Labour Uncut

UNCUT: Three reasons for Labour victory in 2015

31/12/2014, 08:28:22 AM

by Jonathan Todd

Tony Blair might be despondent about Labour’s prospects but all is not lost, there are three reasons for Labour victory in 2015: leadership, economy and brand.

Uncut has consistently warned about the dangers attaching to Labour’s poor polling on leadership and economy. The own goals and gaffes of Conservatives, however, open the door to these improving. Labour enjoys an advantage on brand, which is similarly assisted by Tory missteps.

If David Cameron’s party were a character on Thomas the Tank engine, the Fat Controller would be bellowing at them that they have caused confusion and delay. He’d be saying the same to Labour. Labour is not as popular or convincing as we would like. But Tory error is giving Labour the opportunity, should we seize it, to be marginally and decisively less unpopular and unconvincing.

Labour would be the least unpopular in the unpopularity contest that is this general election. Arriving in government in such circumstances would bring its own challenges. Not least as precipitous demands will be placed on whoever forms the next government by the UK’s fiscal position, underperforming economy and ageing society, as well as looming questions involved with everything from Vladimir Putin’s intentions to Nigel Farage’s staying power about our place in the world.

Someone will have a Labour plan for all of this. Charlie Falconer, perhaps. I think he leads Labour’s preparation for government work. If so, noting his chapter on delivery in the Uncut book, he should call Paul Crowe. The Hollande scenario that troubles Crowe must be averted. One way in which it might become existential for Labour is if UKIP establishes itself as the second party in much of northern England at the general election and then use the frustrations of an administration as disappointing as Hollande’s to further advance.

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UNCUT: Rooted in community: Labour should listen to Orwell – less ideology, more local action

30/12/2014, 11:07:43 PM

In an occasional series to run through the new year, the “Rooted in community” posts will look at those practical, local activities where Labour values are transforming peoples’ lives.

In this post, Paul Dulley gives some historical perspective looking at the importance of a community approach to one of the left’s great heroes: George Orwell

In his 1935 review of Tropic of Cancer, George Orwell praised Henry Miller’s novel for its ‘Whitmanesque enthusiasm for the process of life’, describing it as a ‘remarkable book’. It certainly was.

Published in France in 1934, the novel’s near pornographic depictions of life amongst the Parisian underclass saw it banned in America, Canada and Britain. Orwell’s own imported copy of the novel was seized by two detectives in 1938, a rather sorry letter to his publisher Victor Gollancz reveals.

What is perhaps surprising is that Orwell should have been so enamoured of this work, given Miller’s diametrically opposed view of the world. At the time of his review, Orwell was a member of no political party, and had yet to take his formative trips to Spain or the North. Nevertheless, he was becoming very proactive kind of socialist, his determination to enter unfamiliar communities and witness events for himself contrasting sharply with Miller’s brand of quietism. The one meeting between the two authors perhaps illustrates this difference more than any exposition.

Christmas, 1936. Orwell had resolved to travel to Spain, ostensibly to write war articles from a Republican perspective, but with an itch to ‘kill fascists’. He used his stopover in Paris as an opportunity to pay a fan visit to Henry Miller, who was holed up in a local hotel.

Although the meeting was a cordial one, Miller poured scorn on Orwell’s ideas about defending democracy, countering that civilization was doomed and that there was nothing that individuals like he could do about it. Nevertheless, he was impressed by Orwell’s determined self-sacrifice and, as a symbol of his blessing, gave him a corduroy jacket with which to keep warm on the front line.

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UNCUT: Rooted in community: Labour succeeds when it is local, personal and practical

30/12/2014, 05:49:53 PM

In an occasional series to run through the new year, the “Rooted in community” posts will look at those practical, local activities where Labour values are transforming peoples’ lives.

At a time of cuts and public spending restraint, Labour can still make a difference by going back to its community roots. Today, Jake Sumner describes how an old piano factory in Camden Town became a hub for social change that is rejuvenating the local community

Labour is strongest when it is connected to communities. It seems obvious but it is often overlooked what that fully means.

Knocking on doors is one way of course, and for candidates and local parties it helps with understanding and acting on people’s concerns.

One idea I picked up in the USA on the Obama campaigns is starting on the door with: ‘Hello, I’m a volunteer [with the Obama campaign]’. Saying you’re a volunteer sounds normal. Millions of people are volunteers in all walks of life. And being a volunteer has other gains: volunteers aren’t expected to know everything, giving more latitude on the doorstep, and it is easier to recruit volunteers too.

In the USA I asked everyone voting Obama if they wanted to help out and I recruited about 40 volunteers. Asking people to become a volunteer is a much smaller step than becoming a member. But, above all, a volunteer reflects more what many Labour members actually are: committed members of the community. Some PPCs I’ve talked to like the idea and are using in their areas.

