Millions of households across the UK are living below the Minimum Income Standard (MIS), despite record levels of employment.
Figures provided by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in a report, Households Below a Minimum Income Standard; 2008/09-2017/18, written by Matt Padley and Juliet Stone show some 18.7 million households living below MIS.
Lone parents, pensioners and adults aged between 16 and 34 are most likely to be affected. Also affected are households living in social housing or private rental accommodation.
Employment figures published by the Office for National Statistics this week show that 76% of the UK population is in work (32.54 million people) is in work, the highest number since 1971.
Despite these record levels of employment 17.8% of households living below the MIS are in full time work, up from 11.8% in 2008/09. Workless households in the same position have risen from 48.6% to 60.3% over the same period.
The Minimum Income Standard represents the minimum socially acceptable standard of living.
The number of individuals in the UK living below the MIS has increased every year since 2008/09.
Figures released by the Trussell Trust, the charity running many UK food banks illustrate the impact of poverty on the health and life chances of individuals and families.
The mid-year statistics published by the Trussell Trust and based on a survey of 1100 people who used their food banks between April and September 2019 along with evidence from volunteers and referring agencies paint a stark picture.
94% of clients said they were facing real deprivation, meaning they could not afford to buy essentials. From these three quarters were in rent arrears, two thirds had been subject to benefit delays or sanctions and half were living in single person households. Most, 75%, reported experiencing at least one physical or mental health problem.
Food bank usage is not limited to individuals and households who are receiving out of work benefits. Being in full time work is no guarantee of financial security thanks to short term contracts and the growth of the gig-economy.
Creating an economy that gives a fair chance to all its actors and a social security system that protects the most vulnerable people is the major challenge facing the government. One that if it fails to meet will create economic and social instability that could last for decades.
Friday, 24 January 2020
Tuesday, 21 January 2020
Parity of Esteem: Three Little Words Looking for a Larger Meaning.
Being diagnosed with a mental health condition can have an adverse effect of an individual's life chances. These can range from struggling to find or maintain work though fractured relationships to a lower life expectancy.
There is also a major impact on wider society of unmet mental health needs, for example, according to the Centre for Mental Health time off due to workplace stress cost UK employers £34.9million in 2016/17.
For the past decade there has been an emphasis of achieving 'parity of esteem', for mental illness to be accorded regard and resources matching those devoted to treating physical illnesses. In 2011 the then coalition government set out an expectation of 'parity of esteem' in its No Health Without Mental Health policy, in 2013 a similar commitment was written into the NHS Constitution for England.
To date though despite all the warm words and sincere promises delivery on the ground has been patchy to non-existent.
There is no uniform measure for how mental health services are delivered. Waiting times, an established if sometimes crude benchmark for performance in the NHS, are, apparently, impossible to correlate. Access to many services are not even subject to maximum waiting time standards.
A bigger problem is that Clinical Commissioning Groups, the bodies controlling th ding for a given area, do not have to ring fence money allocated to mental health services. The official line is that that funding should grow in line with that devoted to physical health services, often though the mental health budget is often raided to plug gaps elsewhere.
There are also some practical gaps that get in the way of parity of esteem becoming a reality. These include patchy diagnosis, GPs, usually the first medical professional someone asking support for their mental health will see have little training in this area. The days of busy doctors telling people to 'pull yourself together' may, thankfully, he mostly in the past. Unfortunately, they seem to have been replaced by one's where equally busy, if not busier ones, reach for the pill cupboard instead.
There is also the Dracula like ability of the stigma surrounding mental illness to keep resurrecting itself. Public awareness and understanding may have improved; but old prejudices did hard if they die at all.
In time for the last general election the Centre for Mental Health published its Towards Mental Health Equality report. This called on the incoming government to, amongst other things, create a cross party plan to embed an understanding of its likely impact on mental health in all areas of policy making.
This is a noble and necessary aspiration, unfortunately it's also one that is likely to founder on the rocks of official indifference. At least it is without a significant change in mind-set and actions.
