Labour Uncut

UNCUT: Human rights; legal wrongs

09/02/2012, 07:30:36 AM

by Peter Watt

I am an internationalist, like the best of them. However two separate, but related, issues have today made me very angry. First, the release from prison of the terrorist Abu Qatada. And second, the on-going slaughter in Syria. Both are examples of the way that perpetrators of evil can all too often be protected by the perverse operation of systems of international law. And both show the dilemma of the apparent impotence and weakness of democratic countries.

To put it into perspective; if I were to go into town this weekend, have a skinful, get into a fight and assault someone, then rightly I would, hopefully, be arrested and prosecuted. If the assault was serious enough, or if I had previous, then my behaviour would justify the prison sentence that I would surely receive. Benefit fraud, robbery, tax evasion, illicit drugs – all would likely see a custodial sentence.

But it seems that you can be a convicted terrorist and the legal system can be used to prevent your imprisonment. Abu Qatada sympathised with Osama Bin Laden, praised the 9/11 bombers, was convicted of plotting murder in Jordan and is apparently a member of al-Qaeda’s “Fatwa Committee”. And yet an on-going legal battle has seen him released, imprisoned and re-released from prison. Read the rest of this entry »

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UNCUT: Labour needs to back finance not attack it

08/02/2012, 07:00:29 AM

By Paul Crowe

Everyone hates a banker these days, right? Overpaid, greedy, venal poster boys (and girls) for the gross distortion of our economy and values.

As Dave Mathieson pointed out on Monday it’s not just British bankers who are busy corrupting their national standards of decency and fairness either. The Spanish bankers are also at it, with Santander and BBVA dishing out eye-watering bonuses that will have many City types wondering what exactly their overseas brethren did to end up with both the weather and the cash.

It’s hard not to recoil when looking at the sheer magnitude of some bonuses and then the gap between top and bottom.

But here’s the problem. Words are powerful, especially on a subject as emotive as this. Attacking injustice is fine, but “bankers” has become a term of abuse that is applied without distinction and as a result ends up tarring everyone working in financial services.

This is unhelpful for the debate and dangerous for Britain’s prospects for two reasons. First, it stigmatises a hard working section of society and second it sets a political context where mindless attacks on financial services are seen as a legitimate response to the crash of 2008.

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UNCUT: Whip’s notebook

07/02/2012, 07:00:19 AM

By Jon Ashworth

Before I became an MP I was for many years a bag carrier, which meant a lot of marching at the side of Gordon, Harriet or Ed through Westminster corridors while trying to look serious, doing my best not to drop the wad of briefing papers and most of all desperately hoping I wouldn’t get us lost.

As a diligent member of the leader’s political office, I would usually take advantage of the opportunity to get their view on some upcoming vote at the NEC or some whipping issue causing anguish. Often a backbench MP or fellow (shadow) minster would need a word with Gordon, Harriet or Ed and so Gordon, Harriet or Ed would assure me they would speak to them “in the vote”.

I never really knew what this meant until I became an MP myself.

Now of course at one rudimentary level I knew it meant they would speak to them as they go through the voting lobbies. But I never really appreciated the whole voting lobby experience. It’s where us MPs all congregate, gossip, catch-up and have that quick word with a colleague we’ve been looking out for. We’re all busy people so it’s often where my good friends and parliamentary neighbours Keith Vaz, Liz Kendall and I get together for a quick conflab about any pressing Leicester issue.

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UNCUT: What Chris Huhne’s departure tells us about British politics

06/02/2012, 01:00:05 PM

by Rob Marchant

So, Chris Huhne has left the cabinet. Entire forests have already been destroyed over the interceding months, since the story broke about the speeding points allegedly taken for him by his wife. He will now be charged and is innocent until proven guilty: that is the fair play to which he is entitled.

We will never know – or at least, not for a while – whether Huhne genuinely went willingly, or was pressured to resign to avoid being sacked. But we’re also in new territory entirely: this is the first time a cabinet minister has been charged with a criminal offence in as long as anyone can remember, no-one quite knows what the rules are. And here’s a thing, which some have questioned: would it be right for a cabinet minister to have been made to go under such circumstances, given that he has not, as yet, been convicted of anything at all?

Yes, it is. Because this is not a parking fine. It’s a criminal charge, and criminal charges have to be taken seriously. Here’s what can happen when you don’t.

Mariano Rajoy, now Spanish prime minister, was last year in a similar position to Cameron and Clegg. But his judgement was another: that he was happy to let one of his party’s main figures, Francisco Camps, stay in post after being charged with a criminal offence. Although Camps later changed his mind and resigned anyway, the point was that, not being able to tell whether he was innocent or guilty, Rajoy had bet his party’s reputation on Camps. He lost.

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UNCUT: Angry with RBS? Take a look at the Spanish bank bonuses that British customers are helping fund

06/02/2012, 07:00:49 AM

by David Mathieson

Poor Stephen Hester. Poor ex-Sir Fred. Not of course in financial terms, but perhaps unfortunate to find themselves the individual objects of public indignation while others escape without the slightest scrutiny.

