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Archive for 2012

Sunday review on Thursday: Has the future a left? The thoughts of Zygmunt Bauman

15/03/2012, 01:19:59 PM

by Ben Cobley

The European left “is probably taking an afternoon nap”. That’s what the brilliant eighty-six year old Polish social theorist Zygmunt Bauman told a capacity crowd which included David Miliband, in London last night.

Speaking on the subject “Has the future a left?2 at the London School of Economics, Bauman gave a typically all-encompassing account of the challenges posed by contemporary capitalism and the left’s relation to them, bursting with ideas and full of luminous turns of phrase.

Though sticking to the broad brush and characteristically not pointing the finger at individuals or particular institutions, Bauman’s thesis was clear: the left “has sold out to the right” and become “a fake replica of what it was” in its “appeal to the poor, needy, and also the dreamers”.

He posed a question that he said he asks himself a lot: Do social democrats know where they are going and what they are aiming for? Do they have a vision for the good society?

In place of this, he said, the left has been defining itself in two different ways:

1) in terms of ‘whatever the right can do we can do better’

2) from collecting people who are discriminated against and trying to compose a “rainbow coalition” out of them – a perspective that is probably now losing ground.

Referring to the occupy movement and its Spanish forebears, the indignados (the outraged), Bauman said, “Some people think that if governments cannot do things, perhaps we can do them ourselves. The jury is still out on that.” In fact the signs are that such street protests are more effective in totalitarian regimes, he added, asking: “Where is the inch of change in Wall Street because of ‘occupation’? I wonder if they even know they have been occupied.”

Instead, Bauman made a plea for leftist politics that stick to principles, that we be self-assertive in defending our values, while measuring the quality of a society by the quality of life of its weakest members – something that is very distinctive from the right’s way of seeing things.

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The flaws at the heart of the Labour party’s reorganisation

15/03/2012, 07:00:22 AM

by Peter Watt

I have decided to write something about Labour party governance. Now wait; before you stop reading simply because you assume that any article about governance must be aimed at anoraks give me a moment as it really is an important issue.

The Labour party is governed by the National Executive Committee (NEC) who act in the same way as a board of directors or trustees do. In other words, they are responsible for ensuring that the party manages its finances well; delivers on its primary objective of securing elected Labour representation and other subsidiary objectives like better representation of women. And also for ensuring that the party complies with its legal responsibilities. They also oversee, but do not direct, day-to-day operations of the party. The day-to-day work is managed by the party’s chief executive the general secretary.

Traditionally the arrangement has not been a particularly good one in the Labour party with good governance being secondary to other political pressures. The result was that the party became horrifically in debt and no one on the NEC seemed to notice.

The reasons for this are twofold.

Firstly the NEC itself was much more interested in politics than governance. In other words they got elected or appointed by virtue of fighting for position or votes in internal elections on the back of taking positions politically.

They were experts in lots of things to do with politics, trade unions and so on. But that didn’t make them experts in governance, asking the right questions, finances and the like. Whilst other organisations could undertake a skills audit of their boards and appoint non-execs or other trustees to plug the skills gap – the NEC had elections to its various stakeholder sections.

And secondly the party management team saw it as their job to keep the NEC out of decision making. What they didn’t know couldn’t hurt and anyway the NEC really weren’t that interested, or so the argument went.

It was just easier to set up NEC committees and structures that provided more confusion than transparency. Plus there was always a third source of power that party managers had to worry about – the leader’s office. The leader’s office always wanted to be in charge of everything but knew that the key to managing the weird and byzantine world of the NEC was the general secretary and their team.

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Labour needs to wake up to the threat of Nick and Dave’s very civil partnership

14/03/2012, 12:00:50 PM

by Kevin Meagher

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” remarked Bert Lance, the former Carter-era official. His homespun phrase, much emulated since he coined it in 1977, is intended to ward off the siren demand for change for change’s sake.

That very same advice now rings in the ears of Liberal Democrat ministers as they ponder what state their party will be in at the next general election. Don’t change what doesn’t need to be changed.

Frankly, as most Lib Dems must realise, it would be easier to sell the Sun in Liverpool than hold many of their marginal seats. How can their ministers hope to stay in the style to which they are undoubtedly now accustomed riding a dying horse into the 2015 election?

Let’s fast forward three years. David Cameron will surely – and reasonably – hope to win a big working majority at the next election; this is his obvious Plan A. But continuing with the coalition will be his close-run Plan B. His worst of all worlds would be to win with a small Tory majority. The last thing he wants is to be reliant on his party’s backbenches or, even worse, his rank and file, as John Major was following his general election victory twenty years ago.

