Cut red tape? Let's start with the anti-union laws

HM Government has just wasted a load of public money on a bit of gimmicky social media - they just can't help themselves, can they? The offending website, launched today, is "Your Freedom", which invites the public to enter into "the dialogue" to make proposals under these headings:

Restoring civil liberties
Which current laws would you like to remove or change because they restrict your civil liberties?

Repealing unnecessary laws
Which offences do you think we should remove or change, and why?

Cutting business and third sector regulations
Which regulations do you think should be removed or changed to make running your business or organisation as simple as possible?

A quick-witted socialist, Owen Jones, got on there to propose that the restrictive anti-union laws introduced by Thatcher and maintained by New Labour should be abolished.

How popular this proposal is it is impossible to check at the moment, because the website is down, owing to too much traffic!

On the same theme, of abolishing the anti-union laws, I am happy to report that left-wing Labour MP John McDonnell has come top of the ballot for Private Members' Bills.

This was a karmic consolation prize for withdrawing from the race to be in the Labour leadership race. He asked all his sponsors to back Diane Abbott instead, knowing that neither would reach the threshold (why have a threshold?) of sponsoring Labour MPs if one did not withdraw. And knowing that there was damn all chance of Diane Abbott withdrawing. (In any case, her sponsors would probably not all have backed McDonnell.)

McDonnell's bill is incredibly reasonable. If the same rules applied to Parliamentary candidates as are being applied to unions in regard to their strike ballots, there would not be a single MP that could take their seat without being open to a legal challenge.

The press release for the bill says:

After coming first in the Private Members' Ballot and in consultation with the trade union movement and leading trade union lawyers, John McDonnell MP is sponsoring the "Lawful Industrial Action (Minor Errors) Bill" to tackle the increasing practice by employers of using minor technical errors in the balloting process - which have no material effect on the outcome - to take unions to court in order to prevent them from taking industrial action.

...The Bill has been co-signed by Kate Hoey MP, Tony Lloyd MP, Dave Anderson MP, Michael Connarty MP, Austin Mitchell MP, Frank Doran MP, Kelvin Hopkins MP, Jim Sheridan MP, David Crausby MP, Ian Lavery MP and John Cryer MP.

Second Reading of the Bill will be 22nd October 2010. There will be a mass rally and lobby of parliament on the 13th October 2010.

The elephant in the room

I read this with some horror. It's by Tracie Evans, director of finance and commercial services at Barking and Dagenham... you know, the London borough that would have fallen into the hands of the BNP last month if it hadn't been for half the London labour movement turning out week after week to campaign against them - where are the thanks?

Anyway, as well as revealing that on her bank holidays she sips sparkling mineral water and covers up with sunscreen (so responsible), Tracie says:

...the Government will give us an in-year savings target and we will make them from wherever we can, although clearly, frontline services are also out of scope for savings.

So, where does that leave us? Up the Swanny without a...

Well it’s obvious, we can make even more back-office efficiencies on top of the ones we have already been making over the past few years. But seriously, how are we going to find an unplanned few million pounds. Perhaps it really is time to flush out all of those issues that have given local government its bad name in the past.

I would like to start to tackle the really big elephant in the room – staff terms and conditions. Government is consistently lambasted by the public for the generous conditions it allows its staff at the expense of the taxpayer – regardless, actually, of whether our overall conditions are, in fact, still that generous. Are we really ready to start increasing working weeks, reducing allowances, decreasing leave entitlements and probably the most contentious, abolishing free staff car parking.

Very droll. The last bit, not what went before.

It is in our interest to ensure that as little money is spent on back-office functions and as much money as possible is spent on service delivery. It is time to tackle the really hard stuff. Onwards and upwards – any other boroughs fancy a merger?

The elephant in the room, my arse. A herd of elephants is roaming around Westminster, tearing up trees and crapping all over College Green. Has been since the general election.

Why do public services have to pay the price of the bank bailout and all the crap that went before that? That's the real elephant. I remember how hard they pushed credit at us - "Why wait? Have it now!" - and that was just the advice of my bank to its high street customers. Never mind the rest of the rubbish that went on.

Now they are building up their reserves again, preparing to pay dividends to shareholders, and paying top bankers big bonuses.

But John Burgess, secretary of Barnet Unison branch, describes the scandal rather better than I can do in my current, rather ranty mood.

£1.3 Trillion (1,300,000,000,000,000) public money given to the banks.

£153 Billion (153,000,000,000) the Public Sector deficit that is driving the Con-Dem Governments Cuts Agenda

If I didn’t know better I sometimes feel the politicians almost relish the massive cuts packages they have been promoting for almost a year! Now is not the time to panic, and scaring citizens that we could be worse than Greece is just the act of a bully hoping that when they announce the cuts we will all roll over and accept anything they propose.

We must not roll over. When I return from UNISON Conference I hope to report that our newly elected General Secretary will have provided a plan for how we are to defend public services and jobs.

...I don’t know if it is just me but I am getting increasingly irritated by politicians talking about cuts in the public sector. What annoys me the most is how they talk about cuts to jobs and job creation in the same sentence! Just how does making 300,000 jobs redundant create jobs?

