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Bidding war for Labour insiders as City prepares for red shift RED TORIES

Melissa Lawford

TORY TELEGRAPH 

LOVES CONSERVATIVE LABOUR LEADER SIR KEIR
Sun, 20 August 2023 

Labour’s lead over the Tories has prompted a scramble among companies to hire those in the know - Leon Neal/Getty Images Europe

After 13 years of Tory government, business leaders are facing up to the fact that a new party may be in Downing Street next year – one that many have no experience of working with.

With Labour enjoying a 17-point lead over the Tories, Sir Keir Starmer looks increasingly likely to sweep to power. That prospect is sparking a scramble to figure out how to deal with the government in waiting.

“Public affairs and comms consultancies are getting CEOs asking them what are we doing in preparation for this potential change, do we have the right contacts and connections?” says Lucy Cairncross, managing director at VMA Group, a recruiter that specialises in public affairs.


“We didn’t hear those kinds of conversations happening in 2019. It wasn’t high up on their agenda because they would have thought it’s not going to happen. This time, clearly, there is a shift.”

PR firms and City advisors are rushing to hire current or former Labour insiders who know how the party works and can help get things done.

“We made a conscious decision at the start of the year to hire senior people with a background in centre-Left politics. The value of their stock is currently climbing,” Nick Faith, director of WPI Strategy, says.

“We work with organisations from pretty much every sector of the economy and they are all gearing up for the possibility of a potential change of government.”

City firms are rapidly undergoing a facelift – and they are trying to look like Keir Starmer.

Perhaps the clearest example of the shift is Hanbury Strategy.

The London-based lobbying and communications company has close ties to the Tory party and was set up by a former close ally of Dominic Cummings, Paul Stephenson, who ran PR for the Vote Leave campaign. However, Chris Ward, Sir Keir’s former deputy chief of staff, joined Hanbury last year and launched a new Labour Unit in September.

“Every business and every trade body in the country is making a contingency plan at the moment for a Labour government,” says Alec Zetter, a public affairs headhunter at recruiter Ellwood Atfield.

It is an increasingly expensive procedure: there is a shortage of talent, meaning companies must pay a premium to attract those with real insight.

Labour has been out of power for more than a decade, and many of those who worked under the party’s last leader have been written off.

“There aren’t that many credible people from the Corbyn period because so many of them were avowedly anti-business and of course it’s a long time since Labour were in government, so there aren’t that many Labour advisers who also have government experience,” says Nick King, managing director of Henham Strategy.

One senior public affairs figure says: “Clients are more and more likely to want a Labour offering, and in a classic case of supply and demand, given there is not a lot of supply, Labour people are definitely attracting higher salaries now.”

Many of those who served under the Labour Party’s last leader, Jeremy Corbyn, have been written off - Eddie Mulholland

Former MPs are in particular demand. Luciana Berger, who quit Labour in protest in 2019 before later rejoining briefly, joined iNHouse Communications last year and became a senior adviser this summer.

Anna Turley, who served in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, has joined Arden Strategies, as has the party’s former head of business relations, Ellie Miller.

Instinctif, the City advisor to several FTSE companies, took on former Labour shadow minister Tom Harris in July 2023 to expand its Navigating Labour Unit.

Former shadow deputy leader of the House of Commons Melanie Onn, who left the Commons in 2019, has joined Blakeney Communications.

“For good people who are able to do the role really well and have really good contacts, there is always going to be a bit of a war for that talent,” says Cairncross.

If it becomes even more clear that Labour could win the next general election, there could be a “tipping point of going hell for leather” in throwing money at Labour-connected people, she adds.

Consultancies that have sold themselves for years on having expertise dealing with the Conservative Party know that their currency will slide fast if Labour win the next election.

A current Labour source says: “I get some kind of call probably once a month. It started last year when the Tories properly began to implode.”

Those who have worked with Starmer, the shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves or the shadow business secretary John Reynolds are most in demand.

Firms are seeking people who have worked with key figures in the shadow cabinet such as Rachel Reeves - Eddie Mulholland

However, many of those working for Labour now won’t consider a move because they know they may get their first opportunity to work within government, says Faith.

