2010 « Labour Uncut

Archive for 2010

BBC rules that Strictly will stay a socialist-free zone. No Christmas Mandelson.

22/11/2010, 10:54:24 AM

From: Kate Toft, BBC

To: Dan Hodges, Labour Uncut

Sent: Fri, 19 November, 2010 16:50:27

Subject:

Dear Dan,

I’m responding to your email to Daniel Maynard and your question around political balance on our entertainment show Strictly Come Dancing.

The BBC’s obligation is “due impartiality”. Due impartiality is defined in the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines: “The term ‘due’ means that the impartiality must be adequate and appropriate to the output, taking account of the subject and nature of the content, the likely audience expectation and any signposting that may influence that expectation.”

Strictly is not a political programme it is an entertainment show. The “subject and nature of the content” and “the audience expectation” is rather different.

Both Ann Widdecombe and Vince Cable are huge fans of the show and of ballroom dancing, as is Peter Mandelson, although he declined an offer to take part in the show.

I have no comment to make on reports that Labour MPs are planning to table a House of Commons motion criticising the BBC, if indeed these reports are true.

Regards,

Kate Toft
Head of Communications, Entertainment & Comedy

Posted in Inside | 1 Comment »

The cost-free, universally popular, radical new ideas box

22/11/2010, 08:49:59 AM

by John Woodcock

It is no secret or surprise that ministers and advisers in the last government got hooked on seeing themselves satirised in The Thick of It. But there was one line in particular that summed up the exasperation of office so well that it was quoted back in Whitehall meetings: the line where an irritated adviser responds to a request for an agenda-setting new policy by sarcastically rummaging around in his “radical, cost-free, universally popular” ideas box and declaring it to be empty.

Partly, that just demonstrated how knackered the last administration had become and highlighted Labour’s need to renew and recharge. But The Thick of It did not simply dramatise the Labour government’s decline; the scene mentioned also points to the difficulty faced by any political party when the proposals it seeks to generate to win support actually need to be put into practice.

It is a problem the Tories and Liberal Democrats are facing in spades as they move from opposition to government. Suddenly, the stuff that sounded so catchy on a single-sided press release doesn’t seem quite so realistic when in charge of the department tasked with implementing it.

Tuition fees are the obvious example, of course. Vince Cable even had the chutzpah to explain that he would never have advocated scrapping fees if he had known he was going to be in a position to do something about them – a line beyond satire. (more…)

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Monday News Review

22/11/2010, 08:30:56 AM

Ed is back, and ready to fight

Ed Miliband launches his party on “the hard road back to power”, saying it has to move beyond New Labour and commit to changes in policy and organisation as profound as those introduced by Tony Blair in 1994. He also appears to clash with the shadow chancellor, Alan Johnson, by saying a 50p tax rate for those earning more than £150,000 should be permanent, as a way of creating greater equality in Britain. Making the country more equal, he says, is one of the issues that gets him out of bed in the morning. – The Guardian

He disclosed that a commission on Labour’s organisation would be launched at the weekend. It will cover the contentious issue of leadership elections, including the influence of the unions which ensured he beat his brother, David, despite having less support from Labour MPs and members. There is also to be a policy review starting with “a blank page”, although “not in terms of values”. His views on the tax rate appears to contradict Alan Johnson, the Shadow chancellor, who has said previously that Labour “might not see the need for a 50p tax rate in five years’ time”. But Mr Miliband said the tax rate was not simply about cutting the deficit. “It’s about values and fairness and about the kind of society you believe in and it’s important to me.” – The Telegraph

Former Blairites who carp at Ed Miliband’s leadership are like “twitching corpses”, the Labour leader’s former rival, Ed Balls, said yesterday. Mr Miliband is returning to work today, having taken two weeks’ paternity leave after the birth of his second son, Samuel, amid grumbling in Labour ranks that he has not done enough to define what his leadership stands for. There have also been fresh rumours about plots to unseat Gordon Brown before the general election. But this talk was contemptuously dismissed by Mr Balls yesterday. “The papers are full of all of this sort of twitching of the old corpses of the past. Who cares?” he told the BBC. He also defended the Labour leader’s temporary absence from frontline politics. “He is on paternity leave and I think that’s a really good thing. One of the great changes in the last 10, 15 years under the Labour government was things like paternity leave becoming an accepted part of life. But he’s coming back and he’s going to be fighting hard.” – The Independent (more…)

