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Archive for 2012

An open letter to Ken Livingstone

08/03/2012, 01:00:47 PM

by Jonathan Roberts

Dear Ken,

I write as a Labour party and trade union member. I have spent many evenings in dusty, cold community centres with left of centre colleagues arguing over the minutes of last month’s branch meetings. I have walked more miles than I care to remember on the Labour doorstep. I have stuffed so many envelopes that I feel as though I’ve single-handedly kept my postman in employment.

I do it because I believe Labour values can help people. But I am not, now, doing any of these things for you.

Your supporters will say I’m disloyal to the Labour Party, but don’t seem to mind you campaigning against our candidate in Tower Hamlets.

Your supporters cheered you when you called tax avoiders “rich bastards”, but they don’t seem to mind the £50,000 you have allegedly avoided yourself.

Your supporters criticise Boris Johnson as a “part time Mayor” for churning out a weekly article for the Telegraph, but they don’t seem to mind that you were an MP and a writer for the Independent during substantial parts of your own Mayoral tenure.

Your supporters sing about how you speak the truth, but don’t seem to mind how independent fact-checking organisations regularly describe your claims as “fiction”.

Your supporters were delighted when you announced you would reintroduce the EMA for London, giving hope to thousands of kids, but they don’t seem to mind that the Mayor has no power to reintroduce EMA at all. Nor do they seem to mind you making a promise you knew full well you would be unlikely to deliver on.

But do you know what Ken? I mind. I do. Your relentless cynicism and negativity is matched only by your hypocrisy. And I mind all three.

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Mould appearing in the rose garden

08/03/2012, 08:00:54 AM

by Peter Watt

When the Tory Lib-Dem Coalition was formed, I remember the then hopeful Labour voices saying that it wouldn’t or couldn’t last. That the internal contradictions would bring it down. But David and Nick were cleverer than that. They agreed a shared programme for government, rules for managing disagreement and a divvying up of jobs. And not only that, but they also passed the Parliament act 2010, that for all intents and purposes bound them together until the formal start of the next general election, 2015. And the truth was that Labour didn’t have a clue what to do about it or what to say to attack it.

Labour said that it was a Tory lead government propped up by hypocritical Fib Dems. They taunted the government for its disagreements and obvious internal tensions. But the public weren’t bothered by all that. On the contrary, they looked at the “rows” and instead saw two parties coming together in the national interest trying to cooperate. Because the glue that bound the government together was the deficit. The public understood that they didn’t both agree on everything, but despite that they were prepared to put that aside to help dig the country out of a hole; a financial hole that Labour had dug. And that was pretty much how the story has run since the love in the rose garden.

Of course there have been difficulties: the AV referendum, student finance and almost every word uttered by Vince Cable have all put tension on the partner’s relationship. And Nick Clegg must be pretty miffed that he seems to have taken more than his share of the personal popularity pain, while David Cameron remains, well, prime ministerial. But dealing with the deficit and a sense of sink or swim together has kept the show on the road.

Because the deficit and its reduction is a very necessary policy objective, it is not a political cause. In other words, it is not a story that tells of the sort of country that you want to deliver. And perversely this has been useful up until now as the two parties would almost certainly not have been able to agree on what the story would be. And anyway the public have not been worried about any lack of a visionary story. On the contrary, they have just wanted to be reassured that their government was doing all that it could to avoid Britain becoming Greece. Deficit reduction may not have been a compelling story, but who needs a story when you’re worried that the banks will run out of money?

But just recently there have been signs, just signs, of a growing tension at the heart of government. And at its heart, this increase in tension between the partners is caused by this lack of a shared vision. Because deficit fatigue is kicking in for the public. It doesn’t mean that they don’t care about it anymore because they do. It’s just that it has been said so often that it has almost become meaningless.

Saying that you are in favour of reducing the deficit is like saying that you are in favour of motherhood. Who isn’t? Oh there are arguments about how fast and all that. But no one is seriously saying that we shouldn’t reduce the deficit. So instead people are focusing on the quality of their lives, the price of goods and the security of their jobs. And the political strategists know that they quickly need to start telling a story that addresses these fears and hopes about the future.

And so that is forcing the arguments out into the open about what sort of country that the coalition wants to see. How big and how active should the state be? Who should pay what and how much into the national coffers? What is the best way to create growth? What is the relationship between the public and private sectors? And inevitably the cracks have begun to open as we have seen this week in the run up the budget. Arguments about a mansion tax, the 50p tax rate and the break-up of RBS.

