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Archive for May, 2014

David Axelrod is Douglas Alexander’s “sock puppet consultant”

16/05/2014, 06:56:40 PM

No, it’s not a term of abuse, well not quite. Rather, it’s a description of David Axelrod’s role according to Westminster murmurings that have reached Uncut’s ears.

For all the fanboy gushing in Labour circles at the coup of hiring Axelrod (although given Axelrod’s core business is as a consultant for hire, Uncut wonders whether it’s quite such an achievement; will the party next be trumpeting how Ed Miliband went to Kwik Fit and successfully secured the services of a mechanic?) the motivation for handing over six figures to David Axelrod seems to have less to do with his counsel and more with the divisions at the top of the party.

The split between Douglas Alexander and Spencer Livermore on one side and the shadow chancellor’s team on the other, is well documented. That Ed Balls didn’t even receive a sign-off on last week’s much derided VAT poster, and the alacrity with which his team were keen to let the world know this fact, speaks volumes for the dysfunction in Labour’s campaign machine.

While Douglas Alexander nominally has the lead on campaign decisions, the political heft of the shadow chancellor means that it’s difficult for Alexander to blithely over-rule Balls.

This is where David Axelrod comes in.

He has been positioned as the swing voter. Prior to each key decision, Axelrod will be consulted, briefed and guided, by, yes, you guessed it, Douglas Alexander. And when the time comes to decide in the meeting, Axelrod will cast his vote with Douglas Alexander.

Axelrod’s American stardust and substantial remuneration mean it’s difficult for the shadow chancellor to simply ignore him. After all, given the party is paying so much money for one person’s advice, there would have to be an incredibly good reason to reject it.

This approach, of hiring a high end consultant to validate existing plans and insulate the internal decision-maker from criticism, is common-place in the public sector. These hires have even got a generic name: “sock puppet consultants.” Now the practice seems to have been imported into the Labour party.

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Posted in Inside | 4 Comments »

Labour history uncut: The unions purge the left

15/05/2014, 06:50:21 PM

by Pete Goddard and Atul Hatwal

The Communists’ attempts to affiliate to the Labour party might have been resoundingly rejected at the 1936 Labour conference, but they didn’t give up that easily.

The Socialist League faction within the Labour party, led by ex-Communist J.T.Murphy, and funded by Stafford Cripps, convened three-way negotiations with the disaffiliated Independent Labour Party, and the Communist party to discuss a “united front.”

Few people were aware that Socialist League leader JT Murphy was a free-floating, disembodied head

For People’s Front of Judea aficionados, it’s important to note the difference between a “united front” and the idea of a “popular front,” that was also gaining support at this time.

A “popular front” meant a broad coalition of Labour, Liberals and assorted leftish types, in the style of Leon Blum’s socialist-led French government or the Spanish republican government. Some by-elections at this time had seen successful co-operation between Liberals and Labour in this manner.

In contrast, the “united front” featured only organisations pure of heart, class-conscious and electorally irrelevant. This meant the ILP, the Socialist League and the Communist Party, who all wanted to join forces with the Labour party, mostly because of the ‘electorally irrelevant’ in the previous sentence.

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The Tories have recovered a poll lead exactly when we predicted. Time for Labour’s optimistic alternative

15/05/2014, 07:22:11 AM

by Jonathan Todd

Last October, Uncut ran a regression on economic sentiment and Labour’s poll lead. This indicated that the Conservatives would start to overhaul Labour in the polls when a quarter of the electorate feel that the economy is “doing well”.

The last two times YouGov asked people whether they think the economy is doing well on 1/2 May and 8/9 May, 24% of them indicated that they think it is. By Monday evening, 12 May, the Guardian was reporting two polls that showed the Tories ahead of Labour.

It could be that between the last YouGov tracker on economic sentiment and the polls reported by the Guardian an extra 1% of the electorate decided that the economy is doing well. It might be that Uncut got something wrong with our regression or our interpretation of it.

