Posts Tagged ‘Ed Miliband’

Starmer’s Labour offers genuine hope of restoring Britain’s credibility in the world

24/06/2024, 11:30:58 PM

by Rob Marchant

General elections tend to focus on bread-and-butter domestic issues that affect voters directly. But what would a Labour government look like in terms of its relations with the rest of the world?

Britain’s reputation in the world is surely poorer than it has been for decades – not because it is seen as bad by its neighbours and allies, but because it is looked at with a kind of sad sympathy, as you would a friend who had recently committed an act of self-harm and had not yet turned the corner into recovery. The UK is fundamentally liked and admired abroad more than some cynics might think, but these days it is rather in spite of the Tories than because of them. In particular, the premierships of Johnson and Truss have hardly worked wonders for the credibility of British governments abroad.

At such a time, Labour has a huge advantage, as in some other policy areas, of being able to make major, positive changes, by dint of simply not being the Tories, and therefore not hidebound by Tory obsessions, such as being triggered by any mention of, well, that great continent of which Britain’s landmass forms a part.

Whether or not you agreed with Britain leaving the EU – and most of the country, for better or worse, no longer thinks it was a good idea – in 2024, the country is clearly not ready to rejoin and neither is the party – wisely – positing this as something they will look to deliver. After all, they are not even elected yet, and self-evidently need not to scare the horses and put at that risk. But we are looking to file off some of Brexit’s sharp corners with some simple and specific pledges.

Where the manifesto says “new trade agreements”, it seems to be talking about sensible, focused measures with existing partners, rather than of the Tory-style, “the government announces a terrific new trade deal with Lichtenstein” variety.

For example, exporters of many kinds of perishable goods have been for the last two-and-a-half years been subject to pointless veterinary checks on every load, causing delays and increased costs which have harmed their business; checks which Labour will seek to remove. Neither will they have Britain commit reputational hara-kiri by putting it outside the European Convention on Human Rights, something that only the despotic regimes of Russia and Belarus have managed since its inception.

A major area which requires a high level of international coordination is Miliband’s familiar hobby-horse of the environment and clean energy; while one might speculate on the practicality of his grand schemes, at least Labour will not be beholden to the cranky climate-change deniers of the Tory right.

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The poisonous McCluskey era thankfully draws to a close

16/05/2021, 09:33:31 PM

by Rob Marchant

It’s not really been a good week for Len McCluskey, has it? A mere three months away from stepping down, it does seem the once-irresistible grip of him and his Unite faction on the Labour Party is fading fast.

First there was the Anna Turley libel case, whereby the union is now forced to pay its portion of an astonishing £1.3m to the former Redcar MP, for an article published on the Unite-backed Squawkbox blog (and one imagines that the piece’s writer, Steve Walker, will not be able to contribute very much to the sum, if anything).

And who should be in charge of legal affairs at Unite, responsible for keeping it out of such legal trouble?

Why, the person who looks like McCluskey’s clear preference to succeed him as General Secretary, Howard Beckett, of course.

Yes, that Howard Beckett, demonstrably the most militant of the candidates, who has just been suspended from the Labour Party for a deeply unpleasant tweet about Home Secretary Priti Patel.

Good. Neither should we shed any tears for Beckett – and for clear reasons of decency, rather than because we dislike the political views he is perfectly entitled to hold. Beckett was – not unlike his parliamentary counterpart, former Party Chair Ian Lavery – embroiled in a scandal over the misuse of compensation payments to sick miners.

For that reason alone, frankly, neither man should ever have been allowed to rise in the ranks of the labour movement. But, in the strange and twisted world that was 2010s Labour politics, they were.

And last but emphatically not least on the list of McCluskey’s woes is the ongoing political meltdown in Liverpool, slowly dragging McCluskey’s name further and further into the mire.

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The latest government NHS reorganisation is an unprecedented admission of the failure of the Lansley reforms. Labour needs to be careful in its response

10/02/2021, 08:45:46 AM

by David Talbot

In a grey side-room at the Royal College of Nursing conference in early 2011, a grey-looking Andrew Lansley attempted to defend his controversial reforms of the NHS. In what was surely an unintended ‘Nicola Murray moment’, the then Health Secretary, in the moments after the Congress had unanimously passed a vote of no confidence in him, uttered: “I am sorry if what it is I am setting out to do has not communicated itself”.

