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.

Culture Secretary Andy Burnham calls for regulation of the Internet to protect the “vulnerable, the poor, and the weak.” From the title of the article, “In a Lawless zone, we must protect the vulnerable” one would think he is talking about paedophiles in chat-rooms, or the 180% rise in phishing, but in fact he is talking about copyright theft.

It is also contentious that the poor are being disadvantaged by the ‘lawless’ internet - One great advantage of the medium is that it reduces the financial barriers of entry into any given business. Putting online regulation in place will surely restore those barriers. Indeed, the proposals to introduce some kind of licence fee to download music looks like a revenue generator for record companies, rather than a measure to help young and creative people who are just starting out, and giving away their music free on MySpace.

But for entirely different reasons, it was the following quote hat caught my eye:

Nothing can be accepted as inevitable. Though technology moves quickly, we can’t abandon basic principles that have stood society in good stead for centuries.

Wasn’t this the precise argument against 42 days detention!?

In the past few months, we’ve heard a lot about what Barack Obama’s presidential campaign could teach British progressives (indeed, I’ve been more guilty of that than most), but too much has been vague hypothesising  and rueful ‘what ifs’, rather than a practical sense of how to get started.

So I think Sunder Katwala’s support for an open primary to choose the next Labour candidate for Mayor of London is a really positive first step.

There’s much in the mechanics of the Obama campaign (and the US netroots in general) that we can admire and wish to transplant into British politics, but as none of it has ever been tried before, we’ve no idea whether it would work in a country that appears to have a more cynical, less involved approach to politics than you’ll find in America.

At the very least, having an open primary in London would give us the opportunity to road-test methods like online fundraising, organising and building a movement that tries to reach as many people as possible (ie, not just Labour activists) and bring them into the tent.

If it doesn’t show any signs of success in Britain’s biggest city, then there’s not much hope for the rest of the country. However, if progressives do find some positive signs from the attempt, there’s hope that the process of choosing mayoral & parliamentary candidates could one day be more open, inclusive and, yes, democratic.

The newly elected SNP MP, John Mason, said: “This SNP victory is not just an earthquake. It is an epic win and will send tremours all the way to Westminster.”

The by-election in statistics:
13,500 - the majority that the SNP overturned.
400 - activists thrown into the constituency by Labour to get out the vote
42.25% - the turnout, down on 48% earlier.
11 - visits made by Alex Salmond to Glasgow East

Coverage
Guardian: SNP shocks Labour with 365 majority
Independent - Glasgow by-election disaster for Brown

Predictions anyone?

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.
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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?

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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:
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For those of us who lean centre-right the most dispiriting thing about the row over the crime statistics is the paucity of confidence it demonstrates in some Tory supporters, particularly among bloggers.

We’ve established a near-constant 20pt poll lead, notched up significant electoral victories in London & Crewe, garnered the sort of positive press coverage they’ve only dreamt about for c.15 years and seen even Labour’s most loyal and optimistic supporters in the press now talk about the ‘scale of’ rather than ‘likelihood’ of defeat.

That’s the sort of context most oppositions would shed a limb for.
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For years, the Green Party operated on a system of collective leadership. Up until 1991 it had 6 co-principal speakers. Since then it’s had two. That’s led to certain groups labelling the Greens as political amateurs - with good hearts, but no idea of what to do.

But last summer the party voted by a margin of 73% to elect a single leader. The Yes campaign argued that a leader was necessary for the party to ever achieve its full potential. The bulk of the party agreed - and so this September the Greens will have their first leadership elections.

The story so far
The first nomination came in last Monday. Caroline Lucas (pictured), at present an MEP and a principal speaker, launched a campaign focused on radical politics delivered with a professional punch. Her website summed up the message:

On climate change, scientists tell us that the next 10 years will be critical in terms of whether we have any chance of avoiding the worst of climate chaos. It is still the case that only the Green Party has both the radical policies, and the political commitment, that are so desperately needed to ensure that we do.

