There isn't much more to be said about Louise Haigh's resignation, especially when this piece from the Telegraph (outside the paywall) covers all the bases. Her departure wasn't because of a spent conviction from a decade ago. It was the shenanigans that did for her. Leaving aside its digs and insinuations, the paper reports that the axe has hung over Haigh for some time. Apparently Keir Starmer's and Rachel Reeves's noses were put out of joint because Haigh successfully negotiated an end to the Tory train strikes without their say so. And this claim is supposedly proved by Starmer's 60-word response to her resignation letter. But reading on, we see that there were efforts by Labour apparatchiks to get the Tory press interested in Haigh's conviction before the election. What? The so-called civil service of the party working against its political masters? Say it ain't so.
When it comes to the Labour Party, one cannot understand the present state of play without acknowledging the simmering guerilla campaign waged by Morgan McSweeney and friends against anything that smacks of social democratic politics. And with the left either elsewhere or chained up in a box, that means the soft left are now their targets. They are the designated enemy within for two reasons. For some, they are opposed to the soft left for exactly the same reasons the Tories are. Their closeness to trade unions, the (relative) enthusiasm for pro-worker policy, and a belief that politics are about values and that Labour's mission is to improve society somewhat is too much for the grey we-know-best managerialism that dominates right wing Labour thinking. They believe re-election will be won on straightforward delivery, which typically reduces itself to the statsplaining politics of tractor production figures. The same approach that worked so well across the Atlantic. The second reason is the idea that anything smacking of old Labourism is an electoral bromide. Never mind giving the Tory press fresh angles to attack the new government from, most voters themselves - or at least those the Morganiser thinks the party needs on side next time around - don't like better paid workers, fully funded public services, or the idea that life might get better. Because of this, even had Haigh not successfully negotiated a deal with rail workers, Labour's permanent deep party had sharpened its knives and were waiting for the right moment to skewer the former transport secretary.
For all this, it might be that Haigh gets the last laugh. Because she has resigned over tiny potatoes, she has now set the bar for Starmer's ministers where it comes to conduct. For instance, her departure weakens the position of the chancellor. Who, you will recall, has freely admitted to plagiarising "her" book, and has spent the last week on the wrong end of a right wing campaign highlighting inconsistencies between what she said about her career and the actual CV. This means in the future when a difficulty or a scandal presents itself, because Haigh has gone over something inconsequential it will be politically harder for Starmer to defend his ministers. And it also suggests the Tory press will go harder knowing that their efforts has already scalped one career. By caving to the dirty work of the back room boys, Haigh has inadvertently made Labour's immediate political future harder to manage.
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4 comments:
Louise Haigh's case is very odd. Only a conditional discharge for that? There is a more to this. But it is absolutely inconceivable that anyone was made a Cabinet Minister without the Prime Minister's being aware of her previous criminal conviction.
Heidi Alexander was Shadow Health Secretary in Corbyn's ill-advised first Shadow Cabinet. She effectively scuppered the NHS Reinstatement Bill that would have prevented and reversed the Blairites' signature domestic policy of NHS privatisation. She was the first Shadow Cabinet member to resign. Later becoming Deputy Mayor of London for Transport, she delivered an increase in fares, delays, complaints, and strikes, as well as the Elizabeth Line three and a half years late and more than four billion pounds overbudget.
Having been promised her latest job by Keir Starmer weeks ago, Alexander will now replace the partial renationalisation of the rail service with some ghastly "public-private partnership", allow the cost of the senior citizen's railcard to increase by even more than the present 16.6 per cent, allow bus fares to increase by even more than the present 50 per cent, abandon the reregulation of the buses, and build a third runway at Heathrow, also by means of a PFI or some such, just as the railways' rolling stock was always going to remain in private hands, adding exorbitant rent to every ticket. Where is that money going? To whom?
See also HS2, PPE, Test and Trace, the Rwanda Scheme, the arms companies, and everything else that is very good at kicking back to politicians while employing retired top brass. That includes the newly abandoned Bibby Stockholm. We have been paying £400 million per year to rent that 48-year-old engineless barge, which cannot be worth more than a few million pounds. Whatever happened with Haigh's mobile phone in 2013, it is the very least of our worries.
«Labour's mission is to improve society somewhat»
Roy Hattersley, "soft left", 2001: “The Labour Party was created to change society in such a way that there is no poverty and deprivation from which to escape”
«is too much for the grey we-know-best managerialism that dominates right wing Labour thinking.»
Our blogger keeps pushing that claim, but someone said that "if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck , quacks like a duck, then it is a duck" and if New Labour people for decades target thatcherite voters and enact thatcherite policies then they are thatcherites, not merely practitioners of "grey we-know-best managerialism".
That is important politically because actually-existing thatcherism is the alliance between rentier financialist upper class and rentier property-owning middle class and those are indeed New Labour's main constituencies and the big question for the left is how to persuade a part of those rentier middle-class voters that social-democracy is better for them than property speculation/
«They believe re-election will be won on straightforward delivery»
Of bigger capital gains to those described in “Labour would only win if the party championed aspirational voters who shop at John Lewis and Waitrose”.
her story doesn't make any sense
i dont think anything happened the way she said it did
i think she just made up a story to get a new phone
but didnt get her timings right
and someone spotted that the phone had calls logged and pictures taken via exif data
AFTER the time she said it was stolen
«by means of a PFI or some such, just as the railways' rolling stock was always going to remain in private hands, adding exorbitant rent to every ticket. [...] abandoned Bibby Stockholm. We have been paying £400 million per year to rent that 48-year-old engineless barge»
All interesting points, but they are not mistakes they are policies: the basic issue of UK politics after Thatcher and Blair is that there is a large block of thatcherite "Blow you! I am alright Jack", "Only look after Number One" voters who consistently vote for bigger rents and capital gains for themselves and lower wages, meaner pensioners, worse public services for everybody else, and a climate of "everybody is on the take" is the both the consequence and the context.
That is a large block of voters are corrupted by self-dealing on a massive scale and can only feel affinity for a political class that does the same. All those NIMBYs, all those expense-padders, all those real estate agents, all those cash-in-hand traders, all those gimme-a-kickback purchasers, all those trade-while-bankrupt city shysters cannot criticize any of those who do those interesting points, and clearly want a general climate of impunity.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-03-01/britain-s-white-collar-cops-are-getting-too-good-at-their-job
«Early in the Q&A portion, Green signaled for a microphone and asked a deceptively straightforward question: What did Cameron think of the anticorruption work of the SFO — an agency set up precisely to investigate and prosecute high-level corporate crime?
Cameron, a genteel Etonian with more than his share of the erudition required for high office in the U.K., was somehow tongue-tied.
“The SFO, yes, I do support its work,” he stammered, pausing for several seconds. But there seemed to be a but, and Cameron began to hedge. “As prime minister, you do feel a responsibility for wanting British business to get out there and win orders and succeed,” he said, adding, “so sometimes there are frustrations and worries and concerns.”
To anyone unversed in the folkways of official Britain, the Green-Cameron exchange would seem strange. It’s hard to imagine a U.S. president, Donald Trump aside, being asked if he supported the FBI — let alone responding that it ought to think about the commercial damage when it goes after suspected criminals.»
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