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Posts Tagged ‘Boris Johnson’

What story has Starmer come to tell Britain?

21/09/2020, 08:15:07 AM

by Jonathan Todd

At a recent meeting of the PLP, Kevin Brennan congratulated Keir Starmer on, “getting us from the carousel at Katmandu airport to base camp at Everest, in good shape for the long climb ahead.”

While Labour party conference should digitally pat itself on the back for six months of progress under Starmer, the challenges ahead remain daunting.

Harold Wilson won four general elections. Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair both won three. Absorbing what these different characters had in common might help Starmer.

“At their peak,” writes Steve Richards in his wonderful study of modern prime ministers, “they were all political teachers. They sought to make sense of what they were doing or what was happening around them. This was especially the case with Thatcher and Blair. Thatcher was an instinctive teacher, making complex ideas and contentious policies become reassuringly accessible.”

Thatcher came along at about the same time as Reagan, as Blair overlapped with Clinton, and Johnson with Trump. As if there is some Atlantic ideological synchronicity.

“In the competition with the USSR,” which Reagan won with the support of Thatcher, “it was above all the visible superiority of the western model that eventually destroyed Soviet communism from within,” writes Anatol Lieven in October’s Prospect magazine. “Today, the superiority of the western model to the Chinese model is not nearly so evident to most of the world’s population; and it is on successful western domestic reform that victory in the competition with China will depend.”

The global sense that quality of life was greatest in the west, which the Reagan and Thatcher era exuded, morphed into a hubris that left weaknesses within the west unaddressed during the Clinton and Blair epoch, so much so that the focus of the magazine in which Lieven writes is whether democracy can survive the Trump and Johnson years.

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Labour needs to talk about Brexit

15/09/2020, 11:13:23 PM

by Robert Williams

There is an ongoing debate in the Labour Party about whether Sir Keir Starmer should talk about Brexit. There have been so many other sticks with which to beat the government with, on COCIV test and trace, the highest excess death rate in Europe, the neglect of care homes, the growing scandal of PPE procurement contracts that make Al Capone look like an honest businessman, the A level fiasco. I could go on, and simply list the failures of Boris Johnson and his government for another few thousand words, but readers might lose the will to live.

So why reopen the wound of Brexit, which certainly contributed to Labour’s worst electoral performance since 1935. Why should Labour risk the wrath of its former Red Wall voters? They may not have liked Jeremy Corbyn, and that played no small role in making Labour less popular than a bad case of diarrhoea, but the Brexit saga was also significant. (Sorry for the analogy, but Corbyn was utterly toxic to voters, including former Labour voters, and it feels appropriate for his effect on the body politic).

Voters were exhausted by the political drama and wanted it over. They seized, or at least a large enough proportion of voters in key target seats did, on the promise of an “oven ready deal” and gave the Tories their largest majority since 1987. So one can understand why Labour has been as quiet as a monk in a silent order on Brexit. Even at last week’s PMQs, Keir Starmer did not mention, even in a limited and specific way, the government’s proposals to break international law.

The Labour leadership thinks that talking about Brexit at the moment is a lose-lose situation for them. It will remind voters, particularly those in the “Red Wall” that Labour backed Remain (it didn’t, they promised to renegotiate Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal and put it to another public vote – and yes, it was a farcical policy). Labour also fears that raising Brexit again will take the focus off the government’s handling of our exit from the EU. The “don’t interrupt your opponent making mistakes” view. And finally, Labour thinking is that they cannot do anything about Brexit in any case now that the government has a majority of 80.

So silence, as the government damages its own reputation for competence and now reneges on its own election manifesto – the one Johnson made every one of his candidates pledge to support – is, possibly sound politics. Let the government destroy themselves and wait on the sidelines. It is appealing, but I think it is wrong

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Nothing matters (now), so everything matters (later)

23/08/2020, 09:40:22 PM

by Jack Lesgrin

“Never in the field human commentary was so much outrage expressed, by so many, with so few effects.”

Across much of the political spectrum, we are living through an age of outrage, especially regarding the reckless ineptitude of this government. Many of us are afflicted by ‘outragitis’ – inflammation of their indignation. I was once a sufferer, but despite being a devout optimist, I came to realise midway through the lockdown that both the outrage and any resulting action, don’t matter an iota.

