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Chuka Umunna – A pro on what Labour must be pro if we are to win again

22/09/2014, 04:25:15 PM

by John Slinger

During Phil Collins’s gentle jousting with Chuka Umunna today, their savvy wit was evident. While light-hearted at times (always a boon at conference) there was much substance.

First dodging the brickbat of why hasn’t Labour apologised more on the economy: “we’ve learnt the lessons of the crash” and the debt and deficit rose due to falling tax receipts not profligacy. This is a line that hasn’t resonated enough yet.

Chuka does the big picture well and was expansive on the three challenges Britain faces: “delivering social democracy in a fiscal cold climate, transformative technology, and global competition”.

Politely disagreeing with a questioner on modern technologies he argued that they shouldn’t be feared and can help “transform public services”.

He’s keen to utilise and promote the dynamic and the new, not build up defensive walls against it. Handing out certificates at school in his patch, he’d told the kids that they’re up against others from “Mumbai and Singapore who perhaps want it more as they’ve had perhaps had to struggle more”. Teachers and parents appreciated the straight-talking about how globalisation cannot be turned back. He’s right: dealing with such challenges starts in the classroom and goes way beyond there.

The wit was there, from Collins of course, but while refuting the “nonsense” charge that Labour isn’t sufficiently pro-business, Chuka reminded all that New Labour weren’t exactly flush with business endorsement in ’97, having been “elated to get Richard Branson on a train with Tony Blair”! It was good to hear what should be both a defence against the anti-business charge, and an attack on the newly the newly rejuvenated europhobes of Cameron’s Tories: that “the biggest concern of British business is our exit from the EU”.

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Miliband’s bridge building with business should be applauded

01/07/2014, 08:15:02 AM

by Jonathan Todd

The case for augmenting Labour’s cost of living campaigning is almost as old as this campaigning. The advantages accruing to Labour from this campaigning are challenged by those that accumulate to the Conservatives from the more general economic improvement. This improvement encourages optimism among businesses, which some feel Labour threatens.

Labour needs to reassure these businesses and the voters who work for them that Labour poses no such threat. That, as Pat McFadden and Alan Milburn have both put it, Labour is as concerned with generating wealth as with distributing it. It is, as Chuka Umunna is quoted in a recent FT article headlined ‘Labour seeks to reposition as pro-business party’, a fairly academic decision how you can cut the pie more fairly if you haven’t increased the size of the pie first.

That Umunna is clearly right, while business fears that this is not understood by Labour, makes the repositioning heralded by the FT welcome. We are now in what The Sunday Times described as “a week long campaign to mend fences with business leaders”. No matter what big policy announcements this week may bring, Labour should not expect that they alone will secure business support.

Fifty small press releases matter more than a big policy announcement, as the ex party adviser Steve Van Riel recently observed. If Labour wants better relations with business, and I’m pleased that we do, we shouldn’t think that these can be cemented in a week, no matter how big our policy announcements. Such relations require diligent cultivation over the long-term. Which the activities of this week should be a staging post on.

It is to be hoped that Ed Miliband and his shadow cabinet are up for this. Because there will be those in our party who will implore them not to be. Similar protestations, as Uncut has noted, have blunted moves to the centre on welfare. Concerted efforts to win business support would be another move to the centre, which is valuable enough that Miliband should be prepared to endure internal criticisms.

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Labour should use the language of social justice and ambition to connect with voters

30/05/2014, 12:51:29 PM

by Glenn Edwards

It’s less than a year till the general election and there’s been a lot of talk about Labour alienating itself from business interests and lurching too far to the left. But even if Labour hasn’t been effective in courting corporate leaders this doesn’t mean that it is anti-ambition. Current policies actually seem to have a lot in common with Tony Blair’s once cherished idea of combining social justice with ambition, even if they differ from the ‘third way’ in practice. We just need to start thinking about ambition in a much broader light and therein could lie a key part of the Party’s message over the next year.

Labour is pursuing a political approach that views everyone as potential success stories and not just winners or losers, as people pursuing their own human development and not just static stereotypes and as having a stake in this economy rather than just being compensated for their loss. We need a country that doesn’t wield clout in the world simply through a privileged elite in London but on the backs of a vast army of clever and confident people. Labour’s aim to redirect the economy towards high-skill jobs and create a world-class workforce is a policy example par excellence.

There is a feeling that many politicians, particularly on the right, are pandering to the short term interests of a wealthy few at the expense of the long term prosperity of the nation. In no clearer way is this expressed than the political divide over the treatment of the banks. Labour’s policy of taxing banker’s bonuses in order to create jobs for the long term unemployed isn’t a tax on ambition, it’s a tax on greed. It’s a sensible way of bringing back confidence and self esteem to those who lost it so long ago whilst simultaneously helping expand business.

