Clik here to view.
The new leader of the UK Labour Party has been announced. The contest had turned into a two-horse race between the Miliband brother, David and Ed, sons of the prominent Marxian economist Ralph Miliband who each worked for many years as advisors for Tony Blair and Gordon Brown respectively, and then went on to become senior ministers in the Brown Cabinet.
The elder brother David entered the race as the favourite, but in the end the winner was Ed Miliband, the younger and reportedly the more leftwing of the two — although a set of parallel Q&As by the blog-site Left Foot Forward highlighted how similar they were on the substantive issues.
The victory makes Ed Miliband a central figure in the international progressive movement at an important period of renewal. His views and the way he goes on to shape his party will inevitably have an influence on the tenor of progressive thinking here in New Zealand.
So I thought it was worth citing the following statement (from those same Left Foot Forward Q&As), which I think sets out one of the central challenges for progressive governance in our time (as also discussed at Policy Progress, here and here):
Would you make tackling income inequality a specific goal of a Labour government?
Yes. It is the right thing to do for people on low incomes and it is the right thing to do for society as a whole. Strong, cohesive societies are ones in which hard work is fairly rewarded. More unequal societies are less well off in a range of ways, for example suffering with poorer physical health, poorer mental health and higher crime rates.
New Labour was too cautious on this issue, and as a result, despite us being the most redistributive government in history, inequality rose. So we need a different approach that targets the fundamental causes of inequality rather than focusing on just trying to use redistributive payments to correct for failures in our economy. That is why I am so passionate about a living wage and want to see tax cuts for responsible businesses who pay a living wage.
Many people are surprised to discover that taxpayers are paying more than £6bn each year subsidising low wages in our economy and I want that to end – improving pay and saving money for government. I want a High Pay Commission to sit alongside the Low Pay Commission and address the unfairness that comes when a banker earns in a week what their cleaner earns in a year. And I want a new industrial activism to build a new economy less reliant on low-wage, low-skill jobs and better at investing in people and in skills.
P.S.: Left Foot Forward offers some advice to the new leader.
P.P.S.: As does Malcolm Tucker (from The Thick of It).