Tag Archives: andy burnham

‘A Bed Every Night’ plan for rough sleepers SEEMS to be working – but is it really?

Andy Burnham: It’s been so long since he has appeared in a story of national interest that this image is from 2016.

This would be encouraging if it weren’t for the fact that the government’s ‘snapshot’ figures of rough sleeping have been proved false.

So Greater Manchester’s claim to have cut rough sleeping by 44 per cent in two years via its ‘A Bed Every Night’ scheme is questionable.

However: The figures available show fewer people sleeping rough as a result of the scheme – so it seems fair to say that, no matter what the UK Statistics Authority says is the true size of the rough sleeper population, the Greater Manchester model is doing at least some good.

Initially a crisis response to the ‘Beast from the East’ cold weather snap in November 2018, A Bed Every Night has developed as a co-commissioned service with investment from Greater Manchester’s devolved health and social care services, homelessness, and prison and probation services, and has supported 3,400 people since its introduction. The scheme also enables those accessing help and support to recover and move into longer-term accommodation and a life away from the streets – since November 2018, 1,250 people have done just that.

For those who have slept rough for a substantial period of time, Greater Manchester’s Housing First pilot works alongside A Bed Every Night to provide ongoing intensive support in a home of choice. Funded by £7.6m of public money, Housing First in the city-region has so far helped 84 people off the streets into their own homes and is set to run for a further two years.

The scheme seems reminiscent of the ‘Utah’ model that This Site has praised in the past: get people off the streets and support them back into a home of their own, and you relieve pressure on services like the police and NHS that would otherwise have to deal with them.

There is still that question of the real number of rough sleepers.

If that total is genuinely more than five times what the government has claimed, then ‘A Bed Every Night’ may have merely slowed the Tory-driven increase in homelessness.

But that’s better than nothing and suggests that Andy Burnham deserves the extra funding he is requesting. But will he get it?

Source: Mayor calls on Government to help fund A Bed Every Night as rough sleeping down 44% in two years – Greater Manchester Combined Authority

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Tory MP with links to private healthcare says ‘No health privatisation by stealth’. Liar!

Margot James responded to claims that the Conservatives were running down the health service in order to privatise it. The Question Time audience did not believe her and called her a liar.

No wonder the audience of the BBC’s Question Time became so furious at Margot James when she claimed the Conservatives fully support the National Health Service – she has historical links with private health companies.

Responding to a suggestion that the Conservatives are “ideologically underfunding the NHS so they can make the argument for privatisation,” Ms James – recently appointed as a Culture Minister, said, “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

Audience members retorted, “Liar!” Ms James, on the back foot, had to defend her claim: “No I am not a liar. I have spent time volunteering in the NHS over the last four or five years.” Doesn’t that mean the Tories have denied the service the money needed to employ trained staff?

“I am not a liar. I believe in the NHS and so does my government and we do put more money into it.” But not enough to cope with inflation and increased demand generated by the effect of punitive Conservative policies on UK citizens.

The question that sparked the row suggested that the NHS was “haemorrhaging” nurses, with one in 10 leaving the profession.

Audience member Rebecca Shirazi, a Labour Party council candidate and activist, had said: “What I don’t understand is that there’s so much public support to put more money into our NHS; to pay our nurses more; to support our nurses, and reinstall the bursary program. Because if you’re going to be a nurse, and you’re going to qualify earning less than £30,000 a year, but you ended up in so much debt with such high interest rates to pay, why would you do it? It doesn’t make any sense. And I wonder if the Conservative government that we have is ideologically… underfunding the NHS so they can then make the argument for privatisation.”

Here’s the moment:

Another audience member – herself an NHS nurse, said, “Nurses are leaving … because they can’t believe the conditions that they are working under.” She said: “We work with our hearts and our hands and our heads and we are not valued. We are losing money.” She added that she knew a nurse who was leaving the profession because she was earning £100 less than her 17-year-old son who has no qualifications and is an apprentice.

