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The Herald Scotland
3 hours 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
2 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.
New Statesman
7 days ago
- Politics
- New Statesman
Why Labour has embraced class politics
Photo by. When a Vanity Fair interviewer asked Tony Blair about his faith, Alastair Campbell memorably interjected: 'We don't do God.' In some respects, New Labour didn't do class either. Blair treated the subject as redolent of a failed past and as increasingly irrelevant in modern Britain. John Prescott may never have said that 'we're all middle-class now' (he described himself as a 'working-class man' living a 'middle-class style of life') but Blair did declare that 'the class war is over' in his 1999 Labour conference speech. Keir Starmer and his cabinet, by contrast, have embraced the politics of class. At last Friday's Chequers away day, the Prime Minister reminded his team that they were the most working-class cabinet in history. While Blair used the language of peace, Starmer deployed the language of struggle. 'You all have your own stories about the battle you had to get here,' he told the cabinet. 'This is a time for fighters. You are here to remove the barriers for working people to get to where they want to.' It's a theme that Wes Streeting reprised in his extended (17-minute) speech at last night's New Statesman summer party. '[Starmer] has assembled the most working-class cabinet in history and that really matters, not for tokenism but because of the experience we bring to bear,' he said. 'If you don't have a diversity of perspective and experience, you end up through unconscious, if not conscious, bias making decisions in the interests of the privileged few.' (Blair, Streeting told me last year, was 'too quick to declare a classless society'.) It isn't only Starmer and Streeting who speak the language of class. Their cabinet colleagues routinely connect their policy decisions to their backgrounds. When Bridget Phillipson – last night's other guest speaker – announced the expansion of free school meals to all households receiving Universal Child she recalled the hunger she endured in her youth. At last month's Spending Review, the comprehensive-educated Rachel Reeves declared that she would 'always prioritise' the 93 per cent of children who attend state schools as she defended the imposition of VAT on private school fees (a decision of which Blair is said to disapprove). What else lies behind this turn towards class? In part it reflects a grim policy reality: though New Labour lifted half a million children out of poverty and dramatically improved public services, class differences endured and in some areas even hardened (not least housing). Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe It also reflects a transformed electoral landscape: Blair's project was shaped by winning over middle-class voters in the south of England; Starmer has had to be far more attentive to the working-class voters who abandoned Labour in the 'Red Wall' and Scotland (and who, as Morgan McSweeney understands, began to drift away during Blair's third term). Can class help Labour tell the story that so many feel this government still lacks? It can – and should – correct the perception that this cabinet merely represents 'more of the same'. As I note in my column in this week's magazine, the relationship between the government and the trade unions, to take one example, has been transformed (when he became Business Secretary, Jonathan Reynolds found that his department lacked even the phone numbers of some general secretaries). Confronted by Nigel Farage – a Dulwich College-educated stockbroker – plenty in Labour draw heart from the return of class politics. But while the government needs a compelling story, its fate may ultimately hinge on delivery. If voters don't feel better off by the next election, then Labour's invocations of class will fall just as flat as its 'toff' attacks on David Cameron and Boris Johnson did. This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here [See also: Britain's billionaire tax problem] Related
The Guardian
16-07-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Teenage pregnancy rates are a barometer of Britain's progress. The tale they now tell is not reassuring
It takes the passing of time to fully grasp the scale of the previous government's vandalism. Think where we would be now had the Tories not dismantled the social programmes they inherited from New Labour, with so many showing rapid progress. Those watching the statistics had a jolt last week when figures from the Office for National Statistics for 2022 seemed to show the second annual rise in teenage pregnancies in England and Wales, after a decade of falling rates. This may turn out to be the result of pandemic distortions in the previous year, when numbers dropped due to teens not meeting. The next figures may return to the previous trajectory, but that's still a sluggish rate of falling teenage conceptions and it throws into stark perspective how far Britain lags behind similar countries. The UK now has the 22nd-lowest teenage pregnancy rate out of the 27 EU countries and us. Many of these countries' rates are falling faster, while ours lags, largely due to our exceptionally high level of inequality. Had New Labour's remarkable programmes around social exclusion been doing their work through these wasted Tory years, we may no longer be such a social laggard of the western world. It's worth recounting what was lost. As soon as Labour came to power in 1997, it founded the social exclusion unit, with 18 taskforces pursuing the causes of deprivation. Truancy, bad housing, juvenile crime, debt, mental ill-health, addictions, rough sleeping, school expulsions, youth unemployment and teenage pregnancy each had a dedicated team seeking out social research. Their results were recorded each year in the index of multiple deprivation, an annual Domesday Book of the dispossessed. In 1997, halving teenage pregnancies was regarded as one of the hardest targets. That type of deeply complex social behaviour seemed beyond the reach of the state. To start with, Labour