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Archive for February, 2011

The Sunday Review: The Fighter

06/02/2011, 01:22:54 PM

by Siôn Simon

By coincidence, I re-watched Rocco ei suoi fratelli (Rocco and his brothers) a few weeks before going to see The Fighter. Visconti’s family melodrama had its half century last year. It is one of the best films ever made. Claudia Cardinale is beautiful, Alain Delon even more so. The moral ugliness of the older brother, Simone, is terrible. The pain inflicted and borne for no reason, the need to hurt mixed in with love, tell enduring truths about families and relationships. It is an operatic, Shakespearean film.

The same cannot quite be said of The Fighter. But Mark Wahlberg’s David O. Russell-directed biopic of Micky Ward is another boxing film which is actually about families, not boxing. And, even if it is not quite Rocco, it is a good film.

And the similarities between the triumvirates at the heart of the two films are striking. (more…)

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The week Uncut

06/02/2011, 10:30:09 AM

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

Atul Hatwal says don’t believe the hype, Labour isn’t surging ahead

Richard Burden thinks the small change to AV could make a big difference

But Michael Dugher says the whole debate is a waste of time and money

Sally Bercow wants exploitatively high-cost lending to stop

Kevin Meagher says choosing office over power has destroyed the Lib Dems

Anthony Painter asks if the movement for change is the right direction

Andy Dodd takes a look at the big society and finds a hollow sham

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Sunday News Review

06/02/2011, 06:50:43 AM

10,000 Police to go

The Labour party has released data collated from police forces across England and Wales that shows 10,190 police officers are to be cut during the coming two years. In addition thousands of staff jobs will be cut or have already gone – meaning more administrative work must be carried out by police officers. Labour’s research of all police authorities (except City of London Police and non-geographical forces) has found that thousands of full time police officers are set to be axed, or have already been cut, from police forces across the UK. The research showed that 40 of the 42 forces surveyed had announced the numbers of officers likely to be cut with Gwent and Essex Police yet to declare the size of reductions to be seen. Labour says the figures expose the claim from the Tory-led Government that they can cut the Police budget by 20 per cent and still protect the frontline as false. Yvette Cooper MP, Labour’s Shadow Home Secretary, said: “These figures show the shocking and brutal reality of the 20 per cent police cuts. Far from protecting frontline policing as Ministers promised, over 10,000 police officers are being cut in the next few years alone. – professionalpolice.com

Police numbers in England and Wales will fall by more than 10,000 by the end of next year, according to new research by the Labour Party. That total will almost certainly rise as a third of forces have yet to complete their calculations. Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said: “These figures show the shocking and brutal reality of the 20 per cent police cuts.” But Police Minister Nick Herbert questions her findings, and insists police numbers would have fallen under Labour’s plans. He also says that by making efficiency savings, forces can prioritise the frontline “so that service to the public is maintained and improved”. However, Labour has garnered its information from published material from individual police forces. – Sky News

No money for tax cuts

The Prime Minister says the growing demand to reduce the tax burden for millions of families, facing higher prices and the threat of job losses, “does not add up” in the current climate. He also rules out a “Plan B” on economic policy in the wake of official figures showing the economy shrinking by 0.5 per cent in the final quarter of last year, which sparked fears of a double-dip recession. The Prime Minister also suggests the government will not take further action against bankers’ bonuses, arguing that he is not interested in giving banks a “kick in the pants” – but in getting them lending again, particularly to small businesses. Bob Diamond, the chief executive of Barclays, is set to get a £9 million bonus this year. Stuart Gulliver, the new chief executive of HSBC, is also expected to get a bonus of as much as £9 million later this month. Mr Cameron points out his government is protecting the poorest and lifting tens of thousands out of tax altogether by changing tax thresholds. He insists he leads a “pro-enterprise government”. – Daily Telegraph

