Work as if you live in the early days of a

Better Nation

Archive for category Westminster

Higher education can’t be fixed at 19

May 30

Posted by James in Education, Holyrood, Westminster | 5 Comments

St AndrewsThe Scotsman’s front page declares “Tuition fee axe ‘still favouring the rich’“, a classic instance of the headline not being stood up by the story. To be fair, the headline online is the much more accurate “Scottish universities remain elitist“.

The supporting piece, by Sheila Riddell from Edinburgh University, argues that the proportion of working-class students at Scotland’s ancient universities has declined from 21% in 2003 to 19% now.

Attributing this change to the abolition of tuition fees, as the frothing front-page headline at least seeks to do, is evidentially problematic to say the least, given that rebranded tuition fees were scrapped in 2008, precisely halfway through that decade.

Simultaneously, and more compellingly, the Guardian reports on survey data from England which looked at precisely the most important group: 11-16 year-olds in state schools.

Amongst those who say they’re unlikely to go to university, 41% say they’re not bright enough (something which, it should be noted, never seems to deter the privately-educated and will certainly not be true for many in that group) but 57% cite the cost as the deterrent. The headline on this? The diametrically opposed “University fees biggest barrier to wider access, research finds“.

It is difficult to draw hard and fast conclusions from this data because there’s no control, no parallel Scotland which didn’t abolish tuition fees in 2008, no parallel England where the Lib Dems kept their promises (that one’s even harder to imagine).

Only 19% of students at the ancient universities are from working class backgrounds this year, sure, which is very poor: but what proportion would have been if every student had to pay £9000 per year?

Leaving aside my ideological preference for education to be based on academic merit rather than ability to pay, though, it still seems likely that tuition fees will be less off-putting to those for whom money is no object. It also remains the case that tuition is of course only one cost associated with higher education, which is why previous generations of students (notably including those Labour, Tory and Lib Dem politicians who introduced or hiked tuition fees) had the benefit of a system of grants, now largely gone. As Riddell notes, the SNP administration to its credit is also introducing (reintroducing?) funding in bursaries and loans of up to £7250 for students from poorer backgrounds from the autumn of this year. That will surely help.

However, the problems with unequal intake don’t start when school leavers are considering applying to university. The inequalities in our education system start right at the beginning, and are anchored in a secondary system divided between the private and the state-run. Means-tested grants, ending fees: these are good measures, but they are merely tinkering. Unless we start phasing out private schools (or otherwise bringing the state sector up to their standards), we will continue to see grossly unequal intakes to universities.

It’s not just idealism at work here: the current arrangement is also bad capitalism. The interests of business as well as society would be better served by the brightest making it to university, irrespective of their parents’ background. It’s not time for fees to come back and entrench the divide. It’s time for radical change to an educational system that continues to confirm entrenched privilege, generation after generation, through school, into university, and on throughout life.

Disclaimer: I went to a private school and to St Andrews (above) and am therefore part of the problem.

Labour’s timidity on pay

May 5

Posted by James in Economy, Parties, Westminster | 2 Comments

£1.26The week before their 29% triumph in the local elections down south, “Red Ed” set out a timid Blairite proposal on pay, perhaps with half an eye on UKIP’s bizarre idea that wage levels are entirely determined by the numbers of people arriving in Britain. His grand idea was this – if employers pay the living wage, they might get tax reliefs or lower business rates in return.

The living wage rates are assessed by Loughborough University’s Centre for Research in Social Policy, who calculate that “people need to earn £7.45 an hour to be able to pay for food, heating and clothes, as well as to participate in a minimum level of social activity“.

For those aged over 21 working outside London, a living wage at that rate represents a modest £1.26 an hour above the minimum wage. The other way of looking at this is that the minimum wage is insufficient to allow people to “pay for food, heating and clothes, as well as to participate in a minimum level of social activity“. Can that really be acceptable? Why have a minimum wage if it doesn’t allow people to lead a basic existence of that sort?

Miliband’s proposal would mean taxpayers further subsidising employers who aren’t prepared to pay this minimum, just like parts of the tax credit system did. Effectively, those employers would still be paying below the living wage but we’d be making up part of the difference. It’s an inadequate and pathetic response to a crisis in living standards.

