Labour Uncut

UNBOUND: Wednesday News Review

18/08/2010, 07:30:03 AM

Polling: not great

Polling

The Conservatives have mislaid their lead but it is Labour, and more especially the Liberal Democrats, that ought to worry. That is the paradoxical message of today’s Guardian/ICM poll, which shows a leaderless Labour party drawing level with the Tories for the first time since Gordon Brown’s disastrous dalliance with a snap poll in the autumn of 2007. – The Guardian.

Voters believe the Lib Dems sold out by going into government with the Tories – but are glad they did.
And they don’t want either party to rule alone, a survey reveals. The public’s contradictory verdict was given on the first 100 days of the Coalition Government. – The Sun.

100 weeks, not days

David Cameron’s political marriage of convenience reaches its 100th day today and, so far, the relationship has held firm. But there are testing times to come. “The next 100 weeks – not days – will define this government,” said John McTernan, a former political secretary to Tony Blair. – The National.

Blair

Why did he wait so long to announce it? The question continues to hover over Tony Blair’s decision to present his memoirs money to charity. His decision to write the book was taken long ago. The bargaining over the financial terms finished months ago. Only after long thought has he decided to donate the earnings – surely not too difficult for a man whose current income has been estimated at anything up to £9 million a year. – The Mail.

Darling: deficit deniers

Darling

“I think we did the right thing by preventing the banking system from collapsing, by supporting the economy with the result that we got through the recession and back into growth far more quickly than would otherwise be the case. But I think we should’ve been far clearer, firstly as to why the deficit had risen in the first place, because our revenues had collapsed during the downturn, but secondly, yes you had to get your deficit down, you had to do it over a sensible period and in a balanced and measured way, but also that the at the same time government had a role to play in order to ensure we got recovery and to secure growth in the future.” Alastair Darling tells Channel 4.

Reid remembered

Today Jimmy Reid is best remembered as the spokesman of a struggle that asserted people should come before profit and that unemployment can be resisted. Jimmy Reid’s funeral: Thursday 19 August, 1.30pm, Govan Old Parish Church, Govan Road, Glasgow. – Socialist Worker.

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GRASSROOTS: Who can beat Boris? Ken, argues Steve Hart

17/08/2010, 04:00:21 PM

The London Labour electorate will decide between Ken Livingstone and Oona King on a number of factors. Who has a strategic vision for London? Who can inspire Londoners? Who can defend London against the Tory- LibDem government cuts best? Who has clear policies on London’s economy; for jobs, for transport, for a green future, for diversity, against crime, against poverty? Who has the ability and experience to implement policies effectively? These are just a few of the factors to consider.

But the London selectorate want to be sure that they are electing the candidate with the best prospect of defeating Boris. My paper tries to examine some of the evidence and debunk some of the myths. But the key point is clear – the Ken Livingstone electoral premium makes him the strongest potential candidate for Labour in London.

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HOME: Chris Leslie MP counts down 100 days of regressive government

17/08/2010, 01:30:45 PM

What have the Tory/Lib Dem government achieved in their first 100 days? They have certainly been busy with their ‘reform’ agenda; the only problem being the nature of those reforms.

As an exercise in charting their disastrous progress to date, I wondered if it would be too stretching to list 100 substantive backward steps for each day so far.

Sadly, it wasn’t that difficult and my efforts are listed below. It may just be my perspective on things, but it already has the feel of one of the most regressive administrations in living memory. Are there things I’ve missed in my list? Probably, but it’s just a start.

1.       Choosing to raise VAT to 20% next year

2.       Cutting the corporation tax of the banks by £1billion

3.      Implementing a feeble banking levy at a rate half that implemented in the USA

4.       Freezing child benefit for the next three years

5.       Scrapping the child trust fund

6.       Deciding against the mutualisation of elements of the existing state-owned banking sector

7.       Scrapping the health-in-pregnancy grant

8.       Keeping unemployment higher than needed through anti-growth budget measures as assessed by the office of budget responsibility

9.       Raising insurance tax on holiday and travel insurance to 20%

10.    Increasing insurance tax on cars and homes from 5% to 6%

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GRASSROOTS: The Con/Lib government aren’t playing fair by cancelling the playground programme, argues Pat Kane

17/08/2010, 11:41:32 AM

Michael Gove’s cancellation of the playground building programme last week is no surprise to those familiar with the Gradgrindery of his general educational philosophy, history and Latin lessons. But however unlikely its success, it is worth remembering just what a triumph the programme was for the outgoing new Labour administration.

It is true that when the then children’s secretary Ed Balls announced close to christmas in 2007 that over £200 million was to be earmarked to build 3,500 playgrounds, and then followed it through in the subsequent two years, advocates of play were pinching themselves.

New Labour, with various invocations of a renewed work-ethic for the work-shy and a notoriously exacting measurement culture in education, did not seem the most propitious sponsor of the value and benefits of play; oblique, messy and experimental as play is. Ed Balls did not join up his thinking when he rejected the Cambridge Primary Review in 2009, which showed conclusively that an extended period of kindergarten-style play up to the seventh year was the best developmental start for school children.

But there it was; alongside play initiatives from the lottery fund and echoed throughout the devolved parliaments, a commitment to building playgrounds as a step towards rethinking how we regard the activity of children in our public spaces, town and cities. It’s tempting to say that in a similar way to our shifts on climate change the scientific consensus on the health, the cognitive and social benefits of more play in our lives; both for children and adults, was becoming indisputable.

