I made a storify about VW having been caught using software to cheat on emissions regulation. This impacts their rights to do business in some jurisdictions and their customer’s tax liabilities in others. It also raises the dormant yet critical question as to how do we as citizens know that software is telling the truth.
See also this, on this blog – “pragmatic radicalism’s top of the policies on the digital revolution“ …
What a week-end. Jeremy Corbyn is elected Leader of the Labour Party and just as the first thing he did after nomination was to go on a demo, he immediately went to speak to the “Refugees Welcome” demo in Parliament Square. The German suspension of its European borders is a sad reaction to those who won’t pull their weight, which includes the British Government acting in our name. Even after the Government’s belated reaction to the popular will of the masses, we are still below the UN recommended quotas and as with nearly everything done by the Cameron Government, they’re tone deaf, in that they announce a five year commitment and plan to fund the refugee programs with the International Aid budget.
These news events have buried Cameron’s acquiescence in using military action to kill two British citizens who were allegedly ISIS fighters. This will come back to bite him, possibly as badly as new Labour’s decision to go to war in Iraq. I have done a storify sharing my views on the (il)legality of the act. Make no mistake, it’s a massive escalation in the militarisation of the state. In Britain, we suffered and fought a terrorism/counter terrorism campaign for over 30 years while maintaining civil primacy and ensuring that the rule of law was paramount and that the police and courts were our primary defence. …
I made a storify during the leadership election in 2015 asking if the Shadow Cabinet/PLP would accept a Corbyn mandate from the membership?
Posted to this blog in Nov 2019 and backdated to the date of the blog. …
In the dying days of Labour’s Leadership selection, the key issues remain those of economics & strategy, but also unfortunately now one of mandate.
The debate on economics has come to be between Cooper and Corbyn. Demanding credibility is not an economic policy and so we can ignore Kendall & Burnham. I summarise the other’s two positions below and conclude that Corbyn’s economic manifesto is not just a shopping list of desirable reforms, they are a single set of reinforcing measures to fix and rebuild the economy so it works in the interests of the majority of people.
This was meant to be a short blog, emphasising the economy and virtuously circular, self reinforcing nature of Corbyn’s programme, but I also take the opportunity to look at the defence and foreign policy debate and conclude with some comments on the election process itself and Labour’s future.
I am glad I voted for Jeremy Corbyn, but I am not a Corbynista, I am Real Labour. …
Finally, Vote for Diane Abbott for Mayor and give Sadiq Kahn your second preference. This is an odd one, there’s little to choose between the candidates on policy, although Gareth Thomas is for Heathrow Runway 3 and all the others oppose it. Jobs vs. Air Quality. I like Sadiq Kahn’s commitment to planting trees and buying up London’s Hospital’s debt, although there may be issues of ultra vires and I like Abbot’s bravery in pursuing rent controls, which should be Labour policy. With few exceptions, I expect each of the candidates to nick the best policies from each other, so it’s important to hear from them using their own words. Certainly at the South London hustings, Christian Wolmar was congratulated by several of the candidates for his transport policy initiatives and there’s little doubt that many of his ideas will make it into the manifesto.
The issue here is heart and commitment and I am supporting Dianne. She has a record of getting the big questions right. …
I shall be voting for Tom Watson for Deputy and ask you to do so too. He is a long term campaigner on the side of the good. He has shown he stands up for what he thinks is right and has Government experience having served in the last labour Governments in Defence and the Cabinet Office. In 2010, he took the citizens position and opposed the Digital Economy Act, and during the last Parliament he opposed the Governments repeated attempts to introduce and legalise mass surveillance, most recently 15 months ago when he led the opposition to DRIP, an opposition he took to court and won, with the unique result that the courts have put a judicial sunset clause on the Act. He has also taken the government to court to have their information sharing with the USA declared illegal because of the military use the American make of it. He led the majority on the Culture Media and Sports select committee on phone hacking and media plurality …
The political choice in selecting Labour’s next leader involves choosing a platform and strategy. The platform choice is pretty clear, growth vs. austerity-lite. The strategy choices equally so, triangulation vs. a clear choice. So that’s simple then; it has to be Jeremy Corbyn. …
Labour’s electoral roll for its 2015 elections has now closed. We took a decision last year to extend the franchise for the election of Leader, Deputy Leader and its candidate for Mayor of London to supporters and over 120,000 people have signed up as well as over 100,000 new full members. I hope that this is a first step for them in helping Labour rebuild and create an effective opposition, although not only do we need them to stay with us, we need to respectfully listen to them.
