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Archive for June, 2013

Short queue of applicants looking to take on Clegg

06/06/2013, 01:00:09 PM

Just twelve hopefuls applied to stand against Nick Clegg at the 2015 general election as Labour’s parliamentary candidate in Sheffield Hallam.

Party officials have whittled this down to a shortlist of four comprising of Mark Gill, Mark Russell, Oliver Coppard and Martin Mayer. All have local roots.

Gill is a pollster and a former Head of Political Research at Ipsos MORI.

Russell is chief executive of the Church Army charity which is based in Sheffield.

Coppard is a former partnership manager for Barnsley Council and headed an innovative Olympics partnership between Barnsley and Newham.

Meanwhile Martin Mayer is a Unite branch secretary and a working bus driver from Sheffield. He is backed by shadow cabinet office minister Jon Trickett and Sheffield South East MP Clive Betts.

The hustings takes place on June 24.

Clegg has a 15,284 majority, although the seat includes a high number of public sector managers and students from the city’s two universities and three teaching hospitals. In fact, it is said the Hallam constituency has the highest number of people with a PhD degree in the country.

What of Clegg, is he beatable? The backlash from the student fees debacle will still do him harm, as will the impact of local spending cuts and public sector job losses.

However a recent by-election in the Fulwood ward in the heart of the constituency actually saw the Lib Dems increase their majority, with a four per cent swing away from Labour. They have a formidable local campaigning organisation with most of their city councillors clustered in the constituency.

Worth remembering too that a third of families here live in detached houses, with nearly a fifth of these having five or more bedrooms (the national average is less than 5%).

This is not, it is fair to say, the Sheffield of The Full Monty.

Posted in Inside | 6 Comments »

Why I spoiled my Labour Euro-selections ballot paper

06/06/2013, 07:00:27 AM

by Ben Cobley

Electoral Reform Services will have received my ballot paper by now.

I had thought of writing rude messages on it, or tearing it into small pieces and dropping them into the envelope as a mark of my disdain, but on the balance I plumped for a classic piece of English fudge/moderation: a big X scrawled across the page and a little message offering my unsolicited opinion on the Labour party’s approach to democracy.

This is the first time I have ever treated a ballot paper in such a way. I used to approach them with a form of reverence, taking voting as a privilege and a pleasure.

Then I joined the Labour party.

These latest selections for European Parliament candidates are just the latest example of an approach to democracy within Labour that Erich Honecker would have recognised and admired (and which I like to call “institutionalised fixing”.

Let’s put aside the ceaseless cascade of emails that have been filling members’ inboxes with blandities, platitudes and waffle (though any more talk of “campaigning”, “a fairer Europe” or “Labour values” and I might run for the hills).

Instead, let’s talk about choice.

As a Londoner, I am faced with no choice in whether I wish to re-select Mary Honeyball and Claude Moraes, despite them having a track record for which they can be held accountable. They will automatically come top of the ballot.

Then I am given a clutch of six other candidates whose views seem to be almost interchangeable (unless you can see beyond the double-speak which hides their more interesting and contentious views).

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Posted in Grassroots | 10 Comments »

Labour history uncut: Everybody out!

05/06/2013, 06:00:12 PM

by Pete Goddard and Atul Hatwal

It’s somehow fitting that the fuse for the general strike was lit at the Daily Mail.

The government was still engaged in half-hearted negotiations with the unions when, on Sunday 2^nd May 1926 the print compositors at the Mail refused to set an inflammatory editorial, entitled “For King and Country.” Although the companion piece, “Compositing print causes cancer” probably didn’t help either.

Seeing an opportunity to kick things off whilst still blaming the unions, the government summarily walked out of the talks muttering about threats to freedom of speech.

The unions thought, “Walk out will you? We’ll show you a thing or two about walking out.”

The next day letters went out to union members up and down the country and on Tuesday 4^th May the whistle blew.

”Everybody out!”

The general strike had begun.

Around 1.5 million to 2 million workers took part in the strike. People downed tools all across the country.

Then, frequently, different people across the country picked those tools up again.

Approximately 300,000 volunteers had joined the overwhelmingly middle class and right-wing Organisation for Maintenance of Supplies. Their task was to help keep the country running during the period of the strike in a sort of extended “working class” themed fancy dress party.

The general strike’s PR team knew it had an uphill battle when even the Mirror started calling the strike "evil"

At the same time, with the print setters on strike, someone had to provide the British public with a replacement for their daily sports news, Sudoku and political misinformation. And who had enough spare time to moonlight over hot metal at a time of enormous national economic crisis? The chancellor of the exchequer, of course. Winston Churchill was put in charge of producing the government’s British Gazette.

