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The work of Burnham and Kendall will be futile if Reeves carries on like this
The contrast with the content and style of Liz Kendall’s talk to the Fabian Society, at the headquarters of Scope in Islington last week, could not be more striking. For many citizens, hardworking or not, Ed Miliband was finally beginning to show ‘green shoots’ in his leadership. His conference speech in Brighton was professionally executed, and it largely made sense given what we know about his general approach to the markets and State. Amazing then it took fewer than a few weeks for his reshuffle to ruin all that.
Parking aside how Tristram Hunt MP had changed his mind about ‘free schools’ such that they were no longer for ‘yummy mummies’ in West London, Rachel Reeves MP decided to come out as a macho on welfare. She boasted on Twitter that she was both ‘tough and fair on social security’.
Rachel Reeves’ article was immediately received by a torrent of abuse, and virtually all of it was well reasoned and fair. Yes, that’s right. In one foul swoop, we managed to conflate at one the ‘benefit scroungers’ rhetoric with an onslaught on ‘social security’.
Being ‘tough and fair’ on the “disability living allowance”, in the process of becoming the ‘personal independence payment’ is of course an abhorrent concept. I only managed to be awarded my DLA after a gap of one year, after it had been taken away by this Government without them telling me. At first, it was refused through a pen-and-paper exercise from the DWP. Then, it was successfully restored after I turned up in person at a tribunal in Gray’s Inn Road. This living allowance meets my mobility needs. My walking is much impaired, following my two months in a coma. It also meets my living requirements, allowing me to lead an independent life.
I don’t want to hear Reeves talking like a banker, as if she doesn’t give “a flying fig” about real people in the real world.
For once, the outrage on Twitter, and the concomitant mobbing, was entirely justified. I had to look up again what her precise rôle was – yes it was the shadow secretary for work and pensions, not employment. Many members of Labour were sickened.
However hard Liz Kendall and Andy Burnham manage to convince battle-weary voters that Labour is “the” party of the NHS, certain voters will not wish to touch Labour with a bargepole.
The sentiment is accurately encapsulated by Laurie Penny here:
A spattering of people, would-be Councillors in the large part unfortunately, didn’t see what the fuss was about. They reconciled that ‘the sooner we face up to this problem, the better’. The media played it as ‘the hard left of the Labour Party are upset’. The “Conservative Home” website played it as a sign that the Labour Party were belatedly adopting the Conservatives’ narrative, but it was too little and too late. Like Ed Miliband being booed at conference, a backlash against Reeves’ article can euphemistically be indicative of Labour’s success at ‘sounding tough’.
At yet, this is ‘short term’ politics from a national political party. The social value of this policy by Labour is not sustainable. In the quest for instant profit for headlines, it will actually find itself with no income stream in the long term. For all the analysis with Labour marketing must have done through their ‘think tanks’ and ‘focus groups’, it is striking how Labour have missed one fundamental point. That disabled bashing in the media is not populism from the Left, actually. Conversely, it could LOSE them votes from their core membership. If they learn to love disabled people, they could WIN votes.
Simples.
So what’s the fuss about? She didn’t mention disability. Well – precisely. Disabled citizens of working age are known to form a large part of the population, as Scope reminded us this week in their session on ‘whole person care’ with Liz Kendall MP, so why did Reeves ignore them altogether?
Is it because she has only been in a brief only a few days? Some of us in life have taken the bullet for incidents in life which have lasted barely a few minutes.
What will it take for Labour to ‘get it’ on disability and welfare? Possibly, the final denouement will be when Labour finally realises it can’t ‘out Tory’ the Tories.
The Twitter defenders of the indefensible cite that ATOS are being ‘sacked’ – well, yippedeeeday. ATOS, who were appointed by Labour, are finally being sacked. When negotiating a contract in English law, the usual procedure is to ensure that there are feedback mechanisms in place to ensure the contract is being performed adequately? You can bet your bottom dollar that Labour wishes to do a ‘Pontius Pilate’ on that, in the same way PFI contracts were poorly monitored at first.
This is a disastrous start by Reeves, but ‘things can only get better’. It’s not so much that Rachel Reeves is Liam Byrne in a frock that hurts. It’s the issue that shooting the messenger won’t be the final solution in changing Labour’s mindset on this.
It is all too easy to blame the ‘subeditor’, but the subeditor didn’t write the whole piece. Any positive meme from Reeves, in a ‘well crafted speech’ to “out-Tory the Tories” (such as scrapping the ‘Bedroom Tax’), has been instantaneously toxified by the idea of people ‘lingering on benefits’. The most positive thing to do was to explain how people might not be so reliant on benefits, such as work credits, if we had a strong economy. Reeves chose not even to mention pensions, which is a large part of her budget. Because the article was hopeless from the outset, it could not even get as far as how to get the long-term unemployed (or the long-term sick) safely back to work. It was an epic fail.
