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Posts Tagged ‘Tom Watson’

The greatest lesson from New Labour is that winners have no time for nostalgia

16/03/2011, 07:00:02 AM

by Tom Watson

It is not true, as some uncharitable colleagues have said, that the people who run Progress are a defeated faction in need of a cause. I think, though, it’s fair to say they belong to a very different organisation to the one that Derek Draper, through sheer willpower, fused into a powerful force at the heart of the Labour party, whose influence endured for more than a decade.

I am one of the few people who has seen the confidential strategy document presented in 1995 to Tony Blair, John Prescott and funder David Sainsbury that led to the creation of the organisation.

I remember the day when Derek took the bus from South London up to Islington so that he could pitch the idea to Tony Blair. While the kids were knocking a football around, Derek sat in the future prime minister’s back garden outlining his plans for the organisation. Tony gave his approval on the express condition that Progress centred itself around the party leader and was not in any way to be seen as, or develop into, a faction. He laid down one more condition – it had to have the approval of John Prescott. (more…)

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Cameron would be lucky to get out of the pub alive

09/03/2011, 07:52:16 AM

by Tom Watson

It’s a poor workman that blames his tools. And this week the government has written the case study that scholars of public administration will follow for years to come in their lesson on how not to make reforms.

It’s a complete shambles behind that famous black metal door. Authorised and less-authorised briefings attacking huge sections of the population are spewing out of the government at such a rate that it’s hard to keep count.

I remember being told as a teenager living in Kidderminster that you should never pick a fight with the whole pub. Think about what David Cameron has been up to in the last couple of weeks. With his current record, he’d never have got out of the Market Tavern alive.

The list of people and groups he has officially offended is remarkable.

The civil service. They’re the enemies of enterprise, apparently. I promise Mr Cameron that he will regret those comments and the briefing that went with them. The survival instincts of Mr Gus O’Donnell and his team of mandarins are legendary. Cam’s team will pay in a hundred ways he hasn’t begun to imagine. Sure, the civil service needs reform, but insulting the entire institution won’t work. Trust me on this. I’ve tried it that way and failed. The only way to get lasting reforms in Whitehall will be a “Northcote Trevelyan Two” and a consensus between the parties. There are plenty of frustrated ex-ministers who, I am sure, would suspend their axe-grinding in order to work with our opponents to get the civil service in better shape. (more…)

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Government rides roughshod over civil service rulebook

02/03/2011, 10:34:44 AM

by Tom Watson

New answers to FoI requests released to me this week, show that the cabinet office has breached the civil service recruitment principles 30 times to make appointments, using an exemption to the rules aimed at helping the unemployed.

Exception one of the civil service code has been used to appoint people like Katharine Davidson, Michael Lynas, Kris Murrin and Rishi Saha, who formerly held political posts in the Tory and Lib Dem parties.

Rishi Saha is head of the government’s “digital communications”. How can the interests of the civil service be served by allowing a post like this to be filled without a trawl of the very best digital specialists in the country?

More importantly, how could cabinet secretary, Gus O’Donnell, have allowed his appointment to take place? It’s a clear breach, one where the interest of government is not served by making a political appointment to a non-political job.

Civil servants will feel very uncomfortable reading the new figures. The cabinet office refused to give me the names of 30 people on the list but I have a hunch that a number of them are also former staffers from the political parties. (more…)

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The week Uncut

26/02/2011, 12:30:25 PM

In case you missed them, these were the best read pieces on Uncut in the last seven days:

Peter Watt thinks our brand’s toxic and we should learn from the Tories

Atul Hatwal brings you the latest shadow cabinet work rate league table

Coach Kevin Meagher is leaving David Miliband on the subs bench, for good

Tom Watson says we must remember the name Mohamed Bouazizi

Peter Mandelson on why there should have been a Granita II

Rob Marchant on faith schools and why a bad idea just got worse

Stefan Stern says Cameron has failed the leadership test

Dave Howells is not happy seeing the sacred cow go off to slaughter

Dan Hodges gets cross with the preachers of “fairer votes”

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On the campaign trail in Barnsley, Tom Watson finds a new voter group: the Ed Miliband Tory

16/02/2011, 07:00:16 AM

by Tom Watson

While holding my tie in his clenched fist, Benjamin Wegg-Prosser once described me as “that Prescottite” who tries to be a “hard man of the soft left”. No, I never understood what he was on about either. It was late. We were young. Ish.