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GRASSROOTS: Blair’s book gesture is testament to the quality of its author, says Paul Richards

17/08/2010, 08:00:56 AM

Tony Blair’s autobiography A Journey would have made its author a very rich man. Or should that be an even richer man. The advance was £4.6 million. There’ll be a lucrative serialisation in a Sunday newspaper. It will be translated into many languages, and sell around the world. Already 14 territories have secured translation rights. There is little doubt that with an early release as a paperback Blair’s book will hit the non-fiction best-seller lists and stay there for many weeks. It will probably rival Barack Obama’s Dreams of My Father as a best-seller by a politician which cuts through to the mass market.

All of which makes his decision to donate every penny to the Royal British Legion both remarkable and laudable. For most leading politicians – Prescott, Mandelson, Thatcher, Clinton, Wilson, etc – a memoir is partly the chance to set the record straight, but mostly the chance to make a wad of cash for the retirement fund. Blair has shown that he is a cut above your average politician. He wants his book to tell a story, not make a mint.

There are plenty of people who will say it’s just ‘blood money’, motivated by guilt for sending British troops to war in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq. The professional, irreconcilable Blair-haters are always swift to ascribe motives to Blair’s every move. It must be quite a responsibility to possess the ability to read Blair’s mind so accurately all the time. They will never accept, unlike the British Legion, that this is simply a fantastically generous donation to a good cause. The grubby motives they will ascribe, and ill-grace with which they will react to the donation, say more about them than Blair.

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UNBOUND: Tuesday News Review

17/08/2010, 07:56:53 AM

Goodbye Alan, it’s been emotional

I, for one, am fed up with the media myth which suggests that the Blairites were the cool dudes in the dull Labour gang, that they were popular and/or adored, and that they singlehandedly won general elections for the party. Did anyone ever say to themselves, “I’m voting Labour because of Alan Milburn”? Did people take to the street in protests when Blunkett was sacked from the cabinet? Did the likes of Patricia Hewitt, Geoff Hoon and Stephen Byers help or hinder the Labour re-election effort earlier this year, when they were outed by Channel 4’s Dispatches grubbing for cash? And did anyone really doubt that the ultra-Blairites like Milburn and Hutton were closer to the Tories, in their pro-market, pro-privatization, pro-rich ideology, than to the Labour Party, new or old? – The New Statesman

On Wednesday, he will deliver a speech on social mobility and confirm the disclosure in yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph that Alan Milburn has been appointed an independent adviser to the Government. John Prescott‘s furious denunciation of Milburn as a “collaborator” tells you all you need to know about the political symbolism of this coup: the former Health Secretary and one-time Labour leadership contender joins his fellow Blairite, John Hutton, and Labour’s star thinker on welfare, Frank Field, in the coalition’s Big Tent. David Blunkett is reported to be next on the list of invitees. Just as Blair wooed senior Lib-Dems and One Nation Tories to New Labour — what Alastair Campbell called “Operation Hoover” — so Cameron and Clegg are recruiting disenfranchised Blairites. – The Evening Standard

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GRASSROOTS: A one-off wealth tax is radical but astonishingly popular, says John Underwood

16/08/2010, 07:00:23 PM

For over thirty years, the Glasgow Media Group has linked the analysis of media content with the processes by which audiences receive and interpret messages. It has worked across a range of disciplines and well beyond the normal academic boundaries of communication studies. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Media Group should now turn its attention to media coverage of the national economic “crisis” and the need for cuts.

In an article in today’s Guardian, Professor Greg Philo, Research Director and one of the leading lights of the Glasgow Media Group asks why – amidst all the discussion of the deficit – there has been so little discussion in the media of how much wealth we have in Britain. The truth, of course, is that we are the sixth richest nation on earth with total personal wealth of £9,000bn. As Philo points out, this sum dwarfs the national debt.

Naturally, this wealth is overwhelmingly concentrated at the top. The richest 10% of Britons own £4,000bn, an average of £4m for each of the richest households. The poorest half own less than 10% of Britain’s wealth between them.

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UNCUT: It’s time to accept the dull & boring facts, says Tom Harris

16/08/2010, 04:30:01 PM

I blame Nixon. And Lew Grade.

Until Watergate, everyone believed their government was up to no good, but they could never quite prove it. You can hardly blame anyone for buying into the Kennedy conspiracy. And when JFK’s younger brother and Martin Luther King were felled by assassins’ bullets within months of each other in 1968, the public could be forgiven for believing they were bit players in a Hollywood movie. There was no doubting who the bad guys were.

Then Woodward and Bernstein had to go and publish evidence that the government were, after all, the bad guys. The cultural message was received loud and clear throughout the world. Official cover-ups have become such a central part of our entertainment industry that it is now simply not on to suggest that conspiracies are more fiction than fact.

Then there was Capricorn One (you were wondering when Lew Grade would come into it, weren’t you?), and suddenly the media were giving publicity to brain-addled hippies who had proved that Apollo had been faked using evidence procured by going through Buzz Aldrin’s bins.

Today, the front page of the Daily Mail proclaims that just one in five people believe the official story that Dr David Kelly committed suicide. When I was studying journalism I was taught that when a dog bites a man, that’s not news. When most people believe that the official story is hiding foul play, I’m afraid I see that as a dog biting a man. People want to believe in conspiracies because in doing so, they make life much more interesting than it actually is. More like a movie, in fact. And who wouldn’t want to live in that glamorous world instead of this one?

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