Showing posts with label Labour. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Labour. Show all posts

Sunday, October 04, 2015

Healey: The antithesis of the machine politician

My Journal column may have gone, but life and politics goes on, and since this blog is now the sole remaining outlet for my political writing, it is here that any periodic musings on the state of the nation will be appearing.

I could not, of course, let the death of Denis Healey pass without comment.  On my Facebook page I described him yesterday both as my political hero and without doubt the greatest Prime Minister Britain never had.   As those are bold statements I feel the need this morning to amplify them a bit.

There have been many politicians I have admired down the years - Roy Jenkins, Tony Crosland, David Owen, Charles Kennedy and Robin Cook to name but five.  What was it that made Denis stand out in particular?

I think it was probably summed up in the word he himself used - his "hinterland."  A WW2 hero and genuine polymath, Healey was the very antithesis of today's machine politicians who progress effortlessly from uni to MPs' research assistant to parliamentary candidate without experiencing anything resembling the real world.

Opinions will invariably differ about whether Denis was a great politician.  His tendency to make unnecessary enemies at the height of his career in the 70s and early 80s probably cost him the leadership of the Labour Party, but it was that very refusal to 'play the political game' that made him, in my eyes, such an attractive figure.

An alternative history of Britain in the 1980s would have had him as Prime Minister in place of Margaret Thatcher, using the benefits of North Sea Oil to build a Swedish-style social democracy instead of the American-style market economy we became.  I happen to think Britain would be a kinder and fairer society now had that been the case.

Could it have happened?   Probably not. Denis's best chance of becoming PM probably came in 1976 when Harold Wilson retired, but he came a poor third behind Jim Callaghan.   By the time Callaghan stepped down in 1980, the left was in disarray and the Thatcherite hegemony was in full swing.

Denis as leader in place of Michael Foot might have limited the scale of Thatcher's victory in the post-Falklands election in 1983, but I don't, in all honesty, think he would have stopped it.

Where a Healey leadership would have made a bigger difference is in terms of the internal politics of the left.  Had he succeeded Callaghan in 1980, the marginalisation of the hard left would have begun five years earlier than it actually did, and the impact of the SDP breakaway would have been greatly reduced.

In this respect, it is tragic that Denis should have lived to see the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader - an outcome he sought to prevent in what proved to be the last political intervention of his career.

Ever since I first launched this blog more than ten years ago, the footer has contained a quote from Denis's autobiography 'The Time of My Life' - a comment about his old friend and rival Roy Jenkins which says just as much about himself.

"He saw politics very much like Trollope, as the interplay of personalities seeking preferment, rather than, like me, as a conflict of principles and programmes about social and economic change."

Why do I like this quote so much? Well, partly because it references Trollope, but mainly because it sums up in a single sentence the tension which makes politics such an endlessly fascinating business.

It is, more often than not, Jenkins' definition which prevails. But Healey's definition of politics is the way it probably ought to be. 

Saturday, September 27, 2014

The man is obscuring the message

My take on a less than satisfactory week for Labour's Ed Miliband.  From today's Journal.



While on a personal level I was relieved at the outcome of the Scottish independence referendum, there can be no doubt what the more interesting result from a journalistic point of view would have been.

The counterfactual question ‘What would have happened if the Scots had voted Yes?’ will, I suspect, become as moot a debating point in years to come as ‘What would have happened if JFK had lived?’ or ‘What would have happened if Thatcher had lost the Falklands?’

My guess, for what it’s worth is that David Cameron would by now be an ex-Prime Minister, his status as the man who lost the Union having finally provided his backbenchers with the longed-for excuse to send him packing.

His replacement at No 10 would have been William Hague, one of the few Tories to command respect across the spectrum and a convenient stopgap for those seeking to block the claims of Chancellor George Osborne while keeping the seat warm for Boris Johnson.

And Ed Miliband?  Well, I suspect he might soon have been on his way too.  After all, had the Scottish vote gone the other way, it would have been primarily down to his failure to connect with Labour’s traditional supporters north of the border.

It took an eleventh-hour intervention by Gordon Brown to deliver Labour’s voters into the no camp, though the former Prime Minister remains such an unperson in senior party circles that Mr Miliband did not even see fit to thank him in his conference speech this week.

But of course the Scots voted no, and both Mr Cameron and his Labour opposite number lived to fight another day, albeit with their reputations badly scarred.

