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Brown draws flak over role in handling military budget
Mar 14th
Cameron uses prime minister’s questions to challenge Brown over military funding claims made to the Chilcot inquiry
It was possibly the most supercharged prime minister’s questions of the year so far. At 12:09pm last Wednesday the ritual jousting turned toxic as David Cameron challenged Gordon Brown’s testimony at the Iraq inquiry days earlier.
Brown had told the Chilcot inquiry that he never refused urgent requests for more military funding. Cameron did not believe him, citing two former chiefs of the defence staff who had criticised the prime minister for offering the inquiry evidence that was “disingenuous” and “dissembling”.
Several Labour backbenchers could not hold their tongues. But, they roared, Lord Guthrie and Admiral Lord Boyce were “Tories”. The implication was damning; these men might once have been characters of honour whose duty was to serve the nation but now their criticism could be dismissed as readily as, well, Cameron’s.
It was a poisonous putdown. In their view, the opinions of two of the most powerful figures in modern military history had become corrupted to the extent they were no longer impartial.
Some blamed Sir Richard Dannatt, the former army chief, for politicising the military. After all, Dannatt’s consistent criticism of defence spending in Afghanistan had preceded reports that he would become a defence adviser to the Conservatives. Beyond the hullabaloo over political bias weighed against genuine concern over soldiers’ welfare, the debate boils down to whether Guthrie and Co have a point? Did Brown starve the military of funding when he was chancellor, leaving the forces short of vital equipment?
The answer may depend on whose side you are on. Guthrie and Boyd remain adamant that Brown mishandled the defence budget when chancellor and that his prudence meant, for instance, fewer troop-carrying helicopters in Afghanistan, one of the most vexing issues facing commanders in Helmand province. Their critique was bolstered by an inquest verdict hours before Wednesday’s Commons exchange. Four soldiers were unlawfully killed after troops were given “inadequate” training, according to Wiltshire coroner David Masters.
Brown, too, remains unmoved. He told Cameron that “every request” made by defence officials for “urgent operational requirements” was met. In fact, said the prime minister, £18bn had been invested in Afghanistan and Iraq on top of the military budget. In real terms, spending was up. The Tories, claimed the prime minister, cut it by 30% in the 1990s. But the truth, as so often, is somewhere in between.
Analysts point out that the MoD has a long-term core budget while the additional cost of fighting wars comes from the Treasury reserve. Many believe this dynamic fuelled disagreement between Brown and the military men.
However, the future for defence spending appears less ambiguous. Swingeing cuts are a certainty. Days before last week’s PMQ, the defence select committee bemoaned a £21bn funding gap for scheduled military projects. If they win the election, the Tories will have to preside over huge cuts in military spending. The question is, will Guthrie and Boyd sit quietly on the sidelines when that happens?
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Griffin vs Hodge: the Battle for Barking
Mar 13th
A former Labour stronghold has become home to one of the ugliest fights in politics. In one corner, a long-standing minister. In the other, the leader of the BNP. John Harris joins them on the frontline
The tube heads east, through Whitechapel, Stepney Green, Mile End, Bow Road. Canary Wharf is there in the near distance, but seems like another world. The train passes through post-industrial remains – rusty gasometers, empty canals – and blocks of flats, from inter-war mansion blocks to the great leviathans put up in the 60s. Finally, the landscape opens out into a grey plateau, and you’re there: most of the way to Essex, into the borough of Barking and Dagenham.
As arranged, Nick Griffin’s bodyguard calls me at 1.30pm, and picks me up at Dagenham Heathway station – whereupon we drive to the home of Richard Barnbrook, one of the British National Party’s leading Barking councillors and their solitary member of the London Assembly. An English flag and a Union Jack fly either side of the front door; inside, the lounge is dominated by two big glass tanks populated by Chinese water dragons and other exotic reptiles.
And there he is, like a Bond villain relocated to the set of the Royle Family: Nick Griffin, 51, here for the day before resuming his current job in Strasbourg and Brussels as the MEP for England’s North West. He is personable, if a little nervous. Depending on your point of view, the scene’s fine details suggest either the banality of evil, or the comfortingly Pooter-esque tastes of the house’s owner: a matter not just of the reptiles, but of Barnbrook’s insistence that everyone, his leader included, walks around in their stocking feet, and the fact that he makes a point of offering Griffin a soft drink: “Do you want an apple juice, Nick?”
“Oh, I’d love an apple juice.”
Eventually, we make our way to the Thames View estate, a blighted housing development cut off from the rest of the borough by the cacophonous A13. Seemingly for my benefit and that of a BNP volunteer making a campaign video, Griffin, Barnbrook and another five or six BNP members – at least two of whom are wearing secret service-type earpieces – approach the few members of the public who are braving the rain, and talk to them about the more difficult aspects of their lives.
In Shannon’s bakery, 60-year-old Shannon Slattery tells them about her daughter, who lives with her four-year-old son in a grim, privately-rented flat full of pigeon droppings that have apparently made the boy chronically ill. They’re on the council waiting list, “but every time, she’s, like, number 200 or 300″. She and her husband Derek now vote BNP: “They talk straight – they stand up for the English.” All this is explained while a few black schoolkids jostle at the counter for cakes, and Barnbrook makes awkward small talk with them: “You going to take some exercise after that? You don’t want to get big round the middle.”
Once a dependable Labour stronghold, Barking and Dagenham is now represented by two MPs who could not be more different: the left’s favourite, and likely post-Brown contender, Jon Cruddas; and Margaret Hodge, New Labourite, and minister at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. They have one thing in common: a long, grinding fight against the British National Party. Since 2006, the BNP has had 12 councillors here – nine of whom are in Hodge’s Barking constituency – and come May it could make it to 26 seats and be handed control of the borough. Meanwhile, Hodge is in the early stages of a general election battle against the far right’s most recognisable and infamous face: Nick Griffin.
Modern politicians don’t talk about such issues much, but the underlying problems here are simple enough. Local life used to revolve around the massive Ford car works, which once employed 50,000, but is now home to a diesel engine plant staffed by only 2,000. Back then, the borough was also a byword for plentiful council housing.
