David Miliband’s exclamation today: “We have responsibility to make sure that, come the election, voters know what Labour stands for” is worthy of a H.E. Bateman cartoon for its shocking honesty. After 12 years Labour has come so far adrift from its ideological moorings that it has lost its very identity and sense of purpose and direction. There could scarcely be a more crushing condemnation of the Blairite interregnum than that, and coming from an arch-Blairite (whose interview today is designed to put him back in the leadership race he funked 9 months ago) the admission is all the more poignant. Since neither the Government nor David Miliband seems to know, perhaps the rest of us who were there before the party was hi-jacked in 1994 should tell them what are the values, principles and objectives of the modern progressive Labour Party of the Centre-Left. They can be stated all the more clearly, as follows, against the background of the collapse of the neo-liberal finance capitalism which Blair so sedulously cultivated.

To prevent a recurrence of the present financial crisis, we should break up the overweening power of the banks and of finance capital. We should split up the biggest banks so that none are ever again ‘too large to fail’ and therefore have to be bailed out at utterly unacceptable cost to the taxpayer, and we should also split off traditional High Street banking from investment casino banking which has been the cause of crisis and which should get no State support in future. We should also raise capital reserve ratios substantially to restore stability, and end the bonus culture which drove the recklessness in the first place.
We should rebalance power away from markets towards a more prudential public control. This certainly does not mean a bureaucratic over-centralised State, but one which is a more proactive buttress against the market fundamentalism which caused the crash and now the massive public spending crisis. That means a new role for public services, not only in health and education, but in housing, pensions, energy provision, and regulation of the private sector.
We should shrink the bloated financial sector and give much higher priority to building Britain’s strength in industry, manufacturing and services. We should phase out the pre-eminence of the City and make management-union partnerships the driving force in remedying the long-term weaknesses in Britain’s economic performance.
We should tackle the fundamental injustice of deepening inequality through a range of measures whsich at one end of the scale should include ending the non-domicile rule, aligning capital gains tax rates with income tax, cracking down hard on tax havens, and introduction of a wealth tax (or land value tax), and at the other raising the national minimum wage to a living wage and bringing in a maximum wage or salary at no more than a certain ratio of the lowest wag in the organisation. Since Britain is now more unequal than at any time under Thatcher, we should instal a redistributive programme, raising £11bn a year from a 50% tax rate on incomes over £100,000 year plus a 60% rate on incomes over £250,000 a year, and allocating the proceeds directly to pensioners and others on the lowest incomes which would raise those incomes by £25 a week.
To promote global justice we should use the collapse of the free-market Washington consensus to bring in an international trading system which encourages the growth of domestic industries in developing countries on a fair and equitable basis. The present WTO deregulated trading system allows Western multi-national corporations to run the economy of developing countries in their own interest rather than to optimise the development potential of the countries concerned. If the UK, US, Germany, Japan, Korea and other rich countries all used tariff protection rights to promote their infant industries until they were ready to meet the full force of international competition, then developing countries should have the same opportunity now.
We need a new world order which recognises that climate change, unrestrained exploitation of planetary resources and fast-approaching peak oil make unfettered free market capitalism no longer feasible and put an absolute premium on sustainability. We need a far more radical strategy to wean the UK, and the world, off fossil fuels and towards an economy driven by energy efficiency and conservation, clean technology, and renewable sources of energy.
It is only in crisis that fundamental change is ever brought about. It is in our generation, and at this moment, that such change is possible.

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