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Archive for April, 2013

Confusion reigns over London Labour Euro-list selection as candidates dispute senior official’s story

19/04/2013, 10:59:31 AM

The fiasco over London Labour’s Euro-list selection descended into chaos this week with candidates querying a senior official’s version of events.

On Monday, Uncut ran a piece on the grassroots revolt in London over the selection process for Labour’s European election candidates. In the article, Joy Johnson was identified as one of the key officials on the London selection panel.

She contacted Uncut to complain that her position in the process had been misrepresented. To be absolutely clear on her role in the overall selection procedure we put a question to her:

“Did you discuss the selection criteria, process or any prospective candidates with any of the other members of the panel?”

Her response was posted in the comments to the piece, “You asked did I discuss the short list the answer is NO.”

It seemed an oddly specific response. The question didn’t even mention short lists and was much broader in it’s ambit.

Subsequently, over the course of this week, Uncut has been contacted by several candidates interviewed to get onto Labour’s European short list, perplexed at Joy’s response.

Each of the candidates Uncut has spoken to has been clear: Joy Johnson did attend their short listing meeting and took an active part in the interviews.

Speaking to Labour’s London candidates, it has emerged that the party decided its short list of European candidates at two meetings before Easter on Saturday 23^rd March and Sunday 24^th March. The title of the mail sent out by head office to candidates was very clear: “European Parliament selections Short Listing Interview.”

Last night, we contacted Joy Johnson with this information and her stance appears to have evolved.

“There was a meeting to decide on candidates who were to go forward for interview. I wasn’t at that meeting. I didn’t discuss the list that went forward for interviews. As for the weekend you mentioned…I was at that meeting…As part of the interview process there were discussions to get to the final list that would then go out to party members” (emphasis added)

The new position is that Joy Johnson did attend short listing meetings, she did interview candidates and then did discuss with her colleagues on the panel which candidates would be on Labour’s European short list .

Confused? Many are.

It seems that when faced with the initial question from Uncut, rather than simply give a full answer, Joy Johnson opted to parse. But she got confused between the long listing (sifting candidates before interview) and short listing (interviewing candidates to make Labour’s short list of European candidates).

For someone who was Ken Livingstone’s former director of communications, it’s an astonishing way to deal with the media.

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We should have the courage to legislate for a Living Wage, not just campaign for it

18/04/2013, 05:08:34 PM

by Prem Goyal

It has become a bit of an easy game for cynical journalists to say that Labour’s leadership talks about abstract ideas like pre-distribution and responsible capitalism that are somehow too hard for people to follow. What nonsense. I don’t much like either of the phrases, but I think the ideas themselves are both simple and compelling.

Ed’s offer to the country is rooted in good old fashioned common sense: instead of taking action ‘after the fact’ to try to fix inequality, let’s build social justice into the economy at every level. It might be easy to caricature as the language of the seminar room, but it is basically just another way of saying that prevention is better than cure.

The most effective form of prevention against the most extreme forms of inequality is full employment – and the best vaccination against in-work poverty is the living wage. That’s why Ed Miliband made it such a feature of his leadership bid and did significant follow up on the details late last year.

Right-wing ideologues, of course, claim that any intervention in the market distorts it and, in the end, hurts the economy. This argument, that the market finds its own perfect equilibrium between pay, the number of jobs and the demand for goods, ignores today’s reality: low pay employers are effectively getting a public subsidy for bad practice, in the form of tax-payer top ups to their workers’ wages through the benefit system.

The IPPR and the Resolution Foundation have estimated that a universal living wage would save the Treasury £3.6 billon from the bill it currently foots to help those on poverty pay to make ends meet. Over fifteen years in business I’ve worked in New York, Tokyo, London and Zurich for some of the biggest companies in the world and I can honestly say I’ve never met a business person who would think, when looked at like that, that they could reasonably ask the public to subsidise their profit margins while their staff struggle to survive.

The truth is, the living wage works for everybody: employee, tax-payer and employer alike. Independent research for the Living Wage Foundation has found that 80% of employers giving the wage and 75% of the staff receiving it feel it improves their work. As the Tories continually fail to understand when they attack ‘lazy Britain’ and endorse erosions of employee rights, better pay and conditions improve morale and productivity. Further, plenty of living wage employers felt it strengthens their brand by encouraging consumers to see them as an ethical firm.

