Widespread Surprise As Union Leader Denounces Cuts

Any idea who this man is? Until today, I didn't either: but after hearing his name on the radio, I have subsequently found out quite a lot about Mr Len McLuskey, leader of the Unite union. For one thing, he's been a trade union activist for most of his career. He was also heavily involved in the British Airways strikes that occurred earlier this year. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, he's belligerently left-wing. Put these facts together and what have you got? A letter to the Guardian, that's what:

"Britain's students have certainly put the trade union movement on the spot. Their mass protests against the tuition fees increase have refreshed the political parts a hundred debates, conferences and resolutions could not reach.

We know the vast rise in tuition fees is only the down payment on the Con-Dem package of cuts, charges and job losses to make us pay for the bankers' crisis. The magnificent students' movement urgently needs to find a wider echo if the government is to be stopped.

The response of trade unions will now be critical. While it is easy to dismiss "general strike now" rhetoric from the usual quarters, we have to be preparing for battle. It is our responsibility not just to our members but to the wider society that we defend our welfare state and our industrial future against this unprecedented assault."

Preparing for battle? It would appear that McLuskey's advocating violence, as it were. Supposedly Ed should be shouting for Osborne's head on a stick at PMQs and prodding Camilla with a stick in order to get us out of this mess? Of course not: violence solves nothing, and has the unhelpful effect of alienating those who would otherwise side with you. But let's move on to the integral part of this letter...

"A key part must be a rejection of the need for cuts. "What do we want? Fewer cuts later on", is not a slogan to set the blood coursing.

So I hope Ed Miliband is going to continue his welcome course of drawing a line under Labour's Blairite past, in particular by leaving behind the devotion to City orthodoxy, which still finds its echo in some frontbench pronouncements that meet the coalition's cuts programme halfway at the least."

Right. I see. Dear Mr McLuskey, are you Arthur Scargill in disguise? Are you seriously suggesting that overthrowing the Government with widespread strikes will somehow make us more stable as a country? Even the Guardian's editorial thinks you've lost the plot. More to the point, Ed Miliband has subsequently come out and denounced your "overblown rhetoric" as "wrong and unhelpful". He might as well have said, "Stop trying to make me look bad, I'm trying to write a Policy Review here".

So, poor old McLuskey, in a desperate bid to influence the Labour Party's policy on cuts, has simply been left looking rather silly. Maybe he should go on strike until someone takes him seriously...

The Evening Stanners

Labour Leadership Contest...

JUST.

GOT.

INTERESTING.

Taken from that raging leftie machine of death... I mean, the Guardian :-)

Diane Abbott today became the first black person to contest the Labour leadership after a flurry of late nominations secured her place in the race alongside four other contenders.

The leftwing MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington will fight for the leadership alongside David Miliband, Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, who were already confirmed as contenders.

She is joined by Andy Burnham, who this morning notched up the last two nominations from Labour MPs he needed to reach the threshold of 33.

Abbott entered on the closing day for nominations with the support of just 11 MPs – 22 short of the threshold. Amid unease that the race would be made up exclusively of white, male, Oxbridge-educated candidates, support for Abbott soared in the final hours before today's 12.30pm deadline when her fellow leftwinger John McDonnell withdrew and key figures such as David Miliband revealed that they were nominating her.

Abbott's campaign had already received a big boost when Harriet Harman, the acting Labour leader, took the unusual step yesterday of nominating her to ensure a woman's name on the ballot paper. As acting party leader, Harman does not intend to cast a vote in the election.

Today, McDonnell revealed he was withdrawing from the contest because he could not secure enough nominations and wanted to ensure the presence of a woman on the ballot.

The MP for Hayes and Harlington, who chairs the Socialist Campaign group, which Abbott attends, made his announcement just three hours before the deadline.

Harman was rumoured to be lobbying party colleagues to lend their support to Abbott in the final hours before nominations closed, with the remaining MPs required reportedly signing her nominations during the final minutes, as prime minister's questions was under way at noon.

Balls had asked MPs who had yet to cast their vote to throw their weight behind Abbott, since he had already received 33 nominations.

Miliband, the shadow foreign secretary, made good on his promise last week to offer his nomination to any candidate if it might make the difference to them appearing on the ballot paper.

In a Twitter message, he said: "Gather John McDonnell pulled out. I'm going now to nominate Dianne [sic] myself. Encourage others to do the same."

Jim Murphy, the shadow Scottish secretary, revealed that David Miliband had lobbied in favour of Abbott. "Good that David Miliband spent morning on phone persuading MPs to nominate Diane Abbott," Murphy said on Twitter. "It worked and good for contest."

Two of the last people to nominate Abbott were Jack Straw and Phil Woolas. Woolas was asked to nominate her by David Miliband. Straw and Woolas were keen to get her on the ballot even though she has condemned the Labour policy on immigration they strongly supported.

Abbott said she would stand out from the other candidates because of her "very different view on immigration", her record of opposition to the Iraq war from the start and her determination to recapture the civil liberties agenda from the Tories.

"The important thing is to have the best possible debate and then to regroup and lead the battle to protect our communities against Tory cuts," she said.

Citing 23 years on the backbenches, Abbott said she knew the importance of taking party members seriously and reconnecting with the party's grassroots.

Abbott, a Cambridge graduate, said: "I have never been a policy wonk. My parents left school at 14 and emigrated here in the 1950s. I am a single mother and I have spent 23 years working at every level in this party."

Confirming the candidates, Harman said: "This will be the biggest and most widespread election of any political party or any organisation in this country. The contest will be open, engaging and energising. It will be a chance to invite supporters to join the party to have a vote."

McDonnell's decision to withdraw from the race means he has now twice been thwarted in his attempt to represent the left in a leadership debate. His attempt to challenge Gordon Brown in 2007 failed after he did not manage to secure the necessary number of nominations.

