Grassroots « Labour Uncut

A little bit of information can make a big difference

27/04/2011, 02:01:40 PM

by Mark Cooper

The easter break and the royal wedding weekend will be a great opportunity for people to socialise at their local pub up and down the country.

When you plan a social occasion what do you think about? Is it what to wear, or if you’ll have a drink or two at home before you go out? I think: “can I get to the loo”?

Why? The answer is simple: I am disabled. Going out for me isn’t just a quick email or text “would I like to go for a drink after work”, it’s a military operation.

I have experienced many nights out which have been ruined for me because I have been unable to find an accessible loo. After one night out I had had enough of this problem. I was out in Edinburgh enjoying a post-campaign drink with friends in a pub, which we thought was accessible. But it turned out it did not have a disabled toilet. So I was forced to leave my friends, find another pub with an accessible toilet, then return to my friends.

After this experience, Barred was born, with the simple aim of trying to find out where the pubs are in Edinburgh with disabled access. I started a Facebook group, which soon had hundreds of members all with similar experiences to my own. The local campaign succeeded. Spurred on by the response I decided to try and make it Scotland wide.

The campaign was backed by disability organisation capability Scotland and with their support and the support of Lord Foulkes, the former Labour MSP for the Lothians, secured an amendment to the Scottish criminal justice and licensing act last July. The amendment means licensees must show how their pub can be accessed by disabled customers, when applying for a license. (more…)

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The No to AV campaign is too unpleasant to support, even if you wanted to

25/04/2011, 07:30:52 PM

by Conrad Landin

In the forthcoming referendum, voters will consider contrasting factors when deciding where to place their crosses.

Some will vote on the merits of the alternative vote system, others on the basis of a long-term quest for proportional representation, for a third group, perhaps “basest of the three”, outlook on the current government will doubtless play a role.

Though there remains the under-discussed likelihood that Nick Clegg would use any Yes outcome to serenade a vindication of the coalition deal between his party and the Conservatives. And vindication it would be – this was, after all, the deal which saw every promise bar electoral reform sacrificed.

But despite my strong feelings on the issue, I can’t bring myself to join the campaign against the reform.

Figures in the Yes camp have suggested that their opponents come from a political spectrum narrower even than the Conservative party. With Labour heavyweights such as Ronnie Campbell and John Prescott weighing in with their endorsements of the campaign, we can see that this is far from the case. Yet there is something about the campaign’s tactics which makes one question whether the critics have it right. (more…)

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Come and help Leicester South deliver Britain’s verdict on Cameron and Clegg

25/04/2011, 07:51:20 AM

By Jon Ashworth

With the working-class council estates of Eyres Monsell and Saffron Lane, diverse communities closer to the city centre, traditionally Tory wards on the outskirts and liberal-leaning voters in the areas around the university, Leicester South really is a microcosm of Britain.

Its politics have mirrored the country’s, too. The seat has changed hands no fewer than five times since the seventies. It’s been represented by MPs from all three major parties over the last twenty years with the Lib Dems winning the 2004 by-election.

And when it goes to the polls in the by-election on 5 May it will have the opportunity to speak for Britain again.

The decision by Sir Peter Soulsby, the area’s respected and hard-working MP for the last six years, to stand down to contest the election for the city’s first directly elected Mayor has given local voters the chance to cast the nation’s verdict on a raft of the Conservative-led government’s unpopular policies.

Over the last two weeks, both Ed Miliband and Ed Balls have traveled to Leicester and stood on the very spot outside De Montfort University at which Nick Clegg chose to pledge his opposition to tuition fees.

“It was here a year ago that he made his promise he would be the voice of young people,” the Labour leader told a crowd of young people inside. “The full gravity of the betrayal has today become clearer. Today we learn that 70% of universities are going to charge £9,000 tuition fees”.

(more…)

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Two Eds are better than one

21/04/2011, 01:30:53 PM

by David Talbot

As Gordon Brown succumbed to the inevitable late on that May evening – with an emotional and dignified statement to end his tumultuous premiership – the final chapter of New Labour was being written. A project that had started in earnest in the mid 1990s had met a sorry end. Achieving a meagre 29% of the vote would make Michael Foot blush, but as the former prime minster left number 10 for the last time, two young loyal lieutenants that had served the party since the early 1990s slipped into opposition determined to bring Labour back to the cusp of power.

The howl of indignation across vast swathes of the press and the Blairite bastions at the election of Ed Miliband as Labour leader was an object lesson in frustrated establishment entitlement. His election was not ordained, the media had thrown its weight behind his brother, David, as the continuity candidate – and so had the New Labour hierarchy.

It didn’t take long for the repercussions to start, the Murdoch press predicted imminent disaster, the ever buffoonish Sun labeled him ‘Red Ed’ and disgruntled former ministers began spitting poison around the Manchester conference bars.