My own company, GMC, pays all its staff a living wage and is applying to be on the official list of Living Wage firms. Financial companies, retail outlets and legal firms are joining a long list of councils, including my own Southwark borough council, and a growing number of universities.

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Posted in Grassroots | 11 Comments »

The last few weeks have shown politics at its worst: tribal, divisive and ugly

18/04/2013, 07:00:22 AM

by Peter Watt

Sometimes politics is a noble and even beautiful pursuit where words can capture a moment and inspire. Just think of Martin Luther King on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 or any one of a number of Churchill’s wartime orations.

Then there are political decisions that become once in a generation moments that end up uniting most of the country like the decision to go to war in 1939 or to create a National Health Service in its aftermath.

Other decisions remain more controversial but can still be seen as being decisive moments like the decision to join the EEC, the privatisation program of the 1980’s or the second Iraq war. The point is that over the years politics has mattered because it involved inspiration and decisions being taken that mattered even if they were opposed.

But in the last few years it has felt that politics has mattered less and less. Partly this is because the world has changed so that politics seems to have less influence than say global big business or the seemingly uncontrollable economic forces.

And partly it is the advent of the information age where the internet and social media has fragmented the sense of a shared experience. The reality is that you can set your “virtual preferences” so that you can simply block that which is of little interest or irrelevant.

But politics itself also has to bear some responsibility. In recent months, in addition to being seen as irrelevant, politics has also been ugly. And that ugliness will have served to further drive a wedge between them-and-us; between the tiny band of political warriors and the majority more interested in fuel prices, the security of their family and Gangnam style on YouTube.

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Posted in Uncut | 12 Comments »

Naiveté is a weakness in all walks of life but in politics, it’s deadly

17/04/2013, 02:08:49 PM

by Rob Marchant

Major political events which blow all other news out of the water, such as the death of Margaret Thatcher, tend to do two things. First, they make us take a step back and take stock, to ponder the grand historical sweep of things; and second, they give us a little time to do so, as the normal scheme of things is largely suspended.

So far, Miliband is having a “good war”: his Thatcher tribute speech was widely thought to be very good and, in any event, the fact that his opponents cut taxes for the well-off a fortnight ago is surely helping his approval ratings. His party is still solidly ahead of the government, although arguably still more down to the latter’s failure than Labour’s conspicuous success.

But politics is about people. About personalities. As we do the stocktaking, we now know much more about Miliband and his leadership style than we did back in 2010. As critical friends, do we not have the right – or rather, the obligation – to comment, if we think that there are weaknesses in the approach? We do.

Last week, various leftists were justifying their rapacious criticisms of Thatcher by the “two wrongs make a right” technique: recalling equally harsh words spoken by Tories on the death of Michael Foot, that same year as Miliband’s accession.

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Posted in Uncut | 14 Comments »

For pity’s sake, stay at home tomorrow

16/04/2013, 07:00:32 AM

by Ian Stewart

For the past week those of us who remember the 1980s have been in our own ways reliving them. It has been neither a pleasant nor edifying spectacle to watch friends and family tear lumps off each other over the legacy of the frail old woman who died at the Ritz. Facebook accounts are now covered in the detritus of real life as well as online friendships wrecked by casual or bombastic posts that reopened the wounds long thought healed.

To watch a crowd of idiots vandalise my local cinema – which by the way was showing the excellent Spirit of ’45 – and then break the windows of the bastion of Thatcherism that is Brixton’s Banardos shop defied all logic. I mean, Foxtons – I understand that, but Banardos? Please explain?

I still cannot forgive or forget Mrs Thatcher and her government – not for the miners, nor for Corby, nor for letting the free market rip in such a way that highly skilled industrial jobs in my home town were butchered (Lowestoft men built the Virgin Atlantic Challenger that won the blue riband – using state of the art plasma welding – then were left on the scrapheap). I doubt that Germany, Holland or Norway would have done the same. Eastern Coachworks shut down, north sea oil and gas money frittered away, leaving behind an economy reliant on food processing plants and moving away as the only serious option if you have ambition.

What I also cannot forgive is the fact that ever since 1990, every single succeeding government has attempted not to alter the Thatcher consensus, but simply to give it a “human face”. Up until the great crash Major, Blair and Brown had all seemingly achieved this – balancing social spending with deregulation, further privatisation and tax cuts for the rich.