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The week Uncut

21/11/2010, 09:59:36 PM

In case you missed them, these were the best read pieces on Uncut last week:

India Knight says politicians can’t hide on twitter

Len McCluskey says it’s time to stand up and be counted

Michael Dugher says it’s poor communities which will be cut more than rich

Dan Hodges confesses his love for all things spin

Tom Watson kept an eye out for news buried by the royal wedding

Gavin Hayes thinks the nasty party are back – big time

Eric Joyce says it’s not all that easy for politicians to lie

Jessica Asato says together we are stronger

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Attack, attack, attack

21/11/2010, 05:00:14 PM

by Dan McCurry

The chickens have really come home to roost for the British Labour party. Look at the map that shows the whole of the south of England smothered with Tory blue with only the tiny enclave of inner London bearing the Labour red. This diagram demonstrates the confined extremity of the Labour core vote. It also shows how close we are to being wiped out. If you swapped the constituencies with pictures of cowboys and indians, it would be a diagram of Custer’s last stand.

In all my time as a Labour party member, I have never known this party to be in a greater state of denial. This Kosovo-style social-cleansing is not just nasty but also politically sinister, in that it aims to disperse that red; to disperse our people, our communities. They don’t care where they go, as long as they take their votes with them.

And while all this is happening, we, the Labour party, are slouching about discussing whether we should back AV. Shameful. (more…)

Posted in Grassroots | 4 Comments »

Uncut editorial: Eric Joyce

21/11/2010, 10:00:41 AM

Eric Joyce’s resignation from the front bench, the first of Ed Miliband’s leadership, will not have been met with universal sorrow. Over the past couple of years, Mr Joyce and controversy had become soul mates. He resigned from the government over the conduct of the war in Afghanistan. He was very adversely critical of some in the party leadership, particularly in the area of defence. His article on Uncut this week, condemning the perceived hypocrisy of sections of the electorate, handed further ammunition to his enemies.

But we are told that we live in a time where our politicians know nothing but politics. Eric Joyce joined the Black Watch as an 18 year old private. Through the army he earned himself an education, went to Sandhurst, and worked his way up to a commission and the rank of major. He served in Northern Ireland, Germany and Central America.

We are told that our politicians are loyal only to their own ambition. Eric Joyce resigned from the army, adversely criticising the institution as “racist, sexist and discriminatory”. When he stood down from his position as PPS to defence secretary, Bob Ainsworth, he said, “Above all, Labour must remember that service folk and their families are our people. We say that we honour them for their risk, bravery and sacrifice and we must, at literally all costs, continue to show that we mean it”.

We are told that our politicians lack honesty. On Monday, Eric Joyce wrote, “Here’s the truth. It’s hard to lie as a politician because everything we say is subject to enormous scrutiny – we’ll get found out even if we wanted to lie in the first place. But politicians know the lies a lot of people live and they pitch to you accordingly. There’s a lot of lying going on, for sure. The letters-page paragons are right in that respect. But they might want to reflect on who is really doing the lying”.

A hinterland. Principles. Honesty. These are our political prerequisites.

But there are things we do not want. We do not want to be challenged. We do not want to be questioned. We do not want our imperfections scrutinised by those who may themselves be imperfect.

The mistakes that are the price of our humanity will not be tolerated from those who govern us. They are servants of the public. And the public is a hard taskmaster.

There is no room in our politics for vulnerability, or for weakness. And so there is no room for Eric Joyce.

Posted in Home | 5 Comments »

Sunday News Review

21/11/2010, 07:26:43 AM

A new consensus politics?

