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Archive for 2012

Back to business in the Lords

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

by Angela Smith

After the extended Whitsun recess, the new parliamentary session gets well and truly underway this week for those of us on the red benches, with three Second Readings of new Bills, Labour-led debates on the floor of the House and the continuing scrutiny of government through the Lords daily question time and secondary legislation debates in committee.

First up of the Second Readings is the Financial Services Bill, debated later today, and attracting Labour’s many economic experts. It will be an opportunity for the minister, Lord Sassoon to once again, to wide derision from our benches, try to lay all the blame of the country’s economic woes at the door of the last government. Unless of course, he’s keeping up with current Tory thinking, which now seems to have shifted the blame onto the Eurozone.

Local Government Finance and Civil Aviation are the other Second Readings in the Lords this week, tomorrow and Wednesday respectively. Both bills will excite wider interest, but the increasingly pressured financial environment in which many of our local authorities now operate has the potential for the council funding Bill to become the most high profile piece of legislation this side of the summer. Labour are also fortunate in that not much gets past our Lords lead on the issue, Bill MacKenzie.

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Sunday Review: Ed Miliband on Englishness

10/06/2012, 07:00:33 AM

by Anthony Painter

The Labour party approaches the politics of Englishness rather as Perseus would have approached the Medusa – best avoided if at all possible and if it has to be encountered then no eye contact should be made at any cost. Last Thursday, Ed Miliband talked confidently about the Medusa but thought it best not to enter the cave.

Unfortunately, the Medusa still must be slain.

The speech had quite a nice pace to it and succeeded in many of its rhetorical flourishes. If in doubt, talk about common humanity, Morris, Ruskin and pulling together. This will always be safe ground for a Labour orator – and it does provide some significant crossover into English romanticism too.

No harm done – it can’t, as Miliband argued, be all pounds and pence. The romantics would have been distraught at the omission of shillings but time moves on. On the negative side, we can only hope that the phrase ‘progressive patriotism’ will never be uttered again. Overall though, I’m glad he made the speech – it needed to be done and was long overdue from a Labour leader.

Miliband skidded between the cultural and the political as if there was no distinction between them when it came to his analysis of Scottish nationalism. Unless I’ve misread modern Scottish nationalism I’m not sure if Alex Salmond is really in the business of forcing people to choose between their Scottishness and Britishness. That would certainly seem to sit rather oddly with the passage from his Hugo Young Lecture of early this year where he argued that there would always be a ‘social union’ based on ‘our shared economic interests, our cultural ties, our many friendships and family relationships’. He is asking Scotland to (with notable exceptions such as the currency and the monarchy) choose Scottish political institutions over the British state.

The speech was rather more definitive when it came to distinguishing English culture and political institutions. For Miliband, English cultural expression is “not about an English Parliament or an English Assembly.” So wave the flag of St.George like Bobby Moore was still captain of England but don’t get all political about it. We’ll have none of that.

In this argument was the speech’s central weakness. This would have been a good speech in 1996. Things have moved on considerably since. It is now clear that Scottish devolution was not only the culmination of one process – a creation of institutions to match a rejuvenated civic Scottishness – but the beginning of another process. The claim on ever greater powers for Scotland may or may not result in independence.

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Hang on, did Ed Miliband just change Labour’s local government policy?

08/06/2012, 03:22:19 PM

by Atul Hatwal

The headlines for Ed Miliband’s speech at the Royal Festival Hall yesterday have focused on English identity. Understandably so. But in the roll-out of this initiative, Labour’s leader seems to have slipped in a surreptitious policy change. One that has not been trailed or widely discussed.

Until now, the Labour party has backed city mayors. The policy was in the last Labour manifesto and supported in parliament: in January, Hilary Benn, Labour’s shadow secretary of state for communities and local government, was clear, “we believe that elected mayors can offer a highly effective form of local leadership”.

That was then.

Following up yesterday’s speech, Ed Miliband has penned an article for the Daily Telegraph today, entitled, “The England I love is defined by its spirit”. In this piece, he makes a very specific point,

“…we should get on with devolving power away from Westminster to English local authorities and the people, without the need for mayoral referendums or such-like.”

