What does Obama stand for ?

Is Obama all spin and no substance asks Tim Caswell.

Barack Obama is a charismatic, eloquent, possibly even sincere, pretender to the United States’ Presidential throne who lacks gravitas and policies. Support for this proposition can be found in every newspaper in the English language. There is a technical term for the journalists who write such drivel – “lazy Idiots.”

They are mostly the same people who told us simultaneously that Tony Blair would do anything to appease public opinion then criticised him for defying half the population to fight fascism in Iraq or prevent ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Kosovo. Apparently Blair stood for nothing but changed the Labour Party fundamentally. I can think of one or 50 Labour MP’s who will appreciate him a little more when they sign on the dole for the first time in May 2010 (Things are too bad for my last prediction of a June 2009 General Election to be credible now, although Gordon may have another dither in the autumn next year).

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The Parties: Over?

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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Hear no evil?

TMP columnist Tim Caswell contemplates BNP leader, Nick Griffin, and Holocaust denier, David Irving’s controversial appearance at the Oxford Union tonight.

“I am well aware that the orthodox opinion is that six million Jews were gassed and cremated and turned into lampshades. Orthodox opinion also once held that the world is flat … I have reached the conclusion that the “extermination” tale is a mixture of Allied wartime propaganda, extremely profitable lie and latter witch-hysteria.”

By these words, spoken from the dock, in his own defence in 1998, British National Party leader Nick Griffin will be eternally damned in the court of decent public opinion everywhere.

Should your area ever have the misfortune to be afflicted by the cancer inside the body politic that is the BNP, his words are reproduced by anti fascist magazine, “Searchlight” in an affordable postcard format to distribute to anyone gullible enough to mistake Holocaust denying scum for acceptable members of the human race.

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End of the road

TMP regular, Tim Caswell, contemplates Gordon Brown’s overtures to the Lib Dems and the end of the road for the Labour deputy leadership contest.

For the second time in a generation, Labour party members and supporters woke up this week to the news that a new Labour Leader had been planning to offer Cabinet posts to the Liberal Democrats.

Tony Blair’s predictable attempt to realign the left with Paddy Ashdown fell foul of a large landslide and even larger temper belonging to his Deputy, John Prescott, in 1997.

This week’s invitation to Paddy Ashdown to become Secretary of State for Northern Ireland was vetoed by Sir Menzies Campbell, the man Ashdown quaintly calls his “Commanding Officer”. It will also have come as a complete shock to the vast majority of Labour members, whose support has made Brown’s coronation on Sunday possible.

To both the minority – who welcome this as proof positive that Brown is both his own man and more pluralistic than anyone imagined – and the implacable majority, this will induce feelings that a proper leadership contest would have shed more light on the man who has brooded so long in the shadows and on the direction in which he intends to lead Labour, the Government and the nation.

Has the deputy leadership contest offered any substitute for this process? No, not fully, because all of the candidates are themselves restricted by the parameters of their perception of the Brown project and the need to be loyal to the leader-elect. I wonder if any of the candidates knew that overtures were to be made to Campbell and friends and, if they didn’t, who in the Labour Party did? More importantly, who will be the victor, and will they ever have the same influence over Brown that Prescott apparently wielded over Blair the last time Paddy nearly got his hands on a ministerial red box?

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Essay: What’s next after New Labour?

As Tony Blair announces he will leave as Prime Minister on Wednesday 27 June, the writer and Labour Party member, Tim Caswell, asks what will follow in his wake and explores the future of the Labour Party, in this first TMP essay. For a printable copy of this essay, click here: tmp-essay-may-2007.pdf

To new Labour loyalists, the Prime Minister’s announcement was a similar experience to learning of the death of someone who has been terminally ill, Sad but unsurprising. Like all seminal events in the party’s history it made me think of my Dad who joined the Labour Party as a teenager in 1945.

Throughout the eighties he believed he would never see another Labour government. Forty-seven years on the shop floor of an engineering factory left him with no allusions about the depths to which the party had sunk and the contempt in which working class voters held it before Neil Kinnock saved it from extinction. He believed that New Labour had returned the party to the people who voted for it out of the hands of an unrepresentative rabble. He didn’t live to see the historic third term but I knew what his reaction would have been. I saw the tears in his eyes when Tony Blair said; “Labour, back as the people’s party once again,” at the centenary celebrations.

In nearly thirty years as a member I can only recall the Labour family showing complete unity twice: when Thatcher fell, and the day Tony Blair was elected. That inspirational sunlit day, over a decade ago, seems like yesterday. His departure really is the end of an era. Now that the Blairite chapter in Labour’s history has closed what will be the fate of New Labour? What’s next come the evolution?

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