Uncut « Labour Uncut

Corbyn’s lack of a political strategy is his achilles heel

21/07/2016, 01:25:52 PM

by Kevin Meagher

I didn’t vote for Jeremy Corbyn in last year’s Labour leadership contest and I won’t this time either. It’s not because I think he’s a bad man, I don’t. And it’s not because he’s wrong about everything, because he isn’t.

In fact, he is sincere and compassionate – commendable enough qualities in anyone. But for a political leader that’s just not enough. The problem is that his ‘politics of hope’ – important and refreshing though it is – just isn’t tempered by the politics of realism.

Labour people should know by now that it isn’t enough simply to make the moral case that some injustice or other should be ended. The British people are practical. They want to know exactly what you intend to do and how you will pay for it.

Jeremy Corbyn fails on this score miserably. Calamitously, in fact. There is an empty space where, by now, he should have sketched the outlines of a new programme for Labour. All he seems capable of offering is slightly tweaked variant of the same stump speech he has been making for 30 years.

His biggest weakness though – and one his querulous parliamentary colleagues have let him get away with for the past year – is that he has nothing resembling a political strategy about how Labour puts its values into practice and wins the next general election.

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Labour at the crossroads

20/07/2016, 11:16:26 PM

by Rob Marchant

After the earthquake, it is surely time to stand back a little and take stock. After one of the most extraordinary months ever in British politics, the pieces have been thoroughly shaken and are now returned to earth.

The landscape is entirely different from the seeming certainties of just a month ago, the old guard largely cleaned out and most of the players new.

For Labour, it has shown one thing in particular: the spectacular house of cards on which the whole current leadership had been built.

It has now become a laughing stock, a leadership of zero credibility outside, and even for the vast majority of its own parliamentary party. The only place where the leadership is still respected, paradoxically, is within the party membership itself, where a level of denial exists which in years to come group psychologists will surely write books about.

From Jeremy Corbyn’s election last September, there has been an emperor’s-new-clothes pretence that it is business as usual. That said, the rot arguably set in with the creeping groupthink of the Miliband years, during which time the necessity of reaching out to swing voters was arrogantly negated and the slow recovery of the far left was treated with the utmost complacence.

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Civil servants might not be civil for long

14/07/2016, 07:45:54 PM

by Greig Baker

In the most extraordinary fortnight for British politics, people should be forgiven if they missed an important – if fairly dry – announcement from the Cabinet Office this week. Despite being largely ignored, the announcement is a helpful reminder that Labour could still have supporters outside of Momentum, if only it got its act together.

On Tuesday, arguably the most powerful department in Whitehall announced the new Civil Service Workforce Plan to 2020. This sets out how the government wants to reform the way the Civil Service works – and so change the way that every single public service is delivered and determine the job prospects of the 440,000 people who work for the government.

The Plan includes some reforms that any shadow secretary of state who is even only half awake would presumably want to get their teeth into. For example, the number of secondments to and from the private sector, and especially large scale commercial suppliers, is likely to increase dramatically. Optimists argue this improves civil servants’ understanding of the world and allows them to bring in valuable lessons and expertise from business. Others may be concerned about the influence gained by private interests who lend their staff to policy makers.

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It is time to stand for centre left values

14/07/2016, 04:04:31 PM

by Jonathan Todd

The responsibilities of moderate Labour are so much bigger than mere party tribalism. They are to our country, our consciences and – in the face of ISIS, Putin and Trump – our civilisation.

My conscience would happily rest with the end of Labour if it helped save our country and civilisation. “Histrionic” is a word that has been thrown about lately. And maybe I’m being so.

Perhaps not, though. I believe the UK is going through its biggest crisis of my lifetime. We are a country fracturing on every axis. Our incoming prime minister has proved herself only to be less of a shambles than Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Andrea Leadsom. An unexacting bar.

Theresa May, regrettably, is not up to the challenges of her office. Which include acting to preserve the institution that has helped bring Europe its longest period of peace and prosperity, while also exiting it in a way that does least harm to our economy and society. And I focus on harm minimisation because, kids and grandparents (for it is the baby boomers who must eat their young), we’ve been sold a pup by unaccountable, fly-by-night charlatans.