If directed at effecting immediate positive change or exacting a political price now, they are of no consequence and do the opposite to what was intended. Because they can have no effect, they let the government off the hook by absorbing the well-meaning energy of its critics, leaving them less time to take steps that will matter later.

In any self-respecting democracy, the view that governments must be held to account for incompetence is honourable but sadly misguided. Currently, the sentiment is amplified due to the after-effects of the last parliament, when Theresa May and later Boris Johnson governed with a wafer thin parliamentary majority, which offered a glimmer of hope to their opponents that Brexit could be blocked. But everything changed when Johnson won that 80-seat majority

We needn’t rehearse the details of all the episodes of incompetence since December, for even the debacle over exam results pales into insignificance next to the government’s response to Covid 19.

As well as exposing cruelly all the weaknesses of society and state that were held together by a shoestring pre-Covid, this government’s response to the pandemic is a tragic case study of the most fundamental, yet often overlooked British flaw of them all: that once a government has won substantial majority, there is almost no way that it can be held to account until the next general election. Neither robust criticism nor Royal Commission will result in the government paying any price; they’re untouchable.

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Remember: We don’t always know how it ends!

05/06/2020, 09:49:59 AM

by Tim Carter

Life is very different for everyone at the moment and it is easy to look back on the 2016 referendum or the 2019 UK general election and jump into tribalism or blame. Politics, wherever you looked seemed to be more about blame than anything else.

But then came 2020 and the Covid-19 pandemic, to lockdown or not to lockdown, and other decisions that no one was thinking about in December replaced the more mundane political decisions usually facing world leaders. A deadly virus sweeping the world, something more likely to be seen in a Hollywood blockbuster than in real life, demanded more from political leaders than the promises made in manifestos.

The public, looking for leadership and guidance, trusted and followed advice and the rules. Different countries unsurprisingly, took different approaches, some politicians broke away from tribal politics and for a moment we were “all in this together”

Heartbreak and tragedy played out daily on our TV screens, in our newspapers and online. In the UK on Thursday nights at 8pm we clapped, cheered and banged saucepans for those on the frontline caring for our loved ones, those not ‘shielding’ supported neighbours who were, by shopping and collection prescriptions, and talk was of how a post Covid-19 society would be better than what went before.

Cooperation and looking for solutions that worked were the political agenda, low skilled was rightly replaced by low paid and those who worked to keep us safe were now seen in a very different light by many. There was a very small crack where the light appeared to be shining through but the death toll kept rising and the very real suffering continued but we continued to obey and be guided by our leaders. At the heart of all of that was trust. Trust that the truth was being told. Trust that we really were all in this together. Trust that we were following the science.

And then.

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Five questions to determine the next general election

16/05/2020, 10:48:56 PM

by Jonathan Todd

It is not a sprint to the next general election. Nor a marathon. It is more like 800 metres.

You cannot win it in the opening straight, but you can lose it. Every step counts. And – as Covid-19 has painfully illustrated – new obstacles can appear from nowhere.

Here are five questions to help comprehend this 800-metre random assault course:

1) What will the UK economy be like in 2023/2024?

Sir Charles Bean, a member of the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR), has referred to it being “not implausible” that for as long as the lockdown is in force, economic activity will be reduced “by somewhere between a quarter and a third”, and that a three-month lockdown “would knock something like 6-8 percentage points off annual GDP”.

Two months into the lockdown, however, it does not seem likely that all economic activity will return to pre-lockdown levels a month from now. Therefore, the annual contraction in GDP seems likely to exceed 8%.

Perhaps significantly so if a second wave necessitates a return to lockdown and/or the government fail to deliver a track, trace, and isolate system effective enough to enable more economic activity alongside suppression of a second wave.

Even after two months of lockdown, there are still thought to be around 3500 new cases each day. But where are these? Who have they interacted with? Are the sufferers and all of those that they have interacted with in isolation?

It is a massive task to constantly stay on top of these questions. More so than challenges that the government have struggled to overcome, e.g. delivering adequate PPE and tests.

2020 brings depression-era economics, an ongoing and uncontrolled public health crisis, and the rupturing of around 40 trade agreements with over 70 countries. All of which will create a big hole in public finances.

