Tag Archives: Labour

Two tribes go to war and neither the red nor the blue chief is safe

March 28, 2016MusingsAndrew Rawnsley, Article, Comment, Conservatives, David Cameron, Jeremy Corbyn, Labour, Main section, Opinion, Politics, The Observerdiana Stone

An interesting perspective.

This article titled “Two tribes go to war and neither the red nor the blue chief is safe” was written by Andrew Rawnsley, for The Observer on Sunday 27th March 2016 05.04 UTC

Napoleon wanted generals who were lucky. Napoleon would have liked David Cameron. He became Tory leader when Tony Blair’s electoral magic had faded and his days were numbered. Lucky Dave then fought the 2010 election against a Labour party that had been in government for 13 years and was showing its age.

His rival for the premiership had presided over the most severe economic crisis since the 1930s and, on his own account, Gordon Brown was not a politician suited for the television age. When Mr Cameron failed to parlay those advantages into a parliamentary majority, he borrowed one from the Lib Dems, who did sterling service sustaining him for five years while destroying their electoral base in the process.

He gambled the United Kingdom with a referendum on Scottish independence. Labour did the heavy lifting to keep the UK intact and its reward was to be toxified as Tory collaborators in the eyes of many Scots. The devastation this wreaked on Labour support north of the border played to his advantage at the 2015 election by allowing the Tories to scare English voters with the thought that a Miliband government would be a marionette of the Nationalists. Lady Luck also smiled on him when the pollsters, by calling the election wrong, helped smooth his path back to No 10.

I don’t put all this down to blind chance. That would be to underestimate Mr Cameron. He would not be approaching his sixth anniversary at No 10 were he not highly skilled at exploiting the opportunities that time, chance and opponents have presented to him. Like all successful leaders, he has made the most of his good fortune.

The trouble with luck is that she eventually runs out. She seemed to be bidding farewell to this prime minister last weekend. He had been hit with the most dramatic and damaging resignation of his premiership when Iain Duncan Smith quit the cabinet in a fit of vitriolic vapours. By Monday, the budget was unravelling faster than you can say fiasco and George Osborne had gone into hiding. Mr Cameron had to face the Commons that afternoon. This should have been a horrible experience for him.

Yet still he was in luck. Good fortune smiled on him in the bearded guise of his main inquisitor. His prayers for relief had been granted by St Jeremy, the patron saint of prime ministers in peril. Presented with a priceless opportunity to skewer the prime minister and take apart his claims to lead a one-nation government, Mr Corbyn decided the most effective approach was not to mention the self-defenestration of IDS and his excoriating attack on the cabinet which he had just left.

The Labour leader did not, as some have had it, kick the ball over the bar. He didn’t even try to connect his foot with the ball. I am still trying to fathom why not. Had no one told him that a significant element of the job description of leader of the opposition is to, well, to oppose? Was he too preoccupied drawing up lists of suspected traitors among Labour MPs to prepare for this important engagement at the dispatch box? Was he too busy tending to his allotment and nurturing his marrows to have watched any news? Maybe I am over-thinking this. Maybe he is just hopeless.

If that performance had Labour people looking on in stunned disbelief, there was worse to come two days later at prime minister’s questions. By then, Mr Corbyn had managed to find out that a member of the cabinet had resigned. But it was too late. Bringing it up 4 8 hours on only served to remind everyone that he had failed to stick the ball in the net two days earlier. On top of which, someone on his team carelessly lost a list which divided Labour MPs into five categories of loyalty and opposition to the great helmsman of Islington. The list fell ino enemy hands. So we all now know that his chief whip is designated “hostile” and so is Labour’s candidate to be mayor of London. “Core group negative” includes Ed Miliband and Alan Johnson, the leader of the Labour In campaign.

The Tory leader used the exposure of the list to crush the man opposite. “I thought I had problems,” he jeered after saying they could put him down as “core support” for Mr Corbyn remaining as Labour leader. A half hour that ought to have been torture for the prime minister turned into a humiliation for his opponent.

