After the cuts agenda

You can tell what the Tory focus groups are saying by watching the way the Tories behave. Right now, they are trying to close down the perception that the government has no ideas or purpose, other than the cuts. They know they have no agenda, once the cuts agenda is done.

This explains the flurry of rather pointless ideas announced in the last couple of weeks. Each one of them is half-baked and each one is accompanied with same the line, “Labour did nothing about this in 13 years”.

An example is Theresa May’s call for a consultation of Stop and Search, arguing that the policy tends to target young black males. This got widely reported and became a talking point on the media, even though it was completely shallow. This is not serious policy, just a suggestion that people have a chat about something. Yet every Tory politician took to the air to attack Labour for doing nothing for 13 years.

On health they talk of a £200 deposit for foreigners entering the country. Again, MPs took to the airwaves to claim that Labour did nothing for 13 years of government. There has been little response from Labour to this proposal, but Andy Burnham tells me that he can’t respond as he still doesn’t know the details. He doesn’t object to stopping abuse, but he does object to the idea that Labour had done nothing about the issue previously.

Time for state funding of political parties

When somebody wants to end a relationship, they don’t engage in a rational conversation, they engage in rudeness, spite, and provocation. The end of the end may be a rational discussion, but the beginning of the end nearly always starts with unpleasantness. The manner of Len McClusky’s conduct in recent times has been unacceptable. This is not clumsiness, ignorance or accident. It is downright rude, and he knows it.

When the Tories have attacked Labour’s union relationship in the past, it has had little effect. Voters know Labour is fearful of indulging the unions to much, and that the unions are benevolent to ordinary people. However, the recent Tory attacks are different. Cameron, at PMQs, was not attacking Len McClusky, he was attacking Ed Miliband. His allegation was that Miliband is not in control.

Trust will be the tst for Miliband at the general election

In 1997, Tony Blair won an election by occupying the traditional home ground of the Tories. In 2010, Gordon Brown fought off the Tories by creating a clear dividing line between us and them. Today, Ed Miliband’s strategy is less easy to define, but I contend that it involves avoiding debate with the Tories. This is not good. This can be extremely damaging.

Miliband said at conference 2012: “The Labour party lost trust on the economy. And under my leadership, we will regain that trust.” I don’t think he has increased trust in the Labour brand. In some ways it has been damaged since he made this speech.

Is Ed Miliband Too Intense?

There was an interesting piece in The New Statesman by Rowenna Davis, that examined the DWP report on Gordon Brown’s Future Jobs Fund, whereby young unemployed people were given a guaranteed 6 months work at minimum wage. Apparently this policy had a net benefit to society, for each young person enrolled, of £7,750.

The writer contacted Ed Miliband’s office to ask for a view from the leader’s staff, only to be told that, “it still does nothing for those people who are in work on benefits.”

I see Ed Miliband as a man who has a great conviction that there is something deeply wrong and unjust about the system. He desperately wants to find the answer, but can’t quite put his finger on it. It’s as if its there, but just out of reach. It’s good to have a leader who wants to make a real difference, rather than aspiring to coast through a term in office. However, he does sometimes look like he is chasing rainbows at the expense of doing the job.

How Cameron can beat Miliband in 2015

According to YouGov, David Cameron’s approval rating has shifted from -25 to -18 over the period of the recent tax avoidance story. This improvement flies in the face of the media view that Cameron would suffer the charge of hypocrisy for condemning Jimmy Carr, when so many Tory donors are guilty of the same.

It now seems that Cameron was in touch with the public mood. The media taunts on Cameron’s hypocrisy have served little other than to highlight the Prime Minister’s intervention, while swatting Ed Miliband into the shadows and out of public glare. The crackdown on tax avoidance is now a Tory issue to be grabbed, while Miliband has so far been uninspired on a territory that the public would expect to be owned by Labour.

Making Immigration Policy Tangible

A couple of years ago, following a spate of gang violence, I chaired a youth crime task force, where we strove to create workable ideas for providing employment and occupation to young white and black lads who were hanging about on the street corner, getting bored and getting into trouble. We found ourselves discussing the fact that east-end families used to go fruit picking in the summer, but the tradition seems to have been lost.

Did Cameron arrange the Cable Sting?

