Archive for August, 2010

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The Con/Lib government aren’t playing fair by cancelling the playground programme, argues Pat Kane

17/08/2010, 11:41:32 AM

Michael Gove’s cancellation of the playground building programme last week is no surprise to those familiar with the Gradgrindery of his general educational philosophy, history and Latin lessons. But however unlikely its success, it is worth remembering just what a triumph the programme was for the outgoing new Labour administration.

It is true that when the then children’s secretary Ed Balls announced close to christmas in 2007 that over £200 million was to be earmarked to build 3,500 playgrounds, and then followed it through in the subsequent two years, advocates of play were pinching themselves.

New Labour, with various invocations of a renewed work-ethic for the work-shy and a notoriously exacting measurement culture in education, did not seem the most propitious sponsor of the value and benefits of play; oblique, messy and experimental as play is. Ed Balls did not join up his thinking when he rejected the Cambridge Primary Review in 2009, which showed conclusively that an extended period of kindergarten-style play up to the seventh year was the best developmental start for school children.

But there it was; alongside play initiatives from the lottery fund and echoed throughout the devolved parliaments, a commitment to building playgrounds as a step towards rethinking how we regard the activity of children in our public spaces, town and cities. It’s tempting to say that in a similar way to our shifts on climate change the scientific consensus on the health, the cognitive and social benefits of more play in our lives; both for children and adults, was becoming indisputable.

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Blair’s book gesture is testament to the quality of its author, says Paul Richards

17/08/2010, 08:00:56 AM

Tony Blair’s autobiography A Journey would have made its author a very rich man. Or should that be an even richer man. The advance was £4.6 million. There’ll be a lucrative serialisation in a Sunday newspaper. It will be translated into many languages, and sell around the world. Already 14 territories have secured translation rights. There is little doubt that with an early release as a paperback Blair’s book will hit the non-fiction best-seller lists and stay there for many weeks. It will probably rival Barack Obama’s Dreams of My Father as a best-seller by a politician which cuts through to the mass market.

All of which makes his decision to donate every penny to the Royal British Legion both remarkable and laudable. For most leading politicians – Prescott, Mandelson, Thatcher, Clinton, Wilson, etc – a memoir is partly the chance to set the record straight, but mostly the chance to make a wad of cash for the retirement fund. Blair has shown that he is a cut above your average politician. He wants his book to tell a story, not make a mint.

There are plenty of people who will say it’s just ‘blood money’, motivated by guilt for sending British troops to war in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq. The professional, irreconcilable Blair-haters are always swift to ascribe motives to Blair’s every move. It must be quite a responsibility to possess the ability to read Blair’s mind so accurately all the time. They will never accept, unlike the British Legion, that this is simply a fantastically generous  donation to a good cause. The grubby motives they will ascribe, and ill-grace with which they will react to the donation, say more about them than Blair.

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Tuesday News Review

17/08/2010, 07:56:53 AM

Goodbye Alan, it’s been emotional

I, for one, am fed up with the media myth which suggests that the Blairites were the cool dudes in the dull Labour gang, that they were popular and/or adored, and that they singlehandedly won general elections for the party. Did anyone ever say to themselves, “I’m voting Labour because of Alan Milburn”? Did people take to the street in protests when Blunkett was sacked from the cabinet? Did the likes of Patricia Hewitt, Geoff Hoon and Stephen Byers help or hinder the Labour re-election effort earlier this year, when they were outed by Channel 4’s Dispatches grubbing for cash? And did anyone really doubt that the ultra-Blairites like Milburn and Hutton were closer to the Tories, in their pro-market, pro-privatization, pro-rich ideology, than to the Labour Party, new or old? – The New Statesman

On Wednesday, he will deliver a speech on social mobility and confirm the disclosure in yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph that Alan Milburn has been appointed an independent adviser to the Government. John Prescott‘s furious denunciation of Milburn as a “collaborator” tells you all you need to know about the political symbolism of this coup: the former Health Secretary and one-time Labour leadership contender joins his fellow Blairite, John Hutton, and Labour’s star thinker on welfare, Frank Field, in the coalition’s Big Tent. David Blunkett is reported to be next on the list of invitees. Just as Blair wooed senior Lib-Dems and One Nation Tories to New Labour — what Alastair Campbell called “Operation Hoover” — so Cameron and Clegg are recruiting disenfranchised Blairites. – The Evening Standard

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A one-off wealth tax is radical but astonishingly popular, says John Underwood

16/08/2010, 07:00:23 PM

For over thirty years, the Glasgow Media Group has linked the analysis of media content with the processes by which audiences receive and interpret messages.  It has worked across a range of disciplines and well beyond the normal academic boundaries of communication studies.  It is not surprising, therefore, that the Media Group should now turn its attention to media coverage of the national economic “crisis” and the need for cuts.

