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Whip’s Notebook: Oh what a night

12/07/2012, 11:00:41 AM

by Jon Ashworth

Supporters of a democratic House of Lords can take cheer that on Tuesday night the Commons voted by 462 to 124 give the House of Lords reform bill a second reading. But what a night. What a rebellion.

92 Tory MPs rebelled against their leader’s position. That’s a bigger rebellion than the recent EU referendum vote and almost the biggest Tory rebellion post-war.

From the start of the debate on Monday, Labour MPs have witnessed a slow motion car crash unfold for the Tory whips and No 10 which culminated, apparently, in an angry exhausted red faced Prime Minister angrily jabbing the chest of a leading rebel late at night in the corridors of the Commons. No wonder influential Lib Dem blogs are comparing David Cameron to John Major.

Should last night’s rebellion have come as much of a surprise to the prime minister and his Liberal Democrat colleagues?

Probably not.

For weeks Tory MPs have sidled up to me in the tea room and elsewhere asking for guidance on what Labour’s tactics would be. Fortunately our position was and had been always clear: to vote against the programme motion but support democratising the Lords and so vote in favour of the bill at second reading.

It’s been less straightforward on the government side with question marks over whether the government would win a vote on curtailing the timetable for debate, the so called programme motion.

On Monday, rumour had it the Tory whips were so worried about losing the programme motion that they were encouraging dissident MPs to vote in favour or abstain but rebel on second reading. But the Tory whips’ strategy was soon to be shot to pieces.

Early on Tuesday afternoon, Nick Clegg was still defending the programme motion but minutes later the Leader of the House Sir George Young opening the debate was forced to withdraw the very same programme motion.

Sir George tried to blame the Labour opposition for government’s failure to build support for the programme motion, an incredible claim later torpedoed by leading Tory rebel Jesse Norman who helpfully pointed out to Sir George that the government had been forced to withdraw it due to opposition on the Tory benches.

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Why is the government delaying on social care?

12/07/2012, 07:00:39 AM

by Peter Watt

It may have been a dream once, but free social care for adults who need it is not going to happen.  The majority of adults in this group are aged over 65, about 1 million of them.  The state does not currently pay for all of their care and so many have to pay some or all of their costs.  The reality is that whoever is in government in the future, this situation is only going to get more difficult.

Right now, if you think that you need social care then the local authority has to carry out an assessment of your needs and then and assessment of your finances.  Firstly they see if you are sufficiently impaired so that you need help and then they decide if you or they have to pay.

Increasingly though, the thresholds being used by councils to decide if you are sufficiently impaired are being raised; it means that the numbers of people that they have to provide help to can be reduced along with their costs.  But it doesn’t mean that the needs are less!

So many people who need help with washing, cooking, dressing, and so on have to pay someone to do it.  And similarly many people who need to go into residential care have to pay.  Essentially if you have savings of less than £14,250 then care at home is free; between that point and £23,250 the costs are shared and after that you’re on your own.

If you need residential care and own your house then, unless your partner is continuing to live there, then you will probably have to sell your house to pay for your care.  Quite frankly the situation is a nightmare for hundreds of thousands of families.  You don’t think about it until it is too late; you don’t know what it is you may have to pay for and you don’t know for how long you will have to pay!

The result is that 800,000 older people are going without the care that they need or are relying on friends and family, whilst a further 500,000 are paying for their own care.

But the answer is not to pretend that somehow it can all be solved just by throwing money at the problem.  Or that it is all the fault of the government and cuts.  Labour had 13 years to solve it and didn’t; we don’t have the money and quite simply we’re not going to have it.

The need to reduce our structural deficit means that there are hard choices to be made by this government and the next.  The fact is that many older people do in fact have the resources that mean that they can contribute to their care.

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Labour approaches a tipping point

11/07/2012, 03:13:52 PM

by Rob Marchant

“The future is unwritten” said Joe Strummer. He was right.  We really can change the future: really. Because politics is driven by people and events.

That said, many of these people and events are in turn, whether we like it or not, driven by power.

