Labour has this week launched a bid to protect local neighbourhoods from planning changes that will allow bad landlords to takeover residential communities and fill them with temporary bedsits.
I have signed two motions in the House of Commons today calling on Housing Minister Grant Shapps not to repeal changes to the planning legislation requiring all Houses in Multiple Occupation to have planning permission. The changes, which would otherwise have passed unopposed, will now be debated.
Under changes to the law brought in by the Labour Government in January, local authorities were given new powers to make private landlords converting family homes into shared houses apply for planning permission. The new Housing Minister last week laid down new regulations, which if they remain unchallenged, will mean the repeal of this legislation.
Two Early Day Motions laid down by Harriet Harman MP, Leader of the Opposition, and Shadow Housing Minister John Healey call on the Government to annul the new regulations.
The Government’s plans will tie the hands of councils preventing them from controlling the spread of bedsit barons.
In Derby there are serious consequences to the unregulated proliferation of HMOs. Not only do these large shared houses pose major problems for residents in terms of noise, parking and rubbish collection, but unsuitable conversions also mean that many students and low-paid workers have to live in cramped, poorly maintained and often unhealthy or even dangerous homes.
Dr Richard Tyler, Coordinator of the National HMO Lobby, which represents Residents’ Associations across the UK welcomed the EDM, saying: “The National HMO Lobby received assurances from the Government prior to the election that the legislation would remain intact, and we are deeply concerned at the effect new proposals will have on communities.
“Un-managed concentrations of HMOs de-stabilise local communities, and make it even harder to address the problems they cause for residents and tenants alike.”
The Government’s attempt to repeal new planning legislation follows hard on the heels of their decision in June to scrap the National Register of Landlords, which allowed tenants to make basic checks on prospective landlords and local authorities to better enforce lettings rules, the legal requirement for a written tenancy agreement, and the regulation of letting and management agents. All of these pieces of legislation were brought in earlier this year by the Labour Government to protect tenants and communities from rogue landlords.
This is yet another example of the disastrous legislative programme being pursued by the ConDem coalition and demonstrates how unfit they are to govern this country.
Thursday, 16 September 2010
Tuesday, 14 September 2010
TORIES LAUNCH ATTACK ON THE UNEMPLOYED
The ConDem coalition government announced on Thursday that it will cut £4bn from out-of-work benefits.
Additionally, a leaked letter revealed by the Observer on Sunday showed that the government has agreed to cut £2.5 billion from Employment Support Allowance. This is the relevant extract:
“Given the pressure on overall public spending in the coming period, we will need to continue developing further options to reform the benefits as part of the spending review process in order to deliver further savings, greater simplicity and stronger work incentives. Reform to the Employment Support Allowance is a particular priority and I am pleased that you, the Prime Minister, and I have agreed to press ahead with reforms to the ESA as part of the spending review that deliver net savings of at least £2.5 billion by 2014/15.”
Chancellor to SoS DWP, 19 June 2010, copied to PM, Deputy PM, SoS CLG, and Chief Secretary to the Treasury.
These cuts are in addition to the £11 billion cuts in the Budget, which already hit the poorest harder than the rich, women much harder than men, and children and pensioners harder than everyone else. Now the Government is clearly targeting people it agrees are genuinely too sick or disabled to work.
The government told the BBC on Thursday that it would cut £4 billion from out of work benefits.
The government gave no detail about where the £4 billion cuts would fall. There are five million people claim out-of-work benefits, meaning that if the cuts are applied uniformly each claimant would lose an average of £800 per year.
The government’s measures will do nothing to get more people into work if there are no jobs for people to go into, and when the government is cutting support for jobs.
A leaked letter from George Osborne to Iain Duncan-Smith set out a secret agreement to cut an additional £2.5bn from reforms to Employment Support Allowance (ESA) as part of the Spending Review.
The £2.5 billion cut to Employment Support Allowance will hit only those people that the government has already assessed – through the work capability assessment – to be genuinely too sick or disabled to work.
They are on top of savings already built into Treasury plans based on the anticipated results of work capability assessments, where around two-thirds of people so far tested have been found fit to work.
If these cuts are made uniformly, each claimant would lose an average of around £1,000.
This gives the lie to government claims that welfare reforms will tackle worklessness and protect the vulnerable.
The June Budget Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) report showed that budget reduced growth and increased unemployment compared to the pre-budget OBR - cutting jobs and putting more people on benefits.
The government scrapped the Young Person’s Guarantee of a job, training or work experience for all young people who are 6 months unemployed – and the Future Jobs Fund.
The last Labour Govt was making huge savings by getting more people than expected into work. Labour had set out plans to save £20bn over 4 years through getting more people into work – through:
• unemployment being 500,000 lower than expected due to Labour policies
• testing people on ESA/IB to ensure those who can work are expected to do so
• increasing the number of lone parents in employment
• introducing tough conditions on people who refused to work, and strong requirements on jobseekers
• bringing in the Young Person’s Guarantee and the Future Jobs Fund
The Tories, aided and abetted by the supine Liberal Democrats, are still the same old nasty Tory party of old. George Osborne’s rhetoric about living on benefits as a “lifestyle choice” is a smokescreen to hide vicious cuts on the poorest people in society.
Additionally, a leaked letter revealed by the Observer on Sunday showed that the government has agreed to cut £2.5 billion from Employment Support Allowance. This is the relevant extract:
“Given the pressure on overall public spending in the coming period, we will need to continue developing further options to reform the benefits as part of the spending review process in order to deliver further savings, greater simplicity and stronger work incentives. Reform to the Employment Support Allowance is a particular priority and I am pleased that you, the Prime Minister, and I have agreed to press ahead with reforms to the ESA as part of the spending review that deliver net savings of at least £2.5 billion by 2014/15.”
Chancellor to SoS DWP, 19 June 2010, copied to PM, Deputy PM, SoS CLG, and Chief Secretary to the Treasury.
These cuts are in addition to the £11 billion cuts in the Budget, which already hit the poorest harder than the rich, women much harder than men, and children and pensioners harder than everyone else. Now the Government is clearly targeting people it agrees are genuinely too sick or disabled to work.
The government told the BBC on Thursday that it would cut £4 billion from out of work benefits.
The government gave no detail about where the £4 billion cuts would fall. There are five million people claim out-of-work benefits, meaning that if the cuts are applied uniformly each claimant would lose an average of £800 per year.
The government’s measures will do nothing to get more people into work if there are no jobs for people to go into, and when the government is cutting support for jobs.
A leaked letter from George Osborne to Iain Duncan-Smith set out a secret agreement to cut an additional £2.5bn from reforms to Employment Support Allowance (ESA) as part of the Spending Review.
The £2.5 billion cut to Employment Support Allowance will hit only those people that the government has already assessed – through the work capability assessment – to be genuinely too sick or disabled to work.
They are on top of savings already built into Treasury plans based on the anticipated results of work capability assessments, where around two-thirds of people so far tested have been found fit to work.
If these cuts are made uniformly, each claimant would lose an average of around £1,000.
This gives the lie to government claims that welfare reforms will tackle worklessness and protect the vulnerable.
The June Budget Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) report showed that budget reduced growth and increased unemployment compared to the pre-budget OBR - cutting jobs and putting more people on benefits.
The government scrapped the Young Person’s Guarantee of a job, training or work experience for all young people who are 6 months unemployed – and the Future Jobs Fund.