Professionals, support groups and individual service users need to stop seeking salvation in a form of words. 'Parity of esteem' is as meaningless as all those other phrases that tell a marginalised group to accept less than their due and to smile as they do it.
The mental health community needs to learn from the liberation movements, that their political power exists and is embodied in their willingness to be difficult. It isn't good enough to be promised better services will be delivered on some tomorrow that never arrives; they need to be provided now.
'Parity of esteem' is meaningless, the real battle is for esteem for everyone.
There is also a major impact on wider society of unmet mental health needs, for example, according to the Centre for Mental Health time off due to workplace stress cost UK employers £34.9million in 2016/17.
For the past decade there has been an emphasis of achieving 'parity of esteem', for mental illness to be accorded regard and resources matching those devoted to treating physical illnesses. In 2011 the then coalition government set out an expectation of 'parity of esteem' in its No Health Without Mental Health policy, in 2013 a similar commitment was written into the NHS Constitution for England.
To date though despite all the warm words and sincere promises delivery on the ground has been patchy to non-existent.
There is no uniform measure for how mental health services are delivered. Waiting times, an established if sometimes crude benchmark for performance in the NHS, are, apparently, impossible to correlate. Access to many services are not even subject to maximum waiting time standards.
A bigger problem is that Clinical Commissioning Groups, the bodies controlling th ding for a given area, do not have to ring fence money allocated to mental health services. The official line is that that funding should grow in line with that devoted to physical health services, often though the mental health budget is often raided to plug gaps elsewhere.
There are also some practical gaps that get in the way of parity of esteem becoming a reality. These include patchy diagnosis, GPs, usually the first medical professional someone asking support for their mental health will see have little training in this area. The days of busy doctors telling people to 'pull yourself together' may, thankfully, he mostly in the past. Unfortunately, they seem to have been replaced by one's where equally busy, if not busier ones, reach for the pill cupboard instead.
There is also the Dracula like ability of the stigma surrounding mental illness to keep resurrecting itself. Public awareness and understanding may have improved; but old prejudices did hard if they die at all.
In time for the last general election the Centre for Mental Health published its Towards Mental Health Equality report. This called on the incoming government to, amongst other things, create a cross party plan to embed an understanding of its likely impact on mental health in all areas of policy making.
This is a noble and necessary aspiration, unfortunately it's also one that is likely to founder on the rocks of official indifference. At least it is without a significant change in mind-set and actions.
Professionals, support groups and individual service users need to stop seeking salvation in a form of words. 'Parity of esteem' is as meaningless as all those other phrases that tell a marginalised group to accept less than their due and to smile as they do it.
The mental health community needs to learn from the liberation movements, that their political power exists and is embodied in their willingness to be difficult. It isn't good enough to be promised better services will be delivered on some tomorrow that never arrives; they need to be provided now.
'Parity of esteem' is meaningless, the real battle is for esteem for everyone.
Wednesday, 8 January 2020
How Will Our New MPs Deal with This City's Old Problems?
Figures published late last week show that children born in Stoke-on-Trent are twice as likely to die in the first year of life as in almost any other part of the country.
The city has an infant mortality rate of 8.1 deaths in every 1000 live births, the national average is 3.9 In 2016, the last year for which figures are available there were 26 infant deaths out of 3293 live births.
Speaking to the Sentinel Dr Paul Edmonds-Jones director of adult social care, health integration and wellbeing for the city council said: 'a lot of work is taking place in the city to address this issue.'
Poor public health, poverty and poor housing have been cited as contributing factors to the high rate of infant mortality.
That a city like Stoke-on-Trent has a worryingly high infant mortality rate is shocking, but, sadly, not surprising. This city has been in the grip of serious societal problems for decades.
Mix that with the fall-out from ten years of austerity and it is hardly surprising that the most vulnerable people, children, are suffering.
It prompts an important question about the new political settlement, how will the city's three new Tory MPs deal with this city's old problems?
These include poor physical and mental health, low educational attainment, poor housing, and pockets of deep and intractable poverty. Added to this is an unspoken, but powerful, feeling that second best is more than we have a right to ask for.