had to take on the bogus moralising among a particularly nasty cohort of Tories. The outgoing Conservative government had imposed the section 28 ban on schools discussing homosexuality and gave parents a legal right to remove children from sex education. In 1992, Peter Lilley, the minister for social security, sang a ditty about 'single mothers who get pregnant just to jump the housing queue', while John Redwood, the Welsh secretary, castigated single mothers in Cardiff the following year as 'one of the biggest social problems of our day' ('The assumption is that the illegitimate child is a passport to a council flat,' he said). Moral blame was an excuse to cut lone parent benefits, a last-minute pre-election trap that Lilley bequeathed to the New Labour government, forcing Labour MPs to carry it out, pledged to stick to Tory spending plans. What worked was tackling all causes at once, from child poverty to school absence, alcohol use, poor sex education, a lack of access to contraception, mixed messages about sex, dismal future prospects and the impact of spending a childhood in care. Alison Hadley, who led New Labour's teenage pregnancy taskforce, explains in her book Teenage Pregnancy and Young Parenthood why this matters: young mothers and their children tend to do badly, suffering from higher maternal depressionand higher infant mortality, with children left with a delayed verbal ability and a worse life outlook. What helped was raising the school leaving age, girls staying on until 18, going to college with an array of courses that raise aspirations and an education maintenance allowance paid to the poorest. Pastoral care at school improved, with school nurses dispensing the morning-after pill. So, too, did sex education. Alcohol use among young people fell. Youth services grew, with Connexions offering 13- to 19-year-olds everything from mental health support to careers advice. School absence rates fell as the curriculum became more flexible and fun, with a wider range of subjects and activities. Sexual health clinics for young people opened, with sessions suiting school hours. All of these were attacked by the moralisers as likely to cause an explosion of young sex. But instead, the opposite happened: the number of young people who said they had had sexual intercourse decreased substantially among boys and girls, and there were fewer conceptions. When a new government took power in 2010 and axed the programme, so many of these improving indicators went backwards. In the intervening years, teenage pregnancy rates had still been falling, though far more slowly than in comparable countries as so many key services have been lost. Brook's special sexual health clinics for the young have closed in places such as Wirral, Burnley, Southwark, Liverpool, Lambeth and Oldham. The Connexions youth service was abolished. Schools cut drama, sport, music, arts and technical subjects as Michael Gove's curriculum reforms sidelined anything but his five-subject Ebaccs. In England, attendance fell and school expulsions rose, as did the off-rolling of pupils who were likely to reduce a school's results, all reasons for Britain falling so far behind. The poorest places still have the highest rates of teenage pregnancy: there is still a seven-fold difference in rates between well-off and destitute areas. And those nasty attitudes still lurk on the Tory right among the likes of Danny Kruger, who has called for a return to 'normative' family values. The former Tory MP Miriam Cates was forever attacking sex education with grotesque parodies of what was taught. She asked Rishi Sunak at prime minister's questions if he knew about 'graphic lessons on oral sex, how to choke your partner safely and 72 genders – this is what passes for relationships and sex education in British schools', then demanded he launch an independent inquiry, which he duly did, a month before the last election. What did it take to address the problem? Everything. But the unit is a hopeful reminder that what was done before can be done again. Today, the education department issues bolder broader sex and relationships education guidance, a good sign, bringing schools closer to encouraging their students to think and talk about relationships, misogyny, pornography, bad influencers and internet threats. All of this has been recorded by Moira Wallace, a permanent secretary who became the head of the social exclusion unit from 1997 to 2002, who say she 'watches like a hawk, not an ostrich' the progress or often backsliding of those programmes. Her recent survey on school absence shows the number of students persistently missing is rising sharply, linked to multiple bad outcomes, especially teenage pregnancy. Not everything in her social exclusion unit hit its goal, but many areas did, with action on teenage pregnancy exceeding its target, and youth employment, rough sleeping and early years metrics among other notable successes. The unit's ambition propelled an optimism about what can be done. Lessons to be learned? Nail down improvements in the public mind, so no future government dares commit such social sabotage again. Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
The Guardian
16-07-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Teenage pregnancy rates are a barometer of Britain's progress. The tale they now tell is not reassuring
