We are looking for a new editor of TMP
Now I have been selected as Labour’s parliamentary candidate in Streatham I am looking to focus my energies on Streatham from hereon. I am therefore looking to divest myself of several other activities I am involved with, one of which is running TMP.
To all our regular readers, apologies for the less than regular postings of late – I simply have not been able to devote the time to TMP that I did before being selected. Until we find a new editor I’m afraid new posts will appear, at most, on a weekly basis on this site.
Who are we looking for to take on the mantle of TMP? In short, someone who identifies with the values of TMP, can write (preferably they will have journalism experience), is well versed in the workings of the British Labour Party (though membership of the party is not a prerequisite), and has a good grasp of policy issues, in particular those touching on ethnic minority communities. It is an unpaid post but would be a good stepping stone for anyone looking for a career in journalism and/or politics and is immensley rewarding. It does not involve a huge time commitment.
This is not terminal
TMP editor, Chuka Umunna, reflects on last night’s local elections.
“Ken Livingstone has five children by three women” screamed one headline, “Johnson admits using cocaine as a teenager” shouted another.The other candidates for London mayor were never really going to get a look in. Two larger than life characters, oozing charisma, the personification of their politics. This was no ordinary election.
After a decade of national success for the reds, the blues are allegedly on the march and politics has got interesting again, it is said. Last night’s results will be viewed in this context.
It was always going to be a difficult set of results for Labour, though it was not quite as bad as many had expected, with Labour down 162 councillors around the country at the time of writing. However, it is the London result that everyone is waiting for. What happens in the capital will dominate the weekend’s headlines and set the political scene for next few weeks. So what will the London result tell us about the state of the parties and, most importantly, the forthcoming general election? In the short term, it obviously matters; in the long term, its significance is surely questionable.
40 years ago today
40 years ago today the legendary US Civil Rights leader, Dr Martin Luther King Jnr, was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.
He delivered his last speech – “I’ve been to the mountain top” – the day before at the Mason Temple in Memphis and, in closing, had said:
“Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.”
To mark the occasion, we have included an extract of that last speech here:
Don’t play politics with this issue
TMP editor, Chuka Umunna, enters into the stop and search debate and warns against the perils of playing politics in this arena.
One spring day in April 1981 my mother popped down to Brixton with her little toddlers, to do a spot of shopping. Little did she know what was about to unfold; as the tension mounted and the violence started, she literally sprinted to our car with her two bundles of joy – my sister in her pushchair and me on foot – and fled. She still talks with relief about how she knew the various side roads out of the area, enabling us to make that quick exit more than 20 years ago.
You see, when Conservative leader David Cameron seeks to kick about the stop and search issue as if it were just another political football, this is the arena into which he is lobbing it. It is common currency that it was the disproportionate use of stop and search powers by the police then, in addition to the deprivation which many in urban Britain suffered under Margaret Thatcher, that led to the riots that spring day.
Unlike Cameron, it appears that history has not been lost on Sir Ronnie Flanagan, whose report into policing is published today. Yes, things are different now. The police are not so “gung-ho” in the use of their powers and we have different issues, the number of violent murders of young people in London last year among them. But Flanagan has recognised the need to ensure the police command the respect of all communities given his proposal to retain the “stop and search” form to demonstrate accountability, particularly to ethnic minorities, though he sensibly acknowledges procedures need to be streamlined through the use of modern technology. No doubt his experience in Northern Ireland has informed his outlook.
The Tory leader, on the other hand, has adopted a completely different approach. In his interview in the Sun last week, we were told how he “sees the effects of the violent crime explosion as he cycles to the Commons” from his home in Notting Hill. No doubt he stops every now and then to talk to the locals on his way. Cameron would have us believe that his finger is on the pulse of urban Britain, while Gordon Brown doesn’t recognise the problems. So what did he propose? “Freeing” the police to do “far more stopping and far more searching,” without which we are not going to be able to deal with the current problems, he says. He wants to do away with accountability measures, such as the forms, which were introduced to ensure the police use their stop and search powers properly:
“In the British police service there were problems with racism, there were problems with attitude. That needed to change, I think it has now been changed. I am quite clear the current rules have to go.”
He conveniently forgets the numerous deaths of black people in police custody, like Michael Powell in 2003, and the dreadful reports of racism in police training centres such as those in Hendon and Cheshire since the publication of the Macpherson report, which found institutional racism to be rife in the Metropolitan police.
The best show in town
TMP editor, Chuka Umunna, reflects on last night’s television debate between those vying for the Mayoralty of the Capital.
