Uncut « Labour Uncut

Loyalism’s one-sided love affair with the British state

11/12/2012, 07:00:19 AM

by Kevin Meagher

The troubles have ended, but Northern Ireland’s culture war is in full swing.

Last week’s vote by Belfast city council to limit flying the union flag above the city hall and a couple of other municipal buildings from 365 days a year to twenty has resulted in a week of rioting, attacks on the police and death threats to moderate politicians of the Alliance party.

Last night a police car parked outside the office of its deputy party leader, East Belfast MP Naomi Long, was set on fire by a loyalist gang – while an officer was still inside (thankfully he escaped unhurt). There was also rioting in south Belfast, causing the police service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) to deploy water cannons (which have never been used in Britain).

A trifle of an issue for most Britons, the decision over the flag was, for a loyalist community that famously paints its kerbstones red, white and blue, a decision that cut to the wick. Loyalism, a creed that is filled with suspicion and the narrative of betrayal – both real and imagined – now believes the Fenian hordes are banging at the gate.

One by one their cherished citadels fall. Stormont, that bulwark of unionist ascendancy, is now home to a power-sharing arrangement that sees unionists sit down not only with Catholics, but former IRA men.

The “right” of their loyal orders to parade (never march) through predominantly Catholic areas is now curtailed by the hated parades commission, (surely the British state’s most idiosyncratic quango?)

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Where is the tax justice in our economy?

10/12/2012, 01:28:03 PM

by Amanda Ramsay

When it comes to the economy, George Osborne has failed this country on all levels. He’s failed on debt reduction, on deficit reduction and failed to bring growth or jobs. The price we pay is cuts to our services, employment rights and employment prospects.

The Autumn financial statement poured more cold water on Keynesian hopes, eager for a “do something government,” not a laissez-faire-do-nothing-but-cut-government. Yet in the morass of commentary and analysis since the chancellor sat down last Wednesday, I am still asking myself: why is it acceptable that tax payers end-up subsidising low wages by means of tax credits, housing benefit and all manner of other fiscal instruments to supplement people on poverty pay?

I ask this not because the recipients don’t deserve the help they need to make ends meet, of course they do, but they are only necessary because employers and companies are not paying adequate salaries and wages in the first place.

Someone who has the gumption to start a company and create jobs should be congratulated and supported but without a mandatory living wage, companies are allowed to let profit win over decency in how they pay their staff.

Low pay is forcing people into the arms of the nanny state; to house, feed, clothe and pay for transport to get themselves to work, let alone heat their homes.

Where’s the fairness in that?

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George Osborne has learned his trade from Gordon Brown

10/12/2012, 09:07:19 AM

by David Talbot

“To bring all these decisions for many benefits over many years together,” Osborne told the House of Commons last Wednesday, “we will introduce into parliament primary legislation – the welfare uprating bill. I hope it commands support from both sides of the House of Commons”.

At that moment a thin smile seemed to escape the chancellor’s lips. Or if it didn’t, it should have done. For it represented the Damascene conversion of George Osborne to the scriptures of a once imperious Gordon Brown. And it was a moment of horribly low cunning that was eerily familiar for the Labour benches.

The announcement managed the near politically impossible. It will raise money, it will be popular and it will trap the opposition. It is vintage Gordon Brown, from the days when he was still known as the iron chancellor rather than the flailing prime minister of more recent memory. Yes, it’s easy to forget, but at one time, Brown was the political master of all he surveyed.

The guttural roar that greeted Osborne’s announcement from the Tory backbenches signified wholehearted approval of their chancellor’s ruse. Budgets are meant to be about economics. But for the two most political chancellors of the modern era, everything is politics. The statistics, forecasts, tax and public spending changes are immaterial for the political battleground with their hated opposition.

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The Sunday review: Starbucks

09/12/2012, 08:00:58 AM

by Anthony Painter

I imagine the first Starbucks store that opened in Pike Place market in Seattle was quite an exciting affair. The coffee was probably great. It must have been a remarkable local institution. Four decades later, Starbucks is now synonymous with corporate greed. What a few weeks it’s had – a long way from Pike Place.

What has taken place shows that direct action works. No, not UK Uncut. But that of MPs. Step forward Margaret Hodge, a name mostly associated with New Labour. Who’d have thought it? But when a special report appeared on Reuters in the middle of October, it was the House of Commons public accounts committee that reacted. A few weeks later and Starbucks is £20 million out of pocket. Investigative journalism and a backbench House of Commons committee – it doesn’t get much more old politics than that but it did the trick.

