Equality

Just put this over at Labourhome. Seems I'm blogging more there than here. Anyway this a copy of what I put up.

Why has it become such a dirty word. Roy Hattersley tells of it being a non-word in the early days of New Labour after Blair had gained the leadership. One of Blair’s groupies told him off for using it. How strange, but then again how strange that Hattersley found himself ending up to the left of the leadership.

What got me thinking about this was seeing the BBC management’s salary and expense figures being released under the freedom of information laws. On top of this we hear of another million pound plus package for the new boss of RBS.

Sure New Labour bought in the minimum wage but at the same time we saw the gap between the poorest in the UK and the top wage earners widen to levels it hasn’t been before. GPs are pulling in six figure salaries which also seems the norm for whole layers of management through the public sector. In the corporate world even failing companies pay top management seriously high salaries and bonuses. At the same time the vast majority of the population is now falling further behind.

Part of Labour’s business used to be attempting to iron out these differences but since New Labour this is no longer the case. They say follow the market forces, it’s no sin to be rich. We no longer look to politicians to be altruistic and working for the public good. Instead why shouldn’t they get as much out of the expenses as they can? After all as Gordon Gekko said “greed is good” and as Maggie said while be very honest, “there is no such thing as society.”

So before the usual Tories start adding their comments, let’s look at the downside of trying to engineer a little equality.

First then, “if we don’t pay these people the fat pay packets we will lose them to other companies or countries”. Not sure if there are that many of either ready to pay Mark Thompson his 600,000+ and if there are banks willing to hire away some of our senior management then good to luck to them. If all our GPs want to go private, fine, but how many will be able to pull in 100,000+ in a saturated private market. Go to the US by all means, but you may not find the health industry there is willing to pay quite like it did in the past.

Second, “we would hurt entrepreneurship in the UK”. Sorry these people are not entrepreneurs. They are corporate and public sector bureaucrats. Successful entrepreneurs will always find a way of making the big money. You only have to look at Mandelson’s mates among the Russian oligarchs. Anyone who has ever dealt with the corporate world will know that talent seldom rises to the top. Instead a level of mediocrity reigns as higher levels worry about competition from below.

For Labour to get back on track and offer the public something different to the Tories we need to be using words like equality again. If we leave it to New Labour we will be trying to prove we are nicer Tories than the real Tories yet again.

How to handle Russian oligarchs

On today's BBC website there is a strange story of how Putin bullied and humiliated billionaire businessman Oleg Deripaska last week. On live TV, he stood over the embarrassed oligarch and forced him to sign on the dotted line to reopen an aluminium plant he had just closed. It was almost old Joe Stalin in action which is fitting as Putin does seem to show Stalinist tendencies.

Maybe another leader who has show Stalinist tendencies, not least in internal Labour Party affairs, Gordon Brown, could use the same tactics with the LDV closure in the UK. If he's not sure where Oleg is at the moment, he can ask Oleg's friend Peter Mandelson.

Oleg Deripaska is well known to the UK because George Osbourne leaked the story that Mandelson was having a free holiday on Oleg's yacht off Corfu. This caused suspicions because actions taken by Mandelson when he was an EU commissioner over the tax on imported aluminium increased Deripaska's already great wealth. (There is no proof that Mandelson or those close to him gained financially from these actions except for this luxury holiday in Corfu. Peter Mandelson lives in a £2.5 million villa in London.)

George Osbourne didn't get away unblemished by the affair as he knew Mandelson was there because he also visited Oleg on the yacht. The yacht was moored off of Osbourne friend Nat Rothschild's villa and it was Rothschild, a rich hedge fund manager, who introduced them. Rothschild considered that Osbourne had broken a confidence so then made public that Osbourne had been there to ask Oleg for a donation to the Tory Party via his ownership of LDV.

What a complicated corrupt little world these people live in.

From the Labourhome blog

This is a copy of the first article I posted over at http://www.labourhome.org/. I thought I had better keep a record of them here too. Like the post before this, it's me feeling that the New Labour idea has lost any momentum and we just watching it die now.

Is the experiment coming to an end?

In 1994 the biggest experiment in British politics since the Second World War began. 15 years down the line it looks like it’s coming to the end. Back then the Labour Party made a deal with Blair, Brown and those about them like Campbell and Mandelson. The deal was Labour would be electable if it gave total control of the party to these people and dropped its old ideals, traditions and ways of working.

Now before we all berate ourselves it should be remembered that at the previous election Kinnock had led the party to defeat against Major, and prior to that Thatcher had been punishing every Labour attempt to regain power. In hindsight we could say we didn’t really need a Blair to win the next election as the Tory government was in meltdown, much like the present Labour one.

What should be said is that Blair went on to win two more elections, but again it could be argued that the Tories were still in a suicidal frame of mind during this period. Looking back on this deal between the Labour Party and its new leadership we see the latter mostly lived up to their part. One part of the deal that they didn’t though was the promise of more party democracy, which has since been curtailed so much by the leadership. What activist hadn’t reckoned on was how little would be achieved in 13 years of Labour power. Trying to find progressive policies amongst the many conservative ones is quite hard. Compared to the six years of Atlee’s first government they have done next to nothing.

