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Archive for November, 2012

Labour history uncut: Fabians – don’t get mad; get pamphleting

08/11/2012, 01:30:56 PM

Pete Goddard and Atul Hatwal turn their attention to the Fabians as they look at the organisations that set up the Labour representation committee (LRC) in 1900

The Fabians germinated from very modest seeds.

In October 1883 Edith Nesbit, her husband Hubert Bland and their Quaker chum Edward Reese decided to set up a debating society. That was it. They were the first Fabians.

Nesbit was something of a J K Rowling of her day, mixing easily in political and literary worlds. Not content with founding the Fabians, Britain’s first political think tank, she also wrote a series of best-selling books.

Most pertinently for the modern generation, she wrote the Railway Children and thereby can claim the credit for introducing a generation of young men to Jenny Agutter. Thank you, Edith Nesbit.

Helping others even after death, Edith Nesbit’s grave doubles as a handy boot scraper

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Labour’s opposition to regional pay in the NHS is intellectually dishonest

08/11/2012, 07:00:55 AM

by Peter Watt

There was a debate yesterday instigated by Labour on the introduction of regional pay into the NHS. Labour’s argument is clear, that by allowing the introduction of regional pay into the NHS the government risks breaking it up. Of particular focus for criticism were the group of twenty trusts in the south west, the south west consortium. They are seeking to opt out of the national agenda for Change framework for pay and conditions as an element of their plans to achieve their required cost reductions. As Andy Burnham said in the debate:

“National pay is part of the glue of a national health service, part of what holds it together, and in turn the NHS is part of what holds our country together.

A one nation service bridging the social and economic divides of our country, uniting east and west, north and south. The N in NHS should be cherished, but instead it is coming under ideological attack.”

Powerful stuff and you may think hard to disagree with. But Labour has some form in this area, in both government and opposition, which makes their position a little tenuous. It may well be that there is a perfectly good reason for this apparent inconsistency but you can be sure that this inconsistency will be exploited by opponents.

First, in government it was Labour that introduced the very flexibilities and freedoms that allow NHS trusts to make decisions that ensure their responsiveness to local needs. And rightly so; as commissioners agree local priorities it was important that the local providers were able to operate flexibly and choose what they did in order to deliver on these priorities.

This didn’t mean an end to national pay and conditions but it did mean that if needed trusts could be flexible. So for instance, if there was a need for one particular service to be expanded in an area where attracting the right staff was difficult, then a trust could respond.

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Will the Tories welcome mad Nad back when she returns from the jungle?

07/11/2012, 06:04:38 PM

by Sophie Lambert-Russell

Almost lost in the swirl of the US election has been one of the more bizarre British political stories of recent months.

Yesterday Nadine Dorries was temporarily suspended from her role as MP for Mid Bedfordshire after it emerged she has decided to take part in the reality TV show I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here, apparently without consulting the Tory high command.

This decision which has been characterised by her constituency chairman Paul Duckett as “unusual” – a euphemism on a par with Sir Humphrey calling a ministerial decision “brave” – has provoked an unprecedented level of criticism among the public, journalists and MP’s across the board.

The general consensus is that Dorries has abandoned Britain in the pursuit of her own fame, and the Conservative press office has failed to come up with an alternative, as members of her own party are among the most vocal of opponents.

Chief whip Sir George Young stated that Dorries would have to “explain herself” on her return which makes David Cameron sound like a head teacher in charge of a bunch of naughty school children rather than professional MP’s, and is yet another blow for the party’s already damaged reputation.

The question is, will gentle Sir George allow her back into the party when she returns from her Australian jaunt?

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After that result, the Republicans will go even more batsh*t insane

07/11/2012, 08:00:18 AM

by Nikhil Dyundi

There is an old adage that oppositions do not win elections, governments lose them. Clearly, there is a lot of truth in this; after all, it is only the government that can actually do things. The administration has the record to be judged.

But let us be in no doubt about what happened yesterday: yes president Obama won, but more than anything else, the Republicans lost. They lost, not only the presidency but failed to retake the senate in a year when both should have been a lock.

They achieved this improbable feat because of one simple fact: their base is batshit insane.

As a result, no vaguely competitive candidate stepped forward for the presidential nomination, leaving them with the weakest representative in decades. Electable, centrist senate incumbents and prospective candidates were brushed aside to make way for a variety of fruitloops who couldn’t stop talking about rape.

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Last week’s commons defeat will force the government to address its EU strategy void

06/11/2012, 07:00:19 AM

by Mark Stockwell

The Labour leadership has no doubt spent much of the past week slapping each other heartily on the back. Bliss is it to defeat the government on the floor of the house; to do so by outflanking them on the EU budget is very heaven.

They should enjoy this tactical victory while they can. They were aided by a lackadaisical Conservative whipping operation, and abetted by a worryingly large group of chronic malcontents on the Tory backbenches. Labour will have to work harder in the long term to persuade voters that Ed Miliband and Douglas Alexander’s new-found Eurosceptic fervour would not evaporate the moment the ministerial Eurostar pulled out of St Pancras international.

Clearly, though, it is the government which faces the more pressing strategic issues.

David Cameron’s political instinct (not necessarily the same as his personal inclination) is to try as far as possible to avoid talking about Europe for fear of the “toxic” effect on the Conservative brand. This is understandable. Cameron and George Osborne cut their political teeth in the Maastricht era and that thoroughly miserable experience can’t have failed to be formative.

(I suspect this also partly explains why Labour’s own coterie of former special advisers had so little hesitation in siding with the Tory rebels. There is something of Pavlov’s dog in the way in which both sides have behaved.)

