TUC publishes plan to ‘significantly upgrade’ workers' rights


Junior doctors protest opposite Downing Street, London, during their continuing dispute over pay, June 27, 2024

Berny Torre

MORNING STAR

Sunday, September 8, 2024

THE TUC published its five-point plan to give employment rights a “significant upgrade” today — and accused bosses of a widespread failure to honour even basic rights at work.

New rights promised by Labour will mean little if not upheld, and Britain’s enforcement system is woefully underresourced, a new expert report for the union body warns.

TUC senior policy officer and report author Tim Sharp said: “The new government was elected on a platform that included making the minimum wage a living wage, basic individual rights from day one and expanded family-friendly working.

“These support a drive to ensure that good-quality work underpins an economic recovery after years of lacklustre growth and flat-lining pay.

“However, new rights are only worth something if they are upheld. And the enforcement system in this country is at breaking point.”

The report exposes Britain’s lengthy neoliberal experiment with ultra-flexible labour markets combined with patchy and under-resourced enforcement.

It has led to the rise of widespread abuse of migrant workers — and estimates of up to 130,000 victims of modern slavery in Britain.

More widely, millions of workers are losing out on wages and key entitlements such as holiday pay due to lack of enforcement.

Decent employers are being undercut by those who don’t meet their legal duties, with enforcement so underresourced that it is estimated that the national minimum wage enforcement team could only inspect employers once every 500 years.

The situation is made worse by only a quarter of workers being covered by trade union collective agreements, while the tribunal system is under strain with a backlog of tens of thousands of cases.

The TUC urged Labour last month to crack down on the growing number of businesses offering jobs on less than the national minimum wage. It said dozens of non-compliant vacancies offering less than the £11.44 per hour are being posted on major job sites every week.

Mr Sharp’s report notes that Labour has pledged to introduce a “fair work agency” bringing together several existing state enforcement bodies “to ensure greater co-ordination in the face of complex enforcement challenges.”

A proposed agency could bring together the Gangmasters & Labour Abuse Authority (GLAA), the Employment Agency Standards Inspectorate (EAS) and HM Revenue & Customs’ national minimum wage and national living wage team.

Mr Sharp calls for it to be a single enforcement body with a strong union voice in its governance structures. He says the agency must be able to share data effectively and deal with multiple breaches of employment rights in the course of a single investigation.

Unions would be ideally placed to assist by spotting emerging trends in employments rights issues, he adds, and this first-hand knowledge should be used to shape enforcement strategies.

He says unions should be given board seats on the proposed agency and have a formal strategic oversight role in the labour market enforcement system “as part of a tripartite approach to governance.”

The report says there is a strong case for extending the GLAA’s licensing model — used to tackle exploitation in the shellfish-gathering, food processing, agriculture and horticulture sectors — to sectors such as social care, construction and hospitality.

“There are high proportions of workers in these sectors who are vulnerable to exploitation because of their employment or immigration status and there is evidence of exploitative working practices routinely being used,” Mr Sharp says.

“The inspections and routine monitoring of standards that licensing entails would help prevent exploitation, improve intelligence gathering and ensure that criminal prosecutions are targeted at the worst cases.”

His report calls for the proposed fair work agency to recycle fines back into the enforcement system and urges a major boost to its number of inspectors and inspections of employers.

He warns that Britain is potentially breaching the UK-EU Trade & Co-operation Agreement by failing to meet International Labour Organisation (ILO) recommendations to have one labour market inspector per 10,000 workers.

The report adds that Britain must also crack down on the exploitation of migrant workers by building international links and protection for workers to stop them being deterred from making complaints for fear of being referred to immigration enforcement.

A spokeswoman for Momentum said: “This demonstrates that simply passing pro-worker legislation is insufficient.

“The British state is structurally hostile to workers’ interests, and the job of the Labour government is to use its power to decisively reverse the power relations between capital and labour.”

Rachel Reeves to blast Tory legacy at Labour conference ahead of ‘painful’ Budget

Kate Devlin
Sun 8 September 2024 

Labour will use its upcoming annual conference to condemn the legacy of 14 years of Conservative rule.

Senior figures including chancellor Rachel Reeves are expected to criticise the Tory party’s record on managing the country over its time in power.

It is understood that Labour’s “inheritance” will be one of the big themes of the event, being held in Liverpool at the end of this month.

The four-day event comes just weeks before Ms Reeves delivers the first ever Budget from a female chancellor.

Sir Keir Starmer has already warned the country will be hit with a “very painful Budget”, as his new Labour administration tries to “fix the rot” left by the Tories.

Rachel Reeves is expected to highlight the legacy left by the Conservative government at the Labour conference (POOL/AFP via Getty)

Within weeks of entering office Ms Reeves also announced she had found a £22bn black hole in the public finances, left by the previous government.

In response, she announced a series of measures including stripping the winter fuel payment from millions of older people, a decision expected to be widely discussed on the conference fringe.

A Labour source said: “There will be a lot of talk about the inheritance the Tories have saddled the country with. You can expect to see that across the piece, from other departments – not just the Treasury.”

Labour sources also downplayed the idea there will be lots of major announcements from secretaries of state during the conference, pointing out that they will have been in office a matter of weeks when the conference opens.

A pro-Corbyn fringe festival held outside the main event is expected to be absent, for the first time in nearly a decade (PA)

The event is expected to feel very different now the party is in power, with less of a presence of the party’s Corbynite left wing. Jeremy Corbyn was re-elected as an MP in July – but as an independent.

