Commons People - Politics - Mirror.co.uk

A few home truths on council house sales

2012-04-03T10:11:15Z

One of the more depressing moments during Ed Miliband's conference speech last year was when he endorsed Margaret Thatcher's right to buy scheme.
"Some of what happened in the 1980s was right. It was right to let people buy their council houses," he said.
Really? It could be argued that the selling of the council houses was one of the most disastrous policies of any government in the last 50 years.
Scandalously, the Thatcher government took the receipts of the sales and put them in the Treasury coffers where they were used to pay for tax cuts for the rich and fund the soaring welfare costs of having more than 3million unemployed.
None of the money went towards building new homes. The consequences of this were twofold.
Firstly, Britain has suffered a massive housing shortage, which drove up prices and fuelled a property boom. The consequences of this we still live with today. When David Cameron complains that the average age of a first time buyer is now 38, he forgets to mention that the main reason for this is the failure of successive governments to build enough homes.
The second legacy of council house sales has been appalling social disruption, particularly in rural areas. The lack of social housing has meant that many young people cannot afford to live and therefore work in the towns and villages there were brought up.
Where once they could have lived in cheap rented accommodation provided by the local authority, they are now obliged to move away from their friends and family, weakening the very fundamentals on which Mr Cameron wishes to build his big society.
It took a Labour housing minister John Healey, after 13 years of government, to secure the receipts from council sales for new builds. In fairness to Mr Cameron and the current housing minister Grant Shapps, they too are promising any money from council house sales will go towards development.
But this does not address the flaws at the heart of the policy, which fanned the stigma against rental accommodation, undermined the ideal of mixed communities and left Britain will a dire shortage of cheap housing.

Why Boris is wrong on Thatcher

2012-01-09T14:28:56Z

There is no shortage of articles praising Margaret Thatcher at the moment but by far the silliest is Boris Johnson's paean to her in the Telegraph today.

The Mayor of London claims the former Prime Minister would have "strongly disapproved of boardroom greed" and was against "any kind of crony capitalism."

Never mind the fact that during her time in Downing Street the wealth gulf between the top and bottom 20% widened by 60% (and, incidentally, child poverty rose from 1.8m to 3.5million)

Mrs Thatcher so apparently so opposed to any form of crony capitalism she helped Rupert Murdoch launch BSkyB with exemptions from EU broadcasting rules.

She also negotiated secret arms deals, worth more than £1billion, which ran counter to rules linking overseas aid to trade deals.

Mr Johnson goes on to suggest she "never really much liked the City." She showed a strange way of displaying her disapproval by overseeing the greatest deregulation of the financial markets in their history, paving the way for the financial crisis of 2008.

Why Nick Clegg is really, really cross

2011-12-13T09:29:19Z

Nick Clegg woke up this morning to the worst set of press headlines since the tuition fees u-turn. The deputy Prime Minister is portrayed as a sulking, flip-flopping, yellow belly.
But it is important to understand why he refused to show up in the Commons on Monday. The anger is at three levels. Firstly, he is cross with himself for putting out a statement on Friday supporting Mr Cameron which he knew at the time was completely untrue.
Secondly, he is cross with Mr Cameron for wrecking Britain's relationship with Europe.
And thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, he is furious with the Prime Minister for personal humiliating him. In the run up to the Brussels summit, the two leaders worked very closely on the joint negotiating position.
The multi-lingual Mr Clegg, a former Brussels bureaucrat, was the good cop to Mr Cameron's bad job.
In a series of phone calls to European leaders Mr Clegg suggested Britain was willing to reach a consensus and was working for the good of EU.
Then Mr Cameron went into the talks like a lumberjack at the Royal Ballet and stamped all over his deputy's fine diplomatic work.
That is why Mr Clegg is really cross: his reputation in Europe - a reputation he really cares about - has been tarnished by Mr Cameron.
By the way, this is what the PM said on Friday when asked if thought his use of the veto would put a strain on the Coalition: "I don't think that should be the case."
He added: "This was a Coalition positioon I worked very closely with Nick Clegg in the run up to the meeting. We had a series of meetings. This was an agreed position, it was not a positioning exercise it was a very reasonable position
"I note Nick has put out a very strong statement supporting what has been done today and I am not surprised by that."