Panellist Dustin Lance Black said: “The nurses and the doctors are saying it’s so incredibly difficult and unbearable, the conditions they’ve been put under here. And let me tell you, you don’t want private medicine either. You don’t. What you need is a real investment in the infrastructure and an investment in the NHS… And that’s going to cost money.”

He added: “Who’s benefiting? It’s these corporations. It’s these businesses that are coming here and are reaping the rewards of all you beautiful healthy people. And I want an in-depth examination to make sure they’re paying their fair share for the rewards they’re reaping.”

Another audience member said attributing the loss of nurses to Brexit was “a cop-out.”

She added: “It’s due to a chronic lack of planning and foresight for our workforce… We have no nurses because we’ve taken away the bursary; we are not supporting people going into education; we are not planning for the future, making sure we’ve got GPs, doctors, nurses, physios. We are disregarding the NHS.”

Andy Burnham raised the issue of social care – responsibility for which was added to Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s brief in the Cabinet reshuffle of January 8. He said: “Social care staff are in an even worse position. They do 15-minute slots, they don’t get the travel time between the 15-minutes, so they don’t even get paid the National Minimum Wage.

“Social care in this country is utterly broken. I tried to fix it as Health Secretary, since then there’s just been point-scoring about it… It is time for social care fully to come within the public National Health Service… Older people have seen services utterly slashed and there has been profiteering on the backs of these vulnerable people.”

Ms James’s protestations ring hollow when one realises that she was listed in a dossier compiled by the Unite Union linking MPs who had voted for the Conservative Health and Social Care Act 2012 – which introduced private, profit-driven health companies into the NHS – with the same companies that would profit from the change.

Ms James was listed as having “co-founded public relations company, Shire Health Group. The company was sold to business partner Ogilvy & Mather for £4 million in 2004, with the Conservative MP Margot James appointed Head of European Healthcare for marketing parent WPP Group. She stood down from WPP in 2008. WPP are a marketing giant with a massive list of healthcare clients. One of their companies, Grey Healthcare Group, boasts having 14 of the top 15 pharmaceutical companies as their clients.”

Ms James responded to the report at the time of publication: “I resent this smear… I have no links to private healthcare. I have previously been a director of an NHS trust and did not take a salary, despite being entitled to one.”

But nobody had suggested she had a current link to private healthcare, and her decision not to take payment for working as a mental health manager for Parkside NHS Trust merely reinforces the implication that the NHS doesn’t get enough funding.

Here’s a quick reminder of some more of Ms James’s decisions in Parliament:

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Theresa May’s insulting payment offer shows her contempt for Manchester bomb victims

An explosion hit Manchester Arena at the end of a pop concert by US singer Ariana Grande in May 2017, killing 23 people – including children – and injuring a further 500 others. Among the dead was the single male attacker who detonated the home-made bomb.

Theresa May has delivered a slap in the face to the people of Manchester, showing once again that she is running a country that works only for the rich – and not for everyone as her lying propaganda claims.

After the Manchester Arena Bombing last May, she promised the city, “Whatever you need, it’s there.” Now she has gone back on that promise. It was a lie.

The total cost of the bombing to the public, for police, health and council services, came to £17 million but, in a letter to Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, Mrs May has offered to pay only £12 million.

She has told Mr Burnham that this is “reasonable”. The people of Manchester are likely to take a different view.

Mrs May’s decision shows her contempt for the city – especially when we consider the huge amounts of cash she has pulled from her Magic Money Tree for other purposes, while still claiming there is no money available for the rest of us:

The real reason Mrs May won’t stump up the cash seems obvious, although she’ll never admit it.

The people of Manchester aren’t rich Tory donors, and aren’t likely to prop up her government in return for a bung, like the DUP (for example). In other words:

There’s simply no profit in it for her.

