Peter Watt « Labour Uncut

Posts Tagged ‘Peter Watt’

Time to put away the needle and thread and stop stitching up selections

11/04/2012, 08:30:59 AM

by Peter Watt

If I was sat in Labour party HQ in Victoria Street right now, staring down the barrel of further financial strife, then I would be tempted to do everything I could to minimise unnecessary expenditure. And I would be right to do so. If the reports are true that the party overspent last year by £1.7 million then it is quite a big gun after all!

But if it really is financial strife that has apparently lead to a proposal to ban sitting MPs from standing for election to directly elected mayors or police and crime commissioners later this year, then that is a terrible error.

It is however an error that merely highlights a serious malaise at the heart of our politics, and to be fair, the politics of all of the major parties.

On the face of it, the argument for the decision to ban ambitious MP’s from standing is persuasive. Each by-election will cost £70 – £100,000 or so. We might lose to another (popular) candidate. Why take the risk?

But these reasons are all predicated on an out-of-date thought process.

The assumption is that the only way to win is for the party to impose the “right” candidate. That the campaign must be run using the central party machine which imposes the will of the “experts” on the locals. And finally that the campaign must then spend on staff, hotels, travel, campaign HQ and lots of flash literature. All spending money that the party doesn’t actually have.

To be fair, for many years this model served the party pretty well. As I know well because I have worked on, planned, set budgets for and managed selections (read into that what you will) for more by-elections than I care to remember. But it is a model that is simply no longer fit for purpose.

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London deserves a better mayoral campaign

05/04/2012, 07:55:31 AM

by Peter Watt

Does anyone outside the heady world of politics actually care about the London mayoral election?

Setting aside the train wreck of last night’s debate on Newsnight, the mayoralty is one of the highest profile positions in British politics and carries the biggest personal mandate for any politician in Europe, bar the French presidency. It should matter.

The reason I ask is that my 18 year old daughter (18 last week) received her poll card recently. I overheard her chatting to a friend about the fact that she could now vote which she was pleased about. But then she said that she wasn’t actually sure if she should bother voting at all. So I decided that I would tackle this appalling apathy head on and explain the importance of voting and the particular merits of voting in the London mayoral election.

But I decided, I had better marshal my thoughts first – you know what tricky buggers teenagers can be if you’re not prepared. Anyway, I worked up what I hoped would be a concise set of arguments that set out the importance of democracy and of voting. People have died for the right to vote; having your say; preserving freedoms and so on. It wasn’t exactly Mandelaesque but it wasn’t bad. But then I began thinking about the reasons to specifically vote in the London mayoral election and I struggled.

This has to be one of the least inspiring election campaigns that I have ever witnessed. It seems to boil down to: vote for Ken because he isn’t Boris or vote for Boris because he isn’t Ken. Unless you want to vote for some bloke called Brian whose most endearing feature seems to be that he isn’t called Boris or Ken. I mean beyond that, what else is there?

According to Ken’s website, he is going to give all Londoners a “Fare Deal” by cutting transport costs. Well that’s good. But is that it? According to Boris’s website the main reason to vote for him is to re-elect him. Not even a fare cut from Boris then. But to be fair, if the opportunity to re-elect Boris is not enough to excite you then if you click through to the main site then you learn that by voting for Boris you can cut waste, create an Olympic legacy and…to be honest I got bored. It’s not really the stuff of political legend is it?

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Time for Ed and Cam to grow up on funding

28/03/2012, 07:00:23 AM

by Peter Watt

The cringe inducing video of Peter Cruddas promising supper with Sam and David with comic buffoonery was still leading the news. The nod and a wink about the promise of policy input into (something called) the number ten policy committee of course took this to another level. At a stroke it went from being just another “cash for access story” to “cash for policy” – the real daddy of political sleaze. Having said that, I was actually still quite optimistic on Sunday, maybe this time there would be a political deal; maybe this time our politicians will sort it out; maybe this time there would be legislation fundamentally reforming the funding of political parties?

