The Right Dishonourable – Page 126 – As truthful as resources permit

Mary Creagh quits Labour leadership bid, cussing ‘anti-business’ mindset

Posted on 12 June, 2015 by Jimmy Nicholls

The weeks since Ed Miliband’s thrashing at the polls have seen a whittling down of potential leaders from six (mostly) Blairite hopefuls to a mere four – plus, er, Jeremy Corbyn.

With the departure of Mary Creagh, who will announce in Saturday’s Guardian the groundbreaking news she won’t be succeeding Red Ed, the field has narrowed even further, the previous two quitters being Tristram Hunt (who quit when he realised he was called Tristram) and Chuka Umunna (who somehow failed to notice that the Tory press can get a bit nosy about the private lives of Labour politicians).

The move leaves former health secretary Andy Burnham facing former work and pensions secretary Yvette Cooper and the MP Liz Kendall, but only goes to reinforce how much the Blairite analysis of the general election has dominated the debate over Labour’s future.

Creagh’s piece for the Grauniad is worth reading in full, but for the lazy the key passage is here:

Labour must want big business to succeed – it’s where many of the jobs are – but pay and conditions must be fair. And Labour must want small business to succeed: it’s where innovation and creative thinking take place. All big businesses started out small. But dividing them into “producers” or “predators” alienates businesses, large and small.

Elsewhere in the piece Creagh rambles on about inequality and Labour’s rather churlish flip in favour of the inevitable EU referendum. Unfortunately for the likes of Corbyn the bleating about “aspiration”, or to use Creagh’s lame coinage “bootstrap Britain” has now drowned out any other concerns in the allegedly centre-left party.

Cray cray, indeed.

Header Image – Mary Creagh in Parliament by Shlurder

Blog

Tory minister for constitutional obstruction gives two fingers to demand for election reform

Posted on 10 June, 2015 by Jimmy Nicholls

Who woulda thunk that a government could wilfully ignore a petition actually – well, mostly virtually — signed by half a million people?

Probably most of us, to be fair. Since the age of the Internet most politicos have learnt the dangers of slacktivism, in which half-arsed social justice warriors share pictures, sign petitions and, er, post blogs to cyberspace which have little effect on the world outside their bedrooms.

Yet even the cynics among us will have failed to predict the contortions of one John Penrose, an obscure cabinet minister who is supposed to handle constitutional reform, according to the bracketed part of his job title. On receipt of the petition signed by 477,000 (including your blogger) that demanded seats more closely match votes, the MP for Weston-super-Mare fell back on an old Tory hatchet job: the alternative vote referendum from 2011

Writing to petition organiser Unlock Democracy, the minister for constitutional obstruction said: “The result [of the alternative vote referendum] was a fairly resounding rejection of the idea, with 67% voting against. As you’ll appreciate, it would be pretty difficult to argue the democratic verdict in a referendum and go ahead anyway!”

Those with political memories longer than Penrose’s will remember the Tories pulling out all the stops to defeat the referendum four years ago, the poll itself only delivered as a sop to the Liberal Democrats, who have been campaigning for a more democratic way of electing the Commons for decades.

But the key sleight-of-hand from the minister is his equation of the alternative vote, which requires an office holder to have an absolute majority within their constituency as opposed to merely the most votes, with proportional representation, which as Unlock Democracy points out, has never been offered to the British voter.

Penrose will also know that the appetite for reform has rather changed since the dismal alternative vote poll, in part because of the rising fortunes of Ukip and the Greens, as well as the skewed general election result in Scotland, which saw the Nationalists take almost all the seats despite netting only half of the Scottish vote.

Source: Electoral Reform Society

Penrose’s letter also comes as the old rightwing argument that first-past-the-post delivers strong governments is about to be refuted by his own party, as the Tories ready themselves to tear their slender majority apart through bickering on Europe, in a charming re-run of John Major’s premiership during the 90s.

Of course, the Tories’ objection to a proportional voting system is in no way linked to the fact the status quo suits them rather well – as indeed it does Labour, who might well have been usurped as the main leftwing party by the Liberals during the 80s under a proportional system.

Header Image – Polling station sign near Hampstead Heath, May 2015, by Bondegezou

Blog

How GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 are dodging democratic scrutiny over ‘bulk personal datasets’

Posted on 9 June, 2015 by Jimmy Nicholls

The British have been infringing on freedom a lot longer than their cousins across the Atlantic – so perhaps it is not surprising that we do it better.

