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RIP the “progressive majority”?

17/05/2011, 12:00:51 PM

by David Lammy

RIP the “progressive majority”? So said many following the recent election results.

Two years ago there was a plausible argument for a “progressive moment”. Many thought the economic crash had changed politics irreversibly. That after a crisis of capitalism, voters had moved to the left. That a new generation, without the scars of the 80s, could simply move with them. That Obama’s victory in the States proved all this.

I had some sympathy with this and still do. In government, we never grasped the opportunity to shift the terms of debate beyond managerial concerns about better regulation. Because we allowed ethics and economics to remain strangers, the conversation quickly moved on from the causes of the crash to the size of the deficit.

However we interpret the history of the crash, the world has moved on. As others have both pointed out, the left now finds itself in electoral meltdown across Europe. The “progressive majority” argument did not wash with AV (which I supported), with many Labour voters ticking “no” precisely because they rejected that label. In the local elections, we regained ground we should never have lost in 2007. As Ed Miliband has acknowledged, there is an awful long way to go.

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Cameron’s bullies are bossing the common room

17/05/2011, 07:54:21 AM

by Dan Hodges

Thank god for David Willetts. And Michael Gove. Raise a glass to Andrew Lansley. If they had half the political nous of David Cameron and George Osborne, the Labour party would be toast. Dead as a Lib Dem parrot. Or whatever that strange bird is they have as a logo.

The Tory front bench is basically two gangs. The Bullies and the Geeks. George Osborne is chief bully. He goes to bed every night dreaming about how he’s going to get up in the morning, whack the country on the nose and nick its pocket money. He tells us all he’s doing it to toughen us up. But really, he does it because he enjoys it.

His sidekick is Eric Pickles. A rough northern lad, Eric likes nothing better than picking on southern softies. During local election night, his victim was Sadiq Khan. “You were supposed to win a thousand seats. How many have you got, Saddo”? Sadiq looked like he just wanted to run home to mummy.

Then there are the brainy kids. David Willetts has such a big brain it won’t all fit in his head. Like the universe, his skull is actually expanding, and at a rate so fast, his hair can’t catch up. Michael Gove is also super-intelligent. But while Willetts comes across as a friendly boffin, Gove retains a vaguely sinister air. In fact, he looks a bit like the Nazi in Raider’s of the Lost Ark who has that artifact burnt into his hand. Andy Burnham should ask to check next time they’re at the dispatch box.

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Know your enemy

16/05/2011, 03:00:20 PM

by John Spellar

In a recent discussion on who we should be targeting, one Welsh MP told the old joke: “if you are standing on a cliff with a Conservative and a Liberal Democrat in front of you, who do you push off first, the answer is the Conservative – it’s business before pleasure”.

That priority is absolutely right because the alternative government next time will either be a Conservative or a Labour led government. However, a bit of a refinement of the approach is also probably necessary.

Of course, where you stand in politics often depends on where you sit and I’m sure that my thinking has been shaped by first winning a council seat on an outer London housing estate from the Liberals and understanding at a very early stage how duplicitous, irresponsible and thoroughly negative they are.

However, on a hard-headed practical view of the current political situation, any idea of easing up on the Liberal Democrats is probably premature. It’s certainly the case in Scotland that as the Lib Dem vote collapsed – most of it essentially being an anti Labour establishment vote – it mainly went to the candidates thought most likely to beat Labour, namely the SNP.

However, the picture is very different in other parts of the country. Across much of the North of England, and not just in the big conurbations, the Lib Dems have replaced the Conservatives as the main opposition to Labour. Indeed in many areas they are the sole opposition to Labour. This is also true in some London boroughs.

Therefore for Labour to consolidate our position and firm up our control of those seats, elimination of the Lib Dem political and organisational apparatus which is almost wholly dependent on their councillors is necessary.

This would also then feed into the bigger priority. If the Lib Dems have no hope in seats that they could win from Labour, then in order for them to survive they will have to focus their organisational and propaganda efforts against the Conservatives in many of their seats in the South and South West. We will then have turned round the Iain Duncan Smith paradigm of two coalition parties attacking the Labour party, to two opposition parties attacking the Tories.

Completely focusing on the Tories at the moment would be fine as the answer, if the question was, “how would you vote if there was an election tomorrow”. However, courtesy of the fixed-term parliament bill we are fairly clear that it is not going to be till 2015. Therefore it serves our interest to consolidate our base over the next year or two while still focusing on our strategy of rebuilding Labour in the South.