Margaret Thatcher’s Right To Buy scheme changed things for ever, though only once former tenants sold up and moved on. As that happened, thousands of ex-council houses contributed to the cheapest rental market in London, drawing more and more of the economic migrants who now keep so much of the city running. The borough was thus transformed from a largely white community where abundant accommodation ensured that extended families lived within doors of each other, to a multi-coloured milieu in which people at the sharp end had to compete for scarce supplies of just about everything: decent jobs, adequate schools and, most of all, somewhere to live. The result: a tinderbox, where issues get reduced to race and nationality.
One Saturday in January, I follow a crowd of Labour party people on one of Hodge’s Days Of Action: six or so hours of door-to-door calls. She flits between packs of canvassers, talking to the public when required, noting down their sources of anger and concern, endlessly talking about the BNP’s fascist pedigree. To some people now in the habit of voting for them, this is news.
At the entrance to one of the Becontree Estate’s cul-de-sacs, we meet Jackie Morrell, who clocks her MP – and starts shouting. “All the trouble we have down here, and the council do fuck all. We have trouble from black people, but they call us racist: music all hours of the night at one house. At another they chuck dogshit over the fence.”
Morrell is 42: a trained chef, currently unemployed. She lives in a one-bedroom flat with her mother. She’s on the housing waiting list, but way down the queue. She votes BNP. “The reason I go for them is because they go for a lot of my policies.”
Such as? “Stop the immigrants. You’ve got to shut the floodgates.”
“You’re fed up with us lot, then?” Hodge says, and out come a few of her stock lines: “The borough’s changing. But we can make it work. It doesn’t have to be bad.”
Hodge is 65. Born in Egypt, she came to Britain with her Jewish parents, who were refugees from Nazi-occupied Austria. Her father Hans founded the firm that eventually became Stemcor, the world’s largest independent steel trading business, in which she owns a major stake. Having served time as the leader of Islington Council, she became the MP for Barking in 1994. Back then, according to local Labour insiders, she and the local party struck a deal whereby she saw to her Westminster commitments and they focused their attention on the council. In this telling of the story, it was assumed that Labour rule would extend into eternity, so there was little neighbourhood campaigning, leaving the door open for the BNP when local affairs turned troublesome.
So I wonder: how much responsibility does she feel about her party being asleep on the job?
“Oh, of course… I share the responsibility. When I was first the MP in Barking, we were a safe constituency and people felt they could weigh the votes in without bothering… And that included me. I kick myself that I didn’t hear the alarm bells. I wish I’d been tougher.”
Some of the big failures, she acknowledges, happened at the heart of government. “We failed to realise the importance of the quality of life on council estates and the importance of affordable housing… I think we got that wrong. From 2001, I was saying, ‘Housing is the key issue.’ I showed all the decision-makers in the party my research” – she means people right at the top – “and they all thought it was very interesting. Did it change what they did? No.”
A month later, sitting in a pub on the Thames View estate drinking a pint of light ale and bitter, Nick Griffin tells me that Hodge is an easy target: “far more unpopular than Jon Cruddas”, “fantastically wealthy” and the embodiment of the ties that bind politics and big business. Could he win? “I’m not particularly fussed: I’d love to be an MP, certainly. I’d like to represent this place. I’ve been coming down to Barking – in fact, this estate specifically – since I was 17.”
That was with the National Front, presumably?
He goes quiet. “The NF, yeah.”
His plan, he tells me, is to draw media hostility away from other BNP candidates – particularly for the borough council – and thus allow them a relatively clear run. “The flak will only potentially damage my chances here. So in terms of the benefits for the party, and especially our drive to take the council, well, that’s the real prize. It really is.”
When I ask what the BNP might do with local power, he outlines a “sons and daughters” housing policy, and a few measures – from the teaching of “British values” in schools to unspecified work through local youth clubs – that would aim at “integrating” outsiders into his party’s understanding of British life. He mentions “integration” at least twice, so I remind him that, despite being forced to admit non-white members, his party’s constitution still says they are “wholly opposed to any form of racial integration between British and non-European peoples”. The two don’t sit comfortably together, do they? “They don’t sit particularly well. But this is practical politics as opposed to… um… ideological perfection.”
A more brass-tacks question: are his people up to it? If you look at BNP councillors’ attendance records in Barking, even the best-performing one comes in pretty miserably – at number 28 out of 51.
“It will be a hell of a challenge. Bear in mind that if you look at the stats fully, there’s plenty of Labour councillors who are far, far worse.”
In fact, the bottom seven places are all taken by BNP people. At the last count, the worst performer – one Jamie Jarvis – managed to show up at only 28% of the meetings required.
“Well, Labour councillors don’t have to put up with intimidation, the changing of dates and meetings, and not letting people know.”
This, according to council leader Liam Smith, is ”complete and utter rubbish – these meetings are programmed a year in advance.” And even if it were true, the BNP would still be less than blameless. A good example: according to plenty of locals, one BNP councillor spends a good deal of his time running a guest house on the Isle Of Man. Is Griffin familiar with that case?
“I’m familiar with these things, yeah. We’re not blameless… At this election, we’ve got more people wanting to stand than we have places to fight… We’ll have a far stronger base than we had before. But inevitably, it’s going to be an enormous struggle… at the present, we’re knocking up against our upper limits.”
There’s no excuse for going to only 28% of meetings and still drawing a £10,000 allowance, is there?
“There’s not. No. No. Sure…”
A church “coffee afternoon” hosted by Hodge in Bastable Avenue, Barking. Around 30 locals have showed up, mostly pensioners, none of whom votes BNP or says they’re minded to. The exchanges with Hodge are stilted and sedate, until she mentions immigration and the room explodes.
“We’ve gone stark raving mad,” shouts one man. “We take in more people than anywhere else in Europe.”
“You can’t even get on the bus,” offers a woman at the same table.
Nearby, another voice bemoans the predicament of his son. “Generations after generations of my family have been here. Even if you build new flats, what chance has he got?”
In 2006, just before the BNP won all those council seats, Hodge caused outrage by claiming that eight out of 10 people in Barking were thinking about voting for them. The response of Labour councillor Liam Smith was not untypical: “We have had people saying they’re considering voting BNP because they feel that once the Labour minister says something, it must be right.” The BNP sent her a bunch of flowers.