The tensions inherent in the coalition are there for all to see as outriders from both parties take to the airwaves to promote one view or the other. And more and more often we are seeing MPs from one coalition party condemning the other party. Presumably this will only get worse as we enter the latter half of the parliament. The cooperative strength of the early days of the coalition could quickly become a weakness caused by splits and indecision. There does still seem to be a strong relationship between the big four in the Cabinet (Cameron, Osborne, Clegg and Alexander). And it does seem more likely than not that the Coalition will soldier on. But it also looks like it is quickly going to become an uncomfortable partnership.

So Labour has an opportunity to begin to tell its own story as the tensions within the coalition slowly simmer. But only if it is able to begin to tell its own credible story about the sort of country that they want to see. And only if they remember that people’s deficit fatigue does not mean that Labour have won the argument and that in fact people still blame Labour for causing it.*

*Even if Labour thinks that that is unfair.

Peter Watt was general secretary of the Labour party.

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A trip to Stockholm for London Labour

07/03/2012, 01:00:22 PM

by Rob Marchant

This week’s revelations about Ken Livingstone’s tax affairs are not shocking. They are not even very surprising. But they are important in another sense: in the direct contradiction they highlight between word and deed.

Now, as many readers of Labour Uncut will know, its contributors are not generally renowned as class warriors. But, as a politician, it is simply staggeringly unwise to show yourself in the light that Livingstone has just done. As Nick Cohen notes in the Observer:

“Livingstone…is now the champion of the suffering 99% and enemy of the despised 1%. “Cameron’s problem is too many of his team have become super-rich by exploiting every tax fiddle,” he cried. ‘No one should be allowed to vote in a British election, let alone sit in our parliament, unless they are paying their full share of tax.’ He was talking about himself.'”

Let’s be clear: tax avoidance is not tax evasion. It is not illegal. Some people may even call it smart financial management. But don’t tell everyone it is morally reprehensible and then do it yourself. It’s not the tax avoidance itself, it’s the hypocrisy that will kill you, because people will cease to believe that you do not simply think that it’s one rule for you and another for everyone else. Or that you tell one thing to one person, and another to another

Livingstone’s 1999 failure to be endorsed by Labour’s NEC as its mayoral candidate was, frankly, badly handled. Unlike other countries where regional devolution has a long history, Labour was too green to realise that there are limits to how much you can get a regional politician to toe the party line. They have their own electoral base and can merely pay lip-service to the party, while doing just as they like. As Ken duly did, and as Boris is now doing. Fair enough.

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Gay rights and testy cardinals: respect and tolerance is a two-way street

07/03/2012, 08:00:24 AM

by Kevin Meagher

In case anyone failed to notice, Cardinal Keith O’Brien does not mince his words. The leader of the Scottish Catholic church (and until the Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nicholls is given his biretta, the UK’s highest-ranking Catholic), believes the concept of gay marriage is an attempt to “redefine reality,” a “madness” and “grotesque subversion of a universally accepted human right”.

Wow, all that came from a single paragraph in his piece in the Sunday Telegraph, setting out his position fairly unequivocally ahead of an imminent government consultation on extending civil marriage to gay and lesbian couples.

But aren’t the rights of a gay couple already well-enshrined in the civil partnership legislation, as the cardinal also points out? Why, then, the push to rebrand it as marriage?

Ah, but this is an issue about parity of esteem, comes the response. Love and commitment – regardless of sexuality – deserves respect and equality. So is this a rather overblown argument about the definition of a single word? On the face of it, yes, but, as ever, what lies behind this rumpus is more significant.

This is just the latest skirmish is a much wider conflagration between faith and politics which is now raging. It is a cold war too, fought using proxies; this time it is gay marriage, next time it will be something else. The fighting is often disproportionately fierce, and, like the Little Endians and Big Endians in Gulliver’s Travels, fought over seemingly esoteric issues.

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Why the government is PIG ignorant on economics

06/03/2012, 02:12:07 PM

by Stuart Rodger

The world is transfixed by the Greek Tragedy unfolding before our eyes. It is increasingly clear for those on the left that what is being foisted upon the Greek people by the IMF, EU, and ECB as we speak is nothing less than a form of economic ‘shock therapy’: the labour markets must be ‘liberalised’, large public assets are to be sold off (at rock bottom prices), and banks are to be re-capitalised but maintain their “managerial independence”.

