Peter Watt « Labour Uncut

Posts Tagged ‘Peter Watt’

Labour needs to put families first. Here’s how.

01/11/2012, 07:00:33 AM

by Peter Watt

With years of austerity in prospect, the search is on for things to put on Labour’s famous blank piece of paper. As health, welfare and education budgets come under pressure there is one institution above all others that a future Labour government should prioritise; the family.

The family is the best form of welfare there is from the cradle to the grave. The family is a great place to provide a healthy environment for children and adults alike. And a huge proportion of learning takes place in families as knowledge is passed literally from generation to generation.

Traditionally Labour family policy has focused on families who, for whatever reason, are down on their luck and who need some help with day-to-day essentials. So the priority has been using the welfare state to target resources. Free school meals, targeted benefits, Sure Start and so on.

But as Ed Miliband rightly points out, many other families with modest incomes have been offered little help and have been struggling. So Labour should go into the next election with an unashamedly pro-family agenda that tries to make life a little easier for our millions of working families. This doesn’t mean withdrawing support for some; it does though mean consciously prioritising the majority. So here is a short list. They should not cost much and some of them may seem small things. Some will require us to possibly decide to stop doing something else and others may pay for themselves. But collectively they will add up to a significant package of help.

Labour should introduce tax breaks for those with children. It doesn’t have to be huge but as the cost of living goes up every little helps. Increasing the tax free allowance for a nominated parent by £500 per child would make a significant difference to many household budgets. And of course, the money would be spent by those who earned it boosting the economy.

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The political classes have forgotten about the victims in the furore over Savile

25/10/2012, 07:00:45 AM

by Peter Watt

Sometimes the political world becomes a parody of itself, and Monday was one of those days. Faced with a barrage of revelation relating to the grim antics of James Savile how did it respond? With glee at another political bun fight and the sight of someone else being brought down in front of a select committee. Congratulations everyone, job well done.

Let’s be really, really clear about what has happened. An iconic figure from the world of the media, a children’s TV presenter for god’s sake, has got away with abusing children over a period of several decades. Hundreds of child victims have been sexually assaulted over decades by this man. And according to the police there appear to have been other perpetrators involved in this tragedy.

Each case of abuse, of violation, is a personal tragedy for the person involved. It will almost certainly have involved shame, secrecy, anger and years of trauma. For many, recovery will have been difficult if not impossible with the consequences of the assault carried into later life and relationships. Savile may be dead but the consequences of what he did will be very much alive for his victims.

And yes, the abuse took place in dressing rooms at the BBC. But also in hospitals and in his caravan and no doubt other venues as well. In other words, this is a human tragedy of immense proportions that spans decades, spans institutions and spans families. The crimes were hidden in public and as a society we must begin to try and understand how this has happened. How is it that over the year’s victims were not believed? Or were too fearful to speak out?

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So, if Labour win the next election, where will we be in October 2015?

18/10/2012, 07:00:56 AM

by Peter Watt

On Saturday hundreds of thousands of people will be demonstrating against the cuts to the public sector being imposed by the government.

The TUC’s “we were told there was an alternative” march and rally in central London is the latest in a series of events organised against the cuts since Ed Balls unveiled his emergency budget in June. PM Miliband faced heckling and walkouts at the TUC in early September and at the Labour party conference 100,000 protesters ringed the conference over-shadowing his Tuesday speech.

Government ministers have faced UK Uncut activists chaining themselves to their cars, bikes, houses and constituency offices as disruption and protest is maximised. But it is the anger towards prime minster Miliband that is most palpable. The elation of the election victory a mere four months ago must now seem a very distant memory to our beleaguered PM.

The problem seems to boil down to a sense of voters feeling let down as Labour impose their austerity package. Of course Miliband and Balls can point to a series of speeches and announcements that they made in opposition that they say made it clear that they would need to make cuts. As Balls said in his interview with Andrew Marr last week:

“We said it would be tough and it is, five years of failed coalition policy that delivered negligible growth means that the government books were even worse than we thought. Of course we were always clear with people that we would need to make some cuts but unfortunately in reality this means that we have a much tougher job on our hands than even we realised.”

But it appears that voters were not as clear about the Labour party’s intentions as Miliband and Balls now claim that they were.

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On tax, Labour must remember: “It’s not our money stupid, it’s theirs”

11/10/2012, 08:00:20 AM

by Peter Watt

So the battle of the speeches is over. All three leaders made pretty good speeches. Nick Clegg, who I have a soft spot for, probably had the toughest job of all but seemed to go down well in the hall at least. But the real battle was Miliband versus Cameron.

