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This is now Corbyn’s front bench. Good. He’ll be solely responsible for the failure to come

06/01/2016, 12:43:17 PM

by Atul Hatwal

This is now Jeremy Corbyn’s front bench. Hilary Benn might still be in post but he’s been politically emasculated and the sackings of Michael Dugher and McFadden along with the demotion of Maria Eagle have delivered a clear message: deviate from leadership orthodoxy and you’ll be next against the wall.

We won’t be hearing any more from Hilary Benn on Syria. Little from anyone in the shadow cabinet on Trident. Talented shadow ministers such as Kevan Jones, Jonathan Reynolds and Stephen Doughty have already walked the plank. The Corbyn line has become the Labour line.

Good.

Clarity was needed. Since Labour’s leader was elected, large numbers of moderate Labour party members have been engaged in a collective act of self-delusion: that Labour can present itself as a centrist, electable party with Corbyn at the helm.

The attempts of several members of the shadow cabinet to rein in Corbyn’s exigencies on foreign affairs, defence and the economy are laudable but futile and ultimately counter-productive.

The Syria vote was regarded by moderates within the PLP as some sort of triumph but while parliament ultimately voted the right way to take on the fascists in Isis, it was a political disaster for Labour.

Here was the main opposition party so riven that it had to opt for a free vote on the most important decision a country faces – whether or not to go to war. What does that say to the voters of Britain about Labour’s capacity to lead?

Trident has been another red line for many front-benchers but in the end it’s another pointless fight.

Moderate PLP-ers can talk about Labour’s policy being settled in favour of Trident at conference last year, but what will happen after conference this year, or next?

Within this parliament, party policy will be changed at conference to oppose Trident.

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Bored of the reshuffle? You should be. It’s already occupied more news cycles than any in history

05/01/2016, 03:19:56 PM

by Atul Hatwal

It’s the never-ending reshuffle. This farrago started yesterday morning and is still going over a day later. Current estimates are that it will run past tomorrow and end as a four day marathon by the time the junior posts are announced.

Journalists have been moaning about the length of time its taken and they’re right.

More than they know.

In the old days, Before Twitter (BT), the news cycle used to last 24 hours. Now its shorter, much shorter. According to this academic study of the 2012 US Presidential election, by Professor Daniel Kreiss, it’s gone down from 24 hours to 2 hours.

This means a single day, After Twitter (AT), is now equivalent to 12 days of BT news cycles.

If the Corbyn reshuffle goes on for four days that will be 48 news days in old money – almost 10 working weeks worth of stories.

No wonder people are moaning.

Obviously the elapsed time will remain 4 days, but the frustration and ennui of journalists (and many of their readers) is a vivid illustration of just how news has changed.

And as for Jeremy Corbyn’s team, allowing a negative Labour story like this to dominate double digits of news cycles, it is wholly unprecedented.

Another first to chalk up for the Labour leader.

Atul Hatwal is editor of Uncut

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Doesn’t anyone check what Cameron says?

02/01/2016, 08:00:36 AM

by Kevin Meagher

David Cameron famously doesn’t believe in “green crap”, but that didn’t stop him recycling his New Year message slogan.

His pledge to focus on knotty social problems in order to build a ‘Greater Britain’ is a neat enough line, until you remember its unfortunate antecedents.

It was the title of Oswald Mosley’s 1932 tome extolling his vision of a British fascist state.

Meanwhile, the campaign group formed in the early 1960s by Britain’s most notorious post-war Nazi agitator, John Tyndall, was called the Greater Britain Movement.

Okay, it’s a small gaffe in the grand scheme of things. But it’s emblematic too of just how slack Cameron’s Downing Street ‘chumocracy’ is. It’s the kind of mistake that would never have been made under Blair or Brown (or, indeed, Thatcher).

It reemphasises how Cameron is beatable, but also how Jeremy Corbyn’s team should be much sharper in exploiting these kinds of miscues.

Kevin Meagher is associate editor of Uncut

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The Uncuts: 2015 political awards (part II)

31/12/2015, 02:47:41 PM

Unsuccessful comeback of the year: Lutfur Rahman

One of the most disturbing political news stories of the year had to be the takeover of Tower Hamlets council by central government after the spectacular conviction by an electoral court of the Mayor of Tower Hamlets, Lutfur Rahman, for electoral fraud. The local authority, under his directly-elected mayoralty, had been converted into a rotten borough worthy of a whole issue of Private Eye.