It’s significant that even the word tends to bring to mind thoughts of how power corrupts or how the wielding of power is somehow an undesirable act. But power can be good too. We need it. The just wielding of power is a wholly good and desirable act, whether or not we agree with the political outcome. Democracy would be meaningless without it, after all. Power is there to be used for good, even if that is not always the result as we see it.

Those who have it can choose to wield it, or not. And sometimes it can be about perceived, rather than actual, power, as well. The shifting of the political tectonic plates often happens because the balance changes between one side and another, and it is often these events, rather than the froth of the everyday media, which we should be watching.

So, let’s go beyond, for a moment, the day to day – whether or not Osborne will apologise to Balls (he should), or even whether the coalition is on the rocks (it’s probably not) – and take a little look into the Labour Party’s immediate future. It’s either entirely frivolous, or deadly serious: you choose.

And so we come back to the underlying story which manifested itself in Labour’s affiliated unions wanting to ban Progress. It hasn’t gone away, as many had hoped: the motion to conference has arrived from ASLEF, and it’s not clear that it was an “honourable peace” either, as Mark Ferguson  noted at LabourList on Monday.

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Flawed bill, floored coalition

11/07/2012, 11:03:15 AM

by Phil Hunt

Lords reform faces a hugely uncertain future with the failure of the Coalition government to even put its timetable motion to the vote in the House of Commons last night. The humiliating climb down was a sight to behold. As the Coalition partners slugged it out over a long two day debate, it became abundantly clear that a mass of Tory MPs would not support the Bill. Equally clear during the debate, was the catastrophic failure by Nick Clegg to produce a coherent piece of legislation.

Whatever the controversies over whether the second chamber should be 80% or 100% elected, once only terms of 15 years or the place of bishops, the focus of most MPs was on the powers of an elected Lords. And the lack of any convincing argument from Ministers as to how legislative gridlock was to be avoided between two elected chambers was rapidly exposed.

Potentially, the House of Lords has a lot of muscle. The pre-legislative scrutiny undertaken by the Joint Select Committee it reported back: “if the Lords chose to use its powers, it would be one of the most powerful second chambers in the world”. Yet it hasn’t done this for many years, precisely because its current members know they lack democratic legitimacy. Conventions have developed to help Peers exercise a voluntary constraint. An all or mostly elected chamber will give short shrift to that.

One of the more fanciable claims made by the government about its Lords Reform Bill was that Mr Clegg had dealt with the fear of many MPs that Commons primacy would be challenged by an elected second chamber. In fact, all the Bill does is to say that the Parliament Acts will apply. Without the conventions however, there will be little to hold back a confident and assertive House.

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If the coalition really does fracture after tonight’s vote, will Labour be ready?

10/07/2012, 07:00:35 AM

by Atul Hatwal

Tonight’s the night. The Commons votes on House of Lords reform and a series of dominoes will start to topple.

First, the government’s attempt to limit debate on the House of Lords reform bill through a “programme motion” will be defeated by a coalition of Labour and Tory votes.

It will mean Tory rebels in the Commons can filibuster the House of Lords bill, and the rest of the government’s legislative programme, into extinction. Faced with this threat, the prospect of the government throwing in the towel on House of Lords reform tomorrow morning seems almost a racing certainty.

Second, the Lib Dems will hit back by scuppering the Tories’ plans for revised parliamentary boundaries. It’s hard to see how the Lib Dem leadership could hold their party together without some retribution against the Tories. Again, on balance this seems a highly likely scenario.

Third, notwithstanding many Tories’ secret yearning to bury the new boundaries, there would be an explosion of Tory backbench, even frontbench, rage at their junior partners.

The price demanded by angry Tories would be new, true blue Conservative policies defined by the inability of the Lib Dems to support them. Lists are already being drawn up. The word “Europe” features heavily.

This is where there would be a speculative if not impossible next step. The final domino. Relations would become so strained between the government partners that they mutually lose the will to go on. They row. They snipe. And finally, they vote against each other. It would culminate in the death knell of all broken parliamentary partnerships, a failed vote of no confidence.

