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Archive for August, 2010

Diane Abbott’s desert island discs

06/08/2010, 03:10:56 PM

A woman of conviction, Diane Abbott presented us with the same list she gave to our namesake in 2008. Any flirtations with post ’08 tunes have been put to the back of her mind. She has stayed true to the mix tape which had accompanied her life up to that point. The lady’s not for turning.

Ladysmith Black Mambazo make the list. The Temptations make the list. Bob Marley makes the list. Buju Banton – the (convicted) weed growing, (awaiting trial) alleged coke smuggling, (on/off) gay bashing, (confirmed) Jamaican – singer, makes the list.

But the one song that really stands out from the rest is D.ream, with the Blairite crowd pleasing, conference-electrifying classic Things can only get better. Abbott isn’t a Blairite. Abbott wasn’t a Blairite. We can’t imagine Abbott was one of the many uncomfortable middle class lefties shuffling on the spot and mouthing the words at conference ’97.

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An elected party chair mustn’t become the plaything of MPs, says Joanne Milligan

06/08/2010, 12:30:45 PM

Many weeks ago, Labour leadership contender David Miliband proposed an election for the role of party chair as a step towards ensuring that there’s a voice for party members at the shadow cabinet table.

Discussion of the idea then escalated following a Jon Cruddas’s speech to the Labour Friends of Searchlight’s Organising to Win conference in which he declared that he would put himself forward for the post.

Subsequently, both national executive committee (NEC) member Peter Kenyon and NEC candidate Luke Akehurst took to the blogosphere to offer their views. A little surprisingly – for me anyway – I find more common ground with Peter than Luke on this issue (don’t worry Luke – that doesn’t mean you’ve lost my vote). (more…)

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James Ruddick bids farewell to Nick Clegg

06/08/2010, 08:05:05 AM

Let me be the first to wish Nick Clegg well in his new life outside British politics. Is this premature? Not at all. Clegg will begin this new life – probably back in the corridors of Brussels – much sooner than he or anyone else realises.

Clegg’s political demise has already started. He may have secured an AV referendum for his party during negotiations with the Tories, but he secured nothing for the electorate except pain. On the only issue of importance facing the country – how and when to retrench – Clegg sold out. And for that alone, he is doomed. He finds himself deputy prime minister in a government which has smashed the recovery with a single 40 minute speech.

And the stalled recovery – confirmed by the latest Markit and YouGov data – is only one feature in the pincer movement that is sealing Clegg’s fate. As our economic problems set in aspic, the electorate will start to feel the first wave of the cuts – the cuts that Clegg was hired to ameliorate; the cuts which he has unblinkingly sponsored. There will soon be vast numbers of casualties staring shell-shocked and limbless into the lens of the Sky News camera, all of them looking for Clegg’s phone number. Some aspect of the hacking and sawing will be felt by every family in Britain, especially the seven million who voted Lib Dem. (more…)

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Friday News Review

06/08/2010, 07:32:30 AM

Ed: Narnian resident

Co-op support

The Co-operative Party has reported a record increase in new members following Labour’s general election defeat in May. A Party spokesman told the News that almost 500 new members had signed up in the three months since then — mainly online — and that the figure included a substantial number of returning members. – Co-op News.

It’s grim up north London

The workers’ party has its own aristocracy, and it lives in London’s northern hills. Not far from Hugh Gaitskell’s grave in Hampstead, a Narnian village that in every sense looks down on the capital, other Labour leaders have made their homes. Across the Heath—where one of them, Michael Foot, walked his dog—Karl Marx is buried in Highgate cemetery. Bankers and Arsenal footballers may have infiltrated, but this is still a land of liberal writers, celebrities and assorted cognoscenti. During the general election, houses worth millions of pounds had Labour posters in their windows. – The Economist.

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The American way? No We Can’t, says Dan Hodges

05/08/2010, 01:30:25 PM

Last week I bumped into an old comrade from the Greater Manchester congestion charge campaign. Like Vietnam veterans we speak sparingly of those days, pausing but rarely to wrestle our demons and remember the fallen.

Asked what he was up to now that he was back on civvy street, he replied that he was working as “deputy field manager” for one of the leadership teams.

“What the hell’s a field manager”, I asked?

“Well it’s like an organiser”.

“So why isn’t it called an organiser”?

“Well, it’s what the Americans call an organiser”.

“Have we got loads of Americans over here stitching up the electoral college, then”?

“No. It’s what Obama used”.

Ah. “What Obama used”. The political equivalent of ‘It’s What Diana Would Have Wanted’.