Unceremoniously stripped of office, the court found him guilty of attempted nobbling of votes, unfairly favouring Bangladeshi community organisations above others for grants, propagating untruths about his opponent John Biggs, and a number of other counts.

And so it was that the chutzpah-laden former Mayor had his friends organise a rally, supported by those doughty supporters of the underdog, the Unite union leadership, to try and build support for a comeback for Rahman: an appeal. The utterly damning judgement, of course, was clearly all a horrid plot by racists and Islamophobes.

Indeed at the rally, Unite’s chief of staff, Andrew Murray – Stop the War stalwart and now part of Jeremy Corbyn’s kitchen cabinet, of course – even claimed the support of his boss, the redoubtable Len McCluskey, for the disgraced mayor.

Sadly for Rahman, a couple of days later, the same McCluskey was forced to write to the Guardian, “clarifying” his position, i.e. roughly translated, that even a far-left firebrand could see that Rahman was political poison and would likely not do his cause, of attempting to appear moderate in the run-up to the general election, any good. And so hastily back-pedalled on Murray’s commitment to his support.

And thus, with the withdrawal of powerful union support, did the fraudulent former mayor’s comeback fall flat on its face. It has all gone remarkably quiet since.

Shame.

Civic pioneer of the year – Jim McMahon MP

Last year we gave this award to Sir Richard Leese, who continues to put the powerhouse into the north with his work as leader of Manchester City Council. This year we give it to someone who has recently left local government and leadership of one of the local authorities in the same combined authority as Manchester, Jim McMahon.

Nothing defines McMahon’s local government tenure like his departure. His impressive and pragmatic transformation of Oldham smashed to smithereens UKIP’s hopes of securing a second MP via the recent by-election in this northern town. McMahon proved that a working class hero is still something to be and Uncut looks forward to him bringing his can-do spirit and resolve to Westminster.

Overseas Inspiration: Justin Trudeau (more…)

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The Uncuts: 2015 political awards (part I)

31/12/2015, 12:56:58 PM

Politician of the year: David Cameron

It’s easy to overlook David Cameron. The political news is dominated by Labour’s travails while the Conservatives seem more pre-occupied with their leadership succession.

But there David Cameron sits in Number 10 as prime minister, with a Conservative majority and a wide lead over Labour in the polls.

During the general election campaign, he was virtually written-off. Even Uncut, one of the few sites that consistently predicted a triumph for Cameron’s Tories over Ed Miliband’s Labour (here’s one, from almost exactly a year ago), did not see the Tory majority coming.

David Cameron defeated the last vestiges of New Labour when he beat Gordon Brown in 2010. He’s now beaten the soft left alternative in Ed Miliband and played a central role in driving the Labour party over the edge of electability with the hard left Jeremy Corbyn.

The Prime Minister dominates the centre ground and has put the Tories in their strongest position since the early 1980s. Several Labour MPs privately talk of the prospect of Tory rule until at least 2030 as a likely prospect.

And now, as David Cameron enters the New Year, he is ideally placed in his final major battle: to keep Britain in the EU. The polls are tilting his way with all of the evidence pointing towards a decisive break in his favour among undecideds when he claims to have secured a significant reform deal.

Despite the grim Tory expectations at the start of the year, the doubts of most of the media and his own avoidable missteps, such as pre-announcing his own resignation before the general election campaign, 2015 will go down as David Cameron’s annus mirabilis.

Media disaster: Edstone

Every general election has one of those moments that defines the losing campaign.

In 1992, it was the row over the Jennifer’s ear party election broadcast for Labour. In 1997, it was the Tories’ doomed Demon Eyes poster.

In 2015 it was the Edstone.

It is hard to describe just how blood-chillingly awful the idea of carving Labour’s key pledges on an 8-foot granite tombstone was.

The metaphors were obvious, so blatantly obvious, in fact, that the idea should have been strangled the moment it fell out of the mouth of the person who proposed it. For good measure, they should have been strangled too.

Like everyone else coming to this a bit late one drowsy Sunday morning, I saw #EdStone trending on Twitter and assumed it was some metaphorical remark he had made about his word ‘being like a tablet of stone’ or some such.

