Work as if you live in the early days of a

Better Nation

Archive for category Westminster

Migration, redistribution and renewal

Jun 30

Posted by Guest Blog in Parties, Westminster | 2 Comments

Thanks to Peter Cranie for today’s guest post. Peter is the North West England Green Party’s lead candidate for the 2014 European election and is currently a candidate for leadership of the Green Party of England and Wales when Caroline Lucas MP steps down in September 2012.

In 1983 my father faced redundancy for the third time. A choice had to be made. Stay and face the likelihood of not working or go south for a job near London. Our family, like many others, migrated. In our case, it was from Bo’ness to High Wycombe, despite my protests at the time.

Even without direct barriers, migration is not an easy decision. You move away from family and friends. Your children are moved from their familiar school to one where they stand out as different. It is not a decision to take lightly, but it is one that is being forced on many families, in the UK and around the globe.

I currently work in Skelmersdale, a new town, which promised a better life to thousands from Liverpool. Our college musical to commemorate Skelmersdale’s 50th anniversary made members of the audience cry as the songs asked where the jobs and promise of a new life went. I live in Liverpool, a city that faced the wrath of Thatcher during the 1980s. Despite its defiance Liverpool has seen depopulation over the past few decades, as some of its brightest and best have left.

At a time when we want to build stronger communities, towns and cities, there is a need for government policies that redistribute wealth from the richest regions to the poorest on a much bigger scale. We need not just the affluent suburbia around London to do well, but the forgotten valleys of Wales and former industrial towns of the north to be at the heart of our goal to build a fairer and sustainable society.

I was one of the migrant gang at school, with Ishrat, Shirwan and Dudley. We need the voice of redistribution to also speak for those who take the difficult decision to uproot from their homes not just to escape war, persecution or environmental degradation, but also for economic reasons and develop a future together united by common social and environmental goals.

Ed Miliband has recently pushed the debate on migration into the spotlight. Unfortunately, he has chosen to use the kind of narrative which is being applauded by right-wing Tories, UKIP, and even the BNP. The Green Party must make the argument that while social, economic and environmental inequalities continue on a European and Global scale, immigration to Britain, one of the world’s richest countries is not just inevitable, it is a logical consequence of the way our global economy works.

At its 2011 autumn conference the Green Party of England and Wales voted to reiterate its support for a liberal immigration policy on the grounds that everyone is equal, whatever the colour of their passport. This was the overwhelming vote of the party conference and it shows that the Greens are not the party to change their tone to suit a small subset of voters in swing marginal seats.

We can’t shy away from this issue, and nor should we allow the bigger parties to use immigration to distract attention from other challenges, like the need to redistribute wealth. If elected as Green Party leader, I would want to strongly make the case to defend immigrants, and to bring the real migration debate into focus. I know from experience that a great deal of economic migration is down to necessity. The language used in our media, with talk of “floods” and “invasion” comes close at times to inciting hatred. We need voices in politics that will challenge and discredit this. It is only by facing up to the real challenges of addressing national, European and Global poverty and inequality that can “stop” immigration.

We are the party of redistribution. We will talk about taxation and we will make the case forcefully. Politics doesn’t need another party to fight over swing voters, but a brave and radical vision. That is what is on offer from the Greens.

Come on Dave, let’s haggle

Jun 14

Posted by James in Constitution, Defence, Holyrood, Westminster | 11 Comments

UK Minister Nick Harvey (why do so many coalition Ministers sound like posh shops?) floated the idea yesterday that a post-independence Scotland might tolerate handing over Faslane to the rump UK so they can continue their nefarious and implausibly expensive nuclear hobbies unhindered. The comparison was made to Guantanamo, America’s torture base on Cuba by disputed permanent lease.

It’s no wonder UK Ministers are considering it, too: the costs of decommissioning would be enormous (and UK Ministers want Scots to bear a proportion: thanks, but no), and as was reported earlier this year, there is no plausible English, Welsh or Northern Irish base for Trident and any post-Trident subs.

Pleasing as it is to see the coalition taking independence seriously, many Scots inside and outside the SNP think this sounds about perfect. We chuck Trident out and Westminster has nowhere to put it. An independent Scotland would be able to do what Scotland has never achieved within the Union: deliver a disarmed British Isles. And obviously that’s my preference too. What a great first contribution as an independent nation that would be.

