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A postcard from the Leicester South by-election

11/04/2011, 03:30:39 PM

By Michael Dugher

Last week Ed Balls launched Labour’s by-election campaign in Leicester South. He did so from the same spot at De Montfort university where Nick Clegg, a year ago during the general election, restated his opposition to tuition fees and said that the Lib Dems had “real momentum…particularly with young voters”. He went onto pose the question: “Who do you trust to deliver the change and fairness you want”? If a week is a long time in politics, the last year feels like an eternity.

The Leicester South by-election was caused by the resignation of the sitting Labour MP, the respected and popular Sir Peter Soulsby, who will contest the first ever mayoral election in Leicester. For the small but dedicated group of Labour staff, this will be their third by-election in less than six months. Some of the hard-working organisers have barely had enough time to wash their smalls since leaving Barnsley.

But Barnsley Central is a very different type of constituency to Leicester South. Barnsley Central is a traditional Labour heartland seat, a stronghold that Labour has held without interruption since the inter-war years.

Leicester South, on the other hand, is a city seat that has changed hands on a number of significant occasions. In February 1974, the Conservatives won the seat with a 1,700 majority. Eight months later, Labour took it back with a 1,300 majority. When the Tories were riding high under Mrs Thatcher in 1983, Leicester South again narrowly elected a Conservative MP, with a majority of seven. Despite big majorities for Labour in the 1990s and in 2001, in the immediate aftermath of the Iraq war in 2004, Leicester South was the scene of a major by-election win for the Lib Dems, as they took the seat with a majority of over 1,600. At the subsequent general election in 2005, Labour regained the constituency with a majority of more than three thousand. (more…)

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We’re for the whole country. Osborne is for the City.

11/04/2011, 12:00:00 PM

by Jonathan Todd

It’s only when politicians have bored themselves through repetition that their message begins to hit home with their audience. I’ve heard this dictum attributed to both Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson. Its genesis is of less practical consequence than the reality that Labour’s message of too deep, too fast is now hitting home.

The debates around the causes and management of the deficit are complex. The simplicity of Labour’s message overcomes this. The arguments to which today’s publication of the interim report from the independent commission on banking will contribute are also highly technical. Labour requires a straightforward, powerful line that resonates amid this detail.

This should be that we are for the whole country, not just the city. We’re not banker bashers. We’re with Kitty Ussher on the short-sightedness of that. But the financial sector isn’t presently delivering to the extent that it could for the rest of the country. It’s one of the few sectors in which the UK can claim true global leadership. Labour recognises and celebrates this success. (more…)

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Who the hell does Gus O’Donnell think he is?

11/04/2011, 08:06:21 AM

by Tom Harris

Revelations that head of the civil service, Sir Gus O’Donnell, blocked a judicial inquiry into allegations of phone hacking by the News of the World, prompts the urgent question: who the hell does he think he is?

According to the Guardian, O’Donnell considered that by the autumn of 2009, the general election was imminent and therefore an inquiry would be too politically sensitive, given that former News of the World editor, Andy Coulson, was now spinning for David Cameron.

Well, so what? If something is so serious that it warrants investigation, then it should be investigated, irrespective of the political timetable. In fact, the proximity of Coulson to power at that point should have made an inquiry more imperative, not less. (more…)

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The Sunday Review: Left in the past: radicalism and the politics of nostalgia, by Alastair Bonnett

10/04/2011, 01:40:51 PM

by Anthony Painter

There is a tragic oscillation that occurs cyclically on the left between over-confidence and capitulation. It is summarised by a Christopher Lasch quote in Alastair Bonnett’s study of the complex relationship between nostalgia and radicalism:

“Their confidence in being on the winning side of history made progressive people unbearably smug and superior but they felt isolated and beleaguered in their own country since it was so much less progressive than they were”.

As Labour enters office, it is certain in its knowledge of how progressive the country is. It leaves office in despair at how reactionary it is. Having tried to buy it off with reactionary and authoritarian language and policies, it is generally also perplexed. Labour, meet reality; reality, kick Labour. Only neither perspective is true. Britain is neither predominantly progressive or reactionary. It is, however, deeply conservative, which is an entirely different proposition altogether.

