Vince Cable « Labour Uncut

Posts Tagged ‘Vince Cable’

Students are paying the price of this arranged marriage

08/12/2010, 02:30:37 PM

by Andy Dodd

With tomorrow’s vote on university tuition fees seen as the first major test of the Tory-Lib Dem government’s arranged marriage, it is timely to consider exactly what the vote could, or should, mean for Labour.

To begin with, it is a perfect opportunity to expose the increasingly bizarre contortions of the Lib Dems, who cannot seem to make up their mind whether they are the government or the opposition. Many did not expect the coalition to run smoothly, but they did not anticipate that it would wobble so soon and so dramatically. Increasingly, the notion that Nick Clegg’s party could apply its manifesto as part of an alliance seems fanciful. Nobody cares about the soft touches round the edges when the grand design of the Conservative majority is so brutal.

As Lord Paddy Ashdown pointed out yesterday (BBC Radio 5 Live Drive, 6December), Lib Dem MPs should be duty bound to vote for raising tuition fees. The policy was included in the coalition agreement which was unanimously agreed by all members of the Lib Dem parliamentary party. In agreeing to form the government, each knew very well that they would have to compromise on election manifesto pledges. And yet they made that deal.

So, please spare me the hand wringing of the Lib Dem minions who are learning the hard way that you cannot run the country by cherry picking. Spare us, too, the convoluted logic of a secretary of state who develops a policy that triggers mass demonstrations across the land and then admits that he may not even vote for it. This is a travesty of government. (more…)

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Sunday News Review

21/11/2010, 07:26:43 AM

A new consensus politics?

Ed Balls, the shadow home secretary, used an interview with The Sunday Telegraph to signal that Labour was ready to abandon its support for the current 28-day regime, introduced by the party when in government. In the party’s most significant move away from the Blair-Brown era, which led to Britain imposing some of the harshest anti-terror laws in any Western democracy, Mr Balls also said Labour was prepared to consider alternatives to control orders. Mr Balls, in his first newspaper interview since being appointed shadow home secretary, admitted Labour’s policies under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, which led to failed attempts to get Parliament to pass laws to permit suspects to be detained without charge for 90 and 42 days, had been a mistake. – Sunday Telegraph

Shadow home secretary Ed Balls said he would support Government plans to reduce the current limit from 28 days to 14 providing it did not hinder police and the security services. “Even 42 days was a step too far. Our reputation as a party which protected liberty as well as security suffered as a result,” he said. “Our approach should always be that, if the evidence shows we can go down from 28 days without impeding the police and security services from doing their jobs, then we ought to do it.” Home Secretary Theresa May announced a review of counter-terror legislation in July in which she backed a 14-day limit, a move supported by the Liberal Democrats. Mr Ball’s admission opens the way for a cross-party consensus. – Sky News

Mandelson vs Miliband

Peter Mandelson has added to the growing pressure on Ed Miliband, claiming the Labour leader had insulted him by saying he should be ‘packed off to an old folk’s home’. In a new war of words between the two men, Lord Mandelson suggested Mr Miliband was devious and had secretly plotted against Tony Blair. And he contemptuously dismissed him, saying he had ‘never seriously thought of him’ as a leader. His scathing comments follow a growing revolt against Mr Miliband from both sides of the Labour Party. Blairite figures such as Lord Mandelson, who backed Mr Miliband’s older brother David in the leadership contest, have launched a new bid to stop the Left-winger’s attempt to bury Tony Blair’s New Labour. – Mail on Sunday (more…)

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Sadly, it’s a graduate tax that is stupid, not Vince Cable

10/11/2010, 03:00:01 PM

by Nick Keehan

With a student demonstration marching on Westminster today, it will be tempting for Labour to throw in its lot with the protesters and embark on wholesale opposition to tuition fees. Before we do, however, we should ask ourselves a question: how stupid do we think Nick Clegg and Vince Cable are?

