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Archive for August, 2014

If the West is serious about defeating Isil, a deal with Assad is unavoidable

19/08/2014, 11:30:16 AM

by Atul Hatwal

I recall speaking to Syrian friend last summer about the impending parliamentary vote on military intervention.

He had been one of his country’s leading surgeons, and a classical musician, appearing regularly on national TV. Until his dissent against President Assad had become a little too public. Imprisonment and torture by Assad’s secret police were followed by a lucky escape, both from Assad’s jail and a country degenerating into civil war, to seek asylum in Britain.

I’d expected him to be supportive of action against the regime. After all, it had taken everything from him and his family.

But all I found was despondency and, on balance, opposition to military action.

By this time last year, the primary threat to Syria was no longer President Assad. It was the rise of the Islamist militias and the collapse of secular centre in the opposition. We could bomb Assad. We could send him a bouquet of flowers. Both would have been equally relevant to the suffering of the Syrian people.

In summer 2013, the reality of life in Syria was that it was more dangerous to live in territory controlled by the Islamist militias than Assad.

The discussion that my friend saw unfolding in this country was facile and pointless. The knee-jerk opposition of much of the left to any intervention that involved the Americans – who, by coincidence are also the only country that can mount any meaningful humanitarian or military intervention – was borderline offensive.

Yet the position of the interventionists, although motivated by good intentions, was barely better informed.

Targeting President Assad’s military infrastructure with some limited bombing might have made the hawks in London and Washington feel happier, but it wouldn’t have helped Syrians living under Isil, the Al Nusra Front, the Syrian Islamic Front or any one of the other dozen or so, hardcore jihadi groups.

And if this potential action had materially degraded the Syrian regime’s military capability, the threat of advances by the Islamist militias would have been all the greater.

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If Johnson and Darling return to Labour’s frontbench, two other men are out

18/08/2014, 03:33:16 PM

by Kevin Meagher

The continuing chatter about whether Alan Johnson should return to the shadow cabinet prompts the intriguing question: where would Ed Miliband put him?

In government, Johnson held a number of senior roles including stints as secretary of state for work and pensions, education, health and a final stint as home secretary. As one of Labour’s best known faces, he would surely command a decent perch.

None of his previous postings, however, looks a likely bet. Rising stars Rachel Reeves and Tristram Hunt are making inroads in the welfare and education briefs while Andy Burnham at health and Yvette Cooper at home affairs are too powerful to move without causing Ed Miliband a major headache. Both are solid performers and harbour leadership hopes if Miliband doesn’t manage to cross the threshold of Number Ten next May.

The remaining top roles, shadowing the Treasury and the Foreign Office, are filled by Ed Balls and Douglas Alexander. And they aren’t going anywhere.

Miliband may calculate that he can move anyone he likes in the interests of bringing back a popular figure like Johnson to add weight to his team ahead of the general election. Of course, the dilemma will be doubled if Alastair Darling also returns – assuming the ‘No’ campaign he is leading in Scotland prevails next month.

Johnson’s attributes are obvious enough. A natural communicator, his easy-going, man-in-the-street style contrasts sharply with the crafted but stilted approach of most of the rest of the shadow cabinet. No-one describes him as weird or boring.

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Labour engaging on digital and tech policy – join the action at conference in Manchester

15/08/2014, 12:38:27 PM

by Jag Singh

Guy Levin of Coadec says we are now catching up with the Tories when it comes to digital campaigning and technology policy, and that the party should be applauded for taking on the task of transforming itself into a relevant digital movement, with progressive policies and initiatives to match.

Our own Digital Government Review (led by Chi Onwurah MP) will no-doubt feed great ideas and assist Ed and his team put together a compelling manifesto for the 2015 election, encompassing technology and digital policy to not just save money and create jobs, but also reduce the digital divide. We’ll then also have to make sure ideas are followed through, once we get into Government.
Key public policy issues have in the past all enjoyed dedicated zones at the party conferences, with delegates and politicians flocking to hear about the latest advances and discuss hot issues. We’ve seen this for years with Transport Hub, the Health Hotel and the Climate Clinic, but going forward into the next general election, only Labour can be the party that examines how Whitehall policies and regulations keep up in such a fast moving technological world, while also ensuring the disadvantaged don’t lose out on opportunities in the new economy. It’s long overdue that there was such a public forum at annual conference to bridge the gap between the tech and political worlds.