IDS and his undeserved reputation for compassion

2011-12-04T14:04:35Z

Iain Duncan Smith gave a speech last week almost under the cover of darkness. It was delivered on Thursday evening with selected extracts conveniently handed out in advance to supportive right-wing newspapers.
This was not surprising as his message was, and I paraphrase a bit here: we are declaring war on the feckless poor.
Duncan Smith wears his heart on his sleeve to such an extent that he has created the impression of being the caring, compassionate Tory. He then votes for and introduces policies which disproportionately hurt the poorest the most.
On Thursday he launched a fresh assault on the undeserving poor (a dubious phrase in the first place, not least because all poor should be deserving regardless of their moral outlook).
This is what he said: "I believe that increased income and increased well-being do not always follow the same track.
"Take a family headed by a drug addict or someone with a gambling addiction - increase the parent's income and the chances are they will spend the money on furthering their habit, not on their children.
"Or take a family where no one has ever worked. Increase their benefit income - while taking no other proactive action - and you push the family further into dependency, only increasing the chance that their children will follow that same path as an adult."
Never mind the fact that the research shows it is the middle classes who are more prone to addictive habits than the working classes (page 15 of this report if you are interested: http://www.ias.org.uk/resources/factsheets/drinkinggb_excessive.pdf), would Duncan Smith ever propose taking child benefit away from middle class families if they behaved in a feckless fashion?
Of course not. Because that would be to declare political war on your own supporters. Nor, to my knowledge, has Duncan Smith ever spoken out against the feckless and immoral behaviour of leading Conservatives.
He is deliberately targeting the poor for political reasons. This is not about compassion but ideology. And it is about double standards.
More and more Duncan Smith comes across as one of the rich aristocrats who used to tour Bedlam and mask their curiosity under the guise of compassion.

Europe - the problem Steve Hilton failed to fix

2011-10-20T13:34:46Z

This week I have heard David Cameron compared with Ted Heath and John Major. These are not exactly the ideal role models for a Conservative PM.
According to his critics Mr Cameron has shown the flaccid leadership of Health combined with the weakness of Major on Europe.
The Health comparison I am not so sure about but the Major one is not just pertinent but utterly predictable. When in opposition, Cameron's strategist Steve Hilton had a clear strategy for detoxifying the Tory brand. Firstly, they would present Cameron as socially liberal and environmentally aware candidate who was at ease with contemporary Britain.
Secondly, (and remember this was at a time when Labour's ideas were in the ascendent) Cameron would stick by Labour's spending plans on education and the NHS.
But the project was never completed. Hilton's third ambition was to neuter the issue of Europe for the Tories. If they could resolve the Europe question, then they could claim empirically that the Conservatives had changed.
This week's events show how toxic the issue of Europe remains for the Tories. The braying of the eurosceptics reminds voters that this is party which still bears the worse traits of the 1990s and the 1980s.
The public may be sympathetic towards having a referendum but they are put off by the people demanding one.

Was Pickles telling porkies?

2011-10-03T16:25:33Z

Eric Pickles did his people's chum routine today. It was the usual array of bad jokes interspersed with some political thuggery. What was missing was anything approaching substance or an understanding of how tough it is for local authorities, Labour and Tory alike, at the moment.
One of gratuitous passage included a pop at Ed Miliband for remaining silent about library closures in his Doncaster seat.
"His Labour councillors voted to close libraries but keep bankrolling union officials on the rates," Pickles said.
Except, this may not be the case. Labour is saying that the council is run by an English Democrat Mayor called Peter Davies, the father of Tory MP Phil Davies, and a Cabinet.
It was the Cabinet (a mixture of Tories and independent councillors) who voted through the closures blaming central government cuts. Mr Davies, according to local newspaper reports, said he also opposed the plans.
It was Labour councillors who managed to obtain a 12-month moratorium on the closures, my Labour sources say.
Was Pickles telling porkies?

