TMP Online

Senator Barack Obama won the South Carolina primary on Saturday taking 55% of the vote to Senator Hillary Clinton’s 27%. Notably, he picked up a greater proportion of white Democrats’ votes than expected.

The Democratic nomination juggernaut swings into Florida today for the controversial primary there which, like Michigan’s, has been outlawed by the Democratic Party. Floridian Democratic delegates will not be able to take their seats at the party’s national convention as the state party is being penalised for holding its primary before 5 February.

Obama has not campaigned in Florida but Clinton has, and it is widely believed she may challenge the national party’s ruling as commentators predict the race could come down to the delegate count at the Democratic Party’s national convention in August. A candidate needs 2,025 delegates to win the nomination and it is estimated that Obama currently has 63 delegates, whilst Clinton has 48.

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TMP readers will have been interested to hear that Helen Grant (right), a black, female lawyer was selected as the Conservative prospective parliamentary candidate in the safe Tory seat of Maidstone and the Weald last weekend. 

Helen Grant is highly likely to succeed the sitting Conservative MP, Ann Widdecombe, in the seat.  She is the owner of Grant Solicitors a specialist law firm dealing with the problems of family breakdown in London, Surrey and Kent. 

Of Grant’s selection, Conservative Party Chair, Caroline Spelman MP, said “Helen’s selection as the candidate for Maidstone and The Weald is great news and further proof of the changes that have happened in the Conservative Party under David Cameron.

“As you’d expect the calibre of applicants for this Parliamentary seat was very high indeed and Helen’s success is a credit to her and the local association.
“Helen has a high standard to live up to but I have no doubt she will excel.”

But controversy erupted over the weekend following revelations in the Mail on Sunday that Grant was only recently a member of the Labour Party.  Commenting on her past association with the Labour Party, Grant said,

“I have never been a member of the Croydon Labour party. I was a member of the Reigate & Banstead branch from mid 2004. I never attended any of their meetings, made no donations and did no canvassing or campaigning work for them at all. I have never denied my association with the Labour party and talked of it in a newspaper interview published in the summer of 2006.

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Despite a difficult two months, during which the Evening Standard newspaper has waged a concerted campaign against him and his advisors, and Channel 4 broadcast a “Dispatches” programme highly critical of him, the latest You Gov/ITV poll shows that London Labour Mayor Ken Livingstone has increased his lead in the polls over his Conservative rival, Boris Johnson MP.

The poll shows Livingstone on 44%, whilst Johnson – who is strongly supported by the Evening Standard – is on 40%, with the Liberal Democrats Brian Paddick on 8%. Notably the poll was conducted after the broadcast of the Dispatches programme which was widely reported.

A spokesperson for Livingstone’s campaign said:
“This is a welcome opening up of Ken’s lead, especially as Internet polling has always underestimated Ken’s support compared to actual elections and other opinion polls.
“The election for Mayor will be decided on the key issues of transport, crime, affordable housing, good community relations and the environment and Londoners will refuse to be distracted by nonsense and falsifications being spouted out daily in media storms from his opponents.
“Ken will run on his record and extending London’s success into a third term. He has already announced two new commitments – to extend the hours of the Freedom Pass to a twenty four hour service and his plan to extend student travel discounts – and others will follow on the environment, crime, good community relations, transport and housing.” (continue reading…)

TMP columnist, Lola Adesioye, reflects on the performance of Nigeria’s new president and what the future holds for Africa’s most populous nation.

In 2007 the world began to see Africa through different eyes. The renowned Technology Entertainment Design (TED) conference held its TED Global event in Africa for the first time; the global business community woke up to the fact that China has steadily been increasing its investment in Africa over the past few years because it views Africa as a worthwhile opportunity, and glossy magazine Vanity Fair even ran an edition devoted entirely to the continent. No longer was the world being fed African sob stories: there was finally some acknowledgement that there is more to Africa than just HIV/Aids and starvation.

The positive stories emerging from Africa have continued this week at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. African delegates such as Nigerian president Umaru Yar’Adua have reported that African leaders are “getting it right” and “people have learned what not to do”.

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TMP asked Ade Sawyerr what it would take to get him to join the Labour Party.  Here he explains what Gordon Brown will need to do to seduce him.

What would it take for me to join the Labour Party in the UK? Surprisingly, it would take a lot of persuasion from Gordon Brown the current leader; this is because I have not seen much difference between the policies of the Labour Party and those of the Conservative Party.

I came into Britain near the start of the Thatcher years, in between when I was accepted into business school and when I arrived here from Ghana, there had already been changes – the fees for overseas students were doubled as soon as she came into power – so I was quite ready for the rough ride of monetarism without a care for whether one was a member of the Commonwealth or from any other country without ties with the mother country.

I watched the Labour Party lose an election in 1983 when there were 3 million people unemployed in the country; their major concerns then were more about unilateral nuclear disarmament and whether black politicians in the Labour Party could or could not form their own sections. At that point I realised that the Labour Party was still playing the big paternalistic imperialist, something it still tries to do. So though I continued to vote for it, I did not join the Labour Party.

After Kinnock (right) took over he transformed the party and though he lost the election of 1987, he started making the party electorally viable. But it took the elections of 1992, after Margaret Thatcher had been thrown out by her own party in 1990, for the Labour Party to make a surge. John Major had supervised a Conservative Party that was tearing itself apart with concerns about Europe and was reeling under allegations of sleaze. But in the 1992 elections, Labour was too triumphantlist and the tax calculations of John Smith just did not add up.

So after the great work that Kinnock had done in modernising the party, kicking out the Militant Tendency and purging some of the loony left ideologies, he handed over smoothly to John Smith who made the party even more respectable.

