Kevin Meagher « Labour Uncut

Posts Tagged ‘Kevin Meagher’

The Olympics: ten times the disaster of the Dome

20/12/2011, 11:38:23 AM

by Kevin Meagher

I don’t often find myself in agreement with Diane Abbott, but I have cut out her piece from the Independent about the olympic games and pinned it above my desk, so I can read it over and over again while weeping tears of joy.

God bless the woman. She hit the nail on the head, articulating what I have been murmuring to myself for the past couple of years: the 2012 Olympic Games is a dreadful, expensive pile of tosh. Diane didn’t quite put it like that; she is a London MP after all and it takes more bravery for her to diss the games than it does for a chippy northerner like me; but it was a good effort on her part – worthy of a podium spot.

Diane rightly bemoans the “missed opportunity” of not employing more local people in building the games’ infrastructure, saying the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) was “never serious” about giving opportunities to local people, which may indeed have been a smart move to help avert this summer’s London riots.

Instead the jobs created by the ODA have gone mainly to outsiders, with workers being bussed-in from all across Europe. (more…)

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When does a social democratic party stop being social democratic?

06/12/2011, 08:22:55 AM

by Kevin Meagher

“There is nothing right-wing about fiscal conservatism”, begins “In the black Labour: why fiscal conservatism and social justice go hand-in-hand“. The policy network’s much talked about pamphlet argues that to rebuild its reputation for economic competence, Labour has to learn to love big brother in the shape of embracing fiscal rectitude.

It is a hard-headed but reductive prognosis for a centre-left party. It seems a bit like having a car without any petrol. You can point it in the direction you want to travel in, but you have no means of ever getting there. So what, ultimately, is the point of the car?

That is, in essence, the dilemma this argument, elegantly and persuasively made by the authors (including our own Anthony Painter), presents Labour with. When does a party – a democratic socialist one (in the words of “new” clause four) – stop being the very thing it professes to be? How elastic are our principles, our thinking, and, most importantly, the trust of the people who vote for us if we embark on a self-denying ordinance on public spending? (more…)

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The dalits of poor Britain hate immigration, not immigrants. When will we get that?

28/11/2011, 09:08:01 AM

by Kevin Meagher

Teachers at my school used to try and gee-up indolent pupils by telling them they would end up picking-out burnt cornflakes on the Kellogg’s production line if they didn’t get their acts together.

This warning often fell on deaf ears, and a strong back or willingness to work unsocial hours still pretty much guaranteed you a job anyway. Okay, not a great job, but you could stand there all day, bent over a factory conveyor-belt scouring for errant pieces of breakfast cereal, or lump heavy goods around a dockside or building site. Or perhaps join-up and see the world. You could, in short, earn a living, with or without qualifications.

There was a level of total educational failure we could tolerate as a country and still mop-up the consequences in the foothills of the labour market afterwards. And for those fulfilling these unfulfilling roles, the reward of hard, grinding work was the promise of a job that at least allowed you to secure basic frugal comforts.

The world looks a lot bleaker from those same foothills today. This month’s unemployment figures were especially wintry, indicating, as they do, that at least a million young would-be workers are left without the prospect of any kind of job whatsoever. Not even low-status conflake-picking roles. They simply don’t exist any longer, certainly not on the scale that will soak up the current need. Back in 2006, Lord Sandy Leitch’s landmark report into skills policy warned that by 2020 there will only be 600,000 jobs in our economy requiring no formal skills, down from around 3.5 million today. Some dispute that the numbers are quite that pessimistic, but the broad trend remains correct.

(more…)

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Workforce reform will support not attack our public services

28/10/2011, 07:46:15 AM

by Kevin Meagher

The answer, we believed at first, was more spending. Our dilapidated public services had become so because the Tories had run them down during the 80s and 90s. Catch-up investment was necessary. And Labour delivered it with gusto: doubling the amounts spent on education and trebling the NHS budget.

Then we realised that investment was not enough; there was a need for reform of our public services too. So we introduced performance management and targets. Resented by some public sector professionals, they were at least an attempt to iron out the differences in the quality of service provision across the country.

But we never quite got round to the last part of the puzzle in improving public services: workforce reform. This was always a no-go area for Labour ministers, even for the most swivel-eyed Blairites. Where, broadly, Brownites emphasised resources and Blairites structural reform, no-one wanted to be seen to imply that our teachers, nurses and police officers were not doing a good job.

But the evidence shows that too many of them simply are not. (more…)

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Like a big lunch: the leader’s speech is too much to digest

12/10/2011, 01:44:21 PM

by Kevin Meagher

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to hear Ed Miliband make a speech like that ever again. Not a criticism of the contents of his recent conference address in Liverpool – perish the thought – rather a call to scrap the whole palaver of the annual leader’s speech.

Well not really scrap, more a “refounding” of the whole idea. The current model has had its day. The annual hour-and-a-bit long, Tuesday afternoon speech has become stale and predictable. Not so much a shop window for Labour but a stock check. Visionary bit? Check. Thank-yous to unsung party heroes? Check. Anecdote about meeting a real person? Check. Emotional bit about own life? Check. Attack stuff? Check. Serious and inspirational bit? Check. Clap lines? Check. Gags? Check.

The overall effect is stodgy and lumpy. Like eating a big lunch, it becomes rather hard to digest and does little for your productivity for the rest of the day.