And with the general election now less than eight months away, it is clear that both men face an uphill battle to convince the public of their Prime Ministerial credentials.

Mr Cameron, of course, has the advantage in this regard in that he is already doing the job, but he seems to be held in growing contempt by an increasing number of otherwise natural Tory voters.

His casual failure this week to observe the first rule of Prime Ministerial conduct – that you don’t drag the Monarch into politics – was seen by some as indicative not just of a lack of gravitas, but a lack of basic intelligence.

As for poor Mr Miliband, everyone I speak to who is unconnected with politics seems to regard him as quite simply the dullest man in Britain.

His keynote conference speech this week was perhaps his last big chance before the election to shift that perception – but sadly for him, it appears to have further cemented it in the public mind.

Perhaps he wasn’t actually trying.   Mr Miliband is smart enough to realise that the he is never going to win on the personality stakes and, rather than attempt to sell himself to the electorate in Tuesday’s speech, he set about trying to sell an idea.

This, encapsulated in a single word, was the idea of togetherness – a refinement of his ‘One Nation’ pitch of two years ago which aimed to build on the success of the ‘Better Together’ campaign in Scotland.

Of itself, it’s a strong message, if one that – like his £2.5bn pledge on funding the NHS - seems aimed more at shoring up Labour’s core vote than reaching out to those of a more rightward-leaning disposition.

But it all got rather lost in Mr Miliband’s torpid manner of delivery, while his failure to mention Labour’s plans for tackling the deficit handed further plentiful ammunition to his opponents.

If renewed faith in the concept of ‘togetherness’ was one upshot of the referendum, another was of course the revival of interest in English devolution.

Mr Cameron’s plans for an English parliament within a parliament met with a predictably dusty response this week from North-East MPs and council leaders this week who realise it will do nothing to devolve power and funding to the Northern regions.

The Labour leader, by contrast, spoke of the need for a wholesale decentralisation of power throughout the country in what in may yet become a major theme of his party’s election campaign.

In this, too, Mr Miliband’s instincts are entirely correct.   But sadly for Labour, the man is currently obscuring the message.

Saturday, October 01, 2011

Miliband shows the extent of his boldness, but the reaction shows the extent of his task

Of all the many soundbites devised by Tony Blair’s speechwriters for their leader’s party conference speeches, among the most irritating was the claim that New Labour was “at its best when at its boldest.”

If New Labour had ever done anything remotely bold, it might have had more of a ring of truth about it, but all it ever really did was to maintain and entrench the political and economic consensus established in the 1980s by Margaret Thatcher.

It was this implicit recognition of New Labour’s shortcomings which lay at the heart of Ed Miliband’s conference speech in Liverpool this week, and which gave Labour’s current leader his own, rather more plausible claim to boldness.

Indeed, I would go so far as to say that, in setting out explicitly to overturn that consensus, Mr Miliband has made what was probably the most courageous conference speech by any major party leader over the course of the last two decades.

If anyone thinks I am overstating the case here, they had only to listen to the predominantly negative public reaction to the speech in Wednesday morning’s radio phone-ins.

Far from being a platform from which to relaunch his leadership, the speech left Mr Miliband on the back foot for much of that day, forced to defend himself against claims of a “lurch to the left.”

Does that mean the speech was not so much brave as foolhardy? Well, had it been a pre-election conference, then perhaps so.

But what Mr Miliband was setting out to do was not so much to secure a short-term electoral advantage as to change the entire terms of the political debate, and in this respect, he at least has time on his side.

Much of Labour’s week in Liverpool has been a collective ‘mea culpa’ for the failings and missed opportunities of the Blair-Brown years.

The warm-up act for Mr Miliband was provided on Monday by Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls, who expressed his own regrets over Labour’s economic record.

But while Mr Balls was talking merely about some aspects of economic management, the scope of Mr Miliband’s admission went far wider. “We did not do enough to change the values of our economy,” he said.

While cleverly branding David Cameron – the youngest Prime Minister in almost 200 years! - as the “last-gasp” of the ancien regime, the clear message was that Messrs Blair and Brown were also part of that failed consensus.

Not the least ambitious aspect of the speech was its attempt to restore the concept of ‘morality’ as a defining feature of our political culture.

