July « 2012 « Labour Uncut

Archive for July, 2012

Time for policy in the pub with Sadiq Khan

09/07/2012, 07:27:19 PM

The government might be engaged in a slow motion, policy car crash over Lords reform, but could you do better? Really?

OK, it’s highly likely that Stevie Wonder at the wheel of a McLaren, going the wrong way round the Hanger Lane Gyratory System, would be a case study in safety compared to the attempts of this government’s business managers to steer Lords reform through parliament. But how much better could you do?

Well, here’s your chance to show the world. It’s that time of the month again. It’s policy in the pub with the Pragmatic Radicalism funsters. This month, the topic is justice and constitutional reform with our shadow justice secretary, Sadiq Khan in the chair.

You know the format – 90 seconds on your policy idea, quick-fire questions and then the popular vote. It will all be happening tomorrow night, the 10^th of July, at the Barley Mow Pub (upstairs restaurant), 104 Horseferry Road, Westminster, London, SW1P 2EE, between 1900 and 2100.

The winning idea will be automatically adopted as the first policy in Labour’s next manifesto.

Alright, that last bit isn’t quite true. But the winner does get a slot on Uncut to share their insight with the viewing public, so that’s nearly as good.

See you in the pub.

Posted in Home | 1 Comment »

Getting it right on House of Lords reform

09/07/2012, 07:00:43 AM

by Wayne David

Tomorrow the House of Commons will vote on whether to give the government’s House of Lords Reform Bill a second reading. Labour will vote in favour because we believe in principle that the House of Lords should be democratically elected. This was a commitment we expressed in our general election manifesto and it is a view we still hold firmly.

But this is not to suggest that this is a “good” bill. Far from it. The government’s proposals are poorly thought-out and need to be radically improved.

One of the biggest weaknesses in the bill is its failure to set out how the House of Commons and the reformed chamber will relate to each other.

At present, the primacy of the House of Commons rests upon the Parliament Act, a set of “conventions” and the fact that the House of Commons, because it is elected, has a legitimacy which is lacked by the House of Lords. The government has said that the Parliament Act will remain in force but that it believes that the existing conventions will simply continue and post-reform the relationship will be unproblematic.

This view flies in the face of virtually all informed opinion and it defies common sense: once you have an elected second chamber without clear rules, or explicit conventions, it is inevitable that the members of that chamber will feel that they have a democratic authority to challenge the House of Commons.

The result will be that the two chambers could be locked in endless conflict, resulting in government grinding to a halt.

(more…)

Posted in Uncut | 6 Comments »

The Sunday review:How democratic is the UK? The 2012 audit by Stuart Wilks-Heeg, Andrew Blick and Stephen Crone for Democratic Audit

08/07/2012, 07:00:40 AM

by Anthony Painter

In the time before everyone on the centre-left and beyond was talking about Amartya Sen, he wrote a book called Development as Freedom. The reason for bringing this up is that the book was a powerful reminder of why democracy is important –something we seem to have forgotten. In some parts of the world as well as in our own historical experience, it is a matter of life and death. Here is Sen on politics and famines:

“Famines have occurred in ancient kingdoms and contemporary authoritarian societies, in primitive tribal communities and in modern technocratic dictatorships, in colonial economies run by imperialists from the north and in newly independent countries of the south run by despotic national leaders or by intolerant single parties. But they have never materialized [sic] in any country that is independent, that goes to elections regularly, that has opposition parties to voice criticisms and that permits newspapers to report freely and question the wisdom of government policies without extensive censorship.”

For Sen, the reason for this is democracy is a basic human capability. It is part of being human in an enlightened sense, it enables us to press for our needs to be met and the process itself helps us to understand what we need and how we can cooperate or support collective provision to ensure that those needs are met.

Now, the UK is not despotic, no longer imperialistic and it is has a free press and democratic choice. No famine is on the way. Yet Sen’s perspective still should raise our alarm bells that, in its latest four yearly report, Democratic Audit comes to the conclusion that the UK’s representative democracy is “in long-term, terminal decline, but not no viable alternative model of democracy currently exists.”