“It made me unpopular with people who didn’t like me anyway,” Hodge says. “It gave them something to latch on to. But I think the idea that it was, in any way, the reason why 12 BNP councillors succeeded in the borough elections is… fatuous.”
A year later, she sparked another uproar when she argued that the system for allocating council houses should be changed to favour local people, arguing for policies whereby “the legitimate sense of entitlement felt by the indigenous family overrides the legitimate need demonstrated by the new migrants”. Last month, via an article in the Daily Mail, she pushed the same point again. As her critics see it, this is desperate stuff: a proposal that blurs into the BNP’s policies, and thus makes their drive for respectability all the easier.
“One of the mistakes we made in the past was refusing to tackle some of the issues which draw people to the extreme right,” Hodge says. “If we don’t capture that terrain with our purpose and our values, we leave it to the BNP. And then you get what I get on the doorstep, all the time: ‘Everything the BNP say, I agree with.’ They’re impelled by racism, right? I’m driven by fairness.”
The Sun’s headline, seizing on what she also said about benefits, was Minister: Ban Dole For Migrants, which can’t have done wonders for community relations. “Well, I can’t control the headlines. What I won’t have is, ‘Don’t enter this territory – it’s territory for the extreme right’. I won’t have that. We’ve got to capture it for us.”
In the pub with Nick Griffin, I bring up the reluctance of pensioners round here to vote BNP, based on their memories of the second world war (in any gathering of local seniors, there are scores of people who were bombed out of neighbourhoods such as Stepney and Poplar and given new homes here), and his party’s history of neo-Nazism. “We have things there, sure, yeah,” he says, though reminders of his own backstory are either denied or dodged. For example: yes, he led a National Front march to the cenotaph in 1986 – alongside people who were Sieg Heiling, according to reports – with a banner that said, “No more brothers’ wars”, but that was “about the first world war”.
When I ask where he now stands on what he once called “nonsense about gas chambers” – surely given even more charge because of Hodge’s family history – he pleads the same defence he tried on Question Time: “I genuinely cannot tell you what I used to believe, and why I’ve changed my mind… three times a month I go through France and Belgium, where you’re accessible also to the German courts, and even to say why I’ve changed my mind and become more mainstream would lay me open to a Communist magistrate.”
The subject is batted between us fruitlessly for a few minutes, before we get to the BNP’s campaigning in Barking and its apparent habit of telling lies. Late last year, it falsely claimed Hodge had a personal financial interest in plans – since cancelled – to build a new prison in the borough. “That was an error for which I wasn’t responsible. I didn’t even see it before it was printed. The moment I saw it, we pulled it.”
What about this one, from at least two BNP leaflets, put out in 2006: “Various Labour councils are giving Africans grants of up to £50,000 to buy houses under a scheme known as ‘Africans for Essex’. It is believed that Labour-run Hackney have been conspiring with Labour-run Barking and Dagenham to change the population of this area to ensure safe Labour majorities in the future.”
This most out-there of theories, I remind him, has been conclusively disproved.
“Have you looked at the schools here? What do you mean, ‘Conclusively disproved’?”
The racial mix of the borough may have changed, but African people were never singled out and paid to settle here.
“They weren’t being paid specifically as Africans. But people who were tenants in Hackney were being paid that kind of money.”
Contrary to his own leaflets, he may agree, then: there may have been a scheme whereby home-buying grants were given to families across London, but not because they were African.
“It just happened they all were.”
They weren’t.
“The vast majority of them were.”
They weren’t: 1,300 Londoners took advantage of the scheme, 30 of whom moved into Barking and Dagenham. Seven were white, nine Asian, nine black and the other five’s ethnicity was unclear.
In response, Griffin returns to his theory that recent changes in Britain’s racial make-up have been the product of a politically-motivated conspiracy dreamed up by a Labour government run by “Marxist cranks”, before arriving at a denouement, of a sort. “Let me put all this another way. The middle-class Guardianistas have this concept that the working class are basically happy. They’re OK, until along come these wicked people to stir them up. And it’s basically a way of saying that because these people are working class, they’re stupid and they can’t make up their own minds.”
But when it comes to patronising judgments of his beloved white working class, Griffin himself isn’t wholly in the clear. I read him what he said to two reporters masquerading as French fascists about the white people of London, caught on camera in 1997 by ITV’s The Cook Report: “The people who have the brains and ability got out years ago, one way or another. The people who are left are either the 15% of the population who are happy to put up with it, they’re so decadent they actually like it, or they’re too stupid to do anything about it. They will vote BNP, but you can’t build a movement on those people.”
“I wasn’t talking about this part of London. We were talking about the likes of Brixton and Hackney. People here have still got fight in them.”
That still implies a pretty dim view of white people in Brixton and Hackney. “It’s not a dim view. I feel very sorry for them. But we can’t organise in a place like that. They’re good, decent people. But to organise something, you have to have people who’ve got an unusual flair and spark.”
I repeat his words: “They’re too stupid to do anything about it.” Is he minded to take that back?
“Yes. Yes. I was probably extremely drunk. And I was talking to a Frenchman who didn’t speak very good English, so it had to be simplified.”
In early March, I meet Hodge again in her Westminster office and ask what she thinks would happen if the BNP took control of the council.
“I think Barking and Dagenham would become a no-go area for the rest of the country. That’s the thing that scares me most. Would you buy a house there if you knew there was a BNP council? I think we’d get unrest and violence in the street that we haven’t seen yet, because it would put race at the heart of what the borough was about.”
If Labour is to hold on to the council, it faces problems. In a drive to revive the local party, Hodge says, 13 of Labour’s 36 councillors have been deselected and replaced with “people who see themselves entirely as campaigning in the community”. Her Labour adversaries see it as an act of war against her opponents on the council; in the midst of local rancour, another seven Labour councillors have resigned, and some are threatening to run as independents. Might that split the vote and let in BNP candidates?
“I’m not worried about that. The thing that bothers me is the Christian party.” The latter are a new outfit who want to “honour Christ in politics” by putting up candidates for parliament and the council, and are going for the votes of Barking’s black churchgoers. She has pleaded with them to stand their people down, to no avail: as they see it, her views on abortion, gay rights and stem cell research are just as salient as the great fascist menace.