If the Tories respond to this with the “medicine” of the past decade (austerity), our economic and social problems will deepen. There have been worrying signs that this may be where we are headed.

A dozen years after the global financial crisis, we still live in a world of very low interest rates. Instead of austerity, government must listen to this market signal and seize this opportunity.

2) How will the government be perceived to have performed on the economy?

While the economy recovered after our exit from the ERM, the then Tory government’s reputation for economic competence did not.

Even if today’s government were to leverage very low interest rates to drive an investment boom, their standing on economic competence may be poor if they are blamed – as was the case with the ERM – for having caused the calamity from which we are recovering.

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Labour, co-owner of #brexitshambles

03/02/2020, 10:30:38 PM

by Rob Marchant

We are out. That’s it, the fat lady has sung.

But of course we are not out at all, not in any meaningful sense. This is just the start of a tortuous, eleven-month scramble to try and get some kind of a sensible result in place by the end of the year.

Remainers have to admit that they – we – lost the argument, at least for now. Leavers have got what they wanted and, ultimately, that’s democracy.

But, Leaver or Remainer, we have had in many ways the worst of all possible worlds. Leavers have not really got what many wanted, at least, not yet. If we leave aside the semi-suicidal, macho contingent who are happy to have the hardest of hard Brexits, moderate Leavers will now see that we now have eleven months to get somewhere on the sliding scale between what one former PM has rightly called the “pointless Brexit” and the “painful Brexit”.

If we end at the “pointless Brexit”, people on both sides will rightly say, we might as well have stayed in. Most of the benefits but without a seat at the table.

If we end at the “painful Brexit”, for example, with few and/or poor-outcome trade deals in place, the economic jolt to come will be memorable. And, it must be said, we have both precious little time to get those deals in place and the poor bargaining power of the supplicant. But we are where we are.

And somewhere in the middle? A bit of both of the above or, perhaps, not even really possible. Perhaps it will quickly converge down to just that binary choice of one or the other: who knows.

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Johnson has made undeliverable promises to win from Sedgefield to Sittingbourne. This is what Labour needs to focus on, not his latest culture war dead cat

05/01/2020, 09:57:49 AM

by David Ward

If there’s one thing we’ve seen with the Johnson government so far, it’s that they aren’t going to be content with gentle managerial government. Like a five year old with a remote controlled car, he wants to move fast and break things.

To cut through in the next five years, the new Labour leadership is going to need a hugely disciplined operation focused on how we will make a positive, and credible, difference to people’s lives.

It’s clear that the Johnson government has a tall order in restoring growth to areas in long term global decline. We’ve been talking about HS2 since God was a boy, so forgive my scepticism about it happening in the next five years.

So to keep their voting coalition of leafy shires and newly won northern and midlands towns together the Conservatives will want to be on the front foot on other issues. One thing that unites these groups of voters is socially conservative instincts.

Much ink has already been spilled about the patriotic values of former Labour heartlands. But the seam for Conservatives to mine goes much deeper than that. In August 2019 Yougov produced some interesting research on the surprising views held by people who describe themselves as left or right wing. It found 72% of those who want redistribution of wealth also believe the criminal justice system is too soft. 66% who support Trade Unions want more restrictions on immigration. While 60% of those who support renationalising the railways also want to reintroduce capital punishment.

Of course Labour should always be the party of progress and progressive values, but we have to be mindful of bringing a majority along with us. Just as the party has in the past. In the 1960s Roy Jenkins gave tacit support to backbench bills to legalise abortion, decriminalise homosexuality and abolish the death penalty. Tony Blair’s government scrapped Section 28 and banned fox hunting, but combined those with Anti Social Behaviour Orders and a points based immigration system.

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Let’s be clear from the start: Labour’s next leader is never going to be PM

03/01/2020, 05:58:17 PM

by Kevin Meagher

Sorry to start the New Year with an Eeyorish warning, but it needs saying from the outset. Labour has zero chance – absolutely no hope whatsoever – of winning the next election in 2024 or thereabouts. The glass is definitely half empty – with a crack in the bottom. Short of an almighty calamity – bigger in magnitude to Brexit – Boris Johnson is going nowhere for the next few years.

