Chuka Umunna writes open letter to Osborne
The Labour MP Chuka Umunna has written an open letter to Chancellor George Osborne today, outlining an alternative approach to the budget and demanding answers on various issues.
In the letter, published in today’s Observer, he challenges the view the budget was “progressive”.
Then, in response to Osborne’s claim that Labour should offer its own alternatives and ideas, Umunna lays out some ideas:
First, you could increase the bank levy and exempt banks from the corporation tax cut. If we really are “all in this together”, it is only right that the financial services sector – where the economic crisis started – should pay its fair share.
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Second, you could extend the tax on bankers’ bonuses. It is countercyclical, principled and worth £2.5bn per year to the Treasury. Why not make it permanent?
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Third, you could reverse your decision not to raise National Insurance contributions. NI is a progressive tax. As the IFS has shown, doing so would place the burden on those most able to pay and would raise £13.5bn over the parliament.
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Then you could introduce a financial activities tax.
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Finally, you could join with the French and German governments and leading economists in backing a “Robin Hood” tax on financial transactions.
Was Raoul Moat mad or just bad?
contribution by Zarathustra
In the news this week were claims that Moat had requested psychiatric help, the inference being that if he had received it the Northumbria shootings might not have happened. Was Moat mad or bad? And if he was the former, could mental health services have helped him?
I didn’t know Raoul Moat, but as a mental health nurse I’ve learned to be cynical about people who suddenly ask for psychiatric help at a time when they’re facing criminal charges. My cynicism isn’t lessened by the claim that he was offered a psychiatric assessment but didn’t turn up.
Is there any evidence that Moat had a mental illlness?
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Cruddas: how I’d change Labour as chair
Jon Cruddas MP: Speech to Labour Friends of Searchlight today
Thank you for inviting me to open your conference this morning.
Thank you Nick [Lowles] and Sam [Tarry] for organising it and for your work in building the extraordinary movement Hope not Hate.
Today we begin to discuss Labour’s journey of change.
A party of organisers. Organising for a party of social justice and community.
We have Hope not Hate, London Citizens, the Christian Socialist Movement Labour Neighbours Projects, Compass, and many examples in various Constituency Labour Parties.
We must learn from each other.
We bring different methods but we are united in our belief that organising is the heart of politics
Community is the strength of the people.
We are here to work together.
And we know that communities do not just exist. They have to be built by making relationships. We do not simply have a neighbour. We have to make ourselves someone’s neighbour. In our neighbours we make a common life together. In our welcome to strangers we show our humanity.
Labour needs to be a party that lives by its values. I want to see a more democratic party with an actively involved membership. A conference that is strengthened and its agenda setting opened up. We need to turn the party outward to the communities we seek to represent.
We must create a party rooted in a culture of organising.
We organise to build relationships with each other for the common good: the living wage, a new playground, safer streets, affordable housing.
These local goals matter as they reflect our belief in a sense of neighbourliness, of duty and obligation, responsibility and solidarity. But how do they relate to the larger Labour Movement?
At the heart of all transformational movements is the politics of virtue – creating a life well lived.
Vaclav Havel said in ‘Power and the Powerless’:
We must not be ashamed that we are capable of love, friendship, solidarity, sympathy, and tolerance, but just the opposite: we must set these fundamental dimensions of our humanity free from their “private” exile and accept them as the only genuine starting point of meaningful human community.
Organising is the struggle for a virtuous life of love, justice and compassion. These are relational qualities that we show to each other. It is the way friendship (comradeship) leads to reciprocity
Put simply, ‘Do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself.’
And reciprocity leads to the ideas of justice and the equal value of all.
It is where ethics meets politics.
We are part of the tradition we can trace back to Aristotle- the desire to build the Polis – the community – the city – that allows humans to flourish. The Politics of Citizenship. Democracy has always been the way people organised against the domination of the market and became citizens.
The struggle for democracy teaches us to look at the world with new eyes.
Political struggle has always been the university of Labour. It is how we learn politics and become political leaders.
Not action alone.
Not theory by itself
But action and theory informing one another.
A party dedicated to organising must also be a party committed to open minded thinking.
To a convivial culture of knowledge and education, of writing and speaking and conversation and laughter.
It means listening to what people care about and not what we think they should care about.
For all sections of the party, that’s perhaps the hardest thing of all.
Labour has lost this kind of politics. We became a machine spinning stories to the media and pulling the levers of power.
The leadership retreated into the offices of state and lost touch with the people. In many areas we stopped organising and so we stopped learning and thinking.
And we stopped understanding the ordinary lives of the people and the sentiment of the country.
This afternoon we will hear from the leadership contestants. The contest is about more than 5 individuals competing for office. It is about the future of our party and the fate of our country.
The Coalition Budget threatens us with a new recession.
