New Labour/New Dems... Old Crap

I suspect there aren't many DWT readers who know who George Mudie is. I'd never heard of him until a few days ago when I read in the Guardian that Mudie, a Labour Member of Parliament from Leeds, was about to unload on Labour leader Ed Miliband-- which he has now done. So, you ask-- why should anyone care?

Between Margaret Thatcher and David Cameron's Conservative governments-- with the briefest of technical intervals for John Major and Gordon Brown--Tony Blair moved the Labour Party considerably right with a political concoction called New Labour, basically an anti-union move. New Labour, at least domestically, was never as bad-- in terms of heartless pandering to Big Business and in terms of corruption-- as our own New Dems (let alone America's Blue Dogs). But it still helped muddle the differences between Labour and the Conservatives and it did push the Conservatives further right on a number of issues. Today, according to the long-serving Mudie, voters no longer even know what Labour stands for. But he blames the hapless Miliband.

Labour backbench anxiety about Ed Miliband's leadership spilled into the open on Thursday when George Mudie, a veteran backbencher and former whip, issued a withering assessment, accusing him of being hesitant, cocooned in a bunker and failing to make the political weather.

Mudie, one of the leading figures in the move to oust Tony Blair from the Labour leadership in 2006 and a supporter of Ed Balls in the 2010 leadership election, said that even as a Labour MP he could not describe the party's current policies on education and welfare.

He also said there was a general fear among Labour MPs that the the party's poll lead was weak and unlikely to withstand the heat of an election campaign.

A palpable anxiety has spread in some Labour circles ever since its poll lead started to shrink and it became clear that growth is likely to be higher than forecast this year. There are also political rumbles over the decisions to confront the unions about their role in the party and to accept the coalition spending totals for 2015-16.

... The significance of Mudie's intervention, a self-confessed "cynical old and bad tempered" figure, will depend on whether other MPs voice similar doubts, or he remains an isolated voice. Mudie claimed there was a general concern among Labour MPs that the party's lead in the polls was "not firm enough, big enough and will it withstand a general election discussion?"

He told the BBC's World At One: "I think one of the difficulties a Labour party member would say to you, and I would say to you, I have difficulty knowing what we stand for now. We are 18 months away from an election, thinking that we will put out a document on all these major items and the public will say, 'Oh great'... At the moment the government are setting the agenda, making the weather, and we're responding to it. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown never did that."

He asked: "Do you know, because I don't, our position on welfare, do you know our position on education, do you know our genuine position on how we'd run the health service?

"I remember before we won, the five years to 97, this place was bubbling, we were energetic, we were at them, we thought we had all the answers. We're not at them and we're slightly hesitant and we're slightly confused and I deeply worry about that." Asked whether Miliband was in touch with the concerns of backbenchers like him, Mudie said the leader was "always cocooned by people round him and the basis they are around him is he trusts them".

He said one of Miliband's problems was that "he is young, the way he came to power, the problem with his brother, the fact that the trade unions had a major say. I think he is still trying to find himself and I think the problem with that is that sometimes he is doing things that he thinks a Labour leader should do that he should not do."

Without giving details, he said he knew Miliband had made mistakes. He said unless Labour offered something different and relevant, voters would decide to stick with what they have got.

Miliband has made the strategic decision to hold back on major policy announcements until closer to election, arguing that a five-year, fixed-term parliament requires a more disciplined approach.

I wonder if Miliband gets advice from Steve Israel, who encourages Democratic candidates to keep all but the most insipid, mom-and-apple-pie positions to themselves, and who urges freshmen incumbents to vote with the Republicans in the mostly pointless hope of wooing conservative voters. Two of Israel's worst freshmen, New Dems Sean Patrick Maloney (NY) and Kyrsten Sinema (AZ), have followed his advice and have amassed two of the worst voting records of any Democrats in the House. Both are considered very vulnerable to defeat in 2014. Neither has persuaded many conservative voters to abandon Republicans but both have alienated their Democratic bases who are unlikely to turn out for them at the polls.

MoveOn.org members have launched petitions against 14 Democrats-- including Arizona’s Congresswomen Kyrsten Sinema and Ann Kirkpatrick-- for siding with Republicans in their vote to delay implementation of the Affordable Care Act from 2014 to 2015.

According to The Hill, these members were targeted with MoveOn.org petitions: Reps. Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.) Scott Peters (D-Calif.), Brad Schneider (D-Ill.), Gary Peters (D-Mich.), Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), Julia Brownley (D-Calif.), Sean Maloney (D-N.Y.), Elizabeth Esty (D-Conn.), Dan Maffei (D-N.Y.), Ann Kirkpatrick (D-Ariz.), Bill Enyart (D-Ill.), Bill Owens (D-N.Y.), Cheri Bustos (D-Ill.) and Collin Peterson (D-Minn.).