Latest news with #NewLabour
Belfast Telegraph
6 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Belfast Telegraph
D:Ream's Peter Cunnah on fame, war and finding his birth parents
He's talking to the Belfast Telegraph via Zoom from London about the group's newest album, Do It Anyway, which he made with long-time bandmate Al Makenzie. It's his biggest regret, he explains, that D:Ream's famous hit — Things Can Only Get Better — an anthem of hope and optimism, was used in New Labour's landmark 1997 election campaign which saw Tony Blair enter Number 10.
New Statesman
20 hours ago
- Politics
- New Statesman
All roads lead to Rome? We should be so lucky
Illustration by Charlotte Trounce Last week I swapped the soundscape of urban London summer – the clicking gears of stolen Lime Bikes – for an equally monotonous sound: the cicadas general to a Tuscan evening, not to mention the high-pitched whirr of a mosquito about to commit a bloodthirsty strike on your ankles. And in my case, face. This is what Virgil's Eclogues were all about. For one month a year, Britain offloads most of New Labour to Chianti's rolling hills. Tony Blair used to spend August in those spruced-up rubble-stone farm houses. And the turkey twizzler Duce, Jamie Oliver, is such a fan of one local butcher in the hilltop town of Panzano he glibly refers to it as his 'second home'. So popular is the region with the other sort of leftish tribunes that in the early Noughties it received a new moniker: Chiantishire. Thank God for the perfectly calibrated social consciences of the invading Brits, otherwise the Italians might have a problem with this. The establishment anxiety – that Britain is slowly coming to resemble the Old Boot – is acute, no matter their affinity for the place. Plagued by low growth, regional inequality, general instability, populist gadflies and at the mercy of the bond markets? 'Welcome to Britaly' the Economist warned in 2022. I was sitting on a government owned-and-operated train from Rome to Florence, wondering if that would be so bad. The leather seats and postmodern interiors displayed a level of taste the good people at TfL do not possess. I assumed the waspy Italian businessman beside me was the CEO of Al Italia, or something. Thinking of the many hours I've spent delayed on a Great Western train in England, 'Welcome to Britaly' started to sound more like an aspiration than an omen. The illusion was soon broken. I arrived at the elegant squalor of Florence's train station, Santa Maria Novella, to discover that there was a citywide taxi strike. Though you would be forgiven for not noticing at all – there were no placards, no crowds, and seemingly scant industrial motive (if there was one beyond ambient dissatisfaction it certainly went unexpressed). I only discovered it was happening when I walked up to a small group of men smoking – the taxi drivers – and asked if one of them could drive me to the countryside. 'No, strike,' he said, gesturing limply to a bus station. The spectacle was so unspectacular I wondered if this is what the Tour de France would look like if it were organised by the bikes. Or what an Italian taxi strike would look like, if it were organised by Italian taxi drivers. Up the workers, etc. But it left me in a pickle: rural Tuscan bus services are not as good as the trains. So I did what any accomplished 29-year-old would do in this situation and called my brother. He collected me – after I dashed across Florence to the gates of the city – and in the car we reflected on how reassured the hand-wringy British establishment might be with this unfortunate turn of events. Put to shame by the trains, yes. But here is rhetorical justification for the superiority complex: sure, we have ceded our sovereignty to the long arm of the bond markets, and yes political instability typified the latter half of the 2010s with tremendous force. But those Euros, so lazy! The ponderous and haughty northern Europeans might be concerned they are turning into their southern European cousins. But they haven't nailed the key details of the transition, which is this: they are halfway there politically, but culturally they never will be. Michelangelo was just more important than whatever Albrecht Dürer came up with. The Protestant probity of Britannia is anathema to the south's winking Catholic loucheness. And tomatoes, we all know, are better consumed on the ultramontane side of things. And so, on a train back to Rome (wait, is that also the CEO of Al Italia?) I am unable to take their concern very seriously. The land that produced the Trevi fountain will never resemble one that boasts the blandly demure Eros in Piccadilly Circus. And what of the stolid Land Rover vs the unembarrassed Ferrari? Ale vs Sangiovese? Welcome to Britaly? We would never be so lucky [See also: Kemi Badenoch isn't working] Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Related
New Statesman
20 hours ago
- Politics
- New Statesman
The MoD's Afghan data breach shows us who we really are
