John Harris

SNP’s Humza Yousaf: ‘You have to keep being radical with your ideas’

Wednesday, April 25th, 2012

How does an ‘alternative’ party that finds itself in power preserve its credentials?

On the wall of Humza Yousaf’s office in central Glasgow there’s a recent spread from the Scottish edition of the Sun. “I’m just as comfortable with a chapati in my hand as a bag of chips,” says the characteristically subdued headline, leading into text that celebrates Yousaf as “the motorbike-riding, kilt-wearing nationalist who also cooks a mean curry”, and gets in a lather about his “‘united colours of Benetton’ family home”.

In England and Wales, talk about politics being in the midst of serious change is somewhat speculative, whereas in Scotland, it’s a matter of hard fact. Alex Salmond and the SNP remain almost ludicrously dominant. Labour can feel borderline irrelevant, even in its traditional heartlands: the party has already lost its once-immovable majority on Glasgow city council, and come 3 May, there are serious predications that control will be won by the nationalists. The Tories are a negligible Scottish presence, and the fate of the Lib Dems was pointedly illustrated by last year’s Inverclyde byelection, where they managed just 2% of the vote. There is, moreover, the looming referendum on independence. Compared with the reality of 10 years ago, everything has changed; and Yousaf himself is a reminder of huge shifts within Scottish nationalism itself – specifically, the way that it has slipped free of any identification with any particular section of Scottish society, and found itself able to speak to the whole country.

An MSP since last year, Yousaf – who is 27 – is an assured, articulate presence, tipped for great things. His father, who owns a successful Glasgow accountancy firm, joined the SNP in 1974, when one of his teachers at night school convinced him that the party was more worthy of his commitment than Labour. As with Salma Yaqoob, Yousaf’s own political epiphany came in the wake of 9/11. Within weeks, having split off from a protest against the invasion of Afghanistan, he found himself in a human blockade of the nearby Charing Cross exit of the M8: “We had our two hours, freezing our arses off. And that was it: I was hooked.”

He recalls 25 coaches going from Glasgow’s Central Mosque to the huge London march against the Iraq war, and how Salmond’s opposition to the invasion decisively pulled him towards the SNP – before dispensing his account of why Scotland has been so radically transformed. The story takes in Tony Blair’s toxic effects on the reputation of the Labour party, the credit crunch and subsequent economic crash, and now the arrival of the Westminster coalition – all of which, he says, has fed into the SNP successfully turning old orthodoxies on their head. But even in England, he senses that the usual rules of politics are under threat.

“People are just looking for that alternative: there’s no doubt about it. The Liberal Democrats, I think, would have been the ones who would have benefited from it, but they no longer can. As much as I really don’t like George Galloway at times, I have to tip my hat to him when he says things like: ‘If a backside had three cheeks, they’d be those parties.’”

He concedes that in its second term in power, the SNP has to guard its “alternative” credentials very carefully: “You have to keep being radical with your ideas. We’re lucky: we have a completely distinct policy on independence, which helps us a lot.” The next bit is put beautifully: “But there’s always a danger of being one of one of those butt cheeks.”

On this point, I wonder: though he gives me the usual assurances that his party is a pretty radical, left-of-centre force, aren’t such claims at least slightly undermined by those SNP-ers whose views often seem to put them rather closer to free-market Tories? I’ve met a few. “We’ve now got 22,000 members,” he says. “And not all of them are left of centre … not everybody sings from exactly the same hymn sheet. But generally there’s a consensus in the party that we’re comfortable with being a left-of- centre, social democratic party. To the left of Labour? The current Labour party, sure.”

Not entirely surprisingly, he thinks the independence referendum will go the SNP’s way. But I wonder: what does he think of the idea that if Scotland leaves the union, he and his SNP colleagues will effectively be leaving the English likes of me to eternal Tory government?

