politics – Page 21 – davelevy.info

Health and NHS

I was a delegate from Lewisham Deptford CLP and we had proposed a motion on Health. We composited our words into the motion and got seconding rights. We called for decent GP services and an end to ICSs while the Socialist Health Association motion called for a reversal of privatisation; other CLPs wanted an emphasis on failing mental health services. We got seconding rights, and Louise Irvine of Lewisham Deptford made speech. The motion was of course carried overwhelmingly. It’s the NHS. The words are available in CAC2 Addendum. …

Ukraine

The debate on the composite was introduced by a speech from Lesia Vasilinko, a Ukrainian MP and co-chair of the British Ukrainian Friendship society; the session is on video. Ms Vasilinko’s speech starts at this book mark and I have created a text version (or https://bit.ly/LesiaVasilenkoSpeech ) of the speech.

Ukraine has been invaded by the Russian Federation, a country with a track record of military actions in contravention of the UN Charter and a dreadful record in front of the ECtHR. Ukraine has chosen to fight and I support them in their acts of self defence and their right to national self-determination. Conference now agrees.

Sadly there are some aspects of the motion that divert attention from this act of solidarity.

Within the motion, there is a call for increased investment in weapons production, I argue that we need a defence policy/strategy based on the needs of British and our allies’ security not on the needs of arms manufacturers, which is what we’ve had for too long. The two topics, defence policy and Ukrainian solidarity should have been disaggregated. By not doing so, the proposers gave people a good reason to vote against the motion which is unfortunate, and a number of delegates did.

The words of the motion make no mention of the Russian peace campaigner, or refuge for Russian draft dodgers. It makes no reference to Ukraine’s recent anti Trade Union laws nor of its record in front of the ECtHR, nor that Ukraine’s rating on the 3^rd party democracy indexes is low, albeit higher than Russia’s. Our solidarity must ensure that a post war Ukraine continues on the route to democracy.

Sadly it makes no mention of the UK sanctions, and the need to get Russian money out of British politics. We need to publish the secret parts of the Russia Report and ensure that those involved in funnelling Russian money into British politics are found and held to account particularly for their intervention in the Brexit referendum and funding the Tory party.

Labour List also reports on the motion, their article contains the words of the motion, Composite 13, which are also available in CAC 2 Addendum.

None of this justified a vote against. Russia invaded a neighbour that chose to fight. Ukraine has chosen to fight for its independence, this needs to be supported. …

Starmer speaks

This is available on youtube and as text, it is to my mind one of the best he’s given; he’s clearly more comfortable with the role than previously. The last 11 months of a polling lead which was to leap the following day will have helped, but I hope they don’t believe their propaganda that the May 22 elections were a validation of Starmer’s Labour, there were victories and also losses.

I welcome the promise of a sovereign wealth find, made by Rachel Reeves earlier in the week, and on the surface the promise of GB Energy seemed to be a significant step towards state participation in the energy market and would explain, but not excuse, why the delegates supporting the ‘Green New Deal’ were excluded from the composite meeting; it would have been embarrassing if conference had called for the wholesale nationalisation of the energy industry while the Leader announced a half-way house, or as later commentators note suggests a waypoint. Starmer repeated Louise Haigh’s promise made yesterday to nationalise the railways again.

Back carbon capture. Commit to green steel production. New renewable ports. New gigafactories. And insulate 19 million homes.
Sir Kier Starmer – lab22

I am disappointed at the absence of sensible position on the EU and Trade Friction, interestingly, Cooper was allowed to grandstand on cancelling the Rwanda programme, but left it to Kier to announce that Labour would introduce a points based immigration system. Neither mentioned repealing the hostile environment.

In the 80s we had a point system for people coming to the UK for work. you got one point for speaking English, one point if you had a job offer, one point if that job offer was competitively paid, one point if the job was highly skilled and one point if there was no local labour to do the job. if you had five points you could enter the country. The Tories have replaced highly skilled with highly paid, and the inconvenient truth is that British labour shortages or not restricted to highly skilled, highly paid work. The economy needs hospitality workers, agricultural workers, and care and health service workers. The UK’s exclusion from Horizon Europe is another policy failure that limits UK science’s access to highly skilled research scientists. Any point system will need to ensure that workers across the full range vacancies can enter the country. Any other system will be a barrier to growth. It is clear that many skilled workers originally from Europe have returned to the home countries because they feel unwelcome after the Brexit vote and harassed by the hostile environment which seeks to turn landlords and banks and the NHS into border guards. It needs to go!