Usually when a politician starts banging on about morality it precedes a dramatic fall from grace, but the confluence of the MPs’ expenses scandal, the banking crisis and phone-hacking has created a moment of opportunity which Mr Miliband has not been slow to spot.

Having already made his pitch for the moral high ground by leading the attack on Rupert Murdoch this summer, the Labour leader sought this week to build on that good work.

Now that Nick Clegg has vacated the role, there is a clear gap in the market for a ‘Mr Clean’ of British politics, and Mr Miliband has an authentic claim to the mantle.

Was it a lurch to the left? Well, in the sense that it was setting its face against the centre-right consensus of the past 30 years, then yes.

But on closer inspection there was little in the speech that would fit any traditional idea of left-wingery.

For instance, Mr Miliband said at one point that “government spending is not going to be the way we achieve social justice in the next decade.”

Had Tony Blair said this, everyone would have seen it as further evidence of his determination to bury Old Labour-style tax-and-spend and shift the party several degrees further to the right.

When Ed Miliband fought his brother for the Labour leadership a year ago, he made clear that he thought it was time to move on from New Labour.

At the time, this came over merely an adroit piece of positioning in a party weary of the factionalism of the Blair-Brown years, but now it is starting to look like there was real substance to it.

The largely hostile reaction to Tuesday’s speech illustrates the scale of Mr Miliband’s task – but at least he has a clear idea where he is going.

Now all he needs to do is to take the public with him.

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Saturday, November 27, 2010

Ed Miliband needs to reform his party first

With his leadership of the Labour Party still barely two months old, it did not take long for talk of plots against Ed Miliband to start crawling out of the Westminster woodwork.

One national daily informed us that David Miliband was standing ready to take over should his younger brother prove a flop in the job he so narrowly beat him to in September.

I doubt very much whether David had anything to do with this 'story.' Indeed, many more stories like it and the South Shields MP will probably have to quit politics altogether, rather than risk becoming a focus for discontent over his brother's leadership.

No, I suspect this story arose, as these things tend to do at Westminster, from a Labour MP speculating idly to a journalist about what might happen if Ed Miliband were to fall under a bus.

But the story was not completely without significance. It demonstrated that some Labour MPs remain far from convinced by Ed, and that the new leader still has a big job on his hands to unite his party.

In that respect, his return from paternity leave at the start of this week came not a moment too soon.

Mr Miliband's announcement on his first day back of wholesale review of Labour policies is a wise move as far as it goes.

Barring an irretrievable bust-up if next May's referendum on the voting system goes against the Lib Dems, the coalition is likely to be in power for five years, and there is thus plenty of time for Labour to reinvent itself.

Furthermore, it is a tactic that has worked successfully for the last two Leaders of the Opposition who have managed to be promoted out of that job into Number Ten – Tony Blair and David Cameron.

Both men used policy reviews as a means of detoxifying their parties in the eyes of voters, Mr Blair from its tax-and-spend image, Mr Cameron from its 'nasty party' tag.

But it doesn't always work. Neil Kinnock launched a similarly wide-ranging review in the 1980s called 'Meet the Challenge, Make the Change', but failed to convince the electorate that Labour had done.

Likewise William Hague's much-vaunted 'Common Sense Revolution' in 1999 served only to reinforce voter perceptions of the Tories at that time as shrill and extremist.

For me, the fate of those two leaders seems to sum up the real difficulty facing Ed Miliband – whether he has the personality to connect with the British public and project a new and compelling vision of what his party stands for.

This is what ultimately distinguishes the successful opposition leaders from those who ultimately failed to make the transition to government.

Personality aside, his other big problem is whether the party under him can forge a distinctive policy agenda that is neither Old nor New Labour

For all the talk of the "death" of New Labour, and its replacement by True Labour, Real Labour or Next Labour, any departure from it will inevitably be portrayed as 'Red Ed' lurching to the left.

If anything, Mr Miliband needs to try to out-modernise the previous generation of modernisers by being prepared to tackle issues which they ultimately shied away from.

Welfare reform is one obvious example, but so is reform of the party's own archaic structures and its absurd system of electing its leaders.

It would be a brave politician indeed who, having prospered under the electoral college system, would then advocate its replacement by one member, one vote.

But if Mr Miliband is looking for a 'Clause Four Moment' which will force the electorate to sit up and take notice of him, that could well be the best option.

