Grassroots « Labour Uncut

Labour should lead on constitutional reform

04/06/2011, 01:00:43 PM

The first few years of the last Labour government were radical in a number of ways, and particularly in the way we tried to reform our constitution. We (mostly) swept away the hereditary peers in the House of Lords, threw open a lot of doors and windows onto the workings of government with the freedom of information act and devolved power to Scotland and Wales. This led – not as critics predicted at the time to the formation of a pair of jumped-up local councils – but two thriving institutions that have helped to foster new political systems, a process given expression in spectacular fashion in Scotland a few weeks ago.

As with other areas of policy, we began to lose our radicalism the longer we were in government and our enthusiasm for constitutional reform petered out almost to nothing. We set up a commission to examine electoral reform and then rejected Jenkins’ sensible, moderate proposals for entirely political reasons.· Lords reform was voted on innumerable times and the last proposal – when MPs finally stopped rejecting all of the permutations put to them – got nowhere.

Had we pressed ahead with our plans for a mostly or wholly elected Lords there would have been a second chamber election mid-way though this parliamentary term, giving us a chance to put a new Labour agenda to the public and – in the event of a win – prove to ourselves and to the country that we can be election winners again. A Labour win would have inflicted a mortal wound on the government and provided the perfect springboard from which to launch a general election campaign.

In the end, we didn’t go ahead and now Cameron has assured himself a strong position in the Lords by stuffing the upper house with Tory and Lib Dem apparatchiks. Had we gone ahead with Jenkins’ AV+, then the progressive majority that exists in the country would have been translated into the election results and the progressive rainbow coalition touted last May that was a nice-but-impossible idea would have been entirely workable.

Ed Miliband shouldn’t let his recent unhappy dalliance with electoral reform blunt his aspirations for changes in the way we conduct public affairs, nor convince him that the British public have no appetite for changes to the way we do politics. As a result of the way it was conceived – a Liberal Democrat demand for entering into coalition – the referendum was seen by most through an entirely party political lens and became a referendum on the deputy prime minister and not on the change he was proposing. (more…)

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Is it time to stop bashing the big society?

29/05/2011, 11:00:54 AM

by Dave Hodges

The “big society” sounds like one of those ill-defined phrases some policy wonk latches on to after some “blue sky thinking”. David Cameron may like to wax lyrical that his destiny in government is to create the big society, but to the casual observer it appears as nothing more than a well-intentioned sideshow that reveals the caring nature of our dear leader. It’s as if it was created to be attacked.

We know the rhetoric. Cameron argues that his aim is to shift power from central government to communities and to volunteers. Labour argues that the Tories’ devastating cuts undermine this very ideal and render it a mere smokescreen to hide Cameron’s real, more sinister intentions. Tessa Jowell rightly pointed out last week, in relation to the big society, that “under the indiscriminate impact of accelerated cuts, the essential elements of community life are slowly being starved of sustenance”.

It’s the right message, but the wrong target. There are some devastating cuts affecting the voluntary sector and providers of outsourced government programs. For instance, thousands marched on the “hardest hit” campaign, organised jointly by the disability benefits consortium and the UK disabled people’s council on the 11 May.

Many disabled people, those with long-term conditions and their families are seeing disgraceful cuts to the benefits and services they need to live their lives. We should be strongly arguing that this is wrong. But it’s not the big society to blame, it’s this government’s ill-considered bulldozer approach to cutting the deficit.

Aiming fire at the big society is not the answer. It is a positive, idealistic message that we sour with harsh home truths. We are the grumpy person in the corner who perks up adversely to criticise every time the opportunity arises.

We need a positive answer to the big society. How can the state enable voluntary organisations to flourish? How can it positively interact without the assumption of a top-down relationship? The state has a positive role to play in this, but importantly, not necessarily as the funder. Tom Gash has written an interesting article entitled government is not the only solution, which raises some valid points and gives an excellent example through “parent gyms”. These are organisations Labour needs to engage and learn from. In Lambeth, the cooperative council model is something the party should seek to explore further. Campaigning for more mutuals such as Chuka Umunna’s call for the re-mutualisation of Northern Rock is another avenue that should be studied in detail.

The big society seems like an easy target. Sometimes things are too easy. Focus our fire on destructive, unnecessary cuts where we find them. Focus our energy on providing a positive vision for what a big society, or whatever inimitable name we choose to give it, would look like.

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“Business” is no excuse for prejudice

17/05/2011, 03:54:01 PM

by Ray Filar

Quite strangely for a practice upon which the existence of the human race depends, having babies is still a career disadvantage to women in a way that it is not to men. In stone age fashion, parental leave legislation continues to envisage women as primary child-carers and men as primary breadwinners. Those heterosexual parents who would like to create a work/life balance mash-up of the two stereotypical roles don’t get a look in.

