Uncut « Labour Uncut

Does anyone outside the Westminster village give a damn about Leveson?

14/06/2012, 07:00:44 AM

by Peter Watt

People are suffering out there. Families’ finances are under pressure as prices rise while their incomes remain static. The numbers who are unemployed keeps rising and the fear of losing your job is very real for many more.

It manifests itself in small ways for many families, perhaps the occasional meal out has stopped. Or the much loved and deserved annual holiday has been downgraded or cancelled. The car costs more to fill up and that credit card bill suddenly seems a real worry as money runs out sooner in the month than it did. The news is full of rumblings of worse to come as the dark clouds of possible Euro meltdown gather. It all adds to up to a great deal of worry that is being quietly borne in millions of homes across the country.

People don’t expect to be told “it will all be alright” by their politicians. And even if politicians did say that they wouldn’t be believed anyway. But they have every right to expect that politicians are working tirelessly for them and on their behalf.

So imagine how you must have felt this week as you realised that there was still a couple of weeks to go until pay-day and the kids needed new shoes or the tax on the car was due. And then you flicked on the news and saw that once again the entire political class appeared to have its collective head stuck up its own arse once again!

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We shouldn’t stop at Responsibility To Protect

13/06/2012, 07:00:31 AM

by Rob Marchant

There have been plenty of column inches in recent weeks dedicated to why the world should intervene in Syria: for most of us the unspeakable pictures of children with their throats cut from the massacre in Houla is enough. It seems undeniable that the world should do something in the face of genocide or likely genocide, but something – especially since Iraq – holds many of us back on the left from saying so.

So perhaps it’s useful to step back and look at a more fundamental, perhaps more philosophical point: how can we on the left not feel obliged to stop genocide in general, and not just its implementation within the constraints of the UN, via its doctrine of Responsibility To Protect (RTP)?

Does it not sometimes feel like people still see human life through a nineteenth century prism, where the nation state is all we care about? When it was simply not possible to make military interventions without mass loss of British life, and our interest in intervention was pure colonialism (as, in Diane Abbott’s parallel universe , it probably still is)?

But this is the twenty-first century. We no longer only care about other Britons, our colonial possessions and our allies. Many of us travel widely and form strong relationships with others from across the world, who we may just not want to be massacred.

The simple fact is that it is no longer appropriate, if it ever was, to behave as if we value the life of a single Briton more than multiple lives in a foreign country. We cannot make the daily grind of everyone in the developing world better. But we can at least try to stop them being deliberately killed by murderous regimes.

We feel moved and touched when we remember the Holocaust. Many of us feel guilty about Bosnia and Rwanda. But unless we learn to channel these feelings into a constructive, repeatable act, we will not prevent genocide on anything more than the current, haphazard basis.

There are two ways of reconciling ourselves to this, the most basic and justifiable reason for intervention.

The hard way is this: accept the awkward truth that there is a moral obligation to try to intervene in all circumstances where there is genocide or likely genocide.

If we cannot within the UN, it is perfectly legitimate to build a coalition outside the UN. It can work, and it did in Libya and elsewhere. That would be a true example of the “ethical foreign policy” that we as a party once promised.

The easy way is this, and it’s the way we often choose: there are a number of obvious reasons why we might decide, in our hearts, that we lack the will to intervene: be it isolationism, pacifism, anti-Americanism or something else. Then, armed with the subconscious motive, we set about looking for reasons in our heads as to why action is not possible, each of them wrong.

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Revealed: MoD slashes compensation for injured troops by 9% in the past year

12/06/2012, 06:00:46 AM

by Atul Hatwal

Shocking new figures uncovered by Uncut reveal how the Ministry of Defence has slashed payments to injured troops by 9% over the past year.

Between 2010/11 and 2011/12, claims to the Armed Forces Compensation Scheme – the support fund for servicemen and women who are injured in the line of duty– rose by 20% from 7335 to 8830. But at the same time, the number of claims where compensation was awarded remained virtually static, rising slightly from 3,890 to 3925

This means that the proportion of injured soldiers, sailors and aircrew who received compensation fell from 53% in 2010/11 to 44% in 2011/12, a drop of 9%.

The size of the fall will prompt speculation that money and not troops’ welfare is dictating compensation policy.

The latest figures were buried in an obscure statistical release that was issued by the MoD without a press release or any detail about the striking fall in awards in the summary.

News of the plunging levels of compensation comes weeks after the independent Armed Forces Pay Review Body warned that impending pay cuts would be “damaging for…motivation”.

