Labour Uncut

GRASSROOTS: Why Labour has to win in 2015

19/10/2012, 02:50:29 PM

by Ian Stewart

Politics is a game. It is irrelevant to the real needs. The authorised version of the game and its rules have been pickled, or maybe set in aspic, or possibly worse. The ingredients that make up our HP Sauce have curdled. That is the view from the bottom of the pile, it is the reason why so many of us cannot be bothered. It is also the view peddled by the seemingly endless parade of hip young things in our media today. That is unless they can find a cause that ticks the right boxes of their sales demographic.

If you want to practice politics go to a good university then get that job as a researcher or SpAd. Get yourself into a union machine, work in local government or law or work for a pressure group or the media. In other words get inside the established channels as quickly as you can, starting with student politics.

Whatever you do, do not get a job outside of the process. The process is king – never forget that. Once inside you can play the game to your heart’s content. In your chosen career – showbusiness for ugly people – you will be talking to others similar to yourself and most of those interested in what you do will also be like you. The rest of us neither matter nor care, except during elections.

You can read a lot of leftish blogs and sites these days and most of them seem to accept the rules of this game. It’s a game that few can ever win. Left wing commentators occasionally wring their hands over the fate of beings called “the low paid.”

I have a suspicion that most of them have only sensed these beings from a slight distance. Let me help you, my fellow blogging comrades, in your search for these mythical beings. They were serving your coffee, washing your dirty plates and getting you that glass of wine in the bar at that conference you attended… (did you tip, or did you think a few extra quid would be demeaning? Tightwad.)

I know this because I am one of them. I’ve spent most of my working life in catering, hotels, restaurants and bars. I admit that I’m atypical (particularly in London) as I am English and fairly educated. Oh, and I am interested in politics. Forgive me, I spent all of my working day on my feet, including my break, and am a little cranky. Sadly, in many respects George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London is all too familiar today. To those who see politics as simply a tribal game or as irrelevant to the lives we all lead, let me explain what a large bulk of “the low paid” go through on a daily basis.

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UNCUT: When Ed Miliband marches against austerity tomorrow, will he answer the £10bn question?

19/10/2012, 10:22:26 AM

by Atul Hatwal

Tomorrow, when Ed Miliband attends the TUC’s march against austerity, he will be asked a simple question.

The answer will help determine whether One Nation Labour is an idea that will resonate with the public or just an ephemeral phrase du jour:

Ed, do you back Unite, Unison and the GMB who have just submitted a claim for a 13% rise in wages on behalf of 1.6 million local government workers?

Yes or no?

No, don’t use a parsed formulation of words involving the phrase “tough choices” while avoiding a clear position.

Do not obfuscate, this isn’t a demand to write the next manifesto several years before the next election, it’s just a question that cannot wait three years for an answer.

Neither is it good enough to say that this is a matter for local government as if the leader of the Labour party is somehow legally proscribed from having an opinion.

For the unions, in a very practical sense, this wage claim is part of the alternative to austerity and it is a question they will ask of Labour’s leader, face to face, on Saturday.

Their local government members have faced real terms pay cuts, year on year since 2009. 13% sounds a lot for a wage claim but it would only recoup the real terms losses (e.g. the difference between inflation and the nominal pay rises awarded) suffered since 2009.

What is the point of the union movement if it cannot protect its members from never-ending pay cuts?

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UNCUT: The government’s top 30 “real achievements”

18/10/2012, 11:12:18 AM

by Michael Dugher

Back in July, after a torrid few months for the government following their budget for millionaires and with Britain in a double-dip recession, David Cameron and Nick Clegg responded the way they always do: they organised another press re-launch. At the event held at a railway depot at Smethwick in the West Midlands, they announced that the Government would publish a mid-term review in the autumn outlining what they had “achieved” and identifying future goals and objectives.

So following the party conference season, and with the imminent publication of this review, it seems a good time to look back over the last two years to assess what the government has really achieved and to outline what its real half-term report should look like. Here are the government’s top 30 real achievements:

On the economy:

1. When the Tories took office the economy was growing, but the government’s policies choked off the recovery and have delivered the longest double-dip recession since the second world war;

2. The IMF has cut its UK growth forecast for 2012 to minus 0.4 per cent;

3. Borrowing is up. Compared to last year, borrowing is up by 22 per cent so far this year;

4. Tax cuts for the rich – the government is cutting 5p from the 50p top rate tax, giving 8,000 people earning over £1 million a tax cut of over £40,000 a year;

5. And at the same time as helping millionaires, the government is introducing a “granny tax”, which will see 4.4 million pensioners who pay income tax losing an average of £83 per year.
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UNCUT: So, if Labour win the next election, where will we be in October 2015?