And a total of seven MPs on the left of the party, including high-profile names like the former shadow chancellor John McDonnell, are currently suspended after they rebelled to vote for a Commons amendment which would abolish the two-child benefit limit.

A pro-Corbyn fringe festival held outside the main event is expected to be absent, for the first time in nearly a decade.

But Sir Keir is still expected to face opposition from thousands of pro-Gaza marchers who will target the event to demand ministers go further after they suspended some arms exports to Israel.

Yaz Ashmawi apologised for grabbing Starmer during his glitter-throwing stunt last year (PA)

The Labour leader’s conference speech got off to a shaky start last year when a protester stormed onto the stage and covered him in glitter.

The heckler was heard shouting: “We demand a people’s house, we are in crisis – politics needs an update. We are in crisis.”

But Sir Keir was applauded for keeping his cool, removing his jacket and rolling up his sleeves as he told delegates: “If he thinks that bothers me he doesn’t know me. Protest not power, that is why we changed our party conference.”

The annual meeting is due to take place in Liverpool this year between 22 and 25 September.

More than 17,000 attended the conference last year, but that figure is expected to be even larger this year now the party is in government.

UK

Neil Kinnock thought Black MPs were ‘an embarrassment’, claims Diane Abbott in memoir

Millie Cooke
Sun 8 September 2024 

Former Labour leader Neil Kinnock (Jane Barlow/PA) (PA Archive)

Diane Abbott has claimed former Labour leader Neil Kinnock viewed his black MPs as “an embarrassment”.

Ms Abbott, who is the longest-serving black member of parliament, was elected alongside three other black Labour MPs in 1987.

In her book, A Woman Like Me, the MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington is deeply critical of Lord Kinnock’s leadership, accusing him of “dismissing the concerns of Black people”.


Recalling her experience after being elected, Ms Abbott said she and her fellow black Labour MPs felt they were “not allowed to bask in the glory of our achievement” as both the party leadership and officials “did not see it as a triumph and noticeably did not celebrate it as such”.

She added: “Kinnock thought of his Black MPs as an embarrassment. We were the embodiment of the ‘loony left’, and this was precisely the image he was trying to get away from.”

Diane Abbott has claimed former Labour leader Neil Kinnock viewed his black MPs as ‘an embarrassment’ (PA Wire)

Lord Kinnock strongly denied the allegations and told The Independent he was “delighted, certainly not ‘embarrassed’” at the election of four black Labour MPs to Parliament.

He pointed to his Labour conference speech of 1987, which saw him celebrate their election and what he saw as the beginnings of a “multi­racial parliament to reflect our multi-racial society”.

Ms Abbott, the daughter of Jamaican parents who were a part of the Windrush Generation, also says Lord Kinnock pushed back against the creation of Black Sections – a movement designed to empower black members in the Labour Party.

“They seemed reasonable enough demands, yet the Labour Party leadership thought that Black Sections were completely unreasonable, not to mention dangerous”, she wrote.

Ms Abbott claimed that, when her and her fellow MPs tried to table a Black Sections resolution at the Labour Party conference that year, they were “roundly denounced by the great and the good from the conference platform”.

She continued: “Neil Kinnock was particularly opposed to Labour Party Black Sections, which seemed to him like dangerous radicalism.

“He appeared to think that his occasional expression of concern for Black People far away, such as campaigners against apartheid in South Africa, meant that he could dismiss the concerns of Black people on his doorstep.”

But Lord Kinnock denied that his opposition to the movement came because of concerns over “dangerous radicalism”, instead he said it arose from concerns that “implied racial segregation in the Labour Party would have been malign and regressive” – something he claims to have made clear to Ms Abbott at the time.

He added: “My views were similar to those of comrades in the Anti-Apartheid Movement and several non-white party and trade union members. All of us had rather more than ‘occasional concern for black people far away’, as our lifetime record of anti-racist, pro-equality activity demonstrates.”

Lord Kinnock also claims some who favoured Black Sections did so for “opportunistic and sectarian purposes”, adding: “They were from the ‘loony left’ that inflicted serious harm on the Labour Party in London and elsewhere.

“To safeguard against that, and to reinforce efforts to attract and retain people from ethnic minorities, I established an ethnic minorities officer in party headquarters in order to ensure guaranteed inputs in Labour policies and operations.”

Lord Kinnock also noted that, at the 1990 Labour conference, the party established a Labour Party Black Socialist Society, something he said came about with his advocacy and support.

The society became operational in 1993 and its successor organisation became BAME Labour.

In her book, ‘A Woman Like Me’ , the MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington is deeply critical of Lord Kinnock’s leadership (PA)

Ms Abbott also criticised Labour for blocking the candidacy of Martha Osamor ahead of the 1989 Vauxhall by-election.

She claims that the Labour Party “did not bother to give a serious reason for blocking her candidacy”, adding: “That she was Black, female and left-wing was enough.”

Ms Abbott said she wrote to Lord Kinnock, who was leader of the Labour Party from 1983 to 1992, to lobby on Ms Osamor’s behalf.

Recounting the correspondence, Ms Abbott said: “He wrote to us saying: ‘I am sure that you will see the NEC’s shortlist for Vauxhall as reflecting a serious commitment to having a candidate who will be in tune with the electors.’ There was no doubt that by a candidate ‘in tune with the electors’, Kinnock meant someone white.”