Really stupid, that is. Not wrong. Not dishonest or unprincipled. Not sanctimonious, smug or irritating. Not ignorant or ill-informed, but stupid. Totally useless and incompetent. So inept and ineffectual that stuck on a sinking ship they would burn the lifeboats.

Whatever else they may be, Nick Clegg and Vince Cable are not that stupid. When it comes to tuition fees, however, this is what we are expected to believe. (more…)

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Carthorse Cable off for glue? Crowdsourcing the resignation

13/08/2010, 02:19:15 PM

He’s the most left-wing member of the government. He used to work for John Smith. And this week he learned that he’s got just half as many staff as Caroline Spelman at DEFRA. It has become about as remarkable as pointing out that Gerrard and Lampard don’t really work together in midfield, but it’s worth saying one more time: Vince Cable is a walking resignation.

Add today’s news that, presumably just to annoy Cable, the government has signed up Sir Philip ‘sophisticated tax status’ Green as an efficiency adviser, and the truth is more obvious than the hangover Dave’s never had from the ‘tins’ of Stella he pretends to buy from a supermarket he’s never been to: Cable will walk.

Vince has already manoeuvred his ally Simon Hughes into the party’s deputy leadership; and the grassroots, who still worship Vince, are preparing to brand Gove’s free schools programme even worse than first past the post. But a conference bust up over a ridiculous right wing policy almost certainly won’t be enough to precipitate Vince’s resignation in 2010. So just when will it come, and how?

Here at Uncut we’re crowdsourcing the resignation. We’ll start the ball rolling.

It’s late autumn 2011 and the drastic cuts Vince never believed in have led to the fabled double dip he always feared. It is becoming increasingly apparent that Lansley’s NHS reforms should have been concluded with a rather more substantive paragraph than “we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it”. And the increasingly ubiquitous media presence of Toby Young is – amazingly – one of the least upsetting consequences of Michael Gove’s DfE.

Directly elected police commissioners have been the disaster everyone predicted, and Cable’s own department has been reduced to hot-desking whilst trying to save British business because Danny Alexander ‘needs’ a spare set of computers in case he breaks his by spilling Tizer all over them again.

As he arrives at his office, a downtrodden Vince is forced to cross a picket line of public service workers. He can’t help but feel that they have a point as they protest at Con/Lib plans to axe 98% of social service funding based on the flimsy big society thesis that “maybe a charity will do it instead…hopefully.”

As he walks towards his office Vince wipes the rotten tomatoes from his beige suit and the eggshell from his off-white shirt to discover the final insult. Nick and Gideon are there, in his office, high on a cocktail of port, pimms and power, smoking cigars and doing impressions of the once national treasure using Vincey’s own signed copy of Joseph Stiglitz’ “Stability with Growth” as a makeshift bald cap. As he slams the door he shouts “what the hell do you think you are doing?”, but it barely registers. The braying continues, a defeated Vince turns and leaves, never to darken the great offices of state again.

A broken man, Vince spends the rest of his days pondering one question: how did I let it happen. How did I join a government that contained Chris Grayling, Michael Gove and Iain Duncan Smith. It wasn’t even nice while it lasted.

Your turn.

How do you think the end will come? Bust up with Osborne, schism with Nick. Or an offer he just can’t turn down to fill the vacant presenters chair on Nevermind the Buzzcocks?

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Monday News Review

09/08/2010, 09:05:38 AM

"Aw ma, but WE wanted to do it"

Milimum backs Abbott

Ed Miliband said his mother Marion would be supporting rank outsider Diane Abbott in the leadership battle, which concludes next month. Currently David is favourite to win the leadership, although some suggest his younger brother Ed could pip him at the finish with the support of Labour voters’ second preferences. – Telegraph.

Abbott talks cash

Leadership candidate Diane Abbott has claimed the New Labour brand is contaminated and voiced fears over the influence of money on the contest. She said New Labour was “pretty much contaminated” as she claimed David Miliband was the Blairite candidate, backed by money from big donors sympathetic to that wing of the party. Talking about the relative election campaigns, she said: “It is odd that David Miliband has £400,000 and I have £5,000. He’s got the big Blairite money and the big Blairite backers – Scotsman.