Trying to be non-biased, I think that Ed Miliband just won the battle, although David Cameron wasn’t far behind. They were both very similar in that they were both very personal, focused on values and were policy light. They were also both used as opportunities to attack the other; both with some force; and both speeches were passionate and effective.

But in truth, Ed Miliband managed to use his speech to build much needed confidence in him from his party. Critically he also managed to persuade a sceptical press that he really could win an election. It may or may not have been a game changer but it was certainly a very significant event in the slow run-up to the election in 2015. For that reason I think that he won the battle. But he has not yet won the war.

There were two very significant passages in the speeches. The first from Ed:

“A tax cut for millionaires. Next April, David Cameron will be writing a cheque for £40,000 to each and every millionaire in Britain. Not just for one year. But each and every year.”

And the second is from David Cameron’s speech in response:

“I sometimes wonder if they know anything about the real economy at all. Did you hear what Ed Miliband said last week about taxes? He described a tax cut as the government writing people a cheque. Ed… Let me explain to you how it works. When people earn money, it’s their money. Not the government’s money: their money. Then, the government takes some of it away in tax. So, if we cut taxes, we’re not giving them money – we’re taking less of it away. OK?”

Put aside the silly looseness in language from Ed over the “each and every millionaire” line, these two passages hold the key to one of the central battles of the next election – Labour’s competence on the economy.

Unless and until Labour really does understand the tax point then they will struggle to convince people that they are not profligate “tax-and-spenders”. The truth is that too many people in Labour really do think that taxation is an inherently good thing. That somehow taxing people, the state taking peoples’ own money from them, is somehow morally right.

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What about the deficit Ed?

04/10/2012, 07:00:26 AM

by Peter Watt

I didn’t see “the speech” as I was working. I experienced it through the lens of twitter as I journeyed home from work at about 7pm. The general consensus several hours after Ed had finished speaking seemed to be that it was a virtuoso performance with even fierce critics saying that the conference hall loved it. I actually didn’t see any of the performance until the 10pm news and the clips that I saw seemed pretty good to me. What’s more, the faithful clearly loved it and the professional commentators either loved it or accepted that Ed had looked prime ministerial.

Wednesday morning’s radio and newspaper reports continued in this vein with Ed being lauded both for the performance and for the political positioning. One nation Labour was seen as a clever and bold move that achieved two things. Firstly it moved Labour tanks onto the Tory lawn. And secondly it was a useful way of packaging Ed’s central message. As he said in his post speech email to members:

“That means a one nation banking system: banks that work for all of us, not gamble our savings in casino operations. It means a one nation skills system: a gold standard of vocational education which leads to many more apprenticeships which give opportunities to those who don’t go to university as well as those who do.

It means building a one nation economy with rules that encourage long-term investment. It means keeping the United Kingdom together, making immigration work for everybody and recognising that at the moment it does not, and standing up for the values of the NHS.”

And, as someone who has written about the need for a vision and for Ed to work hard at being “prime ministerial” I am delighted. Throw in the fact that Ed’s most effective attack lines were on governmental incompetence rather than on usual banal “nasty Tory” nonsense and I couldn’t have wanted for much more!

I know that others have said that it was policy light and that it didn’t actually say much. But to be honest I think that at this stage of the game being seen as a credible potential PM and offering a bit of vision is more important than the odd policy. Of course it was just one speech and was hardly watched by anyone. But it will have increased Ed’s confidence, the Labour party’s confidence in him and will have unsettled an already wobbling Tory Party. All in all, not a bad days work!

And the consequence of all of this is that the media will begin to take the prospect of prime minister Miliband seriously. They will therefore begin to look more closely. Here is the thing that team Miliband need to watch. It is the one thing that he definitely didn’t mention in his speech. In fact it has hardly been mentioned in Manchester at all.

The deficit.

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The Rotherham grooming case shows the dangers of confusing criminality with culture

27/09/2012, 07:00:12 AM

by Peter Watt

If you are a parent then there are some things that scare you more than others. Someone else hurting your children is pretty high up that list.

The details emerging from Rotherham over the last few months about the systematic abuse of young girls are truly the stuff of parental nightmare. But it’s all made worse because it now seems that for over ten years those charged with protecting children and young people failed. In fact worst of all, they decided to look the other way!

They made a choice; protect children in the face of overwhelming evidence of sexual abuse and cruelty or worry more about some misconceived notion of “cultural sensitivities”, as if there is any culture where rape is acceptable.

They chose the latter.