And on social justice, we face a country more unequal than it has been for decades. Only the Green Party has coherent alternatives to government policies that are privatising public services, increasing inequalities, and leading to greater violence and exclusion.

Lucas wants the party to provide discontented liberals and lefties with a credible home. Recent events and policies clearly show the party to be of that liberal-left; where else could a party that challenged David Davis as too authoritarian sit? The energy is clearly there, and Caroline Lucas says she’ll provide the professional quality to bring that vision to the voter.
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Spirit of 1976 has found a secret video exposing the Gay Agenda to Take Over the World.

Steph Ashley can’t understand why everyone quotes Iain Dale as if his views actually matter. I share her mystification on this.

Alix Mortimer compares Lib Dem and Tory campaign slogans and (surprisingly!) finds the Tory one somewhat wanting.

Dreaming of Simplicity wants to pee on Aaron’s bonfire in linking to this article on Digital Spy about the BBC’s commercial impacts.

Aberavon and Neath Lib Dems examine the Tax Credit train wreck.

And finally, Lady Mark Valladares has been up in my neck of the woods. He (and Ros) will be in Bradford today and I shall, if I can drag myself out of bed, be going to have a cream tea with them. The perils of Lib Demmery…

Ken Livingstone has effectively begun a four year campaign to be London’s next Mayor, having turned himself into a one-man unofficial scrutiny committee of the new Johnson regime. He says that he will confirm his decision to run once Labour opens the nomination process in 2010 (though he has shown before that this might not be his only possible route to City Hall).

It is not difficult to see why running again appeals to Ken. It offers not the prospect of avenging his defeat to Boris Johnson and being back in office for the 2012 Olympics too. Were Livingstone to win the Mayoralty again, it would demonstrate political stamina and bounce-backability which might well be unparalleled in democratic politics.

But there’s the rub for Labour. Livingstone may now have his sights set on outlasting both Thatcherism and New Labour. But will the party want to run a candidate in 2012 who would not just be re-fighting the election of four years before, but who first held the leadership of the Greater London Council more than three full decades before?
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A weekly roundup of publications, reports, events & articles from the leading UK think tanks.

This week’s ‘must read’ item is the Theos report on the role of Christianity in Britain today, not because I agree with every word but because it’s a provocative read, particularly for those on the liberal / left. Other than that enjoy and as ever please flag anything I may have missed. Also if anyone would like to be included in the email version please let me know…

Reports & Publications…

• Liberal think-tank CentreForum published a report on Academies and the future or state education – ‘Featuring a foreword from Schools Minister Andrew Adonis, this collection brings together the leaders of some of the most successful academies to explain how they have made these previously failing schools so popular with parents’.
• The Foreign Policy Centre published ‘Global Politics After 9/11: The Democratiya Interviews’ - a ‘series of conversations about the dilemmas of progressive foreign policy after 9/11’ edited by Alan Johnson.
• The Hansard Society have published a report called “Law in the Making: Influence and Change in the Legislative Process”. The report “analyses the influences and elements that come together in making an act of Parliament. It looks at the role of external actors such as, the media, voluntary organisations, governmental bodies, professional associations and businesses, as well as Parliament and government departments in the process of making the law”. Note: this report isn’t available for free download but can be ordered here.
• The Institute of Economic Affairs published “The Economics of Fair Trade: A Christian Perspective” – arguing that the promotion of fair trade in schools ‘has often degenerated into crude anti-capitalist propaganda’.
• The New Local Government Network weigh in on the topic of the moment with a report entitled ‘Gangs at the Grassroots: Community solutions to street violence’. Author Anthony Brand warns the Government to “avoid using centralised policies to tackle gang violence and knife crime” and allow local areas “to introduce interventions based on local factors”
• Theos, the ‘public theology think tank’ published “Neither Private nor Privileged: The Role of Christianity in Britain Today”. The report “rejects calls to privatise religious faith but insists that the nature of the church’s involvement with government should differ according to the ‘moral orientations’ of the state at any given time”
• Reform launched a report called “A New Reality: Government and the IPOD generation”. Reform have dubbed 18 to 34 year olds the ‘IPODs’ because they are ‘Insecure, Pressurised, Over-taxed and Debt-ridden’ and this report aims to ‘understand what kind of government IPODs want to see and the relationship they want to have with government’.

