Welcome to Britain 2024 – we’re worse than Georgia when it comes to voter suppression

17/01/2024, 10:50:55 PM

by Paul Wheeler

2024 is the year of elections including amongst others the UK and US.

For decades political pundits here have been able to point an accusing figure to the Southern States of the US when it comes to the dark arts of voter suppression. Well thanks to the current Government Britain has lost the moral high ground. The credentials required to vote in person here are more restrictive here than in Georgia. Student ID is a permissible form of ID in Georgia a form of ID specifically excluded in this country.

The case for voter ID in Britain was always thin but the way that it has been implemented has descended into embarrassment. The comparison with other European countries who request voter ID ignores the simple fact that they nearly all have universal Identity Cards used in everyday life.

Perhaps most important it has diverted political time and energy which would have been better focused on improving the process of voter registration. The electoral register in Britain has been part of the hidden wiring of British democracy since the introduction of universal suffrage in the early twentieth century. However, in the last decade we have seen a slow-motion collapse in the accuracy and scope of the electoral register.

A major part of the problem is that we have expected cash strapped councils to implement huge changes to the process of voting and registration. If ever the principle of unintended consequences was relevant in public life it would apply to the introduction of Individual Voting Registration (IVR) in the UK.

Introduced in 2009 in the last days of the last Labour Government it was a well-intentioned attempt to move away from allowing a ‘Head of Household’ (usually assumed to be a male) to complete the registration of all members of the family/household. and instead put the responsibility on every individual to complete the registration form themselves – a huge change in terms of bureaucracy and form filling

Sadly, it didn’t anticipate that it would be implemented under a Coalition Government who implemented a savage reduction in public expenditure particularly amongst the 400 councils responsible for voter registration.

For one group of voters the results of the change to individual voting was catastrophic – ‘attainers’ are 16/17 year olds included on the register to anticipate their eligibility to vote at 18. In the past a Head of Household was expected to include them. Now the responsibility was their own. It became increasingly apparent over the years that 16/17 year olds have other priorities than voter registration.

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The Uncuts: 2023 political awards (Part II)

01/01/2024, 04:42:03 PM

Politician of the year: Team Starmer

For the 2023 award, Uncut is bending the rules a little to hand the politician of the year gong to a team. There is a logic. Keir Starmer had an excellent year, he has palpably learned, adapted and overcome the challenges in front of him. But politics is a team sport and while he has been front of office, the back-office team have made much of this progress possible.

In the 1990s, Tony Blair had a close-knit team around him that propelled him to power. The big names are well known – Jonathan Powell, Anji Hunter, Alastair Campbell, Peter Mandelson and Sally Morgan. Even at the time, each had their own distinct profile, just as Gordon Brown’s team with Charlie Whelan, Ed Balls and Ed Miliband, each had their own media profile.

The difference in the 2020s is that team Starmer is just that, a single unit, there is little briefing or publicity for the different members. No running storyline on tensions with the shadow chancellor’s team where the advisers become the story. After the psychodrama of the TB-GBs, fuelled in large part by advisers, and the scorched earth of Dominic Cummings tenure, a return to the days when advisers remained firmly in the back-office is a welcome change, not to mention an important part of minimising stories of splits and backbiting in any future Labour government.

So, congratulations to Morgan McSweeney, Matt Pound, Matt Doyle, Deborah Mattinson, Peter Hyman and Muneera Lula for not being the story with an honourable mention for Sue Gray, only recently in post as chief of staff, following a highly publicised exit from the civil service, but resolutely absent from the headlines in her new role.

Most underrated in 2023: President Biden

America is heading towards a presidential election between a candidate facing nearly 100 criminal charges and another that has delivered unprecedented and, given the shocks of Covid and Putin’s war, unexpected economic strength.

It should be a no brainer that the latter will win. By a landslide. And yet the polls suggest otherwise and nervousness – Democratic (as in the party) and democratic (as in the political system) – is pervasive.

When Americans vote, Democrats win. In the 2022 midterms, Democrats won by larger margins than in the 2020 presidential election in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania — all battleground states. Democrats also performed strongly in 2023: flipping a Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin; defeating a six-week abortion ban in Ohio; and keeping the Virginia state house.

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The Uncuts: 2023 political awards (Part I)

01/01/2024, 10:45:40 AM

Worst and Best Takes on the Israel-Gaza Crisis

It has been a decade since the last major flare-up between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza. In that time, millions of Britons have come of age and many more millions, lacking the excuse of youth, seem not to have paid any attention to the facts of a complicated conflict and prefer easy, soundbite answers.