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Thursday, March 04, 2010

Michael Foot: Greatness marred by misjudgements

There seems little to add to the reams of material that has appeared both in print and on the airwaves about the death of Michael Foot. He was undeniably a great parliamentary figure and his death moreorless severs the only remaining link with the days in which politicians were expected to command the House of Commons by the power of their oratory rather than command the news media by the succinctness of their soundbites. As Tony Blair said yesterday, he was as far removed as it is possible to be from the techniques of modern politics, and maybe that is no bad thing to have inscribed on your tombstone.

Nevertheless....I have to say I have been struck by the degree of sentimentality in some of the tributes, notably from Lord Kinnock, about Foot's contribution to the Labour Party in the period after the 1979 defeat. To listen to some of what has been said, anyone would think he saved the party during that grim period. The truth was he actually came close to destroying it.

In my view, Foot would have gone down as an immeasurably greater man had he not succumbed to the vain belief in 1980 that only he could succeed in uniting the party.

Of course, he not only failed to unite it - the Gang of Four split off to form the SDP shortly after his election as leader - but the programme around which Foot subsequently united the remainder of the party was one which was so out-of-kilter with the prevailing wind in British politics at the time that it resulted in Labour's worst election defeat since its arrival as a major political force.

The harsh truth was that Foot should never have become leader of the Labour Party ahead of Denis Healey and, in so doing, he robbed the party of the only leader who would have been capable of stopping Thatcherism in its tracks.

Had Healey succeeded Jim Callaghan, the split in the party would probably still have occurred, but it would almost certainly have occurred from the opposite end of the party spectrum, with the hard-left heading off into well-earned irrelevance.

Labour under Healey would have been in genuine contention for power at the 1983 and 1987 elections and would certainly have returned to office earlier than it ultimately did.

More significantly in terms of present-day politics, it would also not have been necessary for the party to ditch its entire Croslandite social democratic tradition as it ended up doing under Tony Blair in its desperation to return to power after four successive election defeats, and to retain it at all costs thereafter.

Any political career inevitably contains its share of misjudgements, and Foot made one other which I would like to mention here - namely colluding with Enoch Powell to scupper Harold Wilson's modest plans to reform the House of Lords in 1968.

This act of ideological purism - Foot wanted the Lords abolished, not democratised - resulted in the Second Chamber going unreformed for another thirty years, and the survival into the 21st century of a legislature defined in part by heredity.

As someone with more than a superficial knowledge of political history, Foot should have taken the long view, and realised that parliamentary reform in this country has only ever proceeded by increments.

For the man whose accession to the party leadership inadvertently begat New Labour, it goes down as another example of unintended - but not entirely unforseeable - political consequences.

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Saturday, August 01, 2009

Mandy takes up the reins

Whoever ends up leading Labour into the election, the past seven days have shown where the power really now lies. Here's today's Journal column.



Traditionally, the time of the year between the start of the MPs long summer recess in July and the build-up to the party conferences in September has been known as the political ‘silly season.’

In most years, an uneasy peace descends over Westminster, and political journalists are reduced to writing about such ephemera as John Prescott finding a baby crab in the Thames and naming it after Peter Mandelson.

But with an election less than a year away and Gordon Brown’s government still mired in difficulties at home and abroad, nobody expected this to be one of those summers when politics effectively goes into abeyance.

And something else has changed too since Mr Prescott observed that tiny crustacean in 1997. From being the butt of Old Labour humour, Lord Mandelson of Foy and Hartlepool is now seen by most of the party as vital to its slim hopes of election victory.

In one sense, it’s a fulfilment of former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s more controversial pronouncements.

Asked once how he would know when his mission to transform his party had been completed, he replied: “When the party learns to love Peter Mandelson.”

With Mr Brown off on his holidays this week – in so far as the workaholic PM is ever off-duty – the former Hartlepool MP has been large and in charge around both Whitehall and the TV studios alike.

In so doing, he demonstrated beyond any remaining doubt that he has now inherited the mantle of his one-time tormentor Mr Prescott, as Deputy Prime Minister in all but name.

Lord Mandelson is sensibly playing down excitable talk that he could actually become the next Labour leader, although one influential backbencher declared this week that he was the only person who could beat the Tories.

There has not been a Prime Minister in the House of Lords since Lord Salisbury in 1902, and to have one in 2009 would be extraordinary even by the standards of Lord Mandelson’s topsy-turvy career.