“No!” he shoots back, and sketches out one of the most interesting scenarios that might result from the Scots going it alone: an English realignment, whereby leftwing people south of the border might discover the courage of their convictions, whether inside the Labour party or out. “The prospect of an independent Scotland is a challenge for left progressives in England – to wake up, and start being more robust about what they believe in. And if anything, a strong left of centre, independent Scotland would be something to aspire to: ‘If they can do it, why can’t we?’”

• To comment on this or any other article in the New Radicals report, please go here

Posted in Guardian RSS | No Comments »

Plaid Cymru’s Leanne Wood: ‘I looked at local politics. I didn’t like what I saw’

Wednesday, April 25th, 2012

Her leadership victory sent a ripple of both excitement and apprehension through her party’s collective psyche

Leanne Wood is a 40-year-old mother of one, and a former probation officer. Her Twitter feed comes with a neat summary of her politics: “Welsh Socialist and Republican. Environmentalist. Anti-racist. Feminist. Valleys.”

When she won her party’s leadership contest back in March, you could sense two conflicting reactions rippling through the Welsh nationalists’ collective psyche: excitement about such a radical politician taking the top job; and from more conservative quarters, a real trepidation about what she might do with her new role. During the leadership campaign, one of her senior colleagues had issued a thinly veiled warning about the dangers of what he called “Fisher-Price politics”. But enough Plaid members decided to ignore this rather patronising advice, and give Wood her chance, something she traces to our turbulent times: “People are radical, and they want radical solutions to the situation we’re in,” she says.

Before becoming Plaid’s leader, Wood was chiefly famed for an episode in 2004, when she upset some members of the Welsh Assembly by referring to the Queen as “Mrs Windsor”, and found herself temporarily excluded from proceedings. Passionate and prone to shoot from the hip, she doesn’t seem to fit any of the usual political stereotypes – even when it comes to her own party.

Plaid’s traditional heartlands are north and west Wales, and the party has usually expected its leaders to be fluent Welsh speakers. Wood is still learning the language, and hails from the post-industrial heart of Labour-dominated south Wales. Her nationalism is solidly pragmatic rather than romantic: She believes in Welsh independence not primarily as a matter of national identity, but the best way of pulling her country away from a system in which government “puts all its effort into promoting London and the south-east, and neglects the periphery”.

As with so many people who have found a home on British politics’ outside-left, Wood links some of her convictions to Labour’s failures and shortcomings, and the way it has long behaved in its rock-solid heartlands. She grew up in the Rhondda Valley in a Labour-voting family, but any sense of loyalty to the party soon palled. “I looked at local politics, and I didn’t like what I saw,” she says. “I saw mainly older men, with rightwing politics, and a real sense of entitlement – that they just deserved to get people’s support, regardless of their politics, and how they operated.”

I meet Wood on a Thursday morning in the town of Cwmbran, near Newport – way outside Plaid’s usual stamping grounds, where there are only two Welsh nationalists on the local council. We talk in the back room of a local community centre, where one Plaid councillor has been energetically promoting a self-help group for people who have suffered strokes: an example, Wood tells me, of the kind of community activism that might open up new opportunities.

Her party faces a steep climb, to say the least – support for Welsh independence has long held steady at around 10%, and after four years of sharing power in Cardiff with Labour, Plaid finished third in the last Welsh assembly elections, behind the Conservatives. But Wood insists that the SNP’s success in Scotland proves that politics is now in flux as never before.

“I think the context has changed, massively,” she says. “Since 2008, lots of things have been turned on their heads for people: old certainties are not certainties any more. And that’s opened up the space for radical politics. I may not have won the leadership election had the banking crisis not happened.” She goes on: “If you can offer some hope of a different kind of structure to base our society around, and a different set of values in opposition to the ones that drove the crisis, then maybe we’ve got some light at the end of the tunnel. I think people are open to different ideas.”

Even if you’re being generous, Wood’s vision of an alternative can feel like a utopian work in progress. She talks me through the essentials: “changing the most basic structures of the economy” by encouraging co-operatives and employee participation, pushing for Wales to become a specialist in green technologies, and aiming at national self-sufficiency in food and fuel. “I don’t think that Plaid Cymru can overturn world capitalism,” she says, with a wry smile. “I’m not saying that. But what I think we can do is, if people are up for this, then we could transform our communities, and create work for people.”

