By boxing themselves in with the adoption of “fiscal rules” contrived to enable them, they believe, to win the election, Labour seem to have locked themselves out of most of the policies desperately needed to repair our public realm. However, in an article in last Sunday’s “Observer” (14th April) Andrew Rawnsley has helpfully listed a number of progressive measures that would make very little, if any, demands on the public purse. In summary they are:
1. Eject the remaining hereditary peers from the House of Lords.
2. Modernise the school curriculum. (See note *)
3. Reform the planning laws to encourage house building.
4. More effectively regulate the water industry and other utilities.
5. Ban “no fault” evictions.
6. Enhance the rights of workers.
7. Ban “zero hours” contracts.
8. End the practice of “fire and re-hire.”
9. Strengthen relationships with the EU.
1 Ban the sale of “zombie knives.”
To make it a “round dozen” I would add:
11Restore the “Fixed Term Parliament” Act
1 Set up “citizens’ Assemblies” to examine the case for electoral reform.
So, no excuses, Labour, if you want to be seen as a genuinely “progressive” party.
· *Personally I’d like to see the National Curriculum abolished and go back to the days when, apart from an “Agreed syllabus for Religious Instruction” determined locally, and compulsory PE,** teachers and governors were trusted to determine between them what education was appropriate for the children in their area.
· **That’s what operated for most of my career. I’d like to see those two requirements abolished as well.
Sadly the Labour Party are not a progressive party and they will only get an inflated majority because of our awful voting system. Millions of voters don't want Conservatives or Labour and Labour are not to be trusted any more than Conservatives. They will govern only for their own sectional interests and to pacify their paymasters in the Trade Unions.
ReplyDeleteI tend to agree with your comment, which is why I hope Labour does not get a stonking majority but has to rely on Liberal Democrats, Greens or other progressives to govern effectively. The point of the post is to highlight some of the areas where there are no "circumstances" to prevent their introducing progressive policies. The proof will be in the pudding.
ReplyDeleteSure. The Starmer brand of Labourism is not in the mould of Attlee or Blair or Wilson and it sort of sits with a left wing type of New Labour. He will rely on the Unions again and i don't think Starmer is by nature progressive but conservative with a small c. He said he was a reformer but has backtracked on Electoral Reform and the necessary ending of the House of Lords - which should become a partially or fully elected Senate (second chamber). Starmer is in the mould of Ed Milliband and although at the time Ed seemed right for Labour in hindsight his elder brother David would have carried the flame towards another period of New Labour.
Deletethe House of Lords - which should become a partially or fully elected Senate
DeleteThat’s a terrible idea: you’d have two houses with equal claims to democratic legitimacy that would be set against each other. The inevitable result would be the kind of deadlock you see in the USA when one party controls the House and the other the Senate, leading to their entire government shutting down on the regular.
You really want to import that over here?
No, you make the Commons the principal body elected by STV and the Senate partially appointed and the rest elected by party list. The Lords desperately needs reform as it is unsustainable, being nominees from parties and left overs from hereditary principle. Also having Bishops in a secular society sitting there is ridiculous too. The Commons would need to be the chamber that took precedence. Lib Dems and even some Labour and Tories want the Lords junked in its present form.
DeleteI see no problem with having two houses with a claim to democratic legitimacy. We could quite easily introduce a constitutional mechanism for dealing with deadlocks (a joint meeting of both houses for example).
DeleteNo, you make the Commons the principal body elected by STV
DeleteThat’s a bigger change, hardly uncontroversial (it would need a referendum, the last referendum on Commons voting reform was defeated and it wasn’t even close, and there’s no sign public opinion has shifted), and doesn’t really address the issue.
and the Senate partially appointed and the rest elected by party list.
That doesn’t stop the problem and it means the party leaderships have far too much control over what should be a revising chamber with plenty of independent voices.
The Lords desperately needs reform as it is unsustainable, being nominees from parties and left overs from hereditary principle.
Indeed, it worked a lot better before Blair started messing with it.
Lib Dems and even some Labour and Tories want the Lords junked in its present form.
Oh, lots of people want it junked in its present form. But it stays, and will continue to stay for the foreseeable future, because they can’t agree on what to replace it with.
We could quite easily introduce a constitutional mechanism for dealing with deadlocks (a joint meeting of both houses for example).
How would that solve the problem?
Can anyone define what Labour or Labourism is? It is such an old fashioned term reminiscent of cloth caps and clogs, the block vote of the union barons and red meat Trade Unionism ie when millions of working people used to be members of trade unions.
ReplyDeleteThis is an important question and difficult to answer in a brief comment (or a bog-post, or maybe even a book.) I find it tempting to see the Labour party as a “passing phase.”
DeleteMaybe in the 1900s the “working classes” felt that the choice between the Conservatives (led by the landed gentry) and Liberals (led by the business and commercial interests) left them rather out on the cold and there was a need for a party to represent the “working man” (and his family – women did not yet have the vote, and neither did quite a lot of men) so the Labour Party grew up and flourished while society could be reasonably divided between the comfortably-off upper and middle classes ,and the working class , still trooping into the factories, fields and mines, and relatively easily organised into Trade Unions to finance and support the new party.
Now as you point out, society is much more diverse. It is difficult to identify a “working class” (most of whom are employed in the professional and service sectors) and people’s interests and incomes ( I read recently that driving a train – traditionally every boy’s ambition in my childhood- can earn you £100 a shift) and equally diverse.
I hope our policies will evolve to match. We shall always have a Conservative party, representing, essentially, the interests of the “haves,” ranging from the present rapacious leaders anxious to feather their own nests to (a few remaining) “One nation” Tories who fondly believe that if the go-getters prosper without too much interference from the state than the prosperity will trickle-down to those at the bottom of the pile.
We shall continue to need a party to prioritise the needs of those at the bottom of the pile (on zero hours contracts, working for the likes of Amazon with strictly limited toilet breaks etc): that will be the future Labour Party, perhaps under another name. We shall probably always have Nationalists, and certainly need Greens to prioritise preserving the possibility of future life on the planet.
Above all, we shall always need a Liberal party, because there will always be people in the other parties who want to take away our freedoms to further their own interests whereas Liberals will be alert to preserving the maximum amount of individual freedom compatible with the freedom of to others .
Obviously, we need an electoral system which will give each of these interests (and maybe others) a fair crack of the whip.
Ban “no fault” evictions
ReplyDeleteThere's no such thing as a 'no fault eviction'. An eviction is whenever a landlord goes to court to recover their property from a tenant who has broken the terms of the lease; thus there is always a 'fault', or at least a breach of a contract.
Of course a lease is just a contract and like most contracts it includes terms by which either party can give notice to the other that they wish to end the contract. This is not a 'no fault eviction' and is no different from you giving notice to your bank that you wish to close your account, or to your electricity or car insurance supplier or your dentist that you wish to end your contract with them.
So this isn't a matter of 'evictions', it's simply a matter of notice periods in private contracts between individuals or companies, and the government should not be dictating to private entities what notice periods they can have in mutually-agreed contracts.
Personally I’d like to see the National Curriculum abolished and go back to the days when, apart from an “Agreed syllabus for Religious Instruction” determined locally, and compulsory PE,** teachers and governors were trusted to determine between them what education was appropriate for the children in their area.
ReplyDeleteThis might have worked in the days when you could trust teachers not to be left-wing or 'progressive' activists trying to brainwash children into being 'activists' for their pet causes. But such days are long gone and now teachers must be closely monitored or they will not do their primary job, which is to educate children.
That this is the case is entirely the fault of teachers and those who train them. They abused the trust placed in them and now we can't trust them any more. It's sad and I wish it hadn't happened, but it did.
I'd rejoice if more teachers were progressive (it's supposed to be an attractive feature of Winchester.) Most are very confomist
DeleteI'd rejoice if more teachers were progressive (it's supposed to be an attractive feature of Winchester.) Most are very confomist
DeleteWell that's the problem: they are conformist to the current zeitgeist, which is progressive.
Which is why we need inspections to stop them from pushing progressive idea onto children. Because they have proved that they cannot be trusted not to, if left to their own devices.
It would be great if we could trust teachers not to push their political agendas onto children; but it has been proven that we can't.
I have my own list of measures that would not cost the government money (and might even save some) but would make living in this country much more free:
ReplyDelete* abolish the sugary drinks levy -- technically this is a tax cut but I don't think it actually brings in much money as most brands simply started selling their diet version as their non-diet versions to avoid paying it. Ending it would restore people's freedom to choose to have drinks that don't taste like soap, and re-establish the principle that those of us who are careful what we eat and make sure to exercise should not have our freedom curtailed just because some fat slobs guzzle, or allow their children to guzzle, a dozen cans of energy drink a day and spend their lives playing video games.
* reform the planning laws to encourage house building -- I agree with this one. All planning objections should be scraped so that anyone who owns land should be able to build whatever they want on it.
* abolish the requirement to compile 'environmental impact assessments' that adds billions, sometimes tens of billions, onto the the cost of any major project and creates thousands of jobs that are a net drain on the nation's prosperity
* abolish all statutory targets that extend beyond the lifetime of the current Parliament — these are pointless anyway as no Parliament can bind its successors, and they are often used by politicians as a substitute for actually doing things. The usual argument for them is that they give businesses certainty so they can invest, but as we have seen in Scotland this last week they actually do the opposite as the government can just dump them at any time if they seem unlikely to be met, leaving any business basing their investment decisions on the basis of the targets high and dry.
* make clear that 'sex' in any legislation applies only to biological sex, except where the legal fiction of 'recognised sex' introduced by the Gender Recognition Act is explicitly mentioned as overruling that presumption.
* ban civil servants in any devolved administration from working on anything which is not within the competence of that administration (eg constiutional matters, foreign affairs, trade deals, etc).
* introduce primary legislation protecting free speech that overrides devolved administration powers, saving those unlucky enough to live in areas of devolved administration from the effects of binfires like the Scottish Hate Crimes Act.
Oh, and of course first of all: abolish the Supreme Court and bring back the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords.
DeleteAren't they more or les the same?
DeleteAren't they more or les the same?
DeleteIf you think so then you must agree that the change was unnecessary and, therefore, an error, and so we should correct the error by undoing the change and setting things back they way there were as soon as possible.