A correspondent writes... - 4 comments

A correspondent writes:

Dear labour party
I am disgusted at the abolishing of the 10p tax rate . This has a considerable impact on my situaion. It works out as a 20% decrease in my pension even after the so calledd cost of living rises being factored in.
I have always voted Labour but will not from now on and this is because you are too "dear" to support.
Incidentally how could such a measure be put through without our guardian politicians bringing it to the publics n otice. I think the accusation of taxation by stealth levelled at the labour party is sadly TRUE.
I and my wife will not vote for you until this injustice is put right.
I also want you to note that I know many poor who are tragically affected by this unjust labour party do you think you will get away with this nasty policy especially with elections coming up. Our forefathers must be turning in their graves.
My MP is Mr Byers Wallsend please pass onto him.
yours sadly.
Mr P Dxxxx

What would your response be?

Incidentally, I get a lot of this sort of message. This is by no means the first about the 10p starting rate, but I thought I'd post it as an example. How the 10p rate could be restored without revisiting the entire Budget, I don't know. Who knows what newspaper Mr. Dxxxx reads, or what he can remember of last year's Budget; one thing's for sure, those headlines sure do stick in people's minds.

Vote Labour Today - 4 comments

Good luck to all Labour candidates today!

MpURL and vastly more blogs... - 2 comments

I had a look last night at the updated MpURL resource that is available to all Labour members, to discover that all blogs hosted there offer RSS feeds - I'm sure that facility weren't there before.

We're now running 30 or so of the most active of these blogs (our total is now 440). The problem is that, though the feeds (and previews) are available to the public, and can be read by anyone at B4L, the posts themselves are (by default) only visible to party members with a valid membership login, so non-members will not be able to read the full article, or read selectively from the blog.

Now, Labour's software does provide the ability for these "private" bloggers to make their sites available to the general public, with a friendly URL. Only a handful seem to have done so, and the "public" blogs not only look completely different, but don't indicate the fact that there really is a feed available. If you discovered these facts the wrong way around, as I did, you might be a little confused, but I think I understand now.

What Bloggers4Labour does, therefore, is use the public URL and "private" feed if a public URL is supplied. That should deliver the best of both worlds. Otherwise, we fall back to using the private URL, and in these cases you'll need to log in to view the entirety of a post you've clicked.

There's a huge number of these blogs on the Labour system: a simple calculation suggests over 360. Some will be duplicates of/proxies for blogs we already syndicate, but many/most seem to be the handiwork of blogging newbies, who often wonder if anyone's reading. Hopefully our syndicating them will help.

What I can't explain is that we have a couple of sites with a public URL, but no discernible "private" blog to back them, hence no feed at all. Here are the two blogs in that boat:

• Cllr Matt Cooke
• Anne Snelgrove MP

Remembrance of policies past - 7 comments

Reading Paul Anderson's wonderful collection of George Orwell's writings for Tribune - surely essential reading for political bloggers - and the comments here, got me thinking once more about a venerable Labour Party policy, namely nationalisation of the land.

It's mentioned in Election Manifestos as early as 1900, and as late as 1964 (in a fairly vague kind of way), before disappearing in 1966. The policy has similarly failed to make the cut in the New Labour years. Here's what we used to say, back in 1918:

The Labour Party means to introduce large schemes of land reorganisation, and it is fully aware that this can only be done in the teeth of the most powerful vested interests. land nationalisation is a vital necessity; the land is the people's and must be developed so as to afford a high standard of life to a growing rural population not be subsidies or tariffs, but by scientific methods, and the freeing of the soil from landlordism and reaction.

Reading the whole thing is definitely worth five minutes of your time - and in 1945:

Labour believes in land nationalisation and will work towards it, but as a first step the State and the local authorities must have wider and speedier powers to acquire land for public purposes wherever the public interest so requires. In this regard and for the purposes of controlling land use under town and country planning, we will provide for fair compensation; but we will also provide for a revenue for public funds from "betterment".

So I'm interested to know:

1. Whether there's still any enthusiasm for a policy like this.
2. Whether support is any greater on the far-left than on the (Labour) right.
3. What your views are - wherever you are on the political compass.
   

Jon Cruddas: an opportunity wasted - 16 comments

Warning: this post contains criticism of Jon Cruddas. One of the difficulties that arises when spreading the writing of a post across a day two days is finding public opinion shifting against you, making it seem all the more churlish to appear to pick upon a decent bloke. This awareness does motivate me, what with my being a human being, your sufferance of my occasional rants on these pages, and the target being a Labour MP who has impressed many. Nonetheless, I try to criticise when I think it's due, and I'm happy to publish and be damned. So, onward.

*

Having read Liam Byrne and Bill Rammell's earlier article ("An utterly false choice"), I can see why Jon Cruddas might have been riled, but I found his response [via Stuart] equally gloomy reading.

