Uk politics

Ed Miliband delivered a speech at the Festival Hall this morning. A couple of strategic issues emerged from it. The first is that Labour has decided that the IMF is wrong: “This Government is going too far and fast, hitting families and making it harder to reduce the deficit.” This is not altogether surprising. Ed Balls’ recent article in the News of the World suggested that Labour will attack on the cost of living and youth unemployment, both of which may serve to slow the rate at which the deficit is reduced. As Fraser noted yesterday, Labour is aided by rising inflation, which is deepening the effect of cuts. However, Labour is still yet to admit to its role in the crisis or reveal how it would cut the deficit.

This is an age of ideas, not of ideology. That is the thesis of Amol Rajan’s enthralling overview of the intellectual trends in contemporary British politics, published in today’s Independent. As part of the piece, Rajan has interviewed Maurice Glasman, who gives a far clearer account of 'Blue Labour' than he did during his recent comments to the Italian press. Communities must be organised to resist the caprices of capital and the dead-hand of the state. Resist is probably the wrong word because the aim appears to be, in Philip Blond’s celebrated phrase, the ‘recapitalisation of the poor’, which implies some form of empowerment. Rajan notes that Glasman holds a lot in common with Philip Blond’s Red Toryism and the Big Society.

Maurice Glasman, a favoured thinker of Ed Miliband’s, has given an interview to someone called Filippo Sensi who writes for an Italian magazine called Europa. I sound a firm note of caution here because there is a distinct possibility that it's a spoof. Take Glasman on the etymology of Blue Labour: "There is a sense of bravery and tragedy in our position and that is one meaning of the word blue, that links Miles Davis with Picasso and Aristotle. It is not mentally ill or depressed to feel triste and out of that understanding can flow a deeper understanding of the world and a more durable courage in resisting it than a superficial optimism that is the definition of Berlusconi and the progressive left.

A couple of days ago, I wrote about the deleterious effects of political consensus on energy policy. A good example of this has emerged today. According to Politics Home, Luciana Berger and Caroline Lucas are seeking an amendment to the Green Deal to impose a target for domestic carbon reduction. A number of salient points emerge from this. First, it’s a fine instance of the obsession with targets; itself an indication that this area of policy is largely a top down initiative – driven by targets, taxes and penalties. The Green Deal, as it currently stands, is one of the few areas that put incentive before directive. The idea was to ‘nudge’ consumers into improving domestic energy efficiency.