The most devoted of Mr Corbyn’s followers will say that this mockery shows that the Tories are frightened of the Labour leader. Let me try to break this as gently as I can. The Tories really, really are not scared of Mr Corbyn. Most Tories are more likely to lose sleep worrying about whether they put out the cat than they are about the Labour leader. For reasons I will describe in a moment, the Conservatives would be better served, and so would the country, if they were a bit more frightened of Labour. The other thing people will say is that parliamentary knockabout excites only people who live in the “Westminster bubble”. No one “in the real world” cares about this meaningless theatre.

I agree that it is theatre, but it is far from meaningless. Parliament still matters for holding the prime minister to account. It matters more under this prime minister because he rarely deigns to grant substantial interviews with heavyweight media interrogators and only holds news conferences when he has absolutely no choice. The prospect of being tested by the leader of the opposition should, at the very least, make a prime minister nervous. It should keep him on his toes. Since he started facing Mr Corbyn, Mr Cameron clearly finds PMQs so effortless that the ease with which he cruises through them must embarrass even him. It also matters because how the party leaders perform in the Commons influences how the media rate and report on them and that plays its role in shaping public perceptions. It also has a significant impact on the morale of their parliamentary troops. At the end of that PMQs, you didn’t need any lists to tell you what Labour MPs thought about Jeremy Corbyn. It was written on their funereal faces. An encounter which should have united them in exploiting the government’s divisions and disarray turned into an occasion in which the Tories roared on their man as he ridiculed the Labour leader.

My first column of this year remarked that it is highly unusual for both major parties to be doing the splits at the same time. As this year grows older, things are getting even stranger. We now have a feedback loop in which the divisions in the Labour party feed those among the Tories and vice versa. Whatever their manifold and manifest differences, one thought unites nearly all Conservatives – that the next election is as good as won for them. This is encouraging Tories to think that they can behave however they like without fear of punishment at the ballot box.

The empty space where an effective opposition ought to be is an incitement for the government to be complacent, cocky and slapdash. That arrogance has consequences, as we saw with the budget. At the same time, absent an opposition that they fear, Tory discipline is breaking down. The prime minister’s internal opponents are emboldened to be more aggressive in their rebellions against the Tory leader. The language exchanged about Europe becomes more poisonous. It lessens the chances of putting the Conservative party back together again on the other side of the referendum.

In normal times, we’d expect this to have a positive effect on the opposition. The spectacle of Tories tearing into each other like a feral bunch of ferrets ought to be uniting Labour in a conviction that the next election is winnable for them. In these extraordinary times, Tory division has the opposite effect. It is not bringing Labour together; it is amplifying Labour’s internal turbulence. Labour MPs see a Tory party which is bitterly split and despair that their own leadership seems utterly incapable of profiting from the opportunity that it ought to present to them.

A few Labour MPs have broken cover and openly called for Jeremy Corbyn to resign. Many more talk privately of an attempt to oust him once the EU referendum is over. Whether this will come to anything, we will see, but I would caution Mr Corbyn not to place too much reliance on that list as a guide to the mood in his parliamentary party. It has Labour MPs down as neutral or friendly who are, to my knowledge, hostiles.

While talk of toppling their leader grows on the Labour side, regicide is also on the minds of a significant number of Tory MPs. Among them, there is much chatter that David Cameron will face a leadership challenge after the referendum, whether he wins it or not. It is possible that, before year’s end, there will have been attempts from within both the major parties to oust their leaders. What would once have seemed wildly improbable is now quite easily conceivable. The terra becomes yet more incognita.

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The Guardian view on Labour’s byelection win: not such a bad week after all

December 4, 2015MusingsArticle, Byelections, Comment, Conservatives, David Cameron, Editorial, Editorials, Editorials & reply, Jeremy Corbyn, Labour, Local politics, Main section, Opinion, Politics, Syria, The Guardian, UK Independence party (Ukip), UK newsdiana Stone

There’s always hope, though I am not sure how much.
You have to have faith in something though.