The first television face-off between the London mayoral candidates on Wednesday started so jovially. Before the cameras got rolling, Boris Johnson wondered aloud whether they should form a joint administration, with the other two “working under” him. Ken Livingstone’s retort that “too many people already have” provoked much laughter. They were joking, of course, but things got more heated later, in what turned out to be a quite angry affair.
Much has been said about the blandness of our British politicians in the wake of the excitement which the US Democratic presidential race is generating. That may be true of our national political operatives but here in London, while the protagonists may not be as slick and well-groomed as their US counterparts, bland they are not.
You have the Labour incumbent, the cheeky chappy “Ken”, with his slight cockney twang and trademark grin. There is Tory boy, “Boris”, Bullingdon club alumni – a man who carries the look and demeanour of someone straight off the set of a Richard Curtis film. Two characters miles apart. And then there is the Liberal Democrat policeman, former Commander Brian Paddick, who has something of the school head boy about him. So worried was Paddick about being eclipsed by the other two challengers at the outset, that he insisted on sitting between them in the pre-debate photo, lest the national press cut him out of the resulting shots.
Obama gets the big mo!
TMP editor, Chuka Umunna (left), reports on a remarkable victory for the junior Senator from Illinois.
Senator Barack Obama has won the Democratic caucuses in Iowa giving him that crucial momentum – the big “mo” – to help carry him through to the next stages of the race to win the U.S. Democratic Party’s presidential nomination for the November presidential election.
Obama (below) won 37.6% of the vote to John Edwards’ 29.7%, with Hillary Clinton trailing in third place on 29.5%. Of the other contenders, Senators Joe Biden and Chris Dodd have now bowed out of the Democratic race having failed to make an impact.
Ahmed and Warsi lead the way in securing the release of Gillian Gibbons
Everyone at TMP would like to congratulate Lord Ahmed (left) and Baroness Warsi (right) on securing the release of British primary school teacher, Gillian Gibbons, jailed last week in Sudan for allowing her class of school children to name a teddy bear Muhammad.
Ahmed and Warsi led a British delegation that held talks with Sudanese President al-Bashir, who subsequently pardoned Gibbons yesterday.
Commenting on her release at Heathrow today, Gibbons said:
“I would like to thank Lord Ahmed and Baroness Warsi and I would like to thank all the people who have worked so hard to secure my release and make my time more bearable.”
Labour’s lost love
TMP editor, Chuka Umunna, looks at Labour’s relationship with the black community.
At the 1992 general election, the Conservatives suffered a shock defeat in Cheltenham, a place once considered to be “true blue” territory dating back to the 1950s. Their candidate, John Taylor, a black man (and, as such, a rarity) had been subject to racist abuse by members of his own local association, with some of the Cheltenham blue-rinse brigade reportedly urging local people not to vote for him.
Fast forward 15 years and Lord Taylor of Warwick is a Conservative peer, Adam Afriyie (the party’s only black MP) is a shadow minister, and six ethnic minority prospective parliamentary candidates, selected in safe seats, are waiting in the wings. And now the latest issue of the New Statesman, no less, wonders aloud on its cover whether the Tories and black Britain have become “new best friends”. A Tory moderniser’s dream morphs into reality.
The Statesman’s cover article is written by David Matthews, the journalist who caused controversy with his documentary “The Trouble with Black Men” in 2004. He suggests Labour can no longer rely on the unconditional support of black Britain. He thinks that as the black middle class grows, so will Tory support among African and Caribbean people, many of who, he asserts, are disillusioned with Labour policies on many levels and naturally sympathetic to Conservative social values.
Touching on Nigel Hastilow’s recent resignation as a prospective Conservative parliamentary candidate, Matthews (right) is good enough to concede that race is still “an itch the Tories must scratch”. Yet, remarkably, he fails to mention the row that the Tories’ politico-celebrity London mayoral candidate, Boris Johnson, has caused. Only last month, a black Tory councillor in Croydon, Enley Taylor, became the latest to complain that his party was prepared “to overlook clearly racist statements by its mayoral candidate”. David Cameron has been strangely muted on this issue, but I digress. What of Matthews’ central charge? Are the days of kneejerk support for Labour in the black community over?
Speak to any Labour cabinet minister, councillor or activist who knows a thing or two about black Britain and they will tell you that the black vote cannot be taken for granted – gone are the days when it was necessary for Operation Black Vote to drill this into Labour’s psyche. It is not for nothing that, last year, the then leader of the House of Lords, Baroness Amos, started convening regular summits of government ministers and black church leaders, and Tony Blair spoke at Ruach Ministries, Britain’s second biggest black church. This was instigated long before Cameron’s PPS and eyes and ears in the Commons, Desmond Swayne, sent him emails urging him to do the same kind of thing.
