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Commons Sketch: Cameron’s escape

20/07/2011, 06:23:38 PM

by Dan Hodges

And with a single bound, he was free. Well, at least that was the plan.

David Cameron had been cornered. After a week on the run he had finally been tracked down to the Southern-most tip of the Dark Continent.

“The world has changed”, we are told. Well it may have, or it may not. But when a Conservative prime minister runs half way round the globe to find political solace in the arms of the ANC, you know something is up.

Yet while he could run, he could not hide. And hounded by a vengeful head of the metropolitan police, a rejuvenated Labour leader, and an increasingly worried and fractious Tory party, he was forced to turn and face his pursuers.

They met at the despatch box of the house of commons. There is a myth that our prime minister is a natural performer in the chamber. In reality he often appears poorly briefed, distracted and easily provoked.

But credit where credit is due. Where many men would have been cowed, David Cameron came out fighting. “A torrent”, of allegations had burst forth, he said. He would confront them all. He apologised to the speaker, but his response would be lengthy and fulsome. It was what the country demanded, and deserved.

He announced a panel of inquiry to look into the allegations that brought the British establishment to its knees. The greatest political scandal for a generation would be investigated by Shami Chakrabarti, Elinor Goodman and George Jones. A grateful nation let out an audible sigh. Shami, Elinor and George. There would be no whitewash in Whitehall.

Then it was time to deal with the personal allegations that had been made against him. Or rather those made against his chief of staff. Ed Llewellyn had been asked by the metropolitan police whether the prime minister wanted a briefing on possible corruption and law breaking that penetrated to the heart of Downing Street. Not on your nellie, Ed had replied. Quite right too, said the PM. There would have been “justifiable outrage” had he attempted to investigate this cancer at the heart of his government.

There had also been allegations made against a man called Neil Wallis, a former police officer who had done a brief stint of consultancy as deputy editor of the News of the World. Somewhere in between his busy schedule he’d managed to slip in the odd bit of work for the Tory party. “To the best of my knowledge”, said the prime minister, “I did not know anything about this until Sunday night”. The fact that the leader of the Conservative party hadn’t a clue who’d been working for him had the Tory back benches roaring in delight.

There was one final point he needed to address. Andy Coulson. Serious allegations had been made against him, said the prime minister. If they were proven he would be arrested, charged, incarcerated, hung, drawn and quartered and have his entrails scattered to the winds. It would be fitting. He would have lied to him, the police, a select committee and court of law. It was a terrible mistake to have ever employed this cad. With hindsight, he should never have touched him with a barge pole. “But”, he said, “I have an old fashioned belief that you are innocent until proven guilty”. Andy Coulson would no doubt have been delighted to hear it.

Ed Miliband rose. You can always tell if Ed is going to be a little off his game. He starts to speak with an exaggerated precision. So when his first words sounded like the leader of the Labour party had been kidnapped and replaced by a slightly nasal speak your weight machine, we feared the worst. In fairness, there were a couple of moments when it looked like he was starting to pin Cameron down. But just as he did, smack, he’d run right into an answer the prime minister had just given.

“He’s clearly written his questions before listening to my answers”, taunted Cameron. You could see the relief flowing from him. Behind him it was cascading down the government benches like a wave.

He’d done it. He was free.

Then a figure in a dirty raincoat rose from the Labour benches. “Er…prime minister. Before you go. I forgot. Just one more thing”. It was Tom Watson. The prime minister claimed he hadn’t been warned about Coulson. But that wasn’t true. And he, Tom Watson, had the letter to prove it.

Cameron attempted to brush him aside.

“Not so fast”. It was Dennis Skinner. The prime minister has been asked twice if he had discussed the BSKyB merger. He hadn’t answered the question. So had he discussed it? Or hadn’t he?

The prime minister again tried to dodge his inquisitor. But the spring had gone from his step.

David Cameron had escaped. But he was still not free.

