Tag: Labour Party

BIG JOE AND TOP MAN TONY FACE CHALLENGES.

 

BRINGING DOWN JOE.

The actual elections for the Mayors of the Liverpool City Region, Greater Manchester and possibly Leeds, won’t be held until next year. However in effect the people who are likely to occupy these posts will be settled this summer. Labour has an iron grip on our big northern cities and unless a spectacular independent candidate comes forward, whoever Labour members choose, will win.

The party’s choices will be made very soon. Nominations close on June 10th and the results will be announced on August 4th. Whoever thought it was a good idea to run these selections when the European Union Referendum was on needs their head examining. Labour Party members should be concentrating on getting out the Remain vote amongst its supporters. Without them the referendum could be lost. I guess it reflects leader Jeremy Corbyn’s lack of enthusiasm for the Remain campaign.

However the battle for the Labour nomination has been truly joined. The Shadow Home Secretary Andy Burnham declared this week for the Greater Manchester job. Meanwhile in the Liverpool City Region, 2 MPs Steve Rotheram and Luciana Berger are set to throw down the gauntlet to Big Joe Anderson. There are also suggestions that Barry Grunwald, the leader of St Helens, might try and rally Labour members who want a candidate from outside Liverpool.

Joe Anderson has just started his second term as elected mayor of the city of Liverpool. He got a glowing report on his first period in office from the boss of the Heseltine Institute, Professor Michael Parkinson. However not everyone shares the academic’s views. Critics believe Joe brings a “my way or the highway” approach to the office. They worry about his ability to reach out to the people of Wirral, Southport and St Helens. They remember his petulance when Phil Davies, the leader of Wirral, was originally chosen as chair of the Liverpool City Region instead of him.

There has been a sense of inevitability about Anderson gliding from one mayoralty to the other and this is what Rotheram, Berger or Grunwald will have to combat.

Grunwald is quite a character, inheriting the feisty tradition of his predecessor Marie Rimmer. If he stands he will need to work hard to get name recognition across the city region, but he may be able to play on the fear that a Liverpool politician won’t represent the interests of the other councils.

Joe Anderson is now likely to have to battle with two MPs in the city. Steve Rotheram is the amiable MP for Walton and was a popular traditional mayor of the city some years ago. He has family and work connections with Knowsley, St Helens and Halton and is close to Andy Burnham. They would form a powerful alliance for a North West version of the Northern Powerhouse. Efforts may be made to depict him as a Corbynista. He is the leader’s Parliamentary Private Secretary but Rotheram nominated Burnham for leader and will want to portray himself as a good Labour man first and foremost.

Merseyside politics is very male and a female elected mayor would send out the sort of positive messages that Sadiq Khan’s election in London has done. Wirral South’s Alison McGovern was thinking of standing but is heavily identified with the Blairite Progress movement and is unlikely to run. So what about Luciana Berger? She is bright and personable but will have to deal with the, no doubt unfair, feeling that she is a posh outsider from London.

BURNISHING BURNHAM.

Sir Richard Leese recently expressed his disappointment at Tony Lloyd’s tenure as interim mayor of Greater Manchester. It is a blow for Lloyd as he seeks the post permanently. Leese is now believed to be backing Andy Burnham.

The Shadow Home Secretary’s decision to enter the contest is significant. He has Big Beast status in this municipal contest but it has caused dismay among some Labour supporters for what it says about Labour’s chances of winning the 2020 General Election. Burnham has decided that the only way he can be effective is to run Greater Manchester with no chance of becoming Home Secretary. He represents Leigh and so is not from the Manchester City elite. But will he be any match for the Bernstein/Leese partnership, the powerful Chief Executive/ Leader pairing that has dominated for 20 years?

The other candidate, Ivan Lewis, the Bury South MP, has made it clear that he thinks the devolution agenda has been too Manchester focused and concentrated on economic priorities at the expense of social ones.

It all means a high summer of high drama for Labour Party members in our big conurbations.

 

WHITTINGDALE: PERCEPTION IS ALL.