For the Lib Dems – trailing in single digits in most polls – their very salvation lies in preserving the status quo. Their worst of all worlds is to see a return to binary politics with Labour and the Tories carving up British politics once again. That appears a distinct possibility with the Lib Dems now seriously looking over their shoulder as UKIP threatens to usurp them for the third party slot.

They should seek payback for holding their collective noses and backing Cameron over issues like tuition fees, austerity and NHS reform in the shape of a semi-formal electoral pact. Their candidates go into the next election with their nominal Tory opponents defending a joint record, so why not a joint ticket as well?

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Revealed: How BIS abandoned British shipbuilding

14/03/2012, 07:00:21 AM

by Iain Wright

A couple of weeks ago, the MoD announced that a £0.5bn contract for the next generation of Royal Navy tankers had been awarded to a South Korean company.

Ministers thought that they had got away with this because there had been no bids from a British firm.

Peter Luff, the defence procurement minister, was quoted as saying that: “There was no British bid. That does make it a tad difficult to award (the contract) to a British company if there is not a bid from a British company. We don’t build tankers in the UK.”

Excuse me? We don’t build tankers in the UK? I think the minister should try telling that to the Shipbuilders and Shiprepairers Association (SSA), whose membership comprises about 99 per cent of the UK ship production and supply chain, and whose director still insists that this contract could be built in the UK within the timeframe and to the quality required and awarded to a UK shipyard to help maintain jobs.

The government is hiding behind the excuse that no British firms applied. But this is sophistry.

There was a European bid on the table that offered a greater share of work for the UK than the South Korean winners. This would have meant 35 per cent of the contract being delivered in Britain.

But the MoD ignored the wider British economic interest.

This sorry episode raises two serious questions: – why wasn’t the broader economic context taken into account, and could the government have done more with British suppliers to help them bid?

In both cases, it is down to the departmental champion of business across government, the department for Business, Innovation and Skills, to make the Britain’s economic case to other departments and support British companies in engaging with government.

So I asked a parliamentary question as to what meetings the business secretary Vince Cable and his ministers had with MoD ministers and civil servants, UK businesses and trade associations to prioritise the British economic interest in such an important contract.

I got the answer back last week. No meetings had been held between BIS ministers and anybody on this matter.

I find this astonishing.

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Labour’s identity problems go much deeper than all women shortlists

13/03/2012, 12:20:04 PM

by Ben Cobley

In Life and Fate, his epic novel of family, Stalingrad and totalitarianism, the Soviet-era journalist Vasily Grossman wrote:

“Human groupings have one main purpose: to assert everyone’s right to be different, to be special, to think, feel and live in his or her own way. People join together in order to win or defend this right. But this is where a terrible, fateful error is born: the belief that these groupings in the name of a race, a God, a party or a State are the very purpose of life and not simply a means to an end. No! The only true and lasting meaning of the struggle for life lies in the individual, in his modest peculiarities and in his right to these peculiarities.”

Grossman maybe stretches his point a little too far. Nevertheless his polemic makes a powerful and important point: that groups can become forces of oppression, not just against other groups but against individuality and humanity itself.

This happens when they becomes ends in themselves, when they take on a life of their own and become self-sustaining. In Grossman’s Soviet Union this is what happened to the Communist identity – once it became a pre-requisite for career advancement and entry to nomenklatura, it lost its idealistic elements and became a malign force.

On 2^nd March, Uncut published an article of mine about contemporary liberal-left identity politics, in which I questioned the continuing existence of All Women Shortlists (AWS) and other forms of positive discrimination in Labour Party processes. The article provoked a (generally) considered response on LabourList from Luke Akehurst of the NEC, plus plenty of other lively responses on comment threads and elsewhere.

The background to what I was arguing in the piece was summed up in this sentence: “Institutionalising separate identities as we do is a road to nowhere and nothingness.”

So what does this really mean? After all, when we talk about identity problems we normally mean lack of identity: for example that Ed Miliband lacks identity, or that the Labour Party could do with more identity.

My own interpretation is that identity itself is often the problem.

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LGBT rights shouldn’t be stopped by offensive cardinals

13/03/2012, 07:00:06 AM

by James Asser

Last week, Kevin Meagher in his article for Uncut “Gay rights and testy cardinals” raised some interesting points about the balance between faith and politics and the need for religion to have its voice and it’s say. Quite agree. All sections of society have the right to speak out, my concern over the comments at the weekend by Cardinal O’Brien, is less what he wants to say more the way he has chosen to say it.

