Labour has allowed the Conservatives to frame its politics
April 15th, 2015
George Monbiot is well worth reading in today’s Guardian, here are a few extracts . . .
In reality, the deficit should rank somewhere in the low hundreds on the list of political priorities. It’s a con; an excuse for redrafting the social contract on behalf of the elite. But Labour has meekly acquiesced to this agenda, disputing only the extent of its application.
By accepting your opponents’ frame, you reinforce their power, allowing them to pull the entire polity into their own arena. No Labour capitulation has been as extreme and catastrophic as the one with which it begins this year’s manifesto.
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There’s not a word about the iniquities of council-tax banding. Police spies and the laws criminalising peaceful protest pass without remark. There is no commitment to scrap the disastrous private finance initiative
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How does Labour expect to attract the poor, the young and the disenfranchised, whose votes, if they were mobilised, would guarantee power for a progressive party?
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How does it propose, while trapped within Tory framing like a bee behind a window, to ignite a passionate re-engagement of the kind we have seen in Scotland?