Boris Johnson's Sofa Doesn't Matter

The tale of Boris Johnson's soft furnishings has had more than its fair share of attention over the past few weeks. We've had commentary about the cost, about the desirability of John Lewis furniture, about 'taste'. None of these things matter. 

What matters is how Boris Johnson paid for it. It matters because it raises concerns that Johnson is in hock to someone. Johnson has made it an issue by brushing off questions with his usual bluffery. Its made worse by a complicit media, in the form of the main political correspondents of the two main news broadcasters.

If it was a one off and if we were talking about a friend giving him a 'dig out', perhaps it wouldn't matter. Perhaps we could just accept an entry in the Register of Interests and move on

But who is going to move on when there's a permanent cloud of corruption hanging over him.

It adds to the general feeling that Johnson and his sidekicks quite simply cant be trusted

16/4/2017 Outside the Echo Chamber

One of the criticisms leveled at social media is that it is an echo chamber - you talk round in circles, to people that you already agree with. I'd refute that.
I've spent many a happy hours chatting to people with whom I have little in common politically. And allthough it can be a little unnerving sometimes, there's a lot of learning in it. I've yarned with Trump supporters, UKIP supporters, Tories - all sorts. Sometimes I come away really angry. Other times I come away with food for thought.

And so it was this morning. 

We didn't get off to a great start, me and the kipper. He believes that the mess in the NHS is down to health tourism. I believe it is down to tories. So we bantered back and forth for a while and eventually, we drilled down into things that we can say we have in common. 

We are both workers, both single parents, both worked through college, both from relatively disadvantaged areas.

He is from a Labour voting family, and by the sounds of things, the loyalty to Labour has been severely tested. As a result, himself and other members of the family have moved their loyalty to UKIP. The two reasons that emerged were that Labour took them for granted and immigration. There were probably other things too, around welfare reform, for example.also But loud and clear came the message 'establishment politicians don't listen to working class people's concerns. As he said, UKIP saw the opportunity and capitalised on it.

It's really hard to argue with him. 

I am Labour through and through and nothing would take me over to the UKIP dark side. I have been a migrant worker - leaving home at 18 to try and get a job in England. Admittedly, it's not half way round the world (although it felt like it in the days before we routinely used planes). But the feeling of being the outsider was real enough. Much as I loved my new home in England, I was often homesick. So I get why people move.

But, i also get why people get annoyed, especially when times are hard and when there are political opportunists waiting to pounce on the anger.

For a very long time, working class people have seen an erosion of their rights and the things that made their lives secure. Industries disappeared, job security is an aspiration rather than a given, council house building dried up, hospitals closed or were run into the ground, incomes have been squeezed, schools underfunded, social services under pressure, the social security safety net has all but disappeared - virtually all the things that made life a little more bearable have become scarce or non existent.

For decades, most of this has passed with little comment. Occasional bursts of resistance aside, the gradual erosion of peoples security has not really been remarked upon in the places where decisions are made. But there will be a day of reckoning. How it will play out is anyone's guess but it will happen

ANGER

After the announcement of Corbyn's astonishing victory, the ABC (Anyone But Corbyn) machine went into a collective meltdown.  The Shadow Health Minister - now famously known as 'Jamie Who is he? Is he in our party?'  - resigned one minute into Corbyn's victory speech. The rest of the naysayers engaged in a collective head scratch and just looked baffled by the whole affair.

But instead of sitting down and working out why Corbyn had galvanised a movement, they set about preparing the way for a leadership challenge.

The problem with this is a strategy is that the voters are watching. What the average voter sees is two things

They see the well paid political elite using their power to over turn an overwhelming democratic decision. This sends out a very dangerous message to voters and particularly to non voters. It tells people that no matter what they say, noone is listening.

The other thing they see is Labour MPs telling them that Labour is unelectable because they have abandoned the centre ground. The crux of their argument, you see, is that under Corbyn, the party has moved to the 'far left'. Essentially, that means "don't vote for us, vote for some other centre party"

It matters not a jot that Labour on the centre ground hasn't been particularly successful since the heady days of New Labour. Since 1997, our voters have disappeared like snow off a ditch. While Ed did go some way towards winning them back, there are a lot of demoralised, disillusioned non voters, Green voters and worryingly, UKIP voters out there. We lost council seats, EU seats, parliamentary seats but no one seemed to notice til Ed was in charge. He was expected to win, and win big. To some extent he did but not in the places where it mattered.

