How to win elections Tory style: Lesson 1 - Do a deal

On June 8th we went to the polls to elect a new government. The old one was just weeks over 2 years old, 2/5ths of its way through a 5-year fixed term parliament. So why was an election needed? Because, said Theresa May on the steps of Downing Street on April 18th, she needed a strong mandate to negotiate BREXIT after last year's EU Referendum result.

So did the 2017 General Election result provide that? No it didn't! The PM managed to turn a 330 seat Conservative government from 2015 into a 317 seat Conservative result, losing 13 seats along the way and resulting in a hung parliament in which no party has a majority.

So, having been made to look silly by the voters, what does the PM do next? She touts around to find a small party that want to prop up her government. Labour won't do, as the second largest party with 262 seats (up 30 since 2015) they are now an opposition force to be reckoned with.

The LibDems who, having lost 49 seats in 2015 leaving them with just 8, made a small comeback and ended up with 12, are still suffering burned fingers from the 2010-15 coalition with the Tories, which saw their popularity plummet after supporting measures such as hiking university fees, so have no wish to repeat the experience.

The SNP (often referred to as tartan Tories) managed to lose 21 of the 50 seats they took in 2015, but as there are huge differences between the SNP and the Tories on BREXIT, the PM had no chance of making an alliance there.

So who does that leave? The Green Party? One MP and ideologically opposed to the Tories. Or UKIP who managed not to take a single seat at Westminster, so they are out of the running. That leaves just the Northern Ireland parties.

Now here's a problem: under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement in which (in 1998) peace was established in NI after decades of violence on both sides, both the UK and Irish governments are committed to remaining absolutely neutral in respect of NI politics. To do otherwise breaks the GFA and risks plunging NI back into the sort of sectarian violence which was rife from 1969 onwards. So concerned about breaking the peace agreement was the Irish Taoiseach, Enda Kennedy, that he contacted the PM to warn her about the danger.

So, the PM has a choice: protect the peace in NI by not doing a deal with either of the two NI parties that have seats in Westminster or make a deal and risk the peace and safety of citizens there. One of the two NI parties, Sinn Fein, has not previously taken up its seats at Westminster as a protest against both taking the oath to the British Crown and the division of Ireland (currently they have 7 seats); the other, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) does. Their 10 seats would prove valuable to the Tories as an agreement with them would just give the PM a working majority of 1 (326 is the winning level).  Those of us over a certain age will remember the DUP during the Troubles as the party founded and led by Rev Ian Paisley.

In pursuit of this majority the PM sought talks with the DUP aimed at them providing support for her minority government. The DUP, realising that they had the PM over a barrel, have made this into a quite long and drawn out affair, reports indicating two steps forward one step back, until today, when it was announced that the Tories and the DUP have reached a confidence and supply arrangement agreement whereby the DUP will support the Tories in Westminster.

Why should this worry us? Well firstly, the DUP has a much harder line on many of the issues that are accepted in the rest of the UK but that they have managed to block in NI. For instance, the party has repeatedly vetoed marriage equality for same-sex couples in Northern Ireland and is associated with a string of homophobic comments, including branding LGBT people as disgusting and an abomination. They have also opposed changes to the abortion laws in NI which prevent women from having terminations even in cases of rape, incest or severe foetal abnormalities, claiming that their Christian values prevent support for such abortions.  This makes abortion a criminal offence for women, and is a breach of human rights legislation. The DUP also support the teaching of creationism rather than evolution in schools, have a history of climate change denial, whilst issues such as HIV seem to be a mystery to them. Their track record in NI government leaves something to be desired too, as the green energy scheme introduced in 2012 which was budgeted to cost £25m actually collapsed earlier this year, having cost over £500m over its 5 year lifespan. More recently, during the 2016 EU Referendum, the majority of voters in NI voted remain but the DUP are strongly pro-leave, a situation which, it is feared, could further destabilise the peace process and lead to a hard border being reinstated between NI and the Republic of Ireland.

Now let's look at the voting figures: the Tories in the 2017 GE polled 13,636,690 votes, the DUP polled 292,316 votes. To elicit its support for the minority government, the Tories had to make a big concession to the DUP. Today's announcement is that the concession is by way of a payment of £1 billion for NI, which has been broken down by allocation in a publication available on the UK government website (which equates to a cost of £3492 per DUP vote). This from a government which has consistently stated there is no magic money tree to pay for essential services or pay increases for public sector workers. Welsh Labour leader Carwyn Jones expressed his disgust at the deal, whilst the Tory Scottish Secretary David Mundell who had previously stated that funding made to NI to facilitate the deal would unlock funds for Scotland too under the Barnett formula, now finds that it is now being said isn't the case. Will he stand by his earlier statement to block any settlement that does not follow the Barnett formula? We shall see.

