Labour Uncut

UNCUT: Ed’s not going to take down Gaddafi with a sustained blast of the Reith lectures

01/03/2011, 07:00:52 AM

by Dan Hodges

Libya has turned into the first international crisis of David Cameron’s premiership. And he’s flunked it. When an ash cloud stranded thousands of British holidaymakers, the previous government deployed the Royal Navy. With the Middle East aflame, and hundreds of British workers in peril, this government turned to the heavy metal band, Iron Maiden. Bruce Dickinson, the group’s lead singer, is also marketing director and chief pilot of charter airline, Astraeus, one of the first to land at Tripoli to begin a belated evacuation. The RAF heroes of 633 squadron have been pensioned off for the heroes of flight 666.

At times like this, there is frequently a populist rush to judgment. “Something must be done”, goes the cry, even though operational and political realities make the situation far more difficult and complex. This is not one of those times. Ministers had sufficient warning of the spreading unrest in the region in general, and Libya in particular, yet they clearly had no coherent strategy in place for the evacuation of British nationals.

In fact, it is amazing that there appear to be no settled contingency plans for the rapid deployment of military or other assets to remove our citizens from areas of potential instability. It doesn’t need a doctorate in international relations to tell you that Colonel Gaddafi is a fruit cake with the potential to tip his country into chaos at the drop of a pair of his designer shades. Surely one of our chaps in the FCO should have twigged that a guy who calls himself “the Brotherly Leader and Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya” is worth keeping a wary eye on. Read the rest of this entry »

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UNBOUND: Tuesday News Review

01/03/2011, 06:52:58 AM

Leaders clash over Libya

In a statement to the House of Commons the prime minister said would “not rule out in any way” the use of military force against Gaddafi. “We must not tolerate this regime using military force against its own people,” he said. “In that context I have asked the Ministry of Defence and the Chief of the Defence Staff to work with our allies on plans for a military no-fly zone.” He added: “My message to Colonel Gaddafi is simple: Go now.” On Friday Cameron authorised a military operation to rescue Britons stranded in the Libyan desert. The move followed days of heavy criticism levelled at the Foreign Office’s initial rescue efforts. And he said on Saturday two RAF C130 aircraft flew into the Eastern desert and picked up 74 British nationals and 102 foreign nationals at three different locations. – ePolitix

Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, was obliged to endorse this firm anti-Gaddafi line, but attempted instead to develop an anti-Cameron line, by demanding an apology from the Prime Minister for the delay of about a day and a half in evacuating some British citizens from Libya. Mr Miliband’s demand was shot down in the no-fly zone which Mr Cameron proceeded to create over the Leader of the Opposition. For as the Prime Minister retorted to Mr Miliband: “If apologies are in order, perhaps he should think of one about the appalling dodgy dealing with Libya under the last government.” – Daily Telegraph Read the rest of this entry »

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UNCUT: We can’t afford the luxury of leaving the page blank for much longer

28/02/2011, 12:00:00 PM

by Tom Harris

Ed Miliband was predictably mocked by the Tory benches after his “blank piece of paper” initiative was leaked.

Yet even those government MPs who were oh-so-cleverly holding up their blank order papers for the TV cameras knew that opposition parties, in the immediate aftermath of an election defeat, always – always – review their policy from scratch. The Tories did it in 2005, and in 2001 and in 1997. I seem to remember a perpetual policy review throughout the 80s and into the 90s (remember “Labour Listens”)?

The fact is that the 2010 manifesto failed. It was rejected. It is now deceased, an ex-manifesto. It has joined the Choir Eternal in manifesto heaven. And we will need a brand new one before 2015.

The danger for Ed and our party is that the current political and economic climate doesn’t allow us the relaxed timetable that Cameron enjoyed after his party’s third successive defeat. All the future prime minister had to worry about in those days was how to “detoxify” his party’s brand and capitalise on the inevitable imminent succession of Brown to replace the thrice-victorious Blair. It was all about strategy, message, image. Read the rest of this entry »

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UNCUT: You can’t take on the Taleban with a rolled-up copy of the New Statesman

28/02/2011, 07:00:41 AM

by Michael Dugher

The timing of David Cameron’s trade mission to the Middle East last week, during which he took a large delegation of business figures, many from the defence industries, was awful. The government’s response to events in Libya and the wider region have been condemned as a complacent shambles. The prime minister, a former marketing man, tried to “rebrand” the trip when he should have known that he needed to remain in the UK to “take charge” and to manage the implications of the growing crisis.

The prime minister should also have had the judgement to know that it was not an appropriate time to be pursuing trade interests with regimes that had begun to attack pro-democracy campaigners in their own countries, and that the priority needed to be the safety and security of British nationals. Douglas Alexander summed it up best:

“I support the promotion of British exports and British goods; that is important to our economic recovery. But I think the last couple of weeks have been a very salutary reminder to David Cameron and to others that foreign policy embraces more than simply trade policy”.

And similarly Ed Miliband wrote in yesterday’s Observer: “Trying to pretend a trade mission for defence manufacturers and other businesses is a ‘democracy tour’ doesn’t cut it”.