Inevitably, the BNP campaign against her is not pretty. In leaflets she is portrayed as a witch-like figure in high-heels (“and fat,” she reminds me), handing out goodies to stereotyped immigrants drawn according to the usual far-right rules: bug-eyes, goofy teeth. Bob Bailey, leader of the BNP group on the local council, has described her thus: “Poisonous bitch. Lives in Islington. A multi-millionairess and a foreigner to boot.”
Though Griffin hasn’t mentioned her Jewishness, she claims his people bring it up on the doorstep, via her maiden name, Oppenheimer. By way of a response, he claims the issue is “irrelevant”, and the idea of the BNP playing it up is “a classic Labour smear… there’s plenty of things to hit Margaret Hodge with without getting into red herrings and anti-semitism“. Of late, his party has been trying to shed its history of the latter, in order to court Jewish votes and pursue its loathing of Islam, though Griffin obviously has no end of form. What about his infamous pamphlet Who Are The Mindbenders?, aimed at exposing “Jewish influence and control in Britain’s news and information industry”? “That was a long, long time ago. Under my leadership, the BNP’s got Jewish councillors” – it has one, in Epping Forest – “and Jewish members.” The pamphlet, I remind him, came out in 1997: not that long ago at all. “It is in political terms,” he says.
Back in Westminster, the bell rings for a House of Commons vote on some arcane matter of constitutional reform. Hodge runs off to the lobbies, with her mind presumably on much more important things. “I feel totally passionate, in a way that I’ve never felt about an election before,” she says. “I want to expel them, so Barking and Dagenham in 2010 will be seen as the point where we started to see the decline of this wave of fascism. That would be great, wouldn’t it?”
Belligerent optimism is her message, though as I walk to Westminster tube station, it’s hard to shake off a creeping feeling of unease. Eight weeks remain: at the far end of the District Line, the morning of 7 May may yet feel like the start of a long, splitting headache.
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Letters: Fear and loathing in New Labour
Mar 13th
In light of the articles by Simon Jenkins (The bankers lied. And Darling, merely a puppet on their string, knows it, 12 March) and Mehdi Hasan (It’s defeatist nonsense to talk of a crisis of leftwing thinking, 12 March), it seems evident that there is the need for a rearticulating of the political discourse. The hegemony of neoliberal thinking has defined the political space for 30 years, so much so that even in the present crisis, when we all should be marching on the streets against the bankers, New Labour is still running in fear of framing the debate in social democratic terms.
For the 30 years the right have had a stranglehold on how we define freedom. The political classes have been fearful of any reference to the state as a means of solving problems. Individual freedom, essentially defined in terms of freedom from the state, has been their mantra. For example, George Osborne’s first reaction to the nationalisation of the banks was to jump enthusiastically up and down, claiming that old socialist nationalisation is here again. Cameron is careful that his slogan that there is such a thing as society is followed up by a clear rejection of any idea that this means a bigger state.
The current crisis has left both parties searching for ways to rearticulate a progressive politics, but it is up to the left to grab this opportunity, because they won’t have another like this, to reshape the political discourse and redefine the state and its relation to individual freedom. This is a hegemonic struggle to reclaim the terms of liberty and equality in social democratic terms.
Robert Proni
London
• Donald Hirsch is quite right to say that decent employers should pay a living wage of at least £7.14 an hour, and more in expensive areas (The wages of dignity, 10 March). However, we also need to realise that the legal minimum wage of £5.80 an hour is not being paid to many thousands of employees. The root of the problem is that the statutory enforcement powers are held by Revenue & Customs, and they are failing to do their job properly. That is hardly surprising as there are only 123 enforcement staff for the whole of the UK.
In Hackney, where I live, only 258 investigations have been carried out in seven years. Anecdotal evidence of illegal avoidance abounds, but the onus is on the individual to complain, and few feel able to do so. Ideally the enforcement powers should be transferred to local authorities, but in the meantime high-profile awareness campaigns could be organised by councils with advice and information points located in their buildings. This policy will be part of the Hackney Labour manifesto for the forthcoming local elections.
Tim Webb
London
• Neil Kinnock (Letters, 10 March) utterly fails to comprehend the burning sense of disillusionment that has driven so many former Labour supporters either into cynical abandonment of politics or, like John Kampfner, to embrace the Lib Dems. The charge against the New Labour project is not that it did not deliver the benefits he lists. It did, and there were others which curiously he omits, above all the lancing of the Northern Ireland carbuncle and significant constitutional reforms – devolution and human rights legislation. The charge is that it squandered its massive parliamentary majorities and the goodwill that the electorate bestowed on it to transform a divided, sick society.
On the contrary, it took to its bosom the neoliberal ideology that nourished that divide, extending privatisation; it renounced and even demonised public sector initiatives and went back on the welfare state concordat that was the hallmark of the postwar Labour settlement. So, Labour administrations have presided over the widest gulf ever between the haves and have-nots and now the inevitable massive recession. We have witnessed a generation of politicians intent on feathering their own nests, the expenses “scandal” being a minor part of this. Not to speak, as Neil Kinnock dare not, of the criminal adventure that was the Iraq war. I, a onetime Labour activist, like John Kampfner, have joined the Lib Dems, who I see as a catalyst for, and working partner of, a rejuvenated Labour party once it is purged of the New Labour virus.
Benedict Birnberg
London
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Unite members canvass for Labour in key marginal seats
Mar 12th
Political director Charlie Whelan says phone bank operation is largest ever undertaken by a British union
Britain’s largest union is mobilising its members to canvass for Labour in key marginal constituencies, and help counteract the money being poured into the areas by the Conservative election team.
Unite’s political director, Charlie Whelan, who is also Gordon Brown’s former spin doctor, said the operation was the biggest ever undertaken by a British union.
Up to 100,000 Unite members in 90 marginals will be contacted by the union, in the hope that it will galvanise support for the government.
“In 90 key seats the Unite membership is larger than the current Labour majority,” said Whelan. “If almost every Unite member voted Labour, we would win the election. If the union delivers votes it has a lot more influence than if it simply delivers cash. That is the brutal truth.”
He added: “Unions traditionally had a policy of bunging money to the party and saying ‘get on with it’, but we have taken a different approach. In terms of resources there is no way in a million years we can match what Lord Ashcroft is putting in to the Conservative party.”