Starbucks seem pretty par for the course when it comes to multinational tax avoidance. In this case, moral outrage seems to have done the trick as thousands turned away from Starbucks, helped by campaigns such as 38 Degrees (UK Uncut have a habit of putting people off rather than encouraging them to join their campaigns – whatever the claims of the direct action left or paranoid right). But moral outrage only goes so far. Starbucks will be hoping it’s all died down in a couple of years and then get back to business as usual.

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In yesterday’s debate, George Osborne had a clear script, Ed Balls didn’t

06/12/2012, 10:00:08 AM

by Jonathan Todd

“It was just like a budget”. This was the immediate reaction of the ever perceptive Nigel Lawson when the Daily Politics sought it soon after the Autumn statement. Ming Campbell – the only other participant on a very balanced panel – concurred. That said; they had a point. Not only was the stagecraft familiar. The content was too.

The Conservatives have a script, you see. China is rising but the skivers aren’t, so further welfare reform is needed to prevent China eating all our dinners. The global race will be won by strivers, not drunken layabouts. And reform of our schools will create a nation of strivers. That’s if Johnny Foreigner and his euro don’t do what the last government and our “mess” could not quite do and do for us good and proper.

This script has been obvious since Conservative party conference. It has, in its own parlance, stayed the course. It is no surprise, therefore, that it was served up again yesterday. That’s the thing with political scripts. Politicians disembark on one that feels right, feelings which polling confirms. Then they keep saying it and saying it and saying it some more. Finally, maybe, it hits home with the electorate. By which time, certainly, they have bored themselves and the lobby into a stupor.

It was never really in doubt, consequently, what Osborne’s key messages would be. Any sentient political observer should have long known. We know its villains: the last government and the bed we made; welfare recipients and the beds that they lie in; the rest of Europe and their siesta.

But Osborne’s heroes shun and abhor all such lazy, flabby, debt-sodden indulgence. It is the strivers that have doubled exports to major emerging economies since 2009 and created over a million jobs in the private sector since he became chancellor.

Politics is the ceaseless clash of narratives: many half-baked, most never reaching a real terminus but the endless grafting of perceptions unto realities. So, what story did Ed Balls tell in rebutting this tale of striving heroes and shirking villains?

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Changing the law is only the start in tackling discrimination

06/12/2012, 07:00:07 AM

by Peter Watt

Attacking discrimination in all of its forms has been something that unites many from across the political spectrum. Many political battles fought over the years to pass legislation that seeks to end discrimination. In fact Wikipedia has a very helpful list of all of the UK Acts passed over the years, and it is quite a list:

Equality Act 2010
Equality Act 2006
Disability Discrimination Act 2005
Race Relations Amendment Act 2000
Disability Discrimination Act 1995
Race Relations Act 1976
Sex Discrimination Act 1975,
Equal Pay Act 1970
Race Relations Act 1968
Race Relations Act 1965
Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928
Representation of the People Act 1918

Every one of these will have been hard fought and will often have been resisted. Each was dramatic in its impact and generally led rather than followed public opinion in the area of life that it sought to influence. And the social change that can be charted in this list is worth reflecting on.

It starts with extending the franchise to all men and then all women and ends with an Act that brings together the series of laws passed outlawing discrimination on the basis of race, disability, religion or belief, gender, age and sexuality. And let’s not forget that there have also been other battles fought along the way that have slowly made life fairer. For instance, one of the proudest moments for many of us of the last Labour government was the passing of the civil partnership act (2004).

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Pluralism isn’t a choice for Labour, it’s a necessity

05/12/2012, 05:30:25 PM

by Kevin Meagher

One of the curiosities of devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland is the way in which the institutions look nothing like Westminster.

Whether it was a Freudian rejection of the hyper-tribalism of the Commons chamber and Westminster’s self-regard, the model for the devolved bodies has ensured a more pluralistic form of politics, with more grown-up politics the result.

That’s something Westminster village dwellers are not used to. Here, politics is still shaped by student union politicking and the public school debating society.

Yet all parties are coalitions of people with a wide range of views who happen to coalesce around broad themes. Is there really much of an issue of principle, therefore, to seek agreement with people outside the tribe if the ends are mutually satisfactory?

Enter Labour for Democracy, launched in Westminster last night and led by MPs Paul Blomfield and John Denham. The group seeks to make the case for inter-party working, particularly on big, expensive, long-term, cross-cutting issues like social care, pensions and climate change. As the website blurb puts it:

“The tough decisions that we will face, and the need to build wide support for radical change, demand a new approach to the way we do politics.’

