Now it is no more, it would be nice to know who was actually behind it, as they were clearly Westminster insiders.
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Another one bites the dust...
The left-of-centre blogosphere will be a poorer place for the loss of The Daily. At its height, it was in my view one of the top two or three left-leaning blogs in the UK, and a regular source of interesting material on the Labour Deputy Leadership contest in particular.
Now it is no more, it would be nice to know who was actually behind it, as they were clearly Westminster insiders.
Now it is no more, it would be nice to know who was actually behind it, as they were clearly Westminster insiders.
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Blair's place in history
Hats off to the Observer for its magnificent retrospective on the Blair Years on Sunday, the centrepiece of which was a magisterial essay from the essential chronicler of those years, Andrew Rawnsley.
Predictably for one who has always been seen as something of a New Labour boulevardier, Rawnsley's ultimate conclusion on the Blair premiership is a positive one.
"Some Prime Ministers merely preside over their time. Better Prime Ministers change their time. When Tony Blair's portrait goes up on the staircase wall at Number 10, he will leave office with a good claim to belong to that select company of Prime Ministers who change the future," he says.
To its credit, however, the Ob makes room for an alternative perspective from historian Dominic Sandbrook, who writes: "Truly great Prime Ministers challenge the status quo. They do not simply accept it. Blair seems destined to be remembered therefore as a consummately skilled political operator with brilliant tactical instincts but no radical or compelling long-term vision."
It probably won't surprise many people to know that I'm with Sandbrook on this. Any leftward shift in the political centre of gravity under Blair has been marginal when compared with the huge rightward shift under Thatcher which, by and large, her successor-but-one has accepted.
For me, he will go down in history as someone who had a historic opportunity to rebuild a social democratic political consensus in the UK, but who wasted his first term worrying about getting re-elected, his second on the disaster of Iraq, and his third on his preoccupation with his own legacy.
As Sandbrook writes: "Blair could have used his massive majorities to ram through radical changes in the health service, reorganise the railways, reconstitute the House of Lords, overhaul the pensions system, reform the electoral system, push for greater integration in the EU, even write a new constitution.
"If he had managed two or three - perfectly plausible in 10 years as Attlee could have told him, his domestic legacy would be uncontestable. But he never did."
Predictably for one who has always been seen as something of a New Labour boulevardier, Rawnsley's ultimate conclusion on the Blair premiership is a positive one.
"Some Prime Ministers merely preside over their time. Better Prime Ministers change their time. When Tony Blair's portrait goes up on the staircase wall at Number 10, he will leave office with a good claim to belong to that select company of Prime Ministers who change the future," he says.
To its credit, however, the Ob makes room for an alternative perspective from historian Dominic Sandbrook, who writes: "Truly great Prime Ministers challenge the status quo. They do not simply accept it. Blair seems destined to be remembered therefore as a consummately skilled political operator with brilliant tactical instincts but no radical or compelling long-term vision."
It probably won't surprise many people to know that I'm with Sandbrook on this. Any leftward shift in the political centre of gravity under Blair has been marginal when compared with the huge rightward shift under Thatcher which, by and large, her successor-but-one has accepted.
For me, he will go down in history as someone who had a historic opportunity to rebuild a social democratic political consensus in the UK, but who wasted his first term worrying about getting re-elected, his second on the disaster of Iraq, and his third on his preoccupation with his own legacy.
As Sandbrook writes: "Blair could have used his massive majorities to ram through radical changes in the health service, reorganise the railways, reconstitute the House of Lords, overhaul the pensions system, reform the electoral system, push for greater integration in the EU, even write a new constitution.
"If he had managed two or three - perfectly plausible in 10 years as Attlee could have told him, his domestic legacy would be uncontestable. But he never did."
Saturday, April 07, 2007
May 3 and beyond
Today's column in the Newcastle Journal and Derby Evening Telegraph aims to catch-up on what happened while I was away and look ahead to the local election campaign and its likely aftermath. Here it is in full. It is also now available as a Podcast.
***
The Tories say they have a "mountain to climb" in the North of England. Labour are bracing themselves for heavy losses more or less everywhere. The Lib Dems bravely claim there are no "no-go areas" for their party. Sound familiar, anyone?
Excuse me if I experience a slight feeling of déjà vu when it comes to this year's local election battle.
The two main parties appear to be playing down expectations, doubtless in the hope that things will turn out better than anticipated. The third is playing them up, in the hope that the voters will take them seriously.
But as ever, the trick with this sort of pre-election positioning is to try to separate the spin from the reality.
What seems beyond dispute is that the Government is in for a hammering as voters vent their frustration at the sense of drift that has characterised Labour for the past year.
