Posts Tagged ‘Samuel Dale’

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Hilary Benn has shown the way. Moderates must stay and fight for our Labour party

03/12/2015, 03:40:46 PM

by Samuel Dale

Every day I have to convince myself not to leave the Labour party in these dark days of the Corbyn nightmare.

I voted for Liz Kendall in the leadership along with just 4.5% of members. The party has clearly changed beyond all recognition since I joined at 16 in 2003.

Every day brings a fresh humiliation, a fresh moral and electoral disaster. Snubbing the national anthem. Shot to kill. Mao’s Little Red Book. Momentum bullying. Everything Ken Livingstone says. The Syria free vote shambles. No press release produced responding to autumn statement for the first time ever. And much more besides.

It is not so much the policies but the sheer incompetence of a shambolic and ramshackle leadership that has dragged the 100-year old Labour party into the moral and electoral abyss in just three months.

So it is natural to think about leaving. Many have. The FT reported as many as 1,000 members have left in the last month in despair at Corbyn’s leadership.  I understand why they have left and it is easy to lose hope. But we have to stay and fight.

That is why Hilary Benn’s speech in the House of Commons was so important.

He made the case for bombing Isis in Raqqa with passion and persuasive verve but it represented more than that.

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Osborne’s caved in to City vested interests and Labour’s let him get away with it

23/10/2015, 05:10:34 PM

by Samuel Dale

Without the shackles of the Liberal Democrats, George Osborne has been set free in his relationship with the City of London. In Mansion House speech in June, he called for a “new settlement” with banks.

The new settlement effectively means less regulation, less supervision and less tax. Big banks and hedge funds have received a rush of goodies from the Chancellor and we have not heard a peep from the Labour front bench about any of it. Not a single moment of pressure.

Here are five key ways Osborne has appeased banks since May:

  1. Sacking FCA chief executive Martin Wheatley

Over the summer Osborne sacked tough-talking Financial Conduct Authority chief executive Martin Wheatley for being too harsh on banks.

He is now on the hunt for someone who will be less aggressive and more agreeable to bank chiefs. This is a major, under-appreciated shift. Banks now know they can just call up Number 11, complain about the FCA and the chief regulator will be out on his ear. The next chief exec will know if they talk too tough then they will lose their job.

  1. Reforming the bank levy

Osborne has shifted the burden of the bank levy from large banks with global balance sheets such as HSBC and Standard Chartered, who can easily get up and leave, and on to smaller banks and building societies, who can’t leave.

From next April, smaller banks will pay more tax, larger banks will pay less, This stifles new entrants and reduces competition and yet the Treasury is standing firm.

  1. Scrapping bank regulation

The parliamentary commission on banking standards was set up in the wake of the Libor rigging scandal in 2013 to fix banking culture. It was led by free market Tory MP Andrew Tyrie and Nigel Lawson was a key member. No socialist firebrands in sight.

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Pragmatists vs ideologues. Realists vs fantasists. These are the new Tory-Labour dividing lines

05/10/2015, 08:30:53 PM

by Samuel Dale

As Labour continues its march into wilderness, the Tories are free to do whatever they choose. They can march rightwards and fulfill their Thatcherite dreams for the next ten years, or they can hold the centre or move leftwards and dominate for 20 more years.

It’s an incredible choice. And after today’s speech by George Osborne it is crystal clear the Tories are going to hold the centre.

While Labour shows breath-taking arrogance after a stunning defeat, the Tories are showing incredible humility after an epic victory.

Osborne said he would listen to new ideas and pledged to win over many who voted Labour at the 2010 election. Trying to win over voters from the other side instead of insulting them. Now there’s a novel idea.

Here is the key passage talking about the 10 million Labour voters in 2010.

“We’ve got to understand their reservations. So to these working people who have been completely abandoned by a party heading off to the fringes of the left let us all here today extend our hand.

“Do you know what the supporters of the new Labour leadership now call anyone who believes in strong national defence, a market economy, and the country living within its means?

“They call them Tories. Well, it’s our job to make sure they’re absolutely right.”

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Corbyn’s calls for unity are rank hypocrisy. Don’t be surprised if they go unanswered

20/08/2015, 10:54:07 AM

by Sam Dale

“Unity is our watchword,” says Jeremy Corbyn on his campaign website as he sets out his plan to heal the party after a bruising leadership contest.

On the site he has a “unity statement” and calls on members to sign the pledge that aims to bring the party back together after months of in-fighting.

“The leadership election should be conducted with one thought in mind: our objective is to be a united party focused on winning the general election and campaigning across the country, day in day out,” he writes.

