HENLEY DOESN'T MATTER

Labour's performance in the Henley by-election tells us what we already know: the voters don't like Gordon Brown or Labour. But it's a safe Tory seat and mid-term. The BNP isn't going to take over tomorrow.

TAKE A PAY CUT, SUCKERS!

Well, that’s the message tonight from Alistair Darling in his Mansion House speech – and to be fair there is a point in what he was saying about the dangers of getting into an inflationary wage-price spiral. We all need to tighten our belts.

But, and the but is all-important here, there are ways to do this that are fair and ways that are not. In particular, there is no better time than now to rejig the tax system to ensure the burden of taxation falls on those who most deserve to pay: the rich.

My modest proposal:

1. An increase in personal allowances to take everyone on £10,000 a year or less out of income tax altogether.

2. Introduction of new top-rate income tax of 60 per cent for everyone earning more than £60,000, 80 per cent on £80,000-plus and 100 per cent on £100,000 or more.

3. Standardisation of national insurance rates so everyone pays the same percentage on every penny of income above £5,000.

4. An end to all non-dom privileges.

5. A council tax revaluation with abolition of bands and a straightforward proportional relationship between value and payment, so households in £10m homes pay 100 times what a household in a £100,000 home pays.

6. Abolition of inheritance tax up to £500,000 and introduction of 100 per cent inheritance tax over £1m.

So footballers would whinge and plutocrats would quit London? Pah! If we’re talking austerity it’s got to be shared, as I'm sure Sir Stafford Cripps would have said.

THERE IS STILL NO ALTERNATIVE TO LABOUR, BUT BROWN SHOULD GO

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 13 June 2008

I might have said it before, but I’ll say it again. One of the most frightening things about middle age is realising that events you consider recent actually took place ages ago.

The thought strikes me often because I work as a university lecturer, and each year’s intake of students is younger than the last. I’m currently recruiting undergraduates born as recently as 1990 for entry in September. They’re still Thatcher’s children – or at least the Brits among them are – but only just. The other week I went out for drinks with a group of students to celebrate a 21st and was taken aback to discover that the birthday girl had a strong recollection of Labour winning in 1997 because she was 10 the day that Tony Blair arrived in Downing Street. There are still mature students and postgrads with teenage memories of John Major or Monica Lewinsky, but year after year their numbers get fewer.

What really got me this week, however, was not the youth of my students but the jolt of recognition that it’s 25 years since I decided I ought to join the Labour Party. I’m not expecting anyone to start a collection for a long-service presentation – apart from anything else, I didn’t in fact sign up for some time, and the only award I deserve is for most indolent party member not sitting in the House of Lords.

And who would want to draw attention to the circumstances of my mini-epiphany? It was, of course, the general election defeat of June 9 1983, when Labour’s national share of the vote slumped to under 28 per cent, only just ahead of the SDP/Liberal Alliance, and Labour won just 209 seats in the House of Commons. Labour doesn’t want to remember it because it was a humiliation, and for the Tories to commemorate it would seem hubristic. Apart from one meeting of Labour historians in the House of Commons that I missed, the anniversary has gone unmarked.

I’m not proud to admit it now, but I treated that election purely as a spectator sport. I was far too left-wing to get involved, and anyway – whatever the opinion polls said – I was confident it would result in the Tories being defeated and some centrist Keynesian corporatist Labour-Alliance coalition taking their place. That would leave the serious left to push for social revolution through rank-and-file workplace organisation and grassroots social movements. In other words, I thought it would be back to 1960s-1970s business-as-usual (as I then understood it, need I emphasise).

But in the early hours of June 10 1983, as the results came in and the beers went down, it dawned on me with horror that I had got it completely wrong. It was a straightforward Tory landslide. The authoritarian free-market right was utterly triumphant. The idea that somehow there would be space for anything other than desperate defence of the welfare state and trade union rights against the Thatcherite onslaught suddenly struck me as incredibly stupid. Whatever was wrong with Labour, the only alternative in a first-past-the-post electoral system was the Tories – and they were a great deal worse.

A statement of the bleeding obvious, you might think. I certainly do. I’ve not wavered in my belief that Labour is the lesser evil for a whole quarter-century (even while advocating tactical voting for the Liberal Democrats on occasion, though that’s a different story).