Kevin makes the point that the cardinal “doesn’t mince his words” which is a nice way of saying he’s bloody rude and offensive. How else can we interpret the assertion that gay marriage will lead to the “further degeneration of society into immorality” or that gay marriage is “grotesque” or that in a convoluted and bizarre analogy that it is comparable to legalising slavery?

We’re told that tolerance and respect is a two way street, I agree and I respect the cardinal’s right to disagree, and to articulate it, but I see no tolerance or respect in the remarks he made, just abuse.

Of course what is being missed is that the government’s proposed consultation relates purely to civil marriage. There are no proposals to require churches to undertake same sex-marriage, no proposals that they should be made to embrace it; in fact the government consultation doesn’t even cover it. It’s not even as if this is a revolutionary new concept, it is the logical progression from civil partnerships and the work done by the last Labour government and we should be proud of that.

LGBT Labour would argue that if and when same-sex marriage is introduced churches should have the ability to opt in, much as they now have with civil partnerships. That way those faiths such as the Quakers, Unitarians, Liberal Judaism and Reform Judaism that have expressed support and a desire to carry out same-sex weddings can follow their own path, as much as the Catholic Church and C of E.

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This government is driven by venal self-interest

12/03/2012, 04:03:25 PM

by Amanda Ramsay

It’s a very strange time in parliament at the moment. Having changed the legislative calendar, with the Queen’s Speech now in May rather than the traditional November, parliament has run-out of business. The Commons is becalmed while the battles over health, welfare and legal aid being fought-out in the Lords.

With welfare reform cuts about to hit home and housing benefit caps forcing displacement and homelessness, the character of the laws due royal assent over the next few weeks show an old school Tory, right-wing, ideological intent to take government back to laissez-faire sink-or-swim economics; where the state sits back and does the very bare minimum to assist its citizens in trouble.

Whilst Labour souls worry about the Tory-led government’s woeful destruction of aspiration and hope, it is difficult to detect any noticeable or natural empathy from the likes of independently wealthy Cameron and Clegg and the many other millionaires in the cabinet.

Those with private wealth don’t usually know the fear of facing homelessness or joblessness. They can pay for private health insurance and secure their futures through top-class public schooling; can afford private care if disabled, frail or ill and enjoy their own pensions and investments, so have no need for the welfare state. As Tory grandee Alan Clarke once memorably explained, they live off the interest on the interest. Put simply, they can cut with impunity because they don’t feel the pain.

No clearer is this ambivalence evident than with the Health and Social Care Bill. The ramifications of allowing foundation hospitals to use up to 49% of their resources for private, non-NHS work, may not worry certain individuals that can afford US-style private health care insurance, however, NHS waiting lists will surely soar while paving the way for a two-tier health care system.

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Vive la résistance la rue Victoria!

12/03/2012, 07:00:33 AM

That’s the mood brewing in Labour’s Victoria street headquarters.

On Friday, the long planned internal Labour party restructure was finally announced: new departments, new directors, more effective party. Or at least that’s the official line.

While the changes do make some welcome technocratic adjustments, they are ultimately driven by hard politics.

Labour HQ has long been regarded with suspicion by Ed Miliband’s team. During the leadership election it was virtually united in its backing for David.

Since then the relationship between Victoria street and casa Ed in Norman Shaw south has been frosty at best. One leadership loyalist recently described Victoria street as, “a vipers’ nest”.

The restructure is team Ed’s move to bring headquarters to heel. Despite the job advertisements and apparently open selection process, the big three appointments at communications, strategy and policy all have something in common: their previous employer, one E Miliband.

Bob Roberts, Greg Beales and Torsten Bell will seamlessly move a few hundred yards down the road from the leader’s Westminster office to impose direct rule on Victoria street.

Needless to say, the changes haven’t gone down well with a staff team that regards the Ed Miliband’s team with barely concealed derision.

One staffer whispered late on Friday, “Set aside the politics for a moment, what sort of job have this lot done for Ed? Do we want that to happen to the party operation? “

It wasn’t an isolated comment.

But it’s not just personnel that are being changed. Perhaps the biggest change is structural. The way the party is managed has been fundamentally redrawn with the creation of a new executive board.

The board brings together the executive directors, the general secretary with the leader’s chief of staff and deputy chief of staff. It will be the new decision-making heart of the Labour party machine.

