Uncut « Labour Uncut

A statue of Peter Hain?

07/09/2011, 10:02:59 AM

by Dan Hodges

Can’t we just build Peter Hain a statue? Whack up a giant bronze monument to him slap bang in the centre of Neath and be done with it.

Refounding Labour started life as a good old fashioned vanity project. Peter’s reward for services rendered to Ed Miliband during the Labour leadership campaign. No more, no less.

Fair enough. Such baubles are handed out regularly. Part of the currency of politics.

But then things started to get out of hand. First the process, which was supposedly being driven by Labour party members, was outsourced to private contractors. Then some strange rumors began to circulate about what was emerging behind the closed doors of this open and inclusive consultation.

Non party members were to be given some say in superficial areas of the party’s activity. Like deciding its leader and its policies. At the same time, the role of the trade unions was going to be diluted. The collegiate nature of this part of the conversation was underlined by the “insider” who told the papers, “the union leaders are playing hard ball but they need to wake up”.

Members of the PLP were informed that plans for an elected party chair had been dumped. Calls for the refounding Labour submissions to be published were, in keeping with the transparency of the exercise, repeatedly rebuffed. It emerged that party conference was going to be ordered to either endorse the recommendations in their entirety, or reject them.

Then on Monday, via that traditional form of internal communication – a leak to the Guardian – Labour members learned how they’re planning to transform their own movement. According to the report, the party’s traditional aim, “to maintain elected office”, is now deemed outdated. Instead Clause 1 of the constitution will be re-written to “explicitly put the principles of community organising at its heart”. An army of 2,000 “community organisers are to be recruited before the next election, and movement for change affiliated as a socialist society. At the heart of all this is the radical idea of “making formal [the Labour party’s desire] to be attractive to a far greater range of people”.

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Ten years on from 9/11: Why can’t the west believe in itself?

06/09/2011, 09:06:13 AM

by Jonathan Todd

As the national transitional council’s (NCT) grip on Libya tightened, I wondered: What do the Muammar Gaddafi loyalists in their last redoubts want? Having refused the NCT’s generous reconciliation offer, do the Gaddafi loyalists really think that they can recover the whole of their country? As this is implausible, it must be that they remain loyal enough to their barbaric, ego-maniac, delusional leader that they’d rather die in his name than accept Libya’s new reality.

Belief held so absolutely has become alien to most westerners and, thus, inherently terrifying. Willingness to fight to the death is beyond the ken of people unwilling to fight for much besides the TV remote. That’s why it wasn’t just Tony Blair and George W Bush who were mortified by Al-Qaeda. We all were. These ingenuous people would go to any lengths, including sacrificing themselves, to destroy us. What wasn’t to be afraid of?

Well, much less than it seemed. We thought Al-Qaeda’s appalling idea could attract ever more active backers. We suspected that many people, possibly millions, absolutely believed things utterly out of kilter with what we believe fundamentally. And they believed these things with the passion of newlyweds, while the passion of western citizens for the defining values of their states is that of the long married. Not non-existent, but not obviously burning.

While the passionate beliefs of Gaddafi loyalists now bemuse western eyes as much as the passionate beliefs of Al-Qaeda have done, these passionate beliefs are very different, of course. Gaddafi comes from a tradition that starts with Gamal Nasser and hopefully ends with Bashar al-Assad. Upon these strong men Arab states were personalised. Gaddafi was Libya and Libya was Gaddafi. And that just seemed the way things were.

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Give us a Barnett formula for the North to match the Marshall plan we have for the South

05/09/2011, 09:09:24 AM

by Kevin Meagher

“Power, wealth and opportunity” should be “in the hands of the many, not the few” intones Clause Four (Section Four) of the Labour party constitution. An admirable sentiment and one that we could usefully start by applying to our unbalanced and dysfunctional national economy.

No, this isn’t a moan about the iniquities of the Barnett formula, which was revealed last week to shower a fifth more public spending on Scotland than England.

For those of us living north of the Wash, our beef is not with our Caledonian neighbours, but our Southern English brethren. Yes, the problem is our old friend the North/ South divide; that drag anchor that mars all efforts to deliver the wise words emblazoned on the back of our membership cards.

You can see why, when the unemployment rate in the South East is now half that of the North East. The TUC estimates that there are 158,000 fewer jobs now than there were on the eve of the recession in December 2007. During that time, the North West and Yorkshire and Humber regions have lost 60,000 jobs apiece. London, on the other hand, has actually seen 122,000 more jobs created.

Meanwhile the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development’s latest quarterly labour market outlook found a stark differential in business confidence, with employers in the South expecting to increase staffing levels over the next three months, while those in the North predict further job cuts.

The government’s response to this glaring asymmetry? The department of business has just confirmed that it has only managed to green-light one out of fifty approved bids to its new regional growth fund, the scheme designed to bolster the private sector in those regions most reliant on the public sector (and therefore most exposed to cuts). Yet even if all its projects were up and running, this £1.4bn pot amounts to just a third of what Labour’s regional development agencies were spending.