Mayor Andy Burnham has slammed an offer from the Prime Minister to pay just £12m towards the £17m total bill arising from the Manchester Arena bombing.

The city believed the Government had promised to foot the entire £17m cost for policing, health and council services in the aftermath of May’s atrocity which claimed 22 lives and injured 512 others.

But now it has says it will pay only ‘reasonable costs’ of £12m.

Mr Burnham has slated the offer as ‘not good enough and we expect these costs to be paid in full’.

Last week Prime Minister Theresa May told Parliament ‘the majority’ of the cash originally promised would be paid but in a letter to Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham she has only vowed to pay ‘all reasonable costs’.

Mr Burnham declined to reveal the full contents of the letter but said it was ‘inconclusive’ and failed to give Manchester the backing it deserved.

He said he was told at the time ‘whatever you need, it’s there’, and added: “I think we can expect those words to be honoured.”

Source: Government will not pay Manchester the full £17m needed to cover Arena bomb costs – Manchester Evening News

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Corbyn appoints his shadow cabinet

John McDonnell, the new Shadow Chancellor.

John McDonnell, the new Shadow Chancellor.

Congratulations to John McDonnell, in particular, on his appointment as Shadow Chancellor.

Mr McDonnell is a close ally of Jeremy Corbyn and a man who is not afraid to stand up for his beliefs. Reports state that Angela Eagle could have been offered the job, but This Writer is glad that Mr McDonnell took it instead – even if it has led to gripes that nobody in the ‘top four’ jobs is a woman.

Instead, Ms Eagle has been named Shadow Business Secretary and Shadow First Secretary of State, meaning she will stand in for Mr Corbyn at Prime Minister’s Questions when David Cameron is away.

According to the BBC:

Defeated leadership rival Andy Burnham is shadow home secretary, while Hilary Benn remains shadow foreign secretary. Other confirmed appointments are:

  • Lucy Powell, who was Ed Miliband’s general election coordinator, will be shadow education secretary
  • Lewisham MP Heidi Alexander will take over from Mr Burnham as shadow health secretary
  • Lord Falconer, a former flat mate of ex-PM Tony Blair, will continue as shadow justice secretary
  • Seema Malhotra is shadow chief secretary to the Treasury
  • Diane Abbott is made shadow minister for international development
  • Shadow Northern Ireland secretary is Vernon Coaker
  • Rosie Winterton to continue as chief whip
  • Ian Murray to continue as shadow Scottish secretary.

This Writer – and no doubt readers of This Blog – will be particularly interested to see who is chosen as Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary.

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Brown’s speech – unintentionally in support of Corbyn?

Gordon Brown during his speech at the Royal Festival Hall in London. Image: John Stillwell/PA

Gordon Brown during his speech at the Royal Festival Hall in London. Image: John Stillwell/PA

At first, it seemed that Gorden Brown had agreed with Tony Blair for the first time in more than a decade – over the threat to neoliberal New Labour Blairites posed by Jeremy Corbyn.

Big deal.

Of course the other architect of New Labour was going to speak up against Jeremy Corbyn’s candidature to lead the Labour Party. Brown is almost as right-wing as Blair.

It doesn’t stop them both being on the wrong side of history.

The joy of Brown’s speech is that much of it was non-specific. He didn’t refer to any of the candidates by name, and advised that Labour must be “credible, radical, sustainable and electable to help people out of poverty, and that anger was not enough” (according to The Guardian).

Nobody would disagree with that, and Corbyn supporters would argue that the only candidate endorsed by such a statement was theirs; Burnham, Cooper and Kendall – by embracing the nonsense of austerity economics – will only make poverty worse while enriching those who already have enough.

The Guardian article continues: “In a clear reference to Corbyn, he said there was one camp whose own supporters even did not believe their candidate would win the next election” – but this is hardly a ringing endorsement of the others, whose policies (along with Brown’s own) have already lost not just one election but two.

