Labour Uncut

UNCUT: 3 years on: Ed Miliband has created Blue Nun Labour

30/05/2013, 06:20:09 PM

It’s 3 years since Uncut started so, in a series of pieces, we’re taking stock of what has changed for Labour since 2010. Mark Stockwell gives the other side’s view of Labour’s progress

You could see it on Ed Miliband’s face, that far-off day in September 2010 when he snatched the party leadership from under his big brother’s nose. David had led him in every round of the ballot, eclipsed him over every fence, but at the end, somehow, Ed had snuck through on the rails and won by a short head. And the new leader of the opposition was as surprised as anyone. In truth, he wasn’t ready for the responsibility that had been thrust upon him. Over the last three years, it’s shown.

Granted, he didn’t start from the most auspicious position. For all that the Conservatives had failed to win a majority, this only served to disguise the scale of the defeat Labour had suffered at the hands of the British electorate. When what Labour needed was to face up to the manifold reasons for that defeat, too many have sought comfort in the travails of the coalition and revelled in the difficulties of the despised Liberal Democrats.

It fell to Miliband to drag his party away from this comfort zone. He has failed. In truth, he hasn’t even tried. Yes, senior Labour figures have queued up to utter insincere pieties about how the leadership had been wrong in the past to dismiss the concerns of the party’s supporters about immigration. But the party as a whole continues to give the impression it doesn’t think it got much wrong in office – on the domestic front, at least.

It is no use Labour going into the 2015 election telling voters it was a mistake to kick them out last time. Asked to review their verdict (and you may be sure Conservative strategists will happily play along with such an approach), the good people of Britain will apply a swift coat of polish to their boots and find their own way to make sure Labour “reconnects with the voters.”

Miliband’s lack of preparedness has manifested itself in his desperate casting around for a distinctive, coherent agenda. It is rather as if, like the second year politics undergraduate he so closely resembles, finding himself unexpectedly home alone one evening, he has set himself the task of coming up with a tasty supper using only the ingredients he can find already in the kitchen.

Blue Labour? Hmmm, yes I remember picking that up on the way home after the leadership election. Maybe I’d had one or two glasses of wine. Anyway, it sounds interesting, in it goes.

But hang on, it’s missing something. I know, there’s that half-empty packet of incomes policy that’s been hanging around at the back of the cupboard since, ooh, about 1979. If I stick a big label on it saying “predistribution”, maybe I can kid myself it’s not past its sell-by date.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Uncut | 3 Comments »

UNCUT: 3 years on: Is being the “other guy” enough for Ed to win?

30/05/2013, 04:26:50 PM

It’s 3 years since Uncut started so, in a series of pieces, we’re taking stock of what has changed for Labour since 2010. Peter Goddard gives a member’s perspective

I am not immersed in politics. I am not obsessed, absorbed or professionally involved.

For people like me, or as I like to call us, ‘normal people’, politics only consists of the big events.

Three years ago, there were two big events: Labour lost the election and there was a new leader of the Labour Party.

I wasn’t a particular friend or foe of Ed Milliband’s, but what I did know was that he wasn’t the other guy – the disastrous Gordon Brown.

It was a chance, I thought, for a new start. Ed Milliband’s Labour party could be shaped, moulded and presented to the nation afresh.

Three years passed.

Cameron stopped hugging huskies and sharpened his economic scythe. Disability allowances were targeted, tuition fees introduced, a bedroom tax launched.

In response, Labour presented… the same stuff, but not as much of it. And maybe not as fast.

Two years ago, there was another big event: an election took place for Mayor of London. The Tories put forward their wild-haired wild card candidate.

In response Labour presented… that guy from last time.

Last year, a conference happened. Everyone got excited about how Ed Milliband was going to define and shape the party’s future.

Labour presented ‘One Nation’.

So three years on I’m still not sure what Ed Milliband’s Labour party is all about. If it has a story to tell that has just failed to cut through to people like me, or if he is simply keeping things vague in order to remain flexible up to the next election, I don’t know.

But what I do know is that, until someone like me can clearly describe what today’s Labour party is all about, Ed Milliband remains reliant on the same appeal he had on his initial rise to the leadership – simply not being the other guy.

Let’s hope that’s enough.

Peter Goddard is a sales and marketing consultant

Posted in Uncut | 3 Comments »

UNCUT: 3 years on: The Labour party is allergic to making decisions

30/05/2013, 02:00:22 PM

It’s 3 years since Uncut started so, in a series of pieces, we’re taking stock of what has changed for Labour since 2010. Atul Hatwal looks at how Labour is led

When Gordon Brown departed the Labour leadership, there was a sigh of relief across Westminster on both the left and right of the party. For many, the problem with Gordon hadn’t been the policies, though there was clearly room for improvement, but leadership.