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Blue Labour goes global

02/09/2011, 10:18:06 AM

by Jonathan Todd

Blue Labour seems less in fashion than previously. It was never the answer to every challenge facing Labour. But it does have contributions to make to Labour’s renewal. Whatever it is, blue Labour seems defiantly rooted in our country and the traditions which have shaped and continue to comfort and inspire its people. Global and jet-set it isn’t.

It feels odd, therefore, to see the core motivations of a creed as unabashedly Anglo-Saxon as Britpop reflected back in the protests convulsing India and Israel. These protests, like blue Labour, are, fundamentally, about rejecting contemporary materialism for the perceived morality and communality of exalted past eras: the dignity of Gandhi’s India; the solidarity of the Israeli kibbutz; and the warm embrace of the Labour party before the middle class dilettantes stole it from the working class. It’s easy to be cynical. There were, of course, no golden ages. But it’s what blue Labour and the protests say about the present that is most interesting.

Tobias Buck recently observed in the Financial Times that 250,000 Israelis have taken to the streets calling for social reform. He described them as ranging “from students to pensioners, and Holocaust survivors to taxi drivers” and as “perhaps the most serious challenge yet to the government of Benjamin Netanyahu”. He went on: “Many Israelis, regardless of their wealth and social status, say they still long for a return to the years when the country was less materialistic and more egalitarian. Even in cosmopolitan Tel Aviv, the ideals of the kibbutz live on”.

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Ed’s not that daft – but we didn’t know that

01/09/2011, 12:00:37 PM

by Dan Hodges

False alarm. Stand down.

Ed Miliband is not going to start attacking the government for being too harsh on rioting arsonists. There will be no call for a blanket amnesty for illegal migrants. Or for benefit fraudsters.

The Woodward memo, a sort of stamped and self-addressed Zinoviev letter, certainly caused a bit of a flap. “Labour’s new line of attack on David Cameron revealed”, exclaimed the Observer. “The opposition believes the prime minister has abandoned the centre ground in recent months to adopt a more orthodox conservative stance on issues such as law and order, immigration and welfare”. “Labour’s new strategy will highlight the Conservatives’ most popular policies”, reported Conservative Home, gleefully adding, “We’re not making this up”.

Well, they were to an extent. “It’s not a strategy document”, said one Labour insider, “it’s an assessment of where Cameron and the Tories are. It provides analysis but it doesn’t advocate a line of attack”.

That statement is certainly borne out by the sections printed in the Observer. Woodward’s document is heavy on psychoanalysis, but light on prescription:

“Analysis of Tory party policy, carried out over the summer, convincingly demonstrates the Conservatives are shifting to a distinctly rightwing strategy, in both their chosen focus on issues and their solutions… Cameron clearly recognises some of the danger he faces in his repositioning. He is still seeking to separate himself out from a toxic Tory brand and has assumed a presidential role and style”. (more…)

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It was the Tories that broke Britain

31/08/2011, 03:43:55 PM

by Kevin Meagher

What was Labour’s problem with the concept of “broken Britain”?

The weekend before last, Tony Blair became the latest Labour voice to scoff at the “high-faluting wail” about a country that has “lost its way”.

Granted, the offending phrase is the offspring of David Cameron, and his erstwhile chums at News International, so comes preloaded to cause disdain to some on the left.

But we, too, used to believe Britain was broken. We used to endlessly criticise the “divided society” of “haves and have-nots” created in the 80s and 90s.

We were right to do so. This Britain was definitely broken when we took over in 1997. No question. We made a good start in fixing it: the minimum wage, tax credits, child benefit rises and investment in public services. Things, to coin a phrase, could only get better.

By 2001 our election slogan was “a lot done, a lot to do”. We recognised that there was still a mountain to climb in piecing our broken society back together. The legacy of 18 years of Conservative rule, was that whole communities and parts of the country had been reduced to a tightly-wound ball of social and economic problems that did not unpick easily. (more…)

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Brand the Tories right wing? I Woodwouldn’t

29/08/2011, 09:33:48 AM

by Rob Marchant

Oh dear. To read the Observer report of Shaun Woodward’s leaked memo on how Labour should attack the Tories, the question which springs to mind is not so much, is this going to be genuine Labour strategy as, what on earth was he thinking?

The thrust of the piece is that Labour should attack the Tories for reverting from their “cuddly conservative” projection to a more traditional right-wing positioning, and to make this the Brown-style “dividing line” between us and them, on which we should base our attack.

There is much to be said for dividing lines; indeed their judicious use has been a great help to Labour over the last twenty years. And there is no doubt that Cameron is now pursuing a more right-wing strategy than was being projected in the run-up to the general election. However, for a whole raft of reasons, Woodward has badly miscalculated.

First, he has missed that, in the current environment, being seen as right wing is not necessarily a bad thing electorally. In the wake of the riots – unlike various politicians and commentators – voters are in the main looking for punishment over understanding (whether they are right to do so is another matter). They trust the Tories over Labour on the economy. And they are not alone in a more international sense (perhaps someone should point out to Woodward the prevailing conservative hegemony across Europe).

