Andy Burnham: an uninspiring, Tory-lite shop-minder
Last week I got a letter printed in the New Statesman, in response to their leader column which, without naming names (although elsewhere in the edition, the criticism was levelled at Len McCluskey, the general secretary of the Unite union), claimed that some on the left preferred futile opposition to power. I responded that people who believe in social justice will not campaign enthusiastically for someone who promises to do no more than mind the shop for the Tories and take the edge off one or two of their worst policies. It would be hard to get people out to vote for such a man either, and Labour risk losing more of their core vote to nationalist parties (right now, UKIP, but who knows what parties will be on the scene by 2020). Andy Burnham, the front-runner for the Labour leadership, exposed himself as another shop-minder in a speech to 'workers' at Ernst and Young in London reported in the Western Daily Press today (also on the BBC website): that "Labour cannot win the next election while voters believe it gives the workshy an 'easy ride'", that "society's wealth-creators must be valued as highly as NHS staff" and that Labour mismanaged the economy before the credit crunch, allowing a significant deficit to grow.
The website quotes his speech:
The painful truth is this: though we pride ourselves on being the party of the many, we only had answers for too few. Our appeal was too narrow.
Politicians make a terrible mistake when they try to compartmentalise the voters and speak only to the hope and dreams of some in certain parts of the country.
Aspiration is not the preserve of those who shop at John Lewis. Aspiration is universal; it is felt by Asda and Aldi shoppers too.
Since when was your social class or aspiration dictated by what shop you buy your food from? John Lewis is a chain of department stores, and they happen to be the biggest or only one in some town centres, while being absent from others. Some people shop for food at Waitrose because it's just nearest, or in some way most convenient. There are Tescos, Morrisons', Aldis and Asdas in affluent areas and while Waitrose (the food arm of John Lewis) does stock some more upmarket items, their commodity food items cost about the same as in other supermarkets.
I have never believed in levelling down, denigrating success or the politics of envy.
What are the so-called politics of envy? It seems that this accusation is levelled any time it is pointed out that the rich have too much power, or that positions of influence (e.g. in the media) are full of people born with silver spoons in their mouths, or that there is insufficient opportunity for people from less privileged backgrounds to get into a prestigious university or a professional job, or that a small number of very wealthy people are crowding everyone out of whole cities, with politicians' help. None of this has to do with envying anyone's wealth or lifestyle. It's about wanting to get on in life and wanting barriers removed.
The "politics of envy" is a long-standing trick used by the rich and powerful to knock back challenges to their position, as articulated by the American diplomat George Kennan in a famous 1948 memo (emphasis mine):
Furthermore, we have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives.
… We should stop putting ourselves in the position of being our brothers' keeper and refrain from offering moral and ideological advice. We should cease to talk about vague and—for the Far East—unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.
Remember this next time you hear a wealthy man say that the rich are not rich because the poor are poor, as Donald Trump did recently.
Back to Andy Burnham:
"Nor have I believed that people should be handed everything on a plate.
"It worries me that, in some people's eyes, Labour has become associated with giving people who don't want to help themselves an easy ride. That must change before we can win again."
"Some people" meaning "people who believe what the Sun and the Daily Mail tell them". Labour used to be the party of the industrial working class, but since the industries were destroyed and Labour did nothing to rebuild them, the people left on the scrap-heap with nowhere to go have to be supported somehow, if they won't be employed. Labour, when in office, did not "hand everything on a plate" to anyone; people did not get benefits for unemployment, for example, unless they proved they were looking for work. The system did not change from when John Major was in office, and he introduced the scheme for precisely this reason.
Mr Burnham will say Labour did not talk enough about the importance of businesses that create jobs and wealth.
"We didn't celebrate the spirit of enterprise," he will say. "Far too rarely over the last few years has Labour spoken up in praise of the everyday heroes of our society. The small businessman or woman; the sole trader; the innovator, the inventor, the entrepreneur. The small businesses that become big businesses.
Is there a culture of denigrating inventors or entrepreneurs? By and large, genuine inventors like Trevor Bayliss are celebrated, although so much advancement in technology is nowadays done by groups. Small businesses are not particularly valuable or convenient to either party; the Tories favour big businesses who can make large donations to their coffers and use economies of scale to drive down costs of public projects, while the left like large workforces that they can unionise, call out on strike, and fund the Labour party with. Small businesses are more likely to have a more personal connection to their workforce, and sometimes pay less but make up the difference in goodwill and in-kind benefits, when they can. This looks like inefficiency to a capitalist, and is equally anathema to anyone who advocates class struggle.
So, Labour should really spell out what they plan to offer small business owners rather than just mouth platitudes about the "spirit of enterprise" and "society's wealth creators" in a speech to "senior business figures". Their needs are often diametrically opposed, as they enjoy fewer tax breaks, fewer economies of scale, less publicity and cannot call in favours as large businesses can. And too much of the growth in 'self-employment' over the past five years masks people doing jobs at less than minimum wage rather than genuine entrepreneurship. It doesn't offer the possibility of expansion.
"The people with the creative spark to think of a new idea and the get-up-and-go to make it work. Who often have to fight against the odds to succeed, but put in the hours, the sweat and the hard graft to do it.
"So I want this message to go out loud and clear today: in a Labour Party I lead, they will be as much our heroes as the nurse or the teacher."
Does Burnham plan to even think of the worker who does not have the time or money to indulge their "creative spark", who even if they had a good idea to offer their employers, would be dismissed as a low-level nobody with ideas above their station? How does he plan to improve wages, job security and working conditions for them? The genuine entrepreneurs (which a lot of large business owners are not) are certainly a group of people that Labour could prise away from the Tories, but it must not be at the cost of neglecting the people Labour was set up to represent, and whom they can no longer take for granted.
Perhaps you could call some business owners heroes, but they are the ones that provide good jobs with prospects and who contribute to their local communities, who don't pollute the environment more than is absolutely necessary and do not look for any excuses to get out of paying back the state that educated them and their workers, treated them when sick, takes away their rubbish and paved the roads their goods are transported on. Quite a numnber of them are villains who do the exact opposite of all of these, and to say so is not to be "anti-business" and is not a sign of envy or resentment. And as for their value vis-a-vis teachers or NHS staff, some of us don't regard the latter as heroes unless they actually do something heroic that is beyond the call of duty. Just doing your job does not make you a hero, any more than being a businessman or an employer. And much as business gets out of paying a lot of tax and can ruin the economy with sub-prime lending and other irresponsible behaviour and get away with it, so are teachers and NHS staff, as well as private and public healthcare management, not held accountable when their behaviour costs lives or causes unnecessary suffering (Nico Reed, Connor Sparrowhawk, Kane Gorny, Stephanie Bincliffe … the list goes on and on and it takes years to get anything resembling justice, if it ever happens).
And Burnham gave this speech at Ernst and Young of all places — a major finance company, to workers who are able to price those nurses and teachers, not to mention the cleaners and bus drivers, out of living in the neighbourhoods they grew up in or near where they work. A huge insult to all the struggling people in this country. Burnham is not an inspiring new Labour leader as Blair appeared to be in 1997; he offers the timid conservatism of the New Labour era without the few sparks of radicalism. He is a time-serving mediocrity and typical of the shop-minders the right wing of Labour produces. He is regurgitating Tory platitudes and straw-man arguments and making no attempt to challenge them. Surely someone must realise that serving up the Blair formula again will not work, given that its moment will have been 23 years gone by the time of the next election? Why on earth should anyone who believes in social justice expend money and effort campaigning for a party that dismisses it as the politics of envy?