It was a gift to Ed Miliband’s Labour Party. It repeatedly called on the reforms to be scrapped, with the now King of the North, Andy Burnham, burnishing his credentials as Labour’s saviour of the NHS. It wasn’t just politicking, though, with healthcare professionals labelling it as “the wrong reform, not just now but at any time in the future”. The bill’s passage didn’t get a smoother time in Parliament either. The House of Lords alone tabled 374 amendments and it was debated for over 14 months with with 50 days of parliamentary debate, in what was – and still is – the most scrutiny that any bill has had in the history of Parliament.

Lansley was sacked less than a year and a half after his nuanced apology in Liverpool. His ambition to reconfigure the NHS, nine years in the making, had derailed the coalition, stultified and appalled vast swathes of the NHS and, ultimately, cost him his job. He left a toxic legacy within the NHS profession towards the Conservative-led coalition, with the more affable Jeremy Hunt moved into place with the (sole) brief to dampen the NHS as an election issue.

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Labour must beware the Tories’ ‘Miliband minority’ attack line – it worked before, it could work again

30/09/2020, 10:53:48 PM

By David Talbot

The country has become rather used to going to the polls. Three times in four years, no less. The hattrick of recent elections ushered in a Conservative majority for the first time in 23 years. The Conservatives were successful in turning the 2015 election into a de facto referendum on a minority Labour government. The attacks on Labour’s supposed dependence on the SNP gained wider resonance because of voters’ deeper suspicion of its leader and the party he led, but the Conservatives’ campaign created a palpable fear of a minority Miliband.

Fast forward two elections and Brexit has created a remarkable Conservative alliance. By making people’s identity, and the values they hold, the central tenet of the past four years of British politics, the Conservative party has fundamentally reinvented itself from Cameron’s modish liberalism.

From its traditional affluent, Shire-dwelling support to ripping through the Red Wall, it has taken the party to the highwater mark of British politics: 14 million votes. This is in and around the number of votes the Labour Party must achieve if it is to win the 2024 election.

The government’s electoral coalition, although mighty, is unstable. That is why it will continue to focus on socially conservative signalling and policies on law and order, national security and cack-handed attempts to reheat Brexit’s culture wars.

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Labour’s congenital fatalism means it’s in danger of learning the wrong lessons from 2019

20/06/2020, 10:57:30 PM

by Atul Hatwal

There’s much that’s salient in the Labour Together report. The problems of Jeremy Corbyn on the doorstep, an economic prospectus that few believed, a chaotic campaign and, of course, Brexit. This is hardly breaking news, but credit is due for calling this out.

But then there’s also a recurrence of a peculiarly Labour fatalism.

The report states “The roots of our 2019 loss stretch back over the last two decades.” It cites a panoply of long term trends including deindustrialisation, demographic change and declining trade union membership, to explain the steady rise in the Conservative vote in Labour seats, since 2001.

The framing in the report paints a picture of an ineluctable growth of Tory support in Labour strongholds as a function of these deep-seated changes.

To anyone who remembers the late 1980s and early 1990s, this is pretty familiar stuff.

Much the same was written then. Structural factors. Population movement. Shifting values. All were used to explain a decade on decade decline in Labour support, a downward slope starting in 1945 that pointed to final obsolescence sometime in the early 2000s.

Labour Together’s report has a particularly striking line that epitomises the pessimism inherent in this ‘historical forces’ type of explanation.

“Many of these trends are global and have had similar and negative impacts on social democratic and centre-left parties around the world”

Unsurprisingly, Corbynites such as Jon Trickett and Ian Lavery have chimed in with support for this perspective. It’s a crime without a culprit – the politicians in charge are at the mercy of larger forces. It was the system, events dear boy, events, not individual leaders like Jeremy Corbyn or, Ed Miliband (coincidentally a commissioner of the Labour Together report).

In the early 1990s it was Labour’s challenges in the South that were insurmountable. Today, it’s the North and Midlands, exemplified in the notion of the recently crumbled Red Wall.

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Has Ed Miliband’s moment arrived?

