Obsolete

Wednesday, October 06, 2010

Fairness and fatutity.

If you were to use one word to describe David Cameron's speech to the Conservative party conference, and there are a good few choice ones which would be almost equally apposite, then it would have to be fatuous. Fairness was meant to be the theme, yet apart from the few paragraphs given to the media in advance, it hardly got a look in. Instead Cameron treated us, once again, to his vision of the "big society", which was, once again, so lamely sketched out as to be laughable.

Let's put it this way: compared to Ed Miliband's speech last week, large parts of which must have been thrown together at the last moment following his "surprise" victory and which inevitably suffered as a result, his could be a case study in both honesty and humility. It for the most part struck the right tone, and did what had to be done, even if I ripped into parts of it. Cameron, despite knowing just how much anxiety there is throughout the country at the cuts to come, said relatively little to calm nerves, although when the party has already so botched the child benefit cut this week that might well be either unsurprising or surprising according to your view.

In there among an especially ill-thought out attack on Labour for more or less everything they ever did, one which resembled one of the more impenetrable rants left on a website comment thread rather than a critique from a prime minister was a denunciation of spin. Say what you like about Alastair Campbell, at least he was almost always good at what he did, even if the end results were ignoble. He or someone else in New Labour's inner circle would have spotted the obvious problems with Cameron's "your country needs you" motif which must have passed Coulson and Hilton by. Not just that in the most famous case of the government declaring that it needed you personally the reality behind the slogan was the establishment sending off a generation to needless suffering and slaughter in the trenches, although that ought to have stopped them immediately in their tracks. It also isn't just that next week the government is going to be declaring loudly and clearly that it doesn't need tens of thousands of current state employees, told in no uncertain terms that their country doesn't need their services in the Conservative-Liberal Democrat imposed age of austerity.

More than anything, it's that for millions either unemployed or currently on almost any kind of benefit, it's never been more apparent that they are surplus to requirements. Despite this Tory conference being dominated by talk of work and how those willing to work will be rewarded for not sitting on their sofas as in Cameron's distasteful remark on responsibility, talk of jobs or growth has been almost wholly absent. Cameron mentioned the former word just 5 times, and all but one of those uses was in a context other than the creation of them; two of them were in the terms of the government cutting them. You can change the welfare system as much as you like, it's not going to make a scrap of difference when there are simply not enough jobs for those who are on jobseeker's allowance, let alone on the sickness benefits which Iain Duncan Smith is determined to get so many off of. Much is instead being left to the "wealth creators", as window cleaners are now to be known if we take Cameron at his word. The unemployed will get access to an "enterprise allowance" to start up their own business, yet for many who find themselves out of work that will be the last rather than the first resort, when such start-ups require further capital which they either can't borrow or which they don't have. These are the real people who are going to suffer even more when the cuts begin to bite, and the prime minister is offering them the opportunity to join in the "big society spirit" to take their mind off it.

The fatuity was in far too many places to deal with them all (although Left Foot Forward has given it a go). Even by the standards of certain sections of the speech though, talking of the "selfishness" of the Labour years and "unchecked individualism" takes a whole lot of chutzpah for a Conservative leader and prime minister. Labour at least believed in equality, and even if it achieved it almost through stealth, the redistribution it managed mainly through tax credits stopped the poorest from completely falling off the scale. It wasn't enough, yet now David Cameron wants us to not just measure fairness through "the size of the cheque given" but "by the chance we give", one of which is, of course, those elusive jobs. Seeing as most of those cheques are going to be reduced vastly thanks to the various cuts and caps to be imposed, this makes perfect political sense. Cynicism certainly wasn't one of the things Cameron identified as characterising Labour's time in power.

Much else was drearily familiar. No alternative to cutting now, however much Cameron wished there was. Greece beckoned if action hadn't been taken immediately. Everyone agrees with the Tory-Lib Dem position, even the EU, that august economic body much respected amongst Conservatives. Except, oh, Ken Clarke, who admitted there was a possibility of a double dip recession. Ireland certainly didn't merit a mention, despite taking much the same medicine as we're about to and also with the backing of everyone. The debt and deficit a disaster of Labour's making, despite the Tories having supported the government's actions up until mid-way through 2008. A crisis of the private sector transformed into one of the public sector, with those with broadest shoulders sharing the most burden, even when the budget showed it will be the poorest hit the hardest.

If we take Cameron at his word, he wants to build a country defined not by what we consume but what we contribute, something he'll hopefully remember should that dreaded double dip become a reality. Rather than eating cake, he wants us to eat optimism, all in this together, our country needs us, sunshine winning the day all over again. It leaves only one question: will next year Cameron tell us it hasn't been raining despite pissing on us for 12 months?

Labels: big society, Conservative party conference, Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, Conservatives, David Cameron, politics, spending cuts

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10/06/2010 09:55:00 PM | Permalink | | links to this post

Tuesday, October 05, 2010

Where are the other parties in all of this?

Amusing as it undoubtedly is to watch the Tories panicking in such a way on the very first occasion in government that they've done something to upset their base and media supporters, isn't it rather odd that we've heard almost nothing from the Liberal Democrats about what they think of the higher rate taxpayer child benefit cut? True, the Tories didn't make much comment during their conference and the Lib Dems may well just be returning the favour, yet as Paxman's failure to get a straight answer out of Theresa May on when she knew about the cut showed (YouTube undoubtedly coming soon), it's quite possible that many of them were also kept out of the loop. While David Cameron is now apologising for not having the cut in the Tory manifesto, although considering large chunks of it were immediately cast aside in the coalition agreement it was hardly ever a concrete guide, there most certainly wasn't anything in the Liberal Democrat manifesto about one either, even if they proposed "reforming" tax credits, also a potential minefield.

Similarly invisible has been Labour. There might well be good reasons for this: after all, when an opposition policy is imploding in such a magnificent fashion it can sometimes be best to simply let it happen without distracting from the spectacle. Also apparent is that to be credible Labour has to get its deficit reduction plan right very quickly indeed, and by making rash promises about keeping certain benefits or opposing certain cuts it makes that all the more difficult. Even so, capitalising on the Tory difficulties ought to be an open goal: not only do they remove child benefit from higher earners supposedly to save £1 billion a year, but a day later they then make clear that they'll give some of that back eventually by introducing a transferable tax allowance for married couples, including apparently those that they've already argued don't need such help from the state. One day they're saying that higher earners no longer qualify for help from the state for raising the next generation; the next they're saying that those who simply get married do deserve special treatment. It's not just perverse; it's close to being politically bankrupt.

What's more, what does this say about all of the other cuts which the government is so determined to introduce in the national interest, as the Tory conference slogan currently has it? Could they similarly be blown off course by a backlash should they touch the backs of the good burghers of middle England more than they realised they would? Unlikely, yet certainly not unthinkable. Either way, distracted by the shadow cabinet elections or not, Labour ought to be pointing all of these contradictions out, and so far seems to have spurned the opportunity to do so.

Labels: child benefit, Conservative party conference, Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, David Cameron, George Osborne, Labour, Liberal Democrats, spending cuts, welfare reform

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10/05/2010 11:25:00 PM | Permalink | | links to this post

Monday, October 04, 2010

The not quite Blairite stupidity of the coalition's child benefit cut.

Of all the announcements, interviews and speeches over the weekend, only one was really essential to understanding how the the Conservatives intend to govern, even if constrained by the Liberal Democrats:

Michael Gove jumps out of his armchair, rushes over to his desk and lovingly picks up a copy of a well-thumbed tome that has pride of place in his office at the education department, overlooking Westminster Abbey.
"I love A Journey, I have never read a book like it," the education secretary says of Tony Blair's bestselling memoirs. Gove opens it at his favourite page to read out, in a slow and admiring tone, Blair's conclusion that opposition to public service reform can be beaten.