He has also penned an article for the New Statesman claiming the party must unite after the contest is over and how he’ll do it if he’s leader.

By way of example, he insists the main reason the party lost in 1983 was because it was divided.

“The Labour left was fighting a passionate but often inward-looking campaign for party democracy and several figures on the right of the party spent much of that election denouncing the manifesto,” he writes. “It’s no surprise we lost.”

It is astonishing to read these words coming from the pen of Jeremy Corbyn. And astonishing he can do it with a straight face.

If only we were more united then there is nothing we can’t achieve, he seems to argue.

This is hypocrisy.

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Ten hard truths for Labour

05/08/2015, 03:07:15 PM

Following Tristram Hunt’s call for “a summer of hard truths” Labour Uncut is running a short series laying them out. Here’s Samuel Dale with his top ten.

1. We need to match Tory spending plans in 2020. Ed Balls ran the tightest and impressive spending controls of any major party in modern political history at the last election. No shadow minister made a single unfunded commitment. But it didn’t matter because you don’t build economic credibility through micro-policies. You build it through a strong macro-economic plan. Labour was promising to spend and borrow more than the Tories. It meant the Tories were free to make billions of pounds worth of unfunded tax cuts, NHS spending and rail fare freezes all while being able to claim they are more responsible than Labour. General elections are a zero sum game. You choose one party over the other. Labour will not gain economic credibility unless it matches Tory spending plans.

2. We need our own cuts. Labour needs to be creative about how it would cut spending to pay off the deficit and reduce debt in this parliament too. We can’t wait until 2020 to rebuild our economic credibility. John McTernan has suggested a possible fire and police service merger to modernise the emergency services. Do we need a whole department for culture, media and sport? Can we divide up contents of the business department? How can we join up pension policy across the Treasury and DWP? Labour has to provide a fairer alternative and show that the Tories are making the wrong political choices even within a tough economic environment. It must start as soon as possible.

3. A collection of popular policies is not a platform for government. The far left are fond of the old trope that renationalising the railways is very popular with the public. But a collection of popular policies is not a platform for Government. Ed Miliband had popular policies on non-doms, freezing energy prices, ending the bedroom tax and cutting tuition fees. In 2005 the Tories banged on about popular welfare and immigration policies. But put it all together and the manifestos were less than the sum of their parts. Voters choose Governments from the mood music rather than specifics.

4. Attracting non-voters will not win elections. No matter how many pilgrimages Labour leaders make to Russell Brand or how many voter registration drives we do, it will not change. The old will turn out to vote in far greater numbers than the young and the middle classes far more than the poor. You can not change the electorate over five years by attracting non-voters to vote Labour. It is a pipe dream.
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Should Blairites stay or split if Corbyn wins?

30/07/2015, 10:21:33 AM

by Samuel Dale

Jeremy Corbyn is now the bookies’ favourite to win the Labour leadership contest. A couple of dodgy polls puts him miles clear and Corbyn-mania has gripped the nation.

The media is losing the plot. The Spectator’s Rod Liddle thinks he could become prime minister. The Telegraph’s Mary Riddell says he is the a modern politician not a dinosaur. And the Guardian’s Owen Jones believes he would be just swell.

As Atul Hatwal has written this is the same suspension of reality that gripped the nation prior to Ed Miliband’s defeat in May. It is still highly unlikely Corbyn will win.

But humour me. What if on September 13 we wake up to a party in the hands of a leader as unprepared and unsuited to the job since Michael Foot?

For so-called Blarites – moderates who want to actually win and change Britain – there are only two options. Stand and fight to wrest back control of Labour from the grip of a Marxist cabal heading for electoral oblivion.

Or split and create a new party, perhaps forming an alliance with Tim Farron’s Liberal Democrats.

Let’s take them in turn.

First, let’s stay.

Corbyn has no governing experience, he is easily riled, his policies are mad and he has numerous unsavory foreign connections.

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The leadership contest is a total disaster for Labour

13/07/2015, 06:01:30 PM

by Samuel Dale

The leadership election has been a disaster for Labour. It is painfully clear that we are not learning the right lessons from defeat.

The spectacle of Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper, charging headlong into the tax credit trap set by George Osborne, giving him the opportunity to keep hammering Labour as the welfare party, shows how deep a hole we are in.

Let’s be clear.

We lost in 2015 because we had a desperately unpopular leader who was not trusted to manage the nation’s finances. That’s it.

To win in 2020 we need a more popular leader than the Tories have with our economic credibility rebuilt. If we do that then we have a chance.

