Compass put on a sizzling debate last night on Labour’s future direction. Two contributions in particular stood out- those of Steve Richards and a devastating but completely constructive contribution by Jon Cruddas. Actually, I left the meeting feeling that if we don’t win the next election it won’t be because we lack ideas, conviction or talent.

First to Cruddas’ contribution. He counselled that the Conservatives have changed, not just in terms of style but in terms of philosophy as well and Labour underestimates that at its peril. Moreover, and anyone who followed the London Mayoral elections can vouch for this, they have adopted a new emotionalism to their political language. Labour’s language by contrast is managerial and aloof.
Continue reading…

Not long after I moved to Hackney, I witnessed an armed robbery. From a range of about three feet, the fact that the robber was a crackhead was as obvious as the hammer and kitchen knife he was waving about.

A few years later, my partner and baby daughter were abducted outside my house. Continue reading…

I guess should have mentioned and emphasised this little-known-fact earlier. But for a little while I had some respect for Andrew Gilligan’s journalism. Once he went way over the top and sold his soul to the Evening Standard’s vendetta against Ken Livingstone, that evaporated.

First, a bit of background.
Continue reading…

Never fear Labour supporters, here’s the latest messiah to solve all the party’s problems in one fall swoop:

Purnell will declare today that Labour can still beat the Tories in the fight against poverty because it is willing to stump up the money and is committed to tax credits.

“Both their goal and their policies are just aspirations,” Purnell will say. Mocking the Conservatives’ approach, he will say: “It would be nice to reduce child poverty. It would be nice to put more money into the working tax credit. But nice isn’t good enough. Until they pass the test of hardening their commitment and costing their policy, they cannot claim to be committed to ending child poverty.”

Ah, yes, child poverty. It’s strange how this government’s modest redistribution, so modest that it may have lifted some children out of poverty but has done nothing whatsoever to alter overall inequality, only gets mentioned when the going gets really tough. It screams of desperation, of someone begging their lover not to walk out the door, bumbling, “but, but, look at all we’ve done for the poor kids!”

In any case, Labour’s pledge to end child poverty is just as much an aspiration as the Conservatives’ policy announcements are: it’s simply unattainable and completely unrealistic without far more targeted help being provided, and Labour doesn’t have either the will or the funds to do it with. The less said about tax credits, the most hopeless and over-egged panacea of all time, the better.
Continue reading…

Until very recently I would broadly have fallen into the category of the ‘Labour Left’.

I was never totally comfortable with attempts by sections of the left to pull away from the Labour Party, which I had been brought up since childhood to see as “my” party, and which latterly I had come to see as a vehicle via which the Labour Movement could exercise its influence in the party political field: Lenin’s classic formulation of the “bourgeois workers’ party” could not describe it better.

In spite of a brief spell as a member of the Socialist Alliance, I quickly rejoined Labour and argued tooth and nail with comrades that things hadn’t changed so very much. It is now self-evident that I was wrong.
Continue reading…

The post-mortems - the mot juste, I think - on New Labour have missed a point.

The party is paying the price for the fact that the New Labour project was based upon profound, and now crippling, intellectual insecurity.

Put yourself in the shoes of New Labour’s founders in the 80s and early 90s. You see that traditional social democratic arguments for redistribution don’t work. You see Labour’s traditional support base, the manual working class, declining in numbers (pdf). And you see a managerial class winning what you want - wealth and power.

What do you do? You abandon traditional Labourism, in favour of an appeal to Mondeo man and Worcester woman.
Continue reading…

So how goes the vote your way? Here in Exeter we’re not exactly at election fever pitch. Most people seem more concerned about unleaded petrol going over the £5 a gallon mark, and whether City will make it back into the Football League – having narrowly missed out in last season’s play-off final at Wembley.

Then again, the candidates and their publicity machines haven’t treated us to a feast of sophisticated argument or a panoply of significant fact.
Continue reading…

Trying to create a bit of mischief today, the Daily Mail says the Fabian Society “savages” Gordon Brown by calling him ‘neurotic’ and saying voters have ‘written him off’.

Sunder is saying that about the Labour party rather than Gordon Brown, but the spin is to be expected from Daily Mail. Is the relationship between Dacre and Brown has cooled? Either way, applied to the Labour party this prognosis is patently obvious. The article says:
Continue reading…

There are many very good reasons not to vote for Boris Johnson, but most likely we will wake up on Friday to that result.

The election now comes down to a question of turnout and of appealing to second preferences, particularly of Liberal Democrat voters. The key unknown may be what impact last minute doubts about Johnson have. (Two-thirds of the Politics Home ‘insider panel’ think this will make a difference, but will it be enough?)

As I wrote in a Comment is Free piece on how we have come this close to the prospect of Mayor Boris, the Conservative Party has successfully Boris-proofed Lynton Crosby’s campaign from the candidate, and is now worrying about how to Boris-proof David Cameron’s ambitions to be Prime Minister from the possible fallout of Johnson’s Mayoralty.
Continue reading…

During the weeks of the election campaign that’s eaten my life, I’ve striven to be fair to Boris Johnson. There was, though, never much chance I’d vote for him. That said, I’ve also been testing my loyalty to Ken Livingstone. I believe his various critics, including those with roots on the left, have over-spun or overstated their cases against him, but that isn’t to say they lack all force. There’s also the question of how much difference a change of mayor would really make.

On the day campaigning officially began, I argued that the job description and moderate content of Johnson’s stated polices meant that many of the differences were less of Big Ideas than emphasis. This wasn’t what Team Ken wanted to hear, as it made clear in a letter the Guardian published the following day: its job from the off has been to sharpen the contrast in substance - of both policy and pedigree - between the two men; Johnson’s, in keeping with David Cameron’s approach, has been to position himself just enough to the blue side of the incumbent to mobilise Tory support without confirming suspicions that he’s daft and extreme.