Ed Balls, the shadow home secretary, used an interview with The Sunday Telegraph to signal that Labour was ready to abandon its support for the current 28-day regime, introduced by the party when in government. In the party’s most significant move away from the Blair-Brown era, which led to Britain imposing some of the harshest anti-terror laws in any Western democracy, Mr Balls also said Labour was prepared to consider alternatives to control orders. Mr Balls, in his first newspaper interview since being appointed shadow home secretary, admitted Labour’s policies under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, which led to failed attempts to get Parliament to pass laws to permit suspects to be detained without charge for 90 and 42 days, had been a mistake. – Sunday Telegraph

Shadow home secretary Ed Balls said he would support Government plans to reduce the current limit from 28 days to 14 providing it did not hinder police and the security services. “Even 42 days was a step too far. Our reputation as a party which protected liberty as well as security suffered as a result,” he said. “Our approach should always be that, if the evidence shows we can go down from 28 days without impeding the police and security services from doing their jobs, then we ought to do it.” Home Secretary Theresa May announced a review of counter-terror legislation in July in which she backed a 14-day limit, a move supported by the Liberal Democrats. Mr Ball’s admission opens the way for a cross-party consensus. – Sky News

Mandelson vs Miliband

Peter Mandelson has added to the growing pressure on Ed Miliband, claiming the Labour leader had insulted him by saying he should be ‘packed off to an old folk’s home’. In a new war of words between the two men, Lord Mandelson suggested Mr Miliband was devious and had secretly plotted against Tony Blair. And he contemptuously dismissed him, saying he had ‘never seriously thought of him’ as a leader. His scathing comments follow a growing revolt against Mr Miliband from both sides of the Labour Party. Blairite figures such as Lord Mandelson, who backed Mr Miliband’s older brother David in the leadership contest, have launched a new bid to stop the Left-winger’s attempt to bury Tony Blair’s New Labour. – Mail on Sunday (more…)

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Labour must be prepared to challenge the right-wing press

20/11/2010, 12:44:59 PM

by John Tipper

It was only as the march slowed on the approach to the Tate that I was able to take a good look at the crowd. To my left was the Buckinghamshire New University hockey team, who in addition to their sporting livery were wearing blue foam antlers; even then they struck me as unlikely to lead an armed insurrection, although I also concluded that if they did it would be worth sticking around for.

Directly ahead, a student had clambered onto a bin and was pleading for somebody to hand him a sign. Somebody did, apparently without noticing that it was in Welsh – cue much good-humoured speculation from the non-Celtic contingent about what it might actually say.

Amongst the forest of placards I noticed slogans bracingly direct (“Fuck Fees”) and oblique (“Would you cut a CAT? Then why cut EduCATion?”) and cursed myself again for forgetting mine.

At one point I observed a burly fellow with a beard and a Lib Dem sticker attempting a spirited if unconvincing defence of Nick Clegg – he’s got the tuition fees issue wrong but he’s a decent guy, always polite and nicely turned out etc. But not only was he pleasingly juxtaposed against a sign depicting Clegg as a weasel, I also began to suspect that his fellow Liberals Against Fees were not wholly in agreement. Some were loudly shushing, but most of them simply wore the pained expression of a pre-teen whose parents have insisted on dropping them right outside the gates on their first day of secondary school. (more…)

Posted in Grassroots | 8 Comments »

Saturday News Review

20/11/2010, 08:04:12 AM

Lord Young gone, but Tories still are the nasty party

David Cameron’s enterprise adviser resigned yesterday after he undermined the Government’s attempts to show a caring face by saying that most Britons had “never had it so good”. Lord Young of Graffham, a 78-year-old former Cabinet minister who served under Margaret Thatcher, bowed to Labour demands for him to quit for saying that many people had gained from low interest and mortgage rates in what he labelled a “so-called recession”. Tory MPs hope Lord Young’s departure will limit the damage from the affair, which threatened to undo painstaking efforts by Mr Cameron and the Chancellor, George Osborne, to soften the “uncaring” image associated with the Conservatives during the recessions of the 1980s and 1990s. – Independent