“Brown said he was heartbroken and the party grieving after the general election defeat in May, but that it would be ‘even worse if we leave ourselves powerless to do anything about it’” – powerless as the party would be under a Burnham, a Cooper or a Kendall, whose policies would be so close to those of the Conservatives that the electorate would give up on any possibility of opposition and leave the Tories to it?

“Analysing some of the reasons people may have turned to Corbyn’s left-wing politics, he said people were feeling insecure about globalisation, which had left people ‘uncertain and unmoored’ and turned people to nationalism in countries from Greece to Scotland”. This was a clear miss. People aren’t insecure about globalisation; they know for a fact that it represents an attack on their wealth, security and well-being.

Globalisation helps the rich to get richer and pushes the poor down – the behaviour of the European Union over the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership tells us all we need to know about it.

Attacking Corbyn’s foreign policy, Brown said: “Don’t tell me that we can do much for the poor of the world if the alliances we favour most are with Hezbollah, Hamas, Chávez’s successor in Venezuela and Putin’s totalitarian Russia.”

This is a deliberate attempt at disinformation. Corbyn has not indicated agreement with the views of any of those people or organisations. Instead, Corbyn is far more likely to put forward policy agreeing with Brown’s claim that Labour should form progressive alliances, especially within Europe, against “illiberalism, totalitarianism, antisemitism, racism and the extremisms of prejudice”.

Brown’s claim that it is “not an abandonment of principles to seek power” and that Labour members should see their vote not as a protest but a “public duty and sacred trust” also chimes with the Corbyn campaign.

It is only Corbyn’s opponents who paint him and his policies as unelectable. The wider Labour Party clearly sees his policies as preferable by far to the watered-down Conservatism that people like Brown, Blair, and their supporters like Alastair Campbell, Simon Danczuk and John Mann have been peddling for the last 20 years.

Indeed, the idea that a Labour vote is a “public duty and sacred trust” merely highlights the growing belief among the Labour Party and the electorate at large that New Labour, and Labour under Ed Miliband, betrayed that trust, abandoning their sacred duty to the people in order to embrace the profanity that is neoliberalism.

“The best way of realising our high ideals is to show that we have an alternative in government that is credible, that is radical and is electable – is neither a pale imitation of what the Tories offer nor is it the route to being a party of permanent protest, rather than a party of government,” said Brown, not realising that he had just written off the chances of Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall in one sentence.

For those who do not understand: The three non-Corbyns don’t have any high ideals. Their alternative is not credible – otherwise Labour would not have lost the 2010 and 2015 elections. It is a pale imitation of the Conservatives and it has led Labour into the twilight of being a party of protest, rather than government.

Actually – are we sure Brown wasn’t supporting Corbyn? The Guardian continues: “People must vote not for the candidate they ‘like’ as they would on Facebook, but for the candidate who can make a difference, he added.” That’s resounding support for Corbyn.

In support of the policies Corbyn opposes, Brown quoted, among others, Gandhi asking: “Is what I am about to do going to help”, and Nelson Mandela saying the yardstick by which he would be measured was the ability to better the lives of all people. Against this, we need set only one of Brown’s policies: Employment and Support Allowance and its accompanying ‘work capability assessment’.

This single policy, begun by New Labour and continued by the Conservative/Liberal Democrat Coalition and now the Conservative Government, has led to more than 10,000 known deaths and possibly many tens of thousands that have been hidden from the public. Perhaps Mr Brown should be asking how that single policy was ever intended to help anybody in need.

In the end, Brown will probably be seen as having done more harm to the three stooges other candidates than to Jeremy Corbyn.

Brace yourself for a further surge in support – for the people’s candidate.

 

Guardian seems happy to carry on Corbyn-bashing. Why?

Look how hard-left he is! He's wearing a cap and speaking in the open air! But anti-Corbyn hysterics in the media are the one's who look silly.