Her ideas definitely represent a position well clear of the Westminster consensus. I wonder, though: given that her focus is on Wales alone, what does she think people in England ought to do? “Move to Wales,” she laughs, before mentioning the leftwing voices who are beginning to advocate an English parliament, and then correcting herself. “It’s got to be down to people in England to find the solution,” she says, a little apologetically. “I wouldn’t be very happy if people in England starting telling us how to do our politics, so I’m not going to do it back.”

One last question: given her new job as party leader, she’ll presumably have to turn out at the kind of official occasions when she’ll meet the Queen, and be expected to bow, at least. What’s she going to do?

She looks mildly horrified. “Well, I won’t be doing that. I question this whole thing about deference. I just think in 2012, that we should all strive for equality as human beings, really. And the idea that you bow to someone, to me, is anathema.”

• To comment on this or any other article in the New Radicals report, please go here

Posted in Guardian RSS | No Comments »

Green party’s Adam Ramsay: ‘We can replace the Lib Dems as the third party’

Wednesday, April 25th, 2012

Will the latest generation of green activists finally help the party break through?

If there is such a thing as a new, non-mainstream politics, its loudest expression has not been heard in party offices, or council chambers, let alone the House of Commons. Instead, it’s been a new crop of protest movements – UK Uncut, Occupy, the spontaneous coalition that briefly came together over the issue of unpaid work experience – that has most glaringly embodied a new mood, repeatedly kicking issues into the headlines with far more oomph than you get from most politicians.

Thirty years ago, increasing numbers of people combined such activism with membership of the Labour party. That still happens, just about, but there is a much more solid intersection between protest and less conventional politics – which is what brings me to a scruffy coffee shop near Paddington station in central London, and an hour-long conversation with 26-year-old Adam Ramsay. One of the Green party’s brightest young minds, he currently has his sights set on a council seat in his adopted home city of Oxford, but he’s also an energetic specialist in direct action: back in March 2011, he was one of the 150 people arrested when UK Uncut activists occupied Fortnum & Mason, and among 10 later found guilty of aggravated trespass.

Ramsay joined the Greens in 2001, when he was 15. “I was in Scotland, where there’s PR,” he says. “There was a Green MSP, and a socialist MSP. That was the first flavour of multi-party politics in Britain.” The Labour party, he says, “looked boring and old and not relevant to what I was interested in. This was two years after the Battle of Seattle: a lot of what people were talking about was global power systems, the WTO, the IMF, the world bank, climate change, global trade rules.”

There are, he explains, three elements within British green politics: the kind of veteran “ecologist liberals” represented by the Greens’ London mayoral candidate Jenny Jones; more left-leaning people who joined the party towards the end of the 1980s, like their current leader Caroline Lucas; and Ramsay’s own lot: what he calls “the Iraq war generation, which blurs into the cuts generation: people who are students now”. The middle group, he says, tends to side with his faction, and the result is an increasing emphasis on such issues as inequality and the public/private balance, as well as the Green staples of sustainability and climate change. “There’s more of us now, so we win,” he says. “And in terms of ideas and energy – we run the party.”

Ramsay’s political activities extend into the distance. By way of a day job, he’s the activism, volunteering and events manager at the Oxford-based People & Planet, an organisation integrally involved in Occupy London. He’s on the board of trustees of the pressure group UK Feminista, and serves as the co-editor of a vibrant blog called Bright Green. He’s also a member of Compass, the group that grew out of the Labour party, but now admits Greens, Lib Dems, nationalists and people with no party ties, providing a flavour of how politics is changing, at speed.

One question has to be asked: the great Green breakthrough seems to get talked up every six or seven years, but – notwithstanding their successes in Brighton and Norwich – the great leap forward has yet to materialise. Why is that?

