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Archive for 2012

After this budget, the Lib Dems are all over the place

21/03/2012, 02:49:31 PM

by Amanda Ramsay

The focus today has been on George Osborne. Understandably so. But one of the stories in the days to come will be how this budget has exacerbated the cracks that were already spreading through the Liberal Democrats and the instability this will bring to the government.

Like them or loathe them, the Conservatives have made their position known. As NEC candidate Peter Wheeler puts it: “Tories make it clear what their priorities are – Tax cuts for the rich and pay cuts for the north.”

But they are burdened by a partner who lacks their self-assurance and discipline.

Long-suffering Tories, already struggling with David Cameron’s leadership, are tiring of having to put-up with on-the-hoof Liberal Democrat solo policy announcements such as Vince Cable’s off-piste mooting of a mansion tax that was never going to happen.

This may have been political point scoring on Cable’s part, but even whispers of such a tax will have wrought terror in Tory heartlands, particularly in London where such talk could cost Boris Johnson’s political life.

It’s part of a pattern of ill-disciplined behaviour that has increasingly dismayed Tory MPs. For example, there was the failure to support their own leadership line from Nick Clegg over the health bill, not to mention February’s leaked letter from Vince Cable, when the business secretary told the prime minister and the deputy prime minister that the government lacks a “compelling vision” for Britain.

For restive Tory backbenchers and political advisers, all of this will have steeled Tory determination to make this their budget.

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Budget preview: The polling that explains why George Osborne is cutting the 50p rate of tax

21/03/2012, 08:10:41 AM

by Atul Hatwal

When George Osborne steps up to the despatch box later he will publicly launch his campaign to be leader of the Conservative party.

David Cameron can breathe easy though. It will not be a throwback to the TB-GBs. Osborne’s real target will likely be shuffling about his city hall office, watching the TV coverage, thinking that he could do it all so much better.

Until now, Boris Johnson has been the darling of the Tory faithful. He shone at last year’s party conference, has repeatedly tweaked the prime minister’s nose on issues like cuts to policing and has been the king over the water to true blue believers who see too much yellow in the government.

In contrast, his rival to succeed David Cameron, has been conducting his campaign in stealth mode. But away from the bright lights of media scrutiny, in the corridors of Westminster, George Osborne has been very active.

If any evidence were needed, just speak to any first term Tory MP: Osborne has been almost indecent in courting the new intake into the parliamentary party.

The chancellor has deployed the full range blandishments: from hand written notes in the pigeon hole to invitations to select dinners, each and every member of the class of 2010 has had unbelievable amounts of personal attention lavished on them.

Team Osborne is confident that two years into government, they have the parliamentary vote locked up. For all of Boris’s grandstanding and media profile, few in the parliamentary party view him as a serious alternative to either David Cameron or George Osborne.

Recently, at a private dinner, one member of the 2010-ers went so far as to suggest that Osborne might even defeat Cameron in a vote amongst his contemporaries.

But that still leaves the blue rinse legions swooning for their blonde mop-topped heir apparent.

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Budget preview: abolishing national public sector pay rates is right

20/03/2012, 12:00:32 PM

by Rob Marchant

As part of the Budget run-up, on Friday Britain’s labour movement was convulsed at the thought of the latest Osborne proposal: that national public sector pay rates might be scrapped.

But, before we join the voices of the major trade unions and the TUC who are, understandably, trying to look out for their own interest group, as a party whose interests are not always identical to those of our union colleagues, it might behove us to take a few minutes to take a step back.

Now, while no-one would suggest we should be adopting the Tory Budget wholesale, smart opposition is about determining which bits to oppose. A regional bargaining system would likely increase some pay-rates, as well as decreasing (or failing to increase) others.

And it is surely difficult to argue that the current, entirely inflexible system of fixed national pay rates, which was put in place decades ago in a corporatist state era, is fit for purpose.

First, as the Treasury points out, there are absurd variations depending on where you live. In some places pay rates can be artificially up to 18% higher than their private sector equivalents. And furthermore, applying the only current regional exception to the national system, the addition of London weighting, the system even then visibly fails to attract, for example, enough teachers to schools in inner London because many cannot afford to live there. So some people are still not paid enough. Result: poor levels of public service.
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Budget preview: Osborne plays politics with Britain’s economy

20/03/2012, 07:00:25 AM

by Jonathan Todd

Literally no one alive today has experienced a period as economically bleak as we face today.

There could be hope. The chancellor retains a capacity to improve our situation through bold policy and a display of leadership. Instead we can expect a Budget of ruses, a rearranging of the pieces on the political chessboard with little or no thought for the wider reality in which the rest of us reside.