I annotated the text speech on diigo and made a copy of those notes on my wiki; I attempted to extract the specific policy promises from the anti-tory and feel-good rhetoric. …

On points of order

The platform introduced a new process; points of order need to be justified at the speakers desk, before being allowed to put to conference and the chair. I can understand that; some people are quite irresponsible in the points of order they make, however the rules say,

Point of order – Any delegate may raise a legitimate point of order during a debate. Any such point of order shall be heard at the conclusion of the current speech.
The Chair shall retain the power to rule what is and is not a legitimate point of order, and to instruct a delegate to end an illegitimate point of order.
A point of order will be ruled illegitimate if it does not immediately and directly identify which of these standing orders is in question.
Labour’s Rule Book A9.I.4.C

i.e. the Chair determines if a Point of Order is legitimate not an employee of the party, not even the GS. The power to raise a point of order is an important part of the power relationship between the floor and the platform.

The fact is they aren’t very good; they allowed one point of order on ‘the last speaker was talking rubbish’ and two on ‘the chair is not calling people like me’. They denied me a point of order on the conduct of card vote 13, and they also denied a point of order to a delegate who wanted to remind the chair that delegates have been instructed that they can only indicate they wish to speak if seated and to raising their empty hand. The ‘must be seated rule’ is an accessibility issue and people used to wave the most ridiculous of things, including an inflatable red dragon and in one case their baby. The third point in the rule is in my mind sufficient protection against abuse.

On speaker selection, there is no perfect way, there are more people that want to speak than there are slots and the debate is improved if recognised experts such as TU speakers, or in 2018, Richard Corbett, the leader of the EPLP, and even PPCs. However, in 2018 and I believe 2021, the conference provided accessibility stewards, with uniform tee shirts and great big signs to stand beside disabled speakers who wished to speak. This wasn’t done this year. I have no doubt that more can be done to ensure that, “… speakers are a fair representation of Annual Conference, and that there shall be no discrimination on the grounds of protected personal characteristics.” A9.I.4.E.ii …

Justice Crime and Democracy

Onto Tuesday 26th, the motions on PR, parliamentary sovereignty related to the ministerial code, powers of the electoral commission and prohibiting second jobs, and the abolition of the House of Lords were all carried. The words of the composites are published in CAC 2 Addendum.

The Justice agenda was introduced by Emily – she just doesn’t give a shit, the shortest front bench speech, in which she promised to end criminal impunity and address criminal system failures including the decimation of legal aid.

Steve Reed’s speech was a confirmation of the common speech design, loads of stuff on how awful the Tories are, chuck in an announcement if you have one and finish on everything will be better with a Labour Government, led by Sir Kier Starmer, peppered with the slogan, “Labour: On your side”.

Reed had a side diversion into “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”, they i.e. the front bench seem to be considering some form of early action to disrupt social inheritance of criminal behaviour, it all reminded me of the “Precrime” unit from Minority Report, brought to you be the people that developed “Prevent”, by which I mean the spooks and civil servants. I have commented on this, see below. …

Meeting the European movement

I attended two meetings hosted by the European movement. The midday meeting had a panel consisting of Hilary Benn, Anna Bird (EM), Will Hutton and Stella Creasy. It would seem to me that Benn is taking a rest from campaigning, although in answer to questions he did make the point that any move to re-join the EU would need to avoid a ‘yo-yo’ effect i.e. that we can only ask to re-join the EU when it ceases to be a partisan issue. He also questions if Labour, even uber Remainers, are ready for another referendum, although I don’t think we’d need one for aligning with the single market. Hutton was vitriolic in his denunciation of the impact of Brexit and mendacity of its advocates. Bird was in-between. There is a recognition that opinion is becoming anti-Brexit, or at least the Brexit we have. But there is no appetite to challenge Labour’s leadership on their inadequate five point plan except from me.

I spoke, starting by stating that this Government was an ERG government and it should be confronted as such. I asked why the EU would agree to mutual professional qualification recognition outside a freedom of movement for labour agreement. They are looking at such a scheme within the EU, but crudely put, why would they take our dollar paid management consultants if we won’t take their hospitality, farm, care, and low paid NHS workers. I also made the point that border controls are not the only way in which immigration is penalised. We need immigrants to work and the Europeans will not be coming back while the hostile environment is in place. Labour needs to commit to repealing it. This is based on both macro-economic common sense and decency!

I was shocked to read, while checking up for this article, that Labour, in the 2017 manifesto, committed to the “No recourse to public funds (NRPF)” for migrants, which at its ultimate point leads to children starving and even pregnant women denied hospital assistance. This is part of the hostile environment and should also go!

Bottom line, there’s very little appetite to challenge the leadership, not even over the single market and trade friction. There’s a fear over the politics of the freedom of movement and a denial that we need their low skilled people to run the economy and need their high skilled people to maintain our competitive advantage in bio-sciences research and even in financial services.

The evening meeting reinforced that there is little appetite to pursue even a single market agenda. …

Kier in conversation with Gary Neville, of the Couch

Lucy Powell interviewed Gary Neville who is it seems an important footballer and manager, and Kier Starmer who is an aspirant prime minister and Arsenal Fan. The video is here, and here are some noted I made,

“In a football team, we need to align personal goals with those of the team and it’s the same in politics” It’s a shame that the PLP four years ago weren’t able to operate according to that dictum.