Undoubtedly, not all of the Conservatives within the cabinet have a similarly throbbing erection for the former great leader. They have however clearly taken to heart one of Blair's regrets: that he almost entirely "wasted" his first term on policies other than the public sector reform which energised him, and had to compromise, often thanks to Gordon Brown's opposition and interventions, in the second and first two years of the third. This partially explains why they seem to be in such a mad rush when it comes to reorganising the NHS, despite pledging in the coalition agreement not to indulge in top-down reforms without consultation as Labour repeatedly did, in making changes to the academy system and then introducing free schools, and now also in almost ripping up the welfare system and starting again. The other likely reason for why they're operating at such breakneck speed, even if they won't admit it, is due to how they firstly don't know whether the coalition will survive and secondly as they also aren't certain on whether they'll get a second term.

For while it's true that much of the mood music accompanying the opening of the Conservative conference is distinctly old Tory, what with Gove announcing an end to rules which don't exist, Lord Young fulminating against often similarly imaginary elf 'n' safety outrages and Boris Johnson along with the CBI demanding at least a 40% participation threshold before strikes are allowed to take place, even when they'd never apply the same rationale to elections to parliament, the cut in child benefit which has now overshadowed all of the above seems to be similarly Blairite in motive. Similarly Blairite in motive for the reason that despite all the well thumbing of A Journey, it seems to be based on a fundamental misreading of how Blair repeatedly challenged Labour's so-called comfort zone.

On the surface, it looks to be right out of the Blair textbook. By taking on your own party over something they should instinctively oppose, it sends a message to the press that you're a strong leader and will take on your own vested interests, at the same time impressing the voters themselves, whether they agree or not. The key difference is that Blair did it on things which either didn't directly affect the public, didn't affect too many, or didn't affect those that were likely to campaign and protest vigorously, and was also helped enormously by the fairly benign economic backdrop and by having an opposition which was either a shambles, simply not a viable alternative or which actively supported him. Media support or acquiescence also had a strong supporting role. When Blair did it on foundation hospitals, academies, tuition fees and on Iraq (to name but four examples), one or more of these factors ensured that the measures went through and that he went on being leader. True, it was Iraq that eventually had a major role in his downfall, yet his initial "success" cannot be denied.

Where the Tories have gone wrong is manifold. Firstly, it's not at all clear that the party itself opposes universal benefit cuts; there's disgruntlement, sure, yet not outright opposition from the outset then gradual persuasion or loyalist support of the line coming down from the leadership.

Second is that this clearly affects exactly those who are natural Tory voters and does it right in the wallet, by far the most painful place.

Third, while some Tories might consider it a good thing to annoy the Daily Mail in the same way that Blair thought it wasn't a bad idea to at times to piss off the Guardian et al, the Daily Mail has both far more power, influence and readership.

Fourth, it's the manifest unfairness and stupidity of the measure, as well as it how it contradicts some of their family policy. While I personally don't agree with the argument that "services for the poor will always be poor services", and find it difficult not to sneer at how those earning almost twice the average wage can claim to be "stretched" already with little disposable income, the blatant idiocy of how a single parent earning over £45,000 a year will receive nothing while a couple earning £86,000 in total will still get the benefit is so transparent it's close to unbelievable that it was agreed upon. The Mail has splashed on how it'll impact on families with "stay at home" mums, something always close to their 1950s halcyon view of the perfect British society and associated nuclear family, with the husband off earning the wage while the little woman looks after the children, and it's difficult to believe that it won't be altered in some way before it comes into effect. If anything ever comes of the supposed "aspiration" to recognise marriage in the tax system it'll offset some of the loss, but almost certainly not all of it.

Fifth, while Labour is still somewhat in flux over what cuts it is and isn't going to oppose/defend, it looks likely they'll oppose any shift from a universal benefits system. They may not perhaps win many votes from those who'll lose out, and I think it'd be best to support the principle of the cut, just not the way the government's implementing it in such a cack-handed, regressive fashion, but opposition it will still be.

Finally, and while not alluded to above, it also breaches the Blairite tenet that you don't do anything which affects the aspirational middle classes which this directly does, right to the extent that it will mean those earning just below the threshold not taking a rise as they'll actually lose out through the loss of benefits.

While then it's hardly going to lead to an uprising, it is a clear example of how the government is already getting things wrong and how its debt to Blairism is already leading to difficulties, even if based on a misreading of how Blair operated. Certainly, it could be an attempt to put into action Osborne's otherwise ludicrous soundbite of how "we're all in this together", and also a first example of how the cuts are going to hit all sections of society, not just the poorest (although the benefits cap will certainly do that, and seems almost designed to lead to the evacuation of those on housing benefit from the inner cities of the south especially, also coincidentally where Labour still has support), yet you get the feeling this isn't going to be the start of a habit of aggravating the "base" for little overall benefit. It ought more than anything to give a post-Blair Labour party hope: the country desperately needs an alternative to the triangulation of his and Brown's era, and also to the gone off half-cocked tribute attempt from the new Blairites. Ed Miliband has to be able to provide one.

Labels: child benefit, Conservative party conference, Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, George Osborne, Michael Gove, spending cuts, the new Blairites, the new Tories, welfare reform

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10/04/2010 10:38:00 PM | Permalink | | links to this post

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Liam Fox and a truly appalling leak.

It is remarkable, is it not, just how little comment there's been about the calling in of the police, albeit the Ministry of Defence police, to search for the source of the leak of a letter from Liam Fox to David Cameron which sets out in no uncertain terms just how the Strategic Defence and Strategy Review is going to affect his department? The nearest obvious comparison to make is with the arrest of Damian Green a little less than 2 years ago, having received numerous Home Office documents from Chris Galley, a civil servant who had previously applied to work for none other than Damian Green.

Clearly this isn't anywhere near as serious as this hasn't involved anti-terrorist police entering parliament and actually arresting an MP. Nonetheless, it still seems to be an over-the-top reaction to a leak which many would claim to have been in the public interest, regardless of how it involved private correspondence with the prime minister. The letter, while about national security, does not potentially put anyone in actual danger and should definitely not breach the Official Secrets Act. Things do however seem just as murky as they initially were in the Damian Green case: supposedly the MoD doesn't know who ordered the search, or at least wasn't telling the press.

Murkier still is that most initial suspicions as to who leaked the letter fell on Fox himself. Throughout the summer there's been numerous stories about how Fox has been doing battle against the Treasury, most notably over the potential replacement of Trident, with the MoD arguing for it to be paid for out of a separate fund from the defence budget, with George Osborne apparently refusing to budge. The letter however goes even further, Fox directly spelling exactly what might be lost should the SDSR turn into a more comprehensive spending review. It reads, as Mark Urban just said on Newsnight, like it was made to be leaked, with Fox appealing almost desperately and hinting at the consequences politically for the coalition should things continue as they are going, risking have their words on defence being the government's first priority being thrown back at them, the morale of the armed forces potentially damaged. It in fact surely edges into hyperbole; after all, this was a government which also came to power pledging to cut heavily. Liam Fox knew damn well that there were going to be "draconian" cuts; he himself argued for them, and it's not as if the defence budget isn't ripe for savings.

Special pleading similar to that from Fox is doubtless going on across Whitehall as October the 20th looms ever closer. Would however a minister go so far as to leak a letter himself, or if not, get an aide or sympathiser to do so? Without knowing who called in the MoD police, and on what authority, it's difficult to able to ascertain whether Fox would have taken the risk; did Cameron suggest the inquiry so as to be certain that his defence secretary isn't playing him off against the right-wing press, always sensitive to any sort of defence cuts? As ever, the question primarily has to be who benefits, and it's fairly clear that for the moment at least it's Fox, however much he protests about how appalling it is that such private letters have found their way into the hands of the Telegraph. More than anything, it just proves the point that you can change the government, but you can't change how they react when the press gets hold of "sensitive" information. Should something which benefits Labour and not the defence secretary go missing, one has to wonder what the response will then be.

