Posts Tagged ‘Owen Paterson’

The Uncuts: 2021 Political Awards (Part II)

31/12/2021, 07:11:04 PM

Culture War Winners: The England football team

England might have been denied the European Championship, but by the time the final Italian penalty went in, they had won arguably a more significant prize: victors in the battle of bended knee, the England football team effectively ended the main phase of the UK’s culture wars.

Priti Patel, Boris Johnson, various Tory MPs and right-wing commentators had bloviated about “gesture politics” and the Marxist connotations of taking the knee in the run-up to the European Championships. It was the high season of the Johnson premiership and the prevailing narrative was of an extraordinary leader who had used Brexit and cultural values to remake politics in the UK. The attack, like over Brexit, was on the values of the left for being unpatriotic, un-British and in direct opposition to the mainstream view of the country.

At the start, few in politics expected a team of pampered millionaires prone to serial under-performance when it mattered most, to win the argument. But the England team stood, and knelt, together. And most importantly, they won football matches.

This might have turned out very differently had they been dumped out of the tournament in the group stage. But they weren’t, they made it all the way to the final, capturing the imagination of England en route.

Suddenly, a new cast of characters were the ones who were unpatriotic for attacking the national football team. Tory MPs like Lee Anderson, who boycotted England matches because they took the knee, were made to look like fools. Drowned in the hope and adulation of a nation that backed their football team. The polls moved conclusively with the majority for those supporting the knee rising from +13% to +24%.

Unsurprisingly, since then, there has been very little from the Government or its outriders attempting to open new fronts in the culture wars. Their defeat was conclusive and has marked a shift in the battleground of politics. To appropriate the Sun’s headline after the 1992 general election, “It was England wot won it”

Own Goal of the Year: Owen Paterson (more…)

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The Uncuts: 2021 Political Awards (Part I)

31/12/2021, 09:50:22 AM

Political Comeback Of The Year: Keir Starmer

On the morning of Sunday May 9th , Keir Starmer was on political life support. Labour had lost the Hartlepool by-election the previous Thursday and then his attempted reshuffle had been blown up by Angela Rayner refusing to go quietly. The headlines for Labour and its leader were dire. There seemed to be a real chance that Keir Starmer might not make it to the end of the year in post.

But here we are, at the back of 2021 and Labour has a solid lead in the polls with its leader ahead of Boris Johnson on just about every metric. Keir Starmer even delivered a reshuffle that has reinvigorated the shadow cabinet, marginalised the left and palpably diminished the power of his turbulent deputy.

What went right?

Boris Johnson obviously has played a large part in the shift. Few could have anticipated the missteps over Owen Paterson, the video and photos of lockdown breaking Christmas celebrations in 2020 and the loss of a 23,000 majority in North Shropshire.

But these mistakes have only accelerated a trend that was evident back in the dark days of May.

At Uncut, on May 19th, we wrote that the vaccine bounce was obscuring the underlying position in British politics – namely that the parties were likely level pegging, a reality that would become evident once the vaccine bounce subsided.

And so, it has come to pass.

Keir Starmer’s achievement has been in holding fast to his basic approach. Unlike the voices in May who called for an immediate new direction, for tomes of policy to be rushed through, for panic measures, he has demonstrated a rare skill in modern politics: to wait. He remained calm, at least outwardly, waiting to make his case to the public until the worst of the pandemic was in the rear-view mirror.

The news cycle for a major event moves from reporting of the facts to the first wave of comment within a couple of hours. There’s then a further wave of comment reacting to the initial comment within another few hours, generally crystallising around a set of demands for action in a third wave of comment, which is then pitched at politicians for a binary yes or no answer. Should X be sacked? Do you disavow your position on Y? Will you resign if Z happens?

A cycle which would have taken several days to unwind twenty years ago, now occurs within hours. It’s a rollercoaster where the imperative is on politicians to act ‘decisively’. And then do so again the next day on the next issue, and again later that week and on and on. Keir Starmer is a rather an old fashioned politician who doesn’t.

It’s a strategy that carries risk. Persistently rejecting demands for instant action, over weeks and months, builds a meta-narrative of inertia and weakness. It’s a story that the Labour left have done their best to tell to undermine and topple the leader.

But the polling over the past month doesn’t lie and ultimately Keir Starmer has called it right. He’s moved on his own terms when the timing and circumstances were propitious and put himself in the best position to capitalise when Boris Johnson’s manifest failings became electorally evident. More please in 2022.

International Politician of the Year: Olaf Scholz

Germany is under new management. Labour’s sister party now leads Europe’s economic powerhouse and political centre of gravity. Olaf Scholz is our international politician of the year for ending the Angela Merkel era with this sea change victory.

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Paterson’s in the wrong department to wing it

12/02/2013, 11:33:32 AM

by Kevin Meagher

If there’s one thing that united Northern Ireland’s republicans and unionists alike, it was relief in seeing the back of Owen Paterson as secretary of state. His Tory grandee shtick didn’t play with either side, but it was more than his air of lofty patrician indifference, he was disliked because of his poor grasp of detail.

In that respect, he left the frying pan to jump headlong in to the fire. Reshuffled to Defra last September, Paterson is currently floundering, trying to respond to the corruption of our food-chain security which has seen horsemeat turn up, well, everywhere it shouldn’t; while Muslim prisoners have been eating non-Halal pasties. Further scandals are promised.

Paterson is suffereing because of two problems specific to Defra. The first is that the everyday substance of policy there is detailed, pernickety and hard to grasp. It favours clever, assiduous ministers like Michael Meacher or genuine enthusiasts like Elliot Morley with a personal interest in the department’s stock-in-trade. (He was a twitcher before, alas, serving a spell of bird). Assiduous and enthusiastic are not words to describe Paterson’s performance over the past couple of weeks.

The second is that the department is like a portmanteau case, opening out to include powerful vested interests. There’s quangos like the Environment Agency. The privatised water companies and their independent regulator, Ofwat. And the farming lobby. And the landowners. And the animal rights people. There are plenty of well-organised groups to fall out with and Paterson needs to do just that, firing a rocket at powerful food producers and retailers.

I remember asking a former boss of mine who had worked in the gas industry why the old department of energy was folded into the department of trade and industry. His answer? The department was simply a focal point for powerful corporates in the oil and gas industries who button-holed ministers with their own particular gripes. Better to have an energy minister in a department with a wider mandate to dilute their influence on policy.

So, too, it is with Defra. Amalgamating the old Ministry of Agriculture Fisheries and Food (MAFF) with the Department of Environment after the 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak simply aggregated-up the knotty issues and vocal lobbies.

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