The very fact that Ed Miliband won was due in part because he caught a wave of opinion and optimism within the labour movement that was determined to see the party move on from New Labour and its discredited agenda of triangulation, authoritarianism and penchant for privatisation. Miliband offered a new vision and, even in these early stages, there can be no serious doubt that he represents a real and significant shift beyond New Labour politics. The danger is not this breach of the old order, but that the diehard Blairites, who apparently have no clue why Labour lost 5 million votes, continue to snipe and undermine the new leadership. (more…)

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Libya is in danger of turning into a Carry On film

17/04/2011, 10:46:28 AM

by Dan McCurry

David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy have adopted their very own belligerent Arab city, along with several belligerent Arab towns. In total, the entire population of eastern Libya. Whether they like it or not, if they walk away from the situation now, they will be responsible for every act of the regime’s retribution, every arrest made and every life taken.

For Britain and France, to walk away now would be the equivalent of a parent who refuses their baby food, or a doctor refusing their patient treatment. When a politician starts a war, they are responsible for those on the ground who will suffer the consequences of the military action.

If this were a movie, the tragic-comic premise would be the central characters stuck in a situation of their own making. Unable to negotiate a truce between Tripoli and Benghazi, and unwilling to lose face, their only option is to carry on bombing. Perhaps Sid James would play Sarkozy and Hattie Jakes would play Cameron as Matron.

They are publicly angered with the Nato partners who have not been pulling their weight. It is not the provision of jets that is at the forefront of their concerns, but the laying off of responsibilities, the sharing of the burden and the consequent reduction of their own embarrassment.

Cameron and Sarkozy are telling everyone that, “we’re all in this together”, while desperately trying to play down who led the way in this inadvisable adventure. They want Italy to share the blame of a war gone wrong. (more…)

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Social Mobility – the Coalition’s great leap back

16/04/2011, 04:32:17 PM

by Dan Johnson

The question ‘how many black people go to Oxford?’ sounds like the beginning of a very bad joke, unfortunately that joke is our education system and no-one is laughing.

Oxford isn’t racist, I don’t think it’s sexist, I don’t think it still has the same attitude to class that many perceive it to have. The problem isn’t the universities, it’s the government. Universities can only accept people who get the grades, and the grades of everyone in state schools depends on the funding going in to the schools, the teachers, the headteacher and their parents at home.

I should declare an interest; I’m a governor at both a further education college and an academy in my hometown of Thornaby, they are both great institutions that do a great job with the tools they are given. Unfortunately there are going to be fewer tools in future.

SureStart closures will affect those who can’t afford anywhere else, and will also remove valuable training opportunities from young mothers.

EMA has been removed from those whose family earns above the free school meal threshold (£16,190), so if you have two working parents who are both on the minimum wage you won’t get a penny, how’s that for targeting? It now emerges that the new rate won’t be £38 a week: it’ll be £30; it seems Nick Clegg thought that state schools were like private schools and only have lessons for 31 weeks of the year.

The ‘pupil premium’ will take money away from poor pupils in poor areas and give it to poor pupils in well-off areas, and that’s before you factor in an increase in the number of pupils.

The Tory answer to social mobility is to bring back grammar schools. We can see first-hand how grammar schools work, just look to Northern Ireland. The most able pupils do marginally better but the least able to significantly worse. Thankfully the government is resisting the call, but it is still creating a two-tier state system with the introduction of free schools and the roll-out of academy status to top-performing schools.

We need a well-balanced work force in the future and that requires better schools and a better start in life for many children. I don’t really care that Nick Clegg had an internship with a Finnish bank (he may need the contacts in 2015), what I care about is the scorched earth policy this government is leaving to the next generation.

Dan Johnson is the Labour party candidate in Stainsby Hill, Thornaby in the local elections this year.

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The glorious game has become an inglorious free-market free for all

14/04/2011, 01:30:44 PM

by James Mills

“‘Tis a glorious game, deny it who can, that tries the pluck of an Englishman.” Is the chorus annually sang at the start of the Shrovetide football game, a precursor to the modern day version of the ‘glorious game’, still played every year in Derbyshire on Shrove Tuesday, which demonstrates the key community ties that link the origins of our national game.

Similarly, many of the modern day football clubs originated from community based teams that grew into the social sinews of their local areas. Although many of them nowadays have ballooned into monolithic globally recognisable brands, they are also national treasures as well as assets that employ thousands and inspire millions. Most important of all in a globalised world they remind us of the most important thing of all, locality.

On Monday the banking commission laid out plans to prevent another banking collapse by protecting retail banking from investment banking, which a few years ago exposed some of the fallacies of free-market economics. On the same day, Arsenal, known as the ‘the bank of England club’, was added to the growing list of foreign owned clubs in the Premier League. Could you imagine the streets of Paris, Munich, Milan, Madrid or Barcelona staying as quiet as the streets of London are, if this was their club? (more…)

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What values should govern, what’s the use of higher education, and when can we start liking Nick Clegg again?