But by Monday evening the optimism was dashed. Once again the ugly head of tribal politics intervened. Ed Miliband and Francis Maude stood at the respective dispatch boxes and shouted at each other. It was horrifically depressing. Neither of them in my view did politics any favours, despite the supportive bellowing from their respective benches behind them. The public, to the extent that they were watching, must have thought, “WTF was that” because it certainly wasn’t edifying.

None of the parties has much to boast about here. Each has their list of scandals involving party and MP finances. It is all too easy to get dragged in, as I very well know. Some scandals involve people trying to personally gain while some involve mistakes, or are the result of playing within the rules but not within the spirit of them. All though, involve a further nail in the coffin of the reputation of politics, as a sceptical public do not draw any distinction as to the motives. I know that I certainly regret my part in the succession of stories that have damaged politics.

Now if someone decides to feather their own nest and act corruptly there is probably not much that we can do about it, but there is something that we can do to reduce the risk of other funding scandals. Because the harsh truth is that the current system encourages the parties to push at the boundaries of the legislation passed ostensibly to clean up politics. Just as people perfectly reasonably employ accountants to help them avoid tax, so political parties employ people to maximise the income that they can receive. After all, why should they turn a gift horse away? So loop holes are found and exploited. Legal? Yes. Acceptable? Certainly not to the public.

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The Kelly proposals: eminently sensible and workable

26/03/2012, 02:08:13 PM

This post by Peter Watt was originally published on 24th November 2011. David Cameron could have done with reading it back then, might have saved himself a spot of bother. But at Uncut we believe in giving people second chances, so here it is again.

The reaction to the report “political party funding – ending the big donor culture“, by the committee on standards in public life, chaired by Sir Christopher Kelly, has been depressing if not surprising.

I feel strongly about this issue. I was caught up in “cash for honours”. I had to instigate swingeing budget cuts and redundancies to avoid bankruptcy at the Labour party. I was part of Labour’s negotiating team in the failed Haydn Philips inter-party talks on party funding in 2006 and I was embroiled in a pretty major funding scandal that lead to my resignation as general secretary and another police investigation. I also gave evidence to the Kelly enquiry.

So let’s start with some cold hard facts.

Politics is expensive. Staff that run campaigns, develop policy and arrange conferences, plan strategy, engage the public and design materials, websites and videos cost money. And there’s everything a reasonable sized organisations needs: advertising, membership systems, property, cars, travel, hotels, publications, professional services like accountants and lawyers, furniture, computers, software licenses, insurance and stationery. This does not come cheap and it all needs to be paid for.
Politicians are generally shallow and fear failure. This means that they don’t care all that much about where the money comes from to pay for those things that they think that they need to maximise their chances of winning. They will dress it up as wanting to win to do good things, and there is obviously some truth in that. But fundamentally they want the glory; and they need funds to achieve it.
Politicians do not get involved in fundraising. They, rightly, fear being tainted by the “dirty” business of fundraising. So while they demand that the funds are there when they need them, they generally don’t lift a finger to raise it unless absolutely forced. The result is that those charged with raising funds are put under enormous pressure and are given very little support to raise the necessary cash.
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The real impact of the budget on the public

22/03/2012, 07:00:14 AM

by Peter Watt

The thing about big political events is that they generally aren’t big events in the same way that, say big sporting events or a royal wedding are. The latter are things that most people are aware of and that get people talking. Big political events generally do neither. But they certainly feel like really big events if you are a political junkie or you are working inside the political world.

I can remember when Labour Party HQ used to buy all of the staff ice-creams on budget day; it was a bit of a tradition. In the weeks building up to the day itself there would be mounting excitement. Briefings were prepared and printers were primed to start printing materials within minutes of the end of the budget so that local campaigners were ready for their weekends work. Because the point was that budgets were big, game-changing, or game re-enforcing events.

Except looking back, they generally weren’t, and very little actually changed. The polls might blip but they soon blipped back to where they were before.

And I was reminded of this yesterday; because I, along with every other political obsessive, had enjoyed this last week. The NHS Bill skirmishes and the budget briefing. Both had left us all with plenty to read, discuss and tweet about.

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The flaws at the heart of the Labour party’s reorganisation

15/03/2012, 07:00:22 AM

by Peter Watt

I have decided to write something about Labour party governance. Now wait; before you stop reading simply because you assume that any article about governance must be aimed at anoraks give me a moment as it really is an important issue.