It is important to say that the Times (£) has led the way in exposing both the abuse and the cover up. And some of the details that they have uncovered from confidential reports are some of the most shocking that you can imagine. The documents revealed by the Times give details of events over the years for which no one was prosecuted such as:

fifty-four Rotherham children were linked to sexual exploitation by three brothers from one British Pakistani family, 18 identifying one brother as their “boyfriend” and several allegedly made pregnant by him;
a 14-year-old girl from a loving, supportive family was allegedly held in a flat and forced to perform sex acts on five men, four of them Pakistani, plus a 32-year-old Iraqi Kurd. She gave a filmed police interview and identified her abusers;
one girl, 15, spent days in hospital after a broken bottle was allegedly forced inside her by two young British Pakistani men in a park, causing her to bleed extensively;
a 13-year-old girl was found at 3am with disrupted clothing in a house with a large group of Asian men who had fed her vodka. A neighbour reported the girl’s screams. Police arrested the child for being drunk and disorderly but did not question the men.

But the police and local authorities knew – and did nothing!

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People might be in two minds about the parties, but Cameron is still edging it for their vote

20/09/2012, 07:00:52 AM

by Peter Watt

Nearly half way through the Parliament and inevitably we are all reading the runes and making predictions. Who will win in 2015? Who will lead {insert name of party} into the next election? Will the coalition survive? For those of us who like this sort of thing there is a raft of political and psephological soul searching with theory and counter theory argued out on political forums across the media. It is all good stuff and the narrative for the time since the last election can be summarised as:

The government had a good first eighteen months or so and have been a shambles ever since
The budget this year was a particularly big and nasty disaster for the government and as a result Labour have had a poll lead ever since
The economy is stubbornly refusing to recover
People generally like Ed Miliband but David Cameron remains people’s preferred choice as prime minister

What you think might happen next basically boils down to four things:

To what degree you think that Labour’s poll lead is soft
To what extent you think that Ed Miliband/David Cameron are assets for their respective parties
How much the economy recovers over the next couple of years
Whether the public trust Labour on the economy and can see Ed Miliband as prime minister.

But almost everyone thinks that the Liberals look down and out. And increasingly most people seem to think that a Tory majority is unlikely and are now contemplating a possible Labour victory of some kind. Certainly lots of Labour people seem increasingly confident that this will be a one term Government. And equally lots of Tories and Lib Dems are a little nervous about their prospects with their respective current leaders.

But I think that all of this analysis may be more than a little flawed.

It is predicated on a cosy assumption that people are still broadly wedded to the party system. That on the whole some people are broadly “leftish”, some people broadly “rightish” whilst a few electorally influential voters are a bit more promiscuous. Appeal to enough of the promiscuous and you win.

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Archbishop Tutu is wrong, Tony Blair showed true moral leadership over Iraq

13/09/2012, 07:00:37 AM

by Peter Watt

There has been an awful lot of noise again recently about Iraq. This followed on from an article that Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote in the Observer about his decision to publicly “spurn” Tony Blair by not appearing at an event that they were both due at in South Africa. Archbishop Tutu said:

“The immorality of the United States and Great Britain’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003, premised on the lie that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, has destabilised and polarised the world to a greater extent than any other conflict in history.

Instead of recognising that the world we lived in, with increasingly sophisticated communications, transportations and weapons systems necessitated sophisticated leadership that would bring the global family together, the then-leaders of the US and UK fabricated the grounds to behave like playground bullies and drive us further apart. They have driven us to the edge of a precipice where we now stand – with the spectre of Syria and Iran before us.

If leaders may lie, then who should tell the truth?”

This then spawned a wave of articles from clever and eminent people who explained exactly why international law made it clear that Tony Blair was guilty of war crimes and should be dragged to the Hague.

Others wrote articles saying why this was nonsense and that international law said no such thing.

I read many of these articles with interest and increasing disquiet; but I couldn’t quite put my finger on why.

And then I realised what was bothering me. In all of this very clever argument and counter-argument there was one thing missing.

Those who wrote saying “Bliar” was a war criminal did so because they passionately felt that the war was wrong. They felt a sense of moral outrage that shone through their demands that international law is invoked.

Conversely, those arguing that international laws were not an issue tended to argue in purely legal terms. Their arguments somehow lacked the passion or moral outrage of Archbishop Tutu for instance in his Observer article.

The overall sense was that in deciding to commit British forces in the second Iraq war Tony Blair had unquestionably committed a grossly immoral act that might or might not be illegal.

And that was it, the thing that bothered me: the absence of the moral case for freeing Iraq.

I passionately believe that the decision made by Tony Blair was the right and moral response to the circumstances we faced. It must have been an incredibly difficult decision and one that took huge amounts of leadership – and I respect him hugely for it.