We don’t need a big debate. We don’t need to talk to Jeremy Corbyn about his views on Greek debt and Hezbollah. It doesn’t matter whether Liz Kendall has no children. I am not bothered if Andy Burnham is a member of the metropolitan elite. Or whatever platitudes Yvette Cooper is pitching this week.

Instead of debating fringe issues we should be straining every sinew to prove we can be trusted in the Treasury again. We should be comparing the candidates against their potential Tory opponent in 2020.

Once you have the fundamentals right then you can try and win the election with a string of policies to attract key voter groups. But that is for another day because the only thing that matters in this leadership election is the fundamentals.

We should have had a new leader in place by June 1 after asking ourselves the simple, questions about how to win. The long drawn-out affair has proven just as damaging as it was in 2010 when Labour’s reputation was trashed by the coalition.

That’s our lesson from defeat and we are not learning it.

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It’s the budget next week. Does Labour even have a policy on tax?

03/07/2015, 05:45:29 PM

by Samuel Dale

George Osborne is putting the finishing touches to a Budget that will define our national politics for the next five years.

I have previously written how Osborne is both shifting the centre on areas such as fiscal responsibility and tax cuts while moving to the centre on areas where the public opinion will not follow. In other words, political pragmatism – remember that?

The 8 July Budget will do both. It will cut taxes over the parliament, entrench a smaller state as well as moving on to traditionally Labour areas such as boosting low pay.

On moving the centre, Osborne could create a roadmap to merging national insurance and income tax over the next few years in the biggest simplification of tax this country has seen since the 1980s.

As already hinted by the prime minister, he could set in train moving Britain away from a system of tax credits towards a living wage. A lower welfare, lower tax society.

Or he could build on his outlandishly popular pension reforms from last year with a long overdue reform of savings taxation.

He could do all three and more. In the last parliament major reforms to stamp duty and pensions alongside corporation tax cuts shows a bold Chancellor wanting to get out.

He’s also revolutionised how the self-employed file tax returns and he’s simplifying income tax bands on lower and middle earners.

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Labour must support George Osborne’s budget surplus law

11/06/2015, 04:15:30 PM

by Samuel Dale

George Osborne is fond of saying that in opposition you move to the centre while in government you can move the centre.

Ed Miliband’s disastrous attempt to move the centre from opposition is the latest example proving this valuable piece of political wisdom.

You can not change the rules of British politics from opposition but you can if you’re sat in the Treasury.

Labour built a new consensus over 13 years.

In the 2002 budget, Labour decided to increase national insurance contributions by 1p to fund higher spending in the NHS.

The Conservatives now back rising NHS spending every year.

The same is true of the minimum wage, devolution and public service reform

And so it’s happening again.

In his Mansion House speech this week, Osborne resurrected his idea to make deficits effectively illegal in “normal” economic times.

The plan is that only the OBR could approve a budget deficit and otherwise a surplus must be run. It shifts the political centre.

It’s an attempt to shrink the state and force future governments to cut spending or raise taxes if it wants to spend more.

Some in Labour argue it makes sense to “borrow to invest”, which justifies deficit spending even in good years. In simple terms it is sensible to take out a big mortgage loan (capital spending) but not a credit card (current spending).

Maybe. But the hard truth is that the economics don’t matter. With Labour’s economic credibility hole only the politics matter.

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While Labour is wrapped up with its leadership race, the Tories are moving onto the centre ground

29/05/2015, 04:58:28 PM

by Samuel Dale

The tragedy of Ed Miliband is that he shrewdly identified many of the key problems facing Britain today with his responsible capitalism agenda and focus on inequality.

This analysis allowed him to set the political weather at times because he could capture the public mood on booming energy prices or tax avoidance.

But his progress came to a shuddering halt when he outlined his crude solutions. Freezing energy prices and controlling rents were a fundamental misunderstanding of how markets and business works.

He alienated friendly business that would have supported changes and the voters did not believe him. So he failed.

And now to the real tragedy. The victorious Conservative party is stealing his analysis and coming up with their own solutions.

Centrist Tory projects and groupings such as the Good Right and Renewal are seeking to tackle the excesses of private companies and a wealthy elite. A responsible capitalism.

Former Number 10 head of strategy Steve Hilton’s new book More Human could almost have been written by Ed Miliband in its calls for radical change. He criticises big supermarkets, banks and other “private sector bureaucracies” for the way they treat customers, workers and suppliers.

Cameron clearly buys into these ideas too after reclaiming the One Nation mantle on May 8. He has also, significantly, appointed Robert Halfon as deputy chairman.

Halfon is one of the most interesting Conservative MPs with calls for the party to attract trade unionists alongside successful campaigns to cut fuel duty and the way companies treat customers. He has even flirted with renaming the Tories the Workers Party.

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