But it doesn’t seem that way for rather a lot of people right now. The opinion polls in the past few weeks bear a frightening resemblance to the result of the 1983 general election, and so did the local elections last month. My own focus groups – well, actually, the people I meet in everyday life – confirm all the trends. Gordon Brown is hopeless and Labour is finished if it continues on its current course.

Yes, it’s mid-term; yes, the economy might not be in quite as dire a state as the pessimists claim; yes, the Tories are coming back from a performance in terms of seats that was little better than Labour’s in 1983. But it’s looking less and less likely that Brown will be able to pull anything out of the hat. He is the day-before-yesterday’s man, and nothing he has done this year suggests that he has a clue how to restore Labour’s fortunes.

If Labour wants to avoid a repeat of 1983 in 2010, Brown should not be leader then – and the efforts of all party loyalists for the next few months should be devoted to persuading him to fall on his sword in an orderly manner. I don’t think he’ll do it, but it’s at least worth a try. The other options, professing undying loyalty to a leader who has no hope of winning or attempting to force him out, are recipes for electoral disaster.

WHAT A BLOODY MESS

It’s almost too depressing:

1. The whole palaver over 42-day detention has been ridiculous. I accept that the cops need more time to collect evidence from Islamist terrorist suspects than they do, from, say, football hooligans. But why go for bang ‘em up for six weeks for interrogation? No one has explained. Why not risk prosecutions going wrong? OK it’s expensive, but how much more so than the complex compensation packages that seem to have emerged this week in order to win over Labour doubters? Why piss off every lawyer who thinks that Magna Carta did not die in vain? It’s plain stupid.

2. The deals that appear to have been done to win 42 days are disgusting – and I mean kow-towing to nostalgic Stalinists who enjoy the hospitality of Fidel Castro over EU sanctions for jailing writers as much as greasing up to reactionary Northern Irish Protestants who want backdoor constraints on reproduction rights. The whole thing was rank.

3. David Davis is an unprincipled scumbag, and his resignation stunt may well implode under its own momentum. But Davis versus (or rather colluding with) Kelvin Mackenzie and the Sun, with Rupert Murdoch footing the bill for Mackenzie, is potentially a stunt on the scale of the Beaverbrook/Rothermere United Empire Party in 1930-31 – a blatant attempt by reactionary media interests to shift the political agenda to the right.

“Power without responsibility: the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages”, as the Tory leader of the time described it – but we won’t get that from David Cameron. This is scary.

4. The Irish vote against the Lisbon treaty raises the whole question of Europe again in UK politics even thought the vote was a farce – and the Tories look good on it even though they are obnoxious opportunists.


Add it all to the 10p tax rate fiasco and inflation and collapsing house prices, and – oh shit.

CELEBRITY SUPPORT FOR DAVID DAVIS FLOODS IN

YOU COULDN'T MAKE IT UP

Just read this.

SUBMERGED BY MARKING - BUT ...

I've got 280 exam scripts to mark this summer, and I'm in the mood to rant and rave about the idiots who run higher education.

But I shan't. I'm keeping cool because I have an escape mechanism: I'm going to the Cambridge Strawberry Fair on Saturday. Come along. You can do what you like and it's now the biggest free festival in the UK. Bands are local but good, not many cops, loads of beer and grub, plenty of stuff for kids. Facebook mobile numbers to text to meet up.

YUP, IT'S A DISASTER

The Crewe and Nantwich defeat is the worst Labour by-election result since the dog days of the early 1980s. It's not time to panic, but Brown must go before very long. He has lost the plot.

TIME TO CALL IT A DAY

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 16 May 2008

So, farewell then, Chris Mullin, Labour MP for Sunderland South, as Private Eye's resident poet E. J. Thribb would have it (though only if Mullin had died, which of course he hasn't).

Last week the former Tribune editor – that's Mullin not Thribb – told the Sunderland Echo: "After careful thought, I have reluctantly concluded that my useful life in parliament is over. I will not, therefore, be a candidate at the next election."

Mullin will be missed. He held only junior ministerial office, from 1999 to 2001 and 2003 to 2005. But – like Gwyneth Dunwoody, who has died – he played a crucial role in fearlessly chairing a select committee, in his case home affairs from 1997 to 1999 and 2001 to 2003. He has been one of the most effective backbench MPs of the past two decades and parliament will be the poorer without him.

