Tuesday, May 06, 2008 

Labour's "relaunch" and what it ought to do.

Never fear Labour supporters, here's the latest messiah to solve all the party's problems in one fall swoop:

Purnell will declare today that Labour can still beat the Tories in the fight against poverty because it is willing to stump up the money and is committed to tax credits.

"Both their goal and their policies are just aspirations," Purnell will say.

Mocking the Conservatives' approach, he will say: "It would be nice to reduce child poverty. It would be nice to put more money into the working tax credit. But nice isn't good enough. Until they pass the test of hardening their commitment and costing their policy, they cannot claim to be committed to ending child poverty."


Ah, yes, child poverty. It's strange how this government's modest redistribution, so modest that it may have lifted some children out of poverty but has done nothing whatsoever to alter overall inequality, only gets mentioned when the going gets really tough. It screams of desperation, of someone begging their lover not to walk out the door, bumbling, "but, but, look at all we've done for the poor kids!" In any case, Labour's pledge to end child poverty is just as much an aspiration as the Conservatives' policy announcements are: it's simply unattainable and completely unrealistic without far more targeted help being provided, and Labour doesn't have either the will or the funds to do it with. The less said about tax credits, the most hopeless and over-egged panacea of all time, the better.

The whole Grauniad article on Purnell's rallying-cry is about as accurate a distillation as you could get of where Labour is still getting it hopelessly wrong. It treats us first to what this fight-back amounts to:

· An intensification of the government's implementation of the Australian-style points-based system which will tighten the criteria for foreign workers hoping to take up skilled jobs in Britain. Liam Byrne, the immigration minister, will attempt to outflank the Tories by saying that British jobseekers will "get the first crack of the whip", while only those foreign workers needed - and no more - will be allowed entry.

· A £78m boost for schools in disadvantaged areas of Greater Manchester and the Black Country to target funds at those where fewer than 30% of the pupils achieve five good GCSEs including English and maths.

· Senior Labour MPs said one of Gordon Brown's most serious embarrassments - his failure to appoint a general secretary of the Labour party - would be resolved. Ray Collins, a senior figure in the Transport and General Workers' section of the Unite union, is expected to be appointed after winning the support of Brown, who sees him as a unifying figure.


This is what it all adds up to then: flagellating the darkies a little harder for the benefit of the tabloids, parachuting in cash to schools where the Labour vote mostly held up, and err, appointing a new general secretary of the party itself. It's going to knock them bandy!

Just to add to the fun, there's Ed Balls with his own detailed analysis:
Ed Balls, the schools secretary, yesterday signalled a tougher approach by the government when he pledged to dissect Tory policies line by line now that David Cameron is seen as the prime minister in waiting.

"In every area we will challenge and scrutinise the Conservative position and expose their determination to protect excellence for the few and oppose our reforms to deliver excellence and opportunity for all," he said.


There's the whole problem in a nutshell. Labour is so concerned by what the Tories are doing that it's forgotten that it ought to be selling itself and developing new policies instead of "dissecting" the opposition's line by line. You weren't voted into power to attack and stalk the opposition; you were voted in to govern. Forget what they're doing and get on with showing why you deserve to remain in government, and you don't when you come up with such specious claptrap as claiming that your reforms have delivered excellence and opportunity for all when they clearly have not. There couldn't be a better example than Lord Darzi and Labour's apparent desire for the all-singing and all-dancing polyclinics: here's the party that claims it wants to engender choice while doing away with local GP services with almost no consultation whatsoever, leaving the Tories with the biggest open goal ever. Labour doesn't just want to shut your post office, they want to shut your GP surgery and possibly even your hospital too! It might not be entirely true, but it hits home.

It's really come to something when it's Charles Clarke of all people who is talking the most sense:

In his article, Clarke suggested a number of policy modifications, including a resolution of the 10p tax debacle, abandoning the extension of detention without trail [sic] to 42 days (intended for terrorism suspects), accepting House of Lords proposals on women's pensions, and suspending the "over-bureaucratic" review of post offices.

The problem with abandoning 42 days now is that it makes Gordon Brown look even weaker. 42 days is his initiative, borne of his apparent determination to be just as "tough on terror" as Blair was, just at the moment that the majority of the right-wing press has decided that such methods are counter-productive, the Sun being around the only newspaper which still supports the measure. If it was meant to show the Tories as being soft or to wrong-foot them, then it's failed miserably, especially as it seems that unless Brown wants to be defeated he'll need to drop the plans completely, concessions being unacceptable when it will still mean the prospect of those entirely innocent being held at the whim of the police for over a month. The Conservatives don't look weak; their arguments have held up while his have been left wanting, even if the public itself is supportive.