As with any experiment, we are testing a theory to see if it is correct. When the New Labour idea was finally tested it failed miserably. First test was whether it could hand over power to a new leader. From this we ended up with a PLP coronation. Next was its first financial crisis and recession while in power and it had no policies for the situation. The only answer was to dump the free market policies it had been following, shore up the banks and return to Keynesian ideas the party had followed before they came along. The third test was the trust that Labour MPs are basically honest. This was destroyed as the expenses scandals came out and one after another Blair follower was found with their hands in the till.

Let’s look at what New Labour bought us. Of course we should have been suspicious when Blair and Mandelson started their campaign before John Smith was in the ground. It was a pointer to the total lack of principles of this new movement with many more to come. It was to Americanise politics in the UK. To have two main parties with no basic policy differences, just a difference in compassion. To make elections almost presidential with the charisma of the leaders the main vote catcher. (Aren’t Cameron and Clegg just Blair clones?) To have people like Campbell to spin, lie and create the sound-bites instead of sensible discussion. Was it any wonder that the MPs that signed up to this new deal with no principles or ideals ended up stealing from the public through their expenses?

So when the experiment ends what will come next? If the Labour party ends up as some European style Social Democrat party that Roy Jenkins wanted it will fight for the same ground that the Liberals now have, as Jenkins found out. Was the party under the leadership of Kinnock and Smith a better place to be? I suspect so, even with all the infighting, it still had some of that broad church feel. Is there another place we should be heading; is there another ‘new’ experiment to come? Maybe, but we had better be a bit more cautious this time.

Poor Little Georgia!

Again I have to admit my interest in the Labour Party going-ons in the Erith and Thamesmead constituency is because for most of the time I lived in the UK my home was there. Yesterday's Evening Standard interview with Georgia Gould must give you a chuckle. Guessing that most things she does follow Daddy and his friends advice, the Blairite spin doctors got it wrong yet again.

The Standard allows Georgia to whinge about how she was smeared during the selection process without any questions from the Standard's 'reporters'. In fact it looks like a celebrity press release from Max Clifford rather than an interview. Were reporters David Cohen and Joe Murphy actually there.

Let's read a paragraph in her 'own' words as she does her poor little rich girl act. "I was the victim of a well orchestrated and vicious smear campaign," she said. "Every day, I'd wake to articles in the media, and they came from both the Left and the Right, assailing me for being too rich, too young, too inexperienced, but mostly — too well connected. There were days the flak got so bad that I became quite depressed, which is really quite unlike me, and I never wanted to get out of bed."

What she doesn't mention is that in order to help her the local constituency party chairman was removed and her helpers started a campaign to misuse postal votes so she could win without having to get the majority of those who actually turn up for the party selection meeting. (The rules on postal voting at this stage are they should only be used when there are good reasons for not being able to attend the meeting.)

I love this bit. "It's not about Old Labour or New Labour, or Blairites or Brownites any more," she said. "These are old divides, a false split, a dead language, and they speak of a moribund politics that totally misses the point." So I guess Georgia doesn't work for the Blair Faith Foundation then and the papers got it wrong. Who was it that got her on the shortlist one wonders?

Whatever the aims of this piece of New Labour spin, and whether it was done by Alistair Campbell or not, the outcome was it didn't work. Just look at the comments under the article. It seems to be running at 90% against poor Georgia. (A note to the spin doctors - it just doesn't work any more. With the MP expenses scandal people just don't believe in you. They won't clap their hands to bring back Tinkerbelle, or Campbell, or Mandelson.)

Sadly where the article is correct is that Georgia Gould will probably turn up again as a candidate for a Labour seat at the next election and it will probably be through a women only shortlist in a 'safe' Labour seat.

So where has all the money gone!

What Brown, Darling, Cameron and Osborne have in common in this financial crisis is it was correct to save the banks and because of the cost of doing this with taxpayers money things like health and education will be cut. The differences will be in how big the cuts are. The Tories are reverting to old style Thatcherism so forget all about the hug-a-hoody PR.

I read on the BBC website that Mandelson said soundbites are not dead. How about this one then? Following on from Tom Cruise's "Show me the money" in Jerry Maguire, "Follow the money".

Now I'm sure there are good reasons for keeping the banks solvent, bailing them out so they can repay the people they owe money to may be a good thing. Maybe the future earnings and tax income of the City investment banks justifies paying off the present investors in them and keeping London's reputation untarnished among the rich and powerful. If this is the case shouldn't Darling show us the maths?

Now don't confuse saving the banks with small depositors savings or even bank workers jobs. Deposit insurance protects the former and nationalization after bankruptcy would take care of the latter. All I am saying is there was an alternative, bank failure, to throwing billions at the banks. It might not have been the best option but it would be nice to know why not.

