Neil Kinnock « Labour Uncut

Posts Tagged ‘Neil Kinnock’

Unite’s confused kulturkampf

08/07/2013, 07:53:52 PM

by Jonathan Todd

Len McCluskey began his article in the Mirror over the weekend by stating:

“If your son or daughter fancies becoming a Labour MP, forget it. They have more chance of cleaning in the Commons than being elected to it.”

Who is he addressing?

The mother who has worked in the NHS all her life and the father who served his time as an electrician? They’ve never been active in politics or known any university besides the Open University. They have no friends in high places, whether in the “posh part of Stockport” or elsewhere.

Or is McCluskey warning off Oxbridge educated, ex-ministerial advisors and Demos associates? The thing is: Those are my parents and this is my life.

Perhaps my background is working class enough to get over the Unite acceptability threshold. But having checked my privilege, I’ve damned myself by having the temerity to get as good an education as I could and make the most of the opportunities this created.

It seems to me ever harder to be sure what class you are. By most measures, I’m probably becoming more middle class as I get older. But life isn’t a bowl of strawberries. Property prices, childcare costs, pension saving. They worry me as much as the next dad to a young family. I believe there is a term for this: the squeezed middle.

I don’t feel that any superior virtue or wisdom attaches to me through membership of the squeezed middle. We all have our strengths and weaknesses, whatever our class. While class membership seems to me more perplexing than ever, all Labour members can agree with the famous Neil Kinnock line: “The real privilege of being strong is to help people who are not strong.” And caring enough about other people to want to help them is a matter of empathy, not class allegiance.

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Is Labour doing well enough?

29/05/2013, 03:52:42 PM

by Rob Marchant

Having had a couple of months which have not, frankly, been pretty for Labour, this is the question its leaders must surely be asking themselves in the wake of the local elections.

The question is, will they ask it of robust friends who might level with them? Or others who might well-meaningly equivocate, in the name of keeping them motivated?

First, it is easy to base our hopes of success on this or that transitory effect, but that seems rather like building one’s house on sand. There may be a UKIP effect come the election, but history has shown that such things are not usually that big. Yes, there may just have been a fundamental realignment, but things may just as easily go against Labour (Tory voters returning and narrowing the gap) as for Labour (remaining UKIP voters splitting the right-wing vote and letting Labour in). And, in any event, it is a fool who bases his strategy on the failure of others. Stop it. If there is a boost from UKIP, that’s a bonus.

Second, Labour’s poll lead is anyway soft and has been for some time, as Atul Hatwal has shown here at Uncut. Most exasperatingly, many seem to be still extrapolating that poll lead out to 2015 at the same level, when history has shown, time and again, that polls will narrow, as I wrote here, based on the fine time-series research of Leo Barasi. You cannot, and should not, judge polling on week-to-week changes, which are meaningless, but over long periods you can see trends and these are worth looking at.

Although many have compared its current situation with 1992 – when, of course, Labour lost – even that seems rather an optimistic reading; its current polling gap is also comparable with that of Labour’s in 1981, which is not exactly encouraging news, when you think how Labour was destroyed in 1983. By the way, Tory hegemony was by no means consolidated in 1981, many viewed Thatcher’s leadership as shaky and Labour maintained a respectable poll lead all through that year.

Third, the softness of the party’s positive polling in historical context becomes more deeply worrying when we look at our leadership polling in historical context. And no, before you start, this is not an agitation for a challenge to Miliband, which would be of no help whatsoever to Labour. But the worryingly low polling he is experiencing is not a help either and we should not pretend otherwise.

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Thatcher’s legacy and the politics of blame

10/04/2013, 03:17:33 PM

by Jonathan Roberts

The past couple of days have been absurd. As a centrist, I have looked on with quiet respect, but also with head in hands as ideologue after ideologue lined up to offer their views on Lady Thatcher’s legacy.