Those invisible and pretty much disenfranchised former Labour voters will eventually go somewhere. The evidence suggests that they're moving to the kippers. I personally find it hard to believe that the population has swung to bigotry overnight. It seems much more likely to me that UKIP talks about things that the other parties only mention in abstract terms. Bedroom tax (we waffled and prevaricate: kippers will get rid), WCA (we justified its existence: UKIP will get rid), housing (we will look into affordable housing: UKIP will reduce demand by getting rid of immigration and building houses). UKIPs responses are all wrong but they're resonating because no one else is even hearing the rage.

We can either ask the questions and start responding. Or we can stick our fingers in our ears and blame Corbyn when the shit hits the fan.

(04/02/2017)

SHOCK

Well, we are two weeks into the new dispensation and against all the odds (to some) Jeremy Corbyn won. As I write, Labour's 2015 conference is in full swing and John McDonnell has just made his first speech as Shadow Chancellor. YEAH -- I know! John McDonnell!!!!

As I said before, my facebook page temporarily turned into a shrine to Jeremy Corbyn so I forgot to post here.

It was a brutal enough campaign in some ways - the old party machine couldn't bring themselves to see what was in front of their eyes. People who had walked away from political engagement began to find their voices and the overwhelming message was JezWeCan.

So the old guard set about trying to 'educate' the masses. The wanted to tell us how wrong we were to abandon the centre ground. It almost seemed as if they were telling us not to worry our pretty little heads about all this politics stuff. If we would just leave it to them, they would lead us in the right direction (literally, some might say)

Against the surround sound wall of Old New Labour voices, who seemed to have access to every mainstream media outlet, the seemingly solitary voice of Jeremy Corbyn was politely explaining why they were wrong. He explained that Labour would win again by leading a movement of people. He explained that austerity was a political choice rather than an inevitability. He brought people in their thousands into halls and rooms to talk about how we could build a better world based on social justice, equality and peace. I realised early on that something was really different when i saw a video of the event in Liverpool. It wasn't so much what he said - these were issues that have been talked about on social media for as long as I've been using it. He essentially made the moral case for building a nation based on looking after each other. It was the response from the people in the room. They were bursting towards change in a way that i have never seen. People were aching for something new. Ironically, the 'new' they were shouting out for were the very principles that labour was founded on. You could feel, even through a youtube video, that he was saying the things that people have been saying to each other for years. But noone was listening until Jeremy Corbyn scraped onto the ballot paper.

It's hard to believe that social justice, equality and peace are talked about as radical and revolutionary ideas. It's a sign maybe of how cynical we have become politically that these things are seen as a threat rather than values that should underpin everything we do. Anyway, they were cast as threats and the full resources of the free marketeers were deployed to discredit the message and the messenger. Mostly the messenger.

Corbyn himself reiterated the message that this was about policy and not personality. There would be no abuse and debate would be conducted in a civil respectful manner.

Slowly but surely, the momentum began to build and the tide began to turn. It seemed as if whatever they threw at him, Jeremy Corbyn was able to rely on a growing band of ordinary people to refute the lies and challenge the myths.

Obviously some of the loudest social media warriors were unable to contain themselves and the discussions turned very nasty in some places. Not all of the offenders were the Corbynistas though. Some of the party's 'leading lights' made public statements about Corbyn supporters needing heart transplants, about the nominators being 'morons', about 'marching back to the 1980s', about Corbynistas being infiltrators. It was pretty relentless and, if I'm honest, very depressing at times.

The media of course couldn't resist the call of the establishment. With a few notable exceptions, they dug up everything controversial that Corbyn ever said or did and then reported it, mostly out of context, in a bid to paint him as some kind of one man terrorist threat to the world. They resorted to ridicule, lies, distortions, myths and plain abuse, supported by many within the party. They kept it up day in and day out. And still the band of Corbynistas kept growing.

The campaign was underpinned by an unbelievable social media intervention, led by Red Labour. RL mobilised people who had never been involved in politics before, returners whose faith had been restored, supporters of other parties who suddenly recognised the value of Labour. It was slick and yet was run from houses dotted across the country, by people who largely never set eyes on each other. They rebutted every lie, organised people into phone banks, set up petitions. Most of all,they capitalised on the yearning for change. 

On the day the leadership results were announced, our house was on tenterhooks. The tv was turned to BBC News, we had Twitter on one machine and facebook on  another (you can't be too tuned in to the world). You could feel (and read about) the tension. A rumour circulated that it had been won in the first round but as they began to announce the results, my stomach was churning. 

When the scale of the victory became known, I could almost hear the shouts and cheers. Thousands of ordinary people defied the odds and the struggle for power began.

Budget2016: It's Only A Suggestion! DOH!!

