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Where is the left when the country needs it?

06/01/2011, 03:00:51 PM

by David Seymour

In the furore over Vince Cable’s comments on Rupert Murdoch, the media generally ignored something else he said which has far more relevance.

Cable believes that the Tories are engaged in a right-wing Maoist revolution and he is right.

The cuts are a cover for the reversal of more than half a century of social advances. While Cameron continues to project an image of hugging hoodies, huskies and happiness, Osborne, Gove, Lansley and the other gang members are undermining welfare, education and the health service.

Thatcher came nowhere near doing that. Her administrations accepted the welfare state and universal benefits, even though she might personally have done so through gritted teeth. Not this lot, despite all the rhetoric about wanting to help the disadvantaged.

Take just one of the measures they are introducing and which the Liberal Democrats seem too hungry for power to grasp. The question is: why are tuition fees trebling? The answer: funding for higher education is being cut by 80 per cent. That can have little or nothing to do with reducing the deficit and everything to do with abolishing widespread university entrance. (more…)

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Cameron’s bottle-out on fox hunting: a good broken promise

06/01/2011, 07:00:26 AM

by Sally Bercow

Spare a thought for the scarlet-clad tally-ho brigade. Not only were over half the Boxing Day foxhunts called off due to heavy snow and ice, but it looks increasingly like game-over for a repeal of the hunting ban too. As DEFRA officials recently admitted, David Cameron has now abandoned his oft-repeated commitment to facilitate an early overturning of the ban. A free House of Commons vote has been kicked firmly into the long grass. Indeed, with a bit of luck, it may not even take place at all.

This is music to the ears of most people in Britain. For, unlike our prime minister (who was born into the hunting tradition and has repeatedly argued that the 2004 hunting act was “a mistake”), over three-quarters (76%) of us believe that fox hunting should remain illegal. Despite concerted propaganda to the contrary by the countryside alliance and their ilk, Labour’s hunting act has proved to be a popular, humane and effective piece of legislation, which enjoys an impressive conviction rate.

It would be heartening to think that Mr Cameron has abandoned his pledge swiftly to repeal the ban because he has undergone a Damascene conversion. All who oppose wanton cruelty might sleep more easily in their beds if they thought that their prime minister now acknowledged the error of his ways and accepted that, in a modern, civilised society, there is simply no place for dogs to shred foxes to pieces. Such a volte-face would be a real blow (“I say, old chap, what’s going on”?) to the die-hard, unreconstructed, hunting-obsessed Tory toffs who think that opposition to their “sport” is merely the vulgar prejudice of the lower orders. (more…)

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The globalised middle: social justice is key to more easing, less squeezing

05/01/2011, 03:00:04 PM

by Jonathan Todd

Tony Blair made adaptation to globalisation a Labour leitmotif. Yet the existence of the “squeezed middle” is a symptom that he did not finish the job. Today’s globalisation is more about the rise of Asia than was the case when Blair became party leader. Easing the squeezing requires better adaptation to this Asian age.

It will take more than David Cameron hawking UK PLC from one rising Asian power to the next. The prime minister is listless in the face of power seeping from the over-indebted West to the resource-rich East, so neatly encapsulated by FIFA’s world cup decisions. His PR smoothness is no substitute for leadership in urgent debates about the architecture of globalisation. It seems that his only reason for attending the G20 was, unsuccessfully, to press the flesh for England’s world cup bid.

Perhaps Cameron confused diary entries, and we lost the world cup after he confronted FIFA president, Sepp Blatter, on macro-prudential regulation. After all, the Tory-Lib Dems’ bail-out of the Irish demonstrates that we live in an interconnected age. It exposes their myth: that our economic predicament is solely Labour’s fault. (more…)

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Secret Lib Dem “Operation Detach” is a council of despair

05/01/2011, 07:00:29 AM

by Tom Watson

David Laws is keeping himself useful by masterminding the Lib Dems’ 2015 general election campaign. Every month, he meets Nick Clegg to discuss the latest market research and share results of message-testing. Back in the summer, they jokingly called the meetings “Operation Detach”. The phrase has stuck and is used by special advisers to impress their friends that they are in the know.

“Operation Detach” is about the Lib Dems trying to carve out a distinct identity in time for 2015. Back in the balmy days of the coalition’s summer, “Detach” meetings were jovial, good natured and full of enthusiasm. But it’s been the longest winter for Nick Clegg. Laws is apparently toning down the results of the research, so as not to further depress his leader. These days, Clegg’s responses are monosyllabic as Laws delivers him the not-as-bleak-as-he-knows news.

Laws’ research confirms what the whole nation thinks: the Liberal Democrats have been brutalised by the Conservatives inside the government. The internal polls show Lib Dem supporters in despair as they complain that Nick Clegg has lain down and been trampled by the Tories. (more…)

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Cameron is a class act, a worthy opponent. So we must nail him now.

04/01/2011, 03:00:05 PM

by Kevin Meagher

Ed Miliband was right in his New Year message. 2011 is a year of consequences. This is the year Labour really has to nail David Cameron. Once and for all. For five years he has slipped through the party’s fingers with one failed attempt to characterise him after another.

First we had “Dave the chameleon”. Cameron was a chancer; all things to all people. Then we had the toff-bashing fun of the Crewe by-election: a stunt that grew into the entire campaign, with predictably calamitous results. Then we had “Mr 10%” – the amount that a pre-election Cameron was said to want to cut from public spending. A line which no less an authority than Douglas Alexander recently lamented had been quite useless.