Nevertheless, one had the unmistakeable sense this week that this was a moment he had been looking forward to for a long time, such was the relish with which he took up the levers of power.

His aim was nothing less than to set a new strategic course for Labour as it approaches an election that almost everyone now expects it to lose, and lose badly.

Such pessimism about the party’s prospects is hardly surprising given its dire performance in the Norwich North by-election ten days ago, a result which if replicated across the UK would give David Cameron a majority of 240.

So far, it has not led to a renewed bout of speculation about Mr Brown’s leadership, but it has brought about a growing realisation that he has lost the argument over “Labour investment versus Tory cuts.”

This tired old mantra has been central to Mr Brown’s re-election strategy, but has failed to gain any traction with a cynical public that believes spending cuts will follow whoever wins in 2010.

What Norwich North did was to present an opportunity to those Cabinet members who want to move away from a strategy which they think the public now regards as fundamentally dishonest.

Hence the new note of candour in Lord Mandelson’s interview with BBC Newsnight this week when, without actually using the c-word, he accepted that cuts would indeed be part and parcel of a Labour fourth term.

“I fully accept that in the medium term the fiscal adjustment that we are going to have to make….will be substantial. There will be things that have to be postponed and put off, and there will probably be things that we cannot do at all,” he said.

It wasn’t the only change in election strategy Lord Mandelson announced this week. He also appeared to commit Mr Brown to a televised debate with Mr Cameron, despite Downing Street’s insistence that the Prime Minister remains opposed to the idea.

“I think television debates would help engage the public, help answer some of the questions at the heart of the election, help bring the election alive in some way,” he said.

For what it’s worth, my guess is that it still won’t happen, for the simple reason that electoral law obliges the big broadcasters to give the Liberal Democrats almost equal airtime to that of the Labour and Conservative parties.

This will mean that Nick Clegg will have to be included in any head-to-head between the party leaders, something the other two might be keen to avoid.

But that is by-the-by. The real significance of Lord Mandelson’s comments this week is that he now feels in a strong enough position to set out his own agenda without clearing it with Number Ten.

Some could even see it as the beginnings of an attempt to distance himself from Mr Brown and prepare the way for a new leader with a new, more open style.

After the failed “coup” in May I predicted that Mr Brown would, at some stage, come under fresh pressure to stand down in favour of Home Secretary Alan Johnson, and nothing that has happened since has caused me to revise that view.

Mr Brown’s position remains weak. Labour MPs who effectively put him on probation in May spoke then of the need for a demonstrable improvement in Labour’s performance by the autumn, but there is absolutely no sign of this happening.

But whatever internal machinations occur in the run-up to the conference season – and my guess is that there will be plenty – one thing is becoming increasingly clear.

It is that whether it is Mr Brown or Mr Johnson who leads Labour into the next election, it will be Lord Mandelson who is once more pulling the strings.

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Tuesday, May 27, 2008

A broken reed

This Friday, BBC Parliament is planning to screen 11 hours of coverage of the 1983 General Election, the one that has gone down in history as the point at which when moribund Old Labour finally committed suicide, although in truth the stricken patient lingered on until Neil Kinnock finally put it out of its misery at Bournemouth in 1985.

I was at uni in London during the course of that election and my most abiding memory of it was a visit by Michael Foot to a West London housing estate where large numbers of students then lived.

As Footie tottered into view, a bearded Labour activist suddenly started bellowing at the top of his voice: "Michael, save us from this woman," as if he were imploring Christ to come down from heaven and vanquish the devil and all his works.

The idea of this pathetic old man acting as any kind of saviour in the face of the irresistable force of nature that was Thatcher struck me as a telling metaphor for the Labour Party's weakness at the time.

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Friday, November 16, 2007

The Top 10 Labour Twits

A week or so ago, Tara Hamilton-Miller in the New Statesman put together a list of the Top 10 Tory Twits. It was entertaining reading, though she unaccountably omitted both Sir Nicholas Fairbairn, who was once cut off mid-flight by Mr Deputy Speaker when attempting a graphic description of the homosexual act during a Commons debate, and Alan Clark who famously got his penis out in the hallway of his mistress's flat after feeling neglected during a party.

Surprisingly, no-one has yet put together a list of the Top 10 Labour twits, so I thought I would ask for nominations.

