Tag: Ed Miliband

Labour for a People’s Vote, the group that was instrumental in ensuring Brexit was discussed at Labour’s annual conference in September, is calling for a half-day recall for members to endorse a policy of backing a second referendum. It has the support of Labour MPs including Alex Sobel, Paul Williams and Anna McMorrin. Labour for a People’s Vote, which helped organise more than 100 local constituency Labour parties (CLPs) to submit motions to conference calling for a referendum, is now encouraging them to adopt a statement demanding a special conference. “Whether or not a vote of no confidence is tabled and a general election called for, Labour needs to move quickly to clarify our position on a public vote,” the motion says. “When the opportunity to lead presents itself, we believe the Labour party must be seen to take the initiative. Anti-Brexit campaigners are concerned that Labour backed away from tabling a full-blown motion of no confidence in the government on Monday in part to avoid being trapped into supporting a referendum. Instead, Corbyn tabled a vote of no confidence in the prime minister, which has no formal status under the Fixed-term Parliaments Act. That means the government is not obliged to set aside time to debate it, and even if it lost it would not bring down the government. Corbyn’s spokesman has insisted the confidence motion does not imply automatic support for a referendum, even if a vote of no confidence is lost. Other opposition parties, including the Liberal Democrats and Plaid Cymru, have tabled a full-blown no confidence motion, challenging Corbyn to add his signature – without which it will not be discussed until the new year.

Jeremy Corbyn is facing demands to hand power over Labour Brexit policy to members, by holding an emergency conference on endorsing a second referendum. “I can certainly say that if we vote down the deal in parliament then I think it is really important that we have a people’s vote,” she told the Our Future Our Choice group, a youth campaign for a second vote. “This conference calls on all members and our elected representatives to campaign for a people’s vote with urgency and vigour.” While the grassroots back Corbyn’s leadership, the membership is also heavily in favour of a new vote. The last special conference was held under Ed Miliband in 2014 to approve changes in the party’s leadership election rules. Those delegates overwhelmingly backed a policy that ensured a second vote remained an option should it prove impossible to secure a general election. Labour policy is to fight for an election before other options, such as a new poll, are supported. Disagreements within Labour are as bitter as ever, with some MPs accusing shadow cabinet members of being bigger supporters of Brexit than Tory Brexiters. “In the parliamentary party, there’s a group who want a second referendum now, but there is another group – including frontbenchers – who think they can only get behind that publicly after May’s deal has collapsed,” said one shadow minister. A YouGov poll for the People’s Vote campaign has found that 66% of voters believe Labour’s Brexit policy is unclear. It found that 62% of Labour voters said there should be a second vote if May’s Brexit deal was blocked by the Commons.

It had mistakenly put out a template. Not so long ago parties stood for electoral power: anything less was irrelevant Just over three years after Jeremy Corbyn won Labour’s leadership election, our understanding of the role a party can play in political life has been reimagined. Many new members are passive; some prioritise a left agenda within the party; others see the party as a route to social activism in their communities; some joined because they want to get rid of Corbyn. During his first election in 2015, Corbyn won 44% of people who joined the party before 2010 and 49% of those who joined when Ed Miliband was leader – significantly more than any of his challengers and a clear sign of a far broader, deeper shift in the direction of the party. In any case, if it is a cult, it’s not a very good one. At this year’s party conference there were profound disagreements among people who support Corbyn – over Brexit, a second referendum and party democracy. It has fewer members than the Scottish National party, which stands only in Scotland. It lost half its membership between 2005 and 2013. Electorally, the Tories still dominate. The point here is not that the nation would be better served by a more rightwing Tory party – it wouldn’t – but that our political culture would benefit from the Tory party engaging its base and hosting those debates, rather than suppressing them so that it can cling on to power – which at this point is its sole function.