Still to come is a possible legal challenge as it was reported on June 20th, that a legal team were preparing to apply for judicial review of Tory-DUP pact on grounds that it breaches the Good Friday agreement.

Meanwhile, Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams has said that the agreement threatens the NI peace agreement and that "Sinn Fein will resolutely oppose any attempt to give preferential treatment to British forces, either in terms of legacy or the provision of public services." Another voice warning that a coalition with the DUP will put the fragile peace at risk was former Tory PM Sir John Major, who said, a deal with the DUP could risk alienating armed republicans and loyalists, and cause resentment in other parts of the UK if the government made promises to spend large amounts of public money. The PM has apparently ignored them both.

Grenfell Tower fire, false information refuted

Since the tragic fire which consumed Grenfell Tower earlier this month and led to a large number of known deaths (79 confirmed at the time of writing) and many others missing or made homeless, there has been circulating on social media an image of several claims blaming Labour politicians for the catastrophe. Despite clear evidence to the contrary, there are those who persist in circulating this nonsense, and since one person on Twitter challenged those of us who said it was twaddle to prove it, this is my response to his challenge.

Let's begin by looking at the whole image (click to see a larger version)

Now let's look at each point bit by bit:

Firstly, the Grenfell Tower was commissioned by Kensington and Chelsea council as social / council housing, not by the incumbent government.  The current local authority was first elected in 1964, a year before formally coming into its powers and prior to the creation of the London Borough of Kensington and Chelsea on 1 April 1965. It seems to have been under Tory control since it was created.

The building was designed in 1967, but construction did not begin until 1972, and it was completed in 1974. The govt in power at the time is irrelevant (Tories 1970-1974) in that they were not directly involved in the decision making process of building this tower block.

In fact, tower blocks built in London at the time were constructed under the requirements of the London Building Act 1939, specifically Section 20, which imposed extra fire safety measures on their design.  You might be interested to know that laws to protect London against fire were first drafted by Sir Christopher Wren in 1667 in the aftermath of the Great Fire of London and were designed to prevent a repeat catastrophe. The LBA 1939 was amended over time until it was superseded by national Building Regulations in the mid-1980s (Tory govt under Margaret Thatcher) and Sections 20 and 21 of the London Building (Amendment) Act 1939 was repealed in January 2013 (Tory govt under David Cameron.)

The refurbishment of  Grenfell Tower was agreed by the Kensington and Chelsea Council in accord with the block's management company, Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation in 2012 (Tory/LibDem coalition govt under David Cameron) but work was deferred until 2014 as the original contractor tender came in over budget and a new contractor had to be found within the £10m agreed funding. The work was completed in 2016 but according to the council's own planning portal was still at not approved status, as reported by Metro on 21 June 2017.

What the relevance of this might be to the Grenfell fire is a bit of a mystery but here we go... 

In 2008 under the 2005-2010 Labour government there were three Housing Ministers:

Yvette Cooper up to 24 January 2008

Caroline Flint between 24 January & 3 October 2008

Margaret Beckett October 2008 onwards

Sadiq Khan was MP for Tooting from 2005 - 2016. At no time was he the Minister for Housing. He served as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government from 5 October 2008. 

During his time as Mayor of London (elected 2016) Khan has not produced a report saying the fire service did not need further funding. His predecessor, Boris Johnson (Tory), in February 2016 stated his intention to overule the vote by the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority (LFEPA) not to scrap thirteen London fire engines. Boris’s earlier cuts – implemented in 2014 – closed 10 fire stations, with the loss of 552 firefighters’ jobs.  In August 2016 Sadiq Khan announced he was commissioning a review of London's fire service provision to assess staffing and budgetary needs, the first draft was published for consultation in December 2016. 

Oh dear, guilty by association eh?  Let's check the facts...

Emma Dent Coad was elected to Kensington and Chelsea London Borough Council in 2006, representing Golborne ward. She is a member of the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority (LFEPA) and was a council-appointed board member of Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation from 2008 to 31 October 2012 (that's two years before the contract was finalised in case you hadn't noticed.)

It is worth mentioning here the makeup of the TMO's Board of Directors, which should comprise eight elected tenant and leaseholder members, four appointed Councillor members and three independent appointed other members.  Interestingly, in some of the years I checked there were only two elected Councillors on the Board, the other two Council appointees being non-councillor housing consultants, whilst the most recent listing (retrieved 14 June 2017) since removed from the TMO website (but still visible on the Way Back Machine) shows just eight residents, two councillors and three independent members.

