Labour Uncut

UNCUT: Is Cameron feeling vulnerable on crime?

24/02/2012, 02:44:15 PM

by Matt Cavanagh

The lead story (£) in today’s Times tells us that David Cameron is feeling stung by the accusation that his government lacks a coherent policy on crime and law and order. This accusation will be familiar to Labour Uncut readers, for example this piece last year, and more recently after the latest set of crime figures here.

Cameron’s response, we are told, is a new policy of “virtual prison” for offenders on community sentences, tagged and placed under curfew for up to 16 hours a day. But while “virtual prison” is an evocative new label, the policy itself is not new: it was announced in August.

On the inside pages, the Times home affairs expert Richard Ford does a better job of putting the story in context, reminding us that this is “yet another attempt, by yet another government”, to strengthen public confidence in alternatives to prison (similar attempts by the Brown government, for example, can be seen here and here).

The other element in today’s story is No 10’s apparent unhappiness with the Ministry of Justice, and speculation that it may be broken up – based on an article earlier in the week by the Times’ Rachel Sylvester, picked up today by ConservativeHome. Contrary to Conservative Home’s Paul Goodman, I think this is very unlikely – though we agree that “there are few less futile Whitehall activities than merging and unmerging Departments” (as I argued in relation to the plan announced earlier this week, to split up the UK Border Agency).

Structural reforms won’t do anything to help Cameron’s fundamental problem on crime and law and order, which is a lack of ideas. This was disguised temporarily by his ability to strike the right tone over the riots (as far as the majority of the public was concerned), after an initially sluggish response.

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UNCUT: February shadow cabinet league

24/02/2012, 07:00:30 AM

by Atul Hatwal

Boom! There have been fireworks at the start the year from the shadow cabinet: a blaze of 30 press releases per week for the past six weeks, more stories generated proactively than ever before and a couple of urgent questions in the House of Commons for good measure.

The best team performance since the shadow cabinet league began.

But for all this activity, there is one star turn that stands out: Andy Burnham. He has shone as never before.

Although Ed Miliband has grabbed many of the headlines on the NHS with his attacks on David Cameron at PMQs, it’s the shadow secretary of state for health who has made this campaign a Labour-led fight.

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UNCUT: Greece has taken one for the team; for now

23/02/2012, 08:00:22 AM

by Peter Watt

What a relief, the world has been saved. Again.

In 2008 there was a financial crisis that many have described as being worse than that of the 1930s. Markets collapsed, banks failed and lives were ruined. In essence, and over many years, much of the western world had begun to believe in magic. Somehow we could all have really low taxes and really high spending by governments. We could have relatively low interest rates and unlimited access to borrowing. Individuals and governments indulged themselves as excess cash from the economies of the east poured into a market of gorging consumers. Credit cards, mortgages, car loans, government bonds – it didn’t matter as there was so much money to go around.

But it was all too good to be true and it couldn’t go on forever.

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UNCUT: Why Britain needs a new defence strategy

22/02/2012, 02:13:20 PM

by Jim Murphy

The driving focus of the shadow defence team is to develop a defence policy fit for modern times, responsive to a dramatically changing world which enables us to maintain a position of global influence.

That is why today we have published a consultation paper, ‘21^st Century Defence’, to launch the shadow defence review.

Defence is important to Labour for two reasons. First, defence must be the first duty of any government and therefore also the first duty of any party aspiring to govern. Our credibility as an alternative government relies on our credibility on defence.

Second, the Arab spring is the tip of the iceberg of the change we are likely to experience over the next decade. New and emerging threats, from cyber to bioterrorism, demand new policy responses. Constrained fiscal circumstances due to the downturn limit expenditure and potentially our global reach.

Global trends – from climate change to new economies – are creating new threats and recasting the global power balance. These trends come amidst the immediate pressures and priorities of stabilisation in Afghanistan, countering extremism, preventing proliferations and confronting the fresh turmoil in the Middle East. There is massive potential for disruption.

In that context Britain needs a defence policy which can keep up. It must be flexible and agile, with new and wide-ranging capabilities. It must prioritise coalition-building, be attuned to the threats and trends of the future and co-ordinate defence with development and diplomacy.

The government’s rushed review fell short. It did not match ends with means, precipitated a strategic shrinkage by stealth and left us with dangerous capability gaps. Libyan operations succeeded in spite of the defence review. Tough decisions must be made – we have been clear about that – but we disagree with some of the decisions and the manner in which they were taken. There is more than one way to spend an annual defence budget of almost £35bn. Labour is committed to being fiscally responsible and true to our own progressive principles.

We need a new defence strategy consistent with financial circumstances but also with strategic context. Lasting more than a year, this consultation is open to all military, industrial and academic figures, all parties and the general public.