But Lord Kinnock said the “skin colour of the candidate was not relevant in that or any other case”, saying the decision not to select Ms Osamor was based solely on “political alignment”.

He said it was “vital to try to ensure that we held the seat after experiencing by-election defeats when candidates that could not make a broad appeal had been selected”.

Ms Osamor, who had migrated to Britain from Nigeria, won the Labour shortlist but was deselected after being interviewed by a panel of the party’s ruling National Executive Committee.

Instead, Kate Hoey – who went on to win the seat – was selected as the Labour candidate for Vauxhall. Ms Hoey had won only one local nomination compared to Ms Osamor’s eight.

Jeremy Corbyn took me on a date to Karl Marx’s grave, says Diane Abbott

Jenny Medlicott
Sat 7 September 2024
THE TELEGRAPH

Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader, were previously in a relationship - Lynda Bowyer/Corbis

Jeremy Corbyn took Diane Abbott on a surprise date to Karl Marx’s grave during the pair’s previous relationship, Ms Abbott has revealed.

The Labour MP, who dated Mr Corbyn briefly in the late 1970s, said she realised the pair were not a “match made in heaven” after spending Christmas with his family.

She described the Corbyn Christmas as an example of “socialist frugality” with boiled vegetables and turkey, in stark contrast to her “jolly” Jamaican Christmases.

While she enjoyed theatre and reading, she claims he spent almost all of his free time invested in party politics.

The Tomb of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery - Katherine Grice/Historic England

“Once, after I lamented our lack of social activity as a couple, he pondered it for a few days and told me we were going out,” she told The Guardian.

Feeling excited, she said she “dressed up nicely” before setting off in the car together to a surprise location.

However, she soon realised their final destination was quite different to what she had imagined, adding: “I had no idea where we were going – perhaps a nice wine bar? It turned out Jeremy’s idea of a social outing was to drive me to Highgate Cemetery and proudly show me the tomb of Karl Marx.”

Their relations continued for “a short while” after the cemetery date before “gradually collapsing”, she said.

Diane Abbott with Angela Rayner and Jeremy Corbyn on Labour’s frontbench - ALAMY/PA

Ms Abbott was re-elected to her seat in Hackney North and Stoke Newington in July following a row over whether she would be allowed to stand for Labour.

She had been suspended from the party last year after she suggested that Jewish, Irish and Traveller people experienced prejudice but not racism, sparking a long-running process that saw her sit as an independent MP.

Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, had previously declined to say whether Ms Abbott would be allowed to defend her seat, before he eventually confirmed he would back her as a candidate.

Her new book, A Woman Like Me, published by Viking, is released on September 19.

Diane Abbott on her standoff with Labour: ‘It was a question of who blinked first. And they did’

Gary Younge

THE GUARDIAN
Sat 7 September 2024


Diane Abbott: I wasn’t going to have them push me out.’ Photograph: Silvana Trevale/The Guardian. Dress shirt: kaicollective.com. Ring and bracelet: ottomanhands.comPhotograph: Silvana Trevale/The Guardian

In Diane Abbott’s Westminster office, alongside a picture of her with Jesse Jackson and the framed front page of The Voice from 1987 declaring “A New Era” with a picture of Abbott, Bernie Grant, Paul Boateng and Keith Vaz – the four newly elected Black MPs – there are a number of large empty packing boxes. Abbott points at them and laughs. “Ordinarily I wouldn’t bother. But when they called the election we didn’t know whether I would be allowed to stand, so I had to get ready just in case,” she says.

It has been a heady few months for Abbott. So much so, in fact, that the memoir she has written, A Woman Like Me, is already out of date. It includes the story about Tory donor Frank Hester, who had said Abbott made him “want to hate all Black women” and that she “should be shot”, which happened in March. “At first I couldn’t take in his words,” she writes. “It was a clear incitement to violence.” But the book was finished and at the printers before her intense battle with the Labour leadership to keep her seat and her consequent elevation to mother of the House, the honorific title bestowed on the female MP with the longest uninterrupted service.

The way Abbott tells it, for several months going back to last year, she came under significant pressure to do a deal with the Labour leadership to stand down after she had the Labour whip removed for writing an appalling letter to the Observer which, among other things, compared being Jewish, a Traveller or Irish to having red hair. “The deal was that they would restore the whip and then literally that day, within hours, I would stand down,” she says. “Not the same week. The same day. And then maybe I could go to the Lords.”

Abbott would not agree for several reasons. First, she felt it so smacked of a deal that people might think she had sold her constituency, one of Labour’s safest seats, to salvage her reputation. Second, she didn’t want to go to the Lords. “The thing about the Lords is that it’s full of people you thought had died,” she says. “You should never say never, but it’s never appealed to me. I’ve got a couple of friends there. But the people who go from the House of Commons to the House of Lords usually do so because they can’t let go of the status. And the status has never been my thing.”

But mostly she refused because she felt that the whole arrangement was designed to belittle her. “My humiliation was their intent. That’s why I wouldn’t agree to it. They thought there was political gain in it. Keir Starmer had kept saying, ‘It’s a new party, it’s a new party.’ If it’s a new party, then what could be more emblematic than getting rid of Diane Abbott. People tried to tell them to leave it. But they were insistent.”