My notes say, that Banker’s bonuses were capped at 100% of salary unless approved by shareholders in which case 200% bonus can be paid, taking most of them into the disputed supertax bracket. What I find astonishing is that banks would want to pay more than 200% of salary as a bonus. As others have said, it encourages risk not business building investment.

Starmer says we are the party of fiscal responsibility and aspiration; the Tories don’t talk of aspiration. One thing I would say about Starmer, is that he is one of the few British politicians that understand the anger felt by people who work hard and yet still can’t pay their way. Strangely the only other one I have heard attempt this is Rebecca Long Bailey and neither do anger well. It’s important that that anger and sense of justice is articulated. Starmer’s right, the Tories have walked away from this; it’s something that Thatcher had, but Rees-Mogg’s Party can’t. …

Promises from Rachel Reeves

Conference was addressed then by Rachel Reeves, the Shadow Chancellor. ( video | text ). I have used diigo to mark out the exciting quotes from the text. The rest of this post is from my contemporaneous notes.

She started by promising to be Britain’s first green chancellor and promises net zero carbon for electricity by 2030. She promises a real living minimum wage, resurrecting NEDC, where Govt, business and the unions can talk about the economy. She promises that business subsidies will be training focused, business rates are to be abolished to allow the high street to compete with their online competitors, although I wonder where local authority income will come from.

She promised a new sovereign wealth fund, forty years too late, but that’s not her fault.

She spoke of responsible finance, and I add that while I wasn’t so concerned last week, a stricter approach may be needed now that the debt to GDP is nearing 150%. We all need to remember that only growth can reduce debt, but she did promise “No return to austerity”.

She finished the speech with a full and comprehensive promise to invest in NHS jobs, to which I say good, but ask who’s going to do them; many of the vacancies are Brexit related as nurses, cleaners, doctors and research scientists have gone home to Europe and won’t return until the hostile environment is repealed.

She briefly mentioned the plan to ‘Fix Brexit’, which gives me the excuse to repeat or preview that on immigration and labour supply, they have a cakeist view, but left hanging is that she recognised our loss of competitive advantage in science and bioscience, underling the urgency with which we have to rejoin Horizon Europe.

She was silent on currency, and some may consider the plan a version of autarky. It’s a bit hard to judge from a 35 minute speech. …

On the Economy

The bulk of motions on the economy were tabled by Unions, and focused on wages, infrastructure and working rights. Several of the Union motions call for renationalisation of the basic utilities, mail and rail, but not gas or water. I wrote a speech but wasn’t called. This is sort of what I planned to say.

“We are in an economic crisis, a crisis of living standards and possibly the first one caused by a government since the discovery of … Keynesianism.
Reinforced by Brexit, we have declining inward investment, the highest inflation in a decade, imports are up, exports catastrophically down, we have a possibly unsustainable balance of payments deficit again, it’s been in deficit for decades and a labour shortage impacting agriculture, social care, and the NHS and also stagnating wages.
The currency is taking a fall due to confidence, this increases the price of energy and food.
My dad, once said to me, that, “governments take thousands of decisions every day and under the Tories everyone is wrong”. it is not enough to seek to get only some of these decisions right, to compete with this ERG government on the basis of competence allied to debt fetishism. We need to offer hope and then deliver on that promise.
One thing that Kier Starmer has right is the growing anger that hard work is not enough to allow an even reasonable standard of living. it is a struggle to pay for rent or a mortgage and heat one’s home and even, although I hate the phrase put food on the table. We must offer people hope of a better economy and society.
I finish by saying this is a crisis caused by this Brexit government and planning to fix it neither offers hope nor is truthful.
Flirting with monetarism and offering little hope on even trade friction with the European Union jeopardises the loyalty of many of those who voted for us in 2017 & 2019.
Dave Levy, from my notes

Apart from the attempt to fix Brexit, I think we’ll offer more than I had feared. …

Benefits and Pensions

Jonathan Ashworth, the Shadow spokesperson for the DWP spoke, his words are here. He promised that, “we’ll reform, overhaul and replace the Tory Universal Credit system. We’ll treat people with dignity, not burden them with impossible debts, support children not punish them and we’ll reinstate a principle Labour has championed since the days of Barbara Castle but ditched by the Tories, the financial independence of women should be protected in our social security system too.”

He finished with,

So, friends, this is our mission:
Full employment and decent pay;
Security in retirement;
A better world for our children;
Because as Nelson Mandela said:
“Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity but an act of justice.”
Let us rise to that cause and build a future of opportunity, fairness and justice for all.
Jonathan ashworth MP at Labour Conference 22

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