A tweaked introduction is one thing, more fundamentally I’ve always thought of the Labour Party as a movement of volunteers and community champions. This idea can be the party’s strength and the basis for approaching policies and action.

Woven through Labour’s DNA is community politics. Labour has been a movement for change, a vehicle to campaign for social improvement, to bring people together in collective and common good.

Many local organisations have their roots through the work of Labour members from local advice and community centres, advocacy organisations, local charities and groups covering tenant, environment, BME, heath and education issues. National organisations too, have their roots in Labour – like the Ramblers Association and the work that GHB Ward began in Sheffield demanding public access to the local moorland.

Many of these organisations aren’t party political but they are imbued with Labour values and the Labour Party in turn has been shaped by them. It has also made Labour stronger and makes Labour better at campaigning.

There is a question as to whether Labour is still the movement it has been and how can we rekindle this to make the party stronger?

Today, there is an increasing focus on seeking elected office to Parliament. It is often seen as the sole way to achieve social change, obscuring the idea that through working via community organisations a considerable and tangible difference can be made. If we are serious about decentralisation then we must be less Westminster bubble focused, less-Parliament-centric. Community politics and action should be the bedrock and foundation of what we do. This is something Arnie Graf has talked about and looked to rebuild with the Labour party.

It brings huge opportunities. It is the story of the possible and it is what I will now outline through my involvement with my community organisation where I live in Camden.

Nearly 30 years ago local people in Camden Town in north London put down the roots of Castlehaven Community Association (CCA) converting an old piano factory to a community centre to plug the gap of the lack of facilities and services for older and younger people. It has provided many different services for the local community from an under-5s drop in for mums to a youth club and days out for pensioners to local history talks.

I’ve been involved for 15 years first as a local councillor and over the last decade as a member of the Board and Trustee.

The organisation has grown quite a bit since it started out and we now employ more than 20 staff, we’ve four acres of land which houses two main buildings (one a purpose build youth centre) a children’s playground, football pitch and park space.

But the organisation is at a crossroads. Funding is ever tighter. The Government has cut funding to community organisations, while Camden Council’s budget is severely squeezed through the huge government cuts to councils which affect cities and areas like ours the most. Other grants from third party and philanthropic organisations are also much harder to come by.

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UNCUT: Revealed: The SNP’s terms for supporting a minority Miliband government

29/12/2014, 07:00:11 AM

by Atul Hatwal

Christmas might be a time when most of politics takes a break, but from the late night festive carousing comes word of the potential deal that Ed Miliband will be offered by the SNP, to sustain a minority Labour government in office.

Uncut has heard from SNP advisers that their MPs in Westminster could be prepared to “do whatever it takes to keep Labour in office,” if Ed Miliband accedes to one request.

No, it’s not a new date for another independence referendum. Well, not quite.

The SNP MPs would support every aspect of a Labour programme, voting with the Labour whip, even on England only issues, if Ed Miliband commits his new government to “accept the will of the Scottish people” were Scotland to demonstrate a desire for a new independence referendum.

The test of this will would come in 2016 at the Holyrood elections where the central plank of the SNP platform will be a call for another referendum.

Even though Alex Salmond said that the 2014 vote was a once in a generation opportunity, the SNP will cite the unheralded depth of new cuts and the ever more virulently anti-European position of the Conservative party, as the basis for revisiting the choice.

With PM Ed Miliband facing a choice of deep cuts or steep tax rises or big hikes in borrowing, or some combination of all three – none of which any Westminster party will have acknowledged in the election campaign – the SNP case will be that the unionists lied to the Scottish public, about the UK’s economic position, when the original independence vote was taken in 2014.

And if David Cameron loses the election, he will soon be ejected from the leadership of his party, with his replacement likely to be forced to adopt an even more Eurosceptic policy, if not an outright commitment to leave the EU. The SNP position will be that the threat of a future Conservative administration (which drew its MPs almost entirely from England) taking the UK out of the EU, despite Scotland’s desire to remain in Europe, would mean an early referendum, before the 2020 election, was essential.

If the SNP retained a majority at Holyrood in 2016 then Nicola Sturgeon and Alex Salmond would cash-in their IOU from Ed Miliband and set a date for the new referendum.

This is not a certain route to independence for the SNP, but nationalist opinion is coalescing around it as the best one available.

It is politically impossible for Ed Miliband to simply accept a new independence referendum in return for SNP votes. That would be seen as too craven. Making a new independence vote contingent on the 2016 Scottish elections is the next best option.

And come what may, the SNP will need to have a majority government at Holyrood to re-open the independence question; under the terms of this deal, if they achieve that, then the UK government will allow them to confirm the date.

