Tag Archives: Labour

I need to remind Labour party members what socialists actually THOUGHT before the last election…

and who is actually responsible for all these cuts.  Since the election there has been the most remarkable degree of amnesia on the subject.

Yes,  the vindictively targeted cuts of Suffolk’s New Strategic Direction are the responsibility of the Suffolk Tories and the administration they head.  But at national level? – only a political simpleton or  a dissimulator would lay Britain’s cuts  at the door of the Coalition.

Certainly, before the elecction the left knew exactly who was responsible. You just have to read Mick Brooks on Brown and Light Touch regulation

If you can’t bring yourself to remember, here ‘s a quote:

Clearly the present crisis is international in scope (contrary to Brown’s tommyrot that he could immunise Britain from boom and bust), but the neoliberal policies pursued have exposed the British economy to global economic forces and left if unprotected to a dangerous degree.

Here is a sample of Brown’s saucer-eyed adoration for financial whizzkids from his Mansion House speech in 2007. “I congratulate you on these remarkable achievements, an era that history will record as the beginning of a new golden age for the City of London … I believe it will be said of this age, the first decades of the 21st century, that out of the greatest restructuring of the global economy, perhaps even greater than the industrial revolution, a new world order was created.” Readers seeing this for the first time after the crash must be wondering what planet this bloke beamed down from.

Completely suckered by the arrogance and pushiness of the City elite, Brown was determined as Chancellor to let them have their head. He seemed to harbor the insane delusion that an island of 60 million souls could all make a living in the world on the backs of the mysterious activities of a few tens of thousands of people in the City and Canary Wharf.

He therefore called for ‘light touch regulation,’ in other words less regulation on the City and finance capital. Before his Mansion House audience in 2007, he called for, “a risk-based regulatory approach”. It was an old theme. In the same hall three years before, he pledged that “in budget after budget I want us to do even more to encourage the risk takers” (2004). This is the approach that got us in the present pickle.

Right?     Right!

Thank you

Oh, and PS, TUITION FEES:

In 1997 you said Labour has no plans to introduce tuition fees for higher education. You then introduced tuition fees … In 2001 you said: ‘we will not introduce top-up fees and have legislated to prevent them’. You then introduced top-up fees.” Michael Howard to Tony Blair, Prime Minister’s Questions, 6 April 2005

Will tuition fees return to haunt the Labour Party?
Unlike the last general election when university tuition fees figured large, higher education is likely to have a lower profile this time round. That’s because the two biggest parties, Labour and the Conservatives, have done a deal to kick the fees issue into the long grass. They have set up a review, chaired by the former BP boss Lord Browne, which is looking at the options for student funding, including charging students more by lifting the cap on fees that stand at just over £3,000 a year. That review will not be completed until the autumn, well after the election is over. Lucy Hodges, The Independent Thursday, 15 April 2010

Tuition fees dog Labour
Since tuition fees were launched in 1997, student funding has been a thorn in Labour’s side. When Education Secretary Charles Clarke speaks at the Labour party conference in Bournemouth on Tuesday, tuition fees will remain the cloud anchored over his seafront horizon.  Dividing the party, putting off young people, threatening the middle classes, appearing as the party that pushes students into debt – the issue of student finance has continued to be bad news for the Labour leadership.
But what is it that has set the backbenchers grumbling?
And how will the government manage to sell the message that tuition fees is about opening doors to higher education, rather than slamming down the shutters? Sean Coughlan  BBC News Online education staff Tuesday, 30 September, 2003

Like I said, just so you remember, eh? I wouldn’t like to think you were accidentally spreading disinformation, just because you’d forgotten  who was actually responsible.

A Quick Question for Suffolk Labour activists

C’m on, folks, make your minds up. Is the lesser political party in a coalition responsible or not for the actions of the whole?  Helpful hint: We need a YES or a NO here.

Yet Labour activists in Suffolk have difficulty with this one.

When it comes to decisions made at Suffolk County Council,  pre-2005 (a Labour/Lib Dem coalition for those who do not suffer from political amnesia) they  remember it  as if these were their decisions  – and theirs alone.   As in:

“Labour left an exemplary council in 2005, since then this morally bankrupt group of Conservatives have done their best to run Suffolk services into the ground.”

Julian Swainson 2 Feb, “Don’t Privatise Suffolk Services” Facebook group

Yet suddenly,  when it’s politically expedient, when it’s a NATIONAL coalition  (in which it’s clear that the Lib Dems take a small – but ameliorating – role in sorting out the financial debacle of the previous Labour administration)  then suddenly all we hear from Labour is that the resultant problems are all the Lib Dems’ fault.

Yes – right.   And I’m the Akond of Swat.

Do you know, a  prominent Suffolk  Labour councillor had the crust to say to me the other day:   ” I don’t know how a moral person could be a Lib Dem.”  (Brave fellow, eh? Luckily for him  he didn’t know I go to boxing classes. My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure..)

And yet he was  totally flabbergasted when I replied:

“Torture, rendition, war crimes, denial of democracy,  total failure to support public transport and social housing  in times of plenty, privatisation of the NHS by the back door, destruction of our finances by cosying up to, and deregulating the banks,   threatening to cut ‘worse than Margaret Thatcher’ when in power  and then total amnesia afterwards..   Me,  I wonder how any moral person could ever have stayed with your morally bankrupt party!”

It’s like he was believing his own spin!

Come on,  guys – don’t be such hypocrites.  Be grateful that at local AND national level there is the quiet voice of common sense to ameliorate the extravagant  amnesia of right and left alike.

At the moment we Lib Dems are providing the only practical and vocal opposition to the excesses of  Suffolk’s Tory administration, and their bureaucrats’  heaven, the NSD.  United we jolly well ought to stand.  Divided, I’m happy to point out your deficiencies.