Dan Hodges is contributing editor of Labour Uncut.

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The economics of Tony Blair

20/07/2011, 07:35:43 AM

by Jonathan Todd

Tony Blair, according to his economics advisor as prime minister, isn’t much of an economist. In contrast – the only leader to take Labour to three general election victories – Blair is a politician par excellence. While others are better on economics, what Blair says and doesn’t say on the economy is politically insightful.

Let’s take four points made in his speech and the Q&A at a recent Progress event.

First, Labour should focus more on microeconomic debates and less on the macro-economy.

This seems an oddly technocratic point but reminds me of the view of Douglas Alexander and Jim Murphy that “Labour needs a draw on the deficit and a win on growth”. I suspect I took Alexander by surprise when I asked how we achieve this at a CLP dinner earlier this year.

I also suspect that Blair is giving his answer. We get a draw on the deficit by maintaining a strong line that closes it on the trajectory first specified by Alistair Darling. We get a win on growth not by making arguments about the economy as a whole but by crafting a series of bespoke policy offers sector by sector.

The combined impact of these offers would enable a win on growth and creates a series of talking points with business, which, as Blair stressed, matters because we won’t have this win until we have a phalanx of leading business people prepared to back us.

Second, these are distinct questions:

– How do we make sure the crisis never happens again?

– How do we get the economy moving again?

Separating these questions misses the golden thread of confidence. The economy won’t be moving again until we have confidence in a brighter future. We won’t have this until steps are seen to have been taken to mitigate the risk of the crisis of recent years repeating. Rock bottom public confidence attests that this isn’t coming from government. (more…)

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A mounting in-tray will curtail Ed’s summer fun

19/07/2011, 08:03:20 AM

by Kevin Meagher

The annual summer wind-down beckons. Westminster rises for the summer recess this week and MPs will pack up their troubles along with their metaphorical buckets and spades and disperse for sunnier climbs. The silly season begins and through the haze of August, the party conferences loom.

After hitting his stride over the past few weeks with more assured parliamentary performances and some genuine speed and boldness in response to the hacking scandal, Ed Miliband at last has wind in his sails.

But it is not all plain sailing for him. A pile of knotty party management problems is accumulating which needs his careful attention.

First up is the selection of a new Labour general secretary to succeed Ray Collins. This is a pivotal appointment for him (well, technically the national executive). Ed needs a figure capable of energising the party, but also someone long enough in the tooth to know what the party can and cannot deliver for him. The choice is down to a respected insider, current deputy Chris Lennie, and a well-regarded outsider, the GMB’s political officer Iain McNicol. Today is decision day.

Then the political gets personal as Ed has to make good on his bid to scrap elections to the shadow cabinet. The parliamentary party backed his plan last week. The NEC will most likely rubber-stamp it today before a nod-through at conference in September. We can presumably expect a reshuffle thereafter. (more…)

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“Transparent” is the new “progressive”. Oh goody.

18/07/2011, 12:00:13 PM

by Tom Harris

Did I hear correctly? Did David Cameron actually say that every meeting or discussion any MP has with a journalist should have to be registered from now on?

No, he didn’t, actually. Though that’s how some outlets were reporting the Prime Minister’s views when he made his statement on the News International inquiry last Wednesday. All ministers should register such encounters, and the opposition should follow suit, he slyly suggested.

Can you imagine the panic that must have gone through both front benches at that point? What, tell the world that I’m having a drink with So-And-So from the Daily Whatever tonight? What happens when So-And-So’s byline appears on a story in tomorrow’s edition revealing that “a senior minister/front bencher” is unhappy with the leadership of “the leader/Prime Minister”? The ancient right to stab one’s leader in the back while being nice to his face is sacrosanct and was even included in Magna Carta. Probably.

And it would be extremely foolhardy to risk it and not register such an encounter, what with all these nosey bloody parliamentary researchers desperate to spot MPs having discreet conversations with journalists and email them to EyeSpyMP on Twitter.