What David Cameron thought of Ed Miliband's speech

2011-10-03T09:14:57Z

More than last year there is an air of triumphalism at the Tory Party conference. This is a party which walks with the arrogance that comes from being in power.
They have collectively decided to forget the fact they are in coalition (that's a mere technicality) so they can enjoy reliving the glory days of the 1980s.
The tone was set by William Hague who, with barely a mention of his own shortcomings, decided to lecture Ed Miliband on how to be the leader of the opposition.
Miliband's perceived weakness is one of the reasons why the Tories are strutting with such confidence.
Asked last night about Ed Miliband's speech, David Cameron pinpointed two sections for criticism. The first, and most obvious, was when some Labour delegates booed the mention of Tony Blair.
Cameron felt Miliband should not have constructed the speech to have allowed the booing to take place and, having heard the booing, should have broken from his text and denounced it immediately.
The second section was when Miliband claimed he was both an insider and outsider. Cameron said Miliband - a policy adviser to Gordon Brown, then an MP, then a Cabinet minister - was clearly an insider. Voters know this so there is no point in suggesting otherwise.
Interestingly, the PM did not use the opportunity to take on the central argument of Miliband's speech.

Clegg camp out to stop Tim Farron

2011-09-20T09:16:41Z

Party conferences are increasingly grim affairs. Each year there are more lobbyists and corporate suits and fewer party members.
But they do allow you to take the pulse of a political party.
The Lib Dems are in suprisingly resilient form. Despite their abject u-turn on tuition fees, the loss of the AV referendum and the hammering in the local elections the mood among the rank and file is, while not upbeat, is quietly dogged.
Yet the leadership have been spooked by the warm reception party president Tim Farron got for his speech. Mr Farron's address was more George Formby than Lloyd George and was far some statesmanlike. But the activists liked it and he managed to cement his position as a leader in waiting.
This has unnerved those around Nick Clegg. They regard the idea of Farron, who is to the left of Labour on many issues, taking over akin to Diane Abott taking over from Tony Blair.
Clegg sees himself in the same mould as Blair. He has dragged his party away from its comfort zone and made it electorally respectable again. The fear is that the changes will not be permanent and once he has left the stage the Lib Dems will relax back into the indulgence of continual opposition.
The threat of Farron has so rattled the Clegg camp that they are already plotting how to stop him gaining any more credibility. Personally, I am remain unconvinced on the evidence of that one speech he is a plausible leader but party members can be strange creatures and do not always vote for the person who is more likely to win elections.

Big Society hit over the boundary

2011-09-13T17:17:04Z

It is difficult to feel sorry for the Lib Dem MPs now moaning about the boundary changes. What were they thinking of when they voted for Cameron's plans to axe the number of MPs?
But one can sympathise with those who opposed the plans and now find themselves either seat-less or facing an acrimonious battle with a colleague for what's left of their constituency.
The common complaint I've heard in the last 24 hours from MPs is they have spent years building up support, being good constituency MPs and getting to know their voters. In short, they have become the embodiment of David Cameron's big society.
Now the PM, for the sake of saving £12million a year, is destroying the very ethos he seeks to instal elsewhere.
Some will say £12million is a considerable amount of money but it will take nearly 20 years to compensate for the money the government has spent on the cost of the AV referendum and the elected police commissioners.

Billy Hague brought to book

2011-09-09T15:43:07Z

William Hague gave a speech on Thursday in which he lamented the breaking up of the Foreign Office library.

He said that as a "historian and a politician" he was "shocked on his arrival at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FC) by the sight of empty bookshelves.

"To my mind the fate of the FCO library is emblematic of a gradual hollowing out of the qualities that made the FCO one of our great institutions," he said.

The closure of any library is a matter of sadness. But Mr Hague has a strange sense of priorities. This year some 400 public libraries are set to close across England in what could be described as the hollowing out of the qualities which made this country worth living in.

Some of the libraries earmarked for closure are in Mr Hague's Yorkshire constituency. When he was asked recently to comment on the matter he said he would not be getting involved in the debate.

So here is a man willing to use the closure of a private library as a means to attack Labour but unwilling to leap to the defence of public libraries used and loved by his constituents.

David to miss Ed's speech

2011-09-06T08:39:53Z

David Miliband is to miss his brother's speech at the Labour Party conference.

The former Foreign Secretary will attend the gathering in Liverpool for just one day and plans to leave before Ed Miliband's address to the faithful on the Tuesday.

Instead of listening to his brother Mr Miliband has decided to fly to Washington for an international conference.

Apparently, he does not want to be a "distraction" at "Ed's show".

"As I said after the last Conference, and have repeated throughout the year, Ed is the Leader and he needs an open field in which to lead the party as he sees fit.

"I don't want to be a distraction. So I am not going to be a talking head providing commentary on TV, or a media focus for soap opera during the week. It's Ed's show and I want it to be a success," he writes on his blog.

