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Dan Hodges deconstructs the new shadow cabinet

09/10/2010, 09:00:35 AM

ANOTHER HURDLE cleared. The lot of the new leader. Evade the obstacles, real and imagined.

First conference speech. Check. First shadow cabinet. Check. First grilling by Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby. Tough one. But check.

As with every other make or break moment Ed Miliband will face over the next few months, yesterday’s was definitive. “It will test his maturity and decisiveness”, warned the Independent.

Well, unless he was planning to order the shadow cabinet to turn up to their first meeting in fancy dress, or delay the announcement till boxing day, Ed was always likely to scrape home this time. An examination of his leadership skills? Yes. But the reintroduction of shadow cabinet elections ensured that it was a straightforward multiple choice, rather than a full blown thesis.

Put aside the hype. Ed Miliband played a relatively weak hand well. (more…)

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Kevin Meagher calms down after Conservative conference

08/10/2010, 11:58:41 AM

OK, my fists are now unfurled. I have emptied my soul of expletives and invective. Bad thoughts have passed. The rage has subsided. The television, though battered and bruised, will live on. I’m like this every October. For one week, my usually ultra-rational impulses give way to a visceral tribalism. Undiluted exposure to the Conservative party conference does that to me. It elicits a physical reaction as a mixture of loathing and, well, more loathing, rises in my throat.

It’s not one thing in particular. It’s the all-embracing awfulness of it. It’s the platitudinous “debates” – grainy facsimiles of actual democratic discussion. It’s the perfunctory applause and standing ovations (an unfortunate habit that Labour has adopted). It’s the lame jokes. The wretched, simplistic homilies with their sneery nouveau riche morality.

It goes without saying that the Conservative conference is a platform for banality. But it provides endless visual and aural stimulation to someone looking to have his basic political orientation rebooted once a year. That is important. Politics is not only knowing what you are for; it is knowing what you are against too. (more…)

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To Autumn, a poem by Chris Bryant

07/10/2010, 04:08:28 PM

To Autumn

(for National Poetry Day, with dutiful accord to Keats and Shakespeare inter alia)

Season of trysts and pomp-full conferences
When politicians, in three hordes uncouth
Assemble in up-market hotel foyers
To gossip, flirt, conspire and take the hand
Of every willing voter in the land;
To argue for their version of the truth,
To battle for the future of our schools
Our hospitals, police and uncared youth;
Just sometimes to put forward their pet scheme
For rescuing Britain; and perchance to dream
Of greasy poles they yet aspire to climb.

But now the champagne flutes are passed their time –
And late-night, lightweight, internecine strife.
The autumn parliamentary term commences
With all eyes fixed on Osborne’s pending knife.
Statistics, figures, numbers stride the land,
Brought forth by each to stay the other’s hand.
Some worship at the shrine of deficit reduction,
They see a chance to slash the state, scot-free,
They eulogise the Big Society
But in their hearts they make a grand deduction:
Let Alexander, Clegg and Cable take the rap.

III

It’s true, perhaps the sea of faith was full once;
The faith that all our dreams could be enacted by
The simple, legal application of the democratic will;
That honest, good and independent people
Could change the world by sheer determination;
That work for all would pay a living wage,
That poverty, ill-health and destitution
Would be abolished – here and in every nation.
But now the voters issue a redacted sigh
Their trust in politics of every hue in rage
They fear that they will pay a hefty bill.

Which leaves us with the task we set ourselves:
To live within our means but go for growth;
To struggle for the cause of common sense,
Since rapid, ill-considered, swingeing cuts will lead us hence
To double-dip recession, not to economic health.
The songs of Spring still stir our anxious bones,
With echoes of the age-old oath
(Albeit in a voice and accent of today)
To fight for freedom, fairness, and the common wealth.
The people watch, the media barons neigh
And gathering members twitter on their phones.