It was striking how most politicians wanted to call the rioters thugs. It wasn’t random. It was racial violence

The leadership had already removed the whip from the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn: Abbott was the next logical target. But Corbyn and Abbott, while longtime political bedfellows and, at one time, actual bedfellows (they had a relationship), do not have the same currency. Labour misjudged the symbolic resonance of her historic role as the first Black female MP, the optics of bullying a Black woman out of her job and the popular support she had in the Black community and beyond. “I think they didn’t understand how much resistance there would be to that because a lot of the people around Starmer are these young guys and have no sense of the history.”

When the election was called, the question mark over her future and mistreatment dominated the news, forcing Labour to postpone key announcements. Demonstrations of support in her Hackney constituency drew large numbers. “I held out and held out, and it was a question of who blinked first. And they blinked first. You don’t become Britain’s first Black woman MP because you give in to being pushed around like that.”

Abbott relates this story quite dispassionately: a vexing tale of defiance and gamesmanship, enunciated slowly and deliberately. It’s as if she tastes her words before she shares them, in mellifluent tones, with such regal hauteur that it is difficult to imagine she was born and raised in the same area of London as RMT union leader Mick Lynch. Dressed all in blue, from her trainers to her headscarf, at 70 Abbott strikes a diminutive but by no means diminished figure. But when she brings her cup of tea to her lips, her left hand holds the right steady, to limit the shakes. She has diabetes and though she does not mention it the whole interview, she has been quite ill for some time.

The paradox is that if Labour had treated her more respectfully, she might have bowed out of her own accord. They knew this but insisted on the deal anyway. In the book she says she had wanted to stand down in 2017 but thought it would reflect badly on Corbyn. Seven years on, I ask her if everything else was equal, she might have stood down this time.

She pauses. “I might have. But what I wasn’t going to do was have them push me out. I would stand down when I was ready.”

* * *

At the opening of parliament, in his first prime ministerial speech, Starmer singled out Abbott for praise. Referring to diversity in the House he paid “tribute to the new mother of the House … who has done so much in her career over so many years to fight for a parliament that truly represents modern Britain.”

Would the next insult, I ask, not be to elevate her to the status of “national treasure”? She smiles. “Having spent 37 years in parliament not being a national treasure, I think it’s a bit too late for that. And there are things to talk about.”

Her boss is not one of them. More than once during the interview she steps back from what might be a scathing comment about the Labour leader, saying, “It’s too early to criticise Starmer directly.”

Uncharacteristically restrained in person, she is not particularly flattering about him in the book, where she describes his performance in Brussels in opposition as being “reminiscent of the Brit abroad who talks loudly in English so that the silly foreigner can understand.”

Abbott is unapologetic. “What people forget about Keir Starmer is he hasn’t been in the party very long. So though we were in the shadow cabinet at the same time under Jeremy, he’s not somebody I know, in the way I know, say, Harriet Harman. We’re not best friends or anything, but I’ve known her for a long time. There’s a history. There’s no way I’d know him in that way because he’s not been around the movement in that way.”

Abbott rose through the party, first as a councillor in Paddington, London, and as a supporter of Labour Party Black Sections, a group within the party, started in the early 80s, that called for greater Black representation and an affiliated society for non-white members modelled on women-only sections. The demand was opposed by the leadership and championed by the left at a time when there was significant racial tension and had not been an ethnic minority MP for over half a century.

“Race and feminism were the two main strands of my politics. And it seemed the Labour party was potentially a way of progressing those issues. It wasn’t the most obvious choice if you considered yourself a radical Black person, even then. And remember this was during the ascendancy of Tony Benn. So the idea you could move the party leftwards, it seemed within reach.”

From the book one gets the impression she no longer thinks this is the case. She describes Corbyn’s era of leadership as an “interlude [that] tested to destruction the idea that the left will be allowed significant influence in the Labour party any time soon”.

Among the many regional variations that formed the background to Labour’s victory in 2024 is the fact that in the major cities, where ethnic minorities tend to live, there was a significant collapse in turnout and the Labour vote. (In Abbott’s constituency turnout fell by 15.5% and Labour’s vote share dropped by 10%.) According to Focaldata, Labour still won more minority votes than any other party by quite a distance, but it was down 13 points among Asian voters and six points among Black voters to the lowest level of minority support for Labour since minority polling began.

“For a long time Labour essentially had a client relationship with minority communities,” Abbott says. “But different generations have come through and a lot of them think, ‘What is this? I’m not your faithful follower.’ The younger generations are more sceptical and I think Labour are in danger, and have been for some time, in taking them for granted.”

If she no longer sees Labour as a vehicle for the kind of change she wants to see, why stay in it?

“During that whole period when they had withdrawn the whip, people were encouraging me to run as an independent, but I didn’t want to do that. I hinted that I might to upset them. But I never intended to. I’m a Labour party person. Not this particular version of Labour. But I’ve been in the party for 45 years. If they wanted to ban me, well, that was up to them. But I wasn’t going to leave.”

So if she had her time again, would she join the Labour party now? A long sigh is followed by an even longer pause. “I wouldn’t want to say.” When I ask if she thinks Labour have learned the lessons of this last election, her response is quick and brief. “No.”

* * *

Abbott was born in Paddington in 1953 – five years after HMS Windrush docked, marking the symbolic start of postwar, post-colonial migration, and five years before the racist pogroms that swept through Notting Hill in London and St Ann’s in Nottingham.