This all smacks of the silly and damaging one-upmanship that prevailed during the expenses crisis of 2009; remember when Gordon and Harriet were reported as wishing to ban all MPs from having outside interests on the basis that it would damage the Tories more than us? They had to settle instead for the half-way house of forcing MPs to declare every penny of outside income, however small, and to invent a figure for the time spent earning it (“Harris, T: writing a post for Labour Uncut – four and a half minutes – remuneration nil”). (more…)

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Sunday Review: The economics of enough: How to run the economy as if the future mattered by Diane Coyle

17/07/2011, 01:58:43 PM

by Anthony Painter

The Israeli management guru, Eli Goldratt, once asserted: “Tell me how you will measure me and I will tell you how I will behave.” What we measure defines what we value. As a society we measure many of the wrong things so we value the wrong things.

As Diane Coyle argues in The Economics of Enough:

“Profit-oriented capitalism has always drawn on support from other institutional values. The policies of the past thirty years have lost their anchor in values outside the market.”

It should be stated out the outset that this is not a book that is solely about measurement. Its scope is staggeringly broad. It is iconoclastic, counter-faddist, intricate, readable yet grounded. That is some achievement given the book’s ambition: to redefine how we look at our economic institutions in the light of how they contribute to shared social values.

The easy thing to do when writing a book like this is to shoot off into the distance and say what we value is valueless; instead of material things, we should value happiness, the environment, each other and so on. Instead, Coyle articulates a pluralism of values and given that then argues for a balanced economy that allows us to achieve a mixture of fairness, efficiency and freedom while being honest about the contradictions between them. The easiest trick to pull is to say that fairness equals efficiency equals freedom and that’s the trilemma resolved. Generally when things are too good to be true they are and there are choices to be made. Coyle is brutally honest about that.

Of all the conversations that are intelligently engaged with in The economics of enough it is the one about measurement that has the potential to be the most radical. (more…)

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Reforming, yes. Refounding, no thanks

15/07/2011, 01:50:48 PM

by Kevin Meagher

When I hear all this talk about “refounding” Labour, my heart sinks.

I’m not dewy-eyed about it – I don’t mind a bit of tinkering to make the engine of our beloved old jalopy of a party run a bit better – but according to the Refounding Labour website, the party ‘must change fundamentally if it is to lead progressive opinion and win again.’

Why? Our unreformed, unreconstructed party has managed to attract 50,000 new members in the past year, won every by-election fought and delivered 800 new councillors. Not bad for an old banger.

Set in that context, self-loathing about the party’s structures seems a bit perverse. Unfortunately, it’s always been voguish in Labour circles to decry the state of the party’s organisation and push for change.

We need to be careful. When I used to work in the party’s north-west regional office we used to dread talk of organisational reform from smart Alec, dilettante, newbie MPs. I remember one of them dispensing with the monthly meetings of her constituency general management committee in favour of quarterly coffee mornings instead.

As the 2001 election fast approached she needed to be bailed out as her party had by then completely disintegrated. No meetings meant no activists, cash or campaign plan either. Something as simple as scrapping the four-weekly get together removed the organisational tent poles, leaving her local party a billowing shapeless void as people simply got out of the habit of being active members.

The Labour party’s grassroots ecology needs careful management. Local parties are not the plaything of MPs – however senior they are or however well intentioned they may be. Beware, therefore, O Great Leadership of ours, of refounding the party’s structures over the heads of ordinary members.

Most local parties are held together by half a dozen super-activists. Lose them and its curtains. If members like the existing arrangements, don’t risk upsetting them with careless top-down reform.

But what about the hordes of would-be activists who are said to be put off getting involved in the party because of the drudgery of meetings and general party foot sloggery? (more…)

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Where next for Labour on hacking? Follow the money Ed

15/07/2011, 09:46:57 AM

by Atul Hatwal

The wreckage of Rupert Murdoch’s empire floats in the political waters. MPs and journalists view a landscape transformed. But as the initial storm surge from hacking slows, Labour faces some tough new political choices.