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UNCUT: Carpe deficit: Miliband must seize his moment on spending cuts

23/12/2014, 10:39:15 AM

by Samuel Dale

It’s working. On Sunday, Labour took a seven point lead in an Opinium and Observer poll with 36% to the Tories’ 29%.

Sure, it could be a rogue poll, a one-off that misleads us all. Or maybe it is an example of what Damian McBride has called the rope a dope economic strategy while Labour Uncut editor Atul Hatwal said is Miliband’s attempt at triangulation.

With less than six months to election day Miliband has finally awoken from his deficit slumber.

Cut spending every year until the deficit is gone. Prepare shadow ministers for big cuts. Get debt falling by 2020.

Miliband’s speech on the deficit after the autumn statement was substantive. He finally admitted the next parliament would once again be dominated by cuts; deeper, more difficult cuts than this parliament.

It’s a far cry from his conference nightmare when he didn’t even mention it as part of his 10 year vision for Britain.

It is a huge relief for those of us calling for Labour to present a clear deficit reduction plan instead of burying its head in the sands.

Why has Miliband seemingly changed his mind? Firstly, Labour has been forced to change. It lost the debate on whether to spend your way out of recession. Then living standards started to rise, only just but leaving the cost of living campaign with less potency.

Secondly, George Osborne messed up. He outlined huge spending cuts and tax cuts that would reduce the state to 1930s levels.

It is scaring people and Miliband took his chance. Osborne opened up the space for Labour to seem seriously tough on spending cuts without being deranged.

Labour MPs now have genuine answers when asked how they will close the deficit: we’ll scrap it in five years without taking us back an Orwellian Wigan Pier.

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UNCUT: Inequality matters: Labour will shift the balance of power in favour of the consumer, the citizen and the worker

19/12/2014, 04:03:03 PM

by Stephen Timms

Ed Miliband has set out the central challenge his government will need to address: “This country is too unequal. And we need to change it.” Our task is to make this change in a radically different landscape then when Labour took office in 1997.

Ed has acknowledged that inequality will have to be tackled in a period when there won’t be much extra money around. The government’s oft-proclaimed economic plan has fallen disastrously short of its deficit reduction target. We were promised the deficit would be ended in this Parliament. In fact, it won’t even be halved. That means we will be able to shift spending priorities, and to alter regulation, but big new spending programmes – beyond a small number of key priorities with specified funding – will not be on the cards for some years.

With the tools that will be at our disposal, we will need to tackle seriously long term unemployment, especially among the young; to raise real wages; and to tilt the balance of power in favour of the consumer, the citizen and the worker.

Everything points strongly to devolving power. There is, of course, strong impetus in this direction from the Scottish referendum. Powerful economic arguments for devolution were set out in Andrew Adonis’s growth review in July. And the work I have been doing on employment support points to a much more localised approach too.

Andrew Adonis’s review calls for a “bold and simple offer of devolution”, ending the excessive centralisation which has held back economic growth in England. He argues that: “spending on economic development is trapped in departmental siloes that do not sufficiently reflect economic realities”.

His case is well illustrated by the poor performance of the coalition’s approach to employment support. Hundreds of millions of pounds have been spent on the government’s Work Programme, and hundreds of millions of pounds have been spent on skills support – for example by increasing the number of apprenticeships. But there has been a complete disjunction between the policies directing them. The programmes have worked at cross purposes.

They have been overseen by two huge Whitehall departments with different agendas. For example, the criteria set out by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills make it almost impossible for an unemployed person on the DWP’s Work Programme to start an apprenticeship.

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UNCUT: How a business backlash could cost Miliband the election

19/12/2014, 11:06:05 AM

by Samuel Dale

One of the reasons Labour won in 1997 was the prawn cocktail offensive.

Labour ministers launched a three year schmoozathon with the City and business leaders.

It worked. When the Tories brought out their New Labour, New Danger fear campaign it had no bite.

Business leaders had listened to New Labour and would give them a chance.

The Tories couldn’t build a coalition of business leaders to make dire warnings about Labour as they had done in past elections.

Ed Miliband’s Labour party has undergone no sustained prawn cocktail offensive.

Instead it is at open war with business promising a waterfall of new taxes and regulations with no upside. It’s all stick and no carrot.

Tobocco firms, energy companies, rail operators, recruiters, hedge funds, banks, Sports Direct and pension companies are all in Labour cross-hairs to name but a few.

There are two serious consequences to the relentless attack on companies. Both point to serious political naïvety.

Firstly, when the Tories try their scare tactics next year they will find a rush of business leaders to join the cause. It will add bite to the attacks and damage Labour.

The best example is the Scottish referendum campaign when big businesses and employers made decisive interventions in the final few weeks.

Firms promised re-locations, job losses and market chaos. Voters were scared.