It is, in fact, an epic fail on all three planks of Ed Miliband’s personal mission of ‘One Nation': the economy, not recognising the value of disabled citizens of working age to the economy; society, not recognising disabled citizens as valued members of society; and the political process, totally disenfranchising disabled citizens from being included in society.
Somebody better stop Reeves triangulating (but to the Right), before she brings the whole Labour Party down with her before May 7th 2015.
Student protests are doomed (guest article by @fatcouncillor)
Guest article by @fatcouncillor
The recent student protests, have been a case study, in how not to win an argument.
At first glance, the students had a strong case. Certainly, trebling student fees would appear to be, grossly unfair. However, the contra-argument, goes that, as everyone else’s suffering cuts, it’s only right that the students themselves shoulder some of the burden. There are certainly valid arguments on both sides of the student fees debate.
For students, this was always going to be a difficult argument to win. The UK is now governed by a majority Conservative coalition whose mentality certainly appears to be one of ‘you pay for what you use’. So in order to win the argument, students needed to have a clear, focused campaign strategy in place, whereby they both garnered public support, and maintain pressure on the government.
Sadly or happily, depending on the side of the argument is that you are on, the wheels came off the student bandwagon, during the very first protest in London, when viewers of the BBC News Channel and Sky News were treated to the sight of students throwing missiles at the police, lighting fires, and breaking into buildings causing tens of thousands of pounds of damage. Those scenes were replayed time and again over the following 24 hours.
The students, through their leader, Aaron Porter, and other NUS representatives, then further undermined their argument, by claiming that the rioting and violence were carried out by a handful of anarchists, and that students were not involved. This argument was proven to be untrue by, amongst others, the Daily Mail, and the blogger, Guido Fawkes, who published photographs of NUS representatives and students clearly taking part in the riots.
Additionally, the assertions made by Aaron Porter, were contradicted by the rolling news video, which showed a significant number of placard carrying students directly involved in violence, fighting the police and property destruction.
It seems to me, the students were particularly badly let down by the NUS. When it became clear that it was indeed students who had rioted, Aaron Porter lost credibility, and I for one believe that Mr Porter was more concerned about his future political career than representing students.
After the first protest, the NUS should have taken time to develop a new strategy whereby the argument could be made without the protests disintegrating into violence and destruction. Instead the NUS stepped back from the protests and were replaced by a myriad of local committees and activists. While this clearly removed the focus from the NUS nationally, it also caused the fragmentation of the protests and a loss of focus.
There was no clear leadership, no strategic aims were being articulated, and the message was lost as student protesters began to conflate the tuition fees process with the general UK uncut anti-cuts protest. There are those on the left, such as Laurie Penny, writing in the “New Statesman”, who argue that this is a movement without leadership, and the old structure is no longer apply, and that in effect the world is a different place, and we had all better get used
to it.
However, it should be as plain as the nose on your face, that a group of people with a shared goal, need to have a leader and a strategy, in order to achieve that goal.
To fail to understand this causes two problems. Firstly, the people involved in the movement need leadership, so in that face of a vacuum, they create their own leadership structures. But, people being people, some of these leadership structures will be more about the leadership than the goal. The stated aims and goals of the movement will become difficult to recognise as each leadership group develops a subtly different set of goals.
Secondly, as the aims and goals of the movements are no longer clear, and in some cases contradictory, both the public, and politicians, will be confused as to what students are demanding. In these circumstances, all the government has to do, is to put forward a reasoned argument as to why the changes are necessary. The student argument is then lost, and the media focus moves away onto the next set of government cuts.
Quite how the student protest this is anyone’s guess. But one thing is for sure. The argument is lost, and the focus has shifted to books and laptops for children, how dreadful BBC’s Christmas programmes are been, and the weather.
There are those within the student leadership (the leadership of the group which has no leadership, remember?) Who are arguing that this is a repeat of the poll tax riots. In short, they are deluded. The poll tax riots united the electorate, with hundreds of thousands of people from all walks of life protesting and fighting the government. This has not happened in the students fees protests.
There is no broad support for protests. We did not seem masses of people taking days off to go to London to protest. It did not happen, and it will not happen. This argument is lost. The people on the streets required to get this government to revisit legislation which has already passed through both houses of parliament, will not materialise.
At best, we will see a ragtag of unions, the Socialist Workers Party, and students. And any future protest will be set in the context of violence and property destruction. It will achieve nothing.
Students have been betrayed because the people who they saw as their leaders are looking after themselves. And the people who are sprung up in place of the leaders are simply trying to make a name for themselves, and are using students and the protests to that end.
At some point, students will recognise this. But by then no one will care. This is not, and never has been 1968 all over again. Neither is it the poll tax riots. this is a group of students who have been badly let down by the leadership. At a time when they needed that leadership, what they got was self-interest and the usual suspects looking to make a name for themselves.
The argument is lost, but students don’t realise it yet
Shibley Rahman would like to thank the Fat Councillor for the effort that he put into writing this excellent article.