“Well, we’ve been very good at failing. And the problem with that is you get very good at explaining away that failure: ‘It’s the electoral system,’ and all this bollocks. Partly it’s about ambition, and leadership. We should be saying is: ‘We can replace the Lib Dems as the third party.’”

When Ramsay was arrested at Fortnum, one slightly awkward aspect of his history was gleefully seized on by the Daily Mail: the fact that his upbringing was, as he puts it, “properly posh”. He was educated at the fee-paying Glenalmond college, whose old boys have included the ITN veteran Sandy Gall, one viceroy of India, a handful of Scots rugby internationals, and Robbie Coltrane. Is his background an issue for him?

Tellingly, his answer starts with a flourish of old-school leftwing language. “That’s not the struggle my politics was forged in. I still have friends from that world. But it’s not like I found myself surrounded by privilege and was driven to reject it; I found myself cross with the IMF, and then I realised: this about a whole system.”

• To comment on this or any other article in the New Radicals report, please go here

Posted in Guardian RSS | No Comments »

Respect’s Salma Yaqoob: ‘Labour has gone a bit mad since Bradford West’

Wednesday, April 25th, 2012

An assured and calm operator, Yaqoob is being talked of as her party’s potential second MP

In the acres of coverage of what George Galloway showily called “the Bradford spring“, one thing was overlooked. He secured his byelection win in the name of a party: Respect, whose tangled history goes back to 2004. He remains its most recognisable public face, but its leader is Salma Yaqoob, whose personal style represents a sharp contrast with the way Galloway does things. Whereas he tends to pursue his aims in the manner of someone single-handedly performing the last act of Macbeth, she is altogether more measured and open: a reassuringly human operator, with a string of celebrated media appearances – not least on BBC1’s Question Time – to her name, as well as a few creditable political successes.

In 2006, she became a Birmingham city councillor, having won 49% of the vote in an inner-city council ward; at the last election, she stood in the constituency of Birmingham Hall Green, where there was an 11% swing from Labour to Respect. Now, there are rumours that she may soon stand against Labour in a future inner-city byelection – in which case, like Galloway, she’ll stand a good chance of winning.

Just to underline the fact that Yaqoob lives in a slightly more ordinary world than a lot of politicians, when I meet her in a central London cafe, she is en route to her home in Birmingham after a family break in Swanage, with her two teenage sons in tow. The conversation ranges across her upbringing, her ambivalent relationship with the Labour party, the state of the Middle East, and her current focus on Respect’s prospects in Bradford, where their candidates are standing for 12 council seats and aiming to be post-election “power brokers” whose support will be needed to keep Labour – who are currently a minority administration – in office. She’s also campaigning for a “yes” vote in referendums to decide whether Birmingham and Bradford should have directly elected mayors, with an eye on some very tantalising political possibilities.

Yaqoob, 40, is a qualified psychotherapist, who took her first steps into politics in the aftermath of 9/11. Part of what she felt most strongly then reflects a theme she returns to repeatedly: that social advances she had taken for granted when she was growing up – not least, the decline of in-your-face racism – suddenly felt they were being rolled back. Not long after the attacks, she was spat at in the street – and, she says, “what was shocking was that nobody stopped. Nobody said: ‘Are you OK?’”

“The Labour party was the party that was going to war,” she goes on, “and that was also really depressing. Because whatever I’d absorbed growing up, it was that the Labour party stood for what was right. So for Labour to do this, and for us to be at the brunt of the racism that flowed from it, and the whole war on terror rhetoric, was really disappointing. I felt very isolated. There was no protection: that’s what it felt like.”

An initial involvement with the Stop the War coalition led her to co-found the clunkily named RESPECT coalition (it stands for Respect, Equality, Socialism, Peace, Environmentalism, Community and Trade Unionism), a somewhat unlikely alliance of disaffected Labour supporters, the Trotyskist Socialist Workers Party and members of such Islamic organisations as the Muslim Council of Britain. When Galloway won Bethnal Green and Bow in the general election of 2005, Respect got its first MP – but in 2007, a depressingly familiar leftwing script was followed to the letter, and the SWP split away. “We were a coalition – not a front for them,” she tells me. “But unfortunately, their leadership at the time didn’t understand that. I learned that the hard way.”

