Uk politics

Labour’s over-fussing problem

Opposition is underrated. You can spend your whole time pointing at Expensive Things and complaining that the Government Should Do Something about their cost, and grumbling about other things you don’t like either, like a mother-in-law wearing a party rosette. What’s not to like about being a professional complainer? The problem is that at some point you have to stop just pointing at things and complaining about them, and instead actually give a sense of what you would do instead. And if you’ve been too fussy to begin with, you end up disappointing people who thought you really were going to do something about everything you complained about to begin

Men and women should be paid the same – end of story

The gender pay gap should not exist. But it does, as we were reminded today by the Chartered Management Institute report on corporate pay. It is simply unacceptable for a man to get paid more than a woman for doing the same job. The government has taken steps to support equal pay by making pay secrecy clauses illegal and by giving tribunals the power to force employers that break equal pay laws to carry out equal pay audits. The government can do more to highlight the need for gender equality; but, ultimately, businesses decide their workers’ pay. CEOs, HR executives and remuneration committees must root out unfair pay practices because

Isabel Hardman

Liam Byrne’s pitch to keep hold of his job

It can hardly be a coincidence that one of the few Labour figures to bother giving a speech on policy in the middle of Tumbleweed Time is a shadow minister who looks increasingly likely to get the chop. Liam Byrne’s speech today was partly his attempt to get a good last-minute appraisal from the media and Labour party itself before Ed Miliband embarks on his autumn reshuffle, and partly an attempt to lift the party itself out of the doldrums by talking about what Labour would really do. While Labour clearly needs to move on from lying in wait for the government to muck up now that green shoots are

Isabel Hardman

The political divide over David Miranda’s detention

The political fallout from the detention of David Miranda is as interesting as the rights and wrongs of the case itself, as it exposes a fault line in the Conservative party between civil libertarians who are instinctively wary of state power, and those on the other side who think the state did exactly the right thing in this instance and that the laws applying to Miranda’s detention are right too. In the civil liberties corner is Dominic Raab, writing in the Telegraph that ‘on terrorism, as with so many of Labour’s laws, well-intentioned but overly broad powers have been stretched to cover wider purposes, exposing ordinary people to arbitrary interference’.

How the Lobbying Bill may accidentally bring down political bloggers

Is the Lobbying Bill another erratic attempt to censor bloggers? In a similar fashion to the Crime and Courts Act, which almost put blogs under the same umbrella as newspapers for fines, the Transparency of Lobbying, Non-party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill has potential implications for charities and ‘third sector’ groups, not just political parties and bog standard lobbyists. As Mark Ferguson pointed out on LabourList, any campaigning classed as ‘political’ in an election year will be subject to a £32,000 limit, more paperwork and potentially, permission from a political party to actually take place if they exceed that limit.This new regime, unless clearly defined in the bill, could

Isabel Hardman

Mili no mates

If David Blunkett fancies being a kindly older mentor for the current Labour shadow cabinet, perhaps he could start by getting them all on television a little more, if only to say how great they think Ed Miliband is as party leader. As the summer has worn on and the Labour leader’s troubles have thickened like a sauce, the shadow cabinet seems to have evaporated, according to this analysis of the last time any of them pitched up on the airwaves: · Maria Eagle appeared on BBC News (13 August 2013) · Caroline Flint appeared on Daybreak (9 August 2013). · Owen Smith appeared on the Today Programme (7 August

Isabel Hardman

David Blunkett: Give me a job

listen to ‘Blunkett on Miliband’ on Audioboo David Blunkett gave an odd interview on the Today programme this morning. It rather mirrored the problem with Labour: he clearly knew what he really thought, but wasn’t sure whether he should say all of it, so ended up letting really interesting little snippets out in dribs and drabs in between chunks of praise for the current state of the party. So his position on whether the current Labour leadership should think a break with New Labour is a good thing was a combination of acknowledging that the party does need to move on, and reminding anyone who really does want to move

Caroline Lucas’ fracking arrest won’t worry ministers, but here’s what will

Caroline Lucas’ arrest this afternoon at the Balcombe fracking protest might be quite useful for the Green MP, but it’s hardly going to give ministers a sleepless night. Lucas’ presence is actually rather distracting from a real problem that ministers do need to address: ensuring that communities feel they have a stake in the shale gas exploitation taking place on their doorstep. David Cameron rather got their hopes up recently when he, by a slip of the tongue, promised that communities would get a £1 million incentive for accepting drilling on site when the figure was actually £100,000. And today the Local Government Association has been calling for councils to get

Isabel Hardman

Briefing: Advice today for Ed Miliband

Certain Labour types like to argue that this summer season of discontent for Ed Miliband is just a media mirage, made up mostly of journalists talking to each other. That might have a grain of truth: the corridors of Parliament are dusty and echoey at this time of year, and the only people found wandering them are bewildered lobby hacks and bored policemen. But the problem is that all this talk of the problems facing Ed Miliband has offered an opportunity for those in Labour party who think there is a problem to come out of the woodwork. And that there are more and more big names coming out –

Fraser Nelson

David Cameron denies he’s planning another coalition. Good.

I’m just back from three weeks away to find the summer momentum very strongly behind the Tories. A ComRes poll suggests that the majority of Labour supporters think Ed Miliband is doing badly, and things are going so strongly for the Tories (as George Trefgarne writes) that the odds on a Tory majority are shrinking rapidly. So why would Cameron be planning for another coalition, as my colleague James Kirkup writes in his Telegraph splash today? His piece has struck a nerve in No. 10, which is strongly denying that the Prime Minister is thinking of anything other than a Conservative majority in 2015. There are, I’m told, no plans

Alex Massie

Two nations, two cultures? Britain is divided by the Trent, not the Tweed.

