« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

When Ed Miliband marches against austerity tomorrow, will he answer the £10bn question?

19/10/2012, 10:22:26 AM

by Atul Hatwal

Tomorrow, when Ed Miliband attends the TUC’s march against austerity, he will be asked a simple question.

The answer will help determine whether One Nation Labour is an idea that will resonate with the public or just an ephemeral phrase du jour:

Ed, do you back Unite, Unison and the GMB who have just submitted a claim for a 13% rise in wages on behalf of 1.6 million local government workers?

Yes or no?

No, don’t use a parsed formulation of words involving the phrase “tough choices” while avoiding a clear position.

Do not obfuscate, this isn’t a demand to write the next manifesto several years before the next election, it’s just a question that cannot wait three years for an answer.

Neither is it good enough to say that this is a matter for local government as if the leader of the Labour party is somehow legally proscribed from having an opinion.

For the unions, in a very practical sense, this wage claim is part of the alternative to austerity and it is a question they will ask of Labour’s leader, face to face, on Saturday.

Their local government members have faced real terms pay cuts, year on year since 2009. 13% sounds a lot for a wage claim but it would only recoup the real terms losses (e.g. the difference between inflation and the nominal pay rises awarded) suffered since 2009.

What is the point of the union movement if it cannot protect its members from never-ending pay cuts?

(more…)

Facebook Twitter Digg Delicious StumbleUpon

Posted in Uncut | 8 Comments »

The government’s top 30 “real achievements”

18/10/2012, 11:12:18 AM

by Michael Dugher

Back in July, after a torrid few months for the government following their budget for millionaires and with Britain in a double-dip recession, David Cameron and Nick Clegg responded the way they always do: they organised another press re-launch.  At the event held at a railway depot at Smethwick in the West Midlands, they announced that the Government would publish a mid-term review in the autumn outlining what they had “achieved” and identifying future goals and objectives.

So following the party conference season, and with the imminent publication of this review, it seems a good time to look back over the last two years to assess what the government has really achieved and to outline what its real half-term report should look like.  Here are the government’s top 30 real achievements:

On the economy:

1. When the Tories took office the economy was growing, but the government’s policies choked off the recovery and have delivered the longest double-dip recession since the second world war;

2. The IMF has cut its UK growth forecast for 2012 to minus 0.4 per cent;

3. Borrowing is up.  Compared to last year, borrowing is up by 22 per cent so far this year;

4. Tax cuts for the rich – the government is cutting 5p from the 50p top rate tax, giving 8,000 people earning over £1 million a tax cut of over £40,000 a year;

5. And at the same time as helping millionaires, the government is introducing a “granny tax”, which will see 4.4 million pensioners who pay income tax losing an average of £83 per year.
(more…)

Facebook Twitter Digg Delicious StumbleUpon

Posted in Uncut | 10 Comments »

So, if Labour win the next election, where will we be in October 2015?

18/10/2012, 07:00:56 AM

by Peter Watt

On Saturday hundreds of thousands of people will be demonstrating against the cuts to the public sector being imposed by the government.

The TUC’s “we were told there was an alternative” march and rally in central London is the latest in a series of events organised against the cuts since Ed Balls unveiled his emergency budget in June.  PM Miliband faced heckling and walkouts at the TUC in early September and at the Labour party conference 100,000 protesters ringed the conference over-shadowing his Tuesday speech.

Government ministers have faced UK Uncut activists chaining themselves to their cars, bikes, houses and constituency offices as disruption and protest is maximised.  But it is the anger towards prime minster Miliband that is most palpable.  The elation of the election victory a mere four months ago must now seem a very distant memory to our beleaguered PM.

The problem seems to boil down to a sense of voters feeling let down as Labour impose their austerity package.  Of course Miliband and Balls can point to a series of speeches and announcements that they made in opposition that they say made it clear that they would need to make cuts.  As Balls said in his interview with Andrew Marr last week:

“We said it would be tough and it is, five years of failed coalition policy that delivered negligible growth means that the government books were even worse than we thought.  Of course we were always clear with people that we would need to make some cuts but unfortunately in reality this means that we have a much tougher job on our hands than even we realised.”

