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For Diane Abbott MP for running a brilliant campaign
I think Diane Abbott has run the best, most principled, campaign of the whole leadership contest.
I don’t think Britain will be fit to elect a black Prime Minister for several decades.
Anyway, that doesn’t reflect on Diane’s abilities or principles in my opinion.
Nick Clegg: keynote speech 2010
Cynics expected us to back away. Instead, we confounded those who said that coalition Government was impossible. We created a Government which will govern and govern well for the next five years.
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I don’t recall many people saying that Coalition government was impossible. However, I think that David Cameron and Nick Clegg have indeed created a Coalition that can last until 2015. I simply don’t agree with people who say it won’t last the full distance.
Of course there are those who will condemn us. We are challenging years of political convention and tradition and our opponents will yell and scream about it. But I am so, so proud of the quiet courage and determination which you have shown through this momentous period in British political history. Hold our nerve and we will have changed British politics for good. Hold our nerve and we will have changed Britain for good.
Yes, this is the sentiment that I get from genuine LibDem members and supporters all the time, that the torrent of abuse about the Coalition is pretty unselective and continuous. The “Yell and scream” phraseology I’m sure is to picture Labour members as thick yobs, but that doesn’t obviate the fact that Labour has to be highly disciplined and well-mannered in its selective criticism.
Just think what we’ve done already. We’ve ended the injustice of the richest paying less tax on investments than the poorest do on their wages. We’ve guaranteed older people a decent increase in their pension. In November, we will publish a Freedom Bill to roll back a generation of illiberal and intrusive legislation. By Christmas, Identity Card laws will be consigned to the history books. From New Year’s Day, the banks will pay a new levy that will help fill the black hole they helped create. On 1 April, 900,000 low earners will stop paying income tax altogether. In May, the people of Britain will get to choose their own voting system. And this time next year, there will be a pupil premium so the children who need the most help, get the most help.
The Freedom Bill I think will be a good move, as Labour did screw up on civil liberties. Many sane people thought this rapid progression into a super-surveillance state was ridiculous, as well as the intensity of over-criminalising people. I welcome the Freedom Bill, not because it will be a popular piece of legislation, but because it is inherently sensible after Labour has eroded civil liberties. Labour managed to achieve this in an insidious manner, including of course the ID cards scheme which some or all of the Labour leadership contenders themselves voted for.
Remember the four big promises we made in the election campaign? For the first time in my lifetime, Liberal Democrats are able to deliver on those promises.
We promised no tax on the first £10,000 you earn. We’ve already raised the personal allowance by £1000. And in the coming years we will go further to put money back in the pockets of millions of low earners.
We promised more investment in the children who need the most help at school. It will happen at the start of the next school year.
We promised a rebalanced, green economy, a new kind of growth. Already we’re taking action on the banks. We’ve set up a regional growth fund. There will be a green investment bank to channel money into renewable energy. These are the first steps to rewire our economy. New jobs, new investment, new hope.
And we promised clean politics. We’re giving people the chance to change our voting system, cleaning up party funding and finally, a century after it should have happened, we are going to establish an elected House of Lords.
Those pledges we made, together, in the election of 2010, will be promises kept in the election of 2015. The Coalition Programme, which commits the government to making all these changes, is not the Liberal Democrat manifesto. But it is not the Conservative manifesto either. It is our shared agenda. And I stand by it. I believe in it. I believe it will change Britain for good.
These are all impressive. However, the agreement with the Tories on Afghanistan, Trident, immigration and asylum, and free schools have been far from impressive. But then again – I am not totally clear on the views of the five Labour leadership contenders on these important matters.
The new politics – plural politics, partnership politics, coalition politics – is the politics our nation needs today. The Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives are and always will be separate parties, with distinct histories and different futures. But for this Parliament we work together: To fix the problems we face and put the country on a better path. This is the right Government for right now.
The pluralism card was always going to be played by Nick Clegg in justifying the Coalition. It seems a perfectly reasonable one to play, in my opinion.