David Cameron has ruled out ‘significant’ tax cuts while the Government is cutting spending to reduce the deficit. The Prime Minister said he wanted to offer people ‘relief’, but suggested that would only be possible ‘at the end of this hard road’. His comments came ahead of the much anticipated March 23 Budget. David Cameron has ruled out ‘significant’ tax cuts in the forthcoming Budget, despite wanting to offer people ‘relief’ Chancellor George Osborne is facing calls to reduce the burden on hard-pressed voters as inflation spirals. Tory Mayor of London Boris Johnson urged him last month to set out ‘a clear direction of travel’ on how taxes could be reduced. But Mr Cameron insisted there was no ‘Plan B’ on the coalition’s deficit-reduction strategy and said tax cuts would only undo the work of painful curbs in public spending. ‘I would love to see tax reductions. I’m a tax-cutting Tory and I believe in tax cuts, but when you’re borrowing 11 per cent of your GDP, it’s not possible to make significant net tax cuts. It just isn’t,’ he said in an interview with The Sunday Telegraph. ‘It’s no good saying we’re going to deal with the deficit by cutting spending, but then we’re going to make things worse again by cutting taxes. I’m afraid it doesn’t add up.’ Later in the interview, he added: ‘Do I want to see, at the end of this hard road, relief and lower taxes for hard-working people? Yes I do.’ – Daily Mail

Anti AV campaign gathers pace

Campaigners against electoral reform are to distribute six million leaflets taunting Nick Clegg for describing the proposed alternative vote (AV) system as a “miserable little compromise” before the last general election. The No to AV campaign, whose push to maintain the “first past the post” system is backed by David Cameron, believes that Clegg’s assessment of AV last April fatally undermines his case for adopting the method as it shows that even he is unenthusiastic. The leaflet campaign is part of a push by the cross-party “no” camp to associate AV in the public mind with the Liberal Democrat leader and his party, whose popularity has plummeted since the pre-election upsurge of “Cleggmania”. The “no” campaign includes veteran Labour veterans and street-fighters such as John Prescott, Margaret Beckett and John Reid, and is expected to adopt a ruthless approach in its attempt to deprive the Lib Dems of a trophy that would cement the coalition and boost the party’s chances of playing “kingmaker” in future governments. In another sign of the “go for Clegg” strategy, Joan Ryan, deputy director of No to AV, who is a former Labour MP, accused advocates of the new system of trying to hide the Lib Dem leader before the campaign proper has even begun. – the Guardian

Livermore has another life

Ed Miliband has offered a job to a former aide of Gordon Brown who claimed to have been unfairly blamed along with the new Labour leader for 2007’s on-off Election fiasco. Spencer Livermore, Mr Brown’s Director of Political Strategy, visited Mr Miliband’s Commons office last week for talks on a new role. Mr Livermore resigned from No 10 following Mr Brown’s disastrous decision to call off a snap Election in the autumn of 2007. The aide was said to have been reduced to tears by the notoriously hot-tempered Prime Minister. Although Mr Livermore denied the claim, sources say he was badly scarred and had to be comforted by friends. Labour insiders say Mr Miliband wants Slough-born Mr Livermore, 35 – judged by Pink News as the most powerful gay man in Britain when he worked at No 10 – to join his team.‘He has one of the sharpest brains in politics. He’d be a tremendous asset,’ said a source. ‘He understands voters’ instincts better than anyone.’ Mr Livermore originally worked alongside Mr Miliband when they were advising Mr Brown as Chancellor. Later the pair were among the few aides in the room when Mr Brown aborted his November 2007 Election proposal. Mr Livermore said that immediately after the meeting Mr Miliband observed: ‘I bet within 20 minutes we find we’re going to get the blame for this.’ – Daily Mail

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The “big society” is just a big sham

05/02/2011, 10:30:25 AM

by Andy Dodd

The prime minister, as we know, is very fond of the “big society”, the notion that the government can be rolled back to allow individuals and communities to do more to help themselves and each other. How often have we been told in the past nine months that everyone, equally, is in this together? How often have we heard the lecture that through co-operation, self-sacrifice and personal responsibility, we’ll pull through this difficult economic period and emerge stronger on the other side?

But are we really all in it together? The recent by-election in Oldham showed the clear resentment of ordinary people who not so long ago were willing to accept the arguments put forward by the government that tough economic decisions were necessary to avoid disaster. This belief was built upon promises from ministers that everyone would be asked to make their contribution to the hard times ahead. (more…)

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Saturday News Review

05/02/2011, 06:44:06 AM

More damning evidence on Coulson and Cameron

In written evidence to the Commons Home Affairs Committee, which is investigating allegations of widespread hacking by the Sunday tabloid, Paul McMullan, a former features editor, said that the practice was widespread and “easy”. He insisted that Mr Coulson, who finally left No. 10 on Tuesday and denies knowledge of any phone tapping during his time as editor of the paper, knew that “a lot of people did it” at both the News of the World and its sister paper, The Sun. “The real scandal is [David] Cameron would have been briefed ‘We can probably get away with this one,’ when hiring Coulson, so Mr Cameron is either a liar or an idiot,” he went on. Mr McMullan, who has left journalism and now runs a pub in Dover, Kent, also claimed that employees of the mobile phone company Vodafone, “people at the tax office” and doctors’ receptionists would telephone reporters offering to “sell numbers and codes of stars’ phones”. Admitting that he himself frequently hacked into phones, he claimed that Mr Coulson would have been aware of what he and others were doing. – Daily Telegraph

