Nick Clegg « Labour Uncut

Posts Tagged ‘Nick Clegg’

And the real winner of yesterday’s budget is…Nick Clegg

21/03/2013, 07:00:58 AM

by Peter Watt

For many in the Labour party one of the few pleasures of opposition has been that they have been able to indulge in a much loved pastime – Lib Dem hating. It is a visceral thing that stems from the scars of countless bloody local election battles. “They don’t fight fair and once you’ve got them they’re bloody hard to get rid of,” as one hardened Labour activist from a marginal seat said to me a few weeks ago. Their ranks are seen by many in Labour as a cynical but ragbag mix of the politically directionless, the anarchic and a sizeable chunk that are basically Labour or should be. Oh, and of course the odd orange Tory! Lib Dem politics is dismissed as opportunistic as opposed to Labour’s politics of principled idealism.

So the anger and betrayal was very real for many on the left when Clegg took the Tory shilling. Indeed according to the polls, many formerly Lib Dem voters felt the same as they quickly switched to Labour. Clegg went from hero-to-zero in weeks as he became Cameron’s Poodle and was widely ridiculed for having sold out his and his Parties principles for a stint in a Ministerial car. My particular favourite Calamity Clegg joke is:

“Q. What does Nick Clegg stand for?

“A. When David Cameron walks in the room.”

It may be cruel but it sums up the view of Labour party activists across the country. And to be fair, he did seem pretty determined to confirm this view as he was outmanoeuvred on the AV referendum and then clumsily supported the increasing of tuition fees allowing himself to be branded a hypocrite.

His party’s polling numbers went into free fall and Clegg’s personal ratings fell further still. He and his party often looked a bit amateurish and they were blamed over and over by Labour politicians for propping up Cameron’s cuts. The possibility of House of Lords reform came and went as once again the Tories scuppered a favourite Lib Dem policy. And then UKIP started occasionally, and then consistently, pipping the Lib Dems for third place in the polls. The consensus within the Labour Party has been that Nick Clegg lacks principle, is a busted flush, a bit of a joke and that his party should and will dump him before the next election.

But I think that this view is wrong and that Labour has let its own prejudice cloud its strategic judgement. Nick Clegg entered government with two very clear aims. Firstly to prove that the Lib Dems could be a responsible party of government prepared to take tough decisions. And secondly to deliver as much of the Lib Dem manifesto as possible.

And on both he has succeeded.

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Cameron caves on Leveson

18/03/2013, 06:58:13 AM

by Atul Hatwal

It was a weekend of fraught Leveson lobbying and negotiation. After a pugnacious performance from the prime minister last Thursday, when he abruptly curtailed the cross-party talks, the reality of his political position has slowly dawned on him.

The votes in parliament weren’t there. Specifically, David Cameron was headed for one of the biggest defeats for a sitting prime minister, on a fully whipped vote, ever.

With a potential pro-Leveson majority of over 40 in prospect, no previous prime minister in the past 90 years, not Gordon Brown, John Major, Jim Callaghan or Harold Wilson, would have suffered such a reverse on a party political issue.

Late Sunday night negotiations were still ongoing but the outline of a weekend deal hammered out by Nick Clegg, mediating between Cameron and Ed Miliband, had emerged.

For David Cameron it will represent an astonishing volte face from his position on Thursday. If the new deal is confirmed this morning, as expected, he will have U-turned on three central points:

Statutory underpinning for the royal charter – the charter will be embedded in law. A super-majority in parliament will be required to change its terms, rather than the charter being amendable by the privy council
The editors’ veto on membership of the regulator – the editors will no longer be able to block appointments. A majority decision of the appointment panel will be able to confirm membership of the regulator
The editors’ control over the code of conduct – the editors will no longer write the code. It will be drafted by a joint team of editors, journalists and members of the public

David Cameron will ultimately accept 90% of the case made by the victims’ lobby group Hacked Off, as embodied in the Labour and Lib Dem proposals for a royal charter. The one compromise by the pro-Leveson coalition is likely to be to cede the option of exemplary damages against egregiously non-compliant organisations.

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Nick picks Ed over Dave. Leveson is coming.

13/03/2013, 03:49:17 PM

by Atul Hatwal

The Leveson saga reached a turning point in the House of Commons at lunchtime today. As ever with that place, it was wrapped in the arcane minutiae of parliamentary procedure, but make no mistake it was pivotal.

