Stephen Byers..

Stephen Byers is to stand down as MP for North Tyneside.

Given the discussion on our previous thread, I wanted to point out that Stephen is an MP for a traditional Labour area who is very keen on encouraging income growth via making work a more attractive proposition through tax credits and the minimum wage, as well as in attracting inward investment to his constituency and improving schools, colleges, housing and public services.

In fact, that’s the attitude taken by all the Tyneside Labour MPs and councillors  I know, whether on the left or right of the party.  On the other hand, the local Tory Mayor is doing things like cutting Breakfast clubs for local children.

Politics is about priorities, eh?

Anyway, I’m sure Stephen will be a leading voice in the party, whether in or out of Parliament.  One thing’s not in doubt – The Labour party will need the insights and advice of people like Stephen in the years to come.

Ben Brogan is a twit.

Alright, he isn’t but I have to get readers somehow.

Today, Ben (amongst others) rolls out the “Isn’t it terrible people in deprived areas vote Labour” line.

Well Ben, I don’t think there are many people who’ll benefit from inheritance tax cuts in Glasgow North East, but there are plenty who’d suffer if there was less nursery provision. Some people call this “dependency on the client state”. I call it Government working to make life better for families.

If you live in a poorer area, the money Labour governments spend on schools, on policing, on child care, on sure start and on tax credits make a big difference for you.

But really, why doesn’t Ben make the opposite argument? We’ve had a Labour government for thirteen years, and people in Surrey, in Hampshire, in Tatton and in Witney have better indices on poverty than anywhere else in the country.

Yet despite this prosperity, they keep electing Tories in landslides. So why is no-one railing against the shortsightedness of these fools who keep voting against a government that has made life in their area so good, eh? Why are they so shortsighted?

Oh, yes, because they know who’ll act in the interest of their community.

Just like the voters in Glasgow.

Isn’t there an implication in this convential wisdom that it’s OK for the wealthy to vote in their own interest, but immoral and foolish for poorer people to do so?

If Ben really wants to know why people in poorer areas think it’s in their interest to vote Labour and people in richer areas think it’s in their interest to vote Conservative  he could do worse than start with this chart from the IFS.

Average incomes under Tories and Labour 1979 to date

Now, I’m not arguing everything Labour’s done is perfect. The IFS report shows although we’ve made a lot of progress in increasing lower and middle income, the massive increase in wealth at the very top has driven inequality. But where does Ben think the voters of Glasgow and Tatton fit on those income scales and so, who is more likely to make working people in Glasgow North East better off?

Now, all this sits alongside a disturbing trend in journalism (fueled, in part, by the fact that most journalists are like me, middle class professionals) that implies that people in Labour strongholds in places like Glasgow, Newcastle, Manchester and Liverpool are basically a bunch of welfare munching dole scroungers who are only voting Labour because they have not yet been weaned of the welfare teat.

It’s a load of stereotyped rubbish and should be treated with contempt.

The IFS research suggests that those on benefits alone are not hugely better off under Labour*. Rather, it is the relatively low income workers, the shop assistants, the cleaners, the part-time time nursery nurse, the office assistants and the manual workers who have done better in terms of income.

On top of this, it is groups like this that benefit most from schools that have had more money spent on them, medical provision that has improved, more access to nurseries and so on.

It is these people, too often neglected in media narratives, who make up the vast majority of the population of core Labour seats. Their support for the Labour party is neither irrational nor the lazy suckling of the teat of the state, but a recognition that although imperfect, Labour generally tries to do more for them than the alternative.

History shows they’re right about that.

What Labour people want isn’t “welfare”, but for life to be a bit fairer, just a little less stacked against the family trying to make ends meet.

There is a long and interesting debate about income and social inequality in this country – but we must not start it with stereotypes.

*At least in income terms. People in these social groups probably find their houses might be nicer and their schools better, but I refuse to think of that as, y’know, a bad thing.

UPDATE: Dan Paskins says that there’s no easy dividing line between “Feckless poor suckling on the state” and “upright working man/woman”. He’s quite right – and as he says, the support of the state is vital for those trying to climb the income scale. His critique of the stereotype is probably more accurate than mine.

Now for the PLP elections

Now the Glasgow by election is finished, it’s time to move onto the next set of elections – and this time, they’re internal!

The Parliamentary Labour Party has now proposed the timetable for the election for chair of the parliamentary party, which will be finalised by the whole PLP next week.

Nominations will open on the 18th November and close on the 23rd. The election itself will be on Thursday the 26th, the same day as the vote on the Queen’s speech, with the result in the early evening.

There’s been a lot of speculation about this election over the summer as Barry Sheerman has said he’s considering standing against incumbent Tony Lloyd.