Five young Labour activists – all of whom voted for Jeremy Corbyn and back the grassroots revival – talk about the party, their politics and why they joined. They don’t want to see the social change that Labour will deliver.” The charges of antisemitism within the party have been upsetting, he says. Will he be pushing for a people’s vote on Brexit? “I’m proud to have been proved wrong. Born in west London to a midwife and postman, now both retired, she went to the London School of Economics to read social policy and promptly got involved in student activism. Knocking on people’s doors and seeing how you could change people’s minds was really inspiring.” What has she made of the party’s antisemitism crisis? Both her parents, who “met in communist Prague”, work for trade unions and both of her late grandfathers were former trade union general secretaries. “I didn’t think I needed to join Labour as a member, but actually, when Jeremy became leader, I felt really represented. Eight out of 10 Labour party members want to give the public a final say on Brexit. Look at him and his politics and what he says.

Labour raised £55.8m in 2017, while the Tories managed to raise £45.9m, also their highest ever total, as both parties financed general election campaigns. Labour received just over £16m from membership subscriptions, according to the data, an increase of £1.6m from the previous year. In total, these parties reported £125,322,000 in income and £122,194,000 of expenditure. Labour raised nearly £10m more than the Tories in 2017 Standfirst ... total income £0m 10 20 30 40 50 Labour, £55.8m Conservative, £45.9m Lib Dem, £9.7m SNP, £5.8m Green, £2.5m Ukip, £1.7m Guardian Graphic | Source: The Electoral Commission Labour beat its previous highest amount of £51m, which was raised in 2015, also a general election year, but one that was fought under Ed Miliband. The Tories’ second-highest amount raised in a year came in 2010, when donors gave £43.1m. Even Corbyn’s critics have been surprised by the way his popularity has turned around the party’s funding model. Under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, Labour was reliant on a small number of wealthy donors. Labour received more than £16m from membership subscriptions in 2017 while Tory membership income fell below £1m Standfirst ... membership income 0m 5 10 15 Labour Conservative Guardian Graphic | Source: The Electoral Commission The party is now reliant on smaller donations from ordinary members. Spending by all political parties increased by 30% in 2017 compared with the year before, the figures showed. The Guardian disclosed last month that in the nine months from July 2017, the party raised £7.4m from donors paying a minimum of £50,000 to dine with Theresa May.

“I remember very clearly getting up early on the first morning to see this amazing new thing,” Jones, who is now 42, recalls of the show, first presented by Frank Bough, Selina Scott and Nick Ross. BBC Breakfast and Good Morning Britain, meanwhile still have a total TV audience of more than two million. Morgan told the Radio Times last month that his mission was to “destroy” the BBC show. She and co-presenter Nick Owen later fronted Good Morning... with Anne and Nick on the BBC, and Diamond, 63, is now a regular on ITV’s Loose Women and Channel 5’s The Wright Stuff. “People still want to know what the agenda is, what people are talking about,” she adds. “I don’t understand why Good Morning Britain now has this big desk,” Jones says. “I think that’s why BBC Breakfast still does well,” he says. “It’s people sitting on sofas, talking informally, with short items covering a mix of the serious and trivial – exactly the same formula they launched so well with in 1983.” Politics has always been an awkward part of that recipe, where leaders of the day traditionally come in search of an easy ride, while generally looking as comfortable on the sofa as a rabbit on a parrot’s perch. “When we launched Chris’s breakfast show in 2010 we knew people listened to the breakfast show on average for 12 minutes,” says Helen Thomas, Evans’s long-time producer and now head of content commissioning at Radio 2. As the Today programme suffers, losing more than 800,000 year on year this spring, while the news-led 5 Live Breakfast lost more than 300,000 listeners, Radio 2 still pulls in the crowds.