Labels: Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, Damian Green, David Cameron, defence, defence spending, hypocrisy, leaks, Liam Fox, politics, spending cuts

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9/29/2010 10:57:00 PM | Permalink | | links to this post

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

A new generation for change?

It would be unkind and unfair to categorise Ed Miliband's first speech proper as Labour party leader as being remarkable only in being unremarkable. No speech which challenged so much of what became New Labour orthodoxy, even if without offering any actual alternative in many cases, could possibly be described as such. It was however, in spite of the content, delivered soporifically, nervously and received in a similar fashion by the audience, unsure on many occasions whether they should be applauding or not. Harriet Harman was certainly not the only person in the hall who should have been pulled up for her hypocrisy in applauding the new leader's personal admission that he believed the Iraq war to have been wrong.

The stony faces of the old Labour cabinet on hearing Miliband go the mile which was probably required, cynical as it also undoubtedly was, may go some way in winning back old supporters, delighted at seeing them aghast at their new overlord raking over the past which they themselves refused to revisit. All the same, this was hardly Khrushchev in 1956, and probably not even Theresa May and the "nasty party", not least because Miliband is not in a position of power in which to put his changes into immediate effect, even if we knew what they were going to be in practice. More like Khrushchev, Miliband was also complicit in some of which he denounced. It takes a lot of chutzpah to talk of how his parents arrived in Britain and the opportunities which this country gave them when he voted in the last parliament for a stricter asylum system. It takes even more to lament how Labour got it wrong on civil liberties and how the party should return to being the party of them when he voted for all of the key measures which made this a less free country. For someone who quite rightly said the most important word in politics should be humility, he should have added that he had personally got it wrong, even while being loyal to his party. It would have emphasised his authenticity exactly when he needs to be seen as fundamentally honest.

This was first and foremost, somewhat like Nick Clegg's effort last week, a speech directed at his party rather than the country. It was also incredibly formulaic, even as introductory speeches go. It ticked all the modern political speech boxes: the moving life story, the love for parents and family, the quoting of the possibly imaginary "ordinary" voter he encountered, concerned about the effect immigration was having on his friend's wages; the only thing he didn't thankfully do was emulate Cameron and walk around the stage in the deeply insincere manner which he has so perfected, operating without notes. If this was truly the result of work since late Saturday afternoon, then it shouldn't be judged too harshly. He attempted to master the difficult balance of putting the conference at their ease and flattering them while also having to address their failings, even if they weren't personal ones. He told them they had lost 5 million votes; how do we get them back?

No one should have expected him to provide immediate answers and he didn't. Rather, it at times seemed instead like an uncomfortable, overly confrontational attempt to get everything that went wrong with New Labour out in the open and done with in one massive purge, echoes again of Krushchev, however deceptive. As such it didn't really work, not least because he seemed to get things the wrong way round at least once, or at least the transcript has him as doing so, strangely during his espousal of what New Labour got right: surely they were right to emphasise that being tough on the causes of crime was as important as being tough on crime itself, not the other way round? Or was that a Freudian slip, based on guilt at how New Labour had in fact been tough on crime but forgot about the causes in its perpetual triangulation strategy? (Update: neither, see comments)

That which he did get right was well put across, rising above the general tenor: he promised not to oppose every cut, he recognised that migration from within the EU had not been handled properly, was emollient on welfare reform, refusing to give in to stigmatisation, and was strongest of all on admitting the party had become naive about markets, recognising that work is not all that matters, correctly identifying the paradox of being the biggest consumers in history whilst yearning more than ever for that which business cannot provide. If he was to develop thinking on that in particular then he will move the party beyond just policy and into a strategy for changing the way the country feels and thinks about itself, vital to providing a vision of an alternative, optimistic Britain.

The real problems with both the speech and him personally were unfortunately manifest. On paper, it reads well, or at least as well as any recent speech by any main political leader in this country; spoken, he just couldn't seem to find the right delivery. It had echoes at times of Iain Duncan Smith making his ill-fated quiet man conference address; it really was that bad. Certainly, he's got more than enough time to alter that, but first impressions do have an impact. For someone who's just spent the last four months speaking day after day to audiences it was especially lacking. Moreover, that the rhetoric was all but identical in places to that of either Clegg or Cameron also stands against it; perhaps we shouldn't expect anything drastically different when he is superficially so similar to both men and that style is deemed to be successful, yet that doesn't alter how empty it felt.

Worst of all was the idea that he somehow represents a new generation, a new generation for change as the slogan abysmally has it (and surely we can also now consign Kings of Leon to the dustbin of musical history now that they're the soundtrack to the Labour party conference). We really can't seem to get away from change as a motif, as vacuous as it currently is, and Miliband's variety is the most dubious yet. The fact is that even if he himself is leading this new generation, the vote for the shadow cabinet overwhelmingly shows that it's the same old faces that will be making it up. Can they really expect us to swallow that they will be the agents of change, sweeping away New Labour's mistakes when so many sat in angry silence as Iraq was dealt with? It simply isn't credible, and as a result, the entire speech wasn't. As argued yesterday, just as Miliband needs to be determined to make this a one-term government, and he did an efficient job of attempting to woo disaffected Liberal Democrats in the main, especially by not even mentioning them, he also needs to be prepared to fail, and anoint a real new generation that can beat the Tories in 2020 if he doesn't manage it in 5 years' time.

If it's odd to be disappointed and pessimistic after a speech which did so much which those of us on the left urged to be done for so long to reinvent Labour, part of it is the same nervousness that Miliband himself must have felt. How will the voters react? How will the media react to this obvious repudiation of New Labour, even when it should be apparent to everyone just how the party needs to move on from that era? Some will undoubtedly continue to persist in the delusion that it was the tiny movement from ultra-Blairism under Brown which resulted in the party losing, even when it was obvious he would have led the party to a defeat potentially even worse than Brown did. Most of all though it's the feeling that Ed simply cannot lead the party to victory, regardless of what he does. It's true, as Jenni Russell writes, that David Miliband could not have given the speech which his brother did today. It also remains apparent that Ed is still the best possible leader of the five contenders. It's simply that he, like the other four, is simply not the clean break with the past which the party desperately needed. It's difficult to be the optimists when there is still so much to be disillusioned, concerned and worried about.

Labels: Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, David Miliband, Ed Miliband, end of Labour, Labour leadership contest 2010, Labour party conference, New Labour, politics

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9/28/2010 11:03:00 PM | Permalink | | links to this post

Monday, September 27, 2010

Ed Miliband and the doomers.

For my sins, I support Arsenal. When I can't get a stream going I also, for my sins, tend to go to Arseblog and watch the arses (comments) go by (and even occasionally contribute, although not under this name, potential stalkers). Whenever we either aren't winning, or, rare as it is, are losing, the "doomers" turn up. The players are useless, Wenger's a moron who needs to be sacked, our season's over because we're losing our first game of the season, Fabregas is really going to leave this time because the rest of the team are hopeless lazy wasters, and so it goes. Should we then come back on terms, or win, the opposite is the case. If we actually end up losing, the amount of doomers multiplies exponentially. Such is football.