18/10/2012, 07:00:56 AM

by Peter Watt

On Saturday hundreds of thousands of people will be demonstrating against the cuts to the public sector being imposed by the government.

The TUC’s “we were told there was an alternative” march and rally in central London is the latest in a series of events organised against the cuts since Ed Balls unveiled his emergency budget in June. PM Miliband faced heckling and walkouts at the TUC in early September and at the Labour party conference 100,000 protesters ringed the conference over-shadowing his Tuesday speech.

Government ministers have faced UK Uncut activists chaining themselves to their cars, bikes, houses and constituency offices as disruption and protest is maximised. But it is the anger towards prime minster Miliband that is most palpable. The elation of the election victory a mere four months ago must now seem a very distant memory to our beleaguered PM.

The problem seems to boil down to a sense of voters feeling let down as Labour impose their austerity package. Of course Miliband and Balls can point to a series of speeches and announcements that they made in opposition that they say made it clear that they would need to make cuts. As Balls said in his interview with Andrew Marr last week:

“We said it would be tough and it is, five years of failed coalition policy that delivered negligible growth means that the government books were even worse than we thought. Of course we were always clear with people that we would need to make some cuts but unfortunately in reality this means that we have a much tougher job on our hands than even we realised.”

But it appears that voters were not as clear about the Labour party’s intentions as Miliband and Balls now claim that they were.

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HOME: Time for policy in the pub with Iain Wright

17/10/2012, 02:48:49 PM

Yes, it’s that time of the month again: time to go to the pub and talk policy. Tonight it’s all about industry with shadow minister for competitiveness and enterprise Iain Wright.

So, if you want to know how we can get this country moving again, get yourself down to the Barley Mow pub on Horseferry Road SW1P 2EE this evening. The fun kicks off at 1830 and runs till 2030.

For those that haven’t been to one of these Pragmatic Radicalism events before, it’s a quick fire format with 90 seconds for speakers to present a policy idea, 2 minutes for questions and answers and then a vote at the end on the best policy.

Tonight as a special bonus, if the whole pub chants “Iain Wright, Wright, Wright,” the winning policy will be automatically adopted in the next manifesto.

OK, that last bit isn’t true, but it wouldn’t it be fun?

See you in pub.

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UNCUT: Demonstrating against Google? Because of the anti-Islam film? You’re kidding right?

17/10/2012, 07:00:39 AM

by Rob Marchant

On Monday, the Telegraph reported an attendance of over ten thousand at a demonstration outside the UK headquarters of Google, over the controversial film “The Innocence of Muslims”.

The first point to note is that these are only a small handful of the 1.6 million Muslims who live in Britain, and who care passionately enough about the subject to get up and do something, in this case to try to ban it. Yes, we can and should respect the fact that some of our population are annoyed at the negative portrayal of their religion, and that they have the right to demonstrate (the vast majority of Muslims very likely see this news and merely shrug, or are possibly even irritated by the counter-productivity of the protests themselves).

But perhaps it is important is that those other thousands of sensible, free-speech-loving Muslims do not merely shrug, and that they can engage with the idea that, however irritating, banning is not the answer. In particular, it is important that their religious leaders, and so-called “community leaders”, do not merely shrug, or worse, indulge this silliness.

In part, it’s about free speech, but in part, it’s also about the long-term health of this religion: because there seems to be an existential crisis developing within it, a polarisation between moderate and extremist which has been slowly brewing for decades over the twentieth century which is making for an explosive collision with progressive, humanitarian values in the twenty-first.

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INSIDE: Mad Uncle Rupert unsettles anti-Leveson lobby journalists

16/10/2012, 03:41:33 PM

Whispers reach Uncut of disquiet in the lobby on the right approach to oppose Leveson.

The overwhelming majority of parliamentary journalists view the Leveson report as something to be feared and distrusted. The span of opinion ranges from Leveson’s anticipated proposals presaging the end of civilisation to simply sounding the death knell for freedom.

But signs are emerging of a split between the vituperative stance adopted by senior management at some of the leading anti-Leveson titles and the footsoldiers of the lobby.

A recent Mail editorial calling for the Leveson to investigate the BBC, following the Saville revelations, was seen to have made the right point in the wrong way.

The opening paragraph laced into anti-hacking campaigners, Hugh Grant, Steve Coogan and Max Mosley, branding them “three harpies from hell”. One hack at another paper, sympathetic to the Mail’s position said,

“It was way too over the top. The point is about judging the BBC and the press by the same standard, but personalising it like this makes it seem like they’ve got a vendetta and undermines the case. People will think its sour grapes. Dacre needs to button it.”

