The next victim of the chair is Ken Livingstone.
Labour Uncut’s crowdsourcing of the mayoral selection comes to Livingstone next week.
What question would you put to Ken if you could? What would it take for him to win your vote?
Get your questions in for Ken by adding them below by midday on Wednesday.
In case you missed it: Andy Burnham is a working class Roman catholic from the north of England. Not the midlands. And certainly not the south. The north.
He has no aversion to posh people. Nor to protestants. Not at all. But he is not one of them. And it is important that you know that. Weirdly, Burnham has put his ‘ordinary’ northern origins at the centre of his Labour leadership campaign.
His desert island discs are parodically reflective of this. The only tune he’ll hear in paradise which hasn’t been recorded by either a Manc or a Roman catholic or both will be “Protection”, by the Bristol “trip hop” duo, Massive Attack. (more…)
One of the traps for the new Labour leadership is the notion that politics in Britain today is entirely about deficit reduction. How to do it? How fast? How much? Yes, we need to have an intelligent and balanced response to the Tory-Lib Dem government’s cuts frenzy, but Labour victories have always been based not just on good management but on policies to make our society better.
One element of the 1997 victory was the separate New Life for Animals manifesto, which set out a long list of ways that Labour would make Britain more compassionate. The best-known reform was of course the hunting ban, but arguably the animal welfare act 2006 will change the life of animals in Britain more deeply, because it makes it possible for future government to introduce easily-passed secondary legislation on everything from circus animals to pet markets. It was the first comprehensive animal welfare legislation for 96 years.
Keith Flett, socialist historian and letter writer, argues that in the age of social media, a published letter in a newspaper still beats Twitter and Facebook. He should know. In over a quarter of a century, he has had thousands of letters published in national newspapers. We’re grateful to him for sharing his letter writing tips with Uncut readers.
In the age of Twitter, Facebook, blogs, texts and YouTube, why bother to write a letter to the editor? I use all the above formats, but it is only when I have a letter published in a national paper that people stop me to say: “I saw your letter”. They hardly ever say “I saw your tweet” or “I saw your post on Facebook”.
The reason is obvious: a letter in the Guardian or Independent will reach many thousands of people. Other, newer media will reach hundreds if you are lucky. Letters to the editor deliver impact – one of the reasons why those of us who are politically active want to impart our thoughts to a wider audience in the first place. (more…)
The chair is back.
After the success of the leadership crowdsourcing interviews, Labour Uncut is embarking upon a new challenge: crowdsourcing the mayoral selection.
First up is Oona King.
What question would you put to Oona if you could? What would it take for her to win your vote?
We’ll be taking your questions to the mayoral candidate this week.
Get your questions in for Oona by adding them below by midday on Wednesday.
Welsh Labour entered the 2010 General Election with common expectation it would get a kicking. With 29 out of 40 seats in Wales held by Labour there was clearly only one place to go, and that was down. However, as the campaign wore on more and more Labour sources made it clear to me it wouldn’t be as bad as was being suggested. And they were right. Despite multiple vulnerabilities, Labour in Wales held on to 26 seats. Even more amazingly, Labour did it in Wales on 36% of the vote – a full 1.5% down on the calamity of the 1983 election result.
One of the major things that saved Labour was the inability of the Conservatives to take medium range targets in Wales. Thus Labour held urban targets like Newport West and Bridgend with more comfort than had been speculated. There was certainly a swing against Labour, but the party machine was in much better fettle than it had been for several years. In the local elections of 2008 and the Euro election of 2009 Labour’s collapse was sharper in Wales than in other parts of the UK. That was not true in 2010 – Welsh Labour did leagues better than its English counterpart.
Look no further than Blaenau Gwent to prove this point. In 2005 Labour lost its once safest seat in a bloody and brutal scrap with People’s Voice, formed when the late Peter Law broke with the Labour Party over all women shortlists. In the 2006 by-election cause by Peter’s death and in the Assembly election of 2007 Labour was soundly beaten; while in 2008 it lost control of the local authority for the first time ever. This year the rot wasn’t just stopped, it was reversed in stunning fashion. Incumbent People’s Voice MP Dai Davies got under 20% of the vote and Blaenau Gwent – the seat once held by Michael Foot and Nye Bevan – returned to Labour with a 10,000+ majority for Nick Smith MP and a bloody nose for his opponent. Last week People’s Voice announced it was being disbanded. Game, set and match to the red quarter.
Blaenau Gwent may have been the most stunning illustration of Labour effectiveness, but it was also mirrored in holding the Liberal Democrats in bay in Swansea West and Newport East, keeping the Conservatives out of the Vale of Clwyd and Delyn, and stopping Plaid Cymru in their tracks in Llanelli and Aberconwy.
Why did this happen? I’d suggest three factors played a role. One was Peter Hain. His persistent message of saving Wales from the Tories may have grated with the other parties, but it obviously worked with the electors from Gower to Cardiff West to Clwyd South. He repeated the mantra as a constant and his message was simple and, quite simply, plausible to the electorate.
Secondly, Labour had used the previous six months to overhaul its operation and deploy its resources – and by damn they are more scarce than in the past – to best effect. A new communications team made a real impact. Assembly Members and MPs worked together more effectively than in the past, too, and there almost a sense of popular resistance to the trends the polls were showing. At its best the Welsh Labour machine is a tank regiment and, though the machinery has shown significant rust and decay, in the heat of battle it is still the mightiest political army in Wales. In May Welsh Labour found the form that in 2001 allowed it to lose 200,000 votes across Wales but shed no seats.
The third reason? Labour is the luckiest party in Wales. End of.
Daran Hill is an independent political consultant who runs Positif Politics. He is a Trustee of the Bevan Foundation and a co-editor of www.waleshome.org, the leading Welsh political website.