But 24% is pretty darn close to 25% in most people’s books. So, while Labour’s slipping lead may have produced surprise in some quarters, what has happened is virtually exactly what Uncut postulated would happen.

The economy is improving. Voters can see this and are rewarding the Conservatives. This has happened sufficiently to give them a poll lead. While this should be placed in political context, Labour would be foolhardy to not recognise the direction of travel and recalibrate accordingly.

The political context is that in both polls in which the Tories led, they were only polling just above a third of the electorate, well below the 40% that they may well need to win an overall majority. Given the economic headwinds now blowing in the Tories favour, this should, however, be scant consolation for Labour.

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Posted in Uncut | 12 Comments »

The Euros are the elections that don’t matter. Except they do.

14/05/2014, 08:50:50 AM

by Rob Marchant

It’s complicated. Next week’s election will not change very much in itself. We will send members of our favourite parties off to Brussels again in greater or lesser numbers to vote on things that, we tell pollsters on a regular basis, we care little about. Everyone’s eyes will be on the greater prize of a general election, less than twelve months away.

And you can forget the polling around this election; it means very little. Rarely has there been an election with so much of the electorate avowedly committed to protest voting, often for parties they don’t even really like.

A friend of mine, traditionally to the left of me, is voting UKIP. Why? Not because he likes them. Because he’s fed up with both right and left. “Because there’s a chance, just a chance”, he says, “that something might change”.

Now, I believe him to be wrong. But his vote forms part of an anti-establishment effect, which transcends right and left and which has blossomed in recent troubled times right across the developed world. It is not just UKIP, but Respect. It is the People’s Assembly, UK Uncut and other anti-austerity groups. The Occupy crowd. The other nationalists and secessionists. The Spanish “Indignados”. The Tea Party. The list is long.

The principal common trait of all these groups is being against the political establishment and, with the possible exception of the nationalists, if ever confronted with the tedious demands of actually having to do something in office, most would surely run in horror in the opposite direction.

So, forget the Euro-election polling and results. They tell us nothing. Things will blip up for UKIP and punish the main parties, and then in all probability blip back down by the end of the year, well in time for a distinctly lukewarm performance at the general election.

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Posted in Uncut | 16 Comments »

Policy in the pub is back! This evening, plot the digital revolution over a pint

13/05/2014, 04:55:49 PM

What are you doing this evening? Well, if you’re in and around Westminster, cancel your plans and get yourself down to the Two Chairmen (39 Dartmouth St, London SW1H 9BP – nearest tube St James’ Park) for a spot of policy in the pub from 18.30.

You know the format: pitch a policy idea in just ONE minute, followed by TWO minutes of questions from the audience’s Q&A, culminating in a vote for ONE Top Policy. The Policy must be fiscally neutral, funded and well thought out to sustain scrutiny from the floor/Chair.

This week its all about the digital revolution, with Labour Digital’s Lord Parry Mitchell in the chair and sponsored by O2 (who are paying for all those lovely non-digital pints).

So what are you waiting for? Stop reading this on your computer or checking twitter on your phone and get down the pub for some face to face digital policy-making.

Posted in Unbound | No Comments »

As Labour’s poll ratings dive, finally, the scales begin to fall from the Milibelievers’ eyes

13/05/2014, 07:00:30 AM

by Atul Hatwal

The biggest surprise is the surprise. Shock and consternation were in plentiful evidence across Labour’s twitter base yesterday at the news that the party was lagging the Tories in two polls.

But this was not some bolt from the blue.

Over the past months Labour’s lead has been slipping steadily. Yesterday was the first polling evidence of the logical denouement of a long established trend. Labour will almost certainly bob back into the lead in future polls, but with every passing month, the party’s electoral waterline will dip ever lower.

Some will point to the shambolic European election campaign as a cause of the drop in ratings. But, poor as the campaign has been, its impact has surely just been to accelerate the inevitable.