In the chaos of the ensuing election, out of the wreckage of the coalition, maybe, just maybe, a Labour government with a small majority would emerge.

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Getting it right on House of Lords reform

09/07/2012, 07:00:43 AM

by Wayne David

Tomorrow the House of Commons will vote on whether to give the government’s House of Lords Reform Bill a second reading. Labour will vote in favour because we believe in principle that the House of Lords should be democratically elected. This was a commitment we expressed in our general election manifesto and it is a view we still hold firmly.

But this is not to suggest that this is a “good” bill. Far from it. The government’s proposals are poorly thought-out and need to be radically improved.

One of the biggest weaknesses in the bill is its failure to set out how the House of Commons and the reformed chamber will relate to each other.

At present, the primacy of the House of Commons rests upon the Parliament Act, a set of “conventions” and the fact that the House of Commons, because it is elected, has a legitimacy which is lacked by the House of Lords. The government has said that the Parliament Act will remain in force but that it believes that the existing conventions will simply continue and post-reform the relationship will be unproblematic.

This view flies in the face of virtually all informed opinion and it defies common sense: once you have an elected second chamber without clear rules, or explicit conventions, it is inevitable that the members of that chamber will feel that they have a democratic authority to challenge the House of Commons.

The result will be that the two chambers could be locked in endless conflict, resulting in government grinding to a halt.

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The Sunday review:How democratic is the UK? The 2012 audit by Stuart Wilks-Heeg, Andrew Blick and Stephen Crone for Democratic Audit

08/07/2012, 07:00:40 AM

by Anthony Painter

In the time before everyone on the centre-left and beyond was talking about Amartya Sen, he wrote a book called Development as Freedom. The reason for bringing this up is that the book was a powerful reminder of why democracy is important –something we seem to have forgotten. In some parts of the world as well as in our own historical experience, it is a matter of life and death. Here is Sen on politics and famines:

“Famines have occurred in ancient kingdoms and contemporary authoritarian societies, in primitive tribal communities and in modern technocratic dictatorships, in colonial economies run by imperialists from the north and in newly independent countries of the south run by despotic national leaders or by intolerant single parties. But they have never materialized [sic] in any country that is independent, that goes to elections regularly, that has opposition parties to voice criticisms and that permits newspapers to report freely and question the wisdom of government policies without extensive censorship.”

For Sen, the reason for this is democracy is a basic human capability. It is part of being human in an enlightened sense, it enables us to press for our needs to be met and the process itself helps us to understand what we need and how we can cooperate or support collective provision to ensure that those needs are met.

Now, the UK is not despotic, no longer imperialistic and it is has a free press and democratic choice. No famine is on the way. Yet Sen’s perspective still should raise our alarm bells that, in its latest four yearly report, Democratic Audit comes to the conclusion that the UK’s representative democracy is “in long-term, terminal decline, but not no viable alternative model of democracy currently exists.”

Not only is our democracy faltering and floundering, our democratic reformers have, since Labour’s early reforms in the late 1990s and early 2000s, largely failed to find a convincing story of why that should concern us.

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The hard left is on the march and in no mood to stop

06/07/2012, 08:00:42 AM

by Atul Hatwal

The first skirmish is over. The unions have drawn blood. On Tuesday, Progress released its statement describing a series of changes to its internal operation. They were all reasonable changes, but this was never about reforming Progress.

If this row had truly been about the governance of pressure groups active within Labour, then a lot of other organisations would have been in the frame.

The Labour Representation Committee (LRC) for one. Founded in 2004 (though bearing the name of an illustrious forbear), the LRC is open to non-Labour party members, affiliated to such sage organisations as the New Communist Party and Permanent Revolution and has the primary purpose of taking control of Labour party constituency parties to help shift national policy so far to the left, the 1983 manifesto would look Blairite.

Nothing to see here guv. No scrutiny needed at all.

No, this was never about the “acceptable standards of democracy, governance and transparency” trumpeted by the ASLEF motion targeting Progress that is still in the process of being submitted to Labour conference.