The technique has been borrowed from Barack Obama’s election team and Whelan is hoping that the union member-to-union member approach will generate new levels of Labour support.
Whelan is relying on a virtual phone bank, software that lets activists access a list of members living in a region’s marginal seats and phone them. “You don’t need to go to the union’s local office or a call centre any longer to make these calls,” he said. “The beauty of the system is that it can work anywhere. Unite members are quite happy talking to other members.”
Whelan is a controversial figure inside Labour and increasingly a target of attacks by the media. He is often portrayed as a bully, and is also one of the most technology-friendly union workers, remorselessly using Twitter to broadcast his views.
There has been talk of him returning to the Labour campaign in a media role, perhaps buttering up or bullying the broadcasters, or even working with Brown on the campaign trail.
So far, 1,000 activists are using the phone bank regularly. Unite’s head office can see how many calls are made daily, and monitor the running issues.
Whelan was coy about how many contacts have been made, but said: “At present we are on course for 100,000 members being called in the key seats, by the time of the election. All I can say in terms of feedback, is how much union members enjoy doing it, and how pleased they are to get a call from another member. One reason it works because it is not coming from a political party.”
Whelan added: “It is not just about asking members to vote Labour. If it was, it would not work. It is also about ascertaining their views. One goal is to find out what issues are motivating union members.”
The answers, he said, were often immigration and protection of wages and conditions. This cannot be a cynical exercise. They want to know their views are going to be listened to. So if we ask them their views, we have to push them inside the union. It’s true our members have not been happy with Labour, but at no stage has there been a mass desertion from Labour to the Tories. We have been doing a real opinion poll every day.”
The idea of direct member-to-member contact has been influenced by how Obama drew on organisations such as the United Steelworkers of America (USW).
The Steelworkers Union membership might naturally be profiled as being Republican. Indeed, Sarah Palin began her vice-presidential campaign in the US by pointing out that her husband was a proud member of the USW.
Whelan said: “For many years the USW has had a successful strategy of talking to its members on a regular basic. It knew what they thought. As a result, the union managed to persuade 90% of those who voted, to vote for Obama.”
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View from the marginals: volunteer Davids get set to do battle with well-heeled Goliaths
Mar 12th
If Labour has given up on some of its marginal seats, as some say, then nobody has told Edgbaston
The Birmingham Edgbaston Labour office is a place kept cosy by conviction – and a small heater. Four of the volunteers are still wearing their coats. Caroline Badley, the enthusiastic campaign coordinator, who is also a volunteer, is even wearing a woolly hat. Two young men are stuffing envelopes, another two are on the phone working their way through a list of voters. There are people giving their time here every day of the week, from 9am until about 8.30pm.
If Labour has given up on some of its marginal seats, as some say, then nobody has told Edgbaston.
“We’re more determined than ever,” said Badley cheerily. Largely middle class but with areas of deprivation, it had been a Conservative safe seat until 1997, when Gisela Stuart won it for Labour. In 2005, the Tory candidate Deirdre Alden, who is standing again, halved Stuart’s majority to 2,349, and now every one of the constituency’s 12 councillors is Conservative.
If the Tories are to win the election, then the battle is in places like this. And the man who is overseeing the marginal seats campaign is Michael Ashcroft, the Tory peer and non-dom whose money, to a significant extent, has been funnelled into places such as Edgbaston.
On the high street in nearby Harborne, there are two huge Tory billboards, but no Labour ones. Stuart’s campaign literature is a couple of sheets of black and white A4; Alden’s is a wide range of colour newspapers and glossy brochures. “In terms of the quality and mass of produced material,” said Stuart, “it is not a level playing field. To what extent can you buy an election?”
There have been precedents: in 2005, Lord Ashcroft’s donations of around £25,000 helped fund the successful Tory campaign in Gravesham, and he donated £42,000 to the Hammersmith Conservatives. The money doesn’t just pay for glossy leaflets – it allows local parties to create databases, conduct polls, and to sustain a consistent campaign between elections.
This week, however, a Times poll found that the shift to the Tories in key marginals was below expectations, following similar findings last week in a Channel 4 poll.
“What I thought was most revealing was the support for ‘others’, the kind of ‘curse on all your houses vote’,” said Stuart. “But I expect that to shrink closer to polling day. Also we are, for the first time in three elections, picking up a ’soft Tory vote’ – basic Tory voters who say they will vote for me because, even when they don’t entirely agree with me, at least they know what I stand for.”
From an unscientific poll on the town’s high street, it certainly wasn’t clear who would win.
“Gisela Stuart is fighting it hard because it’s close,” said Colin Davis, a former teacher. “People here are in a real dilemma, and don’t know who to vote for. I’ve always voted Labour, but as far as I’m concerned there is no Labour party any more.”
Barbara Lloyd, who is retired, said she had received one of Alden’s brochures, but was disillusioned with politicians in general. “If it wasn’t for the suffragettes getting women the vote, I wouldn’t vote again.”
A few miles away, the Edgbaston Conservative office stands out for two reasons: in a parade of well-worn shopfronts it is the only place with gleaming paintwork, and, several weeks before the election, the front is shuttered. It was opened three months ago by the party leader David Cameron himself, but a woman behind the till of the nearby supermarket said she had never seen it open.
Behind the office is parked the silver Jaguar of John Alden, Tory councillor, former Lord Mayor and husband of the Edgbaston Tory candidate, Deirdre. (Alden herself had been too busy to be interviewed). Regardless of how much of Edgbaston Tories’ cash originated with Ashcroft – “We have had a small amount in the past,” said Mr Alden – there is clearly a fair bit of it around. Even the Tories’ “while you were out” notes are printed in full colour on glossy card. Is there a sense, as one unnamed Tory official was said to have declared in the local paper, that Edgbaston is sewn up? “No, we don’t like to say things like that,” he said. “We will keep working and working until those polls close.”
But where is the activity? Other than several boxes of leaflets ready to be sent out, nothing is happening here.
Much of the telephone canvassing appears to be done from a call centre at Coleshill, a manor house on the other side of Birmingham, which was opened in January and serves as a campaign nerve centre (it has it own printing facilities, and some of Alden’s leaflets, as well as those of other Conservative candidates across the West Midlands, are printed there).