Where next in the campaign?

By common consent Ed Miliband has had a good war. Should he now step back and let the Levenson Inquiry go about its business? Or should he keep on keeping on?

Around Miliband, two camps have rapidly emerged.

On one side are those advocating a Glee strategy – don’t stop believing.

If News International can be brought to its knees, what about the Daily Mail?

The Daily Mail is unique in eliciting the same reaction from Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell as the left of the Labour party. For this group, it is a once in a generation opportunity to fix one of Labour’s most implacable enemies and help create genuinely more open political debate.

The voices on this side of the divide include Ed Miliband’s base – his early and most enthusiastic supporters, new politics think-tankers and those yearning to move on from the technocratic managerialism of New Labour.

Belief is intoxicating. They want the moral crusade to keep rolling. This is the Ed they voted for.

On the other side are the old media hands. They have been out of their comfort zone for the past two weeks. Their world view involves dealing with the media to get Labour’s message across. War on News International was unthinkable ten days ago. War on the Daily Mail makes them feel ill.

Come what may, at some point, Labour is going to have to deal with the media.

The fall of News International might have taken them by surprise, but that doesn’t change the fundamentals of media management where some type of working relationship is essential, even with the enemy.

This group includes rafts of former advisers, members of the shadow cabinet and Labour-leaning journalists. It’s no coincidence that this nexus was also the source of Miliband’s recent leadership crisis.

But in the debate on resolving this dilemna, something’s been missing.

Neither camp has provided a cogent analysis as to why News International’s position collapsed so quickly. (more…)

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The government is spinning crime rates rather than tackling them

14/07/2011, 05:58:51 PM

by Matt Cavanagh

Earlier today the Home Office published the annual crime figures for England and Wales. The Spectator blog informs us that ministers are trying ‘to spin the figures as a vindication of their nascent reform programme’. This is foolish: their only big reform, elected Police and crime commissioners, will not come in until next spring at the earliest. The other policies ministers are fond of citing, like online crime maps, local beat meetings, and a reduction in top-down targets, are all broadly welcome but are incremental developments of initiatives begun under Labour.

Meanwhile, the only major changes in today’s BCS figures which the statisticians judge to be statistically significant are a 9% fall in vandalism – this is the extent of the good news – and a 14% rise in burglary, a 38% rise in assault with minor injury, and a worrying 35% rise in domestic violence. The raw BCS figures also show a 6% rise in all violence, and a 1% rise in overall crime, but neither is judged to be statistically significant.

It is too early to say whether these increases are blips; or a sign that the long downward trend in crime since 1995 has flattened out; or the start of a belated surge in crime associated with the state of the economy. The second is the preferred hypothesis of Home Office statisticians; the third has some grounding in past experience, in that burglary and domestic violence are particularly prone to rising in tough economic times.

At the start of the downturn in early 2009, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats reacted to a much smaller increase in burglary by, first, accusing Labour of complacency, and second, predicting a ‘recession crime wave’. They were wrong on both counts: far from being complacent, ministers had already been working with the police to try to pre-empt a rise in acquisitive crime; and the increase in burglary turned out to be a blip, in marked contrast to the pattern in the last recession in the early 1990s – as I set out on this site two weeks ago.

I hope these latest increases will also be a blip. But it would be more reassuring, as well as more consistent, if Tory and Lib Dem ministers showed the same concern as they evinced in 2009 in reaction to today’s figures, and rather less complacency. The real test of their reforms – and of the impact of their cuts – will come in the equivalent figures in 2012 and 2013.

Matt Cavanagh was a special adviser on crime and justice under the last Labour government.