Instead, government should just be setting the minimum wage at the living wage level, not fudging it like this or gently pressuring companies to do the right thing. Not only would it be a redistributive pay rise for the lowest-paid in society (and make the siren voices of the ‘kippers less appealing) but, as Darren Johnson points out here, it’d save taxpayers an estimated £2.2bn. It’s a decent test of a party that claims to be of the left, too: back this, or give up your claim.

The march of the ‘kippers as the revenge of Yes to AV

May 4

Posted by James in Democracy, Westminster | 4 Comments

Yum! Kippers!The Alternative Vote referendum in 2011 was one of the most cynical episodes in modern British politics – very few of its notional supporters much liked AV, almost all its opponents preferred First Past The Post for perceived selfish political advantage, and the minor point of representative principle which this change would have made was barely discussed.

The Tories in particular objected because they feared AV would make an outright majority permanently beyond them, and that they’d have to deal again with the Lib Dems in 2015 if they wanted to stay in office, a strange concern given how small an obstacle the yellows have proved to the Tories’ promotion of a hard-right economic agenda.

The logic of the Tory opposition also assumed that those people who still plan to vote Lib Dem (for reasons most people find hard to ascertain) would have given their second preference to Labour, and that Labour second preferences in Lib-Dem/Tory marginals would flow to Team Clegg despite their coalition record.

The first of these ideas is less plausible than the second, given that the residual Lib Dem voters are hardly the left of the 2010 cohort of Lib Dem voters. No matter. The partisan calculation in Tory Central Office was of a divided centre-left and a united (Tory) right. No more.

For all that the ‘kippers are undoubtedly correct to say that they will have led some to vote who would have abstained, and for all that some UKIP votes have come from non-Tory parties, the fact is that the march of Farage’s ragtag army disproportionately splits the vote on the right, and that most UKIP voters would be likely to have put the Tories second in 2015 had the AV vote passed. There’s no principled satisfaction here from seeing the Tory maths collapse, merely schadenfreude at the irony. Without UKIP voters’ second preferences, that second Cameron term now looks much less likely, despite the growing realisation that Ed Miliband will flounder in the heat of a proper election campaign. And Britain, with or without Scotland, will still have a grossly unrepresentative Parliament elected under rules that belong in the 19th century, not the 21st. Regrets? Surely the Prime Minister is starting to have a few.

Over your cities Green grass will grow

Apr 19

Posted by Dom in Activism, Democracy, Environment, Governance, Holyrood, Ideology, Parties, Society, Westminster | 1 Comment

The Labour party have looked about them, taken stock of the post-Blair wasteland and identified the enemy. which apparently is those well-known destroyers of democracy and oppressors of the common people in the Scottish Green Party.

At Scottish Labour Conference in Inverness this weekend there will be a fringe event entitled ‘Green Splinters’, staged with the express aim of finding out why some people have realised that they would rather vote Green instead of Labour.

Labour peer Lord Bassam, who I am told by Sooth Folk has a flatteringly obsessive distaste for the Greens, tweeted: ‘In Inverness to discuss countering the Green threat to progressive politics.’. It is hard to think of a more obtuse statement given the situation that many people in England find themselves in. I have no idea how much Lord Bassam knows about Scottish politics or the Scottish Green Party, but I would wager that it is significantly less than he thinks.

The Green vote is not a strictly socialist vote, and it is not an anti-Labour vote. The Green vote is a vote for people actually doing their jobs with competence and enthusiasm, and for an ability to bring new ideas into an intellectually moribund arena. Green politics is socialist in certain aspects, normatively seen it embodies the values and aims of social democracy, but it is marked above all by its ability and tendency to challenge institutions from a citizen-based democratic perspective.

Green politics in Germany is a case in point. The German Green Party as it now exists was born from a coalition of environmental and democratic organisations instrumental in the downfall of the German Democratic Republic, combined with the West German Green Party. After first breaking into German regional parliaments, in the late 1990s it provided crucial support to an SDP government looking to form a parliamentary majority.

In Sweden too the Greens have been able to pick up votes from the intellectual middle class and disillusioned former supporters of agrarian and socially liberal parties where those parties have drifted to the right. They often get a hard time from the officially socialist and social-democratic parties respectively, but for the maths to work it is actually in the interests of the red left to work with the Green left in order to form workable governments, rather than expend resources trying to exterminate them and claim 45 per cent of the vote and a lifetime in opposition.