Decisions would sit on his desk for weeks and months, sometimes years. By the time a choice was made, the moment would have passed and after all the haggling and deliberation, those involved felt exhausted.

The advent of a new leader was meant to change that. Regardless of his politics, Ed Miliband’s swift and determined decision to stand against his brother boded well for his style of leadership.

Unfortunately it seems that was the last major decision Labour’s leader made. Stories abound about landmark speeches being constantly rewritten with endless debate in the leader’s court on the correctly nuanced line to take.

Everyone has an opinion and all are heard with the result that little substantive is ever said.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Uncut | 1 Comment »

UNCUT: 3 years on: We’re still at square one on the economy

30/05/2013, 12:23:58 PM

It’s 3 years since Uncut started so, in a series of pieces, we’re taking stock of what has changed for Labour since 2010. Jonathan Todd looks at Labour’s progress, or lack thereof, on the economy.

As anticipated in my first Uncut piece, the deficit has defined the politics of this parliament. The political premium on being able to say where the money will come from has remained high, while the interest on government debt has stayed low.

George Osborne claims these low interest rates as City endorsement for his policies when really they implore him to borrow to invest. The market, it seems, is always right but only when it’s politically convenient.

While ministers struggle to offer the Treasury the cuts that the spending review demands, the political potency of the cuts narrative hardly seems diminished. This is in spite of the government failing to meet their stated objective: deficit reduction. As they reap a whirlwind of youth unemployment and stagnant growth.

Yet the economic debate stubbornly refuses to turn to Labour. The public seem trapped in a doom loop that is economically self-fulfilling and debilitates Labour, which must convince that a better economy could be achieved under prime minister Miliband.

As well as winning on bread-and-butter issues, Miliband has to address the deep structural problems that the nasty hangover from the NICE – non-inflationary continuous expansion – decade has revealed. Economic rebalancing requires rebalancing our top heavy state. The best chance for this in this parliament came and largely went with the mayoral referendums.

Having worked on Siôn Simon’s campaign, it was a big disappointment that Birmingham rejected this way forward. I’m working with Demos to try to think through new ways ahead for our cities.

These are times laden with immense challenges and without the resources that the delusions of the NICE decade conjured. Solutions urgently demand bold imagination. “One more heave” isn’t enough, as my first Uncut piece concluded.

Jonathan Todd is Labour Uncut’s economic columnist

Posted in Uncut | 2 Comments »

UNCUT: 3 years on: Ed Miliband has one of the most experienced shadow cabinets’ since the war

30/05/2013, 07:00:10 AM

It’s 3 years since Uncut started so, in a series of pieces, we’re taking stock of what has changed for Labour since 2010. Kevin Meagher looks at a battle hardened shadow cabinet.

Like many of you, dear readers, I vividly remember watching the 2010 election count, taking heart from every morsel of comfort on a losing night (‘we’ve held Birmingham Edgbaston!’) and cheering on every small advance (‘Simon Danczuk took Rochdale – even after the Mrs. Duffy incident!’) It was bad – we were out; but it could have been worse.

The share of the vote was abysmal – the lowest since 1922 – but the Conservatives hadn’t won. This was undoubtedly a rejection of Labour, but not a sea change. It was becoming clear gazing at the goggle box in the wee small hours that there would have to be a coalition government and, at that stage – and against all expectations – Labour was still in the game.

The rest, of course, is history, but it seems this sense of relief that the result was not as bad as it could have been for Labour averted any exodus of talent from the top of the party.

After all, here you had a bunch of experienced ex-ministers, many in their early 40s, who could easily have transferred their talents to the worlds of business or academia. Why hang around with no guarantee you will ever sit round the cabinet table again – and even if you do is it worth slogging through five years of opposition only to do a job you’ve already done before?

After all, the immediate effect of losing ministerial office is a fifty per cent pay cut, closely followed by the realisation that your retinue of officials, drivers, security people, diary secretaries and assorted hangers-on are no longer trailing behind you. You are back to running a shadow operation from your pokey Westminster office.

It’s a big psychological readjustment and they could be forgiven for for facing an existential crisis about what they were doing with their lives.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Uncut | 4 Comments »

UNCUT: Is Labour doing well enough?

29/05/2013, 03:52:42 PM

by Rob Marchant

Having had a couple of months which have not, frankly, been pretty for Labour, this is the question its leaders must surely be asking themselves in the wake of the local elections.

The question is, will they ask it of robust friends who might level with them? Or others who might well-meaningly equivocate, in the name of keeping them motivated?

