Archive for March, 2018

Who will respond to Nick Clegg’s call to arms by being our Gladstone?

28/03/2018, 10:22:02 PM

by Jonathan Todd

“All the kindling is lying around, it just needs a spark to light it.”

Thus, concluded Nick Clegg’s weekend interview with the Times. It is a long time since we all “agreed with Nick” at the 2010 election. The AV and EU referendums failed to go his way, while five years of coalition with the Conservatives diminished his party such that they were wiped out at the 2015 election, with Clegg’s seat, on the back of a student vote, angry about tuition fees, turning Corbynite two years later.

With such a record of failing to read or move public opinion, we should take with a pinch of salt Clegg’s expectation that we are on the cusp of something big.

“There will be some kind of realignment. I think it is inevitable … British liberalism should get off its knees.”

This is striking: something that happens very rarely (realignment) is said to be inevitable; British liberalism depends not on his Liberal Democrats but upon this realignment; and its form is vaguely presented – “some kind of realignment”, while elsewhere Clegg repeatedly refers to “a new political entity”, not “a new political party”.

Enough is enough. Not just for the Jewish community with Labour. The security services must also have misgivings about Jeremy Corbyn as he seems less prepared to believe them than Putin’s Russia on attempted murders on British soil. As with the Jewish community and the security services, pro-Europeans now strain to see friends in a Labour party with undiminished reverence for the 2016 referendum.

But where is the extra £350m each week for the NHS? On no Brexit scenario does HM Treasury anticipate a “Brexit dividend” that would extend to this. Quite the opposite. And where are all these Turkish immigrants that we were warned about? Turkey, predictably, is no nearer joining the EU, as Brexodus continues, with talented and hard-working people taking their skills and endeavour elsewhere.

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Enshrining profit sharing into our economy will allow Britain to build a truly common wealth

27/03/2018, 10:44:31 PM

by Callum Anderson

Living standards for millions of hardworking people across the UK remain squeezed. By the end of 2017, British workers’ pay packets were still £15 a week below their pre-financial crisis levels; the Resolution Foundation predicts that pay won’t fully recover until 2025.

At the same time, bosses of the FTSE 100 earn on average 94 times more than the average employee. In too many cases, these sometimes astronomical levels of pay bear no relation to either personal or company performance.

Indeed, the first Thursday of 2018 was known as Fat Cat Thursday – where the average FTSE 100 chief executive had already been paid what it would take the typical UK worker an entire year to earn.

The sheer magnitude of this income inequality should worry all in society. In an era of economic uncertainty and instability – characterised by stagnant wage growth, job insecurity and depressed levels of business investment – Labour must offer an ambitious package of genuinely bold economic reforms that promote an inclusive, collaborative brand of UK capitalism.

One important feature of this should be to promote the use of profit sharing.

Enshrining the principle of profit-sharing – whereby a company apportions a percentage of annual profits as a pool of money to be distributed among the workforce – into our economy would reinvigorate British workplaces by ensuring that a share of their company’s rewards are also passed onto all members of the workforce who helped generate success and not just management and shareholders.

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The Labour MP’s dilemma: when does this become party before country?

22/03/2018, 09:19:22 PM

by Rob Marchant

If there were a week for Labour MPs to question their continued acceptance of the party whip, it was surely the last one.

Should we cite the lack of apparent sanction on Chris Williamson MP, who appeared onstage with Jackie Walker, suspended from the party for anti-Semitism along with Tony Greenstein, and then proposed their readmission to the party, to rapturous applause?

Or the stitch-up of the General Secretary choice, effectively handing control of the party machine to Len McCluskey and his acolytes? Triggering the resignation of six key staff-members? While the aforementioned Walker and Greenstein celebrated outside party HQ, barracking the party’s remaining staff and telling them they were coming for the rest of them? And a General Secretary herself, notorious for questioning the neutrality of Baroness Jan Royall to run an anti-Semitism inquiry, on the spurious grounds that she had once visited Israel?

But the real question for Labour MPs is simple: can you genuinely look yourself in the mirror in the morning and say “I want Jeremy Corbyn to be Prime Minister”?

Yes, we know there are millions of supporters to whom we owe a Labour government. Yes, we know you may well think he’ll probably never get there, but that’s not the point. What if he does?

What if someone who has shown, as Corbyn did last week that he cannot support the Prime Minister even in a fundamental matter of national security, like an attack by foreign agents on British citizens on British soil? A feat which is probably a first in postwar Britain?

That he cannot, in short, be trusted in that most fundamental governmental matter of all, the security of the nation?

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Labour’s Vietnam

14/03/2018, 10:04:18 PM

by John Wall

There are parallels between what’s happened to Labour since 2015 and the Americans in Vietnam.

It comes down to underestimating or not understanding the opposition and forgetting that sometimes you need to do unto others what they would do unto you – but do it first!

Vietnam is controversial, although it’s difficult to argue that it wasn’t worth trying to prevent what happened after the Communist victory.

The Americans expended a lot of blood and treasure and won most of the battles, but when they left and were preoccupied with domestic issues, the North Vietnamese conquered the south.

The North Vietnamese were frequently down, but never out, and only had one objective, to reunite the country under their rule – and were prepared to play a long game.

