Why I think Ed Miliband is the right person to lead the Labour party
The speed and strength at which the Coalition has lurched to the right has united the Left and Labourites much quicker than I expected. It’s useful because some discipline is necessary to ensure the Coalition faces coherent opposition, but it opens the party up to blind spots.
The biggest danger is that Labourites are seduced by the call to quickly get back into power without honestly asking why they lost in the first place. The Conservatives made the same mistakes in 2001 and 2005 (with a ‘modern’ William Hague and traditionalists IDS, Howard). It took Ashcroft’s “smell the coffee” report for them to really, er, smell the coffee about their out-of-touch brand.
Keeping that in mind, there are several reasons why I think Ed Miliband is the right person to lead the Labour party to victory at the next election.
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Boris slams double-digit pay rises but…
Last week the Evening Standard reported that RMT union leader Bob Crow was “under fire” for a double-digit pay rise. It’s fair to ask why a union leader is taking such pay rises while others are suffering.
The 12 per cent rise pushed the pay package of the Rail Maritime and Transport union general secretary to more than £133,000 last year.
The Evening Standard then adds:
A spokesman for Boris Johnson said: “Anyone delivering public services in the current climate who thinks they deserve a double digit pay rise is not living in the real world.”
Not living in the real world eh? But taxpayers don’t directly pay for Bob Crow’s income do they?
They do however pay for the income of the chief executive of the Greater London Authority – Leo Boland.
Last year Boland’s pay was increased from £183,000 to £205,000 a year, according to figures unearthed by Adam Bienkov.
Who approved that 12% pay rise? Boris Johnson – occasional Mayor of London.
By his own admission, he is not living in the real world. I’m sure that won’t come as a shock to most of you.
How RBS funds ‘dirty oil’ and global warming
This weekend, Royal Bank of Scotland is facing its biggest protests in a long history of protests. Environmental groups and hundreds of climate protesters are camped on the lawn at RBS’s Gogarburn headquarters, on the outskirts of Edinburgh.
At the centre of the protest is a growing anger at the bank’s role in funding the world’s dirty oil and gas industries, at huge environmental cost. A report revealed today by the Sunday Herald shows that RBS has provided nearly £13 billion worth of funding to the oil and gas industries since it was bailed out by the taxpayer two years ago.
The report is the first authoritative and detailed account of the bank’s controversial financing of the companies blamed for causing global warming. Among the 66 companies backed by RBS are well-known names such as BP, Shell, ConocoPhilips, Tullow Oil, Trafigura and Cairn Energy. The bank has helped them raise many hundreds of millions of pounds to finance oil exploration, extraction and development around the world.
…
RBS has also helped Trafigura raise £210m. Last month, the London-based oil trader was fined the equivalent of £840,000 by a court in the Netherlands for illegally exporting tonnes of toxic waste which allegedly made 30,000 people ill on the Ivory Coast in West Africa.
New studies contradict Osborne’s claim the cuts can be “progressive”
A new study by John Hills shows that the last government’s spending held back rising inequality and that cutting it is likely to be regressive.
At the same time, an evaluation of the 1990s cuts in Sweden and Canada – often cited by the coalition as an inspiration – reveals that they led to significant increases in poverty and inequality.
The first is a report on new research by Prof John Hills of the LSE – so new that, as far as I can make out, it isn’t on the LSE website yet. It looks at the increase in public spending in the first decade of the last government’s existence.
Prof Hills found that this spending boosted the incomes of the poorest more than any other group. He added that a £1,000 a year cut in services would represent 10% of the income of the poorest and 1% of the income of the richest fifth.
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The Pope is not the same as The Irish
So there’s a debate in the UK liberal blogosphere about Catholicism, Catholics, and when debate turns into race hate. The reasons why this is contentious are pretty obvious.
On the one hand, the Catholic Church is one of the most revolting institutions ever to have existed, second only to the USSR in terms of ‘well-meaning ideas invented by a nice chap that you could have enjoyed a cup of tea with, taken up by insane evil egomaniacs and turned into an excuse for tyranny and genocide’.
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Ed Balls publishes 10 pt contract with Labour
Ed Balls’ campaign team sent out this mail today:
Today I’m launching my contract with the Labour Party – ten pledges I am making about how I will work with party and union members to rebuild our movement and win again. Download the contract as a PDF or read my pledges below.
I’m sending it to every member this week and if I’m elected as leader you can hold me to account for them.
As part of the contract I also want to hear from party members about how we improve our policy-making process, reform the National Policy Forum, make our Annual Conference the debating chamber for working people in our country and how we become a more outward-facing party that engages with and listens to the communities we serve all year round. Please take a couple of minutes to send me your thoughts on the form here.
