The UK goes to the polls on Thursday to decide who their representatives in parliament will be. It's a tough election, with no party slated in the polls to take an overall majority.
I'll be making a post every single day, with an election Liveblog on Thursday, and a final look at the results on Friday, as the dust settles.
Yesterday, Ed Miliband unveiled a stone plinth into which he'd carved his election pledges. The problem isn't that people don't believe these pledges, though that's also true, the problem is that these pledges either take Britain in the wrong direction at a slower pace, or simply don't go far enough. I'll take you through the Labour party's record in government and opposition, and touch on each of these points.
Essentially, though, the Labour Party has since Blair moved rightward, and now occupies a space significantly to the Right of even the US Democratic party on various vitally important issues.
1. A Strong Economic Foundation Austerity "Tougher than the Conservatives" (Labour's own words)
Essentially, what Miliband means here is that he's going to continue with the austerity policies brought in by the Tories. In contrast, at least three other parties, the SNP, the Greens, and Plaid Cymru (Plied COME-ree), have all promised to oppose austerity cuts. If there's a Labour minority government (and that looks like the most likely outcome) they'll work to vote down any Labour budget that expands on the Tory cuts. But Labour is still pushing for more cuts, against all advice.
This is the same tactic which lost them the last election.
In the last election, they caved on their long held beliefs and promised harsher cuts than the ones instituted by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, cuts which annihilated publicly owned industries in the UK, and destroyed Scottish heavy industry forever.
These cuts mean that the British Government is doing things which are completely inhuman. They're ordering people so disabled that they are home-bound to go to disability assessments. Double Amputee Chris Cann was unable to leave his home, and was waiting to receive prosthetic limbs when he was ordered to appear before a committee to prove that he was in fact not fit for work. Cann died just five months after the process began. He spent those last five months of his life fighting to keep the fixed income his government promises to anyone who is too sick or disabled to work.
While the everyday cruelty of the British State didn't kill Cann, it did kill David Clapson. Clapson died penniless and alone of Diabetic Ketoacidosis. His electricity had been shut off, preventing him from keeping his insulin chilled. The Coroner who examined his body said that there was no food in his digestive system.
Clapson's benefits were cut off because he missed a single appointment at a jobcenter, the privatized British unemployment office. People have had their benefits cut off for absurdly cruel reasons. One woman was stripped of her unemployment benefits because she attended a job interview, instead of a meeting at a jobcenter. One man was sanctioned for failing to complete an assessment at a Jobcenter - because he had a heart attack during the assessment.
The Labour Party's response?
In 2013, amidst growing protests over the harshness of Tory cruelty to benefits recipients, the Labour Party announced that they would be Harsher than the Tories on benefits claimants. The article there announces that the Labour party will force people to take the Jobs that Jobcentres decide they ought to be doing. The very same Jobcentres which have proven themselves to be extremely and needlessly cruel will now have the power to force people into work. Under such an arrangement I can see so many potential dangers, the least of which is older people near retirement being forced into physically demanding work that is dangerous to their long-term health.
People are not identical cogs who are equally capable of being placed into an economic machine. This Labour Policy is just as likely to have the same kinds of cruel and horrific outcomes that the current government's policy does. People will be given jobs they're not physically capable of doing, and if they refuse to do them, they'll end up with their benefits cut off.
It boggles the mind that Labour actually argued that even with all this needless and pointless cruelty, the government can be even crueler to those who are worse off in society, and the Labour leadership would like that to be the case.
Economist Paul Krugman is extremely critical of the Labour Party's pro austerity economic approach that they've laid out this election. He ends one of the better pieces of his work with these words.
Labour, sad to say, are echoing [The Conservative] position. So both major parties are in effect promising a new round of austerity that might well hold back a recovery that has, so far, come nowhere near to making up the ground lost during the recession and the initial phase of austerity.
For whatever the politics, the economics of austerity are no different in Britain from what they are in the rest of the advanced world. Harsh austerity in depressed economies isn't necessary, and does major damage when it is imposed. That was true of Britain five years ago – and it's still true today.
And if this isn't horrific enough, it gets worse.
2. Higher living standards for working families A Paltry Minimum Wage Increase that might not arrive until just before the next election
The Labour manifesto promises an increase in the minimum wage to £8.00 an hour by 2020. There are a few places in Britain where this is a livable wage. None of them are in major cities, especially not London. And by the time 2020 rolls around, inflation will mean that it might not still be a living wage in areas that don't contain the majority of the population. Prices in general are much lower in Scotland than in London, and even there the SNP is arguing for a minimum wage of £8.77, which is still just barely adequate for much of Scotland. A living wage in Britain is about £10 per hour, which is roughly equivalent to the US figure of $15 an hour.
