Are 172 new Lords going to be the ‘Change we need’?
“Change”, is what David Cameron pledged all along. Well, you certainly can’t accuse him of leaving things as they are.
If the Times is to be believed today, the House of Lords is set to become the fattest parliamentary chamber in the world.
There are currently 736 sitting Lords, or 707 if you take into account disqualified ones and other exceptions- see here for a full summary.
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Lammy wants public say in Labour leader contest
The public should be given a quarter of the votes when Labour chooses its next leader, former government minister David Lammy says in an article today for the Indy and in the Fabian Review.
He says 25% of the votes in Labour’s electoral college should be handed to ordinary people. At present, the party’s MPs, members and trade unionists each have a third of the votes.
Labour’s national executive committee (NEC) will consider widening the franchise when it fixes the timetable for the leadership contest tomorrow.
The former higher education minister says Labour must drop “old labels” that are no guide to its political future. “Most obviously ‘New Labour’ has become a meaningless term and shouldbeconfined to history,” he says.
“We must move on. Similarly, there can nolonger be’‘Blairites’ and ‘Brownites’.”
Article in the Indepedendent here.
The longer piece for the Fabian Review focuses on three areas:
1) Democratising the party
This political culture hasn’t just stifled our electoral prospects, it is suffocating our party. Membership has reached rock-bottom. Members feel disempowered. The Parliamentary Labour Party feels its voice is not heard. Our volunteers are wonderful but our candidates are still selected by fewer than a hundred people sitting in a room.
2) Moving beyond managerialism
The election itself proved that we stopped listening not just to our own members but also to the country. Going into the election 80 per cent of the public said that they wanted ‘change’. Our message: more of the same.
We warned people not to risk what they had, but forgot to offer hope of something better. We spoke about the economic recovery but never reform. The implicit message was that we would go back to the status quo. But people wanted more than this. The financial crisis revealed that markets are amoral. People wanted ethics, not just economics. For the campaign we should have run, anyone should watch Gordon Brown’s speech to Citizens UK: passionate, idealistic and reformist. This should have been our message throughout.
3) Rebuilding the coalition
The truth is that our party is itself a coalition – of trade unionists, Christian socialists, NGOs and local community activists, human rights campaigners, environmentalists, feminists and anti-racists. We are at our best when we draw from all these traditions. Of course there will be disagreements but renewal must take place in that spirit.
He says in conclusion:
It is time to start to imagine a new governing project. We need to become a more open, democratic party, not centralised and controlling. We must become a more forward looking party that offers vision and reform rather than defence of the establishment. And above all we will only rebuild our governing coalition by rediscovering our own unique identity. Achieve this and come the next election we can be ready to serve our country again.
Have Libdems abandoned those most in need of help?
There is a lot to like in this coalition deal stuff that the Labour Government should have attended to long ago: political reform, cracking down on tax avoidance, regulating and taxing the banks, restoring the link between the state pension and earnings, environmental measures.
But there are three parts of the agreement that must make any serious progressive question the priorities of the Liberal Democrat leadership. Unemployment, the deficit and immigration have all been handed over to the Tories with only moderate qualifications. They are all areas which will most seriously impact on the poorest and most disadvantaged.
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If Ed Miliband wants to be leader he has to get ruthless
Regular readers will know that I was on the Ed Milibandwagon over a year ago. I agree with his strongest supporters that Ed M ‘speaks human’ and comes across as very affable and down-to-earth.
At the Fabian event on Saturday, Ed went much further than I expected in repudiating many of New Labour’s failures in government. He accepted ID cards were wrong, that Nick Clegg had a point on trying to reduce taxes on the poorest, that more had to be done on regulating financial services and on promoting green technology/jobs. If he were to become leader and campaign in a general election, expect him to become more centrist.
Obviously I’m pleased Ed M has entered the race but unlike my colleague Don Paskini, I have a different set of concerns.
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Right-wingers blame Libdems for Cam betrayal
The Daily Mail has an article today that tries to channel right-wing anger at Cameron via the Libdems.
It quotes various Libdem MPs:
A shocked Mr Alexander told Lib Dem MPs: ‘The Tories are ditching policies faster than they can list them. They pointed to them and said, “That can go, that can go.” We thought, “If they are offering up all this, is there anything they will not do?”’
…
Senior Lib Dem Lord Greaves, who was present when Mr Alexander reported back to MPs, said: ‘We were negotiating against people like George Osborne and Oliver Letwin who have never had to negotiate a thing in their lives. They are privileged little rich boys. The most difficult negotiation they had was when they proposed to their wives.“Our negotiating team said the Conservatives told them, “There is something in your manifesto we would like to concede, can you add it to your list?” and “There are some things in our manifesto that are daft which we would be delighted if you would veto”. It was men against boys. They were totally out of their depth. Our people were hard-nosed negotiators.