That having been said, how daft is the exclave idea? They’re surprisingly common around the world. Some are exclaves within exclaves. The map above shows, amongst other things, an Indian exclave within a Pakistani exclave within an Indian exclave within Pakistan. It’d be like leaving Faslane within the UK, but keeping the mess-hall Scottish, except the kitchen, which’d also be part of the UK. Let’s not do that.

But if we did for some reason have to swallow this unpleasant idea, it’d also be a massive bargaining chip. What would it be worth to the rump UK to be able to keep its massive penis substitute afloat? As I found myself discussing with a Labour-supporting friend this morning, perhaps we could swap it for a bit of England or Wales? Berwick-upon-Tweed is a bit obvious, and besides they’ll probably join an independent Scotland of their own accord at some point anyway.

We agreed that some sun and sea might be nice, but that Blackpool was maybe not far enough south to get best value. Bournemouth might be an easier ask than Brighton, perhaps, although Brighton is as far as I know the only part of England to have been represented by an SNP Councillor. Perhaps they’d vote to join us: we wouldn’t want just to annex them, after all.

Given the multi-billion pound value of this theoretical swap, though, why not aim high? There are a fair few Cornish who would like to be independent: perhaps we could invite them to join an alternative union across the British Isles? Maybe the Welsh would feel happier partnering with us at that point too..

From Walthamstow to Westminster: why I want to lead the Green Party of England and Wales

Jun 12

Posted by Guest Blog in Parties, Westminster | 9 Comments

An exclusive guest post today from Natalie Bennett. Natalie has announced she is standing to be leader of the Green Party following Caroline Lucas’s decision not to restand in September. Her website is here: http://www.natalie4leader.org/

In the 2001 general election, having just moved to Walthamstow, east London, I went to the polling station to vote Green. I was surprised, and disappointed, to find that there wasn’t a Green Party candidate. The moment came back to me five years later, when I decided it was past time to make doing something about the state of the world a personal priority.

Joining the Green Party of England and Wales – helping it stand in places like Walthamstow – seemed the natural step, but if you’d told me then that six and a half years later I would be standing for the leadership of the party south of the border, I would certainly have thought you’d been looking at the carbon emissions graphs for too long.

Yet in a way the path from Walthamstow to here is clear enough when I look back.

I’ve been through some great highs with the Green Party, and some pretty tough lows – a high in 2006 in the central London borough of Camden when we won our first two councillors, and a low in 2010 when we lost two of by then three councillors to the general election Labour swing.

I’ve learnt a lot about the party, and politics, since 2006. As an activist, candidate, and now chair, of Camden Green Party, and as founding chair of Green Party Women, I’ve seen how much there is to do, and how difficult it can be to shape lots of enthusiastic volunteers and minimal financial and physical resources into a high-functioning whole.

I’ve become utterly convinced that a Green political approach is the only appropriate response to the current economic and ecological crisis. It’s so screamingly obvious that we can’t continue to treat the world as a combined mine/rubbish tip, and can’t keep discarding to a life of poverty and fear millions of people, whether they are trapped in low-wage jobs or on inadequate benefit payments.

Yet it’s also clear that the Green Party itself is at a critical point. We’ve made the huge leap to our first MP. We’re now identifiably the third party in London following the mayoral/Assembly elections.

But still, for many people up and down the country who might like to vote Green – and we know that when presented with our policies, unbranded, they’re the most popular with voters — there’s no sunflower logo on their ballot paper. And for many others, the Greens have yet to establish themselves sufficiently locally to look like a viable choice.

This needs to change. Fast.

We need to work to ensure that by the end of the decade everyone has at least one Green rep, an MEP. We can certainly treble our number of MEPS in 2014 as a starting point, covering six regions.

Over the next decade we can put at least one local councillor in every major town and city around the country and have a spread of serious Westminster target seats around the country.

To do that, we have to transform how our party works. The Green Party believes in localism; we have local parties, not branches, who decide their own activities and direction. Lots of good in that – just look at the dreadful results of centralised diktats from other parties, from Tony Blair’s pager MPs downwards.

But we’ve also in general interpreted that as leaving local parties to their own devices, to sink or swim. Some have powered on confidently – Brighton, Norwich, Lancaster, more recently Solihull – but many, without targeted, organised support, have not. Under a first-past-the-post electoral system, it is hard to get a real foothold.

Local parties need to work together as teams. Regions need to act as a coordinated unit. The national party needs to bring it all together into a supportive, coherent whole.