Not only is our democracy faltering and floundering, our democratic reformers have, since Labour’s early reforms in the late 1990s and early 2000s, largely failed to find a convincing story of why that should concern us.

(more…)

Posted in Uncut | 9 Comments »

The hard left is on the march and in no mood to stop

06/07/2012, 08:00:42 AM

by Atul Hatwal

The first skirmish is over. The unions have drawn blood. On Tuesday, Progress released its statement describing a series of changes to its internal operation. They were all reasonable changes, but this was never about reforming Progress.

If this row had truly been about the governance of pressure groups active within Labour, then a lot of other organisations would have been in the frame.

The Labour Representation Committee (LRC) for one. Founded in 2004 (though bearing the name of an illustrious forbear), the LRC is open to non-Labour party members, affiliated to such sage organisations as the New Communist Party and Permanent Revolution and has the primary purpose of taking control of Labour party constituency parties to help shift national policy so far to the left, the 1983 manifesto would look Blairite.

Nothing to see here guv. No scrutiny needed at all.

No, this was never about the “acceptable standards of democracy, governance and transparency” trumpeted by the ASLEF motion targeting Progress that is still in the process of being submitted to Labour conference.

It’s one of the hallmarks of how far the party has stepped through the hard left’s looking glass that so many Labour commentators have just accepted the assumption that Progress were a problem.

Following Tuesday’s statement, “peace with honour” was the description used by Mark Ferguson at Labour List. Why not go the whole hog, wave a bit of paper about and proclaim “peace in our time”.

In actual fact, there’s no need. “Peace with honour” were the words used by Chamberlain to describe his thoroughly successful jaunt to Munich, when talking to reporters on the doorstep of Number 10.

Strange how that phrase sprang to mind.

Because this was never about the alleged substance of the issue, Progress’ statement will not be the end of the conflict. Why should it? The unions and left have just won a significant victory. Why stop here? The limits of their power have clearly not been reached.

(more…)

Posted in Uncut | 45 Comments »

Playing party politics over Libor could wreck one of Britain’s leading industries

05/07/2012, 07:00:31 AM

by Peter Watt

You’ve got to say that the banks are shockingly bad at their own PR. The fact that reckless lending played a significant part in the cataclysmic global downturn didn’t exactly endear them to people.

Obscenely high bonuses that seem at odds with the overall performance of the company don’t help.

And then to top it off they’ve been fiddling rates of interest so that they made bigger profits and created a false sense of their own economic strength! Understandably therefore many people right now wouldn’t spit on a banker if they were on fire.

But in the furore we seem to be forgetting that this is also an industry that employs 1.1 million people in the UK. That contributes 9% of the gross value added in the economy as a whole, generates 7% of all tax receipts (£35.7 billion) and produces a trade surplus.

So the current crisis in our financial sector is a potential crisis for our already fragile economy. We simply cannot afford for this mess to continue, there is too much at stake. It is right therefore that all parties are keen to restore the credibility of the UK’s financial sector.

If people around the world fear that our financial sector is prone to fraud then they will take their money elsewhere. It’s not like moving a factory or an industrial complex; they can simply move their capital with a phone call or click of a mouse.

And if credibility is to be restored or maintained then decisions need to be taken about what the right balance of regulation is and who polices it. And there are the Vickers proposals to implement splitting retail and investment banking. Big issues that need to be sensitively but robustly handled if this vital industry is not to be further harmed.

Instead we have a slanging match between the parties.

The hundreds of thousands of bank workers earning modest wages must be crying into their ledgers.

(more…)

Posted in Uncut | 6 Comments »

Want to fix banking regulation? Try a dose of greed

04/07/2012, 07:00:07 AM

by Anthony Bonneville

It’s been a bad couple of weeks for bankers.

Barclays has been caught with its fingers in the proverbial till again. A new mis-selling scandal has been unveiled featuring all our favourite banking villains. And Nat West meanwhile fails to perform even the most basic of tasks one would expect from a bank.

The cry has gone up, “something must be done,” and in government, this means inquiries, reports, sage deliberations and, ultimately, nothing happening to the banks who, by an astonishing coincidence, are also substantial donors and lobbyists.