The problems underlying Labour’s predicament remain the same as they were this time last year, and the year before that, and the year before that.

Labour has still not satisfactorily answered the two questions asked by the electorate at the 2010 election: Can we trust you with the economy? And is your leader a prime minister?

At the last election, in both cases, the answer was a narrow but clear no. According to ICM’s polling just before election day, David Cameron and George Osborne held a 1% lead on the economy over Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling. And on preference for prime minister, YouGov registered a 6% lead for David Cameron over Gordon Brown.

The chart below shows Labour’s performance on these two indicators since the start of 2013.

David Cameron and George Osborne now lead Ed Miliband and Ed Balls by 18% on the economy while David Cameron bests Ed Miliband on preference for PM by 14%.

At no point in the past four years has Labour narrowed the gap on either the economy or leadership to the level it achieved on the eve of the election in May 2010. An election where Labour polled a miserable 29%.

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Posted in Uncut | 7 Comments »

Negative campaigning works. But on the issues not the personalities

12/05/2014, 11:02:07 AM

by Pete Heskett

Labour’s task for May 2015 is complex. Clearly the party needs a powerful narrative that gives people positive reasons to vote Labour. However, history also shows that in many instances the electorate vote the incumbents out as much as the vote a new party in – Mrs Thatcher’s victory in 1979 was to a large extent a rejection of Labour, unemployment and the three-day-week, Tony Blair’s victory in 1997 was boosted by a rejection of sleaze, and John Major’s benign under-panted leadership.

If Labour’s recent party political broadcast is anything to go by then we seem to be asking the electorate to get rid of the coalition because Nick Clegg is shallow and weak and the Tories a bunch of mean toffs. Now I’m sure there are many Labour loyalists who agree with this character assessment. However, it’s communication that speaks to the prejudices of those already converted not the broad-based liberal coalition that Jonathan Todd rightly identifies as the target Labour needs to attract to form a government in 2015.

For me this raises an important strategic point for Labour’s communications team. Negative campaigning in the UK at least tends to be most effective when it makes a political point rather than when it tries to make a personal point. Or to use a gender-biased footballing analogy, Labour is now looking guilty of playing the man and not the ball.

Let’s look at some of the most effective political ads in UK history. “Labour isn’t working” was a poster that helped bring Thatcher to power. It didn’t attack Jim Callaghan as a person – wise as he was generally rightly perceived as nice guy – but it linked the Labour government with unemployment. A strategic masterstroke that hit straight at the heart of Labour’s credibility – how could a party of ‘labour’ be responsible for extending the dole queue? Mrs Thatcher rose to power with a greater proportion of working class votes than even the worst nightmares of the Labour leadership would have thought possible.

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Posted in Grassroots | 7 Comments »

Labour’s populism is all about redistributing wealth. Creating it matters too

09/05/2014, 10:47:18 AM

by Jonathan Todd

Labour forms a majority government, Alan Milburn wrote in the FT on 13 April, when focused as much on creating wealth as distributing it. Pat McFadden used a very similar line when speaking to Newsnight the same week. McFadden used to work with Peter Mandelson as a minister at BIS. Now Chuka Umunna is shadow secretary of state to this department and consciously echoed Mandelson when he recently said: “I don’t have a problem with people making a lot of money, so long as they pay their taxes.”

Similarly, I’ve argued that Labour should focus on growth as well as the cost of living; in other words, making the economic pie bigger, in addition to sharing it more equitably; being a party of increased production, not simply fairer distribution. Whether when Harold Wilson proclaimed ‘the white heat of technology’ or when Tony Blair unrelentingly championed aspiration, Labour has advanced as a party of growth and production. This is not to downplay the redistributive gains that Labour made during these periods. We had our first statutory minimum wage under Blair and got rid of the eleven-plus under Wilson.