For next year, Ed should try something different. Some iconoclasts around him were said to have been arguing to do away with the annual ritual altogether, making a series of speeches around the country instead. Others say that we should follow the Tories and Lib Dems and store up the leader’s speech until the end of the week. (more…)

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Cook and Prezza can teach the shadow cabinet how to do opposition

28/09/2011, 01:15:51 PM

by Kevin Meagher

“My top demand of my shadow cabinet, my party, my team, is this: ambition”.

So said Ed yesterday. But not all agree that message has been getting through.

“This is a Tory government that’s doing some outrageous things and we haven’t had many words of protest”, says a less than impressed John Prescott. “Ed, you’re the leader, get a shadow cabinet who’ll do that”.

Fortuitously, the rule change passed earlier this week now allows a Labour leader to dispense with the ritual shadow cabinet elections, thus presenting Ed with a tempting new freedom. But rather than release his inner Alan Sugar, he should withhold firing any of his coasting colleagues. For now.

Like any responsible manager, Ed should look to see how he can develop his team rather than hand them their marching orders. After all, that is what “good” business people do.

Anyway, a reshuffle at this stage looks like a panic measure, an implicit acceptance that this first year has not yielded all that it might have against the backdrop of the government’s swingeing cuts and inept economic management.

(more…)

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They may be an idiotic rabble: but they’re still family – sort of

24/09/2011, 09:00:26 AM

by Kevin Meagher

THE late Roy Jenkins, grand-daddy of “the radical centre” must be turning in his grave. That’s assuming, of course, that the late and never knowingly under-lunched apostle of Lib-Labbery has room to manoeuvre.

His abiding belief was that the schism between socialists and liberals at the start of the twentieth century needlessly gifted decades of political hegemony to the Conservatives. As a former chancellor, his maths were spot-on. The Tories governed for seven decades out of ten. The forces of the centre-left were divided and impotent for two-thirds of the last century.

There are grand theories about why this happened. But here is an altogether simpler explanation. If you turned on your television this week you would have seen them in all their glory. The loons, crackpots and pedants of the Liberal Democrat party. How on earth could we ever work with these people? (more…)

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The 1980s comparisons are easy to make, but wrong

21/09/2011, 10:07:39 AM

by Kevin Meagher

Spending cuts. Unemployment. Economic experimentation.

Royal weddings. Bombing Colonel Gaddafi. Kenny Dalglish and Alex Ferguson.

Tottenham riots. Strikes and marches. Labour stuck in opposition.

Another series of Ashes to Ashes? More like a tour d’horizon of our so-called new politics.

Welcome back to the 1980s – with parallels as brash and ungainly as a first generation mobile phone.

Overseas, an army labours in the rugged Afghan terrain. In the 80s, the Red Army faced the Mujahideen. Their rebranded successors, the Taleban, now take on the Brits and the Yanks.

At home, a million young people languish, outside the reach of schooling, jobs or training. In the 80s this malaise was simply called “youth unemployment”. Now we call them “NEETs”. They remain poor and hopeless either way.

Many are taking to the streets in civil disobedience. Not miners this time, but minors, with young people and even schoolchildren radicalised.

The first group are idealists, blanching at the crippling cost of studying for a degree. The second group are nihilists, making off with hundred quid trainers and a flat-screen telly, an off-key coda to 80s Thatcherite consumerism.

(more…)

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Why our politicians’ cracks need careful probing

14/09/2011, 09:19:54 AM

by Kevin Meagher

THERE is no roadmap. No right and wrong about how “down with the kids” our politicians are allowed to be. No clear indications about where the “line” is that they should not cross when it comes to humour.

Wit is allowed, that much is clear. Disraeli, Churchill, even Wilson were exponents. Sarcasm too; but after that it go all blurry.

Last week both the prime minister and chancellor found themselves in trouble after foraying across these invisible demarcations with faltering attempts at mirth. David Cameron’s description of Nadine Dorries as “frustrated” during a reply to her at prime minister’s questions drew hearty guffaws at her expense. “Frustrated. Ha! He means she hates the coalition – but he also means she isn’t getting any! Hilarious”.

His pregnant pause gave lie to his subsequent protestations that it was merely a slip of the tongue, so to speak. It seemed deliberate. All he had to do was tee-up the gag and let the dirty minds of our Parliamentarians finish it off. They ignobly obliged.

He is said to have form. Cameron has what earlier generations would have called a “blue” sense of humour. Not a denotation of political allegiance on this occasion, but a predilection for making nob and fart gags.

(more…)

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Remind me why we hate elected police commissioners

08/09/2011, 02:00:59 PM

by Kevin Meagher

Ed Miliband was right in the Commons yesterday: spending £25 million postponing elections for the 41 proposed police and crime commissioners is a waste of money that could instead pay the wage bill (presumably before overtime) of 2000 coppers.

Cameron should be ashamed of himself. And he was doing so well: police commissioners are one of the few things he has got right. He should have stuck to his guns and held the elections next May, as planned. Unfortunately he has caved-in to Lib Dem backwoodsmen in the Lords who have pushed for the polling day to be postponed back to November 2012 to “depoliticise” the issue.

Whenever police commissioners arrive, the resource-intensive, low performance culture of British policing will at long last get a democratic makeover. They will be a shot in the arm for accountability in a key frontline public service and a finger in the eye for complacent chief constables. The public’s priorities might, for once, get a look in.

The only snag is that Labour opposes elected police commissioners. Why? Nobody knows why. But oppose them we do. On grounds, it seems, of cost and because they will politicise policing (whatever that is supposed to mean). (more…)

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