Uncut « Labour Uncut

Polls apart – don’t believe the hype, Labour isn’t surging ahead

04/02/2011, 07:00:25 AM

by Atul Hatwal

Labour’s lead has “surged” to 8 points. So says Anthony Wells at YouGov after the latest Sun tracker had Labour on 44% and the Tories on 36%. Time for champagne?

Not quite.

As Wells points out, given the margin of error, it’s no more meaningful than the narrow 2 point lead posted earlier in the week. Lurking in the detail of YouGov’s latest weekly poll for the Sunday Times were some interesting figures that give a bit of insight behind why an 8 point tracker lead doesn’t signal lift-off.

One of the standard questions asked in this survey over the past seven months has been “how do you think the financial situation of your household will change in the next twelve months”?

It’s an important question in gauging people’s perceptions of how the cuts will impact them personally. (more…)

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Wanted: leadership in the western world

03/02/2011, 12:00:57 PM

by Jonathan Todd

Francis Fukuyama is best known for confusing the period between the falls of the Berlin Wall and Lehman Brothers with the end of history. This was to be defined by the global triumph of liberal democracy and market economies. He recently conceded:

“The most important strength of the Chinese political system is its ability to make large, complex decisions quickly, and to make them relatively well, at least in economic policy”.

China is neither liberal nor democratic, but its state-directed model of capitalism is reshaping markets across the globe. Nonetheless, everyone from George W. Bush to Will Hutton is confident of the model’s limitations. It is thought that history hasn’t ended yet, but that it will, and on the lines that Fukuyama proclaimed.

“Trade freely with China and time is on our side”, said Bush. These economic freedoms will, ultimately, it is argued, require political freedoms. This is because per capita western incomes depend upon what Hutton calls the “enlightenment infrastructure” – pluralism (multiple centres of political and economic power), capabilities (rights, education, private ownership) and justification (accountability, scrutiny, free expression).

Hutton made this argument in a debate with Meghnad Desai in Prospect just before the credit crunch. Desai scoffed: “For you, there is only one road to capitalism – the Western one – and only one political system – ours”. The crunch must place at least a question mark next to Hutton’s Whiggish confidence. (more…)

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Exploitatively high-cost lending has to stop

03/02/2011, 07:00:08 AM

by Sally Bercow

If you’re lucky enough to live in a Royal Palace, you’re not surrounded by “gold for cash” pawnbrokers. Neither do the door-to-door moneylenders that plagued my street in Tower Hamlets come to call. So I’m not going to go all faux woman of the people and pretend I rely on high cost credit. I don’t, haven’t (leaving aside the odd store card) and hopefully never will. But too many people in Britain do; millions of low income households depend on loan advances from pawnbrokers, payday lenders and doorstep lenders just to make ends meet.

These loans with sky-high interest rates come with devastating consequences, as borrowers are forced to cut back their spending on food, rent, utilities, fuel and other essentials in order to meet their loan repayments. The debt trap is blighting the lives of too many people, causing physical and mental health problems, damaging local communities and increasing the pressure on the public purse. In other words, high-cost credit affects everyone, whether you use it or not. (more…)

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Crossman, Etzioni, abstaining and the big society.

02/02/2011, 12:30:45 PM

by Tom Watson

“One of the difficulties in politics is that politicians are shocked by those who are really prepared to let their thinking reach any conclusion. Political thinking consists in deciding on the conclusion first and then finding good arguments for it. An open mind is considered irresponsible – and perhaps it really is”.

It will be sixty years in November since Richard Crossman penned that entry in his diary. I think about that quote a lot; have done ever since I first read his diaries over many hours in the coffee shop of the national film theatre in 1984. It repeats back to me most days, particularly these dark days of opposition. Sometimes it’s the little things that trigger the memory of it.

This week, for example, the Labour party has done a lot of abstaining. The Tories are mired in a long, long internal argument about the European bill. Our corporate view is that much of the discussion, and subsequent backbench clauses to the bill, are private grief for the prime minister. For Labour MPs, the division bells have been closely followed by a text message with the words “we are abstaining”. I hate abstaining on anything. It seems so weak. Last night I cracked and decided to positively abstain, that is, to vote in both “aye” and “no” lobbies. A whip – friendly, polite, gently firm – asked me not to. I obliged. Is my thinking so unclear that I can’t even conclude to abstain right? It’s been a busy, stressful week but I was disappointed with myself for being so compliant. (more…)

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Choosing office over power has destroyed the Lib Dems

02/02/2011, 07:00:55 AM

by Kevin Meagher

If a general election were called right now, just one in ten voters
would plump for the Liberal Democrats, according to the latest brace of
opinion polls.

That’s not strictly true, though. YouGov’s tracker poll actually has them on eight percent. It is ComRes that has them scaling the dizzying double-digit heights of 10%.

Either way, this state of affairs represents a not insignificant problem
for our deputy prime minister; the first mate on the deck of our ship of state. Unfortunately for him, however, the party he leads is holed below the waterline and is still taking in the wet stuff.

Of course, polls yoyo up and down. But these dreadful numbers are merely a
symptom of the Lib Dems’ essential malady: they simply have no clear purpose any more.

Like their Edwardian counterparts who went the way of the dodo in the early
1900s, they now cease to have what marketing gurus call a USP – Unique Selling Point.