New leader powers

Labour’s new leader will be able to hire and fire his or her shadow cabinet under radical reforms drawn up by the former foreign secretary Margaret Beckett. After the summer recess the Parliamentary Labour Party will be balloted on a series of measures handing far greater power to whoever is elected leader three weeks later. – Independent.

Mail on memoirs

Tony Blair will cash in on his experience as Prime Minister by flogging a special edition of his memoirs at a wallet-busting £150.
The red cloth-bound, slip-cased publication of A Journey resembles a Bible or hymn book and bears the signature of the former PM, who was often compared to a vicar for his preachy tone. – Mail.

Age factor still facing Ken

Ken

His rival for the nomination, Oona King, is of the same generation as Ed Balls and the Miliband brothers, whereas Livingstone is at least 20 years older than the next Labour leader, whoever he may be. If he wins the Labour nomination, he will be running for Mayor at the age of 66, and if he wins that, he will be nearly 71 when his term of office ends. – Independent.

Cable

There has been much speculation that frugality is the only feature of this government Cable will find to his taste. Perceived as the Lib Dem furthest to the left – a former Labour party councillor and parliamentary candidate, the man Gordon Brown phoned in the frantic post-election days – Cable is widely tipped as the minister most likely to resign from the coalition. He made no secret of his preference for forming a government with Labour – but was forced by the arithmetic of the election result to abandon that dream, “and follow my head, not my heart”. – Guardian

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The Coalition government has no coherent strategy for growth, argues Rachel Reeves

21/07/2010, 04:36:26 PM

Wednesday morning saw the first evidence session under the new membership of the Business, Innovation and Skills Select Committee. As a Committee, we chose to use this opportunity to put Vince Cable (as Secretary of State for the Department), and David Willetts (as his Minister of State for Universities and Science) through their paces, and put their recent announcements and departmental plans for the future in the spotlight.

This was the chance for Vince Cable to set out how the government was going to rebalance the economy. It was his big opportunity to spell out their desperately-needed strategy for growth, and his vision for how we would rebuild an economy that was sectorally and regionally diverse, with strong, sustainable growth. I looked forward to hearing about the evidence behind the decisions and announcements that had already been made, and his rationale and thinking for future plans.

With these expectations, what we actually heard from the Secretary of State and his Minister was a disappointment. This disappointment started before the meeting had even begun, when we received copies of the Department’s Strategy for Growth, contained in what Vince himself said ‘could not be described as more than a pamphlet’. His opening rhetoric may have sounded good, but his assertion that a new economy should be rebalanced rings somewhat hollow when, as I pointed out to him, the only mention of a regional strategy to rebalance the economy comes on page 14 of a 16 page document.

(more…)

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Don’t cut growth: Andy Westwood says that Labour got it right

08/06/2010, 04:43:31 PM

‘We’ve got to get the economy moving’ urged David Cameron ad nauseam during the election campaign. But beyond his condemnation of the ‘jobs tax’ and his desire to shrink the size and the role of the state, the detail was nowhere to be seen. He claimed then that what government spent or did was not the same thing as the economy – visibly incredulous as Gordon Brown warned about endangering the recovery by cutting expenditure too quickly.

A few weeks into the coalition government and the headlines are still about cuts, because in Cameron’s words ‘growth won’t be enough’. That may be because he has yet to give it any serious thought, or it may be because they just prefer to talk about the deficit. But there’s a third possibility: it may be because the Tories and Lib Dems don’t want to admit that they have retained Labour’s new industrial policy.

Key to this was the formation of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and ‘NINJA’ – the ‘New Industries, New Jobs’ white paper jointly written and conceived by Lord Mandelson and John Denham. Which document was published in Budget week exactly two years ago, providing a narrative for a more optimistic economic future amidst the fast developing recession in 2008.

(more…)

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