So where did the money go? Who had invested in all these failing funds and bad investment instruments at the banks? I wonder whose names would come up. For sure from the UK would be the pension funds. So we have indirectly bailed out some pension funds but that doesn't stop Mandelson talking about the problem of funding the Post Office workers pensions needing outside money. Who else? Must be some UK based hedge funds I guess but then I would be looking overseas. How about the Russian oligarchs, the oil rich Arab sheikdoms and the money that the Chinese have been putting out on the world markets instead of raising the standard of living of their own people. On top of that we would find the rich and famous both from the UK and overseas. Probably find we bailed out the Blairs and the Camerons.

Wouldn't it be nice to know?

Phil Woolas - What a Wowser

From Wikipedia - Wowser: The Australian writer C.J. Dennis defined it thus: 'Wowser: an ineffably pious person who mistakes this world for a penitentiary and himself for a warder'.

So what is going through the mind of Immigration Minister Phil Woolas? He says that in a worse case it would mean 100,000 immigrants coming in if he allowed ex-Gurkha servicemen to settle in the UK. I just saw him on TV saying that if he allowed in the Gurkhas it would open the door to other groups to go get a court ruling. Are there other groups that the UK owes as much to as the Gurkhas? If so we should let them in also.

Woolas shows all the worst in New Labour. He's the man behind the counter at the dole office, the petty bureaucrats that run our health service, and all those well paid administration jobs that Blair and Brown have created. What they can't see that everyone else in the country can, is they are shooting themselves in the foot every time they open their mouths. The tabloids couldn't have made it up. We have a wheelchair bound, VC wearing, Gurkha next to Joanna Lumley protesting outside parliament.

You wouldn't mind as much if it was just one New Labour groupie, but like the Mandelson Post Office statements, Gordon Brown jumps right behind with support. Brown must go and better before the election than after.

Mandelson Flexes His Muscles

It didn't take long. The doctor of spin is back. This week he tells us that there is no turning back on New Labour policies. At the same time his name comes up in dealing with Russian billionaires, he tells us first that we must move forward with privatizing the Post Office and that the economic crisis is not the fault of market forces but of regulation. You can read this on the BBC website and here's a quote from that article.

"I don't believe what has happened is market failure in the financial sector. I believe it is a regulatory failure."

It might sound good but it doesn't bare much inspection. If the Thatcher/Reagan economics that New Labour followed was the reduction of government interference in the economy and allowing market to regulate itself, then the statement is obviously flawed. If you remove regulation to leave it to the markets and there's a failure, how can you blame regulations that don't exist.

In the end if you believe in a mixed economy, which I suspect most of us do, then it's time the mix was moved away from what are now discredited policies, and that does mean those that New Labour and Thatcher before them pushed.

The grass roots of the Labour Party need to revolt against the leadership in bringing back this man and maybe the best way would be to replace the House of Lords with an elected chamber as New Labour promised.

Blair Groupies Now Like Gordon

Yesterday I posted that Mandelson coming back into the cabinet must have meant that the ultra-Blairites had cut a deal with Brown. To add strength to that supposition we have one of the Blairites, George Howarth, on the BBC's website saying that he no longer wants a leadership election. Are there really no Labour MPs that will at least put up a fight, even if just over fear of losing their seats?

He's done more for homophobia than Sol Campbell

Well this was unexpected. Probably the most disliked man in any of the previous Blair cabinets shows up once again. I guess it explains why Brown was given an easy time by the Blair groupies at the Labour Party Conference. He's cut a deal to let some of them back into power. No matter what personality clashes there were, it wasn't hard politically as Brown invented the New Labour idea. I see the other Miliband, Ed, also gets promoted.

Any more thoughts of Gordon Brown turning back to old Labour ideals must be now forgotten. It will be unlikely that any real change will be made in the party until he leads them to a terrible defeat, which he is on course to.

A Short Sunday Walk

The weekends I can get quicker access to the klong by going through the school playground. I don't like doing this in the week as I'm sure the teachers have enough problems keeping the kids attention. I had to make a delivery this morning and wasn't going to take a walk but changed my mind and took a short 45 minute break.

There is a large footbridge by the school's back entrance and I crossed the klong there and turned right. The photo above shows the view south from the footbridge. I walked through the community on the left bank to the road bridge you can just make out in the distance. From there I came back down through the housing estate roads. I took this picture a couple of weeks ago. If I took it today you would see almost every house had there washing out to dry. Sundays must be washing days I guess.

Today's thought is Peter Mandelson, not a very pleasant one either. I have the 2001 Herbert Morrison biography by Donoughue and Jones with Mandelson's forward. He tries to link himself, Blair and New Labour with his grandfather Morrison. Yes, Morrison was on the right of the party but he still thought of himself as a socialist. He had a very working class upbringing and really not much in common with the Mandelsons and Blairs.

If you want to compare Morrison with a present politician look no further than Ken Livingstone. Both have the ability to organize, administer and delegate. Both have had the chance to run London. It is a shame that Ken never had a cabinet job, but lucky for London.