The problems this city faces have taken decades to build up and will take as long again to resolve. They will also need considerable government investment delivered over a sustained period
That presents Jack Brereton, Jonathan Gullis and Jo Gideon with some major problems, solving which or failing to do so could decide their long-term future
The Conservative Party had a deep-seated antipathy towards 'big government' seeing it as the embodiment of interfering bureaucracy. Yet only the government had the reach of resources to solve the problems of cities like Stoke-on-Trent.
The standard Tory practice of delivering pious homilies about people 'pulling themselves up by their boot-straps' doesn't cut much mustard if you can't afford boots in the first place.
Government, big or small riding to the rescue of forgotten towns doesn't fit too well with the MO of their mercurial party leader PM Boris Johnson. The Johnson doctrine, such as it is, is to go in quick, grab all the low hanging fruit and milk the situation for every drop of publicity, then get out even quicker before any adverse consequences of your actions become apparent.
That play won't work with problems that have taken years to build to a head and will need as long again to resolve. Johnson may have promised to be in the corner of the UK's forgotten towns when the flashbulbs were popping on election night; he won't be there for the long haul.
Not unless his marching corps of new MPs representing constituencies nobody expected to turn blue go into bat for them anyway. If the rest are like our three amigos that's what they promised to do on election night.
Now it is time for words to be turned into action; the sort of action that could stop a promising career in its tracks. Two of their number will have to face that possibility if they are to be even halfway creditable representatives
Having shifted once the tectonic plates of politics can do so again and probably much more easily this time. The new Tories sitting for surprising seats will have to risk standing up to be counted; or face the possibility of getting counted out.
Monday, 30 December 2019
The new government will be faced by a hard decision on Trident replacement.
When politicians return to Westminster after the new year holiday the main item on their agenda will be Brexit. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has expressed a determination to push the UK’s exit from the EU through by the end of January, with an eighty-seat majority he will probably get his way too.
There is though, another equally major issue that will have to be decided by the new parliament, whether to replace Trident, the UK’s nuclear deterrent.
Replacement is part of the ‘Dreadnought’ programme to replace the country’s existing fleet of four Vanguard class submarines with four new ones. These will be used to maintain the continuous at sea deterrence strategy.
Plans for replacing Trident have been in the works since 2006 with a projected cost of £41billion, making it the largest capital project the government has on its books. In order to keep things on track to meet the completion deadline of 2030 a decision will have to be made during this parliament.
A final decision on replacing Trident was deferred during the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security review until the one to be carried out in 2019/20. The UK currently has four Vanguard class submarines armed with Trident II D5 missiles that are held in a common pool with the United States. There are 215 warheads held in the Trident stockpile, of which 120 are operationally available.
The cost of the Dreadnought programme involves £31billion to replace the submarines involved with a £10billion contingency fund. There is also a £2.5billion annual cost for keeping the vessels in service, representing 6% of the defence budget.
The National Audit Office has previously raised concerns that despite being within its budget the programme to replace Trident could have a negative impact on the affordability of the Ministry of Defence’s equipment budget.
Opposition to replacing Trident has also been expressed by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), who say the real bill for the programme will be closer to £200billion once decommissioning and other costs are accounted for.
In a statement on their website CND say: ‘Preventing Trident replacement remains an urgent priority, we want to see a world without nuclear weapons and stopping Trident is an essential part of that process’.
Any decision to replace Trident made this year would coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty (NPT). A conference to be held later in 2020 is set to criticise nuclear armed nations for refusing to sign the treaty.
Quoted on the Politicshome website a UK government spokesperson denies that replacing Trident would breech any legal obligations saying: ‘all parties are agreed that the NPT does not prohibit updating weapons-systems’. Then goes on to highlight the significant arms reductions made by the UK since the end of the Cold War with the stockpile held projected to have fallen by 65% by the middle of the coming decade.
