Labour has historically been pulled between two poles: representing the interests of workers & managing workers in the interests of capital. Behind predistribution, the antisemitism flap & nationalised sausages nonsense, this has been the underlying dynamic since 2010.
Miliband wanted a little bit less managing & a little bit more representing & was consistently undermined for it. Corbyn was a hard shift towards representing, which was why he was anathematised. Starmer is a hard shift to managing.
Inevitably, this puts the party into an antagonistic position with the unions, which is why I thought the claims that the leadership was happy with Graham's promised hands-off approach at Unite were nonsense. You're either for or against organised labour: you can't be neutral.
If the party staff do picket, Starmer & Evans will be obliged to become union-breakers, simply to keep the media onside & reinforce their anti-left narrative (even if many of the staff are centrists). I suspect they'll also enjoy the role, because this is who they are.
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You can't tax private schools out of existence. Removing charitable status & levying VAT would have only marginal effects (other avoidance would arise anyway). Anything more (e.g. a supertax) would risk being punitive & so politically counter-productive (creating martyrs etc).
The most effective strategy would be to remove the incentive for the rich to spend on private education (while increasing their taxes more generally). As most want their kids to go to uni, this could be done by allocating Russell Group places pro-rata per school 6th form.
Eton would get the same number of places proportionately as a Cardiff comprehensive. It would then be in the interests of the rich to spread out over all schools. This won't mean relocating from Chelsea to Cardiff, but sending your kids to an inner-London state school.
Freedland really is hopeless at this. "He was twice elected mayor in Labour-dominated London thanks in part to a range of red accessories". No, he won narrowly because he had massive media backing & made liberal (not "red") gestures. theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
Not only did the below tactic fail to work for the Tories, it directly contradicts the preceding para: "If anything, lots of voters seem to like Johnson’s lack of doctrinal purity: again, it’s part of his persona, suggesting a loose pragmatism that many find appealing".
The reason the Torygraph can berate Johnson is because they know there is no alternative on the right & Labour have pretty much given up hope of winning the next election, hence the latter's unpreparedness & surprise ...
The obvious problem with triangulation is that you can easily be played by your opponent, as has happened now with both the nurses' pay rise & social care. The media are complicit in this (here's Rentoul) with their "Ah well, nevertheless".
Regardless of what you think of his politics, or even the lack of vision & strategy in articulating them, it should be obvious that Starmer remains a political neophyte & a remarkably slow learner.
Was it ever credible that Johnson wouldn't break a manifesto commitment? Consider his time as London Mayor or his opposition to Heathrow expansion. channel4.com/news/factcheck…
The hunt for guaranteed returns means that the rich will always favour debt (owed by governments or workers) over speculative investment. It's a rational calculation of relative risk.
The great era of capitalist speculation, from the 17th century to 1914, was the result of small states & limited credit (i.e. few alternatives). The growth of the welfare state & the societal expansion of credit in the 20th century led to a gradual change in sentiment.
The result was a decline in manufacturing (risky over the long term & prone to low profit margins), the growth of property as an asset (both speculative, i.e. as development, & as a security for greater debt), & the hyper-speculation of derivatives.
This focuses on courses within the Greater London area but that means it ignores the wider London Green Belt, 7% of which is turned over to the game. Were half of that to be built on, it could provide 1 million homes at typical density. theguardian.com/politics/2021/…
But the problem is that any change to the Green Belt is beyond any individual local authority, hence their tendency to focus on squeezing more valuable and limited green (or nominally brown) spaces within the borough, as here ... theguardian.com/society/2021/a…
The Green Belt is the ultimate sacred cow in planning, yet its form and purpose has changed radically over the last century, from an urban amenity to a cordon sanitaire. You can't fix London housing without reforming the Green Belt. fromarsetoelbow.blogspot.com/2015/10/loosen…
Shriver can get away with this because the US-born, London-based writer doesn't have any kids herself, but what she ought to be more specific about is which "parts of London" she means. Mayfair? Knightsbridge? Or is it Tower Hamlets that mainly bothers her?