Tories sell access to ministers for £1k a head
The Conservatives are offering business leaders access to government ministers in exchange for money, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.
Executives who buy £1,000-a-plate tickets to a fund-raising dinner at the Conservative Party conference will get to sit with ministers. Despite David Cameron’s pledges to bring transparency to party funding, the identities of the businessmen will be kept secret.
The Conservative fund-raising operation has led to accusations of cash for access, and drawn comparisons with controversial fund-raising methods employed by Labour under Tony Blair. The inaugural Conservative Party Business Dinner is being marketed as “an exclusive networking event” where guests will “enjoy fine wines and superb food with fellow business leaders”.
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However, application forms on the Tory Party website make it clear that business leaders prepared to spend £1,000-a-head can guarantee that they dine with at least one serving government minister.
How does Cruddas endorsement for David M change things?
I expected that Cruddas implicitly sided with David Miliband, but didn’t expect an outright endorsement.
There is ton of speculation, outrage and cheering already on Twitter and elsewhere, so here are a few thoughts.
1. Jon Cruddas’ endorsement isn’t entirely out-of-the-blue. David Miliband has been making strong overtures already in two areas that Cruddas is interested in: developing a more ‘solidarity and community based society’ approach to policy, and developing a sense of progressive English patriotism. Both are cited as main reasons by Cruddas in his endorsement.
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NS endorses Ed M; Cruddas backs David
The edition of New Statesman tomorrow will endorse Ed Miliband as Labour leader.
Update: The leader has been published on the New Statesman website – but here are a few highlights:
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Why Ed Miliband should be the next Labour leader
Many of our readers despair of Labour and will never forgive the authoritarian tendencies of Tony Blair, or how he allowed the party to be drawn into a fatal and militaristic alliance with the neoconservatives of the Bush administration. Nor will they forgive the neoliberal market dogmatism that resulted in the British economy becoming so unbalanced and so over-reliant on reckless financiers. We empathise with them.
…
Indeed, there are many aspects of the coalition government’s programme of which we approve, notably its commitment to constitutional reform and enhanced civil liberties, and the willingness of the Work and Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, to make poverty and dispossession a defining issue of our political discourse. Yet we still believe that Labour is the party that offers the best hope of achieving the progressive transformation of British society that we seek, perhaps one day in coalition with the Liberal Democrats.
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Now, slowly, we are witnessing the first signs of renewal. There has been a preparedness to admit mistakes and ask painful questions about why so many of its natural supporters ended up feeling so betrayed by or isolated from Labour. So far, of all the candidates, it is Ed Miliband who has been most prepared to challenge New Labour orthodoxies, to use a different kind of language. He advocates a Labour agenda that is confident, forceful and empowering, committed to greater freedom, social justice and, above all else, reducing inequality.
The primary task of the next Labour leader has to be to develop a political economy that addresses the fundamental inequalities and inequities that have blighted British society for so long – and which will only worsen as the Con-Lib coalition’s doctrinaire spending cuts begin to bite. To talk of tackling social mobility, as coalition ministers do, without addressing the ever-widening gap between rich and poor, is disingenuous. The fight for a more equal society has to become a priority again and Ed Miliband understands this (see his column on page 21).
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Voting begins on 1 September and we urge all undecided MPs and MEPs, and Labour Party and trade union members, to vote for Ed Miliband. He is the “change candidate” who has the greatest potential to connect with a wider electorate and especially with those politically engaged young people, internationalist in outlook, who have lost faith in conventional Westminster politics but yearn for a more democratic, fairer and freer Britain. Labour needs a bold, charismatic, compassionate and visionary leader to renew the party and begin the journey back to government. Ed Miliband has shown us he could be that leader.
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Update: The magazine also reports that Jon Cruddas has officially come out to support David Miliband:
“I’m endorsing David,” Cruddas says now, “because of a couple of contributions he has made – one was the column on Englishness he wrote in your magazine [in our 5 July issue]. Another was his Keir Hardie Memorial Lecture [on 9 July]. What was interesting to me about this was when he started talking about belonging and neighbourliness and community, more communitarian politics, which is where I think Labour has to go.
He’s the only one [of the leadership contenders] that has got into some of that. He’s tackling some of more profound questions that need to be addressed head-on. What is the nature of the reckoning? We should not just be running from the record but having a nuanced approach to some of the things that went wrong, as well as defending the things that went right.”
Right-wingers respond: the IFS are socialists!
The Conservative response to the IFS report today has gone from the hilarious to the absurd.
First, Paul Goodman at ConservativeHome:
After all, this a Coalition Government, not a purely Conservative one. The junior partner is vulnerable, with its poll ratings plummeting and a testing party conference looming. The Liberal Democrats have bet the farm on “fairness”. Nick Clegg has insisted that the budget was fair, and Vince Cable has elevated “fairness” to the test of whether he’ll support the Coalition.
True, but I distinctly recall a Chancellor, whose name escapes me, calling the budget “progressive”. Remember that? Why isn’t it OK to challenge that mischaracterisation?
Then ConHome deputy editor Jonathan Isaby pitched in – this is all Labour’s fault and their dastardly “equality” legislation!