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Why Labour should fear the blowback from its war on business

15/04/2014, 11:22:40 AM

by Samuel Dale

During his doomed leadership contest David Miliband said Labour could not afford to go into the 2015 general election with no business support.

One year ahead that election and that is exactly what is happening. Labour is at open war with business with signs it is about to step up the offensive rather than build bridges.

The list of proposed interventions into industry is dizzying with almost every major sector targeted.

I’m told Labour is planning a policy blitz on no fewer than eight sectors ahead of party conference later this year. It is part of an ambitious agenda to significantly boost consumer rights and hand power back to consumers and away from huge corporations.

Ed Miliband positions himself as US President Teddy Roosevelt breaking up monopolies and boosting competition. His modern incarnation has been called many names from pre-distribution to progressive austerity or socialism with no money. In 21^st Century Britain let’s see what Miliband is actually proposing in your crucial industries.

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Oh dear Ed, this Europe policy is a disaster

12/03/2014, 11:53:18 AM

by Anthony Bonneville

Today, Ed Miliband blew it.

Contrary to some of the warm words from the likes of Martin Sorrell and Peter Mandelson, effectively ruling out a referendum has sabotaged Labour’s last chance to win over a strong coalition of business backers, not to mention irrevocably divide the Tories.

Labour is largely united on the benefits of staying in Europe. Trade, growth, jobs and the environment are all policy areas wholly dependent on our positive relations with the continent.

It’s a strong case but one that our frontbenchers seem reluctant to make.

The media is largely hostile and in the hurly burly of daily political debate, it’s understandable that Labour politicians prioritise issues more immediately relevant to voters.

Yes, today Ed Miliband gave a speech on Europe, but how many more times will he mention the subject in the next year?

It’s clear that today’s speech was an exercise in box ticking, in doing the bare minimum before abandoning the European battlefield.

If we, as pro-Europeans, want to play a positive role in Europe, we can’t do so without the engagement of the British public. There is a debate that is being conducted and right now Labour isn’t even in the chamber.

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Promoting gesture candidates should be none of Labour’s business

17/07/2012, 02:19:52 PM

by Kevin Meagher

It seems gesture politics is alive and well, although the latest outbreak has popped up in an unexpected place.

We learn today that the Labour party wants more candidates for elected office to come from a business background. It wants to extend the future candidates programme and get sitting MPs to mentor potential applicants from business. They won’t even need to be party members, just sympathetic to Labour’s ‘values’.

Of course the days when Labour candidates overwhelmingly came from trade unions, local government, universities or public sector management are disappearing. The last decade has shown that people who support Labour now work everywhere.

We should embrace that plurality. It is a success for Labour’s ambition to be a true ‘one nation’ party. And ‘business’ covers everything from executives of blue chip companies through to one-man band start-ups.

All oppositions have to reach out to build goodwill and support and it is right to do so. And Labour’s business reception in the City tonight is a good and useful thing to do.

But the announcement about candidates feels like a piece of crude brand positioning – an attempt to counter the charge that Labour is somehow anti-business. If that’s the real motive then there are better ways of going about responding to it.

If we need a concrete message for tonight’s business reception, how about promising that missives from HM Revenue and Customs will be written in plain English? That would be greeted with hosannas from every small business in the land. Or perhaps reverse the closure of HMRC front counter offices? Or how about a dedicated account manager for each small business?

Meet, talk and discuss with business by all means, but offering special access into the party’s selection processes is as abasing as it is pointless. Abasing because it sends the signal ‘we don’t – cannot – understand business without you’ and pointless because the take-up will be so low.

Do we really think there will be a rush from the executive corridors of Britain to spend evenings in residents’ association meetings or to take pay cuts to serve as MPs?

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We’re getting serious on enterprise

28/11/2011, 01:00:05 PM

By Luke Bozier

I wrote in March, in an article for LabourList, that Labour had “in effect become the party of the public sector”, in response to Ed Miliband’s speech to the TUC rally in Hyde Park.

Soon after, Alex Smith & I met to discuss our concerns on the party’s declining credibility; in our own ways, both socially and commercial, we are entrepreneurs, and it was – and still is – pretty clear that Labour has lost its voice on enterprise. That’s not a luxury we can afford; the future economy, which we are already entering – post-recession, post-credit crunch, post-crisis – is an economy which will be built more than ever on the back of entrepreneurs, self-employed people, micro-enterprises, social enterprises and other independent economic actors.

The “means of production”, in the old language of socialism, is now in the hands of every individual with a computer. Instead of being afraid of enterprise, and recoiling away from the opportunities it presents to create a fairer society with more opportunity for all, Labour under Ed Miliband must embrace enterprise and put it at the heart of everything we do as a party.