But Cameron’s trip also sparked an avalanche of criticism from those, mainly on the left, who remain totally opposed to very existence of the British defence industry. Twitter, in particular, was alive all last week with angry tweeters denouncing the “arms trade” and the “arms salesmen” on board the PM’s plane. The list of major British defence companies who jumped on board the prime minister’s flight included Cobham, Thales UK, QinetiQ and – cue for an especially big boo and an extra large hiss – for that favourite pantomime villain, BAE Systems. The list also included firms like Rolls Royce, Serco and Amec, all of whom have large defence interests. Read the rest of this entry »

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UNBOUND: Monday News Review

28/02/2011, 06:55:13 AM

Action on Libya

David Cameron has given his clearest statement yet that the Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi should step down immediately. Speaking from Downing Street, Mr Cameron said: “It is time for Colonel Gaddafi to go and to go now, there is no future for Libya that includes him” and he said the British Government was “putting serious pressure” on the regime to relinquish power by imposing a travel ban and an asset freeze.

The Prime Minister also confirmed that a number of Britons had been rescued on Sunday and although there had been some risks, he decided it was the “right thing to do” to ensure British nationals in remote oil fields were evacuated from the country safely. On Sunday evening the Foreign Office confirmed that the Chancellor George Osborne had taken the decision to freeze the assets of the Gaddafi family before the markets open on Monday. This follows the UN Security Council Resolution tabled by France and Britain, backing sanctions on Libya is response to state violence against protesters. – PoliticsHome Read the rest of this entry »

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INSIDE: Westminster city council proposed byelaw and supporting documents

27/02/2011, 08:04:25 PM

Lots of people found the earlier post regarding the planned byelaw being put forward by tory controlled Westminster council hard to believe. We’ve had countless emails and comments along the lines of:

“This can’t be true, not even the tories are that bad…”

So, just to make sure no one is left in any doubt, here is the draft byelaw:
Draft Rough Sleeping and Soup Run Byelaw

And here is the map of the area they intend to ban people from giving food to homeless people to survive on:
Draft Rough Sleeping and Soup Run Byelaw Boundary

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INSIDE: Tory council to make homelessness illegal

27/02/2011, 03:35:11 PM

The Tories have a new policy on homelessness: make it illegal. That is the extraordinary intention of a Conservative flagship council. Worse, they want to ban Salvation Army soup kitchens.

Westminster city council, the richest and most powerful council in the UK, is proposing a new bye-law to ban rough sleeping and “soup runs” in the Victoria area of London. The proposed new bye-law will make it an offence punishable by a fine to “sleep or lie down”, “deposit materials used as bedding” and to “give out, or permit another to give out, food for free”.

If these proposals are passed, they will also prohibit companies with a proud record of corporate social responsibility from doing good things. Companies like Pret a Manger, who have, very quietly, for many years, given away their unsold food to London’s homeless. If the Tories get their way, companies like Pret will be forced to throw the food in the bin.

What must housing minister, Grant Shapps, think of this? Back in Christmas 2007, Shapps, ostentatiously spent a night in a bag outside Victoria station.

Back then he told Andrew Porter of the Daily Telegraph:

“Our policy is we absolutely need more houses. The way to do it is to incentivise communities to want to build houses. It works by saying, ‘build these houses and you get a new town centre or other services like a hospital or school’. The existing community gets the gain, not just those people who move there”.

That was then and this is now. If the Tories on Westminster council get their way, Shapps would have been fined for sleeping in the street. Not, we suspect, that he would do it now. Read the rest of this entry »

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UNCUT: The Sunday Review: The New Capitalist Manifesto, by Umair Haque

27/02/2011, 12:03:14 PM

by Anthony Painter

Something is going seriously wrong with capitalism.

Yeah, we’ve heard all this before from you green nuts, socialists, idealists. Why don’t you tell us how mean, corrupt, selfish and deluded we all are again? Whatever.

No, really, something is going wrong with capitalism.

I’ve just said, walk on by – do your recycling, save some workers, sell some Marxist newspapers.

No really…

And this time it really is different. It’s no longer just the fringe that says so. It is the mainstream. And not just the political mainstream. The business and academic mainstream. What’s more, politics, even social democratic politics is light years behind. The new radicals are to be found within the temple of capitalism itself.

Take this:

“There is growing concern that if the fundamental issues revealed in the crisis remain unaddressed and the system fails again, the social contract between the capitalist system and the citizenry may truly rupture, with unpredictable but severely damaging results”.

Who is this dangerous revolutionary? Well, it’s none other than Dominic Barton, global managing director of Mckinsey & Co. Yes, McKinsey & Co. Read the rest of this entry »

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UNBOUND: Sunday News Review

27/02/2011, 08:30:34 AM

Ed Miliband: Britain needs a more ethical approach to foreign policy

British citizens facing great danger in Libya have a right to expect more than David Cameron’s shambolic, incompetent government gave them last week. All of us have the right to expect a more coherent and principled foreign policy than the one on show: trying to pretend a trade mission for defence manufacturers and other businesses is a “democracy tour” really doesn’t cut it. But the wider truth is that all western governments are profoundly challenged by the chain of events that began, 10 weeks ago, with a young Tunisian man setting himself on fire in anger and desperation. The central assumption of the durability of long-standing and unpleasant regimes has been swept away. This change in circumstance has left many of the old orthodoxies seeming out of date and on the wrong side of history. – Ed Miliband, The Guardian Read the rest of this entry »