Atul Hatwal « Labour Uncut

Posts Tagged ‘Atul Hatwal’

Post conference blues: Three dangers that will turn a leadership drama into a crisis

30/09/2011, 07:00:14 AM

by Atul Hatwal

So farewell then, Labour conference.

It’s done. The headlines were bad, the political management was poor and the top trending story for part of the last day was Ed Miliband’s denial that he is “weird“.

In amid the detritus of the retreat from conference, talking to folk leaving the security bubble, one apparent point of consensus was that Ed Miliband had definitively secured his grip on the leadership.

Andrew Sparrow even rated it the number one fact in his top ten list of things he learned about the Labour party at conference.

Hmm.

It’s true there is no cabal ready to mount a coup and there was no talk of imminent insurrection either in the bars or the fringes.

But appearances can be deceptive.

Conference has not given the leader the boost either within the party, or out in the country, that he needed. In the polls so far there’s been no bounce, not even the dead cat variety. In fact the fear in Liverpool was the reverse – that his ratings would slip slightly given the coverage of his big speech.

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Labour’s change curve

28/09/2011, 03:30:53 PM

by Atul Hatwal

Originally conceived by psychologist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in 1969, the change curve was formulated as a way to understand how people cope with catastrophic loss or terminal illness.

You get where this is going.

Subsequently, it emerged that the change curve accurately described the stages an individual or an organisation go through when they experience profound change. If you’ve been through a big change management programme at work, chances are, this will have played a big role in shaping it.

Defeat at the general election was as big a shock to the system as Labour has ever experienced. Since then, the party has recongnisably gone through the initial stages of the curve. Numbness, denial, fear and anger are all emotions the party has displayed in the past fifteen months.

This week, as Labour has gathered in Liverpool, the curve crystallises a sense I’ve had for a while and explains some of what the party seems to be feeling.

There’s been a curious insouciance about Labour this conference. The rules of political gravity appear to have been somehow suspended.

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Labour’s Nothing Year

23/09/2011, 08:59:27 AM

by Atul Hatwal

“Nothing ever happens, nothing happens at all, the needle returns to the start of the song and we all sing along like before. And we’ll all be lonely tonight and lonely tomorrow”

While I was looking at the latest polling earlier this week, this melancholic eighties gem, Nothing Ever Happens, by Del Amitri, came on the radio. It couldn’t have been more appropriate.

At the start of the year in this column I highlighted Labour’s poll challenge by tracking responses to three specific questions asked intermittently by YouGov in their daily and weekly polls.

These questions go beneath headline voting intentions to examine voters’ attitudes on what are likely to be defining issues at the next election.

They chart three things – first, how the public feel the government is hitting them in the wallet; second, their view of how the government is cutting the deficit and third, who they prefer as a leader – David Cameron or Ed Miliband.

The answers over the past nine months have involved hundreds of thousands of responses and reveal that the entire Labour party might as well have not turned up for work this year.

Nothing has happened. Nothing has happened at all.

The wallet line tracks voters’ financial self-interest. Because it focuses on peoples’ perceptions of their own financial future, it gives quite a different perspective to the general doom and gloom about the economic position.

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Revealed: Government slashes welfare to work schemes by more than a third despite soaring unemployment

16/09/2011, 08:54:18 AM

by Atul Hatwal

New figures released this week reveal massive cuts in the levels of specialist support for the unemployed. The government has slashed the numbers of people taking part in welfare to work schemes by 34% over the past year, from 137,000 to 90,000.

The drop in government backed training and employment support is the largest since records began in 1992, with the number now taking part in these programmes at its lowest ever level.

The withdrawal of support for the unemployed comes at a time of sharply rising unemployment. It rocketed by 80,000 in the last quarter alone to cross the 2.5m threshold.

The figures were buried in a barrage of thousands of new labour force survey statistics released by the government on Wednesday.

Typically, the participants in welfare to work schemes are those most at risk of becoming long term unemployed (out of work for 12 months or more). As unemployment rises, the numbers in these types of schemes would be expected to go up, to prevent people losing touch with the job market.

In the early 1990s, even John Major’s Tory government used these programmes as a key tool to tackle unemployment. In the comparable quarter in 1992, there were 365,000 people participating in welfare to work schemes.

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Fox’s cuts bite as new figures reveal plunging troop morale

09/09/2011, 07:00:28 AM

by Atul Hatwal

As the findings of the Baha Moussa inquiry cast a shadow over the British army, new figures sneaked out by the MoD in the last week lay bare the slump in morale across the armed forces in the past year.

