US Focus: Power and Irresponsibility

In the first of a series of member posts on US politics in the run up to the Presidential race next year, Young Fabian member Jonathan Bailey reflects on the current political battle over the US debt ceiling.

“With great power comes great responsibility” is one of those toe-curling American clichés. Watching the Republican tactics on the debt issue you cannot help but think that the right phrase should be “With some power comes great irresponsibility.”

Next week, the Federal government will reach its debt ceiling and without Congressional intervention will likely default. So what we can learn about opposition tactics from this impending disaster?

1) If you are on a bipartisan commission, never miss an opportunity to create division:

11 of the 18 members of the Bowles-Simpson bipartisan commission agreed to $4 trillion in spending cuts, and tax increases worth about half that level. Both sides dug in on principle and the 14 required votes were missed. Right now that 2:1 cuts-to-tax ratio looks pretty attractive even if some of the details do not.

2) If you want to make a name for yourself, re-define radical:

Congressman Paul Ryan’s budget with its ‘privatisation’ of Medicare and tax cuts did not capture mainstream support until Presidential-hopeful Newt Gingrich slammed it as being ‘radical’. Gingrich’s Presidential campaign never recovered , and the Ryan budget became the new Republican orthodoxy.

3) If you’re all opposing the same thing, oppose it harder:

With Paul Ryan ruling out a Presidential run, the other Republican candidates lined up to say ‘I agree with Paul’ before competing on how forcefully they could pledge to vote against an increase to the debt ceiling.

So far Sarah Palin is winning.

4) If your side is compromising, be a hero:

After House Speaker John Boehner and President Obama looked close to agreeing a compromise deal with around 3:1 spending cuts to tax increases, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor jumped in to sink the deal by blocking tax increases. Not content with that superhero move he had the closest thing to a punch-up with the President that the Secret Service would allow.

5) And whatever you do, don’t try to explain the complexities of the situation to the American people:

35% of Americans do not know enough about the debt ceiling issue to know whether it should be increased or not, and most Republicans are borrowing from the climate change debate by denying debt default is a problem. Inaccurate analogies are helpful too; Cameron had his line about ‘fixing the roof’ the Republicans have ‘maxing out your credit card.’

It still seems more likely than not that a deal will be done, but Republican obstructionism will have done significant damage to President Obama. The left is frustrated with his continued lack of fight and his wider policy agenda has been put on hold with the summer recess almost upon us.

Putting the global economy at risk is downright irresponsible, but so far the Republicans seem to be getting away with it.

What we need are “thinkers” and “do-ers”

On Tuesday last week the Young Fabians gathered in Parliament for our  ’new members reception’.  Membership has grown impressively this year but this year that we decided to take make this year’s event completely user friendly and help new members quickly convert membership into active involvement.

Hosted by Shadow Small Business Minister, Chuka Ummuna MP, and supported by A4e, our event was a chance for new members (as well as their friends) to mingle with Labour MPs and find out about getting involved with the Young Fabians’ current work.

That is why we said the reception was for “Thinkers and Do-ers”. The theme was deliberate.

Fabians and Young Fabians always hear the criticism that they are more focused on ‘pamphlet Labour’ than ‘leaflet Labour’. We don’t challenge that view enough. But there is an important challenge there too. The Labour movement, now more than ever, faces a generation that wants the opportunity to be both – thinkers and do-ers.

The rise of community blogs like Labourlist, Left Foot Forward, and our own Young Fabian Blog have shown just how broad the appetite for public policy discussion and debate is. Yet turning policy into practice, at every level finding ways to put ideas into effect, is a bigger challenge that needs tackling.

So new members who came to our reception came ready not just to hear about the events they can attend in the coming months, but to sign up to be involved in the various work that was showcased in the room:

• Our Health, Science and Society work involving our Technology and Society Network;
• Our Economy and Employment policy develop group and our Future of Finance Network;
• Our International policy work and our Middle East Programme;
• Our work looking at issues facing the Next Generation;
• Our developing work with schools;  and
• Ways to involve more members in our Anticipations magazine and this blog.

Many of these are already member-led initiatives and we’re eager to see that grow and develop.

Importantly new members also brought with them a flood of exciting new ideas which we should help new members realise in the coming months.

Special thanks should go to Young Fabians member Mark Hornsey for all his help in putting together the reception this year.

Vincenzo Rampulla is Executive Officer without Portfolio on the Young Fabian Executive.

• If you have ideas, want more information or want to get involved in any of the above then please get in touch or use the comment section below.

Our submission to Peter Hain’s Refounding Labour consultation – let us know your thoughts

As Labour’s national executive committee is all set to propose a path forward for reform of the Party, and with the announcement of Iain McNicol as Labour’s new general secretary, the Young Fabians today publish our submission to Peter Hain’s consultation on Labour Party reform.

Click here to read the submission.

The Young Fabian submission offers ideas on:

• New styles of campaigning and organisation
• Becoming a true national party
• Improving Labour’s policy-making process
• Innovations in YF member-led policy development
• Membership growth – and utilising Labour’s affiliates, like the Fabian Society
• Developing the highest quality CLPs

Young Fabians have been working on these issues for three years since our delegation to Ohio to campaign for Barack Obama. We published our ‘lessons learnt’ from the ground campaign shortly after our return. Last year we ran a member-led special project group called ‘Transforming our Party’, which built upon young people’s experiences with the Labour Party to develop ideas to revolutionise the way Labour functions.

You can read more about all this work here.

We wish Labour’s NEC well. But this is a responsibility for everyone with a stake in Labour’s – and the country’s future – from parliamentary leadership to brand new Young Fabian members. It is not an easy task, and will require both patience and a willingness to experiment. I for one believe we can do this.

Please let us know your thoughts on our submission, and the consultation more generally by leaving a comment below.

Is Britain constitutionally challenged?

In this guest post, Shadow Justice Secretary Sadiq Khan MP, sets the scene for a speech he will give tomorrow on the British constitution at a joint Young Fabians/Society of Labour Lawyers event in London.

Labour’s 13 years in power were a period of major constitutional change for Britain – devolution for Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and London; introduction of the Human Rights Act and the Freedom of Information Act, creation of a Supreme Court; separation of the senior judiciary from our second chamber; and the removal of all but 92 hereditary peers from the House of Lords. The list goes on.

But while our record stands tall, I also recognise that we left some areas of constitutional change unfinished.

We’re now faced with a government who are playing with our constitution in a way which is not in the nation’s best interests, but is simply about preserving the harmony of the coalition.

Parliament length is being fixed at five years, boundaries are being re-drawn and the number of MPs reduced by 50 – all to favour one, or both, of the coalition partners, riding roughshod over our constitution. Other issues which are contentious between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats have been kicked into the long-grass – again, to ensure harmony within the government rather than what is in the country’s best interests.

Our constitution deserves better than changes made simply to satisfy the short-term, partisan needs of this coalition.

A future Labour Government will be left with the challenge of putting the pieces back together and restoring public confidence in our constitution. But we must also continue the modernisation of our democratic structures that we started when in power – looking at improving and widening participation in democracy, devolving of power and whether the country might be better served by a written constitution.

Rt. Hon Sadiq Khan MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Justice (with special responsibility for constitutional reform)

NHS reforms lanced by a Boyle

This week the Young Fabians Science and Society Network met with John Healey, Shadow Secretary of State for Health, to share our views on the latest NHS reform proposals and to hear his on how Labour plans to defend the NHS.

The National Health Service remains at the heart of British identity, embodying the best of our nation’s political and social values. Health Secretary Andrew Lansley’s plans, even in their current watered down version, threaten the future of an organisation that regularly polls as more popular than either the creation of the modern welfare system or the end of World War II.

The NHS was 63 years old on Tuesday, having starting life when Nye Bevan opened Manchester’s Park Hospital in 1948. Since 1997, when Labour gained power, it has had its best years: funding was trebled under Labour; 90,000 new nurses were added; and waiting lists were radically reduced. In the face of a sustained trend of NHS improvement, Lansley is proposing a reckless revolution that vexes the medical establishment.

Sir Roger Boyle, government health ‘Tsar’ and National Director of Heart Disease, has just announced his retirement in disgust at the Tory plans. Boyle was on the Today programme this week. He has worked under six health ministers of different political stripes but simply felt he could not continue in his role as the government voluntarily places massive extra strain on the NHS at a time when it is ill-suited to take it.

Given the current fiscal environment, the coming years were always going to be extremely difficult for the NHS. This would be no different were Labour still in power. What worries me and Boyle is that the Tory-led government is choosing this most inopportune of moments to ratchet up the pressure on the NHS by forcing through a full scale organisational resign. Never mind that the Tory government won power on a promise to end top-down reorganisation of the NHS – you could see this one from space.

Boyle says that “he feels in his bones that the current plans are not correct”.

Me too.

Given the financial squeeze on all aspects of healthcare delivery, we should be maintaining and supporting existing structures to ensure stability and continuation of services. Instead, Lansley is breaking up the organisational infrastructure in the face of strong opposition from medical and patient groups. Even if you think the structural reforms are in themselves good- and I don’t- this is certainly not the right time to be implementing them.

At a time of unprecedented financial pressure on the NHS, we should be perusing a policy of progress through gradual evolution (quite Fabian that) rather than opting to restructure when this inevitably means NHS staff will take their eyes off the ball and start to fear for their jobs.