Look how hard-left he is! He’s wearing a cap and speaking in the open air! But anti-Corbyn hysterics in the media are the ones who look silly.

Wasn’t The Guardian forced to analyse its own coverage, only a few days ago, amid complaints that it was overly critical of Labour leadership candidate Jeremy Corbyn?

The verdict was that some articles had taken an overly-‘anti’ tone – but they’re still coming. Today’s Observer (the Graun‘s Sunday sister) has three in a row.

Yvette Cooper: ‘You can be strong without being extreme’ begins with the tagline, “The Labour leadership candidate says she understands the frustration and anger of Corbyn supporters but warns against losing the wider electorate.”

It continues: “The wholly unexpected obstacle to Cooper’s ambition to be Labour’s first female leader is the hard-left Jeremy ‘Jez We Can’ Corbyn.”

So Jeremy Corbyn is “extreme”, is he? He’s “hard-left”? When was that decided?

Most rational thinkers in the UK now accept that Corbyn is absolutely not “extreme” or “hard-left”. He’s left-wing in the classical Labour mould, in line with most of Labour’s loyal membership. If labels like “extreme”, or “hard” are to be applied anywhere, they would more properly belong with fellow candidates Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and especially Liz Kendall, whose attitudes – in Labour terms – would be described most accurately as “hard-right“.

Here’s another article – no headline this time, just straight into the aggro: “With Labour fixated by Corbyn, the Tories have taken advantage of a feeble opposition. Here’s how they did it…”

The text itself makes no mention of Corbyn – he’s just a handy peg on which the sub-editors have hung a headline. The author, Daniel Boffey, accepts that Labour could not be at full strength while the future leader is unnamed and shadow cabinet members have no idea whether they are likely to remain in their posts.

Finally, we have Jeremy Corbyn suggests he would bring back Labour’s nationalising clause IV. Apparently we are supposed to think this is a bad thing but the text of the article betrays the headline once again.

“I think we should talk about what the objectives of the party are, whether that’s restoring clause IV as it was originally written or it’s a different one,” is what Corbyn actually said.

He’s telling the country that, as Labour leader, he would listen to the wishes of his supporters and work to give them what they want.

That’s better than Burnham, Cooper and Kendall rolled together – and much more than the likes of David Cameron, Boris Johnson or George Osborne would ever willingly provide (although we know that their offers aren’t worth the air used to speak them or the paper on which they are written).

This Blog is happy to support Jeremy Corbyn – if only for one simple reason:

He is the only Labour leadership candidate to have shown any support for the Early Day Motion calling for the Conservative Government to publish statistics on the deaths of Incapacity Benefit and Employment and Support Allowance claimants (EDM 285).

In fact, he co-sponsored it.

It was signed by 93 other MPs in the week or so between its creation and the day Parliament went into recess for the summer. I’ve been reminded that Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall cannot sign EDMs because they are members of the shadow cabinet and are barred from doing so. Why haven’t they spoken in favour of it, then? How many of their supporters have signed it?

What does that say about those other leadership candidates?

Does it not tell us that they are happy to collude with the Conservatives in keeping the casualties hidden?

And here’s another good question:

Why aren’t newspapers like The Guardian asking Burnham, Cooper and Kendall about that, rather than stirring up non-existent muck about Corbyn?

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Labour is a ‘headless chicken’ over tax credits

Open mouth, insert foot: Harriet Harman made her Tax Credits mistake on yesterday's (July 12) Sunday Politics TV show.

Open mouth, insert foot: Harriet Harman made her Tax Credits mistake on yesterday’s (July 12) Sunday Politics TV show.

Harriet Harman has softened her position on George Osborne’s ’emergency’ budget; while she still supports his tax credit cuts, she says she is “happy to be overruled” after a backlash from rank-and-file party members (including This Writer).

