Tagged with Chuka Umunna

Labour MPs put internal divisions on public display again

This article from the Hounslow Momentum website expresses a widespread alarm at the behaviour of the 50 Labour MPs who chose to make a very public display of Labour disunity. Being the website of a local group it discusses a local MP who chose to support the Chuka Umunna amendment. Similar points can and should be made about all the other MPs who chose to participate in this harmful exercise.

The anti-Corbyn camp told us for two years that electoral advance was impossible under Corbyn’s leadership. The majority of Labour MPs were so sure of it that the opened party divisions to full public view with a vote of no confidence against the leader which 75% of Labour MPs supported (including Ruth Cadbury and Seema Malhotra). And yet Labour rise in the polls was the biggest since 1945. Labour had experienced dramatic decline from the moment when Tony Blair became prime minister – the data is undeniable. It reached its lowest point of public support in the election of 2010 (led by Gordon Brown). Five years later Labour lifted itself marginally from a historic low point by just 2% (led by Ed Miliband) but clearly there was no sea change. Continue reading →

What Chuka Umunna’s amendment showed us

“We will scrap the Conservatives’ Brexit White Paper and replace it with fresh negotiating priorities that have a strong emphasis on retaining the benefits of the Single Market and the Customs Union – which are essential for maintaining industries, jobs and businesses in Britain. Labour will always put jobs and the economy first.” There you go, clear as day. Labour’s position from the 2017 manifesto on the Brexit negotiations. That nicely prefaces a look at Chuka Umunna’s rebel amendment on retaining single market membership that was put to the Commons yesterday.

I would like to make a basic distinction between the people who rebelled between the principled and the self-serving. 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 →

Chuka is wrong – Jeremy Corbyn can win over the electorate

chukaThis morning Chuka Umunna warned the Labour Party that “we’re running around stamping our feet, screaming at the electorate when ultimately what we need to do is meet people where they are at.” He went on to say that Jeremy Corbyn did not have “a politics that can win.”

The problem with this approach to politics is that not everybody is the same and so when you rely on polls and focus groups you tend to produce conflicting policies, such as Labour’s policy on immigration from the 2014 National Policy Forum report: on the one hand extolling the virtues of immigration, such as the net contribution that immigrants make to the economy and promising not to engage in a “rhetorical arms race” with UKIP, while on the other promising to to “bring it under control” by introducing a “cap on workers from outside of the EU” and prioritising “reducing illegal and low-skilled immigration.” Continue reading →

Don’t let Chuka take us back to not-so-New Labour

Chuka_at_Lambeth_College-2In less than 36 hours after Ed announced his resignation, Chuka Umunna launched his leadership bid. The news, for many on the left, hammers home just how disastrous Thursday’s defeat was. We had woken up on May 7 expecting a Prime Minister to take office in the coming days who genuinely bucked the trend. Miliband, unlike his counterparts, seemed to be in it for the right reasons. In stark contrast to the sinister motives lurking behind the sweaty-Eton-juice of Cameron’s forehead, he offered something honest. He wasn’t airbrushed, he didn’t pretend to support football teams he knew nothing about, and he provided a vision that tried to bring the Labour Party back to its roots. Continue reading →