Such also is politics. For the Blairites and some David Miliband supporters, his brother's victory leaves the party doomed to defeat at the next election. MPs and the party members themselves rejected Ed, even if only by slight margins and due to the vagaries of the incredibly odd system of AV which Labour's electoral college uses. Instead it was the unions, who overwhelmingly supported Ed, who swung it for him. Already those most disgruntled at the result have been murmuring of changing the system for next time, or, as the intention must be, for in roughly 5 years time. The tabloids will moniker him "Red Ed" and bring up his union "bully boy" backers constantly, each week David Cameron will remind him of how his own colleagues on the green benches behind him didn't vote for him as they squirm uncomfortably, and the public, even as they suffer the cuts being inflicted by the coalition, will fear how the leader will be in the pocket of the far worse strikers and wreckers.

Some of this is, admittedly, my own immediate analysis. Winning thanks to the union section of the electoral college was hardly ideal, and it will cast a pall for a while over his leadership, but it's hardly going to lose Labour the next election on its own. The right-wing press, not just the tabloids, have already set out to make the "Red Ed" shortening a permanent one. That it is already tedious and tiresome, as well as ridiculous, will mean it will soon disappear. After all, if there's one thing the public hates, it's being told how they're supposed to view someone when they haven't even had a chance to begin to make their own mind up. Sure, the media influences how they make up their mind, and it will have an impact, but this isn't even beginning to approach the level of sniping and demonisation that went on in the 80s right up until the 92 election. If anything, it's simply pathetic: really Daily Mail, Ed hasn't condemned the "strike threat"? The fiend! He backs "higher taxes and wants to curb top pay"? Well, haven't they blown long and hard about the second part, except of course when it comes to Mr Dacre's yearly pay cheque? They actually seem far more concerned about how his son's a bastard and the father's name isn't on the birth certificate, which as usual tells you everything about the immoral Daily Mail's priorities.

At the same time, it's also difficult to see anyone who's really optimistic at this turn of events, despite what Dave and Laurie might think. Instead they're just accepting of it, and are waiting to see what comes next. All these claims that Ed ran the best, most inspiring and hopeful campaign are hogwash. He probably wasn't even the most competent. The choice essentially was between the unelectable in any form (Abbott), the Brown continuity candidate, even if he has a good line in oppositionism (Balls), the unrecognisable with no chance (Burnham), Blair without the charm (D Miliband) and the best of a bad lot and that's about it (E Miliband). Labour has spent the time after the election leading up to this, mostly doing nothing constructive, and the hope was that this result would leave it energised to take on the Tories, providing the kind of opposition which the coalition marriage of convenience desperately needs. If anything, the life seems to have been sucked out of it even more than after the election.

This was always going to be the problem when two personalities had so dominated the party over the last sixteen years, leaving it without anyone who could unite the two factions, and bereft also of anyone without allegiance who could move the party on from the New Labour era. All that's effectively happened, sadly, is that the soap opera has moved on from the TB-GBs which at times descended almost into a British equivalent of Kremlinology to now the sibling rivalry, with the shock twist of the upstart younger brother triumphing against the favourite. What's D Miliband going to do now? Is he going to petulantly throw in the towel and go off into the wilderness of academia and wait for Ed to fail? Or is he going to compliment his brother by becoming shadow chancellor, taking the battle to the wicked persecutor Osborne?

The best possible thing that could happen would be David deciding to leave politics entirely. That would frame it as a family tragedy, but would mean that Ed could get at least get on with the job, without having to put up with every slight detail of their relationship as ministers being scrutinised. It would also allow the new talent to rise to the top, if it can be described as that, and it's always worth remembering the advice of the sage Jarvis Cocker, who observed that shit floats. Labour desperately needs new blood, new ideas, a whole new generation.

For even while the "doomers" are almost always wrong, they do occasionally get things right in spite of themselves. Much of Labour's thinking (as well as that of bloggers and commentators) has been predicated on the public overwhelmingly rejecting the spending cuts and the damage that they inflict, or even if they don't, they will object to the economic impact they will undeniably have. What though if they don't? What if they decide that they rather like the coalition's reforms and if everything goes as the IMF predicts, they end up with some pleasing tax cuts come the end of the parliament? Labour is depending on everything going wrong, rather than anything going right, and there are no signs of them beginning to offer anything approaching an alternative. The Conservatives prior to the credit crunch were at least looking in different areas, and it emboldened them further, even if they hadn't and still haven't fully fleshed out the "Big Society" and other ideas.

Labour shouldn't be just planning on winning in 2015; it should be in contingency thinking about what should happen should it not win until 2020. When asked by an American I chat to (don't ask) about Ed Miliband, I rather patronisingly (for the American, not Ed) compared him potentially with John Kerry in 04; the Democrats believed that they could put up anyone and they would beat Bush. Kerry was a fine congressman and deserved to win, but didn't win over the American public. Labour isn't in quite such a deluded situation, but it isn't that far off. Ed Miliband could more than conceivably win in 5 years time, if he doesn't just move on from New Labour as he has rightly signalled but actively creates something which is more than just the sum of its parts. It has to be a party which is once again in tune with both the working and middle classes, a party which offers a genuinely bright future and a vision of a Britain which isn't just treading water but actively progressing. New Labour indulged and endorsed neo-liberalism until it became a conservative party in all but name, while at the same time having the worst tendencies of the authoritarian left. Ed Miliband seems to have understood that, but as yet has not articulated properly how he intends to change things. At the same time he needs to recognise that things might not go his way, and that the next generation needs to be groomed should he fail. If he does so he will have prepared his party far better for the future than the competing egos of Blair and Brown ever did.

Labels: Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, David Miliband, Ed Miliband, end of Labour, Labour leadership contest 2010, New Labour, politics

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9/27/2010 11:59:00 PM | Permalink | | links to this post

Monday, September 20, 2010

The Liberal Democrats and the anxiety of power.

It's become traditional when the party conferences come round yet again to take a look back and see what nonsense I wrote about them twelve months ago. This time last year the Liberal Democrats seemed to be, as usual, treading water. Nick Clegg, that eternal hopeless optimist, thought that this might be the long-awaited liberal moment even while everyone around him yawned. And I, in full Mystic Mogg mode, said that the Liberal Democrats deserved a chance even as the spectre of a hung parliament faded. In fairness to myself, the Conservatives were 17 points ahead of Labour at the time in the opinion polls.

Nevertheless, ahem. True, Clegg was wrong: it wasn't a liberal moment. Nor however was it a truly Conservative moment, as the election results attested. Far more controversial is whether we can still agree if the Liberal Democrats deserved that chance, now knowing just what sort of agreement would be reached with the Conservatives for the two parties to go into coalition. The problem is that so many, having voted for a party which promised not to cut until the recovery was secured, now find themselves have helped into power a party which turned that policy on its head as soon as it was offered the slightest trappings of government.

The party is more than just aware of that bargain as it gathers together in power for the first time in over 65 years; it actively pervades it. While the Conservative party conference will probably not be quite as triumphant as it would have been had Cameron won power outright, you expect that it'll be far more pleased with itself than the Liberals are in Liverpool. You'd also imagine that the atmosphere would be completely different if the result had been slightly different and Labour had still held the upper hand, presuming that Labour in power would have stayed with its previously articulated deficit reduction plan. As it is, there's both a sense of anti-climax and trepidation, with the delegates fearing the future, leaving the new government ministers having to face the tricky task of both recognising the anxiety many feel at having to take responsibility for the coming cuts, while also urging them to celebrate, or if not, at least be thankful for having gained office under first past the post, achieving so much in the process.