Progressives look to the future with gleeful zeal. Conservatives warily eye the past, in part longing and part warning, and step into the future only tentatively. In that sense, they are more attuned to the default human condition. We are a species that is disconcerted by convulsive change. How strange then that we have built an economy and society around such change – a key part of the radical critique of where we are. And how predictable it would be if there were a social and psychological reaction to such change. As Ian Dyck writes of farm labourers in the early nineteenth century:

“They remembered a better life and they wanted it back”.

(more…)

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Cameron’s holiday from political common sense

08/04/2011, 03:50:36 PM

by Kevin Meagher

So Dave and Sam have bid “Adios!” to miserable old Blighty and jetted off to Granada for a sneaky break to celebrate the missus’s 40^th.

In our belt-tightening times, Downing Street spinners are keen to point out the first couple flew by easyjet and that they are staying in a “mid-market” hotel.

Of course, if you’re a couple of minted minor blue-bloods, staying in a three-star family hotel is more “downmarket” than “mid market”. Still, I can’t quite see them draped across a couple of sun loungers like the middle-aged swingers in Benidorm.

Or perhaps that’s precisely how Dave expects to reconnect with beleaguered Brits. Taking a budget holiday that may still be just about affordable to many. Not the swinging bit.

But when he’s finished there’s the return to think about. Will he come back like Jim Callaghan, tanned and refreshed from an economic summit in Guadeloupe in 1978 and utter something to rival: “Crisis, what crisis?”

Of course Sunny Jim never actually used that particular formulation. It was paraphrased tabloid-speak. But it was the symbolism that mattered. As it does now. In a week that saw “Black Wednesday”, when the full putrid blast of the coalition cuts hit the public for the first time, there’s a question mark over Cameron’s political common sense.

What does he think people will make of his little jaunt? “Good on the multimillionaire politician who’s just trebled my kid’s tuition fees. I’m sure all that doctrinaire right-wingery takes it out of you. Put your feet up son”. (more…)

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The Old Politics case for AV

08/04/2011, 07:44:40 AM

by Atul Hatwal

What a strange situation. Secretaries of state facing-off at cabinet meetings; shadow cabinet members at loggerheads and rival gangs of activists squaring up, hoping one of the other lot will spill their pint.

Who knew electoral systems were so emotive? It’s enough to make you want to shout “leave it, Lee; it’s not worth it”.

Like many, I find myself looking on, bemused. The intensity of the debate on the referendum on the alternate vote (AV) is in equal parts bizarre and disengaging. Babies without incubators, Nazi fellow-travellers and a rag-bag of random celebrities are all part of the carnival of the absurd wending its way across our news pages.

In terms of the actual argument underneath the artifice, the case is finely balanced.

Most people get Cameron’s Usain Bolt analogy and intuitively feel it odd that someone finishing second in a race should end up winning. But, equally they understand that voting is about building legitimacy, and for most voters, a second best choice as MP is better than someone who the majority actively opposed.

As neither side has delivered the killer blow in their initial pitch, the approach of both campaigns has been to just shout louder. A ten-pints-of-lager strategy.

So they continue to brawl, while people, who are only now just beginning to look at the issue, feel a bit like they have walked into a taxi queue at club kicking-out time in downtown Croydon on Saturday night. (more…)

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Half a minute Harris

07/04/2011, 11:30:57 AM

Episode 6: Ollie Letwin and the common people

You can catch up with previous episodes here:

Episode 1: Welcome, Uncut readers, to the mind of Tom Harris

Episode 2: Should we abstain on the welfare reform bill?

Episode 3: How’s that working out for you Polly?

Episode 4: Student visas… I’m with Theresa May on this one

Episode 5: A distraction from the main event

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Cock a snook at the Tory press: vote Yes to AV

06/04/2011, 01:00:26 PM

By David Seymour

Wake up, Britain, the Daily Mail exhorts its readers and I agree. If the people of Britain woke up and voted the right way in the AV referendum, they would strike a terrific blow for democracy and plunge a dagger in the heart of the anti-democratic forces that are taking over the country.