...I know what I don’t want to hear, I don’t want to hear politicians trotting out glib sound bites like “more for less!” Where does this myth that council workers have been having it easy all these years come from? We may have the easyCouncil tag but working in Barnet is not easy - it is hard work. Everywhere I go to meet members I hear the same message: ‘over worked, not enough time in the day to do the work.’

The choices we make - why Dismore has lost Hendon

Andrew Dismore very narrowly losing Hendon is depressing news. Three Tory MPs in Barnet - argh! They'll be cock-a-hoop.

I don't think if I'd stayed in the constituency and knocked up for Dismore yesterday I could have won him the seat! But if I'd known it would be so close, I might well have stayed and tried... We choose what to do based on assessments we make and we sure as hell don't have perfect knowledge.

I said I would go to Hayes and Harlington to knock up for John McDonnell MP. The local Labour Party was nervous that he might lose; the Tories were suggesting they might win.

In addition to the general disillusionment among previous Labour voters (not, as it turns out, as deep as we all predicted), McDonnell had particular pressures on him.

With the Labour government proposing the third runway at Heathrow, a significant chunk of the constituency was in danger of being literally obliterated. The Tories were oppposing the runway. And there are two immigration detention centres close to the airport, so the anti-im/migration rhetoric in the election has had particular resonance there.

John McDonnell opposed the third runway - from conviction, not just professional self-interest! - and is not anti-im/migrant. In the event, he has won with a stonking majority, his share of the vote only slightly down.

So, I wasn't needed there at all!

However, as miserable as I am about Matthew Offord's wafer-thin win, I don't feel too guilty personally about Dismore. I did things in his favour which in their very small way might have helped to make the vote close.

The local Labour Party should reflect hard on whether it is doing enough to engage local members and residents. Do Labour voters feel any ownership over the party? I certainly don't. Not so long ago, trade unionists would almost automatically have turned out to canvass for Labour. Trade union branches would have sent delegates to the Constituency Labour Party meetings. Those days are passed - can we get them back?

Dismore is reported by the Times series as saying:

“I don't think there was anything me or my team could have done. If we had had more support in door knocking I think we could have won.

“The Conservatives had the Ashcroft funded billboards all over the borough and we just couldn't compete with that sort of money.”

Dismore and Labour politicians like him need not just to seek scapegoats and apportion blame, but to think about what they can do to revive active support for Labour at the grassroots.

Why I vote Labour

Working-class people are more likely to vote Labour, posh people are more likely to vote Tory. The Lib Dems draw their support from people in the middle. Well, that's a very short-hand exposition of what political scientists (pah!) call 'party identification'.

There is a huge percentage of 'mavericks' in all classes, of course. However, I think the general pattern holds.

I grew up in a poor, white-collar family. My parents were from working-class families but grammar educated. My mum became a teacher; my dad a structural engineer (I'm still not sure what that is). I always thought of myself as working-class. My mum asked me, aged 13, what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I said "middle class". I wonder if I'm there yet.

So, that's one reason I vote Labour! But then 'party identification' has been weakening for decades, people are 'dealigning'. Shocks, such as the Iraq war, can break affiliations. And we all know that Labour has been moving to the right and becoming more and more of a pro-business party.

I hated the war; I hate the drift to the right; I oppose the Labour Party leadership and establishment. But I am still voting Labour. Why?

A friend asks on Facebook:

If a new party started up tomorrow and said it were going to invade foreign countries, torture prisoners, set up detention centres for refugees, privatise the Underground, and give the banks billions, renew Trident, and bring in id cards, would you vote for them? Probably not...

No, probably not, but the whole point is that the Labour Party isn't being set up tomorrow, and it wasn't set up yesterday, but a hundred years ago. For a hundred years, the Labour Party has, totally inadequately, but it has, represented the working class in politics. You don't easily find a replacement for that.

My friend goes on to say:

...but now you find out that they're funded by trade unions, so that's alright then?

I believe in trade unions having a voice in politics. I don't agree with Nick Clegg in state funding for parties. I do believe in capping expenditure in elections, so that richer people and groups cannot just buy votes by out-advertising their opponents (the largesse of Lord Ashcroft disbursed in the direction of the Hendon voter in the last few weeks has been truly humbling - but if he paid tax on all his earnings, we could decide how to spend it, and it wouldn't be on cheesy Tory leaflets). But I do believe in trade unions funding a political party.

What's wrong with British politics now, from my point of view, is that the trade unions that fund the Labour Party do not call the tune. Unite holding Gordon Brown to ransom? If only! Unions represent the interests of thousands, sometimes tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of people. It adds to democracy if they can fund a body to represent them politically.

When I say 'trade unions', of course, my interest is with the ordinary members, not the overpaid bureaucrats at the top. So that's another fight to wage: democratise the unions!

I'll go and vote for Andrew Dismore tomorrow (not a personal but a political vote) against ghastly Matthew Offord (personal and political). Then I'm going over to Hayes and Harlington to knock my guts out campaigning for John McDonnell, just the sort of Labour MP we need more of.

And, of course, in the council elections, I will be following the good advice of David Young and voting Labour, to help save the sheltered housing wardens in Barnet, and puncture the easyCouncil balloon.

Not that you asked. See you on the other side...