The Spending Review will report in October and the size of the cuts it proposes will be both unnecessary and devastating.
We are living in the eye of a storm.
The low paid, the poor, welfare claimants will pay for the greed of bankers and the inflated salaries of public service managers and consultants.
This is the politics of the Conservative Party who are the defenders of the property rights and prerogatives of the rich. It is the politics of the Lib Dems who have been lost to their free market fundamentalists.
They are soft on the banks, hard on the poor, and threatening to growth.
That is the basis on which we should take on this government.
But make no mistake the Coalition is a serious threat to the future of Labour.
The political realignments of this crisis could exclude Labour from government for a decade. This is the goal of the Coalition – a centre right majority for the next decade cloaked in the progressive mantle.
And make no mistake they are actively investigating new forms of community engagement and organisation.
But it will not succeed because we will build an alternative.
We will begin locally in our workplaces and neigbourhoods.
We energise communities
We engage in dialogue with people
We build new relationships
And so we create a new kind of Labour movement as part of a New Covenant with the People.
There are no short cuts to a Labour government of transformational change. What do we need to begin our journey?
First we need a leadership that will effectively oppose the Coalition and be able to embrace the political changes for Labour’s revival.
It means being both sure-footed and open to uncertainty.
It means a politics of pluralism and alliances.
And it means a collegial, inclusive style that values good relationships and draws on collective wisdom
We need to change our party:
We need a new statement of our identity; our essential purpose; what we are for, to build a new language anchored in the ordinary lives and sentiment of the people
a new chair that is elected by conference;
a new commission on party structures and a renewed culture of organisation;
a comprehensive review of policy under a joint secretariat of Party Chair and Party Leader;
in a root and branch deliberation about Labour’s future politics and policy strategies.
We must democratise the National Policy Forum.
For that reason if the position is created I would put myself forward for the elected chair of the party – to help build this plural, democratic Labour Party.
But we need more, much more.
Labour needs a new political economy.
We need a politics of the Good Society – to allow people to become genuinely fulfilled.
Mutualism, association and relationships are Labour values. Compassion our prime virtue.
We must take them back from the Conservatives.
Labour can be at the forefront of new economic thinking; engaging with new ideas in political philosophy and sociology; working out new approaches to society, the family and welfare.
If we combine organising and thinking together we will create a winning movement.
Second, we need our leadership to do two things:
dare more democracy
rebuild the economy of our country for a common prosperity
We have to take on the vested interests that have brought our country to its knees.
Rebuilding a productive and social model of capitalism means working together in partnerships, and for economic democracy.
There can be no democracy and no common prosperity in Britain until the banks are reformed.
The power of money is real and we need to build a real opposition based on democracy.
We need finance to help build the low carbon, sustainable economy of the future.
The banks that are ‘too big to fail’ must be broken up.
Employee representation on remuneration committees so that managerial prerogative can be challenged.
Cap interest rates on unsecured loans.
A regional and community banking system to bring credit to the people and capital to localities.
A financial transaction tax.
And tax justice – end corporate tax evasion and tackle price transferring.
A common prosperity means a regional spread of sustainable wealth creation.
Increasing demand by creating good properly paid jobs
Legislation for a living wage and equal pay starting with government public procurement contracts.
Pension funds investing in social enterprise, infrastructure development and green industries.
A major house building programme.
The mission of an organised labour movement is to make a common life between those who are divided.
The message our conference gives to the party today and to the 5 leadership contenders is:
We are making a new life anchored in a new politics of virtue.
Lets start the debate about how we will organise for it.
ENDS
Spot the difference
contribution by Cory Hazlehurst
Steve Bell on David Cameron, after seeing him talk to fishermen in Grimsby, May 5th 2010:
[At 0.58] “What he (Cameron) does have is this assured set of poses and presentational devices. They’re very effective, but I’m not sure for how long they will be”.
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‘Everybody’s doing it’ isn’t an argument, Zac
Tory MP Zac Goldsmith appeared to think he did jolly well in his interview on Channel 4 News tonight, so vigorously rebutting questions about his election expenses by railing against Jon Snow.
Fans of the Goldsmith gene pool will have particularly enjoyed his brave decision to break with British political custom and practice by issuing threats against the media.
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Who will Compass want as Labour leader?
The campaign group Compass is asking its members who they will support for Labour leader.
All candidates will appear on the ballot form including the option not to support any of the candidates. Candidates will be asked to provide statements. Any Compass member with full voting rights can vote in election.
Voting closes at 6pm on Thursday 2 September, and the results will be announced within 48 hours.
The group will be particularly pleased that many of the policies it has advocated, such as the High Pay Commission, on Trident and the Living Wage have been taken up by the leading candidates.