By contrast, what are her politics? “I would characterise them as what people think the Labour party should stand for: social justice, and foreign policy about peace, not war. Pretty basic, but it covers a lot of things.” Her political lodestars, she says, “are people like Arundhati Roy. I love Tony Benn. I really admire Caroline Lucas.”

In the context of modern politics, those reference points might denote radical views – but in one important way, Yaqoob is a little more conservative (with a small “c” ) than hundreds of other people who have opted for politics beyond the usual three parties. As unlikely as it may sound, like Galloway, she sees the Respect party as a means of somehow scaring Labour into moving left – at which point, the need for a separate leftwing force might well disappear.

“I consider myself part of the Labour movement; I consider myself a genuine friend of Labour,” she says. In a lot of her explanation of this, there’s the implied prospect of her joining Labour at some future date if it somehow returns to the righteous leftwing path, and rethinks two big areas of policy. “Stop being austerity lite,” she advises them. “And on foreign policy, get the troops home, and stop this rhetoric about more wars in Middle East. It’s not difficult.”

If someone votes Respect, what exactly will they be getting? We talk about the party’s somewhat uneasy history of combining secular socialism with politics at least partly based on Islam, before getting to the question of whether its most high-profile face actually takes the business of democratic representation that seriously. The numbers are clear enough: while he was representing Bethnal Green and Bow, Galloway’s miserably low attendance at parliamentary votes placed him 634th out of 645 MPs.

“It depends what they want their MP to be doing. If they see their MP championing them, that’s what important – whether it’s in their local area, or in the media, or just getting things done. And in terms of whether he was there [ie in the House of Commons], from what I understand, George Galloway was there, but there were certain votes he chose not to take part in.”

It still doesn’t look great.

“No, I understand that. But it’s down to what people want to do. There are loads of MPs who are like a herd of sheep. Their bums might be on those green benches, but what have they done for their constituents?”

What of Galloway’s questionable record on supporting Arab dictatorships? His salute to Saddam Hussein’s “courage, strength and indefatigability” barely needs mentioning. On a recent Newsnight, he was challenged about an email he sent to a media advisor to President Assad of Syria, which made reference to the country being the “last castle of Arab dignity” and offered Assad – whom Galloway once called “a breath of fresh air” – his “respect and admiration” (to put the message in context, Galloway was asking the Syrian government for their help in getting a humanitarian convoy to the Gaza strip).

“I don’t think people are naive,” says Yaqoob. “They know that our own establishment politicians are happy to meet those people and sell them arms. And George Galloway maintains that the whole ’salute’ quote was about the Iraqi people.”

What about the Assad email?

“Again, who the goodies and baddies are changes.”

Not for people with her politics, it shouldn’t. A dictatorial regime is a dictatorial regime, isn’t it?

“Again, you don’t always get a choice in certain things … some people feel that he was standing against imperialism, and for that reason they may have had some support for him. But it doesn’t mean you don’t criticise when you need to criticise. It’s not as straightforward as a Hollywood film: complete good guys and complete bad guys.” This, in fairness, is eventually followed by something much less equivocal: “Assad is a brutal dictator, and it is time for him to go. I’m not saying: ‘Prop up Assad.’ But definitely, do not intervene militarily. That’s not the answer.”

Owing to ill health that she’d rather remained a private matter, Yaqoob stepped down as a Birmingham councillor last year, but there are now whispers about her possible arrival in the House of Commons. The basic plotline has already been sketched out: the ex-shadow minister Liam Byrne could be picked to run as Labour’s candidate for mayor of Birmingham, and resign his seat of Birmingham Hodge Hill – causing another byelection, and leaving the way open for Yaqoob to become Respect’s second MP. This prospect, it seems, is what lies behind recent Labour suggestions that sitting MPs might be barred from running for mayoralties, in case electoral carnage ensues.