 

 

THE SWORD OF DAMOCLES.

When John Whittingdale was offered the Cabinet post which involved press regulation, why did he not disclose to the Prime Minister that some papers knew of his previous relationship with a woman who had tried to sell her story to said papers?

The government, and Whittingdale in particular has gone soft on press regulation. The Secretary of State is “not convinced” of the case to incentivize papers to sign up to a regulation panel under Royal Charter by exposing them to high costs in civil libel cases if they do not. Nor is there any sign of the second part of the Leveson Inquiry into the original failed police investigation into phone hacking at the News of the World.

The code of conduct for Ministers speaks of the need, not only for there to be no conflict of interest, but no “perceived” conflict of interest. The perception is certainly clear and the actual conflict possibly too. The press clearly had this embarrassing piece of information on Whittingdale and we can “perceive” that he may consider it wise to treat the press gently for fear of exposure.

His fear could be justified by the current press fury and frustration that they are injuncted from reporting on the affairs of a well known entertainer. That sits curiously with their decision that there was no public interest in publishing the story of Whittingdale and the dominatrix. Certainly Max Mosley, the former motor racing chief, thinks it’s odd bearing in mind how he was done over in a similar situation.

Whittingdale may have resigned by the time you read this, otherwise he must be moved in the post referendum reshuffle.

DEFENDING DAD.

David Cameron made a horlicks over his tax affairs but the explanation that that was because he was trying to defend his late father, I found refreshingly frank.

The government need to take account of the growing public clamour for the fat cats not to be allowed to get away with it. If that means trimming the freedom of our overseas territories, hiring more tax officials and voting for tougher European Union action, then so be it.

Labour will be wise to concentrate on those measures and not imply that if Jeremy Corbyn became Prime Minister, they would threaten normal legal tax planning.

PEOPLE’S HISTORY MUSEUM.

The Labour leader was in his element at a House of Commons event I attended this week. It was to celebrate the People’s History Museum (PHM) in Manchester and their fund-raising, Radical Heroes, campaign. On the banks of the Irwell in the centre of town, it is a great resource for telling the story of the struggle of people in the North for economic and political equality.

It is not just a Labour Party institution. Liberal Democrat MPs like John Pugh from Southport was at the event and in the nineteenth century Bury’s Robert Peel was the radical who abolished the Corn Laws and created the modern Conservative Party.

But most of the people there were Labour including former leader Neil Kinnock, who told me he thinks the party is in a worse position now than when he took over in 1983. He had previously told the New Statesman that he found it “difficult to see” Corbyn being elected.

We won’t have to wait long now for the new leader’s first nationwide test in May’s elections.

 

CAN LABOUR EVER WIN AGAIN ?

 

 

I’m not sure Labour can ever win another General Election, certainly under Corbyn and possibly anyone else.

The industrial and trade union base went long ago. Their traditional working class support is flirting with UKIP or if they are old, voting Tory. Scotland has fallen to the SNP and if the Scots want an alternative, the Tory Ruth Davidson is a better bet than Kezia Dugdale, the latest unknown to lead the Labour Party in Scotland.

Then there are the vicious Tories. Not content with smashing the Lib Dems, they are now targeting Labour with a string of legislative measures that will weaken them like individual voter registration, the reduction in parliamentary seats and the requirement for trade unionists to opt in to paying the political levy.

Then we come to the director of the polling organisation Britain Thinks. I heard Deborah Mattinson speaking at a Labour conference in London last weekend. Delegates had just heard party leader Jeremy Corbyn speaking. He was calm, unspun and true as ever to his socialist principles. He gave unilateralism a rest, instead coming up with the idea that companies should be prevented from paying dividends to their shareholders if they didn’t pay the living wage.

He was given a good round of applause and then the delegates spent the rest of the day looking at the mountain, nay the north face of the Eiger, that they would have to climb to win power again. They will need to win an additional 106 seats and 40% of the total vote to win in 2020. Last year they needed a swing of 5% in the marginal seats, next time it will be 10 %.