This article titled “The Guardian view on Labour’s byelection win: not such a bad week after all” was written by Editorial, for The Guardian on Friday 4th December 2015 19.05 UTC

Labour retains safe Labour seat in Lancashire heartlands byelection. No story there, then. Except that, in the case of the Oldham West and Royton byelection, there undoubtedly is a story. This has been a torrid back end of the year for Labour. Splits, bad blood and bad headlines have cooked up such a witches’ brew for Jeremy Corbyn’s party that the expectation on all sides, based on doorstep evidence, was of a Labour slump and even perhaps a loss to Ukip. Early editions of the Daily Mail on Friday were so confident that they ran a pre-declaration story headlined “Corbyn effect costs Labour thousands of votes.” But, let’s be honest, no one else saw evidence of a big Labour win coming.

It is true that the Labour vote fell this week in Oldham West compared with the general election. But so did everybody else’s. That’s because turnout as a whole went down from 60% in May to 40% on Thursday, sadly typical for a modern byelection. What matters though, was that Labour’s share of the vote actually went up – by seven points – not down, while the Conservatives fell by 10 points and Ukip, supposedly the great threat to Labour this week, managed only a small increase while still ending nearly 11,000 votes adrift of Labour’s new MP Jim McMahon.

That’s a good bankable win for Labour in anyone’s money. Mr McMahon’s success puts him into the top 20 Labour shares of the vote in Britain and gives his party a much-needed electoral fillip after a grim time. The flip side of it is that it’s a bad loss for the challengers, Ukip and the Tories, never mind the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, all of whom might have persuaded themselves that Oldham West might offer them something. The gas has gone out of Ukip’s balloon, at least in Lancashire, while George Osborne’s party has no electoral dividend to show for all his northern powerhouse-building.

It’s a mistake to pretend that Labour’s win is all that unusual, though. By a coincidence, the first byelection of the last parliament was in neighbouring Oldham East and Saddleworth in January 2011. Labour successfully put up its share in that byelection too, by a meaty 10 points, while the Tory share halved. It was a reassuring win for Labour’s new leader Ed Miliband, whose party mostly did well in byelections for the next three years. But like most byelections in the early part of a parliament it said little or nothing about the 2015 general election result when it eventually came. There was a long way still to go, then as now.

Mr McMahon was clearly an excellent candidate in a crucial contest for his party. Talented, local, competent, well known in an area where he is the council leader, he was nobody’s callow besuited candidate from Westminster central casting. These things probably mattered more than that he was on a different wing of the party from his leader. Labour’s factions will argue long and loud about whether Oldham was a victory for Mr McMahon or Mr Corbyn. Their respective conclusions will reflect their respective prejudices. The truth is surely that, between them, they did enough to allow the Labour brand to win once more.

Real votes matter more than opinion polls. Yet each of them is important. Labour can draw comfort from Oldham West. But it has to beware the message of a poll this week which showed, first, that the voters grew more doubtful about air strikes in Syria as Wednesday’s Commons vote drew near but, second, that Mr Corbyn’s job ratings have fallen sharply since he took over in September. Mr Corbyn now has a net approval rating of -41, compared with -8 in September. David Cameron, by contrast, has a rating of zero, with voters evenly divided. That should be cause for Labour concern.

Still, we should not be hypocritical. If Labour had lost Thursday’s byelection, this editorial and this weekend’s political talk would all be about Mr Corbyn, especially after a searing week at Westminster over Syria. His leadership would be on the line. The profiles of Hilary Benn would be being burnished. So if defeat for Labour would have been bad for Mr Corbyn, it surely follows that victory for Labour must be good for him. His leadership is therefore not on the line right now. In Oldham at least, Mr Corbyn was not the issue in the way his opponents and critics might have imagined. On Wednesday, Labour MPs went along with majority party opinion and supported him on Syria by two to one. This tells us something, perhaps not too much, about the future. Nevertheless, the Labour leader can undoubtedly breathe a sigh of relief this weekend. And so can his party, at least until next time.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

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Trident is useless. That’s why we must debate its renewal

September 28, 2015MusingsArticle, Comment, Defence policy, Labour, Labour conference, Labour conference 2015, Military, Nuclear weapons, Opinion, Politics, Richard Norton-Taylor, Trident, UK newsdiana Stone

I used to have nightmares about nuclear war. Being just able as a child of 6 to remember the Cuba missile crisis, my attitude too nukes has always been why on earth would you?