If the discomfort of sharing power with the Conservatives is already apparent amongst the rank and file, it doesn't show in the top ranks, or at least not amongst those most associated with the Orange Book. While Vince Cable mutters out loud about the effect the immigration cap is already having, Nick Clegg is going so far in his speech as to accentuate the positive effects working together is having and go to have: when he says "we have become more than the sum of our parts" you imagine a slightly over-the-top couple describing their close relationship, not two parties which away from civil liberties had many policies which were almost complete polar opposites. As unconvincing as his line is that "two parties acting together can be braver, fairer and bolder than one party acting alone", alluding to how two heads are usually better than one, which doesn't really work when parties almost always contain a multitude of differing views, he's right that it would have been seen as a rejection of the pluralistic politics the party has always identified with if they had let the Conservatives attempt to govern as a minority.

This was though fundamentally a speech directed at the party's supporters, not at those who voted Liberal Democrat and already regret it, nor really at a country which is equally worried about how savage the cuts are going to be, as Clegg himself suggested last year, even with the much increased media attention upon the event. Try as he did to play down just how sharp the slashes in spending would be as he appealed to public sector workers, claiming that the cuts would only reduce spending back to a 2006 level, it was mostly an exercise in semantics: the cuts might not take us back either to the 80s or the 30s, but such massive cuts in spending are the biggest since those eras, if not even larger in practice. He may have promised those in the north and in Scotland that the cuts will not have the same effect as they did then, and that the cuts are not ideological, yet there's nothing to suggest the private sector can currently pick up the slack from the public economy in those areas, while certain Conservatives, including those in senior government roles, actively do consider the cuts to be part of a political program aimed at shrinking the state rather than just eradicating the deficit.

Perhaps, as so often when it comes to conference speeches, what's just as instructive is deemed either unmentionable or forgotten about. Hence there's no mention of how the Institute for Fiscal Studies declared the first joint Conservative-Liberal Democrat budget to be regressive despite it being lauded otherwise by both parties, with Vince Cable deeming it one they could be proud of, nor was there any defence of its progressive intentions. Trident was left well alone, as was the previously toxic issue of abolishing or reforming tuition fees, left for Lord Browne's review to sort out.

It would certainly be churlish to describe the speech overall as anything other than well-constructed, in areas cogently argued and making the best of a difficult case to an unconvinced and concerned party. The best praise it can possibly be given is that it kept the devices so often used by politicians to a minimum: he only falls down completely when he bothers to inform us that he "believes in work". It may well be however his vision of a strong, fair, free and hopeful nation come 2015 which comes back to haunt him: if the cuts tip the economy into a double-dip recession then the imagined achievements the activists will be able to boast about come that year will be more than just overshadowed; they could well condemn his party to another 65 years in the wilderness.

Labels: conference season, Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, Liberal Democrat conference, Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, policy, politics, Vince Cable

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9/20/2010 10:39:00 PM | Permalink | | links to this post

Thursday, September 16, 2010

Slow start to the death of the BBC.

Just last month the Director-General of the BBC, Mark Thompson, finally did what he and the corporation should have done a long time ago: they came out fighting. During his MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh festival, Thompson defended the BBC's unique funding model, mocked James Murdoch and attacked Sky's increasing media dominance and failure to fund original British programming outside of sports and news, with the killer fact that despite now being the largest UK broadcaster by revenue, it spends the equivalent of ITV's entire programming budget on marketing while putting only £100m into new home-grown features, or about the same as Channel Five does despite Sky having fifteen times the turnover.

Less than three weeks later, what happens? The BBC Trust meekly submits to a zero-percent rise in the licence fee over the next two years, which even the hawkish culture secretary Jeremy Hunt finds to be thinking too far ahead, agreeing only to the first year, with a decision to be made about 2012/3 at a later date. Not that the BBC should suspect that this will change anything come the licence fee settlement to be secured in 2013: most predict that if anything, the licence fee faces being cut. The freeze is despite the last fee settlement, agreed and signed by Tessa Jowell for the last government, which pencilled in a 2% rise next year and between a 0% and 2% rise the year after.

Well, why not, some might ask. Every other publicly funded body is being asked to identify savings, ready for the cuts which are just around the corner. What's more, isn't it about time that the BBC spent the licence fee more wisely, cutting back on the highly paid executives and star talent, trimming the fat and getting into line with the current economic climate? That, it seems, is exactly the sort of argument which the BBC was anticipating and so has reacted to, avoiding any possibility of the government falling out with the corporation by not embracing the new spirit of the age. And it's true that some executives, especially on the radio side of things, have been receiving more than they probably would in the private sector, mainly thanks to how successful the BBC has long been and continues to be in that sector.

The problem is, as Mark Thompson outlined in his lecture, that the BBC has already been responding both to outside pressure and to an internal realisation that it's been spreading itself too thinly. Thousands of jobs have gone over the last six years, it's made many of its top stars take pay cuts or refused their exorbitant demands in order to stay (for which see Adrian Chiles and Christine Bleakley crossing over to ITV, although describing them as stars is perhaps pushing it), it's tackling its pensions deficit, triggering the planned strikes and it wants to go even further, as its own Putting Quality First document set out. Those cuts and changes already proposed a radically different BBC, one where it effectively emasculated itself in some areas, and also went against its very supposed principles of providing different unique content which the private sector either wouldn't or couldn't. While the BBC Trust saved 6 Music, at least for now, the Asian Network will be closed at the end of next year. Now the freeze in the licence fee effectively means the taking of a further £144m out of the corporation's current budgets. True, if the BBC was to close or privatise a couple of more worthy targets, such as either BBC3 or Radio 1, neither of which even come close to providing a unique service unavailable elsewhere, then that entire £144m could be reallocated. Sadly, those seem to be cuts which the corporation is too stubborn to even begin to consider.

If this sacrifice is intended to endear the corporation to the coalition come the next fee settlement, then it seems to be an incredibly short-sighted gesture. Mark Thompson made an argument against a cut in the fee which applies just as well to the freeze during his MacTaggart speech:

But do not believe anyone who claims that cutting the licence fee is a way of growing the creative economy or that the loss in programme investment which would follow a substantial reduction in the BBC's funding could be magically made up from somewhere else.
It just wouldn't happen. A pound out of the commissioning budget of the BBC is a pound out of UK creative economy. Once gone, it will be gone for ever.

It also reckons without the influence which Murdoch is going to wield in two years time, let alone the deal already done which led to him switching support from Labour to Cameron's Conservatives. All signs point by then to News International having swallowed Sky whole, with Vince Cable apparently unlikely to intervene. Claire Enders, the respected independent media commentator has said that this will represent a "Berlusconi moment", referring to the control which the Italian prime minister has over his country's media through his ownership of vast swathes of it. This would be even more drastic if Ofcom had been abolished or had its powers slashed, as Cameron suggested should happen prior to the election, picking on it directly as one of the quangos which should be cut down to size. While little has been said since the election, it could well be one of the targets in the general spending review. If politicians were scared of taking on News International when it owned only 39% of Sky, as they claim to have been as an explanation as for why they did next to nothing about allegations of phone-hacking at the News of the World, then the potential full spectrum dominance it will have in just a couple of years' time makes it even less likely that such abuses of power would be followed up and investigated to the fullest.

The enraging thing about the BBC is that from a position of power, with mass public support as multiple polls attest, it almost always plays the weakest hand possible. For 39p a day (approximately what £145.50 breaks down to) it represents incredible value for money, regardless of whether it's television, radio or their online content which you prefer to use, and almost everyone in the country uses on or the other and would miss it incredibly were it to slowly fade away. That's what the management essentially seems to be agreeing to, the slow death of a public service broadcaster which is too weak and pathetic to fight its own corner effectively. Perhaps in that respect it almost deserves what's coming.

Labels: BBC, BBC idiocy, Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, Jeremy Hunt, licence fee, Mark Thompson, News International, Ofcom, Rupert Murdoch

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9/16/2010 10:35:00 PM | Permalink | | links to this post

Monday, September 13, 2010

Don't cancel the Queen's speech; abolish it.