These redistributive gains were facilitated by Labour’s strength on production. In crude policy terms, when economic growth is robust, it’s easier to find resources to redistribute to the less well-off. The politics are simpler too. Voters are less likely to withdraw their support from a redistributive party for self-interested reasons if they are reassured that this party is also capable of delivering the growth that will help their back pockets.

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Posted in Uncut | 2 Comments »

Enough is enough. Labour should kick out Ken Livingstone

08/05/2014, 03:44:44 PM

by David Talbot

In January 2004 a controversial member of the Labour family was readmitted to the fold. Ken Livingstone, the hitherto independent Mayor of London, had submitted his application before Labour’s NEC in order to run as the official Labour candidate in the forthcoming second London-wide ballot.

Livingstone had been expelled from party membership for five years in 2000 when, having been blocked by the party’s hierarchy from running as its official candidate for Mayor, he stood as an independent. Labour’s gerrymandering of the selection procedure, coupled with its heavy-handedness in throwing out the longstanding MP, merely resulted in Livingstone beating Labour’s official candidate into a humiliating fourth place.

Upon his return to the Labour column a jubilant Livingstone described it all as an unfortunate misunderstanding and of a marriage that had temporarily broken down. It is near long-forgotten that this fiercely independent firebrand lobbied extensively for his readmission to the party. But since then Livingstone has abused this “marriage of convenience” with the Labour party to the point where many right-minded Labourites can no longer willingly tolerant his membership of their party.

He has taken all he could from the relationship, and given scant in return. The charge sheet of abuse, varying in seriousness, is so extensive and so oft-repeated it is barely worth the bandwidth to detail further; campaigning against an official Labour candidate in 2010, admitting that he never voted Labour under Tony Blair’s leadership, whilst throwing in the customary charge that he should be tried for war crimes; his tax avoidance, his penchant for the mullahs of Tehran, telling the Reuben brothers to go “back where they came from”, likening a journalist to a concentration camp guard – even after he knew he was Jewish, his distaste for the Jewish community in general, and his patronage of Shaykh Yusuf Al Qaradaw, who denies the Holocaust, promotes female genital mutilation, and urges the throwing of homosexuals from rooftops as a punishment for their sin.

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Posted in Uncut | 21 Comments »

Left-wing populism is not the answer for Labour

07/05/2014, 10:51:28 AM

by Renie Anjeh

Energy price freeze, scrapping the bedroom tax, rent controls, 50p tax rate – all part of Labour’s offer to the British people next year. No more Old Labour, definitely no more New Labour – it’s all about Radical Labour.

The party is beginning to set out its popular, and increasingly populist, stall for the British electorate in the run up to the election next year. Those who are arguing for Labour to ‘shrink the offer’, are losing the internal debate in the party – the radicals have come out on top. It’s unsurprising that there are those who want the party to go even further by promising to renationalise the railways, introduce a graduate tax, abolish zero-hour contracts and borrow more to pay for spending commitments. However, this strategy could hinder, rather than help, the Labour party.

Look at the Tories in Opposition. In 2001 and 2005, both William Hague and Michael Howard championed rightwing populism. Hague – a fervent Eurosceptic – campaigned against the prospect of Britain joining the euro, saying that there were ‘twelve days to keep the pound’. Although his policy on the euro was undoubtedly very popular, Hague lost the election and became the first Tory leader not to become Prime Minister.

Howard, having given up on his early attempts to modernise the Conservative party, campaigned on tougher controls on immigration, a tough stance on crime, more stringent discipline in schools and lower taxes. These policies were also very popular with the public but he lost the 2005 election.

This was partly because the Tories were simply not trusted with public services, they looked uncomfortable with modern Britain and people felt that some of its policies reinforced the ‘nasty party’ label.

Labour’s critical weaknesses are on the economy, welfare and leadership and if the party fails to address these issues then, like the Tories in 2001 and 2005, it could end up in opposition for another five years.

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Posted in Uncut | 10 Comments »