I say at the outset that, for those so inclined, the time to celebrate was not this week, it was in 1990 or 1997. Ed Miliband, Neil Kinnock and others have rightly offered generous and respectful words on Mrs Thatcher’s passing, and it is my view that anyone who has expressed joy at the death of this frail old lady cannot realistically claim moral superiority, nor can they claim to be a particularly nice person – regardless of the anger they may still feel.

Like many other commentators, I was merely a child when Thatcher left Number Ten for the last time. Being the son of two council workers I was not one of those who directly benefited from the Thatcher years, nor was I one of those who directly suffered. So it is with that relative impartiality that I offer these thoughts.

The fundamental position of the left is that Thatcher destroyed the concept of society and abandoned countless decent, hardworking people to the scrapheap. The position of the right is that she rescued the country from militant trade unionism and gave people the opportunity to be free from state reliance.

Both of these positions are true.

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A Labour Christmas carol

26/12/2012, 08:00:44 AM

by Rob Marchant

It was Christmas eve, 2012, and Ebenezer Miliband lay in his bed, thinking of how his little hardware shop was faring in the middle of this perniciously cold winter. Business had been difficult, and here was a man generous to a fault. Perhaps too generous, some said. Debt was high everywhere in London that year, and no-one wanted to make promises to anyone, about anything. But Miliband, a decent and honourable man, was always good to his creditors.

He lay and fretted about his little business, and the harsh economic climate, unable to sleep. And, as he lay there, suddenly something very strange happened: it seemed like the bells on all the clocks in the house were sounding, madly, at the same time. Miliband looked around him, startled. What on earth was happening?

And then suddenly, after a few long seconds, they stopped ringing, as abruptly as they had begun, and silence reigned again. As he turned back towards his bed, who should have quietly appeared meanwhile, but the ghost of his mentor and former business partner: Jacob Brown, esq.

Brown had been a faithful friend and backer, but had had mixed success in charge as the shop’s senior partner, before his untimely demise. In his early days, he’d been affectionately known as “Prudence”, a name which people had later stopped using, for reasons which no-one could now quite remember.

Never a man for idle chit-chat, he had obviously come with a purpose and got straight to the point.

“Ebenezer,” he said, glowering a little, “d’you think it’s been a good year?”

The shock of seeing the ghost had not quite hit Miliband yet, and his words came out easily at first. He was also not quite sure what Brown was getting at. “Well, actually, not bad at all, Jacob. Sales are up, and the competition’s had a terrible year. No-one’s buying from them.”

Brown snorted derisively. “I had a honeymoon, too, you know. Much good did it do me. But I mean, do you really think you know where you’re going?”

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The return of toytown politics

08/05/2012, 05:36:41 PM

by Ian R. Stewart

Back in 1990, with thirteen million people refusing to pay the poll tax and the country in uproar, Neil Kinnock lambasted the unsavoury collection of Trotskyites in the SWP and Militant (now the Socialist Party; TUSC; Respect; Left List; take your pick) as being “toytown revolutionaries”.

He was right, as very few of them had ever been willing to take responsibility for their actions, or seriously made the kind of hard choices that even Liberal Democrats are willing to make these days.

Put simply, these people refuse to accept the reality of the world around them.

Yet toytown politics is not dead, in fact it is thriving, don’t just take my word for it, watch “The Wright Stuff” on Channel Five, or “The Daily Politics” on BBC2.

Or, closer to home, just read the blogs, tweets and articles of various hoary old “New” Labour hacks online or in the press.

Toytown has relocated to the media & Westminster village, where today we hear the nonsensical calls from some for Ed Miliband to stand down after a massive victory in England and Wales, spanning from Cardiff to Great Yarmouth.

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Posted in Grassroots | 15 Comments »

Politics is boring and irrelevant

18/08/2011, 07:30:09 AM

by Peter Watt

I went to Chessington World of Adventures today. While sat on the “Jungle Bus” with two of our kids, watching thousands of people enjoying an August day out, it suddenly dawned on me. Sometimes politics inspires and excites. And sometimes it just doesn’t. Right now, I think that politics is hell-bent on persuading much of the public that it is all just an irrelevance.