As Monty Python noted, it is hard to define what makes a really first-class twit. Political twittishness is essentially about more than mere rank bad judgement. Its essential ingredient is frivolity, not just in the sense of lack of seriousness but in the sense of failure to think about the consequences of one's actions.

To help kick start the debate, I have put together the following shortlist of ten, although all other suggestions will be gratefully received.

  • Anthony Wedgwood Benn, as he was then, for nearly wrecking the party for good during the 70s and 80s.

  • Clive Jenkins, for his continual meddling in leadership elections which invariably produced the wrong result.

  • Lord Longford, for his silly campaign in support of child killer Myra Hindley.

  • Chris Bryant, for practically every public utterance since he swapped vicarhood for politics.

  • Robert Kilroy-Silk, for declaring in the mid-80s that he would be Labour leader and PM within 10 years.

  • John Spellar, for saying "these cunts must be stopped" when he meant to say "cuts."

  • Tom Driberg, for numerous indiscreet sexual adventures from the 1930s to the 1970s.

  • David Winnick, for failing to acquire the slightest degree of gravitas despite nearly 40 years in the Commons.

  • George Brown, for throwing his toys out of his pram in 1968 and resigning while pissed.

  • Martin Salter, for thinking what a great idea it would be to get rid of his neighbouring Labour MP.

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  • Friday, February 09, 2007

    Giles Radice knew the score

    Giles Radice was the kindest and most courteous of the North-East MPs I regularly dealt with in my old job as Political Editor of the Newcastle Journal. After I left the Lobby he stayed in touch for a while and sent me a copy of his Diaries which were published towards the end of 2004. Thumbing through them earlier this evening, I came across this remarkable paragraph, written on General Election Day 2001.

    "Lisanne and I work in Newark for Fiona Jones. It is an uphill task, because despite being a sitting Labour MP, Fiona is the victim of a horrendous whispering campaign. Sad to say, she has been a lame duck MP, ever since she was wrongly convicted of "fiddling" her election expenses. Although she was immediately and totally exonerated on appeal, the mud stuck and the Tories have been conducting a vicious doorstep attack on her personal character. We meet hostility to her as we knock up, including schoolboys who say she is "corrupt." Poor Fiona!"

    This needs little further comment from me, as it already says so much: about Giles Radice and his dedication to the Labour Party; about the awfulness of Fiona Jones' plight; but also about the Labour Party's desertion of her, that she was left to try to get the vote out on election day with the help, not of the party's "stars," but of only a veteran backbencher on his way, that very day, into retirement.

    Poor Fiona, indeed....

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    Has Miliband blown it?

    As regular readers of this blog will know I have long tipped Environment Secretary David Miliband for great things under Gordon Brown, including possibly a 50-50 shot at the Chancellorship. But I can't imagine that the PM-in-waiting will have been too chuffed by the Boy Wonder's remarks on BBC Question Time last night.

    "I predict that when I come back on this programme in six months or a year’s time, people will be saying ‘wouldn’t it be great to have that Blair back because we can’t stand that Gordon Brown’."

    Miliband tried to explain it away by saying he was merely making the point that people always complain about the sitting Prime Minister, but the Brownites will view the comment as, at best, inept and, at worst, indicative of the mindset in the "Blair Bunker."

    I don't think Gordon will forget this, and it may well take him a fairly long time to forgive. I may have to revise my predictions as to the make up of Brown's future Cabinet.

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    Friday, December 29, 2006

    Hazel Blears goes up in my estimation

    Whatever health minister Ivan Lewis has said today, there can be no doubt that Hazel Blears' protest against NHS reorganisation in her constituency is deeply embarrassing for the Government. It demonstrates not only that its internal discipline is continuing to break down, but also that ambitious, up-and-coming ministers like Blears are now able to defy those on the way down like Patricia Hewitt with impunity.

    Blears also has the merit of being right. Like the abortive police force mergers project, which was sensibly scrapped by John Reid in one of his first acts on replacing Charles Clarke as Home Secretary, the current health reorganisation is doing exactly the opposite of what people want, and taking services further away from the people they serve.

    In my area, the main A&E hospital in the centre of Derby is being closed and all services transferred to a site on the city's western extremity. That will no doubt make a huge amount of sense to people who live to the north, east and south of the city - not.

    I have always regarded Hazel Blears as a just another shameless New Labour careerist, but perhaps there is more to her after all. She has certainly gone up in my estimation this week, and more importantly, I suspect she will also have gone up in the estimation of thousands of Labour members with votes in the party's deputy leadership election.