Statutory maternity leave currently stands at fifty-two weeks, maximum. Statutory paternity leave, by contrast, amounts to two weeks at the beginning, and from this April, at most twenty-six weeks in the second half of the baby’s first year. These laws continue to dictate that the stay-at-home-with-the-baby be mostly done by the parent with a vulva.

This is clearly unfair to all genders. Women may always be the birth-givers, but frankly, once the actual birth and two-week recovery period is over, a new task begins. This task is called child care, and there is no reason for it not to be shared between parents in a way that suits them. Commitment to legislative gender equality leads me to believe that it should be shared relatively equally, but at the very least, parents should be able to decide, not governments or businesses.

I grew up in a family in which my mum worked longer hours than my dad, and at times earned more. My dad was able to combine his career with picking up my siblings from school and cooking dinner. He’s a pretty good cook, actually. I don’t know how he does it, but having a male body doesn’t seem to render him incapable of child-care. Indeed, based on my experience of being cared for by a father as well as a mother, I’d go so far as to contend that wiping poo out of a baby’s arse is much the same task whatever your gender.

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Real lessons from the actual doorstep

16/05/2011, 12:00:44 PM

by Tom Keeley

One year after a general election defeat, a resurgent Labour party has taken 800 council seats. With the exception of Scotland, up and down the country people are back in love with Labour. People are hearing and agreeing with the party message that we are “your voice in tough times”.

Those parts of the electorate who briefly flirted with the Tories are repentantly coming back. An unpopular prime minister has been replaced with a fresh credible opposition leader, with new ideas. National control is all but a certainty in 4 years time. Right? Well the doorsteps of Birmingham suggest something different.

The Birmingham city council elections were a success for the Labour party. Lib Dem and Tory seats were taken in equal number. Not one seat was lost. Some wards considered safe Tory strongholds like Harborne and Edgbaston were taken, or pushed to the absolute wire.

However, even amongst this unqualified success, the message from the doors and the phones was a mixed one and certainly not the message above. We must listen and learn from the feedback on the doorstep. (more…)

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Refounding Labour: Will Straw’s Labour loves and loathes

15/05/2011, 07:07:53 PM

by Will Straw

Peter Hain’s Refounding Labour review moves to the next level this week with the launch of its website. The new site has been set up to provide a place for members to “critically review and assess the current structures and processes of the Labour party”. Members are being encouraged to set out what they love and want to change about the party.

The thing I love most about the Labour party is how it is arguably the most diverse organisation in any local community. Wherever I have lived I have been struck by how Labour party meetings, social events, and campaigning sessions bring together men and women from different age groups, social classes, ethnicities, and religions. In my CLP, for example, we bring together people from Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas. That might not seem unusual in London when we all share public transport, doctors’ waiting rooms, and supermarkets with people from a variety of backgrounds. But the Labour party must be unique in bringing such a range of people together for a common cause.

The main thing I would change about the Labour party is the excess of interminable meetings. These can be new members’ first experience of the party, since meetings often outnumber campaigning events. The fixed agendas and arcane rules may provide comfort to party stalwarts, but too often our meetings resemble a Monty Python sketch.

The annual votes for specific positions – often held year on year by the same people – can also mean that energetic new recruits are put off getting more involved. Our structures would work much better if meetings were aimed either at political education by bringing in expert speakers for a discussion and debate, or used to update on campaigning activity and outline the next set of action points. Some CLPs seem to manage this, but it would be good if the rule book were updated to reflect the organising norms of the twenty-first century.

You can have your say on what you love and what you’d change about the party from tomorrow at www.refoundinglabour.org.

Will Straw is associate director for strategic development at the IPPR.

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AV may be dead, but our obsession with marginals needs to go too

14/05/2011, 02:43:21 PM

by Ben Cobley

So the AV referendum is come and gone. Life has quickly gone back to normal without many of us giving the whole blasted charade much more thought.

That is in many ways a blessing, for while plenty of energy was injected into the campaigns, they quickly reverted to the sort of down-and-dirty tribal mud-slinging that we already get more than enough of in party politics. Once the campaign went down this route, the coalition of Tories and Labour tribalists on the No campaign was always going to triumph.

For Labour, there is now a temptation for us to shrug our shoulders, be thankful that we did not have a disastrous split, and continue as we were.

However that would be a mistake; there are lessons to be learned. The debate on AV gave us an opportunity to think deeply about the way we do our politics both within the Labour party and in the country as a whole– and for some of us it cast a light on the present way of doing things that was far from flattering.

The lessons to be learned also tie in with those issues arising from disastrous Scottish election results and the disappointingly piecemeal gains in southern England, which remains a desert for Labour. They are about how we do our politics –particularly the way that we willingly turn our backs of whole swathes of the nation in a quest for short-term advantage in a few marginal seats. (more…)

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Opening doors and breaking barriers, or smoke and mirrors

14/05/2011, 12:00:22 PM

by Hugh Goulbourne

Nick Clegg’s social mobility strategy – Opening Doors, Breaking Barriers – has attracted much attention from the media. But are the proposals anything more than just a way of diverting attention from this government’s clumsy budget cuts which have left millions of people, especially those aged 16-25, without access to vital traineeships and work experience opportunities?