At the Festival Hall there was no mention of “mayoral referendums or such-like”.

This isn’t a glib insertion. Each word in an article such as this is carefully weighed. During the drafting it will have been seriously discussed before being included.

Clearly, the public rejection of mayors in city referenda in May by all cities except Bristol was a problem, but this was as much to do with the government’s ludicrous refusal to fully define what powers the mayors would actually have.

It’s hard to ask people to back a change if it isn’t clear what the change will be.

On the assumption that any extension of directly elected city mayors would require a public vote, Miliband’s words mean that Labour has shifted policy so that the party now accepts the status quo of local government.

Bye-bye direct democracy.

For Ed Miliband personally, this issue has always been a difficult one. In his own constituency, the local Labour party has been implacably opposed to directly elected mayors. It meant that in the run-up to the referenda on mayors, Labour’s leader was supporting them while his own local party was in opposition.

Within the party, it prompted a widespread sense of incredulity that the leader of the Labour party could not prevail on his own local party to back a flagship Labour policy on local government at the local elections.

It would seem that this is a problem Ed Milliband will not have to face again.

Atul Hatwal is editor at Uncut

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We must be the pragmatists now

08/06/2012, 01:31:28 PM

by Jonathan Todd

Pragmatism, of course, as Kevin Meagher has previously noted, was how Winston Churchill ushered in 13 years of Conservative government in 1951, fully 43 years after he first held ministerial office and six years after a sea change election had swept him from Downing Street. No ideological hang-ups kept him from accepting what needed to be accepted to make his party electable.

In contrast, a leading advisor to the last government can now observe to Uncut that “ideology is the worst thing to have happened to the modern Tory Party”.

Louise Mensch may rush to do the bidding of her frontbench and defend Jeremy Hunt’s indefensible transgressions. But most Tory backbenchers seem quicker to quibble with their frontbench than please it.

They appear to prefer the ideological purity of opposition to tough choices of government. And their past and their future encourage them in this indulgence.

Their past is of voting against their whip early in this parliament in votes that seemed relatively inconsequential at the time, but which have become habit forming, dangerously so as the votes get more consequential.

Their future isn’t on the frontbench. Liberal Democrats and more pliable sorts, like Mensch, block their path. Their future may, due to the unprecedented boundary review, be in selection battles, which they will require the support of typically ideologically-committed activists to win.

Where’s the harm in scratching the itch to rebel when you have no ministerial career to seek and a seat to save?

Not even Winston could have done it with this lot. It is not simply the political realities of diminished prospects for advancement within a multi-party government and the boundary review that have reduced them. It is something deeper in the gut of the right than that.

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Whip’s Notebook: Izzy whizzy George gets dizzy and blows £200 million

08/06/2012, 07:00:54 AM

by Jon Ashworth

Tory MPs regularly receive briefings from their parliamentary resource unit (PRU) giving them lines to take, suggested responses to letters on policy, attack lines for use in the chamber and that sort of thing. Until last week the PRU will have had standard response scripts on the stocks about the importance of the pasty tax, caravan tax, church renovation tax and charity tax. No doubt these scripts would include a line reminding their constituents that backing down on these new revenue raisers would be deeply irresponsible given the size of the deficit. Loyal Tory MPs will have emailed out these responses whenever a constituent got in touch complaining about the new tax hikes. They will have used the lines in their weekly MP’s column in the local paper and in interviews on local radio.

Behind the scenes some poor staffer in the PRU will have been relieved and grateful that the briefing was available for their Tory MPs. No doubt she or he had been getting a barrage of calls and emails from MPs’ pesky researchers asking for a line.

The poor staffer will have called the junior special adviser in the Treasury who would actually rather focus on important matters like making sure his name is on the list for the Spectator summer party. The special adviser will have no doubt grumpily despaired “why can’t they use the budget PRU briefing, don’t they realise how busy we are?!” Our heroic PRU staffer persists ”but we’re getting lots of calls, didn’t you see the finance bill debate? No one spoke up to support the policy apart from that chap desperate for promotion who founded YouGov.”