Another astonishingly nonsensical claim is this one about the cladding on the outside of the tower. Where do I begin with this one?!  Ed Miliband did hold the new post of Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change from 2008 to 2010, and his department's brief was to look at how to protect against climate change. The EU's Climate Change requirements resulted in the UK's Climate Change Act 2008, which is part of the government’s plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The two main government departments responsible are the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) – leading on the policy for reducing emissions (mitigation) and the Department for Environment and Rural Affairs (Defra) – leading on the adaptation policy.  The departments' brief was to provide broad outlines on how to achieve the emission targets, not to specify individual actions down to the level of selecting what type of insulation to fit to a tower block! 

As this cladding is banned in both the EU and the USA, and in the UK as well as confirmed by the Chancellor, Philip Hammond, speaking to Andrew Marr, the proper question should be why was it used at all, especially given that its manufacturers themselves say it should not be used on a building over 10 metres (32 feet) high. Rather than aim ridiculous accusations at Miliband, why not ask the TMO, the Council, the Contractor and the Installer why they allowed the use of this material?  Are the UK's Building Regulations fit for purpose? It has been reported recently in the media that the last review of them was over 11 years ago, and a call was made just two days ago by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) for the government to begin immediately its much-delayed review of Approved Document B on fire safety in the building regulations following the Grenfell Tower fire. 

Yes, it said "much-delayed".  The review which was promised 4 years ago by the then Secretary of State, after a previous fire in the Lakanal House tower block in Camberwell where 6 people died, has since been deferred again, most recently last year by Gavin Barwell who lost his seat in the recent General Election and who is now the Prime Minister's Chief of Staff. As recently as March 2017 the Fire Risk Management Journal carried an article stating that, "Experts have warned that a government delay in reviewing building regulations could be endangering tower blocks throughout the UK."  So more questions need to be asked of this government as to why this review has not been carried out yet! 

This comment beggars belief...  the fire itself may have been an accident, but the conditions which allowed it to happen were not. They were deliberate decisions taken to fit a type of cladding which was highly flammable, which is allegedly banned for use in the UK, and in the resulting fire people died. As yet we still do not know how many people have died in total, and indeed due to the severity of the conflagration we may never actually know the final total. In a building containing 124 flats, most of which appear to have housed more than one person, the estimates are for a total occupancy level of between 400-600 people.  What we do know so far is the number of fatalities announced and the number of families in temporary housing, but that does not appear to account for all those who occupied the building.  That Kensington and Chelsea council were singularly inept in their handling of the immediate situation and that the government's response was no better, are both issues which have caused righteous anger amongst both those directly affected and those of us observing from afar. 

People affected by a civil disaster who are then apparently abandoned by the council and the government have every right to be angry, they have every right to expect better support, and they have every right to demand answers to what went wrong and why they lost their homes and their loved ones. The emergency services response was beyond reproach, and the volunteers who stepped up were stalwarts, providing support, essentials, shelter, clothing and food in the aftermath. But there needs to be hard questions asked of the council and the government. Why, for instance, was military support not offered?  The UK's army have vast experience in helping with disasters around the world, they have administrators, engineers, temporary accommodation and vital skills that could have been used to help ease the situation for many of those who survived. Yet people were left to cope by themselves or help each other with no other authority to turn to. 

As to the comment about the hard left motivating people, this is utter fantasy. It is a construct of the establishment and media designed to frighten people who really ought to know better. It is a revisiting of the sort of McCarthyism rife in the 1950's in the USA, where witch-hunts against alleged communism abounded. It is as ridiculous an idea now as it was then, probably more so, given that all political parties have moved to the right since the 1950's, and what is now regarded as left-wing in the UK is actually middle of the road normal policy in many other European countries and would have been here in previous decades. (No I will not develop this further here, but it may be the subject of a future blog post when I have nothing else to do on a future Sunday evening!)

Oh dear! This is just such a silly comment that it hardly warrants a response. Clearly the person making it has no real understanding of fascism, nor of the way in which the media (broadcast and in print) attempts to manipulate the way that people think. To consider those who are righteously angry against a great wrong having been done to fellow citizens as fascists shows how successful media brainwashing actually is. 

Well, if you have read this far,  I hope you found it useful in providing information to rebut the false claims in images like the one I started with. If you want to read another rebuttal of a different set of equally stupid claims you can find one on the Another Angry Voice blog here.  Meanwhile, I do hope that the person who challenged me to prove the image was codswallop is reading this.