The combined impact of lower pay and reduced support if injured will likely hit the forces’ already fragile morale.

Worse still, as the cuts bite for frontline troops, the litany of bungled spending and wasted resources keeps mounting up for the MoD.

A damning report earlier this year from the Public Accounts Committee found the cost of Britain’s biggest military programmes had soared by £500million in a year because “wasteful” defence chiefs failed to “live within their means”.

And just last month it emerged that the MoD’s decision to change the planes to be used on the new aircraft carriers, reverting back to the original choice made by the last Labour government, will cost £250 million.

Despite these disasters, and the impact of cuts on forces’ morale, the government has pressed ahead with its ever deeper programme of cuts to the military.

The secretary of state for defence, Phillip Hammond, proudly boasted to parliament that the government would be able to balance the defence budget as a result of their efficiencies.

But with the drop in forces’ compensation now evident, the extent of the cuts seems to be even deeper than previously admitted.

Atul Hatwal is editor at Uncut

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Back to business in the Lords

11/06/2012, 07:00:06 AM

by Angela Smith

After the extended Whitsun recess, the new parliamentary session gets well and truly underway this week for those of us on the red benches, with three Second Readings of new Bills, Labour-led debates on the floor of the House and the continuing scrutiny of government through the Lords daily question time and secondary legislation debates in committee.

First up of the Second Readings is the Financial Services Bill, debated later today, and attracting Labour’s many economic experts. It will be an opportunity for the minister, Lord Sassoon to once again, to wide derision from our benches, try to lay all the blame of the country’s economic woes at the door of the last government. Unless of course, he’s keeping up with current Tory thinking, which now seems to have shifted the blame onto the Eurozone.

Local Government Finance and Civil Aviation are the other Second Readings in the Lords this week, tomorrow and Wednesday respectively. Both bills will excite wider interest, but the increasingly pressured financial environment in which many of our local authorities now operate has the potential for the council funding Bill to become the most high profile piece of legislation this side of the summer. Labour are also fortunate in that not much gets past our Lords lead on the issue, Bill MacKenzie.

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Sunday Review: Ed Miliband on Englishness

10/06/2012, 07:00:33 AM

by Anthony Painter

The Labour party approaches the politics of Englishness rather as Perseus would have approached the Medusa – best avoided if at all possible and if it has to be encountered then no eye contact should be made at any cost. Last Thursday, Ed Miliband talked confidently about the Medusa but thought it best not to enter the cave.

Unfortunately, the Medusa still must be slain.

The speech had quite a nice pace to it and succeeded in many of its rhetorical flourishes. If in doubt, talk about common humanity, Morris, Ruskin and pulling together. This will always be safe ground for a Labour orator – and it does provide some significant crossover into English romanticism too.

No harm done – it can’t, as Miliband argued, be all pounds and pence. The romantics would have been distraught at the omission of shillings but time moves on. On the negative side, we can only hope that the phrase ‘progressive patriotism’ will never be uttered again. Overall though, I’m glad he made the speech – it needed to be done and was long overdue from a Labour leader.

Miliband skidded between the cultural and the political as if there was no distinction between them when it came to his analysis of Scottish nationalism. Unless I’ve misread modern Scottish nationalism I’m not sure if Alex Salmond is really in the business of forcing people to choose between their Scottishness and Britishness. That would certainly seem to sit rather oddly with the passage from his Hugo Young Lecture of early this year where he argued that there would always be a ‘social union’ based on ‘our shared economic interests, our cultural ties, our many friendships and family relationships’. He is asking Scotland to (with notable exceptions such as the currency and the monarchy) choose Scottish political institutions over the British state.

The speech was rather more definitive when it came to distinguishing English culture and political institutions. For Miliband, English cultural expression is “not about an English Parliament or an English Assembly.” So wave the flag of St.George like Bobby Moore was still captain of England but don’t get all political about it. We’ll have none of that.

In this argument was the speech’s central weakness. This would have been a good speech in 1996. Things have moved on considerably since. It is now clear that Scottish devolution was not only the culmination of one process – a creation of institutions to match a rejuvenated civic Scottishness – but the beginning of another process. The claim on ever greater powers for Scotland may or may not result in independence.

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Hang on, did Ed Miliband just change Labour’s local government policy?

08/06/2012, 03:22:19 PM

by Atul Hatwal

The headlines for Ed Miliband’s speech at the Royal Festival Hall yesterday have focused on English identity. Understandably so. But in the roll-out of this initiative, Labour’s leader seems to have slipped in a surreptitious policy change. One that has not been trailed or widely discussed.