Meanwhile Joris Luyendijk’s excellent blogs in the Guardian continue to reveal the mentality of some people in financial services and the potentially toxic culture that they are immersed in and inevitably affected by.

One of the finest examples of this is the interview with a senior regulator, who advises,

“Banks are fundamentally amoral places. They are not immoral; morality simply has no part in the decision-making process. They talk about ‘reputational risk’, not about right and wrong decisions”

He’s not wrong. The resignation statement of Barclay’s chairman Marcus Agius (before he unresigned himself and took charge again following Bob Diamond’s exit) declares.

“We will establish a zero-tolerance policy for any actions that harm the reputation of the bank.”

Not even zero tolerance for actions that could harm the reputation of the bank. This form of words rather unfortunately leaves the door open to an interpretation that Barclays staff are being enjoined not to “do no wrong” but “don’t get caught”.

Bob Diamond followed suit yesterday with the type of heartfelt of mea culpa that restores public faith in bankers’ conscience and integrity,

“The external pressure placed on Barclays has reached a level that risks damaging the franchise”

Or maybe not.

Clearly then, it is a vain hope that the bad banks will keep their own house in order, so what is the solution?

(more…)

Posted in Uncut | 4 Comments »

David Cameron will fully nationalise RBS

03/07/2012, 01:36:39 PM

by Jonathan Todd

We didn’t think the reputation of the financial sector could sink any lower. The Libor-fixing scandal means it has. We may be less surprised that the government’s deficit reduction strategy continues to hurt and not work. When government borrowing jumped to £17.9bn in May, up from £15.2bn in the same month last year, this was confirmed.

These two factors make the impossible seem possible: David Cameron will seize the initiative by an audacious full nationalisation of RBS and its reconstitution as a national infrastructure bank.

The logic that leads to this implausible conclusion involves three stages to this parliament and an evolving contest for national leadership.

Stage one: Two parties together in the national interest.

This must now seem a golden age from the perspective of Downing Street. The political law of this bygone time was that Labour had made the economic mess and Cameron’s government was taking the tough actions needed, with an expectation that the economy would recover well before the general election, which Cameron would win on the back of this success.

Attempts to have Labour adjust to a reality in which fiscal credibility has an increased political salience – such as In the Black Labour – retain an important relevance to our party. But times have moved on. It is ever more obvious that the government’s tight fiscal policy isn’t working.

As the government goes to Olympian efforts to keep their omnishambles rolling, ever more eyebrows are raised, querying whether these good chaps know their apples. They lost the benefit of the doubt long before Chloe Smith spectacularly crashed into the national consciousness.

Stage two: Attacks which seek to undermine the basis of Labour’s claim to national leadership.

(more…)

Posted in Uncut | 10 Comments »

Whip’s Notebook: Cameron is now more focused on party management than running the country

03/07/2012, 07:15:38 AM

by Jon Ashworth

Two weeks ago PMQs served as a reminder of what could have been for a generation of Tory MPs. With Cameron and Clegg both away it fell to William Hague, foreign secretary and also first secretary of state to bat for the government. And what a joy he was to watch. Of course I don’t agree with his answers, but his delivery was assured, witty, measured and a total contrast to the increasingly irritable, bad tempered, stroppy performance we’re now used to from the prime minister.

So far the conventional wisdom on PMQs has been that Cameron is a class act on whom its difficult to land a glove. But despite Cameron’s relative strengths compared to others on the Tory benches, its strikes me as increasingly obvious that the conventional wisdom on PMQs is wrong.

In contrast to Cameron, Ed Miliband focuses on fundamentals at PMQs whether that’s the economy, the squeeze in living standards or the crisis in confidence in the political system exemplified by a prime minister on the run who refuses to report a cabinet minister to the independent advisor on the ministerial code.

Just in the last week, Cameron dithered on whether to hold an inquiry on the Libor scandal before proposing his inadequate, sticking plaster solution of a joint parliamentary committee in response to sustained pressure from Ed Miliband.