A large majority gained in the recent general election gives the Conservatives a strong position from which to push through replacement, a policy the party has long advocated. They may also have support from the Liberal Democrats who are, partially, in favour of replacing Trident, although this position may change in the wake of their impending leadership election.
Labour included replacing Trident in their 2019 election manifesto, although leader Jeremy Corbyn was vocal about the fact that if elected as prime minister, he would never authorise its use. This position may also change when the party elects a new leader.
The Green Party and the Scottish Nationalists both oppose renewing Trident and the UK having nuclear weapons, with the latter making agreement with this position a requirement of their cooperation with any partner in a coalition government.
Trident is an issue that has the potential to divide political parties and the general public alike, with some seeing it as a guarantee of freedom, and other as a huge and wasteful expense.
It is also clear that the costs involved in decommissioning one weapons-system and installing another are likely to be closer to the £200billion suggested by CND that the £41billion official total. At the election the Conservatives promised to invest in areas of the country that had been forgotten for decades, it is hard to see how they can pay for this and buy and maintain a nuclear deterrent at least on the current scale.
Opposing the replacement of Trident may provide a rallying point for an opposition that is still reeling from the unexpected election result. It might also though further expose their internal divisions.
There is though, another equally major issue that will have to be decided by the new parliament, whether to replace Trident, the UK’s nuclear deterrent.
Replacement is part of the ‘Dreadnought’ programme to replace the country’s existing fleet of four Vanguard class submarines with four new ones. These will be used to maintain the continuous at sea deterrence strategy.
Plans for replacing Trident have been in the works since 2006 with a projected cost of £41billion, making it the largest capital project the government has on its books. In order to keep things on track to meet the completion deadline of 2030 a decision will have to be made during this parliament.
A final decision on replacing Trident was deferred during the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security review until the one to be carried out in 2019/20. The UK currently has four Vanguard class submarines armed with Trident II D5 missiles that are held in a common pool with the United States. There are 215 warheads held in the Trident stockpile, of which 120 are operationally available.
The cost of the Dreadnought programme involves £31billion to replace the submarines involved with a £10billion contingency fund. There is also a £2.5billion annual cost for keeping the vessels in service, representing 6% of the defence budget.
The National Audit Office has previously raised concerns that despite being within its budget the programme to replace Trident could have a negative impact on the affordability of the Ministry of Defence’s equipment budget.
Opposition to replacing Trident has also been expressed by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), who say the real bill for the programme will be closer to £200billion once decommissioning and other costs are accounted for.
In a statement on their website CND say: ‘Preventing Trident replacement remains an urgent priority, we want to see a world without nuclear weapons and stopping Trident is an essential part of that process’.
Any decision to replace Trident made this year would coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty (NPT). A conference to be held later in 2020 is set to criticise nuclear armed nations for refusing to sign the treaty.
Quoted on the Politicshome website a UK government spokesperson denies that replacing Trident would breech any legal obligations saying: ‘all parties are agreed that the NPT does not prohibit updating weapons-systems’. Then goes on to highlight the significant arms reductions made by the UK since the end of the Cold War with the stockpile held projected to have fallen by 65% by the middle of the coming decade.
A large majority gained in the recent general election gives the Conservatives a strong position from which to push through replacement, a policy the party has long advocated. They may also have support from the Liberal Democrats who are, partially, in favour of replacing Trident, although this position may change in the wake of their impending leadership election.
Labour included replacing Trident in their 2019 election manifesto, although leader Jeremy Corbyn was vocal about the fact that if elected as prime minister, he would never authorise its use. This position may also change when the party elects a new leader.
The Green Party and the Scottish Nationalists both oppose renewing Trident and the UK having nuclear weapons, with the latter making agreement with this position a requirement of their cooperation with any partner in a coalition government.
Trident is an issue that has the potential to divide political parties and the general public alike, with some seeing it as a guarantee of freedom, and other as a huge and wasteful expense.
It is also clear that the costs involved in decommissioning one weapons-system and installing another are likely to be closer to the £200billion suggested by CND that the £41billion official total. At the election the Conservatives promised to invest in areas of the country that had been forgotten for decades, it is hard to see how they can pay for this and buy and maintain a nuclear deterrent at least on the current scale.