Ouch.
Right-wing Tory MP Philip Davies said: ‘The Lib Dems are entitled to crow. Our negotiators panicked. It is absurd to give them five Cabinet jobs – that’s ten per cent of their MPs in the Cabinet. They are supposed to be the junior partner. We gave away too much. I get the distinct impression that David Cameron is happier with his Lib Dems than he is with some of the people in his own party.
And of course Lord Tebitt makes an appearance again.
On MP told the Daily Mail: “George [Osborne] is convinced that this will make it easier for us to swallow up the Lib Dems.”
The question now is: will the right-wing sense of betrayal lead to continual bad press and fractures within the Tory party? And will that make it harder for Cameron to pass legislation?
Is this why the Libdem election vote didn’t hold up?
contribution by Renard Sexton
There’s one point about the recent election that has not been discussed about. And that is whether there was a “loud but flakey Lid Dem” effect at play, similar to the “shy Tory” problem of the 1990s.
As put by Nate Silver at 538 earlier this week, this “may not be the pollsters’ fault if voters changed or made up their mind while casting their ballots, as sometimes happens for third parties whose viability is questionable” (emphasis his).
We now have at least partial answers to these questions, which conspired to precipitate an election result where instead of seeing a long-awaited Lib Dem breakthrough we saw a rather demoralising Lib Dem meltdown.
To begin with, the Liberal Democrats pulled 23.6 percent of the national vote, a mere 1.5 point increase over their 22.1 percent share from 2005. As we have learned from our projections, however, if those 450 thousand voters (1.5 percent of the total 2010 electorate) were gained in the right seats, they could flip perhaps 5 to 10 seats to the Liberals.
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Welsh politics is about to get more interesting
contribution by Marcus Warner
The last few days have been rather normal for those of us who operate under devolved systems. Negotiations, drama, rumours and compromise are all part of Welsh Assembly elections, with it taking weeks to come to a Government being formed.
The One Wales Government, despite being from parties of the centre left, was seen as a marriage of mortal enemies.
Regardless of the political hue of the Government, it has been resolutely strong and focused, with minimal bust ups.
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10 years for preparing for a race war
Ian Davison, the neo-Nazi who succeeded where others failed in producing ricin, must be somewhat relieved at receiving only a 10 year sentence for concocting a chemical weapon along with other terrorist offences, including making pipe bombs, one of which he recorded exploding.
After all, Martyn Gilleard, the skinhead who shared a passion for potential race war with a predilection for children, was given an 11-year-stretch for similar offences while only putting together some very rudimentary nail bombs, involving film canisters.
Davison’s son Nicky, on the other hand, has been given what seems a far harsher sentence of two years detention for only having the almost required Anarchist Cookbook and Poor Man’s James Bond manuals, both of which the judge himself noted are available to purchase from Amazon (and still are) despite their possession itself being an illegal offence.
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The unfairness of Ed Miliband
Since the election there have been a slew of former Labour ministers keen to tell us that Labour needs to change by listening to the voters and their concerns. The speeches and articles are sprinkled with anecdotes from conversations that these ex-ministers had with voters in their constituencies.
In many cases it is obvious that going and talking to voters had been a rather novel activity.
Ed Miliband’s speech today, in which he announced himself as a candidate for Labour leader, gave two particularly obnoxious examples of this genre. On immigration, he announced that:
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Exclusive: Ed to launch leadership bid this week
Ed Miliband is launching his leadership bid for the Labour party leadership next week, perhaps as early as Monday morning, sources have told me.
The former cabinet minister will do a round of local interviews to launch his bid in stark contrast to his brother David Miliband’s launch in Westminster. The latter move was described by Alex Smith at LabourList as possible “strategic error“.
Ed Miliband will be keynote speaker at the Fabian conference tomorrow in London.
A group of supporters are planning a rally before the conference starts to persuade him to throw his hat in the ring.
That is now a forgone conclusion. The Sun today speculated he would launching sometime next week.
Supporters have already set up a website advocating for him.
But Labour MP Tom Watson wrote on Liberal Conspiracy this week that the party would be better off having a slow leader contest.
Update: There seems to be some confusion over names. It now looks like Ed Miliband may not go as early as Monday. But it is expected he will put his hat into the ring early next week.
David Miliband will launch his campaign officially on Monday and do local media interviews. It is now thought that brother Ed won’t want to clash with that deliberately.
Update 2 The confusion was over when exactly the campaign would be launched. But as confirmed by various media outlets now, Ed Miliband will run for Labour leadership. Remember where you heard it first.
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