Now the fact that this event is even taking place caused a squeal of delight amongst many in the SGP because it means that the Greens have gone from being a party nobody in politics cared about to one which is obviously threatening the hegemonies enjoyed by institutionalised Labour and unimaginative nationalism.

It would, however, be sad if the Labour party were to decide that keeping the Greens at bay were more important than trying to build workable alternative governments at Westminster and Holyrood.

There is also the crucial matter of Labour failing to embrace either electoral reform or the environment to any significant degree. And devolution, childcare reform, progressive taxation and urban planning. We need a future democracy which looks quite different from today, and all tomorrow’s parties should try to work together to make it happen. The Greens have the ideas and they need viable partners to make it happen.

We’d rather be friends than enemies, but if Labour want to be enemies they should consider the fact that it is a civil war they might well lose.

The War of the Roses

Apr 19

Posted by Natalie in Elections, Holyrood, Parties, Westminster | 3 Comments

hearts 2In 1999 I wrote a dissertation for my CSYS Modern Studies entitled: The Autonomy of The Scottish Labour Party. In conclusion, I realised that “or lack thereof” should have been included in the title.

It was, perhaps, the best thing I have ever written. It was certainly one of the best researched pieces I have ever produced. I spoke to both Dennis Canavan and the late, much missed, Alex Falconer MEP for some background.

They had, by 1999, both fallen foul of the Labour machine constructed and peopled by those acceptable to the UK leadership. Traditional Labour elected representatives, Alex and Dennis did not fit the mould of the shiny New Labour brand, and they resisted pressures to adapt. Alex Falconer was on the cusp of retirement, but Dennis Canavan had a point to prove, and a constituency which reacted to protect its own; electing him with an overwhelming majority as an independent. It was an early indication that traditional Labour would bite back. They may be sedated and lie dormant, but somewhere they are concealed.

I did invite opportunity for the establishment to contribute – on more than one occasion and through more than one media – but the then General Secretary Alex Rowley didn’t pay me the courtesy of a response.

What was apparent then, and is apposite now, is that there is a fight for control of the heart of the Labour Party. That fight is currently being waged on two fronts; in Westminster and in Holyrood for the heart of the Scottish Party and for the heart of the party as a whole.

This isn’t a new fight. The change of focus and ownership of the party started over twenty years ago. The Labour Party does not lose elections well. When it loses the party goes in to decline and becomes absorbed in a vacuum of policy ideas and ineffective introspection. History is strewn with examples of the folly of the Labour Party in the years following loss of power. They take a long time to regroup.

That Thatcherism prevailed almost unscathed during the Blair years is testament to how far the party had moved from its traditional stomping grounds on the left in order to appease and appeal to the moderate voters of middle England. That there is current debate about reform of the welfare state and the pernicious changes which the Tories have enacted and the Labour Party have no concrete alternative policy ideas shows just how unprepared for the next general election they are and how much traditional ideology has been sacrificed for electoral success.

Democracy demands strong opposition. It demands effective opposition. What we have at Holyrood and at Westminster is neither of those things. The Labour Party in opposition are devoid of ideas, bound up in useless rhetoric, and seemingly incapable of presenting an alternative ideology. Their opposition is a magic box of illusion, fairly transparent and centred on illuminating what the Scottish and UK Governments are doing wrong but without the honesty of giving the public something else to aspire to. In essence, practising opposition for opposition sake. The Labour Party is the biggest opposition in both parliaments, and they mirror each other exactly for lack of foresight and substance.

There are some great representatives within the amassed Labour ranks – some of the work Kezia Dugdale is doing on legal loan sharks for example proves this – but there are some there, it seems, merely to keep a seat warm without contributing much to debate or in helping to provide credible discourse.

Success is both a prize and a curse. Success breeds careerists like rabbits, allegedly. I don’t know much about rabbit reproduction but I know a boom in careerists when I see one, and the Labour Party have had plenty of them, and now, so have the SNP. Careerists, career politicians – or whatever you wish to call them – are not good for the heart of a party. Every party draws them when it looks like they’re about to get out of opposition. Careerists are not representative of any particular ideology but of Thatcherite self –aspiration. Talk to them and they could pretty much represent any political party which was successful.