First, it is easy to base our hopes of success on this or that transitory effect, but that seems rather like building one’s house on sand. There may be a UKIP effect come the election, but history has shown that such things are not usually that big. Yes, there may just have been a fundamental realignment, but things may just as easily go against Labour (Tory voters returning and narrowing the gap) as for Labour (remaining UKIP voters splitting the right-wing vote and letting Labour in). And, in any event, it is a fool who bases his strategy on the failure of others. Stop it. If there is a boost from UKIP, that’s a bonus.

Second, Labour’s poll lead is anyway soft and has been for some time, as Atul Hatwal has shown here at Uncut. Most exasperatingly, many seem to be still extrapolating that poll lead out to 2015 at the same level, when history has shown, time and again, that polls will narrow, as I wrote here, based on the fine time-series research of Leo Barasi. You cannot, and should not, judge polling on week-to-week changes, which are meaningless, but over long periods you can see trends and these are worth looking at.

Although many have compared its current situation with 1992 – when, of course, Labour lost – even that seems rather an optimistic reading; its current polling gap is also comparable with that of Labour’s in 1981, which is not exactly encouraging news, when you think how Labour was destroyed in 1983. By the way, Tory hegemony was by no means consolidated in 1981, many viewed Thatcher’s leadership as shaky and Labour maintained a respectable poll lead all through that year.

Third, the softness of the party’s positive polling in historical context becomes more deeply worrying when we look at our leadership polling in historical context. And no, before you start, this is not an agitation for a challenge to Miliband, which would be of no help whatsoever to Labour. But the worryingly low polling he is experiencing is not a help either and we should not pretend otherwise.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Uncut | 15 Comments »

UNCUT: Revealed: Unite about to be investigated by the information commissioner for Falkirk fix

29/05/2013, 07:00:31 AM

by Atul Hatwal

This week, the Labour party report into irregularities in the selection process for Falkirk West’s prospective parliamentary candidate, will be published. The selection procedure was suspended two weeks ago following allegations that Unite was fixing the contest in favour of its candidate – Karie Murphy.

The party had hoped to draw a line under the affair with the publication of the report. But, regardless of the findings of the inquiry, the row is likely to rumble on with the government’s privacy watchdog, the information commissioner, set to be called in.

The suspension of the selection was prompted by two main charges: that Unite members were signed-up for Labour party membership, with their subscription paid, without being told; and Unite and Murphy had privileged access to the local Labour party membership list.

Last week in the Herald, details of a letter of complaint sent to the Scottish party emerged. In it, a Unite member, living in Falkirk West wrote,

“Myself and two family members have been enrolled by Unite…I or my family did not fill in or sign any forms and wish to know what information the party holds about my family.”

Further allegations have been made that Karie Murphy and Unite have used the Falkirk West membership list to contact CLP members without members’ permission on at least two occasions.

If either of these claims is found to be true, Unite will have significantly breached the Data Protection Act.

Under the terms of the Act, each individual must have agreed before their personal details are passed to a different organisation. The law could not be clearer: point 1 of schedule 2 of the Act, which governs the conditions for personal data being used or “processed” by an organisation, states

“The data subject has given his consent to the processing”

At the point where Unite members’ personal details were registered with the Labour party, without their consent being first granted, the law would have been broken.

At the point where Falkirk West Labour party members had their details passed to Unite, without their prior consent, the law would, once again, have been broken.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Uncut | 5 Comments »

UNCUT: Sally Bercow and the slaughter in Woolwich shows why we can’t put social media back in a box

28/05/2013, 02:36:58 PM

by Kevin Meagher

Citizen journalism is perhaps a rather grand term to describe a person with a smartphone capable of pressing an ‘app’ and pointing it at a commotion, however its effect has now revolutionised the visual media, as we saw in all too stark terms last week.

The heinous murder of Drummer Lee Rigby on the streets of Woolwich and its aftermath was quickly whizzing round cyberspace allowing us to see, graphically, the tale of horror that was being cautiously relayed by the mainstream media.

The term ‘media’ never used to need this caveat. The term was exclusively reserved for newspapers and broadcasters. Now, the technical utility of a smartphone allows everyone to publish and broadcast. We are all the media.

It may be shaky and grainy, but we are getting used to unexpurgated and contemporaneous footage undercutting broadcasters and newspapers’ monopoly in telling us the truth. It is utterly changing our understanding and reaction to major events.

Now, we decide for ourselves. Uploaded to YouTube, this unshackled truth is, to paraphrase Lyndon Johnson, up and halfway around the world before the context gets its boots on.