This is the dynamite question, the one that has the potential to bring down this government. Whose idea was it for The Telegraph to conduct a covert recording on Vince Cable in December 2012? Could it have been the Tory leadership? If this was demonstrated to be the case, then the Tories have deliberately destroyed the reputation of a Liberal Democrat colleague, and the coalition would immediately come to an end.

Honour and Shame in Tower Hamlets

We used to be proud of spreading our ideas around the world. Now we are confused about how we explain our identity to the people who have settled here.

The problem is that we need to understand their culture and identity, before we can explain to them our own. With 3,000 honour crime complaints to the police last year, maybe this is the issue that we’re failing to comprehend.

It would help to understand what happened in Tower Hamlets last year, when the Labour Party collapsed in on itself over the selection of Lutfur Rahman as candidate for Mayor.

It started out as a conversation about secularism, but we didn’t know it was about secularism, because in school we learn everything there is to know about Martin Luther King, but nothing about Martin Luther. We know about the rights of minorities, but not about the separation of church and state.

PMQs, 9th March 2011

Not the best PMQs since there was no clear winner, which is a bit surprising after the disastrous week the Tories have had. It was a perfectly respectable punch-up though.

The Real Ed Balls

During the leadership elections, Ed Balls was the only contender with the ability to engage Labour audiences emotionally. Early in the campaign, at the huge Fabian hustings, he attacked the Tories’ desire to end breakfast clubs by reminding us that for some of these kids, it will be the only square meal they’ll eat that day. The audience gave a gasp to this, and I thought they’d fallen in love with this guy, but the polls stayed stubbornly low.
No other candidate was able to remind us of why we became socialists. At another hustings, he told the story of some children who were so amazed by their new school that one looked up at him and said, “I never thought we’d be worth this much”. It was touching, and everyone was drawn in by him, but still the polls stayed stubbornly low.
I met him at some point, and found him to be a really nice, easy going guy. He seemed to be a people person, which is a major quality in a politician. But the low poll rating refused to budge. He wasn’t going to win.
Bill Clinton once said that if you want to run for President, the first thing you have to do is to get people to see you as President. It didn’t matter how much raw talent Ed Balls had, by this time, he was being seen as the loser. I started to hear people describe him as being the henchman of Gordon Brown. They associated him with division in Downing Street, and bad news in Tottenham.
At the time, I was on Oona King’s campaign as photographer and film maker but I was frustrated and felt like my ideas were being ignored, which was unfair, on reflection, as these campaigns tend to happen under the sheer chaos of pressure. But I wanted to help the underdog, Ed Balls, so I made contact and offered to make a film.

I was only peripheral on the Ed Balls campaign. It was a bit weird in that they had been together since the beginning, while I’d come along only once it was obvious he was losing. It was a tiny, close knit team, mostly very young. Ed once joked that he came in one day, to find the campaign office empty. When he asked why, he was told that school term had re-started. He was only half joking.
I didn’t much enjoy the leadership debates, because it was so woolly. Maybe I was unfair. If any of them had any good ideas then those would have been spent during the last government and as we know, that government had lost the election. So maybe I shouldn’t have had such high expectations. But still, it was woolly regardless.
But with Ed Balls, he’d always make you listen to him, because he had such conviction. A good politician doesn’t ask what you want him to stand for, he tells you what he stands for, and demands that you stand beside him. As far as Ed was concerned, it was a catastrophic mistake to end the fiscal stimulus.
A good politician doesn’t fear being vulnerable. When asked why is it that the last government’s policy was to end the fiscal stimulus, even though Ed was a part of that government, he simply said, “I lost the argument.” There was no shame and no bitterness. His conviction was not shaken. When asked to clarify, he simply said, “I lost the argument.”
I think what I got out of last year’s leaders campaigns, was to learn about myself. I felt as if photography was below me and that I should occupy some higher position on the campaign, but without experience of campaigns, I had no skills. I felt that I had ideas to offer, but it’s impossible to come into a campaign with ideas; there is no time to chew things over.
I decided I should go back to writing, which I’ve done. Also to accept that I know precious little about the actual business of politics, but that I’d like to learn. I think the whole experience made me more confident, while at the same time more humble.
The other thing I know from the Ed Balls campaign is that if, in time to come, there is another leadership election, then he should time it to be between terms. Those young, but committed campaigners would be needed again, but this time as managers.