Michael Meacher MP

There is much to welcome in David Miliband’s call for a ‘comradely and serious debate’ about the future for the Labour Party, as prompted by Roy Hattersley’s recent article in the Political Quarterly on social democracy.   He is certainly right about the spirit in which the debate should take place, but this initial foray will have to sharpen its edge drastically if it is not to fade into a merely pious exchange about abstract aspirations.   The starting point has to be what went terribly wrong in the last decade or two leading to financial collapse and cataclysmic defeat in 2010.   Those factors include financial deregulation which opened the way to toxic derivatives and the crash, a bonus culture that pumped up recklessness in the City and ballooned inequality, over-reliance on finance to the huge detriment of manufacturing, a naive belief in the self-regulation of markets, and an extension of privatisation into all public services on ideological grounds irrespective of outcomes.   David does not mention one of them. (more…)