UNCUT: Could Thames water lose the Tories the election?

25/04/2024, 10:45:26 PM

by Kevin Meagher

The water industry, privatised in 1989, was for a long time a chimera.

A public service that happened to be located across the aisle in the private sector. A big lumbering beast that just got on with the job and caused little fuss.

Not anymore.

Thames Water – the largest of the regional water monopolies – appears to be on the brink of collapse, carrying debts of nearly £15 billion.

Furthermore, its parent company, Kemble Water (a consortium that includes a Canadian pension fund, the China Investment Corporation and a subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund), is withholding a cash injection to prop-up it up.

That is unless the industry regulator, Ofwat, allows it to increase average customer bills over the next five years – which would see them rocket by 44% to £627 a year.

Ouch.

It all used to be much simpler.

During the nineties and noughties the water companies got on with the task of implementing EU wastewater regulations, which led to dramatic improvements in the quality of our drinking water, coastlines and urban waterways.

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UNCUT: Want to improve British politics? Advertise special adviser roles

23/04/2024, 10:02:20 PM

by Kevin Meagher

My Mum’s informal media monitoring service is always spot on.

‘They had some treasury minister on with Ed Balls this morning,’ she told me the other day.

‘She was absolutely hopeless. He made mincemeat out of her.’

Turns out the hapless victim of Ed Balls’s perfectly reasonable probing about the inflation rate was treasury minister, Laura Trott, putting in yet another faltering media appearance to add to the long, painful, list of similarly egregious examples.

I have these conversations with my Mum every day.

One hopeless minister after another does the media round, only to be pulled apart by interviewers like a French baguette.

There was a vintage example on Sky News.

James Daly, the deputy Tory party chairman, who made the police complaint about Angela Rayner’s disputed household arrangements, was on.

Labour’s Chris Bryant asked – again, perfectly reasonably – what he thought she had done wrong.

Presenter Kay Burley and Political Editor Beth Rigby, also part of the discussion, echoed the point.

Now, this was the most obvious thing in the world to ask him. Daly – badly briefed, panicky and defensive – floundered, accusing Bryant of shouting at him.

It seems to happen time and again.

Obvious questions that Tory frontbenchers should be prepared for leave them pole-axed.

It’s an excruciating sight and sound, as the life-force oozes out of this government on what is now a daily basis.

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UNCUT: The Tories have diminished the role of Prime Minister

20/04/2024, 08:10:17 AM

by Kevin Meagher

I was born under Harold Wilson, started school under James Callaghan and left under Margaret Thatcher.

My 16-year-old daughter was born under Gordon Brown, started school under David Cameron, then Theresa May, then Boris Johnson, then Liz Truss and is set to leave under Rishi Sunak.

A stark 2:1 ratio in a single generation.

In the modern age, it seems PMs are like buses.

And this presumes Sunak will last until my daughter’s GCSEs in the summer.

He remains the potential victim of either an early general election defeat, or a last- minute putsch by his own backbenchers to replace him, in the hope of a final-second reprieve from the voters.

It’s not just that the Tories have broken the constitutional precedent that parties should only ever change their leader/ prime minister once in a parliament before seeking the reapproval of the voters, it’s that they have diminished the office entirely.

Look at their record.

Hubristic David Cameron called and then lost a referendum on our EU membership that was practically unlosable, destabilising British politics ever since.

Dumbfounded by Parliament and party, Theresa May was unable to divine a coherent way forward over the country’s decision to quit and was forced out by her own side.

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UNCUT: Scottish Labour misses a moral imperative and an open goal

02/04/2024, 10:48:19 PM

by Rob Marchant

Yesterday – as many wags observed, fittingly, the first of April – is the first day of possibly the most illiberal piece of legislation in the UK during at least the last three decades (and it has been almost 36 years since the enactment of Section 28, the Margaret Thatcher’s notorious anti-gay legislation, so that pretty much fits).

It essentially creates a hate crime, which can be pretty much whatever imagined slight the person who reports it says it is. It is also a crude attempt to secure gender self ID through the back door, because it talks about “gender identity” (not a protected characteristic) instead of “gender reassignment” (a protected characteristic).