The public affairs sector is also losing staff to Labour, as people return to the party ahead of the election. “I know loads of people seconding jobs into Labour from business,” says Ward.

Demand for Labour expertise is strongest in finance, tech and net zero adjacent industries.

“Any industry that is under particular pressure from a net zero agenda, for example, they are absolutely trying to talk to what they perceive will be the next government around what their responsibilities and contributions will be,” says Zetter.

Ward adds: “Then you also get very large employers who are asking: what is Labour going to do on employment rights and taxation for large companies?”

Labour are happy to answer these questions. When Starmer launched his “Prawn Cocktail Offensive 2.0” last autumn, it marked the second phase of a long push to try and woo businesses to the Left.

“The first phase was basically decontamination – basically trying to convince people that the party is no longer Jeremy Corbyn,” says Ward. “The second phase is carpet bombing – meeting every business or anyone who will meet you. That is what they are doing now and have been for the last year or so.”

The third phase will be a calculated, targeted programme of engagement with a much smaller group of businesses that Labour can trust, he says.

As the circle gets smaller and the election draws nearer, the value of insiders will only go up.

Left, Right and Liberty

My old pal from our Canadian University Press (CUP) days; Terry Glavin in his latest blog entry criticizes what he sees as the libertarian/anarchist underpinings of the new left, the anti-war and the anti-globalization movement.

And Glavin believes they are dangerous, American ideas influencing our glorious Canadian Social Democratic politics.

Glavin first quotes from Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, in Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can’t be Jammed (Harper Perennial, 2000)

Unfortunately, the idea of counterculture has become so deeply embedded in our understanding of society that it influences every aspect of social and political life. Most importantly, it has become the conceptual template for all contemporary leftist politics. Counterculture has almost completely replaced socialism as the basis of radical political thought. So if counterculture is a myth, then it is one that has misled an enormous number of people, with untold political consequences.”

The counterculture of music, smoke ins, Adbuster magazine, G@P anarchist hip clothing chic is recuperated by capitalism, thus it is not socialism it is protest chic. Well congratulations on discovering that the counter culture is a consumer form of capitalism which it always was anyways. 'Hip capitalism', as we called it in the seventies and eighties was a kinder groovier kind of capitalism. See my Hypocrisy of Hip Capitalism

It's an old debate in the Anarchist movement as well, lifestyle reformism versus social revolution. Today the debate over counter culture is exemplified by Murray Bookchin with his Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism and Richard Day with his new book Gramsci is Dead.

Do we create alternative drop out cultures that ignore the state (Day) or do we actively mobilize to create a social revolution based on class struggle (Bookchin). This debate is now occuring again in the anti-war/anti-globalization movement which I think is the point that Glavin is trying to make. I think, because it is far from clear, that he is identifying libertarian/anarchist politics with drop out politics of the old counterculutre.

But then he goes and says this.

Ron Dart is a Red Tory philosopher, a devout Anglican, an NDP supporter (at least for now), an authority on the beat poets and the Catholic mystic Thomas Merton, and the author more than a dozen books, including The Red Tory Tradition: Ancient Roots, New Routes. In conversation with Ron the other day, I heard more than just a faint echo of the Heath/Potter thesis.

Beware the “antistate” left, he said. It may be Harper’s loudest and most vociferous opposition, but listen carefully. It speaks the same language that Harper does. It cleaves to “liberal” ideas, but in the American meaning of the word. It is a “subtler imperialism” that threatens to render Canada incapable of articulating an effective, homegrown defence against neoconservatism.

Beware of the Anti-State Left. As if Anarchism and Libertarian ideas are somehow foreign to the Canadian Left, an American influence on good old Canadian Methodist Social Democracy. In a further leap of logic Glavin then tells us what kind of an outcome will happen if these dangerous libertarian, anti-state ideas influence the Canadian Left.

"And it comes with a warning Canadians should heed: Beware, else we end up with our own versions of Fox News shouting matches, and our own Al Frankens pitted against their Bill O’Reillys in the same degenerate American arguments, carried on in the same American language, and the same hoarse and hate-filled stalemate that has so horribly paralyzed and disfigured American politics."

I know Glavin has gone native, and lives in the heart of the counter culture beast on the Left Coast of Vancouver Island but really where has he been for the last thirty years since we both left university?