In the US, Donald Trump has periodically monopolised the headlines since 2015 with his rude and obnoxious behaviour, often showcased via Twitter or at international summits, where he has pushed presidents out of his way and left his counterparts visibly exasperated. In British politics, for one, there is a long history of politicians being openly rude to each other, including in parliament itself. Cameron was known to deploy every tactic from character assassination (“The truth is he is weak and despicable”, he said to Ed Miliband in 2015) to outright mockery (“If the prime minister is going to have pre-prepared jokes, I think they ought to be a bit better than that one – probably not enough bananas on the menu” – this to Gordon Brown in 2010, mocking his opponent’s dietary choices). The House of Commons’s benches are organised in such a way that confrontation is encouraged, and adversarial style is both encouraged and expected by members of parliament. Rudeness is also a useful way to curb others’ behaviour or challenge their political views with as much force as possible. Some researchers suggest that such behaviours aren’t rude when considered in the context of political discourse; it has been argued that “heated discussion” (both face to face and online) should be encouraged to enable voters to engage with politicians, express disagreement and heighten engagement with the political process. But bystanders who witness the behaviour can also be adversely affected, experiencing anger and compromised performance. Journalists and politicians are increasingly citing past incidents (say, Trump’s repeated references to Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren as Pocahontas) as the basis for any rudeness directed towards the administration, including a recent incident where the homeland security secretary was booed out of a Mexican restaurant. Then there are the diplomatic consequences of Trump’s rudeness towards supposed allies, many of whom seem to be running out of patience. So while rudeness might be a perfectly effective strategy in some adversarial contexts, it’s a dangerous game to play in the public eye.

Michael Gove has admitted that the official leave campaign should not have stoked fears about Turkish immigration during the 2016 Brexit referendum. During the campaign Gove claimed that Turkey and four other countries could join the EU as soon as 2020, and their accession could lead to 5.2 million extra people moving to the UK by 2030 under free movement. The Conservative minister was asked by Tom Baldwin, a former communications director for Ed Miliband, in his book Ctrl Alt Delete whether he had been happy making appeals to “some very low sentiments” in the context of concerns over Turkish immigration. If it had been left entirely to me the leave campaign would have a slightly different feel. There is a sense at the back of my mind that we didn’t get everything absolutely right. It’s a difficult one.” Warnings about a possible Turkish accession to the EU were a controversial theme of the leave campaign and were frequently made by Gove himself. The leave campaign released a video in May 2016 arguing that “David Cameron cannot be trusted on Turkey”, to back up an argument made in a speech by the minister that if Turkey were to join the EU the impact on the NHS would be “clearly unsustainable”. In June 2016, only a couple of weeks before the final vote, Gove made a second warning about Turkey, arguing that if the country were ever to join the EU it could create a risk to security. Even at the time of the UK’s referendum, the possibility of Turkey joining the EU was seen as remote or non-existent. Theresa May, Michael Gove and Jacob Rees-Mogg: where do they stand now?

Discuss!”, Nick Clegg declares jauntily at the start of the first episode of his new podcast, Anger Management. The former Lib Dem leader and deputy prime minister can now be heard on the internet airwaves fortnightly, grilling guests about what he calls “the politics of anger”. Jacob Rees-Mogg, too, has a fortnightly podcast called the Moggcast, which launched in January 2018 and is hosted by Conservative Home. Where once a politician might do a phone-in show on LBC or guest host The Jeremy Vine Show on BBC Radio 2 to show how in touch and relatable they are (as in Call Clegg, which aired on LBC from 2013 to 2015, or Ed Miliband’s lunch time death metal scream), they can now go it alone. There’s no need to put up with John Humphrys or work with the BBC’s requirement for political balance. His first guest is former Ukip leader Nigel Farage (coincidentally also the host of a podcast called Farage Against the Machine). It’s a slightly odd choice of guest to launch the show — made, no doubt, to generate controversy and a higher iTunes chart position — and it doesn’t exactly show Clegg’s broadcasting skills in a good light. It would take someone substantially more skilled behind the microphone than Clegg to completely reinvent the one-on-one discussion format in a single episode. They’re not journalists, and they don’t often have a good nose for what makes a strong show for the listener, or take the advice of those who do. Otherwise, like Nick Clegg, they will end up telling Nigel Farage that he’s “very good at the high horse stuff about how the EU is ghastly” in a strained tone of voice.