- Home
- Blair BBQ: “It’s my party and I’ll plot … er … cry if I want to”
- ‘Labour Home’ on this issue
- Ed Balls (Brown ally) says – Brown “could get run over by a bus”! Part-time job, Mr Balls?
- Brown to go now – or soon, say MPs
UPDATE 13th Sep: MP Joan Ryan (Vice-Chair of Party) adds to call for leadership election – listen here
“I am not part of any plot or conspiracy … a number of MPs expressed their concerns … I am a loyalist … I didn’t contact the media”. BBC’s Nick Robinson – “they want to create a momentum.” JUST WONDERED - WHY ARE SO MANY WOMEN OUT FRONT ON THIS? Two female MPs on the contest call and half of today’s 12 Progress writers!
FURTHER UPDATE 13th Sep: Now 7 in calls – Five Labour MPs – Fiona Mactaggart, Siobhain McDonagh, Joan Ryan, George Howarth and Janet Anderson – want leadership nomination forms sent out. And fellow MPs Graham Stringer and Gordon Prentice have publicly called for a leadership contest.
FURTHER AGAIN UPDATE 10:00pm, 13th Sep: And now left-wing MP, John McDonnell has made it 8. He wanted to stand last time. No support. No wonder.
Newsnight tonight – Siobhain McDonagh says she wants to know what the party’s programme is …. what the plan for the future is … how the future will unfold to bring about progress and see things get better … wants to continue the momentum. Asked if there is a groundswell of support: “I hope I may have given a bit of courage to a few people”
Comment at end
12th September, 2008
[DEVELOPING STORY ... CHECK BACK TOMORROW, PLEASE]
A “Progress” article of interest is due to be published tomorrow (read the full article here, prior to publication, thanks to Guido Fawkes’s contacts.) It comes from “a dozen Blairites” according to Guido’s site (but notably includes six former ministers) – Janet Anderson, Karen Buck, Patricia Hewitt, George Howarth, Eric Joyce, Sally Keeble, Stephen Ladyman, Martin Linton, Shona McIsaac, Margaret Moran, Tom Levitt, and Paddy Tipping.
Keep an eye on the Progress site. It might be released earlier than planned.
GOVERNMENT WHIP – NO LONGER WHIPPING!
A junior member of the government is out of a job after breaking ranks to call for a challenge to Gordon Brown as party leader.
Government whip Siobhain McDonagh said she wanted to “clear the air” about the leadership issue.
A government spokesman said that if Ms McDonagh has not resigned then she will be sacked. The source said her replacement had already been appointed.
The source said Ms McDonagh had always been “Anti-Gordon”.
Ms McDonagh – who was the only member of the government not to nominate Mr Brown for the party leadership last year – said she wanted a debate about the future of the party.
In this “extraordinary development” she has called for a debate to clear the air. Radio 4’s 5:00pm news says the first casualty is her job!
This coincides with calls to the Labour party’s office from some MPs for nomination papers for a leadership nomination form, including it seems, Ms McDonagh. The party says it hasn’t sent such papers to party delegates for 10 years.
Perhaps they didn’t need them then.
Interview with Eddie Mayer on “PM”:
“In my 11 years as an MP I’ve never voted against the government”. The Mitcham & Morden MP said she doesn’t know if she has lost her job – “I was told about this by the lady from ITV”. (Read ITV website report).
She thinks the debate is going on inside the party and within the press – and “it needs to be open”. “I’m saying that we should have a leadership election”.
She says she did not nominate Gordon Brown at the time.
Asked how widely heard are her views, she said she thinks there are a “huge number of MPs who want a leadership election”.
“I think that Gordon is a really good man … with the best of intentions … being prime minister is a shockingly hard job”
This kind of call was referred to in The Independent on 29th July.
Whip out of job after leader call
A junior member of the government is out of a job after breaking ranks to call for a challenge to Gordon Brown as party leader.
Government whip Siobhain McDonagh said she wanted to “clear the air” about the leadership issue.
A government spokesman said that if Ms McDonagh has not resigned then she will be sacked. The source said her replacement had already been appointed.
The source said Ms McDonagh had always been “Anti-Gordon”.
Ms McDonagh – who was the only member of the government not to nominate Mr Brown for the party leadership last year – said she wanted a debate about the future of the party.
She said “everybody” in government is talking about the leadership issue and she wanted such discussions to be out in the open.
“It’s about time we let party members and people involved in the Labour Party and the wider community in on that debate,” she told the BBC News Channel
“I think we need to clear the air. I think whoever wants to stand for leader of the Labour Party should do so and we should have a good debate about the direction of the party and the government.”
She said she did not have a particular candidate in mind.