People at Chessington were probably worrying about rising utility bills, that it costs a small fortune to fill up the car and how their weekly food bill just keeps creeping up. They may be worried about their job or how they will pay for Mum’s care. But I bet that hardly any of them thought that politicians had the answer. And I thought all of that, when I should have been enjoying the stomach churning delights of the ride.

If I think back just over my lifetime, there have been some pretty exciting and inspirational periods. Margaret Thatcher remains a figure of hate for many on the left, but there is no doubt of the extent to which she dominated the political scene. Who can forget the sense of something important having happened when she stood on the steps of Downing Street reciting St Francis of Assisi? Over the next ten years she took on and beat the trade unions; liberated the Falklands; played her part in glasnost and changed the direction of the British economy. Whatever you thought of her, you knew that with her in charge politics mattered, the battles between the parties were keenly felt, emotions often ran high and she seemed to inspire adoration and hatred in equal measure. (more…)

Posted in Uncut | 13 Comments »

The big week uncut: what next?

03/10/2010, 02:00:39 PM

As Dan Hodges noted in Friday’s column (below), Labour reached the end of a long road in Manchester. If anyone needed closure on the New Labour project, we had it last week.

It was a journey which had begun where it ended: at Labour party conference.

Neil Kinnock’s 1985 speech in Brighton marked the start of a fight back which took 12 years to come to fruition and 13 more to end in failure.

Neil was the father of New Labour, but he was never part of it. With the passion that he showed in that brave and beautiful speech, he knew that we needed it. But he wished we didn’t. He would have preferred it the old way. By the end, he even knew that what we needed wasn’t him. (Just as he knew that it wasn’t John Smith either). But he could only be himself.

That is why he is so attached to Ed, who isn’t New Labour either. Ed was a contented but never ideologically committed member of the outer circle. He often notes that he wasn’t factional. This was helped by his not being political either.

There is nothing new or unusual here. Blair and Brown, for instance, were fellow travellers in Peter Hain’s Tribune group during the 1980s. It was a necessary accommodation with the prevailing orthodoxy.

Nor is it a weak position. It was Stalin who issued the Blairite dictum that “theory guides practice, but practice is the criterion of ideological truth”. And, whatever he was, Stalin was not weak.

Ed Miliband’s ruthlessness is beyond question. If he has a lack which comes to seem weak, it will be consistency, not cruelty.

Many whom one would call New Labour or old right very actively campaigned for Ed Miliband. And it is those influential individuals, not the facile nebula that is the term ‘the unions’, who are mainly responsible for Ed Miliband’s victory.

Which term (responsible) is apt in two senses: both cause and obligation.

So it is to them, as much as to Ed himself – and to his brother staked out in Primrose Hill-les-Deux-Eglises – that we pose the week’s overwhelming question: after New Labour, after permanent revolution and endless victory, what next?

Jonathan Todd warns of Osborne’s traps on the economy

David Prescott on David Miliband’s big speech

Kevin Meagher looks at the new leader’s in tray

Siôn Simon sketches Ed Miliband’s big speech

Peter Watt says the last thing we need is a membership drive

Jamie Reed MP looks beyond London for the shadow cabinet

Dan Hodges responds to Labour’s extraordinary week in Manchester

Sunder Katwala on Labour’s top baron: BAME voting in the leadership election

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Leadership is not a game, says Dan Hodges

01/10/2010, 09:43:19 AM

If a week is a long time in politics, then at Labour party conference it’s a lifetime. Remember where we came in. Excited. Hopeful. Enthused. And how we leave. Fractious. Edgy. Uncertain.

It was not supposed to be like this. An emboldened party, united behind its new leader, was meant to stride out, strong in mind and purpose, to take the fight to the government. Instead, we have hit a wall. Political reality has intruded. This was the week we finally realised that the 2010 general election had been lost.