It certainly is a sensible business model; it could also be a pleasure.

John Spellar is Labour MP for Warley.

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Making the progressive case for Israel

16/05/2011, 08:13:38 AM

By John Woodcock

It is not every day that one of the best speeches you have ever read drops into your lap and you are asked to deliver it in front of a packed, appreciative audience.

If I had known that Making the progressive case for Israel was going to be the last thing that its brilliant author would ever write, I would have been barely able to get the words out.

So many moving tributes have already been made to David Cairns by people who knew that kind, effervescent and compellingly passionate man far better than me.

But David’s absence from the excellent and important We Believe in Israel conference in London yesterday, where again I had the sad honour of deputising for him, highlighted that a lasting and fitting tribute would be for us to advance the campaign he crafted as the chair of Labour friends of Israel.

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Sleepwalking to irrelvance, part 1

13/05/2011, 12:00:03 PM

by Lisa Ansell

After a year in which Labour believed it could be all things to all people, last week’s election result brought home the pickle the party is in. Gleeful delight over a Liberal Democrat implosion, and debates about a voting system many didn’t want or care about are fun, but Labour’s results show the British political map is being redrawn. David Cameron faced taunts that with deep seated anger at a Labour government, he couldn’t achieve a convincing lead. Labour’s problems are much much deeper.

With ‘Cleggmania’ long forgotten, the assumption that everyone fed up with the Labour party would duly return home out of anger with Tory-Lib Dem government were misguided. This should have been no surprise. Support in Scotland collapsed, and with it the support that would have facilitated the move to the left that many within the party yearn for. Those precious southern swing voters successfully poached by Blair have left Labour, travelled through the Lib Dems, and, dependent on which side of the fence they were on to begin with, have settled back home as Conservatives, or are cast adrift. Any gains to be made from anger at the government have already been made. Conservative support has consolidated, the Liberal Democrats have rendered themselves unnecessary. Cameron has a clear message, solid support, funds to fight an election.

Labour’s most secure support came from the north of England, where the perception of Labour as opposition to the cuts was the driver for campaigns. Towns like Barnsley and Oldham, where hordes of Islingtonites had failed to suppress dismay at the lack of facilities, while they informed residents that Labour was the only option for them. Towns where the inequality that Labour was comfortable with is demonstrated clearly, where Labour’s cuts are already hitting hard.

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Labour’s plan B: concede and move on, and more

13/05/2011, 07:00:33 AM

by Atul Hatwal

These are conflicted times for the Labour party. As the impact of last week’s election results has sunk in, two opposing camps have emerged.

On one side is the leadership and its loyalists. The official line is that the current strategy is working. In this interpretation, last week’s results were pretty good. 800 odd new councillors, an 8% increase in the national share of the vote and a Labour administration in Wales are indeed positives.

Not everything is perfect, ahem, Scotland, but things are basically going to plan.

On the other side are those unhappy with the current strategy. This is a big tent. In it, among many others, are Dan Hodges, Sunny Hundal and Rob Marchant and, based on his speech to Progress, Ivan Lewis, the shadow culture secretary.

For this camp, last week was a disaster. At a time of unprecedented government cuts, Labour managed to lose the popular vote in both England and Scotland and virtually no Tory voters from the general election switched to Labour.

Plan A is failing and unless something is done soon, Labour faces a dismal return to the 1980s.

Cards on the table, I’m no fan of plan A. My own post last week puts me slap bang in the middle of the unhappy tent. But over the past week, reading the different despairing takes on Labour’s performance, one thing has leapt out.

There’s no plan B.

Not in the sense that we are doomed and nothing can save the party, but that the focus of analysis has been on why it went wrong rather than what can put it right.

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We must learn to make hard choices, or fail

12/05/2011, 05:42:56 PM

by Rob Marchant

There are four types of election result. Ones that are undeniably good. Ones that are undeniably bad. Ones that are on balance good, but look otherwise. And those that are on balance bad, but look otherwise.

The most dangerous, obviously, are the last. There is a risk that, like an alcoholic, you don’t notice, or don’t accept, that there’s a problem.

And, excluding Scotland, we had a night that looked good. We won back a bunch of seats in the English local elections and scraped home in Wales. A mixed bag, perhaps, but respectable.

Now, Scotland was clearly a disaster and deserves a separate post all to itself (let’s be fair, it seems a problem all its own, unconnected to Labour’s national strategy). Wales, again, is a separate case. As for the positive results in England, three possible explanations come to mind.

