UNCUT: Wes Streeting is right. If Labour is going to save the NHS there needs to be a serious debate about its future

07/01/2023, 10:27:51 PM

by David Talbot

The NHS is so central to British politics that a vague promise to provide it with more funding, festooned across the side of a bus, helped to sway a referendum of vital national importance. Such was the potency of the claim, which spoke to voters’ deepest passions, and indeed fears, about the NHS, that whilst voters believed Brexit would be bad for the economy, they had believed the Leave campaign’s claim of more funds for the health system in a post-Brexit Britain.

The pledge was indisputably incorrect, and horrid – but ultimately effective – politics. Little or no precious national debate was directed towards just what the funding ought to be directed towards, nor whether more long-lasting reform was required beyond the perennial resources argument.

That may be, of course, because ‘the NHS’ and ‘crisis’ has become the white noise of British politics. As an editorial in the BMJ pointedly stated: “The current media frenzy over the latest NHS crisis prompts speculation on how the NHS might end.” The caveat, however, is the editorial was written in 1999.

The Shadow Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, has lamented that the NHS is not “the envy of the world” and that “it is a service, not a shrine”. He has been lambasted from the predictable bastions of conservatism, the far left and the BMA. It did, though, signal a welcome, and long overdue, injection of realism from the Labour Party into the NHS debate.

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UNCUT: The Uncuts: 2022 Political Awards (Part III)

01/01/2023, 10:18:49 PM

Backbencher of the Year – Lee Anderson MP

Readers of the ConservativeHome website picked Lee Anderson, the Member of Parliament for Ashfield as their own backbencher of the year last week.

Rather than scour Hansard for the worthy contributions of countless Labour MPs, we thought it might be a good idea to second the motion and make Anderson our hero of the green benches too.

Hopefully it doesn’t need stating that our motivations are diametrically opposite.

Anderson personifies two hoary old truisms about the Conservatives.

First, JS Mill’s remark that it is the ‘stupid party.’

A rent-a-gob reactionary who presumably imagines himself as a man of the people, Anderson makes Peter Bone sound like Isiah Berlin.

He is also the corporeal representation of Theresa May’s line about the Tories being the ‘nasty party.’

Perhaps best-known for his advice that people on the breadline could make meals for 30 pence a day and that volunteers in food banks were merely ‘do gooders,’ Anderson has since branched out.

He recently upbraided nurses for their financial fecklessness (as he sees it) and made a boorish remark about how he would not follow Eddie Izzard into the toilets.

He is part of a long and ignoble tradition of ‘hang em’ and flog em’ Tory backbenchers, but his persona is based on a complete misconception of working-class voters.

They are not stupid.

They made what they thought was a rational choice in 2019. Like the other 60-odd Tory MPs in Red Wall seats in the North and Midlands, Anderson is the temporary beneficiary of Labour’s missteps with Corbyn and Brexit.

As the polling is now starting to show, these votes are borrowed, not paid for.

And no amount of stoking the culture war will disguise the cost-of-living crisis felt most keenly in working-class towns like the one he represents.

The next election will be won or lost on the economy, not trans rights and Anderson, like many of his colleagues, will pay the price for the government’s manifold failures in this regard.

Sensing the twilight of his brief parliamentary career, Anderson knows this, but he will not be able to help it.

He will continue to make a berk of himself and up the rhetorical ante as he does so. In fact, it feels like a safe bet to predict he will lose the Tory whip before the year is out.

Let’s see.

Pebble in the Shoe Award – Northern Ireland Protocol

Of all the grisly problems left behind in Rishi Sunak’s in-tray by his predecessors, the problem of the Northern Ireland Protocol – the political equivalent of Japanese knotweed – is proving stubbornly resilient to speedy remediation.

The post-Brexit proviso negotiated by Boris Johnson, effectively leaves Northern Ireland in the EU’s orbit as far as the importation of goods from Britain is concerned.

