Rob Marchant « Labour Uncut

Posts Tagged ‘Rob Marchant’

Without a revival in the south there will be no new Labour government

30/05/2012, 07:00:30 AM

by Rob Marchant

It is spring, two years into a parliament, and an activist’s mind turns to…elections (well, we are an odd lot).

Candidates start to be chosen and campaigns planned. We have a much clearer idea of what kind of opponents we will be up against in 2015. A new leadership finds its feet and gets to grips with its medium-term political strategy.

The trouble with the end of an era in politics, as in most other branches of human thought, is that in our rush to turn the page, we’re invariably faced with the baby/bathwater problem. And the next election is no exception.

New Labour is dead, and those of us who were part of it need to be sanguine about the need for moving on. But there’s a current fashion in some quarters of the party to go further: to try and convince ourselves that everything which happened after 1994 was somehow a tragic disaster, an aberration from Labour’s true path.

The truth, as ever, lies somewhere in the middle – it was neither perfect nor a disaster, but it was self-evidently a pretty good thing to be in government for thirteen years. But where Labour decides to draw that line, between what to keep from that success and what to throw away, will arguably determine our fate at the next election.

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The status quo in London is not an option

16/05/2012, 07:00:59 AM

by Rob Marchant

As the post-election dust settles, we must hope that the party is, somewhere, currently holding a quiet post-mortem, to take away the lessons for next time. There are many positives we can take away, of course: that the locals went swimmingly and so did the London Assembly. And that we held Glasgow, that vital first step in turning around the Scottish party, a task which is, in turn, a sine qua non for preserving the very Union.

However, in a post-mortem, the biggest lesson to learn – and the easiest to forget if, as in this case, things have gone well – usually comes from what went wrong, not what went right.

In this case, it’s staring us in the face: we lost the mayorals to a mediocre candidate whose party was fairly unpopular, while our London result overall was a resounding win. And what went badly wrong was not the policy offering or the party’s campaign tactics, but the Livingstone candidacy itself.

What is the long-term lesson for Labour, then? How should we be fine-tuning our London strategy? There’s no need to go through again how the election was thrown by the candidate (although, if you need one, there’s a summary here). But he is just one man, and now he is gone. So, job done, right?

Well, no. Labour’s pressing task now is to ensure this can never happen again. And, by the way, he is not gone.

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The double-dip, if it is one, has not changed the rules of the game

02/05/2012, 07:00:17 AM

by Rob Marchant

Delight, for many on the left, met the economic figures last Wednesday. Britain was not in recovery after all, but was the victim of a double-dip recession. Paul Krugman wrote eloquently of Britain’s “death spiral of self-defeating austerity”, and Ed Balls had a very good day.

All true, or very likely so, although one cannot know for sure, Balls and Darling seem to have been closer to the mark, and Krugman is usually a pretty shrewd observer.

Balls’ argument is looking considerably stronger than it did and, in parliamentary terms, as Dan Hodges puts it, he “put George Osborne on the canvass” . So this is the start of Labour’s long road back, right, now we have fixed our economic credibility problem?

Ah, would that it were that simple. Where we might want to differ from the good Hodges is when he says that “Balls has won”. He has not. Labour has not. For a number of reasons: but most already known. Stephen Beer, a fund manager, warns at Progress that we have not done “enough to restore economic credibility for Labour”, and he’s right.

But it is more than that. Even if we can make a convincing argument, in the court of public opinion, for being cleared of economic incompetence, there are a half-dozen other charges which it will surely want taken into consideration.

First, as Hamish McRae points out in the Independent , government predictions have underestimated GDP by half a per cent, on average, over the last ten years. So we may well not actually be in recession at all after the figures are corrected.

Indeed, the insightful McRae goes as far as to predict that the “doomsayers will be proved wrong” on the basis of some alternative figures from Goldman Sachs. Not conclusive, but enough to make us hesitate.

Second, the Tories being proved wrong is not the same as Labour being proved right. We do not know for sure what might have happened, had Darling or Balls been Chancellor instead of Osborne. Neither can we even explain in detail what we would have done: while we have specified a level of cuts, we have not yet said where we would have cut, which of course could affect outcomes.

So Labour might have done just as badly, or worse. We do not know and, besides, the game of alternative histories is rarely one which moves voters.

Also Beer writes correctly that, on top of this, we need to get back credibility with the financial markets, where we currently seem to be doing our best, via our “predators versus producers” talk, to alienate them.

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So remind me again, why should Lord Ahmed should be a Labour peer?