But though the choice between the two was not as stark as their media images suggested, there was no doubt they were there. The thing was to clarify and quantify them. I’ve done my best and now feel I can vote for Livingstone with conviction.

Here are 10 reasons why.

Continue reading…

In a bolshy defence of Gordon Brown, David Aaronovich coins an amusing alternative to the phrase “awkward squad”:

It isn’t just the 20 licensed super rebels, specific only to Labour (the Tories don’t have this hard core of perpetually oppositional MPs who get in on the party’s coat-tails and then spend all their time trying to defeat it)

The rise of these rebels is an interesting development in British politics. The phenomenon of these rebellious MPs seems to have occurred as a side-effect of New Labour’s sizeable majority from 1997-2005: The large majorities gave the Blair Government a feeling of invincibility, which emboldened it to make unpopular policies it might not otherwise have attempted… thereby prompting rebellion. Additionally, it also meant Labour MPs could rebel on principle without bringing down the Government. However, as Aaronovich points out, this has changed in the Brown-era, and these rebels threaten to destabilise a Labour Government. People should know exactly who they are - so we can help or hinder them as we see fit.

As a lunch-time example of citizen-journalism, could we conspirators and contributors and commenters compile a list of who these Super Rebels might be? It strikes me as the sort of recieved wisdom that it would be useful to record in one place. May we have suggestions in the comments, please? I will update this post when we have a long-list. Thanks.

I have the good fortune to live just down the road from Ripping Yarns, a north London secondhand bookshop that specialises in vintage children’s literature, but also has a neat line in radical books, newspapers and pamphlets. It is run by Celia Hewitt, the actress wife of the poet Adrian Mitchell.

It’s a wonderful place, brimming over with old Rupert the Bear annuals and old copies of the New Musical Express. If you pop in now you can probably still pick up an old copy of Tariq Ali’s 1968 newspaper Black Dwarf.

My best recent find was an orginal copy of the 1967 New Left May Day Manifesto, priced Two Shillings and Sixpence from 41 years ago.
Continue reading…

Now that it has backed down over the 10p tax band, we need the government to lose over the 42 days legislation too. Labour loyalists might balk at this but not only would it be good for our democracy, but its an incredibly bad piece of legislation.

On Monday Jackie Ashley faithfully asked loyalists to hold their nose:

For after the 10p vote will be plenty more possible crises, not least the vote over the 42-day detention proposal. On both, I am 100% against the official government view and, with every instinct, on the side of the Labour rebels. But disaster is looming and the real parliamentarians have carefully to weigh in the balance what they now do, and ask how much likelier it will make a Tory landslide a year hence.

This sort of thinking is appalling. It is the road of good intentions to hell.
Continue reading…

For those of us who believe that the current economic climate is exactly the worst time to consider raising the taxes of those on meagre incomes, yesterday’s u-turn compromise by the Chancellor is a victory of sorts.

There were no certainties or specifics, and suspicion surely remains that this ‘compensation package’ will be aimed at the more politically-appealing pensioners and families rather than any single people and under-25s who’ll lose out.
Continue reading…

Gordon Brown was forced to interrupt his US trip yesterday to persuade a parliamentary aide not to resign in protest at the abolition of the 10p starting rate of tax.

Last week the National Union of Students threw out a proposal to drastically restrict its campaigning and representative powers by an approximate ten-vote margin. Frustrated by this narrow defeat at the annual conference, Labour Students, ‘independent’ Labour affiliates and other centre-right groups have already drawn up plans for an extraordinary conference to attempt to pull the changes through.

If they do go through, NUS democracy will be re-focused upon “celebrating the achievements” of the union, with a cutback in constructive debate and a much larger role for external, unelected political and corporate ‘advisers’.

NUS radicalism has been so eroded over the past decade, however, that there’s barely been a murmur of fuss has been made about all of this outside the narrow alley of student politics: as a former NUS rep for Goldsmiths commented, “It’s been coming for a long time.”
Continue reading…

Dear Vince,

As you are a Liberal Democrat with a record of support for progressive causes and who represents a London constituency in Parliament, I am writing to you as we enter the final month of what looks certain to be the closest London Mayoral election campaign that we have seen to date.

Naturally, I know that you will be campaigning and casting your first preference vote for the Liberal Democrat candidate, Brian Paddick. Many people outside the Liberal Democrats will agree that Brian is running a serious and creditable campaign, particularly on the issue of crime.

However, the London elections also give every voter a second preference vote.
Continue reading…

Over on the Guardian blog Andrew Collins asks: Can a leftie read the Spectator? and gets into the oft-debated territory of why so many people read the Spectator compared to the New Statesman.

Given that NS still haven’t got a new editor this is still up for debate, and donpaskini, Hopi Sen and Chris Brooke have been down this road earlier. But I have slightly different questions. Two of them in fact.
Continue reading…

What’s in it for them, eh? That must have crossed your mind on reading this chirpy piece from Green London mayoral candidate Siân Berry in the New Statesman hitching her wagon to the Labour party.

Continue reading…

Christians are surely the last people who should be getting uptight about healing the sick; after all, Jesus was reportedly a bit of a dab hand at it himself.

OK, I’ve never actually read the Douay-Rheims Bible on which I presume Cardinal Keith O’Brien bases his teachings on. But according to the King James Version that I am familar with, Christ cured dozens of people with ailments ranging from unspecified fever, leprosy, menorrhagia and/or haemophilia, withered limbs, dropsy, deafness, blindness and paralysis. What’s more - unlike the average NHS general practitioner - he didn’t even have a problem with Saturday call-outs.

All of this makes Christ a tough act to follow. But humanity could be on the verge of doing just that.
Continue reading…