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UNCUT: Welcome to the 2010s: the era of reactive, populist, say-anything politics

22/02/2012, 12:00:59 PM

by Rob Marchant

What has David Cameron done so far, which has marked him out as a prime minister? The answer is, surprisingly little, as John Rentoul observes in the Independent on Sunday: “…the Prime Minister seems unformed. He is adroit at reacting to events, but not so good at making them happen.”

But that does not mean he is unpopular (despite lots of potential reasons for this to be so), or that he will lose the next general election. It is just an example of an era, post-2010, which has seemingly been defined by a lack of seriousness of purpose on the part of the major parties.

Cameron has scored a few political successes. He has done what few would have predicted: he has put together, and held together, a coalition that has lasted nearly two years and will quite likely last five.

He has been successful, thus far, in winning public support for his eminently populist handbagging of his EU partners, although only time will tell whether he was wise to do so. He is generally felt to have had a “good war” in Libya.

But as regards defining a domestic policy direction for his government, he has relatively little to show: an austerity program, showing strength but courting unpopularity; and education reforms which are competent and probably modestly positive with the public, although mostly despised by Labour. The rest is largely either a blur, with no significant impact made, or a mess.

Now compare and contrast with his coalition partner. Clegg made a textbook populist pitch before the election, “an end to politics as usual”, before demonstrating eighteen days later, via the person of David Laws, that he represented just the opposite.

Being a junior coalition partner encourages populism, because of one’s limited impact on events and the inevitable going along with large numbers of things which you do not like. There’s not much else you can do: hence the rubbish about “alarm clock Britain”, Clegg’s desperate and probably doomed scrabbling around for a distinct identity for his party.

And lastly - in the order in which the media currently treat the three parties – we come to Labour. Miliband at times seems populist, but it is not in the sense that most people would recognise. And this is because his populism is mostly directed inwards, at his own party, and what they want to hear.

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UNCUT: Whip’s Notebook

22/02/2012, 07:00:01 AM

by Jon Ashworth

So we’re all back after our constituency week and I’m spending my time as a dutiful whip touring the tearoom, smoking room and the various other nooks and crannies hidden away in the palace of Westminster to catch up with fellow members of the Parliamentary Labour Party.

The first day back after recess always has that back to school feel and we’re all eager to swop stories of what we got up to. Talking to colleagues, I’m struck by the extent to which unemployment is affecting all our constituencies in similar ways.

Last week we learnt that unemployment, youth unemployment, over 50s unemployment all rose again across Leicester South. I’m not surprised. In recent months, I’ve found more and more people turning up at my advice surgery desperate for any guidance I can offer to help them find work. Almost every Labour MP I’ve spoken to this week tells a similar story.

And yet we have a government that is completely failing to show any grip and put in a place any strategy to deal with the unemployment crisis so many areas of the country now face. I’m well aware it’s so clichéd to remind Labour Uncut readers that Norman Lamont twenty years ago famously said “unemployment is a price worth paying” but I’ve become convinced that the government’s complete lack of action in tackling unemployment suggests that David Cameron probably harbours that attitude even he is not so gauche as to say it in the way his former boss did.

Take for example when I asked Cameron at PMQs when he had last met a young unemployed person, I was amazed he couldn’t answer. What’s more neither he nor George Osborne could tell me when they last visited a jobcentre plus office. Instead of organizing Downing Street summits on the wretched and disastrous health bill, where are the Downing Street summits on youth unemployment? Where are the meetings out in unemployment hotspots to find out what needs to be done?

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UNCUT: In Alex we trust

21/02/2012, 01:10:41 PM

by Tom Harris

When I launched LabourHame in June last year, I thought it would be fun to initiate a semi-regular column entitled “Questions To Which The Answer Is Er…'”

The point was simply to expose some of the more glaring inconsistencies in nationalists’ arguments and to poke a bit of fun at them in the process.

So, for example, we asked “Why are the SNP so reluctant to re-regulate the bus industry?” “Does the largest party in a hung parliament always have a right to form a government?” And “Would the euro be good for Scotland?”

Each of these questions is aimed at a particular Achilles heel in the nationalists’ armoury: their receipt of a million pounds from Stagecoach owner Sir Brian Souter; the SNP’s insistence that in 2007 Alex Salmond had the exclusive moral right to lead a government but in 2010 David Cameron didn’t; the party’s long-established (and continuing) support for ditching sterling in favour of the euro.

What was remarkable was the response from nationalist readers of, and contributors to, LabourHame. Was there even a hint of defensiveness or disagreement about their party’s inconsistencies, as there is in every other party? Not a bit of it.

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UNCUT: Labour must go further, faster on welfare reform

21/02/2012, 07:00:16 AM

by John Woodcock

The workfare row of the last few days may have exposed the shambolic nature of the government’s work experience scheme, but Messrs’ Cameron, Duncan Smith and Grayling may nevertheless view the fury it is generating as manna from heaven.

For the heated debate over whether or not placements in supermarkets were voluntary or obligatory, permanent or temporary, and exploitative or not, risks giving a false impression that there is a substantial and coherent government programme to tackle unemployment.