19/04/2012, 01:18:36 PM

by Rob Marchant

Last weekend, the world was shocked to learn that a Labour peer was allegedly calling for a bounty on the heads of Bush, Blair and Obama. “Allegedly”, because there was seemingly no independent confirmation by UK media of the story, which Ahmed vehemently denied. The Labour party, for once, reacted almost immediately in suspending the whip “pending investigation”.

On Monday, thinking it strange that no-one had seemingly bothered to dig deeper into the clip from Pakistani TV, Uncut did a little more research and was advised, by a friendly Urdu-speaking journalist, that, although the clip appears to contain footage from the relevant speech, it was voiced over and did not confirm his exact words. Alarm bells sounded.

On Tuesday it was confirmed that his exact words were different, that he “only” called for George Bush and Tony Blair to be brought to trial for war crimes, a proposal he boasted that he would personally fund. Oh, and name-checked the leader of the Mumbai bombers in a statement of brotherly solidarity.

So, the Pakistani press misreported. And the British press were lazy.

And you know what? He should go anyway and the whip should stay withdrawn. Here’s why.
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The return of the far-left: a turning point for Labour

04/04/2012, 07:40:18 AM

by Rob Marchant

Politics has its own rhythm. It is governed partly by obvious dates, like general elections, but partly by longer-term movements in the tectonic plates. It is easy to overestimate by-elections – the media almost invariably do – but I suspect that Bradford West might just be one of the few that historians remember.

Until Thursday, it was all going so well: but only because the Tory-led government had been in disarray all week, not because of anything that Labour had done. The fact that Labour could lose an entirely safe seat to George Galloway, who won an extraordinary 56% of the vote, means that Labour will want to, at the very least, review its approach.

Aside from the unpleasant re-emergence of sectarian politics, there are two obvious stories: one is Labour’s collapse, for which we might come up with a lot of distinct reasons and which is already being dissected at length.

But while we might debate those reasons, the impact of Labour’s collapse is clear. Above all, the impact on its political credibility.

Oppositions usually win by-elections: a result which hands such a high proportion to a newcomer does not generally happen to oppositions where everything is in order. Rather to parties where the wheels are starting to fall off, as Roy Jenkins showed when he won 42% of the vote in Warrington in 1981. Someone now really needs to explain, convincingly, why this case is different.

The other major story, as Dan Hodges rightly identifies , is the resurgence of the far left as a political force. This matters to Labour in a way it does not to the Tories or Lib Dems. And many commentators are in shock about this second story. Indeed, until Thursday, many found it laughable the idea that the pro-Islamist, anti-American far left was on its way back into respectable politics.

They’re not laughing now.

So let’s look a little closer: why would this comeback happen now and not, say, in the late 1990s or early 2000s? Three reasons spring to mind.

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Budget preview: abolishing national public sector pay rates is right

20/03/2012, 12:00:32 PM

by Rob Marchant

As part of the Budget run-up, on Friday Britain’s labour movement was convulsed at the thought of the latest Osborne proposal: that national public sector pay rates might be scrapped.

But, before we join the voices of the major trade unions and the TUC who are, understandably, trying to look out for their own interest group, as a party whose interests are not always identical to those of our union colleagues, it might behove us to take a few minutes to take a step back.

Now, while no-one would suggest we should be adopting the Tory Budget wholesale, smart opposition is about determining which bits to oppose. A regional bargaining system would likely increase some pay-rates, as well as decreasing (or failing to increase) others.

And it is surely difficult to argue that the current, entirely inflexible system of fixed national pay rates, which was put in place decades ago in a corporatist state era, is fit for purpose.

First, as the Treasury points out, there are absurd variations depending on where you live. In some places pay rates can be artificially up to 18% higher than their private sector equivalents. And furthermore, applying the only current regional exception to the national system, the addition of London weighting, the system even then visibly fails to attract, for example, enough teachers to schools in inner London because many cannot afford to live there. So some people are still not paid enough. Result: poor levels of public service.
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A trip to Stockholm for London Labour

07/03/2012, 01:00:22 PM

by Rob Marchant

This week’s revelations about Ken Livingstone’s tax affairs are not shocking. They are not even very surprising. But they are important in another sense: in the direct contradiction they highlight between word and deed.

Now, as many readers of Labour Uncut will know, its contributors are not generally renowned as class warriors. But, as a politician, it is simply staggeringly unwise to show yourself in the light that Livingstone has just done. As Nick Cohen notes in the Observer:

“Livingstone…is now the champion of the suffering 99% and enemy of the despised 1%. “Cameron’s problem is too many of his team have become super-rich by exploiting every tax fiddle,” he cried. ‘No one should be allowed to vote in a British election, let alone sit in our parliament, unless they are paying their full share of tax.’ He was talking about himself.'”

