Margaret Thatcher's official biographer asks: is the Left right after all?
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Charles Moore, the former editor of the Daily Telegraph, tacked to the left over the weekend. Photograph: David Sillitoe/The Guardian
Ed Miliband showed over the weekend how much the tectonic plates of British politics have shifted in recent weeks as the House of Murdoch shakes.
In a newspaper interview on Saturday, Miliband set out how he hopes to capitalise on Britain's new political settlement in which party leaders can be more honest as they pay less attention to the Murdoch press.
Readers will have been struck by these comments which would be brave even for a Labour leader who hails from the Fabian, rather than the Tony Blair, tradition:
The rich run a global system that allows them to accumulate capital and pay the lowest possible price for labour. The freedom that results applies only to them. The many simply have to work harder, in conditions that grow ever more insecure, to enrich the few. Democratic politics, which purports to enrich the many, is actually in the pocket of those bankers, media barons and other moguls who run and own everything.
If this seems a tad leftie even for Miliband then, yes, you've guessed it – they are not his words. The new leftie in our midst is none other than Charles Moore, the former editor of the Daily Telegraph.
Moore's column on Saturday opened with these words:
It has taken me more than 30 years as a journalist to ask myself this question, but this week I find that I must: is the Left right after all? You see, one of the great arguments of the Left is that what the Right calls "the free market" is actually a set-up.
So Margaret Thatcher's official biographer gave the most telling illustration of how the phone hacking scandal is re-shaping British politics. This is what he wrote:
The Left was right that the power of Rupert Murdoch had become an anti-social force. The Right (in which, for these purposes, one must include the New Labour of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown) was too slow to see this, partly because it confused populism and democracy. One of Mr Murdoch's biggest arguments for getting what he wanted in the expansion of his multi-media empire was the backing of "our readers". But the News of the World and the Sun went out of the way in recent years to give their readers far too little information to form political judgments. His papers were tools for his power, not for that of his readers. When they learnt at last the methods by which the News of the World operated, they withdrew their support.
Moore's column was one of the the most striking articles over the weekend on the fallout from the phone hacking scandal. But it is Ed Miliband who is setting the pace in shaping Britain's new political settlement.
In an interview with the Times on Saturday, he said that the lesson of the last few weeks – the dangers of concentrating too much power in too few hands – should lead to changes beyond the media. Showing a populist touch that will surprise critics who thought he only understood the world of Fabian seminars, the former energy and climate change secretary called for the "big six" energy companies to be broken up to help cut household bills.
This is the key quote in his interview:
The powerful are very good at talking about the responsibilities of the powerless but they aren't very good at looking at their own responsibilities. Labour is the party of grafters, the people who work hard and do the decent thing but don't feel they get a fair deal out of society.
Tories were quick to clock the significance of Miliband's remarks. One senior figure said:
We need to watch out. Ed Miliband may well be onto something here. We all thought he was a bit obsessed with phone hacking and would just focus on that. But he is showing something of a sure touch. He is taking the lessons from that and applying them elsewhere in a way that will be understood by many voters.
The danger for Cameron is that, as the tectonic plates shift, he becomes stranded and looks out of touch. The prime minister, who famously taunted Gordon Brown in 2006 as an analogue politician in a digital age, thinks he embraces what his aides describe as the "post bureaucratic age". This denotes the era of Google when people are empowered by the internet to wrest control of their lives from the rulers of the previous "bureaucratic age" – central government and big business.
Cameron will be nervous that his friendship with Rebekah Brooks appears to have belonged more to the spirit of the "bureaucratic age".
Perhaps all is not lost for Cameron. This is how Moore concluded his column:
One must always pray that conservatism will be saved, as has so often been the case in the past, by the stupidity of the Left. The Left's blind faith in the state makes its remedies worse than useless. But the first step is to realise how much ground we have lost, and that there may not be much time left to make it up.