01/06/2020, 08:05:47 AM

by Jonathan Todd

“In 2008-09,” Gordon Brown recently told New Statesman, “we tried to persuade people that it made sense to run a deficit and it was not a problem in the long term if debt rose in the short term. We failed to persuade people. If anything contributed to the return of the Conservatives to power, it was their ability to scare people about the deficit and debt.”

After succeeding Brown as Labour leader, Ed Miliband attempted to become prime minister by positioning Labour to the left of New Labour. This strategy was thought to be justified as the financial crisis of 2008-09 had enlarged public appetite for stronger regulation and an expanded economic role for the state.

In 2015, Labour and the rest of the country moved in opposite directions. Labour’s general election defeat brought into doubt the extent of the appeal of Miliband’s more muscular state. Jeremy Corbyn’s ascent indicated that Labour considered Miliband’s offer too tepid.

“Now,” Brown continued in his New Statesman interview, “the fiscal orthodoxy has changed. What we were criticised for in 2009-10 is understood to be the best way of dealing with a crisis. We’ve got to understand that the only way that you can replace spending power and economic activity when the private sector fails to be able to invest, and consumers are not spending and people are not able to work, is that the government steps in.”

It must be hoped that Brown is right about the fiscal orthodoxy. Yet Jo Harding reminded Uncut, “local authorities are facing a £10 billion black hole due to coronavirus.”

This is despite Local Government Secretary Robert Jenrick telling 300 English council leaders and sector bodies in a conference call on 16 March that the government would do “whatever is necessary” to help them tackle coronavirus.

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Starmer seeks to cheer miserabilist Labour

14/05/2020, 10:26:53 PM

by David Talbot

One of the many dangers for Labour following its devastating 2019 general election defeat was that, if the pattern from the previous three election defeats were a guide, rather than learning the wrong lessons, it would learn no lessons at all.

The seemingly one constant for the Labour Party since 2010, though, has been its unerring miserabilism. It has relentlessly lectured the country that its future is bleak, its prospects poor and its decision to return four Conservative-led governments wretched.

“The trouble with Ed [Miliband] is that he is just too miserable” so uttered a Shadow Cabinet member in 2015, shortly before the party went down to a second resounding defeat. Miliband had much to say about the travails of the previous five years, attacking austerity, most notably, but his introspection, subdued and ultimately quite gloomy outlook was bettered by Cameron’s innate optimism.

Jeremy Corbyn’s torrent of miserabilism sums up the party’s recent woes. Labour has won, all too rarely in its history, when it has been optimistic about the country it seeks to govern, when it inspires people, understands and enables their aspiration, and when it projects confidence both for now and the future.

The hectoring over austerity, the sheer angst and self-pitying on Brexit, this miserabilist tendency that exudes from the party’s rhetoric, tone and policies has whittled it down to its core. If now is not the time to ask whether this doom-laden strategy has been effective or not, then surely when is?

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We have wasted a decade. We cannot afford to waste another

20/04/2020, 10:30:57 PM

by Jonathan Todd

We have wasted a decade.

All my son’s life, twice my daughter’s life, a quarter of my life. Lived since the last Labour prime minister – as David Talbot has recalled for Uncut – launched a general election campaign in a Labour seat in the home counties, which now has a 17,000 Tory majority.

Wasted by Labour, the UK, the world.

We are all in this together. I want to believe it now when I see it on the t-shirts of Tesco workers. I never did from David Cameron.

Fixing the roof when the sun is shining. That is what the Conservatives said Labour did not do.

The Sunday Times casts severe doubt on the extent to which Boris Johnson was on top of NHS capacity and pandemic preparedness. Sadly, this is not the only roof unfixed in our decade of austerity.

“The world is on fire, from the Amazon to California, from Australia to the Siberian Artic,” begin Christina Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac in their book on our climate crisis, as its impacts begin to ominously manifest. “The red wall” submerges under Tory MPs and flood waters.

As Prospect illustrate, child poverty in the UK, after falling under the last Labour government, has returned to a similar level to what it was two decades ago, when Tony Blair said it would be eliminated in 20 years.

Austerity, we were told, was the price to be paid to ease the burden on future generations. Trapped in poverty and destined to confront catastrophic climate change do not expect gratitude.

There are footballers whose transfer value rises when they are injured. What they bring to their teams becomes more apparent in their absence. Gordon Brown is that footballer in the politics of the last decade.