Chukka Umunna made the points again eloquently on the Today programme last week: there would be no RBS to pay Hester or Goodwin anything had we, the tax payers, not come to the rescue of the stricken bank and saved it from complete collapse in 2008.

When millions of public sector workers are having their wages, salaries and in some case jobs cut, the payment of bonuses at RBS – always discretionary and never contractual – should not even be on the table.

But does the story stop there? Hardly.

RBS is different only in that it is more than 80% owned by the state. For all the other retail banks, the bonuses being paid are funded from the charges paid by millions of ordinary account holders.

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HOME: The week Uncut

05/02/2012, 05:06:52 PM

In case you missed them, these were the best read pieces on Uncut in the last seven days:

Atul Hatwal on Labour’s lost king

John Woodcock says Cameron is full of hot air

Peter Watt stands up for the bankers

Kevin Meagher says the Tories are leading the way on localism

David Talbot wants Labour to land a punch

Jonathan Todd thinks Labour can win on welfare

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GRASSROOTS: We need to stop talking to each other

04/02/2012, 12:00:32 PM

by Charlie Cadywould

David Miliband’s response to Roy Hattersley in New Statesman represents a problem that seems to be endemic to parties of the centre-left. As soon as they are voted out, parties of the centre-left have an identity crisis, and spend years discussing to whom precisely they are to try to appeal.

Hattersley tells us that Labour must go back to its roots, talking explicitly about social democratic values and the morality and efficacy of the central state. Miliband does not disagree on the importance of the central state from a policy perspective: he agrees that there are things that only government can do, and other things that only government can do fairly.

What he objects to is that narrative that Hattersley wants to construct. Miliband wants to talk about making government better, but he agrees that the state needs to do more, he just doesn’t want Labour to frame the argument in that way. Hattersley, no doubt, agrees with Miliband that government can be better, and that local government has an important role to play, but he would prefer Labour’s narrative to be unashamedly about morality and the central state. Read the rest of this entry »

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UNCUT: Bonnie prince Davy, Labour’s lost king

03/02/2012, 09:25:15 AM

by Atul Hatwal

The king over the water is an alluring concept. Over the water the grass is greener. Hopes and aspirations are nurtured, castles built in the air.

Rarely does the inconvenience of reality intrude on the floating possibility or what might be, if only the king could return.

Followers of faraway kings tend to assume away questions on what their leader would actually do with power and fixate on removing the undeserving incumbent.

For all those years in the early 2000s, legions of Brownites (back in the days when such a grouping existed) didn’t give a second thought to tricky details like an alternative policy programme. All would be fine. Plans were bound to have been made by pointy headed wonks in backrooms somewhere. What mattered most was removing Blair. That was the business of politics.

And so the wheel turns and now its bonnie prince Davy who awaits with a promise of a better tomorrow.

The reaction across the media to David Miliband’s article in the New Statesman is defined by lost leader syndrome. All the reporting has been entirely through the prism of a leadership challenge, nothing on the substance of what he’s saying.

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UNCUT: In defence of bankers and Fred the shred

02/02/2012, 08:00:09 AM

by Peter Watt

If you are the Tories then you know that in general voters are wary of what you might do with the NHS, given half-a-chance. It is a political weakness for them. No matter what they say many people assume that their instincts are anti that most beloved of national institutions.

It is why David Cameron invested so much time and effort in trying to persuade people that his intentions towards the NHS were honourable in the run up to the general election. It is why he pledged, ridiculously, to protect NHS budgets when all others were being cut. He knew he couldn’t win on the NHS, but he hoped he could stop it being a negative for him. Now of course all of this has been blown out of the water by Lansley’s ineptitude, and the NHS is once again an electoral vulnerability for the government. A degree of trust so hard fought for so easily lost.

In contrast, the Labour Party is trusted by voters on the NHS. It means that they could get away with reforming the NHS, maybe even make mistakes, and would still on balance be trusted. Read the rest of this entry »

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UNCUT: How Labour can win on welfare

01/02/2012, 08:00:55 AM

by Jonathan Todd

Labour will win the welfare debate when we reassure the public that we believe in the responsibility to work and convince them that the government is too incompetent to secure the right to work.

Labour’s approach to rights is anathema to Tories, and goes beyond the legalism of liberalism. The right to work is fundamental to us – we’re Labour, after all. Tories see no such right. Unemployment is a price worth paying. And work is, of course, a relational and lived experience, which can’t be distilled to the system of legal rights that defines liberalism.

All have a right to dignity, which the welfare state that Labour created must ensure. This right, more associated with Labour than other parties, is, however, abused when it subsidises the unwillingness of some who could work to fulfil their responsibility to actually work. That Labour has a stronger emphasis on rights than other parties, can leave us vulnerable to attacks predicated upon appeals to responsibility.

Iain Duncan Smith has launched such an attack. The principle driving his benefits cap is that all who are able have responsibilities to look for and take up work. Where there is more to be gained by staying at home, welfare incentivises the violation of responsibilities to seek and undertake work. Read the rest of this entry »

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