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Thatcher’s rotten government was only interested in discord and division

31/12/2015, 10:29:17 AM

by Kevin Meagher

It’s not just the low-fi racism of Oliver Letwin’s 1985 memo to Margaret Thatcher that appalls. His dismissal of the “bad moral attitudes” of young Black men following the Broadwater Farm riots also reflects ministerial contempt towards so many other groups throughout that dismal decade.

Conservative politics in the mid-1980s was about as far from the ‘One Nation’ variant as it was possible to be. This was a government at war with large parts of the country it ran. Truly, an elective dictatorship, openly contemptuous of those that did not yield to its will.

So the “pampered Scots” were to be pitched against the “envious” north of England when it came to funding allocations. Black people were only interested in the “disco and drug trade”. Northern Ireland’s border towns should be bombed to stop republican suspects escaping to Southern Ireland.

As we well know, the miners were regarded as “the enemy within”. The entire city of Liverpool was to be subject to “managed decline” following the Toxteth riots, while the local football club’s fans were smeared in a vile cover-up over the deaths of 96 of their number at Hillsborough.

As the hapless Lewtin, possessor of an eager mind but dull wits, currently resides in political no-man’s land, waiting to see if his perfunctory apology is enough to sate the reaction against his comments, Tory strategists should perhaps ponder what other toxic memo-bombs he penned during his time running Thatcher’s policy unit. After all, this was the mid-80s, when she was at her wildest and the New Right policy wonks that fuelled her insurgency were unencumbered.

But aside from the trickle of released government papers of that time, we now also have Lowell Goddard’s wide-ranging inquiry into historic child abuse allegations. Just what will she unearth in the next few years about what ministers did or did not know in relation to the slew of allegations about that period?

What we do know is that all the invective and moral outrage directed towards Margaret Thatcher and her ministers during the 1980s was not wasted. We thought the Tories were a heartless, sneering bunch at the time.

Yesterday’s revelations now make that an evidence-based assessment.

Kevin Meagher is associate editor of Labour Uncut

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Kennite vs Corbynite split in the leader’s office reruns eternal hard left divisions

29/12/2015, 01:29:18 PM

by Atul Hatwal

Uncut hears that simmering differences in the leader’s team have become deep divisions as they grapple with the looming reshuffle.

At the heart of the split is a long-running tension between two factions of the hard left: Socialist Action and the Labour Representation Committee.

In the corner on the left is Socialist Action – a Trotskyist group most closely associated with Ken Livingstone with several of his advisers from his time as Mayor, either members or supporters. As Livingstone himself said,

“Almost all of my advisers had been involved in Socialist Action,”

“It was the only rational left-wing group you could engage with. They used to produce my socialist economic policies. It was not a secret group.”

Socialist Action’s modus operandi is to achieve a socialist nirvana by boiling the capitalist frog slowly. During their tenure at City Hall, the priority was not to promise wholesale revolutionary change but take incremental steps towards socialism where possible.

In practice this led to bizarre and seemingly random policies such as pursuing the American embassy over parking fines (fair enough) but going easy on the Russian embassy over the same issue (wtf) while happily doing deals with London property developers to underpin the expansion of the City.

Prominent Livingstone City Hall alumni, Simon Fletcher and Neale Coleman, now occupy central roles in Jeremy Corbyn’s office as chief of staff and head of policy and rebuttal while the former Mayor is co-chair of Labour’s defence review.

In the corner even further to the left is the Labour Representation Committee. (LRC) Founded in 2004 (lifting the name of Labour’s original founding committee from 1900) by John McDonnell, the LRC has a more doctrinaire and unbending view of the path to socialism.

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Twas the night before Christmas (with apologies to Clement Clarke Moore)

24/12/2015, 12:53:59 PM

by Rob Marchant

Twas the night before Christmas, and in Labour’s house

Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.

The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,

In hopes that St Jeremy soon would be there.

Corbynistas were nestled all snug in their beds,

Political utopias danced in their heads.

It’s ok, they dreamt, don’t pay heed to the polls,

The party loves Jezza, despite the own goals.

It’s not pesky voters ‘bout whom we should bother,

As Brecht said, dissolve them, then elect another.

Not true that each interview’s now a car-crash,

Or that they didn’t trust us with their hard-earned cash.