“1958 was a big moment,” the late Jamaica-born academic Stuart Hall once told me. “Before that, individuals had endured discrimination. But in that year racism became a mass, collective experience that went beyond that.”

This summer’s wave of social unrest was another big moment, which Abbott describes as shocking but not surprising when we speak again a few weeks after our Westminster meeting. “With racism there’s always an undercurrent of violence,” she says. “But it was striking how most politicians wanted to describe them as thugs, as though it was just random violence. It wasn’t random. It was racial violence. You didn’t need to be a political scientist to work that out. They attacked mosques, Black people and asylum seekers’ hostels. My concern now is that [ministers] pivot to draconian anti-immigration legislation to address ‘the root causes of the violence’. But the root cause wasn’t immigrants. It was racism.”

Abbott’s parents, among the earlier postwar migrants, came from Jamaica. Her mother, Julia, who became a nurse after she could not become a teacher in the UK, docked in Bristol in 1950. Her father, Reginald, a machine operator who became a sheet-metal worker, arrived about the same time.

“People get sentimental about Windrush,” Abbott says. “Our parents are all national treasures now. But they left rural Jamaica in the 50s and 60s to come to Britain and it took a lot of courage and resilience to survive that. The racism was brutal. There was no race relations legislation. People could literally not employ you because you were Black and there was nothing you could do. My parents never spoke about racism. They just put one foot in front of the other and kept going.”

If Black migrants were relatively rare, Black babies were even more so. While her mother was in hospital, recovering from the birth, she had to stop nurses and doctors coming to lift up the blankets and take a peek at Diane. “No, please,” she told them. “She’s not a doll.”

Her father bought a house in Paddington and rented out all the rooms bar one, where they lived, with the cooker on the landing. In the basement was an Irish family, headed by Uncle Jimmy, who took a shine to Diane. One day in the 50s, as her mother tells it, teddy boys came down the road banging on the door and attacking any Black person who answered. As they approached her home, Jimmy came up declaring, “They’re not going to get our Diane.” When they opened the door, the teddy boys thought he owned the house and moved on. (A story that illustrates the point she was trying to make about being a visible minority in her Observer letter, without excusing what she actually wrote.)

That experience of being what TV super producer Shonda Rhimes refers to in her autobiography as “FOD – first, only and different” has persisted all her life. “I went to Harrow county grammar school for girls, where I was the only Black girl … Then Newnham College, Cambridge, where there was a mixed-race girl and a south Asian girl. After Newnham I was a graduate trainee at the Home Office and again I was the first and only one at that level. Then I went to the National Council for Civil Liberties and I think I must have been the first Black person they ever employed. Then I went to work in television and I was the only Black person there.”

So when she entered parliament in 1987, being the first and only Black woman was more of a novelty for Britain than it was for her. “From my schooldays I was in institutions where I was the only Black person, so when I came here that was what my whole working life had been up until that point.”

That took nothing away from the moment itself. With some pride, Abbott asks her assistant to pull up a picture of silver-haired Lord David Pitt, a Grenada-born Labour politician who unsuccessfully stood for parliament in the 50s and 70s before going into the House of Lords, throwing his arms around her on her first day.

African American novelist and essayist James Baldwin coined the term “the burden of representation” about the pressure brought to bear on the “first and only” minorities who make it to use whatever influence they have to reflect and respond to the interests of the communities from which they come. The fate of the second may arguably hang on the success of the first.

Abbott, who remained the only Black female MP for 10 years after her election, says she was aware of that pressure but never felt constrained by it. “I never consciously saw it as a burden. I knew people would be going after me. But if you stop and say, ‘What a burden,’ then you might as well give up. I was conscious that I was maybe being judged by harsher standards. But it’s one of the things I learned from my parents: to just put one foot in front of the other and keep going.”

* * *

But everyone stumbles sometimes. Her letter to the Observer, which she apologised for unreservedly the same day, was not her first mistake. In 2012 during a Twitter exchange, she was forced to apologise after writing: “White people love playing ‘divide & rule’. We should not play their game #tacticasoldascolonialism.”

During an LBC interview in the 2017 election as shadow home secretary, she first referred to Labour plans for an extra 10,000 police officers costing £300,000, then corrected herself to say it would in fact cost £80m, only to eventually clarify the actual figure, which was closer to £300m. It was bad.

Compared with, say, Boris Johnson conspiring to have a journalist beaten up, being fired for plagiarism, lying about an affair, reciting a colonialist poem in Myanmar and calling women in burqas letterboxes – just the ones that spring to mind – others have got away with much worse. But then she knew that going in.

“I’d done about six radio interviews back to back that morning and then I made these mistakes.” She knew she’d get dinged for it but not below the bow.



I made mistakes and the world exploded. People presumed that I was an idiot, despite everything they knew about me

“When the world exploded I was very taken aback,” she says. “I wasn’t someone who no one had heard of before. But the fallout presumed that I was an idiot. I went to grammar school, Newnham College and had done a series of high-status jobs, and no one had ever thought that. So I didn’t think of myself as that. And I didn’t realise that people would slip so easily into thinking of me as that, despite everything they knew about me. Because it’s very hard to eliminate an idea that had no basis in fact in the first place.”

At times it’s as though she floats in and out of a sharpened racial consciousness. One minute she is acutely aware that she will be judged more harshly because she is a Black woman; the next she is surprised when she actually is judged more harshly. Or maybe it is simply the scale and intensity of the attacks that is truly shocking.