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Labour, like Britain, must look to the future

14/07/2011, 11:30:09 AM

by Ian Austin

I’ve been really worried these past few months. People kept asking me what I thought of “all this Blue Labour stuff”.

I wasn’t sure what to say, but I knew it must be significant because it was creating such a buzz.

You can imagine my relief when they put together an “e-book” setting out the details.

It explained that a series of seminars had been held in London and Oxford to “open up the Labour tradition to new syntheses of meaning, and so to originality and transformation.”

The introduction said it would discuss the “relationship with tradition and modernity, nation and class, labour and capital, community and the individual, society and the market, the state and mutualism, and between belief and empiricism, romanticism and rationality, obligation and entitlement.”

Fortunately, help was at hand in the form of an interview a week or so ago with Lord Glasman, the leading figure behind our new approach.

“There are three poles,” he said, when asked to explain Blue Labour. ‘”First: a conception of the common good. That comes from Aristotle. Second: an impulse to organise labour. That comes from Minsky and Alinsky. And third: decommodification. That means stopping things that were not produced for sale being sold. That comes from Polanyi.”’

Of course we need seminars as well as conversations on doorsteps, but it’s where the theory takes us that worries me, not the inaccessibility of the language.

Elsewhere we’ve been told the new big idea is based on the insight that New Labour’s response to globalisation failed to value and protect local and community services like post offices and pubs and the traditional high street, or failed to recognise the value of the human relationships that underpin our communities.

The danger, as Mary Riddell pointed out recently, “lies in a neverland inhabited by superannuated pigeon-fanciers who like Woodbines and Watneys and don’t think much of foreigners.” She was absolutely right to warn that “Britain is not a museum of nostalgia but a forward-looking country.” (more…)

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Peter goes to the palace

14/07/2011, 07:58:01 AM

by Peter Watt

I think I am going all Blue Labour. All that longing for the lost icons of a simpler more communitarian age; it warms the fraternal cockles of my nostalgic heart. Or am I mixing my popular political philosophies? Anyway, it doesn’t matter because on the whole they’re all gobbledygook! But what I do mean is that whilst I am all for modernisation, I also happen to think that there are some more traditional aspects of life that are also worth preserving. They provide us with a feeling of stability and security whilst all around is changing. One of those traditional aspects, that many on the left struggle with, is the royal family.

A couple of weeks ago I was privileged to attend a garden party at Buckingham Palace. It was a fantastic experience. There were several thousand people attending from all walks of life. Charities, the military, business, politics all gathered as a recognition for their, or their organisations’ work. The focal point was Her Majesty and Prince Phillip who made themselves available to meet and greet their guests. Their energy levels at their age were really incredible. And the guests had of course all dressed up, with a handy protocol card sent in advance ensuring that the ladies wore hats and gentlemen morning or lounge suits. The national anthem was played and people mingled. My only complaint was that we missed out on the cakes and sandwiches because by the time we got to the tea tent there was none left. I couldn’t help but notice that there were plenty of other guests with very full plates. I tried not to be bitter about their gluttony.

There was lots of the choreography and so on that I didn’t really understand. The Yeoman of the Guard; the men in top hats who seemed to be in charge of the walkabout; all of the titles of the various palace officials and the heraldry. It did all feel a bit ‘olde worlde’ and yes there were an awful lot of very posh voices. But do you know what? It didn’t matter because it was an honour to be there and it felt special. This was the royal machine delivering an event in the same way that it probably has for 100 years. I bet that the Royal and diplomatic tea tents are in exactly the same place, tea served at exactly the same time and the running order is pretty much the same as it was in 1911. And that to me is quite simply fantastic and something to be proud of.

I accept that intellectually the hereditary principle is a little at odds with notions of equality. But I don’t care. The alternative to a royal head of state is an elected one. Quite frankly, I can think of little worse than an elected head of state. Another powerful, elected, party political politician. Another point of political friction taking on those in the Parliaments. Try selling that one to the public; good luck. (more…)

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