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Break down the Berlin Wall at FIFA

02/06/2011, 02:00:16 PM

by Jonathan Todd

What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you use it? To whom are you accountable? How do we get rid of you?

Tony Benn wants these questions to be put to any powerful person. If Sepp Blatter retains any self-awareness whatsoever, which is doubtful, then he must cringe to have these questions applied to him.

He has great power as the president of football’s global governing body, FIFA. Following the “temporary exclusion” by FIFA’s ethics committee from football posts of Mohamed Bin Hammam, who was challenging Blatter for this post, he was yesterday re-elected, unopposed, for another four year term. The coronation of Blatter came from a body that has seen nine of its 24 executive committee members accused of corruption in recent months. While FIFA’s motto is “for the game, for the world”, the power bestowed in Blatter may not always further such high-minded ends. He seems accountable only to the executive committee, who exclusively appear able to remove the man in charge of a game loved with passion by billions.

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Our class based attacks on Cameron are missing the mark

02/06/2011, 07:46:31 AM

by Peter Watt

To paraphrase Sun Tzu in The Art of War, you need to know your enemy. But does Labour know who David William Donald Cameron is? Understanding him, his relationship with voters and his party is an important part of Labour’s preparation for the tough elections to come.

I suspect that while we think that we understand him, we are deluded. Instead we are judging him through our own partisan prism, which is in contrast to much of the electorate. Ask most Labour party folk what they think of Cameron and they will emphasise his class. They will talk of Eton and the Bullingdon club, of the baronets in his lineage and the millions he has in the bank. This all adds up, so the theory goes, to one seriously out of touch (and obviously posh) politician.

But this emphasis on his “poshness” is currently cold comfort. Let us start with first principles: he is likeable and popular with voters. According to the latest You Gov poll for the Sunday Times, his approval ratings are at +2, with 48% saying he is doing very well or fairly well. Nearly one in five Labour 2010 voters agree. And popular leaders tend to win elections more often than not. As importantly, according to a Populus poll, in early May, Cameron is comfortably beating the other party leaders on leadership attributes like “standing up for Britain”, “determination” and “competence”. It is true that Ed does have a lead on “shares my values” and “on my side”, but these leads are small.

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It’s not more doctors and soldiers we need in Parliament, but more plumbers and electricians

01/06/2011, 02:00:53 PM

by Sunder Katwala

Should Labour in Parliament look more like the country it seeks to represent? And how would it go about it? David Miliband is reported answering those questions at the Hay festival.

“Mr Miliband told the Hay festival: ‘If you look at the Parliamentary Tory party and the Lib Dems, they have got some strengths over us.

They have got more doctors in Parliament than we have.

They have more military officers. The Tories are trying to open up’.

Suggesting Labour should follow suit, he added: ‘We have to make sure we look like the country we represent, not just our supporters'”.

There are a whole range of practical and philosophical problems with seeking to make the PLP “look like the country we represent”, other than in the most broad brush and impressionistic terms. The goal of fair chances and no unfair barriers for candidates, whatever their background, is a better one. Over time, that would generate a group which was very broadly representative. But it is extremely difficult

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Let’s leave the lapel badges in the 1980s and focus on what matters

01/06/2011, 09:46:17 AM

by Kevin Meagher

Labour’s history is pockmarked with prolonged periods of opposition following ejection from office; none more so than during those 18 wasted years in the 80s and 90s.

The explanation for that generation in the wilderness is familiar enough: the party’s pitch to the country was tone deaf. On the economy, law and order, defence and a hundred other issues Labour had nothing to say that chimed with what people wanted to hear.

The party was more bothered with pleasing its own fissiparous cliques; the wannabe Dave Sparts, the bedsit revolutionaries, the local government crackpots who refused to set a rate, the headbangers of Militant.

The “loony left” were responsible for torpedoing Labour’s reputation and sinking the party’s chances with their puerile antics in Labour councils up and down the country and through their reckless control of the party’s policy-making machinery.

Fringe causes were put before mainstream concerns, with many in the party seriously accepting the flawed logic that stapling together a collection of special interest groups would create a counterweight to Thatcher’s electoral coalition of aspirational voters.

No prizes for guessing how successful that idea was.

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Don’t let contempt for Clegg blind you to the Lib Dem threat

31/05/2011, 01:00:54 PM

by John Woodcock

My twitter feed may not be quite as representative as an IPSOS-MORI poll, but it was still striking to witness the outpouring of abuse when Nick Clegg briefly honed into view at the champions league final on Saturday night.

The excellent John Park MSP summed it up: “Nick Clegg was on our telly and the whole pub burst into laughter: #nowayback”.

It is important to guard against seeing the world purely through the Labour rose-tinted spectacles of your friends and supporters, but John may well be right.

The X-Factor-style rise and fall of the Liberal Democrat leader has been much remarked already. But the hapless man has managed to intensify people’s annoyance at his broken promises still further by maintaining a peculiarly grating tone of injured sanctimony (hat tip, Adrian McMenamin’s twitter) through his transition from chief critic of the “broken politics of Westminster” to epitome of said broken politics.

It is possible that he will spring back again, but it seems increasingly unlikely.