In short, it is exceptionally poorly drafted, making it completely unclear what the objective criteria are for having committed this crime; it is severely limiting of free speech, in a similar way to blasphemy laws enacted in developing countries; it will undoubtedly be used to attempt to stifle dissent on the Scottish Government’s LGBT policies, and quite probably instigate punishment for anything understood as religious blasphemy; it will gum up the wheels of an already-understaffed and over-worked Police Scotland; and finally, it will almost certainly be politically disastrous for the hapless government of Humza Yousaf, a First Minister so inept that he has been in a disaster at every previous portfolio he has held in that government, and failed upwards.

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UNCUT: Welcome to Britain 2024 – we’re worse than Georgia when it comes to voter suppression

17/01/2024, 10:50:55 PM

by Paul Wheeler

2024 is the year of elections including amongst others the UK and US.

For decades political pundits here have been able to point an accusing figure to the Southern States of the US when it comes to the dark arts of voter suppression. Well thanks to the current Government Britain has lost the moral high ground. The credentials required to vote in person here are more restrictive here than in Georgia. Student ID is a permissible form of ID in Georgia a form of ID specifically excluded in this country.

The case for voter ID in Britain was always thin but the way that it has been implemented has descended into embarrassment. The comparison with other European countries who request voter ID ignores the simple fact that they nearly all have universal Identity Cards used in everyday life.

Perhaps most important it has diverted political time and energy which would have been better focused on improving the process of voter registration. The electoral register in Britain has been part of the hidden wiring of British democracy since the introduction of universal suffrage in the early twentieth century. However, in the last decade we have seen a slow-motion collapse in the accuracy and scope of the electoral register.

A major part of the problem is that we have expected cash strapped councils to implement huge changes to the process of voting and registration. If ever the principle of unintended consequences was relevant in public life it would apply to the introduction of Individual Voting Registration (IVR) in the UK.

Introduced in 2009 in the last days of the last Labour Government it was a well-intentioned attempt to move away from allowing a ‘Head of Household’ (usually assumed to be a male) to complete the registration of all members of the family/household. and instead put the responsibility on every individual to complete the registration form themselves – a huge change in terms of bureaucracy and form filling

Sadly, it didn’t anticipate that it would be implemented under a Coalition Government who implemented a savage reduction in public expenditure particularly amongst the 400 councils responsible for voter registration.

For one group of voters the results of the change to individual voting was catastrophic – ‘attainers’ are 16/17 year olds included on the register to anticipate their eligibility to vote at 18. In the past a Head of Household was expected to include them. Now the responsibility was their own. It became increasingly apparent over the years that 16/17 year olds have other priorities than voter registration.

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UNCUT: The Uncuts: 2023 political awards (Part II)

01/01/2024, 04:42:03 PM

Politician of the year: Team Starmer

For the 2023 award, Uncut is bending the rules a little to hand the politician of the year gong to a team. There is a logic. Keir Starmer had an excellent year, he has palpably learned, adapted and overcome the challenges in front of him. But politics is a team sport and while he has been front of office, the back-office team have made much of this progress possible.

In the 1990s, Tony Blair had a close-knit team around him that propelled him to power. The big names are well known – Jonathan Powell, Anji Hunter, Alastair Campbell, Peter Mandelson and Sally Morgan. Even at the time, each had their own distinct profile, just as Gordon Brown’s team with Charlie Whelan, Ed Balls and Ed Miliband, each had their own media profile.

The difference in the 2020s is that team Starmer is just that, a single unit, there is little briefing or publicity for the different members. No running storyline on tensions with the shadow chancellor’s team where the advisers become the story. After the psychodrama of the TB-GBs, fuelled in large part by advisers, and the scorched earth of Dominic Cummings tenure, a return to the days when advisers remained firmly in the back-office is a welcome change, not to mention an important part of minimising stories of splits and backbiting in any future Labour government.