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Councillor complains that Liverpool MP made his life “unbearable”

05/06/2013, 07:00:48 AM

The spat between Liverpool Wavertree MP Luciana Berger and one of her local councillors is hardly in the same league as the epic battles fought within the Liverpool Labour party – (remembered this month as its thirty years since Militant seized control of the city council) – but it’s a strange little row nonetheless.

To recap, a messy war of words between Berger and one of her local councillors, Jake Morrison, has poured forth into the public domain – largely thanks to Morrison publishing the contents of a letter of complaint he received from Berger last Friday.

In it, Berger, the upwardly-mobile shadow minister for climate change, complains to Morrison about “your complete lack of team work and respect for other members.”

She alleges he “ignored” emails about a training session with Ed Miliband’s campaign guru, Arnie Graf, and that he is the only councillor in her constituency who doesn’t “engage with my office”.

The letter was copied to Liverpool Mayor, Joe Anderson and the party’s chief whip.

Morrison published the letter on his Facebook page before responding with his own complaint to Ed Miliband about Berger’s behaviour.

He alleges that Berger and her constituency aide, Sheila Murphy, “orchestrated” a campaign enlisting party members in a bid to put pressure on him to quit before his term of office ends after announcing last month that he will not contest his seat at the next election in 2015.

He protests to Miliband that Berger has made his life “unbearable” and that “at every opportunity Luciana has undermined me, rather than supported.”

Sensationally elected to Liverpool City Council in 2011 having only just turned 18, Morrison managed a notable giant-slaying, beating formidable ex-Lib Dem council leader Lord Mike Storey.

At the time, Ed Miliband telephoned to congratulate him.

Morrison says that he wasn’t invited to the session with Graf, but fully supports his campaigning methods, which seek to develop a more meaningful conversation with the electorate rather than just identifying voting intentions – an approach he already uses as a local councillor for the Wavertree ward.

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Posted in Inside | 27 Comments »

Ed Miliband needs to tell us what he stands for

04/06/2013, 09:55:11 AM

by Dan McCurry

So YouGov tell us that Ed Miliband is regarded as “honest but untrustworthy”? What to make of it all? I’m sure his speech on Thursday will sort out all the confusion. What I think he need is to show us what he stands for.

There has been recent comment about whether Labour should reveal it’s policies, with Alan Johnson arguing that Miliband has already “shown too much leg”. Others, including myself, argue that a lack of openness creates a lack of trust. We’re both right and wrong. The confusion is in the distinction between policy, and aims/values.

The media always demand to know what the policies are, but the public want to know what the aims and values are. Policies are a list of promises while aims and values represent what we care about and what kind of a world we want to live in. It’s our aims and values to stick up for the small guy. It’s the aims and values of the Tories to stick up for big business and lobbyists.

Both parties try to present aims and values through slogans. The Tories say “We’re all in this together”, while Labour talk of “One Nation”. The Tory slogan is better because it’s about their intention to reduce the deficit. Ours was created as an attack on Tory hypocrisy, but has since been shown to mean little else.

It seems to me that Ed Miliband is forever working on the manifesto, instead of communicating what he stands for. Welfare is an obvious example. He chose to rise to the bait when Cameron challenged him on welfare, but then failed to put a lid on things when the “bedroom tax” got out of control.

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Posted in Uncut | 17 Comments »

Balls is no Churchill

03/06/2013, 05:40:13 PM

by Jonathan Todd

Politics, as Churchill said, is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. Much of the theatre of politics exists, however, in the unanticipated events to which Macmillan attributed the failure of political plans. While, to paraphrase Lennon, politics is what happens when you are making other plans, plans are politically necessary and should be attuned to the likely and inevitable.

Political tacticians specialise in events. Political strategists identify trends and plan accordingly. The character of politicians is revealed in their handling of events but they are exposed without convincing strategy. And the strategic context that was obvious from the outset of this parliament was the politics of the deficit.

We might have thought in May 2010 that the government’s economic strategy of tough deficit reduction would fail and the public would then turn to Labour. Perhaps we thought that this strategy would fail, causing the government to adopt the Plan B that Labour called for and the public to conclude that Labour was right all along.

Few seriously thought that things would work out precisely as George Osborne forecast in his hopelessly optimistic 2010 budget. The real debate was always about whether this failure in itself would be enough to return support to Labour.