After John Smith passed on we all expected that the senior partner in the Brown-Blair tag team (below) of high performers in parliament would have followed Smith. But Brown passed up that chance; some believe that he was outwitted by meddlesome Mandelson to allow Blair ascend to higher office as leader of the Labour Party.

Soon we had Emily’s list, all women shortlists, to increase the number of women in parliament but no such list for black candidates, I did not blink – maybe the signs were there but I could not discern them. Blair led the party to a spectacular election victory in 1997 – there was so much excitement; the party of the masses had come into power and the politics for the working class back in fashion.

I did not worry too much that they were taxing the super rich corporations to pay for the National Health Service or that they had given the Bank of England its independence. I was actually impressed that they had promised the country fiscal prudence and that the economy would be left to grow at a faster pace than the Conservative Party had left it.

I even laughed off their desire to turn this country “cool”, in line with their modern agenda and their decision to pump some much needed money into the health service. I was ecstatic that they dared to put through the proposals for the minimum wage and less so that they screwed single mothers for the little that the state provided. Elections are won at the centre, so it is all right to ensure that the middle class stays the course with you.

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TMP columnist Tim Caswell returns and ponders the future for Britain’s three main political parties.

The Liberal Democrats increasingly remind me of Newcastle United. They have a distinguished history and a loyal band of friendly fans, but they never win anything and change their leader frequently. The latest looks a bit like Tony Blair and sounds identical to David Cameron (Nick Clegg that is, not Kevin Keegan). But there the similarity ends.

Keegan’s third coming was heralded by near hysterical adulation by the Geordie faithful and more than a modicum of interest, curiosity and goodwill from the population as a whole. Mr. Clegg assumed office with the endorsement of just over a third of his party’s members and was met with a wave of complete indifference from the general public. A third of the Lib Dem membership voted for his opponent, another Blair/Cameron clone; the other third abstained. It is hard not to marvel at the level of apathy entailed in an abstention by 20,000 people in their own party’s leadership election. But what is really surprising is not the narrow margin of the victory (dolly the sheep versus dolly the sheep was never going to be a landslide) but the size of the party’s membership, apparently a mere 60,000.

Labour’s membership has fallen from 405,000 in 1997 to less than 200,000 ten years later, a loss of one every twenty minutes. Cameron’s Conservatives claim a larger membership than Labour, which is plausible as it is rumoured that in some parts of Surrey buying a double Gin and tonic at the local “Con Club” qualifies one for life membership, if not a peerage, when they return to power.

Mathematicians among you will have already calculated that this gives the three “big” parties a combined mass membership of less than half a million in a nation where the National Trust has more than a million members and more than three and a half million of us belonged to a political party in 1950. Yes, membership has declined all over the world but in Britain participation and turnout are now almost the lowest in Europe, although the percentage of British adults who tell pollsters that they are “very or fairly interested” in politics has remained constant at 60% for the last thirty years.

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Senator Barack Obama (pictured left with Tyra Banks) is looking to regain the momentum in his pursuit of the US Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in South Carolina on Saturday, following Senator Hillary Clinton’s win in Nevada over the weekend.

Clinton won 51% of the vote to Obama’s 45% in the Nevada Democratic Party caucus. However Obama took 13 delegates to Clinton’s 12 in the contest. The delegates, who will attend the Democratic Party’s national convention in August, will vote on who will be the party’s nominee in November’s presidential election. Former Vice Presidential candidate John Edwards won just 4% of the vote and no delegates and Nevada effectively marks the end of his hopes of winning, though he has said he will press on.

In South Carolina, which returns 45 delegates to the Democratic Party’s national convention, almost double the number of Nevada, Obama has a 10.5% lead over Clinton in the most recent poll of polls. The support of African American voters who are said to make up approximately half of the Democrat electorate in South Carolina is said to be crucial to victory. According to some polls Obama won 80% of the African American vote in the Nevada caucus.

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TMP columnist Lola Adesioye, writing in the Guardian newspaper today, argues that integration and separation need not be polar opposites.  Presently based in New York Adesioye asks whats wrong with people choosing to live among people of their own race.  Noting the differences between the UK and the US, she says that:

“Londoners who visit New York are often shocked by the “segregation” of African-Americans and white Americans. In the US, people socialise and live within their own racial groups – according to one study, only 5%-10% of families live in integrated communities.”

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Africans for labour is hosting a fundraising dinner and dance at the Holiday Inn Hotel, London Bloomsbury, Coran Street, London WC1N 1HF on Thursday 21 February 2008.

The organisation was set up to increase political awareness and to mobilise support in the African community for the Labour Party. It was established in 2006 at a time when the Conservative Party started to vociferously court the Black vote.

In recent months Conservative front bench spokesmen have regularly written for publications such as the Voice newspaper and have been seeking to build links with Britain’s Black churches. This prompted the journalist and Conservative supporter David Matthews (right) to write a article at the end of last year suggesting the Tories and the Black community were new “best friends”; TMP editor, Chuka Umunna’s response to that article can be read here.

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The House of Commons International Development Select Committee has just announced it is holding an inquiry into the Department for International Development’s (DFID) programme in Nigeria.

Nigeria is one of the largest and most populous countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Despite oil wealth, poverty levels are high with over 70 million people living on less than $1 a day and one in five children dying before the age of five. Nigeria receives relatively little development assistance per capita (around $6) compared to the average for sub-Saharan Africa (over $20). DFID’s programme in Nigeria has increased from £35 million in 2003/04 to £80 million in 2006/07 and to £100 million in 2007/08. Nigeria is one of 22 countries DFID will be monitoring in relation to progress towards its 2008-11 Public Service Agreement Delivery Agreement.

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