Even as the Yanks roll back the NSA’s powers to sift through American phone records the resurgent Tory government in Britain is using its new majority to tackle freedom through the Snooper’s Charter and Extremism Bill – the latter of which does not even require a sinister sounding nickname.

Fortunately in the spirit of bringing home the revolution Privacy International, a British charity with a global remit, is challenging the spooks’ abilities to put together “bulk personal datasets” with little or no legal oversight.

Such powers only became known in March with the publication of a report by the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament, which noted that these collections were only authorised implicitly by other powers granted to spies. And even the committee, which is hardly unsympathetic to the “national security” argument for snooping, had some concerns to raise:

“Until the publication of this report, the capability was not publicly acknowledged, and there had been no public or parliamentary consideration of the related privacy considerations and safeguards.
“The legislation does not set out any restrictions on the acquisition, storage, retention, sharing and destruction of bulk personal datasets, and no legal penalties exist for misuse of this information.
“Access to the datasets – which may include significant quantities of personal information about British citizens – is authorised internally within the agencies without ministerial approval.”

What data goodies are contained in such collections is unstated in the report, though they can contain “hundreds to millions” of records. As such it is understandable that Eric King, deputy director of Privacy International, is rather upset at the practice.

“Secretly ordering companies to hand over their records in bulk, to be data-mined at will, without independent sign off or oversight, is a loophole in the law the size of a double-decker bus,” he said.

“The use of these databases, some volunteered, some stolen, some obtained by bribery or coercion, has already been abused, and will continue to be, until the practice is overhauled, and proper protections put in place.”

The Home Office, whose secretary Theresa “Jackboot” May has been at the forefront of stamping on British freedom, maintains that such powers are necessary to stop the terrorists slaughtering us all, and that there is appropriate oversight – a view which appears naïve, careless or malignant.

At least the Brits can take comfort from the fact that unlike the Yanks we do not endow our snooping bills with names as Orwellian as the Patriot Act and the Freedom Act. It is a shame we cannot say the same for their contents.

Header Image – GCHQ Model, September 2006 by Matt Crypto

Blog

Labour’s leftwing revolt: What Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership bid means for the party

Posted on 7 June, 2015 by Jimmy Nicholls

Standing opposite Downing Street on the evening after the Queen’s Speech, Jeremy Corbyn, the leftist Labour MP for Islington North, thanked the small crowd of anti-austerity campaigners for showing up. “We prove there is a different voice,” he said to the ramshackle bunch.

In a parliament where even the leftwing Labour party has accepted the need for austerity, that voice on the hard left has been loud and angry since the Tories triumphed unexpectedly at the polls. On the very day Corbyn spoke, the crowd of anti-austerians had cornered the Ukip MP Douglas Carswell, shouting “racist” and “fascist” at him until the police were forced to whisk him away in a van.

Such aggression is one side of Labour’s existential dilemma since it was embarrassed at the general election, an event which prompted two explanations. On one side the Blairites believe that the (now former) leader Ed Miliband failed to tap into the “aspiration” of the British people. Even Andy Burnham, widely seen as the candidate closest to the unions, spoke to this in his campaign video.

Meanwhile the likes of Corbyn have been trumpeting another view: Labour lost the election because it was insufficiently leftwing, or at least could not articulate its leftwing views in a way that was compelling. Speaking on this theme outside Downing Street, Corbyn said: “I’m in favour of aspiration, but not for the individual. I aspire for the whole community to be decently housed, for a young person to get somewhere to live.”

This focus on community is something that Labour has mostly abandoned since former prime minister Tony Blair bolted the word “New” to the party’s name and sought to steer it to the centre-ground. The Blairite method is more or less the strategy being plotted by the rest of the contenders for the Labour leadership: which includes Burnham, Liz Kendall, Yvette Cooper (wife of defenestrated shadow chancellor Ed Balls) and Mary Creagh.

As such Corbyn’s entry into the contest marks him out from the pack. To make it onto the ballot paper he now needs 35 Labour colleagues in the Commons (15 percent) to back him. He will then face the popular vote in which every Labour member and affiliated supporter (mostly unionists) gets a single vote.