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Ed Miliband clears up confusion over tax credits

05/08/2010, 12:08:56 PM

On Tuesday we reported on the fallout coming from an Ed Miliband interview with the Northern Echo that took place last week. The article stated that:

During the interview, Mr Miliband controversially suggested that people in the South should receive higher tax credits than people in the North, to reflect the higher cost of living.

It also quoted Miliband as saying:

We can look at the level of tax credits, so they benefit people in the South who haven’t benefited from the minimum wage.

However Ed’s campaign has been quick to refute this. A campaign spokesman for Miliband Jnr told Uncut that:

This [story] is based on a misunderstanding by the Northern Echo. He did not say he was in favour of regional rates and indeed he isn’t.

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It’s time to wake up and smell the coffee, argues Richard Darlington

05/08/2010, 11:13:37 AM

After the Tory defeat in the 2005 general election, Michael Ashcroft published an analysis called ‘Smell the coffee: a wake up call for the Conservative party’. In the introduction he argued that “the Conservative party’s problem is its brand…the brand problem means that the most robust, coherent, principled and attractive Conservative policies will have no impact on the voters”.

Labour needs to ‘smell the coffee’ now and not wait for three election defeats. New polling shows the Labour party’s brand is in toxic territory. Ashcroft realised that policy is nothing without presentation and presentation is nothing without policy. Labour now has a problem with both.

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Thursday News Review

05/08/2010, 07:52:55 AM

Weak, divided and old fashioned

The challenge facing Labour’s next leader is laid bare in a poll published today, showing that disillusioned former voters view the party as weak, divided, out-of-touch and old-fashioned. Demos, the left-of-centre think tank, said its findings demonstrated that the Labour brand had become “toxic” among previous supporters. It warned that it would take more than just a change of leader to tackle the party’s severe image problem. The survey, conducted by YouGov, found that 73 per cent of people who voted for Labour in the 2005 election but not this year thought the party was “weak”, with 72 per cent believing it was “divided”. – The Independent

Shadow Cabinet

The new shadow cabinet will not start to be elected until the week of the Conservative conference, starting on 4 October, with the results announced on the evening of 7 October. The new Labour leader will then have to distribute portfolios including the vital role of shadow chancellor before the spending review. Ed Balls and to a lesser extent Ed Miliband have suggested that the deficit programme proposed by Labour at the time of the election should be revisited since it proposed too rapid a deficit reduction, and too harsh public spending cuts. David Miliband has been less specific, and has focused on how Tory plans require £30bn more cuts than Labour had proposed. – The Guardian

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Why Cameron knows nothing and cares less about council house tenants

04/08/2010, 06:50:35 PM

Never has David Cameron displayed his lack of understanding of council and social housing tenants more than in the appalling idea of time-limiting social housing tenancies. My parents moved into a new council house in 1965 and I was brought up there. It was our home. Our family wanted a secure place from which to plan our future. That is not unusual for anyone – whether they live in rented or bought accommodation.

If my parents had been told they could be evicted after five years of the tenancy, it would have immediately cast a shadow on the family’s security. No longer would they have been able to plan work and education for their children. Their focus would have been: “where will we be living next?”

Would David Cameron countenance this arrangement for his own family?

It tells us a great deal that the prime minister’s response to shortage of social housing is to limit the rights of those in occupation of social housing. A more explicable option would be to stop the sale of council housing. This directly removes homes from public sector stock and makes fewer homes available for those in need. But I suspect that this would not be acceptable to David Cameron’s political antennae – alienating his restless back-benchers.

Instead, our prime minister chooses an easier target: those in desperate need of homes who will accept a roof over their heads at any cost. Time-limited tenancies will create uncertainty and store up problems for families in years ahead. It tells us much about the political instincts of this Tory/Lib-Dem government.

Ian Lucas is the MP for Wrexham

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Joe Cox presents the Compass campaign to end legal loan sharking

04/08/2010, 03:30:05 PM

The world of high finance can often seem a remote place. A friend once told me that after the financial crash and subsequent fall out that they were frustrated that they couldn’t link the behaviour of capital to the lives of ordinary people. The reason why citizens groups and citizens organising is all the rage at the moment is because it does this very thing – it links the intangible and the remote to the immediate.

After the financial crisis Citizens UK began to hear stories about the increase in interest rates on money loans. More and more stories also emerged about doorstep and other high cost lending. High cost lenders were targeting housing estates with offers of immediate credit at very high prices. Once people took out these high cost loans their problems often become worse and they had to borrow more. (more…)

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