Opposing the replacement of Trident may provide a rallying point for an opposition that is still reeling from the unexpected election result. It might also though further expose their internal divisions.
Thursday, 26 December 2019
Labour must ask serious questions about their purpose not just plan to return to the centre ground.
After recording their worst result in a general election since 1935, returning just 202 MPs to parliament in December 2019, the Labour Party is to convene a commission into what went wrong.
The commission will be run by Labour Together, a member’s group with the Canute like task of promoting unity in the party. It will be chaired by former shadow Education Secretary Lucy Powell and will include former leader Ed Milliband.
The commission will report back to whoever wins the leadership contest, the runners and riders for which will emerge early in the new year.
Both Powell and Milliband have the Labour Party in their blood and have shown polite, compared to many of their colleagues, misgivings about the direction under Jeremy Corbyn. Powell was a leadership contender in 2015 and despite his bacon sandwich related misfortunes and the bizarre decision to have the party’s policy pledges carved onto a giant tombstone in the closing days of the 2015 election Ed Milliband owns one of the sharpest brains on either side of the house.
The commission will hear evidence from the 59 former MPs who lost their seats in December and hold focus groups for party members. It is, of course, good to hear what the view looks like from inside the tent, though it might be somewhat obscured given that said tent has just been blown down by a perfect storm.
As a corrective I’d like to offer my own view based on having been a member of the Labour Party between 2001 and 2010. One who was driven away by many of the issues that have led them to this sorry point.
The first thing that must be said is that Jeremy Corbyn made some serious mistakes and so is in many ways the author of his own misfortunes. These include not taking a position on Brexit, failing to respond adequately to accusations of anti-Semitism in the party and relying too heavily on support form the hard left.
This last group, in the shape of Momentum, despite near fanatical loyalty to Corbyn did him few practical favours. Many entered the party by paying their £3 fee as supporters with the purpose of voting in a left-wing leader and then stuck around to pick fights with the Blairites. They also brought with them the familiar political narrative of the far left that winning elections is less important than maintaining ideological purity.
The answer to the mess that has been created is, according to former prime minister Tony Blair, is to reject ‘Corbynism’ and for the party to return to the centre ground. Preferably under a leader cast in his image.
Advice from a three-time election winner is always going to be alluring to a part reeling from losing four elections in a row. The awkward thing is though that making such a journey would be at best a false hope offering only ineffectual mediocrity; at worst it could be the path to disaster.
Many of the problems that boiled over in 2019 could be seen when I left the party in 2010. In fact, they were around long before then, I remember in 2005 the year the saw Blair win his last election that members should ‘hold their noses’ and vote for a party they didn’t much like for rear of getting something worse in its place.
The biggest of these problems is the disconnect between the party elite in London and grassroots members in what the former probably think of as the ‘provinces. It is a relationship based on a mixture of paranoia and paternalism that has seethed out of sight for decades until the pressure got too great and resulted in an explosion.
The paranoid belief of New Labour that if given the slightest say in making policy grassroots members would embrace revolutionary Marxism led to the ideological hollowing out of the party. Unlike the Tories who believe in power and wealth and nothing else the Labour Party must believe in something to have any purpose; when it doesn’t it drifts about in the doldrums desperately trying to catch the wind of whatever is popular now.
On a practical level the control freakery of New Labour led to the collapse of local parties, branches were swept up into tame CLP’s, all the better to be controlled by regional offices who often acted like colonial administrators. As a result, ties with communities that had taken decades to create were severed at a stroke.
Local Labour parties also lost control over the selection of candidates, this led to legions of eager young men and women with impeccable metropolitan credential being ‘parachuted’ into communities they didn’t understand; many went on to compound things by not even trying to do so.
This led to the embitterment of individuals and whole communities who felt their loyalty to the Labour Party had been taken for granted. The 2016 referendum on leaving the EU provided the catalyst for their resentment to be turned into rage.