Chris Bryant is Labour MP for Rhondda

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Child benefit and middle class single mums: the sums, by Lesley Smith

07/10/2010, 12:39:34 PM

Much guff has been talked about the effect of the loss of child benefit on the so called aspirant middle class. Yes, a family with one earner taxed at 40% and one at 0% will be hit. And, yes, it’s a grand less towards the school fees. But the tax system already looks after happy couples. (Two people, two tax allowances). And Cameron and Osborne knew that there was little appetite to defend them.

So who does lose out? And does it matter? Well there’s not much sympathy for working single mums who’ve managed to go up the income scale. Sure, they’re not the worst off. One blogger points out that the median income for working single parent families is £21,035 a year (compared with a median of £32,158 a year for a two parent family with one worker.) (I’m assuming this is gross.)

But single parents earning £45k aren’t an urban myth. And nor are they leading the life of Riley.

Unless she has stumbled on a lottery ticket, a single mum on £45k is out at work and shelling out on childcare, paid out of already (higher) taxed income. (Funny that an accountant is tax deductable but a nanny is not.) So her net income is far, far lower than that of the couple who generate the same income but only pay 20% of it to the tax man. (And she’s up half the night cooking and cleaning as she hasn’t time in the day or money to pay). (more…)

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A reckoning deferred: Dan Hodges on Cameron’s cagey week

07/10/2010, 09:00:14 AM

Policy chaos. MPs in a panic. A rattled prime minister, with fear in his eyes.

It’s been a dangerous couple of days for the Labour party.

Conference season is a game of two halves. Attack. Counterattack. You roll out your programme. They hit it. You assess where the blows have fallen hardest. Recalibrate. Then you roll out your programme again.

Not this year. By accident, and by design, the Tories have played to different rules.

This should have been the week that Cameron and co. blew some sizeable holes in “Red Ed” and the “new generation”. Instead, they spent the best part of their conference blowing holes in each other.

Their semi-disintegration on child benefit was selfishly dispiriting. I couldn’t weep for the single mothers about to lose their benefits. Or the families facing hardship. All I could think was: “did we really lose an election to this shower”? (more…)

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Liverpool FC is a big society, say Jonathan Todd and Alison McGovern

06/10/2010, 05:30:10 PM

As Ed Miliband was unveiled as Labour’s leader in Manchester ten days ago, Liverpool were drawing with Sunderland 30 miles away. Which disappointing result was of secondary concern for many compared with protesting against the club’s misrule by Tom Hicks and George Gillett.

Yet even with the possibility of administration hanging over the club, Jeff Stelling of Sky told the protestors to “concentrate on what’s happening on the pitch.”

But this “let them eat cake and drink warm lager” attitude misses the point.

As the clock ticks down to the club effectively being publicly owned, we should ask whether David Cameron has a better grasp of the issues at stake. In spite of the ownership bid from New England Sports Ventures, Robert Peston continues to see control of the club by the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) as a live option. RBS, 84 percent publicly owned, could assume ownership on 15 October when loans taken out with them expire.

While it may be that RBS avoids this outcome by finding new owners capable of servicing the debt in the next week, an RBS takeover is close enough that questions must be asked about how they would conduct themselves as custodians of the club. A publicly owned bank taking on such a role raises new issues.

These issues are larger than the club; even than a club as great as Liverpool. They cut to the core of what we want our post credit-crunched country to be.

There is a worry that the practices which contributed to our troubles may be returning to the financial sector. This concern undermines the hope that there may be opportunity in the financial crisis; opportunity to re-evaluate what kind of economy and society we want to be and to recalibrate ourselves accordingly. (more…)

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Let’s not join the Tories in going soft on sentencing, says Nick Keehan

06/10/2010, 10:30:49 AM

Ken Clarke played the hard man at the Tory conference yesterday. Prisoners will work a full forty hour week, he told them. “A regime of hard work” will teach them a lesson. It was what they wanted to hear.

He didn’t tell them that, under his watch, a wind of change has swept through the ministry of justice. No longer is there talk of ‘getting tough’ on ‘local crooks’. Instead, the ministry has taken to promoting the positive role that offenders are playing in their communities.