One: a vindication of Labour policies. It’s not. This one’s straightforward: we don’t yet, by common consent, have defined policies. Ergo, it can’t be a vindication of them.

Two: the first electoral vindication of Ed Miliband as leader. It’s not. That’s not because he’s not a popular leader: it’s just too early to say. And that’s for the simple reason that most of the population, outside the Westminster and party bubbles, will still have no idea who he is and what he stands for. That’s the reality of having a relatively unknown figure suddenly come to prominence. Therefore, this cannot be reasonably seen as a vindication of his leadership.

Three: discontent with the Coalition. The only reasonable explanation: discontent was manifested with the Lib Dems in particular, Nick Clegg reprising his now-familiar role of lightning conductor for the Tories.

However, we also need to be aware of the difference between, on the one hand, giving the Coalition a bloody nose; and, on the other, giving it its marching orders. (more…)

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The NHS doesn’t need Tory reorganisation, but it does need reform

12/05/2011, 07:00:43 AM

by Peter Watt

I am furious about the Lansley NHS reforms, but not just because of their well documented failures. We all know the arguments against them: another top down reorganisation, competition on price not outcome, cherry picking by the private sector and all that. The Tory-Lib Dem government is, of course, engaging in post-May 5 good cop, bad cop role playing in an attempt to dig themselves out of their hole. I have no doubt that their instinct for survival will lead them to deal with the worst excesses. The Tories, in particular, are rightly terrified of an NHS-led electoral backlash.

But right now, that is not what’s making me so angry. What is making me angry is the real danger that this row will set back the cause of vital NHS reform for years.

Under Labour, the NHS made some significant progress. We introduced choice for patients and gave them statutory rights about what they could expect from the NHS. A variety of suppliers were introduced into the health market and improved commissioning lead to reduced unit costs, greater numbers of treatments, improving health outcomes and shorter waiting times.

And budgets were increased considerably. In fact, you could argue that budgets were increased faster than the reforms could cope with. The result is that there is undoubtedly room for significant efficiency savings.

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Everybody is ignoring us, because we are weird

11/05/2011, 02:30:54 PM

by Anthony Painter

As Kevin Meagher noted on Uncut this morning, the canvas on which Labour is currently painting by numbers is wearing rather thin. A bit of blue, a bit of purple, some red, something of a strange colour called ‘new’, finish it off with a bit of a flourish. Stand back and marvel at the complete, er, mess.

In the meantime, the Conservatives emerge largely unscathed from their first electoral test since the general election. OK, they emerged completely unscathed. And Labour has spent the year talking to itself and in the seminar room (in fact, the last four years). Now the results of the experiment are about to be unleashed. There will be a deafening silence across the land.

There is a narrative of failure that has come to dominate: Labour became too statist, technocratic, detached, captured by the market; it lost its soul. All of this is true. But it’s not why Labour lost. The cause of defeat is much simpler than that. People didn’t trust Labour anymore. They’d seen enough and decided enough was enough. They wanted a new government and new prime minister. They just weren’t over-enamoured with the alternative.

But we are very educated people on the left. We read social history. We have consumed the political classics from Aristotle to Rawls and beyond. We have framed and conceptualised every single action of every human on this planet. We inhale public policy as if it were shisha. And you know what? We’re weird.

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Time for Labour to stand up for the hardest hit

11/05/2011, 11:30:38 AM

by Julianne Marriott

10,000 people are marching past Parliament now. If you were here, though, it would not be the march’s size that would catch your attention. Nor the distance; it will only really be a few hundred metres. Yet for many of those marching today, that short journey is more like a marathon.

And this march looks different too. It is slow. It includes lots of wheelchair users, people walking with sticks and others with guide dogs. Many are living with constant pain, on gruelling medication regimes, distressed by being in a crowd.

Scores of the walkers have fluctuating conditions, including cancer, dementia, arthritis and MS. Which means that many marchers can only be here because they are “having a good day”. Lots of people have a carer with them and wouldn’t have been able to come alone. They may have had to pay their carer, or they may be a family member, who’s had to take a day off work.

These 10,000 people are the hardest hit. Their incomes, independence and integrity are being systematically undermined. And today, a year to the day since that seven page initial agreement was signed, they have made a difficult and exhausting journey to Westminster to tell their story.

After the march, over a thousand people will queue for two hours to make their way into Westminster Hall. They hope that their MP will give them 15 minutes. And in that quarter of an hour they need to paint a picture of their lives now, and what effect of the welfare bill will have on them.

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