But it appears that voters were not as clear about the Labour party’s intentions as Miliband and Balls now claim that they were.

(more…)

Facebook Twitter Digg Delicious StumbleUpon

Posted in Uncut | 12 Comments »

Demonstrating against Google? Because of the anti-Islam film? You’re kidding right?

17/10/2012, 07:00:39 AM

by Rob Marchant

On Monday, the Telegraph reported an attendance of over ten thousand at a demonstration outside the UK headquarters of Google, over the controversial film “The Innocence of Muslims”.

The first point to note is that these are only a small handful of the 1.6 million Muslims who live in Britain, and who care passionately enough about the subject to get up and do something, in this case to try to ban it. Yes, we can and should respect the fact that some of our population are annoyed at the negative portrayal of their religion, and that they have the right to demonstrate (the vast majority of Muslims very likely see this news and merely shrug, or are possibly even irritated by the counter-productivity of the protests themselves).

But perhaps it is important is that those other thousands of sensible, free-speech-loving Muslims do not merely shrug, and that they can engage with the idea that, however irritating, banning is not the answer. In particular, it is important that their religious leaders, and so-called “community leaders”, do not merely shrug, or worse, indulge this silliness.

In part, it’s about free speech, but in part, it’s also about the long-term health of this religion: because there seems to be an existential crisis developing within it, a polarisation between moderate and extremist which has been slowly brewing for decades over the twentieth century which is making  for an explosive collision with progressive, humanitarian values in the twenty-first.

(more…)

Facebook Twitter Digg Delicious StumbleUpon

Posted in Uncut | 11 Comments »

US campaign diary: Three reasons for Democrats to be calm about tonight’s debate

16/10/2012, 07:00:23 AM

by Nikhil Dyundi

It’s nearly here. Two frustrating weeks since president Obama phoned in his performance in the Danville debate, he has the opportunity to make amends.

Across the nation, Democrat nerves will jangle and nails will be bitten. The more volatile will fear disaster at the end of every sentence while even the most confident will feel anxious.

But, in spite of the unavoidable tumult of emotion, rationally Dems should be calm. There are three reasons the result in New York tonight should be more to our liking: expectations about Romney’s performance, his weaknesses and the format

First, Romney is facing a tough fight in the media expectations game. He won last time out and won big. Anything less than a comparable result will have journalists writing about a drop in his level of performance.

The swing of the media pendulum is as predictable as it is exaggerated. The last fortnight gave them the opportunity to write a Romney rebound into reality. An avalanche of gushing pieces about the GOP candidate’s performance has changed the prism through which the public view the race and inevitably shifted the polls.

But that story has been written.

Barring a similarly pallid non-performance from Obama as in the first debate, a passable showing from the president will spawn a wave of comeback pieces.

A presidential fightback will give the media the new angle they need to churn through the next six days until the final debate. There will be review pieces on the performance, tick tock pieces on the minutiae of how the campaign prepared Obama and impact pieces looking at how it played in the battlegrounds.

(more…)

Facebook Twitter Digg Delicious StumbleUpon

Posted in Uncut | No Comments »

The Sunday review: conference season

14/10/2012, 08:00:33 AM

by Anthony Painter

The two main parties have raised their game. Admittedly, this wasn’t difficult after last year but it is the case nonetheless. Conference season 2012 has defined the 2015 fight and was, unusually, consequential. The Liberal Democrats sunk without a trace. We now have a traditional fight between a party of enterprise and individualism and a party of the people taking on unjust elites. There is real choice in politics again.

On their own terms both Ed Miliband and David Cameron delivered very good speeches. The script for Labour’s conference was that its leader would deliver another vague, unfocused, holier-than-thou address. He didn’t. It had a clear and appealing message and it re-defined him as a political voice with an ability to cut through.

Equally, the script for the Conservative conference was that, having failed to establish a convincing economic recovery, the party would simply shift back into 2001/2005 mode. In fairness, the party did shunt right with all the old classics on abortion, the right to shoot at will, human rights and fantasies about workers being traded as if they were grains of wheat. Its leader did something different: he articulated a centre-right vision of the mainstream; one that is recognisable from the Thatcher years. It was full of many of the same bogeymen: intellectuals, teaching unions, the work-shy, and so on. But its aspiration nation message is a mainstream one nonetheless.

