The knives are out again for Ed Miliband this morning. But the Labour leader is the least of his party’s problems. Labour has still not come up with answers to the two existential questions facing it, what’s the point of it when there’s no money left to spend and how should it respond to globalisation. I argue in this week’s magazine that until it does, the party will be in a death spiral.
The Labour party has always believed in spending money for the common good. Even Tony Blair’s new Clause IV declared, ‘by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone.’
Public spending was the glue that held together the traditional Labour coalition and the New Labour one. Blair himself increased public spending from 40.6 percent of GDP in 1997 to 44.1
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