There is not. It is right to be angry about the millions out of work who are being failed by this Tory-led government; but so far, what ministers are failing to do should make us angrier than the schemes, however flawed, they are attempting to establish.

Welfare minister Chris Grayling was clearly delighted to take to the airwaves and wind up the rhetoric in the knowledge that every protest he provokes diverts attention from the real scandal: namely, that this Tory-led government is doing far too little to get people back to work, not too much.

The charge sheet of inaction on welfare is growing longer alongside the spiralling numbers of jobless and continued failure to return the economy to growth so businesses can create more jobs. Ministers have set their face against financing extra job opportunities for young people by repeating the tax on bankers’ bonuses; they axed the future jobs fund and have belatedly replaced it with something less extensive; and there are already dangerous signs that their flagship work programme could fail to help sufficient people off the sick because of problems in the contracts agreed with private and voluntary sector providers.

In assessing what is happening now, it is worth dwelling on just how much damage to families and whole communities was inflicted by the last Conservative administration’s failure to act on welfare.

On top of the appalling legacy of long-term youth unemployment, areas like Barrow and Furness still bear the scar of welfare dependency inflicted when Conservative ministers tried to mask the true level of joblessness by parking many thousands of able people on the sick and leaving them to rot. Nothing was asked of them, and no help was given to get back to work. Those people dumped on incapacity benefit were the forgotten millions, sentenced by the Tories to a life of quiet despair.

But in truth, Labour let them down too; we should have spoken up for people trapped on sickness benefit sooner and asked more of them alongside increased offers of help.

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INSIDE: Police Commissioner deadline extended as candidates start to emerge

20/02/2012, 03:53:46 PM

Labour Uncut has learned that party officials have extended the deadline for applications for Labour candidates hoping to become Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs).

Originally, potential candidates had until 17 February (last Friday) to submit applications for the 40 new roles which cover existing force areas. Now, the party is saying that it will “accept applications from interested individuals until the end of February”.

The two-week deadline extension hints at a shortage of potential candidates. One possible reason is that candidates must actually live in the force area they wish to stand in. A panel of Labour’s National Executive Committee is expected to meet in early March to begin shortlisting in each area.

The most high-profile candidate to emerge so far remains John Prescott in Humberside. Last week Labour leader Ed Miliband came close to backing him, saying he was an “unstoppable force and I’m sure he’d be a great police commissioner.” Former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair also praised the former deputy prime minister, saying he would do an “extraordinarily good job.”

Sitting MPs hoping to become police commissioners include current Chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party, Tony Lloyd, who is hoping to become Labour’s candidate in Greater Manchester and former Welsh First Minister, Alun Michael, who is hoping to stand in South Wales. By-elections for their Westminster seats will be triggered if either wins.

Perhaps the most closely fought contest will be in Merseyside where two former Labour ministers are set to go head-to-head. Jane Kennedy and Peter Kilfoyle, who both stood down at the last general election, will compete for the Labour nomination.

Other former Labour ministers who have announced their candidacies include Paddy Tipping, a former deputy leader of the house (Nottinghamshire) and former DWP minister James Plaskitt (Warwickshire).

In South Yorkshire, former Chief Constable Med Hughes has announced he is standing for the Labour nomination – just four months after retiring from the force. He previously claimed politicians were not “of the right calibre” to be police commissioners.

Police and crime commissioners will set strategic priorities for their force, while chief constables will lead on operational matters. Elections will be held on Thursday 15 November, the same day earmarked for elections for any city that chooses to have a directly elected mayor in May’s referendum.

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UNCUT: The right Labour attack on Lansley’s health bill

20/02/2012, 07:00:41 AM

by Jonathan Todd

“The trick is to keep doing outrageous things. There’s no point passing some scandalous piece of legislation and then giving everyone time to get worked up about it. You have to get right in there and top it off with something worse, before the public have had the chance to work out what’s hit them. The thing about the British conscience, you see, is that it really has no more capacity than … a primitive home computer, if you like. It can only hold two or three things in its memory at a time.”

Thus spoke Henry Wilshire, cut-out evil 1980s Tory of Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up. And Wilshire was half right. But only when certain conditions hold.

The conditions are that the central principle of the reform enjoys both popular mandate and sympathy.

This brings to mind, not for the first time, the contrasting fortunes of Iain Duncan Smith and Andrew Lansley. The first is at the peak of his career, the second fights for his.

The latter is taking forward legislation that voters did not vote for, while the former is doing broadly what the last Conservative manifesto promised. If we wish the next Labour government to be transformative, our manifesto must, to borrow a supposed Cameroon maxim, seemingly forgotten by Lansley, roll its pitch.

Pitch rolling should connect proposed policy programmes with popular values. Duncan Smith’s core argument is that work should pay more than welfare. This resonates so strongly with popular values that he has reduced much of the public to Wilshire’s 1980s’ home computers.

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