The Glasgow East byelection result is another nail in the coffin of New Labour. Across the country, the electorate are crying out for change, they want a government that can help improve their lives.

But a politics that is rooted in the 1990s has simply run out of answers. In response, the government once again claim they are listening, but things still seem unlikely to change; despite political wipe-out now staring Labour in the face.

If Labour politicians refuse to protect people from the economic forces that are harming their lives it’s no wonder people are turning to other political parties.

This awful defeat vindicates what Compass has been saying for three years – that the coalition that brought Labour to power in 1997 has been shattered. Between 1997 and 2005, the party lost 4 million voters – and this time we saw a further pulling-away of the working-class vote that New Labour has always ill-advisedly taken for granted.

Meanwhile, people across all classes and social groups are turning away from the party. Particularly in England the Tories are on the march; partly thanks to the sense that they are engaging with concerns that lie at the centre of people’s lives.

Needless to say, Gordon Brown’s stiff, remote style of leadership doesn’t help. But there is a more fundamental political problem that is destroying the Labour Party.

Even at a time when the credit crunch and rising prices mean that the post-Thatcher settlement is being questioned as never before, a supposedly progressive government refuses to address the way that the unrestrained free-market is damaging people’s lives in no end of areas: from housing and rising fuel bills, to crippling consumer debt and insecurity at work, and on to the dysfunctional inequality that defines so many of the UK’s current problems.

Others may be distracted by New Labour kremlinology, and the question of whether one of Brown’s cabinet colleagues might somehow be persuaded to replace him.

For us, there is no point in talking about such changes if the conversation isn’t fundamentally about a change of direction that will revive people’s confidence that the government is in touch with modern concerns, and in control of the forces that shape them.

There is little money left to spend and less than two years before the likely date of the next election, but that still leaves room for measures that would signal a change of direction and show that Labour understands the challenges of the 21st century.

We would argue in favour of:

- A windfall tax on energy and oil companies to help those struggling with escalating fuel bills.
- A fairer tax system with a new top rate and a cut in taxes for the low paid with all new revenues ear marked to boost benefit levels for the poor. Some have suggested that those earning under £10,000 per year should pay no tax. This is clean, simple and very appealing.
- A new drive to build council houses. By 2010, 5 million people will need social housing, but this year, a start will be made on only 100,000 new homes. With private construction apparently in freefall, the state has to step in.
- A high-profile drive to improve people’s working lives via government setting new standards. As a minimum, we need a new fair employment clause in all public contracts, to make sure that the public sector points the way out of the low pay culture that ensures – contrary to recent headlines about welfare reform – that work is still no guarantee of an exit from poverty. The government should take the lead of London and roll out a living wage nationwide in all public procurement contracts – which even Boris Johnson has raised in London in his first months in office.
- A moratorium on Post Office closures, and new protection for the universal service obligation of the Post Office.
- Abolishing the youth exemptions in the minimum wage.
- Help close the gender pay gap – with statutory pay audits for equality.
- Access to all local authority sports facilities free for children under 16 to confront the issues of obesity and anti-social behaviour head on.
- Across all these policy areas, if money is needed to deal with rising insecurity and anxiety then we should rethink the renewal of Trident and scrap the ID cards scheme. Government insiders claim that the latter is effectively being left to wither away, but where is the political advantage in that? On this, as with so many policies, a clear change has to be demonstrated.

Over the summer and beyond, Labour has to begin a conversation about all of this and take clear action, or face long years in the political wilderness. Compass intends to act as a catalyst for that process and play an active role in it.

So how should a serious political party of the 21st century faced with the acute and growing problems [of obesity] react?

The Foresight scientists highlighted the fact that for an increasing number of people, weight gain is inevitable and largely involuntary as a consequence of exposure to a modern lifestyle.

They used the term “passive obesity,” and pointed out that it particularly effects the socially and economically disadvantaged.

Not every child is lucky enough to live in an environment that promotes good health. Not every family has a leafy back garden for their kids to play in. Not every family can afford to buy fresh organic produce from the local farmer’s market, or to put food on the table that their children will refuse to eat.

Our strategy made clear that in approaching this problem, we reject both the “nanny state,” which polices shopping trolleys and institutes exercise regimes and the neglectful state, which wipes its hands of the problem, and wags the finger in the direction of the most vulnerable families in the vague hope that they will do as they are told.
Continue reading…

Just how much bigger will this week’s ‘biggest shake-up of the welfare state since the 1940s’ be than ‘the biggest shake-up of the welfare state for 60 years’ unveiled by David Blunkett in 2005?