Osborne’s capacity to frame political debate should not be underestimated. He has the bully pulpit of office, a sympathetic media, and the public have bought into his central narrative: there is no alternative to his tough deficit-reduction medicine and anyone who suggests otherwise, particularly on behalf of Labour, who he paints as wholly culpable for our economic predicament, represents an unaffordable risk.

It is a powerful argument, a train rumbling down the track straight for Labour, threatening to smash us into another parliament in opposition. Some think the train will change direction, almost irrespective of what Labour does. They hope and believe that exasperation with Osborne will build such that his prescription is rejected.

Some contend that the train is immutable and that Labour had better adjust – deficit reduction will remain the key issue and Labour must do more to demonstrate how we would deliver this.

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All-women shortlist for Manchester Central?

19/03/2012, 03:28:16 PM

Labour Uncut has learned that party bosses are considering whether to impose an all-women shortlist in the forthcoming process to select Tony Lloyd’s successor in the Manchester Central constituency.

Lloyd, the former chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party, is set to step down from the House of Commons to run as Labour’s candidate in the forthcoming election to become Greater Manchester’s first police and crime commissioner. Under party rules he will need to relinquish his Westminster seat ahead of the November election for the PCC, triggering a by-election.

Lloyd was interviewed by an NEC panel for the police commissioner’s role last Saturday. Surprisingly his was the only candidacy, making his “selection” as Labour’s PCC candidate academic.

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Love thy Tory

19/03/2012, 07:00:01 AM

by Peter Goddard

Because I enjoy becoming maddeningly frustrated with other people’s stupidity I am a keen reader of the Guardian’s Comment Is Free (CiF) section.

On CiF over the last couple of years it appears that reasoned debate has become increasingly neglected in favour of vituperative attacks by all sides on all the others.

A five minute survey reveals “filthy free market scum” (Tories), “the scum of the Earth” (Labour) and “lickspittles” (Liberal Democrats).

And as the budget draws nearer, the temperature keeps rising.

All good fun, no doubt, but is it helpful?

From the perspective of what passes for everyday politics – I’m thinking prime minister’s questions, media interviews and press releases – the answer is “yes” (although perhaps without being quite so rude). This is because these events are not dialogues but showcases.

Ed Miliband will not rise to give the opposition response to the Budget on Wednesday hoping that maybe this time, this time he will finally succeed in changing Cameron and Osborne’s minds.

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Budget preview: an opportunity to change the nature of Labour’s political attack?

18/03/2012, 08:00:52 AM

by Anthony Painter

If the leaks turn out to be true, we are facing one the most radical Budgets in living memory. The abolition or reduction of the 50p rate, regionalisation of public sector pay, increasing the personal allowance, and the introduction of “tycoon tax” (ie: minimum tax rate for all) is a major package of reform. As soon as George Osborne stands up, the framing battle will commence. What should Labour’s line be?

I’ll put my personal allowance tax saving on the fact that the line will be “fairness”. Ed Miliband and Ed Balls will focus on the abolition or reduction of the 50p tax rate. They will say this proves we are not all in it together; one rule for the rich and one rule for the rest of us. They will follow with a flurry of numbers about how the average family has been hit by the Tory-led government’s tax and spending changes since 2010. Labour would tax banks, protect tax credits and reduce VAT. The Tories favour the rich over the rest.

When George Osborne announced the VAT increase, the reaction was pretty much the same. The party HQ printing presses went into overdrive even while the leadership election was on and off Labour went. People didn’t want VAT to increase and they don’t want the 50p tax rate abolished. So it’s a no-brainer, right?

The problem is that it didn’t work.

Labour cries “unfair” at every possible opportunity. People know that Labour thinks everything the government has done is “unfair”. A good portion of the population think it is unfair too. One problem is that they take “fairness” to mean a slightly different thing to Labour. They take it mean reciprocal fairness: you should receive in accordance with your contribution. Labour means distributional fairness: the poorer you are, the more you should get. That is why Labour’s cris de coeur about fairness slightly miss the mark.

There is another approach: attack the government’s fiscal and economic decisions. The package of measures which is rumoured undermines fiscal consolidation and economic growth.

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St. Patrick’s Day, the flag and Irish America

17/03/2012, 08:00:27 AM

by Kevin Meagher

The green, white and orange of the Irish tricolour, currently fluttering to questionable purpose outside a thousand pubs, has an interesting history.

It was presented to the Irish nation by my illustrious forebear, Thomas Francis Meagher, in Dublin in 1848. Shortly afterwards he, and a gallant band of brothers in the Young Ireland movement, launched one of the many heroic, but ultimately fruitless, insurrections against British rule.