Brown’s defiant listing of Labour achievements at conference 2009 is now proudly replayed. It can be forgotten that the prime minister went into that conference under threat of potential challenge from David Miliband. To whom the camera cuts half-way through Brown’s listing, as if to say, who are you trying to kid?

As today’s world leaders fall short of the coordination that Brown helped to bring about in the 2008/9 financial crisis, we ask the same of them.

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Labour’s problems are not all down to Corbyn

04/04/2020, 10:34:11 PM

by Kevin Meagher

Of course, the temptation is to grind Corbynista faces into the dirt.

After all, aren’t they responsible for the party’s drubbing in December, the worst performance in a general election since 1935?

Yes, but only to a point. Culpability for the state Labour finds itself in should be shared more widely.

The party has been in decline for at least the past 15 years and there has never been an inquest into why the Corbyn insurgency ignited in the first place.

Plainly, Jeremy Corbyn should never have been leader.

He was a classic campaigning backbencher, pulled out of position and kept in the leadership because the parliamentary party would never have nominated a replacement candidate from the left in any subsequent leadership contest.

So, there he stayed.

To his credit, he never even wanted the role, merely standing in 2015 as the left’s candidate on the cab-rank principle that it was his turn to fly the flag in a leadership contest and lose heavily, as McDonnell did in 2007 and Abbott in 2010.

Yet, as we know, Ed Miliband’s disastrous party reforms opened the door for the ‘three quid trots’ to sweep into the party and turbo-charge Corbyn’s vote. The rest is history.

Labour MPs are to blame, too, for making a bad situation worse. Their precipitous leadership challenge in 2016 played straight into the hands of left-wing activists who yelled ‘betrayal,’ galvanising them into returning Corbyn in even greater numbers.

From that point, he was unmovable.

The trade unions – representing only a sliver of the modern workforce – are to blame for indulging their fantasy politics.

The fact the main three affiliates: Unite, Unison and the GMB broke three ways for, respectively, Long-Bailey, Starmer and Nandy, is proof they are slowly coming back to the centre, but they bear responsibility for dragging the party into shallow water in the first place.

(Indeed, the hidden story in this election is just how quiet Unite and Len McCloskey have been, leaving the hapless Rebecca Long-Bailey to her own devices to run one of the poorest campaigns I can remember).

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The Labour Together election review showcases everything that’s wrong with the Milibandite approach to politics

27/12/2019, 05:20:32 PM

by Atul Hatwal

Since it was announced, the Labour Together review has had a strangely unifying impact on the party: voices from across the ideological spectrum, hard left through to the old right, have panned it. Earlier this week on Tuesday, Lisa Nandy, one of the people leading the review, was on the Today programme, giving the opposite of a ringing endorsement,

“I have to be honest though, I didn’t know anything about this review until two days ago.

And if the lesson is drawn from this election is, a review can be drawn up in a meeting room in Westminster without any reference to the two parts of the Labour movement – our councillor base and trade union base, that were probably the reason we didn’t have a worse result, I just don’t think that people are drawing the right lessons at all.

We need to be out in places like Ashfield, listening to people like the ex-miner I met yesterday, not sitting in meeting rooms in Westminster trying to debate this out amongst ourselves with the help of a few think-tanks.

I just think the approach is wrong.”

The reason the review has brought together so many disparate strands of the Labour movement in eye-rolling frustration is twofold.

Problem number one: The review dodges the tough questions.

To inform the review’s analysis is a survey. An OK idea. Less OK is the manner in which it completely ignores the obvious. Options for Labour’s terrible showing are offered but these focus on campaign organisation and individual policies. In all of the possible reasons that Labour did badly, nowhere is any mention of the leader and his vote-repelling impact on the doorstep. Nor is there any acknowledgement of the public’s incredulity at the wish-list manifesto and its role in dissuading the the electorate that Labour was a serious choice for government.

Needless to say, the term “anti-Semitism” does not appear anywhere in the survey.

As with all these types of party commissions, there’s an onus on doing some original research. Hence the survey and interviews with defeated candidates. But in the terms of reference, there seems to be no acknowledgement of the vaults of existing quantitative and qualitative analysis. There’s so much that it is near pointless doing the sort of partial effort proposed by Labour Together.

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