3. An NHS with time to care Yet more privatization of the NHS
"Time to care" refers to waiting times for healthcare. The preferred Labour solution to waiting times is privatization.
I could write pages and pages about the process of privatization that was begun under Blair with Foundation hospitals.
There are some complicated issues here, not least of which is that Gordon Brown was not only privatizing hospitals, but doing it using the Public/Private partnerships which were not reported as government investment or debt under EU rules. One of things which brought down Brown's government was a change EU-wide in the legal definition of government debt, caused by the Greek government's use of public/private partnerships to hide truly absurd amounts of debt behind PPPs. The Greeks were doing this for corrupt purposes, while the Brits look no less corrupt than Americans, accepting graft via the lecture circuit, as Alistair Darling did with the privatization firms.
Privatization is a key part of Labour Party Strategy, but the SNP has made it their policy to renationalise every one of the Blair-era Private Finance Initiatives, or PFIs, in Scotland. That was one of the personal missions of now SNP Leader Nicola Sturgeon when she was still deputy First Minister.
In contrast, the Labour party even in Scotland has opposed making education and healthcare a universally guaranteed right that is free at the point of need, arguing that it would cause Scotland to develop a "Something for Nothing" culture.
For more on the disastrous Labour policy of creating PFIs, Open Democracy has an excellently well-researched post here.
It's at this point that I want to point out that even though the leadership favors these harsh, conservative policies, that's not true universally of all Labour members.
Labour backbencher Debbie Abrahams is one of the MPs in the Labour Party that I respect greatly for her work. Not only has she called out the government for cruelty, but she also led an Inquiry for the Socialist Health Association which flies in the face of Labour's privatization policies on foundation hospitals, and ultimately argued that Privatization of the NHS must be stopped or reversed.
Abrahams is a Back Bencher, though, meaning that she has no leadership position within the party, and is expected to vote with her party or face the destruction of her career by the incredibly powerful party whips. Enough Labour Progressives working together should have been able to turn the Labour party around during its years of wandering in the wilderness as an opposition, but this hasn't happened.
So there are really, really good people in the Labour Party. The problem is that while they might have some excellent ideas, none of them are in any position of power where they might be able to exercise those ideas.
And I need to call out one moment of irony.
One of the reasons that the SNP is accused of being conservative is that after 2007, they were forced to rely on Tory votes to pass their budget.
Why?
Because part of their budget included the renationalisation of some of Labour's PFIs.
As much as Labour may scream that the SNP can't be trusted for this, they're throwing stones through their own glass house. In opposing a vote for public healthcare, Scottish Labour placed itself to the right of the Tories.
This is how far a once proud, once-Democratic-Socialist party has fallen. Opposing public healthcare when even Tories are willing to vote for it doesn't make you a left wing party.
4. Controls on immigration An expansion of a senselessly cruel immigration policy based on fear and racism
All around the world, in Australia, in China, and even in the US and Canada, there are British Citizens living in exile who cannot come home without leaving their partners and potentially children behind. In the UK, there are children growing up without parents.
This is because under current UK immigration law, around 17,000 families are told each year that their marriages are not based on love, but convenience, and are being used by wily immigrants as a back door into the United Kingdom.
The stories you hear are horrific. I've personally heard stories that this affects families right across every single racial, religious, class, and age demographic. One American, an expert in her field, married an independently wealthy Scottish gentleman, and stopped working for a few months to have her baby.
She was told by the British state that her failure to keep working would mean that she would become a drain on public resources, and she was deported to the United States, where she no longer had any living family. She was lucky enough to be able to return six months later, but as a new mother, she missed the first six months of her child's life.
This is one of the stories with a happy ending. Most families aren't independently wealthy, and don't have the means to bring the deported parent back to the UK once they're told they must leave. Their are children today who are growing up in Britain whose only interaction with one of their parents is over Skype. Some of them have never met their parent in person.
These are people who are married.
But rather than fighting the race baiting bigots like Farage on immigration, Miliband and the Labour government have not only dithered, but promised even harsher controls than the current, cruel system.
In the Debates, it was ultimately left to Nicola Sturgeon to smack down Nigel Farage:
5. A country where the next generation can do better than the last A country where the government cynically pushes students towards the jobs of the past, because they think it will mean loyalty to the Labour party.
The biggest promise from Labour during this election on education is that they'll guarantee thousands of places for Vocational training. This policy makes no economic sense. Vocational Jobs are still important in the west, where instead of post industrial nations, 3d printers and new robotics technology are slowly transforming us into auto-industrial societies.