(more…)

Facebook Twitter Digg Delicious StumbleUpon

Posted in Uncut | 6 Comments »

On tax, Labour must remember: “It’s not our money stupid, it’s theirs”

11/10/2012, 08:00:20 AM

by Peter Watt

So the battle of the speeches is over.  All three leaders made pretty good speeches.  Nick Clegg, who I have a soft spot for, probably had the toughest job of all but seemed to go down well in the hall at least.  But the real battle was Miliband versus Cameron.

Trying to be non-biased, I think that Ed Miliband just won the battle, although David Cameron   wasn’t far behind.  They were both very similar in that they were both very personal, focused on values and were policy light.  They were also both used as opportunities to attack the other; both with some force; and both speeches were passionate and effective.

But in truth, Ed Miliband managed to use his speech to build much needed confidence in him from his party.  Critically he also managed to persuade a sceptical press that he really could win an election.   It may or may not have been a game changer but it was certainly a very significant event in the slow run-up to the election in 2015.  For that reason I think that he won the battle.  But he has not yet won the war.

There were two very significant passages in the speeches.  The first from Ed:

“A tax cut for millionaires. Next April, David Cameron will be writing a cheque for £40,000 to each and every millionaire in Britain. Not just for one year. But each and every year.”

And the second is from David Cameron’s speech in response:

“I sometimes wonder if they know anything about the real economy at all.  Did you hear what Ed Miliband said last week about taxes?  He described a tax cut as the government writing people a cheque.  Ed… Let me explain to you how it works.  When people earn money, it’s their money.   Not the government’s money: their money.  Then, the government takes some of it away in tax.  So, if we cut taxes, we’re not giving them money – we’re taking less of it away.  OK?”

Put aside the silly looseness in language from Ed over the “each and every millionaire” line, these two passages hold the key to one of the central battles of the next election – Labour’s competence on the economy.

Unless and until Labour really does understand the tax point then they will struggle to convince people that they are not profligate “tax-and-spenders”.   The truth is that too many people in Labour really do think that taxation is an inherently good thing.  That somehow taxing people, the state taking peoples’ own money from them, is somehow morally right.

(more…)

Facebook Twitter Digg Delicious StumbleUpon

Posted in Uncut | 40 Comments »

Cameron breaches Labour’s Maginot line

10/10/2012, 03:10:56 PM

by David Talbot

The battle lines for 2015 have begun to be drawn. As Labour’s foot soldiers marched to the beat towards the feted middle ground last week in Manchester, its gun batteries trained their aim onto unfamiliar territory with audacious talk of a Labour “one nation” prime minister. The Tories, retreating in disarray, have receded to their ideological redoubt, and Labour skirmishers have at last engaged with hostile middle England in a first serious advance on the mission to Downing Street.

Or so the Labour hierarchy would have you believe. But they have made a serious tactical error.

The infamous Maginot Line was a fortified defensive line built by the French to protect the Franco-German border. It was a formidable defensive structure, and a feat of military engineering and strategising far beyond the era in which it was built. It lies between 12 to 16 miles in depth and stretched from the Swiss Alps in the south to the Channel in the north. The defensive structure was completed after ten years, just before the outbreak of war, and is estimated in today’s money to have cost the equivalent of nearly €50 trillion.

This is the comparable psychological position the Labour party are now staking their ground upon. The party’s grey beards have assumed that, much like the French army, the Conservatives would become unsteady under fire and surrender without trace when grapeshot thinned the lines. This is a first-class misjudgement. The Conservatives are headed through the Ardennes.

Miliband stole the Tories’ one-nation clothes precisely because David Cameron had forgotten to look after them. The Labour leader was executing a classic New Labour move straight from the Tony Blair’s playbook. But unlike the Blair years the Tories will not move ever-rightwards to placate the rabid tenancy and pander to their core. Cameron, frankly, is far too astute for that. Revitalising the “compassionate conservative” model that launched his leadership some seven years ago, the Conservative leader resolutely refused to fall into Labour’s lazy caricature. Moreover, he fought back and punched through Labour’s lines. Tough language on Labour’s Achilles heel – the deficit – will cut through to the nation’s conscience far more than any high-minded seminar on a 19th century Disraelian ideal.

