Open Road

Friday Sep 26th 2008

Brown’s fantasy legislation

In what was a generally well received speech, Gordon Brown said he would legislate to end child poverty.

A wonderfully laudable objective.

Just one or two tiny little snags with the plan.  Sadly, after the welcome falls in child poverty in Labour’s first and second terms, it is now on the increase.  There is no money to meet the government’s target of halving child poverty by 2010, so where the hell are the resources going to come from to end it altogether?  Gordon Brown will not be PM in 2020 and may not survive much after next June.

Regrettably, this commitment therefore is a bit like legislating for better weather in the UK.  A lovely idea, but with no means of implementation.  In fact it is an attempt to draw a dividing line between Labour and the Tories in the run up to the next general election.  (The Tories use a similar tactic before general elections of legislating to toughen up the asylum rules – you galvanise your base and you try to expose the opposition in the year before an election.)

When Labour came to power in 1997, they really felt they could make a difference on this issue, and they did.  It is sad that all they can do now is use the issue for political purposes and have no real plan to be able to do it in practice.

Wednesday Sep 24th 2008

The calm before the next storm?

As the troops begin the long trudge back from Manchester, Labour Party supporters can take some comfort from the fact that their man put in a respectable performance at Conference yesterday. 

The clapometer speaks

During Gordon Brown’s speech at the Labour Party Conference he made much of the desire for a fair society which he claimed drove both him and the Labour movement.  (This incidentally is only one of the many elements of the speech that was open to the accusation of false antithesis.  Who is against fairness?).  The audience clapped with the enthusiasm of people who have been told that they are jolly good types, thank you very much.  But the volume they managed was as nothing compared to the fervour they managed whenever their leader threatened dire consequences for the City boys and financiers.  It seems that not that much has changed at the Labour party conference since Dennis Healey promised to squeeze the rich until the pips squeaked.  Class warfare still does the trick for the faithful, that’s for sure.

Politically it’s a good short-term plan to push the ideological divide in this way.  It might even give a bit of a bounce.  But given the patient years Blair invested in remaking the party, it’s a retrograde step that his successor will regret.

Wednesday Jul 30th 2008

Must Labour Lose?

“Must Labour lose?” It was a question posed after the party’s third successive election defeat in 1959, and is the opening gambit of David Miliband’s Comment piece in the Guardian today. 

Tuesday Jul 22nd 2008

A Slice of Politics

On Sunday, whilst Gordon Brown was completing his whirlwind tour of Middle Eastern rhetoric, at a supermarket somewhere in the Glasgow East constituency a smiling William Hague posed for a photograph. 

Having made the short trip from his Yorkshire constituency to campaign alongside his fellow conservatives, Hague stopped off at the local Tesco to take the chance to highlight the rise in food prices, in particular, the rise in cost of a loaf of bread.  Whilst the former Tory leader stood, trolley in one hand, Kingsmill in the other, smiling broadly to all, a visiting photographer thought he saw the chance to take the classic campaign picture - candidate engaging with locals.  Instead, what our intrepid photographer actually managed to take was an impromptu snapshot of the ‘David Cameron’s Conservatives’ party and Labour’s failure in tackling them.