In 2023, there was not a mere escalation in tensions but a horrific upsurge of violence, triggered by a single day of massacre of civilians on the 7th of October. We struggle for comparisons, but a simple way think of it is as the Israeli 9/11; a day when a terrorist organisation opted to cut the lives short of innocents, in this case many tortured and raped before their eventual slaughter. How anyone could expect Israel not to retaliate against an organisation not only carrying this out, but which had restarted a daily barrage of rocket attacks into the bargain, defies understanding.

It is unfortunate to have to note that our national media has not exactly covered itself in glory on the subject. The Guardian we have, in the main, long expected to show ugly partisanship with any country which opposes Israel, no matter how awful the regime. But we might have expected better of BBC News and even Sky News, which seemed to demand ridiculous levels of proof of the rape and torture aspects of the attacks which most of us realised were real on Day Two, as well as adopting unabridged casualty figures from a terrorist organisation well known for its shameless misinformation.

For balance, there were some poor journalistic takes on the pro-Israeli side too, however; in the Telegraph, Jake Wallis Simons decided that the two-state solution was part of the problem and not the solution. And there were the usual braying voices on the Israeli right.

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2024 – Our year of socialism or barbarism

28/12/2023, 10:43:03 PM

by Jonathan Todd

We are entering Rosa Luxemburg’s year. “Capitalist civilization cannot continue,” she wrote a century ago. “We must either move forward into socialism or fall back into barbarism.”

A similar contrast was recently drawn by Doyne Farmer, an American scientist and entrepreneur, which was quoted by Alastair Campbell in a fantastic speech: “We are in a race between Armageddon and awesome.”

Farmer’s Armageddon is a brutal Malthusianism of climate chaos: more and more of the world becoming unhabitable for humans, driving hundreds of millions of desperate people towards shrinking islands of habitability, where warm welcomes will not await. Awesome is a world that has taken the steps to avert climate chaos, which will come with an abundance of fresh air, natural habitats, and clean energy.

Lives of Armageddon or awesome await today’s children. With their fates determined by 2024’s decisions.

Change is not linear. Neither the way our climate is changing: “climate tipping points … lead to abrupt, irreversible, and dangerous impacts with serious implications for humanity” (e.g., collapsing ice sheets and rapidly rising sea levels). Nor our trajectory to net zero: “positive tipping points within our social systems (that) help accelerate progress towards a sustainable future” (e.g., take-up of Electric Vehicles rapidly advancing due to steep price reductions).

“Pace is truly what matters in the climate fight,” says the front of Simon Sharpe’s compelling book on how our rate of decarbonisation needs to increase by five times. We either now speed through positive tipping points to a world of awesome or slip beyond negative tipping points to Armageddon.

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Antisemitism is bad enough right now, without trying to frame actual Jewish allies

28/11/2023, 09:23:59 PM

by Rob Marchant

If the horrific news coming out of Israel and Gaza resulting from Hamas atrocities were not sufficient, the last six weeks have been the worst period of antisemitism in living memory, not just in Britain but in many other parts of the world.

Some Labour figures have not exactly covered themselves in glory: if you can manage to live with the cognitive dissonance of framing the “ceasefire” narrative as a neutral one, rather than one which helps Hamas; or recent serial hate marches as “peace demonstrations” – as it seems both Andy Burnham and Sadiq Khan were able to, not to mention a highly-predictable Jeremy Corbyn – you are not going to get to common sense or coherence any time soon.

However, at national level, Keir Starmer has largely avoided the platitudes of his predecessors and has managed to hold a sensible line with his Shadow Cabinet in not “both-sidesing” the Hamas atrocities and the civilian casualties resulting from Israeli counter-attacks. This all in the face of Chicken-Licken comment pieces predicting imminent, and terrible, splits in the party over this stance, which in the end have turned out to be rather overblown.

In difficult times, then, Labour has managed to truly move on from the Corbyn years and not fall into the trap which has recently befallen the Spanish, Belgian and Irish prime ministers, in wetting the bed on this issue. Bravo to Starmer.

So far, so good; until we come to last weekend’s Sunday Times piece, in which it was revealed that Rosie Duffield MP, one of the very few MPs to stand up and be counted as a Jewish ally when antisemitism was rife in the party and is, let us not forget, a vice-chair of the APPG on antisemitism, has not yet been added to the approved parliamentary candidates list, despite having been reselected for Canterbury seat, on grounds of a complaint over alleged antisemitism.

You what, mate?

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3 Bs for Rachel Reeves’ speech: Building; Betting; Bridging

09/10/2023, 02:43:06 AM

by Jonathan Todd

The Labour party and the rest of the country want the same thing: big change. The country knows the essential precondition of this: getting the economy right. We look to Rachel Reeves for that.

