And another thing…

THIS POST from Alex Smith of LabourList has caught my attention. It quotes Michael Merrick’s assessment last week about how Labour can connect with the poorest in scoiety, and this section struck a chord with me:

The Labour Party has embraced an ideology that actively undermines the beliefs and culture of ordinary working people. Immigration, whilst the most topical, isn’t the only battleground. One by one, it seems that the social and cultural outlook of many is scorned upon by an elite who, whilst laughably painting themselves as on the side of the ‘oppressed’, choose to studiously ignore this particular subjugation. On issues ranging from school/parental discipline (‘child abuse’), to capital punishment (‘barbaric’), to patriotism (‘Little Englander’), to Euro-scepticism (‘xenophobic’), to immigration (‘racist’), to morality (‘bigoted’) – across all these issues and more, the general beliefs of vast swathes of the electorate are demonised and ridiculed by an elite interested only in securing the dominance of their own particular worldview.

Now, I’m not saying Merrick is entirely right about this – he uses a pretty broad brush and generalisations are rarely helpful – but he clealry has a point. It was one to which I alluded in a post yesterday when talking about the need for the Labour Party as a whole, and at every level, to start talking the same language of the people we represent and to reflect their views.

And although Merrick talks of immigration as just one of the pressure points, it’s clearly near the top of an awful lot of people’s agenda today.

A few weeks ago, after Lord Griffin (to be) appeared on Question Time, I was forced to concede by commenters that Labour had, in the past, been guilty of attempting to shut down debates on immigration by shouting “racist”. Whenever that has been done it has been for well-meaning reasons. Nevertheless, the road to hell is paved with good intentions and it was stupid and wrong.

It’s a Monday, so no doubt I will now be accused of adopting the Daily Mail’s/BNP’s agenda by raising immigration here. Still…

Knocking on doors in my constituency on Saturday morning, I once again had to try to defend the government’s policies on immigration. This is a very regular occurrence these days, particularly in so-called “solid” Labour areas. These people are not racists by any stretch of the imagination, but they are worried. And they’re talking about their concerns now because it’s only now they feel they have “permission” to do so.

There is absolutely no point in simply responding: “Well, immigration has brought the country a lot of prosperity through extra taxes and productivity”, even though that is true. Because more often than not, the people expressing the concerns are the people least likely to have benefited directly from Britain’s economic growth to 2008. And they have as much right to have a say in this area – and to be listened to – as anyone else.

I detect a huge amount of snobbery from some on the liberal left towards such people and their views. They’re usually the same sort of people who criticise me when I uphold and promote government policy on asylum (essentially – if your application is approved, welcome to Britain; if it’s rejected, have a safe journey home).

And we are way, way past the point at which we can sneer “racist” at good people for daring to hold a view with which we’re uncomfortable.

CAN LABOUR win under the current electoral system? Well, given that we have won three times in the past 12 years, I would hazard a guess at “yes”.

If some of Labour’s parliamentary candidates reckon we can’t win unless we promise a referendum on the alternative vote on the same day as the general election, maybe they should be examining their own so-called “democratic credentials”.

The ambition of the 34 candidates is truly soaring: “hundreds” of LibDems throughout the country would switch to Labour if we were to hold a referendum on the same day. Phew! That many, eh? Nearly enough to affect the result in … well, a seat, probably.

They propose a “government Bill” to facilitate such a referendum. The only problem there is that such a Bill is very unlikely to succeed. Apart from those Labour MPs who would oppose it (including Yours Truly), the Libdems would be likely to campaign against it on the basis that it’s not precisely the exact system that would most benefit them be most democratic.

And can we please stop all this nonsense about the 1997 manifesto commitment? That was a promise of a referendum, not on AV but on AV+, a version of AV which would be even more calamitous than straightforward AV, with “assisted places scheme” MPs (like those in the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly) being “elected”. We have never made a manifesto commitment to a referendum on AV.