Tony Blair once chided Cameron that he would not withstand the “big clunking fist” of Gordon Brown. But Cameron has instead shown that he has a decent chin. Then we had Brown’s repeated charge that he was “all style, but no substance”. That is not a crime in modern politics; as, indeed, Blair testifies. (more…)

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Mind the pay-gap: Lib Dem chutzpah’s not enough

04/01/2011, 07:00:55 AM

by James Watkins

To be fair, it took some chutzpah. At the Lib Dem conference in September, the equalities minister, Lynne Featherstone, declared that it was time for “a new politics which has equality at its heart”. She continued that there would be “an equality for the future which is driven by the liberal principles of the past”. And, in a particularly impassioned part of the speech, delegates were urged to watch the film Made in Dagenham. And while watching to reflect on “the women to whom equality in the workplace is still a pipe dream”.

One of the last great acts of the Labour government was to require businesses employing 250 or more people to undertake gender pay audits from 2013. However, the minister has said, “We want to move away from the arrogant notion of government knowing best to one where government empowers individuals, businesses and communities to make change happen”.

With this strange policy contortion – of condemning the gender pay-gap but not wanting to get the facts – the “equality of the future” seems to have slipped away to a parallel universe. (more…)

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BAME Labour is pointless – because Labour’s leadership can’t be bothered with minority communities

03/01/2011, 03:30:04 PM

by Atul Hatwal

If BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) Labour mattered it would be a headline writer’s dream. “Who’s to BAME”? “BAME blame game begins”; “Labour mess: BAME to blame”. The list of blame-based headlines would give a ready top line for each new problem to afflict Labour’s gaffe-prone successor to the black socialist societies (BSS).

But, unfortunately, BAME Labour barely merits reporting. It has been in existence for three years and under-performed even the low expectations that greeted its birth.

A quick look at the website shows an organisation ossified in the past. There’s an announcement about the formation of BAME Labour (presumably dating back to 2007), a plea to back Gordon in the wake of the MPs expenses furore (that’s summer 2009) and the “Obama scholarship free training course for aspiring BAME candidates”, upcoming in April 2009. Whether president Obama managed to send a supportive message to recipients of the scholarship in his name remains unclear. (more…)

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Parliament is still the family’s enemy

03/01/2011, 07:00:18 AM

by John Woodcock

My new year’s resolution is to be a good dad to my two-year-old daughter.

Readers of a zingy political website understandably might ask why this should be of any interest to them. Bear with me.

The resolution, and my decision to share it, is driven by an issue I had not properly considered before becoming a Member of Parliament: namely, the difficult relationship between family life and elected politics in Britain.

It is not that I think I have been a rubbish dad so far, though the explosion of fury from my daughter when she is denied a second slice of chocolate cake would make any parent doubt himself.

But since being elected last May it has been unexpectedly difficult to balance the schedule of Parliamentary life with giving the time and energy that a loving little girl deserves and a partner sharing parenting duties should have the right to expect. The life of an MP is not an obvious case study for the good parenting handbook: shuttling up and down the country every week; late votes and meetings that can snatch away even the promise of a call back home before bedtime; events and campaigning that you want to get stuck into when you are back home in your constituency rather than spend the weekend at the zoo. (more…)

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On the eve of greatness, a memento mori for English cricket

02/01/2011, 01:25:06 PM

by Dan Hodges

A few years ago, Kevin Pietersen nearly killed me. It wasn’t personal. I was looking for my sandwich; he was looking to hook Brett Lee into row 20 of the Peter May stand at the Oval. I didn’t find my sandwich, but he found the stand.

Two seats to the right, and I would have been a tragic footnote to England’s historic 2005 Ashes triumph. I sometimes wonder if there would have been a moment’s silence for me in Trafalgar Square; a poignant pause before Vic Flowers led Andrew Flintoff in a drunken rendition of Jerusalem. Knowing Vic and Freddie, probably not.

Tonight, England’s cricketers take to the field for the most important cricket match since that fateful, near fatal, day. “What madness is this”, goes the cry. “The cricketing Rubicon was successfully forded a week ago, in Melbourne. We saw the cheers, the tears, the cream of English youth dancing the sprinkler in front of delirious men dressed as Arthurian knights and Camilla Parker-Bowles”.

Wrong. The Ashes have not been won. Merely retained. (more…)

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Sunday Review: the giving green paper

02/01/2011, 10:30:26 AM

by Anthony Painter

Lying a short reach from my keyboard is a Cadbury’s Twirl. I want to eat it, as I like Twirls. Most connoisseurs of corner shop chocolate bars do. It seems a fairly logical response for me to eat it. But wait. Eat too many and all sorts of bad things could happen. I could become obese. My teeth could rot. I could end up with diabetes and heart disease. These are not nice things.

What we have here is a defective choice architecture. All the benefits of eating the Twirl are in the here and now. The costs are deferred. Our decision-making is flawed. Even the knowledge of the harm that too many chocolate bars will have is not strong enough to override the impulse to consume this Twirl. Even if we are consciously aware of the long-term cost, it is very difficult to overcome the overwhelming short term emotional benefit.

Somehow, I need a short term nudge to prevent long term pain. Essentially, this is what the Tory-Lib Dem government’s Giving Green Paper is about. How can we be nudged to do good to make ourselves and those around us more happy? (more…)