In so doing, Benjamin was unwittingly demonstrating that labels are usually unhelpful. Sometimes though, they help the non-activist understand the complex world of UK politics. And, even more occasionally, they help a politician understand UK politics.

If ever I were allowed to define myself, it would probably be as a “Kempian pragmatist” – a follower of the former MP, Fraser Kemp. Fraser’s phenomenological approach to life gives him the rare ability to sniff change in the air. He can feel the faint pulse of a political tremor before it reaches the clipboards of the opinion pollsters, those who write the reports that land on the desks of the people who sit behind them in newspaper offices and political party head quarters. (more…)

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Sergeant Watson sends a postcard home from Barnsley

09/02/2011, 07:00:50 AM

by Tom Watson

I always find it amusing to be described as “Scottish” in the newspaper columns written by famous people I have never met. I think Jackie Ashley started the trend. Back in 2006 she described me as “burly, Scottish and a former engineering-union official….most people’s idea of the archetypal Brownite”. She was spot on, except that I am neither Scottish nor a former trade union official, though I did work in the political department of the AEEU and some may describe me as “burly”. Had she written, as Ann Treneman once did, that I was a “down market Billy Bunter” she would have been more accurate.

Actually Jackie, I’m a Yorkshire man. South Yorkshire. With heritage in mines and steel that stretches generations. That’s why it’s so great to be in Barnsley helping Dan Jarvis win for Labour.

I think there’s going to be a by-election here soon. And the climate here is a gift for the political campaigner. The people on the doorsteps are writing the slogans. “I want you to go to London and tell that David Cameron that I’m already sick of ‘im, me love”, said a kindly pensioner who voted Tory last May. (more…)

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Crossman, Etzioni, abstaining and the big society.

02/02/2011, 12:30:45 PM

by Tom Watson

“One of the difficulties in politics is that politicians are shocked by those who are really prepared to let their thinking reach any conclusion. Political thinking consists in deciding on the conclusion first and then finding good arguments for it. An open mind is considered irresponsible – and perhaps it really is”.

It will be sixty years in November since Richard Crossman penned that entry in his diary. I think about that quote a lot; have done ever since I first read his diaries over many hours in the coffee shop of the national film theatre in 1984. It repeats back to me most days, particularly these dark days of opposition. Sometimes it’s the little things that trigger the memory of it.

This week, for example, the Labour party has done a lot of abstaining. The Tories are mired in a long, long internal argument about the European bill. Our corporate view is that much of the discussion, and subsequent backbench clauses to the bill, are private grief for the prime minister. For Labour MPs, the division bells have been closely followed by a text message with the words “we are abstaining”. I hate abstaining on anything. It seems so weak. Last night I cracked and decided to positively abstain, that is, to vote in both “aye” and “no” lobbies. A whip – friendly, polite, gently firm – asked me not to. I obliged. Is my thinking so unclear that I can’t even conclude to abstain right? It’s been a busy, stressful week but I was disappointed with myself for being so compliant. (more…)

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Why did the police not investigate phone hacking leads?

26/01/2011, 08:35:20 AM

by Tom Watson

I’m not a lawyer but the phone hacking scandal has meant I’ve had to act like one.

If you told me a year ago that I would have read Archbold, the criminal lawyer’s bible, inside out, I would have laughed. I’m the digi-guy. I read Clay Shirky, not boring legal text books. But then Tom Crone, the slick in-house lawyer for News International, tried to remove me from the culture, media and sport select committee. It was an act of aggression that finally convinced me that I had no choice but to get to the bottom of this murky affair, once and for all. Phone hacking took over from the future of the Internet as a policy preoccupation. I look forward to the day when I can return to Shirky.