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UNCUT: The Uncuts: 2022 Political Awards (Part II)

31/12/2022, 04:48:53 PM

Comeback Of The Year: Keir Starmer  

Starmer has spent the last two-and-a-half years quietly playing a long game. While never to everyone’s satisfaction – that would be unfeasible – he nevertheless has addressed most of the issues he had on the table back in the spring of 2020, even largely cleaning up the smell of antisemitism which the Corbyn years had left hanging over the party. Corbynites have left in droves; Momentum marginalised; and, perhaps most importantly, the backroom political pressure exerted by Unite has been dramatically reduced.

This is not so much to do with Starmer directly: a major factor has been the transfer of power between former leader Len McCluskey and his successor Sharon Graham; and also the financial and political impact of multiple investigations (including criminal ones) getting close to McCluskey and his cronies, effectively pulling the plug on the old money-machine which funded Labour’s entryist cabal for so long. But these things might also not have happened, had Starmer not secured a convincing win over the Corbynites.

Starmer has not been perfect, by any means. He has failed to be ruthless with his frontbench, with the result that it is still rather weak in political heft. And his vacillation on women’s rights has created a potential Achilles heel for Labour, which the Tories have already shown themselves keen to exploit. He is still failing to beat Sunak in “best PM” polling.

But Labour’s current strong showing overall under his leadership is an undeniable achievement, when you consider the nadir it faced just three Christmases ago, after the party’s worst defeat in three-quarters of a century.

He now needs to ensure he doesn’t throw it away, which is still eminently possible.

The Order Of Black Wednesday Award: Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng

The Order Of Black Wednesday Award is a special prize, awarded by Uncut for wanton, gratuitous attempted or actual destruction of the UK’s finances (for political historians, the award is named after the fateful Wednesday in 1992, when Tory Chancellor Norman Lamont and the then non-independent Bank of England conspired to make UK interest rates jump massively several times in the same day; in the end proposing to hike to 15%, before collapsing out of the ERM, the EU’s currency-pegging system prior to the euro. He resigned in disgrace shortly after and his party lost its reputation for economic competence; not to mention power, in a Labour landslide five years later.)

Close to being awarded during the Johnson administration for the final Withdrawal Agreement, it was felt however by the judges that, although the damage was significant and the policy management cack-handed, it was not of the order required.

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UNCUT: The Uncuts: 2022 Political Awards (Part I)

30/12/2022, 10:33:03 PM

Labour frontbencher of the year: Rachel Reeves

The numbers speak for themselves. At the end of 2021 Rachel Reeves trailed Rishi Sunak in Yougov’s tracker on who would make the best chancellor by almost 20 points, 11% to 30%. Now she is in a statistical tie with the current Tory chancellor, Jeremy Hunt who is on 19% versus 17% for Rachel Reeves.

Clearly the Conservatives have played the leading role in detonating their reputation for economic competence, but how many times have Labour shadow chancellor’s fluffed the opportunity when Tory incumbents have stumbled? Not Rachel Reeves.

Her tenure in 2022 has been synonymous with three changes in how Labour makes its economic case.

First, there is now internal self-control on spending. A shadow minister recently summarised the situation to Uncut, “I wouldn’t dare fly a kite about spending in a briefing or make a speech, that’s not how we work any more.” Not since the days of Gordon Brown as shadow chancellor in the mid-90s and the iron grip of his economic secretariat has a Labour opposition been so disciplined.

Second, Labour is developing self-contained policy initiatives – where revenue raising and spending are balanced – that target Tory fault lines. The windfall tax is just one example where Labour moved early, announced the policy with the government ultimately capitulating, but not before it had repeatedly aired its splits on the issue. This fusion of economics and politics is the essence of successful opposition. David Cameron and George Osborne did it very well (see the 2007 election that never was, following Osborne’s announcement on taking most people out of inheritance tax) and needless to say Tony Blair and Gordon Brown ran the Tories ragged with this approach.

Third, when Labour has had to respond to Tory economic announcements, reversals and general chaos, Rachel Reeves has been more than equal to the task. Her speeches have been authoritative with the right soundbite for the news clips. The rise in Labour confidence in the House of Commons over the year has been evident and the media reporting describes a party that has real momentum on the economy.

