Labour Uncut

UNBOUND: Friday News Review

06/08/2010, 07:32:30 AM

Ed: Narnian resident

Co-op support

The Co-operative Party has reported a record increase in new members following Labour’s general election defeat in May. A Party spokesman told the News that almost 500 new members had signed up in the three months since then — mainly online — and that the figure included a substantial number of returning members. – Co-op News.

It’s grim up north London

The workers’ party has its own aristocracy, and it lives in London’s northern hills. Not far from Hugh Gaitskell’s grave in Hampstead, a Narnian village that in every sense looks down on the capital, other Labour leaders have made their homes. Across the Heath—where one of them, Michael Foot, walked his dog—Karl Marx is buried in Highgate cemetery. Bankers and Arsenal footballers may have infiltrated, but this is still a land of liberal writers, celebrities and assorted cognoscenti. During the general election, houses worth millions of pounds had Labour posters in their windows. – The Economist.

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UNCUT: The American way? No We Can’t, says Dan Hodges

05/08/2010, 01:30:25 PM

Last week I bumped into an old comrade from the Greater Manchester congestion charge campaign. Like Vietnam veterans we speak sparingly of those days, pausing but rarely to wrestle our demons and remember the fallen.

Asked what he was up to now that he was back on civvy street, he replied that he was working as “deputy field manager” for one of the leadership teams.

“What the hell’s a field manager”, I asked?

“Well it’s like an organiser”.

“So why isn’t it called an organiser”?

“Well, it’s what the Americans call an organiser”.

“Have we got loads of Americans over here stitching up the electoral college, then”?

“No. It’s what Obama used”.

Ah. “What Obama used”. The political equivalent of ‘It’s What Diana Would Have Wanted’.

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HOME: Ed Miliband clears up confusion over tax credits

05/08/2010, 12:08:56 PM

On Tuesday we reported on the fallout coming from an Ed Miliband interview with the Northern Echo that took place last week. The article stated that:

During the interview, Mr Miliband controversially suggested that people in the South should receive higher tax credits than people in the North, to reflect the higher cost of living.

It also quoted Miliband as saying:

We can look at the level of tax credits, so they benefit people in the South who haven’t benefited from the minimum wage.

However Ed’s campaign has been quick to refute this. A campaign spokesman for Miliband Jnr told Uncut that:

This [story] is based on a misunderstanding by the Northern Echo. He did not say he was in favour of regional rates and indeed he isn’t.

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GRASSROOTS: It’s time to wake up and smell the coffee, argues Richard Darlington

05/08/2010, 11:13:37 AM

After the Tory defeat in the 2005 general election, Michael Ashcroft published an analysis called ‘Smell the coffee: a wake up call for the Conservative party’. In the introduction he argued that “the Conservative party’s problem is its brand…the brand problem means that the most robust, coherent, principled and attractive Conservative policies will have no impact on the voters”.

Labour needs to ‘smell the coffee’ now and not wait for three election defeats. New polling shows the Labour party’s brand is in toxic territory. Ashcroft realised that policy is nothing without presentation and presentation is nothing without policy. Labour now has a problem with both.

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UNBOUND: Thursday News Review

05/08/2010, 07:52:55 AM

Weak, divided and old fashioned

The challenge facing Labour’s next leader is laid bare in a poll published today, showing that disillusioned former voters view the party as weak, divided, out-of-touch and old-fashioned. Demos, the left-of-centre think tank, said its findings demonstrated that the Labour brand had become “toxic” among previous supporters. It warned that it would take more than just a change of leader to tackle the party’s severe image problem. The survey, conducted by YouGov, found that 73 per cent of people who voted for Labour in the 2005 election but not this year thought the party was “weak”, with 72 per cent believing it was “divided”. – The Independent

Shadow Cabinet

The new shadow cabinet will not start to be elected until the week of the Conservative conference, starting on 4 October, with the results announced on the evening of 7 October. The new Labour leader will then have to distribute portfolios including the vital role of shadow chancellor before the spending review. Ed Balls and to a lesser extent Ed Miliband have suggested that the deficit programme proposed by Labour at the time of the election should be revisited since it proposed too rapid a deficit reduction, and too harsh public spending cuts. David Miliband has been less specific, and has focused on how Tory plans require £30bn more cuts than Labour had proposed. – The Guardian

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HOME: Why Cameron knows nothing and cares less about council house tenants

04/08/2010, 06:50:35 PM

Never has David Cameron displayed his lack of understanding of council and social housing tenants more than in the appalling idea of time-limiting social housing tenancies. My parents moved into a new council house in 1965 and I was brought up there. It was our home. Our family wanted a secure place from which to plan our future. That is not unusual for anyone – whether they live in rented or bought accommodation.

If my parents had been told they could be evicted after five years of the tenancy, it would have immediately cast a shadow on the family’s security. No longer would they have been able to plan work and education for their children. Their focus would have been: “where will we be living next?”

Would David Cameron countenance this arrangement for his own family?

It tells us a great deal that the prime minister’s response to shortage of social housing is to limit the rights of those in occupation of social housing. A more explicable option would be to stop the sale of council housing. This directly removes homes from public sector stock and makes fewer homes available for those in need. But I suspect that this would not be acceptable to David Cameron’s political antennae – alienating his restless back-benchers.