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GRASSROOTS: Jim Murphy needs to be radical to revive Labour in Scotland

18/12/2014, 05:27:18 PM

by Daniel Charelston-Downes

Labour, according to the New Statesman, is now 20 points behind the SNP in Westminster voting intentions. This would see an almost virtual wipeout of Scottish seats for Labour and goes some way to explaining why Nicola Sturgeon was so keen to welcome the new Scottish Labour leadership with words of unity and collaboration. It seems SNP are preparing for, even expecting, coalition partnership.

Jim Murphy’s leadership has come at a crucial time for Scottish Labour. When Lamont talked of her despair at Scottish Labour being treated as a branch office, she hit close to home with all Scottish voters. London-centric politics is killing the main parties in Scotland and will take Labour down leaving the SNP the last man standing.

The moment Tony Blair’s name became sacrilegious in my household growing up was when he abandoned Clause IV. With Murphy using the language of the Clause, he is clearly trying to evoke memories of that kind of reform within the party and the wave of electoral success that brought with it. A rehashed statement of intent for Scotland is an attempt to move Labour into a ‘reformer’ platform.

However what Scottish voters liked about Salmond and continue to appreciate in Sturgeon is their lack of political machinery.

Where Murphy will struggle, and where his use of Blairite language displays a complete lack of understanding, is that he is viewed as the worst kind of career politician. He is straight out of Westminster. He has bounced from education, to the National Union of Students presidency, to think tanks and policy groups and now parliament. He has always seen Scotland through Labour eyes.

If Labour is ever to win a majority again they are going to need to gain Scotland back. The SNP are a much greater threat to the Labour party than UKIP are to anyone, they are doing a much more successful job of converting anti-Westminster sentiment into seats than any other British party.

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UNCUT: Ed’s aides failed him on anti-Ukip strategy

17/12/2014, 06:13:51 PM

by Callum Anderson

Whilst Nigel Farage was throwing back pints of lager and glasses of wine and champagne on Channel 4, Ed Miliband and his closest aides were reeling from yet another awkward episode on immigration.

On a day that was supposed to represent an opportunity for the leader of the opposition to portray himself as the prime minister in-waiting, what instead occurred was a series of deflections by Miliband about that document, culminating in him entirely distancing himself from it.

In short, Miliband’s closest aides failed him.

Yet it wasn’t through actually leaking the 33-page private strategy document that failed him. It was the contents of that document which did.

Whilst the document correctly identifies immigration as the issue people most often cite when explaining support for UKIP, it makes several mistakes insofar as stating that any messaging around immigration should always be done in conjunction with other policy areas, such as health and housing. Doing this, the theory goes, will enable activists and candidates to tilt conversation away from uncomfortable, but frankly needed, exchanges about immigration, in favour of ‘comfort-zone’ topics of conversation.

Or, in other words, activists and candidates should do their best to entirely avoid the concerns of voters, and talk about traditional, safe Labour issues.

This is a dangerous game to play.

It is clear that Labour will always be facing an uphill struggle on immigration. The ultimately flawed policy of allowing the so-called A8 (i.e. the Eastern European countries which joined the EU in 2004) to arrive without any initial border controls has tarnished Labour’s credibility on migration issues.

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UNCUT: Murphy’s push on party rebuilding should not stop at the Tweed

17/12/2014, 12:17:52 PM

by Rob Marchant

Jim Murphy is the new leader of Labour in Scotland. It is hard to see this as other than good news; irrespective of political leanings, he is an experienced, Cabinet-level politician, with the kind of clout and vision that the Scottish party urgently needs. The SNP is sneering as best it can, but it is nervous laughter.

Murphy has, of course, a huge challenge on his hands: to turn around disastrous polling and an inward-looking party; left to its own devices through its hegemonic days under Blair and Brown and the early days of devolution; and later, seemingly taken by surprise by the rise of the SNP.

It was certainly high time that Scottish Labour took a long, hard look in the mirror, rather than give in to the temptation of huffily declaring that it was treated as a “branch office”, as its last leader, Johann Lamont, did. And it has: it has realised both that it needs a radical change and that it does not need to dance to the Nats’ own tune of “MSPs only”.

It has realised that, far from attracting support, trying to compete with the SNP to see who can be the most insular is a game Labour can only lose.

Reaching out to all the party’s talents, in contrast, is a position of strength. The truth is that there is valuable experience and support that Labour colleagues in Westminster or elsewhere can provide, as Murphy has just shown.

As a first step, what refreshingly positive was Monday’s announcement that Murphy would immediately start to reform and rebuild Scottish Labour; that party reform would be at the centre of his plans.

Almost since its inception, Uncut has repeatedly written on the importance of party reform for Labour, including in our manifesto of 2013. While cautious about the party’s commitment to full implementation, we applauded Ed Miliband’s adoption of funding and voting reform this year.

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