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”
Josephine Bacon
Funny how the Tories’ austerity is only aimed at Labour local councils and services for which they hope Labour councils will be blamed. No austerity if you live in Surrey! So much for austerity. The Tories’ austerity agenda is just another of their tricks for grinding the faces of the poor. As for Jeremy Corbyn’s “kinder politics” that is another myth, he will continue to be a leading antisemite and Holocaust denier, as he was before his fan club elected him leader.
Angus Lindsay
Just read this in an article by Steve Topple [ _ http://www.thecanary.co/2016/08/08/the-left-wing-journalists-attacking-corbyn-need-urgent-reality-check/ _ ] “As The Canary previously reported, most of Ed Balls’ economic policy came from think-tanking with the likes of former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers (a man considered to be one of the Bill Clinton-era policy architects that led to the 2008 financial crash). The ideology which dominated Miliband’s Labour was based around Balls’ and Summers’ conclusions. An overarching ideal called ‘Inclusive Prosperity’.
Simply put, it was the notion that wealth hadn’t been trickling down and that it was time to redress the balance, via various methods. It impacted nearly every other area of Labour’s manifesto. But the nuts and bolts of the mantra weren’t that at all. As I wrote in January 2015, Inclusive Prosperity actually had its roots in a joint project between the management consultants at McKinsey & Company and right-wing think-tank The Henry Jackson Society:
“Inclusive Capitalism” is described as a “long-term” way of “maximizing the extent to which capitalism can heal its own ills”, in the hope that “the capitalist system that has made our societies great will continue to do so”.
Inclusive Capitalism was, in turn, based on the findings of a group called ‘Focusing Capital on the Long-Term’, a think-tank dedicated to ‘value creation’ for investors and markets, whose members included Barclays, AXA, and Unilever. Essentially, what underscored most of Miliband’s policies were the wishes of those sat in corporate boardrooms.
There was, in short, nothing socialist about Miliband’s Labour Party, apart from a cleverly constructed PR operation that talked of equality, ‘predistribution‘, and a One Nation Labour.”
Robert Petulengro
First of all I am appalled that two people should unsub because they do not agree. It is vital to go on all sites – especially the ones you disagree with. Ever heard of groupthink? Or conspiracy theories?
Secondly George Osborne increased the national debt to £1.5 trillion. And that is austerity?
I suppose you mean cutting back on all those non-jobs? Like the 40,000 police people. Well I reckon that is a good thing. Non jobs are insulting, expensive and they simply add to the weight of bureaucracy on teachers, nurses, police and doctors.
Caramella
Ed Miliband sought to stop the rot.
Unfortunately he couldn’t deliver on the changes promised, and was undermined from within by certain sections of the Labour Party, as well as the right-wing mainstream media, and even the BeeB at the end of the GE2015 campaign.
Agree much that he was too timid – especially about the “Crash of 2008”, but with all of his faults, I would cautiously support Ed-M’s return to high office if he was a little less polite, more congruent politically and stopped supporting Owen Smith, as the gentleman is clearly not a democrat.