Chuka and Polly – the conversation continues
In the second part of his interview with Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee, TMP editor Chuka Umunna puts to her the accusation that she contradicts herself, asks her to justify her claim that the Brown government has left social democracy for dead, discusses with her the electoral viability of the equality and fairness agenda she promotes, finds out what she thinks of all-black shortlists and invites her to speculate on which “young turk” will succeed the Prime Minister.
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CU: Some people say you are a bit all over the place and that you often contradict yourself. For example, on the one hand you claim that the Blair government was one of the best, on the other hand you were highly critical of Blair the man. How do you marry those two approaches?
PT: …..well both things are true. We haven’t had a lot of good governments since the war. I’ve done two books with David Walker [the Guardian’s social affairs editor] assessing Labour’s first and second terms, in which we added up everything that has been done in each department, and it is a pretty impressive record. The amount of money spent, the improvements, the way hospitals, schools and open spaces – everything – just looks so much better! We forget how utterly run down things were in 1997 and how bad it was.
Most of Labour’s ideas have been very good. Most of the things they have done have worked, though some have not and not enough has been spent on the public sector (the result of Swedish ambitions on close to American levels of taxation). I supported Blair, despite the fact of being passionately against the Iraq war right from the start of it. I supported him through the last election because I thought that dumping him and putting Brown in beforehand would have been the wrong thing to do and Blair would probably win – he did.
But after that I thought he ought to go very quickly – quit while he was ahead, having won three elections. The time he stayed was incredibly painful after the 2005 election, at which point I was turning very anti-Blair but I never moved to a position where I was saying “everything the government does is rubbish”. I simply said that Blair should go, the war is a calamity and he ought to realise he’s not in a position any more to be inspiring or to produce new policies.
CU: Were you ever inspired by Tony Blair in a big way?
PT: Erm…well I suppose by things he did, yes. And you couldn’t but catch the enthusiasm of ‘97. What they pulled off between ’94 and ’97 was pretty fantastic. It was pretty amazing what they’d created, it was a huge success and it went on to do a great many very good things.
But there were a lot of things I didn’t like about Blair’s approach. I didn’t like him not being able to speak about inequality and not caring about doing something about the rich. I didn’t like the whole choice agenda and the privatisations, but that was only a fairly small part of what his government did. We’ve had a very competent 10 year government – better than anything since Attlee.
I don’t think any of that is contradictory. It is possible to say how well the government has done, whilst highlighting the opportunities they have missed.
CU: What about Brown? What is your assessment of his performance so far? Two weeks ago you were bemoaning the fact that Labour’s leaders had left social democracy for dead.
PT: I think Brown has decided – and Blair had done so already – that he is not a social democrat (they had both stopped being socialists a long time ago). I think what you see now is a very decent, “centre” government.
CU: When do you think Brown decided to become a “centrist”?
PT: I think its been creeping up on him. Afterall, he has never called himself a social democrat. I think he has a very strong moral conscience and a very strong wish to do the right thing. He’s a thoroughly decent man but I think he’s made an accommodation with a sort of capitalist truism: he thinks there is nothing you can do about globalisation except educate people enough to be able to cope with it; that government doesn’t have power to interfere with the market much beyond a bit of regulation here and there. He thinks you should have very flexible labour markets and that all you can do is “swim with the tide”, hope for the best and keep people in work. He doesn‘t really think you can stand up and say “this [inequality] is too much, this is disgusting”.
CU: But what about his 2003 “best when we are boldest, best when we are Labour” speech or his 2004 address to the Compass national conference, pointing out the limits to the market? Both sounded social democratic…
PT: …but that was when he wasn’t in power….
CU: … he was the Chancellor of the Exchequer!?
PT: The impression that Gordon and his people consistently gave was that he would be, if he could, further to the left. A lot of people at the time said “don’t be deluded, New Labour is their joint project”. I think that has been the case. Although their styles are different, the emphasises different and the things they care most about are different, basically they have made the same pact – they think there is not much you can do about the market or capitalism, and you had better just bow down in front of the City.
I think Brown subscribes to this view point for economic reasons – I don’t think its just a case of political cowardice. I think he thinks you cannot disturb the market and if you try to change it, it’ll just fall apart in your hands and you will destroy everything. I think he genuinely believes what we have now is necessary. For example, Brown admires Alan Greenspan [the former head of the U.S Federal Reserve] and thinks Greenspan is correct in his thinking, but Greenspan is very far to the right by any social democratic standard – Greenspan thought it was okay for Bush to make those huge tax cuts for the rich which resulted in quite serious economic trouble for the U.S.