Last September, following the failed coup attempt against Tony Blair, I wrote that if the Prime Minister was still in place by time of these elections, the party would pay the price.
As it has turned out, it appears to be a price the party is prepared to pay in order to allow its most successful leader ever a dignified exit at a time more or less of his own choosing.
But whether that is how it will be seen by the hundreds of Labour councillors, Scottish MSPs or Welsh AMs set to lose their seats on May 3 is another question entirely.
The local councils are one thing. Labour would doubtless like to win back cities like Newcastle, but it won't do any lasting damage to the party's national powerbase if it doesn't.
Local government has, in any case, nothing like the power it had when I first started covering local elections two decades ago.
The Scottish and Welsh bodies are a slightly different matter, though. They do have significant devolved powers, as Welsh Assembly leader Rhodri Morgan's recent decision to scrap prescription charges showed.
Furthermore, because most seats in the devolved bodies are coterminous with Westminster constituencies, there is much more of an interplay between Labour's performance in Scotland and Wales and its electoral prospects UK-wide.
I must confess to being surprised that Scottish and Welsh Labour MPs have been prepared to put up with a situation which is likely to see their party's powerbase in those areas significantly eroded.
If, for instance, a Labour parliamentary constituency ends up with a Lib Dem MSP, it creates a situation in which Labour's hold on the Westminster seat can be steadily undermined.
It was for this reason that I expected Scottish and Welsh MPs to be in the vanguard of a renewed attempt to force Blair out well before we got into the local election campaign.
But they bottled it, and in my view, that is something they will fairly shortly come to regret.
So, I believe, will Gordon Brown. The prevailing consensus throughout the past few months has been that the Chancellor was happy to let Mr Blair "take the hit" for the expected May 3 carnage.
If that is the case, I think that he was taking an extremely defeatist view about his ability to restore Labour's fortunes if and when he finally takes over.
If Mr Brown truly believes that he is the man to renew Labour in government, he should instead have taken the view that the sooner he took over, the better for the party's prospects.
The more electoral damage that is done to Labour under Mr Blair, the more poisoned the chalice that Mr Brown will eventually inherit.
Assuming, that is, that he does inherit. The fortnight since this column last appeared has seen a further ratcheting up of the pressure on South Shields MP and Environment Secretary David Miliband to throw his own hat into the ring.
It no longer seems possible to take at face value Mr Miliband's denials of last autumn, when he declared that he was "neither a runner nor a rider for any of the posts that are being speculated about".
His failure to kill the current wave of speculation has led to suspicions in the Brown camp that he is, at the very least, still pondering a bid.
One Brown ally said last weekend: "Miliband knows exactly what he is doing. He could quite easily say specifically, `I won't stand against Gordon' or that he is far less experienced than Gordon - something he couldn't go back on. But he doesn't."
Mr Brown, meanwhile, is in an increasingly invidious position. Like the long-distance-runner who has spent too long anxiously looking over his shoulder, his position seems to weaken with each week that goes by.
Notwithstanding its historic import, his decision to announce a 20p standard rate of tax in the Budget appears to have won him few friends and the row over the 1997 pension fund grab has been deeply damaging.
Labour has a perfectly respectable story to tell on this, which is that an anomaly in the tax system needed to be removed in order to release funds to help the many, not the few.
Instead Brown's strategy seemed to be firstly to try to conceal the evidence that he ignored civil service advice, and then when that failed, spin a cock-and-bull story about how the CBI encouraged him to do it.
It is hard - very hard - to escape the conclusion that this is exactly what Mr Blair intended when he decided to "play it long" and drag out his departure until this summer.
Messrs Brown and Blair were united on the campaign trail for one last time last week as Labour launched its local election push - but it is hard to see who they were trying to convince.
The old double act has served Labour well over a decade or more, but it has long since run its course.
And the real story now is not what happens in the days and weeks leading up to May 3, but what happens in the days and weeks immediately afterwards.
***
The Tories say they have a "mountain to climb" in the North of England. Labour are bracing themselves for heavy losses more or less everywhere. The Lib Dems bravely claim there are no "no-go areas" for their party. Sound familiar, anyone?
Excuse me if I experience a slight feeling of déjà vu when it comes to this year's local election battle.
The two main parties appear to be playing down expectations, doubtless in the hope that things will turn out better than anticipated. The third is playing them up, in the hope that the voters will take them seriously.
But as ever, the trick with this sort of pre-election positioning is to try to separate the spin from the reality.
What seems beyond dispute is that the Government is in for a hammering as voters vent their frustration at the sense of drift that has characterised Labour for the past year.