It takes the passing of time to fully grasp the scale of the previous government's vandalism. Think where we would be now had the Tories not dismantled the social programmes they inherited from New Labour, with so many showing rapid progress. Those watching the statistics had a jolt last week when figures from the Office for National Statistics for 2022 seemed to show the second annual rise in teenage pregnancies in England and Wales, after a decade of falling rates. This may turn out to be the result of pandemic distortions in the previous year, when numbers dropped due to teens not meeting. The next figures may return to the previous trajectory, but that's still a sluggish rate of falling teenage conceptions and it throws into stark perspective how far Britain lags behind similar countries. The UK now has the 22nd-lowest teenage pregnancy rate out of the 27 EU countries and us. Many of these countries' rates are falling faster, while ours lags, largely due to our exceptionally high level of inequality. Had New Labour's remarkable programmes around social exclusion been doing their work through these wasted Tory years, we may no longer be such a social laggard of the western world. It's worth recounting what was lost. As soon as Labour came to power in 1997, it founded the social exclusion unit, with 18 taskforces pursuing the causes of deprivation. Truancy, bad housing, juvenile crime, debt, mental ill-health, addictions, rough sleeping, school expulsions, youth unemployment and teenage pregnancy each had a dedicated team seeking out social research. Their results were recorded each year in the index of multiple deprivation, an annual Domesday Book of the dispossessed. In 1997, halving teenage pregnancies was regarded as one of the hardest targets. That type of deeply complex social behaviour seemed beyond the reach of the state. To start with, Labour had to take on the bogus moralising among a particularly nasty cohort of Tories. The outgoing Conservative government had imposed the section 28 ban on schools discussing homosexuality and gave parents a legal right to remove children from sex education. In 1992, Peter Lilley, the minister for social security, sang a ditty about 'single mothers who get pregnant just to jump the housing queue', while John Redwood, the Welsh secretary, castigated single mothers in Cardiff the following year as 'one of the biggest social problems of our day' ('The assumption is that the illegitimate child is a passport to a council flat,' he said). Moral blame was an excuse to cut lone parent benefits, a last-minute pre-election trap that Lilley bequeathed to the New Labour government, forcing Labour MPs to carry it out, pledged to stick to Tory spending plans. What worked was tackling all causes at once, from child poverty to school absence, alcohol use, poor sex education, a lack of access to contraception, mixed messages about sex, dismal future prospects and the impact of spending a childhood in care. Alison Hadley, who led New Labour's teenage pregnancy taskforce, explains in her book Teenage Pregnancy and Young Parenthood why this matters: young mothers and their children tend to do badly, suffering from higher maternal depressionand higher infant mortality, with children left with a delayed verbal ability and a worse life outlook. What helped was raising the school leaving age, girls staying on until 18, going to college with an array of courses that raise aspirations and an education maintenance allowance paid to the poorest. Pastoral care at school improved, with school nurses dispensing the morning-after pill. So, too, did sex education. Alcohol use among young people fell. Youth services grew, with Connexions offering 13- to 19-year-olds everything from mental health support to careers advice. School absence rates fell as the curriculum became more flexible and fun, with a wider range of subjects and activities. Sexual health clinics for young people opened, with sessions suiting school hours. All of these were attacked by the moralisers as likely to cause an explosion of young sex. But instead, the opposite happened: the number of young people who said they had had sexual intercourse decreased substantially among boys and girls, and there were fewer conceptions. When a new government took power in 2010 and axed the programme, so many of these improving indicators went backwards. In the intervening years, teenage pregnancy rates had still been falling, though far more slowly than in comparable countries as so many key services have been lost. Brook's special sexual health clinics for the young have closed in places such as Wirral, Burnley, Southwark, Liverpool, Lambeth and Oldham. The Connexions youth service was abolished. Schools cut drama, sport, music, arts and technical subjects as Michael Gove's curriculum reforms sidelined anything but his five-subject Ebaccs. In England, attendance fell and school expulsions rose, as did the off-rolling of pupils who were likely to reduce a school's results, all reasons for Britain falling so far behind. The poorest places still have the highest rates of teenage pregnancy: there is still a seven-fold difference in rates between well-off and destitute areas. And those nasty attitudes still lurk on the Tory right among the likes of Danny Kruger, who has called for a return to 'normative' family values. The former Tory MP Miriam Cates was forever attacking sex education with grotesque parodies of what was taught. She asked Rishi Sunak at prime minister's questions if he knew about 'graphic lessons on oral sex, how to choke your partner safely and 72 genders – this is what passes for relationships and sex education in British schools', then demanded he launch an independent inquiry, which he duly did, a month before the last election. What did it take to address the problem? Everything. But the unit is a hopeful reminder that what was done before can be done again. Today, the education department issues bolder broader sex and relationships education guidance, a good sign, bringing schools closer to encouraging their students to think and talk about relationships, misogyny, pornography, bad influencers and internet threats. All of this has been recorded by Moira Wallace, a permanent secretary who became the head of the social exclusion unit from 1997 to 2002, who say she 'watches like a hawk, not an ostrich' the progress or often backsliding of those programmes. Her recent survey on school absence shows the number of students persistently missing is rising sharply, linked to multiple bad outcomes, especially teenage pregnancy. Not everything in her social exclusion unit hit its goal, but many areas did, with action on teenage pregnancy exceeding its target, and youth employment, rough sleeping and early years metrics among other notable successes. The unit's ambition propelled an optimism about what can be done. Lessons to be learned? Nail down improvements in the public mind, so no future government dares commit such social sabotage again. Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