Ed Miliband's (non-personal) letter to me: Time for change!
Dear Shibley,
I am writing to you for the final time before the end of this campaign to ask for your help to win the next general election — because only change can win.
I believe we have won the argument for change in this election. Every day of this campaign we have been winning support from people who recognise that Labour must turn the page on the past if we are to reach out to those we lost and win again. But we can take nothing for granted. In these last few days, your help could make all the difference. I hope you’ll do everything you can in these next 48 hours.
** By phoning 30 members in your area it could make a real difference to the result. Please reply to this email and tell us where you are in the country — then we will send you a list of undecided voters in your region for you to speak to. **
I am more convinced than ever of the scale of change we need. And I believe more strongly than ever that I am the best person to reconnect with the millions of voters we lost and take us back to power.
I have said throughout this campaign that we cannot win again without first understanding why we lost.
We heard on the doorsteps that many felt we no longer spoke to the challenges of people’s lives and their hopes and aspirations for the future. People are struggling to make ends meet and fearful for their jobs. They are working harder for longer for less. They worry about the future facing their children — the debts they will take on just to get an education and whether they’ll ever afford a place of their own.
After the 1992 election and our fourth general election defeat, Tony Blair said the problem was not that we had changed but that we hadn’t changed enough. I don’t want to wake up after the next general election and have to debate why we didn’t change enough to win.
I believe I am the best person to build a new winning majority for Labour — to reconnect with our lost voters, and to reach out to the millions of Lib Dem voters in the centre of British politics that Nick Clegg has deserted by his lurch to the right.
This country cannot afford even one term of this Coalition. As leader I will work every hour of every day to remove this government so that we can once again provide the leadership this country needs.
** Please reply to this email now and we’ll be in touch with a list of 30 members in your area to call. You could make all the difference. **
This election is not yet decided. By supporting me you are choosing change. By choosing change, you are choosing for Labour to win again.
Thank you,
Ed Miliband
PS — If you haven’t already, please vote online by clicking here, using your unique security code on your ballot paper. Ballots close on Wednesday at 5pm, so please vote for me as your first preference now!
On Ed Balls.
How’s the coalition doing these days? Well, considering. Cameron seems confident, and ‘on top of his game’ at the moment. He has a clear idea of how he can lead the country as well as his Party, which is no mean feat. Meanwhile, Labour seems to go on with its neverending shambles which is the leadership election, with Ed Balls revealing today that he disagreed with Gordon Brown and how he could now work with the Liberal Democrats.”
Here is Ed’s latest account of where things went wrong with him at the helm: Indy article
Gordon Brown fudged Labour message, says Ed Balls
“I could have chosen to have broken away in an emphatic and decisive way from Gordon in the last few years, and I didn’t,” he told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.”
Why not? Of course, the traditional arguments are ‘collective responsibility’ and ‘loyalty’, but this admission goes to the heart of how exactly decisions were made in Gordon Brown’s government. The impression that, “If Gordon didn’t like it, tough”, seems to be getting stronger and stronger everyday, with the publication of a new set of political memoirs (e.g. “The Third Man”, or “The Journey”).
“I disagreed strongly with Gordon on the 10p tax rate cut, I thought we should have gone for the election in 2007, I felt that he trimmed and fudged his message to try to keep the Daily Mail happy in a way which meant that people didn’t know where we stood. I said that to him many times.”
Well, there’s disagreement and there’s disagreement isn’t there? As a junior member of the Fabians, I believe strongly that Labour government under both Blair and Brown screwed up on poverty. Poverty and inequality aren’t even mentioned in Blair’s index. Whatever your views on capital gains tax and corporation tax, the issue about the 10p tax (and the top rate of tax) still raises more questions than answers.
So, whilst Kerry is right to emphasise our achievements, we still have a lot of soul-searching to do. For what it’s worth, I don’t feel Ed Balls MP is the right man at the right time. He wasn’t then, and he isn’t now.
Meanwhile, Guido Fawkes has revealed interesting information about Ed Ball’s leadership chances from his research.