We already have those voices on the right, the Ezra Levants, the Fraser Institute, the Byfields, the Alberta/B.C./Western Report, etc etc. They have been around for ages. The right specializes in generalizations and outrageous statements, the social democratic left as I have complained before have been far too polite and nice in debates allowing these screaming ranting right wingers to brow beat them in media debates. Glavin appears to think that some how polite English school boy debate, tea and crumpets, good show ol boy, is the Canadian way.

But back to my main point Anarchism and the Libertarian Left are as Canadian as any other aspect of the New Left or the Old Left. Emma Goldman the famous anarchist agitator traveled across Canada and eventually died in Toronto in exile from the United States. The Revolutionary union, the IWW was active in Canada at the turn of last century and the radicals which formed it went on to form the One Big Union, the OBU. It was reviewed in Canada in the seventies by those of us young anarchists including some of us in CUP. And is is going strong again now.

George Woodcock the famous English professor from UBC and anarchist biographer and historian was one of the earliest promoters of anarchism in Canada in the sixties. By the late sixties the New Left in Canada had a strong anarchist compenent in it based on Our Generation, a magazine out of Quebec which represented what the editors broadly called the Extra Parlimentary Opposition in Canada, that is the New Left.

By the seventies we had Yippies and anarchist collectives in every city in Canada.
And Vancouver, Glavins home town was no exception. It was chock full of anarchists especially around the magazine the Open Road. Which is well documented in Alan Antliffs book Only A Beginning: An Anarchist Anthology

Besides the Social Democratic Left which would influence the Liberals and Progressives alike in the Forties, we had a tradition of both radical Communists and Anarchists in Canada.

Way before Stephen Harper and the neo-cons recuperated the term libertarian it was used by members of the new left. And as I have taken pains to show here on numerous occasions those on the right who call themselves libertarians are merely Lazzie-faire capitalists, not real libertarians.

And one of the major Libertarian theorists in the U.S. was Canadian Samuel Edward Konkin III (SEK3) who moved to LA from Edmonton. That is truly a 'subtle imperialism'. True SEK3 was a student of Murray Rothbard, the economic historian, who did much to promote the Libertarian ideology that so upsets Glavin and his Red Tory friend. A NEW AMERICAN REVOLUTION

But Red Tories are really classic liberals, fiscal conservatives and socially liberal. Not unlike Tommy Douglas and the old CCF. In fact that is the history of liberalism, it went from a radical idea to becoming the defender of the status quo. In fact old fashioned political conservatism in Canada is liberal. The success of the Manning Reform party, and indeed the so called libertarianism of Stephen Harper are not based on libertarianism at all but on populism, economic liberalism and American Republican conservatism.

Here is what Murray Rothbard has to say about liberalism the ideology of the Red Tories and the Social Democrats that Glavin claims are as Canadian as maple syrup and beaver pelts.

In England, the classical liberals began their shift from radicalism to quasi-conservatism in the early nineteenth century; a touchstone of this shift was the general British liberal attitude toward the national liberation struggle in Ireland. This struggle was twofold: against British political imperialism, and against feudal landlordism which had been imposed by that imperialism. By their Tory blindness toward the Irish drive for national independence, and especially for peasant property against feudal oppression, the British liberals (including Spencer) symbolized their effective abandonment of genuine Liberalism, which had been virtually born in a struggle against the feudal land system. Only in the United States, the great home of radical liberalism (where feudalism had never been able to take root outside the South), did natural rights and higher law theory, and consequent radical liberal movements, continue in prominence until the mid-nineteenth century. In their different ways, the Jacksonian and Abolitionist movements were the last powerful radical libertarian movements in American life.

Thus, with Liberalism abandoned from within, there was no longer a party of Hope in the Western world, no longer a "Left" movement to lead a struggle against the State and against the unbreached remainder of the Old Order. Into this gap, into this void created by the drying up of radical liberalism, there stepped a new movement: Socialism. Libertarians of the present day are accustomed to think of socialism as the polar opposite of the libertarian creed. But this is a grave mistake, responsible for a severe ideological disorientation of libertarians in the present world. As we have seen, Conservatism was the polar opposite of liberty; and socialism, while to the "left" of conservatism, was essentially a confused, middle-of-the road movement. It was, and still is, middle-of-the road because it tries to achieve Liberal ends by the use of Conservative means.