John Alden said they are delivering 10,000 leaflets a week, “and canvassing like mad. A number of people have said they’ll take four weeks’ holiday as soon as the election is called to help out full time. Our volunteers are extremely enthusiastic. Tomorrow we’ve got a lot of people coming here to stuff those envelopes.”
Rose Robinson, a part-time dinnerlady, said she had had glossy leaflets from the Tories through the door. “They do seem to be spending a lot on them. Here in Harborne, it’s quite posh so maybe it does have an effect, but if you go up the road, I don’t know if anyone is going to be that impressed with them.”
Stuart said that the way her local party is counteracting the money that the Tories have is “on things that don’t cost money: that is our volunteer network.”
Back at Edgbaston Labour HQ, Badley echoed this: “They might have more money, but we have more people on the ground. It is like a David and Goliath fight – and we’ve got a lot of Davids.”
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Love thy neighbour – pool your energy bills, says Labour
Mar 12th
General election manifesto to encourage creation of community co-ops for getting good deals on insulation and solar panels
Home owners will be encouraged to club together to negotiate discounts from their energy bills under plans to be put forward in Labour’s general election manifesto.
Such community energy co-operatives could also be used to get good deals on insulatiing properties and renewable energy devices such as solar panels or wind turbines.
Labour will not pledge money for the idea, but will offer to set up an advisory service to support groups. No target will be set, but a Labour source said there could eventually be “several thousand” such projects. In the US there are 900 similar schemes involving 42m people.
Ed Miliband, the climate secretary, said: “One of the most exciting things happening in the energy field at the moment is the formation of energy co-ops – local people banding together to get cheaper energy bills by buying electricity in bulk and discounts on energy efficiency measures such as home insulation.
“The government has already provided funding for some of these groups through our Low Carbon Communities Challenge Fund. But now I want Labour’s manifesto to commit to establishing a support service so that more energy co-ops can be formed and more people can benefit from their services.”
Energy co-operatives already exist in the UK, though they are mostly organised to invest in renewable power or mass insulation and share the profits from selling the electricity or energy savings, rather than push for reduced bills. Labour’s idea builds on a report from the Co-operative Party, published last year, which suggested more consumer groups could be set up to emulate the success of those in US and Europe. One scheme in Belgium has about 15,000 members.
Based on overseas schemes, the report estimates consumers could save up to 10% – or about £100 a year – on their annual bills by using “collective power” to negotiate better deals with suppliers or direct with generators.
Those groups could then club together to pay for insulation, and following that build combined heat and power units, for example burning biomass, or put up renewable energy such as solar panels on roofs or even commercial wind turbines. These could in turn provide clean energy and possible generate profit from selling surplus electricity back to the National Grid, said Michael Stephenson, the party’s general secretary.
“Firstly you can save even more money – the more control you have, obviously the more money you can save,” said Stephenson. “If you’re saving carbon, you’re saving energy which means you’re saving money off your bills. [But] a lot of reasons why local communities are working to get this off the ground is because they want to tackle climate change as well.
“We can see this as a potentially massive player in the energy market.”
As well as the obvious appeal of lower energy bills – especially with Ofgem warning bills could rise 25% by 2020 – and pressure from most rival parties including the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats to announce clear policies on the environment, Labour is understood to be attracted to the benefits of co-operatives in improving community links.
However the lack of any new funds to support the scheme will raise concerns that many community groups will not be able to afford the up-front cost of investing in efficiency or renewable power. There will also be questions about whether power companies will pass on the price cuts to the new groups, in the form of higher bills to other customers.
Stephenson said experience in the banking sector suggested they would not: in countries with a strong mutual (customer-owned) banking sector all banks tended to make lower profits out of their retail customers, said Stephenson. “It tends to have a civilizing influence on the market, rather than driving people the other way,” he added.
Simon Roberts of the Centre for Sustainable Energy charity, which oversees a network of community energy groups in Somerset, said co-operatives would need advice on which technology to use in their area, likely costs, procurement and how to develop the structure of the organisation, especially if they needed to employ staff later to manage projects.
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How liberal are our MPs? | Stephen Tall
Mar 12th
A new website ranking MPs’ anti-authoritarian credentials reveals that the Liberal Democrats are the party of freedom
One sure-fire way to bring most Lib Dems out in hives is to ask them the question, “Do you think of yourself as rightwing or leftwing?” This right/left dichotomy – an archaic hangover from the French revolutionary period – is a nonsense in today’s political situation, in which all three major parties broadly subscribe to the principles of market economics and parliamentary democracy. Left and right are terms beloved by those parts of the media too lazy to engage in nuance; for most of the rest of us they belong in the lexicographical dustbin of history.
When most of us set up our Facebook profiles, we were not asked to define our political views according to an outmoded left/right axis. No, the dividing lines they set up were liberal versus conservative, terms which identify an individual’s general social and political outlook. The late Robin Cook preferred the more loaded terms “cosmopolitan” (outward-looking, internationalist, pro-choice, tolerant, progressive, forward-thinking) and “chauvinist” (reactionary, isolationist, narrow-minded, centralising, nostalgic). As a liberal, I say take your pick.
When looking at political labels, left/right is – figuratively and actually – so last millennium. That’s the serious point underpinning a new website launched today by Liberal Democrat Voice, the leading independent website for those interested in the party. Code-named by us “Project Rank“, it has a very simple aim: to provide an easy way for the public to find out how liberal or authoritarian are the views of their MP according to his or her voting record in parliament.
We have identified ten crunch votes from the last five years – ranging from ID cards and freedom of speech to freedom of information and trial without jury – in order to score all current MPs out of 100: the lower their score the more liberal they are; the higher their score the more authoritarian they are.
The results are revealing. Of the 340 most authoritarian MPs in the House of Commons, 339 are Labour MPs: all score more than 35 out of 100, with 39 Labour MPs ranked as 100% authoritarian. (Lady Hermon, the Ulster Unionist MP for North Down, earns the dubious privilege of being the most authoritarian non-Labour MP). The most authoritarian Conservative MP – perhaps unsurprisingly – is Ann Widdecombe, with a score of 28 out of a possible 100. David Cameron might term himself a “liberal Conservative”, but in reality the honour belongs to Tory MP Richard Shepherd, the only Conservative to score an impeccably liberal score of zero. All Liberal Democrat MPs score lower than 12 out of a possible 100: 22 achieved the perfect zero.
