Trying to work out Ed Miliband

Ed Miliband's first headline statement on the unions was unsurprising. On the campaign trail he struck a distinctly centrist note when pressed on the unions: as with all his answers (a quality I admired at the time, and still do now) he made sure the audience were aware that if elected, his response to situations would be context-specific rather than ideological. Too much of the old politics was concerned with ideological fixity, which had and continues to have a paralysing effect on strategy, barring progressive solutions rather than enabling them. That union strike action is programmed for the day of the royal wedding is understandable given the strike's purpose in hitting hardest for maximum effect. There really is no perfect time for strike action. Ed Miliband's paradox, however, is to condemn the cuts as his central narrative and castigate the unions when they pose little real threat. What damage can strike action do on a royal wedding bank holiday beyond the sustained damage posed in the long term by the current government? Why placate the royalists? For one thing, it's contemptible that the extra bank holiday the country has been demanding for such a long time has been granted on the occasion of a meaningless marriage. Is Miliband appealing to the hardened royalist, or perhaps those feckless individuals who count the symbolic presence of feudalism as one of the things the country's got going for it? What's certain in the context of all this royal puffery is that it's not critics of public sector reform who need to grow up.

There is a deeper narrative threading its way through the thicket of Ed Miliband's leadership. Talk of the 'squeezed middle' has dominated his overall response to the cuts, whilst reference to the erstwhile working class continues to be elided. 'Squeezed middle' at least implies its target socio-economic group, whereas 'the vulnerable' is the catch-all term embracing other groups. The semantics of class collapses between these two terms, forming, if you like, a capitalist dialectic of the indigent and producer. Whilst the decimation of the national industries prepared the groundwork for the dismantling of the working class, late capitalism abides in a working class tethered to corporate retail power, producers of nothing but profit as a result of low-paid labour that is subsequently devoured by the relentless cycle of consumerism. The spectral working class wobbles over prospects such as lost cause dependency and Tesco. One of the major consequences of this hopeless situation is generalised apathy, where not even the carrot of the freedom to vote can inject an ounce of self-empowerment. This is one reason amongst many why the working class fails to make it to the polling booths. You begin to feel that the problem is not so much located in which type of government exists but rather with the prevailing system. There is no let-up in the daily grind in a society poised for ever more privatisation and increasing supremacy of the profit margin. Meanwhile the Tory-led discourse of people power and decentralisation rings hollower by the day as - to pluck one random example from that rotten Tory oak - we're told that there's money in the pot to support 'free schools' for the affluent but no longer anything at all for the building work of existing schools that desperately need it.

Ed Miliband's task is to navigate these concerns in a way that speaks to the millions of voters lost over the years due to New Labour's increasing deafness to the issues affecting the working class. Should Miliband have expressed more support for the unions? If it is left to the unions to coordinate a dynamic response on the streets to Tory-led austerity, then what of a Labour leader who can't seem to engage with this mass movement? One immediate fear is that his inability to negotiate a healthy relationship with the unions in order to revive the working class roots of Labour's support will only end up confirming that New Labour lives on, slightly adjusted against a background of directionless, hand-wringing apologia about the past. In daydreaming moments unchecked by the realities of parliamentary politics, I have willed Miliband to take the leap and go along with the unions, to gauge the public's response; at least he can do something unusual for politicians these days and claim categorically that he has stood by his word by standing alongside the unions and the workers. He was never going to lead the march on the day, but it was reasonable to expect a change of heart, a principled vote of support.

The thorniest of thorns is the image of the unions: damned if they do and damned if they don't. People - even working class people, which is always counter-intuitive - are polarised on the unions. Miliband's dithering over his relationship with them no doubt comes as a result of the influence of the 'squeezed middle', who trumpet the values of common sense, reason, and public order. Values, in other words, not practiced by the trade unions. Meanwhile the squeezed middle holds sway because they turn up at the polling booths. Perhaps Miliband senses that his legitimacy and prospects recede if their support isn't secured, a situation that has haunted all Labour leaders, if not throughout the party's history then certainly during and since Thatcher. Her overarching plan, which the Tory-led government plans to bring to a rousing conclusion, means that Labour's legitimacy cannot be guaranteed without the very voters who hold the interests of the party's traditional working class supporters at bay.

The chaos of this here internet

It's been frustrating lately because I've felt there's been nothing to write about for this blog. There's little point in offering my thoughts on politics - at the moment, what with one thing and another, there's nothing I can add to the far more dedicated bloggers who are focused on the issues day in, day out. And I've not the moral energy to write much else. I've waited for a very strange thing to happen before tapping away.

Sometimes I use my own blogroll to check up on websites and blogs. For some reason I'd not checked on a particular link for a while, and so earlier I clicked. What I found was that the blog's subject and writer had died. Raymond Federman. Raymond Federman died in October 2009. He was 81. It was a strange experience: first, that Federman, a writer whose experiments in fiction and eccentric way with the blogosphere had such propulsive energy it seemed he would go on forever. Then came the thought that I hadn't checked his blog for that length of time. I spend much time on the Internet and flick relentlessly between a regular repertoire of links, so much that it's worryingly part of my physical existence - reaching for the laptop, lifting the lid, entering my password, etc., etc.. Checking Federman's blog was at one stage part of the musculature of everyday life, but checking it today to find out that he'd died over a year ago jolted me out of that reassuring ritual. A paradox suggested itself: that of the blog's familiarity and the life-cycle expanse of time that had elapsed since the last passage reaching it.

How could I have missed the passing of Raymond Federman? Have I forgotten reading news of his death? Though I haven't read much of his work (now is the time to correct this), there seemed to be correspondence between his ludic [Funny: the spell check had 'lucid' for 'ludic'] experimentalism and the distinctly random structure of the way in which I have discovered the sad news of his passing. Internet life is inescapably labyrinthine. Or: you can't escape the labyrinth that connects the human mind with the algorithmic rationality that digital technology supposedly lends the chaos of our everyday lives. But this is to forget the wayward route that led me to my unfortunate discovery and the writing of this blog post...

Please go to Federman's blog - now in legacy, as is said - to find links to obituaries and posts reporting his passing, and of course to explore the great man's archive.