In other words the anarchist critique of socialism (being the left wing of the socialist movement), has been that its reliance on parilmentary politics and the idea of the seizure of state power by either elections or by revolution is flawed.

The anarchist or libertarian critique has been that social democracy, which is not socialism any more than Bolshevism is communism, is State Socialism, in other words Bismarkian socialism and thus a defense of the status quo. It is reformism an attempt to ameliorate the worst conditions of capitalism. European Social democracy died with WWI when it aided and abetted that war.

In Canada social democracy arose with the coming of the second wave immigrations of Central and Eastern Europeans who brought with them their growing revolutionary aspirations towards socialism and democracy that they lacked in the old country.They came to a Canada dominated by the English ruling classes and a French comprador class in Quebec.Canada's First Internment Camps

After WWI Canada saw the rise of a broad based immigrant workers and farmers movement. And again in the midst of the depression socialist ideas gained hold in the workers movement. After the second World War, the Progressives merged with the Conservatives, the CCF held power over a Liberal minority government, and Canada's war time state capitalist economy under C.D. Howe the Minister of Everything (and a darling of the neo-con right wing today ironically) easily shifted to welfare state capitalism of Keynesian model.

So Glavin and Dart are right in saying Canada's uniqueness in relationship to the U.S. is our social democratic values as a nation. I have said that here many times. That being said the libertarian spirit of Canadians also exists and is expressed on the left as well as the right. In particular in both Quebec and the Prairies where we have struggled against the English colonial mercantilist establishment of Ontario.Social Credit And Western Canadian Radicalism

What Glavin and Dart are attempting to do is identify social democracy with nationalism, with a unique Canadian identity of state capitalism. This is the same ideology of classic liberal nationalists like Mel Hurtig and Maude Barlow who run the amorphous mass organization the Council of Canadians. And while Hurtig is from Edmonton as a capitalist he always aspired, much like Peter Lougheed, to see the West as a real partner in late twentieth century Canadian Politics.

All Canadian nationalism is Ontario centric. It is based on the politics of Ontario's identity in relationship to the Americans and Quebec. Once upon a time Canadian Nationalism was the Ontario English ruling class identity, formed by its special relationship to the British Crown. Later as Canada became ten provinces, Ontario allowed the West to join in 'its' confederation not as a partner but as chattel colony for the mercantilist interests of its ruling class. Rebel Yell

Today Nationalism in Canada reflects the interests of Ontario, not the West or the Maritimes or Quebec. Today's social democrats be they Red Tories, New Democrats or Liberals, still cannot concieve of Canada as a different kind of federation. A more decentralized one, a real partnership, a renewed democracy with greater individual and community control and representation. The Bankruptcy of Liberal Federalism

In fact Toronto has become such a megacity it has veiewed itself as seperate from Ontario for many decades now, which is why Torontonians refer to Toronto, Canada. The base of Canadian nationalism is here in the heart of the beast. All the left has their base in Ontario, their national headquarters are either in Ottawa or Toronto. While capitalism has moved west.

Calgary is the new centre of Capitalism in Canada. Not Bay Street. Winnipeg was once what Calgary is today, the centre of rail, grain, furs and other real exports. Ontario was the industrial heartland where Winnipeg shipped goods to for processing. Winnipeg shared with Chicago the Grain Exchange and the Commodity exchange. Bay Street was le petit Wall Street. Real capitalism in Canada in the 20th Century has been a movement westward.

Toronto and Ontario cling to a rustbelt future, an old conservative elite whose time once was. Today the leaders of the liberal values of the status quo are interchangeable.

We have Bob Rae former NDP leader touted as a potential leadership candidate for the Federal Liberals. His brother already is.

We have the McQuinty brothers representing both the provincial and federal Liberals.

We have Jack Layton a former Toronto city counselor as federal NDP leader now joined in Parliment by his wife, Oliva Chow another former Toronto city conselor.

We have Belinda Stronach, millionaress, business scion of the new capitalism of post-fordism. She went from being a Conservative Leadership contender and MP to being a Liberal Cabinet minister and now MP and potential Liberal leadership candidate.