Now as it reels from another defeat at the polls the Labour Party must accept some truths that will be awkward for all sides of its internal divisions to accept.
The first is that for all his mistakes Jeremy Corbyn got one important thing right, he gave the Labour Party back its sense of being different. If the hard left and the Blairites had been able to have a mature dialogue rather than a squabble for supremacy that might have translated into the purpose the party so badly needs.
Second, this isn’t the 1990’s, today the centre ground will not hold. Despite his love of larking about for the cameras and profession of being a ‘one nation Tory’ Boris Johnson has led his party sharply to the right. An opposition that promises to follow much the same sort of policies, but to do so in a ‘kinder’ way; will be ineffective and irrelevant.
The third and maybe most awkward truth takes the form of a question, in 2019 just what is the Labour Party for? I can get a dozen books out of the library telling me about its past; but neither I nor many people who are still members have a clue about its future.
Whoever wins the leadership election and gets to read the report of this commission might have to recognise that his or her first task may have to be thinking seriously about dissolving the Labour Party and forming a new progressive one in its place.
The commission will be run by Labour Together, a member’s group with the Canute like task of promoting unity in the party. It will be chaired by former shadow Education Secretary Lucy Powell and will include former leader Ed Milliband.
The commission will report back to whoever wins the leadership contest, the runners and riders for which will emerge early in the new year.
Both Powell and Milliband have the Labour Party in their blood and have shown polite, compared to many of their colleagues, misgivings about the direction under Jeremy Corbyn. Powell was a leadership contender in 2015 and despite his bacon sandwich related misfortunes and the bizarre decision to have the party’s policy pledges carved onto a giant tombstone in the closing days of the 2015 election Ed Milliband owns one of the sharpest brains on either side of the house.
The commission will hear evidence from the 59 former MPs who lost their seats in December and hold focus groups for party members. It is, of course, good to hear what the view looks like from inside the tent, though it might be somewhat obscured given that said tent has just been blown down by a perfect storm.
As a corrective I’d like to offer my own view based on having been a member of the Labour Party between 2001 and 2010. One who was driven away by many of the issues that have led them to this sorry point.
The first thing that must be said is that Jeremy Corbyn made some serious mistakes and so is in many ways the author of his own misfortunes. These include not taking a position on Brexit, failing to respond adequately to accusations of anti-Semitism in the party and relying too heavily on support form the hard left.
This last group, in the shape of Momentum, despite near fanatical loyalty to Corbyn did him few practical favours. Many entered the party by paying their £3 fee as supporters with the purpose of voting in a left-wing leader and then stuck around to pick fights with the Blairites. They also brought with them the familiar political narrative of the far left that winning elections is less important than maintaining ideological purity.
The answer to the mess that has been created is, according to former prime minister Tony Blair, is to reject ‘Corbynism’ and for the party to return to the centre ground. Preferably under a leader cast in his image.
Advice from a three-time election winner is always going to be alluring to a part reeling from losing four elections in a row. The awkward thing is though that making such a journey would be at best a false hope offering only ineffectual mediocrity; at worst it could be the path to disaster.
Many of the problems that boiled over in 2019 could be seen when I left the party in 2010. In fact, they were around long before then, I remember in 2005 the year the saw Blair win his last election that members should ‘hold their noses’ and vote for a party they didn’t much like for rear of getting something worse in its place.
The biggest of these problems is the disconnect between the party elite in London and grassroots members in what the former probably think of as the ‘provinces. It is a relationship based on a mixture of paranoia and paternalism that has seethed out of sight for decades until the pressure got too great and resulted in an explosion.
The paranoid belief of New Labour that if given the slightest say in making policy grassroots members would embrace revolutionary Marxism led to the ideological hollowing out of the party. Unlike the Tories who believe in power and wealth and nothing else the Labour Party must believe in something to have any purpose; when it doesn’t it drifts about in the doldrums desperately trying to catch the wind of whatever is popular now.