The Golden Dawn – Greece’s equivalent of the BNP – is on the verge of winning representation. In a recent Newsnight report, one unemployed, professional Greek citizen spoke of “civil war”. The place where democracy was born is turning out to be the place where democracy goes to die.

But far from being an irrelevant calamity at the other end of Europe, the economic crisis unfolding may have some important lessons for us – David Cameron et al, after all, routinely bring up the examples of Portugal, Ireland, and Greece as warning signals for what could happen to Britain should it not cut its way out of its deficit, with the price of debt spiralling up and growth stalling.

But a cursory reading of the news made me wonder if austerity is in fact exacerbating their problems, and is in fact the root cause of their problems in the first place.

So I decided to dig into the statistics to see if my theory was true. So, is David Cameron’s government PIG-ignorant? (see what I did there?). The following fiscal and growth statistics are all from the Eurostat and World Bank websites respectively, unless otherwise stated (measures of inflation have also been taken from the World Bank).

P is for Portugal. This country is important because it has been held up by David Cameron as his response to the Labour Party’s proposals to halve the deficit over the course of this parliament, rather than try to eliminate it entirely.

What policy did they follow? Initially, they increased spending moderately and the result was a moderate recovery. But in May 2011 they announced cuts to public spending and then, six months later, Portugal was reduced to “junk” status, with Eurostat estimating moderate contraction in 2011.

The lesson from Portugal is that spending brought recovery, and cuts promptly killed it off, worsening their debt problems. Crucially – punishment by the bond-markets came post-austerity. By citing Portugal, Cameron cites an economic experiment which proves him wrong.

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The Labour party’s double standards on all women short-lists

06/03/2012, 07:00:01 AM

by Atul Hatwal

Last week Ben Cobley wrote for Uncut about all women shortlists. It wasn’t a reactionary rant. He wasn’t dressed in a batman costume, sitting at the top of Big Ben when he wrote it. The tone was measured and the points reasoned.

While most comment, on both sides of the discussion was similarly nuanced, some of the responses were pavlovian, at best. Little effort to engage with what had been written, just a standard rehearsal of long established positions.

Yesterday, Luke Akehurst gave us one of the better versions of the conventional case for AWS over at Labour List.

In theory, I should support what Luke is saying.

I believe in all women shortlists. I see the logic of why AWS is needed – a second best solution in a third best world. And not enough has been achieved to achieve greater women’s representation. 81 female Labour MPs out of a parliamentary Labour party of 258 still leaves Labour nearly 50 MPs short of achieving equality.

But Luke and similar defenders of AWS lose me.

In his piece, Ben raises the rhetorical question – why only shortlists for women? Surely the same logic could be applied to other groups?

He’s right.

Ben is consistent in the way he draws his conclusions. All types of discrimination are wrong, therefore preferential shortlists should be ended.

If only the official party line, which backs positive action to tackle inequality, were similarly rigorous.

For of all those who manned (so to speak) the barricades in defence of AWS, equality seems to stop at gender. Zero discussion about ethnic minority or disabled communities. Equality is a principle worth fighting for, but not worth applying equally.

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How enterprise can empower young people to tackle youth unemployment

05/03/2012, 12:00:47 PM

by Lee Marsham

Youth unemployment is a national crisis that has been worsening steadily in the last few years and has increased to unprecedented levels in recent times.

With financial tightening well underway and no sign of it loosening any time soon, it is hard to see an obvious solution to the problem from within our current leaders in many of our sectors of work. Why?

Today we are faced with a generation of leaders who only know how to put programmes in place with government support and incentives, both of which are on shortening supply.

As of yet no one has adapted to the new austere times.

It seems that only young people themselves can solve youth unemployment. But in order to enable young people to achieve this, we need to capitalise on the business capacity that they can provide.

This can only be achieved through a radical reshaping of the current curriculum so it entrenches entrepreneurship into young people.

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Whip’s Notebook: Top down NHS reorganisations, Hulk Hogan and Oliver Letwin

05/03/2012, 07:00:22 AM

by Jon Ashworth

Last week the leader of the House of Commons and lord privy seal Sir George Young (who by the way reads my posts for Labour Uncut or at least his special advisers do and then lets him know if I say anything interesting) announced the likely date for the Queens Speech.

