Latest news with #NewLabour
New Statesman
a day ago
- Politics
- New Statesman
The British left is coming for the Government
Photo byWhisper it as yet, but after five long years of confusion and disarray, the British left is rallying. Local political organisations are coalescing, from Chiswick to Liverpool to Newcastle. The Green Party leadership contest has become a straight fight between an energetic, 'eco-populist' left candidate, and the party's more cautious establishment. The prize is clear: local elections due next May across England's major cities, including London councils. After that, who knows. Could Labour's urban fiefdoms fall victim to the rout northern councils saw in the local elections last month? It won't be easy. Bitterly, almost viscerally unpopular as Labour may be, it is the self-styled insurgents of Nigel Farage's Reform that have been the overwhelming beneficiaries of the Starmer slump. Farage himself has been happy to pilfer from the left – a long-time Thatcherite now turned improbable friend of the welfare state. But the Reform squeeze isn't only on Starmer's Labour, who, after talking up their fiscal discipline at huge political cost are now u-turning on its most unpopular consequences. It's also a squeeze on all those on England's left who fondly imagine that the popularity of their traditional policies, from nationalisation to more welfare spending, is enough to win them votes. Instead, they're now seeing those same demands nabbed by opportunists from the radical right, precisely because they are popular. A new programme for 21st-century England will be needed, focused relentlessly on the everyday cost of living and wealth inequality. But new organisations are also needed. Peter Mandelson once spoke of a Labour left buried in a 'sealed tomb' by New Labour. This proved to be optimistic, as the Corbyn surge of the 2010s proved. And fearful of a second Corbyn-style resurrection, Starmer's operation has driven a stake through the left's heart, stuffed its mouth with garlic, placed it in a lead-lined coffin, sealed the tomb, and stationed a grim-faced 24-hour armed guard outside, gripping their pistols and blazing torches. The monster will not now escape. As a political force, the Labour left is finished. The tactic of entryism – entering the Labour party and changing it – is finished too. Instead, the party's steely-eyed Van Helsings should have been looking elsewhere. From the shadows, far away from Westminster, a terrifying new apparition is approaching. Disguised by the size of Labour's majority, the 2024 election saw the non-Labour left win its biggest parliamentary representation in British history, on its biggest vote ever. Four million voters returned nine left MPs, spread between the Greens and five independents, including Jeremy Corbyn in Islington. At the height of its success, in the late 1940s, the Communist Party won two MPs and 94,000 votes. Since the foundation of the Labour Party itself, the non-Labour left has never seen anything like this support. Against a seemingly monolithic Labour majority, this may have mattered little. Britain's perverse voting system found Keir Starmer foisted into Downing Street with a landslide majority, but with half a million fewer votes than Jeremy Corbyn lost by in 2019. As a result, the party has been left with more marginal seats than ever before in its history. Fifty-one of its seats were won with a margin of less than 5 per cent. Accurately described after the election by polling expert James Kaganasooriam as a 'sandcastle majority', the turning political tide has now washed away Labour's 2024 support. The main beneficiaries, for now, are Reform, whose spectacular success in the local government elections saw them win control of previously Labour councils from Durham to Derbyshire. Its one-time heartlands in the North of England were already riddled and on the verge collapse, with Boris Johnson's demolition of this so-called 'Red Wall' in 2019 having already delivered the fatal blow. Johnson's failure to hold his new coalition together, coupled with Liz Truss' calamitous 44 days in office, saw many of Johnson's wins fall back into Labour hands five years later – but on the most tenuous and temporary basis. Demographic change, and a great, decades-long shift in the economy from manufacturing to services, has created new heartlands for the party, concentrated in inner cities and major urban areas across the country: a mix of underpaid, insecure younger workers, often with university degrees; more settled ethnic minority communities; and a solid layer of public sector employees, many of whom are now at or approaching retirement. Generally socially liberal, 15 years of persistent economic failure since the financial crisis have shoved this base increasingly to the economic left. And 25 years of failed military interventions have created a deep cynicism about Britain's role abroad – crystallised in the distance between Starmer's government and its voters on Israel. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Even before entering Downing Street, the horrors of Gaza, and Britain's complicity in them, had been a powerful solvent on Labour's new base of support. That undermined Labour's vote in 2024, and resulted in the arrival of the 'Gaza independents', the four pro-Palestinian MPs elected in the strongly Muslim areas of Leicester, Blackburn, Dewsbury and Birmingham. Combined with Labour's blunders and cruelties in office, from the Winter Fuel Payment to disability allowance cuts, the party's support has been hollowed out. Its voters won't vote, its activists aren't active, and the party's once-fearsome ground game is crumbling. There was a taste of what could be to come in Haringey last month when a Green Party candidate, Rurairdh Paton, was elected by a landslide in a solidly Labour and solidly working class ward. Tellingly, local campaigners report that Labour grew so desperate for campaigners that local councillors from Folkestone in Kent were drafted in to door-knock. It's the better-established Greens who can seize this opportunity in Labour strongholds. Zack Polanski's leadership bid, and the newly formed internal faction, Greens Organise, have already identified the potential for a breakthrough. Polling shows the Green's support to be younger, and poorer, than the other national parties. These are not the middle-class do-gooders of legend. The broader left, outside the Greens, needs to recognise how the world has changed. Rumours that Jeremy Corbyn was about to set up a new party have swirled around him since his expulsion from Labour, almost five years ago. National negotiations to establish a new party, organised between different chunks of the post-Corbyn left, have come to little. A combination of political caution, and disagreements over a new party's potential direction and leadership have so far scuppered agreement. Perhaps wisely, Corbyn himself has been wary of jumping the gun. The history of left-wing breakaways from Labour, from the Independent Labour Party in the 1930s, to Scottish Labour in the 1970s, to Respect in the 2000s, has not been a happy one. Only George Galloway has, to date, made anything like a success of it, and then only via an increasingly eccentric one-man triangulation between the economic left and 'socially conservative' right. Whatever else he may be, Jeremy Corbyn is not George Galloway. And declaring a new party will not magically reproduce his 2015 breakthrough. Cooperation across the non-Labour left is the order of the day. On the ground, this cooperation is already starting to happen. In Lancashire, Greens have banded together with the newly formed Preston Independents to become the official opposition on the County Council. Greens and Independents are working closely in Islington. Local organisations are being pulled together by prominent independent left candidates, like former mayor Jamie Driscoll in Tyneside, Faiza Shaheen in Chingford, and former ANC MP Andrew Feinstein, who came second place in Keir Starmer's own constituency of Holborn and St Pancras at the 2024 election. Green Party members in all those constituencies are working alongside the independent left. Local alliances can become a national force. Across the channel, France's New Popular Front, an alliance between forces of the traditional left, the left populist France Insoumise, and the French Greens, was pulled together in weeks on a radical programme that catapulted the alliance to top of the polls in the snap elections – and pushed Marine Le Pen's National Rally to third place. France Insoumise MP Danielle Obono spoke at the London Green Party's conference last month on the practical experience of unity. There's a desire to learn from what worked – and what did not. The next general election isn't due until 2029. But a string of local council victories next year would pave the way for an unprecedented challenge to Labour – not from the right, as the party has always had to fight, but from its radical flank. And this new movement could take parts of Labour with them: from the tone of his Guardian op-ed on Wednesday, John McDonnell already regards his party as half-lost. Far from the coming in from the cold, what was once the Labour left has a different goal: burning the house down and building something completely new. [See also: Child poverty is rallying the Labour left] Related
New Statesman
5 days ago
- Business
- New Statesman
Even Peter Mandelson thinks globalisation is dead
Photo byIn 2005, Tony Blair said debating globalisation was as worthwhile as debating whether autumn followed summer. Twenty years later, his old cabinet minister Peter Mandelson, now Britain's ambassador to America, gave a lecture pronouncing the demise of 'hyper-globalisation'. Trump, it seems, has the power to reorder the seasons. Mandelson is integrating well into Trump's America. The last time he was in public he was grinning through a car window on the White House driveway, moments after the president praised his 'beautiful accent' as they signed a deal on tariffs in the Oval Office. He was soon being heralded back home as a Trump whisperer. Mandelson's profile soared, even as evidence of a Special Relationship dwindled. There's an irony to Mandelson's mission in Washington: he has been tasked with shepherding Britain through Trump's dismantling of the very global system which he helped to create. He was the EU's trade commissioner between his slots atop the pro-globalisation New Labour government. Now, on the 11th floor of the moneyed Atlantic Council, he said the World Trade Organisation rulebook is unfit for the 21st century, and that Nato must go through a 'reinvention'. The institutions he had spent decades building up were crumbling around him. Washington's old diplomatic guard had gathered to hear how the Special Relationship would endure this tumult. Mandelson's prescription is for the UK to prove its 'huge usefulness' to America. Britain must become 'less dependent [on the US] but still inseparably linked'. The country is not torn