The last Labour Govt was making huge savings by getting more people than expected into work. Labour had set out plans to save £20bn over 4 years through getting more people into work – through:
• unemployment being 500,000 lower than expected due to Labour policies
• testing people on ESA/IB to ensure those who can work are expected to do so
• increasing the number of lone parents in employment
• introducing tough conditions on people who refused to work, and strong requirements on jobseekers
• bringing in the Young Person’s Guarantee and the Future Jobs Fund
The Tories, aided and abetted by the supine Liberal Democrats, are still the same old nasty Tory party of old. George Osborne’s rhetoric about living on benefits as a “lifestyle choice” is a smokescreen to hide vicious cuts on the poorest people in society.
Monday, 6 September 2010
NAKED CONDEM GERRYMANDERING
NAKED GERRYMANDERING
On Monday evening the ConDem coalition secured the second reading of its gerrymandering Parliamentary Voting and Constituencies Bill, that will reduce the number of constituences and introduce AV. It passed its second reading even though most of the Tory MPs who spoke in the debate opposed it.
In his rather ham-fisted speech introducing the bill, the deputy prime minister tried to reassure the House of Commons that the bill was “not an attempt to gerrymander”. Who is he trying to kid? This is the most naked political stitch-up the UK has ever seen.
Indeed, Clegg’s proposal is so blatantly designed to reduce the number of Labour MPs that the process might even acquire a new sobriquet. In future shady political practices intended to fix the outcome of elections might come to be known as ‘Cleggmandering’.
The minority of Con/Dem MPs who did speak in favour accused Labour of being opposed to the equalisation in the number of electors in each constituency. But that doesn’t stand examination. The fact is the Boundary Commission’s existing arrangements already strive to create constituencies of equal size, but it also has to have regard to communities as well.
But if this bill is passed, natural boundaries like rivers, mountains and even the sea will be transgressed. For example, the Isle of Wight will be linked with Hampshire, parts of Cornwall with Devon and seats on one side of the Mersey with those on the other. This illustrates the ludicrous scenarios that will be forced on communities all over the country.
Claims that the UK is over represented by the number of MPs doesn’t stand examination either. The truth is the UK is broadly comparable with most European countries and well below some like Sweden, Ireland, Greece and Austria. Interestingly, even David Cameron said he opposed a reduction in the number of MPs when he was speaking at the Oxfordshire Boundary Inquiry in 2003.
Furthermore, there isn’t a huge discrepancy between the size of Labour seats compared to Tory and Lib Dem ones. On average, the number of registered constituents in Labour seats across the country is 68,423 compared to 72,444 in Tory seats and 69,725 in Lib Dem seats.
On top of that, the Electoral Commission estimated that in 2005 3.5 million eligible voters were missing from the electoral roll in England and Wales. And in a report published earlier this year, “under-registration is notably higher than average among 17-24 year olds (56% not registered), private sector tenants (49%) and black and minority ethnic British residents (31%)”. It also found that “the highest concentrations of under-registration are most likely to be found in metropolitan areas, smaller towns and cities with large student populations, and coastal areas with significant population turnover and high levels of social deprivation”.
Con/Dem MPs assert that the Labour government should have done something about under registration, but it is local authorities that are responsible for electoral registration. And in the last five years it is the Tories and Liberal Democrats that have controlled most local authorities so their criticisms of Labour are misplaced.
The Con/Dem coalition argue that it takes more people to elect Liberal Democrat and Conservative MPs compared to Labour MPs, but reducing constituencies and introducing AV won’t change that. The fact is the political geography of parliamentary constituencies favoured the Tories in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. It was broadly neutral in the 1970s and 1980s and it has only marginally favoured Labour since the 1990s.
The Liberal Democrats say they are most disadvantaged by the present system. But the Liberal Democrats are not a national party so dividing their national popular vote by the number of Lib Dem MPs elected in their regional enclaves is statistically invalid and extremely misleading.
This is a thoroughly anti democratic bill that Labour will continue to vigorously oppose. To compound the political stitch-up, the Con/Dem coalition want to abolish the public inquiries into boundary changes. At a stroke they want to remove the ability of individual citizens and local communities to have a meaningful say over boundary changes in their area.
The Con/Dem MPs who spoke so passionately against the bill would do well to heed the words of former Republican US president, Herbert Hoover, who said: "Words without actions are the assassins of idealism." The question is; will they acquiesce in the assassination of British democracy.
On Monday evening the ConDem coalition secured the second reading of its gerrymandering Parliamentary Voting and Constituencies Bill, that will reduce the number of constituences and introduce AV. It passed its second reading even though most of the Tory MPs who spoke in the debate opposed it.
In his rather ham-fisted speech introducing the bill, the deputy prime minister tried to reassure the House of Commons that the bill was “not an attempt to gerrymander”. Who is he trying to kid? This is the most naked political stitch-up the UK has ever seen.
Indeed, Clegg’s proposal is so blatantly designed to reduce the number of Labour MPs that the process might even acquire a new sobriquet. In future shady political practices intended to fix the outcome of elections might come to be known as ‘Cleggmandering’.
The minority of Con/Dem MPs who did speak in favour accused Labour of being opposed to the equalisation in the number of electors in each constituency. But that doesn’t stand examination. The fact is the Boundary Commission’s existing arrangements already strive to create constituencies of equal size, but it also has to have regard to communities as well.
But if this bill is passed, natural boundaries like rivers, mountains and even the sea will be transgressed. For example, the Isle of Wight will be linked with Hampshire, parts of Cornwall with Devon and seats on one side of the Mersey with those on the other. This illustrates the ludicrous scenarios that will be forced on communities all over the country.
Claims that the UK is over represented by the number of MPs doesn’t stand examination either. The truth is the UK is broadly comparable with most European countries and well below some like Sweden, Ireland, Greece and Austria. Interestingly, even David Cameron said he opposed a reduction in the number of MPs when he was speaking at the Oxfordshire Boundary Inquiry in 2003.
Furthermore, there isn’t a huge discrepancy between the size of Labour seats compared to Tory and Lib Dem ones. On average, the number of registered constituents in Labour seats across the country is 68,423 compared to 72,444 in Tory seats and 69,725 in Lib Dem seats.
On top of that, the Electoral Commission estimated that in 2005 3.5 million eligible voters were missing from the electoral roll in England and Wales. And in a report published earlier this year, “under-registration is notably higher than average among 17-24 year olds (56% not registered), private sector tenants (49%) and black and minority ethnic British residents (31%)”. It also found that “the highest concentrations of under-registration are most likely to be found in metropolitan areas, smaller towns and cities with large student populations, and coastal areas with significant population turnover and high levels of social deprivation”.
Con/Dem MPs assert that the Labour government should have done something about under registration, but it is local authorities that are responsible for electoral registration. And in the last five years it is the Tories and Liberal Democrats that have controlled most local authorities so their criticisms of Labour are misplaced.
The Con/Dem coalition argue that it takes more people to elect Liberal Democrat and Conservative MPs compared to Labour MPs, but reducing constituencies and introducing AV won’t change that. The fact is the political geography of parliamentary constituencies favoured the Tories in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. It was broadly neutral in the 1970s and 1980s and it has only marginally favoured Labour since the 1990s.