It’s one of the hallmarks of how far the party has stepped through the hard left’s looking glass that so many Labour commentators have just accepted the assumption that Progress were a problem.

Following Tuesday’s statement, “peace with  honour” was the description used by Mark Ferguson at Labour List. Why not go the whole hog, wave a bit of paper about and proclaim “peace in our time”.

In actual fact, there’s no need. “Peace with honour” were the words used by Chamberlain to describe his thoroughly successful jaunt to Munich, when talking to reporters on the doorstep of Number 10.

Strange how that phrase sprang to mind.

Because this was never about the alleged substance of the issue, Progress’ statement will not be the end of the conflict. Why should it? The unions and left have just won a significant victory. Why stop here? The limits of their power have clearly not been reached.

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Playing party politics over Libor could wreck one of Britain’s leading industries

05/07/2012, 07:00:31 AM

by Peter Watt

You’ve got to say that the banks are shockingly bad at their own PR.  The fact that reckless lending played a significant part in the cataclysmic global downturn didn’t exactly endear them to people.

Obscenely high bonuses that seem at odds with the overall performance of the company don’t help.

And then to top it off they’ve been fiddling rates of interest so that they made bigger profits and created a false sense of their own economic strength!  Understandably therefore many people right now wouldn’t spit on a banker if they were on fire.

But in the furore we seem to be forgetting that this is also an industry that employs 1.1 million people in the UK.  That contributes 9% of the gross value added in the economy as a whole, generates 7% of all tax receipts (£35.7 billion) and produces a trade surplus.

So the current crisis in our financial sector is a potential crisis for our already fragile economy.  We simply cannot afford for this mess to continue, there is too much at stake.  It is right therefore that all parties are keen to restore the credibility of the UK’s financial sector.

If people around the world fear that our financial sector is prone to fraud then they will take their money elsewhere.  It’s not like moving a factory or an industrial complex; they can simply move their capital with a phone call or click of a mouse.

And if credibility is to be restored or maintained then decisions need to be taken about what the right balance of regulation is and who polices it.  And there are the Vickers proposals to implement splitting retail and investment banking.  Big issues that need to be sensitively but robustly handled if this vital industry is not to be further harmed.

Instead we have a slanging match between the parties.

The hundreds of thousands of bank workers earning modest wages must be crying into their ledgers.

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Want to fix banking regulation? Try a dose of greed

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

by Anthony Bonneville

It’s been a bad couple of weeks for bankers.

Barclays has been caught with its fingers in the proverbial till again. A new mis-selling scandal has been unveiled featuring all our favourite banking villains. And Nat West meanwhile fails to perform even the most basic of tasks one would expect from a bank.

The cry has gone up, “something must be done,” and in government, this means inquiries, reports, sage deliberations and, ultimately, nothing happening to the banks who, by an astonishing coincidence, are also substantial donors and lobbyists.

Meanwhile Joris Luyendijk’s excellent blogs in the Guardian continue to reveal the mentality of some people in financial services and the potentially toxic culture that they are immersed in and inevitably affected by.

One of the finest examples of this is the interview with a senior regulator, who advises,

“Banks are fundamentally amoral places. They are not immoral; morality simply has no part in the decision-making process. They talk about ‘reputational risk’, not about right and wrong decisions”

He’s not wrong. The resignation statement of Barclay’s chairman Marcus Agius (before he unresigned himself and took charge again following Bob Diamond’s exit) declares.

“We will establish a zero-tolerance policy for any actions that harm the reputation of the bank.”

Not even zero tolerance for actions that could harm the reputation of the bank. This form of words rather unfortunately leaves the door open to an interpretation that Barclays staff are being enjoined not to “do no wrong” but “don’t get caught”.

Bob Diamond followed suit yesterday with the type of heartfelt of mea culpa that restores public faith in bankers’ conscience and integrity,

“The external pressure placed on Barclays has reached a level that risks damaging the franchise”

Or maybe not.

Clearly then, it is a vain hope that the bad banks will keep their own house in order, so what is the solution?

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