When I read the section of Archbold on perverting the course of public justice, the whole hacking saga came into focus.

“The offence may be committed where acts are done with the intention of concealing the fact that a crime has been committed, although no proceedings in respect of it are pending or have commenced”,

says Archbold in the 2009 Edition, page 2631.

This week, the director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer, confirmed that he would examine all new evidence in the News of the World phone hacking saga.

I’ve made the case that he should be investigating a potential attempt to pervert the course of public justice. As fragments of evidence have been forced out of news international and the metropolitan police service by civil litigants and Parliamentary enquiries, the case for a deep investigation by an outside force is now, I think, insurmountable. (more…)

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Watson formally requests Hunt to re-refer News Corp bid for BSkyB to Ofcom, on new grounds

24/01/2011, 07:03:19 PM

Tom Watson MP

House of Commons

London, SW1A 0AA

The Rt Hon Jeremy Hunt MP
Secretary of State
Department for Culture, Media & Sport
2-4 Cockspur Street
London
SW1Y 5DH

24 January 2011

Dear Jeremy,

In light of recent revelations I write to ask you to commission a further report from Ofcom, concerning the bid for BSkyB by Rupert and James Murdoch’s News Corp.

As you know, the News Corp proposal was investigated by Ofcom under the public interest provisions of the Enterprise Act 2002. There are three sub-clauses: ‘plurality’, ‘range of broadcasting’ and ‘commitment to broadcasting standards’. The original referral only looked at ‘plurality’.

I would like the transaction investigated under the ‘broadcasting standards’ category.

Section 58 of the Enterprise Act 2002 provides the Specified Considerations of which 2 C specifies:

“The need for persons carrying on media enterprises, and for those with control of such enterprises, to have a genuine commitment to the attainment in relation to broadcasting of the standards objectives set out in section 319 of the Communications Act 2003”.

Section 319 of the Communications Act contains the Ofcom code.

Paragraph 2 a) states “that persons under the age of 18 are protected”.

Paragraph 2 b) of the code states “that material likely to encourage or to incite the commission of crime or lead to disorder is not included in television and radio services”.

Paragraph 2 d) of the code “that news included in television and radio services is reported with due accuracy”.

The investigation is entitled to study whether the acquirer has shown evidence of bad practice in its other media companies.

In terms of generally criminal conduct; you will well know of the News of the World’s industrial use of material acquired by illegal phone-hacking. Two individuals formerly employed by the News of the World have been imprisoned for offences related to this practice and two current employees are suspended following material obtained by civil actions against the newspaper. The police have re-referred the matter to the CPS. There is no doubt that there is much more yet to come to reveal the extent of the activities. (more…)

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Editorial: Neither Coulson nor Cameron is the real story

21/01/2011, 01:27:13 PM

Andy Coulson has now resigned from two massive jobs for something he says he knew nothing about.

On 23 November, Tom Watson predicted on Uncut that Andy Coulson would resign “within the next few weeks”. In the end, it was eight weeks. They moved the date back in response to Watson’s article.

On 12 January, Watson revealed on Uncut that the working date within Downing Street for Coulson’s departure was now 25 January. He has resigned on 21 January. The opportunity of a Friday combining Blair at the Chilcot enquiry with the aftermath of the Johnson resignation all but obliged them to bring it forward by the width of a weekend.

And Rupert Murdoch is due to be in London next week. He is sick of the scandal swirling more and more distastefully around his (distasteful) family business. He believes that it has been mishandled by his minions. Did he send word that the Coulson embarrassment (the only easy bit to fix) should be cleared up before he arrives?

Many people – including the prime minister’s official spokesman, on the record – dismissed Tom Watson’s intelligence as rubbish. It was not. Watson was telling the truth; Cameron and his people were brazenly lying.

Coulson’s official spokesman, Nick Robinson of the BBC, has said – as has most of the rest of the Lobby – that the worst damage this will do David Cameron is to deprive him of Andy Coulson’s expertise. (more…)

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