By focusing on these big issues, people are again starting to take a look at Labour though I don’t think anyone in the parliamentary Labour party is in any doubt about how much further we need to travel. However the performance of the government is starting reinforce doubts about the Tories and the competence of David Cameron.

The economic policy of the government isn’t working with growth downgraded and borrowing up. Living standards are dropping and youth unemployment stubbornly high. It’s hurting but not working.

(more…)

Posted in Uncut | 1 Comment »

Labour’s swing voter problem

02/07/2012, 07:00:22 AM

by Atul Hatwal

Over the past 2 years a myth has taken hold within the Labour party: the fable of the lost 4 million working class votes. Votes that Tony Blair secured in 1997 which Labour had lost by 2010. The Unite political strategy mentions it and this factoid has been a staple at the union conferences this summer.

The implication being that Labour needs to recast its platform to attract these missing supporters rather than chase after pesky, centrist swing voters. It is the core vote strategy, reborn.

For those that can remember Labour in the early 1980s it is all eerily familiar, right down to the same wilful ignorance on the evidence.

At the last election, YouGov’s eve of vote poll – which successfully predicted Labour and Tory vote share to within 1% – identified the Tories as the most popular party among working class voters: 32% of the social demographic C2DE backed the Tories, 31% Labour and 26% Lib Dem.

Given that the Tories were the preference for working class voters, it seems fantastical to believe that moving further to the left will magically win a majority of this group.

But evidence and logic do not seem to be highly regarded qualities among Labour’s myth-makers. The story has taken hold and the absence of voices challenging such nonsense is tantamount to intellectual self-harm.

The renewed emphasis on the core vote seems to be driving a decidedly half-hearted attitude to swing voters for Labour. The mood music from the party’s leaders continually reiterates the desire to move on from triangulation, emphasis on the centre ground and New Labour’s campaigning approach.

It might sound good at the podium, and even feel good in the warmth of the applause. But outside of Labour audiences, in the real world of voters, the electoral damage is already becoming evident. It might seem strange to say this given the polls, but when looking at actual votes in real elections the danger signs are already apparent. The recent London elections shine a light on Labour’s lack of progress in winning back territory held by the Tories.

London provides a unique electoral laboratory because it held local elections on the same day as the general election in 2010, and then mayoral and assembly elections this year. In both cases, the ward level data is available which enables a unique comparison of how millions of voters have shifted their views over the past two years based on real elections rather than snapshot polls.

Labour’s current lead in the opinion polls is stable at almost 10% and the party needs a swing from the Tories of roughly 5% to form a government.

For Labour to be on track to move into government, in the London election, the party should have won a comfortable clean sweep of Tory wards where a swing of 5% was required. Ideally Labour would have won wards requiring a swing of upto 8% to come near to the current poll lead and ensure a solid working majority.

But it didn’t.

In London, research by Uncut reveals that there were 61 wards held by the Tories vulnerable to a Labour swing of 5%. Taking the assembly elections as the best comparator to 2010 (rather than the mayoral election which was more driven by the personalities of the candidates), Labour managed to win in 31 wards.

This means that Labour failed to take 49% of the marginal wards it should have.

Granted, London does not define the position around the country, and there are specific regional factors, but this result does provide an indication of what is likely to be happening elsewhere.

Despite the government’s omnishambles, Leveson, the recession and the budget, Labour missed out on half of its ward targets against the Tories.

In comparison, in wards already held by Labour, the party went from strength to strength. The average increase in Labour vote in Labour wards was 13%. Lots of votes there. Shame none of them are worth much under first past the post.

If anything comparable were replicated at a general election, despite the current poll lead, Labour would fall substantially short of government.

This is the true result of the myth that has taken hold in the Labour party. Large national poll leads and an incompetent government cosset the party and keep us happy in our comfort zone. But when voters go to the polls in real elections, swing voters aren’t swinging.

The base is motivated. It’s turning out and small Labour majorities are becoming landslide leads. But marginal Tory wards are staying just that. Tory.

Atul Hatwal is editor at Uncut

Posted in Uncut | 12 Comments »