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The undead Nick Clegg starts to stir…

23/09/2011, 12:00:41 PM

by Dan Hodges

Ed Miliband has a nightmare. Forget the sleep apnoea; this is what really keeps him awake at night.

He is walking along the corridor of a dark, abandoned castle. He turns a corner into an imposing room. Like the rest of the castle, the room has been ransacked by angry villagers determined to wreak revenge for the evil that once dwelt amongst them. All that is left is a large black table. Upon the table sits a coffin, lid open.

Ed inches closer, torch flickering. He peers in. Inside there is a pale figure, eyes closed, dressed in a dark morning suit. It wears a gold tie.

Ed is initially gripped by fear. But as the moments pass the fear recedes; replaced by a strange feeling of empathy. Then sympathy.

Poor Nick Clegg. What he did was wrong. So very, very wrong. But he has paid the price. The price exacted from all politicians when their public turns upon them. Now, at last, he has found peace…

“Hello, Ed. I’ve been waiting for you”.

Dear God, he’s alive! He’s sitting up! He’s…

“You’ll find it’s not so bad in there. You have time to stop and think. To come to understand where it all went wrong”.

Ed turns, tries to run. But his feet are like clay. Clegg is out of the coffin now advancing towards him, cape spread wide. He can see razor-sharp teeth glinting in the moonlight; a cold, piercing stare reaching out from dark, empty eyes.

And somewhere in the distance he hears a laugh. A cruel laugh. He knows that laugh. It is David Cameron’s. Then there is silence.

(more…)

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Labour’s Nothing Year

23/09/2011, 08:59:27 AM

by Atul Hatwal

“Nothing ever happens, nothing happens at all, the needle returns to the start of the song and we all sing along like before. And we’ll all be lonely tonight and lonely tomorrow”

While I was looking at the latest polling earlier this week, this melancholic eighties gem, Nothing Ever Happens, by Del Amitri, came on the radio. It couldn’t have been more appropriate.

At the start of the year in this column I highlighted Labour’s poll challenge by tracking responses to three specific questions asked intermittently by YouGov in their daily and weekly polls.

These questions go beneath headline voting intentions to examine voters’ attitudes on what are likely to be defining issues at the next election.

They chart three things – first, how the public feel the government is hitting them in the wallet; second, their view of how the government is cutting the deficit and third, who they prefer as a leader – David Cameron or Ed Miliband.

The answers over the past nine months have involved hundreds of thousands of responses and reveal that the entire Labour party might as well have not turned up for work this year.

Nothing has happened. Nothing has happened at all.

The wallet line tracks voters’ financial self-interest. Because it focuses on peoples’ perceptions of their own financial future, it gives quite a different perspective to the general doom and gloom about the economic position.

(more…)

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The world has changed: but we’re still partying like it’s 1995

22/09/2011, 11:14:07 AM

by Peter Watt

Since the general election it is fair to say that the Labour party, probably the left generally, has been struggling with exactly what it is there for. In simple terms, what is it that the Labour party wants to do that the government doesn’t?

The problem has been that there has been a divide in Labour’s ranks over the handling of the economic situation, the cuts, the Blair and the Brown legacy. So when it comes to key questions we struggle for coherent answers. Would we have needed to cut? Should we tax more or less? Should we defend public sector jobs? What about the role of the private sector in delivering the public services? Is there a “progressive majority”? On so many issues there is a divide on the left.

The government, in contrast, seems to lack none of this uncertainty. It makes mistakes, but at its heart it is playing a pretty mainstream tune. Mainstream in the literal sense that its overall message resonates with, well, the mainstream of voters. It’s a message of economic prudence, balancing the books, prioritising spending decision and localising decision making. It celebrates family and tradition but looks to the future. It is comfortable with enterprise and would prefer lower rates of tax.

Those “right wing extremists” have become the mainstream and the Labour party is becalmed on the fringe, apparently struggling to find answers to the problems of the day. The government is a security blanket in a scary world. And that is before we know the full extent of the Eurozone crisis. (more…)

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The 1980s comparisons are easy to make, but wrong

21/09/2011, 10:07:39 AM

by Kevin Meagher

Spending cuts. Unemployment. Economic experimentation.