And we have Buzz Hargrove with his social democratic strategic voting in the last election endorsing the Liberals. While Ford and GM care not a wit who he votes for and still slash Canadian autoworkers jobs.

The political reality of Canada is that the base of social democratic power remains identified with the status quo, with its Nationalism and with its base in Ontario. This can be clearly seen from the last election. Where really nothing changed. The social democratic left is still stronger than the social conservatives who are now the government. But its base is the status quo, not radical change. Voting for Capitalism On January 23

On the other hand the election shows that libertarian/populist radical politics comes from the West and Quebec. Rather than embracing the staus quo as Glavin and Dart suggest, in order to revive a failed dream of a Federal NDP government, the left in Canada needs a good dose of libertarianism to thwart the right. Without it the contradictions of the Harper Conservatives will never be confronted their psuedo-libertarianism never exposed for the Republicanism it is. Whigs and Tory's

Glavin and Dart suggest we maintain the status quo, that the Left subsume itself into parlimentary politics, and existing trade union politics by extension. But the left has been doing that for fifty years and it has gotten us nowhere. It is the politics of the stationary bicycle. The libertarian left wants to put wheels on the bicycle and go somewhere.

See:

The Neo Liberal Canadian State

Historical Memory on the Eve of the Election

LABOUR HISTORY

The Edmonton General Strike Of 1919

Also references in the article: A greater union,

Calgary 1919-The Birth Of The OBU And The General Strike

The CCF:The Original Reform Movement

The Edmonton District Labour Council and Municipal Politics 1903-1906

Tags
Canada
libertarian
anarchism
social democrcaty
politics
socialism

left wing

Labour and Tories both offering more austerity for the NHS, finds Nuffield Trust


Labour Party leader Keir Starmer and shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting meet patients and staff at Bassetlaw Hospital in Nottinghamshire to discuss Labour's plan to reduce NHS waiting lists if they get into power after the forthcoming General Election on July 4, June 15, 2024


ANDREW MURRAY 

MORNINGSTAR

SUNDAY, JUNE 16, 2024

BOTH Labour and Tories are offering new austerity for the National Health Service if they win the general election — only worse, research shows.

Independent health think tank Nuffield Trust has scrutinised both parties’ pledges on the NHS.

It believes both parties, because of their rigid fiscal plans, will leave the NHS in crisis with lower increases in spending than those imposed by the Tories and Liberal Democrats at the height of austerity.

The trust says this will mean a squeeze on staff costs and make it impossible to meet pay increases planned for junior doctors and others.

It estimates that over the next parliament, the Tories will increase health spending by 0.9 per cent a year, and Labour by just 1.1 per cent.

These parsimonious plans, the trust argues, “would make the next few years the tightest period of funding in NHS history” whoever wins on July 4 and render “the dramatic recovery all are promising” inconceivable.

The revelation came as shadow health secretary Wes Streeting called on junior doctors to call off planned strikes and pledged he would start resolving the dispute on his first day in office.

He said he was “beyond furious” that the dispute was continuing although he also conceded that he would have liked a “more ambitious” social care policy in Labour’s manifesto, an indication of the tensions roiling even the party’s right over its paper-thin prospectus.

Mr Streeting called on voters not to give “matches back to the arsonist to finish the job,” as he suggested a Conservative election victory would be a “nightmare on Downing Street.”

It is a nightmare that the country looks unlikely to sign up for since Tory Party support is now at its lowest-ever level in opinion polling history.

Indeed, it is now in a fight to maintain itself in second place as the Reform Party has gained ground since the announcement that Nigel Farage had reappointed himself leader.

Top pundit John Curtice said that “every poll has reported a fall in Conservative support and nearly all the narrowing of the Conservative lead over Reform.

“So, what last week was an average eight point Conservative lead over Reform has now halved to just four points — and standing at just 20 per cent, Conservative support is now at its lowest ever in British polling history,” he added.

Backing for Labour is also drifting downwards, as some voters move towards the Greens and others may be attracted by Reform, particularly in the fabled “red wall” ex-industrial seats.