Following the Conservative’s refusal to countenance enacting Leveson, pro-reform forces have looked to make amendments to existing bills to legislate for the majority of Lord Leveson’s recommendations. Principally, these amendments have been tabled for the Crime and Courts bill and the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform bill.

The Conservatives have been privately panicked at the prospect of these amendments coming to a final vote in either the House of Commons or the House of Lords. Their whips have been warning the leadership for weeks that it is unlikely the Tories will be able muster the votes to defeat the amendments, and so prevent Leveson becoming law.

Late last night came a final throw of the dice. The Conservative whips tried to re-schedule Commons debate on the Crime and Courts bill amendments. Specifically, they tabled a welter of new amendments to the bill – 29 pages of them – and tried to specify that any debate of the Leveson changes would happen after consideration of the government’s new additions.

With a fixed limit of two days debate on the amendments, all of the Leveson provisions would have been lost.

This procedural attempt to remove the Leveson amendments was contained in something called a programme motion: a motion which sets the timetable for parliamentary debate and is itself discussed, and voted upon, on the floor of the House of Commons.

In response, Labour tabled an amendment to the programme motion that would have guaranteed time for debate of the Leveson amendments.

For the Conservative plan to work, they needed the co-operation of their Liberal Democrat partners to defeat Labour’s amendment to the programme motion.

It offered the Lib Dems a potential route to help out David Cameron without being seen to publicly renege on their commitment to support Leveson.

Until this lunchtime, no-one on either side of the debate knew conclusively how hard the Lib Dems would push their coalition partners on Leveson. When Lib Dem home office minister, Jeremy Browne, got up to speak at the despatch box, on the programme motion for the Crime and Courts bill, he implicitly answered the questions on the Lib Dem’s commitment to Leveson.

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Clegg has survived, but his party might not

04/03/2013, 07:57:39 AM

by David Talbot

It would be cruel to deny the Liberal Democrats some light relief from the two years of relentless drudgery they have had endured. Holding a seat they have held for some twenty years is seemingly a cause for wild celebration in today’s Liberal Democratic rump. Overly-excited, and optimistic, Lib Dem officials even audaciously briefed the Guardian that the party would now extend their sights to gaining Conservative seats at the next general election. The bravado is breathtaking, but one has to question the extent that the officials even believed it themselves. Still, it is a poke in the eye to their comrades in the coalition and a reminder to the electorate at large that they mostly still exist.

Let Nick Clegg enjoy his moment. Once lauded to the skies as another Churchill he surely must know that this is as good as it gets. Leading a party on the ascendance merely two and a half years ago he gives the appearance of a man horribly tormented by the reality in which he now finds himself. His party’s paradox ever since it was usurped by the Labour party over a century ago is that is has strove for influence in a hung parliament. Yet the moment they entered it, it hung them.

The Conservative’s masterstroke, having inexplicably failed to win an outright majority, was to in effect buy themselves a comfortable one with Liberal Democrat lobby fodder. The much-heralded Programme for Government, released all too beautifully in the Downing Street rose garden, was short term glory for the Liberal Democrats, but a longer-term suicide note.

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Could someone please be sensible about a Lib Lab coalition?

23/01/2013, 07:00:12 AM

by Ian Stewart

Thank you Andrew Rawnsley. No, really – this was exactly the right time to bring up the possibility of Nick Clegg clinging to office by whatever means necessary after 2015.

Of course, Andrew was simply doing what he is paid for – writing speculative fiction that tantalises Observer readers every Sunday. After all, with Len Mcluskey giving one of the most important speeches from any trade union leader in ages, it was obviously a slow week in politics. Oh, and Cameron running away (again) on Europe, those nasty cuts to all those skiving strivers in the NHS, the armed forces; the firefighters’ warning of a looming crisis in our emergency services, yes, nothing to worry the world of high politics.

Now predictably the reaction to Rawnsleys’ article on Sunday has fallen into two camps – those who are trenchantly against any co-operation, and those who, for all sorts of reasons, favour some kind of Lib-Lab alliance. I can find no coherent reason to join the latter camp, yet I also reject the former.

The situation as I understand it is this: Ed and Nick are no longer throwing dung at each other. Outside of Westminster, the Lib Dems still covet the ambition to replace Labour as the main contender to the Tories, and, in differing areas, act accordingly. Most true blue Tories still detest the orange bookers, and blame government failure on them, rather than on Osborne’s economic incompetence.