No doubt the decision will reignite talk that relations between the two brothers remain strained a year after the bitter leadership contest. This may be true but more likely that David Miliband is sensitive enough to realise his presence was more likely to reopen wounds rather than allow them to heal.

Former Home Secretary Alan Johnson and former Chancellor Alistair Darling are also expected to be absent from this year's conference (both backed David for the leadership, incidentally).

The lack of greybeards may give the conference are rather lightweight air. But it could also provide a chance to show there is plenty of talent and energy among the new generation of MPs.

Nick Clegg: a paper tiger

2011-07-14T12:24:46Z

Reading Nick Clegg's speech today and you could be forgiven for thinking the Lib Dem leader has been at the forefront of the crusade against Rupert Murdoch.

A great chunk of his speech was given over to how the political establishment had failed to stand up the media tycoon.

"Labour refused to take on Murdoch. And, as Peter Mandelson admitted this week, the reason was simple: fear," Mr Clegg says.

No doubt the Lib Dem leader has always held this principled point of view.

No doubt, he was so appalled by Murdoch and so determined to stop the BSkyB takeover that he decided he would have nothing to do with the tycoon's papers. Papers, incidentally, had accused him of hypocrisy and lying during the 2010 general election.

No doubt, he decided to give an interview to the Sun earlier this year without any fear or favour. And he must have written an article for the paper on "alarm clock Britain" because he wanted to show that he the last person to be intimidated by Murdoch.

If we are going to have a statue for Reagan why not one for Michael McIntyre?

2011-07-04T13:22:34Z

Just in case we were in any doubt about the resurgence of the right, today they unveiled a statue of Ronald Reagan in London.
Because of his folksy charm and self-deprecating line in humour, President Reagan was a difficult man to dislike. But his record in office was not quite the triumph painted by his supporters.
The number of people living in poverty during the 1980s in the United States rose to 33 million. At the same time the number of homeless people jumped to 600,000.
Funding for urban municipalities was cut and the budget for public housing halved. National debt tripled and personal debt went off the scale.
His deregulation directly contributed to the Savings and Loans crisis which cost the US taxpayer $150billion.
And this is before the we take into account the illegal war in Central America.
Perhaps he deserves a statue for being a nice guy. But then so is Michael McIntyre.

Nick Clegg - you're so vain you probably thought this was written about you

2011-07-04T10:35:11Z

MPs had a chance last week to do something useful. They could have voted for a review into the exorbitant, I would say criminal, interest rates charged by money lenders.
Labour MPs led by Stella Creasy have been campaigning for the review as a way of eventually getting a cap on interest rates for financial loans.
(Although Labour's record in office on this issue was pathetic Stella deserves credit for running so hard with this).
Many Lib Dem MPs and some Conservatives are also in favour of a cap.
So why did the vote not happen? Because the Lib Dem leadership got it pulled. And why did Nick Clegg do this? Because he wants to announce a crackdown on legal loan sharks at his party conference this Autumn.
This is pretty cynical. Nick Clegg wants to deprive Stella Creasy of the glory and soak up any accolades he may get when the Lib Dems eventually announce the policy.
In the mean time, as a consequence of this piece of politcal vanity, thousands of more people will get deeper and deeper into debt.

UPDATE The Lib Dems are contesting this. They insist they have no plans to make an announcement at conference. To be fair, my source said there would be announcement this Autumn and did not specify conference. He also said "it would go far futher than anything Labour did."

IMF - the international ministers' friend

2011-06-07T11:46:12Z

How independent is the International Monetary Fund?

Yesterday it held a press conference in the Treasury building to reveal the results of its annual report on the UK economy. Unsurprisingly, the IMF bigwigs bent over backwards to be as diplomatic as possible to George Osborne.

But should they have held the press conference in the Treasury in the first place?

This is like the King's Fund, an independent health think tank, holding a press conference in the Department of Health, or Ofcom, the communications regulator, holding a public meeting in Vodafone's HQ.

Did the IMF pull its punches as a result? The IMF should have been equally diplomatic to the British public by spelling out exactly what it thought of Mr Osborne's handling of the economy. But, of course, they didn't. They put political sensitivites ahead of public interest.

The Chancellor has form here. He recently hosted a press conference for the OECD in the Treasury. Again, you have to question whether this was appropriate? And again, you have to question whether the OECD compromised itself by agreeing to such an event.