Hundreds of people are evacuated out of Afghanistan by British armed forces in August 2021. Photo by Ben Shread/MoD Crown Copyright via Getty Images The Afghan data breach was not an isolated incident. Between 2023 and 2024, there were 569 known cases in which the Ministry of Defence (MoD) failed to keep sensitive information safe: software compromised, devices missing, documents mishandled. On 16 July it was revealed that a UK official had accidentally leaked information on 18,714 Afghan nationals applying for a government relocation scheme for those who had helped the British military. Before that, the MoD had made public the identities of 265 Afghan collaborators, most of whom were interpreters, in a stray email in 2021. It had left its payroll system vulnerable to hackers who gained access to the names and bank details of British military personnel. And it had admitted to losing hundreds of government assets, from laptops and memory sticks to a Glock pistol and a First World War machine gun. What explains this pattern of failings? It appears that by removing security checks, foregoing proper data protection, cutting back on staff and hiring outside contractors, the MoD laid the foundations for the unfolding national scandal. The leaks thus reflect the deeper maladies of the British state: a decrepit structure, starved of skills and resources, which is willing to meddle in the affairs of foreign countries yet incapable of running its own IT. It is equally the latest reverberation from the new century's version of imperialism, when Tony Blair hymned overseas conquest like Kipling reborn, and the British army marched through deserts it had last seen in 1880. The New Labour era was a period of peculiar political and geopolitical arrogance. Today, Keir Starmer praises the record of these governments and cites it as a model for his own, even as their legacies threaten to undermine his leadership and give succour to his right-wing opponents. Nostalgists for the Blair-Brown era tend to bracket its foreign policy, presenting the war on terror as a blunder that needn't detract from domestic achievements like Sure Start or the national minimum wage. But the Afghan debacle shows that these two spheres cannot be separated; the national and international dimensions of Blairism followed the same economic logic. As New Labour embarked on its state-building projects abroad, it simultaneously hollowed out the state at home, marketising those parts of it that hadn't yet been sold off by the Tories. The MoD was the second biggest departmental spender on private finance initiatives, raining hellfire down on Iraq and Afghanistan with the help of an emboldened private sector, to which it handed billions worth of contracts. This strategy left public institutions increasingly unable to function by themselves. They made little effort to develop their internal expertise, not least when it came to the new frontier of digital services and databases. Both New Labour's military adventurism and its private finance agenda emanated from a belief that the market-led 'liberal democracy' would conquer the world after the Cold War, replacing backward governments with modern ones, fusty bureaucrats with dynamic entrepreneurs. Authorities in Kabul and Westminster alike would be swept away by this emerging order. Since the arc of history supposedly bent in its direction, the transformation would be mostly spontaneous. Policymakers were encouraged to step back and let it take its course. Their main role was to remove the obstacles to this telos via targeted interventions: overthrowing unfriendly dictators, repealing onerous regulations and waiting for peace and prosperity to follow. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe But such progress never arrived. Instead, the Middle East was drenched in blood: cities bombed to oblivion, ancient heritage sites razed and ethnic conflicts inflamed, with a network of torture facilities springing up across the region to deal with popular resistance. The puppet government in Afghanistan hid out in its securitised Green Zone, siphoning off foreign aid while the rest of the country suffered an endless social crisis. Inequality widened, with basic services in short supply. Political opposition was monopolised by the Taliban, who could bide their time until the occupiers exhausted themselves. Nor was New Labour's 'modernising' vision realised on the home front, where opening the state to market competition brought no benefit to anyone apart from the successful competitors. Just as external actors took over what passed for public provision in Afghanistan, private entities assumed many of the traditional functions of government in Britain, creating a culture of kickbacks and corner-cutting, soaring costs and deteriorating services. Blair had assumed that he could remove the constraints on his 'Third Way' model – 'rogue regimes', nationalised utilities – and bask in its success. But in practice the elimination of those fetters led to perpetual crisis, which the government was forced to step in and manage: staying in the Middle East far longer than expected to attend to the aftermath of its invasions, while struggling to limit the blowback from its free-market reforms. This sequence of events unfolded not just in Britain but across the Global North, as governments joined foreign wars and delegated authority to big business. It soon gave rise to a paradoxical situation. New forms of international dependency were created, with impoverished client states becoming completely reliant on the imperial powers. At the same time, those powers themselves became dependent on predatory investors and asset-stripping corporations, with dire results for states and wider societies. So, as elites in Kabul looked to Western governments to stabilise their rule, they realised that the latter were grappling with their own set of instabilities, caused by the forward march of neoliberalism. Politicians in the developed world had forfeited their own sovereignty while trying to assert it over others. This dynamic contributed to the failure of the regime-change doctrine. These weakened states – internally atrophied and externally overstretched – were not up to the task of neocolonial governance. Their operations were often haphazard, their intelligence flawed. They never established hegemony, which requires the maintenance of power through a careful balance of coercion and consent. The mode of rule was based on the first far more than the second: domination pure and simple. Under this system, the original sins of colonialism began to proliferate. According to a BBC investigation, scores of Afghan civilians were executed by British special forces, with one SAS squadron reportedly competing internally to attain the highest body count. One veteran described it as 'routine' for soldiers to handcuff and kill detainees – including children – and then cover up their crimes by removing the restraints and planting weapons on the corpses. Killing, said another former fighter, was 'addictive'. 'On some operations, the troops would go into guesthouse-type buildings and kill everyone there… They'd go in and shoot everyone sleeping there, on entry.' Countries that are run in this way tend to rebel against their rulers. The abrupt Nato withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, allowing the Taliban to regain control rapidly, was an open acknowledgement of that fact. Two decades of engagement had cost an estimated 243,000 lives without leaving behind any durable power structure. While some clung to the dream of an indefinite occupation, most of the political and military establishment recognised the urgent need to jump ship. Yet the notion that Britain could easily escape this quagmire was no less misguided than the decision to enter it in the first place. Relations of dependency do not disappear overnight. UK officials had to work out what to do about the significant number of Afghans who lent their services to the war effort, and who now have a legitimate claim to asylum. Once again, their response was astoundingly inept: first presiding over a leak-prone MoD that broadcast the collaborators' details on an unencrypted spreadsheet; then failing to notice the mistake for 18 months; then refusing to inform those it endangered; and finally launching a belated resettlement scheme under the cover of a super-injunction. Britain has now abandoned even this fleeting attempt to make up for its reckless activities. The Defence Secretary, John Healey, has announced that no more Afghans whose data was exposed will automatically be offered relocation in the UK, nor will they be given compensation. He assures us there is 'little evidence of intent from the Taliban to conduct a campaign of retribution against former officials' – even though there is already a well-documented record of similar revenge attacks, and Healey admits he is 'unable to say for sure' whether people have been killed as a result of the breach. Naturally, the families of those featured on the spreadsheet are not as sanguine as he is about their possible fate. All this follows Labour's earlier decision to shut down safe routes for Afghan asylum seekers, abolishing both the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy and the Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme. These were designed for those who had assisted UK forces along with other vulnerable groups, but have now been closed with immediate effect, as part of a broader attempt to outflank the anti-migrant politics of Reform UK. Starmer's intention, it seems, is simply to ignore the inconvenient fallout of the war on terror. The fantasy of building a harmonious Western-orientated Afghanistan has been swapped for the fantasy of evading the consequences of that project. It will not turn out well. The Labour Party's wars of aggression have reshaped 21st-century Britain, not to mention the Middle East, in ways that are impossible to repress. In particular, by promoting the narrative that Muslims are incapable of running their own countries and attempting to modernise them at gunpoint, they have legitimated the kind of Islamophobia Nigel Farage is now wielding against the main Westminster parties: calling for a hard-border regime to keep out those lacking in 'British values'. Farage has used the data breach to further incite such paranoia, claiming with no evidence that sex offenders have been allowed into the UK under the resettlement programme. The only principled and effective antidote to this reactionary tendency is a full rupture with the legacy of New Labour. The first step would be to reckon with the scale of suffering caused by foreign interventions and accept Britain's obligation to alleviate it to the greatest possible extent: by welcoming refugees, easing sanctions that continue to strangle the Afghan economy, and paying reparations. The real test of whether we've learnt from the 2000s, however, is whether we continue to repeat its mistakes. The current Labour government might be more wary of dispatching troops to faraway places. But it still sent RAF spy planes to aid Israeli intelligence operations in Gaza, and has supplied components for Israel's F-35 jets that are being used in air strikes, all in the service of a protracted regime-change campaign against Hamas. It refuses to rule out supporting a US-Israeli assault on Iran, which would inevitably cause mass death and displacement as well as creating many more refugees. If the government's main foreign policy ambition is to act as Washington's henchman, this is in part because its domestic policy is not designed to reclaim the sovereignty that was relinquished during the neoliberal period; it is characterised by the same mix of deregulation and deference to private interests. In this sense, the data leak offers a glimpse of a much wider problem: the ability of Blairism to survive amid the wreckage it has made. [See also: Israel and Gaza: A question of intent] Related
The Herald Scotland
a day ago
- Business
- The Herald Scotland
Who does Labour exist to represent in Starmer's Britain?
Contrary to what many people remember the first Thatcher government, elected in 1979, was comparatively benign compared with what was to come – the miners' strike, mass unemployment, the economic vandalism of the 1980s, the Poll Tax – and Kinnock knew that it was simply a warm-up routine. If Thatcher was re-elected, he told the packed hall and a live TV audience on News at Ten, 'I warn you not to be ordinary. I warn you not to be young. I warn you not to fall ill. I warn you not to get old'. Read More: A politician so cruelly misrepresented in the Conservative media, Kinnock was not only the architect of New Labour, and arguably the best Prime Minister his party never had, he was also the greatest platform orator of his generation. Listening to one of his rousing, charismatic and intelligent speeches, was to be reminded of the power of collective ambition and the glorious possibility of change. Above all, he always stressed the importance of not overpromising and of delivering. Neil Kinnock (Image: PA) What is striking about listening to his words today – more than 40 years later – is that under the current leadership, they might equally apply to the Labour government. Labour leaders have always faced a perilous balancing act in appealing simultaneously to the party faithful and the wider electorate. There are those, like Tony Blair and Harold Wilson, who managed the neat trick of speaking effectively to both. Others, like Jeremy Corbyn and Michael Foot didn't even pretend to be interested in engaging with the latter and succumbed, inevitably to the gravitational effects of their own hubris at the polls. The current leadership appears to be the first in the party's history to speak to neither. Sir Keir Starmer's first year as Prime Minister has been marked by a dramatic collapse in public support, with his net approval rating now worse than all post-Thatcher prime ministers, with the exception of Gordon Brown, at the same stage. Key missteps include his controversial decision – alongside Chancellor Rachel Reeves – to cut winter fuel payments for pensioners. This move, justified by a disputed £22billion "black hole", alienated older voters and damaged his reputation, and his inability to deliver on key manifesto pledges accelerated that decline. A recent Public First poll revealed 39% of voters believe he has made no progress on any major promises, including cutting NHS waiting times (24%), restoring order to the asylum system (8%), or improving border security (12%). Tax hikes included in last year's Autumn Statement eroded business confidence, while a prisoner early-release scandal – where a freed inmate thanked Starmer for his "privilege" – deepened the sense of detachment. A disastrous first year was capped with the poor handling of the government's welfare bill, which squeezed through its final Commons stage, only after significant rebellion and concessions. The bill's passage followed weeks of chaos, with ministers forced to scrap PIP cuts for existing claimants and delay changes for new ones. Starmer's low-drama persona, once an asset against Tory turmoil, now appears indecisive, with Reform overtaking Labour in polls and Nigel Farage seen as a stronger leader. The most damaging impact of these failures may well be in the longer term, applied by voters who could be forgiven for wondering who Labour represents and what it stands for. If it is not there to support the 'ordinary, the young, the ill and the old' then what is its purpose? The party is still battling to overcome claims of antisemitism that took root under Corbyn's disastrous, sclerotic leadership. This week Susan Smith, director of the campaign group For Women Scotland claimed the party has an 'ongoing women problem' after Labour MP Tim Roca described gender critical activists as 'swivel-eyed'. While Blair had the benefit of a growing economy when he won a landslide victory in 1997, he also came into office with an identifiable political credo and a sense of purpose. The doctrinal prism through which all policy decisions were refracted, was reform – modernising the party and bringing it more in line with mainstream orthodoxy. While he inevitably alienated parts of Labour's base – not least through his disastrous and, ultimately career-defining, decision to support a US invasion of Iraq – he continued to command popular support. If there's one thing core voters and activists cannot argue against, it's winning elections. The problem for Starmer and his colleagues is that, more than a year into government, voters still have no idea what they stand for. Relying solely on competence for electoral appeal quickly becomes a liability when you make a series of demonstrably incompetent decisions. Before Starmer can begin to address his party's disparity in the opinion polls, he must prioritise reconnecting with its grassroots, to articulate more clearly his values and beliefs, to counter the threat, not only from Farage's snake oil promises, but also from Corbyn's new, and as yet unnamed, party of the far left. He could do worse than start watch another of Kinnock's former speeches, his leader's address to the Labour conference in 1985 when he took on Militant Tendency, the Trotskyist insurgency that threatened to subvert the party from within. His delivery was an object lesson in highlighting the futility of dogmatc obsession and was directed at Militant members who had captured Liverpool City Council, bankrupting it with profligate, illegal spending and then sacking its own employees because it couldn't afford to pay their wages. 'Implausible promises don't win victories,' he told a chastened hall. If Starmer can first convince his party's faithful of that abiding truth, he will be better placed to win over the wider electorate. Carlos Alba is a journalist, author, and PR consultant at Carlos Alba Media. His latest novel, There's a Problem with Dad, explores the issue of undiagnosed autism among older people