The jobs needed for this new kind of work place, for these new systems, are significant. We'll need more software engineers, more programmers, more electrical engineers, and more network engineers, who will network all of these systems together to create ever greater opportunities for collaboration.
Vocational training is important, but Britain already has too many skilled workers who can't find any work. So why has the Labour party made this decision? Because vocational training traditionally leads to careers which are union jobs. Union jobs tend to mean support for the Labour party.
This is a cynical, political policy that is backward looking, and part of a dangerous EU trend of race to the bottom economics.
6. Action on rents and homes to buy
Essentially, the Labour Party looks set to bring back Margaret Thatcher's policy of right to buy, which sells of public housing to the residents of public housing.
I'll be honest, sometimes that policy can make sense. But it certainly doesn't make sense in the context of a shortage of public housing.
Construction is what's called a trailing indicator in economics. Economically, construction only really bounces back when a country is out of recession. It's often slow to respond to shocks to the market as well. I understand the need for the construction of new housing, but if the government wants to take action, it ought to focus its efforts on building affordable and public housing units in the central parts of cities where people might be more likely to find work, but can't afford rent. Britain once had public housing estates in centrally located areas that allowed workers in fast food and retail a quick commute to downtown businesses, but most of them were sold off under right to buy in the 80s.
Labour hasn't been exactly clear about what this policy is or what it would do. Just that there will be more homes, and some kind of action on rent prices.
Miliband's Leadership has been a disaster for Labour
One of the most insipid statements of this election is that we ought not to mistake Ed's compassion for weakness.
In truth, he's considered a weak leader because of a marked lack of compassion. Were Miliband a strong leader, he would have taken the stories of suffering for the horror stories they were, and he would have brought those stories directly to the British People. He would have marched in the streets with the people who protested these needlessly cruel policies. He would have been able to commit a political coup by rightly exposing the conservatives as an anti-family party for their immigration policies.
A strong leader would have opposed the Tories idiotic economic policies. Instead, Miliband caved, and supported Tory austerity.
A Labour Party whose benefits policy is so terrifyingly authoritarian that it's tougher than the conservatives' is not a left wing party. A Labour party that is complicit in racist immigration policies is not a left wing party. A Labour Party that engages in race to the bottom economics is not a left wing party. Left wing parties fight for people who work for a living, they don't fight against the poor.
This is why the Labour Party can't defeat an unpopular, cruel, right wing government, because they would only replace it with an unpopular, possibly crueler, slightly less right wing government.
The only reason Labour aren't set for a sweeping victory against the Tories is because on the most important issues, they've decided to agree with the tories.
The progressives in the Labour Party should have revolted years ago, when the Leadership started making claims that they'd have deeper cuts than Thatcher, and tougher benefits policies than Cameron.
Labour have dithered themselves into this position. But as we all know, you're only truly a failure if you blame others for your own mistake. It's in that vein that Labour Uncut has decided to blame the SNP for Labour's current woes.
Labour insiders familiar with the latest figures have told Uncut that the picture for Labour in marginal seats, where it is fighting the Tories, is almost uniformly grim.
Seats that canvass returns had suggested were strong prospects for gains are much more finely balanced and those that were close are swinging heavily to the Tories.
The tartan scare is working with the fear of McLabour shifting large numbers of wavering Lib Dems and Ukippers into the Tory column.
Oh, as an aside, the reason that post is archived instead of linked directly is because it admits that Labour is breaking some election laws, so they pulled the article. Nothing remotely like theft of votes, just the publishing of illegally counted early postal votes.
There's no time for the progressives to save Labour from itself before the next election. And unfortunately the most likely outcome will only cement Miliband's position of power.
This is why most people in the British left do want a Labour Party held hostage by the SNP. This is why Nicola Sturgeon is the most popular politician in the UK.
She's the only powerful voice standing up to the Tories, to UKIP, and to the right.
But for Labour, this list of policies may as well be inscribed on their gravestone. Hopefully, it's the gravestone of this pack of center-right party leaders, rather than a winning election platform for the opponents they so often agree with.
My hope for the Labour Party in the future is that the fighters and the progressive activists from Labour who I've met can rebel against the current right-wing leadership, and take their party back. But I don't see a pathway for them to do that in the next five years.
I can foresee only one unlikely outcome that would lead to this: a Labour Leadership which refuses to work with the SNP sees a revolt from within that puts progressives in charge and topples Miliband. I'd love to see someone like Abrahams as health secretary, next in line to be a progressive Labour prime minister. But there's one reason I think that's unlikely.
Miliband has a lot in common with pledgehenge. They're both bland, unexciting, and extremely vague. The main difference between Miliband and his policy plinth is that the plinth won't bend under pressure.
This is a companion piece for my Monday guest post on the AfterShow, The Last Half.