Clarke doesn't have a monopoly on getting it mostly right, however:

Looking ahead to May 22's key Crewe and Nantwich byelection, Clarke said that Labour's "all-consuming priority" should be to ensure that the defeat in the local elections was not repeated in the 2010 general election.

That would require changing Labour's recent, erratic short-term politics that had led to the "entirely unjustified" charge that Labour was mimicking Conservative proposals or following demands of the rightwing press, he said.


No, Labour's all-consuming priority should be governing and developing policy, not concentrating on winning an election two years' off. How Clarke can also claim that Labour isn't mimicking Conservative proposals or following the demands of the rightwing press when while he was Home Secretary one of his chief tasks was asking how high when the tabloids said jump is also beyond parody.

Clarke's obsession with power for power's sake is another of New Labour's emerging neuroses. Like the Conservatives after being dumped out in 97, they've came to the conclusion that they're the natural party of government, and that being voted out, or even the possibility of it is not so much a reflection on them but on the voters themselves. They've fallen into the same old trap of becoming the new establishment, and then when faced with the gathering storm fall into denial, buck-passing and outright bribery. Additionally, as with Boris Johnson, Labour is still making the mistake of both underestimating and slandering the Conservative leadership; yes, Cameron and Osborne might be public schoolboys and the product of Oxbridge, but then so was Tony Blair, and one or the other also applies to the vast majority of the cabinet. It's no coincidence that Alan Johnson, the former postman, received a standing ovation at the nurses' conference last week while Patricia Hewitt, the most patronising woman in politics was heckled and barracked on her last visit. Another man with the common touch, Jon Cruddas, said much the same in a Times interview today.

As previously noted, there isn't much that Labour can do to turn it around because the damage is almost certainly terminal. To even have a half-chance however, or to at least get past the Crewe by-election, it needs to either reverse the 10p tax rate abolition entirely or make completely crystal clear down to the last detail how it intends to compensate those that have lost out. It needs to stop worrying about what the Conservatives are doing and make clear what it is doing, beyond such bland generalities from Brown as feeling the hurt and pain as the economic downturn bites. Brown ought to swallow what remains of his pride and drop 42 days, which would be entirely the right thing to do however much short term pain it causes him. He could go further by scrapping ID cards, abandoning the increasingly irrelevant "rights and responsibilities" constitutional changes which couldn't seem more foolish, and as a further gesture that would signal real change, bring home the remaining troops from Basra. Then they could fully concentrate on, as Bob Piper suggests, pensioner poverty and social housing. All of this might do nothing more than staunch the bleeding without healing the wound, but it would be a start. There is however no sign whatsoever that even these small steps will be taken up, and with them the Conservatives will only continue to watch and wait.

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Tuesday, January 08, 2008 

Blame the poor, blame the uneducated, blame the sick.

I sometimes wonder why I write a politics blog when I'm so disgusted and often turned off by the minutiae of the policies espoused by all of the political parties. I'm directly referring in this instance to the Tory proposals on welfare reform, more on which in a moment.

First though, it's the return of politics after the season where we mostly concern ourselves with the internal family equivalent. Old Gordie Brown has been having a thorough think during Winterval, as though he doesn't do that intensively every moment of the day anyway, and he decided that his prime ministership needed a relaunching after the accumulation of disasters that left him about as feted at the end of the year as Chris Langham crossed with the McCanns. (Speaking of which, perhaps he can relaunch his career by playing Robert Murat in the Maddie movie.) If there's one thing Brown knows about, it's tradition, so this relaunch looked much the same as his original charm offensive. Off he went to the Andrew Marr programme, talking of "fiscal arithmetic", promising to clamp-down on inflationary pay demands, whether they be from MPs themselves, the police or the angels, and how he's going to transform the NHS into a bastion of prevention from bad health rather than the source of it as it is now. It culminated with a similar interview in the Observer where he set out his stall on how he's going to save us from ourselves in this "dangerous" year. The solutions are 42 days, even though he's determined to find a compromise when there isn't one on such a fundamental matter of civil liberties, and ID cards, which despite the child benefit database debacle, won't be "compulsory", despite the legislation which has passed through the Commons confirming that they err, will be just that.

Next step in the fightback was the finding of a proper spin doctor. Served badly by his advisers from his days in the Treasury and by his cabal of "Young Turks" centred around Ed Balls, Douglas Alexander and Ed Miliband, he's called on the services of Stephen Carter, who just happens to be the chief executive of a PR firm. So much for all the jibes at Cameron about being in a similar but lower down position at the ITV regional broadcaster Carlton; now Brown needs just that sort of experience in his cabinet. Carter should in any case be used to being in charge of such a dysfunctional outfit as 10 Downing Street under Brown; he was head of NTL when it was nicknamed "NTHell" by its long-suffering customers, now under the yolk of Richard Branson in the similarly revamped Virgin Media. Most hilarious though were the remarks from the Tory Caroline Spelman about Brown bringing in another spin doctor rather than getting on with the job. That would be the same Conservative party that employs as its chief spin doctor the former editor of the News of the Screws, a man with about as much political knowledge as a fruit bat.