The Liberal Democrats say they are most disadvantaged by the present system. But the Liberal Democrats are not a national party so dividing their national popular vote by the number of Lib Dem MPs elected in their regional enclaves is statistically invalid and extremely misleading.
This is a thoroughly anti democratic bill that Labour will continue to vigorously oppose. To compound the political stitch-up, the Con/Dem coalition want to abolish the public inquiries into boundary changes. At a stroke they want to remove the ability of individual citizens and local communities to have a meaningful say over boundary changes in their area.
The Con/Dem MPs who spoke so passionately against the bill would do well to heed the words of former Republican US president, Herbert Hoover, who said: "Words without actions are the assassins of idealism." The question is; will they acquiesce in the assassination of British democracy.
Friday, 3 September 2010
BLAIR'S JOURNEY
As a longstanding trustee of the League Against Cruel Sports, I was extremely disappointed by Tony Blair's revelations about the Hunting Act. I actually joined the League Agaisnt Cruel Sports in the same year that I joined the Labour Party - 1976.
This is the League's take on the latest twists in Tony Blair's story about the passage of the Hunting Act into law.
If TB is to be believed, he didn’t understand the hunting issue until he had a chat with a hunt master, or in this case a hunt mistress, while visiting friends of friends on Elba, as a side trip to his usual Tuscan summer break.
Blair’s understanding of the hunting issue could have been written for him by the Countryside Alliance. He apparently bought hook, line and sinker the assertion that ‘hunting was a large part of our rural present’. He then openly admits to spending time seeking a way out of the political situation he had got himself into.
Even more disturbingly, he reports his conversation with Hazel Blears MP, then a minister at the Home Office, when she apparently asked him for his views on the vigorous policing of the Hunting Act and the police getting a few prosecutions under their belts. He reports her as saying, “I thought you might say that”. Not quite an admission of an instruction to pervert the course of justice, but about as close as one could get.
What Blair still seems to have failed to grasp was the political reality of what he was up against. He gets closest to it when he says, “by the end of it I felt like the damn fox”. That in essence was the whole political point: to his opposition he was the fox! To those who opposed him and all that he stood for, he was a pest that needed to be dealt with, he was a threat to the country and the countryside as they wanted it to be, and they then set out to hound him from office.
If you look at the actions of the so-called countryside lobby, they were clearly designed to remove the elected ‘New Labour’ government from office. Polling showed that over 80% of the so-called countryside marchers were in fact Conservative Party supporters. The hunting issue was just the particular stick that they chose to beat him with.
Support for and opposition to hunting have long been cross party and not a straightforwardly party political issue. Yet at the same time the hunting issue was totemic in many ways. What Tony Blair failed to grasp was that for well over twenty years the vast majority of the public have been against hunting with dogs for sport. For someone who prided himself on finding a third way, that the usually silent majority would back, the hunting issue was one he got comprehensively wrong, and which by his own admission he still does not get.
It is quite fascinating to read the relevant pages of Tony Blair’s book where he writes about his struggle with the hunting issue. Try counting the number of times he uses the word “I”. “I made a fatal mistake”, “I just couldn’t get it”, “I can’t believe it”, “if I told you the contortions and permutation I went through to avoid this wretched business, you wouldn’t credit it”, and so on and on. The arrogance of it is quite extraordinary. Cabinet government and parliament don’t feature in his decision making at all, and the whole thing revolves around what he thinks and what he decided to do. What hubris.
When he met the hunting friend-of-a-friend on Elba, no doubt he was literally a sitting dinner duck. Despite public opinion, government inquiries, and all the rest of it, one personal appeal - no doubt over a few glasses of Chianti in the warmth of an island summer sun - becomes the basis for his policy position on hunting and on that basis he then sets out to frustrate party policy, the will of parliament and the overwhelming majority of public opinion. If that isn’t arrogance I don’t know what it is!
Hunting and the freedom to chase and to kill for sport is emblematic of a particular way of life, which for most of society is already ancient history. In the UK today there are less than a dozen parliamentary constituencies where more than 25% of the electors actually live in rural areas. There are an estimated ten million people living and or working in what are called the rural constituencies, and most of them live in the market towns and larger villages. Less than 4% of them are engaged in any way in farming forestry or fishery. The lady Blair met and was won over by was no more representative of the majority in the countryside as a whole than a poppy would have been representative of a field of sunflowers.
The so-called countryside lobby does not actually speak for the majority of the people who live in or work in the countryside. Neither do they speak for the vast majority of the people who live in the country towns or for the vast majority of those who visit the countryside. The countryside lobby actually speak for that very small group, or at least a section of them, who own the vast majority of the land. Their support base is in the less than 0.5% who own and control over 80% of the land. The fact that Blair bought into their claims about unemployment and social melt down, all of which have proven to be untrue, shows the dangers of go it alone leadership.
The fact that Blair got completely side tracked on the hunting issue is symptomatic of the distance that grows between government and people, particularly Prime Ministers when in government. The Burns Inquiry at considerable expense comprehensively rubbished the countryside lobby’s claims that the rural economy would fall apart, that life as it was known in the countryside would fall apart, yet as a result of one meeting on holiday with a hunt master, the Prime Minister changed his view. It could have been the Chianti, but whatever it was, it was a serious lapse of judgement which his book reveals he still does not understand.
The whole hunting debate gets side tracked when politics gets in the way. First and foremost the Hunting Act does not ban all hunting. What it does is take the fox, deer, hare and mink out of hunting with dogs for sport. What Parliament actually banned was the ancient bloodsport of hunting. Parliament did not ban pest control and it did not ban groups of people in the countryside from getting together and riding around enjoying themselves. In essence as Blair says in his memoir, parliament achieved a “very British compromise” – no thanks to him it now appears.
It won’t be long before the Countryside Alliance will claim that “even Tony Blair” says it is a bad law. Of course that isn’t actually what he is saying, but none the less that will be the gist of their attack. What actually happened was that the parliamentary process worked despite Blair’s best efforts to scupper it, and what we got was the Hunting Act 2004.
The Hunting Act has many critics, but it also has well over 130 convictions. There are still those who argue that they should have the legal freedom to be cruel to animals for sport, but the vast majority of the general public and parliament do not agree with them.
The single most compelling comment on the Hunting Act was the comment by Lord Bingham, the leading Law Lord at the time, when he said that the Hunting Act was a reasoned and proportionate response to the issues that it sought to address.
Blair should have the grace to recognise that parliament got it right and he got it wrong.
This is the League's take on the latest twists in Tony Blair's story about the passage of the Hunting Act into law.
If TB is to be believed, he didn’t understand the hunting issue until he had a chat with a hunt master, or in this case a hunt mistress, while visiting friends of friends on Elba, as a side trip to his usual Tuscan summer break.
Blair’s understanding of the hunting issue could have been written for him by the Countryside Alliance. He apparently bought hook, line and sinker the assertion that ‘hunting was a large part of our rural present’. He then openly admits to spending time seeking a way out of the political situation he had got himself into.
Even more disturbingly, he reports his conversation with Hazel Blears MP, then a minister at the Home Office, when she apparently asked him for his views on the vigorous policing of the Hunting Act and the police getting a few prosecutions under their belts. He reports her as saying, “I thought you might say that”. Not quite an admission of an instruction to pervert the course of justice, but about as close as one could get.