Instead, our prime minister chooses an easier target: those in desperate need of homes who will accept a roof over their heads at any cost. Time-limited tenancies will create uncertainty and store up problems for families in years ahead. It tells us much about the political instincts of this Tory/Lib-Dem government.

Ian Lucas is the MP for Wrexham

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GRASSROOTS: Joe Cox presents the Compass campaign to end legal loan sharking

04/08/2010, 03:30:05 PM

The world of high finance can often seem a remote place. A friend once told me that after the financial crash and subsequent fall out that they were frustrated that they couldn’t link the behaviour of capital to the lives of ordinary people. The reason why citizens groups and citizens organising is all the rage at the moment is because it does this very thing – it links the intangible and the remote to the immediate.

After the financial crisis Citizens UK began to hear stories about the increase in interest rates on money loans. More and more stories also emerged about doorstep and other high cost lending. High cost lenders were targeting housing estates with offers of immediate credit at very high prices. Once people took out these high cost loans their problems often become worse and they had to borrow more. Read the rest of this entry »

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GRASSROOTS: The Andy Burnham interview

04/08/2010, 12:00:07 PM

Burnham: Everton, FA Cup final

When Andy Burnham is asked a question, he gives it some thought. And then he gives you an actual answer. Sitting in his Parliamentary office in Norman Shaw South, Burnham tells it how it is, no matter how deliberate the grimaces from his team. The result is a genuine response from a man who’s answering on normal terms. He’s got time for everyone; chatting to researchers in the corridor when we arrive, and he’s got plenty to say about the campaign. But even now he’s aware that playing nice is often read as lacking strength. He talks to Labour Uncut about career politics, Christianity, Everton and his eyelashes.

Q. (from Luke Charters-Reid): What would you do to revitalise the party for young people, to attract young members who are essentially the Labour cabinet in 40 years time.

A. Well, we’ve got to make Labour the natural home for all young people who want to change the world. As I did, and as I still do. When I was fifteen, I wanted to change the world. That’s why I joined Labour. But we lost a sense of it when we were in government. So, what would I do? I had a meeting on Saturday with Manchester young Labour and the young Fabians and we had a really good discussion about this.

I think you’ve got to rethink through what is a young person’s introduction to Labour when they join. And I don’t think we should immediately assign them to a branch or a ward and then a constituency. I think the first contact they should have is from a young labour group in their locality. Because I think too many might fall at the first hurdle. They get the first contact and go to a meeting that they basically don’t relate to and we’ve got to rethink our introductory approach to people joining the Labour party. They’re joining it to change the world and to change policy. And we’ve got to make sure that their first experience of labour is inspiring, why they think they’ve joined. And we also have to think about how we can connect them immediately to the policy discussion and how to change the world. Sadly, the party’s not done what it says on the tin. That’s what they thought they were getting when they joined and they often turn up at meetings finding they’re talking about the minutes of the last meeting or the yellow lines by the chippy or something like that. That for me…we’ve got to rethink what is their introduction to Labour.

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UNCUT: Equal-sizing constituencies is gerrymandering through ignorance, as well as cynicism, says Kevin Meagher

04/08/2010, 09:10:50 AM

In last week’s Guardian, Martin Kettle, accused Labour of ‘playing fast and loose on AV reform’ following the Shadow Cabinet’s decision to oppose the bill paving the way for next year’s referendum on electoral reform. It got me shouting at the cat.

Of course the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill also has bolted on to it measures to reduce the number of MPs and comprehensively redraw parliamentary constituencies, hence Labour’s objection.

But in a passage that sent dear old Puss heading for the cat-flap, Kettle cited the Chartists’ call for equal-sized parliamentary constituencies and asked whether Labour ‘is any longer a party of reform at all’ given that it is ‘no longer willing to go into the Parliamentary lobbies in September to advance the equality of representation for which the Chartists campaigned.’ Read the rest of this entry »

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UNBOUND: Wednesday News Review

04/08/2010, 07:38:14 AM

Bounce for Balls?

Ed Balls has won praise for his opposition to Tory plans

Coverage of him in the media has been too dismissive. Recently, when he failed to secure the endorsement of the massive Unite trade union (which he had long been cultivating), there was talk of his “humiliation”, and his impending withdrawal from the race. Some in the press make him out to be a figure of fun (an honourable exception was this Spectator editorial). In fact, many within Labour think Mr Balls has had his reputation more enhanced by the contest than either David or Ed Miliband, one of whom will nevertheless win the election in September. He has landed blows on Michael Gove, the Tory education secretary. His resilience in the face of difficult odds has impressed many. He now has a good chance of being appointed shadow chancellor by whichever Miliband wins the leadership. That was not so certain when the race began in May. – The Economist

Yet if you look at what the five have said and done in the past month or so then a different picture emerges – for the one who is demonstrating again and again that he’s the best equipped politician is the same Mr Balls. Just read his thinking and analysis of Labour’s challenge in his recent interview with the Times and you see observations and insights that are not coming from the other four. Take his assertion that Labour has allowed itself to be distracted by the Lib Dems when the main target for the party’s fire-power should be the Tories. Take also his observation that Labour did not lose the election because of its lack of appeal to middle income groups – rather it was the failure of the party to engage traditional supporters at the bottom end where they lost out. – Political Betting

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