Compared to the "botched" reshuffle of 2003, when Tony Blair all but abolished the historic post of Lord Chancellor in one fell swoop, the proposed moving of the Queen's speech from autumn to spring is not likely to trouble too much those with a fetish for Britain's unique constitution and its arcane unwritten strictures. That hasn't however stopped Labour's shadow ministers, experiencing their last hurrah before their posts are put up for election when the new leader takes over, from objecting in terms similar to those expressed 7 years ago. While the reasons put forward for not holding a Queen's speech next year at all are far from water tight, given it would make sense to start as they mean to go on at the earliest opportunity, rather than skipping a year, and it does look like the government expects there to be serious opposition to the setting out of the cuts coming in comprehensive spending review, most will shrug it off. After all, even though Blair's botched reshuffle had such controversial beginnings, its chief aims, achieved through the 2005 constitutional reform act, established the supreme court replacing the law lords, removed the anomalies associated with the position of Lord Chancellor without abolishing the post itself and established a fully independent body to appoint judges, all thoroughly laudable and necessary changes.

While the reason for moving the Queen's speech is to ensure it ties in with fixed term parliaments, as well as also getting rid of the shortened final parliament at the end of a term prior to a election, there's more than a case for not just cancelling the speech next year but abolishing it in its entirety. The state opening of parliament and connected speech by monarch setting out the government's proposed legislation programme which goes with it are not legally or constitutionally required; instead they are purely ceremonial and traditional, although it does provide a vivid example of the separation of powers and bring together all three branches of government for one special occasion. Increasingly, as with much else surrounding parliament and the monarchy, much of it seems to be continued with not out of any great fondness for the overblown pomp and circumstance, but for both tourism purposes and due to how no one seems to want to be the one to put an end to something which looks increasingly ridiculous as each year passes.

For those of us who hoped that with the Queen's advancing years the whole thing might be quietly forgotten as it becomes increasingly deranged for her to have to don the full regalia and read out a load of what is almost always nonsense inscribed on goatskin vellum to a posse of quaintly dressed lords and legislators, the bad news is that her place will likely be simply taken by the Lord Chancellor. One already suspects that she resents the entire charade, especially considering how she complained when posing in similar garb when being photographed by Annie Liebovitz. It isn't just though that expecting the Queen to keep taking her place in the anachronisms of parliamentary tradition is daft; modernising parliament in its entirety is long overdue. We could start by dispensing with the inane silliness: what, after all, is simply stopping the Speaker from reading out the proposed legislation program at the beginning of each new parliament, a more independent figure now than the Lord Chancellor will be should he be called upon at some point? Some almost certainly would describe it as cultural vandalism, just as they did Blair's "botched" reshuffle, and it's true that it would be consigning part of our cultural history to the dustbin. Parliament must though move with the times; not forgetting its heritage, yet still progressing as society itself has. Hell, perhaps afterwards we could even consider ridding ourselves of the monarchy itself.

Labels: Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, constitutional reform, parliament, parliamentary reform, politics, Queen's speech, Tony Blair

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9/13/2010 11:01:00 PM | Permalink | | links to this post

Thursday, September 02, 2010

It began with a photograph.

It all began with a photo. They could be father and son, although whether a grown up son and father could look so comfortable and at ease with each other as William Hague and Christopher Myers do in the moment they were snapped walking together in August of last year is far more difficult to quantify. Equally, if it's possible to both look like a complete tit and also almost vaguely cool at the same time, then Hague, complete with baseball cap, an echo of his notorious previous attempts to get down with the kids whilst Conservative leader, manages it. To hazard a complete guess, it's possible they were in fact joking about how Hague is casually dressed up, and the full series of shots shows us Hague removing the cap and then the sunglasses.

How the photographs came to be taken in the first place is a currently unexplained conundrum. It's credited to Xposurephotos, a paparazzi agency which doesn't list the following of then shadow cabinet ministers as among its priorities, although it also accepts submissions from the public. Whether it was just a citizen photographer who sighted Hague and Myers, or an actual paparazzo, that still doesn't answer whether the Mail on Sunday came across the photo of the insouciant pair first and the story of Myers' hiring as Hague's special advisor second. Perhaps they knew about the photographs at the time and were waiting, almost exactly a year as it happened, for a suitable occasion to use them. It certainly wouldn't have been anywhere near as good a story without it; the old cliché that a picture paints a thousands words couldn't be much more applicable.

We also don't know whether at the time the papers knew for a fact that Hague had, during the election campaign, shared a twin-bedded hotel room with Myers and were routing around for enough suitable justification to go with it. In any event, as Sunder Katwala and Stephen Tall note, the papers and Guido either worked off or with each other, until the cryptic Telegraph article on Saturday about the cabinet minister threatening legal action over accusations concerning his personal life, which seemed to see them back off. Then Guido went with the sharing hotel room story on Tuesday, complete with utterly crass cartoon, which first the FCO and then Hague himself yesterday felt had to be responded to.

This isn't then, as some have been claiming, an especially bleak day for blogging. It rather shows how incestuous the "mainstream" and supposedly ardently against-MSM likes of Guido have instead become. The story went from the innocuous and the implied in the Mail on Sunday to the none too subtle reference to Peter Mandelson in Guido's first post. It's also an example of how the legitimate covers the supposedly off limits: the questions about how qualified Myers was for the role of special advisor to Hague were perfectly fair and in the public interest, yet even then Guido was clearly grasping at the gay angle, asking first and foremost whether Hague had been on any international trips with Myers involving overnight stays. The claims that it was never about sexuality, or rather now that the issue is Hague's judgement, not that Westminster's guttersnipes were whispering about him shagging a 25-year-old man while his wife wasn't around are absurd and specious in the extreme.

Guido in any event isn't showing even the slightest remorse for Hague making yesterday's humiliating and embarrassing statement, and why should he? He can instead shift all of the blame onto Hague himself for being silly enough to share a room with an attractive young man supposedly unqualified for the job he was doing, especially when fellow Tory stuffed shirts are saying much the same thing. You can understand why Hague felt he had to respond to the rumours, yet to do so in a way in which Laurie Penny rightly suggests was demeaning to his wife and indeed to their failure to have children was completely unnecessary. Everything about it sits painfully, written as it almost is in a Lord Gnome-type pronouncement style; it also has more than a whiff of the Piers Merchant protesting too much bouquet wafting from it. This is doubly unfortunate when absolutely everyone, except Guido it seems accepts that Hague just liked the kid and got on well with him. Hague should have just let Guido get on with what he does and let the story die down, as it would have; that would have been the best course of action. He was however fully within his rights to respond. The real judgement call should perhaps of been how far the response itself went.

We shouldn't, as Mr Eugenides wisely advises, get too sanctimonious about the whole thing, and I was also one of those who back in the day noted John Prescott's alleged affair with Rosie Winterton, never proved and also still never disproved, as it I can now say it rightly should have stayed. Worth concluding on however is Guido's tweeted tribute to a tabloid editor:

We solve all the blog's ethical dilemmas by asking ourselves "what would Kelvin MacKenzie have done?"

When it came to accusations made that Elton John had used rent boys, MacKenzie believed them. When John sued, MacKenzie went one step further and published a story claiming that John had had his guard dogs' vocal cords cut, something so eminently disprovable that John must have immediately started estimating how big the payout would be. The stories in their totality turned out to be worth £1,000,000. The difference is that Guido prides himself on being above such recourse to legal action, even if Hague wanted to consider all his options. MacKenzie at least believed in the concept of "publish and be damned".

