Posts Tagged ‘Ian Lavery’

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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The Uncuts: 2017 political awards (part I)

30/12/2017, 12:45:42 PM

Politician of the year – Jeremy Corbyn

2017 was the year when everyone lost. The Tories lost their majority, Labour lost the election, the SNP lost a third of their Westminster seats and the Lib Dems, well, 60% of Lib Dem general election candidates lost their deposit.

Yet despite this litany of defeat, one politician had a very good 2017: Jeremy Corbyn.

Labour might have fallen short in June, but it was nothing like the wipeout predicted by the polls, pundits (not least at Uncut) and Labour’s own candidates.

At the 2017 general election Jeremy Corbyn was able to tap into seams of Labour support among the young and non-voters that have been beyond the reach of the party for over a decade, if not longer.

Expectations, however, are a tricky taskmaster.

Having wildly exceeded the bar for success in 2017 – let’s not forget, even Len McCluskey was talking about 200 seats as a decent performance – the political world now expects much, much more of Labour’s leader.

Jeremy Corbyn has done his bit to help fuel these expectations, predicting he’d be prime minister by Christmas when at Glastonbury in June, and more recently, in his Grazia interview, forecasting that he’ll “probably” be prime minister next year.

When expectations rise like this, either there needs to be demonstrable progress – for example, establishing a commanding poll lead over the Tories – or the media narrative will turn to why Labour is under-performing.

The local elections in May, which are being fought in metropolitan areas, will likely give Labour a boost but at some point Labour is going to have to win big votes in the House of Commons and bring the government down.

If not, those expectations, which contributed so much to Jeremy Corbyn’s happy 2017, will be a lot less benign in 2018.

Early-bird shameless leadership bid – Emily Thornberry

Emily Thornberry wins for realising that the anti-Semitism currently infecting parts of the party membership was poisonous to opinion-formers, as well as many party members. Visiting Israel and the West Bank, she staked out her position as clearly differentiated from that of Corbyn himself, who refuses to visit Israel, despite numerous invitations.

Ah, if only it were the result of a deeply-held belief, rather than political expedience. We need only go back a few years to 2007 to find the now Shadow Foreign Secretary speaking at an anti-Israel rally with all the bigots of the BDS (Boycott Divestment Sanctions) crowd.

No, she’s polished up her act a great deal since those days; not to mention cultivating the party’s most important single backer, one Len McCluskey of Unite. A journey indeed from tweeting herself out of a job in 2014, by way of a patronising photo of a White Van Man’s house.

Question is, can she keep a lid on her flexible principles, and that contempt, if she ever makes it to leader?

Pragmatist of the year – Angela Rayner

Angela Rayner gets on with things: whether it is pregnancy at 16, taking on a shadow cabinet job when many were walking away from them, refusing to be pigeonholed as being of the left or the right.

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Ian Lavery should not be Labour’s Elections Coordinator. Or anything coordinator, with his toxic past

17/02/2017, 02:00:50 PM

by Rob Marchant

Since Jeremy Corybn’s rise to prominence, there has been a seemingly never-ending succession of skeletons pulled out of the closets of senior Corbynites, to the delight of Tory press officers everywhere.

There was the relationships of Corbyn himself with Holocaust denier Paul Eisen, and with Hamas terrorists; John McDonnell’s outspoken pro-IRA stance; the support of a motion supporting denial of the Kosovo genocide by both; the suspension and reinstatement of MP Naz Shah over anti-Semitic remarks; the suspension of Momentum vice-chair Jackie Walker over the same; the well-known Stalin apologism of Corbynites Seumas Milne and Andrew Murray; and so on. Doubtless the Tories are currently holding fire on a number of the more juicy ones, keeping their powder dry for 2020.

But the connecting thread between all these embarrassments has been clear: no matter how senseless or unsavoury, they have all been essentially connected, in the minds of the perpetrators at least, to political positions.

For example, the connections with anti-Semites are always justified on the grounds that the people in question are merely anti-Israel (of course!) The IRA connection? Because they were romantic freedom-fighters, naturally, who happened to kill people. And the Stalin connection because, well, Communism wasn’t all bad, was it? However dire the story, there was always some kind of contorted political justification which allowed the people involved to continue to look at themselves in the mirror the following morning.

In contrast, this was clearly not the case with Ian Lavery. Lavery is Corbyn’s new Elections Coordinator and the man in charge of every set of elections, we presume, from now until Labour is inevitably decimated in 2020.

Until now he has been in relatively low-profile roles, such as Shadow Minister for Trade Unions and Civil Society, and Shadow Minister for the Cabinet Office. No, with Lavery the story was not political: it was about his questionable behaviour on a matter of simple personal ethics.

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Ed Miliband’s speech on Tuesday was another example of why he will make a fine prime minister

11/07/2013, 07:00:26 AM

by Ian Lucas

I enjoy how much Ed Miliband is underestimated.  I am not at all surprised that Ed has taken a bold and visionary step in seeking to redefine the historic link between Labour and trade unions. After all, he has taken similar steps before.

First, Ed talked about the “squeezed middle”.  Opponents chortled at first.  But when people understood what the phrase meant, they agreed that there are indeed more and more people in Britain who are being asked to work harder, for longer hours, and are being put under severe financial pressure.  They are the ones paying the price for the cost of the world crash, whilst, for the bankers, it seems to be business as usual.

Second, Ed spoke in his Liverpool Conference Speech in 2011 about “responsible capitalism”.  Whilst some of the initial reaction from the media was negative, when the dust settled, most recognised that Ed had a point.  Our economic system is not working for the majority of people, with many paying the high cost of subsidising profits for, amongst others, international utility companies.

Next, he spoke out for the innocent, vulnerable victims of appalling media intrusion by one of the most powerful businesses in the UK, News International.  I know that many will have told him not to take on Rupert Murdoch.  After all, he was acting against the received political wisdom of the last thirty years.  This timorous approach had debased not just our politics, but our national life.  But when it needed to be said that things had to change, Ed said it.

Now, Ed has said that he wants machine politics to end – the politics that demeans us all.   And Ed has gone further.  He also wants MPs to concentrate on doing the job we are paid to do.  At a time when the Government is freezing public sector pay and private sector pay is flat, how can any MP think it is right to draw an MP’s salary from the public purse and have an income of up to £400,000 too?

Contrast these steps with the approach of David Cameron, the man who held private dinners for Tory political donors in Downing street, promised to come clean on it, and, a year later, is yet to publish the report he promised to publish.

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