The statement follows another backlash against a local party official who wrote to others in an attempt to stop Constituency Labour Parties from giving their support to leadership candidate Jeremy Corbyn, who currently has the second-highest number of CLP nominations.

The person responsible for the latest attempt to rig the Labour leadership election (the first being the ridiculous ‘Tories for Corbyn’ campaign) – Luke Akehurst – was taken to task by fellow Labour members (including, again, This Writer) on Twitter. Pressed to explain his attitude, he referred us to a blog piece he wrote before the general election which appears to explain much that is wrong about the current attitude of some of Labour’s leading lights.

It’s all about ‘triangulation’, rather than ‘dividing lines’, Mr Akehurst reckons.

He writes: “It involves adopting for oneself some of the ideas of one’s political opponent (or apparent opponent). The logic behind it is that it both takes credit for the opponent’s ideas, and insulates the triangulator from attacks on that particular issue.”

In the words of the late – great – Tony Benn, Mr Akehurst is calling for Labour and its leaders to be ‘weathercocks’ (triangulators) rather than ‘signposts’ (adopting dividing lines against their main opposition). Mr Benn said some politicians are like signposts. They point in the direction they want to travel and say, “This is the way we must go!” And they are constant. Others are like weathercocks; they lick their fingers, find out which direction the political winds are blowing and follow.

Mr Benn would have been witheringly opposed to a weathercock like Luke Akehurst.

Triangulation leaves Labour without any principles of its own – the party ends up wasting time, chasing other people’s policies like (to stretch Mr Benn’s “weathercock” analogy) a headless chicken.

This brings us back to Harriet Harman. Instead of defending tax credits as a way of ensuring a certain standard of living and encouraging people to be good parents – the position of the Labour Party when it introduced tax credits a little over 10 years ago – she thought the wind was blowing in George Osborne’s direction and decided to let it blow her along with it. Big mistake.

Osborne’s tax credit raid will make working people and parents significantly poorer than they are now – and this is even after five years of being hammered by cut after Tory cut.

Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has said the rise in the minimum wage heralded by Osborne in his budget to offset his benefit cuts would raise £4 billion for families, while they would lose £12 billion in government help.

The freeze in working-age benefits, tax credits and local housing allowance will deprive 13 million households of £260 a year, on average.

And Harriet Harman supported it. That position does not correspond with Labour Party principles. It’s the position of a headless chicken.

Look at what has happened now: Harman has been forced to backtrack, with a spokesperson saying she had been “setting out an attitude that we are not going to oppose everything”. Headless chicken.

Sadly, Labour’s leadership candidates offered a mixed response. Liz Kendall fully supported Harriet Harman’s position – most probably because she is a closet Tory.

Andy Burnham’s spokesperson (!) said he did not support the tax credit cuts but added that he “will not offer blanket opposition and, where we agree with a government policy, we won’t oppose for the sake of it”. Headless chicken.

Yvette Cooper said she opposed the cuts because they would “hit working families, reduce work incentives and push more children into poverty”. On the fact of it, that’s good. However, she would be another extension of the New Labour disaster, which was all about ‘triangulation’, as Mr Akehurst’s article illustrates. Headless chicken.

The only ‘signpost’ among the lot of them – the only one with solid Labour principles – is Jeremy Corbyn. He said he was “not willing to vote for policies that will push more children into poverty” – and when he said it, he didn’t mean he might change his mind tomorrow, or whenever it becomes expedient. He means he is not willing to push more children into poverty – ever. Signpost.

We need more people like Jeremy Corbyn leading Labour – and fewer like Harriet Harman.

Follow me on Twitter: @MidWalesMike

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Frankie Boyle disparages Labour’s right-wing leader candidates – with uncomfortable facts

Frankie Boyle

There is a problem with criticising people for failing to say what they mean in a straightforward way. It arises when you do exactly the same thing.