What Blair still seems to have failed to grasp was the political reality of what he was up against. He gets closest to it when he says, “by the end of it I felt like the damn fox”. That in essence was the whole political point: to his opposition he was the fox! To those who opposed him and all that he stood for, he was a pest that needed to be dealt with, he was a threat to the country and the countryside as they wanted it to be, and they then set out to hound him from office.
If you look at the actions of the so-called countryside lobby, they were clearly designed to remove the elected ‘New Labour’ government from office. Polling showed that over 80% of the so-called countryside marchers were in fact Conservative Party supporters. The hunting issue was just the particular stick that they chose to beat him with.
Support for and opposition to hunting have long been cross party and not a straightforwardly party political issue. Yet at the same time the hunting issue was totemic in many ways. What Tony Blair failed to grasp was that for well over twenty years the vast majority of the public have been against hunting with dogs for sport. For someone who prided himself on finding a third way, that the usually silent majority would back, the hunting issue was one he got comprehensively wrong, and which by his own admission he still does not get.
It is quite fascinating to read the relevant pages of Tony Blair’s book where he writes about his struggle with the hunting issue. Try counting the number of times he uses the word “I”. “I made a fatal mistake”, “I just couldn’t get it”, “I can’t believe it”, “if I told you the contortions and permutation I went through to avoid this wretched business, you wouldn’t credit it”, and so on and on. The arrogance of it is quite extraordinary. Cabinet government and parliament don’t feature in his decision making at all, and the whole thing revolves around what he thinks and what he decided to do. What hubris.
When he met the hunting friend-of-a-friend on Elba, no doubt he was literally a sitting dinner duck. Despite public opinion, government inquiries, and all the rest of it, one personal appeal - no doubt over a few glasses of Chianti in the warmth of an island summer sun - becomes the basis for his policy position on hunting and on that basis he then sets out to frustrate party policy, the will of parliament and the overwhelming majority of public opinion. If that isn’t arrogance I don’t know what it is!
Hunting and the freedom to chase and to kill for sport is emblematic of a particular way of life, which for most of society is already ancient history. In the UK today there are less than a dozen parliamentary constituencies where more than 25% of the electors actually live in rural areas. There are an estimated ten million people living and or working in what are called the rural constituencies, and most of them live in the market towns and larger villages. Less than 4% of them are engaged in any way in farming forestry or fishery. The lady Blair met and was won over by was no more representative of the majority in the countryside as a whole than a poppy would have been representative of a field of sunflowers.
The so-called countryside lobby does not actually speak for the majority of the people who live in or work in the countryside. Neither do they speak for the vast majority of the people who live in the country towns or for the vast majority of those who visit the countryside. The countryside lobby actually speak for that very small group, or at least a section of them, who own the vast majority of the land. Their support base is in the less than 0.5% who own and control over 80% of the land. The fact that Blair bought into their claims about unemployment and social melt down, all of which have proven to be untrue, shows the dangers of go it alone leadership.
The fact that Blair got completely side tracked on the hunting issue is symptomatic of the distance that grows between government and people, particularly Prime Ministers when in government. The Burns Inquiry at considerable expense comprehensively rubbished the countryside lobby’s claims that the rural economy would fall apart, that life as it was known in the countryside would fall apart, yet as a result of one meeting on holiday with a hunt master, the Prime Minister changed his view. It could have been the Chianti, but whatever it was, it was a serious lapse of judgement which his book reveals he still does not understand.
The whole hunting debate gets side tracked when politics gets in the way. First and foremost the Hunting Act does not ban all hunting. What it does is take the fox, deer, hare and mink out of hunting with dogs for sport. What Parliament actually banned was the ancient bloodsport of hunting. Parliament did not ban pest control and it did not ban groups of people in the countryside from getting together and riding around enjoying themselves. In essence as Blair says in his memoir, parliament achieved a “very British compromise” – no thanks to him it now appears.
It won’t be long before the Countryside Alliance will claim that “even Tony Blair” says it is a bad law. Of course that isn’t actually what he is saying, but none the less that will be the gist of their attack. What actually happened was that the parliamentary process worked despite Blair’s best efforts to scupper it, and what we got was the Hunting Act 2004.
The Hunting Act has many critics, but it also has well over 130 convictions. There are still those who argue that they should have the legal freedom to be cruel to animals for sport, but the vast majority of the general public and parliament do not agree with them.
The single most compelling comment on the Hunting Act was the comment by Lord Bingham, the leading Law Lord at the time, when he said that the Hunting Act was a reasoned and proportionate response to the issues that it sought to address.
Blair should have the grace to recognise that parliament got it right and he got it wrong.
Tuesday, 24 August 2010
CUTS? YOU AIN'T SEEN NOTHING YET
The hyperbole surrounding the first 100 days of the Con/Dem coalition government has now passed.
It was a milestone that saw the media concentrating on the fact that two political parties are working together in Britain’s first coalition government since the Second World War. But the media didn’t highlight how the Liberal Democrats have become indistinguishable from the Conservative Party.,
It’s a far cry from last year’s Liberal Democrat conference when Nick Clegg said: "We know what happens when you simply squeeze budgets, across the board, until the pips squeak. We know, because we lived through it before, under the Conservatives. We remember the tumble-down classrooms, the pensioners dying on hospital trolleys, the council houses falling into total disrepair. We remember, and we say: never again."
Yet, despite Clegg’s rhetorical criticisms of Conservative cuts, the Liberal Democrats have endorsed the fastest, deepest and most savage reduction in public spending since the 1930s.
Next month, Mr Clegg will attempt to reconcile his remarks when he addresses his conference in Liverpool. The word is he intends to urge Liberal Democrat supporters to simply celebrate the fact that they are in power.
Of course the truth is the Liberal Democrats are not really in power at all. Their cabinet members are merely occupying titular positions while their strings are manipulated by Conservative puppeteers.
After betraying everything the Liberal Democrats claimed to stand for, Nick Clegg’s comments betray an underlying contempt for the people who trusted him. Holding up five superficial cabinet members as an example of something to celebrate suggests that Nick Clegg thinks his supporters are stupid.
But far from being stupid, many people who voted for the Liberal Democrats in the General Election are indignant that their votes helped to usher in a new Conservative era.
Support for the Liberal Democrats has been haemorrhaging away ever since they signed up to the coalition agreement and the Labour Party has seen an unprecedented increase in membership.
But the dwindling support for the Liberal Democrats is cold comfort when the country is about to be gripped by the most severe austerity measures in living memory.
And when it comes to cuts, my fear is we ain’t seen nothing yet. The Comprehensive Spending Review is due in the autumn and will set out where the Con/Dem coalition’s sweeping cutbacks will be made.
Leading economists are worried that the government’s policies will result in a double dip recession and a huge rise in unemployment. Consumer confidence is falling, people are fearful about losing their job and the National Institute of Economic and Social Research is predicting that last month’s encouraging economic figures will be short lived.
The Conservatives are not being honest with the British people. They are using the national deficit as cover for their ideological assault on what they describe as ‘big government’ and the Liberal Democrats to provide window dressing to legitimise Tory dogma.
But it’s worth considering what it is they want to abandon. It’s big government that is responsible for the NHS, providing care for elderly people, delivering education, putting police on our streets and protecting our children. It’s big government that supports local businesses through regional development agencies and of particular significance for Derby, it’s big government that saved the aerospace industry through the Export Credit Guarantee Department.