But that's enough elegiac fawning – ed. Or maybe not, because another admirable thing about Mullin is that he's decided that it's time to quit after carefully considering how much he could achieve by staying.

As such, he's unusual among Labour MPs. There are now 351 of them sitting in the House of Commons. I have not kept a record of who is stepping down in 2010 – we can safely assume the election date, I think – but the pollster Anthony Wells has, on his excellent UK Polling Report website, which lists 26 Labour MPs as having announced that they are retiring at the end of this parliament.

If you add Mullin and Clare Short, who was elected as Labour but resigned the whip, the figure comes up to 28, but so what. The point is that very few Labour MPs have said that they are bowing out, and most of those that have are either very old or represent seats that will be abolished through boundary changes – or both.

It's true that the election is two years away. It's also true that on past form quite a few veteran Labour MPs will hang on until the last moment before announcing their retirements – a course of action that has historically been a good way of securing a peerage, because it allows the grateful Labour leadership to parachute favoured candidates into safe seats irrespective of the wishes of local Labour Party members.

Arise, I suspect, Lords Mitchell of Haddock and Chips, Skinner of Legover in a Baseball Hat and Meacher of Mad Conspiracy Theory.

All the same, the small number of announced retirements is noteworthy, even though it's easy enough to explain without reference to where we are in the electoral cycle or the cynicism of might/might-not retirees.

Labour won a landslide in 1997, in which no fewer than 178 of its 418 MPs were elected for the first time, and more than a third of the 240 others elected that distant glorious day have retired, died or been defeated since, most of them replaced by Labour members despite the losses of 2001 and 2005. I've not worked out the precise numbers, but the Parliamentary Labour Party now has a large majority of MPs first elected in 1992 or after. And those MPs think, some with justification, that they still have a way to go before they pass their sell-by dates.

But it's easy to get sell-by dates wrong. Labour's problem right now is that it is as appetising as the steak-and-kidney pie you discover at the back of the deep-freeze labelled "Best before July 2007". It might be safe to eat, but do you take the risk or make your supper from the stuff Sainsbury's delivered this morning?

It's most critical at the top: if Gordon Brown fails to turn round his and Labour's dismal opinion poll ratings before the autumn, he should take a deep breath, admit he isn't the man for the job and resign to let someone new – let's say David Miliband – take over before the next general election.

But it's not just Gordon who should be thinking he's not as fresh as he could be. There are several cabinet ministers with nothing left to give: Jack Straw springs immediately to mind, but there are others. And there are dozens of Labour MPs elected in 1987, 1992 and 1997 who have done a lot less in their time in parliament than Chris Mullin and who have no prospect of making any difference if they hang on.

Of course, getting new people in isn't a panacea. Rejuvenating Labour is much more a matter of new ideas, of which we've heard virtually nothing, than it is of new people. But people matter. The lot we've got are not, on the whole, very impressive, and very few of them would be missed. And in the worst-case scenario we'd be better-off losing with a bunch of hungry youngsters than going down with battling old pros.

HOW NOT TO TURN ON THE VOTERS

The decision to reclassify cannabis is utterly cretinous. It won't stop anyone smoking it, and it won't deal with the problem of kids becoming psychotic from getting stoned too much.

The reason more of them are getting wasted today than 20 years ago (even though overall cannabis consumption seems to have gone down) is that the dope is stronger. The skunk that has being doing the rounds the past seven or eight years – probably longer, my memory is shot to hell – bears the same relationship to the red Leb or even the Afghan black of the 1970s as whisky does to beer.

But why is the dope stronger? Er, skunk's dominance of the market is the result of clamping down on smuggling of milder cannabis resins from warmer climes. Raising ultra-strong homegrown under lights in a cellar or a loft or a business unit in Stoke-on-Trent is a lot less risky than coming into Los Angeles bringing in a couple of keys. And it takes a bit more work and money to extract the resin than it does to dry out the plants.

The answer is to legalise the lot, make them all available in premises licensed to sell them – they don't have to be licensed for consumption – and make sure the taxation system dissuades the punters from the strong stuff. You could even introduce tax breaks or an appellation d’origine contrôlée system for producers who maintain traditional techniques for making classic hash. Just about anything would be better than threatening people who use Britain's fourth-most-favoured recreational drug – after caffeine, alcohol and nicotine – with tough policing and serious gaol sentences.