“I think Labour has gone a bit mad since Bradford West,” she says, laughing. “The people spreading those rumours are Labour people. I can’t commit to anything next week, never mind November. My only issue is health, which is frustrating. But the fact they’re saying: ‘It’ll be Hodge Hill next,’ and trying to stop Byrne standing says a lot.”

About what? “Well, people are rejecting the neoliberal consensus. They don’t necessarily have the language, because it hasn’t been articulated. But when people like Caroline Lucas and George Galloway articulate it, and people get a chance to hear that message, they vote for it. Because that’s where people are at.”

We meet a week or so before the National Front do well in the first round of the French presidential elections, but what Yaqoob says next attests to the fact that even if our troubled times might raise the profile of her kind of leftwing dissent, much uglier forces can also prosper. “It can go either way,” she says. “When you get these kinds of economic pressures, things can swing to the right. And that’s why it’s so important that we put forward these politics, and don’t allow all this scapegoating of people. What we need are alternatives.”

• To comment on this or any other article in the New Radicals report, please go here

Posted in Guardian RSS | No Comments »

Politics’ new radicals: a special report

Wednesday, April 25th, 2012

Big politics is in crisis. And the fresh ideas and strong personalities are emerging from what were once regarded as irrelevant fringe parties. Ahead of next week’s local elections we ask four rising stars from outside the mainstream how they see the future

When George Galloway won last month’s Bradford West byelection, two reactions sounded an unlikely note of agreement. One was from Galloway: “This is a rejection of the mainstream parties with their Tweedledee, Tweedledum, Tweedledee-and-a-half approach. It was people saying they want political leaders they can believe in, who say what they mean, do what they say and don’t lie to people.” The other was voiced by that well-known leftwinger John Redwood MP: “The old-fashioned virtues of beliefs, passion and consistency have powered Mr Galloway to an amazing victory. He has shown all the established parties that people can vote them out if they are fed up enough with them.”

In the following days, there was a burst of excitement about yet another sign of a crisis in mainstream politics and the growth of new parties. The consensus was: yes, parts of the electorate are certainly volatile, and capable of giving Westminster a shock. But those on the supposed fringes of politics are likely to remain there – merchants of protest politics rather than anything with a meaningful future.

Yet something is definitely happening. At the last general election, even faced with a titanically unpopular Gordon Brown government, the Tories couldn’t win a majority. Having entered the coalition, the Liberal Democrats have removed mainstream politics’ usual receptacle for protest votes, with consequences that have yet to become clear. In a run of opinion polls leading up to next week’s local and mayoral elections, the UK Independence Party has been either neck-and-neck with the Lib Dems, or in front of them. We now learn that Labour is sufficiently rattled by the Bradford West result to be considering barring its MPs from standing as mayors or police commissioners, in case further byelections cause similar upsets.

Meanwhile, Scottish politics has been transformed by the dominance of the SNP – set for yet more gains in the local elections on 3 May – and the prospect of the referendum on independence, whose result could have huge repercussions for England and Wales. One very pronounced long-term trend is obvious: combined support for the Tories and Labour peaked in the 1950s, and reached its lowest ever figure at the last general election. And in Europe, politics is being shaken up on what feels like a monthly basis: the National Front’s strong showing in the first round of the French presidential election, the rise of the Pirate Party in Germany, the fact that the hard left is proving to be a lot more resilient than some people would like to think.

As becomes clear when you talk to people involved in non-Westminster politics, dry numbers only tell you so much. Particularly on the left, most truly radical, interesting voices are from outside the usual circles – in new protest movements, or the Greens, or the UK’s two nationalist parties. The people responsible tend to have a lot in common: dim views of the Labour party hardened when Tony Blair was in Downing Street, watershed experiences at the time of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, a keen sense that the fracturing of the UK has profound political consequences – and a common understanding that the political legacy of the 2008 crash has only just started to reveal itself.

Moreover, two questions increasingly spring to mind. Does it feel like the Westminster way of doing things is working? And if not, who has any better ideas?

Posted in Guardian RSS | No Comments »