So, congratulations to Morgan McSweeney, Matt Pound, Matt Doyle, Deborah Mattinson, Peter Hyman and Muneera Lula for not being the story with an honourable mention for Sue Gray, only recently in post as chief of staff, following a highly publicised exit from the civil service, but resolutely absent from the headlines in her new role.

Most underrated in 2023: President Biden

America is heading towards a presidential election between a candidate facing nearly 100 criminal charges and another that has delivered unprecedented and, given the shocks of Covid and Putin’s war, unexpected economic strength.

It should be a no brainer that the latter will win. By a landslide. And yet the polls suggest otherwise and nervousness – Democratic (as in the party) and democratic (as in the political system) – is pervasive.

When Americans vote, Democrats win. In the 2022 midterms, Democrats won by larger margins than in the 2020 presidential election in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania — all battleground states. Democrats also performed strongly in 2023: flipping a Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin; defeating a six-week abortion ban in Ohio; and keeping the Virginia state house.

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UNCUT: The Uncuts: 2023 political awards (Part I)

01/01/2024, 10:45:40 AM

Worst and Best Takes on the Israel-Gaza Crisis

It has been a decade since the last major flare-up between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza. In that time, millions of Britons have come of age and many more millions, lacking the excuse of youth, seem not to have paid any attention to the facts of a complicated conflict and prefer easy, soundbite answers.

In 2023, there was not a mere escalation in tensions but a horrific upsurge of violence, triggered by a single day of massacre of civilians on the 7th of October. We struggle for comparisons, but a simple way think of it is as the Israeli 9/11; a day when a terrorist organisation opted to cut the lives short of innocents, in this case many tortured and raped before their eventual slaughter. How anyone could expect Israel not to retaliate against an organisation not only carrying this out, but which had restarted a daily barrage of rocket attacks into the bargain, defies understanding.

It is unfortunate to have to note that our national media has not exactly covered itself in glory on the subject. The Guardian we have, in the main, long expected to show ugly partisanship with any country which opposes Israel, no matter how awful the regime. But we might have expected better of BBC News and even Sky News, which seemed to demand ridiculous levels of proof of the rape and torture aspects of the attacks which most of us realised were real on Day Two, as well as adopting unabridged casualty figures from a terrorist organisation well known for its shameless misinformation.

For balance, there were some poor journalistic takes on the pro-Israeli side too, however; in the Telegraph, Jake Wallis Simons decided that the two-state solution was part of the problem and not the solution. And there were the usual braying voices on the Israeli right.

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UNCUT: 2024 – Our year of socialism or barbarism

28/12/2023, 10:43:03 PM

by Jonathan Todd

We are entering Rosa Luxemburg’s year. “Capitalist civilization cannot continue,” she wrote a century ago. “We must either move forward into socialism or fall back into barbarism.”

A similar contrast was recently drawn by Doyne Farmer, an American scientist and entrepreneur, which was quoted by Alastair Campbell in a fantastic speech: “We are in a race between Armageddon and awesome.”

Farmer’s Armageddon is a brutal Malthusianism of climate chaos: more and more of the world becoming unhabitable for humans, driving hundreds of millions of desperate people towards shrinking islands of habitability, where warm welcomes will not await. Awesome is a world that has taken the steps to avert climate chaos, which will come with an abundance of fresh air, natural habitats, and clean energy.

Lives of Armageddon or awesome await today’s children. With their fates determined by 2024’s decisions.

Change is not linear. Neither the way our climate is changing: “climate tipping points … lead to abrupt, irreversible, and dangerous impacts with serious implications for humanity” (e.g., collapsing ice sheets and rapidly rising sea levels). Nor our trajectory to net zero: “positive tipping points within our social systems (that) help accelerate progress towards a sustainable future” (e.g., take-up of Electric Vehicles rapidly advancing due to steep price reductions).

“Pace is truly what matters in the climate fight,” says the front of Simon Sharpe’s compelling book on how our rate of decarbonisation needs to increase by five times. We either now speed through positive tipping points to a world of awesome or slip beyond negative tipping points to Armageddon.