If you follow the ping pong of accusations and claims that flowed from Gideon's budget, you're probably as astounded as I am about Nicky Morgan's claim that the cuts to ESA and PIP are 'only a suggestion. 

On Nicky's planet, there's a consultation and they will be listening to the evidence. Never mind that the consultation closed  weeks ago, the cuts were broadcast last week and they've included the savings in the budget. This means that the whole budget is wrong! 

This talk of cuts as a 'suggestion' came as something of a surprise to former Chief Economist at the Cabinet Office, Jonathan Portes. Portes could barely contain his amusement when Frank Shivers, a tory spokesperson in N Ireland tried to explain that it's not really a mess. They are reassessing people's needs (ie redefining what counts as 'disabled'). The situation is unsustainable, he says, so they must make people undisabled* 



*ok - he didn't actually say that. It's what he meant though

ESA cuts

A successful campaign, by disability activists and others, highlighted the utter hypocrisy of  the government by 'naming and shaming' Tory MPs who voted for  cuts to disability benefits. These MPs ignored the advice and evidence of disability activists, disabled people, charities, academics, researchers, GPs, commentators, other politicians and voted for a significant cut to the income of disabled people.

Those acting as patrons for disability charities, like Zac Goldsmith, Kim Malthouse and James Cleverly , have come under sustained pressure to resign as patrons of charities after they voted for the cut. 

Graeme Ellis, a Conservative member and 'owner' of the Conservative Disability Group website, was so enraged that he resigned from the party and closed down the website, 
 A mere week after the vote, Tory MPs lined up to give their justification for voting to cut the benefits.  A cynic might say that it took a week to get their story straight.

Alun Cairns (MP for Vale of Glamorgan), Johnny Mercer (MP for Plymouth), took to the media to justify their position.  Gavin Barwell  (MP for Croydon Central) relied on his blog and a few snide comments on Twitter. They appear to be speaking from a script because there are some common themes emerging. The arguments are surprisingly (not) similar to the arguments from the IDS propaganda machine. The main threads of their arguments are:

They are spending more on disability support than Labour did,

The changes are being made to a specific group of people that are actively seeking work,

Current recipients of ESA and disabled or sick people who are unable to work are wholly unaffected by this area of welfare reform and

New claimants with the most severe conditions will get just as much in a year’s time as they do today.

All of these are questionable (to say the least)

I will be honest, I am not sure if it's true that they are spending more than Labour on disability. Maybe the extra costs are associated with the costs of assessment, appeals for wrong assessments, tribunals. Maybe the costs are higher because, in spite of the endless rewriting of the regulations to 'un-disable' people, they are remaining stubbornly disabled and still eligible for benefits. That's a bit I will have to check. What's clear though is that in spite of this alleged increase in support, a lot of disabled people are struggling

The idea that people in the WRAG group should lose money to help them back into work is quite astonishing. It denies the very real struggles that disabled people face just to maintain an existence. The costs of being ill or disabled are well documented. Transport costs, heating, clothes, support with household or personal tasks eating are often much higher. This series of cuts simply ignores these costs.

And people in the WRAG group are *not* necessarily supposed to be 'actively seeking work'. In the first place, a lot of these claimants actually have jobs that they can't do because they aren't fit to do them.  They are *supposed* to be taking part in work related activities. For some, this might mean that they are participating in a condition management programme. For others, it might be meeting with an adviser to talk about what things might help them to return to work.  

The thing about using current claimants as a benchmark for the 'noone will suffer' tale is that a lot of 'current claimants' will be future new claimants. This points to a monumental misunderstanding of what 'disability' means. Disability is not always (or ever) a fixed state. 

In spite of everything you may hear, most people claim disability benefits on a temporary basis. 

 The impact of an illness or disability can vary widely from day to day. There are a lot of people who suffer from long term, fluctuating conditions. Such people may well have jobs and be paying tax and national insurance. 

The thing about a fluctuating condition is that it fluctuates. Today you might be on ESA, tomorrow you might be well enough to return to work. You might well be working for the next year before your illness flares up again leaving you unfit for work. You would become a new claimant and would be faced with £30 a week less than you're currently getting. For a lot of people, the ESA claim is a recurring stress in their lives so multiple new claims are to be expected.

As far as PIP is concerned, the 'new claimants' issue is even more outrageous. People who are still on DLA will be reassessed for PIP and will automatically be new claimants. Bear in mind also that DLA was not designed as an out of work benefit - it was intended to enable people to live independently and where possible work. It was designed to meet all those extra costs.