David Cameron yesterday suffered a humiliating defeat in his fight to save the adviser who claimed recession-hit Britons had “never had it so good”. The Prime Minister desperately tried to cling on to enterprise tsar Lord Young, a pal since the days when they both served Margaret Thatcher. But Mr Cameron was forced to accept the peer’s resignation – just hours after insisting he should keep his job. Number 10 eventually announced the peer had lost his job shortly after 1pm. The PM accepted his resignation without speaking to the peer, a spokeswoman said. – Mirror

His words echoed those of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, a former Conservative prime minister, who was accused of insensitivity to hard-pressed Britons when he said in 1957 that “most of our people have never had it so good.” They were also seen as undermining Mr. Cameron’s efforts to present his government as keenly attuned to the hardships experienced by Britain’s 60 million people, including 2.5 million unemployed. The prime minister first described Lord Young’s statement as “unacceptable” and said he would be doing “a bit less speaking in the future,” but as the political storm over the remarks continued to build, 10 Downing Street announced within hours that Mr. Cameron had accepted Lord Young’s resignation. – New York Times

54 in all

The controversy over honours for political benefactors was reopened today with the appointment of a clutch of party donors and political apparatchiks as working peers. The millionaire car importer Bob Edmiston, who gave £2m to the Tories, the Conservative party treasurer Stanley Fink, and the Labour donor Sir Gulam Noon were among 54 new working peers announced by Downing Street today. Howard Flight, a former deputy chairman of the Conservative party, and Tina Stowell, a former deputy chief of staff to William Hague when he was opposition leader, were also on the list. Better-known names include the screenwriter Julian Fellowes, celebrity divorce solicitor Fiona Shackleton and the former defence chief General Sir Richard Dannatt. – Guardian

David Cameron was yesterday accused of cronyism after packing the House of Lords with Tory donors. Angry Labour leader Ed Miliband claimed the move was undemocratic. The PM has put forward 29 Tories for working peerages, compared to 15 Lib Dems and 10 for Labour. In a letter to Mr Cameron, Mr Miliband complains: “These appointments would create an even bigger majority for the Coalition in the Lords and risk reducing its role to a mere rubber stamp for the House of Commons.” – Mirror

It is a sign of how confident David Cameron is feeling that he has risked the reopening of the whole class question. A few MPs who stood down have received peerages — Sir Patrick Cormack, David Maclean, and Richard Spring — and there are the usual smattering of donors, though Sir Anthony Bamford is conspicuously absent from the list. The Labour list shows Ed Miliband’s intellectualism: three of his ten peers are academics. Maurice Glassman’s acceptance of a peerage is a coup for Ed Miliband given how hard the Tories have courted London Citizens, the community organising group that Glassman works with. – Spectator

Joyce loses job and dignity

Labour MP Eric Joyce stepped down as shadow Northern Ireland minister last night after he was banned from driving for a year. The 50-year-old ex-Army major had appeared at Falkirk Sheriff Court handcuffed to a custody officer yesterday where he pled guilty to failing to provide a breath sample. The MP for Falkirk was arrested near Grangemouth oil refinery on Thursday and held in custody overnight pending his court appearance. He was fined £400 and banned from driving for a year. – Herald

Joyce, shadow Northern Ireland spokesman, last night said he was “deeply ashamed of his actions” after being held by police at a petrochemical plant in his constituency. He added: “I have been incredibly stupid and rightly suffered the penalty for it. I want to apologise unreservedly to those I have let down.” He said: “I had one of those bottles of wine on the plane, but not excessive.” But he refused to give a breath sample, saying he wanted to speak to a solicitor first. He was charged with failing to give a sample without reasonable excuse. – Scotsman

Harman hosted coup attempt

Harriet Harman’s pivotal role in an attempted coup against Gordon Brown has been laid bare in an explosive book on New Labour. Miss Harman, then as now deputy party leader, encouraged and supported the bid by former ministers Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt. The revelations – in a book by respected political historians Anthony Seldon and Guy Lodge raise major questions about the loyalty of the woman who is now deputy to Labour leader Ed Miliband. It also reveals the treachery of Lord Mandelson, Jack Straw and Alan Johnson and a string of Cabinet ministers. It goes to the very heart of the plot to unseat Mr Brown. – Daily Mail