(more…)

Facebook Twitter Digg Delicious StumbleUpon

Posted in Uncut | 14 Comments »

It’s been a dreadful conference for the Tories but they will still leave Birmingham happy

10/10/2012, 07:59:31 AM

by Atul Hatwal

One wonders if the Tories can see how their conference has looked to the rest of Britain. Once upon a time in the mid-2000s they used it as a platform to speak to the country. It was an opportunity to demonstrate how they had changed. There was talk of voting blue to go green, civil liberties and hugging hoodies.

The rank and file might have been unhappy but the message to the general public couldn’t have been clearer: “we are not the same old Tories, we have changed, we live in the modern world.”

These last few days have been like looking at the photo negative of days gone by: cutting workers’ rights, slashing benefits and battering burglars.

The pre-briefing about this conference focused on the Tories new magic word “striver.” In itself it’s a good idea; aspiration and hard-work will never be out of political fashion.

But the Tories seem to have got confused.

Tough messages on law and order and benefits might be perennially popular but without some balance in other areas like civil liberties or the economy it all begins to look decidedly familiar. More red meat vicar?

It’s as if the Tory political managers have given up on ever returning to those halcyon days when the words “progressive” and “Conservative” were routinely used in the same sentence. They have meekly accepted their slide back into the comfortable embrace of the past.

For the Tories, uniquely of all of the parties, the only audience that matters at their conference is not out in the country, but sat in the hall.

(more…)

Facebook Twitter Digg Delicious StumbleUpon

Posted in Uncut | 2 Comments »

Bring me the head of David Cameron

09/10/2012, 07:00:39 AM

by Jonathan Todd

Kill the body and the head will die, so goes the old boxing maxim. The spine that is the chief whip is banished from conference. The lifeblood that is the party chair does not know who he is. The minister for Murdoch, now minister for the NHS, has distracted from efforts to restore vitality to the body Tory with his views on the bodies of women.

The Tories are taking a pummelling. It has become, to mix metaphors, as easy as shooting fish in a barrel to attack Tory ministers. What is more challenging and much more consequential is to have these attacks stick on the man responsible for these ministers. Up until now the prime minster has displayed a rather Teflon ability to evade calculability for the rolling omnishambles over which he has presided.

Several shadow ministers have been heard to bemoan over the TV and radio lately that the rule for blame allocation in this government is ABC: Anyone but Cameron. Damaged ministers are kept in post for as long as possible to soak up as much opprobrium as possible – otherwise, it might attach to the prime minister. Hapless junior ministers, as far as possible from association to Cameron, are sent out to try to explain u-turns. No humiliation is too great for these dispensable shock absorbers. Their reputations only matter insofar as they impact upon the prime minister’s standing.

It’s no surprise that a man whose only motivation for being prime minister is that he wants to be prime minister is deploying a vain and self-serving strategy. But shallow egotism is not the only motivation for Number 10’s approach. They see Cameron as the Conservative’s strongest resource, which they must preserve over all others.

Even if – as has transpired – the economy tanked and deficit grew, Conservatives reassured themselves with the view that the country would never vote for Ed Miliband and had become content with the idea of Cameron – so natural, so smooth, so born to rule – as their prime minister. Now two things are changing, which worry these Tories.

First, Miliband is starting to look and act a bit more like a prime minister. He leads a party united and determined to make a concerted pitch for the electoral centre ground: two preconditions of electoral success that Tories had assumed Miliband would never satisfy.

Second, Cameron seems less imperious. It’s not that Boris Johnson has won two elections, while Cameron has won none. It’s not that Johnson strikes an easier bond with the Tory faithful. It’s not that a time beyond Cameron has long been in sight. But all of these things matter. It’s that events appear the master of Cameron and his incompetent ministers.

(more…)

Facebook Twitter Digg Delicious StumbleUpon

Posted in Uncut | 3 Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »