Labourlist Column
My Labourlist column this week is about the Budget and the TUC National Demo:
http://labourlist.org/crunch-time-on-the-cuts
posted by Luke Akehurst at 9:37 am
Monday, March 21, 2011
http://labourlist.org/crunch-time-on-the-cuts
About Me
- Name: Luke Akehurst
- Location: North Durham, County Durham, United Kingdom
Labour MP for North Durham since 2024. Labour Party activist since 1988 - firmly on the moderate wing of the party. Member of Labour’s NEC 2010-2012 and since 2020. National Secretary of Labour Students 1995-6. Parliamentary candidate for Aldershot (2001) and Castle Point (2005). Hackney Councillor (Chatham Ward) 2002-2014, Labour Group Chief Whip 2002-09, Chair of Health Scrutiny 2010-2014. Dad. Unite and GMB union member. All views expressed in a personal capacity. The rest will become evident from reading the blog.
5 Comments:
I agree with quite a lot of this.
However, it cannot be denied that the Labour government helped cause the deficit:
(1) Cuts in corporation tax
(2) Cuts in Capital Gains Tax
(3) De-regulation of the banks
(4) Doing absolutely nothing about tax avoidance by the wealthy and by corporations.
(5) Iraq/Afghanistan
(6) The Trident nuclear status symbol (even Blair had serious doubts about wasting money on this
rubbish)
(6) ID cards and the database
Even Stephen Byers wanted to get rid of those last two!
The Labour Party needs to be more contrite about these things.
12:33 pm, March 21, 2011
I agree with quite a lot of that. The one bit I disagree about is the idea that we need to reach everybody beyond the 43% who already agree with us.
I'm not sure that's the case. I think there's a hard core of 30% of the population who will never vote for us in any circumstances and we'll never be a broad enough church for them.
We need to win as much support as possible, but what's possible is substantially less than 100%.
2:27 pm, March 21, 2011
The second comment makes an interesting point.
One of the problems with the Labour Party in more recent years is that it failed to make a distinction between taking a message to certain groups of voters and changing its policies to suit those voters' existing beliefs.
In his biography of David Blunkett, Stephen Pollard says about how the Labour Party never really bothered to campaign in a more well-off part of his then council ward. Blunkett decided to change this.
Such a change makes sense. Taking a message to such voters and seeking to win support from them is perfectly okay. That, however, is not the same as changing policies to fit in with their existing beliefs. Unfortunately, the latter situation is what happened all too often in recent years.
Failure to make that distinction led Labour to lose existing voters without even, sometimes, gaining new ones. The most notorious example of this is the 10p tax disaster.
4:05 pm, March 21, 2011
We need a formal apology from the Labour party for:
1)The worst recession in 70 years.
2) The non existent banking regulations and the hopeless FSA.
3)The illegal Iraq war and the resulting 500,000 dead and injured.
4)The mass immigration of some 4 million people into the UK that was never in any manifesto and we now know was for political purposes only.
5)An apology for claiming that the mass immigration was from the EU when we now have figures confirming that 75% was non Eu.
6) Tripling university tuition fees.
7)Using the public sector as job creation schemes creating thousands of non-jobs.
8) Deserting the white working class.
9) The doubling and in some cases tripling of council tax due to waste driven inflation.
10)An education system that after 13 years of having money thrown at it,still has over 50% of students leaving with less than 5 GCSE'S.
6:42 pm, March 21, 2011
Can you imagine reading David Blunkets biography? Apart from the bit where he got that married totty into bed I can't think of anything less exciting.
Takes all sorts I guess.
7:24 pm, March 22, 2011
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