The Labour party is governed by the National Executive Committee (NEC) who act in the same way as a board of directors or trustees do. In other words, they are responsible for ensuring that the party manages its finances well; delivers on its primary objective of securing elected Labour representation and other subsidiary objectives like better representation of women. And also for ensuring that the party complies with its legal responsibilities. They also oversee, but do not direct, day-to-day operations of the party. The day-to-day work is managed by the party’s chief executive the general secretary.

Traditionally the arrangement has not been a particularly good one in the Labour party with good governance being secondary to other political pressures. The result was that the party became horrifically in debt and no one on the NEC seemed to notice.

The reasons for this are twofold.

Firstly the NEC itself was much more interested in politics than governance. In other words they got elected or appointed by virtue of fighting for position or votes in internal elections on the back of taking positions politically.

They were experts in lots of things to do with politics, trade unions and so on. But that didn’t make them experts in governance, asking the right questions, finances and the like. Whilst other organisations could undertake a skills audit of their boards and appoint non-execs or other trustees to plug the skills gap – the NEC had elections to its various stakeholder sections.

And secondly the party management team saw it as their job to keep the NEC out of decision making. What they didn’t know couldn’t hurt and anyway the NEC really weren’t that interested, or so the argument went.

It was just easier to set up NEC committees and structures that provided more confusion than transparency. Plus there was always a third source of power that party managers had to worry about – the leader’s office. The leader’s office always wanted to be in charge of everything but knew that the key to managing the weird and byzantine world of the NEC was the general secretary and their team.

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Mould appearing in the rose garden

08/03/2012, 08:00:54 AM

by Peter Watt

When the Tory Lib-Dem Coalition was formed, I remember the then hopeful Labour voices saying that it wouldn’t or couldn’t last. That the internal contradictions would bring it down. But David and Nick were cleverer than that. They agreed a shared programme for government, rules for managing disagreement and a divvying up of jobs. And not only that, but they also passed the Parliament act 2010, that for all intents and purposes bound them together until the formal start of the next general election, 2015. And the truth was that Labour didn’t have a clue what to do about it or what to say to attack it.

Labour said that it was a Tory lead government propped up by hypocritical Fib Dems. They taunted the government for its disagreements and obvious internal tensions. But the public weren’t bothered by all that. On the contrary, they looked at the “rows” and instead saw two parties coming together in the national interest trying to cooperate. Because the glue that bound the government together was the deficit. The public understood that they didn’t both agree on everything, but despite that they were prepared to put that aside to help dig the country out of a hole; a financial hole that Labour had dug. And that was pretty much how the story has run since the love in the rose garden.

Of course there have been difficulties: the AV referendum, student finance and almost every word uttered by Vince Cable have all put tension on the partner’s relationship. And Nick Clegg must be pretty miffed that he seems to have taken more than his share of the personal popularity pain, while David Cameron remains, well, prime ministerial. But dealing with the deficit and a sense of sink or swim together has kept the show on the road.

Because the deficit and its reduction is a very necessary policy objective, it is not a political cause. In other words, it is not a story that tells of the sort of country that you want to deliver. And perversely this has been useful up until now as the two parties would almost certainly not have been able to agree on what the story would be. And anyway the public have not been worried about any lack of a visionary story. On the contrary, they have just wanted to be reassured that their government was doing all that it could to avoid Britain becoming Greece. Deficit reduction may not have been a compelling story, but who needs a story when you’re worried that the banks will run out of money?

But just recently there have been signs, just signs, of a growing tension at the heart of government. And at its heart, this increase in tension between the partners is caused by this lack of a shared vision. Because deficit fatigue is kicking in for the public. It doesn’t mean that they don’t care about it anymore because they do. It’s just that it has been said so often that it has almost become meaningless.

Saying that you are in favour of reducing the deficit is like saying that you are in favour of motherhood. Who isn’t? Oh there are arguments about how fast and all that. But no one is seriously saying that we shouldn’t reduce the deficit. So instead people are focusing on the quality of their lives, the price of goods and the security of their jobs. And the political strategists know that they quickly need to start telling a story that addresses these fears and hopes about the future.

