2012 is the year of the water Dragon
Miliband redefines the politics of opposition
Ed Miliband has been talking much over the past few days about what the Labour Party stands for, what it believes, what its intentions are... And how much more do we know?
We know that Miliband supports the Tory cuts, supports their pay freeze on public sector workers and he refuses to talk about the future... until it gets here?
What does Labour-Now stand for? Who does the party represent? He vocalises the answer, "the squeezed middle"... should that be middle-class? No, no, we must get away from the old tags.
Who are the squeezed middle?
They are a sizeable income group, around 11 million adults, families, whose income is stagnating, and probably going backwards. State handouts, in the form of tax-credits has kept the wolf from the door but the cut-backs are making life difficult. This group is not saving, half have only a month's income to fall back on. This group work for a living but they are not seeing the benefits of their labour. According to the Resolution Foundation (yes, another bunch of time wasters), incomes for middle earners have fallen by £720 over the past three years.
Why target the squeezed middle?
This group are the most unhappy and have the most to complain about. And this group are most likely to vote for a party who takes their plight seriously. Ed's constituency (the squeezed middle) might find it difficult to take him seriously, unless he is able grab the popular imagination with something new and innovative.
Even Ed's support for the squeezed middle is not new. At the Party Conference of 2011, Ed told us he was his own man, not Blair and not Brown. And yet his support for the squeezed middle is straight off of the page of Golden Brown's 2009 Conference speech:
"When markets falter and banks fail it's the jobs and the homes and the security of the squeezed middle that are hit the hardest."
The Problem of the Squeezed Middle.
Study the data and you'll discover that the term squeezed middle is just a speech writer's hat stand... Ed should keep his hat on because those he espouses and champions are not, as he supposes, a political grouping that Labour-Now can elicit support from as if it contained a ounce of class awareness... as Old-Labour would have done.
Labour-Now's political survival is in the balance, the unions are mighty upset with Ed's support for Tory cuts, the party's traditional support is vanishing along with the traditions of Old-Labour.
What Labour-Now stands for is unknown, who it represents is a mystery, it all seems a bit pointless... having an opposition that doesn't oppose?
What's Going On...
The Blast-It project over the next 12 months will be to focus on what the ConDem government are up to.
The Cameron government are currently engaged in a social engineering project on the scale of a Hollywood epic. Every corner of Civil society, even the private space between our ears is now subject to some new policy initiative or another.
The package of measures currently underway are part of our leader Dave's mission to mend broken Britain. Our mission will be to track Dave's progress across 2012.
Cameron's claim that everything is broken is in the realm of Donald Rumsfeld, the realm of the big lie. Every government action can now be premised on the imagined fact that everything needs fixing.
Things don't need fixing, they need changing. The whole fabric of our deep democracy needs a clean out. The reason that liars like Mandelson and Blair thrive is because all investigations into their probity are superficial, anything otherwise would result in transparency and deep democracy can only thrive due to its ability to conceal the lie until memories of wrong doing fade.
Witness how the News of the World phone hacking enquiry drags on and on and how much more do we know about the nexus between Rupert Murdoch, Rebekah Brooks, Andy Coulson and David Cameron. Was Coulson hired at the behest of Murdock, passed to Cameron by Brooks - a favour for future favours.
Will you ever know the truth, don't trouble yourself; you should be focused on finding out who Adam Werritty is because Dave would really like to know?