Until now, the Labour party has backed city mayors. The policy was in the last Labour manifesto and supported in parliament: in January, Hilary Benn, Labour’s shadow secretary of state for communities and local government, was clear, “we believe that elected mayors can offer a highly effective form of local leadership”.

That was then.

Following up yesterday’s speech, Ed Miliband has penned an article for the Daily Telegraph today, entitled, “The England I love is defined by its spirit”. In this piece, he makes a very specific point,

“…we should get on with devolving power away from Westminster to English local authorities and the people, without the need for mayoral referendums or such-like.”

At the Festival Hall there was no mention of “mayoral referendums or such-like”.

This isn’t a glib insertion. Each word in an article such as this is carefully weighed. During the drafting it will have been seriously discussed before being included.

Clearly, the public rejection of mayors in city referenda in May by all cities except Bristol was a problem, but this was as much to do with the government’s ludicrous refusal to fully define what powers the mayors would actually have.

It’s hard to ask people to back a change if it isn’t clear what the change will be.

On the assumption that any extension of directly elected city mayors would require a public vote, Miliband’s words mean that Labour has shifted policy so that the party now accepts the status quo of local government.

Bye-bye direct democracy.

For Ed Miliband personally, this issue has always been a difficult one. In his own constituency, the local Labour party has been implacably opposed to directly elected mayors. It meant that in the run-up to the referenda on mayors, Labour’s leader was supporting them while his own local party was in opposition.

Within the party, it prompted a widespread sense of incredulity that the leader of the Labour party could not prevail on his own local party to back a flagship Labour policy on local government at the local elections.

It would seem that this is a problem Ed Milliband will not have to face again.

Atul Hatwal is editor at Uncut

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We must be the pragmatists now

08/06/2012, 01:31:28 PM

by Jonathan Todd

Pragmatism, of course, as Kevin Meagher has previously noted, was how Winston Churchill ushered in 13 years of Conservative government in 1951, fully 43 years after he first held ministerial office and six years after a sea change election had swept him from Downing Street. No ideological hang-ups kept him from accepting what needed to be accepted to make his party electable.

In contrast, a leading advisor to the last government can now observe to Uncut that “ideology is the worst thing to have happened to the modern Tory Party”.

Louise Mensch may rush to do the bidding of her frontbench and defend Jeremy Hunt’s indefensible transgressions. But most Tory backbenchers seem quicker to quibble with their frontbench than please it.

They appear to prefer the ideological purity of opposition to tough choices of government. And their past and their future encourage them in this indulgence.

Their past is of voting against their whip early in this parliament in votes that seemed relatively inconsequential at the time, but which have become habit forming, dangerously so as the votes get more consequential.

Their future isn’t on the frontbench. Liberal Democrats and more pliable sorts, like Mensch, block their path. Their future may, due to the unprecedented boundary review, be in selection battles, which they will require the support of typically ideologically-committed activists to win.

Where’s the harm in scratching the itch to rebel when you have no ministerial career to seek and a seat to save?

Not even Winston could have done it with this lot. It is not simply the political realities of diminished prospects for advancement within a multi-party government and the boundary review that have reduced them. It is something deeper in the gut of the right than that.

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Whip’s Notebook: Izzy whizzy George gets dizzy and blows £200 million

08/06/2012, 07:00:54 AM

by Jon Ashworth

Tory MPs regularly receive briefings from their parliamentary resource unit (PRU) giving them lines to take, suggested responses to letters on policy, attack lines for use in the chamber and that sort of thing. Until last week the PRU will have had standard response scripts on the stocks about the importance of the pasty tax, caravan tax, church renovation tax and charity tax. No doubt these scripts would include a line reminding their constituents that backing down on these new revenue raisers would be deeply irresponsible given the size of the deficit. Loyal Tory MPs will have emailed out these responses whenever a constituent got in touch complaining about the new tax hikes. They will have used the lines in their weekly MP’s column in the local paper and in interviews on local radio.

Behind the scenes some poor staffer in the PRU will have been relieved and grateful that the briefing was available for their Tory MPs. No doubt she or he had been getting a barrage of calls and emails from MPs’ pesky researchers asking for a line.

The poor staffer will have called the junior special adviser in the Treasury who would actually rather focus on important matters like making sure his name is on the list for the Spectator summer party. The special adviser will have no doubt grumpily despaired “why can’t they use the budget PRU briefing, don’t they realise how busy we are?!” Our heroic PRU staffer persists ”but we’re getting lots of calls, didn’t you see the finance bill debate? No one spoke up to support the policy apart from that chap desperate for promotion who founded YouGov.”