In short, big government is a good thing but David Cameron’s so-called ‘big society is a confidence trick to implement the 21st century equivalent of the poor law.
It doesn’t have to be this way. If we all stand together, we can defeat the cruel intentions of this callous Con/Dem coalition.
It was a milestone that saw the media concentrating on the fact that two political parties are working together in Britain’s first coalition government since the Second World War. But the media didn’t highlight how the Liberal Democrats have become indistinguishable from the Conservative Party.,
It’s a far cry from last year’s Liberal Democrat conference when Nick Clegg said: "We know what happens when you simply squeeze budgets, across the board, until the pips squeak. We know, because we lived through it before, under the Conservatives. We remember the tumble-down classrooms, the pensioners dying on hospital trolleys, the council houses falling into total disrepair. We remember, and we say: never again."
Yet, despite Clegg’s rhetorical criticisms of Conservative cuts, the Liberal Democrats have endorsed the fastest, deepest and most savage reduction in public spending since the 1930s.
Next month, Mr Clegg will attempt to reconcile his remarks when he addresses his conference in Liverpool. The word is he intends to urge Liberal Democrat supporters to simply celebrate the fact that they are in power.
Of course the truth is the Liberal Democrats are not really in power at all. Their cabinet members are merely occupying titular positions while their strings are manipulated by Conservative puppeteers.
After betraying everything the Liberal Democrats claimed to stand for, Nick Clegg’s comments betray an underlying contempt for the people who trusted him. Holding up five superficial cabinet members as an example of something to celebrate suggests that Nick Clegg thinks his supporters are stupid.
But far from being stupid, many people who voted for the Liberal Democrats in the General Election are indignant that their votes helped to usher in a new Conservative era.
Support for the Liberal Democrats has been haemorrhaging away ever since they signed up to the coalition agreement and the Labour Party has seen an unprecedented increase in membership.
But the dwindling support for the Liberal Democrats is cold comfort when the country is about to be gripped by the most severe austerity measures in living memory.
And when it comes to cuts, my fear is we ain’t seen nothing yet. The Comprehensive Spending Review is due in the autumn and will set out where the Con/Dem coalition’s sweeping cutbacks will be made.
Leading economists are worried that the government’s policies will result in a double dip recession and a huge rise in unemployment. Consumer confidence is falling, people are fearful about losing their job and the National Institute of Economic and Social Research is predicting that last month’s encouraging economic figures will be short lived.
The Conservatives are not being honest with the British people. They are using the national deficit as cover for their ideological assault on what they describe as ‘big government’ and the Liberal Democrats to provide window dressing to legitimise Tory dogma.
But it’s worth considering what it is they want to abandon. It’s big government that is responsible for the NHS, providing care for elderly people, delivering education, putting police on our streets and protecting our children. It’s big government that supports local businesses through regional development agencies and of particular significance for Derby, it’s big government that saved the aerospace industry through the Export Credit Guarantee Department.
In short, big government is a good thing but David Cameron’s so-called ‘big society is a confidence trick to implement the 21st century equivalent of the poor law.
It doesn’t have to be this way. If we all stand together, we can defeat the cruel intentions of this callous Con/Dem coalition.
Wednesday, 18 August 2010
IN ORDER TO WIN WE MUST PUT NEW LABOUR COMFORT ZONE BEHIND US
Ed Miliband has just produced a Fabian Society essay about what is required for Labour to win back the support we have lost since 1997.
It is a clear a well argued tour-de-force. It covers why we lost and how we can regain the confidence of people who have stopped voting for us. It also identifies the need to expand our base to win new support to enable us to win back power in order to build a better society.
For me, it is a perfect illustration of why Ed Miliband is best placed to lead a Labour Party renaissance that will once again put Labour in the vanguard of progressive politics.
If we can do that, I am convinced that we can win back power at the first attempt.
I have reproduced Ed's essay in full below.
TO WIN WE HAVE TO PUT THE NEW LABOUR COMFORT ZONE BEHIND US
By Ed Miliband - Fabian society essay 16 August 2010
Without values we become managers and technocrats. It is a Labour ideology that
makes us who we are. That is why I have put values at the centre of my campaign:
a belief in equality, social justice, fairness at work, internationalism. But the
challenge is how to apply that ideology to our time—and how to win power.
Tony Blair said in his first Conference speech in 1994 “If the world changes, and we
don’t, then we become of no use to the world. Our principles cease being principles
and just ossify into dogma.” Tony was right then and the lesson applies today. We
should always stand up for our ideology and values but always be willing to
recognise the way the world has changed.
In the early 1990s some Labour people thought of themselves as traditionalists
defending the Labour cause against Tony Blair and the modernisation of New
Labour. Today our danger is to defend traditionalist new Labour solutions on every
issue because this will consign us to defeat. It is my rejection of this New Labour
nostalgia that makes me the modernising candidate at this election.
To win next time, it is the New Labour comfort zone that we must escape: the rigidity
of old formulae that have served their time, the belittling of any attempt to move on
from past verities and the belief that more of the same is the way to win.
New Labour was right to seek to build a coalition of lower and middle income support,
show we can create wealth as well as distribute it and speak to people’s aspirations.
We need to keep doing all these things. But old-fashioned New Labour thinking about
what this means today in electoral strategy, policy and style of leadership is now an
obstacle to winning the next election and transforming our society.
Start with electoral politics: New Labour’s proposition was simple - we need to
persuade Tory voters to come to us. The task is very different now. Five million votes were lost by Labour between 1997 and 2010, but 4 out of the 5 million didn’t go to the Conservatives. One-third went to the Liberal Democrats, and most of the rest simply stopped voting.
It wasn’t, in the main, the most affluent, professional voters that deserted Labour
either. New analysis has been produced by Ipsos/Mori which shows the scale of loss
among lower income groups. Between 1997 and 2010, for every one voter that Labour lost from the professional classes (so called ‘ABs’), we lost three voters among the poorest, those on benefits and the low paid (DEs). You really don’t need to be a Bennite to believe that this represents a crisis of working-class representation
for Labour---and our electability.
Add in skilled manual workers, and the differential goes to six to one. Almost all the new Tory voters came from these social groups. Put it at its starkest, if we had
enjoyed a 1997 result in 2010 just among DEs, then on a uniform swing we would
have won at least 40 more seats and would still be the largest party in parliament.
Seats like Stroud, Hastings & Rye, and Corby would have stayed Labour. The core
Labour vote that some thought could be taken for granted became the swing vote
that went Conservative.
We also need to understand that the danger of people switching from our party to
others has been joined by the danger of people simply drifting out of voting---and
disproportionately among our supporters. The gap between turnout among ABs and
DEs grew from 13 to 19 points between 1997 and 2010.
This is bad for democracy and particularly dangerous for us. We need to take this
skewing of the electorate far more seriously than we have done in the past. As
President Obama has shown in the United States, expanding the electorate is part of
a winning strategy as well as winning back voters who have gone elsewhere.
We can neither win an election with a working-class vote alone—New Labour was
right about that---nor can we take it for granted. But the problem of conventional New Labour analysis applies to white collar voters too. Particularly when it comes to the South of England, we sometimes clung to an illusory picture whereby we imagined easy affluence to run wider than it did. Half of the people in work in Reading, where the Conservatives got one of their biggest swings to take Reading West, earn less than £21, 000 a year. Even in Britain’s more comfortable places, people increasingly feel insecure, overstretched and distant from rich elites.