And we need to stand up proudly with the courage of our convictions. We have a model for an entirely different kind of economy and society that the public is crying out for, yet we haven’t done enough to develop it and to put it into ordinary language, in mass circulation news outlets.

On many policies – drugs, nuclear weapons and prostitution to name just three — we have what the Daily Mail would call shocking ideas. Yet these are ideas that the majority of the public actually back – and sometimes we’re not brave enough in proclaiming them.

Neither of those points is a criticism of Greens working hard up and down the country. We don’t need them to work even harder – that would hardly be possible. But we do need to work smarter, and in a more coordinated way. And we need to make sure we’re telling the public about what we’re doing, convincing them to vote for us, to support us, to join us.

Then we can ensure that everyone not only has the chance to vote Green, but the opportunity to contact an elected Green rep with their concerns, at every level of government. And we can move confidently on to be the third party in the country, then beyond. And in doing that we’ll not only elect more Greens, but start to pull the centre of political gravity in Britain back from the hyper-capitalist neoliberalism that’s nearly shredded our economy and society.

Changing gears but not drivers

Jun 2

Posted by Kirsty in Economy, Parties, Westminster | 5 Comments

The coalition’s got problems, but Tory government can still survive, albeit perhaps with a different, older head.

The end of this week sees George Osborne retreat on three high-profile sections of his 2012 Budget, with the cap on charity tax relief (previously blogged here) joining u-turns on the VAT status of pasties and static caravans.

To negate embarrassment, the Treasury made these announcements in the true tradition of choosing good days to bury bad news, with pasties and caravans being announced just prior to recess and thus avoiding any awkward parliamentary questions, and the charity tax cap, despite the promise of a summer consultation, being ditched just as Jeremy Hunt gave evidence to Leveson on Thursday.

According to the Financial Times, Osborne has sacrificed these measures in order to avoid the politicking: “Mr Osborne presented the retreats as a sensible piece of housekeeping – defusing awkward and relatively trivial political rows to allow him to focus on his role as the country’s economic helmsman: ‘Keeping Britain safe in the gathering storm.’”

Nonetheless, this embarrassing muddle does nothing to diffuse the growing perception that Cameron’s government are out of touch toffs. Denying the plebs the pleasures of sausage rolls and a week by the sea in a caravan. Not realising that those wealthy benefactors don’t just magically appear at the appeals of charities and arts organisations in need, but require cajoling.

Like a stopped clock, Nadine Dorries is, occasionally, right. Or she was at least once last month when she called Cameron and Osborne “two arrogant posh boys” with “no passion to understand the lives of others”. While Osborne is beset by Budget troubles, Cameron is increasingly suffused by the omnishambles generated by Leveson, from the arrest of his mates Rebekah and Andy, to having to defend Hunt.

It’s no surprise that recent elections to the 1922 Committee saw backbenchers like Priti Patel, Guto Bebb and Simon Kirby elected, all part of the 301 Group loyal to the leadership and less likely than the 1922 Committee old guard to criticise government policy. The lack of coincidence is reaffirmed by Nick Pritchard, who complained that Downing Street “should spend more time trying to fix the economy and less time trying to fix the 1922 elections” as he stood down as one of its secretaries.

So the wagons are circling, as we approach Westminster’s mid-term. The Tories’  hope is that current controversies become chip paper, the economy starts to recover and grow, and that those 301 Conservative MPs (hence the name of the faction) are elected in 2015 for a full Tory government.

Labour, of course, revel in each and every crisis plaguing the coalition, whether condemning the budget u-turns as a shambles, or forcing a vote on Jeremy Hunt. But whether these issues will lead to any electoral benefit to Labour is yet to be seen.

Despite shoring up the 1922 Committee with supporters, the Tories do have a streak for being ruthless when their leaders let them down. If Cameron and Osborne can’t get the coalition show back on the road, the knives will be drawn by their backbenchers.

Any obvious successors? Osborne is right that the focus has to be on steering the economy – the foremost issue in voters’ minds. -So it needs a good, calm pair of hands. Possibly someone already tried and tested, known by voters.

Despite claiming he has no ambition to lead his party for a second time, William Hague seems an obvious choice. A competent Foreign Secretary, with a Yorkshire accent and comprehensive schooling to boot, just to get rid of all those Tory toff jibes.

This week Hague and Miliband look like leaders, while Cameron looks like anything but. Hague is promising that military action on Syria is not being ruled out, and launching campaigns against sexual violence in war zones with Angelina Jolie. Meanwhile Ed Miliband is visiting troops in Afghanistan and calling for action to protect soldiers from abuse back home. Meanwhile 1 in 10 people apparently think David Cameron is an alien.