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Modernising Chuka is so hard to please

15/12/2015, 05:28:41 PM

by Kevin Meagher

Is there anything about British politics that Chuka Umunna likes?

Hardly a month goes by without a pronouncement from him about how some institution or part of our political fabric is not hopelessly outdated and in need of massive reform – or scrapping entirely.

He was at it again yesterday, arguing that our first-past-the-post electoral system leaves voters “remote and unrepresented” and should be replaced with the Additional Member system used in the Scottish Parliament.

It follows his call in the summer for a federal UK, predicting, with a hyperbolic flourish that we are witnessing “the end of British electoral politics as we know it.”

Modernisation is Chuka’s favourite riff. In case we hadn’t noticed.

Prime Minister’s Questions is a “circus” while the Palace of Westminster is Ground Zero for everything that’s wrong with our political culture: “It’s a beautiful building and it often feels like you are in a museum. So why don’t we turn it into a museum?” he suggested back in July.

Pimp my parliament, so to speak.

But it’s not just the décor that so offends: “How can we continue with a chamber that nurtures the ridiculous tribalism that switches so many people off?” His solution? Introduce a passion-sapping horseshoe design instead.

Political partisanship is a regular target of Chuka’s exasperation. “I am not the most tribal politician” he once told GQ magazine (the kind of publication he seems to like appearing in). “Party affiliation among the public is not what it was, so just putting on an old party label or old-style tribalism will not win you elections.” (Apart from the small fact that it so clearly does. Ask Mr. Cameron – he’s just won one!)

Political debate, meanwhile, is usually “ridiculously adversarial” and parties “urgently need to move with the times.” Yet tribalism is what binds politicians to their parties. It’s just another term for loyalty and shared assumptions. While seeking to stand apart from the party he (briefly) wanted to lead in the summer, is a strange signal to keep sending out.

It explains, though, his proposal back in 2012 to fast-track business executives into parliament. There’s nothing wrong with encouraging more people from business to play a part in politics, but to elevate their interests over those who have earned their spurs with years of campaigning for the party shows how little feel he has for the grassroots or Labour’s traditions.

And reveals how unlike Tony Blair he is, despite the superficial comparisons. For all his modernising zeal, Blair took care to regularly touch base with the party he led. (His emotional final conference speech as leader being a case in point).

Chuka is certainly fluent and thrusting, but he is also impatient and rootless. If he ever hopes to stand for leader again, he needs to show he understands ordinary people, (beyond the rarefied circles where his tetchy hyper-modernism is lauded). Perhaps he would now be better off finding a few things about politics and the Labour tribe that he does like?

But if his quest to modernise all he surveys must continue, perhaps he could start a bit closer to home.

The ‘latest news’ section of his website hasn’t been updated since March.

Kevin Meagher is associate editor of Uncut

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Centrists need new ideas and purpose, not a new party

15/12/2015, 11:40:32 AM

by Jonathan Todd

Phil Collins comments in the Times on speculation within Labour of an SDP type breakaway. Those favouring this move believe that, “the volatility of politics makes 2016 a more propitious moment for novelty than 1981.” Collins, who remains a Labour member, is unconvinced. “The only reason to stay (in Labour),” he wrote a few weeks earlier, “is that it (the Corbyn leadership) can’t last.”

“Corbynism for a decade?” asks Stephen Bush in the New Statesman. “It no longer sounds ridiculous”. In the sense that it was until very recently a widely unanticipated outcome, which would leave many, not least the likes of Collins, distraught, it still sounds pretty ridiculous. But what Bush means is clear.

“Many more than the 66 (Labour) MPs who did vote for airstrikes were convinced on the case for extending British bombing against Isis from Iraq into Syria,” reports Bush, “but pulled back due to pressure from their constituency parties”. CLPs, which MPs need to support them if they are to remain so, are increasingly under the grip of Corbynism.

If MPs are prepared to place political self-preservation before voting with their consciences on Isis, there’s probably nothing – no indignity, daftness, or nastiness – that they wouldn’t endure to extend their political careers. If in the dark nights of their souls, they affirm that this makes them happy, we can only wonder about their souls.

They might read how Tom Harris is happier as an ex-MP than he was as an MP. And Harris got out before Corbyn began. You get the sense that he doesn’t envy Ian Murray, Labour’s only Scottish MP.

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