This was midway through the Irish Famine – An Gorta Mor (“The Great Hunger”) in which Ireland’s population fell by a quarter, with a million people starving to death and a million more emigrating to America, Canada, Australia and Britain. Cruel Victorian indifference to the plight of the Irish cast a lingering shadow until Tony Blair’s welcome apology for this disgusting episode in British history back in 1997.

Meagher was sentenced to be hung, drawn and quartered for his sedition – a sentence reprieved after public outcry – and instead he and his comrades found themselves transported for life to Van Dieman’s land in what is now Tasmania.

They were meant to remain there for life, checking in once a week with the authorities and expected to eschew thoughts of escape, on their word as gentlemen. Meagher thought better of it (as you would), procured a rescue ship and set sail for America whereupon he became a cause celebre to Irish immigrants who had reached America in less salubrious confines, usually aboard the infamous “coffin ships”. So great were the incidences of typhus among the starving Irish that a third died on the perilous Atlantic crossing. (It is said sharks could be seen following the ships, such were the numbers of corpses thrown overboard).

After starting an Irish newspaper and working as an attorney (he was on the defence team of Congressman Daniel Sickles, who shot his wife’s lover outside the White House and became the first person to successfully mount a defence of temporary insanity) Meagher became embroiled in the American civil war.

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The Sunday review on Friday: The Young Fabians’ jobs summit

16/03/2012, 02:35:50 PM

by Jonathan Todd

Earlier this week on Tuesday, the Young Fabians demonstrated their capacity to work for solutions to the most pressing of problems by holding their jobs summit in the week in which the ONS announced youth unemployment has topped 1.4 million – the highest since records began.

The discussion roved from the big, macro picture to very particular concerns. The willingness and capacity of young people to turn up on time for work and put a shift in was amongst the latter.

Punctuality isn’t just a challenge on the shop floor, though. The summit didn’t start on time. The star turn, David Miliband, we were informed by the chair of proceedings, Rayhan Haque, “had to do a bit of a vote”. The best laid plans and the NHS bill. Whether the lost time features on the risk register of the bill may never be known but the Young Fabians had become the latest to suffer from Andrew Lansley’s ill-considered reforms.

Manfully Will Hutton and his friend Sony Kapoor stepped into the breach created by Miliband’s absence. Many speakers at political events like to kick off with a joke. Hutton, in contrast, sobered proceedings by reminding us that we are living through the longest and deepest recession since the 1870s.

Comparisons with the 1930s are so 2008. We are now beyond them, with GDP still 3 per cent below where it was 4 years ago. Nobody living has ever lived through a recession as pronounced as this. Getting through this, Hutton insisted, is “the social democratic challenge of your lives”.

Helpfully he had come armed with suggestions for how this might be done: extending the kinds of business models that the ownership commission reported upon the day after the jobs summit; ecosystem policy, rather than industrial policy; a twenty-first century social contract, which would allow individuals to mitigate the risk in their lives; and a state-backed infrastructure bank. Some of these remained ideas thrown out to the room, unpacked and unpicked. Kapoor did, though, latch on to the infrastructure bank suggestion, pointing out that we are already serviced by one in the form of the European Investment Bank.

This was consistent with the strongly European flavour of Kapoor’s remarks. He provided a passionate and meaty articulation of the case that Europe, including the UK, now stands together or falls together. We shouldn’t be defensively building firewalls. We should be going on the offensive and taking advantage of the rock-bottom long-term interest rates across much of northern Europe to create an infrastructure boom.

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What the next few weeks have in store for Charles Allen

16/03/2012, 07:30:34 AM

by Atul Hatwal

Charles Allen, welcome to the spotlight. You might have thought you were already high profile, after all running ITV and EMI made you a fixture in the business pages. And your turn on Channel 4’s the Secret Millionaire was genuinely touching.

But all of that is as nothing compared to what you will experience as chair of the Labour party’s executive board.

As you start your new role, you should be aware of the two pitfalls that perennially await ingénue businessmen keen to apply their acumen to the political world.

First, what works in business does not apply in politics. Second, the media are coming.

Politicians frequently muse about how good it would be to apply business practice to politics and improve efficiency. They do this because they have never worked in business, beyond perhaps a temporary sinecure in public affairs en route to a parliamentary seat.

Most politicians can barely run a bath, let alone any form of enterprise. Executive management as you understand it is almost non-existent. Just look at the how Labour party restructure has been managed so far.

But politicians are not an untalented breed and there’s a reason they have evolved in a particular way.

In business, all relationships are underpinned by money. Whether its shareholders and their dividends, employees and their wages or suppliers and their fees, power is held by the he or she who holds the purse strings.

In politics, most things that matter are based on goodwill.

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