In an article in today’s Guardian, Professor Greg Philo, Research Director and one of the leading lights of the Glasgow Media Group asks why – amidst all the discussion of the deficit – there has been so little discussion in the media of how much wealth we have in Britain.  The truth, of course, is that we are the sixth richest nation on earth with total personal wealth of £9,000bn. As Philo points out, this sum dwarfs the national debt.

Naturally, this wealth is overwhelmingly concentrated at the top.  The richest 10% of Britons own £4,000bn, an average of £4m for each of the richest households.  The poorest half own less than 10% of Britain’s wealth between them.

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It’s time to accept the dull & boring facts, says Tom Harris

16/08/2010, 04:30:01 PM

I blame Nixon. And Lew Grade.

Until Watergate, everyone believed their government was up to no good, but they could never quite prove it. You can hardly blame anyone for buying into the Kennedy conspiracy. And when JFK’s younger brother and Martin Luther King were felled by assassins’ bullets within months of each other in 1968, the public could be forgiven for believing they were bit players in a Hollywood movie. There was no doubting who the bad guys were.

Then Woodward and Bernstein had to go and publish evidence that the government were, after all, the bad guys. The cultural message was received loud and clear throughout the world. Official cover-ups have become such a central part of our entertainment industry that it is now simply not on to suggest that conspiracies are more fiction than fact.

 Then there was Capricorn One (you were wondering when Lew Grade would come into it, weren’t you?), and suddenly the media were giving publicity to brain-addled hippies who had proved that Apollo had been faked using evidence procured by going through Buzz Aldrin’s bins.

Today, the front page of the Daily Mail proclaims that just one in five people believe the official story that Dr David Kelly committed suicide. When I was studying journalism I was taught that when a dog bites a man, that’s not news. When most people believe that the official story is hiding foul play, I’m afraid I see that as a dog biting a man. People want to believe in conspiracies because in doing so, they make life much more interesting than it actually is. More like a movie, in fact. And who wouldn’t want to live in that glamorous world instead of this one?

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Milburn vs. Milburn: Round III

16/08/2010, 01:15:50 PM

In round three, Mark Watson fires a volley for the greater good and Paul Smith hits straight back with a large helping of  ego and delusion.

The best thing for the country is what’s required

The only thing you can be sure of in Westminster is that things are never going to be quite the same again. The Lib Dems are in power but sharing with Conservatives. Prescott is in the House of Lords, but following Frank Field and John Hutton’s acceptance of advisory positions to the current incumbents comes the completion of the triumvirate of ex-Labour ministers working in the current administration, with the addition of former cabinet minister Alan Milburn as social mobility tsar. 

Alan Milburn knows his social mobility bag; he has first hand experience. Gordon Brown thought so much of this arch-Blairites position that he appointed him to advise his government on the subject, although the subsequent binning of his proposals in file 13 confirmed to many the view that this appointment was simply a concession to the Blair wing of the party. 

Whilst criticising this appointment as a sell-out, amongst other things, many Labour figures are approaching the subject from a sectarian position and missing the point. It seems as though the underlying narrative of the detractors is that the well-being of the country comes second to the lines in the party sand.  Labour only want social mobility sorting if they are the ones to sort it out – so why didn’t we?  There is no doubt that Milburn is one of the premier social mobility minds, so why shouldn’t the country benefit from what he has to say, regardless of his allegiance.

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Milburn vs. Milburn: Round II

16/08/2010, 11:45:19 AM

In the second round Andrew Parrington says we should remember the government of talents, but Jonathan Todd counters that we shouldn’t be doing anything to help the Tories.

Remember the government of talents

It’s easy in our system to retreat to tribalism. When your party is on the losing end of an election, you really have lost everything. Compared to America – where the Democrats have a near-super majority (for the moment at least) and the Republicans are still forcing Obama to water down his agenda, our system is unbelievably brutal.