between the EU on one side and America on the other. Instead, the UK can 'serve' – his word – both allies. Labour's strategy has been to hug Trump desperately close. Mandelson said he 'could not complain' about the administration's welcome. He meant that they'd treated him well – but it's also literally true: complaints in Trump's Washington do not go unpunished. His call for Britain and America to renew their 'vows' over the coming months was an unfortunate metaphor for a president with a predilection for divorce. Nonetheless, Mandelson is more candid than a traditional diplomat, happy raising a telling eyebrow, or alluding in answers to his regret over Brexit – a political dart no traditional civil servant would publicly throw. This authenticity suits Trumpland, where respect for procedure is long gone. Ditto that soporific drawl. Beneath the accent, and the dire prognosis for globalisation, Mandelson's message was temptingly optimistic – and specific: the Special Relationship will be revived in the labs of Silicon Valley. Where once globalisation was both inevitable and beneficial, now Britain's saviour will arrive bearing Artificially Intelligent robots. Mandelson is positioning the UK for a big deal on technology; he talks of the tariff deal as a precursor to something more substantial. This speech sounded like an invitation to America's technologists to realise his techno-futurist vision of Britain as 'an AI-driven, new model economy for the 21st century.' Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe If Mandelson pulls off some such deal then his influence would extend far beyond the sphere of a traditional ambassador. He would be shunting the British economy into Silicon Valley's fiefdom. [See more: Meet Britain's Joe Rogan] Related
The Guardian
21-05-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Sure Start centres saved UK government £2 for every £1 spent, study finds
Sure Start children's centres provided £2 of savings for every £1 in costs, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), prompting calls for the government to look at such services as potentially paying for themselves. The centres, championed by the last Labour government, created £2.8bn in savings and revenues at the scheme's peak in England, according to the IFS study. Sarah Cattan, a research fellow at the IFS and an author of the report, said: 'Our work shows that integrated early years services, done well, are cheaper than they initially seem once their benefits are taken into account.' After calculating the benefits for government and individuals, the IFS said: 'We estimate that every £1 of up-front spending on Sure Start generated £2.05 in total benefits over the long run.' The IFS found the positive impacts of Sure Start were widespread and 'remarkably long lasting', producing better health, education and social care outcomes for families who enrolled in the programme offering support for children up to the age of five. Sure Start established 'one-stop shops' initially in disadvantaged areas, from 1999 onwards, with early years, health and family support services under a single roof. It is often regarded as one of New Labour's most successful social policies. The programme was dismantled by Conservative-led governments elected from 2010 onwards. At its peak in 2009-10 Sure Start had 3,600 centres in England, before austerity cuts reduced government funding by two-thirds, with local authorities scaling back or closing most of the centres by 2018. The IFS looked at children born in the 1990s and 2000s who took part, and found it improved health and educational outcomes, including better than expected GCSE results, as well as reducing school absences and less severe special educational needs and disabilities. Nick Ridpath, a research economist at the IFS and an author of the report, said: 'These benefits are not only important in their own right, they also generate savings to the public purse and boost lifetime earnings. Sure Start did not quite pay for itself from the government's perspective. But taking benefits for lifetime earnings into account, in the long run it will generate around twice as much value as it cost.' At its peak, Sure Start's running costs were about £2.7bn a year in 2023–24 prices. The IFS calculated that the government benefited from savings of £600m each year in lower health, special needs and social care demands, and £1.9bn in extra income tax and national insurance revenue. Sign up to First Edition Our morning email breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what's happening and why it matters after newsletter promotion In addition, the IFS said the programme generated a further £3.1bn in higher earnings for each year group who used the centres, equivalent to a £7,800 average boost to lifetime post-tax earnings. Neil Leitch, the chief executive of the Early Years Alliance, said: 'As the IFS rightly points out, this kind of integrated early support has a positive impact not only on the children accessing the services but on society as a whole in the longer term. Clearly, then, investing in quality integrated early years services is not just the right moral decision, but a smart economic choice too.' The researchers warned that Sure Start was not a 'silver bullet', with the programme 'unable to address all challenges that children and young people face'. It noted that it had no significant effect on the number of children spending time in council care and didn't reduce support for more serious special needs provision.
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Starmer announces U-turn on winter fuel payment cuts
Sir Keir Starmer has announced a U-turn on last year's controversial cuts to winter fuel payments. More than nine million pensioners lost out on the payments, worth up to £300, after eligibility for the pension top-up was tightened last year. Speaking at Prime Minister's Questions, Sir Keir said ministers would look again at the threshold to allow "more pensioners" to qualify again. He did not provide further details, adding that the changes would be made at a future Budget. But he added the government would only "make decisions we can afford". Starmer's winter fuel U-turn seeks to calm Labour nerves How much is the winter fuel payment and who can still get it? The winter fuel payment is a lump-sum amount of £200 a year for pensioners under 80, increasing to £300 for over-80s, paid in November or December. Around nine million pensioners lost out on the payments last year after the government restricted them to those who qualify for pension credit and other income-related benefits, to save an estimated £1.4bn. Some Labour MPs have blamed the policy for losses at last month's local elections, where the party lost around two-thirds of the seats it was defending. Grumbling from MPs generally on the Labour left spread into the party more widely, and even MPs who defended the policy said it was the most frequently raised issue by members of the public. The policy has also faced fierce criticism from pensioner charities, and has been opposed by all the main opposition parties at Westminster. Downing Street ruled out changes earlier this month, but Chancellor Rachel Reeves hinted at a change in position earlier this week, saying she was listening to "concerns" about the policy. Tory leader Kemi Badenoch appeared to welcome the U-turn in the Commons, adding that restricting eligibility for the payments last year had "driven thousands into hardship". However, she later tweeted that the change was "too little, too late". Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey also welcomed news that eligibility would be expanded, but pressed the prime minister to reverse the cuts "in full". The income threshold to qualify for pension credit this year is £11,800 for individuals and £18,023 for pensioner couples. Providing an alternative way to qualify for the payments could create administrative hurdles for ministers and officials. Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, a spokesman for the prime minister was unable to say how many more pensioners would be eligible for the benefit under the U-turn. And he declined to guarantee it would be in place this coming winter, but added: "We obviously want to deliver this as quickly as possible. "We will only make decisions when we can say where the money is coming from, how we're going to pay for it and that it's affordable," he added. The winter fuel payment was introduced in 1997 by New Labour as a universal payment for all pensioners. It was billed as a way to guarantee they would be able to pay for increased heating costs over the winter - although in practice it is a pension top-up, which recipients can spend on whatever they want. From 2010 onwards, the state pension gained additional protection under the "triple lock" policy - under which pensions go up each year by the highest of inflation, average earnings or 2.5%. This year state pensions went up by 4.1% - a rise of £363 a year for those on the basic pension or £472 for those on the new pension.
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Thick of It creator reveals scene which cabinet ministers say happened in real life
The creator of the hit political satire The Thick of It has revealed which scene in the series cabinet ministers have confessed to experiencing in real life. Armando Iannucci told Sky News' live event with that the writers would make up scenarios to be "as stupid as they can" - only to be asked later by Whitehall officials how they had found out about it. One episode in particular that was close to the bone involves the fictional mouthy communications director of Number 10, telling a cabinet minister the policy he is due to announce to the media is being cancelled because it is too expensive - and he will have to come up with another one on the spot. Mr Iannucci said: "Sometimes we would come up with stories that were like, we had to invent them, you know, and we thought, let's push it as stupidly as we can. "And then a couple of weeks later, someone from Whitehall would say, 'how did you find out exactly? We thought we'd kept that very quiet'. "And you know, the opening episode has them in the back of a car trying to come up with a policy. Malcolm's rung up and said the policy you've called the press to hear, you cannot go ahead, It's too expensive. "So they've got to come up with a policy that sounds great but will cost nothing. And I've had various former cabinet members say to me quietly, 'I've been in the back of that car'." The Thick of It aired 20 years ago this month, when New Labour was in government. It satirised the inner workings of modern British government, with the focus on the fictitious Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship. Harriet Harman, one of the few senior female figures at the time and now a peer and co-host of Electoral Dysfunction, asked Mr Iannucci if anyone inspired the character Nicola Murray, who was the focus of series three. "I'm asking for a friend, because basically it's like she was so ineffective, but she was so hard working and a nice person. Yes, but she was utterly destroyed by Number 10 and her ministerial colleagues putting the boot in. "I just wondered if she was based on anyone in particular?". Mr Iannucci said everyone in The Thick Of It was "based either on a composite of different things we've heard in different people or on a kind of guesstimate of what this person might be".