The overarching principle set out in Opening Doors, Breaking Barriers is a sound one, namely that “no one should be prevented from fulfilling their potential by the circumstances of their birth” and instead “what ought to count is how hard you work and the skills and talents you possess, not the school you went to or the jobs your parents did”. Indeed it is the very principle that all of us in the Labour party sign up for when we join.

Under New Labour, a series of interventions were made to help target internships and apprenticeships at those from unprivileged backgrounds. Perhaps the most successful of those programmes was the future jobs fund (FJF). The FJF programme provides a grant to charities, social enterprises and local government to offer a paid contract of employment to an individual aged 18 – 24 who has been out of employment for six months – in effect a paid internship.

The experience of the FJF demonstrates the importance of paid internships in opening up vital work experience to those without existing financial support. In West Yorkshire, a consortium of not for profit arts organisations have used the final slice of FJF funding to provide an internship to a local arts graduate, who, despite a good degree and several voluntary positions, has not been able to find the requisite workplace experience to be able to secure full-time employment. All over the country, the programme has been a success, with well over 50% of those who have joined the FJF scheme ceasing to claim job seekers allowance and entering into paid employment seven months after they started the programme.

FJF was axed in April, together with a number of other Labour programmes as part of the government’s spending cuts. It will be replaced by a new code for government internships, a new business compact for fairer, more open internship and work experience programmes and the new work programme.

The first limb of Clegg’s proposals – the reform of government internships and the removal of barriers to internships within the professions and corporate organisations – has already attracted widespread support from those within the Labour party. These are certainly sectors of the economy where significant investment should be directed towards developing a new generation of workers from a range of backgrounds. (more…)

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Where next for the democracy movement?

11/05/2011, 05:00:07 PM

by Emma Burnell

The question of electoral reform is now closed for a generation. Anyone who disagrees with this statement is part of the much wider problem that the democracy movement has.

The movement likes to believe that it listens and that it represents “the people”, but, generally, what that has meant in my experience is that people who agree with the aims of the movement get a hearing as to how their aims might be achieved, while those who question the priorities of the reformers are dismissed as dinosaurs and not engaged with to understand their reticence. And while the movement certainly represents some of “the people”, who deserve a voice as much as anyone else, the inability to grow from a niche to a mass movement demonstrates clearly that it is not the voice of all the people.

At the moment, the blame game is moving quickly. So far we have the mendacious No campaign, the toxicity of the Lib Dems and particularly the childish tantrums of Chris Huhne, the intervention of the prime minister and the split in the Labour party. All of which did – of course – play a part in why the Yes campaign failed. But for my money, the biggest reason the campaign failed is because it was run by people who don’t know the electorate and don’t understand what they want and what they fear. (more…)

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The grotty, anti-politics, Yes to AV campaign deserves to lose

02/05/2011, 05:00:51 PM

by ffinlo Costain

The Yes to AV campaign is flagging dismally in every poll and will almost certainly lose the referendum on Thursday. No wonder. From the start its organisers failed to understand that they needed to fight and win a single issue campaign, not an election.

Crucially they never understood that the No to AV camp had the easier task. No-ers didn’t have to win the case for first past the post (FPTP) – they simply had to convince people the case for AV was unproven.

The referendum will provide Britons with a once in a lifetime opportunity to make the electoral system a little bit fairer – but instead of making the case for AV, the Yes campaign has been a cheap and tatty, anti-politics affair. If the only reason to change the electoral system is that all politicians are scumbags, then why not just bring on the revolution?

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The so-called Liberal Democrats need more discrimination

29/04/2011, 01:00:47 PM

by Ray Filar

“Political equality is a pre-requisite for, not just a
consequence of, social equality”.

– Why Lib Dem Women Face Electoral Meltdown, the fabian society.

Fans of the political cockfest rejoice: Lib Dem women MPs could soon be “wiped out”. This week, The fabian society released a report arguing that in the next general election it is possible that all current women Liberal Democrat MPs will lose their seats. Wake up and read that again. It is possible that after the next general election, there will be 100% male Lib Dem MPs, and 0% female Lib Dem MPs. All men, no women. Not even one woman. Not one.

Those of you who have been living in a crater on the moon since 1905 will wonder why this matters. I’ll tell you one reason why. It matters that the Lib Dems do not lose their women MPs, just as it matters that Labour and the Conservatives continue to push for increased women’s representation in their still under-representative parties, because representative voices in government are the only way to representative policy for people.

Its easy to see how this might play out. To take just the first example that springs to mind, the identity of a fundamentalist Catholic is totally at odds with the identity of a woman who believes in her right to not have other people tell her what to do with her body. One only needs to look at certain parts of the USA, or Ireland, to see that a female and feminist counterbalancing voice in its own interest(s) is required.

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