* * * * *
My contract with the Party
These are my pledges to every party member – if I’m elected hold me to account for them:
1. I will lead a responsible but effective opposition to the Tories and Lib Dems. I will lead from the front and ensure the whole party from the shadow cabinet and PLP to every councillor and party member plays their part in shortening the life of this coalition and exposing the unfair decisions they are taking.
2. I will increase party membership and strengthen Labour’s link with the trade unions – not just nationally but in every constituency and union branch. We should extend the £1 youth membership rate to every affliated union member joining Labour for the frst time. And as the frst Co-op MP to stand for Labour leader, I would build a closer relationship with the co-operative movement too.
3. I will give Party Conference back to members. Our Conference must be reinvigorated as the debating chamber for working people in our country. We must not go back to the 1980s, but nor should we repeat the mistakes of the second term when the Labour government neglected its base and often sounded like it was attacking trade unions and the public sector.
4. I will reform our party’s policy-making process by consulting members on how our National Policy Forum needs to change. On some policy areas – Iraq, tuition fees, agency workers, housing, and fair migration – we lost touch and lost our way. That cost us the trust of voters. I will listen to members about what we got wrong and what needs to change for the future.
5. I will drive a culture change in our party to support greater representation of women at every level. I support the goal of having at least 50% women in the shadow cabinet and in Parliament too. But we will only achieve this with greater representation of women in local government and our party structures.
6. I will set up the party’s ?rst-ever Diversity Fund to help all those who are under-represented get selected, including BAME groups, disabled people and those from ordinary backgrounds.
7. I will end undemocratic imposed selections and start the selection of candidates much earlier. We must start campaigning now in the seats we need to win – and be ready for a general election whenever the coalition falls apart.
8. I will support all our candidates, councillors and CLPs to win again. Labour faces crucial elections in the next two years, where we must take on the Tories, Lib Dems, nationalists and the BNP. They’re not simply a platform for winning again at the next general election – we need Labour in local government, the Scottish and European Parliaments and the Welsh and London Assemblies to deliver for our constituents.
9. I will nurture talent in our party and help our youth and student movement grow by giving Young Labour a full time member of staff and keeping all three Labour Students sabbaticals.
10. I will bring our party closer together by including our leaders in local government and the European Parliament in the shadow cabinet and giving our leaders in Scotland and Wales a place on the NEC.
Conspiracies around Dr Kelly’s death are a silly distraction
Ay, Dr. David Kelly’s death is back in the news for the umpteenth time.
The whole story uncannily shares a notable trait with pointless distractions such as the infamous Iraq-will-kill-everyone-in-45 minutes claim; the Oooh, how legal is the war debacle – a bit or not really?; the dodgy dossiers and so on, namely that it’s composed entirely of utter bullshit.
The Kelly case provides critics of our various wars with an unmissable opportunity to take aim at the previous government and its naked dishonesty with a twelve-bore shotgun and then, with unerring accuracy, blow their own feet off in full public view.
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Maude: volunteering is good for others not me!
As part of their ‘Big Society’ idea – the Conservatives want everyone to get involved in volunteering.
So clearly they must have lots of experience themselves?
Not the man who is in charge of the Big society programme himself – Francis Maude, according to his own words.
He is asked on Radio 4, by Eddie Mair, what volunteering he does.
His response? “Er, that’s a very unfair question.” (via Kevin Blowe)
Listen:
ConHome not on-message with Coalition
After hailing the Coalition’s radicalism, even with caveats, you would think that Conservative Home would remain fairly friendly towards the Liberal Democrats. Judging from the below image, I think somebody needs to inform the admins of Conservative Home’s McCarthyist Left Watch.
In a typically asinine post Jonathan Isaby declares “The Green Party now wants to restrict my freedom of choice and stop me eating meat.” Was this a new manifesto promise? Nope, just a proposition for Meat Free Mondays:
Quite simply, the party’s leader and sole MP, Caroline Lucas, wants to ban me and everyone else working on the parliamentary estate from being able to eat meat on Mondays. She has written to the parliamentary catering authorities asking them to provide, on one day a week, “a totally animal-free menu in order to help tackle the world’s environmental and other problems”.
The attempt to change the menu of a private establishment through writing to someone hardly merits accusations of being “uncuddly, far-left, statist and authoritarian” in my book, but that is Isaby for you.
What caught my eye was the rather fetching “Left Watch” motif running across the top of the page – I’m sure the Tory’s coalition partners will just love it too.
Why it was unlikely Charles Kennedy would defect to Labour
I’m surprised the rumour that Charles Kennedy was going to defect to Labour got as much traction as it did.
It was somewhat ludicrous from the start, though I wouldn’t be surprised if Charles Kennedy’s team encouraged it. It never fails to surprise me how much Labourites don’t understand the Libdems (not that Tories are any better) even on basic issues.
What’s is a top issue that Libdems hold close to their hearts? At a guess, I’d say civil liberties rates very highly.
What was Labour’s record on civil liberties until May 2010? Abysmal.
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