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Ignore the headlines, Leveson will still pass…if Nick Clegg wants it to

30/11/2012, 07:00:59 AM

by Atul Hatwal

It’s quite simple really. The decision on whether Leveson is implemented is not exclusively in the gift of the prime minister. He does not, to quote today’s Telegraph headline, have a veto because the Tories do not command a majority in the House of Commons. Ed Miliband has committed to bringing forward a vote on the judge’s recommendations so it will be down to the 650 members of parliament to determine the future of press regulation.

Here’s how the arithmetic stacks up: the coalition normally has a working majority of 82. This is the number by which the 360 coalition MPs (303 Tory and 57 Liberal Democrat) exceed the combined strength of all the other parties – 278 MPs – less the speaker and his three deputies who don’t vote and the five Sinn Fein MPs who similarly don’t vote.

If the Lib Dems were whipped to support a vote on implementing Leveson (albeit an amended version to address Clegg’s misgivings on Ofcom’s role in verifying the new watchdog and on data protection), the working majority over the Tories would be 35 (303 Tories versus a new combined total of 335 of the rest).

There is the potential that one of the Lib Dems, John Hemming, will defy the whip, given he signed the anti-Leveson letter organised by Conor Burns and David Blunkett. Similarly there are a handful of anti-Leveson Labour MPs who may defy the whip, including Blunkett, Gisela Stuart, Frank Field, Kate Hoey, Gerald Kaufman and Eric Joyce (yes, I know Eric Joyce is nominally an independent).

Taking these dissenters and adding them to the Tory total gives a reduced pro-Leveson majority in the Commons of 18 (a combined total of 328 MPs versus 310 Tories and anti-Leveson defectors.)

As whips office veterans of the knife edge votes in the 1990s and late 1970s can attest, this is where it gets complicated. The remaining 23 votes are made up of a hotch potch of minor groups and parties.

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Last week’s commons defeat will force the government to address its EU strategy void

06/11/2012, 07:00:19 AM

by Mark Stockwell

The Labour leadership has no doubt spent much of the past week slapping each other heartily on the back. Bliss is it to defeat the government on the floor of the house; to do so by outflanking them on the EU budget is very heaven.

They should enjoy this tactical victory while they can. They were aided by a lackadaisical Conservative whipping operation, and abetted by a worryingly large group of chronic malcontents on the Tory backbenches. Labour will have to work harder in the long term to persuade voters that Ed Miliband and Douglas Alexander’s new-found Eurosceptic fervour would not evaporate the moment the ministerial Eurostar pulled out of St Pancras international.

Clearly, though, it is the government which faces the more pressing strategic issues.

David Cameron’s political instinct (not necessarily the same as his personal inclination) is to try as far as possible to avoid talking about Europe for fear of the “toxic” effect on the Conservative brand. This is understandable. Cameron and George Osborne cut their political teeth in the Maastricht era and that thoroughly miserable experience can’t have failed to be formative.

(I suspect this also partly explains why Labour’s own coterie of former special advisers had so little hesitation in siding with the Tory rebels. There is something of Pavlov’s dog in the way in which both sides have behaved.)

One of the benefits of coalition from Cameron’s point of view was, as Andrew Lilico has suggested at ConservativeHome, that this evasion could be sustained by a block of Lib Dem votes, acting as a counter-weight to backbench rebellions from the Tory right. Wednesday’s vote has shown that this cannot be relied on.

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The government’s top 30 “real achievements”

18/10/2012, 11:12:18 AM

by Michael Dugher

Back in July, after a torrid few months for the government following their budget for millionaires and with Britain in a double-dip recession, David Cameron and Nick Clegg responded the way they always do: they organised another press re-launch. At the event held at a railway depot at Smethwick in the West Midlands, they announced that the Government would publish a mid-term review in the autumn outlining what they had “achieved” and identifying future goals and objectives.

So following the party conference season, and with the imminent publication of this review, it seems a good time to look back over the last two years to assess what the government has really achieved and to outline what its real half-term report should look like. Here are the government’s top 30 real achievements:

On the economy:

1. When the Tories took office the economy was growing, but the government’s policies choked off the recovery and have delivered the longest double-dip recession since the second world war;

2. The IMF has cut its UK growth forecast for 2012 to minus 0.4 per cent;

3. Borrowing is up. Compared to last year, borrowing is up by 22 per cent so far this year;

4. Tax cuts for the rich – the government is cutting 5p from the 50p top rate tax, giving 8,000 people earning over £1 million a tax cut of over £40,000 a year;

5. And at the same time as helping millionaires, the government is introducing a “granny tax”, which will see 4.4 million pensioners who pay income tax losing an average of £83 per year.
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The future is Labour’s to define

02/10/2012, 09:30:39 AM

by Sophie Lambert Russell

Analysts of the 2010 election cannot deny that during the televised debates Nick Clegg charmed his way into the hearts and minds of the British public with his apparent honest approach and sincere appeal to the camera. However, various news outlets are now awash with musings about the next election and it is all too clear that the buzz surrounding Nick Clegg vanished long ago.