39% of Guido’s Readers Want Ed Balls to Lead Labour Party
Here are Guido’s findings.
“Ed Balls liked to tell the hustings that he was the one the Tories feared most, hence the attacks on him from the right-wing media. Guido takes the opposite view, he is the one that opponents of the Labour Party most badly want to win the Labour leadership because he would be as disastrous as his mentor was for Labour. Today”
Is Labour uniting behind a new leader for an autumn of discontent?
People who dislike Labour love reminding themselves of when Denis Healey had to ‘beg’ to the IMF for a loan to keep Britain afloat. Labour took a long time to shrug off the notion that unions were intrinsically evil, and served to destabilize the effective running of Britain. Britain in the late 1970s couldn’t even to bury the dead.
Unfortunately, in the 2010s, Britain may not be able to look after the living adequately. The over-zealous attitude by the spending review has been observed by many pundits as being rather macabre, and misfiring in a number of critical areas. For example, Iain Duncan-Smith has provided a programme of welfare reform, but has been unable to put a figure to it. In the meantime, many genuine disabled people who indeed aspire to go to work have been terrified by what it all means, by the continuous torrent of mistrust from the Coalition politicians towards the poor and/or the disabled.
We all know where intuitively the autumn of discontent would be likely to happen, but the Unions have now specified that the strikes are going to be due to spending cuts, pay and pensions in the public sector. The tables motioned for the Trades Union Congress have called for co-ordinated action by various unions.
The scale of this is not going to be a joke. The reason for this is many hard-working citizens, especially the low paid, feel embittered. They realize that the state owes them nothing, contrary to popular media, but the issue is that they do not feel responsible for the mess that Britain is in. They are simply not accepting the argument that “there’s no money left”, put forward by Liam Byrne of all people. Instead, they have fully accepted that spending in a recession was necessary to stop the economy going into a complete standstill, and the proof of the success of this policy has already been demonstrated by stable growth figures and a lack of inflation thus far. However, the cuts threaten to lessen investment in both the private and public sector, produce inflation, increase unemployment, and therefore increase substantially the benefit budget.
Unison, Britain’s biggest public sector trade union with 1.3 million members, has called on unions to join a Europe-wide day of action in September. Unite has been hard at work, or non-work, in Manchester. Workers at the Manchester office of one of Britain’s largest finance firms are being balloted for strike action in another outbreak of industrial unrest. Staff at Capita Life and Pensions have begun voting over proposed changes to their pensions, which Unite national officer Rob MacGregor said were a “clear attempt by the company to profit at the expense of our members”. Unite have provided that staff at Capita Life and Pensions will lose thousands of pounds in retirement income if the plans go ahead.
“Our defence must be built on generalised strike action and community resistance,” said the RMT general secretary, Bob Crow, predicting the biggest public mobilisation since the anti-poll tax riots of 1990.
That things have come to a head so early on has caught many by surprise. If Labour elects too supine a leader, who won’t support its major paymasters and adopts a “wait-and-see” approach, Labour will achieve nothing for the poor and/or vulnerable. Many are yearning for a true left-wing agenda with a leader with the courage of his convictions, who won’t come to this with any populist overly right-centrist baggage. Ed Miliband could therefore, as the only electable socialist candidate, be the right man at the right time.
David Cameron, who is likely to be on paternity leave during the TUC conference, has declined an invitation to address the congress. Quelle surprise?
Lilla Bruce, worried about her bus pass, is voting for Ed, whereas Andy Coulson receives a £140,000 salary. Fairness, Mr Clegg?
Soon the reality of the spending cuts will bite, making the Andy Coulson stuff, whilst potentially illegal, pale maybe into insignificance. Lilly has her mind on other things much closer to home, away from Mr Coulson’s £140,000 tax-payer funded salary.
Lilla Bruce, 83, who lives in the North East of England, is worried about pensioners because of the bus pass and the winter fuel payments.
It turns out that areas in the North East are possibly least likely to withstand the economic shock of cuts which are proposed by the Coalition, new research suggests.
