Labour is clearly going to get a fearful drubbing at the county council and EU elections on Thursday. There are 3 main reasons for this: the expenses scandal, the impact of the recession, and the widespread perception that the Labour Government is badly failing its own supporters. Is the collapse of support for Labour for these reasons fair? The picture is varied. Tthe expenses trauma has hit Labour harder even though the proportion of offenders in the Tory party and the scale of their offences is much greater. The recession has been attributed by the Government to the sub-prime fiasco in the US, but it is also true that even if that hadn’t happened, the ballooning house price and credit card bubbles would still have burst, probably sooner rather than later. On the third count, the belief that the Government has simply not looked after its own people is certainly true, but it does offer the best opportunity for perhaps a generation for a fundamental change of direction of politics in this country. Just as it required the horror over the expenses revelations to spark the demand for major democratic reform of Parliament, so the plunge towards the absolute nadir of voter support may finally drive Labour to rediscover its historic role in British politics. The Left needs to be ready with a clear alternative plan.

That plan, I believe, should concentrate on just 3-4 key objectives, no more. They should be chosen to mark out a clean break from the neo-liberal finance capitalism that New Labour has worshipped for the last decade and made the centrepiece of all its policies. My choice would be as follows:
1 Finance.
The banks should be broken up so that never again by their recklessness can they tip over an economy and a whole society into deep recession. The traditional commercial role of the banks (lending to businesses and households) should be split off from the much more risky investment banking role (as the Glass-Steagall Act provided for in the US). The biggest banks should be broken up so that never again are they ‘too big to fail’, and their core function of community investment should always get priority. To prevent casino gambling in the financial markets, the banks would be much more closely regulated to ensure adequate capital ratios, to restrict or eliminate use of risky derivatives, to close down tax havens, and to monitor financial speculation which would be made liable to a Tobin tax.
2 Housing.
A major housebuilding programme should be started immediately for 3 strong reasons. There are now 1.77 million households on Council waiting lists, and lack of social affordable housing is the single biggest cause of misery in Britain today. Housebuilding has been allowed to collapse to its lowest level since 1953. And a campaign to drive up the number of houses built to at least 250-300,000 a year would provide one of the best counter-cyclical ways of tackling the recession, meeting a desperate social need, and providing a big increase in jobs. Both housing and pensions are major components of the Welfare State that New Labour has sacrificed to the market, with disastrous effects in both cases, and social need should once again take priority over the ideology of markets and ownership.
3 Inequality
Britain is now more unequal than it ever was under Thatcher. This must be reversed by raising the minimum wage significantly, introducing a maximum ratio between top and bottom pay in an organisation, raising the marginal rate for the richest 2% (those with incomes over £150,000 a year) to 60% and redistributing the proceeds to pensioners and others on the lowest incomes, charging capital gains tax at the same rate as income tax, ending the non-domicile rule for tax exiles, and introducing a wealth tax with a high threshold to limit liability to the wealthiest 5% of households.

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