Furthermore, many of the affluent voters themselves didn’t go blue, they went yellow-
--the Conservative vote has fallen among ABs since 1997. In a number of seats, like
Hornsey and Wood Green or Manchester Withington, we lost to the Liberal Democrats because of desertion over issues such as Iraq, civil liberties and tuition fees and in many other places, the Labour vote was depressed, thereby letting the
Tories in by the back door.
All this requires a refounding of Labour, as profound as New Labour in the mid-
1990s. Our working-class base cannot be dismissed as a ‘core vote’ and taken for
granted, we need to understand the real landscape of middle England to strengthen
our appeal to voters right across the income scale, we need to recognise the
concerns and nature of modern affluence, and we need to change our style of
leadership.
To do this we need, just as we did at the start of New Labour, to go back to our core
values and apply them to the world in which we find ourselves. We need to understand what our belief in equality, fairness and opportunity means in the face not just of the electoral situation, but also the economic and social condition of Britain.
This rethink is all the more important because many of the good things that
happened under new Labour were possible because we used the proceeds of growth
to support public services and redistribution. Given the fiscal constraints, this route to social justice is going to be much more constrained for the foreseeable future.
First, the renewal required in relation to Labour’s so-called ‘traditional’ vote is
perhaps most profound. We need to tell a story about how we can improve people’s
lives, starting with the way we approach the economy.
That begins by revisiting New Labour’s recipe for the jobs Britain can create. A low
skill, low wage economy that is over-reliant on service industries is not the future that people aspire too. Instead, we should build on the active industrial policy that we came to late in our term in office, and which had already helped develop the
beginnings of an electric vehicle industry, an offshore wind industry and a nuclear
power renaissance in Britain. By supporting British business, we can create high
quality manufacturing jobs, and under my leadership we would.
We also need to think again about our approach to labour markets. What became a
dogmatic attraction to maximum flexibility meant poorer wages and conditions, and
we need to address that. We need to learn the lesson from other countries that
raising the floor in the labour market can be a more sustainable route to both better
conditions and stronger growth. Creating stronger incentives for companies to invest
in their workforce can have a powerful impact on productivity and provide a stronger
platform for the future.
That is why I am for a living wage over £7 an hour, not just a minimum wage, so
people can feel more comfortable that they will get a decent day’s wage for a decent
day’s work. I am for greater protection for time outside work so people don’t feel
compelled to work harder for longer for less.
This new approach will help address the issue which Labour candidates heard so
much about on the doorstep: immigration. Eastern European immigration is a class
issue because it increases competition for jobs, particularly those at lower wages. It looks very different if you are an employee rather than an employer. But we refused to recognise that sufficiently. Similarly, concerns about preferential access to housing - often false - built up because we refused to prioritise the building of new social housing. If we want to win back our lost support, this can no longer be a marginal issue.
Second, we must speak to aspiration and recognise where we need change from the
past in order to meet people’s hopes for the future. The burden of University debt is
big issue for swathes of parents—and their kids. That is why I have proposed we
scrap tuition fees and replace them with a graduate tax.
But we must recognise as New Labour sometimes didn’t that aspiration is not simply
about earning and owning, but also enjoying time with your family. So our economic
strategy should change the culture of working time. It’s not just the low paid in Britain who work the longest hours in Western Europe, don’t get a chance to read to their kids, and feel stressed out.
Third, we must recognise that people, including affluent voters, care about tax but
also about the sort of society we live in. I will unashamedly argue for a more equal
society because I believe it harms the rich as well as the poor to live in a country
which is increasingly unequal. I will argue for a society characterised by responsibility at all levels – from bankers pay to people who can work but at the moment are not doing so. I will make the case for a greener society because climate change is the greatest challenge to our way of life.
We must also be reformers of the state to make it more democratic, more open, more
efficient and less overbearing. Alan Johnson’s view expressed last week that “I can’t
think of a single issue on which Labour got the balance wrong on civil liberties”
speaks to an understandable desire to defend the past, but if we don’t recognise and
put right our mistakes, we won’t win back those who have left us.
Face it: we never convinced people of the case for ninety days of summary detention
without charge, or ID cards and they spoke to a belief in an off-putting overpowerful
state. I am for CCTV and measures that work, but under my leadership, we will not
be casual with civil liberties. As important, we must have the courage to accept
where we got things wrong and change our approach. Without that, we will not win
again.
Fourth, we need to change our style of politics. Disconnection from voters, including
our working-class base, is not just a product of policy error, it is the result of the hollowing out of the movement and the party. In part, this hollowing out is a long-term trend that faces political parties in many parts of the industrialised world. But in part it happened because people left us over specific issues like Iraq and it is also a product of a particular approach to the role of the Labour Party.
A Labour party member in Cornwall, Nick, put it best when he said to me that New
Labour had behaved as if “the role of the Labour leader is to protect the country from the views of the members of the Labour Party”. That may have been necessary in the 1980s, but Neil Kinnock’s Conference speech about Militant took place twenty five
years ago. We can’t still let ourselves be haunted by those ghosts. Unless we change
this style of leadership we will never change society in the way we aspire to do
because we will never have the political movement we need.
We need that movement because we can only win the arguments we need to win — both in Opposition and in government - if we have a movement that can sustain us and from which our ideas emerge. That outward looking, vibrant movement comes from high ideals and party members who recognise that we are hearing their voice.
And anyone who thinks that listening to our party is somehow pandering is doing
them a great disservice. Indeed, if we had listened more to them, we would have
been a better government not a worse one: on housing, on agency workers, on
tuition fees.
Of course, no leader is ever going to agree with everything their party members
believe. And we need to forge a winning coalition which reaches out well beyond
traditional supporters of our party. But the answer to this is to build a party which
connects us to the public, and that must also include an understanding of the
strength that could come from our trade union link.
The crisis of support among our working-class base shows the ground we have to make up. The relationship with the trade union movement needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. Part of the problem is that MPs are not connected locally to the trade
union levy payers. As a start, each MP should be reaching out to these levy payers
and hearing their voice with regular dialogue and meetings.
The final change we need as part of our future is political confidence. New Labour
was ultimately quite pessimistic about the ability of our values to speak to a
progressive majority in Britain. Contrast this with the self-confidence of the new
coalition government: nobody would really believe that the Conservatives won just
36% of the vote at the election. While Labour often acts like squatters in government, the Tories act like they deserve to be there.
That pessimism about what is possible is now a barrier to winning again, not just to
creating the kind of country we believe in. Unless we address issue of low wages,
working time, inequality, we will never reach out to those people we have lost and
make politics seem like it might have an impact on their lives.
New Labour nostalgia says that there is a tension between our values and our
electability. But the truth is that the opposite is the case. Whether you look at our
approach to the excesses of markets, or our belief in a foreign policy based on our
values, not just our alliances; the morally right and the electorally right thing to do come together. We lost because people lost a sense of who we are and what we
stand for. To win again, we need to restore our clarity of purpose.
Only with a politics based on clear values can we win again. Indeed, it is by speaking openly and clearly about what we believe that we can best get back into power. Head and heart come together in a politics based on clear values, a sense of who we stand up for, and a vision of the good society.
