TMP Online

Barack Obama’s historic acceptance speech to 84,000 of the Democratic Party faithful in Denver, Colorado last night can be viewed below. 

Hugh Goulbourne argues that more needs to be done to ensure National Lottery sports funding benefits less affluent urban communities.

Like most other Brits I am clearly delighted at the unprecedented level of success of our Olympians in Beijing this year. But, I am surely also not alone in wondering why, given that this is the Peoples’ games, our medal haul does not reflect the wide ethnic and social mix of our great nation.

Our overall tally of 47 medals, 19 of them Gold and fourth place behind the three world super powers (USA, China and Russia), is clearly a tremendous achievement and the athletes, coaches and other Team GB members deserve a lot of credit.

Credit must also go to the National Lottery, and its founder John Major, which has funded our athletes and coaches over the past decade in the build up to these games. However, our euphoria should not overshadow the unfortunate reality, which even Major himself has admitted, that most of this money is not reaching the communities that are most in need of it.

The national lottery has delivered significant finances to sports. However, as any inner city volunteer can tell you, accessing and sustaining the funding that is distributed through Sports England is an arbitrary and convoluted process. It is a system which unfairly disadvantages those communities without the actors that are able to devote the time and to access the skills needed to construct business plans for the development of the facilitates and programs that will support the sport of choice in their community.

Well versed in the influencing skills need to tease money out of the unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats at Sports England, middle class sports have thrived under this system. Over a third of our Olympic medals have come in sailing, rowing and canoeing, the preserve of the rural middle classes. The vast majority of the rest have come in cycling, again hardly a main stream pursuit in our less affluent urban communities.

This is compared to just seven in athletics and boxing, with Christine Ohuruogu and James Degale left alone to fly the gold medal flag for Team GB. These are sports that demand simply a pair of good lungs, a willing mind and a good coach. They are not therefore closed to the vast majority of our population in the same way as sailing, rowing or canoeing which rely heavily on highly technical and expensive equipment.

None of this should detract from the enormous goodwill created towards Team GB, Sports England and the Olympic Games in 2012. But as the outstanding results of our swimmers demonstrates, it is not impossible to put in place the club structures that offer support to schools and communities in more deprived areas.

The great metropolitan swimming clubs have demonstrated how the injection of a bit of social capital can enable these communities to develop the programmes and plans needed to secure continued Sports England backing. Given the location of the 2012 games in East London, then it is to be hoped that Government can follow this model and work with Sports England, local councils and the third sector to put in place the support mechanisms needed to bring through our own Usain Bolt. That way we will truly make this into the Peoples’ Games.

Hugh Goulbourne is a school governor and community director of a new deal for communities regeneration trust.

Skills Minister, MP for Tottenham and Britain’s most senior elected ethnic minority politician, David Lammy, has written an article for the New Statesman in which he argues we are failing miserably to provide Britain’s teenage boys with meaningful occupations, worthy role models or hope for the future.

Lammy, pictured above last month with US Democratic Presidential nominee, Sen. Barack Obama, Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Dawn Butler MP, says:

“In society, the fetishisation of money and the growth of consumerism add new pressures. In a “bling” culture, criminality easily becomes a short cut to symbols of wealth and power that will otherwise take years of hard work to achieve. Inequality plays its part, as young men from poor backgrounds feel they have the least to lose. Why, one boy asked me, was I worried about his grades at school, when he might not live long enough to get a job? This is the world of “get rich or die trying”.

You can read Lammy’s article, published today, in full here.

His comments are reported here:
BBC News Online – “Boy’s harmed by “get rich” culture”;
The Guardian – “Bling culture turns youths to crime, says minister”;
The Daily Mail – “Senior MP in impassioned lament of self-image ‘crisis’ among young men seduced by ‘bling’ and crime”.

Philip Glanville argues that local campaigning is the route to electoral success for Labour.

Following Labour’s losses in Crewe and Glasgow East, barely a day goes by someone or other being accused of plotting. Get any group of activists or wonks together and you’ll hear various ideas to get us out of this mire. Looking back at the successes and failures of the last year, it’s easy to pick out the ‘toffs’ campaign and problems at the top. But what about the deeper, more unsettling questions at the heart of the Labour party’s current problems?

Campaigning in Crewe, I was struck by the lack of long-term organisation. The late, great Gwyneth Dunwoody was a formidable parliamentarian and much-respected MP, but the local party in Crewe seemed moribund at best. Sadly, it was clear that canvassing and campaigning had not taken place for a generation. No historic data, no personal relationships, no record of local campaigning.

In estate after estate, there was no sense that Labour had been talking to local people. We hadn’t fostered a sense that the party was on their side – campaigning for better schools, safer streets and new homes. Ten pence tax and Gordon Brown did not create these problems, they merely exacerbated them.

Oppositions do well in by-elections not only because governments are unpopular mid-term, but because they often take place in the soft underbelly of the thought-to-be-safe seat. Faced with an unfavourable national climate and an ill-judged campaign, there was little we could have done to stave off defeat. Crewe and Glasgow are better after eleven years of Labour Government. Yet, for years it seems nobody has talked to local people about what we are doing and why.

Our supporters don’t need Facebook, they want us to talk face to face: in their local pub, at the church fete, at a residents’ meeting or on the doorstep. It may be old-fashioned or unsexy, but it works. You can’t just turn up every four years (or, even worse, mid-term) and expect people to vote for you.

Clearly being in power is vital. We should never lose sight of that aim or hold the deluded view that we need to be in opposition to renew. Yet being in government can hold the party. Leaders inevitably start to listen to civil servants over party members and citizens. We get caught up in the idea that a good policy and a slick soundbite is all it takes to succeed.

The underreported lesson of the May elections was how local parties up and down the country bucked the losing trend: from Oxford to Hastings, from Haringey to Slough, we held and gained seats from the Lib Dems and the Tories. The common theme? Strong local messages and a strong local campaign.

Party structures are often highlighted as a reason people are turned off by party politics: having sat through many GCs and branch meetings, I agree that it’s not for everyone and shouldn’t be the only form of involvement. Yet it is an important building block from which to sustain a campaigning party. Throwing it overboard to somehow broaden our reach could be as damaging as seeing structures as the be all and end all.

Where I would advocate serious change, however, is from the top down, with MPs, peers, MEPs, AMs, MSPs and councillors.

There are many, many Labour MPs who work all year round, quietly building the party’s presence in their community. Yet, there are many others who haven’t knocked on a door in years – who are happier on TV or in the newspapers criticising the government. We will always have, and need, critical voices. We don’t want an army of nodding dogs in parliament as fodder for the whips. But all Labour MPs have obligations to the party and one of these must be to campaign for its ongoing success.

Contrast this with the local leadership shown by councillors in Hackney, Oxford, and Lambeth and MPs such as Siobhan McDonagh, Jim Knight and Martin Salter; they know that campaigning is at the heart of being a Labour representative. That means MPs doing regular campaigning on top of their representational role. The best MPs are already excellent campaigners, but the NEC and party whips should be less concerned with votes in parliament as a measure of loyalty and more worried about how many voters they have spoken to. If MPs aren’t up for leading from the front they should be out – deselected. As simple as that.

True renewal will only come when we become closer to the people. Let’s take a good look at the Britain we have been a part of creating, look at what works and what doesn’t. Let’s return politics to the people by talking to them about their priorities.

Philip Glanville is Labour councillor for Hoxton.