People are angry now but they’ll be more so when they find no economic nirvana awaiting. Some take out their frustrations on immigrants – who the prime minister, pawns to her as gunboats were to Palmerston, struggles to reassure.

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Theresa May is eminently beatable. Labour just need a leader up to the job

12/07/2016, 10:43:11 AM

by Atul Hatwal

The ascension of a new party leader is usually a time for rushed, breathless hagiographies and fears among opponents, within and without their party, that a new tide will sweep away their forces.

Allow me to demur.

Theresa May has demonstrated many qualities to become prime minister designate, but her position is far from imperious.

For those of us around in Westminster in the 1990s, there are some recognisable contours to the new political landscape that now confronts Labour, following the tsunami of the past three weeks.

A major economic event fundamentally that changes the narrative on who can be trusted on the economy. Personal enmities and ideological divisions spilling into public view across the Conservative party. A Tory leader facing the prospect of recession while trying to protect a small parliamentary majority.

It all feels rather familiar.

In the 1990s, the starting point was Black Wednesday. In the mid-2010s, it’s Brexit.

In 1992, Sterling’s exit from the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) re-defined the Tories’ image of economic competence. Whatever the rights and wrongs of leaving the ERM, it became the prism through which the ongoing recession was reported.

In the process, the Conservatives became associated with a deadly combination of economic incompetence and pain.

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Labour is in meltdown

07/07/2016, 08:40:09 PM

by Rob Marchant

“The Labour Party is facing its most serious crisis in its century-long history,” writes Eric Shaw, Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Stirling. He’s not wrong.

First of all, since my last Uncut column, it is no exaggeration to say that British politics has been turned upside down by the win of Leave in the Brexit referendum. Barring some kind of monumental U-turn, Britain is on its way out of the EU. In the resulting whirlwind, it is difficult to keep pace with the rapidly-changing landscape.

Aside from the immediate and dire economic fallout from the decision itself, to have a PM resign, mass Shadow Cabinet resignations and a Leader of the Opposition deserted by the vast majority of his MPs in a confidence vote – all in the same week – is surely unprecedented.

Most bizarrely of all, while millions of Leave voters are apparently now regretting their decision, barely any of the winning Leave campaign politicians are now placed for much of a role in carrying out Britain’s transition to its post-EU future. Neither does there appear to be even a sketchy plan. It is as if neither the campaign’s leaders, nor its followers, ever really expected to win.

But this is Labour Uncut: let us now turn to the impact of all this on Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. Corbyn has blamed by many, not unfairly, for the contribution of his lacklustre campaign to Remain’s defeat. But it has also been a convenient moment to mount a challenge to what has so far been a disastrous leadership anyway, at least in terms of engaging with the British electorate.

Hence the mass resignations from the Shadow government – plus the sacking of Hilary Benn for perceived disloyalty – which followed a few days after the vote. But things have not stopped there: it is still thought likely that one of Angela Eagle MP or Owen Smith MP will challenge Corbyn, though the smoke signals from the PLP aren’t exactly clear.

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Labour: Stop meeting. Start leading. Or others will

05/07/2016, 10:06:50 PM

by Jonathan Todd

“There are decades where nothing happens,” according to Lenin, “and there are weeks where decades happen.”

We are living weeks of decades. At least the Great British public are. In contrast, Labour, with its Leninist conclave nominally at our helm, are having some meetings.

Meetings about meetings. Paranoid bunker meetings. Rousing, Kinnock-fuelled PLP meetings. Nice that Neil’s still got it in him. But just a meeting.

But some meetings don’t happen. Like between our leader and deputy. Portland Communications, newly rumbled and keen to appear even-handed but doubtless driven by dastardly capitalist motive to showcase a client, have given them both brain reading technology.

This means that they are constantly meeting, even when they are not meeting, but never, decade after decade, saying anything relevant to a population crawling into a new, disconcerting era.