It is a clear a well argued tour-de-force. It covers why we lost and how we can regain the confidence of people who have stopped voting for us. It also identifies the need to expand our base to win new support to enable us to win back power in order to build a better society.
For me, it is a perfect illustration of why Ed Miliband is best placed to lead a Labour Party renaissance that will once again put Labour in the vanguard of progressive politics.
If we can do that, I am convinced that we can win back power at the first attempt.
I have reproduced Ed's essay in full below.
TO WIN WE HAVE TO PUT THE NEW LABOUR COMFORT ZONE BEHIND US
By Ed Miliband - Fabian society essay 16 August 2010
Without values we become managers and technocrats. It is a Labour ideology that
makes us who we are. That is why I have put values at the centre of my campaign:
a belief in equality, social justice, fairness at work, internationalism. But the
challenge is how to apply that ideology to our time—and how to win power.
Tony Blair said in his first Conference speech in 1994 “If the world changes, and we
don’t, then we become of no use to the world. Our principles cease being principles
and just ossify into dogma.” Tony was right then and the lesson applies today. We
should always stand up for our ideology and values but always be willing to
recognise the way the world has changed.
In the early 1990s some Labour people thought of themselves as traditionalists
defending the Labour cause against Tony Blair and the modernisation of New
Labour. Today our danger is to defend traditionalist new Labour solutions on every
issue because this will consign us to defeat. It is my rejection of this New Labour
nostalgia that makes me the modernising candidate at this election.
To win next time, it is the New Labour comfort zone that we must escape: the rigidity
of old formulae that have served their time, the belittling of any attempt to move on
from past verities and the belief that more of the same is the way to win.
New Labour was right to seek to build a coalition of lower and middle income support,
show we can create wealth as well as distribute it and speak to people’s aspirations.
We need to keep doing all these things. But old-fashioned New Labour thinking about
what this means today in electoral strategy, policy and style of leadership is now an
obstacle to winning the next election and transforming our society.
Start with electoral politics: New Labour’s proposition was simple - we need to
persuade Tory voters to come to us. The task is very different now. Five million votes were lost by Labour between 1997 and 2010, but 4 out of the 5 million didn’t go to the Conservatives. One-third went to the Liberal Democrats, and most of the rest simply stopped voting.
It wasn’t, in the main, the most affluent, professional voters that deserted Labour
either. New analysis has been produced by Ipsos/Mori which shows the scale of loss
among lower income groups. Between 1997 and 2010, for every one voter that Labour lost from the professional classes (so called ‘ABs’), we lost three voters among the poorest, those on benefits and the low paid (DEs). You really don’t need to be a Bennite to believe that this represents a crisis of working-class representation
for Labour---and our electability.
Add in skilled manual workers, and the differential goes to six to one. Almost all the new Tory voters came from these social groups. Put it at its starkest, if we had
enjoyed a 1997 result in 2010 just among DEs, then on a uniform swing we would
have won at least 40 more seats and would still be the largest party in parliament.
Seats like Stroud, Hastings & Rye, and Corby would have stayed Labour. The core
Labour vote that some thought could be taken for granted became the swing vote
that went Conservative.
We also need to understand that the danger of people switching from our party to
others has been joined by the danger of people simply drifting out of voting---and
disproportionately among our supporters. The gap between turnout among ABs and
DEs grew from 13 to 19 points between 1997 and 2010.
This is bad for democracy and particularly dangerous for us. We need to take this
skewing of the electorate far more seriously than we have done in the past. As
President Obama has shown in the United States, expanding the electorate is part of
a winning strategy as well as winning back voters who have gone elsewhere.
We can neither win an election with a working-class vote alone—New Labour was
right about that---nor can we take it for granted. But the problem of conventional New Labour analysis applies to white collar voters too. Particularly when it comes to the South of England, we sometimes clung to an illusory picture whereby we imagined easy affluence to run wider than it did. Half of the people in work in Reading, where the Conservatives got one of their biggest swings to take Reading West, earn less than £21, 000 a year. Even in Britain’s more comfortable places, people increasingly feel insecure, overstretched and distant from rich elites.
Furthermore, many of the affluent voters themselves didn’t go blue, they went yellow-
--the Conservative vote has fallen among ABs since 1997. In a number of seats, like
Hornsey and Wood Green or Manchester Withington, we lost to the Liberal Democrats because of desertion over issues such as Iraq, civil liberties and tuition fees and in many other places, the Labour vote was depressed, thereby letting the
Tories in by the back door.
All this requires a refounding of Labour, as profound as New Labour in the mid-
1990s. Our working-class base cannot be dismissed as a ‘core vote’ and taken for
granted, we need to understand the real landscape of middle England to strengthen
our appeal to voters right across the income scale, we need to recognise the
concerns and nature of modern affluence, and we need to change our style of
leadership.
To do this we need, just as we did at the start of New Labour, to go back to our core
values and apply them to the world in which we find ourselves. We need to understand what our belief in equality, fairness and opportunity means in the face not just of the electoral situation, but also the economic and social condition of Britain.
This rethink is all the more important because many of the good things that
happened under new Labour were possible because we used the proceeds of growth
to support public services and redistribution. Given the fiscal constraints, this route to social justice is going to be much more constrained for the foreseeable future.
First, the renewal required in relation to Labour’s so-called ‘traditional’ vote is
perhaps most profound. We need to tell a story about how we can improve people’s
lives, starting with the way we approach the economy.
That begins by revisiting New Labour’s recipe for the jobs Britain can create. A low
skill, low wage economy that is over-reliant on service industries is not the future that people aspire too. Instead, we should build on the active industrial policy that we came to late in our term in office, and which had already helped develop the
beginnings of an electric vehicle industry, an offshore wind industry and a nuclear
power renaissance in Britain. By supporting British business, we can create high
quality manufacturing jobs, and under my leadership we would.
We also need to think again about our approach to labour markets. What became a
dogmatic attraction to maximum flexibility meant poorer wages and conditions, and
we need to address that. We need to learn the lesson from other countries that
raising the floor in the labour market can be a more sustainable route to both better
conditions and stronger growth. Creating stronger incentives for companies to invest
in their workforce can have a powerful impact on productivity and provide a stronger
platform for the future.
That is why I am for a living wage over £7 an hour, not just a minimum wage, so
people can feel more comfortable that they will get a decent day’s wage for a decent
day’s work. I am for greater protection for time outside work so people don’t feel
compelled to work harder for longer for less.
This new approach will help address the issue which Labour candidates heard so
much about on the doorstep: immigration. Eastern European immigration is a class
issue because it increases competition for jobs, particularly those at lower wages. It looks very different if you are an employee rather than an employer. But we refused to recognise that sufficiently. Similarly, concerns about preferential access to housing - often false - built up because we refused to prioritise the building of new social housing. If we want to win back our lost support, this can no longer be a marginal issue.
Second, we must speak to aspiration and recognise where we need change from the
past in order to meet people’s hopes for the future. The burden of University debt is
big issue for swathes of parents—and their kids. That is why I have proposed we
scrap tuition fees and replace them with a graduate tax.
But we must recognise as New Labour sometimes didn’t that aspiration is not simply
about earning and owning, but also enjoying time with your family. So our economic
strategy should change the culture of working time. It’s not just the low paid in Britain who work the longest hours in Western Europe, don’t get a chance to read to their kids, and feel stressed out.