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Sunday Review: There ain’t no black in the Union Jack, by Paul Gilroy

28/08/2011, 12:00:45 PM

by Anthony Painter

If the riots hadn’t spread beyond Tottenham, there is little doubt that we would now be having a far more heated discussion about “race” and British urban culture, rather than a generalised moral moan. The book that many would turn to would be Paul Gilroy’s 1987 classic: “There ain’t no black in the Union Jack”. In it, Gilroy outlines “race” as an agent of historical change alongside “class” or “gender” (note the inverted commas). And after riots in the early and mid-1980s that were more political in their nature than those we have just seen – in the sense that there was a deliberate political point being made – Gilroy’s theory of “race” as historical agent of mobilisation was forceful. But then things went a different way.

What marks out the latest edition of the book, is its introduction. Gilroy has substantially revised his approach. In fact, he declares that race is now “ordinary”. It has blended with poverty, material deprivation and inequality as a complex interplay of power, injustice and exclusion. Like other motivating social forces such as class, race has been shattered.

The “rise of identity politics, corporate multi-culture, and an imploded, narcissistic obsession with the minutiae of ethnicity” have fragmented “political blackness”. Bonds of solidarity have weakened. Rather than huddling together, the oppressed and excluded are wandering alone, facing the cold and the rain without protection. Where “blackness” was a motivating political force a quarter of a century ago, it no longer fulfils that role. (more…)

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Don’t promise what you can’t deliver on immigration

26/08/2011, 11:21:00 AM

by Matt Cavanagh

Yesterday’s ONS figures are a reminder of the risks of politicians promising what they can’t deliver, particularly on an issue as emotive as immigration.

Before the election, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats said immigration was out of control; afterwards, they said they would cut it dramatically. Neither was true.

The figures reinforce how stable immigration has been in recent years: non-British immigration is estimated at 455,000 in 2010, compared to 437,000 in 2009 – and broadly stable since 2006:

Long term immigration, emigration, and net migration of non-British nationals

Source: IPS, ONS Migration statistics quarterly report, August 25 2011

The Government’s chosen target is not non-British immigration, but ‘net inward migration’: total (British and non-British) immigration, less total (British and non-British) emigration. As the above graph shows, non-British emigration is falling, and while British emigration has risen slightly over the last year, overall emigration remains down – with the result that the Government’s target of reducing net migration below 100,000 has moved further from their grasp since the election:

Long term immigration, emigration, and net migration of all nationals

Source: LTIM, ONS Migration statistics quarterly report, August 25 2011

Yesterday’s figures suggest the interim immigration ‘cap’ on working migrants from outside the EU had negligible effect in 2010. The Government has made further changes since relating to non-EU migrants, including closing Tier 1 (highly skilled) to all but the wealthiest migrants in December 2010; a number of changes to Tier 4 (students) in March 2011; and a permanent ‘cap’ on ‘Tier 2’ (skilled) workers in April.

The latest quarterly figures to June 2011, published by the Home Office yesterday, should show these changes starting to have an effect, and indeed there is a slight fall in people coming from outside the EU for work (down 2.7% compared to the year ending April 2011), almost all in Tier 1 rather than Tier 2. This fall is offset, however, by a rise in those coming from outside the EU to study (up 3.5% compared to year ending April 2011).

More significantly, any reduction in numbers coming from outside the EU is likely to be offset by the continuing rise in those coming from inside the EU, particularly from Eastern Europe – a category of immigration which the Government cannot control.

Yesterday’s figures show that immigration from Eastern Europe rose from 52,000 to 71,000 in 2010 – and emigration back to Eastern Europe fell from 47,000 to 31,000, adding further to overall net migration.

In terms of the number of Eastern Europeans in work – as opposed to new arrivals – recent Labour Force Survey figures confirm that, after being stable between 2008 and the first quarter of 2010, numbers have been rising steadily since the election:

The changes the Government has made to immigration from outside the EU may well have more effect in the year to come – particularly on students and highly-skilled migrants.

But the rising trend in immigration from the EU looks set to continue. More recent figures from the Department of Work and Pensions, included in yesterday’s ONS report, show that for the year to March 2011, over 187,000 National Insurance numbers were allocated to Eastern European nationals, an increase of 24% on the previous 12 months.

In terms of employers’ future plans, a survey this week from the Chartered Institute for Personnel Development suggests that the number of private sector employers intending to hire migrant workers in the next quarter continues to rise. The CIPD survey also suggests that, if the ‘cap’ has any effect in future months, it is unlikely to deter employers from hiring migrant workers – it is more likely to make them switch to hiring migrants from inside the EU.

Ministers need to be more honest with the public about how far overall immigration numbers are really determined by government policy, rather than economic factors, and employer preferences. Ministers also need to avoid reacting to their difficulties with the net migration target by trying to clamp down further on those categories of migration which are the most economically valuable – and instead, start thinking about how to harness immigration to promote employment and growth. Conservative ministers in particular have consistently argued that welfare reform and immigration control are the answer to youth unemployment and worklessness. But with youth unemployment back over 20%, and NEETs at a record high, they need to look towards other policies if they are to prevent the creation of another ‘lost generation’.

Matt Cavanagh is Associate Director at the IPPR

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