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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.
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Reading the Grauniad’s interview with David Cameron and the accompanying article, it’s very difficult not to become depressed that after 10 years of Blair, within a couple of years we’re going to be under the thumb of his very real heir, and with not just the Labour party but the entirety of the left raising barely a whimper of defiance.

Cameron’s broken society gambit is almost certainly the one detail that makes me despair the most. He knows it’s not true, we know it isn’t true, the government knows it isn’t true, even the Times, whose sister paper has done the most to perpetuate the notion knows it isn’t true, and yet I don’t think I can recall a single politician, whether they be Labour or Liberal Democrat who has directly challenged Cameron to provide some real evidence that British society is any sense broken.

Here’s Cameron’s incredibly weak case for it:

He denies he is giving a false picture of Britain by talking of a broken society, saying: “There is a general incivility that people have to put up with, people shouting at you on the bus or abusing you on the street, or road rage. There is a lot of casual violence; and I think it is important to draw attention to it.”

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Sunder Katwala recent article on the BBC raises two issues: editorial bias and funding. Many of us have encountered what we regard as examples of BBC lack of impartiality.

Anthony Barnett on Our Kingdom lambasted the BBC’s coverage of the David Davis campaign. I have spent nearly six years trying to persuade the BBC to acknowledge, let alone make amends for, the worst breach of impartiality in its history (a documentary on the Mau Mau rebellion purporting to be objective but actually presenting a lone scholar’s highly tendentious - and subsequently widely discredited - opinions).

In truth, these concerns regularly arise, and for the most part the BBC is aware of its obligations, especially under the new governance structure, which was responsible for a recent report by John Bridcut on the whole question of alleged liberal bias in the BBC. For me, funding is a much more important long term issue.

There are those who would die in a ditch to defend on principle the present licence fee - what former BBC DG Greg Dyke regularly calls an unfair poll tax. I would have much less of a problem with the licence fee if it were equitably levied: on those who can afford to pay tax, in proportion to their taxable income. A BBC charge of 0.75% of taxable income, collected with each individual’s tax payments, would leave the BBC with roughly its present income, but excuse those too poor to pay tax.
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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 nearly choked on my cereal yesterday when Tim sent a link to this story at the Mail on Sunday stating Margaret Thatcher was to be honoured with a state funeral.

It has not yet been decided whether the 82-year-old former Conservative leader will lie in state in Westminster Hall. To date the only Prime Minister in the 20th and 21st centuries to be given this honour was Churchill.

There were four non-Royal State funerals in the 19th century – Nelson, Wellington, Palmerston and Gladstone.

I accept that it’s incredibly discourteous to speculate about someone’s death and I want to state I don’t wish anything terrible to befall Magaret Thatcher.

But c’mon, a state funeral? For such an incredibly divisive PM? For someone who decimated entire industries? For a Prime Minister who went out there to destroy the trade union movement? For someone who supported South Africa’s racist apartheid regime and branded Nelson Mandela a terrorist? And that’s just the start.
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David Lammy MP’s recent call for the introduction of open primaries for candidate selection into British politics got a bit lost on LC, because

- quite understandably, not a few people preferred to play the man rather than the ball;

- the Single Tranferable Vote fetishists feared that our broken electoral system might be fixable in some other way (I’ll come back to that);

- Lammy didn’t make his case anything like as strongly as he might have done. And he didn’t, because he didn’t look at a different, but connected issue.
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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:
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