She is so far the only member of the government to publicly call for a leadership contest.
She is also thought to be among the Labour MPs to have sought details about the nomination process for a contest.
It would take 70 MPs to trigger a potential leadership contest.
Labour confirmed they have had letters from a “small number” of MPs asking why no nomination papers for leader were issued ahead of the party conference.
Backbencher Graham Stringer was the first Labour MP to call for Mr Brown to step down, after the party’s defeat at the Crewe and Nantwich by-election in May.
And former Home Secretary Charles Clarke last week warned the party faced “destruction” at the next general election – and told Mr Brown to improve his performance or quit.
Foreign Secretary David Miliband made what was widely interpreted as a leadership move when he penned an article over the summer on Labour’s future without mentioning Mr Brown.
But he has now publicly backed the prime minister to lead Labour into the next election.
Other figures thought likely to run if there was a contest – Jack Straw and Harriet Harman – have also said they do not think there should be a contest.
But Ms McDonagh’s intervention means the issue is likely to dominate Labour’s annual conference which gets underway in Manchester in two weeks time.
More extensive BBC report here
WHAT THE PAPERS SAY
Chris Grayling, the shadow work and pensions secretary, described McDonagh’s actions as “unprecedented”.
He said: “The Labour party is quite clearly degenerating into a state of civil war. For a prime minister to have one of his own whips calling for a leadership contest is unprecedented.
“At a time when Britain faces massive economic challenges it is profoundly damaging to have a government in such disarray. We need an early election to get the change Britain so desperately needs.”
‘Politics & The City’ on this:
Ms McDonagh, first elected in 1997 and known as a diligent constituency campaigner, is well-known as a loyalist to the Labour government, having never voted against the Labour whip. However, she was one of a handful of Labour MPs who did not endorse Gordon Brown when he was made leader without a contest last year. It was a surprise, therefore, that she was offered a junior position in the Brown government.
Ms McDonagh has been replaced in her whip position by Dawn Butler, Labour MP for Brent South, Downing Street has announced.
The Spectator Coffee House says: “The Blairites have moved, now will the Left revolt too? They have more in common than they think.”
Times Online: – the voters say – LEADER? – “none of the above”
The Telegraph: Analysis of ‘Gordon Brown leadership battle’ – excerpt:
‘Over the next 24-hours, a succession of senior figures close to Tony Blair are expected to break cover and effectively call for the removal of the Prime Minister.
Frank Field, the former minister who so successfully marshalled Labour opposition to the abolition of the 10p income tax band, may also show his hand.
One of the leading rebels said last night that there would now be a loosely organised series of events – “volcanic outbursts” – which would leave the Cabinet in little doubt over the scale of dissatisfaction on the Labour Parliamentary benches.’
Times blog asks: Is Charles Clarke fed up with the Labour party”. He is due to attend the Liberal Democrat conference. Interesting. Is a defection the next catastrophe? (Although he’d be pleased to be rid of Clarke).
The BBC’s Nick Robinson said only this morning that Gordon was safe. Whoops, Nick!
The Omniscient Oborne – You realise you’re riling the Tories when they start supporting BROWN! Oborne – “Yet I am increasingly coming to believe that Gordon Brown is a better Prime Minister than portrayed.” Hysterical and unbelievable bit of double-speak. And this title – “Blair’s assassins”! I expect he wrote a similarly upset and empathetic (but Blair supporting) article two years ago criticising “Brown’s assassins”. No? Well, knock me down with a terrified Conservative. (See – WHO could save Labour)
Peter Oborne is a disgrace, as this article attempting to slam Labour for its approach to Muslims shows. Would he be saying the same thing about the Conservatives had they tried to raise these widely-held concerns? On this issue, come to think of it, the Conservative party too is a disgrace.
So is this the end for Gordon?
Following backbench Graham Stringer’s call for Brown to go after by-election disasters, David Miliband’s article and Charles Clarke’s call for the PM to leave with dignity, this call is likely to stir the horses.
Watch this space.
LABOUR BACKBENCHERS DEMAND BOLD NEW NARRATIVE
“Labour needs to provide a convincing new narrative if left-of-centre politics are to remain the driving force in Britain. This has to be more than a series of policy initiatives. It has to set a new framework for post-credit crunch Britain, and in particular to provide the basis for us to move forward in three key areas: the economy, public services and the relationship between the citizen and the state.
And it needs to be bold. We have produced defensive policies to deal with crises like the housing market, or the 10p tax debacle. Yet as a progressive party, our natural territory should be leading the debate about new ideas, and our natural role should be to champion change and harness its economic and social benefits to serve the interests of the many.
Our most urgent task is to renew confidence in our economic competence so that people know that the country will come out of the current downturn with a resilient economy and a cohesive society.