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“Business” is no excuse for prejudice

17/05/2011, 03:54:01 PM

by Ray Filar

Quite strangely for a practice upon which the existence of the human race depends, having babies is still a career disadvantage to women in a way that it is not to men. In stone age fashion, parental leave legislation continues to envisage women as primary child-carers and men as primary breadwinners. Those heterosexual parents who would like to create a work/life balance mash-up of the two stereotypical roles don’t get a look in.

Statutory maternity leave currently stands at fifty-two weeks, maximum. Statutory paternity leave, by contrast, amounts to two weeks at the beginning, and from this April, at most twenty-six weeks in the second half of the baby’s first year. These laws continue to dictate that the stay-at-home-with-the-baby be mostly done by the parent with a vulva.

This is clearly unfair to all genders. Women may always be the birth-givers, but frankly, once the actual birth and two-week recovery period is over, a new task begins. This task is called child care, and there is no reason for it not to be shared between parents in a way that suits them. Commitment to legislative gender equality leads me to believe that it should be shared relatively equally, but at the very least, parents should be able to decide, not governments or businesses.

I grew up in a family in which my mum worked longer hours than my dad, and at times earned more. My dad was able to combine his career with picking up my siblings from school and cooking dinner. He’s a pretty good cook, actually. I don’t know how he does it, but having a male body doesn’t seem to render him incapable of child-care. Indeed, based on my experience of being cared for by a father as well as a mother, I’d go so far as to contend that wiping poo out of a baby’s arse is much the same task whatever your gender.

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Cameron’s brave boasts ring hollow: the Tories are failing to back British business.

07/03/2011, 09:17:34 AM

by John Woocock

David Cameron has faltered abroad of late because under him Britain lacks a coherent foreign policy to guide it, as Douglas Alexander cogently set out in the Observer yesterday.

But yesterday the prime minister’s incoherence spread to the home front. Cameron’s speech to the Conservative spring conference highlighted a weakness in his leadership and the government’s economic position that is worth dwelling on, beyond the two lines of rebuttal to which such orations are usually treated.

The foreign policy section of the speech bad enough. Was there really a single true blue activist in the Cardiff hall, never mind anyone in the rest of the country, convinced by the notion that the key difference between Labour and the Conservatives in foreign affairs is that we do “dodgy deals with dictators” while they are primarily interested in volunteering to build schools in Africa? And if any Cameroon speechwriters read Labour Uncut (They do – Ed.) let me help you out: if you are going to force that kind of absurd contrast on your audience, don’t then segue into a eulogy of Margaret Thatcher’s foreign policy principles. Some would say she ended up being a teeny bit too close to a dodgy regime or two herself, as her friendship with General Pinochet and reluctance to impose sanctions on apartheid South Africa showed (which latter Mr Cameron himself adversely criticised back in the days that he wished to project himself as a break from Tory tradition). (more…)

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Wednesday News Review

01/09/2010, 07:31:58 AM

The Mirror backs David

It is a difficult decision. David Miliband went into this contest the frontrunner. The big surprise of the race has been his brother Ed who has been at times truly inspirational. Both are passionate in their beliefs and show anger at the wrong-headedness of political foes. Both are rare men who wear their deep-seated principles on their heart. The choice between them is tough and we hope whoever wins finds room in the Cabinet for his brother. But we believe David Miliband ticks more boxes and is without doubt the best candidate to be the next leader of the Labour Party. And, more crucially, the next Prime Minister of our country. – The Mirror

Labour’s big guns last night lined up behind David Miliband to be the new Party leader – calling him the “special one”. The 11 shadow Cabinet heavyweights insisted he was the right man to galvanise members after the election letdown and kick David Cameron out of No10. Their support comes as the Mirror today also backs Mr Miliband, 45, as the best candidate to take Labour forward […]In their letter, the shadow ministers say Mr Miliband is the only person who can succeed Gordon Brown and return Labour to power. It is signed by Bob Ainsworth, Douglas Alexander, Liam Byrne, Ben Bradshaw, Alistair Darling, Tessa Jowell, Pat McFadden, Jim Murphy, Shaun Woodward and Jack Straw. – The Mirror

Ed Ahead?

Ed Miliband has “pulled ahead” in the race to become Labour leader, his camp claims, as voting begins today to choose a successor to Gordon Brown. The Shadow Energy Secretary’s campaign says that, among the 271 MPs and MEPs, he is picking up more second preference votes than his main challenger, his brother David, who is still the bookies’ favourite. Second preferences could be crucial as few expect any one candidate to secure a winning majority on first preferences in an electoral college split into three between MPs/MEPs, party members and members of affiliated bodies like the trade unions. – The Herald

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