Sheerman has varied his reasons for his possible challenge, sometimes saying it would be a direct challenge to Gordon Brown and at other times saying he wanted to stand because he felt the PLP hadn’t been agressive enough in his defence of MPs over the expenses scandal.

So two interesting issues – will Sheerman stand, and on what basis?

I’d put the line on Sheerman at about 100 votes if he stood on his own, but probably less if it was an explicit challenge to the PM, especially after this week.

Huzzah!

Congratulations to Willie Bain, and congratulations to all those who worked and campaigned in Glasgow. A fantastic result, and a salute to the work of everyone who delivered a leaflet, knocked on a door, made a phonecall or put up a poster.

What’s interesting about this result, for me is that although the Micheal Martin resigned almost five months ago (in late June), thus making the By-election campaign one of the longest imaginable, none of the main opposition parties built up a head of steam. Usually, even in the safest Labour seats, a long by-election campaign is awful for the sitting party, as it allows opponents to put in resources, time, build up infrastructure, identify issues, and become locally identified. The Lib Dems are especially good at this as we saw in Brent and in Hartlepool.

This time, that didn’t happen, even though the seat was vacant for three times as long as the Glasgow East by-election. A toast therefore to Scottish Labour camapign organisers and workers.

Holy Tory Decoder Ring, Batman!

There is a certain sort of political article that requires, to understand fully, the ability to decode what is being said.

Typically these are articles written by a reporter with apparent sympathies and good links with a faction or grouping within that party  (Think Paul Routledge for old school Labour, or Alistair Campbell for the then-nascent New Labour team, or Allegra Stratton for the anti-Brownites). 

What they report, therefore, can have an agenda, whether their own or their sources. That purpose is often tangential to what is actually said in the article.

As a result, If you don’t know the reporters sympathies, who they’ve been talking to or what the internal struggles of the party are,  you’re left feeling like one of Plato’s cave dwellers watching the shadows flickering on the wall, unaware of what really causes them.

So it is with James Forsyth’s article in this weeks Spectator. This comes in the form of the public handing of the black spot to a prominent Tory, Shadow Justice Secretary, Dominc Grieve.  Grieve is attacked for being too cerebral, insufficiently anti-European, intefering with the work of Shadow cabinet colleagues, and not being willing to cut his departments budget. The scoundrel.

It is allowed that he is a good lawyer, but this is not a good thing, as it makes him persnickity and obfuscatory. Why he’ even seems to know details of how European Human rights law works and dislikes the Sun. Closet lefty, probably. 

On first reading, my suspicion was that this was someone from the Home Affairs team telling Grieve to get off their patch. But the sourcing seems wider than that. So why would James Forsyth, an enthusiastic water carrier for the Tory cause, take it upon himself to launch an assault on Mr Grieve?

I don’t know.  I need the decoder ring.

Contra Cameron on Society

I was quite excited to hear about David Cameron’s speech on “the Big Society” yesterday.

Having read the Phil Collins article that challenged Cameron on his agenda, I was looking forward to hearing Cameron’s response, which I hoped would be meaty, and significant and tell us how the Conservatives would resolve the tension between their progressive aims and their stated policy desire to sharply reduce state spending, lower taxation on capital. To tell the truth, I was looking forward to getting my teeth into it.

But Cameron didn’t do any of that. It was, for the most part, perfectly agreeable pablum. Frank Field said the text reminded him of Blair, but if so, it was Blair at his most frustrating and vague – perhaps the Blair whose refusal to commit caused Field to quit Government after a year.

At one point, Cameron says that Facebook adding a volunteering button to their website would have more impact than any number of government programmes. He then proposes a government programme to support volunteering. It’s that sort of speech.

It wasn’t a bad speech in the sense of being wrong headed, or unpleasant. There was a nod to behavioural economics and progressive ends. There was some sensible stuff about how vital social enterprise is, and an acknowledgement that the battle against inequality is a particularly tough one in an era of massive wealth at the top end. There was a recognition that the growth of the state led to a drop in inequality up until the late sixties (Note to Tory speechwriters: the state hasn’t “expanded” since the late sixties, in terms of share of GDP, so not sure if that actually makes the point you want it to make)

This ran alongside some fairly bromidal remarks about the need for the state to intervene smartly, rather than plonkingly, some rather standard denunciations of Tax Credits and the occassional reference to the need to improve state schools by liberating them.

But what was missing was a response to the core point about equality and social mobility – that in a free market, assuring equality of opportunity, let alone aspiring to equality of outcome,  is both difficult and expensive.

Eton doesn’t charge £30,000 a year (plus extras) because the provost is a rapacious capitalist intent on exploiting the stupid rich, but because a good education costs money and rare skills, and is a valuable commodity worth the annual investment of more than the average workers salary -a price only wealthy people can pay.