‘Where would we be without offenders?’ someone who reads MoJ press releases might ask. School children in Zambia would be using dangerous paraffin lamps (‘Offenders help students in Africa’, 14 June), and people in Wales would be having trouble remembering both Princess Diana (‘Offenders create fitting memorial to Princess Diana’, 31 August) and the 142 miners killed in the explosion at Old Black Vain Colliery at Risca in 1860 (‘Offenders uncover lost memorial to miners’, 29 September).

Even worse, one woman in east London would be without her handbag, had not a group of offenders doing community payback been there to chase her mugger and reclaim it (‘Offenders to the rescue as woman mugged’, 13 July). This is how the big society will work. Police numbers will be cut and offenders, no longer crowded out by the big state, will step in and tackle crime themselves. ‘More offenders on the street’ is the pledge (‘Revolving door of crime and reoffending to stop says Clarke’, 30 June). (more…)

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Shadow cabinet campaigning: the lessons from history, by Dan Hodges

05/10/2010, 09:00:25 AM

Many winters ago, a fellow House of Commons researcher and I were walking the corridors of Westminster. Suddenly, a hand touched my shoulder.

“Hi, Dan, how are you”.

It was Peter Hain.

“Great, thanks Peter. You”?

“Well. Well. How’s your mum”?

“She’s fine, thanks”.

“Great. She was brilliant on the radio the other day. You do the briefing”?

“Yes, I did”.

“Great. Great briefing. Well, see you”.

My colleague and I continued walking. Then in unison, without breaking stride, we uttered the same phrase:

“Shadow cabinet elections”. (more…)

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ITV News’ Alex Forrest takes her baby somewhere funny

04/10/2010, 03:00:45 PM

As a certificated resident of the Westminster village, it’s strange watching the party conference season from afar. But I’m getting used to being removed from the big political events of the year. Hey, I was the political correspondent who managed to miss the entire general election – the ‘most exciting in decades’. Why? Well I achieved something far more important than a political scoop – I had a baby.

My beautiful son Charlie arrived 10 days before the election. He weighed a rather eye-watering nine pounds. Let’s just say it wasn’t an easy delivery. But my husband and I formed a perfect coalition, with me doing all the hard work. Eventually, Charles Stanley Whiting arrived 16 days late.

The trauma of his birth is why I thought that, at 10 weeks old, Charlie should visit a cranial osteopath. Friends had told me that this treatment is supposed to help realign the body from the head to the bottom of the spine. It’s recommended for babies delivered using ventouse and forceps, so I decided to give it a go.

When I arrived at the health centre, I was greeted by a woman who can best be described as an ‘ageing hippy’. We followed her down to the basement and into a room furnished with large scatter cushions and candles… very new age. (more…)

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Liam Fox is right (and George and Dave are wrong), says Michael Dugher

04/10/2010, 09:00:28 AM

In defence circles it is sometimes unfairly said that the real enemy of our armed forces is not the taleban but the treasury. The recently leaked letter from defence secretary Liam Fox to the prime minister warned of the threat to our defence capabilities if the government presses ahead with severe cuts to the defence budget in the forthcoming review. During the row that has followed, Downing Street reportedly said that David Cameron was “untroubled” by Fox’s letter. But he should be. The prospect of deep cuts that undermine our defences, and especially those that weaken the army, should worry the country too.

In his uncompromising letter to Cameron, Fox set out a dire warning that the government risks failing in its first duty if the treasury is allowed to cut the MoD budget too deeply. Fox has long been a cheer-leader for the Tory right. As such, he believes in less government and, central to that, less government spending too (though not, it would seem, when it comes to his own budget). Fox described the current strategic defence and security review (SDSR) as being like a “super comprehensive spending review”, and one driven by financial and not strategic requirements. Indeed, he said the cuts were “intellectually and financially” indefensible. He warned that if “it continues on its current trajectory it is likely to have grave political consequences”. (more…)

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