Tagged with 2015 general election

Labour’s timid education manifesto – and what it must include next time

Tristram Hunt 1Our education eystem has undergone a severe and vicious ideological assault since 2010 with teacher morale at all-time lows, a rise in child mental health issues due to over testing and a teacher recruitment crisis to name but a few. Never was there such an education Secretary that provoked such vitriol and contempt than Michael Gove. His successor, Nicky Morgan, is hardly winning any popularity contests either.

It really should have been easy fare for Labour with this on their side but instead they produced what could only be described as one of the blandest and most timid education manifestos they have ever written which sadly failed to get to grips with key educational issues. Our children are some of the most over tested children in the world, with tests starting as young as five, an age where in most countries they are enjoying a more holistic curriculum centred on social skills and learning through play. Continue reading →

The Left needs to unpack what “Electability” really means

Blair-ClintonThe candidacy of Jeremy Corbyn for the Labour Party leadership has stimulated the party’s old debate surrounding the Left and “electability”: supporters of the Islington North MP claim that elections are won by a clear and confident statement of one’s ideas, whilst opponents universally claim that elections are won, always and in any circumstance, by limitless and feral Right-wingery, which is referred to as occupying the “centre ground”.

The version of history used to support the latter claim is often selective and disingenuous: New Labour is portrayed as Labour’s first attempt at a “centre-ground” strategy, rather than a third attempt after two instances of abject failure under Neil Kinnock, the original “moderniser”. Forgotten, too, is the way in which Labour’s long-term demographic base and its reservoir of public good will were steady and disastrously eroded by the same Blairite/Brownite political machine that had successfully delivered the goods in 1997. Continue reading →

In the UK as in Greece do you stay with failed policies or change course?

Miliband Hope imageAlmost everyone, and that includes the IMF and the ECB, now admit that austerity has gone far too far and is now holding back growth. The only exception are the Germans, but even they are now losing ground. They were forced to concede the eurozone bailouts which they never agreed with, they were compelled to accept the foundations being laid for a eurozone banking union, and they lost out in the struggle to stymy Draghi’s ECB offer of €1 trillion of quantitative easing to kick-start the eurozone out of deflation. And following the Syriza victory in Greece the rigid German position – the primacy of cuts, sound budgets, lower borrowing, and structural reforms – is bringing to the surface serious splits within the eurozone with France, Italy and Spain quietly giving support to Tsipras, even if unwilling to pick a public fight with Merkel. Continue reading →

Labour’s Scottish bloodbath … And what needs to be done about it

Salmond and Sturgeon BLOODBATHAs an ex-Trot, I’ve got previous when it comes to looking at reality and laughing in its face. I’ve been running through those memories … hope that the far left might work together constructively … that a new workers’ party was a go-er … that the paper I used to sell was improving … in preparation for the much-trailed Ashcroft polls of select Scottish constituencies. And? Put it like this. I chuckled at the numbers his fieldwork has turned up because the alternative was sticking my head in the oven.

They are bad, really very bad. Of 14 Labour-held seats polled, the party is set to lose them all bar one to a SNP tsunami. We’re not talking marginals here either. Take West Dunbartonshire, which is typical of the Ashcroft sample. At the 2010 general election Labour’s Gemma Doyle romped home with 25,905 votes, or 61%. The SNP trailed far in second with just under 8,500 to their name. Fast forward to 2015 and it’s carnage. Continue reading →

Miliband and Murphy must apologise for ‘Better Together’

scottish-independenceIt is clearer this morning than it has ever been. Lord Ashworth’s polls leave us in no doubt that the threat to Labour from the SNP that has been forecast by other polls is very real. If Labour loses this election, it will have lost it primarily in Scotland. Douglas Alexander and Margaret Curran stand to lose their seats, and whilst this may be some justice for their failure to recognise the danger of cooperating with the Tories in Better Together, and to alert Ed Miliband to it, the Scottish people do not deserve the consequence which would be a Tory-led government. Continue reading →