What does such number-crunching mean for the forthcoming election? Well, for a start we hope the site will draw the public’s attention to how their MPs have voted over the past five years. If you hold liberal views look at how your MP has voted, and ask yourself if his or her record justifies your vote.
Does the fact that Labour is, according to their voting record, by far the most authoritarian party represented in the House of Commons mean that the Lib Dems must automatically favour the Tories if the election result is close? No, not necessarily. Commitment to the civil liberties of the British people is enormously important to the Lib Dems, that is true: but freedom is only half of the liberal equation. The other half is fairness, the key message Nick Clegg is stressing as the Lib Dem message in the coming campaign.
That is why I view a vote for the Lib Dems as an important one. Labour cannot be trusted with our freedoms; the Tories cannot be trusted to build a fairer Britain. Only the Lib Dems recognise the fundamental importance of a free and fair Britain, and can act as guarantors for those cosmopolitans who want to vote for a party which shares their values.
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Prince Charles’s political agenda | Graham Smith
Mar 12th
If the government exempts the royals from the Freedom of Information Act, it must mean they’ve got something to hide
Last week, the constitutional reform and governance bill received its second reading in parliament. It passed easily and is now on its way to the Lords. A little-noticed aspect of this bill is an amendment to the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act. In short, the royal family’s communications with government will be completely excluded from the act.
The monarchy is, of course, already exempt from the FOI Act (indeed, the monarchy is not even recognised as a public body). But at present the public may still get their hands on correspondence between the royal family and government ministers if there is a public interest in releasing the material. This amendment will remove the public interest test for all communications from the monarch, the heir to the throne and the second in line. The message is very clear: the royal family’s interest always takes precedence over the public’s.
So why does the government want to make its work less transparent at a time when all parties are talking about “cleaning up” politics? The Ministry of Justice has stated that the present safeguards within the FOI Act are “insufficiently robust to protect our current constitutional arrangements”. The proposed ban on access to royal documents is designed “to ensure that our information access arrangements allow essential constitutional relationships and conventions to be preserved”.
It doesn’t take a conspiracy nut to understand the government’s real motivation. As Maurice Frankel from the Campaign for Freedom of Information points out: “The main aim appears to be to protect Prince Charles’s correspondence with ministers. None has yet been disclosed, but currently it could be – rightly so – if the prince’s intervention seriously affects a minister’s decision. That door regretfully may now be closed.”
Basically, there are a hell of a lot of “communications” out there bearing the Clarence House stamp that, if made public, would be likely to cause a constitutional crisis. It is a basic tenet of the idea of constitutional monarchy that the monarch and (by implication) the heir to the throne remain outside of politics. The government and the palace seem divided in their opinions on the matter. When Republic complains that Charles is stepping over the constitutional line they answer that he is not yet king and so is not bound by the convention that requires his silence. When we then ask ministers for details of his lobbying we are told that his constitutional position requires secrecy so as to maintain an appearance of impartiality.
The true extent of Charles’s political lobbying is probably far greater than we’re currently led to believe, and there is no way to know to what extent ministers are taking his views into account before making decisions. If passed, this amendment would mean that Charles’s attempts to influence government policy on health, architecture, education, agriculture, the environment, even war and peace, will remain secret – until years after his death. Far from protecting “impartiality”, this amendment gives Charles the green light to get even more stuck in.
During the course of last night’s debate, Jack Straw reassured MPs:
“There is no way that members of the royal family can change public policy. They may have opinions, and they are entitled to those – why would they not be? [...]The work that Prince Charles has done in better educating the public about, and ensuring that they are better informed about, one of the world’s wonderful religions, Islam, is remarkable. Some people might regard that as slightly partisan, but I do not; I think that it is entirely appropriate for him to do that. However, he is not making public policy on that matter; public policy is ultimately decided by this place.”
In that case, there’s no harm in being entirely open and transparent about his communications with ministers. The government and the palace clearly have something to hide if they are to allow cabinet papers to be revealed, but not royal papers. The removal of the public interest test for correspondence with senior royals simply cannot be explained any other way.
Voters have a right to know if government decisions are being made in the public interest or in the prince’s interest. This law will make that harder. Straw says our constitutional arrangements are threatened by greater transparency. We say this is an argument for a new constitution – not more secrecy.
• This article was commissioned after a reader contacted us via the You tell us thread
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The battle for women’s votes | Yvonne Roberts
Mar 12th
With working-class women abandoning Labour and political apathy on the rise, who will win women over in the election?
Thirteen years ago, many working-class women with a couple of children, a husband in a poorly paid full-time job, and a need to earn some extra money were wooed and won over by New Labour. During Blair’s reign, their bounty included a minimum wage, a national childcare strategy and better parental and part-time workers’ rights. Now we’re heading for another election, why are those same working-class women deserting Labour in droves?
The sociologist Geoff Dench, in a Centre for Policy Studies report published next week, believes he has the answer. Working-class woman have deserted Labourbecause their views, as mothers who “prioritise family life”, have been marginalised by a sisterhood of sharp-suited middle-class career women, whose outlook can apparently best be summed up in two words: Harriet Harman.
Anyone who lobs a stink bomb at the sisterhood has a certain audience on side immediately. However, when you look at Dench’s argument, drawing on statistics from the British Social Attitudes study, an alternative interpretation is that it’s not gender but class that’s at issue – and money, or rather the lack of it, not middle-class madams that might be causing many women to walk away from the charms of Gordon Brown.
Dench argues that over the past 20 years there has been a steady growth in the proportion of people who support no political party. Among men, the rate of support for “no party” has nearly doubled from 8% in 1986 to 15% in 2006 . (They have presumably been betrayed by the brotherhood). Among women who describe their occupation as looking after the home, the proportion describing themselves as “no party” has tripled from 8% in 1986 to 24% in 2006. Among working-age single mothers, the increase for the same period has been from 7% to 25%.