Will the impending ‘Labour Blitz on Dole Scroungers’ hailed by the Sun be more or less of a blitz than the ‘Brown Blitz on the Black Economy’ similarly praised in the Murdoch press eight years ago? Luftwaffe, eat your heart out.

Come to that, how is it that those people singled out in pensions secretary James Purnell’s work for dole proposals are exactly the same people name-checked in Peter Lilley’s ‘I have a little list of benefit offenders who I’ll soon be rooting out and who never would be missed’ speech to the Conservative Party conference in 1991?

Continue reading…

James Purnell says the long-term unemployed “will be required to work full-time or undertake full-time work-related activity in return for their benefits.” (par 2.18 here).

This raises several questions. Isn’t this an abuse of language? I had thought that if you work, the money you get in return is wages.

And if you have to work 40 hours a week to get Job Seekers Allowance of £60.50, you’re paid £1.50 an hour. How is this consistent with the principle of a minimum wage?
But there’s a deeper question. Purnell could have sold a similar policy differently. He could have spoken thus:
Continue reading…

“Now Labour plans to bar white men from jobs” – just one of the recent screaming tabloid headlines about the Equality Bill.

What a fantastic nine-word summary of what is wrong with so much of our tabloid journalism: whipping up fear and division based on a fairy tale.

I’m not sure what is worse – believing that the person who wrote the headline was so ignorant of the story they thought it was true – or so cynical they were happy to write it knowing it wasn’t.

Because the truth is there is no provision like that in the Equality Bill. Nowhere. All the Bill proposes is that if two different people are equally qualified for a job (and that is a very big if!), it should be ok to choose between them on gender or race grounds.
Continue reading…

Throughout my teenage years and early twenties I had many jobs as a waitress, in a number of different restaurants. Sometimes fun, with friendly customers, plenty of staff camaraderie and after-work drinks, other times gruelling with hot hours spent in a nasty uniform trying not to look embarrassed as I handed over another overcooked/overpriced/much delayed by a fight between the chefs, pizza.

Part of what drew me to these jobs was the tips - by smiling, being helpful and pandering to odd food requests I could significantly increase the amount I took home at the end of a ten hour shift thanks to the generosity of some of those I waited on. Lucky, since these jobs usually had pretty low hourly rates.

But I was furious when I realised the last restaurant I worked in not only paid a low hourly rate but actually took money from my tips as a top up to the minimum wage.
Continue reading…

Aaron is leeeeeaaaaving onna Jet Plane this morning, so I’m afraid you’re stuck with me. Tips to the usual address if’n you’m got any, and away we go:

Anna Jane Clare meant to post about Henry James, but ended up devoting most of her post to how the feral underclass is created (NSFW warning: may contain swearing).

Lynne Featherstone has been on t’wireless.

Love and Garbage has less a post and more a treatise bemoaning the MSM’s failure to examine Cameron, especially his speeches to the CBI.

Nicholas Whyte has decided who he’s going to support in the race for Lib Dem party president, and reveals that it won’t be the same person he voted for last time. Despite my detesting the slogan, I’m 4 Ros too (see sidebar). Huzzah for the Blogging Baroness!

Matt Wardman has a challenge for Unity and other bloggers who like to dig for obscure things. His post comparing webstats for newspaper websites and blogs is worth looking at too.

Lizbee has discovered an early Fandom Wank and relates a Tom Baker anecdote. I link to these for those of you who still labour under the delusion that Doctor Who fans, like bloggers, are (and always have been) male.

And finally, those philistines of you who still don’t read Livejournal blogs? Have a look at Livejournal Aqua. The post titles float past as they are posted, hover over them and you get an excerpt; click and the post will open in a new tab (assuming that you’re using Firefox like all sensible persons)

So, a state funeral for Maggie? Why the hell not. Let’s do it.

And whilst we’re at it, let’s have a frantic choir of badly-dressed midgets singing the ding-dong song. Hell, I’m only 5ft tall myself, I’ll lead the chorus. Let’s have a party. Let’s have a gigantic piss-up to see the old girl off, and with her what remained of industrial Britain: its hatred.

Because once the witch is dead, maybe the progressive left can finally move on.