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Posted in Uncut | 29 Comments »

We do not need to divide the country to get through difficult times

15/04/2013, 06:49:16 PM

by Helen Godwin Teige

Ed Miliband came to Bristol on Saturday, so I, my husband. our two toddlers and my sister went along to see Ed and listen to what he had to say. He did an ‘on the stump’ speech and answered questions from members and non-members who had gathered in the busy St Nicholas Market in Bristol.

I am pretty sure Ed won some votes for both himself and the Labour party on Saturday. He took questions on everything from mental health, vocational qualifications, and the bedroom tax to legalisation of drugs and Trident. Bristolians are an understated bunch but they know what they are interested in and we felt Ed answered each question well; he listened, gave real and honest answers and didn’t sound as policy light as the press are desperate for him to be.

He was here on the back of the local elections but there were key things that he mentioned that I think Labour need to drill down into and build deeper policies

1. Mental Health

The stigma of mental health needs to end. The increase in dementia cases means this is on the agenda in a big way but mental health affects all ages and is a vast subject requiring more research, treatment and occupational health. We need to take the lead in accepting people with mental health problems and ensuring their place in society is understood and valued.

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Posted in Grassroots | 3 Comments »

London Labour revolt over Euro-list fix grows

15/04/2013, 11:09:28 AM

Perhaps the leadership thought no one would notice? That no one would care about the fixing involved in selecting Labour’s European election candidates?

Well, the evidence is that they were wrong. Very wrong.

The lightning rod for emerging discontent in London is Anne Fairweather. Ahead of the 2009 European elections she was the top choice for Labour members, securing almost 3,500 votes, comfortably ahead of the rest of the field.

As Peter Watt and Jon Worth have noted, this time round, she was rejected by Labour, without even an interview.

In the past week anger has been rising across London with a slew of motions about the London selection being passed at grassroots level.

Anne’s branch in Brixton Hill passed a motion calling on the regional board to explain their decision. Bloomsbury ward in Camden passed a motion condemning the selection process,

This branch expresses its disappointment that Anne Fairweather has not been placed on the long list of candidates for the London Labour European election. As the third-placed candidate on the Labour list in London in 2009 she worked hard to increase Labour’s vote share at a difficult time for the party, and would have been elected as the third London Labour MEP after Claude Moraes and Mary Honeyball had the region of London not had its tally of seats reduced to eight. For 2009 she topped the ballot of London Labour members which decided the order on the list, winning more than 3000 personal votes. Denying members the ability to choose whether or not to vote for her again is undemocratic and this branch calls for this decision to be explained in full and reviewed by the national party.

Moreover, we will need strong and experienced advocates for a pro-EU reform agenda in what will be a very tough campaign next year. More strong campaigners are needed in leading positions if we are to return a Labour government in 2015.

Thornton and Clapham Common branches in Streatham CLP have passed similar motions with branches in Southwark, Islington and Redbridge expected to back motions calling on the regional board to explain their rationale.

In each motion, the central questions are the same: how does someone go from Labour’s leading European candidate to not even meriting an interview? What has changed?

Based on the evidence, it seems that while Anne Fairweather remains very much the same candidate so strongly endorsed by Labour members at the time of the last European election, control of key decision-making posts is now in the hands of the resurgent left.

Her crime seems to have been to work in business and not be one of the chosen candidates of the unions and the left.

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Posted in Inside | 15 Comments »

Getting tough on late payment to SMEs will help build the business wing of Labour’s one nation movement

12/04/2013, 12:15:33 PM

by Dan McCurry

There was an interesting article in last week’s Economist about a speech made by Chuka Umunna to the Federation of Small Businesses, which began with the sleepy audience unengaged, but went on to inspire them to shout, “Hear hear!”

I suspect this was following the announcement that Labour would crack down on big companies that deliberately hold out payments to small companies for months on end.

The article compared Labour’s wooing of small business with the “prawn cocktail offensive” of the early Blair years, when Labour wooed the bankers. However, the crucial difference is that we no longer need to persuade the markets of our commitment to capitalism. This speech was about something altogether different.

Sole traders and small businesses don’t see themselves as in need of the state. Nor has the state previously had much of a role to support them. The Tories believe that the best policy is to actively get out of the way, and they often make passionate speeches boasting of their intention to do absolutely nothing. Chuka disagrees, and he’s right. Small business is absolutely in need of the state, but they mostly don’t realise it, because they don’t know what the state can do for them.