Royal weddings. Bombing Colonel Gaddafi. Kenny Dalglish and Alex Ferguson.

Tottenham riots. Strikes and marches. Labour stuck in opposition.

Another series of Ashes to Ashes? More like a tour d’horizon of our so-called new politics.

Welcome back to the 1980s – with parallels as brash and ungainly as a first generation mobile phone.

Overseas, an army labours in the rugged Afghan terrain. In the 80s, the Red Army faced the Mujahideen. Their rebranded successors, the Taleban, now take on the Brits and the Yanks.

At home, a million young people languish, outside the reach of schooling, jobs or training. In the 80s this malaise was simply called “youth unemployment”. Now we call them “NEETs”. They remain poor and hopeless either way.

Many are taking to the streets in civil disobedience. Not miners this time, but minors, with young people and even schoolchildren radicalised.

The first group are idealists, blanching at the crippling cost of studying for a degree. The second group are nihilists, making off with hundred quid trainers and a flat-screen telly, an off-key coda to 80s Thatcherite consumerism.

(more…)

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Sunday Review on Tuesday: The Purple Book

20/09/2011, 04:57:33 PM

by David Talbot

It is hard to recall now, but 2 May 1997 was a gorgeous spring morning. It felt as though it might have been 26 July 1945, the day that ushered in the first majority Labour government. The country seemed fresh again; there was a sense of something about to be born, a new world, a new start, a new Britain – a new Labour. Even the Conservatives, if you could find one, did not seem to resent the new era or begrudge this young, charismatic prime minister, who had led the Labour party out of 18 years exile to a stunning victory. It was, however, the beginning of his end. The triumphal procession of 1997 led to excited hopes that could never be fulfilled. It was, as George Dangerfield said of the Liberals in 1906, a victory from which Labour never recovered.

But we bought it, all thirteen and a half million of us. Those were the heady days of the new deal, taxes on the profits of privatised utilities, the minimum wage, sure start and five millennium villages (no, me neither). With British troops in Kosovo, even the wars were better.

Now, of course, it is different. The narrative of disillusionment and betrayal is almost beyond challenging. To speak well of him, these days, is to invite scorn, ridicule and worse among Britain’s self-appointed liberal intelligentsia. It is difficult to recall a former prime minister that was last faced with such rancour – much of it, it should be said, coming from his own side. (more…)

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Postmodernism is dead. But Nick Clegg isn’t quite

19/09/2011, 09:13:29 AM

by Jonathan Todd

Edward Docx declared postmodernism dead in Prospect during the summer. Many hierarchies were shattered by postmodernism’s insistence that no perspective is more legitimate than another. This revolutionary insight has wrought all kinds of change over the past 40 years or so, but also contains the seeds of its own exhaustion. If all perspectives are valid, do any of them mean anything?

Our contemporary longing for authenticity suggests that postmodernism has left us with a deficit of meaning that we are seeking to fill. Docx sees this all around us.

“We can see it in the specificity of the local food movement or the repeated use of the word “proper” on gastropub menus … We can recognise it in advertising campaigns such as for Jack Daniel’s, which ache to portray not rebellion but authenticity. We can identify it in the way brands are trying to hold on to, or take up, an interest in ethics, or in a particular ethos”.

There is more politics in this observation than there might seem. And the political insight has much commonality with that contained in this tweet from Chris Dillow: “Politicians obsess about public opinion and are despised. Steve Jobs doesn’t do market research and is admired. There’s a lesson here.”

Jobs is thought authentic and politicians are not. He seems propelled by mission and genius, while politicians appear calculating and superficial. As postmodernism has encouraged the decline of deference, the political class has been lampooned. Politicians seek redemption by desperately scrutinising opinion polls. But they are looking in the wrong direction.

(more…)

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The seven-year itch: a cautionary tale of tax, cuts and debt

18/09/2011, 12:00:14 PM

by Rob Marchant

There was this bloke. And there was this girl. They met, fell in love, got married, usual story. It was a big, special wedding, everybody went. A match made in heaven, everyone said. People came out of their houses to wave as they went to the church. The kind of wedding that fills everyone with hope for the future.