On a practical level the control freakery of New Labour led to the collapse of local parties, branches were swept up into tame CLP’s, all the better to be controlled by regional offices who often acted like colonial administrators. As a result, ties with communities that had taken decades to create were severed at a stroke.
Local Labour parties also lost control over the selection of candidates, this led to legions of eager young men and women with impeccable metropolitan credential being ‘parachuted’ into communities they didn’t understand; many went on to compound things by not even trying to do so.
This led to the embitterment of individuals and whole communities who felt their loyalty to the Labour Party had been taken for granted. The 2016 referendum on leaving the EU provided the catalyst for their resentment to be turned into rage.
Now as it reels from another defeat at the polls the Labour Party must accept some truths that will be awkward for all sides of its internal divisions to accept.
The first is that for all his mistakes Jeremy Corbyn got one important thing right, he gave the Labour Party back its sense of being different. If the hard left and the Blairites had been able to have a mature dialogue rather than a squabble for supremacy that might have translated into the purpose the party so badly needs.
Second, this isn’t the 1990’s, today the centre ground will not hold. Despite his love of larking about for the cameras and profession of being a ‘one nation Tory’ Boris Johnson has led his party sharply to the right. An opposition that promises to follow much the same sort of policies, but to do so in a ‘kinder’ way; will be ineffective and irrelevant.
The third and maybe most awkward truth takes the form of a question, in 2019 just what is the Labour Party for? I can get a dozen books out of the library telling me about its past; but neither I nor many people who are still members have a clue about its future.
Whoever wins the leadership election and gets to read the report of this commission might have to recognise that his or her first task may have to be thinking seriously about dissolving the Labour Party and forming a new progressive one in its place.
Sunday, 15 December 2019
A Bad Night for Labour as the Tories Sweep Through Stoke and Other Heartlands.
On Thursday the UK held a General Election in December for the first time since the 1920's. It turned out to be one that delivered something like an electric shock to the body politic.
The exit poll conducted for the BBC and published after voting stopped at ten pm suggested the Tories would have a fifty-seat majority. At the time this seemed somewhat optimistic; before dawn broke on Friday, they had secured one of seventy-eight.
Remarkably it was one gained by winning seat after seat in the North and Midlands where until recently they didn't count the Labour votes; they weighed them.
Election nights are an odd mix of short bursts of frantic activity and long stretches of boredom. Long before anyone makes a declaration you have drunk enough coffee to make your appreciation of what is going on as realistic as a Salvador Dali painting.
Out of the fog of confusion I was able to piece together a few observations.
As usual there were a few shock defeats, among the suddenly ex-MPs trying their best to smile as their career dissolves live on television was Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson. She started the campaign saying she was poised to be the UK's next prime minister and ended it with time on her hands to spend looking up hubris in the dictionary.
Another surprise exit was Denis Skinner, the Beast of Bolsover slain after almost fifty years in parliament. The next time Black Rod knocks on the door of the commons chamber there will be nobody to ask if it's the Avon lady, the political life of our country will suddenly be a little bit more vanilla than it used to be.
It was a bad night for Labour with the promise of only worse days to follow. Nowhere was this more evident than in my hometown of Stoke -on-Trent. The prediction was that the Stoke Central and Stoke North seats would go to the Conservatives as Stoke South has in 2017.
To be honest it wasn't one I took all that seriously, Stoke is the sort of city where voting Tory is anathema to most people, or so I thought. Turns out I was wrong, both seats turned blue contributing to Labour's worst defeat since 1935.
There were more worrying signs than just the pile of voting slips filling the baskets of the Tory candidates. All the young people in the hall were wearing blue rosettes, suggesting a corps of activists and potential candidates that could consolidate their hold on the council as well as the three parliamentary seats for years to come.
Labour, by contrast looked old and tired, like a party bemused by how quickly things have fallen apart. As recently as 2005 former Stoke Central MP Mark Fisher was able to walk around the room long before two am calling out 'weigh am in! Weigh so in!' as everyone gave him a standing ovation.
How far and how fast the mighty have fallen; how did they get into this mess?