Labels: bloggocks, Christopher Myers, Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, Guido, homophobia, invented scandals, politics, William Hague

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9/02/2010 10:13:00 PM | Permalink | | links to this post

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Nick Clegg and a budget he can't be proud of.

As Tom Freeman and Sunder Katwala have gone to great pains to gently point out, Nick Clegg's complaint, repeated again today, that the Institute for Fiscal Studies hasn't taken into account what the coalition government might do in the future when delivering their verdict on the budget (even more regressive than they said previously) is not exactly the most compelling argument as to why we should disregard their reasoning.

Absurd as the notion is that the IFS should adjust their statistical models according to policies which have not yet been introduced and which probably have still not even been gestated yet, you can still just about see his point, you just have to frame it differently. The message he is presumably trying to get across is that we shouldn't judge the coalition on its first "emergency" budget, when many of the Liberal Democrat policies which the coalition agreed upon introducing are either yet to arrive or have only been started upon. And it would indeed have been perverse to judge New Labour on their first two budgets, especially when you consider what they did in the following years and how in their first two years of government they followed the spending limits bequeathed to them by the Tories.

The difference is that, as the IFS shows, it's as a direct consequence of the parts of Labour's budget which George Osborne didn't repudiate that their effort isn't even more potentially regressive, yet the coalition, in claiming that their budget is imbued with fairness and is overall progressive, gives them no credit for. The difficulty for Nick Clegg is that Vince Cable no less claimed that this budget was one they could be proud of; that's this budget, rather than an imaginary one in the future which will include measures which will show this initial IFS model to be completely inaccurate. While we shouldn't get ahead of ourselves, and 2014 is still a long way off, we can only make judgements based on Rumsfeld's known knowns, not his known unknowns. Either Clegg and his party accept that this budget did not have, as they claimed, "fairness hardwired into it", or they can instead argue that the real progressive measures are yet to come, ones which will put right the soaking of the poor yet to come. They cannot do both.

Labels: benefit system, Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, economics, George Osborne, Nick Clegg, politics, spending cuts, the budget, Vince Cable, welfare reform

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8/25/2010 10:41:00 PM | Permalink | | links to this post

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

The nonsense of middle class benefits.

One thing everyone should be able to agree about this septic isle of ours is the inhibiting and petty nature of our social class structure, as universally derided and mocked as anything else abroad, including by those Americans who define "middle class" as meaning not sleeping rough and eating out of dumpsters. This isn't, it should be stressed, the fault of any class in particular; anyone, regardless of what they might be defined as, can possess the most gigantic chip on their shoulder about their social status and those they consider either inferior or undeservedly superior to them. At the same time, class should never, ever be ignored. The dictum of 1-Speed-Bike is one which should always be stuck to: any movement that forgets about class is a bowel movement. Many of Labour's problems can be directly linked to the identity politics which superseded class with every other definition of self, all important, but all of which relegated the one other thing that unites and separates us more than anything else.

When certain universal benefits are therefore described or identified as "middle class", whether with those sardonic quotation marks around them or not, it's time to start making things clear. The great thing about the welfare state is in that in the vast majority of cases, it's completely blind to the claimant's background: it doesn't matter whether you're a banker who's just lost your job or a road sweeper, in almost all cases you'll qualify for either contribution based or income related jobseeker's allowance. The same is the case if you suddenly fall ill and find yourself no longer being able to work, regardless of what line of work you were doing: whether you qualify for either income support or employment and support allowance, your circumstances for the most part won't or shouldn't make that much difference. When you then describe the likes of child benefit or the winter fuel allowance as "middle class" benefits, on the virtue of the fact that you receive them for either procreating or reaching 60 years of age and so everyone who meets those criteria is eligible without having to be unemployed or ill, the implication is, even if it isn't made implicit, that the other varieties are either "working class" or "lower class" benefits. If we define what class someone belongs to purely on the basis of their financial income, which is hardly the most reliable of measures, that might just be about accurate, as despite what the tabloids will have you believe, most on JSA or IC or ESA temporarily and even long-term are only going to be scraping in the bare minimum the state decides they need to be able to live on. It almost goes without saying however that doing so completely ignores the circumstances of those prior to having to go cap in hand, a significant number of whom would not on any measure belong to what is still just about described as the working class.

Whether it says something about the prejudices or insecurity of those who describe such benefits as "middle class" or not is open to question. On the face of it, after all, the winter fuel allowance looks like a perfect example of a benefit that could be means tested in order to save money: although it's not even the beginnings of a guide, the Groan's letters page usually fills around the time it's paid with those who've given it to charity, having no need of it. Why then give it them in the first place? The difficulty comes in the expense which would come from deciding those who are economically secure enough to not need it, which would almost certainly have to be put at an arbitrary figure of either income, pension income or savings or all three combined, and which would be fiercely contested, leading to exactly the sort of dissent, grievance and bitterness which the current situation avoids. The universality of the system, some will argue, is what protects it; start chipping away at that and you end up with poor services for poor people, the benefits for the lower orders which the "middle class" ones imply already exist, and support for which will subsequently ebb away from.

It's not yet clear whether the winter fuel allowance or child benefit will turn out to be, like free milk for the under-fives, something which not even the coalition will touch for fear of coming across too much like the caricature of Tory-slashers past, and those Labour figures and partisans already crowing about how this either shows Cameron as lying or Labour's scaremongering during the election as accurate are at the very least jumping the gun, especially when as Dave Osler notes, this was exactly what Labour itself was considering doing last year. When however housing benefit is being slashed, much to the delight of many it should be noted, for the winter fuel allowance and child benefit to not at least be reviewed would be perverse, and introducing loaded labels into aspects of the welfare state shouldn't even begin to alter that.

Labels: benefit system, class, class war, Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, politics, spending cuts, welfare reform

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8/18/2010 10:33:00 PM | Permalink | | links to this post

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

100 days later.

Look past the 44% of those who think the coalition is doing a "good job in securing the economic recovery" over the 37% who believe the opposite in the latest ICM/Groan poll, and you'll find that despite this truly overwhelming "support for the cuts-based recovery strategy", as the paper puts it, Labour already finds itself at parity with the Conservatives, both earning 37% support, with the Lib Dems back on 18%.

This could be a rogue poll: it is August after all. Regardless though, as the Graun's archive of the polls going all the way back to 1984 shows, no winning party has so quickly lost its lead over the main opposition. It took 8 months after the 1987 election before Labour reached parity with Conservatives (although it then took another 7 before the party was to take the lead again), and even after Black Wednesday Labour only equalled the Tories' percentage score of voting intentions in the next poll, six months after the election. It would be 13 years before the Tories would come out on top again. This is, as yesterday's post set out, despite the fact that Labour is currently completely rudderless, without a leader let alone a direction, before the cuts have even begun to be properly outlined, let alone bite, and, it should be noted, with the press overwhelmingly supportive of both the coalition (or at least the Conservative part of it) and that aforementioned "cuts-based recovery strategy".

True, this is still all but meaningless for the moment, and it shows that support for the Liberal Democrats, despite ratings in other polls, is holding up well, even if down 6% on the election result. No one's going to be too worried about Labour drawing level in the middle of the silly season, even if it marks the coalition's 100th day. What's really going to be interesting to see is whether Labour starts to squeeze both the Lib Dem and Tory support; 37% in any case is hardly a bad place to be after 3 and a bit months.

Labels: Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, Labour, opinion polls, politics, silly season, spending cuts

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8/17/2010 10:33:00 PM | Permalink | | links to this post

Monday, August 16, 2010

Why I'm not joining the Labour party.

You might recall that a couple of months back I wrote a pretty dreadful off-the-cuff piece on how I might be joining the Labour party, having been moved to reappraise my long opposition to the party while in power. Since then I've reappraised the reappraisal, and moved by Sunny's decision to join, it's worth taking a look at the reasons why now isn't the time to do so.

