Labour Party

Janine Booth’s new book, Plundering London Underground: New Labour, private capital and public service 1997-2010 examines the Public-Private Partnership (PPP), which was dreamed up, and imposed, but also faltered and collapsed, within the term of Blair and Brown’s Labour government. One key “justification” for the PPP was that London Underground was is such a poor condition that it required a massive cash injection. The argument went (wrongly) that only the private sector could deliver that investment. But how did London Underground get into such a woeful state? The first section of Plundering...

The top ten per cent in Britain pocket over £300 billion a year. Just a ten per cent tax bite from that flow would be enough to offset all the cuts that the Government is making. Yet shadow chancellor’s Ed Balls’s minimal proposal to tax fewer of the rich, and more lightly — to raise the top income tax rate from 45% to 50% — has brought an outcry. Digby Jones, former chief of the bosses’ federation the CBI, and briefly a minister in the last Labour government, squealed that it meant “kicking” those who “create wealth and jobs”. Stock exchange boss Xavier Rolet said it would stop new enterprise...

The Labour Party will hold a special conference on 1 March at ExCeL in London. The Labour leadership will put proposals to carry through some version of Ed Miliband's call, in July 2013, to change the relationship between trade unionists and the Labour Party. Ray Collins, who is charged with drafting the detailed proposals, had suggested that he would present his conclusions before Christmas. Now it looks as if the detailed draft may be much more delayed, maybe even after the Labour Party National Executive meeting on 4 February. This is good insofar as it reflects opposition from the trade...

As local councils prepare their budgets for the financial year 2014-5, they face reductions in their income from central government which by 2015-6 “will bring to 43% the total cuts to local authority funding announced by this Government”. So estimates the councils’ umbrella body, the Local Government Association, adding that “the money available to deliver non-social-care services... is predicted to shrink by 66% by the end of the decade”. Central government pressure squeezes even tighter because it goes with decrees forbidding councils to raise council tax — the major element of their income...

The Executive of the giant Unite union voted unanimously on 9 December that Unite will resist diminution of the trade union vote at Labour conference and in other Labour Party structures. It will also oppose primaries and any restriction on union constituency development plans. The resolution ( click here to download it ) allows for the development of a new category of Labour "associate membership" which trade unionists who pay the political levy would "opt in" to, but without reducing the existing rights of Labour's full individual members and affiliated organisations. It reflects the impact...

The official consultation period for the Collins report on Labour-union links closes on 24 December. Then Collins, commissioned by Labour leader Ed Miliband, is due to produce proposals to go to a Labour special conference in spring 2014. The whole thing starts from a speech by Ed Miliband in July when said that individual trade unionists in affiliated unions should “opt in” to paying political levies to Labour. Since 1946 the system has been rather than individuals can “opt out”. It was “opt in” only between 1927 and 1946 under a law passed by a Tory government. Labour right-wingers want “opt...

The Observer on 8 December published a leaked Labour Party memo showing that Alan Milburn is to have a role in Labour’s planning for the general election in 2015. Just how big a role is really not clear. The memo outlines no fewer than 22 committees to run election strategy! But Labour’s elected National Executive figures nowhere in the maze of committees. Nor do trade unionists. Milburn does figure. Milburn was a Blairite Labour minister from 1998 to 2005, responsible for introducing Foundation Trusts and PFI in the Health Service. Since he has been serving the Tory-led government as its so...

The worst of the cuts in local government are yet to come. Cuts in England in Wales amounted to £5.2 billion in the last two years, and are estimated to be £6.3 billion in the next two. Leaders of Birmingham city council say they need to find £840 million over the next eight years. They have announced 1,000 job cuts and are warning they may not be able to fund all statutory services. Many other smaller councils are looking at the same kind of future. With 500,000 jobs already gone, many further job cuts will be by compulsory redundancy. These have to be fought in the first place by industrial...

The Executive of the Unite union meets from 8 December. It will decide the union’s attitude on Ed Miliband’s drive to change union members’ Labour political-levy payments to “opt-in”. Jim Kelly, chair of the London and eastern region of Unite, told the Guardian on 3 December: “Our executive has got to keep a collective voice, and that... has to be expressed through the block vote at a decision-making party conference where unions keep 50% of the vote.... “If unions stand together, with half the votes at Labour’s conference, and supported by many constituency parties worried about the severe...

A decade ago the Scottish Sunday Herald had a circulation of over 60,000. But now it has sunk lower than 25,000. A decade ago Paul Hutcheon was an investigative reporter. But now he just hunts with the pack. Could the decline in the paper’s circulation be related to the decline in the quality of its journalism? “Leading Labour MSP Urged to Resign After Taking Part in Unite Demo Outside Director’s House,” read the headline above an article by Hutcheon last Sunday. Over five weeks after the event, the giant inflatable rat used in a Unite protest outside the house of an Ineos director had made a...