Reform chairman Richard Tice took aim at such voters today, claiming that “Reform is the real party of the workers, who have been abandoned by ‘café latte’ Labour.”

His proprietor, Mr Farage, worked the Conservative side of the field, saying right-wing Tories “are just in the wrong party” and predicting that turmoil within the Conservatives would only get worse with the hard right rebelling.

Trying to counter the Farage surge, former Tory minister and hard right leadership aspirant Robert Jenrick claimed that while he “sympathised with the frustrations” of voters attracted to Reform, failing to vote Tory could lead to an “elective dictatorship” by Labour.

Labour maintains a 17-point lead over the Conservatives in the latest poll, on 40 per cent to the Tories’ 23, with Reform up to 14 per cent.

Other surveys have put Reform level with or even ahead of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s party, although it is unlikely to win nearly as many seats.

But the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg said Reform’s “influence could yet prove dramatic and deadly for the Tories.”

Mr Curtice, with studied understatement, said that Mr Sunak “must be beginning to doubt his decision to call the election early.”

Liberals Empty Promises

It is not just the Tired Old Tories that are making empty promises this election, so are the Alberta Liberals. They suffer from the me too syndrome.

Liberal Leader Kevin Taft reiterated today his pledge for "an absolute cap on greenhouse gas emissions from all sources" within five years of becoming Alberta premier as part of a plan to control oilsands expansions, offer subsidies for carbon sequestration and bar new coal-power plants that don't use the cleanest technologies.The Liberal leader did not provide specifics on where emission targets would be set, but said he would work with industry to establish caps.

An industry that donates to the Liberal Party.

Liberal Leader Kevin Taft promised today to give the natural gas sector a break on royalties amid its current struggles, but squeeze more from the oilsands to rebalance Albertans' fair share of energy riches.

But he admitted he doesn't know how to tweak the rates Ed Stelmach's Conservatives have already announced, saying only that the Liberal goal is to somehow reap 20 per cent more from royalties.

And like the Tired Old Tories the Liberals lack any plan on how they will cap greenhouse gases.

One prominent environmentalist said she likes that the Liberals were planning quicker short-term steps than the Tories, but contended their agenda was "empty" on detail."They're all great statements, but you have got to outline some steps on how you're going to achieve (the reductions)," the Sierra Club's Lindsay Telfer said.

Yeah no need to have plan now, wait till we are the government then we will plan. Wait a minute I have heard that before.

And like the Tories they are good at recycling, announcements that are not much different than those announced by the Tories. And like the Tories they are calculator challenged when it comes to costing their promises.

Taft explained a plan his deputy leader Dave Taylor first released in October.

The Liberals would temporarily cap rent increases until new housing units get built, hire a provincial housing director to co-ordinate various cities' 10-year homelessness plans, and boost outreach services.

Taylor said the plan would likely cost hundreds of millions of dollars, but couldn't say exactly how much.

Like the mayors of Edmonton, Calgary and Red Deer, Ed Stelmach's Conservatives have also pledged to end homelessness in 10 years.

And they also don't follow their own play book when making election announcements.

Liberal Leader Kevin Taft envisioned a day when school closures were banned forever in Alberta - but then he was reminded his party plan is for only a three-year moratorium.

A few hours after announcing a plan for an "indefinite" halt today, Taft was forced to modify his proclamation, because his Liberal policy book promises the more temporary suspension on school closures.

Yep Liberals Tories same old story.

He may say he favours hard caps on greenhouse gasses, but Liberal Leader Kevin Taft and his party voted against motions to that effect when the subject came up in the legislature.

On April 10, 2007, members of the Liberal caucus voted against an NDP motion in favour of Kyoto- compliant hard caps on green house gas reductions. Liberal environment critic David Swann spoke against the motion.

“This highlights exactly what we have been saying about the Liberals and Conservatives in this campaign,” said Mason. “They talk a good game when they want your votes, but when push comes to shove – they support their financial backers in big oil and other large polluters.”

Mason also slammed the Liberals for continuing to call for an end to home heating rebates, noting that the Liberals want to take rebates away from families while subsidizing big oil for carbon capture projects.

“Alberta families will suffer,” said Mason. “The Liberal plan will particularly hurt tenants who pay their own heating bill, but live in homes that have not been retrofitted.”