Of the many certainties those Scots in favour of independence hold to be self-evident two in particular stand out. First that Scotland and England are fundamentally different places whose political cultures are so divergent  they can no longer sensibly be expected to live together. Secondly that the British state is moribund and impervious to practical reform. They are nice theories. They persuade Yes voters that independence is both necessary and virtuous. The only wonder is why so many Scots seem so stubbornly hesitant about accepting these obvious truths. This may have something to do with the fact that neither of them is actually true. At least not obviously true. Take the second article of

Isabel Hardman

What would Frank Field do for Labour?

The latest tranche of advice for Ed Miliband contains pleas for the Labour leader to think the unthinkable and hire Frank Field as his welfare adviser to how that Labour was ‘serious’ about reforming the welfare system. This would represent quite a change of direction for the party, and would be what commentators like to call a ‘bold move’, partly because Field is known to be quite difficult to work with, while also offering an expert understanding of benefits and poverty. I interviewed Field for Coffee House in May, and it’s worth revisiting some of his remarks now for an indication of what a Labour welfare policy would look like

Alan Duncan is wrong about ‘token women’

It takes a courageous individual to brave the threats to their person that public utterances on gender seem to attract these days. Undeterred, Alan Duncan is among them. (This is a man who once made a citizen’s arrest after protestors flung paint bombs at the Tory Party chair, after all). Last week the international development minister reportedly cautioned the prime minister against promoting ‘token women’ in his next cabinet reshuffle. Duncan rests his argument, in part, on his experiences as the Conservative Party’s first openly gay MP, telling the Financial Times: ‘I never wanted to be a token gay and now things have progressed so there is no need for

Alex Massie

David Miranda’s detention shows that the state is not only malevolent but stupid too

The problem is less that the state is malevolent but that it is stupid. And that stupidity means that a lack of malevolence may be a matter of luck, not policy. Or, if you wish to be more generous, the state has the power to crush liberties and its failure to do so on a more consistent, wider, basis is a matter of forebearance or inefficiency more than anything else. That, at any rate, is one theory to explain why David Miranda, the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, was detained at Heathrow airport for nine hours. If the state wants to fuck you up, as Larkin didn’t quite write, it can.

The quiet Miliband wants to turn up the volume

Ed Miliband has already managed to steal a big pile of clothing from the Tories by pinching the One Nation tagline for his own party. But this weekend Chuka Umunna offered the beleaguered Labour leader another Tory tag that he might not be quite so keen on. Trying to defend the party, the Shadow Business Secretary said: ‘The Shadow Cabinet and the leader of the Labour party are doing a huge amount already to sell Labour to the electorate which is why we’ve won back almost 2,000 councillors since Ed Miliband became leader of the party and of course as we move to the general election we will be turning

Watson interview piles pressure on Labour to publish Falkirk report

Decca Aitkenhead has a history of producing revelatory August interviews that make tricky reading for the Labour leadership. Her 2008 interview with Alistair Darling involved the journalist following him around during the August recess and unleashed the ‘forces of hell’ against the then Chancellor when it was published. Her interview with Tom Watson in today’s Guardian fits in with that tradition. Watson argues that there is no case for Unite to answer over Falkirk: Watson thinks on all three counts his party got it wrong. “I thought it was silly to report the allegations to the police, bordering on wasting police time.” The whole affair, he insists, is “a storm

How the Tories planned to spend this summer behaving like an opposition party

Unless you’re as optimistic as Jon Ashworth, it’s pretty clear that messaging-wise, Labour have had a pretty bad summer. There are many reasons for this that many wise people have examined in quite some detail and at quite some length, but one of the major strategic errors is that the party appears to have made entirely the wrong assumption about what the Tories had planned for recess. Labour was clearly just lying in wait for more mistakes and bad news to come crawling out of the woodwork over the holidays. But they’d reckoned without the months of careful planning that the Conservatives had put into this slower season. I understand

Brendan O’Neill is wrong on unpaid internships

For this week’s edition of The Spectator, Spiked Magazine Editor Brendan O’Neill has put forward a passionate defence of unpaid internships. And he has a long list of insults for those of us who disagree – we are ‘ridiculous’, ‘preposterous’ and ‘nauseating’. I can appreciate why he might be so angry about our efforts to ensure fair practice: ‘Due to limited funds’ at his website, ‘interns work on a voluntary basis.’ O’Neill’s unpaid interns provide him with ‘administrative support’, enabling them to improve their ‘organisational skills’, alongside writing and research. As O’Neill knows (Spiked internships can last several months), modern day unpaid internships are a far cry from the week

Melanie McDonagh

The row about Stuart Wheeler shows Britain has turned into a giant version of Woman’s Hour

The hunt, since you ask, is on for one of Stuart Wheeler’s three very pretty daughters – Jacquetta is a well-known model – to opine about their father’s off-message remarks about women being ‘nowhere near as good as men’ at chess, bridge and poker. This was in response to a question about why there are so very few women on company boards. Stuart Wheeler, UKIP treasurer and Douglas Hurd lookalike, went on to explain that both sexes are good at different things and ‘you don’t necessarily want to impose a minimum of either sex at the top of any profession or at the top of any board’. Here Wheeler showed