Public alarm over what has so far been a slowdown is shaped by the experience of the last two recessions. Mass unemployment was the price that the Tories considered worth paying to manage inflation, and they considered jettisoning traditional manufacturing areas – the Labour heartlands – as the price worth paying for restructuring industry.
We rightly reject both, but have no explanation yet as to how we are going to steer the economy through the troubled waters ahead.
Clamour is understandably growing for measures to help families under financial pressure from rising energy prices and heavy mortgage costs. But one-off taxes and payouts, no matter how justified in their own terms, do not amount to a strategy.
Tax is very good for raising money to pay for public services and universal benefits. It is not very good for targeting money at particular pressure points. For example, the personal tax allowance hike to compensate people for the loss of the 10p tax band cost £2.7bn. Of that, £0.6bn went to the low-income earners who had lost out. The rest, £2.1bn, was a general – and unheralded – tax cut for standard rate taxpayers. Ironically, the £2.7bn would have been enough to pretty much wipe child poverty off the map of Britain.
We need to explain what we’re going to do about the things that affect people day to day: inflation and interest rates, household bills and mortgages. Harold Wilson talked about the ‘pound in your pocket’ and Margaret Thatcher likened the economy to a household budget – derided by the pundits, but understood by the public.
The Bank of England’s control mechanisms, that have served us well for a decade, have lost credibility and impact. People can see that the Bank’s Consumer Prices Index inflation measure does not tally with what is happening to their household bills, and that the Bank’s interest rate does not equate to what is happening to their mortgages.
We need to explain what is happening and show how a progressive Labour government can intervene in the public interest.
Second, the investment Labour has made in public services has transformed our society. Universal nursery education was a pipedream back in 1997. In the NHS, ’suffering’ is waiting over 13 weeks for an operation – not over 26 months as it was back then. Schoolchildren now have interactive whiteboards, not blackboards. People’s chance of being a victim of crime is now only half what it used to be.
Yet there’s a malaise. We have spent money, diversified, provided choice. But we need to provide the public with a sense of ownership and explain how we are going to give both them, and the workforce, a say in how we design and deliver services.
This does not mean a return to a top-down command economy in the public sector. It means providing transparency in the governance of the academies, trusts and companies that spend public money. We should encourage new forms of ownership such as social enterprises that cross the traditional boundaries between private and public sectors. We can still provide fairness and sustainability through frameworks for access and finance. And, through better regulation, we can guarantee standards for the public whatever the model of ownership or management.
It also means showing that legitimacy for a local trust running a community asset can come from good governance and accountability. This can provide as much of an electoral mandate as those depressing local elections in which only a small minority of people take part.
A similar malaise afflicts the body politic, so the third big challenge for centre-left politics is the relationship between the citizen and the state, and the need to shift power away from centralised institutions to the individual, particularly in services that are self-evidently personal. Devolution of decision-making to the most local level, including to local communities to manage substantial assets – and not just old buildings – would create an empowering state.
There is also unfinished business in our failure to create a wholly democratic legislature, especially in a world that is becoming increasingly democratised. There is a lack of coherence in the devolution of powers to subsidiary tiers of government, and what should be the final settlement for Scotland. We need to show what a progressive state should look like. Fixed-term parliaments could provide some certainty to voters and redress the balance of power between the executive and the citizen.
More controversially for Labour is the need to provide security at our borders and on our streets without increasing the micro-management of the public realm. Specifying an age limit for buying cans of spray-paint, for example, was a step too far. Criticism of New Labour’s perceived authoritarianism has restricted the political space for pragmatic policies such as identity cards.
The reason for the urgency is the realignment in our political parties. On the right, David Cameron and his Notting Hill set are pushing their policy agenda: economic hard-headedness to appeal to middle-income earners, social conservatism for their traditional and religious voters, and enough moral liberalism to attract their non-traditional voter. They lack core values to underpin their position, as seen by George Osborne’s decision to dump his public sector spending commitments.
However, it’s an attractive bandwagon, and sure enough the Liberal Democrats are jumping on it – even to the extent of Vince Cable jettisoning his tax commitments. The significance of the Liberal Democrat leadership election was that in choosing Nick Clegg, they went for the man who would take the party to the right, not the centre-left.
On the left, we will probably see some of the failures of a top-down statist approach in the SNP administration in Scotland, which is trying to take decisions centrally that should be left to local bodies – such as on car-parking charges. It will also show us what happens when a party pours money into populist polices such as scrapping prescription charges, at the cost of improving the services that will provide real health equality.
So there’s a yawning chasm which we on the centre-left need to fill. Failure to do so would be a hammer blow, not only to the future of progressive politics, but also to our government.”