Rachel Reeves is Uncut’s frontbencher of the year for the herculean achievement of making Labour competitive again on the economy. More needs to done but after years – well over a decade – of utterly abysmal ratings and constantly trailing the Tories by double digits, the party has solid grounds for optimism heading into 2023.

International politician of the year: Joe Biden

With the catastrophic collapse of Xi’s “zero Covid” strategy and Ukraine’s defiant refusal to welcome Putin, 2022 was a year in which reality caught up with autocrats. Macron and Lula also beat Le Pen and Bolsanaro. But, alas, Italy now has its most right-wing government since World War II and Israel has its most extreme government ever.

The global battle for democracy and democratic values persists. With America being foundational.

Joe Biden was the big winner of this year’s midterms, Donald Trump the big loser. Trump-backed candidates were defeated (to a greater extent than other Republicans), Biden’s party strengthened its hold on the Senate. Trump deepened America’s culture wars, Biden waged economic war for the heartlands – securing massive investment in America’s industrial and green capacity through landmark legislation, such as the Inflation Reduction Act. Trump maintains the fiction that he won in 2020, Biden said democracy was on the ballot in 2022. America’s verdict in both years favoured Biden.

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UNCUT: Labour MSPs should be ashamed of themselves

29/12/2022, 06:54:19 PM

by Rob Marchant

The following piece has been liberally linked with information sources – we would ask that readers check them out, but they are not for the faint-hearted.

It’s certainly been an historic year in British politics but, even in the last few days of the calendar, it seems we still have the ability to squeeze out the last drop of “history”.

In this case, it is one of those occasional moments when parliamentary votes become historic in retrospect, but not in a good way; where the actions of political leaders are so poorly thought-out that they ultimately result in years of embarrassment and regret.

Like the serial 2019 rejections of a half-decent EU Withdrawal Agreement under Theresa May, in favour of Boris Johnson’s final, shambolic one. Or the 2013 Syria vote, where Ed Miliband’s opportunism and Cameron’s bungling unwittingly triggered the collapse of any chance of international intervention to prevent the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians.

Such a moment occurred last Thursday for the SNP, whose vote in the Scottish Parliament to allow that country’s citizens to decide what sex they are with no legally-enforceable proof, it is difficult to see as anything short of disastrous.

To the uninitiated, self ID means, in the name of “trans rights”, that any Scottish male will soon be able to declare themselves female – and any female male – by filling in a few forms and paying the princely sum of £5. They can then get all their government records changed to the opposite sex and, crucially, those who are men can legally insist on access to women’s spaces, in direct contravention of the single-sex exemption enshrined in the UK’s Equality Act.

This is a development that, if most of the public were made fully aware of it, would likely think insane.

However, it is not just the SNP: Labour MSPs also voted for this*, even though they did not need to. Their votes were unnecessary, they could have abstained or voted against and the SNP would still have won. But they were whipped to vote for the bill, because the top team seemed to actually think it was the right thing to do; their collective reputation now in the bin for nothing.

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GRASSROOTS: Power cuts, military superpowers in conflict, and Labour taking office in the midst of economic meltdown – could it be 1964 all over again?

13/10/2022, 10:41:59 PM

by Declan McHugh

The incredible divergence of political fortunes that has seen Labour open up 30-point poll leads has given rise to a growing belief that the Conservatives are heading out of government. That view isn’t confined to those on the Labour side. It is now widely held in the business community, the media and indeed in the Conservative Party itself. Tory MPs openly lament that their party is careering, inexorably, to a catastrophic defeat at the next general election. The parallel that many draw is with 1997, when Tony Blair led Labour to an historic landslide. But is 1997 the right point of historical reference? Or do we need to look back several decades earlier for a more apt comparator – all the way to 1964?

That year saw the threat of blackouts at home and the eruption of superpowers in armed conflict abroad. It also saw Labour end 13 years in opposition; a narrow election victory enabling Harold Wilson to become PM. With a majority of just four, his new administration faced major political challenges from the outset. But the bigger problem facing the Wilson government was the economic inheritance left by the departing Conservatives.