This extraordinary general election

We are approaching what is probably the most important election of our lifetimes, so it saddens me immensely when I hear voters say they don't want to hear about election issues, or that they have no interest in politics, whilst political decisions affect every aspect of their lives from birth to death and all the bits in between.

Part of the cause of that lack of interest or apathy or whatever it is, I feel, is down to the behaviour of a large number of politicians of all parties over several decades, who have shown that there is no real difference between them, who have all jumped onto the Westminster gravy train and exploited the system for themselves. Whether that was the expenses scandal, or flipping homes to benefit from offsets, or heavily subsidised catering and drinks in the Houses of Parliament, or lucrative consultancy positions with businesses seeking to influence government, or a comfy seat on a corporate board on standing down from politics, or even an elevation into the upper chamber with a life peerage: all of these have made politicians toxic in the eyes of many voters.

What we have now are several parties which appear to still be operating on that same basis, and one (Labour) which has a change of leader and which is actually proposing a different path for the country. There is still work to do to make changes within the "political class", but I think this is the first chance we as voters have had since 1945 to really call our elected representatives to account and make significant improvements to life for ordinary people.

If you look at the proposals being put forward by both of the two major parties, one set is driven by austerity and privatisation, the other is driven by people and investment.  On Brexit, which seems to be the whole reason for us having yet another election anyhow, you will have a team of David Davis, Liam Fox and Boris Johnson for a Tory govt., or the superbly qualified Sir Kier Starmer QC, Emily Thornberry and Barry Gardiner for a Labour govt. It is not, as the PM keeps stating, going to be "me or Corbyn" doing those talks. I think that last year's Referendum result was a wake-up call for many people who have just ticked along, coping as we tend to do, getting by with some grumbles and our usual British stoicism.

The divisions caused by the close Referendum result, the realisation by younger people that their future has been changed irrevocably, and the fear that somehow we have released from a bottle a genie with malicious intent, seems to have activated the electorate in a way not seen by most of us before. That the cuts to our public services have been brutal is undeniable, that those cuts have impacted on how the safety and security of the country is managed is also undeniable, and that we have endured terror attacks in London and Manchester should be enough to shake us out of any complacency we feel about having a Tory govt. The cuts to police and security services over the last seven years have, in the words of retired and serving police officers, led to a position where they are no longer able to effectively do the job we expect of them and keep us safe. Those cuts are down to the decisions taken by the Tory govt, the Tory PM, and the Tory Home Secretary. It would have been very easy for people to be frightened into more of the same: the media expound constantly that the Tories are the party for strength and security, but voters are no longer being taken in by that rhetoric. The cuts since 2010, that have led to where we are now, were done by a Tory govt. and people know it, and are not happy with this situation. 

I have been a political activist all my life. I worked for two different trades unions and saw how working people were treated by a whole raft of different companies, large and small. I served on an Employment Appeal Tribunal for a while, sat on a trades council for a longer period, and worked with various groups and on various campaigns both as a member of the Labour Party and outside it. I left Labour under Kinnock as I didn't agree with the direction the party was going under him and Mandelson, and didn't feel able to rejoin under Blair's New Labour as the party inched further to the right under its neo-liberal policies such as PFI, although to give the Blair govt. credit they did actually do some good work in respect of families and children especially, but totally lost public credibility with the Iraq War.

From the late 1980's I was not party politically active until two years ago, when Jeremy Corbyn announced he was running for the party leadership and I rejoined Labour. I remembered his campaigning in London when I lived and worked there, his stance against apartheid and fighting against miscarriages of justice. He has never, in all his 30+ years as an MP, changed from being the highly principled and very honest man he was back then, and I have no reason to think he will change now.

But, you might say, he is just one man... and yes that's true, but he also has tremendous support within the party and (although the press would have you think otherwise) amongst Labour MPs. Also, in 2015 there were a number of newly elected Labour MPs who came from ordinary working backgrounds rather than being more privileged. They are people who had "proper jobs" before standing for election, not those who worked as special advisors (spads) to MPs, so they are more grounded, they relate to the lives and experiences of voters, and will help to bring about the changes we need to see.

All of this - despite the tragedies of recent weeks - has given me hope that we will see a change for the better. That people who have seen the cuts bite into public services, schools, police, health, etc. over the last seven years, have finally reached the point where they are saying, "ENOUGH!" and I hope they will vote for change, vote against more of the same Tory austerity, and will vote for a Labour government to put things right.