“Kevin Taft’s ideas are not practical for average families. They simply don’t reflect the reality of the struggles Albertans go through to make ends meet.”

“The Liberals, like the Conservatives, put the needs of big oil over regular Albertans.”

SEE

Careful Of What You Ask For


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Alberta, Alberta Liberals,Alberta Election,

LABOUR ARE RED TORIES
How Starmer seized the moral advantage

While the Tories squabble over the Rwanda plan, the Labour leader declares that he will lead a “decade of national renewal”.

By Freddie Hayward
NEW STATESMAN

Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images

The backdrop to Keir Starmer’s speech today (12 December) could not have been more illustrative. While the Labour leader spoke in Buckinghamshire castigating the Conservative Party for allowing internal skirmishes to override their responsibilities as a government, Tory MPs ferreted around Westminster, deciding whether to put Rishi Sunak’s leadership at risk by voting down his Rwanda bill in the Commons this evening.

While the Tory party splinters into four or five factions, Starmer’s decision to deliver a speech away from Westminster was a smart way of showing that Labour will govern in the national interest. Whereas the Tories cannot even manage their own party. They are making it easy for Starmer. “While they’re swanning around, self-importantly, with their factions and their star chambers, fighting like rats in a sack, there’s a country out here that isn’t being governed,” he said.

The Labour leader ran through the government’s failures, describing the Rwanda plan – which would send asylum seekers to the central African country – as the pinnacle of its incompetence. It is not only a “gimmick”, he said, but a waste of money that could instead be spent bolstering the border force. Wasteful government is a core Labour attack line but here Starmer made a broader point. “After the sex scandals, the expenses scandals, the waste scandals, the contracts for friends, even in a crisis like the pandemic, people now think politics is about naked self-enrichment.”


Beyond the attacks on the government, this was a statement of values meant to draw a contrast between the two main parties – one at ease breaking international law, and the other led by a former director of prosecutions who put “expense-cheat politicians in jail”. As prime minister, Starmer claimed, he would abide by the law and restore probity to public life – a bar set so low by the government’s own standards.

That partly explains why there are so few areas that Labour is not willing to go up against the Conservatives. If you thought Keir Starmer’s opposition to high immigration was a one-off sop to the right, then his speech today suggested the opposite. It showed that lower immigration will be central to Labour’s programme. Whether it delivers on that is another matter, but Starmer’s opposition to wage-reducing, condition-suppressing, business-driven immigration is becoming more trenchant.

That tonal shift began with his speech to the Confederation of Business Industry last year when he condemned Britain’s “immigration dependency”. Today, he made explicit the connection between high immigration and the Tories “driving down the terms and conditions of the British people”. And yes, Starmer confirmed, Brexit was a vote for “lower immigration”. But he thinks it was also a vote for higher wages, better public services and the restoration of communities.

The problems that pockmark the public realm demand, Starmer said, a “decade of national renewal”. The alacrity with which Starmer can survey the fractures in the public services has always been the reason that he, and not the leader of the party in power for 13 years, is the more plausible “change” candidate. The government’s actions today, and for a long time, have furnished Starmer’s speech writers with copious material.

Starmer’s speech was not a policy programme, but a statement of values. And with the Conservative Party’s civil war as his background, it was one of his most comprehensive yet.

Liberals The New PC's

So suggests Gerry Nicolls who recently was fired from the National Citizens Coalition. It seems he is uber disappointed in the new Authoritarian Government of Harper the autarch. As result of his criticism of the Harpocrites, the invisible hand of the government reached out and touched the NCC which in return gave Gerry the boot.

Now Nicolls is suggesting a revival of the old Progressive Conservatives under the New Liberal Party of Dion. This of course has upset some Liberal bloggers, but frankly considering Dion's flip flops on issues like the war in Afghanistan and the Anti-Scab legislation, well if it walks like a PC and quacks like a PC it probably is a PC.

And think of it, if the Liberals became the new PC party Elizabeth May would join in a heartbeat and dissolve the Green Party into a new Progressive coalition with the Liberals.