44% of personnel reported low morale in their service – army, navy, royal air force (RAF) or royal marines – according to the 2011 forces survey, a rise of 11% since 2010.

It reverses a five year trend of improving morale in the forces since the survey began in 2007.

The figures were slipped out by the government last Thursday, via the office of national statistics website. Unlike previous surveys, the ministry of defence did not issue a press release or give any indication the survey was being released. (more…)

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Revealed: £1.9bn surge in gambling as desperate Brits try to bet their way out of recession

26/08/2011, 08:00:27 AM

by Atul Hatwal

As George Osborne’s economic vice gets ever tighter, new HMRC figures show that struggling Britons gambled £1.9bn more than last year. It follows two years where the total amount gambled actually fell.

Based on government receipts from the duties levied on gambling since the start of this financial year, the projections for 2011/12 are of another big increase, by £3.5bn to £48bn.

This is the first time since government records began in the mid-1990s that gambling has risen while household incomes have fallen.

Earlier this year, a major survey by the gambling commission found that nearly three-quarters of Britons – 73% – had gambled in the past year, up from 63% in 2007 when the survey was last conducted.

Most worryingly of all, the numbers with a problem gambling habit was estimated to have risen to 451,000, an increase of 5% since 2007.

When in opposition, David Cameron was quick to position himself as an opponent of gambling.

In 2007 he over-ruled his shadow chancellor in opposing the Labour government’s plans on casinos and led the Tories in a U-turn on their previous commitment to support the proposals.

In the House of Commons, he was clear that his fears on problem gambling were at the heart of his concerns. Following the awarding of a super-casino for Manchester he said,

“We congratulated Manchester, because we thought the review had been conducted properly, but then we found out that the decision to put it in Manchester, they hadn’t looked at really important issues, like will this encourage problem gambling”?

The current minister responsible for gambling, John Penrose, couldn’t have been clearer in his views in an EDM he tabled in 2006 on the problems of gambling addiction in his local area,

“I don’t want to see one form of addiction – drugs, being replaced by another – gambling”.

But since those early days in opposition, the Tories have adopted a very different approach. (more…)

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Revealed: Cameron supercop’s company mired in bugging and hacking allegations

19/08/2011, 09:51:43 AM

by Atul Hatwal

In the week that newspaper hacking exploded back onto the front pages, it has emerged that the company run by David Cameron’s American crime tsar, Bill Bratton, is mired in a British court case accused of illegal bugging and hacking.

Bill Bratton, a former chief of the LA Police Department is chairman of the private detective agency, Kroll. In June this year, Kroll were accused in court papers by Dr. Martin Coward, a leading city investment manager, of planting covert surveillance devices in his house in Steyning, West Sussex.

Coward claims that Kroll agents illegally broke into his property last December and hid bugs and video cameras in the kitchen and in the fireplace of his study as well as a GPS tracking device in his car.

Evidence referenced in the court papers included the surveillance devices and, most extraordinarily, a video made inadvertently by the bungling snoopers on the surveillance cameras as they were planting them.

Following the hacking allegations against Andy Coulson, these accusations involving David Cameron’s latest appointment will raise new doubts about the prime minister’s judgement.

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Memo from Croydon to Westminster

12/08/2011, 11:08:21 AM

by Atul Hatwal

Walking down, past Reeves Corner in Croydon on Thursday evening, one thing was crystal clear.

The government doesn’t get it.

Cameron’s proposals in the parliamentary statement didn’t come near addressing the reality of what has happened.

And while Labour did slightly better, particularly on police numbers, the response didn’t give a clear sense of an alternative.

When David Cameron talks of a sick section of society and the need for a moral fightback, he sounds like an opposition politician.

‘Broken Britain’ was a decent routine two years ago, but he’s in power now. Government’s job in this situation is to identify what failed and fix it – not opine impotently on social morality.

Instead, the prime minister’s parliamentary statement gave us some irrelevant commentary, a pointless inquiry on gang culture and a re-heat of existing plans.

There’s nothing new in the police being able to force people to remove facemasks or in social landlords evicting tenants found guilty of looting. Councils across the country are already pushing ahead on this front.

Ed Miliband was cautious in his response. He asked pertinent questions, but didn’t frame a narrative for how Labour would make a difference. The net result is a political vacuum from our leaders.

It shouldn’t be this difficult. All our leaders need do is to listen to their constituents. (more…)

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