She was popular, always a lot of boys round her. But she was smart, knew what she wanted. Sometimes it looked like she wasn’t paying much attention, but she did when it counted. Didn’t stand for any nonsense. He, on the other hand, was a bit of a tearaway. Heart in the right place, but not very together a lot of the time. And a drinker. A long history, in fact. Lots of girlfriends, but in the end, they all went, because of the drink. But not this one: this time it’d be different.

So, on the day they married, he promised to her that that was it with the drinking. And it was true. Never touched a drop. Day in, day out, he would walk home past the pub, think how lucky he was to have found her, and kept straight on walking. Life seemed charmed. (more…)

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Sunday Review on Friday: What next for Labour?

16/09/2011, 02:24:47 PM

by Peter Watt

I have my copy of The Purple Book and I am loving it. It is great to have a coherent and well thought out vision for the next phase of Labour’s development. I agree with what Anthony Painter said on this site on Thursday:

“The Purple Book, published today, after months of political hysteria, is actually a largely constructive and imaginative collection. It is far from being “lazy” and “idiotic” as its detractors claim. This is the progressive Labour – out of political favour for almost half a decade – response to blue Labour. It is much more than that too. And it manages, fairly convincingly, to move on from its New Labour past”.

I strongly recommend that people buy and read it. But there is a downside to The Purple Book: that it will, inevitably, be seen as being partisan. Because of course it is. Speaking as a fully signed up member of progress, I am completely comfortable with the direction of its partisanship. But the Labour party is a coalition (I know that this is a bit of a dirty word, but I think we may well have to get used to it) and there will be many therefore who dismiss The Purple Book simply because it is from the progress stable. (more…)

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Revealed: Government slashes welfare to work schemes by more than a third despite soaring unemployment

16/09/2011, 08:54:18 AM

by Atul Hatwal

New figures released this week reveal massive cuts in the levels of specialist support for the unemployed. The government has slashed the numbers of people taking part in welfare to work schemes by 34% over the past year, from 137,000 to 90,000.

The drop in government backed training and employment support is the largest since records began in 1992, with the number now taking part in these programmes at its lowest ever level.

The withdrawal of support for the unemployed comes at a time of sharply rising unemployment. It rocketed by 80,000 in the last quarter alone to cross the 2.5m threshold.

The figures were buried in a barrage of thousands of new labour force survey statistics released by the government on Wednesday.

Typically, the participants in welfare to work schemes are those most at risk of becoming long term unemployed (out of work for 12 months or more). As unemployment rises, the numbers in these types of schemes would be expected to go up, to prevent people losing touch with the job market.

In the early 1990s, even John Major’s Tory government used these programmes as a key tool to tackle unemployment. In the comparable quarter in 1992, there were 365,000 people participating in welfare to work schemes.

(more…)

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Show voters you care: talk about their jobs, not yours

15/09/2011, 01:00:32 PM

by Peter Watt

I have developed an annoying habit. You know the way that ex-smokers are annoying, always pontificating in a superior way about the dangers of smoking, the nasty smell and the cost? Well I am kind of like that about politics. I used to “do politics” full time. I was a real insider and all that. And then I gave it up, and now I love to tell those still addicted the dangers of the habit, the nasty smell and of course the cost.

Well this week, let me tell you, I have felt a pretty smug ex-politico and to be honest I think that I am justified, even if I am annoying.

The real anger at Westminster this week has been reserved for, wait for it, the outcomes of the boundary commission. Not the weak state of the domestic, European or even world economy. Not the worryingly high level of inflation and the real pain being felt by families struggling to make ends meet. Not the implications of the welfare reform bill for people with disabilities or the health and social care bill. No, not even the hacking of phones could come close to the levels of Westminster angst that the threat to a handful of MPs’ jobs could raise.

MPs and political parties have been getting agitated about whether MP A or MP B might or might not have a seat after the election. At the same time, mere mortals are working hard just to pay their electricity, gas and food bills. Whatever the rights or wrongs of the policy to reduce the number of Westminster seats, I am not sure that much of the public will share the dismay of many at Westminster. Well, except the dismay that the numbers are not being reduced further. (more…)

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