Andy Coulson was aware that phone hacking was taking place at Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper empire and “told others to do it”, a former executive at the News of the World told MPs. In written evidence given to the home affairs select committee and published for the first time today, Paul McMullan, a former features executive and investigative journalist at the title, said former editor Coulson “knew a lot of people” used the technique when Coulson worked at sister paper the Sun. He joined the News of the World in 2003, where he worked alongside McMullan for 18 months. McMullan said: “As he sat a few feet from me in the [News of the World] newsroom he probably heard me doing it, laughing about it … and told others to do it”. McMullan told the Guardian last year that Coulson must have been well aware the practice was “pretty widespread”. Coulson has continued to deny this. The director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer, also confirmed in written evidence to MPs he has instructed the Crown Prosecution Service to adopt a far broader definition of what constitutes illegal phone hacking. This decision makes fresh prosecutions more likely. The CPS announced a new investigation into phone hacking last month. News International says McMullan’s evidence is unreliable and will demand evidence is withdrawn or corrected. The home affairs committee will publish its report into unauthorised phone hacking in the spring. David Cameron was, meanwhile, accused tonight of “breathtaking arrogance” for refusing to answer questions about his links to Murdoch’s media empire, which owns the Sun and News of the World. – the Guardian

Sorry Sally

A Government minister yesterday told the publicity-mad Speaker’s wife “to shut up and cover up” after she posed in just a bedsheet in an interview on her sex life. Children’s Minister Tim Loughton hit out as Sally Bercow defended the controversial snap. Mrs Bercow, 41, admitted she was “a fool” to pose but insisted the snap was tasteful. Sally, whose outbursts have built her a profile to rival hubby John, 48, added: “I’m a personality, I’ve got ambitions.”Responding to Mr Loughton’s tweet, she wrote on Twitter: “I always pass on good advice. It’s never of use to oneself.” Earlier, she told BBC Radio 5 Live her husband was “not exactly thrilled” about her interview with a London paper. But she dismissed critics who said her actions belittle the dignity of his Commons role. She said: “Should I be a wife who walks dutifully three paces behind my husband, keeps her mouth shut and makes cucumber sandwiches? It was a bit of fun, but it backfired.” – the Sun

Sally Bercow, the wife of the House of Commons Speaker, John Bercow, today admitted a newspaper photo of her wearing a bedsheet had made her look a “complete idiot” and that her attempt at a bit of harmless fun had “completely backfired”. But despite her apparent contrition, Bercow insisted the revealing photo was “tasteful” and that she found the situation quite funny. She attracted criticism for a photoshoot, in which she stood by a hotel window, clad in a white sheet with the House of Commons in the background. The photo was taken to accompany an Evening Standard interview, due to be published today, in which she described the aphrodisiac effect on the couple’s life at the Palace of Westminster. She told the paper’s magazine section that she found living in a grace-and-favour apartment in the building “sexy”, and that both she and her husband had been “hit on” more since he was elevated from a Tory backbencher to the Speaker’s role in June 2009. Today, Bercow went on Victoria Derbyshire’s BBC Radio 5 Live show and admitted she was “probably stupid” to do the interview and had been a “fool” to agree to be photographed in the sheet as part of the newspaper’s Valentine’s Day coverage. – the Guardian

Not there yet on the AV Bill

Labour’s Lord Falconer has said there is still “work to do” if a bill setting up a referendum on the Westminster voting system is to get through.It follows a marathon 15-day debate on one stage of the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill. A compromise was reached to end it but the bill returns to the Lords next week. It must be law by 16 February if a referendum is to be held on 5 May. Lord Falconer told the BBC’s Record Review: “There isn’t a deal yet.” The shadow justice minister said agreement had been reached on “certain aspects” of the bill – but added: “There is still work to do.” – the BBC