The United States’ political environment isn’t the friendliest at the moment, yet apart from in the fringe tea-party movement; neither Republicans nor Democrats have shown any level of hostility to one of their own members being in government while the party is out of power. In fact, it is the opposite – for a new President to appoint an entire cabinet without at least one member of the opposite party is regarded as a slap in the face. This is a much healthier way of regarding government service. It really doesn’t do Labour any credit to whinge because one of our own gets to advise on an issue they care about.

This isn’t the first time it’s happened either; when Brown assembled his ‘government of all the talents’, Patrick Mercer and then-backbencher John Bercow advised the government on issues which they, themselves , were experienced in. Whether or not Cameron is creating these roles to make trouble for Labour ought to be irrelevant – to the public, and to me, Milburn is putting partisan labels aside to try to influence government policies. And given his recommendations to the government following his commission on social mobility last year, I for one hope he is successful.

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Milburn vs. Milburn: Round I

16/08/2010, 11:00:53 AM

In the first round of our Milburn vs. Milburn feature, Sam Hargreaves agrues that we should rejoice at having one of our boys on the inside, while Paul Cotterill hits back with his view that it’s just a Tory trick:

Who would you rather have in charge?

Alan Milburn’s appointment as social mobility tsar has been a surprise for those within the Labour party; however it should not be viewed as an unwelcome one.

Social mobility is an issue at the heart of the Labour movement; it has long been the goal of our party to reduce the gap between the richest and poorest members of our society. This goal is not one that is shared by the members of the current cabinet, as shown by the scrapping of the future jobs fund.

A study conducted by Milburn before he left parliament criticised industries that were inaccessible to those from a poorer background. He has shown a clear understanding of the problems we currently face in our society, by forcing coalition members to see these problems, a shift in policy may be achieved.

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Our new leader will need to move quickly to define our narrative, says Peter Watt

16/08/2010, 09:05:28 AM

Whatever people once thought, Labour must be rueing the decision to allow the leadership contest to drag on.  This window has allowed the Con/Lib government to to create a sense of moral outrage about Labour’s so called ‘profligacy in government’.  They’ve tricked us in to thinking that cuts of up to 40% in departmental budgets aren’t savage – and to do anything else would be irresponsible at best and probably immoral to boot. 

Eric Pickles reinforced this last week with his decision to open up the DCLG books.  Eric, who must surely be seen as having one of the strongest performances of any cabinet member so far, has pulled a master stroke.  How credible does it look for Labour to challenge the government on spending when it allowed tax payers pounds to be spent on massages, trips to the races and swanky hotels? 

Over the coming months, journalists and armchair auditors will be poring over the lists of payments and drip-feeding a diet of ‘excessive spending’.  It doesn’t matter what the reality is, the perception will be as the public suspected; spending had got out of control.  The mood of the day is that although it might be painful, it needs doing. 

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What must the new leader do to win, asks guest editor Tom Watson

16/08/2010, 09:00:35 AM

“To lead a political party you must first establish whether the party wishes to be lead.”

These are the alleged words of Neil Kinnock in the bad old days of the 1980s. The reassuring message to the thousands of Labour members who hold our great party together is that the parliamentary Labour party wishes to be lead.  This has not been the case after previous election defeats. The party faced extinction in the years after 1979. In 2010 our MPs, the new intake in particular, are murderous in their desire to win.

For every day that the fragmented group of charismatic individualists running the country continue to stumble from one sporadic decision to the next, the more the lust for victory grows amongst the best intake of MPs I’ve known in my lifetime.

Whoever wins the leadership election will inherit a parliamentary party with a killer instinct. They are backed up by a party on the ground that is newly rejuvenated by the audacity of David Cameron and Nick Clegg.

The challenge for our new leader is to harness the energy, focus the attack, build a new vision that challenges the notion of a “big society” and the spurious new politics of the coalition.

So my question to Uncut readers this week is a simple one: what has the new leader got to do to win? If you think you have the answer to this question, or even a partial solution, then I want to hear from you.

Our former general secretary Peter Watt kicks off the discussion. Peter argues that in failing to elect a leader in July, we are already missing out on the opportunity to characterise the opposition as lacking vision. Worse still, we are allowing them to destroy our legacy by besmirching our economic record. Peter carried a heavier load than he deserved for the Labour party.  It is to his credit that he still cares enough about the party to worry about our future.

Tom Watson is the MP for West Bromwich East, a blogger and guest editor of Labour Uncut.

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