Posts Tagged ‘Peter Johnson’

The week Uncut

12/09/2010, 03:37:45 PM

The PLP have spoken. The entire shadow cabinet will remain elected. Whoever is celebrating in Manchester on the 25 September will wake up to the reality of leadership and little control over who makes their front bench team.

Talk of who’ll get what job has begun. Senior MPs are canvassing support to make sure they get in to the shoot out for the top roles. With some of the big beasts ruling themselves out it’s all to play for. The big winners this week were the Whip’s office. If their hype is to be believed, there will still be a Mr Brown at the very heart of the party.

It was the week that Ed B played the drums, Ed M led by a nose, Andy sent out a mail shot, David won the support of an east ender and a deep spacer, and Diane, well, has anyone seen Diane?

In case you missed them, here are Uncut’s best read pieces of the last seven days:

The hacking-gate heroes: four men in search of a scandal

Ed Balls may be winning the economic argument – but he could still be wrong, argues Anthony Painter

Lets not get carried away with the Coulson affair says Dan Hodges

We lost the 2010 election during Blair’s watch, as well as Brown’s, says Michael Dugher

Rachel Reeves on the government’s chaotic and contradictory economic policy

Big business, bad bankers and hard times for Northern Ireland, by Peter Johnson

Jonathan Todd on the challenge for the new shadow chancellor

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Big business, bad bankers and hard times for Northern Ireland, by Peter Johnson

08/09/2010, 02:06:37 PM

When it comes to its relationship with private industry, Labour can’t seem to win. In the period before the New Labour adventure, the party was perceived as being anti-business, the big battalions of which wasted little love on us in return. To prove that we had changed our ways, Blair and Brown “wooed big business and acted as if they were in awe of it”, to slightly re-cast Andy Burnham’s phrase.  In this critical respect the Blair-Brown journey, with the party dutifully in tow, went too far. We should have stuck with our instincts about the barons of business.

In contrast to our tentative trust in it, big business – or specifically banks – repaid Labour’s new found faith and support by stabbing it in the guts. The blade was twisted to maximum effect and placed in the hands of Labour – who were caught red-handed by the electorate still holding on to the evidence.

Subsequently, everything Labour achieved and implemented in 13 years is being unravelled before our eyes by the policies of the corrosive Tory-Lib Dem government that replaced it.  From the scrapping of the child trust fund; the freezing of child benefit, cuts to the disability living allowance and the scrapping of the free primary school meals project, the list reads dramatic and seemingly endless. Even the winter fuel allowance is in the assassin’s sights.  Worryingly, the accuracy of the chancellor’s aim to date has been true and his trigger-finger pulled with the cold, ruthless efficiency of a professional hit-man.

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