Grassroots « Labour Uncut

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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Austerity isn’t inevitable. Labour needs to be bolder on the alternative

08/04/2013, 01:07:55 PM

by Matthew Whittley

We have grown familiar with Tory backbencher’s frustration at the reality of coalition government that prevents them from delivering the yet deeper cuts to social security that a Conservative manifesto would likely call for. So much so that it’s easy to forget just how radical this government has been on welfare. The austerity driven assault on the poor has started to gather pace, with the first raft of welfare reforms already implemented.

This month, the vital link between benefits and inflation will be broken. With inflation remaining at close to 3%, the 1% cap on the uprating of benefits will make it even harder for those families already struggling to keep pace with the rising cost of living. Furthermore, the ending of full council tax rebate is forcing two million low-income households to contribute hundreds of pounds to their council tax – a tax that, until now, they have been considered too poor to pay.

This appears to have gone largely under the radar. One cut that has attracted substantial media attention is the introduction of under-occupancy charges for 660,000 social housing tenants – what’s been dubbed the ‘bedroom tax’. Those with a spare bedroom are having to deal with cuts to their housing benefit of, on average, £56 a month. As well as reducing the housing benefit bill, the government argues that this policy has been designed to make the best use of housing stock. Unfortunately, there aren’t anywhere near enough small properties to move people into.

This is especially the case in the North. Teeside based housing association Coast and Country Housing, for example, has 1,800 tenants classed as under-occupying, but they have only two one-bed properties available to let. People are being sanctioned for not moving into smaller houses that don’t exist.

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Erosion of universal benefits is destroying public support for the welfare state

05/04/2013, 07:00:15 AM

by Robin Thorpe

Earlier this week George Osborne stated that “this month, around nine out of 10 working households will be better off as a result of the changes we are making”.

The BBC report on this speech (before it happened, which frankly annoys me, why can’t politicians just give a speech and have it reported after the event? Why must it be released beforehand?) states that;

“This month saw the start of sweeping changes across public services including reform of the benefits system.

Mr Osborne argues that the government has had to take difficult decisions to cut the deficit and the current benefits system is fundamentally “broken”.

Changes include:

The introduction of a £26,000 cap on the amount of benefits a household can receive

A cut to housing benefit for working-age social housing tenants whose property is deemed to be larger than they need

Disability living allowance replaced by personal independence payment

Working-age benefits and tax credits uprated by 1% – a below-inflation cap

The chancellor believes the changes to benefits and tax will be fairer and help ensure that the country can live within its means and compete globally”

For all the rhetoric both in favour and against these cuts I would agree with Osborne on the limited claim that the vast majority of the public are in favour of these changes to the benefit system and do not agree with Labour or other critics of the changes. The very fact that 9 out of 10 people will purportedly be better off underlines the reason why most people agree with the changes. This, however, does not make it the right thing to do.

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David Miliband has gone. We now need more “star strikers” in our top team

01/04/2013, 05:58:50 PM

by Renie Anjeh

As Chuka Ummuna put it on twitter “one of Labour’s strikers has left the field”. Many Tory MPs were jubilant at David Miliband’s departure from British politics to run the IRC. They tried to spin this as evidence of Labour lurching to the left, but I could not help thinking that it their joy was really about Labour losing a big beast who Ed Miliband could bring back before 2015.

Last week’s mini-reshuffle showed that Cameron is in constant fear of his backbenchers as they move his party further to the right, but to contrast that Ed needs his own reshuffle to show that he is in command of his ship.

Firstly, he must promote the big beasts of the future. Top of that list should be Stella Creasy and Tristram Hunt as shadow cabinet office minister and shadow universities minister. Caroline Flint could be promoted to another domestic policy brief to allow the entry of Luciana Berger and perhaps Gregg McClymont could join as shadow Scotland secretary with Margaret Curran becoming the new chief whip – as she did a similar job in the Scottish Parliament.

Secondly, Ed needs some good former ministers. David Lammy is a prime candidate. He is a great thinker especially on social policy, his book “Out Of Ashes” is testament to that and he is full of refreshing ideas especially on social policy. He could be a reforming Justice Secretary in a future Labour government.