Career politicians are – usually – university educated and go straight to work for political parties without any life experience. They are not particularly active at grassroots level, but have their eyes on the shiny prize of election to parliament. Not for them the traditional route through the ranks. We all know who these people are.

The Blair years attracted many careerists. Even the brothers Miliband don’t have sufficient real life experience to bring to the fore, and it shows. The amassed ranks of both the Labour Party and the Conservatives are packed with people who were selected through patronage and the Labour Party’s current ennui is evidence of the damage they cause. Traditional routes to government have been eroded and the forums for building real, effective policy removed. The policy vacuum is mirrored by their vacuum of real life experience.

Ed Miliband doesn’t have the support of the Labour Party. He was elected by the unions possibly hoping for a partial restatement of some Labour values eroded during the Blair years. However, I’d warrant that even they won’t be delighted with his lacklustre performance and inability to frame the debate within a Labour prism.

The parliamentary Labour Party and the membership did not vote for Ed, and that makes his hold on the leadership shaky. Furthermore, it doesn’t bode well for the regard they hold him in and if he doesn’t have this, he doesn’t have their respect.

The seams are creaking on Ed’s leadership. Even Tony Blair has taken time out from saving the Western world to stick the boot in. The leadership election and the previous Blair/Brown tensions have left carcasses and grudges strewn throughout the Labour Party. It remains to be seen if Ed can find the mettle to really unite them. Basing an opinion on current murmurs which are increasing in crescendo, I’d moot the answer is no. Ed Miliband will not win a general election for the Labour Party.

In the UK the Labour Party are ahead in the polls, but we have seen them lose a 20 lead to the Tories previously as an election looms and people concentrate on the issues at hand. Tories = Bad is not going to stack up as a manifesto. Iain Gray tried SNP = Bad at Holyrood in 2011, and look where that got him? From 2007-2011 the Scottish Labour Party completely failed to conjure their own narrative and in 2011 they were soundly punished for it. They were riding high at over 10 points in the opinion polls less than six months before the election too. Ed Miliband should take note.

And what of Scotland? I’d doubt even the staunchest Labour Party stalwart would express – privately – that they think Johann is doing a sterling job. They may like her, and think her capable, but she is not currently demonstrating that competence. She walks a very difficult line and her problems are compounded because she doesn’t appear to have the support of Labour MPs who seem very surly toward her having supremacy over them and over Scottish Labour policy. I have no idea if persistent rumours which abound about MPs not attending the Scottish Labour conference this weekend are true, but I would warrant there is no smoke without fire.

It seems that the attempt to really establish a policy making Scottish Labour Party – missing at the time of writing my dissertation – is not without its own detractors. SNP support in the polls is quite enough for Johann to be worried about, but the addition of low level, but constant and destabilising, sniping from Westminster can’t be helping.

Dennis Canavan was unusual in 1999 that – beast of a figure at Westminster he was – he wanted to represent his constituency Scottish Parliament. Who can forget the “pretendy wee parliament” and “parish council” remarks about the Scottish Parliament? It seems some of the Labour MPs haven’t changed their mind. Westminster is where they perceive the talent and power to be.

After 2011 there was much introspection and a leadership contest in Scotland. There was much harrumphing about getting back to basics, but where are the new policies which were meant to be developed as a result? All too often Johann Lamont announces the creation of new groups to consider new areas of policy, but where are the fruits of this?

The hastily constructed proposals yesterday on a Devo Plus model were rushed, and it showed. They were not the considered plans which the public have the right to expect. If you are going to announce new policy, plans, proposals or consultations, they should be able to stand up to rigorous scrutiny, not fall foul of less than 6 hours half-hearted considerations.

Until Johann Lamont can capture the heart of the Scottish party, she is not going to recapture any ground from the SNP. It has been almost two years since the 2011 elections. It must terrify proud Labour members that the leadership are failing to articulate any new ideas.

The Labour Party won’t be a credible force in either Scotland or the UK until they abandon opposition for the sake of opposition, quash their detractors and develop alternative policy. And Ed and Johann should never forget that no leader is indispensible; look at Margaret Thatcher.