The challenge for the progressive, capitalist politician is find ways to counterbalance these market pressures for inequality – the collection of wealth and staus in the hands of a minority-  with the limited resources of state and society. (There’s also the tricky business of doing this while still giving incentives to people to create the weath that makes the whole society more prosperous, but that’s an issue for another day)

That takes money. Childcare, decent homes,  transport, and health – all come with a cost.

(more after jump)

Jaw jaw

I’ve become transfixed at the possibility that one day, Douglas Carswell and Lembit Opik will appear on TV together. This is because their jaws appear to be wonky at equal, yet opposite angles.

Seperated at birth?

You be relieved to know that it is possible to tell them apart. Carswell is grumpier looking, possibly because he spends his spare time with the Lisbon treaty not lingerie models.

Disclaimer: I don’t have a wonky jaw, but I do have a head the size of a pumpkin and stupid hair. So we’re all about even.

New “insults our troops” storm…

Sun mispells grieving widows name, mistakes dead soldier for TV personality.

Shocking lack of respect, eh?

Good work, Harry’s Place.

It’s interesting that the tone of the media coverage on this has shifted so quickly from attacking the PM to discomfort at the attack on him. I wonder how much is the lobby’s own feeling of awkwardness at covering this story, and how much the result of is some fairly strong public feedback to the Suns coverage (though public feedback is usually ignored by journalists, they tend to take note when it’s counterintuitively supportive of a public figure)

Losing my few million

If you ever want to feel strangely unanchored and rootless in the digital world, try reading this thread (The section wer’re concerned with starts there and continues for another 200 pages or so).

The thread consists of  reportage on a match between two internet poker players, playing heads up. We don’t know who one of the players is, except that he’s named himself after a minor Tolkien character.  People think he might be a 19 year old Swedish guy.  He’s won about $2 million in two days play.

Tom Dwan

The guy who just lost that money to him is a twenty three year old American, Tom Dwan, one of the best no limit hold ‘em players in the world. He reputedly won around five million last year, though American winnings tend to get a little murky for tax exposure and sundry legal reasons.

Strangely, in this photo he looks a little like the Secretary of the Parliamentary Labour Party. 

 

 

Many of the hands these two guys play are for several multiples of the average British annual salary. Oh, and they were playing for 12 hours straight, six tables at a time, usually with about three or four million dollars at stake.

How radically has the world changed when a young guy from Sweden can win a couple of million dollars off a young guy in America at a card game, without either of them speaking, meeting, or one knowing for certain who they’re playing?

As far as we know, neither man (or teen) was personally wealthy before they started playing poker, so this is money they’ve won from other people.

A small army of workoholic multi-millionaire online gambling degenerate teenagers. That’s what the world is breeding.

William Gibson would be proud.

 

Grief, letters and the media.

I didn’t really want to write about this. It strikes me that if someone has lost a loved one in the service of our country, they have every right to be angry.

Almost by definition, when a British soldier dies, they’ve been put in harms way by the choice of the government of the day. So it is natural for a parent to ask themselves if their childs sacrifice was worth the loss, and if enough was done to minimise the dangers they face.

If they feel the answer to either question was no, they have every right to say so as loudly as they can.

So if Jacqui Janes feels that that the hand written letter the Prime Minister wrote to her was symbolic of a perceived lack of worth given to the sacrifice of soldiers, it is no wonder she felt it called into question her son’s sacrifice and reacted in the way she did. 

There’s no point in making arguments about whether the Prime Minister’s intent was understood correctly. The pain and anger that was caused is simply a fact, and all you can do is apologise for the hurt, whether intentional or not.

My view is that the letter was heartfelt rather than careless and it strikes me that the Prime Minister has done everything he can to try to reassure the family that the Janes’ loss was in a worthwhile cause. However, that is the families right to judge, not mine.

That said, I don’t think I’m alone in my discomfort at the role the media, and specifically the Sun, are playing.  Let me indulge a thought experiment.

If the Prime Minister had sent a perfectly typewritten letter to a different family, and they had come to the Sun and complained at the heartlessness of sending a pro forma letter to a grieving wife, would we instead be seeing a similar campaign from the same paper compaining that a typewritten letter was soulless and an empty gesture?

I think we would. If I’m right about that, then this is not a debate about the appropriate support for troops but using genuine grief as a tool for a newspaper to attack a prime minister who the paper wishes to be rid of.

 Well, that’s their right. We can all reach a judgement on whether they are right or wrong to do so.

But here’s where that gets dangerous. The debate about the war in Afghanistan is now being conducted on the question of whether the Prime Minister’s m’s look like his n’s, and how much he should apologise if they do. 

That is a disservice to the cause we fight for and the sacrifice of our soldiers far greater than any letter.  What’s more, that is a deliberate choice, not a slip of a pen.