As one minor elected voluntary official I welcome you to Labour’s movement. …
While this looks like a technical spat over issues of macroeconomic monetary policy, with Chris Leslie, Labour’s stand in Shadow Chancellor arguing classical monetarist i.e. Thatcherite economics, its also about who benefits in terms of policy and for three people, about career advancement.
Leslie said: “Printing money and ending Bank of England independence would push up inflation, lending rates, squeeze out money for schools and hospitals and mean spending more on debt servicing. Higher inflation and a higher cost of living would hit those on the lowest incomes, the poorest people who couldn’t afford those goods and services. The very people we should be standing up for would pay the price – the poor and vulnerable.”
In an interview with The Independent, Mr Leslie issued a wake-up call to Labour members to reject what he called a “starry-eyed, hard left” economic strategy, amid growing signs that Mr Corbyn could pull off a shock victory next month. Notice – no model of cause… the huge discovery over the last seven years is that printing money doesn’t cause inflation and with interest rates at an all time historic low, now is the time to borrow long term to invest in the future. Leslie is as on most of his economics very wrong on this.
He got another bite of the cherry in the New Statesman, where he focuses on QE, and it’s consequent interest payments (there aren’t any) and the independence of the Bank of the Bank of England which for some reason he holds up as a great reform. There’s no doubt about it – the Labour Party has reached a fork in the road and on 12 September the fate of the progressive centre-left in Britain will be sealed. There are millions whose living standards and working conditions depend on Labour winning government in 2020 to fight for power, wealth and opportunity in the hands of the many not the few. The independence of the Bank and the foundation of the Office of Budget Responsibility are both anti-democratic reforms, reducing the power of the elected Chancellor and the House of Commons. The ideology behind these reforms is that these decisions are too important to be taken by politicians, and I’d like to remind Leslie of Mervyn King, the then Governor of the Bank’s behaviour in both 2008 and 2010.
Chris Dillow performs a technical analysis of the proposition, critically pointing out that with the current levels of unemployment and underemployment, it’s highly unlikely that anything would be inflationary. It’s widely agreed that Jeremy Corbyn’s popularity is due in large part to the mediocrity of the alternatives. As if to demonstrate this, Chris Leslie – Shadow Chancellor – claims that Corbynomics would be inflationary. This isn’t wholly unreasonable. A money-financed fiscal expansion – which is all “people’s QE” is – would increase employment and aggregate demand.
Richard Murphy, a Corbyn advisor and author of taxresearch.org.uk opposes Leslie in the most robust terms, in this press version of his radio interview, The author of the economic plan set out by Labour leadership contender Jeremy Corbyn has defended “Corbynomics” in the face of an attack by the shadow chancellor, Chris Leslie. Richard Murphy, the fair tax expert recruited by Corbyn to draft his economic policy, deepened divisions on the left by saying “Leslie has got this completely wrong.” The article states that when challenged on Leslie’s point about high inflation, Murphy said: “Any system of people’s QE would be turned off if we got to a situation of high wages and full employment, but we are so far from that at the moment that we have to tackle the low-wage economy and the lack of productivity in the UK by creating new investment, which is the foundation for new prosperity.”
I have heard Chris Leslie speak, and these issues are at the crux of the debate, but it still surprises me to find Labour people using the economics of the ’80s to understand today’s problems; this isn’t the first time he’s spoken this way. QE clearly doesn’t cause inflation, because we have one and not the other. He’s another of Harriet Harman’s partisan decisions taken as interim leader, the job’s beyond him, and he’ll be gone if they reintroduce elections to the shadow cabinet.
Finally if the choice of Shadow Chancellor is between Murphy, Leslie and Rachel Reeves, it’s just another reason for voting for Jeremy Corbyn.
Mind you, Murphy is not an MP and so cannot serve as Shadow Chancellor, Chief Commissioner of HMRC anyone?
ooOOOoo
This was originally published as a storify and reposted in Oct 2018 as this blog article. …
Left Foot Forward publishes an article “Who is the ‘human rights candidate’ for Labour’s leadership?”. This is based on a post on the Labour Campaign for Human Rights, who publish the candidates answers in their own words on their own blog. One of the LCHR’s questions was on Surveillance, and none of them have consulted me ;), but Cooper and Burnham both support the need for judicial authorisation and probable cause. Kendall and Corbyn both support strengthening the legal framework in favour of civil liberties. Kendall states she opposes the privacy breaches inherent in mass surveillance. Corbyn that he thinks mass surveillance is ineffective (and thus not justified?). …