Then over the weekend, Rupert Murdoch tweeted “Told UK’s Cameron receiving scumbag celebrities pushing for even more privacy laws.” Labelling victims of hacking that News International has had to pay substantial sums, as “scumbags” was widely viewed as a major mistake. One journo murmured,

“He’s basically the mad uncle, locked in the attic, crashing about. Now he’s got twitter, the window is open and everyone in the outside world can hear him. Noone needs that.”

Another scribbler worried about the effect that the almost inevitable divestment of News Corporation’s British stable of papers will have on Rupert Murdoch’s behaviour,

“It’s alright for him. He knows he won’t even have any British newspapers to bother about soon, he can spout off as much as he likes. It’s the rest of us that will have to live with the consequences.”

With journalists from at least one paper under strict instructions to not even tweet about Leveson before the report is published, the signs are that the anti-Leveson lobby is feeling jittery.

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UNCUT: US campaign diary: Three reasons for Democrats to be calm about tonight’s debate

16/10/2012, 07:00:23 AM

by Nikhil Dyundi

It’s nearly here. Two frustrating weeks since president Obama phoned in his performance in the Danville debate, he has the opportunity to make amends.

Across the nation, Democrat nerves will jangle and nails will be bitten. The more volatile will fear disaster at the end of every sentence while even the most confident will feel anxious.

But, in spite of the unavoidable tumult of emotion, rationally Dems should be calm. There are three reasons the result in New York tonight should be more to our liking: expectations about Romney’s performance, his weaknesses and the format

First, Romney is facing a tough fight in the media expectations game. He won last time out and won big. Anything less than a comparable result will have journalists writing about a drop in his level of performance.

The swing of the media pendulum is as predictable as it is exaggerated. The last fortnight gave them the opportunity to write a Romney rebound into reality. An avalanche of gushing pieces about the GOP candidate’s performance has changed the prism through which the public view the race and inevitably shifted the polls.

But that story has been written.

Barring a similarly pallid non-performance from Obama as in the first debate, a passable showing from the president will spawn a wave of comeback pieces.

A presidential fightback will give the media the new angle they need to churn through the next six days until the final debate. There will be review pieces on the performance, tick tock pieces on the minutiae of how the campaign prepared Obama and impact pieces looking at how it played in the battlegrounds.

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INSIDE: Andrew Mitchell will go on Thursday

15/10/2012, 07:00:17 AM

That’s the consensus Uncut hears swirling around the ranks of senior Tories. Post-conference, the denouement of #gategate has acquired a new lethal inevitability. Hopes of a firebreak, with conference season giving space for the furore to subside, have been decisively dashed.

As members of parliament return to Westminster, Ministers and MPs who have fanned out over the weekend for media interviews are all reporting back the same message to the Tory whips: this problem is not going away.

These interviews were meant to have been an opportunity for the Tories to build on David Cameron’s speech and set the agenda before the start of the Autumn session. But, on every single occasion the questioning returned to Andrew Mitchell’s position.

It not only dragged the MPs back into territory that the Tories have been trying to escape, but also presents a uniquely difficult question to answer.

There’s no defending Mitchell’s conduct. His absence from Birmingham, despite being the Tories’ only Birmingham MP, was stark. The agreed line to take that he apologised and the police personnel involved have accepted the apology leaves too many unanswered questions: what did he actually say? Why are the police federation calling for him to go? How long will this drag on?

The critical day is now Wednesday. PMQs will be dominated by Andrew Mitchell, who will then face the judgement of the Tories backbench 1922 committee later that day when it meets.

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UNCUT: The Sunday review: conference season

14/10/2012, 08:00:33 AM

by Anthony Painter

The two main parties have raised their game. Admittedly, this wasn’t difficult after last year but it is the case nonetheless. Conference season 2012 has defined the 2015 fight and was, unusually, consequential. The Liberal Democrats sunk without a trace. We now have a traditional fight between a party of enterprise and individualism and a party of the people taking on unjust elites. There is real choice in politics again.

On their own terms both Ed Miliband and David Cameron delivered very good speeches. The script for Labour’s conference was that its leader would deliver another vague, unfocused, holier-than-thou address. He didn’t. It had a clear and appealing message and it re-defined him as a political voice with an ability to cut through.

Equally, the script for the Conservative conference was that, having failed to establish a convincing economic recovery, the party would simply shift back into 2001/2005 mode. In fairness, the party did shunt right with all the old classics on abortion, the right to shoot at will, human rights and fantasies about workers being traded as if they were grains of wheat. Its leader did something different: he articulated a centre-right vision of the mainstream; one that is recognisable from the Thatcher years. It was full of many of the same bogeymen: intellectuals, teaching unions, the work-shy, and so on. But its aspiration nation message is a mainstream one nonetheless.

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