Campbell stands up for Scottish school

He was renowned for piping up for the New Labour cause. But now Alastair Campbell, the bagpipe-playing former spin doctor to Tony Blair, has become the latest high-profile figure to join the growing chorus of condemnation against the threatened closure of a traditional school of music in the Highlands. The National Centre of Excellence in Traditional Music at Plockton High School is facing the axe following the announcement that Highland Council plans to withdraw its funding of £317,000 for the facility as part of a package of spending cuts. The centre opened in 2000 after receiving £650,000 from the Scottish Executive and has produced many award-winning musicians over the last decade. Mr Campbell said yesterday that he had been made aware of the threat facing the school by a friend and had been highlighting its plight on his Twitter and Facebook pages. The former director of communications at Downing Street, whose father is a Scot, said: “I wanted to support this because I think it is important. It looks to me like an easy target in a way. “And it’s one of those things that, unless enough people raise their voices in support of it, it could just go without a fight and I think that would be wrong.” – the Scotsman

Every little (vote) counts

Labour surged from bottom of the poll to the top when it snatched a surprise council by-election breakthrough. Candidate Brian Oosthuysen won Gloucestershire’s Rodborough division by a margin of three over the Tories, with a votes share surge of nearly 20% for the party since the last county contests in 2009. This is particularly encouraging for Labour’s chiefs since it trailed a poor fourth last time. Rodborough is part of marginal Stroud constituency, lost to the Tories at the General Election. – the Independent

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Is he or isn’t he – the mystery of Richard Carvath

04/02/2011, 03:30:02 PM

by Victoria Williams

Where do former Conservative party members go to die? Not, as one would hope, to Eastbourne. Rather, it seems that they are taking to the blogosphere. Formerly actual and currently self-styled “Conservative activist“, Richard Carvath, first emerged from the political ether as an independent candidate for Salford and Eccles in last year’s general election. He has been causing something of a stir ever since. Of which more later. First, some background.

Carvath was unceremoniously booted from the nasty party back in 2008, after annoucing his opposition to Stonewall, and publically declaring “Allah is actually Satan“. Ever since, he’s taken to the internet with gusto, becoming a lean, mean, tweeting, blogging machine. After a brief flirtation with Islamophobia, the hardline Christian turned his attentions to homosexuality, and hasn’t looked back since.

All of which was fairly inconsequential when he was a failed independent who garnered just 0.9% of the vote in the general election. But having already received a written warning from Manchester police after previous internet comments about the Tory selection for the area, he managed to put himself right back on the map in November last year, with this blogpost. (more…)

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Movement for change: the man who coined the phrase questions its embrace by Labour

04/02/2011, 11:47:10 AM

by Anthony Painter

It is rum that community organising has risen to such prominence as a result of the election of Barack Obama. Because, of course, he would never have been president had he not turned his back on community organising. By the time he went to Harvard to study law, he had lost faith in the ability of organising to achieve significant change.

One of his leading activists turned around one day and said to the young Barack, “Ain’t nothing gonna change, Mr Obama. We just gonna concentrate on saving our money so we can move outta here as fast as we can”.

David Mendell, Obama’s biographer, also chronicles his loss of faith in organising by his third year on the south side of Chicago. He had come to the conclusion that without hard political power, his time was wasted. Upon the untimely death of his political hero, Harold Washington, Obama “felt shackled by the limited power of a small nonprofit group to create expansive change”, writes Mendell.

His campaign certainly adopted some of the insights of the community organising tradition: focus on organisation building, networked through kith and kin, focus on the ultra-local. Equally, it concentrated ruthlessly on hard political power, was centrally directed and had intense message discipline. In other words, its core narrative came from the top, while its organisation reached into community grassroots. It was focused on the hard power of community campaigning rather than the soft power of community organising.

When the Birmingham Edgbaston campaign looked to learn from the success of Obama ’08, it sought to understand it as a community-based hard political campaign, as opposed to looking back at Obama’s community organising years. Obama ’08 – the movement for change – was a political movement. Its plan was to mirror the “new (political) organiser” model described by Zack Exley, and then develop ever more sophisticated means of issue-based community engagement once victory had been secured. And that is what it is now doing. (more…)

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Polls apart – don’t believe the hype, Labour isn’t surging ahead

04/02/2011, 07:00:25 AM

by Atul Hatwal

Labour’s lead has “surged” to 8 points. So says Anthony Wells at YouGov after the latest Sun tracker had Labour on 44% and the Tories on 36%. Time for champagne?

Not quite.

As Wells points out, given the margin of error, it’s no more meaningful than the narrow 2 point lead posted earlier in the week. Lurking in the detail of YouGov’s latest weekly poll for the Sunday Times were some interesting figures that give a bit of insight behind why an 8 point tracker lead doesn’t signal lift-off.