The earlier article seemed content for electoral politics to be pitched at the voters most likely to tilt a General Election Labour's way, with little criticism of the legitimacy of the ambitions and priorities of a few (lucky) slices of that society being made the priorities for a future government, ignoring such trifling concerns as freedom, equality, justice, or the democratic aspirations of the rest of the electorate.

Unfortunately, rather than savaging the original piece for these obvious omissions, or finding some way to engage the entire Labour movement in a plausible crusade against poverty and injustice worldwide (two priorities for any Labour Party, surely), just about all Jon could conjure up with was a vapid appeal to "traditional" values. At no point did we learn what these traditional values are, how they equip us to reduce poverty and meet future challenges, who these "traditional" voters are, or what their needs are, let alone whether those needs are best met by those traditional policies. Does "traditional" really boil down to the following?

Everything anyone remotely likely to vote Labour don't like about politics today, and any favoured policy from the past that is no longer in current use, for whatever reason.

Sorry, but anyone who insists upon using terms like "core" voters (no less silly a term than "swing" voters), and "Labour values" is being abstruse, whether deliberately, or otherwise. It denies potential voters the opportunity to judge candidates and parties on the basis of the policies they might actually carry out, and the chance to judge the accuracy, applicability, plausibility, and likelihood of success of those policies. Sure, there's no General Election in the offing, but there's no harm in a politician who wants to be remembered for their policies to act like there is.

References to "core" and "traditional" remind me of the futility of searching for ideological purity - in our case, the mythical "Real Labour". It's a label more often adopted than bestowed. It's not hard to suggest groups in society - the poorest, for starters - who should expect the most attention from a Labour programme. To what extent their concerns tally with traditional Labour voters (who I'm not yet convinced aren't, in fact, substantially more middle class than is believed), I don't know, but the policies Labour should be pursuing are what work particularly well for the disadvantaged, whether the policies are old or new.

Perhaps this is unfair - there is a little politics in Jon's piece:

Too often the second-term Labour government ... [arrived] at policies such as differential top-up fees that not only owed more to free-market dogma than our traditional values but were also deeply unpopular among swing voters.

This is unhelpful in several ways. The need to address higher-education funding dates back to substantially before 2001, with several different funding/fees options on the table, and this need was felt within the Labour Party just as much as elsewhere, so it's hardly accurate to claim the current policy just materialised. And, hang on, why would a government overly concerned with swing voters stick to a policy that, so it is claimed, fails to deliver those middle class votes? Could it be that there was an impulse behind the policy that Jon's analysis fails to spot?

Appending "dogma" to "free-market" is (I regret to say) a fairly common rhetorical trick on our side, used either to restrict discussion to comfortable or agreeable arguments, or to signal one's statist credentials to supporters, masking off huge areas of policy exploration - for example, road pricing that simply asks drivers to pay the social cost of their driving, then let's them alone - at a stroke. Funnily enough, support for university fees is one of the few policies I've held consistently over the past decade or so, even back to the days when I might have used similar language, but one problem with traditionalists is their tendency to cherry-pick those "traditions" that suit them. For example, I can't help feeling "If you have the means, you're going to have to make a pretty good case before we subsidise you with taxpayer's money, but we'll give the most help to those who most need it" is a better established expression of Labour values than "All potential students have a right to free higher education, whatever the cost, whatever their means; and taxpayers have the corresponding responsibility to pay, whatever their means." You might not agree with my choice, but at least you didn't slap "dogma" on the one you didn't like.

The idea that we need lectures from Rammell, the minister for top-up fees, on winning back aspirant voters frankly beggars belief.

We could, of course, turn that around and say:

The idea that we need lectures from Cruddas, the Member of Parliament for Dagenham, on winning back "traditional" voters frankly beggars belief.

In fact, that's pretty generous: Rammell, after all, was tarred with "minister for top-up fees"; he no more "lectures" than Jon does (though I've already stated that I strongly dislike the inferences of Rammell and Byrne's piece); and besides, Rammell didn't - to my knowledge - make any claims about the popularity of the introduction of (deferred) higher education fees, nor should that be a priority for any Education Minister.

*

I don't have a problem at all with Jon's housing suggestions, but if he can make a difference in that area, wouldn't it be more sensible for him to position himself to take on a future housing portfolio, rather than gun for a Deputy Leadership job that would deny him a direct input?

Likewise - and I'm tailing off a little, here, so bear with me - I don't have a problem with the suggestions about political activity...

They think this is modern, but actually today's voters are more likely to respond to active, campaigning parties that are properly rooted in their local communities.

... insofar as anyone disagrees with that. The statement isn't wrong, or harmful, it's just lost its value through overuse. Saying it might meet our fairly low expectations, but showing that you have a unique solution, or a unique ability to achieve an existing solution, is what will restore value to the fine sentiments.

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I don't think I'm simply being pedantic here: having the opportunity to write for a popular and influential publication should be an opportunity to appear sensible, thoughtful, accurate, interested in the truth - and what works. Coming across as close-minded, and with a preference for warm, woolly, catch-all terms, doesn't seem to me to adequately reward the reader for their time.