Now here’s the killer for Labour. In 2015 they could rely on large numbers of Liberal Democrats coming across. Next time 4 out of the 5 new voters Labour will need will have to be people who voted Conservative last time. How likely are Tory voters in Milton Keynes, Nuneaton, Bolton West and Morley to vote for Jeremy Corbyn?

Next the age problem. Older people vote and are increasingly voting Tory whereas the young who are more left leaning are far less inclined to go to the polling station.

Now I want to turn to a man with a low profile but who had a big job in last year’s election, Tom Baldwin. He was Ed Miliband’s senior adviser. He spoke some home truths to the activists, like don’t trash your record and expect to win. He was referring to the way the record of three time election winner Tony Blair has been heavily criticised by Labour activists keen to distance themselves from “New Labour”. Baldwin says that was why the Tories were able to blame the last Labour government for messing up the economy when in fact it was the victim of a global crash.

It gives me no satisfaction at all to write this. I want a vibrant democracy with two or three parties vying for power under a fair election system. But if we are not to face the prospect of the Tories in power for twenty years, what is to be done? Labour MPs who believe in “heart and head” social democracy need to sink their differences with Liberal Democrats and moderate Greens. Then they need to form a new party to represent the centre left where the British people have been in 1945, 1964, 1974 and for thirteen years from 1997.

 

A DREADFUL WEEK IN BRITISH POLITICS

 

CABINET SPLITS ON EU.

What an appalling start to the New Year it has been for British politics.

David Cameron’s decision to allow Cabinet members to split on the E.U Referendum is a flat contradiction of what he told the BBC’s Andrew Marr a year ago. The Prime Minister is a brazen pragmatist. What he said yesterday does not matter. He can busk it with his effortless Etonian charm. Now we must wait and see how many Cabinet Ministers take the opportunity to rubbish the deal Cameron gets from his negotiations. If Home Secretary Theresa May, and careerist Boris Johnson join the perennial anti EU Iain Duncan Smith and Chris Grayling then the Prime Minister has a serious problem and so do those of us who want to stay in. Cameron will deserve it if the campaign becomes acrimonious and the Tory Party is split for a generation.

LABOUR BETRAYAL.

That is what happened to Labour soon after Harold Wilson allowed his Cabinet to split on the 1975 referendum. Within six years Cabinet members who had campaigned to stay in formed the Social Democrat Party whilst the Labour Party descended into faction fighting. It vowed never to return to those days when it won power sixteen long years later but this week we have seen in the longest reshuffle in history that Labour is going to be unfit for office until 2025 or 2030. What a betrayal of working class people! From the Blair-Brown feud to the current shambles, both left and right in the party have let ordinary people down big time.

THE YEAR AHEAD.

Apart from the EU Referendum which is likely in June, what else have we to look forward to this year?

THE AMERICAN DYNASTIES TO CONTINUE.

Kennedy, Bush, Clinton; it is amazing that in a country of 320 million people that it is quite possible that between 1989 and 2024 either a Clinton or a Bush will have been President of the United States apart from Barack Obama.

It looks almost certain that Hilary Clinton will win in November because the Republicans have narrowed their support base at a time when America is becoming more multicultural. It is possible the Republicans will choose Donald Trump but even if it is Florida senator Marco Rubio, they are still likely to be handicapped by their reluctance to accept the USA as it is.

CARRY ON CORBYN.

Labour are likely to be heavily beaten in the Scottish government elections but if they can win the London Mayor race and hold their very strong position in local government in the North, there will be no immediate pressure on Jeremy Corbyn.

Locally interest will focus on Liverpool where Joe Anderson is due to stand again for mayor of the city. As he has recently taken over as chair of the Liverpool City Region which is due to elect a mayor for the wider area next year, he may stand down. It is difficult to see how elected mayors in Liverpool and Salford will sit happily under mayors for the larger combined authorities.

Meanwhile Leeds, Lancashire, Cheshire and Cumbria will be looking to conclude devolution deals.