Her name became a punchline. “We heard that up in the north of England the Tories were running a campaign all about me, because what could be more horrific than a Black woman as home secretary,” she says. “On national radio I was brought up completely gratuitously by Tory ministers.”

An Amnesty International report in the run-up to the 2017 election revealed that Abbott received almost half of all the abusive tweets sent to female MPs. The hate mail arrives with such regularity that learning how to deal with it is part of the training for all new staff in her office. On election day itself, a man pleaded guilty to three charges of sending letters conveying indecent or offensive messages. Abbott’s office had alerted the police three years ago.

But it is one thing being targeted by Tories and racists; it’s quite another to find yourself attacked by your own side. The Labour minister Jess Phillips once claimed she told Abbott to fuck off.

“She didn’t,” Abbott says. “But by going around and telling everyone she did, she thought it gave her a sort of cachet.”

Phillips apologised on Twitter for her behaviour that day but has never said sorry personally. Has Abbott ever taken it up with her? “No.”

Given Phillips was deeply hostile to Corbyn’s leadership, one might put even that down to factionalism. But it’s not as though it has been plain sailing on the left either. Even among those colleagues with whom she is ideologically aligned, Abbott is described as anything from “difficult” to “impossible”. “Stubborn” comes up a lot. She didn’t go to parliament to make friends. And in this she has succeeded. Quite how many of these characteristics are necessary if you are going to persevere as a Black female politician of her generation in a place like the Commons is unknowable but important to think about. As the Kenyan MP Millie Odhiambo told the Kenyan speaker, in a clip that soon went viral, when she was asked to set a good example to the “girls” serving their first term, “Mr Speaker, if they are good girls they will never get corner office. Be a bad girl like Millie Odhiambo and you will be the mother of this house.”

* * *

A few days after the LBC interview, Abbott says, Karie Murphy, the executive director of Corbyn’s office, came to her home and told her she should stand down from the shadow cabinet for the rest of the election. Abbott refused. “As far as we were concerned we had left matters unresolved. Then the next morning we heard on the radio we had been stood down. It was a bit of a shock. I think some people around Jeremy convinced themselves that if only I stepped down as shadow home secretary they could win. That was the idea.”

So Abbott found herself embattled within the already embattled project that was Corbyn’s leadership. “It wasn’t great. How can I put it? It was a ‘learning experience’.”

Did she ever take it up with Corbyn? “No … If I took up everything with everybody and looked at all the nastiness that comes in, I’d be paralysed.” Has she just developed a thick skin? “Nobody has skin that thick,” she says, with melancholic emphasis. “Nobody.”

So how has she survived for 37 years with that level of hostility? She says she picks her battles and has a group of female friends that she’s known for years, many of whom have nothing to do with politics.

“But mostly,” she says. “I know what I know.”

What does that mean, I ask. “I know what I believe in and I know my own self-worth. I always have done.”

She recalls a conversation she had with her teacher after she came back from a school trip to Cambridge and said she wanted to apply to the university. “But you’re not up to it,” the teacher said. “But I do think I’m up to it,” the 16-year-old Abbott replied. “And that’s what matters, isn’t it?”

“In a way that’s been my theme,” she says. “Even when the world’s fallen on my head because I got some figures wrong, which is a horrible, horrible experience, I know what I know. In the end I know my own worth.”

UK

WAIT, WHAT?

Streeting says NHS ‘broken but not beaten’ as he seeks private sector deal

Claudia Savage and Harry Stedman PA
Sun, 8 Sept 2024

Health Secretary Wes Streeting has said the NHS is “broken but not beaten” as he defended plans to utilise the private sector to improve outcomes.

A review by eminent surgeon and independent peer Lord Darzi due to be published on Thursday is expected to highlight how children are being let down by the health service.

It is also likely to pinpoint falling vaccination rates, and rises in ADHD medication and in eating disorder-related hospital admissions for children.


In the interview with the BBC, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said the NHS is “broken” and has been left in an “unforgivable state” by the previous government.

Mr Streeting said the report from Lord Darzi would again highlight the much-discussed need for reform in the NHS.

Health Secretary Wes Streeting (Tejas Sandhu/PA)

He told Sky News: “I think what Lord Darzi, who is a very experienced clinician with decades of experience in the NHS and experience of serving both Labour and Conservative governments in different capacities, what he essentially says is the NHS is broken, but not beaten, and the investment matters, but so does reform.

“And if we don’t change the way that the NHS works as a system, then we will continue to see a heavy price for failure.

“The reason why we asked Lord Darzi to do this report was, if you don’t provide an accurate diagnosis for the patient, you’re not going to prescribe the right treatment.”

The Health Secretary has previously said he would utilise the private health sector to cut NHS waiting times and improve health outcomes.

Mr Streeting said the Government wants an “independent sector deal” in order to utilise more private capacity.

He said: “Fundamentally, I mean, it’s a means to an end.

“The end is to not just get the NHS back on its feet, but make sure it’s fit for the future, so that we’re not reliant on the independent sector in the longer term.


“How do we do that?

“We need three big shifts, a shift from hospital to community, better primary care, community services, mental health, social care, a shift from analogue to digital.

“Make sure we’ve got the latest treatments and technology, but also the improvements to the systems, the waste, the inefficiency, the bureaucracy we see in the NHS.

“And thirdly, a shift from sickness to prevention.

“We pay a very heavy price in this country, the price of society’s sickness.