Forget Ann Widdecombe. Or any of the other establishment talking heads rolled out to speak for the Church of Rome for that matter. Most Catholics in Britain are like me: working-class, from the North and ethnically Irish. And most vote Labour.
But relations between Catholics and some on the left have traditionally rested on a delicate modus vivendi. We walk in tandem on economic and social justice. We both abhor war and starvation. We even have similar things to say on the environment (although the Vatican, understandably, stops well short of ‘Earth worship’ greenery). And we both have a penchant for moral absolutism.
But we go our separate ways on abortion, birth control, gay rights, euthanasia and the ‘importance’ of marriage. And there it lies. Like Cyprus or Korea we have a demarcation line that is simply irreducible. The iron doctrinal differences on either side are simply not bridgeable.
So, wisely, we try and avoid confrontation that will dredge up the full extent of our differences and instead focus on the significant areas where we do agree. But it’s not easy. Our time in office saw one flashpoint after another. Sometimes on big issues: Abortion adverts on television; the Mental Capacity Bill; euthanasia; faith schools; human embryology legislation and gay adoption. But sometimes on smaller issues too, like the British Secular Society’s splenetic call for hospital chaplains to be cut – which, sadly, saw no health minister take to the airwaves to denounce such mean-spirited nonsense.#
I left the Labour party in March 2003 when the bombs began to fall on Baghdad. This ended a formal relationship that began on 4 May 1979, when I joined the day after Thatcher was elected. My Labour leanings had roots in my childhood in a small Sheffield terrace with no bathroom. One of my earliest memories is of my dad explaining to me why Harold Wilson and not Alex Douglas Home should lead the country. My dad died in 1968. He was a toolmaker in a family firm where conditions were Dickensian. Health and safety was non-existent and there was no sick pay or pension. He didn’t trust politicians, but he told me that Labour were our best hope. He suffered from a series of lung diseases and his life was saved by the NHS on at least three occasions starting in 1949. If Nye Bevan and Clem Atlee had not created the NHS I would not have been born.
In between working with bands like ABC, The Human League and Heaven 17 I campaigned vigorously for Labour. In the 1983 election I argued with voters who looked at you incredulously when you explained that Michael Foot should be Prime Minister. In 1985 I played a small in part setting up Red Wedge, the collective of radical musicians, comedians, writers and film makers who attempted to engage young people with politics and encourage them to listen to what Labour had to say. We supported Neil Kinnock’s efforts to bring the party into the modern world without losing its passion and principles. We liked Neil.
Labour was not too bad on sex. Gay rights, single parents, sex education, civil unions, AIDS treatments, STD education, general openness of discussion of sex issues, problems and possibilities. These all added up to a pretty positive development in the social environment. Chronic British uptight-ness, prejudice and repression were dealt with in social life and interaction, the arts and education. It made a Britain a better place to live in.
In contrast, the treatment of drugs was a classic opportunity lost; fear of every hysterical headline demanded a conservative response. Drug czars, the war on drugs and experts on the misuse of drugs sacked or resigned all played to the worst of Labour’s populism and PR directed policy responses. Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson orchestrated a mindless response to the drug problem, despite all the evidence that repression and prohibition was having little if any positive effect, and that the most dangerous thing about drugs were that they were illegal.
Something strange is going on in Downing Street. Workers are removing “Tony Blair’s mirrored gym”, ripping down a wall and installing a lavish new kitchen, we are told, in the flat above Number 11 – the London home of David Cameron and his family. Meanwhile, the Camerons are enjoying the first week of their holiday at the PM’s country retreat Chequers, with its tennis court, heated pool, and staff to attend to their every need on the 1,000-acre estate.
That’s a bit odd too, given Downing Street initially led the media to believe they’d be in Cornwall this week. But does any of this really matter when up to 500,000 public sector workers are facing the sack in the tightest spending squeeze in living memory with every pound of the public finances under scrutiny? Yes, it does. As chancellor George Osborne (who has the run of the croquet set at his country residence of Dorneywood) keeps telling us: “We are all in this together”.
Both men are making far greater use of these pads, more suited to rock stars than to servants of the people, than their Labour predecessors. And, while the residences are funded via charitable trusts and not taxpayers’ cash, Cameron’s and Osborne’s growing fondness for their new homes sits uncomfortably with their rhetoric about austerity Britain.
When it comes to the Camerons’ flat above No11, the media were initially told that the family would be shelling out for all the work in the building. According to the Sunday Telegraph, it now looks like they may only pay any costs above £28,000. We’re also told the main Downing Street kitchen is also getting a major makeover. Is that a top priority in these difficult times? How much is that costing? Only days ago, communities secretary Eric Pickles courageously revealed details of all the spending Labour made over £500 in his new department during Gordon Brown’s last year in power. Pickles insisted this was all in the need of greater openness and transparency and challenged other Whitehall departments to do the same. “This department, like the rest of Whitehall, needs to look at where every penny is going and getting this data out in the open will help that process,” maintained Pickles. Although I’m not sure the edict has yet extended to the chauffeur-driven Jaguar that Pickles reportedly enjoys courtesy of the taxpayer.
It’s a similar story when it comes to the cash being poured into the revamp in Downing Street. Digging around for a bit of Pickles-style “transparency”, I find Labour Uncut’s guest editor Tom Watson has already fired in questions in the hope of some clarity. So far, nothing has emerged. Why? Haven’t they got the Pickles memo yet? If we really are all in this together, Cameron and his ministers should be leading by example. He should start by publishing all the spending on the renovations on his taxpayer-funded Downing Street flat. And then, he should insist that all Whitehall departments publish all their costs over £500 on a quarterly basis. I won’t hold my breath.
Vincent Moss is political editor of the Sunday Mirror Group