Most do not expect him to win, but now at least Burnham has an adversary on his left flank. As well as being anti-austerity Corbyn has many other leftist views to his name: staunchly defending the welfare state and NHS from perceived privatisation by the Tories; opposing war and the use of nuclear weapons; and campaigning against racism and imperialism with Liberation, an advocacy group.

The extent to which such positions are relevant in today’s world and the worldview of Parliament will define how much of an impact Corbyn has. Populist politics of both the Left and the Right have been a growing trend throughout Europe as the rigours of austerity provoke protest – most notably in Greece where Syriza has moved the country to the brink of financial turmoil in negotiations with creditors.

Commenting on this after the Queen’s Speech, Corbyn said: “A generation [of Greeks] don’t work, don’t hope and don’t have opportunity. And they have said ‘No’.” Unfortunately for the Islington North MP, the British people just said “Yes” to a Tory government headed in the opposite direction.

Header Image – Jeremy Corbyn, February 2007 by David Hunt

Blog

The next five years will give the Left much to rally around – but will they stop bickering?

Posted on 2 June, 2015 by Jimmy Nicholls

For no party has the General Election been sadder than for the Liberal Democrats. Their crumbling from 56 to 8 seats (which may be reduced to 7 if Scottish MP Alistair Carmichael calls a byelection) was perhaps the defining factor in lifting the Tories over the majority threshold in the Commons.

For their pains as the junior half of the coalition the Liberals have been traduced by both sides. Likely knowing their protest vote would vanish and others would abandon them to the fringe Left, the Tories flooded Liberal marginals with cash. The result was the worst drubbing since the Social Democratic Party teamed up with Gladstone’s descendent in the 80s.

In the wake of the collapse the Tories are lining up illiberal bills they could never have got through with the Liberals in tow. One bans legal highs (the Psychoactive Substances Bill). Another launches a censorship scheme (the Extremism Bill). Yet another will authorise more government snooping (the Investigatory Powers Bill).

But perhaps most troubling, and most baffling, is the furore over the Human Rights Act, a 1998 bill that the Tories promised to scrap in what prime minister David Cameron’s press officer claims is a move to make Britain’s Supreme Court “the ultimate arbiter of human rights”. As The Right Dishonourable has argued before, the plan is a mess.

It was this piece of legislation that motivated fragments of the Left to gather near Parliament Square last Saturday. Whilst mostly these were Liberals there was a smattering of the Socialist Worker’s Party (which appears to have set up a permanent gazebo across from Downing Street) and a few odds and sods.

Such rallies these days show in microcosm why the Left was so roundly beaten. Many of its supporters remain bitter that the Liberals ever went into coalition with the hated Conservatives. One bystander even heckled the “Yellow Tories” as a pack of placard-carrying Liberals walked away from the protest, which congregated opposite Downing Street.

That another protest levelled against austerity was taking place at around the same time on Westminster Bridge, not three minutes walk from Downing Street, says much of the split ambitions of the Left these days too. Liberalism and socialism may not be incompatible, but they need not be allies either.

As the views of journalist Owen Jones readily attest, whoever wins the contest for leadership of the Labour party is unlikely to satisfy those who turn out to anti-austerity marches. Much as there is a portion of the Tories who will not accept globalisation, there are those within the Left that rebel against its uglier effects: pollution, deprivation and exploitation. Such people will not savour a return to Blairism.

At least on this front the Liberals do not seem so divided. Tim Farron, the MP and grassroots’ favourite, has been much in view at the post-election meetings, shaking hands and making speeches as he prepares for a leadership bid. Whether he or his fellow MP Norman Lamb wins the ensuing contest, there are not enough Liberals for a major rupture to be anything other than suicide.

That difference aside, both Liberal and Labour will have a challenge to reëstablish what it means to be in opposition, and more broadly what it means to be on the Left. Both have what the corporate world terms a “branding issue”. For Labour this means harnessing some of the breadth that Tony Blair mustered in his hat-trick of victories – a task that may prove impossible for now.

For the Liberals, however, it means adapting to the fractured multi-party state they helped build. It means fewer protest votes. And as Saturday showed, it means greater competition from other leftwing political voices, most obviously in Scotland from the Scottish National Party.

The Left has five years until the next general election. Whether this is enough time remains to be seen.

Header Image – Human Rights Act Protest, May 30th 2015 by The Right Dishonourable