One of the standard questions asked in this survey over the past seven months has been “how do you think the financial situation of your household will change in the next twelve months”?

It’s an important question in gauging people’s perceptions of how the cuts will impact them personally. (more…)

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Friday News Review

04/02/2011, 06:45:02 AM

Ed fights for ‘betrayed generation’

Young people today will be the first generation for 100 years who will end up worse off than their parents. So the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, will say in a speech today. It is a profound insight into what could become the defining political issue of the decades to come. The generation which shaped the modern world grew up in an era in which, as the then prime minister Harold Macmillan put it, people had “never had it so good”. So it proved. Average incomes soared, life expectancy rose, infant mortality rates plummeted. Modern medicines staved off cancer, heart disease and countless other diseases. Universities were free. Jobs were plentiful. Pensions were sound. House prices climbed inexorably, creating nice equity nest-eggs for owners who sat back and did nothing. The unwritten covenant – that parents create better lives for their children, and in return those children finance the care of their parents in their old age – has been broken. Mr Miliband has put his finger on something here which the nation intuitively knows to be true. Polls show a deep sense of pessimism among voters. Almost three-quarters of the nation believes life will be harder for children. Yet having crystallised this perception, Mr Miliband now needs to formulate the policies to deal with a world in which Britain is going to have a lot more older people who will need a lot more looking after – and far fewer younger folk to pay for it. That long-term demographic imbalance could prove a more grievous legacy than our current economic predicament. – the Independent

Mr Miliband will claim today the ‘British promise’ that each generation will do better than the last has been broken. But he will refuse to acknowledge that Labour failed to reverse a decline in social mobility during its 13 years in power. Instead, he hopes to attract the votes of younger people by pinning the blame on the Coalition, highlighting the increase in tuition fees and the scaling back of the educational maintenance allowance. Mr Miliband will warn that for the first time in more than a century there is a risk that young people will find it harder than their parents to continue in education, get a decent job and own their own home. In a speech in Gateshead, he will highlight ‘the British promise’ that ‘each generation will pass on to the next a life of greater opportunity, prosperity and happiness. There is now a legitimate fear the British promise will be broken and the next generation will have fewer opportunities and find it harder to get on than the last,’ Mr Miliband will say. A Labour source added: ‘Ed will not thoughtlessly defend everything Labour did in power. ‘We wish we had done more to address inequalities.’ – Daily Mail (more…)

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We need the Marshall plan for Egypt that wasn’t ready for Iraq

03/02/2011, 06:00:55 PM

What is really happening in Egypt? And why? The country was close to collapse before the people took to the streets. Inflation has risen over 40% in the last three years, unemployment is rising, and the world food programme reports that almost 20% of its population live under the poverty line. Egypt was cracking under the weight of rocketing food prices, people were angry and Mubarak was the legitimate target.

But simply to remove Mubarak and “leave Egypt alone”, as Simon Jenkins argued this week would be as much a dereliction of duty as neglecting to rebuild Iraq after the tanks had removed Saddam Hussein. What has history taught us, if not that the way to provide a stable democratic government is not to leave a country on its knees, but to stretch out our hand and help it to its feet?

The connection has been often been made with the 1989 uprisings in Eastern Europe, but this is misleading. No matter how paranoid our vision of Islam may be, countries such as Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan are separate entities that have no overarching common idealogical enemy as the Soviet Union was.

Rather, we should be looking at how another recession started in the US (in 1929) affected the world. Then, unstable countries suffocated on their debt, were powerless to act as banks collapsed, unemployment rose and food prices rose, leading to the instability and helplessness that laid the grounds for extremism to rise in 1933. The similarities are striking. If the geographical focus has shifted from central Europe to southern Europe and the Middle East.

The historical exemplar should be the Marshall Plan, and the government and relief in occupied areas (GARIOA) that freely gave Europe and Japan the means to get back to their feet. This altruism after the second world war is the one of the few examples of intervention leading to stable government and the flourishing of democracy.

After so much blood on our hands from pushing the region from one post to another, walking away from the Middle East may seem like a logical step; but it would also be the cowardly one. Let’s be brave enough to swallow our pride, accept our mistakes and, instead of providing the gun, offer the real tangible support of a friend.

The question is: with our own wealth being squeezed, will we realise that the only way to provide long term stability to the Middle East is to put into place the structural and industrial practices that will ultimately lead to long term self reliance of these soon to be emerging democracies?

Ranjit Sidhu blogs here.

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