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John McTernan on Militant, muppets and the coalition budget

22/06/2010, 05:51:09 PM

Some commentators compare Danny Alexander to a missing member of the Sesame Street cast. While such disrespect may annoy and upset him, he’s lucky to be described in such cuddly terms. For when I listen to him and his Lib Dem colleagues, I hear echoes of something far worse and far more sinister – the Militant Tendency.

Admittedly there aren’t the hand gestures, but there is the absolute conviction of the convert to a totalising ideology. By which I mean an ideology that can offer an explanation for every woe. For Trotskyists, it’s capitalist monopolies that wreck lives; the solution: nationalisation. For the coalition, it’s debt; the solution – deep cuts in spending. (more…)

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Mark Fox explains why Conservatives are delighted with the budget

22/06/2010, 04:44:45 PM

George Osborne delivered the emergency budget with confidence and clarity. He tackled the deficit head on and was clear and open about his plans.

Business on the whole will be pleased that Britain now has a decisive plan to reduce the deficit, stabilise the economy and encourage small and medium sized businesses. Industry will broadly welcome the measures that were taken to reduce tax rates. The move on CGT was expected as was the increase in VAT.

This in turn should lead to a continuation of low interest rates. Low interest rates will give business the confidence to invest in their future and recruit more staff as the economy grows. We need a private sector driven recovery. The private sector is the only part of the economy that generates the wealth – and the tax stream – to pay for what we want delivered in the public sector. (more…)

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Siôn Simon’s budget sketch

22/06/2010, 02:16:43 PM

Gentlemen in suits no longer call at one’s door selling things. Sometimes shaggy young men in football shirts turn up with baskets of sponges and rags. But the days of polite young men selling insurance and encyclopaedias seem to have passed.

In their stead, we have this nice young fellow on the television. He is smart and well-spoken and has learned a lot of information. And he brings us things we need with solemn charm.

Not all the words he says make sense. And sometimes he seems to say things which sound as though they might not be true. But he looks very well washed. His hair is shiny. He is going to rebalance the economy. (more…)

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Harman’s Budget Challenge, by Jonathan Todd

22/06/2010, 08:30:43 AM

The budget response is the great set-piece political challenge. Your opponent has an age to prepare and all the resources of treasury. You stand up when they sit down. By the time you sit down, the political context is virtually set, not least because your opponent’s spinners have tried to fix this. Given the centrality of economics to present politics, it is a bigger challenge than ever. Harriet Harman must rise to this as our acting leader. Which transience of tenure, of itself, reduces her potential agility compared with a permanent leader. You have to feel for her. Here are a few, hopefully helpful, suggestions.

The first task is to distinguish pragmatic economics from small-state ideology. As the need for deficit management is widely acknowledged, pragmatism is required, but only Thatcherites see this crisis as an opportunity for ideological resurgence.

The second task is to oppose the manifestations of this ideology, while the third is to provide a coherent alternative economic prospectus. This prospectus must contain tax increases and spending cuts, but the mix should reflect a very different ideology from that supported by Tory MPs agitating for a budget akin to the Thatcherite “cold shower” of the 1981 budget. Overarching all of this is the need to gain an audience in a media climate favourable to the coalition.

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Michael Dugher on the strategic defence review

21/06/2010, 11:07:35 AM

At the General Election, all three main parties were committed to holding a strategic defence review (SDR) as part of their manifestos for government. Today in the House of Commons, the debate begins as to how we configure our armed forces for the challenges we face in the coming years. How Labour engages in this will be important.

In February, Labour in government produced Adaptability and Partnership: Issues for the Strategic Defence Review, the green paper which paved the way for the SDR. The document set out very well the principles that underpin Labour’s approach.

The first is that we cannot simply “defend our own goal line”. This is a response to the “troops out” message that goes out, not just from anti-war protesters, but from sections of the media and parts of the wider public, usually in response to ever-mounting casualties in Afghanistan. (more…)

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Mark Fox says the leadership candidates should admit New Labour’s real mistakes

18/06/2010, 02:07:43 PM

For the first time in 13 years Labour finds itself adjusting to the problems and challenges of opposition – and they are real. It’s not just the chauffer driven cars and private office officials that have disappeared. More important – and much harder to overcome – is the lack of easy access to information and data, no longer having an automatic slot on prime time news and, for a while at least, still trying to argue from the policy platform on which they lost the election.

And, of course, not yet having a new leader to provide direction and purpose adds to the problem. These things will sort themselves out in time, but for a while Labour will continue to struggle. (more…)

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Jonathan Todd sorts the economics from the ideology

16/06/2010, 09:13:43 AM

The Daily Telegraph isn’t normally essential reading for Labourites. But yesterday it should have been, especially for Harriet Harman. Fraser Nelson set the backdrop to the politics of the deficit and the “emergency” Budget, to which she, as acting leader, will respond. This week’s report from the new Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) dramatically changes this political context. Nelson has been quick to realise this and, while our instincts differ markedly from his, we need to be equally fleet-footed.

The limited discussion on the deficit in the leadership election has denied our candidates the opportunity to demonstrate this quality. Though, of course, they could engineer such an opportunity for themselves. I’d be impressed if any of them do flesh out a more substantial economic platform, not least as The Economist is right to note that, “nothing will make or break the next leader of the opposition like his response to the government’s austerity programme”. (more…)

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Nick Palmer says the sacred cow of income tax may be unwell

15/06/2010, 02:33:56 PM

One of the curious features of being a Labour MP in the last three elections was that we would often wake up and find out from the newspapers that we were irrevocably committed to something that we had not discussed, but which Tony or Gordon had decided was vital to our chances.

A hardy perennial was the recurrent commitment not to increase the standard rate of income tax. This was part of the New Labour deal: we were not unilateralists; we weren’t going to nationalise the commanding heights; and we wouldn’t put up your income tax.

This probably did help initially in refurbishing our image, but it has become a sacred cow. In these troubled times, we should re-examine the cow to find out how it’s getting on and if, in electoral terms, it is actually still alive. (more…)

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Eugene Grant says the disabled should still have grounds for optimism.

14/06/2010, 11:51:24 AM

Helen Keller, the deafblind American radical, once said: “Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope or confidence”. The first deafblind person to earn a bachelor of arts degree, Keller went on to become an accomplished author, well-travelled lecturer and prolific political activist.

The election feast is now behind us. The first frenzies of the coalition’s honeymoon are done. And yet, thus far, the Lib-Con coalition has offered little in the way of optimism for some of the most disadvantaged in our society: people with disabilities. On the contrary, the approach adopted by the new government appears tainted by cynicism.

First, the pledge from work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith to reassess all 2.6 million incapacity benefit (IB) claimants and move them onto other benefits like jobseeker’s allowance and employment and support allowance (ESA). This is a thorny political issue, which isn’t necessarily regressive.

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Clever politicians are using the social web to make humanity scaleable, says Jon Bounds

13/06/2010, 01:24:52 PM

Despite its sneering disregard for politicians, the biggest hit at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York earlier in the month was Cory Booker. The two main threads of the conference were platforms and tools (some promising, some not) and a desire to discover whether the internet could “fix” politics. The general assumption was that trust in politicians is irretrievably lost and that political mechanisms are broken and need reforming in new ways.

Cory Booker is the mayor of Newark, New Jersey. The mayor of a city in the shadow of a big neighbour, a city of around a million people with a high non-white population, a city often unfairly characterised in the media as dangerous or dull. Philip Roth, who grew up there, has not been kind about contemporary Newark. (more…)

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