Jess Philips spoke movingly at political therapy last week at 1000 Trades about the pervasive hopelessness that she encounters among the electorate. The deep struggles in a country where nothing works. The exhausting dysfunction hardwired into many facets of national life.

“People have had enough,” Rachel Reeves told the FT over the weekend. This feeling, while it has grown over the 13 years of Tory misrule, is not new.

It powered the surge towards Yes in Scotland’s 2014 referendum. Breaking up the UK has always seemed to me, among other things, a tremendously risky path: divorces can get messy. Yes appeared much less so for those gripped by hopelessness: with so little stake in the UK, the alternative was a worthwhile gamble.

Almost a decade later, the tide started to go out on the SNP last week in Rutherglen and Hamilton West. But not on the hope for big change that has transformed Scottish politics. Few want a status quo of grinding poverty and thwarted opportunity.

Labour needs to get the UK building to meet this appetite for change. Building houses, life science labs, wind farms: all the infrastructure that the UK needs for coming decades.

Building should be a leitmotif of the Reeves speech. Uncut will count the number of building references.

But building HS2? Reeves, during her FT interview, “hints that Labour will not go into the general election promising to reinstate the northern leg of the line. Fiscal responsibility is one of her mantras.”

It compromises Labour’s focus on building to not keep alive the train line that will give the UK north of Birmingham the transport capacity and connections it needs. We all know the difficulties being created by the government, such as allowing compulsory purchases for HS2 to lapse, but “we can’t because of the Tories” is a line with limited mileage for Labour.

How large-scale change really happens is the subtitle of a book that Rajiv Shah will, coincidentally, publish during party conference. The author – who has helped vaccinate nearly a billion children, lead high-pressure responses to the Haiti earthquake and against Ebola, dramatically expanded American Covid-19 testing at the height of the pandemic – promises to reveal, “the power of the big bet mindset: a belief that seeking to solve problems boldly, rather than settle for incremental improvements, will attract partners with the capacity to achieve transformational change”. (more…)

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Unfinished revolution: is Labour’s conversion to a party ready for power complete?

07/10/2023, 09:46:50 PM

by Rob Marchant

Philip Gould’s book, The Unfinished Revolution, was an emblematic tome of the late 1990s, documenting New Labour’s lead-up to governing in 1997. But in the 2020s, have we yet reached where we need to be?

Polls: clearly good. Policy programme: we are making respectable progress and cutting out the mad, or madly-expensive, stuff. Tick. Tick.

News management: we are perhaps not yet as ruthlessly disciplined as we need to be, but we seem to be getting a lot less accident-prone than we were even this time last year. And, looking at our opponents this last week, the Tories are hardly the well-oiled spin machine they once were. Good, although room for improvement.

Party management: we are working through the disciplinary cases, and expulsions have happened. While there are still – anecdotally at least – a lot of cases about antisemitism, the party has come a long way. A number of the more cranky and toxic members who joined under Corbyn have left of their own accord, often joining the Greens. It doesn’t bear thinking about how the party would have responded at Labour conference to the awful events in Israel during the Corbyn years and the coming days will be a highly visible test of how Labour has changed.

There have been some rule changes, which last week caused a ripple of protest from the usual Corbynista suspects, but the story is thin gruel: although it may have been paused or ignored during the Corbyn years, the requirement that conference motions need to be contemporary was put in place at least twenty years ago, to stop endless debates about long-dead issues making conference unspeakably turgid[i].

There are also some disciplinary-tightening measures, making it easier to expel those supporting candidates outside the party, aimed at cleaning the Augean stables of our local parties which, after the infiltration from outside that went on in the Corbyn years and some of the nuttiness which still persists in some of our backbenchers and councillors, seem more than welcome. Err on the side of caution if you aspire to be a party of government.

Damage limitation: some of the previous legal actions, such as the defamation case with the Panorama whistleblowers – which the outgoing regime first caused and then somewhat unhelpfully left David Evans’s new team to clean up afterwards – have been settled, and at least there are no new ones being triggered. But some are still pending, including that against former LOTO chief of staff Karie Murphy and four others over the “LabourLeaks” debacle, and may be expensive; the party is trying to kick it into the long grass post election but on that decision, as it were, the jury is out.

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Revealed: Labour high command planning for TWO elections – 2024 and 2026 – with ‘the longest and most expensive ever rolling general election campaign’

06/10/2023, 01:27:58 PM

by Atul Hatwal

Labour high command has begun planning for a single general election campaign that does not end with the next general election but continues through to the election after that. The rationale is that while Labour will likely win the next election, the majority will be sufficiently narrow to make a quick-fire return to the polls almost inevitable.