Forget the permanent revolution nonsense emanating from Dominic Cummings. Boris’s instinct will be to cut an early deal with the EU on our future trading arrangements and then consolidate his position. He would much rather govern as a benign figure that a malevolent force. He will prove formidable if he does. His victory is already seeing the Tories mobilise their tanks on what remains of Labour’s front lawn, in what may become a strategic realignment of British politics.

Rewriting Treasury rules to favour the North? Check. Inflation-busting increase in the National Living Wage? Check. Renationalising Northern Rail? Check. The new political battleground in British politics cuts across large chunks of what used to be safe Labour territory. The Tories already know this and are wasting no time in preparing their fortifications.

Last month’s result was no fluke. It was a long time coming.

So many of the seats Labour lost in unfashionable towns in the north and midlands were places that underwent 20 years of Thatcherite deindustrialisation, followed by a decade of New Labour pumping money into the public sector, but not replenishing decent jobs in lost industries. This was book-ended by ten more years of Tory austerity. Four decades of misery and disappointment. It just so happens that the timeline corresponds perfectly with our membership of the EU, so, for many, their unhappy experience of politics, which only ever seems to disappoint and frustrate, was taken out in the Brexit referendum.

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The Uncuts: 2019 political awards (part I)

30/12/2019, 08:50:15 PM

Politician of the year: Boris Johnson

In this supposed period of Labour reflection, many would concede that Boris Johnson faced a weak opponent in Jeremy Corbyn. And that Corbyn was foolish, given the leverage afforded to him by Johnson’s lack of a Commons majority, to allow Johnson a general election at the time and on the terms that he desired.

But you can only beat what is in front of you and Johnson did this comprehensively. With Mandelsonian message discipline (get Brexit done) and a Blair-like pitch for the centre. “We were elected as New Labour and we will govern as New Labour,” said Blair in 1997. Substitute One Nation Tories for New Labour and you have the key ingredient of Johnson’s acceptance speech.

This is easy to mock. But what was Labour’s slogan in 2019? And what was our pitch to mainstream Britain?

Perhaps we should see these things as less New Labour and more essential requirements of any political success, which Johnson much more effectively provided than Corbyn.

Johnson has no time to rest on his laurels: a Catalonia-type standoff with Scotland is pending; a trade deal with the EU, on the timescale that he insists upon, will require compromises that he has not yet acknowledged. But he now enjoys a majority large enough to make Mark Francois as marginal as Corbyn was in the Blair years.

Johnson is deadly serious, like a contemporary Disraeli, about using this new authority to sufficiently deliver for the north and the Midlands that the new blue wall keeps him in power for a decade. It is time, finally, for Labour to stop underestimating him and start – without descending to clichés about London coffee bars and northern towns – taking the steps to stop him.

“Sharp Elbows” award for earliest use of a personal logo in a leadership election

This special award, in leadership election season, marks out Rebecca Long-Bailey for her committed start to campaigning to be party leader, even long before the 2019 general election was lost. (more…)

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Trying to out spend Johnson’s Tories won’t work. Labour needs to be smarter

17/12/2019, 10:56:57 AM

by David Ward

So here we are again choosing a new leader. And once again all the different factions of the party are getting ready to fight like cats in a sack about it. I have no doubt it will fall on deaf ears, but my appeal to the party is to put the burning anger with each other to one side for a moment and think about the next election and choose someone right for that task.

Back in 2015 I wished on these pages we would stop re-fighting the 2010 election and recognise that the EU referendum would finish Cameron’s career, change the conversation, and put in place someone such as Johnson.

In 2015 and to a lesser extent in 2017 Corbyn captured the moment with an anti austerity message. It turned out that wasn’t what was needed in 2019. But in 2024 it will be nearly a decade since Corbyn won the leadership, with a government who have been investing in public services and infrastructure outside London.

We need to take Johnson at his word about trying to improve lives in former Labour heartlands. He means it, even if he might not achieve it.

We have already tried in 2019 to out-spend Johnson and it didn’t work. The astronomic figures weren’t seen as credible. The policies were too scattergun with no sense of priority. Too many of them seemed have come straight out of a think tank seminar. Such things are all well and good, but Local Transformation Funds or a National Energy Agency don’t correlate to people’s everyday lives. The job of the skilled politician is to make ideas sound less Wonk and more Wakefield.

By 2024 with some Conservative investment no doubt making at least some kind of difference, the out-spending approach will be even harder.

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