The race for the Scottish Leadership livened up today as further trade union nominations were revealed and Ian Davidson emerged as a very strong contender for the deputy leadership. Ian Davidson has virtually cleaned up the trade union nominations, winning the backing of Unite, Unison, GMB, UCATT, CWU and ASLEF. With that level of support, […]
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The 1%, the 9% and the 90%: all you need to know in one graph
Oct 24th, 2011 by Jon Lansman.This is a chart, reproduced from here, showing percentage growth in income for three groups in the USA from 1979 to 2007. It says it all.
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OccupyLSX – and police ‘kettling’
Oct 17th, 2011 by Ann Pettifor.On Saturday, I spent a frustrating afternoon trying to honour a commitment to the organisers of the above demo, to address the crowd on the steps of St. Pauls’ Cathedral. Got there at about 2.45 p.m to find that all avenues into the square on Ludgate Hill in front of St. Pauls were blocked by […]
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Osborne: Speaking truth to wealth and power? Really?
Oct 6th, 2011 by Ann Pettifor.George Osborne was presumably aiming at himself and his friends when he vowed “to speak truth to power and wealth” at the Tory party conference this week, but dare he speak economic truth to the rest of us? On the narrowest of bases, he might still claim he spoke “truth” to the weak and powerless […]
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Changing the values of our economy
Oct 3rd, 2011 by Jon Lansman.In his leader’s speech last week, Ed Miliband talked about ‘changing the values of our economy.’ Some businesses have good values, he claimed, and others do not: we need to distinguish in our policy, in our regulation, between ‘producers‘ and ‘predators‘. Right-wing commentators have lambasted these comments from a predictable stand-point. David Osler also suggested […]
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Refounding Labour threatens local accountability
Sep 19th, 2011 by David Gardner.Rumour has it that the NEC is considering abandoning the Local Government Committee and handing over local policy formulation to an as yet undefined group of local officials to include the Labour group leader! A fig leaf of a local coordinating forum would take on the role of panel formulation, candidate selection supervision and election oversight. This […]
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Beware Liam Byrne’s policy review
Jul 12th, 2011 by Lucy Anderson.At the recent Labour Party National Policy Forum in Wrexham, much of the discussion focused on internal organisational issues and the ‘Refounding Labour’ consultation, and rightly so. But it is also vital that the Left focuses fully now on the detail of the policy developments now taking place, and particularly Liam Byrne’s ‘interim’ report on the […]
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Blue Labour? No thanks
Apr 24th, 2011 by Michael Meacher.Let us start with one point of agreement with Maurice Glasman’s Blue Labour. He is right to focus on regaining Labour’s lost working class vote rather than, as with the Blairites, preposterously concentrating on the tipping points of the swing marginals. Labour lost 5 million votes since 1997, 4 million of them in the 8 […]
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It’s PR in the Lords, not AV, that could save the skins of Lib Dem MPs
Apr 20th, 2011 by Jon Lansman.Political Scrapbook today reports that Lib Dem losers — Elwyn Watkins, two-time loser in Oldham East, and soon-to-lose leader of Sheffield Council, Paul Scriven — are to be given “ermine parachutes” in the House of Lords. Many more ermine parachutes could of course be available to Lib Dem MPs who lose their seats when the […]