I have different nightmares now…

This article titled “Trident is useless. That’s why we must debate its renewal” was written by Richard Norton-Taylor, for theguardian.com on Monday 28th September 2015 15.48 UTC

It might be perfectly understandable why Labour party delegates decided to bottle out of a conference debate on Trident, Britain’s most powerful, most expensive, most irrelevant and most useless weapon. Yet the attempt to suppress debate on the utility of Britain’s nuclear arsenal is undemocratic. And a discussion is needed, desperately.

“The question of Trident renewal becomes a symbol for Britain in the world, for patriotism, or for enlightened foreign policy,” says Michael Clarke, director general of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) thinktank. He adds: “The one thing that politicians don’t address when they talk about Britain’s nuclear weapons is how they do, or don’t, actually figure in practical defence policy for the next 10 or 20 years. It is really very depressing.”

In his memoirs, Tony Blair said of Trident: “The expense is huge and the utility … non-existent in terms of military use.” He said he could clearly see the force of the “common sense and practical argument” against Trident, but in the end he thought that giving it up would be “too big a downgrading of our status as a nation”.

It is about symbols and sacred cows. The arguments are not simply ones of left versus right. In Brighton on Sunday, unions who are pro-Trident on employment grounds voted against a debate (though their skilled workforce could readily switch to building submarines or warships that are not armed with nuclear-armed ballistic missiles).

Crispin Blunt, the Tory chairman of the Commons foreign affairs committee, says: “It is no longer sensible to put aside the money [for Trident] for the size of nation we are. At what point is it no longer value for money for the UK? In my judgment we have reached that point.”

Max Hastings, a historian and respected commentator on military affairs, chastised the government in yesterday’s Sunday Times, accusing it of “indefensibly” ruling out of the debate on the forthcoming strategic defence and security review (SDSR) “the huge commitment to replace Trident”. (Hastings added that the navy’s new aircraft carriers might have provided jobs for Scottish shipyards but were “less relevant to Britain’s security needs than is the Great Pyramid”.)

“When you are short of money, you should put everything in the melting pot,” says Major General Patrick Cordingley, former commander of the 7th Armoured Brigade, the Desert Rats. He argues that Trident should not be ringfenced and the costs should be weighed up against new ships, planes, tanks and infantry. The defence secretary, Michael Fallon, made clear in a keynote speech to RUSI last week that the SDSR would, as he put it, “certainly be confirming the importance of a nuclear deterrent”. Yet he also made plain that no agreement had been reached on such urgent problems as the shortfall in the number and capabilities of RAF strike aircraft and skilled navy personnel. According to the latest MoD figures, the navy is short of 620 specialists, including submarine engineers who would be needed for Trident.

Costs of US F-35B Lightning II fighter jets planned for the carriers have soared and numbers have been drastically scaled back. The RAF is having to rely on 30-year-old Tornados against Isis fighters because its newest strike aircraft, the Typhoon, is not yet equipped with Brimstone missiles, the most accurate weapon in the RAF’s armoury.

Ministers say that Trident, estimated to cost £100bn over a 30-year lifespan, will be needed as merely as an insurance policy in an “uncertain” world. Yet would a similar argument ever be used for hospitals, or for any civil, as opposed to military, contingency?

Trident is supposed to be a deterrent: the point is, it is there so it would never be used. Yet its credibility depends on whether a rational British prime minister would ever take an independent decision to order Trident submarine commanders to launch a nuclear weapon. That belongs to the realm of fantasy.