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Labour was right to abstain on workfare

27/03/2013, 10:00:17 AM

by Ann Sinnott

The workfare court ruling deemed unlawful the regulations governing JSA-sanctions imposed on claimants Cait Reilly and Jamieson Wilson and thus opened the door to repayment of lost benefits to 230,000 other sanctioned jobseekers, a total of £130m. In response, the government rapidly drew up an emergency bill to retrospectively make those same regulations lawful; a shocking and unprecedented Kafkaesque step that, when Cait Reilly and Jamieson Wilson take their case to the Supreme Court, may well be challenged under EU Human Rights legislation.

Labour’s decision to abstain from voting on the emergency bill left many non-plussed, induced rage in others and generated a frenzy of press and blogger coverage running over several days. It goes without saying that “a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work” is part of the Labour party’s DNA, so for Labour not to reject a Bill that will prevent the repayment of withheld JSA is counter-intuitive; but look closer.

Drafted by swift-acting machiavellian brains (judging by Vince Cables’s more than usually self-satisfied smile the next day, his among them), the bill was neatly packaged-up and calculated to cause maximum trouble for Labour. It was effective and a stark display of the art of politics at its darkest.

The court not only ruled in favour of the two claimants but also removed from the DWP the right to impose sanctions, a power the department had held since 1911. The emergency bill will reinstate the DWP’s power of sanction. Labour supports fair and proportionate sanctions, though in the context of a guaranteed six-month minimum-waged job, so what better way to tie-in their support, tacit or otherwise?

If Labour had walked into the “Nos” lobby it would have been voting against its own policy. Bad enough, but just imagine the headlines and the everlasting government taunts: “Labour U-turn on sanctions for shirkers!”, “Labour lets skivers off the hook!”, “No need to work under Labour!”, and permutations thereof.

Some Labour critics have said, “Sod the headlines!” – but, with a largely right-wing press and public opinion still largely suckered by the government myth that Labour ran the country into the ground, headlines really do matter.

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Leveson will protect the little guy

23/03/2013, 05:55:28 PM

by Horario Mortimer

Simon Jenkins, Peter Preston and Nick Cohen have all written vigorous dissents of the Leveson agreement in (on?) the Guardian this week. Preston laments the vitriol that has infected the debate; while Cohen vents spleen at liberals with short-term aims of binding right wing tabloids at the expense of basic freedoms. Simon Jenkins rails against one-sided justice drawn up by victims.

All of them claim a victory for the establishment. Preston asks what

“independence” means in a quangoid Britain where the same cast of great and good characters, retired judges, retired permanent secretaries, Oxbridge dignitaries, shift sweetly from one padded committee seat to the next ?”

And then Cohen:

“Did you not notice that Leveson hurt no one in power? …Can you not see an establishment stitching up a winding sheet for our freedoms in front of your very eyes?”

And Sir Simon Jenkins:

“the cheering across town this week is from the rich, the celebrated and the powerful”

This is a classic example of the maxim that power is always somewhere else. As Peter Jukes tweeted it :

“Fleet Street bias and entitlement is a bit like white privilege, invisible if you’re an unconscious beneficiary of it.”

The three of them are in the privileged position of being given a platform from which, week in week out, they can shout out whatever they like right across the establishment and reach every sympathetic influential ear.

Their unusual freedom blinds them to the fact that the press is a very long way from being a conduit of free expression.

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Help to Buy is another Tory policy that will help millionaires most

22/03/2013, 10:09:20 AM

by Radhika Madhani

In Wednesday’s budget George Osborne revealed his Help to Buy scheme. On the face of it,this looks great: financial assistance for homebuyers, and a supposed boost to the economy through the stimulation of the property market. But a closer look will reveal that the chancellor has developed a scheme to help the wealthy and create unaffordable housing in the property market.

Help to Buy has two key parts. The first relates to government proposals to loan up to 20 per cent deposits for borrowers, providing they put in at least 5 per cent of the deposit through their own means (thus allowing for a 25 per cent deposit in the mortgage application process).