And, like, man – the working class smokes too these days. It isn't the dog-whistle to "Labour's natural supporters" that it probably was in 1967.

WELL, IT MADE ME LAUGH

I have just received a joke from a Labour Party comrade.

Q. What's the difference between Gordon Brown and the first world war?

A. The first world war wasn't finished by Xmas.

BROWN IS HOPELESS: HE HAS TO GO

Labour's disaster at the polls on Thursday was so massive it's only now really sinking in. This is not mid-term blues: it is worse than meltdown. Labour has lost it with the voters and will lose the next general election unless it changes course and does it soon.

The architect of Labour's catastrophe is easy to identify: Gordon Brown, whose smart-arse last budget and utterly incompetent premiership over the past six months have left Labour staring into the abyss not only in comfortable middle England but in its northern and Welsh heartlands.

He is not up to the job and should never have got it. That he did was down to Tony Blair's idiotic agreement back in 1994 that Brown would be his preferred successor — a deal that guaranteed that no one else in 10 years of government came close to growing into a contender.

For 10 years in office, Brown played his cards with one intention, to shaft potential rivals for the top job when Tony eventually decided to go — and Blair acquiesced. By the time Brown's half-wit supporters in the parliamentary Labour Party made their move to force Blair's resignation in autumn 2006 there was no one left standing to take Brown on. Robin Cook was dead, and the rest of the would-be contenders, most importantly Charles Clarke, were busted flushes — at least in terms of their government careers.

So we ended up with Gordon, nem con apart from a handful of diehard Trots.

But we don't need to keep him. Thanks, paradoxically, to his promotion of assorted youngsters to cabinet in order to refresh the government's image, there are now credible alternatives as there were not 18 months ago. David Miliband in particular stands out as everything Brown is not: telegenic, dynamic, engaged.

Of course, changing leader is not a panacea: Labour needs more than a different face at the top, most of all a credible narrative about how Britain would be better as a more equal society. But leadership matters all the same. Brown should recognise that his time has been and gone, and retire inside the next nine months. It does not need to be a dramatic resignation: he could discover a prostate problem as Harold Macmillan did or calmly announce that he has had enough of the strains of high office after all these years. But go he must.

JUST LIKE OLD TIMES

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 25 April 2008

Unlike dozens of 40-something lefties I know, I'm not going to be wandering around the Love Music, Hate Racism carnival in Victoria Park this Sunday reminiscing fondly about the day 30 years ago when the very same place was the site of the first Anti-Nazi League carnival with the Clash, the Tom Robinson Band, Steel Pulse and others.

Don't get me wrong: I've got nothing against Love Music, Hate Racism and I'd be there if I could, but I'm working. And even though I can't make it, I shall pause during my shift to indulge in a little misty-eyed nostalgia for the 1978 carnival.

I hitch-hiked down from Ipswich for it with a posh girl from Colchester called Gabriel whose parents would have gone bananas if they'd known where we were going and how. And it was one of the two best days of many good ones I remember from that spring. (The other best was Ipswich beating Arsenal 1-0 in the FA Cup final a week later.) Victoria Park was heaving with people – something between 80,000 and 100,000 showed up – and the gig was brilliant. On the way home Gabriel kissed me... I wonder what she's doing now?

But enough of that Miss J Hunter Dunn moment. I hope everyone has as good a time on Sunday as I had 30 years ago – and that no one spends too long thinking seriously about historical parallels between 1978 and 2008, because that could all too easily spoil the party.

The context for the 1978 carnival was of course the rise of a xenophobic far-right gang in electoral politics, the National Front – and obviously there is a contemporary equivalent in the shape of the British National Party. If Sunday does anything to galvanise opposition to the BNP in the run-up to next week's London elections, it will have performed an extraordinarily useful function.

Yet, unpleasant as the prospect is of the BNP sitting in the London Assembly, the rise of the far right in London is not the most disturbing similarity between 1978 and now. That distinction goes to the national political scene, where now as then a deeply unpopular Labour government seems to be stumbling towards oblivion in the face of a Tory revival.