The last point is a blatant lie. Eligibility for ESA or PIP depends not on your condition, no matter how serious it is, but on the way that your condition affects you (according to the DWP assessment) and how long it is expected to last. Thus you have the ludicrous situation where people with very severe conditions  (like a terminal illness) are expected to participate in work related activities, even if they are so ill that they can barely lift their head off the pillow. The assessment only assesses your 'performance' on a range of tasks  (eg can you put a pen in your pocket, can you lift an empty cardboard box, can you press a button). There is no evidence that suggests that these tasks are in any way related to a person's ability to find a job and to remain in employment. 

Let us be clear: Jonathan Portes (from 32 mins) is quite right when he says that the government has set out to cut the cost of disability benefits by 20%. They assumed that 1 in 5 people on disability benefits are frauds, scroungers, swinging the lead. We don't really know where this 20% figure came from.  What we do know is that, in spite of their best efforts to rewrite the rules to make people suddenly become well, the number of disabled people hasn't changed much.

Frank Shivers, the NI Tory spokesman, says that 'something must be done' and that current spending is 'unsustainable'. 

In that sense, he is right. Something *must* be done. The Tory way is to remove the 'disincentives' (ie benefits) but there is no robust evidence that £100 per week is a disincentive to work. In fact, the evidence from the last Labour government is that when there is work available, employers will take a chance on employing a person with a disability and disabled people will work when the jobs are available.

'Something' cannot be simply to impoverish people further. We do have options. We could abolish the work capability assessment and find a way of assessing what people can actually do in terms of employment. We could offer training to people so that they can build work round their illnesses and disabilities.. We could reorganise work so that people can work part time and still earn a living.

Instead of doing something constructive though, Gideon has established a £22 million war chest to fight claims from people who have been wrongfully denied benefits. It is the Tory way: 'whatever the evidence, we're right and you're wrong'

SURPRISE

Well two surprises and a shocker: First, that I have remembered that I blog.
Second: not only did Jeremy Corbyn make it on to the ballot paper but he seems to be taking the whole country by storm. My facebook has turned into a shrine to Jeremy Corbyn and I have read and written so much about him that I forgot that I had this wee blog to play with.

A few weeks ago I said

"Jeremy Corbyn may not win the vote of the membership. He may not inspire. He may not have what it takes to translate his vision into practical policies. He will make it harder for the party and the other contenders to fiddle with the edges of policy and vision because they will be challenged. He will present an alternative vision of the party and he will give a voice to people who believe that they have been silenced since 1995".

Well, I am eating my words now. Not only has he inspired, he has galvanised the party and the membership to a degree that noone predicted. He has ripped up the austerity script and told us that we are going to rewrite the agenda.

Actually, not only did we not predict it, when Corbyn was first confirmed as a candidate, the consensus seemed to flow from "Jeekers.. that's nice - we will have a bit of a debate about things now" to the foul  (in my opinion) Toby Young starting a #ToriesForCorbyn campaign. Toby, y'see, thought it would be really hilarious if Corbyn won because it would consign Labour to the dustbin of history for generations.

Meanwhile, the ever polite Corbyn got his head down and started a civil and respectful campaign to put left wing ideas to the people. It's a straightforward enough campaign. Labour should be a social movement. There's no place in the 21st century for poverty, homelessness and inequality. Austerity is a big con. And, we held our collective breath and waited to see what the people might think of this big idea.

Well, the people must have been sitting in their living rooms, waiting for the call.

Even with the evidence that something big is happening, we're still rubbing our eyes and pinching ourselves. We can't quite believe what we are seeing. And this is the shocker: Corbyn might actually win. As I write, the bookies are predicting a win. Membership of the Labour party is exploding and on every news bulletin and in every newspaper, there are debates about policy and alternatives to austerity.

A lot of people seem to think that it's pretty basic.It's about choosing your priorities. A lot of us out here are of the view that, as Tony Benn once said, "if we can find the money to kill people, we can find the money to help people". It seems so simple.

Personally, I will be eternally grateful to the MPs who swallowed their own beliefs for the few minutes it took to write his name on the nomination papers. For some reason, I feel particularly grateful to Neil Coyle and Chi Onwurah, who did it in response to requests from members even though they won't support him in the ballot and Frank Field, whose views are so far removed from Corbyn's that they should really be in different parties. But, Neil Coyle, Chi Onwurah and Frank Field recognised something that some others didn't - you can't defeat an argument by ignoring it. They acknowledged that, even if you are fundamentally opposed to an idea (or maybe especially), you have to be prepared to take it on and present your argument. Most of all, they knew that people wanted to hear Corbyn's message and they acted on that. They did not run scared and to my knowledge, they have not joined in with the appalling smear campaign that has ensued. To me, they are proper Labour people.