Change so bewildering that a politician who struggles to guarantee the status of EU nationals in the UK, against a backdrop of intimidation to such people, starts to appear the least bad PM option. Better than the “political psychopath” who did as much as anyone to induce this Brexit catastrophe. Preferable to the new Iron Lady – who, as the Remain frontrunner is intensely scrutinised, might win to satiate the Tory thirst for a Leaver.

No matter who the next PM is, they have no mandate for the terms upon which the UK leaves the EU. The Leave campaign – on a false prospectus that no one is held to account for – won a Brexit mandate.

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As the Labour leadership contest inches closer, MPs are getting very nervous. But all might not be as bleak as they fear

04/07/2016, 11:32:22 PM

by Atul Hatwal

Q. When is a coup not a coup?

A. When it is organised by the Labour party.

Well over a week since Hilary Benn’s departure from the shadow cabinet sparked wholesale resignations, there has been no challenge to Corbyn.

Instead, there is stalemate between PLP and leadership, with a front bench that is effectively on strike but has been too scared to put its concerns about the leader before members in a leadership contest.

On Monday night, following the PLP meeting, it seems there was finally some movement.

Tom Watson’s commitment that meetings on Tuesday would be a “last throw of the dice” at coaxing Jeremy Corbyn out of office was widely taken as the final step before a challenge (it also assuaged some of the simmering discontent among MPs at his role in the drawn out nature of events.)

The choice for challenger would appear to be between Angela Eagle and Owen Smith, although Yvette Cooper is rumoured to be still interested.

Given the Tory party is potentially about to have an all-woman run-off between May and Leadsom, it’s hard to see how Labour could run an all-male equivalent with Smith.

With a contest imminent, a new wave of jitters was rippling through the MPs that Uncut spoke to on Monday night; the nightmare scenario of a Corbyn victory a constant topic of conversation.

These fears have been driven in part by last week’s YouGov poll of Labour members which unnerved many of the PLP.

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The battle for the survival of Labour is on. Members have to fight

30/06/2016, 12:46:15 PM

by Samuel Dale

This is it. Jeremy Corbyn has vowed to fight on despite 81% of his parliamentary party expressing no confidence in his leadership. He’s shown his true colours today by drawing an equivalence between Israel and the Islamic State.

It’s time for members and supporters to fight.

The legal advice around whether he can get on the ballot for a membership vote is vague but irrelevant. As Atul Hatwal explained, he has to be on the ballot. He has to be defeated.

Ordinary members, and £3 sign-ups have to defeat Corbyn in a full election. That is the only way we can put the nightmare behind us.

This is going to incredibly difficult – perhaps impossibly so. But we have to try and here are some positives and negatives to consider.

Firstly, the latest YouGov poll shows 54% of Labour voters do not want Corbyn to resign compared to 35% who do. That’s voters, not members.

Despite the ludicrous unreliability of polling today, especially YouGov, it should give pause for thought. There is clearly still strong Corbyn support in the party.

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Plotters beware, you are leaving Corbyn with the moral high ground

29/06/2016, 05:49:52 PM

by Kevin Meagher

You can disagree with Jeremy Corbyn, you can think he’s deluded and you can even think his continued leadership of the Labour party is a one way ticket to political oblivion, but he has a fair point in trying to hold on.

He was elected with an overwhelming majority as party leader just ten months ago. There is no chink of light, no clever tactical point that reduces the power of his victory. He won a fair fight, securing a first ballot victory with 65 per cent of the vote to succeed Ed Miliband. It was a clear, unambiguous call for a different kind of politics.

Since then he has clearly tried to implement his mandate to refound Labour as a democratic socialist party. A decent chunk of the party’s moderates have tried to work with the grain of his victory and should be commended for doing so.

Teeth may have been gritted and smiles painted on, but, largely the ship has stayed afloat until last weekend as Brexit changed the terms of political trade, raising, as it does, the prospect of an early general election.

Yet despite all the courtliness of the past year, a battle was always coming. And, indeed, here it is.

But the manner in which this awkward modus vivendi, this unhappy cohabitation between left and moderate sections of the party, now ends is of critical importance.

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