Eventually the Treasury special adviser relents and signs off an agreed brief while remaining irritated that his more important special advisor colleague Rupert Harrison gets the Spectator summer party invite not him.

But at least the tenacious staffer is happy and finally emails the pasty tax brief out to a grateful parliamentary party and now turns attention to the “Hunt hasn’t really broken the ministerial Code” brief that the Number 10 Political Office are demanding goes out.

But an updated PRU brief wasn’t enough to satisfy MPs or more importantly public opinion.

The Government’s majority had already been reduced to just 25 on the votes on the pasty and caravan tax. They should be winning votes in the Commons by 83. Overall 31 Tory MPs – around 10 per cent of the Conservative Parliamentary Party – voted against one or more of George Osborne’s budget measures.

And if Osborne thought winning the votes was enough to put this issue to bed, he was wrong.

Lib Dem MPs were handing out pasties in Parliament, 4 Tory MPs brought petitions to the Commons on the caravan tax even though they voted for it, Labour’s frontbench Treasury team were constantly up and at them. MPs were calling adjournment debates forcing ministers back to the Commons to defend the policy. Just two weeks ago poor David Gauke, Exchequer Secretary was sent out to defend the pasty tax in a Westminster hall debate and confirmed that samosas cooked and sold in sweet shops, many of which we have in Leicester, will have VAT as well.

And then in the week that Tony Blair, Vince Cable and Jeremy Hunt were all at Leveson we witnessed what appeared like a dizzying u-turn a day from Osborne. In total he makes £200 million of u-turns with no explanation of how these latest unfunded commitments will be paid for. That’s a lot of cash for Osborne to spend to try to save his draining credibility.

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The uncomfortable truth about party politics is that loyalty trumps morality

07/06/2012, 07:00:28 AM

by Peter Watt

This week there was one story that depressed me more than any other. It was actually quite a small story and you may well have missed it. It involved Baroness Sayeeda Warsi and a referral to the City of London Police following various allegations in the national newspapers about her expenses.

Putting aside the actual allegations and whether or not the police should be involved, for me the really depressing part of the tale was actually an interview given on LBC 97.3 by the MP who referred the matter to the police, Karl Turner.

Karl was being interviewed on the James Whale show and you can hear the interview here. Basically Karl appears to concede that, despite the matters being considered being serious and a non-party political issue, he would not have referred a Labour MP in the same situation.

Now I don’t know Karl and I am sure that he is an excellent MP. But inadvertently he has allowed something to be raised in public that is a pretty uncomfortable truth about party politics. Worse, it is something that most people involved in party politics will recognise and actually completely accept. In the words of Disraeli to errant MPs, “damn your principles!” and “stick to your party.”

All political parties make much of the fact that they “stand up for” people; that they are “working together” for the greater good. All try and portray their positions as being in the national interest and of being a selfless pursuit of power that once achieved would give them opportunity to deliver for others.

To a very large extent of course this is true. But there is another side; a side that allows things to become, well a little less balanced: namely that when push-comes-to-shove all that really matters is that my team wins. Quite often this trumps the more altruistic elements of political motivation.

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FRIENDS OF AL’AQSA: APOLOGY

07/06/2012, 06:30:40 AM

On 16 March 2011 an article I had written (“When bigotry comes disguised as compassion, Labour must recognise it and root it out”) was published on Labour Uncut. In the article, I stated that Friends of Al’Aqsa (FOA) had referred to the “so-called Holocaust”. In fact, this was an error and was untrue. The publication in which this phrase was used was written by someone else, and had nothing to do with FOA. The article had the effect of wrongly labelling FOA as Holocaust deniers and I apologise unreservedly for making this allegation.

Ian Austin MP

This statement was first published on May 29th 2012

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A polling question to which the answer is yes (or at least probably)

06/06/2012, 07:08:08 PM

by Atul Hatwal

Earlier today Anthony Wells posted a response at UK Polling Report to a post of mine, “Is Labour’s lead actually 3% not 10%?”

Anthony makes a series of reasonable points defending the accuracy of YouGov’s 10 point Labour lead. He cites the high level of precision of YouGov’s final poll in the London election and the greater robustness of polls today compared to twenty years ago. Fair enough. But this misunderstands the purpose of my piece.