First off, the only real legitimate reason to join Labour at the moment is to vote in the leadership election. The party certainly hasn't since the general election presented any real reason to join it through its performance in opposition, which has been woeful at best and damning at worst. True, the party has been more concerned with the election of that new leader than anything else, but that hasn't stopped the current old shadow cabinet from deciding to oppose the bill setting up the referendum on the alternative vote on the specious grounds that the equalising of constituencies will amount to gerrymandering. To go from supporting AV to ostensibly opposing it in just over three months is an absolutely ludicrous position, and bodes ill for how the party intends to fight the coalition over the next potential five years. Whilst it's perfectly reasonable to want to have a say in who leads the opposition, we all know that it's going to be a Miliband. And again, while it matters which Miliband it is, and my preference would be Ed, it isn't going to make that significant a difference: both will undoubtedly keep the party either dead in the centre or move it very slightly to the left. Indeed, the only candidate who might move it further would be Diane Abbott, and she isn't going to win.

Sunny makes a good, but hardly watertight case in his piece for joining something, just almost certainly not Labour:

I don’t think it’s possible to sit by idly while the Coalition tries to better Thatcher in destroying the welfare state. I wanted to get involved in the fight-back but I also wanted to be part of a political movement that articluated an alternative.

Trouble is, we don't yet know just how far the coalition is going to go. Admittedly, the omens are far from good, and there's already much to oppose which has so far been suggested, but we're not going to find out just where the cuts are going to fall and how heavily until October. Sure, we should start to mobilise now, yet from within Labour? Almost certainly not.

Why? Because the candidates for the leadership have not even begun to articulate that alternative. The hustings so far have been raking over the past, which any party which has just lost power needs to do, yet with the exception perhaps of Ed Balls none of the candidates have set out a course on what they need to do now to oppose the coalition, let alone rebuild the party to an extent where it can win again. All of them have successfully identified areas of policy which Labour while in power got wrong, and in their Fabian essays, probably the best distillation so far of where they stand and where they're going, all recognise that the party has been too managerial, that it triangulated far too much and that it lost the support of core voters for various different reasons whom they need to win back. Andy Burnham, bless him, even makes an attempting at rehabilitating "socialism", even if he has to pair it with that other should be dead New Labour buzzword "aspirational" to do so. None of this however at the moment amounts to anything other than fine words, nor should we be surprised that it doesn't. When the coalition itself doesn't yet know how hard and how fast it's going to cut, we can't expect them to build an alternative to something which itself doesn't yet exist. Hence why joining Labour now is a daft idea: let's first see what the new leader does when the time comes.

We shouldn't however got our hopes up even then. At the moment most are assuming that even if the coalition lasts the full five years, Labour will be able to effectively clean up, such will be the anger over the cuts, the wholesale desertion from the Liberal Democrats of the floating voters and general discontent at how things will have gone. What though if that doesn't happen? What instead if this is Labour's turn to experience what the Tories did from 1997 to 2005? Just like the Tories suffered from being unable to exorcise the ghost of Thatcher, such was the grip of Blair and Brown over Labour that we now have a whole group of leadership candidates whom with the exception of Diane Abbott can be identified either as Blairite or Brownites, fairly or not. As much as the party might want to move on, it's struggling to do so for the simple reason that none of the candidates even begin to represent a clean break from the party's period in government. This would have been different if either Jon Cruddas or even John Denham had decided to stand, neither of whom fit comfortably into either category, have their own ideas and could have at least been in with an outside chance of winning. Moreover, even with many of the shadow cabinet retiring or returning to the backbenches once the leadership election is over, it's not clear where the new blood is going to come from. It's in all likelihood going to take until 2015 for the rising talent and new MPs to make a proper impact, conveniently maybe for when Labour needs to choose its next leader.

Sunny also writes:

Given the Coalition’s agenda, the time to just shout from the sidelines and hope the system changes is over. We have to campaign for it and get involved in the political system. We have to try and influence that direction. Labour’s values used to be different, and it can change again. That doesn’t necessarily mean political wilderness, because

Labour is at an intellectual juncture with the centrists devoid of ideas, vision or energy. It’s no wonder many of them are now joining the Coalition as advisers.

The problem is that it isn't just the centrists who are devoid of ideas: the entire party is. The party's election manifesto, lest we forget written by Ed Miliband, is testament to that, and even with the addition of his thinking on a living wage rather than simply a minimum one it remains a tired document, just as the party itself is tired. It needs revitalising, but while those previously outside the party can help it's fundamentally the role of those inside to recognise such is the case, and they show no indication of doing so. This is, as Jamie so succinctly puts it, the party of Phil Woolas. It's the party of Alan Johnson, declaring that he doesn't think anything the party did which affected civil liberties was wrong. It's the party of Jack Straw, disingenuous, dissembling and the consummate politician to the very last. Labour as it stands is an authoritarian, centralising and centrist party which has yet to even begin to realise where it went wrong, and in the shape of David Miliband at least has little to no inclination to change any of that.

If the cuts turn out to be as harsh as we fear them to be, let alone if the feared double-dip recession becomes reality, then the real opposition to them is unlikely to be led by Labour but instead by the trade unions and at the grassroots. The record of Labour support for such campaigns in the past has been sketchy at best, despite so many current Labour MPs and indeed leadership candidates expressing horror at their own memories of the 80s, and there's no reason to assume anything will be different this time, especially as Labour's connections with the trade unions continue to dwindle as MPs and activists fail to find common cause. A single member, even one as well connected and influential as Sunny, is highly unlikely to make much difference on that score.

Sunny concludes:

Labour has to become pluralist, outward-looking and visionary. It needs conviction in the values that it was founded on. It needs to attract back millions of voters. I feel I can better campaign for that from within the party than outside it.

All of this is true. Key will be whether the party itself is willing to be receptive to those aims, and at the moment it seems to be interested only in power for its own sake, just as it was after 97, rather than in any great internal soul-searching. I could be too pessimistic: this time next year the new leader might have articulated the alternative to the cuts in such a way that makes the coalition's blaming of Labour for everything start looking like the big fat lie which it is; the party might be leading the opposition to the worst, most destructive cuts while recognising and supporting alternatives elsewhere; it could have left behind the Blair and Brown years and be outlining the beginnings of a new era of Labour thinking; and it could have dislodged, even abandoned the authoritarianism and centralising nature previously inherent within the party. Equally, it might be just as much in the doldrums as it is now. Either way, joining the party at this time will change nothing. The left needs to unite and fight; it just doesn't need to do so from within the confines of a party.

Labels: civil liberties, Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, economics, inequality, Labour, Labour leadership contest 2010, personal shit, politics, spending cuts, Sunny Hundal

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8/16/2010 09:53:00 PM | Permalink | | links to this post

Obsolete

Wednesday, October 06, 2010

Fairness and fatutity.

Tuesday, October 05, 2010

Where are the other parties in all of this?

Monday, October 04, 2010

The not quite Blairite stupidity of the coalition's child benefit cut.

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Liam Fox and a truly appalling leak.

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

A new generation for change?

Monday, September 27, 2010

Ed Miliband and the doomers.

Monday, September 20, 2010

The Liberal Democrats and the anxiety of power.

Thursday, September 16, 2010

Slow start to the death of the BBC.

Monday, September 13, 2010

Don't cancel the Queen's speech; abolish it.

Thursday, September 02, 2010

It began with a photograph.

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Nick Clegg and a budget he can't be proud of.

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

The nonsense of middle class benefits.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

100 days later.

Monday, August 16, 2010

Why I'm not joining the Labour party.

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