Janet Anderson, Karen Buck, Patricia Hewitt, George Howarth, Eric Joyce, Sally Keeble, Stephen Ladyman, Martin Linton, Shona McIsaac, Margaret Moran, Tom Levitt, and Paddy Tipping.
Article sourced here
A regular visitor to this blog has just sent me this video:
BBC Question Time 25th Anniversary Programme 2
Go to 2mins 20secs to watch Tony Blair, then shadow Home Secretary, in 1993, on “intervention” and the issues surrounding the need to get the United Nations to lead on the world’s big issues, and thus avoid some states taking unilateral action. Of course, the UN didn’t always get it together, and the USA DID have to intervene over a very big large issue. This indicates to me that Mr Blair was ALWAYS in favour of using the UN as long as it spoke and acted in the common good. This was an early warning from Mr Blair a year before he was leading his party, four years before he became PM, and 7 years before Bush became US president.
Real leadership.
- Watch the Anjem Choudary interview, and read the transcript on HARDTalk after the 7/7 2005 London bombings
- British Muslims against Terror & Democracy
- 9/11 – Lies of the Loopy Liberal Left
Tags: crisis for gordon brown, Eric Joyce, George Howarth, gordon brown criris, Janet Anderson, John McDonnell, junior government whip calls for leadership election, Karen Buck, low key blairite, Margaret Moran, Martin Linton, Paddy Tipping, Patricia Hewitt, Sally Keeble, Shona McIsaac, Siobhain McDonagh, Siobhan McDonagh, stalking horse, Stephen Ladyman, Tom Levitt, whip sacked
September 12, 2008 at 6:00 pm |
BREAKING NEWS: BROWN CRISIS-Minister calls for leadership election…
Radio 4’s 5:00pm news says the first casualty is her job! This coincides with calls to the Labour party’s office from some MPs for nomination papers for a leadership nomination form, including it seems, Ms McDonagh. ……
September 12, 2008 at 10:03 pm |
Calm down, BS. Supporting TB (as I do) is no reason for running with every media and Tory-inflated anti-Brown story.
September 12, 2008 at 10:22 pm |
Oh! So Stan, it’s only the Tories and the meeja, is it? THEY resigned from the government did they? (Or were dismissed – whichever came first.)
Right, my good friend. I’m sure you know best.
;0)
Noticeable that Mr Blair is quiet over this. But then he has every right to be. Brown was fairly dumb when the backstabbers leapt upon the Previous.
Of course he has said little about British politics since leaving – apart from the statement about the credit squeeze not being “Gordon’s fault”, so his silence is entirely consistent.
Do you really think this is all over-inflated, then, Stan? REALLY?
September 15, 2008 at 5:50 pm |
BS, yes, I REALLY think that all this is over-inflated. Ms McDonagh was very minor government figures who never approved of Brown anyway. My views are explained more fully at http://theprogressive.typepad.com/the_progressive/2008/09/labour-needs-a.html . I have confined myself to the calls for a leadership debate since I see little wrong with calls for a change of direction to reflect today’s realities and political necessities.
September 15, 2008 at 6:28 pm |
I’ve read your article at Progress, Stan.
If nothing else, you will probably have re-instated yourself as the voice of reason amongst your readers! That’ll make a pleasant change, won’t it?
I wrote an article here, nine months ago called “Back Him You Fools” when there were moves about shifting Brown. My article was more in despair than in hope. But my despair was to do with the last coup and its bad ending for Brown and the rest of Labour.
It was a kind of “told you say” article. I couldn’t help it!
Now, with this latest uprising, I’m not so sure. It’s beginning to look terminal. Death by a thousand cuts.
My main doubt about pushing for a leadership election is that there is no useful alternative to Brown with widespread appeal. Not unless Blair DOES make some kind of comeback. Even that could be destructive to the Left of Labour who still think he is ‘Tory’ Blair. They are wrong, imho, but there’s no telling them. Not until the political wilderness takes its revenge again.
As for policy, vision and direction – no chance of any of the present crowd selling that. Personally I quite like Patricia Hewitt, but many on the Left, hate her. Too much like Tony.
Sadly the party is beginning to look set for the opposition benches unless something MAJOR happens.
If you think that anything can get them all to “SHUT UP” as you say Stan until the next election with Brown leading the polls ever downwards, well, you are forgetting that New Labour was a process. Some were signed up, some were completely anti. But even the antis had a proper LEADER for 10 years, even if they hated the direction.
Through leadership incompetence, unfortunate economic circumstances and his own general confusion as to where he stands on direction and policy, Gordon Brown has failed your party AND Mr Blair.
Badly.
Send in the cavalry!