What makes Brown a centrist is that he thinks you can be entirely up for the capitalist project, absolutely not for taxing people more (particularly the rich who would otherwise flee) on the one hand, and on the other hand you can try to do your best to help the people that get left behind. Read more
Chuka in conversation with Polly
Polly Toynbee (left) is invariably referred to as one of the most influential commentators of the New Labour era, reviled and revered in equal measure. This doyenne of the Left was formerly BBC social affairs editor and an associate editor of the Independent before rejoining the Guardian in 1998, where she had spent many years earlier in her career and where she still resides.
In the first part of his in depth interview with Polly, Chuka Umunna, editor of TMP (right), talks to her about her career, her political activism in the 1980s, her views on her profession, her take on the Paxman/Humphrys approach to politicians and her opinions on the Great British press in general. Enjoy.
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CU: One gets the impression that you have a lot of fire in your belly so why journalism and not activism or doing politics proper?
PT: Well, I was briefly a politician. I was in the Labour Party but left in the early 1980s when the choice between Michael foot and Margaret Thatcher didn’t seem a very sensible one, and the Labour Party looked as if it was bent on self-destruction (there was no way that Michael Foot’s Labour Party was electable!).So I joined the SDP, the Social Democratic Party, which formed an alliance with the then Liberal Party in 1981, with a load of other Labour Party people I knew. I was an admirer of Roy Jenkins – one of the “gang of four” who helped found the party – though I allied myself with David Owen (partly because Owen pushed forward lots of women) when the SDP split in 1988 between those voting to merge with the Liberal Party (to become the Liberal Democrats) and those, like Owen, who were against.
I was on the national executive committee of the party, stood as its candidate in Lewisham East in the 1983 election and was one of the main organisers of its 1987 general election campaign. After it all ended in [a proverbial] car crash, I joined the BBC in 1988 as social affairs editor, which gave me an elegant reason for leaving the party.
CU: So why, after 1987, didn’t you just stick it out and hop on board the New Labour bandwagon as a politician, when it came? Why did you return to journalism?
Well I’d always been a journalist and had carried on as a journalist [working at the Guardian] right the way through my involvement with the SDP – I had done politics in my spare time. And at that point in the late ‘80s I wasn’t going to rejoin Labour – I didn’t see any particular point. Labour was on its way after 1984 and I’d never had a burning desire to be a politician.
In any case, being at the BBC ruled out being involved in politics and I was there for 7 years, before leaving to join the Independent in 1995 for a while. Andrew Marr’s removal as editor of the Independent in 1998 prompted my return to the Guardian that year.
CU: Do you feel any guilt in perhaps prolonging Thatcher’s reign during the 1980s, by further splitting the progressive vote with your SDP colleagues?
PT: No, not at all, as we always knew we would either help bring the Labour Party to its senses or we would win. At the time a lot of people joined the SDP saying “either we win or Labour comes to its senses”. It took a lot longer than we thought. We got within two points of Labour in 1983. Even if we hadn’t got many seats, if we had overtaken Labour in the popular vote, I think we would have got to a sort of “New Labour” position a bit sooner than we did – I think we would have got Labour to a position where it would have won the 1992 election…but who knows.
CU: You get so very passionate and angry about things. Don’t you feel restrained by just putting your thoughts on to paper?
PT: Well in some ways it’s a hell of a lot less restrained than some poor old minister [she refers to one new, young, minister] who absolutely can’t say anything. The sad thing about Labour is that almost everyone one knows and meets feels passionately about things too, but the moment they get a post and become insiders, they have to zip their lip and not say anything.
CU: You’re supposedly influential and pop up in published lists of the influential. Do you feel influential?
PT: No not nearly enough [she says laughing loudly]. I wish they’d all do what I say!
CU: Do you ever see the results of your reported influence?
PT: I would like to think that the most constructive thing I ever did was to bang on about child care – the need for Children’s Centres and a Sure Start type programme, which I got on to very early and went on about in print and to Labour politicians every time I saw them. One of Gordon Brown’s inner circle was kind enough to say to me that he thought I had had an influence in that respect. I hope that by saying – “if you really want to invest in poverty, start at the very beginning, invest in kids before the age of 5 and you have some hope” – I had some effect, but I have no idea. I’m just one of many voices. Read more
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