You have to wonder why Labour candidates are so keen to get into Parliament if all they want to do is bargain away power to the LibDems. “Ah,” they will argue, “but the Tories were in government for most of the 20th century and we must make the 21st century the century of progressive politics.”

Yeah, okay, I’ll sign up to that. But you know the best way of electing a Labour government? Not through messy, sordid little deals with the minor parties, but by winning more votes than the Tories. That’s how they stayed in power for most of the last century – by beating us in elections; by offering the electorate policies that were more popular than ours.

By carping on about voting systems, we simply reinforce the notion – and I hope and believe it’s a wrong notion – that we have nothing to offer the voters but electoral calculations.

CONGRATULATIONS to Labourlist for its new make-over and for its thought-provoking poll of readers on what Labour’s next manifesto should contain.

Readers are being asked to nominate three ideas from a list of 25. Here’s what I voted for:

• Create universal childcare
• Commit to building a national high-speed rail network
• Raise the basic rate of income tax threshold to £10,000

Disappointed that there was no proposal for universal ree school meals.

Some of the 25 didn’t just fail to secure my enthusiasm; they provoked a frustrated shake of the head and a deep sigh of despondency. For example:

• Increase the national minimum wage to a national living wage
• Lower the voting age to 16
• End domestic civil aviation (no, seriously)

Still, good to see there’s still some enthusiasm for 1980s retro. I suppose I should be grateful that there was no proposal for a national investment bank, the nationalisation of the top 200 companies, or making a sequel to St Elmo’s Fire in there.

TO MARK our success in the Total Politics Blog Poll, the top five Labour bloggers – Yours Truly, Hopi Sen, Alex Smith (out of Labourlist), Alastair Campbell and Luke Akehurst – got together earlier tonight for a celebratory drink.

Well, one thing led to another, and before we realised it we were getting into the spirit of the evening. As you do.

THERE’S  an interesting debate going on over at Labourlist on the subject of Tony Blair’s faith.

Mary Honeyball MEP’s attack on Tony (now that he’s safely out of office) seems to be along the lines of: “If you have to be a Christian, I suppose we’ll have to tolerate it. Just don’t talk about it publicly.”

She’s since been suitably taken to task by Frank Owen’s Paintbrush.

There’s a long tradition of Christian Socialism in the Labour Party, just as there’s a long tradition of leftist suspicion of Christianity. 

But I was particularly intrigued by Honeyball’s opening paragraph in which she writes: “The persistent rumours that he (Blair) and President George W Bush prayed together at Camp David while deciding to go to war in Iraq have refused to go away.”

Given that the two men concerned are Christians, I’m not remotely surprised that they prayed together; I would have been more surprised if, although sharing the same deep faith, they had failed to do so.

GLAD to see that LabourList editor Derek Draper now has his own personal blog. Good news, because it will allow LabourList, which Derek also founded, to be less about Derek’s continuing and ugly feuds with Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale and more about promoting and discussing Labour values.

The catalyst for the launch of his personal blog has been a report in the Guardian Online on Thursday, the day of the official launch of LabourList, casting aspersions on Derek’s professional qualifications.

The only downside of being “accidentally” left off the invitation list for Labour’s bloggers’ breakfast last week (again) is that I missed the shouting match between Derek and The Guardian’s Michael Henke over the aforementioned story. Sounds like it would have been fun. The argument, I mean, not the breakfast.

I FELT strangely depressed yesterday on reading this over at LabourList. That in this day and age we can still have this kind of “debate” in the Labour Party is incredibly dispiriting.

I mean, come on! A maximum wage!? And it’s not just left-wingers who betray this level of disengagement from reality: many right-wing and Tory-supporting commenters on this site have, over the months, left barbed and pointed comments expressing their resentment that Tony Blair is earning many millions of pounds a year. Good for him, say I.

And while we’re at it, good for Geoff Hoon for hiring a private tutor for his daughter. Any decent parent would do the same, and I certainly would, without hesitation or apology, if I felt any of my sons would benefit from it.

So there.