Tagged with Blairites

Intense relaxation: John McTernan and the freedom to not pay tax

Businessman pocketing cash - Image Copyright: <a href="http://www.123rf.com/profile_zestmarina">zestmarina / 123RF Stock Photo</a>Peter Mandelson famously declared himself “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich, as long as they pay their taxes”. His successors now appear intensely relaxed about the wealthy not paying their taxes at all. Senior Blairite John McTernan has responded to last weekend’s Panama Papers revelations by reassuring Telegraph readers that “tax avoidance is an expression of basic British freedoms.”

It also appears to be an expression of the basic Russian oligarch freedom to transfer huge kickbacks out of their country, and the inalienable right of dodgy Middle East politicians to set up shell companies in jurisdictions with banking regulations so light touch that they would make Gordon Brown blush, but let that pass.  Continue reading →

What’s love got to do with it? A brief rejoinder to Peter Hyman

Whats-Love-Got-to-Do-With-ItThe Labour right and the Labour left never was one of the great romances. Ever since the couple plighted their troths on 15 February 1906, theirs has always been the very exemplar of loveless marriage.

Little wonder that both partners have been guilty of flirtation – and sometimes adulterous couplings – at repeated intervals, for more than a century.

The right walked out to shack up with the Tories in 1931, and decided to live on its own in 1981, when I guess it ‘needed some space’, as the saying goes. More recently, it has repeatedly been hitting on the Lib Dems. Continue reading →

Chuka Umunna’s partial olive branch

olive branchIn his speech yesterday Chuka Umunna appeared to be offering from the Blairite faction of the PLP an olive branch of reconciliation. If this is the correct interpretation, it is a useful and welcome one, although he made it conditional on Jeremy Corbyn showing flexibility on EU, NATO, Trident renewal, and tax (unspecified). I don’t remember Blair, when he won the leadership in 1994, offering flexibility on policy in order to gain support from potential front-bench members of the PLP, having won. My memory is that, come 1997 in particular, we were all told to knuckle down and loyalty was the order of the day. But let that pass. The key point is that he emphasises solidarity and agrees, what is obviously true, that the vast majority of the hundreds of thousands who have joined Labour in recent weeks are not entryists, but have done so because they are animated by Labour values. Continue reading →

Blairites still don’t understand public ownership

railwaysSo the latest Blairite plan to derail the Jeremy Corbyn steamroller is to try to label him as rewriting Clause IV when it is perfectly clear that what he is really trying to do, rightly, is to re-start the debate about public ownership which is now so badly needed. Thatcher’s dominant ideology was ‘let the markets run the whole show and the State get out of the way’. That was the route to the efficient allocation of capital underpinning a strong economy, offering big rewards for innovators and entrepreneurs and a trickle-down of prosperity for all. Blair if anything took it even further with privatisation of public services and regulation-lite hands-off the City of London. So was it a phenomenal success? Unrestrained free-market capitalism led directly to the biggest financial crash for a century, the banks massively abused the power of de-regulation as we keep seeing day after day in the papers, and the privatisation of energy, water, rail and the Royal Mail have even Tories demanding the restoration of public ownership. And even that’s without the scandals of behemoths like G4S, Serco, A4E, Atos, and Capita. Continue reading →

The Blairites would prefer to bust the party rather than accept democratic choice

tumblr_nruxiw8EEa1u5f06vo1_1280The arrogance and intolerance of the Blairites is breathtaking. Faced with the prospect of a runaway victory for Jeremy Corbyn who has come from repudiated outsider to front-runner in scarcely more than a month, their sole response is to prepare a coup against Corbyn if he is elected leader under the section 47 procedure of the Labour Party rules. It is hard to exaggerate the folly and selfish indulgence of such a move.

For the party to spend 3 months in continuous debate and hundreds of hustings in accordance with the legitimacy of party democracy, and then have an insider palace coup seek to overturn it via back-rooms intrigue within the PLP would be utterly disreputable. It would split the PLP and likely also the Labour Party as a whole. Maybe that is what they want: if they cannot get their own way, they would prefer to bust the party rather than accept democratic choice. That has always been the way: the Right has always used the Party as a base for its own domination and access to government, while the Left has always remained loyal to the Party it seeks to represent. Continue reading →