“Actually, if we help people not just to live longer, but live well for longer, that’s not just better for them, it’s better for the taxpayer, and that’s how the NHS is sustainable.”

Mr Streeting said the rise in the number of people paying for treatments or surgeries out of pockets as a result of waiting lists has created a “two-tier system” that sees those that can’t afford it being “left behind.”

He said: “There’s nothing about my centre-left principles that says, because I believe in the NHS as a public service, I’m willing to see working class people waiting longer, even where there’s spare capacity in the private sector that we could use via the NHS to get those people treated faster.”

Former health secretary Victoria Atkins (Jeff Moore/PA)

The Conservative shadow health secretary Victoria Atkins accused Labour of using Lord Darzi’s health review as “cover” to raise taxes in the upcoming Budget.

Also speaking to Sky News, Ms Atkins said: “This report, I fear, is cover for the Labour Party to raise our taxes in the budget in October, and they are laying the groundwork for this.

“They weren’t straight with us about winter fuel payments, they’re not being straight with us about taxes, and we need to have a grown-up conversation about the NHS, but this is not the way to go about it.”

She added: “I was clear as secretary of state that to build an NHS for the next 75 years, we have to marry reform with investment, and I tried to do that through the productivity plans, bringing tech to the frontline of NHS services, which I hear that Labour is cancelling.

“What worries me is what we’ve seen so far from the Health Secretary, the only thing he’s done is to give junior doctors a pay rise with no productivity reform.”

 

UK Govt’s own analysis says its non-doctor ‘associate’ plan poses HIGH risk for patients

BySKWAWKBOX (SW)08/09/2024

on Govt’s own analysis says its non-doctor ‘associate’ plan poses HIGH risk for patients

NHS campaign groups have long warned Tory cost-cutting plan supported by Labour is dangerous – now government’s own investigation has confirmed it but Starmer and Streeting pressing ahead regardless

Doctors and health experts have warned for many months that NHS England’s plan, started by the Tories but enthusiastically pushed by Labour in opposition and now in government – even to the point that Starmer whipped peers to defeat an attempt by health campaigners in the House of Lords to kill the plan – to increase the use of ‘associates’ without medical training or even adequate supervision in the NHS instead of doctors poses lethal risk to patients. At least two patients have already died as a result.

The General Medical Council (GMC), responsible for regulating doctors, has also enthusiastically embraced government instructions to regulate the new ‘associate’ roles – a situation so grave that both the British Medical Association (BMA) and a group of anaesthetists are taking the GMC to court over it. The Royal College of Physicians (RCP) has been accused by medics of conflicts of interest and of misleading doctors about the associate roles and was caught on video refusing to answer questions about patient safety.

Despite these serious concerns and the avoidable deaths already caused, the new Labour government continues to push the plan – one of many under so-called ‘integrated care’ designed to cut NHS costs to allow greater profits for private providers.

But now, the previous government’s own analysis of the risks posed by the use of associates has come into the public domain – and it shows high risks for patients treated by associate roles:

Dr Tom Stocks, who posted the above extract from the analysis, said that right-wing Heath Secretary Wes Streeting – under pressure today for giving sensitive NHS information to a former politician with millions invested in the promotion of private healthcare:

knows that Physician Associates are HIGH risk for patients, because that’s the government’s own analysis. But Wes thinks he can duck this scandal, and get away with it.

UK

HMRC has ‘failed to use new powers’ around retail tax evasion, says watchdog

Alex Daniel, PA Business Reporter
Sun, 8 Sept 2024
The UK is failing to tackle tax evasion among retailers despite new government powers, according to a new report by the UK’s public spending watchdog.

The National Audit Office said the Government “lacks an effective response” to illegal tax dodgers in the sector, amid a sharp increase in the problem in recent years.

HM Revenue and Customs’ (HMRC) most recent figures, from 2022-23, estimate that £5.5 billion was lost due to tax evasion, 81% of it from small businesses, up from 66% in 2019-20.

But the department currently “does not have a specific strategy” to clamp down on the issue, the NAO said.

One particular issue is retailers that allow themselves to go insolvent then set up again under a new registration, so the same directors can carry on trading.

HMRC estimated the practice, known as phoenixism, accounted for 15% of its tax debt losses in 2022-23, equivalent to more than £500 million.

However, the Insolvency Service disqualified only seven directors specifically for phoenixism between 2018-19 and 2023-24, out of a total of 6,274 disqualified directors.

Meanwhile, new powers to issue penalties for businesses that falsely manipulate the amount of money passing through their till – known as electronic sales suppression – came into force in 2022.

The NAO said that HMRC has still not yet issued any civil penalties using the powers, but that the department told report writers that publicity around their existence has “had a deterrent effect”.

Gareth Davies, head of the NAO, said: “Although tax evasion has been growing among small businesses, HMRC has so far lacked an effective strategic response.

“Its assessment of risks has given too little emphasis to widely used methods of evasion such as sales suppression and phoenixism. It has also failed to use new powers to tackle tax evasion.


“Tackling tax evasion is not a straightforward task. But real opportunities exist for HMRC to work more systematically across government to reduce it. Tighter controls and more compliance work could raise significant sums and improve value for money.”

It comes after Labour said during the general election that it will crack down on tax avoiders to pay for its commitments on schools and the NHS.

The party said it will try to raise £5 billion a year by the end of the next Parliament by narrowing the “tax gap” – the difference between the amount of money HMRC is owed and the amount it actually receives.