The Progressive Conservative Party was cannibalized by the Alliance Party. The loss of the adjective “progressive” was more than grammatical. The heart was torn out of Canadian politics. The loss of the traditional, principled Progressive Conservative counter-weight to the ethically flexible Liberals has cost this country dearly.

After all the Progressives who came out of the PC's are now going Green.

See:

Elizabeth May and Red Tories

May Day For MacKay

Green Party

Elizabeth May

Peter MacKay


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Canada, Nova Scotia, Elizabet hMay, Peter MacKay, Green Party, politics, election, Conservatives
NCC, National Citizens Coalition, Gerry Nicolls,
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Stelmach Up The Middle

Ted Morton is scared. He announced yesterday that he was now the moderate candidate for leadership of the provincial PC's. With major endorsements from Hancock and Oberg and now Norris, Stelmach is gaining strength in numbers. And this scares Morton.

Morton tries to lure support from leadership rivals

With Dinning grabbing the majority of the votes and Stelmach’s support growing since the ballots were counted, Morton, who sits in the right end of the political spectrum, yesterday cast a wider net looking for Conservatives of all shades to join his campaign.

“To the supporters of the other candidates ... I’d be honoured to have your support,” he said.

“My goal has always been a broad, inclusive coalition that includes all Conservatives, red Tories, blue Tories, green Tories, back into our party.”

And although he has promised to build a party based on principle, at the end of the day, he will do what the Tory majority wants him to do, he said yesterday(MON).

“A Ted Morton government will be as Conservative or as Liberal or as moderate as our party wants it to be,” he said.

“The key to keeping a conservative coalition together ... means that no one fraction is going to get everything they want all the time, including myself.”

Yes I know I said that Stelmach was out of the race earlier however I have crunched the numbers and with Norris supporters added to them he has a chance to win. Mea Culpa and a nod to Ken Chapman.

Obviously the Morton camp has done the same. With Saturdays balloting based on Proportional voting, you chose first, second and third place, Stelmachs chances are now better than they looked on the weekend.

Take a look at Greg Farries Map and you will see why.





Mortons power is in the Socred stomping grounds of Southern Alberta. While Stelmachs support is now enhanced in Edmonton, and Northern Alberta (Oberg), and even with Obergs support in Calgary, which went Dinning red.

Dinning will not win the first ballot on Saturday, the forces in the PC's are united in a campaign of anybody but Dinning.

"I think that Jim Dinning is a nice man" but he's surrounded himself with the "Calgary mafia" and "back-room boys," Norris said, explaining why he didn't hitch his star to Dinning's campaign.


Dinning shot his load last week. And his numbers will not go up. His campaign is stalled thanks to Stelmach.Some of the Oberg support may go to Morton, but it is weak. Doerksons vote will go to Morton and Stelmach. McPhersons support goes to Stelmach.Rather the numbers say that Stelmach can come up the middle and win the second ballot. Add them up yourself.

Dinning 29,470 (30.2%)
Morton 25,614 (26.2%)
Stelmach 14,967 (15.3%)
Oberg 11,638 (11.9%)
Hancock 7,595 (7.8%)
Norris 6,789 (6.9%)
Doerksen 873 (0.9%)
McPherson 744 (0.8%)

Stelmach with support from Hancock, Oberg and Norris alone has 40,989. Which is why Morton is afraid, very afraid.Not only has he gotten support from the four, fifth and sixth place candidates, he is everyones favorite second choice on the three choice ballot next weekend. Morton and Dinning supporters all will vote him as second choice. So if there is no clear winner on the first ballot, Stelmach wins.

"Seventy per cent of our party rejected the establishment status quo of Jim Dinning on Saturday night and, given the preferential ballot system we'll be using, the real race is between Ed and myself," Mr. Morton said.

Dinning is claiming it's a two way fight between him and Morton.

Dinning has ruled out Stelmach as a contender and says Morton is his only challenger."I have a high regard for Ed Stelmach. I would love to have him as a right-hand person. He cares about Alberta, he's a smart guy. But clearly, I think that this has come down to a serious two-person race with two distinctly different choices."

I thought so do. But it ain't so. Stelmach seen as man to heal party torn over leadership vote

It's Stelmach up the middle. Which would be good forAlberta. Why? Well two little words; Harry Strom.

See:

Conservative Leadership Race

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