His latest campaign was marred by his joke earlier this week that he would like to have gone back in time and assassinated Margaret Thatcher, the former Tory prime minister.

Shadow environment secretary Hilary Benn, who backs Ed Miliband, denied the last-minute race to secure enough nominations for Abbott meant the contest had become a shambles.

"It's not a shambles at all," he told BBC Radio 4's The World At One. "It's going to be a good contest. There's going to be an open political debate because we are not just choosing a leader, we are determining the future of the party."


Abbott denied she was the beneficiary of positive discrimination. "Not at all," she told the BBC News Channel. "I have been an MP for 23 years and if, after 23 years, I haven't earned the right to stand for the leadership then nothing counts for anything."

Abbott said her senior colleagues had responded to the mood within the party for a contest with a greater diversity of candidates.

"This isn't an artificial thing," she said. "There is real support out there, both in the party and the public, for the broadest possible slate of candidates and for a proper debate about the future of the Labour party."

Abbott, who appeared on the BBC's late-night This Week politics show prior to throwing her hat in the ring, cited opinion polls which indicated that was the second most popular candidate among Labour voters and the top choice of the public at large.

"My support came from across the party and I believe in the contest I will get support from across the party also," she said.

The successor to Gordon Brown will be chosen by a complicated electoral college system in which three sections – MPs and MEPs; affiliated organisations including trade unions; and party members – each wield one third of the vote.

The postal ballot will be conducted over the summer, with the result announced on 25 September at a special conference ahead of the party's annual autumn gathering in Manchester.

Voters will rank candidates in numerical order of preference on ballot papers, with a "transferable eliminating" system used to redistribute votes until one contender has more than 50% support.

Labour is hoping that interest in the leadership contest will spark a surge in membership applications, with anyone joining the party before September 8 entitled to vote.

Exciting stuff, no? It's definitely a good day for democracy, because this leadership contest was in danger of becoming horrendously boring. As it is, we now have five people running instead of three, two of whom are relative unknowns, and one of whom (Abbott) is on the left of the party, voted against the Iraq War and is a backbencher. Burnham will also make things more interesting, whilst the performance of Ed Balls, David Miliband and Ed Miliband will show just how dead or alive New Labour is.

Also pleased that Harman backed Abbott. Another triumph for Women's Lib, perhaps?

The Evening Stanners

Broken Laws

Oh, dearie me. The coalition may well hold a new record for the quickest Cabinet resignation since the formation of a UK government known to man. Not even Ted Heath's government started this badly, though it has to be said that David Cameron did NOT get hit by rotten tomatoes.

So why is the Lib-Con coalition honeymoon "already over"? Well, as I'm sure you'll have read in the Guardian and other such outraged newspapers (ie all of 'em), David Laws (above), Chief Secretary to the Treasury, resigned yesterday. This is because he broke the expenses rules from 2006, when he claimed money that should have gone to the taxpayer.

About £40,000 to be precise.

Naturally, there's a bit of outrage about that: the Lib Dems did rather well after taking the moral high ground on the expenses scandal last year, so the Yeovil MP is not exactly in much of a position to argue.

The difficulty for Laws is that he was trying to protect people around him: because the money he claimed went to his landlord, and partner, James Lundie. Many of his close friends did not know about Laws' sexuality: hence why he claimed the money, in order to protect his reputation. Unfortunately, covering something up will only get you so far: in Laws' case, into the Cabinet for 18 days, before all hell broke loose.

It's hard not to feel sorry for Laws: one gets the feeling he's been hounded out a bit here. But rules are rules, and Laws would only have damaged his reputation further by trying to wriggle out of it. In any case, judging by the support from such right-wingers as Iain Duncan-Smith, he will probably be back at some point. But the lefties will want to see him repay the money, and plenty of penitence whilst he's at it: much like they wanted to see Tony Blair apologise for Iraq, or George Bush apologise for being a muppet.

So will the coalition fall apart? My guessing would be: not yet, lads. This was very much the media baying for blood, and the public mood is decidedly anti-media: newspapers are not cool, Twitter and Facebook more sort of are. So the likelihood is it will hold until at least next May, by which time we'll see how the new Labour man (or woman) is doing.

Definitely a shock to the system, though.

Clegg: Well, this is a bit bogus.

Bill: Shut up, Clegg!

The Evening Stanners

Recent Bereavement

Hello everyone,

Apologies for the blog being so light over the weekend: sadly my Grandmother, Elizabeth Grey, passed away yesterday morning after suffering a heart attack. I will be up in London for the funeral at some point in the future, but for now would like to thank all those I know who passed on their sympathies to me yesterday: it was greatly appreciated. The news did come as a slight shock, but she had a good innings and she went peacefully, and I am grateful for that.

I would also like to dedicate at least part of this blog to my grandmother, as a great deal of my time during the election campaign was spent in her company. She was exceptionally adept at discussing politics to the last, and a great deal of my knowledge about both past and present governments is largely thanks to her (especially about that "crook" Harold Wilson, and the politics of Northern Ireland). She also made a point of giving me far too much food in the mornings, but grandmothers do have a habit of spoiling their grandchildren, and mine was no exception.

Possibly one of the most amusing incidents during the election campaign was when I brought a copy of the Guardian into her house: my Gran is instinctively Conservative, and she was quite glad when I recycled the offending copy! That said, she never paid much attention to the newspapers: as long as she listened to Desert Island Discs on a Sunday, got the occasional tenner on the lottery, and lived under a strong (and preferably Conservative) Government, she was happy. She will have died safe in the knowledge that the Tories were in power: it's the way she would have wanted it.

R.I.P. Gran. "Hello, 0929?" won't sound quite the same on the phone now.

The Evening Stanners