Spelman does have something of a wider point: this was the same Gordon Brown who standing in Downing Street last year faced by the world media talked of change as much as Lionheart talks about how evil Muslims are. For as long as he went on unscathed, regardless of attacks by patio gas canister jihadists, floods or foot and mouth, the status quo was acceptable. It was only once he departed for an opportunistic visit to Basra at the start of the Tory conference that everything started to fall apart. After all, while everything's going well, you don't need someone to distort the reality of what's happening for you. That was why the Labour reliance on Alastair Campbell and news management was so perplexing: when the majority of the media was so favourable to you, why did you need to be practicing the dark arts? Campbell's blithe explanation that he never wanted to see a Labour prime minister on the Sun front page on election day in a light bulb again is an excuse, not a reason. You can at least respect Brown's decision to employ one now, even if you can't accept it.

Brown's maneuvering on the NHS and with Carter though is nothing to the latest populist measures from the Tories dressed up in their compassionate clothing. The illusion under David Cameron has been that this is a changed party, one that isn't going to come out with reactionary nonsense about asylum islands again or ask whether we're thinking what they're thinking. Even while headbangers like David Davis remain in position but at least sensibly oppose extended detention for terrorist suspects, and they propose inheritance tax cuts while bribing the married middle classes, the emphasis has been on the touchy-feely environmental promises and just what a thoroughly nice bloke Dave is. This has worked when Labour has been woeful, but while Brown looked fresh in the summer it briefly fell apart. The support for the Tories isn't because they're trusted or look like they're ready to form a government, it's because they're not New Labour.

Whether their welfare reform proposals published today will change any minds remain to be seen. What is clear is that just like in the past, what first goes in the United States eventually winds its way over here. Quite where they're inspired from is contentious: some say Wisconsin, others say New York state. Whichever it is, neither can be a direct comparison with the benefit system currently in operation here, where our population vastly outnumbers that of both. As Chris points out, when you get down to the actual figures involved, despite them initially looking huge, they're far smaller than you're probably being led to believe.

First up is a reassessing of every single person on incapacity benefit, of which there are 2.64 million current claimants, by a doctor. As Labour has argued, this would be hugely expensive, incredibly time-consuming, a waste of resources and probably do next to nothing to actually bring the figure down. It has to be remembered that some of those on incapacity benefit have not worked for nigh on 20 years: the unlucky who found themselves out of work during the glorious Thatcherite revolution, shoved onto IB to bring down the unemployment figures. They're simply not going to work again, full stop, however uncomfortable that is for any political party but especially the Tories to admit. As has been pointed out, incapacity benefit is now in actual fact incredibly difficult to get on: a relative of mine who at one point was only given a few years' to live and has chronic back pain was refused. Those on it are overwhelmingly genuinely sick or unemployable; getting them off IB and onto jobseekers' allowance or even into employment will save the state either a whopping £22 a week or £200 a week. It sounds a lot, but in the scheme of things will make next to no difference to the Treasury coffers.

The changes to JA itself are no better. Those on it for 2 years will be expected to carry out "community work"; for which almost certainly read the removal of graffiti, picking up rubbish, maybe setting plants or general cleaning up. The Conservatives haven't explained how those already employed to do just that, or indeed those carrying out "community service" which often also involves just those things are going to be affected. When not cleaning up the trash, there'll be expected to be at "back-to-work" centres, where they'll be able to do everything apart from seemingly the training that politicians of all stripes think will be needed in the "knowledge" economy. These centres, to be run by the private or voluntary firms so en vogue with the Tories, will also be paid according to how many they either get back into work or off benefits when they refuse an "reasonable" job offer. As with much else of the plans, what a "reasonable" job offer will be isn't defined. Those who do so though will be more or less destitute or dependent on others, as they will first lose benefits for a month, then three months, then three years. Whether some will accept job offers then quit immediately or get themselves sacked so as not to lose benefit and how they will be dealt with also isn't considered.

The main reasons behind all of this are again explained well by Chris. Like him, I also think the biggest motivation behind it is the get tough strategy. So prevalent is the view that those on benefits are either skivers or scrounging, repeated endlessly in the tabloid press, that if you're told a lie enough you'll often start to believe. As with so much else, there are some who could work but who don't simply because they can. For the majority though, who desperately would like to work but who can't for a whole spectrum of different reasons, making their lives even more miserable seems to be a Conservative priority. David Cameron asks where the dignity is "in sitting at home, dependent on the state, not having a job?", but where also is the respect for those that can't? It takes something to make New Labour look humane and liberal, but the Tories have somehow managed it.

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