Posts Tagged ‘Emma Burnell’

Stop shouting at me – I’m on your side

16/07/2011, 02:00:18 PM

by Emma Burnell

I regularly read the blogs of people I disagree with. I think it’s vital to do so not only to challenge your own perceptions, but also to work out how best to frame your arguments. I also regularly read blogs of people I agree with. Sometimes these are the same people. Politics can be a bit like that. Some days the person I’ve had a blazing Twitter row with about the necessity of trident, the very next day I’m nodding in agreement with about the campaigning future of the Labour Party. Modern communications are both fun and confusing that way.

Like real life, people have different moods online. Some days I’m feisty and argumentative, others I’m contemplative and receptive. Sometimes I just want to have a laugh. Because I’m political that laugh will often be at the expense of the Tories or their allies.

There has grown up on all sides of the Labour party a filtered response to all other parts of the party. I know because I get both sides of it. Those on the right of the Party get called Blairites and those on the left Trots. Then they all go about their business with not a single idea improved through debate, a mind changed or a voter won over.  This leaves me in despair when people I know to be interesting and highly intelligent are losing the opportunity to actually try to change a mind. (more…)

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Where next for the democracy movement?

11/05/2011, 05:00:07 PM

by Emma Burnell

The question of electoral reform is now closed for a generation. Anyone who disagrees with this statement is part of the much wider problem that the democracy movement has.

The movement likes to believe that it listens and that it represents “the people”, but, generally, what that has meant in my experience is that people who agree with the aims of the movement get a hearing as to how their aims might be achieved, while those who question the priorities of the reformers are dismissed as dinosaurs and not engaged with to understand their reticence. And while the movement certainly represents some of “the people”, who deserve a voice as much as anyone else, the inability to grow from a niche to a mass movement demonstrates clearly that it is not the voice of all the people.

At the moment, the blame game is moving quickly. So far we have the mendacious No campaign, the toxicity of the Lib Dems and particularly the childish tantrums of Chris Huhne, the intervention of the prime minister and the split in the Labour party. All of which did – of course – play a part in why the Yes campaign failed. But for my money, the biggest reason the campaign failed is because it was run by people who don’t know the electorate and don’t understand what they want and what they fear. (more…)

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We need to keep our sense of class, while embracing them all

22/01/2011, 11:28:54 AM

by Emma Burnell

The Labour party has always understood and been uniquely informed by the class struggle and the struggling classes. This is not to say that we are solely a party of the working class – that has never been true. But our strength has been in the finding of common interests between the working and middle classes, and formatting policies that allowed both better lives for themselves and better dreams for their children.

This was considerably easier when the social strata of the UK was more clearly delineated. To paraphrase the Frost Report, the upper class wore bowler hats and the working class knew their place. But if class ever was that clear-cut, it certainly isn’t now. It’s a more elusive beast, shadowy and ill-defined by a combination of our jobs, education levels, property ownership and history. (more…)

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The tyranny of the daily tracker poll

08/01/2011, 10:30:56 AM

by Emma Burnell

If, like me, you’re a political geek (and I have to assume that if you’re reading this site, you take at least a passing interest), then you’ll be following the YouGov daily tracker polls. Every night we see how the parties rise and fall. Will we be ahead? By how much? How low will the Lib Dems fall?

Like an underlying drumbeat, the tracker feeds into our daily narrative on the state of politics and the Labour party. Some people celebrate wildly each new time Labour pulls ahead of the Tories and the Lib Dems fall behind “Others”. Conversely, for some Labour supporters it seems to depress them even further, as they convince themselves that Labour is becoming complacent in reading these celebrations.

I try to fall between the two. I think Labour has a long journey still to take, but I take heart from the polls, they make me optimistic for the future. And I channel that optimism into working harder all the time for a Labour victory, taking nothing for granted.

Ed Miliband and his team should be doing the same. That is what the voters – not the hacks – expect. To hear some commentary, you’d think that we were weeks from the next election.  But we’re not, and the public knows it. The Tory-Lib Dem coalition will hold, and as the polls get worse for them are cemented together. No politician – and especially not one as wily as Cameron – would go to the polls by choice with a 20 point disapproval rating. Their programme is clearly designed to ensure that a 2015 election will be at the best possible moment economically. Labour and Ed have time to get this right. There will be hundreds more tracker polls before the only poll that counts, and both optimists and pessimists must learn to take the daily ups and downs for what they really are – a snapshot. (more…)

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