Frankie Boyle’s critique of the Labour leader candidates in The Guardian is very amusing but falls prey to exactly this problem. He makes several good points, but they’re a long way down the page. Why? So people will lose interest and stop reading before they get to them? Let’s pull them out and give them a proper airing.

Political parties are meant to have guiding principles. Frankie mentions this way down in the fifth paragraph, after revealing: “We’re told that they are responding to the concerns of voters. Labour keeps saying: ‘We’re concerned about immigration because that’s what people say on the doorstep’,” which is guaranteed to stimulate yawns as we’ve all heard it many times before.

Labour did have guiding principles once. They were intended to improve prosperity for everybody in the UK by raising the people who did the work out of the poverty that the leisure class (the people who profit from unearned wealth) force them to endure. So Labour used to stand for cheap accommodation, cheap – but nutritious – food, affordable utilities (gas, electricity, water), nationalised healthcare, a living wage, good government – all the things that helped Jeremy Corbyn score so highly in Newsnight‘s televised hustings a few nights ago.

Ah, but Corbyn, despite being lauded as “one of the few decent politicians remaining in the Labour Party”, is talked down as a candidate who caused “the left of the party to get quite excited that it is still allowed to lose”. He’s saying all the right things, Frankie. People are connecting with him. Don’t write him off so blithely.

Can it really be easier to convert Tories than to reconnect with your own core support? Of course not, but Frankie hits on one of the largest elephants in Labour’s room. It’s just a shame he does it in his concluding paragraph. He reckons Burnham, Cooper and Kendall get their information on what voters want from what businesspeople say (they’re desperate to be pro-business without knowing what it means), polls (which Frankie rightly says can be misleading) and the media (which are, again, rightly labelled deliberately misleading). As a result, they end up campaigning on all the wrong issues and turn potential supporters away, rather than attracting them.

Why does being ‘pro-business’ have to mean being ‘anti-worker’? The three leading – actually they’re not leading anything at all in the eyes of the public; let’s call them ‘preferred’ – candidates seem determined to disappear up their own rear ends, trying to explain how they will support the kind of people who couldn’t care less about anything other than building their own wealth, even though this creates misery for the workers on whose efforts it is built. Frankie hits it on the head when he writes: “I’m reduced to imagining that ‘pro-business’ is simply a rhetorical code for ‘right-wing’, and that we are watching leadership contenders wonder aloud whether they are being right-wing enough.”

We end up with a leadership campaign aimed at a public who hate benefits, immigrants and shirkers. Benefits and shirkers are in fact the same issue, but Frankie is right to highlight it. Labour introduced the most punitive benefit-cancelling system in British history – Employment and Support Allowance – in 2008 and the party line is still to say that there’s nothing wrong with it in principle, even though its implementation has led to many thousands of deaths that the DWP has already admitted – and who knows how many that it is covering up (see Vox Political‘s many articles on the subject). The simple fact is that Labour is afraid of newspapers saying the party is soft on ‘shirker’ benefit claimants, and is instead forcing itself to persecute people who desperately need help, just to stay alive. That is a Tory Party attitude.

There is a very simple case to be made against austerity, but Labour doesn’t have the guts to make it. Jeremy Corbyn did.

Still, they must know that they are not going to win the next election. This is the most damning claim of all. A decade ago, the Conservative Party was finished, washed up; a joke. All Labour had to do was keep a steady hand on the tiller and the Nasty Party would have been banished to history.

But Labour couldn’t do that. It had been infiltrated by neoliberal might-as-well-be-Tories who pushed harmful policies including ESA and the failure to regulate the banks that eventually sucked the UK into the global financial crisis and allowed the Tories to create a myth that Labour had messed up the economy. If Labour is unlikely to win elections now, it is that party’s own fault for giving the Tories a chance – by being too much like the Tories themselves.

Now we have three ‘preferred’ leader candidates who want Labour to be different from the Conservative Party only in nuance.

Let’s vote for the one who wants Labour to be the Labour Party again.