We lost, back in the mid-80s. Well, in fact, I was watching The Poddington Peas and eating a rusk on a sofa in Islington at the time, officer - but, vicariously, I lost too. We all lost. We need to face that, forgive ourselves and move on.
Continue reading…

David Cameron is moving further away from Thatcherism. This is one interpretation of his call for a US-style chapter 11 bankruptcy law. He says:

Instead of companies going straight into liquidation and having to lay off staff, they get a stay of execution and they can be restructured to try to save the business, to try to save the jobs.

This is a flat contradiction of standard neoliberal economics. This says that the very fact that a company is bankrupt is a sign that it has little value; the market - customers  - judges things right. The firm should therefore be broken up, so that workers can be released to find more productive employment. And in removing excess capacity from an industry, the firm’s more efficient rivals will become more profitable, allowing them to expand.

And the notion that bankrupt firms can be restructured is pish; if there were a way for the firm to become more efficient, either the existing managers would have found it, or the firm would have been bought by those who can make a go of it. That this hasn’t happened shows there’s no hope for the firm.

Now, this view was pretty much orthodox Thatcherism. “Lame ducks must go to the wall” was a cliché of the early 80s. And the reason Thatcher called coal mines “uneconomic” - rather than just unprofitable - was because she thought miners would find better work than digging up cheap coal*.
In calling for a chapter 11, Cameron is rejecting this view. Why?

One possibility is that the evidence is on his side. We know now that displaced miners generally did not (pdf) find work, suggesting that workers don’t quickly find valuable work elsewhere. There’s some (but limited) evidence that firms can turn themselves around in chapter 11. And it’s not clear that firms in chapter 11 in industries with excess capacity actually do harm their more efficient rivals. Chapter 11 does, then, have its supporters.

But there’s another possibility. Whether or not chapter 11 is good for the economy generally, it’s certainly good for investment bankers and lawyers, as creditors spend a fortune fighting over the scraps.  So perhaps Cameron has just listened to his friends.

* Of course, it’s possible that Thatcher’s pit closure programme was motivated not by economics but by mere class hatred. But no-one believes this, do they?

I need David Cameron lecturing me on moral responsibility in much the same way as I need a layer of icing applied to my lasagne.

Cameron had the gall to give this speech on the eve of the Glasgow East by-election campaign, in a deprived city licked to a splinter by the economic policies pursued by his party in the 1980s.

He said:
Continue reading…

He’s getting beyond parody:

Britons must stop wasting food in an effort to help combat rising living costs, Gordon Brown has said as he travelled to the G8 summit in Japan. The PM said “unnecessary” purchases were contributing to price rises, and urged people to plan meals in advance and store food properly.

Now, I’m embarrassed to point this out, but people don’t need telling this. The more expensive food becomes, the less folk will want to waste it. That’s basic self-interest and GCSE economics.

So, why is Brown saying this? I can think of four possibilities.
Continue reading…

Other than being the Big Swinging Dicks in their very different respective ‘hoods, there might at first sight appear to be little in common between a rap superstar and the editor of the Daily Mail.

But following on from a comment in a Shakilus Townsend post I wrote on my blog, I am rather taken with a possible parallel between 50 Cent (pictured) and Paul Dacre, namely the role they wittingly or otherwise play in popularising ‘knife culture’.

Fiddy, of course, routinely glorifies violence for commercial reasons, because that’s what sells records. For his part, Dacre regularly ramps up the reportage of the latest moral panic, becauses that’s what sells newspapers.
Continue reading…

What stories can we tell about poverty in the UK? As prices rise and wages stagnate, a new era of industrial action may turn up some new ones.

The second Tube Cleaners’ Strike this week is a flashpoint for a city and a country sick to its stomach of scraping by or stumbling over whilst the rich get richer under New Labour.

We are sick of market-licking policy promising us jam tomorrow; for a generation, now, we’ve been waiting for Thatcher’s economic reforms to trickle down and lift the rest of us out of squalor, as we were promised they would.

But now the bubble has burst, and it’s the poor who are taking the fall for the City. The recipients of Income Support in London who rode in with their discounted travel cards to vote Ken Livingstone out of City Hall are now feeling the pinch after Johnson cut that benefit, in one of his first acts as Mayor. And with wages across the board failing to rise in line with inflation, Alastair Darling’s plea that we all ‘tighten our belts’ rings hollowly in the ears of those not earning an MP’s salary of £62,000 plus expenses.
Continue reading…

What’s the minimum amount of money that someone living in Britain needs?