Last September, following the failed coup attempt against Tony Blair, I wrote that if the Prime Minister was still in place by time of these elections, the party would pay the price.
As it has turned out, it appears to be a price the party is prepared to pay in order to allow its most successful leader ever a dignified exit at a time more or less of his own choosing.
But whether that is how it will be seen by the hundreds of Labour councillors, Scottish MSPs or Welsh AMs set to lose their seats on May 3 is another question entirely.
The local councils are one thing. Labour would doubtless like to win back cities like Newcastle, but it won't do any lasting damage to the party's national powerbase if it doesn't.
Local government has, in any case, nothing like the power it had when I first started covering local elections two decades ago.
The Scottish and Welsh bodies are a slightly different matter, though. They do have significant devolved powers, as Welsh Assembly leader Rhodri Morgan's recent decision to scrap prescription charges showed.
Furthermore, because most seats in the devolved bodies are coterminous with Westminster constituencies, there is much more of an interplay between Labour's performance in Scotland and Wales and its electoral prospects UK-wide.
I must confess to being surprised that Scottish and Welsh Labour MPs have been prepared to put up with a situation which is likely to see their party's powerbase in those areas significantly eroded.
If, for instance, a Labour parliamentary constituency ends up with a Lib Dem MSP, it creates a situation in which Labour's hold on the Westminster seat can be steadily undermined.
It was for this reason that I expected Scottish and Welsh MPs to be in the vanguard of a renewed attempt to force Blair out well before we got into the local election campaign.
But they bottled it, and in my view, that is something they will fairly shortly come to regret.
So, I believe, will Gordon Brown. The prevailing consensus throughout the past few months has been that the Chancellor was happy to let Mr Blair "take the hit" for the expected May 3 carnage.
If that is the case, I think that he was taking an extremely defeatist view about his ability to restore Labour's fortunes if and when he finally takes over.
If Mr Brown truly believes that he is the man to renew Labour in government, he should instead have taken the view that the sooner he took over, the better for the party's prospects.
The more electoral damage that is done to Labour under Mr Blair, the more poisoned the chalice that Mr Brown will eventually inherit.
Assuming, that is, that he does inherit. The fortnight since this column last appeared has seen a further ratcheting up of the pressure on South Shields MP and Environment Secretary David Miliband to throw his own hat into the ring.
It no longer seems possible to take at face value Mr Miliband's denials of last autumn, when he declared that he was "neither a runner nor a rider for any of the posts that are being speculated about".
His failure to kill the current wave of speculation has led to suspicions in the Brown camp that he is, at the very least, still pondering a bid.
One Brown ally said last weekend: "Miliband knows exactly what he is doing. He could quite easily say specifically, `I won't stand against Gordon' or that he is far less experienced than Gordon - something he couldn't go back on. But he doesn't."
Mr Brown, meanwhile, is in an increasingly invidious position. Like the long-distance-runner who has spent too long anxiously looking over his shoulder, his position seems to weaken with each week that goes by.
Notwithstanding its historic import, his decision to announce a 20p standard rate of tax in the Budget appears to have won him few friends and the row over the 1997 pension fund grab has been deeply damaging.
Labour has a perfectly respectable story to tell on this, which is that an anomaly in the tax system needed to be removed in order to release funds to help the many, not the few.
Instead Brown's strategy seemed to be firstly to try to conceal the evidence that he ignored civil service advice, and then when that failed, spin a cock-and-bull story about how the CBI encouraged him to do it.
It is hard - very hard - to escape the conclusion that this is exactly what Mr Blair intended when he decided to "play it long" and drag out his departure until this summer.
Messrs Brown and Blair were united on the campaign trail for one last time last week as Labour launched its local election push - but it is hard to see who they were trying to convince.
The old double act has served Labour well over a decade or more, but it has long since run its course.
And the real story now is not what happens in the days and weeks leading up to May 3, but what happens in the days and weeks immediately afterwards.
Thursday, April 05, 2007
The desolation of Gethsemane
Unfortunately I'm not at church tonight as baby-sitting duties call, but from my youth I've always thought the Maundy Thursday communion service was the most moving and dramatic in the Christian calendar.Back in my home town church of St Mary's, Hitchin, they used to - probably still do - conclude the service with the reading of Matthew 26, vv 47-55, a passage which ends with the baleful words: "Then all the disciples deserted him and ran away."
At this precise moment, the lights in the church would be extinguished, symbolising the total darkness and desolation of our Saviour as he prepared to face his forthcoming ordeal, alone.
It sent shivers down my spine as a 12-year-old choirboy, and it still does.
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