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Labour is dangerously complacent about winning back London post-Boris

14/08/2014, 11:32:25 AM

by Samuel Dale

It was the worst kept secret in Westminster but Boris is finally on his way back.

After years burnishing his profile as Mayor of London, he is looking for a Commons seat next year.

Inevitably the focus has been on the implications for Cameron, Osborne and the battle for the Tory leadership.

But it also confirms – almost certainly – that Johnson will not run again as Mayor of London in 2016.

This is leading to a dangerous complacency from Labour.

The theory goes like this: London is a Labour voting city that has been twice charmed by the charismatic Boris but when he goes the mayoralty will slip back to its rightful owners, Labour.

This belief is fuelled by electoral successes.

Labour did surprisingly well in London in the 2010 general election, costing the Tories a majority.

In the intervening years, it has also won back control of councils and had record breaking results in areas such as Camden in May.

But the mayoralty is different. In their own ways Ken Livingstone and Boris have made the Mayor Of London a big job.

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When it comes to minorities, woo, don’t appease

13/08/2014, 04:31:32 PM

by Kevin Meagher

How far should a political party go in trying to win over ethnic minority voters? Baroness Warsi is clear that the Conservatives can’t win next year’s general election without more of them, while senior Labour figures like Sadiq Khan and David Lammy have raised the prospect of all-minority shortlists for parliamentary selections.

If nothing else, demography suggests it is smart politics for all parties to win a commanding share of what is now a growing market. The 2011 Census shows that around eight million people – 14 per cent of the population – are now non-White, (with half of that total – 7.5 per cent – being Asian/ Asian British). Academics at Leeds University reckon this figure will rise to 20 per cent of the UK population by 2051 while the Policy Exchange think tank reckons the figure will be nearer to a third.

But politicians need to be clear that they don’t succumb to a conceptual fallacy. When they talk of “making politics look more like the electorate” they are speaking in code for promoting candidates because of their skin colour. This is hopelessly naïve and horribly tokenistic.

Minority ethnic communities are not simply ‘Black’ or ‘Asian’. Indeed, the impact of large-scale European immigration over the past decade makes that a nonsense. As does the growth in people from mixed-race backgrounds, who are now said to make up the second largest minority ethnic group.

Instead of descending into gesture politics with the promotion of ethnic-only shortlists, or treating minorities like electoral blocs, parties should focus on providing a fair and transparent policy offer to woo them instead.

Despite the diversity, there are often common issues of concern. Take public health. We know that South Asians have a higher propensity towards Type Two diabetes and that Afro-Carribbean people are three to five times more likely than any other group to be diagnosed and admitted to hospital for schizophrenia. Meanwhile the Irish, a predominantly White ethnic group (and, arguably, the UK’s largest), suffer from a higher preponderance to genetic conditions like coeliac disease and haemochromatosis.

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Labour risks being on the wrong side of history over Islamism

13/08/2014, 11:17:44 AM

by Rob Marchant

No-one could exactly accuse President Obama of rushing into military action to deal with the resurgent Islamists of ISIS in Iraq, currently massacring local Christians and Yazidis. No, if there were a perfect illustration for the phrase “dragged kicking and screaming”, this would surely be it.

But Iraq’s apparent political and military meltdown is, ironically, drawing the “troops out” Obama administration – and could yet conceivably draw our own – into some kind of ring-fenced, belated rear-guard action in the Middle East. Whatever the rights and wrongs of any such action might be, the cause is, again, the phenomenon which has dominated the first decade-and-a-half of this century’s foreign policy and may yet come to dominate the rest of it: jihadism, the extreme version of political Islam.

As the years have worn on from 9/11 and 7/7, it has been easy for the world to retreat into the comfortable delusion that the threat has gone. It has not. Taking a bit longer in the airport security queue has not made everyone safe. Islamist terrorism is still happening, just not on our shores. And the fundamental problem is not Islam per se, of course; it is Islam as the basis for an illiberal form of politics and government.

If further evidence were needed of how Islamism seems destined always to end in some kind of madness, then it could certainly be provided by recent events in Gaza, where Hamas has spent recent weeks using civilians as human shields. Or in Nigeria, where Boko Haram is busy kidnapping its schoolgirls for use as slaves, as our politicians take decisive action to fight them via, er, Twitter.