Hague now seems a lifetime away from his aborted leadership during Tony Blair’s heyday. Where once was naivety and bluster there is parliamentary oration and political instinct. He would be a far more difficult, heavy-weight opponent than Cameron for Miliband to take on at a General Election. I doubt a Conservative Party, led again by Hague, could be beaten.

Nobody wants to join Peter Bone, in his morbid fascination with who gets to run Britain should Cameron be killed, but I think his preference for that person to be Hague is telling. Should the present omnishambles not clear any time soon, Hague’s definitely the one to watch.

 

Hiring and Firing

May 24

Posted by Kirsty in Economy, Westminster | 5 Comments

To be denounced as “a socialist” by a venture capitalist and Tory donor certainly counts as a compliment by my reckoning.

Adrian Beecroft might not have noticed when he meant to insult Vince Cable, but given the recent electoral success of Francois Hollande in France, Elio du Rupo in Belgium and Alexis Tsipras in Greece it doesn’t seem the political trend as European economies continue to crumble is for voters to shelter in the austere arms of the right.

But it is a path the Westminster government seems intent to remain on. Described as the UK government’s “most important independent economic policy review so far” in The Telegraph, the Beecroft Report is a continuation of the coalition’s Red Tape Challenge – getting rid of all the regulations impeding the economy – moving this time to focus on employment law.

The coalition has already diminished workers’ rights, by increasing the qualifying period to two years before a worker is able to claim unfair dismissal. But in his 16 page report, Beecroft proposes a decidedly Dickensian way for us all to be in it together.

Unfair dismissal rights removed from employees and replaced by the employer’s right to no-fault dismissal, including complete immunity from unfair dismissal claims for small employers. Reducing the statutory redundancy consultation period from 90 to 30 days. Reducing rights for TUPE and collective redundancies. Introducing fees for tribunals and letting employers ignore their statutory liability in third party harassment cases. Excluding small businesses from the pension auto-enrolment. Not compelling employers that lose an equal pay case at tribunal to conduct an Equal Pay Audit. Allowing companies to choose to opt-out of flexible parental leave, right to request flexible working, and licensing for employing children.

As barrister David Renton dryly notes, “Imagine: if, by waving a magic wand, the Coalition could undo every employment law reform of the past 40 years.”

Beecroft’s assault is based on the premise that removing employment rights increases employment – an assumption even the Financial Times states is “unproven”.

But this is nothing new. A previous liberal-conservative coalition has tried this before.

In 2006, Australian PM John Howard enacted the Workplace Relations Amendment Act 2005. This legislation massively revised Australia’s industrial relations legislation, in an attempt to improve employment and economic performance through dispensing with unfair dismissal laws, reducing rights to strike through requiring workers to bargain for previously guaranteed conditions without collective representation, and significantly restricting trade union activity.

Studies into the impact of WorkChoices, the Orwellian name for these interventions, showed a climate was created “where some employers licensed to act with unilateral disdain”, with cuts in conditions without improvements in pay or conditions. More than a million Australians suffered a real pay cut due to changes in setting the minimum wage, hundreds of thousands lost annual leave, overtime and public holidays, and more than 3.5 million Australians lost protection from unfair dismissal.

But was it worth it? In the phraseology of the coalition, was it “a price worth paying”?

According to Dr Sarah Wright, decentralising wages had no impact on increasing labour productivity. Getting rid of unfair dismissal protection did not encourage employers to take on more staff, with employment growth decreasing from 3.9% in 1994 (when the protection was introduced) to 2.6% after the protection was abolished. Wages share declined from 56.2% of national income when Howard came to power in 1997 to 53.3% by 2008.

As Wright states: “The Government at the time argued that WorkChoices would create more jobs, lift wages and result in a stronger economy; WorkChoices had the opposite effect”.

Back in Britain, apparently the intervention of the Liberal Democrats will ensure Beecroft’s proposals are consigned to the filing cabinet where they’re storing all the rest of Steve Hilton’s nutty ideas.

But much like ignoring the elections of socialists elsewhere on the continent, the Tories might want to note, given WorkChoices was one of the major issues in the 2007 federal election campaign, just what happened to Howard’s government (and his parliamentary seat).

Workers’ rights should be universal. I suspect voters’ reactions to having them removed might be likewise.