It adds: ‘The days when over 95% of the electorate voted either Tory or Labour are long gone. Increasing support for smaller parties, switching between parties and differentiation between local and national voting reflect the changed approach of the electorate.”

By 2015 the age of majoritarian government may well indeed be behind us. There is nothing to guarantee Labour will win a general election victory outright (alas) and the party needs to get its collective head around that prospect.

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Labour history uncut: Lib-Labbery and the 1906 election

04/12/2012, 10:35:17 PM

by Pete Goddard and Atul Hatwal

By late 1903, initial worries over the survival of the LRC had abated. But these were soon replaced by the eternal question for every small party: how do we make this a big party, with national standing, official stationery and an annual conference that doesn’t take place above a pub?

There were two schools of thought: the first was to go to the nation, stand in as many seats as possible on a purely socialist platform and trust the people to embrace the need for change and bring about a new dawn for the nation.

The second stood a chance of actually working.

It entailed finding something in common with a bigger, more successful party and hanging out with them – the law of the playground on a national scale.

Ramsay Macdonald had already cosied up to the Liberals in the Woolwich by-election, securing a clear run for LRC man Will Crooks to go head to head with the Tory. It was a tactical victory but a more systematic alliance seemed unlikely without a clear issue to bring Labour and Liberals together.

Step forward Joseph Chamberlain, secretary of state for the colonies in the Tory government and all round political homewrecker.

Joseph Chamberlain was a major force in politics, despite being operated the entire time by ventriloquist Ray Alan

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The debate on Osborne’s Autumn statement will, once again, ignore what really matters

04/12/2012, 07:00:37 AM

by Jonathan Todd

Is the national scandal David Cameron’s lack of inclination to implement Leveson or his failure to facilitate a similarly forensic investigation and debate on the culture, practices and ethics of the financial sector?

The central reality of Britain in 2012 is that our national wealth remains more than 3 percent below its pre-crisis peak. The Autumn statement should tell us precisely how far George Osborne’s debt and deficit targets are off track. But the core truth is obvious: our anaemic growth makes it ever harder for us to sustain the public services and quality of life we would like.

We have not been through a deeper and longer growth contraction than the notoriously grim 1930s because of Rupert Murdoch. Labour rightly insists that if Leveson is implemented then the indignities and injustices of the press will be reduced. But we have little to offer in terms of policies that will provide comparable certainty that the financial crisis of 2008 will either not happen again or not precipitate such a deleterious effect upon the wider economy if it does.

Labour has made much of Cameron’s reluctance to provide a statutory underpinning to press regulation but the call made by Michael Jacobs and Tony Wright for a judicial inquiry into the financial crash on the lines of Leveson went unheeded. Instead we had the Vickers Report, which Osborne managed to get away with partially implementing, in spite of Sir John’s insistence throughout that his recommendations will only work as a complete package.

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Is the shire one nation? Are hobbits blue Labour?

03/12/2012, 02:54:47 PM

by Ian Stewart

Sometimes it is a good thing to have obsessions other than politics. There are times when your interests can coincide, and that’s good too, but we all need to have an escape from the world – even an atheist needs his “heart in a heartless world.”

Only a few days to go now comrades, and I am reaching a level of excitement normally only reached at election time, or during the six nations. Soon we will see the results of all that had work for ourselves.

Not a by-election, not a mayoral race nor even one of those exciting composite motions at the TUC, but the imagining of the wilds of Mirkwood. Yes, Mirkwood, across The misty mountains of middle earth, with Bilbo Baggins, Gandalf and thirteen dwarfs, led by Thorin Oakenshield. I really, really cannot wait to see what Peter Jackson has made of this children’s classic.

From December the thirteenth, we will finally get to see if the waiting has been worth it. The production has been fraught with controversy, from Gulliermo del Toro being in, then out, to accusations of animal cruelty, to taking a pretty slim book and expanding it into three full-length feature films.

On top of this, the Conservative New Zealand government drove a horse and cart through workers rights to enable Warner Brothers and New Line to pay actors and extras below scale. From the outside, it has sometimes looked like a production doomed to failure, and what with the anti-union practices and threats, a deserved one at that.

Yet we all watched the Olympics, knowing full well that the companies who built the stadia were engaged in blacklisting health and safety reps, that the founder of the modern games was a proto-fascist who admired and applauded Hitler in 1936. All I will do is cut the films and Jackson a little slack.

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