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Labour leadership: Campaign for ‘None Of The Above’ box on the ballot paper looms

It seems likely that the only Labour leadership candidates to appear on the ballot paper for ordinary members will be Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall, depriving ordinary members of a socialist option.

Kendall might as well be a member of the Conservative Party and will turn Labour into a pale copy. Cooper and Burnham appear to be little better.

Creagh has too few supporters at the time of writing – as does Corbyn. The lack of support for his left-wing, anti-austerity option is a sad indication of the depths to which the Parliamentary Labour Party has fallen.

The Labour leadership candidates are engaged in a last-minute scramble for endorsements ahead of nominations opening later on Tuesday, although Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall already have enough supporters to get on the ballot.

The real issue now is what the grassroots Labour Party does about all this. Labour’s membership is now clearly far more left-wing than its MPs – as is the population in general, which supports the renationalisation of utilities, the removal of private companies from the National Health Service and the end of Iain Duncan Smith’s death penalty for people claiming incapacity benefits (all right, the last may be a slight exaggeration – but only a slight one).

The way the field looks at the moment, we could end up with a lame duck leader who will not command the support of the party in general – or the people of the UK.

Perhaps now is the time to demand a box on the ballot paper marked ‘None Of The Above’, for those of us who don’t believe in any of the candidates being pushed on us by the Parliamentary Party.

Contact interim leader Harriet Harman by emailing [email protected]

Source: Labour’s leadership race: nominations deadline looms | Politics | The Guardian

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Labour’s next leader must challenge Tories’ poisonous myths

Here’s Kevin Maguire, writing in the Daily Mirror:

Labour’s next leader will become trapped in a maze of Tory lies unless he or she challenges a string of poisonous myths.

I badgered Ed Miliband for years in this column to prove spending by the last Labour Government didn’t trigger the 2008 global financial collapse.

The national debt was a smaller proportion of GDP before the banking crisis than Labour had inherited from the Conservatives in 1997.

Failing to regulate the spivs and speculators was the catastrophic error, not reviving the NHS or putting money into workers’ pay packets.

Economists knew it, the Bank of England governor knew it and so too did David Cameron and George Osborne – but the Tory duo ­cynically pinned the blame for the crisis on Labour’s spending plans.

The problem is, of course, that many of the politicians who now claim to represent Labour values are quite happy to let this Tory lie go unchallenged.

Those of us who know the facts have been telling everybody we can for the last five years and more, but we simply don’t have the mass media clout needed to get the message across.

People like the right-wing Labour leadership candidates (everyone apart from Jeremy Corbyn) and Harriet Harman can’t be bothered to correct a ‘big lie’ that has been repeated so often that people now believe it automatically.

They’ve got their Parliamentary seats and pensions; they’re doing quite all right out of all this, thank you very much.

Maguire makes some more useful points, which are well worth repeating, if you have ignorant friends:

The whole welfare debate is skewed when we wrongly think £24 in every £100 of the social security budget is fiddled. In reality, it’s just 70p.

The Department of Work and Pensions pumps out these tales to justify deep cuts. The £1.2 billion a year benefit fraud is pennies next to a great tax robbery soaring to as high as £120 billion.

Yet the Treasury and HMRC prefer cosy private deals with wealthy dodgers while what crooked US socialite Leona Helmsley referred to as the “little people” are thrown to the hounds.

And how about this:

It isn’t just the economic debate that’s distorted by myths. Immigrants pay in more than they take off the system.

Only reactionaries and racists benefit when it’s thought 24% of the population are recent migrants when it’s 13%.

Standing up for decent values requires politicians to tell hard truths and never pander to prejudices.

That’s not going to happen in a Labour Party led by Burnham, Cooper, Creagh or Kendall, then.

Source: Labour’s next leader must learn from Ed Miliband’s mistakes and challenge Tories’ poisonous myths – Kevin Maguire – Mirror Online

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