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UNCUT: Antisemitism is bad enough right now, without trying to frame actual Jewish allies

28/11/2023, 09:23:59 PM

by Rob Marchant

If the horrific news coming out of Israel and Gaza resulting from Hamas atrocities were not sufficient, the last six weeks have been the worst period of antisemitism in living memory, not just in Britain but in many other parts of the world.

Some Labour figures have not exactly covered themselves in glory: if you can manage to live with the cognitive dissonance of framing the “ceasefire” narrative as a neutral one, rather than one which helps Hamas; or recent serial hate marches as “peace demonstrations” – as it seems both Andy Burnham and Sadiq Khan were able to, not to mention a highly-predictable Jeremy Corbyn – you are not going to get to common sense or coherence any time soon.

However, at national level, Keir Starmer has largely avoided the platitudes of his predecessors and has managed to hold a sensible line with his Shadow Cabinet in not “both-sidesing” the Hamas atrocities and the civilian casualties resulting from Israeli counter-attacks. This all in the face of Chicken-Licken comment pieces predicting imminent, and terrible, splits in the party over this stance, which in the end have turned out to be rather overblown.

In difficult times, then, Labour has managed to truly move on from the Corbyn years and not fall into the trap which has recently befallen the Spanish, Belgian and Irish prime ministers, in wetting the bed on this issue. Bravo to Starmer.

So far, so good; until we come to last weekend’s Sunday Times piece, in which it was revealed that Rosie Duffield MP, one of the very few MPs to stand up and be counted as a Jewish ally when antisemitism was rife in the party and is, let us not forget, a vice-chair of the APPG on antisemitism, has not yet been added to the approved parliamentary candidates list, despite having been reselected for Canterbury seat, on grounds of a complaint over alleged antisemitism.

You what, mate?

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UNCUT: 3 Bs for Rachel Reeves’ speech: Building; Betting; Bridging

09/10/2023, 02:43:06 AM

by Jonathan Todd

The Labour party and the rest of the country want the same thing: big change. The country knows the essential precondition of this: getting the economy right. We look to Rachel Reeves for that.

Jess Philips spoke movingly at political therapy last week at 1000 Trades about the pervasive hopelessness that she encounters among the electorate. The deep struggles in a country where nothing works. The exhausting dysfunction hardwired into many facets of national life.

“People have had enough,” Rachel Reeves told the FT over the weekend. This feeling, while it has grown over the 13 years of Tory misrule, is not new.

It powered the surge towards Yes in Scotland’s 2014 referendum. Breaking up the UK has always seemed to me, among other things, a tremendously risky path: divorces can get messy. Yes appeared much less so for those gripped by hopelessness: with so little stake in the UK, the alternative was a worthwhile gamble.

Almost a decade later, the tide started to go out on the SNP last week in Rutherglen and Hamilton West. But not on the hope for big change that has transformed Scottish politics. Few want a status quo of grinding poverty and thwarted opportunity.

Labour needs to get the UK building to meet this appetite for change. Building houses, life science labs, wind farms: all the infrastructure that the UK needs for coming decades.

Building should be a leitmotif of the Reeves speech. Uncut will count the number of building references.

But building HS2? Reeves, during her FT interview, “hints that Labour will not go into the general election promising to reinstate the northern leg of the line. Fiscal responsibility is one of her mantras.”

It compromises Labour’s focus on building to not keep alive the train line that will give the UK north of Birmingham the transport capacity and connections it needs. We all know the difficulties being created by the government, such as allowing compulsory purchases for HS2 to lapse, but “we can’t because of the Tories” is a line with limited mileage for Labour.

How large-scale change really happens is the subtitle of a book that Rajiv Shah will, coincidentally, publish during party conference. The author – who has helped vaccinate nearly a billion children, lead high-pressure responses to the Haiti earthquake and against Ebola, dramatically expanded American Covid-19 testing at the height of the pandemic – promises to reveal, “the power of the big bet mindset: a belief that seeking to solve problems boldly, rather than settle for incremental improvements, will attract partners with the capacity to achieve transformational change”. Read the rest of this entry »

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