This is a little unfair, because tonight’s Keir Hardie speech is meant to be intellectual and the audience will expect nothing less. This is the kind of rhetoric that plays well within the party heartland. Still, some of Mili-D’s comments seem more than a little confusing: is it just me?
I’ve put my own translations in bold – they may well be wrong. (Here is the entire text of the speech).
In our concern with meeting people’s needs we seemed to sever welfare from desert and this led people to think that their taxes were being wasted, that they were being used: Some people got benefits who didn’t deserve them
Our lack of distinction between the proceeds of financial capital, which was often concerned with its short term multiplication not its long term investment, and manufacturing capital, which was embedded in the real economy, led to a real lack in private sector growth throughout the country. We concentrated too much on City of London casino banking and not enough on manufacturing.
Here, in this place that Hardie represented, was the cradle of a beautiful and strong child, and Labour achieved unique and great things. The Labour movement began here in Wales.
In 2008 and 2009, Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling did not make the mistakes of Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden. They made the correct technical calls. Our savings were protected. But I believe in reciprocity all the way up, and all the way down. And we did not summon the moral power of shared responsibility to supplement the mechanical power to print money of the Bank of England. That is how solidarity is strengthened, not from the centre alone, but by a mutual responsibility for each others’ fate. The bankers deserve more blame for the mess we’re in.
Jim Pickard
Kiran Stacey