But it’s not just such visibly extreme Islamism; look closer to home, to a “moderate” administration governing a historical ally of the West, where Turkey’s government has been slowly sliding into an increasingly unpleasant authoritarianism. If you want an indication of the current direction of a country which had previously made great strides towards modernisation, try reading recent comments by deputy prime minister Bülent Arınç, who recently opined that “women should not laugh in public”. This from the “acceptable face” of Islamism.

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Our MPs are deeply unhappy people. Mark Simmonds just did something about it

12/08/2014, 03:15:46 PM

by Kevin Meagher

Ever since Norman Fowler resigned from Margaret Thatcher’s government claiming he wanted to spend more time with his family (although he didn’t quite use that phrase) resigning from ministerial office for reasons other than sexual exposure, financial corruption or manifest incompetence has been something of a curiosity in Westminster.

Yesterday, foreign office minister Mark Simmonds “did a Fowler,” quitting the government in the pursuit of a happier life. At just 50 and with a desirable job and safe seat (from which he had previously announced he was retiring at the next election), Simmonds seemed to have it all going for him. Yet his farewell to politics is evidence that he does not have it all; certainly not the balanced existence he craves.

For him, the ephemeral buzz of high office gave way to the practicalities of family life. Explaining his move, Simmonds said:

“The allowances that enable Members of Parliament to stay in London while they are away from their families – my family lives in Lincolnshire in my constituency – does not allow me to rent a flat which can accommodate my family, so I very rarely see my family and I have to put family life first.”

“Mr Simmonds” reported the BBC “said the idea of spending another five years rarely seeing his children and staying in a different hotel room each night “’fills me with horror’”.

It’s easy to mock his decision – 90k minister can’t rent a plush London crash pad – but Simmonds has exposed an unsayable aspect at the heart of life in Westminster – that so many MPs, on all sides, are deeply unhappy people.

Many feel they are trying to juggle an important job that doesn’t pay particularly well (sorry, it doesn’t) while clinging on to some kind of a family life and, usually, running two homes (or, in Simmonds’s case a home and a procession of hotel rooms). To this add in the perennial demands of constituents, party workers, and whips, the nagging worry of electoral defeat and the glare of unrelenting media scrutiny.

Of course, MPs will never say any of this for two perfectly understandable reasons. The first is that a hundred other people would happily crawl across broken glass (and much worse besides) to replace them. The second is that the public simply doesn’t give a stuff about how miserable their MPs are. In fact, the more disconsolate they are, the better.

Forget about work-life balance; the political life is all-consuming. It’s a wonder that any MPs’ marriages hold together or that there kids even recognise them. This is why so many compensate by having spouses and children work for them. (This, in turn, earns them a bucket of ordure for milking the expenses system and turning their office into a family business).

Sunday’s Observer reported that 15 per cent of the Parliamentary Labour Party will resign at next year’s election – twice the rate that retired before Labour’s 1997 landslide. There will of course be a range of individual reasons, but more and more MPs seem to be realising that the all-too-common experience of resentful partners and distant children are sacrifices that are not, in the final analysis, worth making.

Kevin Meagher is associate editor of Labour Uncut

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If Yvette wants to be leader she needs to tell us what she stands for

12/08/2014, 08:10:46 AM

by David Talbot

What else is there to do in the long summer months than speculate on the next leader of the Labour party? Last summer, of course, events in Falkirk consumed the body politic. This year, with nowhere near as much excitement to hold the nerve during the month of news-austerity that is August, commentators have turned their eye to much more familiar ground; leadership speculation. As Boris Johnson confirms that he had been fibbing all this time and is positively squeaking with ambition to become the next Conservative leader, so too the next roll-call of Labour leadership hopefuls is being sized up. This is predicated, of course, on a Labour loss next year. But that argument is for another day.

Step forward one D Hodges, formerly of the Uncut parish, and now musing from his perch at the Telegraph. Hodges has written a blog suggesting that Rachel Reeves has utilised her ‘boring snoring’ credentials to propel herself into the position of a credible contender for future leadership of the Labour party. Reeves , we are told, for no one actually noticed at the time, launched the latest salvo in Labour’s “the choice” summer campaign last week. Reeves no doubt has a serious and illustrious career ahead of her in the Labour party and, when she genuinely is not being quite so boring, could one day make leader. But the secondary, and all the more intriguing, observation was the slow demise of Yvette Cooper.