An ill-fated ‘dash for growth’ had left the UK economy in a nose-dive. So much so that when the outgoing Chancellor, Reggie Maudling, handed Number 11 over to James Callaghan, he cheerily told him: “Sorry old cock to leave it in this shape. I suggested to Alec [Douglas Home] this morning that perhaps we should put up the Bank Rate but he thought he ought to leave it all to you.”

The incoming Labour government was saddled with an £800m deficit that immediately triggered a series of Sterling crises. One of Callaghan’s first acts was to raise interest rates to 7%, leading the Building Societies Association to hike rates for new mortgages to 6.75%. Although the party won a bigger majority in the 1966 election, it was never in control of the economic situation. By 1967 the Wilson Government was forced into a devaluation that saw the pound reduced from $2.80 to $2.40. Hopes of investment in the ‘white heat of technology’ were crushed as the administration was pushed into a programme of austerity that brought it into conflict with unions and, ultimately, contributed to electoral defeat in 1970.

By contrast, the political and economic conditions in 1997 were far more favourable. Labour went into that election facing nothing like the electoral mountain that stands before it today. Although the Conservatives had won a shock victory in 1992, they had done so with a majority of just 21. The electoral arithmetic today is starkly different. Assuming Labour don’t make spectacular gains against the SNP, the party requires a swing from the Tories of more than 13% just to get a bare majority. To put that into perspective, Blair won a landslide with a swing of 10%; Attlee won a post-war landslide with a swing of just over 12%. So for Labour to win a majority of any kind it must surpass those two landmark victories.

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UNCUT: Labour conference 2022: The Mersey wind of change

28/09/2022, 11:08:56 PM

by Jonathan Todd

The turbulence around Labour conference was much more than the Mersey wind. Sterling hitting an all-time low versus the dollar. 900 mortgage deals pulled by banks and building societies. Criticism of last Friday’s “mini budget” from the IMF.

The collapse in sterling means rising inflation, higher interest rates, and more pain for already suffering households. Government capacity to ameliorate this is limited by higher borrowing costs than Greece and Italy.

Dramatic changes in the UK’s economic fortunes are often driven by global events. It was OPEC and the oil price in the 1970s. American subprime mortgages and collateralised debt obligations in the 2000s. It takes a special kind of budget to crash the economy outside of global events – such as Nigel Lawson’s tax cuts in 1988 that overheated the economy and precipitated the 1990s recession.

The Tories will try to blame our economic problems on global events (Covid-19 and Putin’s war in Ukraine). “Global financial markets,” said the Treasury’s statement in response to new purchases of government debt by the Bank of England, “have seen significant volatility in recent days.” That the Bank of England acted after the “mini budget” reveals blame much closer to home.

“Panics do not destroy capital,” according to John Stuart Mill, “they merely reveal the extent to which it has been previously destroyed by its betrayal into hopelessly unproductive works.”

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UNCUT: In all this chaos, Labour’s chance is now, at this conference. And we are still perfectly capable of making a pig’s ear of it

20/09/2022, 10:45:13 PM

by Rob Marchant

As every political journalist will tell you, this by-election or this conference is always the decisive one, the one which changes everything. Of course, it is a journalist’s job to make a story more interesting and engaging than it actually is. But in this case, that argument might just have a point.

Labour, under a leader nearly two-and-a-half years into the job, is in a decent place. Largely thanks to Boris Johnson’s long-overdue implosion and his replacement by a less-than-inspiring alternative PM, Labour is riding high in the polls. In normal times, he would be looking like a shoo-in for an election in two years’ time.

But these are not normal times, if anything has been remotely normal in Britain these last few years.

After Brexit, Covid and now a worsening economic crisis, we end up in the bizarre position of having changed both prime minister and head of state in the same week. The normally phlegmatic British public is now in an emotional place, with some perhaps even subconsciously reassessing this country, its place in the world, and what kind of a place we would like it to be.

In the midst of all this confusion, like an object randomly falling from the air, plops the 2022 conference season. No doubt, Liz Truss will be aiming to come out of it looking like a powerful, well-supported primus inter pares of an A-list team. This will be a challenge: as the Conservatives’ fourth leader during the last six years, the look is more like the dismal fag-end of a long period of one-party government. But it is up to Labour to make it so.