Let’s be clear: tax avoidance is not tax evasion. It is not illegal. Some people may even call it smart financial management. But don’t tell everyone it is morally reprehensible and then do it yourself. It’s not the tax avoidance itself, it’s the hypocrisy that will kill you, because people will cease to believe that you do not simply think that it’s one rule for you and another for everyone else. Or that you tell one thing to one person, and another to another

Livingstone’s 1999 failure to be endorsed by Labour’s NEC as its mayoral candidate was, frankly, badly handled. Unlike other countries where regional devolution has a long history, Labour was too green to realise that there are limits to how much you can get a regional politician to toe the party line. They have their own electoral base and can merely pay lip-service to the party, while doing just as they like. As Ken duly did, and as Boris is now doing. Fair enough.

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Welcome to the 2010s: the era of reactive, populist, say-anything politics

22/02/2012, 12:00:59 PM

by Rob Marchant

What has David Cameron done so far, which has marked him out as a prime minister? The answer is, surprisingly little, as John Rentoul observes in the Independent on Sunday: “…the Prime Minister seems unformed. He is adroit at reacting to events, but not so good at making them happen.”

But that does not mean he is unpopular (despite lots of potential reasons for this to be so), or that he will lose the next general election. It is just an example of an era, post-2010, which has seemingly been defined by a lack of seriousness of purpose on the part of the major parties.

Cameron has scored a few political successes. He has done what few would have predicted: he has put together, and held together, a coalition that has lasted nearly two years and will quite likely last five.

He has been successful, thus far, in winning public support for his eminently populist handbagging of his EU partners, although only time will tell whether he was wise to do so. He is generally felt to have had a “good war” in Libya.

But as regards defining a domestic policy direction for his government, he has relatively little to show: an austerity program, showing strength but courting unpopularity; and education reforms which are competent and probably modestly positive with the public, although mostly despised by Labour. The rest is largely either a blur, with no significant impact made, or a mess.

Now compare and contrast with his coalition partner. Clegg made a textbook populist pitch before the election, “an end to politics as usual”, before demonstrating eighteen days later, via the person of David Laws, that he represented just the opposite.

Being a junior coalition partner encourages populism, because of one’s limited impact on events and the inevitable going along with large numbers of things which you do not like. There’s not much else you can do: hence the rubbish about “alarm clock Britain”, Clegg’s desperate and probably doomed scrabbling around for a distinct identity for his party.

And lastly - in the order in which the media currently treat the three parties – we come to Labour. Miliband at times seems populist, but it is not in the sense that most people would recognise. And this is because his populism is mostly directed inwards, at his own party, and what they want to hear.

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What Chris Huhne’s departure tells us about British politics

06/02/2012, 01:00:05 PM

by Rob Marchant

So, Chris Huhne has left the cabinet. Entire forests have already been destroyed over the interceding months, since the story broke about the speeding points allegedly taken for him by his wife. He will now be charged and is innocent until proven guilty: that is the fair play to which he is entitled.

We will never know – or at least, not for a while – whether Huhne genuinely went willingly, or was pressured to resign to avoid being sacked. But we’re also in new territory entirely: this is the first time a cabinet minister has been charged with a criminal offence in as long as anyone can remember, no-one quite knows what the rules are. And here’s a thing, which some have questioned: would it be right for a cabinet minister to have been made to go under such circumstances, given that he has not, as yet, been convicted of anything at all?

Yes, it is. Because this is not a parking fine. It’s a criminal charge, and criminal charges have to be taken seriously. Here’s what can happen when you don’t.

Mariano Rajoy, now Spanish prime minister, was last year in a similar position to Cameron and Clegg. But his judgement was another: that he was happy to let one of his party’s main figures, Francisco Camps, stay in post after being charged with a criminal offence. Although Camps later changed his mind and resigned anyway, the point was that, not being able to tell whether he was innocent or guilty, Rajoy had bet his party’s reputation on Camps. He lost.

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Smart people learn from their enemies

23/01/2012, 02:00:55 PM

by Rob Marchant

The furore over last week’s defection of former Labour staffer, Luke Bozier, to the Tories provides a convenient excuse for a closer look at the party that he has just joined. Not with a view to doing the same, you understand – it’d be a cold day in hell for most of us – but with a view to a bit of hard-nosed, non-partisan analysis.

Leafing through Alan Clark’s idiosyncratic history of his party, The Tories, there are some interesting lessons for Labour. Not ideologically, of course: but about the nature of politics, and the nature of power. And power is something which the Tories were uncommonly good at securing and retaining during the period of the book, from their successful defenestration of Lloyd George in 1922 through to their rout in 1997. Indeed, during this period, as Clark points out: