Though Cowards Flinch

The #cashforcameron scandal offers easy picking for Labour at the moment, but it won’t last long. 

The Tories are already working hard to cast Labour’s union funding arrangements in an even worse light than its own, and a compliant media will ensure that, when the dust settles, it’s a score-draw, unless Miliband changes the game now.

 The Tories may have been found out on this occasion, but the political establishment as a whole will have been dragged down further into disrepute.  In the end, what started out as bad news for the Tories will be even worse news for Labour, as the Tories create the space for a fuller attack on the Labour-union link. 

Miliband and his team should now think strategically, not tactically. 

Calling for a public inquiry is tactical response-by-numbers; the public is sick of public inquiries which never seem to change anything. 

Instead, Miliband needs to act decisively, and announce that Labour plans to review its own funding processes, in a way which not only meets head-on any concerns over Labour’s policy-making probity but also – and more importantly – seeks to rejuvenate party political activity by devolving party funding to the the lowest possible party unit.

In so doing, Miliband will create clear water between Labour and the other parties on how and why it funds its politics -  avoiding the false choice between donations to pary HQ or state funding, both of which are no-nos with the public.  At the same time, Miliband has a golden opportunity to develop a genuinely more legitimate and equal relationship between Labour and the unions who fund it will be created.

Assiduous TCF readers will, of course, remember that I’ve been here before, but what I said back in 2010 is now even more relevant to Labour’s fortunes:

[W]e need to think radically, and soon, about how to generate additional membership/union income.

There are, I contend, two main ways in which we can increase revenue through the enhancement of party/movement democracy and a consequent increase in our activist/membership base.

Both are radical but logical steps in power devolution of the type all leadership candidates now say they espouse (though details are scant on how this will be acheived), and both will increase membership/union input substantially if they are implemented properly and in good faith.

First, the financial flows within the party need to be totally reversed.

All membership money and donations, barring a very small top slice for absolutely essential national administrative functions, should be distributed to CLPs (and possibly branch level in time) on a pro-rata basis according to membership numbers.

The CLPs, thus resourced, will then be open to ‘business plans’ from MPs/PPCs and from regional party structures/the NEC etc. which they can approve, ask to see amended, or reject as they see fit. Under your guidance, CLPs should have a mind to ensuring the smart, cost-effective campaigning you advocate. Initially, the task facing CLPs may seem overwhelming, and some central support from the top slice may be necessary.

In time, all parliamentary monies paid to MPs for running their constituency office should have automatic sequestration by CLPs and this should then be subject to the business planning process indicated above. Beyond this, MP salaries might also be taken down the same route (as would councillor allowances), with local decisions made on how much MPs are worth paying (of course, we would expect to see Labour MPs form their own union to negotiate collectively).

This devolution of power over the party’s resources will, in a fairly short space of time, create a major incentive for people to join the party, in the knowledge that they now have a local say over how the party’s resources are spent i.e. on what campaigns. In effect, local party members become Trustees of their own local party, with the MP and councillors (and other staff) acting as employees.

When back in government, Labour should also consider passing legislation which imposes the same ‘bottom-up’ funding model on all political parties with parliamentary representation in respect of all monies paid by government to parties e.g. Short monies. This funding pro-rata to membership, with memberships of the various parties then having real financial clout, will create a virtuous circle of local input-increased membership of parties-increased local input.

Second, and closely related to the first radical step, the NEC should commence work with trade unions to encourage them to disaffiliate from Labour nationally and to re-affiliate to local parties [and to take to conference a motion making this a Labour party rule].

Funding should be allocated to these local parties on the basis of satisfactory ‘business plans’ (an extension on the way in which unions already fund specific campaigns with MPs).

Again, this will enhance local input into decision making and increase party/union membership in time, creating scope for additional revenue into the party.

Clearly there will be a need to agree a transition plan which caters for the fulfilment of exisitong obligations to creditors and reassures them that this move towards localised funding arrangements will provide better guarantees of debt repayment because it creates both better revenue and better understanding within the membership of the party’s current financial obligations, leading to an enhanced willingness to contribute, fundraise and recruit.

Membership and union involvement needs to increase dramatically. This is the best way towards long term financial stability and further growth. Empowering the existing membership and union supporters is the way to do this.

These proposals are set out more fully here, and (in respect of legislation for all parties) here.

Maybe this time the Labour hierarchy will listen.

“Forget rising tax allowance. VAT hike, real terms cuts to tax credits, Child and Council Tax benefit mean poor getting poorer” tweets Owen Jones.

Owen is, I think, quite wrong.  The personal allowance is the last thing we should be forgetting.  This is the key to the Tories’ claim that this a fair budget, and it needs to be challenged for what it is.

The Labour leadership, and the Labour PR machine under its instruction, will almost certainly focus its fire on the lowering of the basic tax rate, and on the huge hit on pensioners’ tax allowances.  This is classic squeezed middle territory (remember that we’re talking second, not state, pensions here).

Meanwhile, the Tory party and its press will focus its narrative on the decision to raise the personal allowance to £9,205. 

As George Eaton identified this morning, the personal allowance hike may be bad policy but it’s great politics; the distributional effects may well be skewed to the upper earning centiles, but it’s easy to understand and  voters are already in favour of it.  In general, people are interested less in how the benefit might be distributed than in the idea that they might at least get some.

So while Labour is busy working out complicated ways to show how “average” hard working families and pensioners are hit (e.g. the claim that average families will end up £235 per year worse off), the Tories will be able to get on with their simple, effective message that it’s they who are the real party of the poor. It’s already happening, as this tweet indicates:

The Coalition Govt has now HALVED the income tax bill of a full-time employee on the minimum wage.

So what should Labour (and Owen) do differently?  

The answer is to tackle the personal allowance issue head on, with examples that people can readily understand. 

Here’s one I prepared earlier.

Take a single parent dad with two school age children, working full-time on just £12,000 per year (before deductions) as of April 2013, when the allowance announced today comes in. 

The new personal tax allowance from 2013-14 will be £,9,205.  This means that he’ll have (£12,000 – £9,205) £2,795 to pay tax on and a tax bill of (£2,795×20%) £559.

This compares with a tax bill for 2012-13, during which the personal allowance is £8,105 of  ((£12,000 – £8,105) x20%) £779.

So the tax saved is £779 – £559 – a not massive £220.

This isn’t the whole story, though.   To get a proper sense of how this family will fare, we need to take into account a) the three year freeze on child benefit effective from April 2011; b) the new freeze on working tax credit to which this family would be entitled.

Child benefit remains at £20.30 for the first child and £13.40 for the second (£33.70 total).  If you calculate what the benefit rate would have been if it had been inflation rated from 2011-14 (at, say, 5%, 5% and 3% per year as inflation drops), you find that child benefit that would have been totalled £1,995.5 in 2014 actually totals £1,752.40.  That’s a loss to the family of some £245 per year.

Then there’s the working tax credit freeze.  You can put the information into this handy government calculator, and you find that without inflation  rises in 2012 and 2013, the family ends up a further £29 out of pocket.

So for all Osborne’s fine words, a single parent family wioth two children surviving on £12,000 per year will be £274 per year worse off simply as a result of Osborne’s recent tax and benefit changes, and before any of the other factors like general cost of living increases, and VAT, are taken into account.

This is one angle in which we should be taking on the government when it talks about how it has lifted low earnersout of tax:  it’s smoke and mirrors.

But the other way – to make the personal allowance hike relative to the 50p tax reduction for high earners – may be more effective.

The maths are simple.  Someone who earns £1m per year will now pay £42, 500 less tax.  The personal allowance rise means someone on £12,000 will pay £220 less tax if you leave the previous freezes out of the equation. 

Someone earning a million earns 83 times as much as someone on £12,000, but will save 193 times as much in tax.  A simple measure of how regressive this is simple: 83/193 = the rich are being treated at least (193/83) 2.3 times better than the poor by today’s budget.

Of course, this is the dull maths, and someone in the Labour team will need to make the points a good deal more snappily than I can.  But the point remains that we shouldn’t just be letting the Tories get away with their lie that their personal allowance rise is doing anything at all for those on low incomes.

In a 2008 essay, I set out in some detail the policy implementation theory and empirical research to show that the then emerging Workfare programme would end up being entirely counterproductive:

[W]ith the ‘welfare reforms’ now proposed there’s a real risk that, given the additional bureaucracies inevitably involved, mechanisms will evolve that produce less flexibility, more ‘processing’ (i.e.  dehumanising) of clients. In the US at least front-line staff’s starting culture was one geared to just processing benefit claims with no great expectation of what might happen next; in the UK, the invasive New Public Management techniques of the last 25 years mean that front line staff in Job Centre Plus already start from a more a negative standpoint, just as inclined to ‘process’ but to do so with more of a mind to benefit withdrawal.

[T]here is a huge risk that the whole plus side of the reform – and at policy-making level increased personalized support is seen as a plus – will be ignored in favour of the downside; this will be about pushing people into (for them) counterproductive ‘work related activity’ in order to meet the newly introduced range of targets…..

At the time, the essay received some praise from the left, while on the Labour right it was largely dismissed it as pseudo-academic esoterics irrelevant to the main debate about how we needed to deal with the “welfare problem”.  Those same commentators now apparently have little to say about the abuses being heaped on the unemployed, the disabled the sick.

The Conservative regime has picked up from New Labour’s intellectual incoherence with glee, and my predictions about dehumanisation of welfare recipients have been fully borne out.  Under a Labour government, the consequences of advisor “flexbility” might have been seen as unfortunate and unintended, and in time processes might have been adapted to make them more humane.  Under the Conservative regime, there will be no such change of course. 

The current adverse public reaction to the regime’s “slave labour” excesses is to be welcomed, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves that it’s anything other than a temporary setback for the government.  Indeed, the signs are that the Coalition’s “job snob” narrative, while not currently effective, might well end up turning the current backlash to longer term advantage (this will be the subject of another blogpost). Once the backlash has faded from the headlines, the sanction rules will remain in place, as will the perverse-incentive contracts with A4E, Serco and the rest. 

The key problem is that we are focusing our resistance at the wrong point.

At the moment, the focus of attention is on those parts of the Workfare system which are wholly under the control of the private providers.  The private providers are an easy target it in the short term, but this ignores the fact that clients only arrive for abuse at their hands via Job Centre Plus advisers, who form part of a still largely unionised workforce.

This raises difficult questions for the unions, and in particular for PCS, the main union operating in this sector.

Why, we should be asking, are these unionised advisers apparently not telling young people that they don’t have to stick with work experience placements that they are not finding valuable?  Why are unionised advisers using their discretion to impose “Mandatory Work Activity” on a much larger group of people than was originally set out in the government’s own plans.  Why are unionised advisers not telling JSA claimaints that I have a right to refuse disclosure of their details to thirs parties, thus preventing their entry in the Work Programme, at which point unpaid work becomes mandatory.

Why, moreover is the only recent PCS press release concerned with Workfare, focused solely on the activities of A4E, rather than on the dehumanising tasks that his own members are being encouraged to carry out?

I am not seeking to blame individuals here. As I set out in my 2008 essay, the way in which job centre staff are now treating claimants is simply a reflection of the way in which they have been ground down by the forces of New Public Management, to the point that they see clamaints as part of their target, not as people.  The New Labour ideal that they might, in the culture and with the resources they are now expected to work, offer a MORE personalised service than before, is more ridiculous now than it was in 2008.

This is how I concluded my 2008 essay:

So how should the Left react to the ‘reforms’? I’ve already indicated some ways in which we might seek to ameliorate the situation, given that the bill WILL go through and the ’reforms’ will be implemented, however badly. In general, I think alongside the protest marches and the opposition in totality, we need to be thinking about the best way to deal with what is coming. To a large extent, I think the responsibility has to lies with the unions, especially the PCS, not just to protest, but to get their members thinking at an early stage where their priorities lie.

In practical terms this means looking at the ‘detailed guidance’ that comes out in due course, arguing long and hard over the drafts to make them fairer, working to ensure that the performance targets imposed reflect real people, not numbers on a claimant count, and working with their staff and all their unions supporters to enable them to stand up to managers driving their ‘performance, by empowering those staff to say ‘No, these people have a right to personalized and appropriate support – it says so in the guidance. It also of course means arguing and if need be striking hard for extra resources – staff, time, office space – to do the job properly.

This will not be easy, and it will take a huge effort not just from the PCS but the whole union movement and its support to make, what for some branches at least will be a step change from arguing the vital but narrow case for member conditions, to a scenario where members realize that their conditions and fairness to clients are inextricably intertwined, and that some form of ‘strategic alliance’ is needed to combat what is bad in the ‘reforms’ and to bring out what might be good if it’s given a proper chance.

Time has moved on, and the details of what can be done are clearer.  Yet I stand by the view that the only effective resistance to the demolition of this large part of the welfare state is through organised labour, in conjunction with the broader protest movement, in which union members come together, with the support of their leaders, to establish institutional legitimacy for their way of doing things – including respect for the people they are there to serve.  In time, this institutional legitimacy must compete openly for primacy with the rules imposed from without (and a signficant aspect of this later stage will be unionising the private provider workforces so that the “sites of resistance” can grow)

2012 is a lot worse than 2008, but the same basic rules apply: organisation, organisation, organisation.  I just hope Mark Serwotka and his PCS comrades takes note that public sector unions have two interrelated duties: to defend the interests of members, but also to defend public service.

Martine Aubry, a big player in Francois Hollande’s presidential campaign, gave a newspaper interview yesterday.  It marked a real step forward for the campaign, but I hope it will also embolden the British Labour party.

Central to the interview is Aubry’s attack on Sarkozy’s scapegoating strategy:

Avec son interview au Figaro Magazine, M. Sarkozy commence sa campagne de 2012 comme il a gouverné depuis 2007: en voulant désigner des boucs émissaires - les chômeurs, les étrangers, les homosexuels, les professeurs, la gauche…- qui seraient les responsables de tous les maux du pays. Une nouvelle fois, il cherche à diviser les Français au lieu de les rassembler.

[Trans:  With his interview in Le Figaro, Sarkozy begins his 2012 campaign as he has governed since 2007: by creating scapegoats - the unemployed, foreigners, gays, teachers, the left - whom he would have us believe are responsible for all that is wrong with the country.  Once again, he seeks to divide the French people instead of bringing them together].

Sarkozy’s interview in Le Figaro (a key rightwing newspaper) does indeed reflect a lurch for the dog whistle, as he tries to shore up his vote against Le Pen’s Front National, which may not yet be surging but certainly isn’t retreating as a threat to Sarkozy even making the second round (assuming Le Pen makes it onto the ballot paper with the 500 nominations she needs).  His suggestion that allowing immigrants from outside the EU to vote would result in “des cantines scolaires hallal” (Halal school canteens) all over France, for example, gives us a pretty good indication of the votes he’s pitching for.

The Sarkozy interview is also notable for the quite bizarre idea that if re-elected he might put vocational education (formation professionelle) policy to a full referendum, and when the interviewer then follows up with two questions about whether other matters would need a referendum, it feels as though he’s mocking Sarkozy.  It’s so odd a move that even the Daily Mail has noticed.

Sarkozy may be getting desperate already, so it can be argued that it’s all easy enough for the Hollande campaign team, and that they can well afford (and need) to court the leftwing vote even at the expense of the few that might go missing as a result of their approach.   Even so, it’s good to see  Aubry, on Hollande’s behalf, calling out Sarkozy so directly on his scapegoating strategy. 

From a British left perspective, there is inevitably a sense of regret that the Parliamentary Labour Party lacks the confidence, as yet, to speak out firmly on the right side of the argument.  As I said back in July:

If Labour keeps on trying to scare the shit out people on things like crime and immigration, as a way of getting Labour votes, it’s making a big mistake; it’s really just doing the Tories’ job for them*.

Hopefully, as Hollande maintains his lead and goes on to become President, Miliband and team will learn that constant rightwards triangulation is less effective as a route to electoral success than doing the right thing.

*George Monbiot made much the same point  last week, claiming that only he and Charlie Brooker had realised what was going on (perhaps he’s just not reading the right blogs):

Confronted with mass discontent, the once-progressive major parties, as Thomas Frank laments in his latest book Pity the Billionaire, triangulate and accommodate, hesitate and prevaricate, muzzled by what he calls “terminal niceness”. They fail to produce a coherent analysis of what has gone wrong and why, or to make an uncluttered case for social justice, redistribution and regulation. The conceptual stupidities of conservatism are matched by the strategic stupidities of liberalism.

When Cameron vetoed the ‘Merkozy treaty’ in early December, it meant that the deal could not be signed off as a variation to the Lisbon Treaty, and that any deal would need to be an intergovernmental treaty of the 26 participating countries.  As such, any deal is separate from the workings of the European Union.

This threw into doubt whether the 26 countries signing up to the Merkozy “non-EU” treaty could legitimately use the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) to police the deal and punish states which failed to abide by the proposed fiscal rules.  At the time, Cameron threatened legal action to stop the other 26 governments trying to use the ECJ in this way.

Unsurprisingly, now that he’s gained cheap political brownie points from using the veto, Cameron’s not bothered about pursuing this threat.  Diplomats are calling it a “heat of the moment” thing, and it’s being dropped as quietly as possible. 

This does, however, raise an intriguing possibility.

If the 26 member states now do go ahead uninterrupted and sign offtheir economically absurd pact, and include within it provision for ECJ ruling authority, it sets an important precedent for any set of European countries to come together, bash out a deal, and then call on the ECJ to do its thing.

Logically and legally, what could stop Francois Hollande, coming together with other like-minded European countries to sign a pact running entirely counter to the Merkozy pact, and asking the ECJ to be the binding arbiter on that too? 

After all, Hollande has already set out a clear manifesto promise around the need for a new ‘pact’.

Je proposerai à nos partenaires un pacte de responsabilité,de gouvernance et de croissance [growth] pour sortir de la crise et de la spirale d’austérité qui l’aggrave. Je renégocierai le traité européen issu de l’accord du 9 décembre 2011 en privilégiant la croissance et l’emploi, et en réorientant le rôle de la Banque centrale européenne dans cette direction. Je proposerai de créer des euro-obligations [Euro-bonds]. Je défendrai une association pleine et entière des parlements nationaux et européen à ces décisions. Cinquante ans après le traité de l’Élysée, je proposerai à notre partenaire l’élaboration d’ un nouveau traité franco-allemand.

Why would this new pact have any less legal weight than the one now being rushed through before Sarkozy is sent packing?

The  like-minded countries Hollande needs for such a scheme might include Spain, whose (rightwing) government is now calling for a ‘new realism’ about how to manage the economic crisis in light of its descent into economic chaos, and Greece,  fuming at Germany’s proposal to make its government subservient to an EU budget commissioner. 

It might, in 2015, also include Britain (or England/Wales/NI & Scotland) if Labour were minded to push for an entirely new approach to the European economy, something Ed Miliband at least hinted at in Davos this week (though clearly ideas on what to do are not yet formed).  If Labour has its wits about it, it should see jumping on the Hollande bandwagon, in a common drive to reorientate the EU towards the welfare of its people, as a very attractive proposition.

The alternative ‘Holliband’ pact might include shared commitments to investment in jobs, with targets for the reduction in unemployment levels, as a mirror to the stupid fiscal targets advocated by Merkozy, and call on the sanction of the ECJ for countries that failed to meet the employment and other needs of its citizens.

Clearly, two diametrically opposed  intergovernmental pacts, formed outside the EU but calling on the same EU institution for their operative legitimacy, would create a legal and institutional crisis at the heart of the EU that Cameron could never possibly have dreamed of when he stook his foot in his mouth in December, but that might well be better than simply allowing the current rightwingers in France and Germany to carry through their plans for the outlawing of  socialist econmics in Europe.

And what better payback for Cameron’s arrogant but wholly ignorant politicking with the EU than for him, in time, to see it used as the opening for a few Left front for a new Left ascent in Europe.

Guest post by John McDonnell MP

Yesterday, in a parliamentary debate on UK-India trade, I found myself in the somewhat unusual position of quoting Peter Mandelson approvingly.  Writing for the FT in advance of the major IPPR report on globalization (published today), Mandelson argues:

[L]iberalisation of trade and financial markets requires a careful parallel process of building domestic institutions and capabilities. It is not the absolute level of openness in the global market that matters for growth so much as the fact that it is governed by shared rules and sustainable practice.

I agree. 

Sadly, when it comes to the EU-India Free Trade Agreement (FTA), negotiations on which began when Mandelson was still EU Trade Commissioner, the reality falls a long way short of his aspiration. 

As a result, many millions of Indians stand to be driven towards poverty and hunger.

The sudden removal of import tariffs, especially on dairy and poultry products, and the consequent flood of imports from the EU, is likely to have a devastating effect on millions of marginal and landless farmers, who will suddenly find their markets swamped by produce – notably skimmed milk and poultry meat deemed unsuitable for the European market – which remains heavily subsidized through the European Common Agricultural Policy. 

The European Commission’s own Sustainability Impact Assessment calculates that the FTA may be of benefit “in the long run to those “who are able to participate in evolving supply chains“, but it acknowledges that  “integrating small farmers and producers into the supply chains is a daunting task which is only possible through domestic policy measures only.”  A subsequent Right-to-Food Impact Assessment, conducted in 2011 by NGOs, came to very worrying conclusions about the impact of the FTA on the Indian poor, some 27% of whom already live with chronic hunger.  

Similarly, if multi-brand retailing is suddenly and without safeguard opened up to EU retailers such as Carrefour, Metro and Tesco, 1.8 million jobs may be created, but at the cost of up to 5.7 million people working as street vendors.

In other words, Peter Mandelson’s condition for good globalisation – well-developed  “domestic institutions and capabilities” which allow the poor to engage on something like equal terms – has clearly not yet been met in the case of this EU-India FTA.

This is precisely why the European Parliament resolved, in December 2010, that the European Commission should carry out impact studies on human rights in addition to those on sustainable development.  To date, the Commission has completely failed to act on this resolution, even though the FTA is due to be agreed and ratified by member states during 2012.

The European Commission currently appears unwilling to listen to the views of its own Parliament, so it is up to the UK Parliament to ensure that the human right are not trampled on in the rush towards global trade. 

I reiterated this call for a full Human Rights Impact Assessment in parliament yesterday, in support of a broad range of EU and Indian civil society organisations (including Traidcraft), who are doing the same.

In his FT piece Peter Mandelson goes on to say:

Globalisation is a means, not an end. This way of seeing things challenges equally the political right and left. The anti-globalisers of the left have always underplayed or ignored what is good about the expanding reach of global markets by focusing on the (legitimate) grievances of the short-term losers. The right has too often shrugged off the negative social effects of global markets as unavoidable or even a price worth paying for the benefits of ‘liquidity’.

Mandelson’s analysis may be astute, but it skirts round the brutal reality – that these “short term losers” are hundreds of millions of men, women and children going hungry for want of a fair free trade policy, and for whom being a “short term loser” can be the difference between life and death.  These people are as much a part of the 99% as those now occupyingSt Paul’s.

Time is short.  I hope we can build a coalition for the defence of the Indian 99%.

John McDonnell is the Member of Parliament for Hayes & Harlington. You can read his full speech in the UK-India Trade debate here.  If you would like to help, please ask your MP to sign John’s Early Day Motion 2645, calling for a Human Rights Impact Assessment on the EU-India Free Trade Agreement.

(This article is cross-posted from Liberal Conspiracy, though we’ve got a slightly fuller version.)

I’ve written a review today of Peter Hain’s autobiography Outside In on the Left Foot Forward website (published yesterday), saying what a good read it was, and what an interesting person Hain is. I’ve also said that he is something of a conviction politician, which is good to see, and that clearly he was in it for changing the world, not careerism – which in spite of how you see his politics, or whether you agree with them, is noble at least.

On the 20th of January he was clearly delighted that Ken Livingstone was leading Boris in the opinion polls for the mayoral election. He said on twitter:

Great London/Ken poll wipes smile off smug Tory faces and caps off great week for Labour

In his book he did mention that in not supporting Ken for Mayor, Tony Blair’s New Labour control freakery was one example of the mistakes which led to Labour losing supporters (p.212).

But elsewhere (pp.159-60) he had this to say about Ken, which I love:

…I wanted to be effective, to be able to make a real difference. And that meant learning what not to do from Ken Livingstone … he seemed to go out of his way to make enemies, for instance on one occasion gratuitously insulting Labour MPs from northern England by falsely implying that they spent their evenings either drunk or in brothels.

Further in that chapter (p.185) he told the story of when Tony Blair asked him to be a whip in 1995, despite the fact  there was much “suspicion” about him.

Blair, according to Hain, explained:

how he would have wanted to bring Ken Livingstone in too, but that Ken’s behaviour had never permitted that. ‘I may not have liked everything you have said or written, Peter, but you have never been aggressive or personalised your criticisms like Ken has.’

Ken as a whip – imagine that. Rumour has it that Ken recently grassed on the Labour whip when back in the nineties they were encouraging MPs to claim a second-home allowance as supplementary to their wages.

If Ken’s behaviour had been better, he could have stopped that, theoretically.

Still, great intervention by Hain. It’s a great read.

I have decided to stand for a place on 184 member strong Labour’s National Policy Forum (NPF), and if I get the necessary endorsements from my and other Constituency Labour Parties (CLPs), I’ll be asking, nay, begging for your vote in May/June.

My election manifesto is simple enough: I would like to see the NPF abolished.   If elected to the NPF I will campaign for its end within a two year period.   I encourage other candidates to stand on the same manifesto.

I have previously set out my reasoning for the abolition of the NPF, and simply provide a somewhat abridged version here:

1.  Good intentions do not lead to effective policy making, or member involvement in policy making, and the party needs simply to accept that what we have now does not work for the vast majority of members, who feel alienated from the whole policy making process. Relatively few people in the labour movement understand the NPF, and probably even fewer trust it to deliver ‘effective policy’ (even this term is contestable).

2.  The party needs to accept that there are limits to the effectiveness of the kind of deliberative/semi-democratic NPF structure now in place, and Labour – if it really is to engage more members and non-members – needs to embrace the messy, but creative dynamics of contested power, scrutiny of and challenge to authority.

3.  First of all, the often lengthy NPF process is simply unsuited to the demands of modern government and opposition.  The public, through the media, demands on-the-spot policy responses from those at the top of  the national party hierarchy, and media statements about policy inevitably become that policy.  It is pointless to pretend that it can be otherwise.

4.   More fundamentally, the current NPF process lacks accountability. There is no-one within the process to whom ordinary members can go and ask about what happened to their or their branch’s policy submission, whether it was accepted, why it was rejected, and what’s going to happen now.

5.  Ultimately, the problem is that structure has been developed as a way of disguising power asymmetry in the party. To tackle this, we need the complete abolition of current process in favour of one which acknowledges that power is (and should) always contested and contestable, and which puts accountability of senior party people at the heart of the process, rather than allowing them to use a complex ‘deliberative’ NPF structure as shield.

6. We need to build accountability back into the process . The best way to do this, having abolished the NPF, is to invest both authority and accountability in the place where most members of the party see it invested anyway, and where they have a real and meaningful point of contact.

7.  This is the local MP (and MEPs), or the local PPC in places where there is no Labour MP.

8.  To replace the failed NPF we need to establish a process – indeed culture – whereby branches/CLPs/affiliate groups, and perhaps also individual members, can make legitimate policy demands of their MP/PPC, asking them to promote their policy proposals and ideas.

9.  The parameters for this process should not be set out from ‘on high’ as they are at the moment (with pre-defined policy areas), and the power to raise policy ideas/concerns should fit squarely with local parties. It should then be the job of the MP/PPC to feed these policy ideas directly towards the Parliamentary Party hierarchy (and European Labour Party) and to report back directly to local parties on what steps, with what level of success, they have taken.

10.   This whole process should be part of a wider configuration of the MP/prospective MP role, whereby s/he should become answerable to the local party.  Local MPs should start to see themselves as akin to the CEO of a charity, in which the members elect Trustees (in the form of CLP officers) to oversee theMP/CEO, and the MP/CEO presents, say, an annual business plan to the ‘trustees’ for approval of business expenditure) and regular monitoring. 

11.  Where policy matters are expressed in local terms by local parties, it should be up to the MP to extrapolate as need be to develop wider policy recommendations for submission to the Cabinet/NEC, in conjunction with other MPs as s/he feels necessary/useful.

12.   This will create a much more dynamic structure for the policy making process, with accountability back to members built in as part of an MP’s performance by which s/he is judged when it comes around to selection trigger points etc..

Frank Field MP, whom I do not like, has a 10 minute role motion in parliament on Tuesday 24th January:

That leave be given to bring in a Bill to require the Secretary of State to make provision for the system for social housing allocation to give priority of choice of social housing to those with an exemplary tenancy record; to place a duty on housing associations to inform potential tenants about conduct of existing tenants in neighbouring properties; and for connected purposes.

Logically, this means that local authorities and social housing providers would be required to keep behavioural league tables on all the people who rent their homes from them, so that the ‘exemplary’ ones can go to the top of the list. 

Of course, a 10 minute rule motion has little chance of making its way immediately to law, but Field is sowing the seeds for his weird surveillance state, where if you want to rent a home you’ll have to not just stay out of trouble, but conform to his idea of an ‘exemplary’ way of life.

Will we get extra points for going to church, I wonder?

Is there any reason to believe Ed Balls supports the Tory-led cuts agenda?

No. He said that he accepted the cuts, not agreed with them. He also said “I cannot make commitments now for three years’ time. I won’t do that. It wouldn’t be credible.”

So does Ed Balls have ideas to the contrary to the coalition government?

Yes. According to the Guardian, he said that “he was not abandoning his belief that the cuts programme was too deep, and he was willing to remain outside the political consensus on the relevance of Keynesian demand management.”

What does Ed Miliband think?

He told Andrew Marr this morning that: “If Labour was in power now we wouldn’t be making those changes. We wouldn’t be cutting as far and as fast as the government.”

He didn’t say they wouldn’t be making cuts at all, and that’s important.

What do both Ed’s really think about the public sector pay freeze?

Ed Miliband said this morning: “It’s a hard choice, but when you are faced with the choice between protecting jobs or saying the money should go into pay rises I think it’s right to protect jobs.”

This is an indication that if Labour were in power now, while they wouldn’t be cutting so hard and fast, they would effectively cut the pay of public sector workers. Owen Jones, at the Fabian conference yesterday, said that given the rate of inflation, a pay freeze effectively amounts to a cut. It is clear that this reality has Labour’s backing.

Is it political disaster?

Left wing voices from Owen Jones to Bob Crow have mentioned electoral and political disaster. This is because it looks as though Labour support the cuts agenda unreservedly – but what Ed Balls is really to blame for is talking about this in a kind of quasi-managerial way, rather than talking about this in a way that says the coalition government are making a set of irreversible mistakes.

Oddly, in an attempt to make the party’s economic message credible, they are allowing the press – from the right wingers to the left – to paint them as supportive of austerity measures that aren’t working.

So are Balls and Miliband being as bad as left wing critics are making out?

They are obviously playing the long game, which is fine, but they’ve come out looking confused. This could be the fault of the Guardian, under the political control of Patrick Wintour, who has been very tough on Labour of late.

But even judging by Ed Balls’ keynote at the Fabian conference yesterday (a watered down version of the previous day’s interview with the Guardian), he is trying to earn credibility by “accepting” a set of cuts that are not credible.

It’s true that he cannot yet promise to reverse every cut the coalition makes, but why has he not framed this in a discussion about how irreversibly damaging the government is being on the economy?