Eventually the Treasury special adviser relents and signs off an agreed brief while remaining irritated that his more important special advisor colleague Rupert Harrison gets the Spectator summer party invite not him.

But at least the tenacious staffer is happy and finally emails the pasty tax brief out to a grateful parliamentary party and now turns attention to the “Hunt hasn’t really broken the ministerial Code” brief that the Number 10 Political Office are demanding goes out.

But an updated PRU brief wasn’t enough to satisfy MPs or more importantly public opinion.

The Government’s majority had already been reduced to just 25 on the votes on the pasty and caravan tax. They should be winning votes in the Commons by 83. Overall 31 Tory MPs – around 10 per cent of the Conservative Parliamentary Party – voted against one or more of George Osborne’s budget measures.

And if Osborne thought winning the votes was enough to put this issue to bed, he was wrong.

Lib Dem MPs were handing out pasties in Parliament, 4 Tory MPs brought petitions to the Commons on the caravan tax even though they voted for it, Labour’s frontbench Treasury team were constantly up and at them. MPs were calling adjournment debates forcing ministers back to the Commons to defend the policy. Just two weeks ago poor David Gauke, Exchequer Secretary was sent out to defend the pasty tax in a Westminster hall debate and confirmed that samosas cooked and sold in sweet shops, many of which we have in Leicester, will have VAT as well.

And then in the week that Tony Blair, Vince Cable and Jeremy Hunt were all at Leveson we witnessed what appeared like a dizzying u-turn a day from Osborne. In total he makes £200 million of u-turns with no explanation of how these latest unfunded commitments will be paid for. That’s a lot of cash for Osborne to spend to try to save his draining credibility.

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The uncomfortable truth about party politics is that loyalty trumps morality

07/06/2012, 07:00:28 AM

by Peter Watt

This week there was one story that depressed me more than any other. It was actually quite a small story and you may well have missed it. It involved Baroness Sayeeda Warsi and a referral to the City of London Police following various allegations in the national newspapers about her expenses.

Putting aside the actual allegations and whether or not the police should be involved, for me the really depressing part of the tale was actually an interview given on LBC 97.3 by the MP who referred the matter to the police, Karl Turner.

Karl was being interviewed on the James Whale show and you can hear the interview here. Basically Karl appears to concede that, despite the matters being considered being serious and a non-party political issue, he would not have referred a Labour MP in the same situation.

Now I don’t know Karl and I am sure that he is an excellent MP. But inadvertently he has allowed something to be raised in public that is a pretty uncomfortable truth about party politics. Worse, it is something that most people involved in party politics will recognise and actually completely accept. In the words of Disraeli to errant MPs, “damn your principles!” and “stick to your party.”

All political parties make much of the fact that they “stand up for” people; that they are “working together” for the greater good. All try and portray their positions as being in the national interest and of being a selfless pursuit of power that once achieved would give them opportunity to deliver for others.

To a very large extent of course this is true. But there is another side; a side that allows things to become, well a little less balanced: namely that when push-comes-to-shove all that really matters is that my team wins. Quite often this trumps the more altruistic elements of political motivation.

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A polling question to which the answer is yes (or at least probably)

06/06/2012, 07:08:08 PM

by Atul Hatwal

Earlier today Anthony Wells posted a response at UK Polling Report to a post of mine, “Is Labour’s lead actually 3% not 10%?”

Anthony makes a series of reasonable points defending the accuracy of YouGov’s 10 point Labour lead. He cites the high level of precision of YouGov’s final poll in the London election and the greater robustness of polls today compared to twenty years ago. Fair enough. But this misunderstands the purpose of my piece.

Polls measure how people feel at a point in time. There are adjustments and various psephological tricks to ensure respondents reveal their true preference, but the emphasis is on measuring how voters are actually feeling when the poll is conducted.

In mid-term, with an election some way off, many people might feel thoroughly hacked off with the government and be convinced they want rid of them. But when faced with the real choice, when it is days before polling and they engage with the arguments, a significant minority will change their minds.

By definition, this cannot be picked up by polling several weeks out from an election because voters haven’t switched yet.

The point of my piece was not to contest the accuracy of current polls, but to try measure this effect: to attempt to quantity the proportion of respondents who are relatively convinced Labour backers in mid-term but will then switch when the campaign ramps up and the polling booth beckons.

In fact, it is only because modern polling is so much more effective that we can be confident that a shortfall between mid-term polls and actual election results reflects voters who changed their mind rather than those who simply lied to the pollster in the first place.

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