a network of regional banks.
• We will meet Britain’s long-term infrastructure needs by setting up an independent National Infrastructure Commission to plan for those needs and hold government to account.
• We will tackle skills shortages, ensuring all young people study English and maths to 18 and introducing a gold standard vocational route, including a plan to create thousands of new apprenticeships.
• We will support access to international markets by returning Britain to a leadership role in a reformed European Union.
They were only ever going to cap the current budget not the capital budget, seems familiar to what MacDonald keeps saying to me
Mason Dixon, Autistic
‘Kinder politics’ was an offer, not a promise. It requires the snivelling weasels of Labour’s Right to stop shitting on the carpet.
BigDave
Oh come on! Miliband’s Labour (and Harman’s) continued not to oppose the Tories’ austerity measures in Parliament, especially the attacks on benefit claimants. Still, the NHS survives, as this site seems to have become Left Foot Amputated.