This is the challenge facing modern editors and news outlets, judging how far to go in matching its pace. Sit too long on these first-eye accounts and the readers will simply find them elsewhere on the web. Edit their usage and stand accused of censorship or bias. Use them and stand accused of sensationalism or in that hoary old term, giving terrorists the oxygen of publicity.

In a piece for the New Statesman last week, Sunder Katwala, the director of British Future, a think tank exploring issues of identity and integration, said it was ‘a shame’ that no newspaper front pages the day after the killing of Drummer Rigby ‘inverted the lens’.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Uncut | 2 Comments »

UNCUT: Labour must look forward, not back, to win in 2015

28/05/2013, 09:51:49 AM

by Jonathan Todd

Peter Kellner reminded us in his recent hard hitting analysis for Progress that the Tories’ central message in 1992 was that Neil Kinnock was a dangerous man who would lead Britain down the road to ruin. He also recalled that the same trick completely failed in 1997. This was because, he argued, Tony Blair had reassured voters that their jobs, homes, pay and savings would be safe with him.

The “Demon Eyes” poster just seemed daft next to the reassurance that Blair had provided. Labour’s “Demon Eyes” football team, founded in 1997, plays on, but the need for reassurance from Labour has returned. Ed Miliband is, according to the Tories, the menace that Kinnock once posed. He must convince that his sums add up on the big challenges facing the country: the economy, welfare, immigration, public services and the cost of living.

While Miliband must seek to reassure, his capacity to do so is not entirely in his control. It can be argued that the tentative economic recovery of 1992 was a harder context in which for Kinnock to provide reassurance than the more upbeat economy in which Blair campaigned in 1997.

Taking a chance on an opposition party seems less of a risk in a stronger economy. Which is why a tepid recovery by 2015 may be the best backdrop to David Cameron’s “don’t let Labour ruin it” message.

Labour’s opposing message, of course, will be “it’s time for a change”. But why? We might say that it’s time for a change because if too far, too fast cuts had not been implemented then we’d now be better off. Unfortunately, this invites the Tories to remind the country why they deemed the cuts necessary: Labour’s profligacy. And there is evidence that this argument increasingly convinces the public.

As the opposition party, Labour has to argue for change in 2015 but this should be an argument about the change that could be achieved from 2015 under Labour, not the change that might have been achieved had Labour been in office from 2010. This might seem obvious but placing an attack on the depth and speed of the government’s cuts at the centre of our economic argument has us looking back to 2010.

Labour can only win with a positive argument for how things will be better from 2015. Yet not only is our main economic argument backward looking but it is backward looking in a tonally negative way. The implicit message of much of our rhetoric is fearful: the government shrinks and the economy collapses; the immigrants arrive and society implodes.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Uncut | 13 Comments »

GRASSROOTS: Why seeing is believing on life for the Palestinians

27/05/2013, 10:20:20 AM

by Lee Butcher

A delegation of Labour party members returned last week from a five day tour of the Palestinian West Bank. The campaign group Labour2Palestine have now sent 100 party members to the troubled country to see for themselves the on-going hardships faced daily by the Palestinians.

It is a fair question to ask why party members should choose to do so, and why it is important for the Labour party to have informed members that can speak knowledgeably from firsthand experience on this subject.

The party’s attitude to this ever recurring topic has been largely unchanged since a weary Labour government in 1947 left the country to their own devices with more than a sigh of relief. Since then the left of Nye Bevan has moved from enthusiastic support for Israel to a commitment to Palestinian solidarity, and the right of Bevin and Attlee has moved from Arab sympathy to enthusiastic Israeli support. Entrenched ideology runs deep within our party on this matter.

The 5 days I experienced in Palestine demonstrated to me that the realities of hardship and persecution faced by the Palestinians ought not to be abstracted as we done over our history. The realities cannot be fully realised in the briefing papers of international bodies, government departments or spun by campaign groups. They have to be witnessed to be understood.

Military occupation is a sensory experience; twenty foot high walls, observation tours, ever present armed soldiers, the intimidation of questioning by a teenager holding a gun, cages that serve as “checkpoints”, the acrid smell of Israeli tear gas that pours over unarmed protestors; all of this I and my fellow Labour party members witnessed in the West Bank.

Emotion is difficult to escape when you visit refugee camps, established in 1948, where the residents tell you of having access to water once a month from a single communal pump as very young children play in the streets festooned with uncollected rubbish. Where a young man tells you of the night when armed soldiers, arriving at 2am, seized him and his younger brother (only 15 years old) after which they faced military interrogation for days, without access to lawyers or their parents, eventually being convicted of throwing stones by a military court and spending four years in jail as a result.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Grassroots | 6 Comments »