Voting for Labour leader is also taking alongside elections will now take place for the Compass Management Committee and Compass Youth Organising Committee 2010/2011.
Public invited for opinions on vote reform
The newly created Political and Constitutional Reform Committee decided at its first meeting this week to scrutinise the government’s proposals:
1. to hold a national referendum on using the alternative vote system at general elections, to reduce the size of the House of Commons, and to equalise the size of parliamentary constituencies, and
2. to establish fixed-term Parliaments of five years.
Labour MP Graham Allen, the committee chair, said
I would also like to hear from you about how we can involve the widest number of people in giving their views, not least via new media.
Government bills to implement these proposals are expected to begin their passage through Parliament later this month. Some information on the proposals were included in the Deputy Prime Minister’s statement to the House of Commons on 5 July.
The committee will hold its first public hearing on Thursday 22 July into the government’s proposal to hold a referendum on changing the way in which MPs are elected to the Alternative Vote (AV).
The session is also likely to touch on the government’s proposal to have fewer MPs representing more equal numbers of electors, and to have fixed-term parliaments of five years. The session will take place on, at 10.00 am, in the Wilson Room, Portcullis House.
The witnesses will be:
· Peter Facey, Unlock Democracy
· Dr Michael Pinto-Duschinsky
· Dr Martin Steven, Electoral Reform Society.
The committee will be holding a number of public hearings in July and September. Witnesses will be confirmed at a later date.
How to respond
Responses should be submitted as soon as possible, and by Friday 3rd September at the latest. Please send your views by email to pcrc@parliament.uk (doesn’t seem to work yet).
If you do not have access to email, you may send a paper copy of your response to:
Clerk of the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee,
Committee Office,
First Floor,
7 Millbank,
London SW1P 3JA.
Each submission should:
* be no more than 3,000 words in length;
* begin with a short summary in bullet point form;
* have numbered paragraphs; and
* be in Word format or a rich text format with as little use of colour or logos as possible.
Written submissions will usually be treated as evidence to the Committee and may be published as part of a final report. If you object to your response being made public in a volume of evidence, please make this clear when it is submitted.
Via a press release
BMJ slams Lansley’s NHS ‘reorganisation’
The government’s ambitious plans to reorganise the NHS will cost between £2bn and £3bn and distract from its core business of providing high quality care to patients, according to a highly critical editorial published online today by the British Medical Journal.
Structural reorganisations do not work, says Kieran Walshe, professor of health policy and management at Manchester Business School.
“For someone who has spent more than six years mastering the health brief in opposition, Andrew Lansley [the health secretary] seems to have learnt little from the history of NHS reorganisation,” Walshe writes.
Reorganisation has happened frequently, he writes, with the details sometimes being worked out even as it has been implemented
Mr Cameron accused Labour of mismanaging the health service and said he would be taking to the streets with a campaign to stop the cuts.
“So, for me, it is not just a question of saying the NHS is safe in my hands – of course it will be. My family is so often in the hands of the NHS, so I want them to be safe there.”
He promised “no more pointless and disruptive reorganisations”. Instead, change would be “driven by the wishes and needs of NHS professionals and patients”.
Well, that promise didn’t last long then.
For the right to wear the burqa (and the right not to)
Of course the state has no business telling people what to wear, and of course the French parliament’s 355-1 decision to ban the wearing of full face covering in public was motivated primarily by racism towards Muslims.
On those considerations alone, the move should be resolutely opposed in France, and certainly not be emulated elsewhere.
But for leftists simply to leave the matter at that – as most British radical commentators have – surely smacks of what comrades used to call an undialectical approach.
It remains the case that both the niqab and a fortiori the burqa are deeply objectionable from any rational, feminist or libertarian point of view. They represent the oppression of women through the symbolic medium of black textiles.
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Why scrapping Trident is important to reduce the deficit
contribution by Diane Abbott MP
Over the course of this campaign I have discussed at length my opposition to the Trident nuclear system and everywhere I have been my position on this issue has drawn applause and support.
So why do so many of my colleagues still refuse to support the dismantling of our nuclear weapons system? In part, I wonder whether Cabinet meetings are actually just very influential and very convincing, but I doubt it.
continue reading… »
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» Do older people really need more NHS healthcare?
» There are alternatives to the reckless ‘Plan A’
» On Beecroft: it is already quite easy to sack people
» Why Cameron’s claim of 600,000 jobs created is plainly wrong
» By using age to allocate NHS funding, Lansley rewards Tory voters
» The rise in domestic violence deaths is not an “isolated” problem
» Adrian Beecroft highlights mindset of Tory right
» The US is now a model for the Eurozone to save itself
» The IMF plan to revive the economy doesn’t go far enough
» The Boris brand is weaker than his friends think
» Nine things you can do to halt Lansley’s destruction of our NHS
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