Elsewhere, the NAO added that fraudulent businesses setting up on Companies House, the UK’s register of companies, is still an issue despite the Government introducing tighter requirements in March.

Suspicious companies have included directors named after cartoon characters or religious figures, while some directors on the register have been listed as being as young as zero, or older than the world’s longest-living person.

While new powers in March are supposed to allow officials to request evidence on company registrations, verify directors’ identities and remove inaccurate listings, some of the measures will still “not be fully operational until Companies House develops the necessary systems and capability”.

An HMRC spokesperson said: “The UK has one of the lowest tax gaps reported in the world, but the Government is committed to reducing it further.

“While the vast majority of businesses pay the tax that’s due, we will continue to use our civil and criminal powers against the determined minority who refuse to play by the rules. Such action helped us protect £41.8 billion in the last 12 months.

“We also work closely with partners including the Insolvency Service and Companies House to tackle evasion in retail and online services.”

An Insolvency Service spokesperson said: “We work hard to tackle phoenixism using all the investigative tools at our disposal and working closely with HM Revenue and Customs.

“This may mean on some occasions, we use our civil and criminal powers to target other misconduct connected to phoenix activity, but which is more likely to result in tougher enforcement outcomes.”

A Companies House spokesperson said: “We are using our enhanced powers in various ways to crack down on misuse of the register, including proactively sharing intelligence with law enforcement colleagues.

“As part of our ongoing programme of reform we will be introducing compulsory identity verification checks for new and existing officers and equivalents as well as those filing information with Companies House.”

Reeves can loosen Britain’s purse strings: 

she just needs to think outside the

Treasury box

Phillip Inman Economics editor

THE GUARDIAN

Sat 7 September 2024

 

The chancellor has resisted calls to reinstate the winter fuel allowance.

Photograph: Jacob King/PA

Pressure is building on Rachel Reeves to prevent some of the UK’s poorest pensioners being hit by restrictions on the winter fuel allowance. A plan to scrap the subsidy for all but those who claim pension credit, saving the exchequer £1.4bn, is under attack from opposition parties, trade unions and many inside Labour’s ranks.

So far, the chancellor has resisted calls to reinstate the allowance of up to £300 a year – or even to make more of an effort to ensure only the richest pensioners lose the payment, implying that she needs all the savings to help close a £22bn gap.

Many of Reeves’s critics have focused on the small gain this means for the exchequer, as part of £1.2tn of government spending expected this year.

The same accusation – that she is shaving trivial amounts from her budget shortfall – could be levelled at the many other savings Reeves has announced. Whether it is scrapping the £1.7bn tunnel planned to run alongside Stonehenge on the A303 or the £1.1bn cost next year of implementing the Dilnot report – which recommended a cap on an individual’s social care costs – they are all small in relation to the truckloads of cash spent every year by Whitehall departments.

Yet Reeves believes, and has an argument to back up her stance, that she needs every penny to bring the government’s day-to-day budget into some kind of balance, restricting the deficit to no more than 3%.

And that’s because the £22bn funding shortfall inherited from the Conservatives is only the beginning of a growing gap between government income and the costs of running a 21st-century public sector, with services that function properly and a decent safety net for those who need it.

Tax breaks for the rich can be axed, interest payments on Bank of England loans could be ditched and investment spending could be separated from day-to-day spending

Related: Greens to push Labour for wealth tax to fund public services

There is already a queue at the Treasury’s door of ministers keen to secure a deal ahead of the upcoming spending review that will keep their departments afloat, let alone meet manifesto policy pledges.

Delayed by previous Tory chancellors, the spending review is Labour’s chance to lay out its priorities for the next five years. That might be a straightforward exercise were it not for the long list of hidden costs and ticking financial time bombs that keep most ministers awake at night.

The biggest is the health department, where secretary of state Wes Streeting is coping with hospital trust deficits and GPs protesting at the lack of funds in the primary care sector.

The education secretary needs more cash for schools just as many universities edge closer to bankruptcy. At the justice department, ministers are asking how they cover the cost of the summer riots and deal with long backlogs in the courts. The list extends to defence spending, the police and more.

Then there are all the welfare programmes that must be funded because they are underpinned by new legal obligations, and that is before Reeves considers removing the two-child benefit cap.

Related: I believed Starmer and Reeves were too smart to repeat austerity. It appears I was wrong | David Blanchflower

That’s not to say Reeves has no options. Plenty of tax breaks that benefit the richer in society can be scaled back, a commitment to pay the Bank of England interest on its loans could be ditched and investment spending could be separated from day-to-day spending. This last measure would allow Reeves to press ahead with costly investments to boost growth by increasing the amount the UK borrows without – as Liz Truss did so spectacularly – spooking international lenders.

Truss’s antics helped Labour get elected, but now that record of failure is circumscribing the Treasury’s powers. So, too, is Starmer’s two-parliament plan, which gives an excuse for procrastination and an adherence to unnecessary strictures on spending in the short term.

There are ways that the winter fuel allowance can be means-tested without affecting pensioners in the bottom half of the income scale. As campaigner Martin Lewis has suggested, the cut could be tied to higher council tax bands. Or it could be made a taxable benefit, though those with an income of more than £12,570 would lose 20%.

These more equitable restrictions wouldn’t affect the deficit in any meaningful way if a more expansive mindset was winning inside No 11.