Cooper has long been seen as the one serious contender to take on the might of the Umunna machine. Her abstention during the last Labour leadership contest, with the announcement that it wasn’t “the right time”, was rightly seen as the barely-disguised motions of someone who given the chance would run for leader. The reasons for her prominence are well known, and her CV reads like so many of her current Labour contemporaries; First Class degree in PPE at Oxford, Harvard, Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, Harriet Harman’s office via the Independent and emerging as Labour’s Member of Parliament for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford.

Her rise through the ministerial ranks was systematic and impressive; from underling at the Department of Health to Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. Given New Labour’s obsession with reshuffles, Cooper was a member of the government in no less than 6 departments holding 8 positions. The depth and breadth of her experience is enviable. As shadow Home Secretary she has at times forensically dissected the arguments and machinations of her government counterpart, Theresa May, who is widely regarded as one of the Conservative’s best performers and strongly tipped for their throne.

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Sofa government has ended in Scotland. This needs to happen in the rest of the UK

11/08/2014, 05:41:12 PM

by Jonathan Todd

“When this is over, I am not going back to my sofa,” said a working class grandmother, who’d never previously been politically active, of the Scottish referendum. She made this remark to Robin McAlpine of Common Weal – “a vision of what Scotland can be if it rejects the failed Me-First politics that left us all in second place and instead builds a politics that puts All Of Us First” – and he reported it to BBC Radio 4 last week. The legacy of the referendum campaign, irrespective of its outcome, observed McAlpine, is the widespread popular desire for “a politics that involves us and which we get involved in”.

The latest polling gives Better Together a 13 percent lead. While the pro-independence grandmother got active because the referendum was “too important to the future of her grandchildren”, it seems to be moving toward the outcome that she opposes. Nonetheless, the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats are now all committed to additional powers for the Scottish Executive and Parliament. Scotland seems likely to say “no thanks” but the consensus between the political parties means that such an outcome will lead to some form of “devo-max“.

As grandmothers refuse to return to their sofas, more power will be brought closer to them within a new devolution settlement. Which is why Neal Ascherson seems justified in concluding in the current edition of Prospect that “whichever way the referendum vote goes on that Thursday in September, Scotland on the Friday morning will already be living in some form of independence”.

I have worried that post-referendum Scotland will be a fractious place, with festering grievances and bridges to be built. This might be part of the picture. But the whole picture may well contain positives: a highly engaged electorate with new powers to shape their future.

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If we can’t access GPs, do we really have a health service at all?

11/08/2014, 10:54:08 AM

by Kevin Meagher

As I sit here nursing a nasty chest infection that I can’t seem to shake off, the crisis in the NHS is brought home to me all too clearly. I can’t get an appointment to see my GP before the end of next week, begging the question that if I cannot access basic healthcare at the point of need, do we in fact have a National Health Service in any meaningful sense at all?

As Shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham has pointed out, the slump in service standards “is more marked in general practice than anywhere else in the NHS: in 2009/10, four out of five people said they saw a GP within 48 hours; now it is just two in five.”

And it’s set to get worse. A recent poll of GPs suggests average waiting times for a basic appointment are going to stretch to 13 days by next April. Apparently, I should have had the forethought to make an appointment after the first cough.

In response, the government’s NHS Choices website (“Your health, your choices”) suggests that people like me should “consider the alternatives” before bothering their GP. Thankfully, this is just a range of staggeringly inane and nannying ‘advice’ rather than an invitation to seek out a consultation with the village wise woman or medicine man.

Instead of seeing the doctor, “[t]he pharmacist behind the counter at your local chemist may be able to give you the help you need, so you won’t have to spend time waiting for an appointment.” Discussing your medical history within earshot of the queue in Boots certainly offers an interesting approach to patient confidentiality.

If, however, you feel compelled to seek out the kind of informed medical support that we pay our taxes to access when we are ill, the advice is not to forget your manners, especially to the support staff. “Be polite to receptionists. They are busy people who often have to deal with unhappy patients. Being polite to them will encourage them to help you.”

What is the corollary of this extraordinary statement? Patients are not busy people and if some receptionist does not consider a patient to be sufficiently ‘polite’ they will not help them?

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