Then Tim Montgomerie threw in his 2 pence, saying that perhaps what Tories needed to do was just re-define what “fairness” actually means:
In an article for The Guardian’s Comment is free I make the case that the Coalition’s key message should be that the route out of poverty is (1) a good education, (2) paid-work and a (3) strong family AND crucially we are not laissez-faire but believe that government has a role in helping people achieve those things.
He goes on to blame Gordon Brown because he “discouraged low-income couples from living together”.
He may want to recall Cameron himself admitting:
Basically I think a strong society benefits from having strong families and I think marriage is a good institution. Of course, you know, nobody gets married for money and nobody stays married for money.
This is all getting very confusing, policy wise. How exactly did Labour “discourage” low income couples from living together?
But the best response to the IFS comes from former TaxPayers’ Alliance employee Mark Wallace: Time for the IFS to come clean – they swing to the Left
What is odd, though, is that the Institute for Fiscal Studies have become Britain’s leading cheerleader for the idea that progressive=good, regressive=bad, promoting the concept that particular types of economic policy are politically better than others.
The IFS’ pitch and reputation is that it is both non-partisan and politically unbiased – that it does not prefer one set of political ideas over another, but it just wants the sums to add up. As they say on their website, “our most cherished asset is a hard-won reputation for objectivity and impartiality”. Given that this status imparts such huge weight to their reports, particularly within the BBC, it is bizarre and misguided that they are increasingly moving beyond bean-counting and into flag-waving.
Wait? The IFS say something that doesn’t agree with us? They must be socialists!
As someone beneath Wallace’s blog post points out: “If you think it’s a fiction that progressive=good and regressive=bad, why does it matter to you that the IFS identified the budget as regressive?”
Quite.
Claudy bombing: answers, please
Unlike the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday, at least the police ombudsman’s report into the Claudy bombing did not cost anything like £195m. And it only took it eight years rather than 12 to establish for the record what everybody knew already anyway, which is positively speedy by comparison.
Briefly put, Al Hutchinson found that parish priest James Chesney was an Irish Republican Army quartermaster and in that capacity directly involved in the 1972 terrorist atrocity that claimed nine lives and injured dozens of others.
Tory home secretary Willie Whitelaw discussed the issue with Cardinal Conway, head of the Catholic church in Ireland. The Cardinal conceded that Chesney was ‘a very bad man’, and decided that he should be punished by being transferred to a parish the other side of the border, where he served until his death in 1980. There. That showed him.
Why a ban on ‘dangerous dogs’ doesn’t work
This week, DEFRA is considering proposals to change the dangerous dogs act.
And rightly so – the act’s ridiculous breed-specific ban must be abolished and the act changed to shift all responsibility for dog control to dog owners.
I’ve been talking to SPCAs and dog control experts around the world this year. They say politicians who insist that dog control legislation should include breed bans compromise public safety, because breed bans do not reduce attack numbers.
They’re lobbying government to put proven dog control programmes in place:
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More Climate Camp action against RBS
On a related note, this article in the New Yorker is eye-popping.
An excerpt:
The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests.
In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.” The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups.
Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.
How the Cancer Drug Fund is being used to attack the NHS
contribution by Rosanna Singler
The Coalition knew just what it was doing when it announced its controversial £50 million Cancer Drugs Fund in July. It’s a significant milestone in the long-planned unravelling of the NHS
The essential role of NICE is to ensure that the NHS practices and more significantly drugs that it uses are effective, backed up by robust evidence and, perhaps controversially for some, cost-effective. It cannot buy drugs which gives only weeks of life and which cost more than drugs who can give years of extra life.
The NHS does not have a never ending budget, even in times of prosperity. This is why NICE has to play such a brutal role – who would want to control the purse strings where people’s loved ones lives are at stake?
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Watch: ‘Stop Ground Zero Mosque song’
No – this is not actually a parody. It’s serious. (via @LeftOutside)
Also related to this – arch-”libertarian” MEP Daniel Hannan listing the silly reasons cited for opposing the Ground Zero Mosque before…
The sponsors of the religious centre might consider doing something similar. They should not give up their right to build their mosque: that right is entrenched in the First Amendment and in the very notion of private property. But choosing not to exercise it would be an apt and charitable response to the feeling of their fellow citizens
And I thought Daniel Hannan had libertarian strong principles that he stood by regardless? Oh sorry, maybe those don’t apply to Muslims.
Perhaps he should consider that many of the people who oppose the GZM aren’t just doing it there – they oppose mosques hundreds of miles away too.
This isn’t a one-off, right-wing Republican groups have been trying to restrict rights of Muslim Americans to build mosques for years (Economist link if you’ve registered).
Meanwhile – a senior US military interrogator says: “Build the Mosque; Help Defeat al Qaeda”.
You know a libertarian who actually speaks sense on the issue? Ron Paul
Perhaps Dan Hannan is only a libertarian when politically expedient.
Finally – definitive evidence that Osborne’s budget is regressive
Today, End Child Poverty reports on new research, commissioned from the IFS, that shows definitively what many others have highlighted – the cuts announced in the Budget will hit families and the poorest the hardest.
As we showed immediately after the Budget, the Chancellor’s claim that the spending changes he announced were ‘progressive’ has always been contentious – significantly the Treasury’s modelling did not include a third of social security changes, including cuts to Housing Benefit and Disability Living Allowance, and only changes up until 2012/13 were considered.
continue reading… »
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