By joining with the Conservatives, they have trashed their brand as Westminster’s good guys. It is an irrecoverable loss. Their identity and independence is shattered. The price of joining with the “nasty” Tories is losing the “nice” party label. There is no splitting the difference on that point. (more…)

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Why are we wasting time and police resources on phone hacking?

01/02/2011, 11:30:10 AM

by Dan Hodges

Westminster is gripped by a strange madness. Last week it was announced that the economy is teetering on the brink of the precipice, a swathe of cuts are set to scythe through every community in the land and that the 350th British life had lain down for its country in Afghanistan.

But what is dominating our political discourse? Phone-hacking. The hunt to uncover which journalists eavesdropped on the mobile messages of which politicians and minor celebrities. This is now the burning issue of our age.

We are witnessing the car crash of the British establishment. Our MPs are piling into the media. The media are piling into the police. The police are piling into everyone. All the while the public are gliding slowly by watching, with incomprehension, the unfolding spectacle.

On the surface, the hacking controversy raises important issues. Laws have been broken. The privacy of public figures invaded. There are questions over the integrity of senior police officers.

These matters should not be taken lightly. But nor should they be whipped into a frenzy of rumour, speculation and accusation. (more…)

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AV is a small change – but it could have a big impact

01/02/2011, 07:00:51 AM

by Richard Burden

For me, securing a yes vote in the referendum is about helping to create a more open and participatory politics. A lot of people in this country find politics a really big turn-off – and I can understand why. They want to see a change in the way politics is done. I do too.

Introducing AV is a small change – but it could have a big impact.

It is hardly earth-shattering to suggest that if we MPs are going to claim the right to speak for our constituents, we should each secure the support of 50% of those who voted. Preference voting systems – such as AV – are already used up and down the country in the internal elections of membership organisations, businesses and unions. Labour and other political parties use them to elect their own leaders.

That preference voting for the House of Commons is sometimes regarded as an outlandish suggestion says a lot about the narrow culture of the existing political system. It will take more than a new voting system to change that culture. But it will certainly help. (more…)

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AV – who cares? The whole debate’s a waste of time and money.

31/01/2011, 12:00:18 PM

by Michael Dugher

In September 2009 I was asked to conduct the traditional pre-briefing for broadcasters of the leader’s speech to the party conference. I remember reporting back to Gordon Brown’s other advisers that I had just “had my balls fried” by journalists about a line in the speech committing Labour to hold a referendum on the alternative vote. There was much confusion. The journalists wanted to know why having a referendum on AV had anything to do with the need for political reform after the MPs expenses scandal. They also wanted to know whether Labour would be campaigning for a “yes” vote, or whether we were simply committing to giving people the choice to move to AV or not. “Oh we’re definitely in favour of AV”, said one policy wonk. “No we’re bloody not,” said a political adviser, “large parts of the PLP are against and it hasn’t gone through the NEC yet”.

18 months later, the tedious irrelevancy that is the debate about whether or not to change to the alternative vote system continues. It is striking that the only party to have had a commitment to having a referendum on AV was Labour, the party that definitely lost the election. The Tories were opposed, as were the Lib Dems, who, as longstanding supporters of proportional representation, dismissed AV as “a miserable little compromise”. And yet we are having a referendum nonetheless, whether the public wants one or not. (more…)

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The unholy alliance destroying the country (no, not that one)

31/01/2011, 07:45:12 AM

by David Seymour

It is the last resort of a desperate politician to fall back on denouncing judges as unelected. Michael Howard was at it the other day, complaining that the courts should not be asked to decide whether it was lawful for the government to snatch away million of pounds promised to councils as part of the “building schools for the future” programme. (Yes, that’s the same Michael Howard who was overturned 27 times by the courts when he was home secretary).

If the only people who could decide anything had gone through an electoral process, we would be in a situation in which an administration supported by less than a quarter of the electorate (as most governments in the past decade have been) could do what it liked.

What really gets me agitated, though, aren’t the attacks on judges by politicians and right-wing journalists (can’t recall many of them being elected), but their acceptance at the same time of certain unelected and self-appointed individuals and bodies who exert an overwhelming influence on decision-making.

Take Sir Andrew Green and migration watch. Where did they come from? He was a retired diplomat who founded a body which has been at the forefront of terrifying the British people into thinking we are being over-run by foreigners. (more…)

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The Sunday Review: How the West was lost, by Dambisa Moyo

30/01/2011, 03:00:39 PM

by Anthony Painter

On their way to discuss “shared norms in the new reality” in Davos this week, many of the world’s leading politicians, businesspeople and media figures will pick up a copy of Dambisa Moyo’s How the West was lost. Those coming from “the West” will turn the pages nervously. Those from emerging nations will smile contentedly. The future is China’s. The US will not only lose its number one spot but will decline precipitously and end up as a bloated socialist state. How the tables have turned.

We have been here before. In the 1960s, it was the USSR that was going to overtake the US. Sputnik focused minds. NASA landed a man on the moon and all was fine again. By the 1980s it was Japan, when a spate of books detailing Japan’s onward march to global domination filled those same bookshelves that now hold Moyo’s book. Now, it is China. Surely, this time it’s different?

Actually, this time it probably is different. China will end up as the largest global economy. It’s huge, its population is four times that of the US and it’s growing fast. The surprise will be if China does not replace the US as number one in the next couple of decades. Japan has already slipped into third place as a result of China’s rise. (more…)

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