‘Brown has caved in to Labour’s Neanderthals’
Gordon Brown has been slammed by the campaign group ‘Vote for a Change‘ today for backing down on electoral reform.
It was widely expected that the PM would strengthen his commitment to amend the Constitutional Renewal Bill, tying the next government to holding a referendum on the future of first-past-the-post.
Willie Sullivan from the Vote for a Change campaign just sent out a press release stating:
Today we expected Brown’s to commit himself to take action in this parliament. This watered down pledge sees the Prime Minister caving in to the Neanderthals in his own party.
After all Labour’s soundings, half-promises and positioning we required a firm government commitment to electoral reform, not another exercise in calculated vagueness.
This appears a victory for Labour’s most conservative backbenchers and another blow to Brown’s leadership. If Brown wants to show he still has any authority over the Parliamentary Labour Party he has to make clear his intention to amend the Constitutional Renewal Bill this week.
It’s time for PM to draw a line under months of dithering and begin the task of restoring credibility to our parliament.
More reactions are due to come in soon.
Vote for a Change supporters have been targeting cabinet minister Ed Balls in an ad campaign to change his mind.
Last week they also delivered a letter from supporters to David Cameron asking to explain why he feels voters don’t deserve a choice on the future of their democracies.
Campaign to take aim at Blair on Iraq Inquiry
The online campaign group 38 Degrees is taking aim at former PM Tony Blair over his appearance in front of the Iraq War Inquiry on Friday next week.
The focus is on getting the questioners to ensure they ask the right questions.
There are plans to organise various stunts for next week to ensure there is enough counter-pressure on the Inquiry to ask Blair serious questions.
38 Degrees has so far signed up over 7,000 people to a petition demanding the questioners resist pressure to give him an easy ride.
A mail-out yesterday said:
There’s a risk we could see yet another whitewash.
The people asking the questions mustn’t let Blair get away with more spin. Together we can make sure they arrive next Friday morning feeling ready to get tough with the former PM: they need to know that thousands and thousands of us expect them to challenge him properly.
…
If they decide to really challenge Blair, it will shed light on why the UK supported such a deadly and expensive war and make future leaders think twice about making the same choice. If they give him an easy ride, it will mean key questions get brushed under the carpet.
The campaign group already has some questions for Blair including:
When did you first promise George Bush you’d back an invasion?
When did you really realise Saddam Hussein probably didn’t have WMD?
Did you cover up advice that the war might be illegal?
Why did you decide to ignore the anti-war protests by the British people?
We’ll get our demands in front of the inquiry panel just before Blair appears. We’re going to pile on the pressure in every way we can: e-mails, phone calls, the media and protests on the day.
What they won’t tell you about Labour-run councils
Here’s a nice example of sucking up to Tories reporting the research findings that your audience wants to hear: Ben Page, CEO of Ipsos-Mori, writing on Conservative Home:
If you want to have residents who are satisfied with their council and think they get value for money, get Conservatives to run it for you. That is one of the headline findings of Ipsos MORI’s latest report on local authority performance.
Harry Phibbs claims that this “report shows Conservative councils perform best”.
But that’s not what the actual IPSOS-Mori report found:
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Support the NoBonus4RBS campaign!
contribution by Stan Moss
Do you remember when the government bailed out the banks to the tune of £850bn? Didn’t Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling insist that conditions be attached, that it would all be very strict and that, with the government as major shareholder, the banks would not be free to slip back into past excesses?
“[The deal] will carry terms and conditions that appropriately reflect the financial commitment being made by the taxpayer” – said Darling in 2008.
Back to today, and neither Labour nor the Tories are saying a word to the scandal that is quietly unravelling before our eyes.
RBS, where the governments owns a stake of 84%, have announced that they’re about to dish up £1.5bn to £2bn in bonuses, with the board threatening to resign if not allowed to do so.
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Cadbury’s and Kraft: what the left needs to consider now
Cadburys has succumbed to the advances of Kraft in a takeover deal worth £11.5bn. Unions have expressed their concern for the future of Cadbury’s workforce.
They are right to be concerned; Kraft financed its takeover by incurring £7bn of debt and that will have to be repaid somehow and already, Cadburys Chairman has said job losses are ‘inevitable’. Plus there is the highly likely chance of asset-stripping.
Both Gordon Brown and Lord Mandleson expressed concern about Kraft’s intentions. Back in December Mandleson said;
If you think that you can come here and make a fast buck, you will find huge opposition from the local population and from the British Government
However, despite this both have been powerless to do anything and Mandleson now has washed his hands of the whole affair saying what happens is a “matter for the shareholders”.
But what happens to Cadbury’s is of concern to both British citizens, especially as we have to deal with the consequences of redundancies and we lose a successful British brand.
So, what can the left do to shape the debate in situations like this?
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Brown wins shock election victory
Republican Scott Brown won yesterday’s special election to become Senator for Massachusetts. Brown will succeed liberal icon Ted Kennedy, and is the first Republican elected to the Senate from Massachusetts in nearly thirty years.