This deposit assistance will apply to new-build properties in England worth up to £600,000, and will come into effect in April this year. The second part of the scheme relates to a mortgage guarantee designed to support £130 billion worth of loans. Coming into effect next year, this guarantee will place a £12 billion guarantee on the taxpayer for mortgages between 80 and 90 per cent loan-to-value (LTV), and will apply to first-time-buyers (FTBs) and existing borrowers.

Looking at the scheme as a whole, Help to Buy is a real missed opportunity in reforming the property market. Presently, those wishing to buy their own homes face the problem of high property prices, high interest rates (at least when compared with the Bank of England’s current base rate of 0.5%), high LTV requirements, and stringent and complex affordability calculations used by lenders in assessing borrowers’ ability to repay the mortgage. Help to Buy fails to address all of these problems.

The first part of Help to Buy will obviously encourage more people to buy their own properties. With the government providing up to 20 per cent deposits to borrowers, there will of course be an increase in mortgage applications.

But unless this demand is matched in supply, Help to Buy will actually have a severely damaging impact on the economy. It is a basic economic principle that increased demand without increased supply will lead to a rise in prices. Yesterday the chancellor failed to announce a government commitment to build enough houses to stimulate the economy, and without these new homes we can expect a huge increase in property prices that will distort the market even further, especially in the London property bubble.

Property values will be unnecessarily pushed up, and far from helping FTBs and families, Osborne’s budget will actually create an unaffordable housing market. The economic rationale behind the government’s decision is almost impossible to understand, and we have here a clear example of an ill thought out, incompetent, and potentially disastrous policy.

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This “no change” Budget fails to inspire

21/03/2013, 01:34:06 PM

by Simon Fitzpatrick

We were warned that this would be a no-change Budget, and it seems that was no bluff.

Yes, Osborne is cutting a little more from departmental budgets and yes, he’s spending a little more on housing and infrastructure.

He will accelerate the rise in personal income tax allowances, cancel the planned fuel duty rise for a second year and go further on cutting corporation tax.

But predominantly these are measures that were already in place, and going a little further on them in no way alters the direction of travel.

And try as he might, the chancellor cannot disguise the fact that that direction of travel is not pretty. By every one of his self-set tests, George Osborne’s plan is not working.

A chancellor who pledged to eliminate the budget deficit in this Parliament now concedes that we will still be running a deficit of 2.2% in 2017-18. Debt as a percentage of GDP will not begin falling until the same year. And growth forecasts are down again – just 0.6% is forecast this year. If the OBR’s track record on forecasts is anything to go by, we’ll be lucky if there’s not a “negative” in front of that figure.

In the face of so much bleak news, Osborne seemed determined to win himself some positive headlines regardless by announcing some populist measures for the ‘man on the street’. The man on the street George Osborne has in mind drinks beer and drives a Vauxhall Astra, though hopefully not in quick succession.

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Time for socialists to rethink the role of government

12/03/2013, 04:48:43 PM

by Robin Thorpe

In December 2011 I wrote a piece for Uncut on the subject of how we address the meaning of socialism today and in the future. In this piece I discussed the notion of solidarity and how Leo Panitch describes this as meaning “transcending diversity” and not merely collating groups of ethnically or culturally similar people. I was reminded of this article and a few of the comments by several recent events.

The first of these was a training course in which the trainer presented Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. This made me think of the following comment by Amber Star;

“Here’s the dichotomy… the more successful a Labour government is in legislating for minimum wages, equality in the workplace, health & safety, maternity/ paternity leave, paid vacations & other workers’ rights, the less need there is for working people to join a Union &/or organise themselves”.

The fundamental basis of Maslow’s theory is that each of us is motivated by needs. “Only when the lower order needs of physical and emotional well-being are satisfied are we concerned with the higher order needs of influence and personal development” (businessballs.com).

This notion has particular relevance in industry where employers can optimize the workers potential by ensuring that they have a secure standard of living, welfare etc and are therefore focused on doing their job. The other side of Maslow’s needs based model is that where systems of support that maintain lower order needs are removed, then an individual no longer has the motivation to achieve higher order needs.

This has particular resonance in the field of politics. Amber Star’s statement is superficially true but it misses the point that we need to maintain this safety net to enable us to succeed in life. Furthermore, successfully resolving these needs is not possible without collaboration.

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