One of the benefits of coalition from Cameron’s point of view was, as Andrew Lilico has suggested at ConservativeHome, that this evasion could be sustained by a block of Lib Dem votes, acting as a counter-weight to backbench rebellions from the Tory right. Wednesday’s vote has shown that this cannot be relied on.

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Obama must be more ambitious if he wins a second term tomorrow

05/11/2012, 04:30:36 PM

by Jonathan Todd

“Obama is forty-seven years old”, noted Russell Baker prior to the 2008 presidential election. “McCain is seventy-two, old enough to be Obama’s father … In classical mythology the son must kill the father to allow for the earth’s renewal.”

Has Obama’s vanquishing of McCain really brought the renewal that it might have done?

Yes, he arrived in office in the midst of the biggest economic calamity since the Great Depression. But, unlike FDR, he has not reformed Wall Street, often seeming keener to pacify than challenge financial interests.

Yes, Obama became president with America’s moral capital debased. But Guantanamo bay remains open. And his escalating use of drone attacks threatens to recruit violent anti-Americans as effectively as Guantanamo bay. His failure to meaningfully support those who oppose the Assad regime in Syria also seems to be increasingly driving them towards extremism.

Yes, China’s rise is about decisions taken over the past 30 years in Beijing, not anything done in DC or on Wall Street. But the tone and content of Obama’s attacks on Romney has hardly encouraged America to look outward to the great opportunities that are opening up as a consequence of Chinese communists doing capitalism better than American capitalists. Nor has any substantive reform of global institutions been secured to make them more democratic, inclusive and credible in a world where economic and political power shifts ever more south and east.

Yes, the American political system is designed to necessitate compromise and Obama was confronted by a Republican party determined to not compromise. But it took him an age to accept this. And he still struggles to adapt to it. He thinks, for example, that his re-election will sufficiently wipe the slate clean that the fiscal cliff will be averted via a deal somewhere close to the Simpson-Bowles plan. It is unclear, though, why Republicans who have not voted for any tax increases since 1990 will suddenly do so.

Obama misapplied the exhortation of Rahm Emmanuel: Never let a serious crisis go to waste. There are at least two crises that Obama has failed to fully exploit.

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The Guardian bottles Leveson

05/11/2012, 07:00:16 AM

by Atul Hatwal

Pity the Guardian. Such good work in bringing hacking into the light and making the case for a full independent inquiry: more than any other newspaper, the Guardian helped reveal the full scale of malfeasance across the press.

Nick Davies and Amelia Hill won scoop of the year at this year’s press awards for their story on the hacking of the Dowlers and the paper has been rightly lauded for its dogged and fearless work.

Now, having shown the world why change is needed, days before Lord Leveson delivers his proposals to reform the way the media is regulated, the Guardian has bottled it.

On Friday, the paper ran a long, meticulously parsed editorial giving their position on regulation. Amid the nuanced 1,130 word meander, there is one salient sentence,

“We do believe in a contract system – not the use of statute – to secure participation.”

It’s easy to become lost in the minutiae of regulatory reform, and the Guardian editorial certainly does an excellent job of getting tangled in the weeds, but there really is only one simple question that needs answering: will media regulation remain voluntary, as it is now, or will all newspapers be covered?

Regardless of the various carrots and sticks that maybe proposed in a new regulatory model, without the sanction of law, it is all still voluntary. If a newspaper proprietor does not want to participate, they don’t have to, and that is that.

This is the Guardian’s position.

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Time for radical reform of the railways

02/11/2012, 05:07:00 PM

by Amanda Ramsay

The department for transport’s fiasco over the west coast mainline has cost the public purse a staggering amount: £40 million for the delays in negotiations with a startling £100 million estimated as the compensation bill. And all of this before the costs of re-running new bidding processes are taken into account!

The knock-on effect of this incompetence has held-up local and intercity rail services, to and from Bristol and in and around the city. On top of the delay and job insecurity for staff at First Great Western, the costs are hideous at a time of cuts that are threatening vital services in communities across the land.

More than ever, we need a publicly owned and integrated railway.

Public opinion is behind bringing rail back into public ownership, hardly surprising when it is estimated that £1.2billion pounds of taxpayers’ money could be saved every year by re-integrating the railways, simplifying the system for passengers and management alike. Over time this saving could be the equivalent of an across the board cut in fares of 18%.

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We all owe the state for the lives we lead and tax is how we pay our fair share

02/11/2012, 02:00:03 PM

by Dan McCurry

I’ve completely changed my mind, thanks to Peter Watt. I used to agree with Peter’s position, that taxation is a necessary evil, not a automatic right of the state. Then I read his piece, on tax, Labour must remember: “it’s not our money stupid, it’s theirs”, and I’ve since reversed my position completely.

This is part of a wider debate about whether the state creates private business, that began with a gaffe from Obama. “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

It was a gaffe, but the rest of the quote made sense of what he meant. “There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that.”

The debate re-emerged in this country during the party conference season. Miliband had described a Tory tax-cut with the visual image of David Cameron writing out £40k cheques to his mates. At the Tory conference Cameron responded, “When people earn money, it’s their money. Not the government’s money: their money. Then, the government takes some of it away in tax”.

Previously I was very much in agreement with David Cameron on this one, but reading Peter’s article got me thinking. If it were the case that the state acts as a hindrance to wealth creation, then why do millions of enterprising and ambitious young people, from the developing world, risk their lives to enter the western world every year? Surely if our top heavy state was standing in the way of business, why don’t they stay in their own country and make their fortune there?

As Obama pointed out, we have an infrastructure allowing fast and smooth transportation, as well as an advanced rule of law. We have an educated and healthy population who are available both as workers and as consumers. The state provides conditions that allow enterprise to flourish.

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