In 1986, 52% of working age working-class housewives said they supported Labour. This support had dropped to 27% in 2008. And they haven’t drifted to the Tories. Dench then leaps to the following conclusion:
“Women who value home and family life are becoming disenfranchised. The feminist ’sisterhood’ has clearly failed them, and the result is that they are withdrawing their support from the mainstream parties. Politicians of all parties should be concerned about this… because… the proportion of young women who prioritise home and family has been growing steadily in recent years, and so their votes matter.”
Home and hearth and women in pinnies gently rocking the cradle with one hand while they stir the pot with the other while their man does the “real” work in the outside world is an image that has long fuelled nationalist propaganda – as has a particular choice of language. Take, for instance, Dench’s “disenfranchised”. We are living in the age of the consumer and politics isn’t immune. Describing oneself as “no party” does not necessarily mean disenfranchisement – the deprivation of choice – on the contrary, it could be read as a signal that choice rules supreme. These voters intend to “shop around”.
“No party” could also mean that no party conveys the values, goals and vision of a society in which these voters can believe. This isn’t about the sisterhood. It’s about neglect of the white working class and the death of a clear Labour ideology. Or, to put it another way, perhaps some of those 52% of working class women who voted for Labour during a bad case of the blues under Margaret Thatcher now believe the party has become too posh for its own good – reflected in a House of Commons stuffed with white male bankers, lecturers and management consultants.
In this scenario, the small band of Labour women, including Harman, who could have done more have at least done something, including achieving a reduction in child poverty, changes to women’s pensions and improved rights for carers, all impacting on women who are full-time mothers (who have increasingly powerful voices via the classless Mumsnet, Netmums and the Women’s Institute).
Dench’s arguments patronise women at home, insult women in paid work and do no service to men. Once there is equality in earning power, more men can opt out of the straitjacket of being the main breadwinner and play a greater role in care. Once care is given its proper value, inside and outside the home (and research tells us that more involved the dad, the better the child), and paid work ceases to be the only coin with currency, the whole of society benefits.
A recent paper by the TUC gives a further set of reasons for working-class women’s disillusionment with Labour – that underline that far from wishing to stay at home full time, many women are frustrated in their inability to get a secure full-time or part-time job – and once the cuts in the public sector hit home (the public sector accounts for 40% of all jobs held by women), the situation will get very much tougher.
The latest YouGov poll says that women are split 37% to 29% in favour of the Tories, and that’s before Sam Cam, the Conservatives’ secret weapon, and the classic working mother, has been fully launched. Labour’s election strategy will apparently be underpinned by claims that “middle-class mainstream” mums will suffer most if the Tories win and launch spending cuts. That’s how far the party has drifted from its roots. And ironically, what there is of the sisterhood in the House is probably trying to tell it so.
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Malcolm Tucker’s election briefing
Mar 12th
Posted by Malcolm Tucker in Politics
No comments
They know the Tories are dipping. But we are still losing. We are not winning. I don’t think I can stress this enough
So, coming back to the field of screams, the chamber of dipshits, I have to say, the atmosphere has certainly picked up. Last time I came in for a coffee the only sound was the soft shuffle of herds of wonks heading to the stationery cupboards to talk to corporate headhunters. The head of European policy was emailing Pret about their management training program. Most of the strategy unit were occupied with putting government property on eBay, and the foreign policy team were writing sexual slurs about Samantha Cameron on the undersides of their desks in permanent marker.
Now it’s a hive of activity. There’s a sense of hope. Your lads are handing round wedges of polling data like they’re porno mags on an 80s school trip to the Sellafield visitor’s centre. Someone’s plugged a Glade air freshener in, and to be honest it makes me want to hurl. It’s morning in America.
But as I see it there are two big hairy problem teenagers locked in the cellar threatening to break out:
1. Your people have no single fucking clue what in the wide wide world of field hockey is going on with the British electorate or why.
They know the Tories are dipping. But ask them why, and they smile a First-in-PPE-at-Arsepipe-College smile and say that “maybe it turns out people like a bully?”. Bollocks. If people liked a bully I’d be drowning in Moët and John Lewis vouchers and sex texts. I am not. I don’t know what’s going on either, but I tell you what, we need more of a strategy than to say, “Ooo, winter’s over in Narnia, let’s watch the crocuses push up, and the rabbits hump and we can relax and put up our World Cup wallcharts.”
2. We are still losing.
We are not winning. I don’t think I can stress this enough. No poll puts us ahead. None. I suggest you shout that in the face of every little policy wang who bounces into the war room looking perky. When we’re seven points ahead, that’s when we start smiling and breaking out the baby oil and Curly Wurlys.
Now, as we know, the various polling organisations use different methodology. Mori and Populus phone people, YouGov use an internet panel, and I believe some of the cheaper outfits prefer throwing a spanner in the street and then getting the lunk it takes out to put his finger on one of three colours when he wakes up in casualty. As you know, I prefer to conduct my own polling by the means of ripping chickens apart, and reading the tea leaves I have force-fed them. And what this is telling me is that however well we think we’re doing, we are currently located midway up shit creek, in the vicinity of the hamlet of Nofuckingpaddles.
So what do we do? In my view, as DC gets ready to roll out SamCam in a bid to appear not to be the lardy-cheeked plum sucker the entire nation instinctively knows he is, the big angle we need to hit this week is: TORY NUTTERS!
We’ve got a clear story to tell on this. They’re in bed with the Ulster Unionists. And I think this is a good week to not unfairly characterise these guys as beardy weirdy, bollocks-in-the-mangle old-time-religion, one-step-from-Waco fruitcakes.
Then we have the Young Britons’ Foundation. As we know, the links between these bright young blitzkriegers and Conservative Future are stronger than the bond between Charlie Clarke and his takeaway menu. We need to push this. Any hint of the old “hang Mandela” T-shirt vibe would be great for us, so you want the research team not leaving their desks, fed moulinexed Diet Coke and Subway sandwiches through intravenous tubes till they hit pay dirt. Anything will do. Feed it all in – even Young Tories voicing reservations about the narrative structure of the third act of Invictus. It can all hurt.
Finally there is Ashcroft. Here the line is simple. Ashcroft. Millionaire. Belize. In the public’s mind we want them to be thinking: Bond villain who’s made his money out of sex chatlines and child-labour landmines. Bish bash bosh.
Until next week. Regards. Malcolm.