The organisational independence of the Labour party from the leader’s office is now a thing of the past. For many, even amongst Ed sceptics, it’s a common sense step. A large gap between leader and machine is hardly conducive to effective campaigning.

But, as ever when power shifts like this, there are winners and losers, and the big loser here is the well-liked and respected general secretary Iain McNicol.

He wasn’t the leader’s choice for general secretary, but McNicol has been loyal and tried to ensure headquarters and the leader’s office worked together more smoothly in the few months since he took office in September.

Now with executive board, the dynamics at the top of the party are very different.

If an executive director, who nominally reports to the general secretary, has a difference of opinion about what should be done, the executive board not the general secretary will decide.

And what are the chances that some of the new executive directors might just decide to pick up the phone to their old chums in the leader’s office before executive board meetings to make sure they get the right decision, regardless of what the general secretary might think?

In the words of one staffer on Friday, “Iain is basically now a glorified head of HR”.

Over the weekend, as the scale of the changes were being digested by the Labour HQ team, two camps were emerging.

One group was dusting down CVs. It’s a tough market out there for Labour apparatchiks, but for many, even unemployment might be preferable to this brave new world.

The other was talking about resistance.

The signs of rebellion were evident even as the changes were being announced. Before the full staff team had been briefed, details were being leaked to Guido Fawkes, hardly team Ed’s greatest friend.

And then when Iain Mcnicol sent an e-mail to staff about the leaking, that was leaked to Guido as well.

For the rebels, it’s just the start. Over the coming weeks expect to see more signs of the Victoria street maquis. Team Ed has moved decisively to take control of the party operation. But lurking in the sandwich bars and watering holes of Victoria street, the resistance is plotting.

Posted in Inside | 5 Comments »

What is the point of International Women’s Day?

09/03/2012, 12:11:22 PM

by Lucy Ashton

We’ve had International Women’s Day and soon it’s mother’s day so maybe March should become girls’ month. Oh, sorry, can I call them “girls”? Even I’m not sure what’s politically correct any more when it comes to feminism.

Twitter was flooded with #iwd hashtags this week but *whispers* I really don’t know what it’s all meant to be about? And most of my girlfriends don’t either.

My local city council stated “it celebrates the economic, political and social achievements of the past, present and future” and listed a host of events.

I liked the sound of this, so clicked on the list to find out what was happening. Women-only chairobic sessions at a number of churches, a taster in zumba and henna painting for Somali women. Suffragette Adela Pankhurst, who lived and worked in my home city of Sheffield, would be so proud.

So it’s no wonder the day passed by unnoticed for all the smart, sparky women I know. They were too busy running their businesses and rearing children.

And isn’t that the crux of the problem with all this? What exactly are we fighting for in Britain in 2012?

Women can drive, go to university, become a captain of industry or wear a bikini and sell their wedding photos to Hello magazine.

We can take contraception, have an abortion, undergo IVF, adopt and become single mothers. And I can get married, get divorced or have a civil partnership. Hell, I can even become a man if I want to.

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How Labour has misread voters on the deficit

09/03/2012, 08:30:21 AM

by Atul Hatwal

On Tuesday, Ed Miliband did what should have been a good thing.

His speech on the need for a more active industrial policy was rooted in common sense. Ideas like a British bank tasked with expanding business lending are widely supported. And it was a neat idea to back an existing campaign by British manufacturers for a “made in Britain” label.

Although sceptics will always roll their eyes at a buy British campaign, the politics were right. Identifying the party with a business led initiative that had lots of businesses ready to talk positively about the proposal is a world away from “predators and producers”.

The government did their bit too, issuing a rebuttal comment that talked about the need for global trade and international business. The dividing line could not have been clearer – Labour backing British business while the government opened the next round of GATT negotiations with the public.

But despite receiving as warm a reception as he has enjoyed for an economic policy speech, what thanks did Ed Miliband get? Minutes after the applause he was fighting off a baying mob on Radio 5 live.

It was impossible not to feel sorry for him. The leader offered the usual platitudes about the scale of the task facing Labour, building up support slowly and getting a warm reception up and down the country. But it was just chaff.

What Ed Miliband reaped was in part the inevitable result of Labour’s economic strategy.

The last election was lost on the deficit. The electoral challenge for this parliament: which party is most trusted to reduce it.

In a way, Labour has understood this and developed a strategy that does indeed address the deficit.

Every press release issued by the economic team is rigorously consistent. The headline is almost always about poor growth with a clear causal link made in the story between growth, unemployment, reduced tax revenues and a worsening deficit.

Great. Job done, right?

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