Polls measure how people feel at a point in time. There are adjustments and various psephological tricks to ensure respondents reveal their true preference, but the emphasis is on measuring how voters are actually feeling when the poll is conducted.

In mid-term, with an election some way off, many people might feel thoroughly hacked off with the government and be convinced they want rid of them. But when faced with the real choice, when it is days before polling and they engage with the arguments, a significant minority will change their minds.

By definition, this cannot be picked up by polling several weeks out from an election because voters haven’t switched yet.

The point of my piece was not to contest the accuracy of current polls, but to try measure this effect: to attempt to quantity the proportion of respondents who are relatively convinced Labour backers in mid-term but will then switch when the campaign ramps up and the polling booth beckons.

In fact, it is only because modern polling is so much more effective that we can be confident that a shortfall between mid-term polls and actual election results reflects voters who changed their mind rather than those who simply lied to the pollster in the first place.

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Johanna Baxter is changing how the NEC engages with members – but there’s more to be done

06/06/2012, 06:41:57 PM

by Jim Knight

Let’s be honest, two years ago how many of us could name more than about three members of the Labour Party’s most important body? Since the reforms that limited MPs from standing, the National Executive Committee has become somewhat anonymous. CLPs nominated according to adherence to the Grassroots Alliance or Progress slates and votes followed the same trend – our CLP representatives became a mixture of the two wings of the party, candidates hand-picked by the unelected leaders of these well resources groups.

But what if you wanted something between the devil and the deep blue sea?

Then Johanna Baxter stood as an independent candidate promising to put members first – a slogan now adopted by others. Everyone told her that she would lose because she wasn’t part of a slate. That didn’t put her off – Johanna has been an activist for 16 years, growing up in a Scottish CLP, a London CLP Secretary for 9 years and a national officer for a trade union. At that point she had also never met anyone on the NEC. She fundamentally felt that members simply weren’t being listened to at the heart of our party and wanted to do something about it.

And lose she did, but only by 172 votes in an election that had 10,000 spoilt ballots. For the first time an independent candidate running up against the money-rich machine politics of the slates almost made it – that was nothing short of extraordinary. A few weeks later Johanna then got on to the NEC, as the ‘highest placed loser’, when Oona King was elevated to the Lords.

Since then she has not only lived up to her promise to put members first but, in doing so, is fundamentally changing the way the NEC works.

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Is Labour’s poll lead actually 3% not 10%?

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

by Atul Hatwal

So what is the real Labour lead? Sure, we’ve all seen the polls, and they tell a consistent tale across different pollsters. Looking at YouGov, the latest results from the weekend have Labour 10 points up over the Tories, 42% to 32%.

It’s a commanding lead but for those who remember the 1980s and 1990s, there remain nagging doubts.

At the end of 1980 Labour was registering week after week of double digit leads, peaking at 24% for Gallup in mid-December. But we all know what happened in the 1983 election.

Almost a decade later, it was déjà vu.

In 1990, Labour was once again posting massive poll leads. Between the end of February and end of April, Labour averaged a 22% lead across nearly 20 different polls. Impressive. Except, once again, we all know the result of the 1992 election.

The purpose of this trip down a rather painful stretch of memory lane isn’t to be a Cassandra. The future is not written and any form of poll lead is better than a deficit.

But caution is needed. Taking these leads at face value can breed complacency and for Labour, the experience of the past thirty years is clear: as the actual general election draws near, the poll leads have regularly evaporated.

Since those heady days of Dave and Nick in the rose garden, there has been a fundamental shift in how the public regards the government; and David Cameron in particular. The question is how would this translate in the polling booth? Would voters turn away from the Tories, and more pertinently, would they choose Labour?

The problem with attempting this judgement has been the absence of polling data that can be compared to an actual election, outside of the general election.

While there is a regular cycle of local council elections punctuated with by-elections, the pollsters rarely poll these specific areas, and even on those rare occasions when they do, only after the campaign is underway. So it’s almost impossible to compare like with like.

But regional elections offer a new opportunity. London has been polled by YouGov regularly since 2010 and recently voted.

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