I know there are differences. The Labour governments of the 1970s had bigger problems than Gordon Brown has today - runaway inflation, growing unemployment, dire industrial relations, a currency crisis - and from 1977 Labour had to rely on a pact with the Liberals for a majority in the House of Commons. By contrast, Brown has (on most things) a comfortable parliamentary majority, growth has been continuous for a record period, inflation is relatively low and unemployment is falling. The unions – teachers' days off aside – are supine.

But Labour's economic prospects today look much less rosy than its recent record – and the Brown government shares with the Callaghan government of the late 1970s an aura of aimlessness and exhaustion that augurs very badly.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the crisis over the abolition of the 10p starting rate of income tax. The measure was announced in Brown's final budget as chancellor of the exchequer last year as part of a package that included reduction of the basic rate of income tax from 22p to 20p – and at the time nearly everyone heralded it as a master stroke. (I demurred but so limply it is embarrassing.) The very few critics who asked how it would affect people on low incomes were reassured that any ill-effects would be minimal as tax credits would compensate.

This was simply not true - as Labour backbenchers came to realise long after they had voted the tax changes through parliament. In fact, abolition of the 10p rate means that some 5 million low-paid people will be worse-off, some of them by nearly £4 a week.

It's difficult to fathom what was going on in Brown's head when he hit on these tax reforms. If he did not realise what their impact would be he was stupendously careless – and if he did realise but thought no one would notice he was plain stupid.

Not that the MPs who were this week threatening to rebel over the issue have much to be proud about. It should not have taken Labour backbenchers the best part of nine months to discover that rather a lot of people would be hit hard by Brown's changes. To mix metaphorical clichés, the threatened backbench rebellion was one of headless chickens trying to shut the door after the horse has bolted. They got Brown to U-turn, in the end, but at a massive price to not only his but their party's credibility.

Will Brown survive this fiasco? I think so, but whether he does or doesn't I'm starting to get a feeling in my bones that the next prime minister will be David Cameron. It would take a massive swing for the Tories to win the next general election. But on the evidence of the past few weeks, I have a hunch they could do it. Right now, Labour isn't working – as the famous 1978 Tory poster had it.

SINKING IN THE SWAMP

I was in a great mood this morning until I read this pernicious nonsense from the playwright David Edgar in the Guardian – the point of which is that Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen, Andrew Anthony and others who have objected to the left getting into bed with reactionary Islamists are defectors from the “progressive” cause who have abandoned any commitment to defending the most exploited people in our society. Edgar fails to explain how Hitchens, Cohen et al have "defected" – he simply takes it as read – and does not engage with any of the supposed defectors' arguments. But he does claim, on the basis of the scantiest of evidence, that Islamists are getting more “progressive” on homosexuality and women’s rights as a result of their engagement with the left intelligentsia. I'm used to reading utter bollocks in the Guardian, but this really takes the biscuit.

WAS I RIGHT OR WAS I RIGHT?

I've been doing some saddo cleaning up and indexing on this blog – OK, I'm so 1999 HTML – and found this.

OBITUARIES - 18: AIMÉ CÉSAIRE

I had no idea that Aimé Césaire, the Martinique poet, playwright, political intellectual and politician, was until yesterday still alive, when he died at the age of 94. I have never been an uncritical admirer, but his 1939 poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (translated as Return to my Native Land) is one of the most stunning works of 20th-century Modernist poetry – up there with the best of T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, the Surrealists and the Futurists. The Times has an obituary here.

STILL HOLDING BACK BUT...

SUBS' SOLIDARITY

Members of Suffolk National Union of Journalists braved the wrath of a major hotel chain to protest against plans by Ipswich's daily papers to axe sub-editors' jobs.

They distributed leaflets opposing the cuts to members of the Suffolk Chamber of Commerce, which was holding a meeting at the Ipswich Novotel where senior executives of Archant, owner of the East Anglian Daily Times and the Evening Star, were speaking.

The two activists were asked to leave the hotel carpark by a Novotel employee but refused to go until they spoke to a senior manager. The delay this caused allowed them to hand out more than five extra leaflets.

Suffolk NUJ member Paul Anderson said: "It's mad to think you can produce newspapers or websites or anything else without subs. We are essential if publishers are going to avoid major libel actions and serious embarrassment over inaccuracies."

Archant recently announced that it would be replacing sub-editors on its Ipswich titles with advertising layout production staff.