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The unsung hero of our golden Olympic summer is…John Major

06/09/2012, 07:00:54 AM

by Peter Watt

Rightly over the last few weeks we have marvelled at the sports that we have witnessed during the Olympics and currently at the Paralympics. If we were worried about whether we could pull it off as country before, then now all we can do is push our chests out and rightly gloat. We did it!

It is difficult to find anything that has not gone well and the memories that we are left with are sublime. Mo Farah, Jessica Ennis, Bradley Wiggins, Ellie Simmonds, David Weir; we will all have our favourites. It has been a sporting experience that is being shared in some shape or form by the majority of the population.

The rest of the world has rightly looked on and has been impressed by our organisation, by our sporting success and by the sheer joy with which we have embraced the games.

Inevitably there have been some rather lame attempts to get political kudos from all of this. Labour has mentioned “once or twice” that it was a Labour government that had the courage to secure the games in the first place. The Tories have made much of the fact that the delivery was completed on time and on their watch. They have also hoped that a national focus on the weeks of glorious sport would give them a break from the relentlessly bad news of the previous months.

Our politicians have had photo-ops with athletes and with supporters. They have presented medals and flowers to winners. Twitter has been full of the political community discussing the multiplicity of sports and publicly congratulating our sporting greats. The hope was that the greatness and feel-good factor would rub off. It worked for Boris but definitely not for George or Theresa.

In fact I suspect that the booing of George Osborne may become an enduring and defining impression. But that aside, on the whole, the activities of our politicians have thankfully gone unnoticed during the sporting festivities.

But I have been inspired by the spirit of fair-play embodied by the Olympians and Paralympians. And in that spirit, there seems to me to be one politician above all others who can justifiably feel self-satisfied at the role that they have played in the success of London 2012.

And that is John Major.

John Major has somehow been written out of history by many in politics. Certainly the Tories don’t really talk about him or his term in office. And Labour isn’t that bothered about referring to the Major years either. It is almost as if nothing happened politically between 1990 and 1997 that really matters anymore. Surely it was all about sleaze, internal fights over Maastricht and assaults on John Major’s leadership?

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Self-interest not the national interest is driving each party’s economic policy

31/08/2012, 07:00:13 AM

by Peter Watt

For three successive quarters our economy has contracted. And this week there is yet another report painting a gloomy picture for the foreseeable future. This time it’s the CBI reporting that they expect the economy to contract by 0.3% this year. The CBI’s director general, John Cridland, said:

“At present I believe the economy is flat rather than falling but, nonetheless, momentum seems to have weakened and the latest official figures put the UK in recession for the second quarter of this year.”

And so it goes on; it’s hard to remember when the economy was doing anything else other than struggling or worse. Behind the headline numbers jobs are under threat, family budgets are squeezed and uncertainty stalks the land. And on top of an economic contraction we have public finances that are in a pretty dire state. No party expects an end to the current public sector budget squeeze until 2017 at the earliest. In fact, after the most recent government borrowing figures even that looks optimistic. In July 2011 the chancellor had a surplus of £2.8 billion and in July 2012 he had to borrow £600 million!

Some experts are saying that he may end up borrowing £30 billion more this year than last when the OBR had been predicting a significant drop in the amount needing to be borrowed. Not quite the progress that George intended.

So now is the time for strong and bold leadership and honesty with the public about what our increasingly dire economic position means. And yet none of the parties seem capable of either.

Firstly the government is increasingly wrapped up in its own navel gazing and appears rudderless. For months now it has seemed bereft of any sense of purpose other than deficit reduction. But now that this seems to be failing the lack of a vision is telling. You would really struggle to say exactly what the government is for and what it wants to do. There are exceptions; you might not agree with Michael Gove or Iain Duncan Smith but you at least know what they intend to do in their departments.

But beyond that, what are the government trying to do? They chop, change and squabble giving the impression of being all over the place. Policy is announced and then reversed and the briefings and counter briefings are now endemic. Who’d be a government whip right now?!

Most importantly there aren’t many government MPs left who really believe that George Osborne is the man to save the country’s economic, and their political, bacon. David Cameron appears bemused but is caught in the contradictions of the coalition. But the one thing that still binds the coalition is the central plank of their coalition, their stated core purpose, deficit reduction.

To challenge their hitherto agreed approach right now maybe sound economics but risks exposing the schisms within and between the parties. It risks further damage to that which keeps them all in government – their shared parliamentary majority.

Yet that doesn’t stop the deputy PM announcing wild and ill thought emergency taxes on the rich. He might have thought that it would make him look in tune with the concerns of those who once voted Lib Dem but everyone else just laughed!

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