And so that is forcing the arguments out into the open about what sort of country that the coalition wants to see. How big and how active should the state be? Who should pay what and how much into the national coffers? What is the best way to create growth? What is the relationship between the public and private sectors? And inevitably the cracks have begun to open as we have seen this week in the run up the budget. Arguments about a mansion tax, the 50p tax rate and the break-up of RBS.

The tensions inherent in the coalition are there for all to see as outriders from both parties take to the airwaves to promote one view or the other. And more and more often we are seeing MPs from one coalition party condemning the other party. Presumably this will only get worse as we enter the latter half of the parliament. The cooperative strength of the early days of the coalition could quickly become a weakness caused by splits and indecision. There does still seem to be a strong relationship between the big four in the Cabinet (Cameron, Osborne, Clegg and Alexander). And it does seem more likely than not that the Coalition will soldier on. But it also looks like it is quickly going to become an uncomfortable partnership.

So Labour has an opportunity to begin to tell its own story as the tensions within the coalition slowly simmer. But only if it is able to begin to tell its own credible story about the sort of country that they want to see. And only if they remember that people’s deficit fatigue does not mean that Labour have won the argument and that in fact people still blame Labour for causing it.*

*Even if Labour thinks that that is unfair.

Peter Watt was general secretary of the Labour party.

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Workfare: fair work with a clear benefit

01/03/2012, 08:00:37 AM

by Peter Watt

Once again Labour has discovered its self-destructive sense of self-righteousness. It seems that sometimes we really can’t help ourselves. This time the issue is workfare where some in the party seem determined to reinforce the image of Labour as the party of the workshy.

But let’s get real. We need to start being honest and stop sending mixed messages. We have said that we are in favour of supporting people into work and of investing in supporting the long-term unemployed. We have said that we support reforming the welfare system so that welfare is not a lifestyle choice. And we have said that we must support hard working families who are struggling as costs go up. But then we go and spoil it by seeming to take pleasure in attacking companies who agree to take on the unemployed as part of a package of back to work support.

But “hang on”, I hear you say. Of course we oppose workfare. It makes people work for nothing. It compels people to work against their will. It allows bloated profit makers to exploit poor people as they don’t have to pay them for their work. And it forces people who would otherwise have to be paid out of a job. Quite frankly we might as well put the unemployed in orange boiler suits, spray “soap-dodger” on their back and make them dig ditches.

Except of course it isn’t true. (more…)

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Greece has taken one for the team; for now

23/02/2012, 08:00:22 AM

by Peter Watt

What a relief, the world has been saved. Again.

In 2008 there was a financial crisis that many have described as being worse than that of the 1930s. Markets collapsed, banks failed and lives were ruined. In essence, and over many years, much of the western world had begun to believe in magic. Somehow we could all have really low taxes and really high spending by governments. We could have relatively low interest rates and unlimited access to borrowing. Individuals and governments indulged themselves as excess cash from the economies of the east poured into a market of gorging consumers. Credit cards, mortgages, car loans, government bonds – it didn’t matter as there was so much money to go around.

But it was all too good to be true and it couldn’t go on forever.

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If Labour wants to save the NHS it must change it

16/02/2012, 07:30:58 AM

by Peter Watt

Almost everybody agrees that the NHS bill is dangerous. Except, probably, the health secretary Andrew Lansley. Patients groups, trade unions and most of the royal colleges are seemingly all united in their condemnation. And opinion polls indicate a sceptical public. The legislation is so dangerous that the end of the NHS is apparently nigh if you listen to the most hysterical opponents of the legislation.

And increasing numbers of Tory MPs allegedly think that the bill is bad for their political health. If the economy is Labour’s weakness, then they know that the NHS is theirs. Much of the public may not yet have caught up with the reforms, but they fear that they will soon.

Up until now the government has successfully blamed all of the country’s ills on the last Labour government. It has been easy, and on the whole very successful. But they know that between now and the election, every winter crisis, unclean ward or staff shortage is an opportunity for Labour to blame them and their NHS legislation. And that risks their seats and may just put the outcome of the next election, which up until now they were feeling optimistic about, in some doubt. (more…)

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