Speaking to multiple sources, Uncut understands that expectations across the shadow cabinet are for a majority between 10 and 40 with a clear understanding that even a majority of 40 would likely be unworkable to deliver the scale of change needed by the country.

Labour won 202 seats in 2019 and to achieve a majority of 40 at the next election would mean winning an extra 158 seats, significantly more than the boost of 146 seats that Tony Blair secured in 1997.

Even if the upper end of expectations was somehow reached with a majority of 40, a rebellion of just 20 Labour MPs could derail government plans. Currently the hard left Socialist Campaign Group has 35 MPs with a swathe of other backbench Labour MPs, most of whom are likely to be in the next parliament, disgruntled with the leadership and already identified as likely serial rebels.

The experience of the Lib Dems in the 2010 coalition which resulted in their near total wipeout at the 2015 election combined with the nature of seats that they are currently targeting – Blue Wall, long term Tory bastions where voters have a historic hostility to Labour – means that the prospect of anything other than a slightly augmented confidence and supply agreement with Ed Davey’s party is remote.

A vulnerable majority would not only place huge constraints on policy but the longer the parliament ran the more Keir Starmer’s authority would be eroded as the political debate increasingly focused on Westminster psychodrama rather than the government’s agenda. The fate of past PMs with narrow majorities such as Theresa May, John Major, Jim Callaghan and Harold Wilson, looms large in the thinking of key figures around the Labour leader. (more…)

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If it’s really ‘no more Mr Nice Guy’ from Sunak, why not remove the whip from Liz Truss?

30/09/2023, 09:10:15 PM

by Kevin Meagher

‘In the next few days, we will all see more of the new-look Rishi Sunak,’ the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg predicted yesterday, previewing the Conservative party conference which is about to start in Manchester.

“’Mr Safe Pair of Hands’ is gone – it’s ‘No more Mr Nice Guy’ now,’ apparently.

Truly, the sort of dismal, by-the-numbers briefing that PMs in trouble always make.

John Major amusingly claimed that when your back’s against the wall, you should ‘turn around and come out fighting.’

Croaky Iain Duncan-Smith was the quiet man turning up the volume.

We’ve been here a million times.

When you’re taking political blows, the inevitable relaunch always looks to project raw power.

The claim of decisiveness is usually inverse to the reality.

The true test of a leader is what they do, not what they claim. A brand – or rebrand – must be founded on substance.

So, in a spirit of ecumenism from across the political aisle, let me suggest how Sunak can transform words into deeds with one simple move.

Remove the whip from Liz Truss.

Madam 49 Jours appears to have de-iced from the political Siberia she was sent to last year – by her own colleagues and the international money markets.

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The poetry of a better world is beyond Rishi being Rishi

25/09/2023, 11:04:00 PM

by Jonathan Todd

Let Rishi be Rishi, say his advisers. Let him try to set up a dividing line with him and hard-working families on one side and Labour on another. Let him talk gibberish about seven bins and attempt to associate Labour with this. Let him make a solemn speech to the nation from Downing Street, supposedly about tough choices for a shared future, when only a changed government, making different choices, will save our future.

The veneer of competence, which Sunak brought to his office when succeeding Liz Truss, was wearing very thin by the speech’s end. This is the latest phase of his benighted reign. There was the relative calm after the chaos of Truss and Boris Johnson. There were the five priorities for 2023 – which, for Sunak’s misfiring administration, are much more stretching than they initially seemed.

Having not stopped the boots, the role of ULEZ in the Uxbridge byelection appeared as a rubber ring. Many Uxbridge voters who will be unaffected by ULEZ voted Tory in misplaced protest. The latest phase of the Sunak is even more firmly rooted in desperate dishonesty than earlier ones.

The 2030 target for electric cars was achievable – because of investment unlocked by clear and consistent regulation. Instead of applying a similar approach to the 2035 target for boilers, Sunak has watered down both targets. Creating a dividing line between himself and the businesses that, with the right regulatory backing, would make such investment, while claiming to stand-up for hard-pressed households.

What would really help such households is to rapidly push green technologies along the S-curve: “a well-established phenomenon where a successful new technology reaches a certain catalytic tipping point (typically 5-10% market share), and then rapidly reaches a high market share (i.e. 50%+) within just a couple more years once past this tipping point.”

We see market trends in green technologies that align with the S-curve. Wind and solar power generation, for example, is now 12% of the global total from less than 1% a decade ago, growing at 20% per year. By effectively banning onshore wind farms in England for the past eight years and botching a recent auction for a major offshore wind farm, the UK is failing to fully take advantage of this emerging era.

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