Unless the Americans had reunited the country under South Vietnamese rule or maintained a permanent military presence the outcome was probably inevitable. That’s very simplistic as the memory of Korea was strong, particularly the Chinese intervening to prevent UN forces occupying the whole peninsula.

Hindsight is wonderful, and infallible!

I see Labour as having, basically, two creeds; social democrats (pragmatists) and socialists (dogmatists).

The former recognise that appropriately regulated markets and competition create wealth which can then be taxed. They see how innovation driven by the survival instincts of the private sector can be used to deliver public services. Politically, they consider the western democracies as a force for good.

The latter hate markets and competition and despise the private sector. To them America is the “Great Satan,” and Russia – whether Communist or under Putin – is an ally. Their mantra is inevitability, communism (where Corbyn and McDonnell fit), probably preceded by socialism, is the inevitable, and final, form of society.

After the early 1980s the hard left were – particularly during New Labour – little more than lost sheep.

It’s instructive to see the intolerant vitriol now directed at those who aren’t disciples of the bearded messiah, and the worst seems to be reserved for non-believers on the left.

The homophobic abuse (in a party that practices identity politics) against a heretical lesbian Labour MP is just one example.

The Labour leader of Harlow is leaving because of:

“…an active campaign against my leadership by a local Momentum organiser, being called a neo-Nazi by some Corbyn t-shirt wearing person outside the Labour Party Conference, and events at a national level targeting Labour Councillors and Labour Councils that do not conform to the particular form of ideological purity that seems to have taken a grip of the party…”

Previously, the Labour leader of Haringey quit saying:

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Work is where Labour needs to help people “take back control”

12/03/2018, 10:38:00 PM

by Tom Clements

As pleasing as the increase in the Labour vote was in 2017, the continuing decline in support from the working classes is a pattern that the Party has to address. If we are to govern again, earning the trust and support of working people in places like Mansfield and Pudsey will be crucial.

To do that, we must show that we are the Party that will allow them to truly “take back control” of their own lives and communities.

If the success of the Leave campaign in 2016 should teach us one thing, it’s that people will no longer meekly accept being at the mercy of global forces. It is no good focusing on the growth of the economy if it’s not being felt in people’s pockets. Moreover, if we are ever to compete with the dangers of populism, it is vital that we offer a credible and optimistic vision that will allow people to control their own destiny.

And this is not a new problem.

In 1987, Neil Kinnock described young people unable to get work, married couples who could not get on the housing ladder and elderly people living in poverty.

And today, more than thirty years later, James Bloodworth’s Hired paints a similar picture. From the misery of temporary workers through zero hours contracts to the gig economy he speaks of working people who, echoing Kinnock, “live in a free country but don’t feel free”.

So if we are to regain the trust of the working class, this must be our mission: to restore dignity and security to the forgotten corners of Britain. To give working people the opportunity to be free.

For the Tories, freedom is a simple proposition. For them, it means an absence of barriers. It means deregulation, insecurity of contract and a relentless focus on the margin. The Right have encouraged a society where global companies have been able to drive down standards due to the replaceable nature of the surplus workforce.

But we cannot accept that this is the way things have to be. Without security, it is impossible to be free.

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Three reasons why Jennie Formby should not become General Secretary of the Labour Party

11/03/2018, 10:29:48 AM

by Rob Marchant

Following the abrupt resignation of Iain McNicol – apparently not fallen on his sword but pushed under a bus by the party leadership (£) – there are currently two candidates to be Labour’s General Secretary: Unite’s Jennie Formby and Momentum’s Jon Lansman.

While this might be reasonably likened to choosing for your leader between Ghengis Khan and Pol Pot, there is always a least worst option and, in these difficult times, it is important to take note which it is.

Here’s why Formby should not be General Secretary.

One. Jennie Formby is not so much a supporter of the Palestinian cause, as a fully-fledged anti-Israel campaigner who has been demonstrated to have, let’s say, controversial views.

To explain: two years ago, she “outraged” an NEC meeting by questioning Baroness Royall’s suitability to lead the party’s investigation into anti-Semitism at Oxford University Labour Club (later suppressed from publication), on the grounds that she had previously visited Israel. It seems remarkably close to the 2011 questioning by Paul Flynn MP whether it was right for a British Ambassador to Israel to be Jewish, for which he was rightly vilified.

The logic of the first is a mirror image of the second: if you are Jewish, you cannot be trusted to be objective with subjects involving Israel. If you are pro-Israel, you cannot be trusted with to be objective with subjects involving Jewishness. In either case, it plays to the old trope about Jews and untrustworthiness.

Given that the usual criticism from the anti-Israel lobby is that of conflating Jewishness with Zionism, it seems strangely ironic that Formby should here be doing precisely that. Anti-Semitism, quite obviously, is a wholly separate phenomenon from whether or not a person supports Israel.

Then there was the 2015 NEC meeting where, the Times of Israel reported, she promoted the idea that G4S should be boycotted for conference security on account of its Israel links, a vote which was passed with only around half the NEC present. She then stated that it was not a boycott of Israel, which the minutes later showed it clearly was, according to the newspaper.

Finally, we might note that, although Momentum has been extremely slow to take action against anti-Semites in its own ranks, Lansman is, after all, Jewish himself and has acknowledged there is a problem to be solved within Labour. Rather cleverly, Formby has of course recently condemned anti-Semitic attacks on Lansman, thereby conveniently diverting attention away from any criticism of her in that respect.

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