13/04/2011, 03:00:55 PM

by Ray Filar

The Liberal Democrat spin machine has gone into overdrive during the last week. Nick Clegg’s sympathetically candid interview in the New Statesman seems almost like the beginning of a public rehabilitation. The message seems to be that we’ve torn him down, and now, in time honoured media tradition, it’s time to build him back up again. Even the Telegraph’s take on the interview, beneath with the ostensibly mocking headline, “I cry to music and even my sons ask why everybody hates me”, inspires a quick flicker of – what is it – guilt?

The question arises, are we justified in continuing to hate everything Nick Clegg represents, or have we turned into massive playground bullies, continuing to flush our victim’s head down the toilet?

Almost a year into coalition government, it is still worth holding onto the memory of those Liberal Democrat manifesto pledges, embodied by Nick Clegg, that led to a barrage of student protests, vociferous journalistic bile, effigies on bonfires, and his own set of entries in Urban Dictionary. Nobody who can understand that £27,000 is a ludicrous amount of money for three years of lectures and library access will forget the tuition fees betrayal in a hurry. (more…)

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Join the Labour heist on the Tory crown jewels: Trafford

08/04/2011, 12:00:22 PM

by Andrew Leask

The past few weeks have been a difficult time for communities across the country. But none more so than Greater Manchester. It has been said before, that the PM’s politics may well have been developed on the playing fields of Eton. In recent years Cameron has flirted with Manchester: there was the getting to know you PM direct session, spending the night during party conferences and even gifts: Greater Manchester will soon become the country’s first combined authority. But he is now performing the parliamentary equivalent of pulling Manchester’s hair, spreading rumours about it on the bus and calling it names in the playground. It seems that what they say about Cameron’s politics is true.

So how has the Tory-Lib Dem government got away with its repeated accusations that Manchester (in particular) is subjecting its citizens to politically motivated cuts. Cuts entirely of their own making and not due to anything the national government may have done or wanted. Well, obviously there is outright propaganda and spin. But beyond that, the Tories have sought to use their “jewel” in the north, their only council in the entire Greater Manchester region: Trafford.

Time and again, Conservatives have used Trafford as a comparison piece when trying to claim that national cuts do not have to mean job losses or reduced services. But regardless of the differences of need, resource and actual funding allocations of Manchester and Trafford, it is fundamentally untrue that services are not suffering and that people will not lose their jobs. For example, in the ward I’m fighting in, Broadheath, our local park wardens have already lost their jobs. Not only does this add to the skyrocketing unemployment statistics, but it has a real effect on our local community. Without park wardens, our green spaces are slowly falling into a state of disrepair and being used for all sorts of anti social behaviour. The Trafford cuts are real, and they are affecting all of us in the local community.

So the Labour group in Trafford is fighting hard in every ward. But to win Trafford, we need to win Broadheath. We’re up against the sitting mayor, so not only will a victory help push the council back towards a Labour majority, but will be a great PR victory too. But to win here, we’ve decided to do things a little differently.

Building on the stunning work done by people like Caroline Badley, we have built our campaign on the principles of community organising. We are seeking to equip and empower our volunteers and truly understand our local community. Whilst we’ve not quite reached Obama like levels of efficiency, we are taking huge strides. And we have been kept focused by one guiding principle: to reconnect with our volunteers, and through them, the community at large.

We have spent a long time going to churches, community groups and people’s homes and simply asking what can we do to help keep this area great. We’ve asked people to let us work with them to solve the problems they face. Already, we are starting to have an effect. Quite apart from the broken streetlights and awful potholes that we have got fixed, there’s the residents who have told us again and again, that no one has ever bothered to ask their opinion. By the simple fact we’ve done even that, they feel valued, respected and ready to engage again with the political process.

I love the community that I’m standing in. I believe the people of Trafford deserve better than a Tory council cheerleading national cuts. Looking at the voting history, we know that an extra 800 votes or so will be needed to win in my ward. We have a modern, dynamic strategy that is learning from the best political movements across the world. We are engaging volunteers by giving them responsibility, building around their skills and interests and engaging with a broad base of supporters and residents to make a positive difference in their lives.

But we don’t yet have enough people to ensure a Labour victory in May. So we’re asking activists from across the country, and particularly the north, to come and join us. To help us rob the Tory northern crown jewels.

We will be campaigning every day between now and 5 May. But in particular we want to encourage activists to come and get involved at the weekends, when we can spend the most time talking to residents and ensuring that they turn out to vote. We’ll also be phone banking Monday to Friday. So if you’re interested in helping, please email me or visit our website for more information.

Andrew Leask is the Labour candidate for Broadheath