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    Thursday, December 07, 2006

    The mark of the Beast

    In a comment on the previous post, "Guardian Reader" questions the choice of Dennis Skinner as one of my least favourite MPs, saying: "I don't understand why you consider Dennis Skinner to be part of a deeply unpleasant Derbyshire old [Labour] mafia."

    "I agree that he is not the national treasure that he seems to have become, and I worry that his lack of engagement in his constituency is akin to Tony Benn's similar disregard of Chesterfield - notably lost to the Liberal Democrats once he left. (Will Bolsover suffer the same fate?)

    "However, when you consider the Derbyshire Labour MPs, I can't think of a single one who could be considered old Labour or mafia. That's not to say they're all Blairites, by the way.

    "If you mean the councillors in North Derbyshire, you might have a point; but to be fair to Dennis he only criticises Labour within the party, not in public - which is more than can be said about MPs such as Charles Clarke!"

    Well, the answer to the question why I consider Skinner to be part of a "deeply unpleasant Derbyshire Old Labour mafia" relates to an old story dating back to a General Election campaign in the 1970s which deserves to be retold in full.

    A group of Labour activists were out canvassing for Skinner on a bleak estate outside Clay Cross when the following doorstep exchange took place.

    Canvasser: "Own this 'ouse, do yer?"
    Voter: "No, it's rented."
    Canvasser: "Council 'ouse, is it?"
    Voter: "Yes, that's right."
    Canvasser: "Wanna keep yer council 'ouse?"
    Voter: "Well, yes, 'course I do."
    Canvasser: "Well then fookin' vote Labour."

    I doubt if the said canvasser was actually Skinner himself, or even his equally obstreperous brother David, a former road-ganger who was later awarded a job by Labour-run Derbyshire County Council as cultural attache to Japan. But it was on such Old Labour thuggery that his political career was built.

    There are probably plenty of other Labour MPs of whom the same could be said. But unlike Skinner, none of them have managed to fool the public into thinking they are some nice, cuddly old socialist.

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    Wednesday, October 25, 2006

    Balls for Leeds, Battle for Lords

    There has been much speculation of late as to the fate of Treasury minister and Gordon Brown first lieutenant Ed Balls following the Boundary Commission's decision to do away with his Normanton constituency. Well, I reckon the answer lies in this recent post on Labour Watch.

    It reveals that Leeds West MP and former Foreign Office minister John Battle, has become the latest MP, at the age of just 55, to announce he will not be standing again at the next General Election. Leeds West is but a short train ride away from Normanton and his decision leaves a convenient opening for Mr Balls.

    Call me a cynic if you like, but I have been in the political game too long not to believe that Battle's reward for this unexpected act of selfless generosity will be to return to government under Gordon Brown as a Minister in the House of Lords.

    Mr Balls meanwhile is tipped by many to succeed his old boss at the Treasury, but I reckon the Brownites have pulled off another deal over that one - with one-time Blairite leadership favourite turned enthusiastic Brown cheerleader David Miliband.

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    Friday, October 20, 2006

    Another one bites the dust...

    Clare Short's resignation from the Labour Party today is not just the culmination of a long process of personal disillusionment with the party, but the latest example of Tony Blair's failure to retain the trust of the people who once constituted his top team.

    Short is the second member of the 1997 Labour Cabinet to leave the party, the first being ace badger-watcher Ron Davies. I cannot recall this ever happening to another Government in my lifetime, although others may have longer memories....

    Of that initial Blair Cabinet, just six members remain - the Prime Minister himself, John Prescott, Gordon Brown, Jack Straw, Margaret Beckett and Alastair Darling, great political survivors all.

    Four are dead - Ivor Richard, Donald Dewar, Robin Cook and Mo Mowlam - while another five - Ann Taylor, Jack Cunningham, David Clark, Chris Smith and George Robertson - have joined Derrry Irvine in the land of the living dead, aka the House of Lords.

    Oct 23 Update: Rumours of Ivor Richard's death are apparently greatly exaggerated - see comments thread below.

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    Thursday, September 28, 2006

    Blair the ingrate

    Mo Mowlam (pictured) was just one of the people who played a big part in the creation of New Labour who didn't get a mention in Blair's valedictory conference speech. Maybe he was afraid she would get another standing ovation. Should he have taken this last opportunity to express his gratitude to the contribution made by those who, like Mo, are no longer with us? More on this theme on my Labour Home Blog.