The new report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, “A Minimum Income Standard for Britain“, makes an interesting attempt to answer this question. They asked people from a range of different backgrounds, with advice from experts, to put together a list of ‘essentials’ of what they thought people would need in order to be able to participate in society.

They found that, after tax and excluding rent and childcare, a single adult would need a minimum of £158/week, a pensioner couple would need £201/week, a couple with 2 children would need £370/week and a lone parent with one child would need £210/week.
Continue reading…

There can be only one high tech manufacturing sector in which a substantially deindustrialised Britain still claims world leadership in export terms, and here’s a clue; it isn’t advanced medical equipment.

It is rather – as the government proudly revealed yesterday – production of the means of destruction, as the FT reports:

Britain became the world’s largest arms exporter last year, according to government figures released yesterday, overtaking the US which normally occupies the top slot.

The UK won £10bn of new defence orders in 2007 from overseas, giving it a 33 per cent share of the world export market, according to figures released yesterday by the Defence and Security Organisation, set up to promote Britain’s defence exports. Export orders totalled £5.5bn in 2006 …

Lord Jones, trade and investment minister, said: “As demonstrated by this outstanding export performance, the UK has a first class defence industry with some of the world’s most technologically sophisticated companies.”

Continue reading…

Thisannoys me:

Chancellor Alistair Darling today called for restraint over wage rises…The Chancellor told the BBC’s Today programme yesterday: “Inflationary pay rises would be disastrous not just for the country but for each and every one of us.”

What it ignores is the fact that no pay rise I get makes a blind bit of difference to the inflation rate. And, with decentralized wage bargaining, the same’s true for each of us. Low inflation is a public good. And ideally, each of us would like to free ride on others’ efforts to provide it. The upshot is that no-one accepts a low wage rise because it leads to low inflation.

Wage inflation is low because there are two
billion Indians and Chinese threatening to do our jobs more cheaply - not because anyone wants to make a contribution towards achieving low inflation.
Continue reading…

A couple of weeks ago, I was contacted by Nick Cowen of the right-wing think-tank Civitas with an interesting and rather flattering proposition - would I review Nick’s new pamphlet, ‘Swedish Lessons’, which looks at what we in England could usefully learn from Sweden’s educational reforms of the last 10-15 years, particularly it’s use of a ‘voucher’ system to increase parental choice and diversity of provision in education.

Never one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I quickly agreed and, on Friday, a package dropped through my door containing Nick’s pamphlet together with two previous Civitas publications on education policy, all of which made from very interesting reading over the weekend.

I’ll come to the other two pamphlets at a later date, but for today I want to concentrate on Nick’s exploration of the Swedish education system. I had, originally, planned to write a review over the weekend and post-date it for publication here immediately following the expiry of the press embargo on its release, but on reflection decided to hold off for a few hours to see exactly how Civitas would pitch it to the media and what angle, if any, the media would take.
Continue reading…

The real problem with Labour is right, more than anything, is the perception that we’re being bled dry by various different outlets of our hard earned cash.

If Gordon Brown is to have any hope of a fightback, the best place to start is with our energy prices, a subject that the government clearly feel is a priority given the announcements made on the 30th of May. Don’t be fooled though, if you’re hoping for a cure to the ever booming gas and electricity prices then you’ll be sorely disappointed by this latest official announcement.

All in all the plans seem to do as much as the idea of the big six energy companies investing a further £225million over 3 years in to social tariffs, a scheme that if you take British Gas’s profits (which is from my perspective a good average of the other companies) would mean merely 2-3% of their annual profits being “reinvested” in to helping the poorest customers afford their rising energy bills.
Continue reading…

Even with New Labour now in urgent need of a major bail-out from the unions simply to stay solvent, Gordon Brown has apparently decided that he has better things to do than attend next week’s GMB conference.

Most delegates will privately be relieved not to have to sit through the inert expanse of boilerplate, platitudes and waffle that passes for a prime ministerial speech on these occasions. But the arrogance of the snub is both palpable and somewhat distasteful.

Perhaps one of the reasons for Brown’s no show is that a call for disaffiliation from the Labour Party is on the GMB’s agenda. Meanwhile, the Communications Workers Union will discuss the issue at its annual get-together, also planned for next week. Smaller unions such as RMT and FBU are already out of the fold, of course.
Continue reading…

Liam Byrne, minister for borders and immigration, will today give the first of five ministerial speeches to Progress, the New Labour pressure group, as part of its new ‘Progressive Challenge’ series. Continue reading…