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Progressive McCarthyism and the fear of ACL Soze

31/05/2011, 08:59:21 AM

by Dan Hodges

The terror. The stomach-churning, sheet-drenching, palpitation-inducing fear that gnaws at the heart of the people’s party.

At night it infiltrates our dreams. During the day it invades our subconscious.

He could come back. They could come back. We could lose our party once again.

Tony Blair. New Labour. Once they were a leader and political program; successful ones at that.

Now they are bogeyman. Tales to scare the children. Anthony Charles Lynton Blair – our very own Keyser Soze.

The Labour party has been seized by a form of progressive McCarthyism. Beneath every bed lieTory traitors. Within every closet lurk Blairite counter-revolutionaries. In every basement there are secret cabals yearning for a return for the lost leader, David Miliband.

The local elections were a great result, say the true believers. We have a mountain to climb, but we have at least reached base camp. Ed has only been in post eight months. Give it a rest, and him time.

Then the terror finds a voice. The Blairites are agitating. They are plotting. Keyser Soze is coming for us again.

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Small man, big world

30/05/2011, 12:00:52 PM

Jonathan Todd

The financial crisis was unprecedented and complex. But the left’s interpretation of it tended to be straight-forward. Banks and bankers were bad. Government and politicians were good. Government saved the banks from themselves and would stimulate economies. This enlarged role for government made a “progressive moment” inevitable. Yet government is now being scaled back and the left is out of power across Europe.

The left must move beyond its misconceptions to recover. While Labour’s plans to close the deficit concede limits to government’s size, George Osborne was much quicker than Gordon Brown to acknowledge such limits. The lesson of the debate on the deficit during and after the general election is that the left cannot be abashed by fiscal reality. It must confront it squarely. This is a lesson that Barack Obama might now reflect upon as debate in the US on the size of government moves to a similar place to that in the UK in the six months or so prior to the general election.

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Shoesmith outrage: a pox on all their houses

30/05/2011, 09:21:39 AM

by Dennis Kavanagh

Sharon Shoesmith addressed the assembled media last week, fresh from her court of appeal success and promptly rammed her foot so far down her throat it’s a wonder she didn’t knock her teeth out.

“I don’t do blame”, she revealed, seconds before blaming the police and health departments for the Baby P scandal. “You cannot stop the death of children”, she told the BBC later, an extraordinary statement from someone whose department was supposed to do exactly that. My personal favourite was “I haven’t thought about compensation”; maybe she was asleep while her barrister and the court of appeal discussed damages and remedies before remitting the case back to the administrative division of the high court to settle exactly that question.

If she was never “in it for the money”, as she assured the Guardian later, presumably we’ll see a whacking donation to childline or NSPCC. That at least would put a fitting stop to the merry go round of public money behind two lots of high court hearings, representation of three public bodies and enormous sums in court time.

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Shadow cabinet league table: Murphy opens up clear lead

27/05/2011, 07:39:34 AM

by Atul Hatwal

Bottom three adrift as Uncut readers vote on whether there should be relegation from the shadow cabinet

Jim Murphy has opened up a commanding lead over Douglas Alexander at the top of the league. Following a month in which he landed yet another urgent question and was a fixture in the media, there is now a gap of 74 points between first and second.

The gap is all the bigger because of an uncharacteristically quiet month for Alexander. For the first time since the shadow cabinet was formed, he didn’t put out a single press release in the month. Based on his performance in May, Alexander was the eighth hardest working member of the shadow cabinet.

He has never been this low in a monthly ranking.

It’s too early to tell whether this is the start of a decline in his work rate, but with the conflict in Libya, upheaval in the Middle East and the Taliban’s summer offensive underway, this is hardly time for a dip in activity.

In third, Sadiq Khan posted another solid month. He stepped up his media output, issuing four press releases, double the number of any previous month. In previous months, this media profile has been a weakness for Khan. Increased press work will help establish him as a major Labour figure in his own right, beyond having been Ed Miliband’s leadership campaign manager.

But, for Khan, there were areas for improvement that highlighted the difference between being third and what it takes to be number one. (more…)

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Don’t forget the old git vote

26/05/2011, 07:19:05 AM

by Peter Watt

I was on a train the other day when a couple of kids got on acting like total muppets. They were shouting, running up and down the carriage, throwing rubbish and swearing. Selfish and self-centred, they had no consideration for anyone else on the train. They acted as if the world revolved around them. The guard asked them to calm down and they let fly a torrent of foul-mouthed abuse. The rest of us kept quiet.

I considered the possible impact of low incomes and deprivation on their lives. How this had probably lead to feelings of helplessness, low levels of aspiration and the resultant attitudes and behaviour that we were experiencing.

Except that that is not what I was thinking at all. What I was really thinking was, “bloody yobs”, “kids of today: I blame the bloody parents”, and best of all, “it wasn’t like that in my day”. I really was the proverbial old git. It wasn’t just this incident; I increasingly find myself saying to people that my own children don’t know lucky they are:

“They have lots of toys, get to go on holidays and never really want for anything. But it never seems to be enough. When I was younger I was always grateful for what I had, knowing that I was more fortunate than many others”.

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