Unsurprisingly, Osborne has not said: “Ed Balls was always right”. We don’t need the spending review to know, however, that the government is failing. But polling published by Labour List contains scant evidence that this failure builds support for Labour on the economy.

As Osborne scraps around to increase the capital budget and Vince Cable cobbles together the kind of active industrial strategy that he previously denounced, agreement with Balls is implicit in their actions. Government policy inches towards Plan B but recognition that this constitutes a Plan B is politically impossible.

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Posted in Uncut | 4 Comments »

3 years on: Five years’ hard Labour?

03/06/2013, 07:00:47 AM

It’s 3 years since Uncut started so, in a series of pieces we’ve been taking stock of what has changed for Labour since 2010. In the last of the pieces, Rob Marchant looks back at this parliament, and forward to 2015

Obviously, we’re only halfway through the parliament, but what would be a celebration of our third birthday without a look back at the immediate past and a little look to the future.

2010: the year of purgatory. Uncut is born out of the ashes of Labour’s electoral disaster in May. The country still in economic crisis. It takes six months, however, for the party to get itself together and organise a leadership election, in which David Miliband, the seeming heir apparent, is effectively defenestrated. Most of the year is wasted, politically.

2011: the year of innocence. There is the sad departure of Alan Johnson, but a fresh-faced Fotherington-Miliband has skipped into public view. Hullo clouds, hullo sky, says he. We are going to do a new kind of politics. There are good people and bad people, for example in business there are producers (good) and predators (bad). Eh? says the public, a bit confused, and rather more concerned about their jobs and mortgages. Much work to be done.

2012: the Tories’ annus horribilis. A disastrous budget, coalition scandals and the travails of the Murdoch press mark the year. Miliband plays a blinder on the conference speech and the party discovers One Nation Labour. There is hope.

2013: the year of drift. One Nation Labour stays a slogan. The Tories start to recover. Disappointing election results. Trouble with the unions looms. The party organisation, unreformed, falters over controversial candidate selections.

And some thoughts about a possible future:

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Posted in Uncut | 10 Comments »

Labour history uncut: Industrial war beckons, Labour looks at its shoes

02/06/2013, 04:24:37 PM

by Pete Goddard and Atul Hatwal

On 31^st July 1925, the unions celebrated “Red Friday.” The threat of general strike over miners’ wages had forced prime minister Stanley Baldwin to concede a 9 month wage subsidy. A royal commission had also been sent off to peer down a few mines and figure out how to fix everything.

It looked like a victory for the unions, but everyone knew it wasn’t over yet. When the commission reported, battle was likely to be resumed unless the deadlock could be broken in the intervening nine months.

The best hope for peace lay with the miners’ leader, Herbert Smith. He was a realist and a moderate union man.

Unfortunately, standing right next to him was almost the biggest threat to peace. The increasingly influential miners’ union secretary AJ Cook was, in the words of TUC general secretary Fred Bramley, “a raving, tearing Communist.”

AJ Cook even did his own signing for the deaf

Cook was a syndicalist, a Marxist and a firm believer in the power of direct action. He was also extremely charismatic and, like the Yamaha YHT-893BL with 100W subwoofer, a very powerful speaker.

According to the home office, he was also “an agitator of the worst type.” Although ironically, being the worst type of agitator in the home office’s eyes meant that he was actually very good at it.

Cook was, in contrast to the solution-seeking TUC and Herbert Smith, keen to get stuck in and challenge the status quo with a bit of workers’ power.

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Posted in Uncut | 5 Comments »

Can anyone explain Labour’s euro-list ranking system?

01/06/2013, 03:24:16 PM

Here is a paragraph from an e-mail Labour party members will have received in the past 24hrs; it explains the way our European candidates will be ranked on the party list following the membership vote:

“If a male candidate secures the most preferences, then the highest-placed female candidate will come next on the list, followed by the next highest male candidate and then by the female and so on. If a female candidate secures the most preferences, then the highest-placed male will come next on the list, followed by the next female candidate and then by the male.

This process is known as zipping and is used by the Labour Party in European candidate selections to help to balance male and female candidates.”

All clear? Thought so.

At a time when there is widespread mistrust in politicians and disengagement in politics, does this really represent the most transparent way of selecting candidates?

Is “zipping” what the new politics is all about?

Answers on a postcard please to the Labour party, One Brewer’s Green, London SW1H 0RH.

Posted in Inside | 3 Comments »