The injustice here is about enterprising people who work hard to build their business, but find themselves continually the victim of the unscrupulous and unchecked greed of powerful companies and individuals. They endure a continual battle to get paid, not because there is no law to protect them, there is plenty of law, but there is inconsistency in the application of the law.

If a man walks into Sainsbury’s and steals a chicken he will be prosecuted. However, if that same man hires a printer to provide a box of leaflets, and doesn’t pay, the police would refuse to prosecute, arguing that it is a civil matter.

This is true even if the purchaser dishonestly intended to avoid payment before placing the order. The printer would have to file a small claim at the county court. There would be no criminal punishment and no mark of bad character against the cheating customer.

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Posted in Uncut | 4 Comments »

Labour history uncut: Return of the Mac

11/04/2013, 04:24:23 PM

by Pete Goddard and Atul Hatwal

After the general election in November 1922, Labour had a lot to feel good about. It broke three figures for the first time with 142 MPs – 27 more than the total for Lloyd George and Asquith’s Liberal factions put together and firmly established itself as the second party of British politics. Not the first party, true, but one step at a time eh?

Even better, the wave of Labour gains had seen the return of many of the party’s big beasts who had been swept away in Lloyd George’s landslide of 1918.

Returnees included acerbic left wing orator Phillip Snowden, Poplar’s most popular socialist George Lansbury and, the battling pacifist Ramsay Macdonald himself.

The character of this new parliamentary Labour party was quite different to its predecessors. Two, not entirely unconnected, changes marked the 1922 intake: increased representation for the left and the arrival of a number of middle class Labour MPs (including one Clement Attlee, so don’t mock).

The rise of the left was best illustrated by the increased influence of the Independent Labour Party (ILP). In 1918, 3 MPs had been sponsored by this socialist society. By 1922 this had grown to 32.

Although the centre and centre-right bloc of trade union sponsored MPs was still the largest at 85, for the first time the left had a broad caucus to challenge the right.

The ILP mob was sufficiently large that it even had its own left-wing. This was led by the so-called red Clydesiders, part of the contingent of 30 notably left-wing Scottish MPs. The name may sound like a playground torture (“Sir, that bully just gave me a red Clydesider), but these were committed and uncompromising socialists who weren’t averse to the idea of a workers revolution.

Leading lights included the former school teacher Jimmy Maxton (admiring biographer: Gordon Brown, who clearly failed to absorb every lesson this teacher had to offer) and self-made businessman John Wheatley.

With school teacher Jimmy Maxton in the house, inattentive Labour colleagues lived in fear of the well-aimed blackboard eraser

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Posted in Uncut | 2 Comments »

We deserved to hear a rounded account of Thatcher yesterday. We didn’t.

11/04/2013, 10:30:59 AM

by Kevin Meagher

In the Thatcherite spirit of free enterprise, the chamber of the House of Commons was leased out yesterday for a private wake as Tory MPs used the occasion of Margaret Thatcher’s death for what is becoming a familiar riff on How She Saved the Country.

As if the gap between the governing and the governed is not enormous enough already, our parliamentarians gathered to not to discuss the perilous state of our economy, but to trade lame anecdotes and hear boilerplate rhetoric about how dead-eyed Britons, existing on a diet of gruel, shuffled through a monochrome landscape before the brilliant new dawn of Thatcherism began in 1979.

This was the Commons at its private school debating chamber worst. History revised without question, assertions pedalled as fact. Guffaws all round.

When Tory MP Christopher Chope said Mrs. Thatcher was “not only a passionate Conservative but a compassionate Conservative” the dial on my irony-ometer whipped round to eleven. Compassion from the same woman who proclaimed there was “no such thing as society?”

Later Tory Daniel Kawczynski brought us the important revelation of how he once sat next to Thatcher at dinner. “I was mesmerised. My heart was beating.” Move over Cicero.

For the most part, Labour MPs sat there like lemons. A hardy few said what we needed to hear more of; that Thatcherism wrought a terrible price for the people and communities at the sharp end of her ideological crusade.

The faux outrage from the Tory benches in response Glenda Jackson’s biting remarks proved George Orwell’s old maxim that in an age of cant telling the truth is a revolutionary act. Plaudits are also due to David Winnick and Dave Anderson from Blaydon for having the guts and good sense to remember their job is to represent the people who send them to Westminster.

Alas, other Labour MPs seemed content to go with the flow and listen to partisan Tory-politicking masquerade as unctuous tribute-making.

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Posted in Uncut | 13 Comments »