The Liberal Democrats have failed to withstand the pressure that comes with being treated as a serious contender in government. An aide who accompanied Clegg during the campaign likened his success to a movie script: “we were like that mousey girl who goes to the prom in films, takes off her glasses, and shakes her hair, and suddenly everyone realises how beautiful she is” he said.

The media were certainly captured by Nick Clegg’s sparkle but this statement does reflect a slight ‘Bambi-ness’ in the Liberal Democrat camp. Since being in power they have failed to push through electoral reform and betrayed a core group of their voters by breaking their election pledge to abolish tuition fees. Jeremy Paxman described this pledge as “the most bare-faced untruth” on Newsnight last week and consequently the party has lost more than half of the support it had in 2010 and Nick Clegg’s popularity is plummeting.

The Conservatives have fared little better. Cameron had the unique experience of not entering his first term in office on the back of a political victory, but as a part of a hastily thrown together coalition. They should have worked harder to shape their message and form popular policy initiatives but like their election campaign, their time in office has been characterised by confusion and inconsistencies with U-turns on removing tax breaks for charitable donations, selling off Britain’s forests, the pasty tax and the third runway at Heathrow.

Arguably, this would not be such of an issue if the Conservatives knew how to handle the press but curiously for the party that brought us Thatcher, ‘the marketing pioneer’, this modern day Conservative party is outrageously media incompetent. Boris Johnson described the commission on a third runway at Heathrow as ‘a fudge’, and fudging is exactly how the Conservatives will make their way through the next election. The government’s media operation resembles one of those old fashioned pinball machines where a policy or a story is catapulted into the political arena where it bounces out of control off any number of levers and whizzing dials while Number 10 are scrambling around trying to bring the story under control and spin it into something positive.

Additionally both parties seem extremely divided. Vince Cable is regarded by some as waiting in the wings, schmoozing Ed Miliband, ready to take the reins from his younger, less experienced counterpart. Cameron has bigger problems. However much he tries to deny it, it is hardly unnoticeable that Boris Johnson is mounting a campaign to take over as the next leader of the Conservative Party. His popularity is growing and growing after an extremely successful Olympics and his likeability and ability to reach across all sections of society is something that will prove invaluable in years to come.With the coalition floundering and both leaders tainted by its failures, Ed Miliband has real opportunity to score with his ‘real jobs guarantee’ and the renewed drive to engage everyone in the political process. Nick Clegg stated in his speech on the last day of the Liberal Democrat Party Conference that “only the Liberal Democrats can be trusted to deliver a fairer society”… yeah right.

All eyes on Ed please.

Sophie Lambert Russell is a Labour activist

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After Clegg’s strop, it’s time for a grown up approach to Lords reform

29/08/2012, 07:00:02 AM

by George Foulkes

When, earlier this month, Nick Clegg announced the demise of his ill-judged and ill thought out plans to reform the House of Lords, he was in a terrible strop. So much so, that he rubbished any proposal to improve the present composition of the second chamber.

David Steel, Helene Hayman and others have proposed a number of measures which would make the current composition and method of appointment more sensible and greatly reduce the ridiculously large size. Hereditary peers could be phased out by ending the laughable by-election provision for so called ‘vacancies’ when hereditaries pass away. Weeding out poor and non- attendees and bringing in a retirement provision could provide the biggest reduction. New members meanwhile could be approved by an expanded and statutory appointments commission and some guidance criteria for appointments published.

Clegg would have none of this. He does not want to add any credibility to what he considers to be a totally discredited House.

In doing so, the deputy prime minister is adopting a typical Marxist/Leninist revolutionary posture: “do not improve the hated institution of government or you will delay the revolution”. But it should be evident to Mr Clegg that the only intelligent way to achieve his goal of Lords reform is through two stage evolution.

Stage one is the kind of tidying up of the present arrangements described above which remove the worst aspects of the status quo – huge size, hereditaries and lack of transparency in appointment.

Stage two however, could be started simultaneously to allay the fears of those who think stage one is a ploy to cast real reform back into the long grass. And this would be found upon the recommendation of the alternative report of the joint committee.

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