The result plunges Democrats into crisis just one year after Barack Obama was inaugurated as President. Even on election day, anonymous Democrat staffers were spending their time briefing the press that defeat was a result of an inept local campaign, or of a lack of support from the national party, or of a backlash against the economic situation and the healthcare reforms.
Brown has already pledged to vote against healthcare reforms, making it much more likely that tens of millions of Americans will continue to struggle without any affordable healthcare.
Right wingers on both sides of the Atlantic will attempt to claim that this shows mass support for their anti-government agenda. It’s worth noting that analysis suggests that Brown got his support from people who thought he was a ‘moderate’ or liberal, and that those who thought he was a conservative voted heavily against him.
Instead, Democrat (and indeed Labour) strategists would do better to pay heed to advice like this:
I think Obama’s biggest miscalculation upon taking office was that the American people were looking for a return to Clintonism — that is, a Democrat who is buddy-buddy with business elites and who won’t rock the boat too much on the economic populism front. Basically, it’s the sort of mentality that if you let the corporate elites work their magic and grow the economy, you can use the added tax revenue for social good.
But the times clearly demand something else. Corporate-friendly Democrats do well when the livin’ is easy, but these times demand angry populism in one form or another. The good news is that Obama can do a really good job of calling the Republicans out on their bullshit by launching populist initiatives including the bank tax, new financial regulations and a strong jobs bill. The GOP will reflexively hate all of these initiatives and will give Obama and the Dems an opening to say, “See? Same Republicans who spent eight years in bed with Wall Street.”
ESA proves Labour has betrayed its core values
I spent this evening watching a black labrador slurpily lapping the shoes of a major think-tank director whilst its owner thought up ways to lie to me about his party’s attitude to the poor and needy. In a speech given in conjunction with Progress, David Blunkett MP set out to demonstrate just why the Tories are so very, very different from New Labour.
The former Home Secretary quoted Aneurin Bevan, who described the Conservative party’s habit of using government policy to shore up the assets of the privileged as “sucking at the teats of the state”.
“That sums it up pretty well”, said Blunkett, who went on to describe how the evil, ghoulish Tories, are planning to reduce the size of the state by selling off central and local government functions to private companies in an effort to save money, because they, unlike Labour, care about money more than about people.
Mr Blunkett omitted to mention the small matter of the Welfare Reform Bill 2008, with its stated aim of saving cash by getting a million people off sickness benefits and back into work whether they are up to it or not.
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The brazen cheek of brazen elitism
For an Old Etonian to promise a ‘brazenly elitist’ approach to state education – as Tory leader David Cameron has done this week – is nothing if not brazenly cheeky.
It’s a nice catchphrase of course, chiming as it does with the popular perception that something is wrong with the system, and that sex-crazed pothead Sirs and Misses of the type parodied in that Channel 4 comedy-drama a few years back bear most of the blame.
To be sure, there is nothing wrong in principle with offering more money to attract people to a sector where vacancies are hard to fill. That, the economics textbooks tell us, is how labour markets are supposed to work.
But let us not even pretend that any government is going to provide state school teachers with the kind of starting salaries that Oxbridge graduates can pull down in the City or at a City-oriented law firm.
This is the Conservatives ‘class war’
At the weekend Peter Oborne treated us to a treatise on how the Conservatives have put together the most radical program for government since Oliver Cromwell, or words similar to that effect.
But in reality, as yesterday’s launch of the party’s education policies showed, somehow managing to be even worse than Labour at reforming our benighted education system.
After all, it really ought to be an open goal. Even after almost 13 years under New Labour, still barely 50% manage to get 5 “good GCSEs”, a record so appalling that it can’t be stressed often enough.
There have been improvements made, although considering the amount of money pumped in it would be incredible if there hadn’t been, and diplomas as introduced by Ed Balls, is one of the few reforms which has been a step in the right direction.
So when Cameron then immediately decides that the most important thing which will decide whether or not a child succeeds is not their background, the curricula, the type of school or the amount of funding it receives but the person who teaches them, he’s on the verge of talking nonsense on stilts.
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Cameron: Isn’t the most socialist education system in the OECD brilliant!
It’s always a sure sign that the Tory faithful are happy when Tory bloggers start posting long extracts from one of Cameron’s policy speeches.
We’re going to begin at source – at recruitment – and make sure we get the best people into the profession. At the moment, not enough of our brightest people consider going into teaching, especially those in the subjects we need – like maths, and in the schools that would benefit most from their knowledge – tough inner-city ones…
We can get round this problem – we just need to learn from abroad. Finland, Singapore and South Korea have the most highly qualified teachers, and also some of the best education systems in the world, because they have deliberately made teaching a high prestige profession.
They are brazenly elitist – making sure only the top graduates can apply. They have turned it into the career path if you’ve got a good degree…
So we will end the current system where people with third class degrees can get taxpayers’ money to enter postgraduate teacher training. With our plans, if you want to become a teacher – and get funding for it – you need a 2:2 or higher.
But can you be sure that any of these high-flying graduates you want to attract can actually teach?
It’s also interesting to see Dave picking on Finland as one of the three countries cited as having an excellent education system.
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