For many of us – dare I say, those if us who are part of Generation Ed – politics has been a long, yet steady, march towards the summit. Kinnock, Smith, Blair and even Brown. All were part of a clear evolutionary process. They represented order. Now, with the election of Ed Miliband, the natural order has been disturbed.

This is not, of itself a negative. It needed something to jolt us out of our post election stupor. We have been. Ed’s victory has caused a convulsion.

On Saturday we were a movement in denial. The build up to the leadership announcement was spectacularly misjudged. The video of our achievements in office seemed to taunt the public; ‘See what you’re throwing away. You’ll be sorry’. Gordon’s speech seemed to taunt us all; ‘I will be loyal. Had you been loyal, we wouldn’t be in this mess’. (more…)

Posted in Uncut | 8 Comments »

Saturday News Review

18/09/2010, 07:56:32 AM

Another Lib Dem defector – How many is that now?

Solihull Lib Dem councillor Simon Slater has defected to the Labour Party. At a press conference in Solihull High Street on Friday Ian Austin, Labour MP for Dudley North, welcomed Coun Slater to the Labour fold and hinted there could be more defections to come across the West Midlands. – Solihull News

The Mirror’s final pitch

So we urge MPs, Labour Party members and those in affiliated trade unions and socialist societies to cast their votes, online or by post, for David Miliband before the ballot closes next Wednesday. Supporters of Ed Balls, Andy Burnham and Diane Abbott should consider giving second preferences to David Miliband. The head must rule the heart. It might appear cool to vote for Ed Miliband but the sensible choice is David Miliband. – The Mirror

“If we make the wrong choice we’ll leave Labour stuck in opposition for many years, that’s why this is too important a vote to ignore and it’s the reason the Daily Mirror has backed David. The people who really want him to lose are the Tories.” – Alan Johnson, The Mirror

Kinnock wades in again

Kinnock airs their differences publicly when he tells a Channel 4 docudrama of his surprise at David Miliband’s behaviour towards his younger brother, saying: “David’s response to Ed running has, to my astonishment, been deeply resentful. David’s people are spreading all kinds of bloody bile about Ed being in thrall to the left and he would be in the pocket of the unions and all kinds of crap like that.” – The Guardian

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Tuesday News Review

24/08/2010, 08:10:30 AM

Burnham blitz on ‘metropolitan elite’ continues

“Work experience internships, which often serve as a middle-class passport to good jobs, should be restricted to a maximum of three months, be paid the minimum wage and be required by law to be advertised, Andy Burnham says today as he steps up his Labour leadership campaign against self-perpetuating “metropolitan elites”. In his determination to tackle Britain’s stalled social mobility Burnham also promises to explore the options for graduates to get “extended access to student finance” to see them through low-paid work experience that would help them into their chosen careers”. – The Guardian

Ed Miliband doesn’t seem to disagree with Andy

“He also dismisses any suggestion that his backing from the three biggest trade unions risks reviving an impression of a Labour leader in the pocket of Unite. “I’m not defending everything the trade unions do, nor would I as Labour leader. I don’t think we’re about to go back to the 1970s, and I’m not planning to take us there. But I do defend the role of trade unions in our society. And I think it’s surprising that that’s surprising, coming from someone who wants to be leader of the Labour party. Politics has basically become a middle-class pursuit – a London-middle-class pursuit, detached from ordinary people’s lives – and it’s actually the link with the trade unions which helps make us relevant to people’s lives.” – The Guardian

Cameron urged to break holiday to back cup bid

“David Cameron faced calls to return from his holiday today to show the proper level of support for England’s 2018 World Cup bid. Tom Watson, who sits on the Commons Culture, Media and Sport select committee said: “We want to put on a good show for the bid but the government is fielding the B-Team. It’s a very poor show.” – The Daily Mail

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