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    Thursday, September 14, 2006

    Clare Short - the woman who saved Bliar

    Doubtless Tony Blair will be glad to see the back of Clare Short, who today confirmed that she would be standing down as an MP at the next General Election.

    In reality, though, Blair has cause to be extremely grateful to the former International Development Secretary, whose failure to resign along with Robin Cook prior to the Iraq War in 2003 arguably saved his premiership.

    In the run-up to the crucial Parliamentary vote on the conflict early that year, all the speculation had been about whether Cook, or Short, or both, would quit - and whether that in turn might cause the Government itself to implode.

    However a North-East MP who was once a close ally of Cook's told me at the time that under no circumstances would the two of them resign together. "If he goes, she won't, and if he doesn't, she will," he said.

    In the event, this turned out to be spot-on. Apparently the enmity between the two went back to some arcane split on the left in the early 1980s, and though the subject of Iraq was close to both their hearts, they never even discussed it between them.

    Short did of course resign after the war, and the content of her resignation speech about Mr Blair's obsession with his place in history was devastating, but by then, the PM had seen off the immediate threat to his leadership, and its political impact was greatly reduced.

    I still believe that if she had delivered that speech immediately before or after Cook's at the start of the Commons debate, Blair could not have recovered.

    In the end, Short's ego and desire not to be outshone by Cook was more important to her than getting rid of this lying Prime Minister and saving this country from a disastrous war.

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    Thursday, August 03, 2006

    Walter Wolfgang joins Labour's NEC

    Possibly the greatest victory against NuLab control freakery since Peter Mandelson failed to be elected to the NEC in 1997! Read the full story HERE.

    I was however genuinely surprised by this result as, from her Loughborough Uni days onwards, Lorna Fitzsimons has always been good at getting elected to things, occasionally employing some innovative techniques in order to do so.

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    Monday, July 17, 2006

    Working-class MPs: A good or bad thing?

    Commenting on the death of former miner and Labour MP Kevin Hughes, the former Europe minister Denis MacShane has lamented the decline of working-class representation in Parliament - historically speaking the original raison d'etre for the Labour Party's existence.

    Macshane blames it on Margaret Thatcher and her destruction of the coalfield communities, but for my part, I put it more down to the progressive convergence between left and right and the resulting homogenisation of MPs' social backgrounds, as well as the narrowing of the window of social opportunity that existed in the 1960s and 70s for the likes of ambitious working-class boys like John Prescott and Alan Milburn.

    Either way, Macshane's comments have provoked what, to say the least, is an interesting reaction on the otherwise excellent Labour Watch site, whose author writes: "It is difficult to argue convincingly in support of the idea of more MPs like Dave Anderson, John Cummings, and Ronnie Campbell in parliament."

    Shame on him! Quite apart from the fact that the trio he singles out are all from the North-East - a bit region-ist for a Lib Dem, don't you think? - the constituencies they represent are all themselves heavily working-class.

    Is Labour Watch seriously arguing that consittuencies such as Easington and Blyth Valley with large numbers of former mineworkers would be better represented by policy wonks like David Miliband or law lecturers like Stephen Byers as opposed to, er, former mineworkers like Cummings and Campbell?

    As MacShane quite rightly says: "We have fewer and fewer working-class Labour MPs like Kevin Hughes now, and parliament is the poorer as a result."

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    Fattersley joins the list

    Former Labour deputy leader Roy Hattersley has become the second most senior Labour figure (after Denis Healey) to join the growing list of MPs, peers, newspapers, political commentators, bloggers and pollsters who have publicly called on Tony Blair to stand down this year.

    The list currently stands as follows:

    Lord Healey
    Lord Hattersley
    Andrew Smith
    Frank Dobson
    Michael Meacher
    Ashok Kumar
    Glenda Jackson
    The Guardian
    The Daily Telegraph
    The Economist
    The New Statesman
    Tribune
    Polly Toynbee
    Matthew Parris
    Jonathan Freedland
    Stephen Pollard
    Paul Linford
    Bloggerheads
    Skipper
    BBC Newsnight poll
    Times Populus poll
    YouGov poll of Labour members

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    Thursday, June 15, 2006