In Stoke Labour's demise has been coming for years, decades of being the only game in town has made them complacent and unimaginative, a deadly combination on politics. While Labour were looking anywhere but where they were going the city was changing, the old industries were dying and with them old loyalties.
Nationally Labour were sunk by the person a small but influential cabal thought was their greatest asset; Jeremy Corbyn. In 2017 he looked almost charismatic compared to the leaden ineptitude of Theresa May, despite losing he became a minor cultural icon appearing on stage at Glastonbury and having football crowds chanting his name.
Deafened by the shouts of 'Oh Jeremy Corbyn ' he made the mistake of believing his own hype. All he had to do, it must have seemed was keep turning left and he would lead his party to the promised land.
While the leader had his eye off the ball his party was tangling itself up in ever more complicated knots over accusations of anti-Semitism and scaring the City with the most openly socialist manifesto since 1983. Now he, or rather lots of MPs in former safe Labour seats have paid the price.
Where do Labour go next? Jeremy Cornyn has said he will not lead the party into another election; but will stay on while the party goes through a period of reflection. He is unlikely to get his wish, no head rolls quicker than that of an icon who has failed.
Whoever takes on the Labour leadership will be taking on one of the most unenviable jobs in British politics. They will be obliged to swallow some bitter truths.
The bitterest of these is that working-class culture as the Labour Party understood it has changed. Their core vote no longer work and play together, they aren't happy to take what the leadership think they should be given for their own good either
They have embraced a cynical individualism that that is ripe to be exploited by an equally cynical populist like Boris Johnson.
The left, at least in the incarnation represented by Jeremy Corbyn has failed, the centre probably won't hold either. Quite what sort of country is going to slouch away from Brexit and its birth I shudder to think.
Tuesday, 3 December 2019
The Green New Deal and UNI could free millions of people from poverty.
This has been called 'the Brexit election', while it’s true that the issue of when or if the UK leaves the European Union is important, there is so much more at stake.
On 12th December we will be voting for the sort of country we want to be in the years to come.
Do we want isolation from the wider world and a populist government that makes futile gestures like bringing back blue passports, but chips away at important civil liberties like worker’s rights and environmental protection?
Do we instead want to be an open, forward looking country that respects its long history; without making it a weight to hold us back from progress?
As a candidate for the Green Party in one of the three constituencies representing my hometown of Stoke-on-Trent, I believe we should look out to the world and the future because that is what Britain has always done.
That is why I am backing the Green New Deal, an ambitious plan to invest in our shared future.
New jobs created in the industries of tomorrow, a better transport system and an end to the inequality that has divided our society for forty years. Action to tackle the climate emergency and bring UK carbon emissions down to net zero by 2030.
Part of this new deal is using a Universal Basic Income to transform the social welfare system, moving away from sanctions and suspicion and towards hope and inclusion.
Universal Basic Income will lift every citizen above the poverty level, freeing them from the want, stress and insecurity that shadow the lives of so many people. In practice someone working 37.5 hours a week would see their income rise by 10 to 15% thanks to UBI.
This would replace most current income related benefits, ending the indignity of means testing and massively reducing administration costs.
Introducing UBI wouldn't just produce a cost savings for the state, it would set millions of people free from the struggle to get by. This would result in a net improvement in their physical and mental health, taking the weight of dealing with the consequences of an unfairly punitive welfare system.
It would also set them free to study, start small businesses and to care for their families; unleashing a tidal wave of previously stymied potential. Far from adding a cost burden onto the state, this could lift the UK out of the doldrums of poor productivity and make us an economic powerhouse.
Delivering the Green New Deal will involve a serious financial investment, £141.5 billion, raised through a combination of measures including tax changes, cancelling Trident and taxing polluters.
As a charity volunteer in Stoke-on-Trent I see every week the consequences paid by vulnerable people for decisions taken in London by politicians who understand little about the challenges they face.
The Green New Deal and UBI would give them something they have been denied for far too long. The hope that comes from knowing that their government is working with rather than against them.
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