Where the Mail and I part company is that they want a No vote while I want to say No to the Mail and the other right-wing papers, which means voting Yes to AV.

It is an inescapable fact that referendums, like by-elections, give voters the chance to cock a huge snook at whoever they feel like teaching a lesson at that time.

The politicians are so split on AV that snook-cocking is particularly difficult this time. UKIP supports AV, the BNP prefers to stick to first past the post. Half the Labour party wants change, the other half doesn’t. Clegg wants it, Cameron doesn’t. Both sides have uncomfortable bedfellows.

There is one group, however, which is completely united and that is the Tory press. All are hysterical in their insistence that changing the voting system would mean an end to democratic life as we know it.

The Mail, the Express, the Sun and the Telegraph are as one in pouring out bile towards the Yes lobby and screaming at their readers to save the nation from AV. Magna Carta, universal suffrage and human rights are as nothing compared with the sanctity of FPTP.

What’s their panic? The reality is that a) first past the post is an unfair system which results in millions of people in hundreds of constituencies rarely if ever having a vote that counts; and b) the difference which AV would make is marginal – only full PR will properly modernise our electoral system.

It is true that a Yes vote on May 5 will create problems for Cameron, but the Tory papers dislike him anyway, so they ought to be pleased if that happens. Yet they have worked themselves into a lather at the prospect of “losing” the referendum.

It isn’t as if the vast majority of their readers care. In the real world there are genuine political crises which are causing turmoil in people’s lives, though the papers don’t like to accept that. They continue to insist that all public spending is profligate and all public-sector employees are lazy, over-paid lead-swingers.

Perhaps the referendum is a surrogate issue for them to get their fangs into. But that doesn’t explain the passion and fury with which they are pursuing it.

Their arguments are laughable. They say AV is complicated. Not for anyone who can count it isn’t. They say it will cost millions. Why? They say it is unfair when it patently isn’t less fair than the current system.

They claim it will be a historic deviation from the great British electoral tradition. By that measure, we should take the vote away from women and anyone who isn’t a property-owner. (Incidentally, did you know the president of the Tea party thinks people who don’t own property shouldn’t have the right to vote)?

It is being increasingly recognised that the answer nowadays to the question “Who rules Britain”? is: the media. Particularly the Mail and Sun.

If they succeed in getting a No result on May 5, they will be smugly confirming their conviction in their divine right to rule.

But if we can get a Yes vote, just imagine the tantrums, the screaming, the carnage in newsrooms on May 6. It will make the Dacres even more furious and desperate, but we will have won a crucial battle for freedom against the Fleet Street tyranny and the wind will be with us for the really big wars ahead.

David Seymour was group political editor of Mirror Group Newspapers for 15 years.

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The Tories’ give and take, take, take

06/04/2011, 12:01:05 AM

by Ed Balls

Today will be a black Wednesday for millions of families across Britain.

David Cameron promised to lead the most family-friendly government ever. George Osborne said we’re all in this together. So why are their changes to tax and benefits, which come into force today, hitting women harder than men? And why are they taking so much support from children: with families on low and middle incomes being hit the hardest of all?

We’ve been through a global financial crisis; not a recession made in Britain. And, like every major economy in the world, we now have a big challenge to get the deficit down. So there have to be tough decisions. They will include some spending cuts, fair tax rises, like the 50p top rate of tax for the richest, and the national insurance rise we proposed last year.

But as we have consistently argued, by making a political choice to cut the deficit further and faster than any other major country, George Osborne is going too deep and too fast. He is putting jobs and growth at risk. And he is doing so in an unfair way, giving the banks a tax cut this year while low and middle income families are hit hard.

This month families aren’t just seeing their national insurance contributions go up. David Cameron and George Osborne have gone further and faster: with a big hike in VAT, cuts to tax credits, cuts to childcare support and a three year child benefit freeze as well. (more…)

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