Get your diaries out because the next Gracious Address is set to be May 9^th.It didn’t come as much of a surprise to Labour MPs as Politics Home’s brilliant Paul Waugh revealed weeks ago. But MPs are always the last to hear these things anyway.

It means we will have had one of the longest parliamentary sessions on record even though we’ve hardly been scrutinising any legislation at all in the Commons in recent months. Instead we’ve been spending our time on innumerable backbench business debates with countless one line whips. All important stuff of course but rather odd when you consider we are elected to be legislators and we’ve not been doing much actual legislating.

Take the controversial Health and Social Care Bill. So despite it being one of the biggest issues in my postbag (actually inbox, nearly everything I get is by email but us MPs like to say “postbag”) and I suspect colleagues’ postbags (inbox) too, MPs have only had the opportunity to debate this monstrous bill in recent weeks because Andy Burnham tabled an opposition motion on the NHS Risk Register and asked what’s known as an urgent question on Nick Clegg’s health amendments as well last week.

So effectively Andrew Lansley in recent weeks has only come to the Commons to defend his policies because Labour has forced him to. Last month at health questions, genuine Lib Dem rebel Andrew George had a question on the order paper asking the Secretary of State whether he would withdraw the Health and Social Care Bill. Did Mr Lansley step up to answer it? No his loyal deputy Simon Burns was sent into the breach instead. “Frit” was the inevitable heckle from the more boisterous Labour MPs.

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All women shortlists are an insider’s charter

02/03/2012, 01:30:22 PM

by Ben Cobley

“White people love playing ‘divide & rule’ We should not play their game”, these words, tweeted by Diane Abbott, ignited a storm of accusations and denials of racism and opened a window into the complexities of identity politics.

While it is doubtful that many white people were properly offended by the tweet, it does expose Abbott’s assumption that black and white people should be divided, and that they have different (and opposing) interests.

The “divide and rule” agenda that Abbott talked about in fact applies more to her in this instance. She was clearly trying to draw a racial drawbridge between black and white people.

This is the sort of political philosophy that George W. Bush espoused when he said, “You are either with us or against us”; one group’s identity is defined opposite to the other – and if you do not share the dictates of your own group’s “leaders”, then you are letting your side down. Bim Adewunmi herself made a strong argument about this.

As it is highly unlikely Diane Abbott is a racist, how did she get into such a tangle?

Part of the answer surely lies in the way that certain curious, arcane attitudes are still widespread in liberal-left circles.

Abbott herself responded to the tweeting controversy by saying that she was talking about the politics of colonialism. But she clearly was not discussing history in her tweet, and that is where the colonialist worldview belongs – and where the anti-colonialist mentality will have to find a home sooner or later. It is hopelessly outdated in a country where the evidence of integration is all around us, not least in the many children and young adults of mixed race.

The unthinking identity politics of the liberal-left maintains and extends this anti-colonialist narrative though, by simplistically inverting the racist, sexist and ruling class ideologies of past times.

So it is that dark skin is favoured over light, female over male, while the possession of assets and money is deemed as something to be ashamed of.

This attitude is woven into Labour Party practices and procedures, especially when it comes to candidate selection.

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What is Labour’s message on public service reform?

02/03/2012, 08:00:03 AM

by Atul Hatwal

Step back for a moment. There’s lots going on in politics with the welfare and health reform debates raging, and it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture. Now, ask yourself this question :– what’s Labour’s narrative on the Tories?

What is the common thread that runs through Labour’s positions on these two issues; ties them together and explains to voters why the Tories are wrong.

In politics it’s easy to lurch from issue to issue and get sucked into the detail of the day to day battle. Like a primary school game of football there’s a scrum of politicos, journalists, bloggers and tweeters charging around the Westminster pitch en masse chasing the day’s story.

But out there in the real world, voters aren’t players in the micro-drama of news cycle politics. They aren’t interested in the minutiae that concerns the political class, life’s too short. They are spectators, with at best a passing interest in the game on the pitch.

The majority will have opinions on issues like health or welfare reform but what matters most is how a party’s various policies combine in a to give a clear idea of what they stand for, and equally importantly, why the other side are the wrong choice.

The big picture.

So back to the question, what’s Labour’s narrative to frame the Tory picture?

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