Post by stevedtrm on Mar 28, 2016 9:00:54 GMT
from www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-69b5-Anti-Corbyn-MPs-have-a-new,-more-subtle-plan-but-it-still-wont-work#.VvjogjEromj
"Major Dan tried positioning himself as a future leadership candidate with a “big speech.”
It shows that Jarvis thinks he needs to move left of Blairism to stand any chance of becoming Labour leader. But there are two problems.
First, Jarvis took some money from Labour’s richest donors to hire someone to think these new thoughts for him.
He used cash from Labour’s “high value” donors to employ “Blue Labour” thinker Jonathan Rutherford as an aide.
To be honest, if Jarvis needed to use £28,000 to employ a university academic to help write his bland, pinkish speech, then I don’t believe he really has much commitment to his new, slightly left pose.
One of the criticisms of Blue Labour was that it was very abstract and airy-fairy. Back in 2011, in response to these criticisms, Jarvis’s new assistant Rutherford said: “I’m an academic, an intellectual and so I don’t work in the demotic, although I value it greatly.”
But when Jarvis gave his speech, written with Rutherford, delivered in pretentious think tank Demos, in front of an audience of journalists and wonks, he included a little dig at John McDonnell, saying: “The people I meet, the people I am talking about, don’t attend economic seminars. They don’t follow the doctrinal discussions of the Labour Party.”
It’s not very convincing making the “I’m not all academic, I’m a man of the people” pose in a speech written with an academic, delivered in a think tank.
The second big problem is that Jarvis’s little move left seems very small indeed.
His speech to Demos in March was billed as a “radical,” setting out a “vision.” But it says nothing about the benefit cuts — the one that Labour’s mainstream were scared of, but Corbyn stuck with, and is now causing a Tory crisis.
It says nothing about tax cuts for the rich. It bears the worst hallmarks of Blue Labour.
Just as the banking crisis blew a big hole in New Labour’s we-love-capitalism stance, Blue Labour stepped in with a new, and limited, form of criticism — one that said the main problem of allowing capitalism to run free was how it upset “men who have lost their traditional masculine identities and roles.”
Blue Labour looked like an attempt to appeal to working-class voters as Alf Garnett figures, Ukip-y blokes worried about immigrants and women.
In his “vision” speech Jarvis decided to distance himself from Blairism. He said: “New Labour were intensely relaxed about things they shouldn’t have been intensely relaxed about.”
But it turns out, according to Jarvis, that the thing New Labour did wrong wasn’t being intensely relaxed about the super-rich. Or NHS privatisation. Or PFI. Or the Iraq war. It was “cheap labour” — migration pushing down wages."
"Major Dan tried positioning himself as a future leadership candidate with a “big speech.”
It shows that Jarvis thinks he needs to move left of Blairism to stand any chance of becoming Labour leader. But there are two problems.
First, Jarvis took some money from Labour’s richest donors to hire someone to think these new thoughts for him.
He used cash from Labour’s “high value” donors to employ “Blue Labour” thinker Jonathan Rutherford as an aide.
To be honest, if Jarvis needed to use £28,000 to employ a university academic to help write his bland, pinkish speech, then I don’t believe he really has much commitment to his new, slightly left pose.
One of the criticisms of Blue Labour was that it was very abstract and airy-fairy. Back in 2011, in response to these criticisms, Jarvis’s new assistant Rutherford said: “I’m an academic, an intellectual and so I don’t work in the demotic, although I value it greatly.”
But when Jarvis gave his speech, written with Rutherford, delivered in pretentious think tank Demos, in front of an audience of journalists and wonks, he included a little dig at John McDonnell, saying: “The people I meet, the people I am talking about, don’t attend economic seminars. They don’t follow the doctrinal discussions of the Labour Party.”
It’s not very convincing making the “I’m not all academic, I’m a man of the people” pose in a speech written with an academic, delivered in a think tank.
The second big problem is that Jarvis’s little move left seems very small indeed.
His speech to Demos in March was billed as a “radical,” setting out a “vision.” But it says nothing about the benefit cuts — the one that Labour’s mainstream were scared of, but Corbyn stuck with, and is now causing a Tory crisis.
It says nothing about tax cuts for the rich. It bears the worst hallmarks of Blue Labour.
Just as the banking crisis blew a big hole in New Labour’s we-love-capitalism stance, Blue Labour stepped in with a new, and limited, form of criticism — one that said the main problem of allowing capitalism to run free was how it upset “men who have lost their traditional masculine identities and roles.”
Blue Labour looked like an attempt to appeal to working-class voters as Alf Garnett figures, Ukip-y blokes worried about immigrants and women.
In his “vision” speech Jarvis decided to distance himself from Blairism. He said: “New Labour were intensely relaxed about things they shouldn’t have been intensely relaxed about.”
But it turns out, according to Jarvis, that the thing New Labour did wrong wasn’t being intensely relaxed about the super-rich. Or NHS privatisation. Or PFI. Or the Iraq war. It was “cheap labour” — migration pushing down wages."