Ed returns

Ed Miliband will attempt to “hit the ground running” to stabilise his leadership when he returns from paternity leave on Monday. Party sources say Labour’s leader will end his first week with an announcement at the National Policy Forum of a special commission to review how the organisation is set up. Pressure on Mr Miliband to deliver has ramped up in recent days, amid party in-fighting and even suggestions from some MPs that he might not lead them into the next general election in 2015. – Evening Standard

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Together we are stronger

19/11/2010, 04:42:56 PM

by Jessica Asato

Is social action ‘un-Labour’? On Twitter, I recently praised this Progress article by Tessa Jowell. In it she describes what fun she and her local party had during a day of volunteering in her constituency clearing flower beds, planting bulbs and launching a new tenants’ association. I suggested in my Tweet that this is the sort of grassroots community engagement local CLPs across the country should be emulating.

I wasn’t prepared for the reaction which came from two Labour councillors and campaigners whom I much admire – Antonia Bance and Luke Akehurst. “We’re not Tories; our social action is making the system work for ordinary people, not isolated acts of benevolence”, wrote Antonia. “I’m with Antonia on this”, wrote Luke, “I think it’s a bit tokenistic and a sticking plaster where we need a shield”.

I can see where they are both coming from. Labour people shouldn’t have any truck with the idea of noblesse oblige or that entrenched social and economic inequalities can be transformed by acts of charity. Or “the big society”, for that matter.

But if Labour members plant some bulbs with local residents, this can’t mean that they have capitulated to one nation Toryism? Our history should tell us otherwise. The strike by the Bryant and May factory girls in the late nineteenth century was an impressive display of the growing power of organised labour, but it was still supported by the soup kitchens of the salvation army. Early socialists did not just agitate for justice, they tried to build it through social activism. The two should not be mutually exclusive.

Matt Carter, in his fantastic, if dense, book on TH Green and the development of ethical socialism, writes that this strand of Labour’s early thinking places “individual moral development and character above simple state reforms”. According to Carter, ethical socialism recognises that “however beneficial state action is, it cannot simply force through social improvement”. If one lesson should be learnt from the last 13 years of Labour in power, it is that unless we take the public with us, our progressive reforms will be smashed to pieces the moment we are out of it. Too often, New Labour imposed change on our poorest communities, rather than taking them on a journey where citizens felt they owned that change.

Planting bulbs may seem a far cry from a discussion about the role of the state, but reconnecting with people, in a soggy trousers, dirty hands sort of a way, is essential if we want to engage in a wider debate about what the party should do in power. This is what David Miliband understood when he launched the movement for change as part of his leadership campaign. In his Keir Hardie lecture, Miliband spoke of how the Labour movement was “built on ethical relationships that were forged between people through common action”, and how Hardie embodied this: “Hardie was not a mechanical reformer who tried to bring about change through external control. He was a moral reformer who understood that you cannot create virtuous people by bureaucratic methods”.

Of course, it would be better if the system ran perfectly, with the state keeping flower beds neat and the new tenants’ association not needing Labour’s support to get it going. But there should be more to Labour’s aims than keeping the bureaucracy in check. Our mission should be to help build the conditions necessary for people to become the best they can be, in a society which is the best it can be. Robert Putnam’s seminal paper, Bowling Alone, developed the theory that the decline of situations in which people could interact socially had led to a decline in trust and political engagement. In its simplest form, when we get together with others we develop bonds which make it easier to trust one another and understand differences. We share knowledge, networks, news, jokes and cups of tea, which helps society to rub along better. Facilitating these opportunities should partly be Labour’s role. If we say we speak on behalf of deprived communities, that has to be real, otherwise we take these people’s names in vain.

No one is saying that members from local parties scrubbing off graffiti will solve the deficit or poverty. (Well, except for some Tories perhaps). But it helps to open up a conversation which is far better than “can I ask which political party you usually support at election time”? That has to be a step forward.

Jessica Asato is a social media consultant and Islington councillor.

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