Third, we must recognise that people, including affluent voters, care about tax but
also about the sort of society we live in. I will unashamedly argue for a more equal
society because I believe it harms the rich as well as the poor to live in a country
which is increasingly unequal. I will argue for a society characterised by responsibility at all levels – from bankers pay to people who can work but at the moment are not doing so. I will make the case for a greener society because climate change is the greatest challenge to our way of life.
We must also be reformers of the state to make it more democratic, more open, more
efficient and less overbearing. Alan Johnson’s view expressed last week that “I can’t
think of a single issue on which Labour got the balance wrong on civil liberties”
speaks to an understandable desire to defend the past, but if we don’t recognise and
put right our mistakes, we won’t win back those who have left us.
Face it: we never convinced people of the case for ninety days of summary detention
without charge, or ID cards and they spoke to a belief in an off-putting overpowerful
state. I am for CCTV and measures that work, but under my leadership, we will not
be casual with civil liberties. As important, we must have the courage to accept
where we got things wrong and change our approach. Without that, we will not win
again.
Fourth, we need to change our style of politics. Disconnection from voters, including
our working-class base, is not just a product of policy error, it is the result of the hollowing out of the movement and the party. In part, this hollowing out is a long-term trend that faces political parties in many parts of the industrialised world. But in part it happened because people left us over specific issues like Iraq and it is also a product of a particular approach to the role of the Labour Party.
A Labour party member in Cornwall, Nick, put it best when he said to me that New
Labour had behaved as if “the role of the Labour leader is to protect the country from the views of the members of the Labour Party”. That may have been necessary in the 1980s, but Neil Kinnock’s Conference speech about Militant took place twenty five
years ago. We can’t still let ourselves be haunted by those ghosts. Unless we change
this style of leadership we will never change society in the way we aspire to do
because we will never have the political movement we need.
We need that movement because we can only win the arguments we need to win — both in Opposition and in government - if we have a movement that can sustain us and from which our ideas emerge. That outward looking, vibrant movement comes from high ideals and party members who recognise that we are hearing their voice.
And anyone who thinks that listening to our party is somehow pandering is doing
them a great disservice. Indeed, if we had listened more to them, we would have
been a better government not a worse one: on housing, on agency workers, on
tuition fees.
Of course, no leader is ever going to agree with everything their party members
believe. And we need to forge a winning coalition which reaches out well beyond
traditional supporters of our party. But the answer to this is to build a party which
connects us to the public, and that must also include an understanding of the
strength that could come from our trade union link.
The crisis of support among our working-class base shows the ground we have to make up. The relationship with the trade union movement needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. Part of the problem is that MPs are not connected locally to the trade
union levy payers. As a start, each MP should be reaching out to these levy payers
and hearing their voice with regular dialogue and meetings.
The final change we need as part of our future is political confidence. New Labour
was ultimately quite pessimistic about the ability of our values to speak to a
progressive majority in Britain. Contrast this with the self-confidence of the new
coalition government: nobody would really believe that the Conservatives won just
36% of the vote at the election. While Labour often acts like squatters in government, the Tories act like they deserve to be there.
That pessimism about what is possible is now a barrier to winning again, not just to
creating the kind of country we believe in. Unless we address issue of low wages,
working time, inequality, we will never reach out to those people we have lost and
make politics seem like it might have an impact on their lives.
New Labour nostalgia says that there is a tension between our values and our
electability. But the truth is that the opposite is the case. Whether you look at our
approach to the excesses of markets, or our belief in a foreign policy based on our
values, not just our alliances; the morally right and the electorally right thing to do come together. We lost because people lost a sense of who we are and what we
stand for. To win again, we need to restore our clarity of purpose.
Only with a politics based on clear values can we win again. Indeed, it is by speaking openly and clearly about what we believe that we can best get back into power. Head and heart come together in a politics based on clear values, a sense of who we stand up for, and a vision of the good society.
Friday, 13 August 2010
100 DAYS OF AUSTERITY ECONOMICS – THE CON/DEM COALITION’S GAMBLE WITH GROWTH AND JOBS
The Government is embarking on an extremely risky gamble with the British economy, and Britain’s public services.
They have rejected a sensible, balanced approach to economic policy, instead choosing to take a gamble with their economics of austerity. That has resulted in independent experts and institutions predicting a worse picture for growth, jobs and unemployment in the next few years.
1) Slowing Growth
Before the election, David Cameron said that his first Budget would be “a Budget that goes for growth”.1 But in fact his Budget slows down growth. The Government’s own economic forecaster, the Office for Budget Responsibility, has downgraded its growth forecast for this year from 1.3% to 1.2%, and for next year from 2.6% to 2.3% as a direct result of measures taken in George Osborne’s June Budget.
2) Holding back job creation
George Osborne has said that unemployment is “never a price worth paying”,2 but his actions mean less people in work, and less support for those who have lost their jobs.
3) Making the deficit more difficult to reduce
By hitting growth and undermining private sector confidence, the Government will make
deficit reduction more painful and difficult. If the Government raises less tax and spends more on unemployment benefits, it will take bigger cuts to public services or further tax increases to reduce the deficit.
4) Putting the burden on the most vulnerable
We are already seeing some aspects of that pain, with measure hitting the poorest that neither the Lib Dems or the Conservatives gave any warning of before the election – a VAT rise without any compensation for pensioners, cuts to Child Tax Credits for families with household incomes well below £30,000 and changes to housing benefit that will hit some of the poorest and most vulnerable members of our communities.
5) Taking expensive risks with public services And – while the public finances are severely constrained – the Government is embarking on expensive experiments in schools and the NHS. Instead of providing guaranteed treatment times or rebuilding schools, the Government will be left picking up the bill for the cost of these
reorganisations – likely to run into billions of pounds.
They have rejected a sensible, balanced approach to economic policy, instead choosing to take a gamble with their economics of austerity. That has resulted in independent experts and institutions predicting a worse picture for growth, jobs and unemployment in the next few years.
1) Slowing Growth
Before the election, David Cameron said that his first Budget would be “a Budget that goes for growth”.1 But in fact his Budget slows down growth. The Government’s own economic forecaster, the Office for Budget Responsibility, has downgraded its growth forecast for this year from 1.3% to 1.2%, and for next year from 2.6% to 2.3% as a direct result of measures taken in George Osborne’s June Budget.
2) Holding back job creation
George Osborne has said that unemployment is “never a price worth paying”,2 but his actions mean less people in work, and less support for those who have lost their jobs.
3) Making the deficit more difficult to reduce
By hitting growth and undermining private sector confidence, the Government will make
deficit reduction more painful and difficult. If the Government raises less tax and spends more on unemployment benefits, it will take bigger cuts to public services or further tax increases to reduce the deficit.
4) Putting the burden on the most vulnerable
We are already seeing some aspects of that pain, with measure hitting the poorest that neither the Lib Dems or the Conservatives gave any warning of before the election – a VAT rise without any compensation for pensioners, cuts to Child Tax Credits for families with household incomes well below £30,000 and changes to housing benefit that will hit some of the poorest and most vulnerable members of our communities.
5) Taking expensive risks with public services And – while the public finances are severely constrained – the Government is embarking on expensive experiments in schools and the NHS. Instead of providing guaranteed treatment times or rebuilding schools, the Government will be left picking up the bill for the cost of these
reorganisations – likely to run into billions of pounds.
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