Turning to Starmer, we can see a creditable progress which has been made since the Corbyn nadir. The sixty-four million dollar question is, though, has Labour changed enough to be ready for government?

We might first look at history: last time Labour was out of power, it took twelve years to reinvent itself from its turning point, which we could reasonably claim to be Kinnock’s 1985 conference speech. Starmer has had just over two. So, if he has really managed the necessary turnaround, he has done it in double-quick time. Or rather, six times as quickly.

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UNCUT: It is the economy, stupid – but Labour needs a story of economic change

12/08/2022, 11:07:17 PM

by Jonathan Todd

Remember when the war on woke was going to keep the Tories in government till 2030s?

We used to hear more of this claim, a year or so ago. Lee Anderson was banning himself from watching the England men’s team nearly win the Euros. Tortoise was profiling anti-woke, power couple Munira Mirza and Dougie Smith. Brexit was an identity issue and others – such as, Anderson thought, taking the knee – would be stoked to retain the 2019 Tory coalition.

Since then, the economic challenges of Brexit (ask a trucker or holidaymaker queueing at Dover if Brexit is an identity issue) and the longer-term economic impacts of Covid-19 have crystallised.

Vaccine rollout powered a Tory victory in the Hartlepool byelection in May 2021 and a post-lockdown household spending surge. Meeting this demand has not always been easy. Long Covid diminished the UK workforce and global supply chains cannot be smoothly switched off and on – especially with China persisting with a damaging zero-Covid strategy.

These problems have been turbocharged by the war in Ukraine and associated energy sanctions on Russia – rapidly increasing UK inflation, now forecast to hit 13% during 2022.

Getting on top of the cost-of-living crisis – inflation outstripping wage growth, reducing the ability of households to afford their way of life – requires a restructuring of the UK economy much bigger than Tory imaginations.

Tax cuts and fracking is how putative PM Liz Truss says she will reduce energy bills. It is not much of an answer. Gordon Brown has some better ideas.

Truss has been critical of the Bank of England. The Bank is responsible for controlling inflation – but monetary policy in the UK is inadequate to seismic events in China and Ukraine.

Being a political teacher with a skill for explanation and making sense of complex issues is an essential qualification of successful PMs, according to Steve Richards’ engaging book on recent holders of this office.

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UNCUT: Come on Labour, happy to back women’s football and the brilliant Lionesses but still denying Labour Women’s Declaration a stall at conference? Women are watching

02/08/2022, 10:33:30 PM

by Joanne Harding

On Sunday afternoon I had the absolute privilege of attending the Women’s Euro final at Wembley Stadium. As the Executive Member for Culture & Leisure in Trafford, I was incredibly proud to host the opening match at Old Trafford and watch the amazing journey of the Lionesses unfold. The atmosphere during the final was one of hope, anticipation but most importantly one of friendship, vitality and really wanting the women to win.

I watched, with my heart in my mouth as we entered extra time; but I was also caught off guard a few times feeling very close to tears. Bursting with pride at what these women had achieved so far, thinking about the message they were sending out to women and girls everywhere. The final whistle couldn’t come quick enough and, when it did, the stadium erupted.

Walking back to the tube, the image that stuck with me was of a father walking ahead of me, his two daughters, probably about 7 and 8, draped in the Three Lions flags. I asked the girls if they had enjoyed the game. Their little faces lit up and they were telling me how much they had loved it. Interestingly, the dad was a little blunter with his observations. He recounted his experience of watching the England V Italy match in 2021, “I couldn’t have taken the girls anywhere near that match, men drunk, shouting and swearing. This has been totally different, a real family atmosphere”

Those little girls saw women winning and I want them to hang on to that. That dad witnessed the differences between the way that men and women behave; and, in a world where we are battling to end violence against women and girls, I want him to hang on to that. I want them to be part of the change we want to see for women and girls, not only in sport but in wider society.

During the very long train journey home, I of course took to Twitter. I saw the Starmer tweet congratulating the England team and I saw the responses. Not, in my opinion, wholly unfair responses either.

“What is a woman?”, “What is a girl?”, “Protect women’s sports.”

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