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Business
- The Guardian
Cunliffe's reforms for water should have happened 20 years ago
Farewell, Ofwat, soon to disappear down the regulatory U-bend. Its leadership has been up against some serious corporate miscreants and boardroom financial engineers over the years, but abolition is the right decision. The original sin – overseen by New Labour – was to allow the leveraged takeover boom of the mid-2000s, which was the point at which regulatory control over the sector started to be lost. The past decade has been about trying to undo the damage, which has only exposed yawning gaps in regulatory knowledge, such as the storm overflow scandal that broke in 2021. A 'reset' moment is overdue by about 20 years. Sir Jon Cunliffe's review goes to the heart of one main problem: the fragmented, overlapping and inflexible nature of a regulatory system that takes in not just Ofwat and the Environment Agency (a regulator that lost its way as severely) but also the Drinking Water Inspectorate, Natural England and Natural Resources Wales. That structure is simply confused. A super-regulator in England (and equivalent in Wales) should, the theory goes, solve the problem of duplication and lack of coordination. Simpler is better. One line of criticism says the government is merely rearranging the deckchairs. Not necessarily. The bite in Cunliffe's recommendations, if they are to succeed, will be the switch to a 'supervisory' model. The description is bland but, if done correctly, it could make a difference, as it has in financial services, from where Cunliffe, one of the clean-up officials at the Bank of England after the great crash, has drawn his analysis. The Prudential Regulation Authority is capable of striking fear in bank boardrooms. For water, it will require the regulator to know a company's operations in detail at a basic engineering level, and thus be equipped to know when excessive returns are being made or when, genuinely, the company hasn't been given the financial resources to do the job. It is, for example, amazing that Ofwat's board does not include anyone with the job title 'chief engineer'. (The new regulator should have one, says Cunliffe.) And it is even more astonishing, 36 years after privatisation, that nobody seems to have a clear idea of the real state of companies' assets. (Fix that too, says the report.) Add it up and there is a framework for a more commonsense approach than the current cycle of reviews and exchanges of documents running to thousands of pages. 'Ofwat has relied too heavily on a data-driven, econometric approach, and has not taken sufficient account of company-specific conditions and challenges,' says Cunliffe's commission. It is hard to disagree. In the end, it is not possible to run a privatised system without strong regulators who form their own judgments. New powers, under Cunliffe's advice, would allow regulators to block certain owners and to apply a financial-style suitability test for senior executives. Both sound like improvements if backed by 'public benefit clauses' in water company licences that would allow the regulator to interfere more aggressively. Given the sector's history of financial engineering, Cunliffe could have gone further and suggested caps on debt levels. Instead, he opted for new regulatory powers to set minimum capital levels. That is weaker, but at least we may see an end to the nonsense of Ofwat announcing a leverage ratio for its 'notional' company (55% of assets currently) and then being ignored. In other respects, the report will read as investor-friendly: 'company-specific' supervision and the possibility of 'regulatory forbearance' in turnaround situations will be music to the ears of the sector laggards. If the latter is to achieve public consent, the other side of that coin will have to be tougher day-to-day enforcement of environmental laws, which comes down to the government's willingness to fund boots on the ground. That part is the gift of ministers. Indeed, Steve Reed, the environment secretary, should take note of what this report demands of government – a 'step change' in strategic approach, including setting medium- and long-term priorities and an acknowledgment of trade-offs. Step one, one can suggest, would be for Reed to stop claiming the government has 'secured £104bn of private sector investment' when everybody knows the vast bulk of the sum comes from customers' bills. Sign up to Business Today Get set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning after newsletter promotion For some, nothing less than full nationalisation will do. On that score, the government's resistance is justified. Nationalisation would take years, would be challenged in court if attempted at less than market value, and offers no guarantee of success if the HS2 debacle is a guide to departmental talents in building critical infrastructure. Cunliffe's vision of a 'low-risk, low-return' sector for investors is a better pragmatic bet if the goal is to clean up lakes and rivers as quickly as possible and actually build some reservoirs. Low-risk cannot mean risk-free: it must still be possible for the owners of outright corporate flops to lose their shirts, as the mugs who bought Thames Water from Macquarie will. Everything will depend on execution, of course. In the meantime, the Thames crisis rumbles on and special administration remains a highly possible outcome for that disaster, not least because Cunliffe's review should remove the 'contagion' risk for the wider sector. For now, the forward-looking aspect of his review is the thing to focus on. A tally of 88 recommendations illustrates how much has gone wrong. But the core advice to create a single, stronger regulator – one that can throw its weight around on the basis of up-to-date information – should be unarguable.