Daniel Bamford is Networks Officer for the Young Fabians.

Reviving the Fabians: What the new General Secretary must do

The selection of a new General Secretary is an important juncture for the Fabian Society. It is a chance to revisit our purpose and vision, refresh the way we do things and re-fit the organisation to the changing context in which it operates.

But for this opportunity to be fully realised, Andrew Harrop, who has been recently appointed as the Society’s new General Secretary, needs to be clear about the severity and nature of the challenges that we face.

We exist in a world in which many people have given up on politics, in which the social equality which the Society was founded to promote is facing its biggest onslaught for a generation, and in which Labour appears powerless against a Coalition Government which is both more radical and politically more stable than anyone thought possible a year ago. At the same time, the Society risks being marginalised as the labour movement seeks to rebuild, cast as a fuddy-duddy irrelevance that cannot provide the kind of transformative ideas the party needs.

More immediate crises – the precarious finances of the organisation, for example – need to be addressed as part of a much more fundamental stock-take that asks what the Fabian Society is for, where we want to get to and how we need to change in order to get there.

Over the next three years the Fabian Society needs to rediscover its ‘USP’ – its strengths and the things that set it apart – and then build on it. We are never going to be all things to all people. We need to know who we are and then endeavour to be really excellent at it. Our three unique characteristics also represent three important opportunities: our membership, our substance, and our independence.

Member-led

First and foremost the Society is a members-led organisation. But this needs to become something we actually do/live/breath rather than just say. Our members have a wealth of talents – specialist knowledge and skills, networks that extend far beyond the society’s reach, access to the movement outside London – and need to be given far more opportunities to use them.

We need to grow our membership across three dimensions: (1) by recruiting more members in absolute terms, (2) by diversifying our membership across age, location, gender and ethnicity and (3) by empowering members to engage more deeply with the Society and its activities.

Becoming a truly ‘members-led organisation’ is not only a way to have a greater influence and to draw on the creativity, energy and ideas of a greater number, it is also the smart way to expand Society activities at low cost. In other words we need ‘less top, more bottom.’ By capitalising on our greatest untapped asset the Society would at the same time demonstrate how the Fabian Society is not diametrically opposed to the Blue Labour/community organising zeitgeist, but rather can play a part in realising the vision of a revitalised grassroots movement.

Intellectually Substantial

Secondly, the Fabian Society is substantial and intellectual, and should be unashamedly so. Rather than combating accusations of wonkish irrelevance by dumbing down or taking a more populist approach, we should recognise that substance and new ideas is what the movement is crying out for, and the Fabian Society is better placed than anyone to provide it.

It is precisely our ability to offer big, singular new directions and ideas that will prevent us from becoming marginal or irrelevant. It is for this same reason that we should fight the urge to take a scattergun approach to our published outputs, events and media presence. Clear themes and substantial projects should continue to be the modus operandi. However, this should not necessitate an exclusive and centralised command and control approach. The Society could do far more to democratise involvement and ‘crowd source’ inputs from its members.

Affiliated but independent

Finally the Society’s USP rests on being affiliated to, but not part of, the Labour Party. This affords us an unequalled level of access to the party leadership and influence over parliamentarians. But it also means that we can be critical, objective and take risks in a way that the party itself is often unwilling or incapable of doing. While the Labour Party was in power the Society had one type of role to play. Now we have entered a period of opposition, another role is demanded of us. We need to rediscover an ‘opposition voice’ that is bolder in its vision for the left and more critical of the Coalition.

So the focus of the new General Secretary should be to help us as a Society rediscover who we are and what makes us unique, and then to focus on becoming really good at it. But there is little time for naval-gazing and time is of the essence. The next three years takes us almost to the next election, meaning internal reform must be front-loaded and efficiently managed.

The best of luck to Andrew as he takes the helm at an important and potentially exciting time in our history as an organisation.

Claire Leigh is Treasurer of the Young Fabians and was shortlisted for the position of Fabian Society General Secretary.

Cameron: a reluctant Captain

What kind of Prime Minister is David Cameron? What does it matter for the future of his premiership?

The ongoing saga surrounding the passage of the Health and Social Care Bill has unwittingly revealed a great deal about the sort of Prime Minister David Cameron was, and the sort he is changing into. As the story of NHS reform has unfolded we have witnessed his transformation from Major-General, happy to oversee his ministers’ march against the opposition from a safe distance, into hands-on Captain, at the heart of the fight getting bruised and burned along with the rest of his government.

Cameron was undoubtedly sensitive to the fact that he entered office in a climate of hostility towards the “old politics” and, forced into a shotgun marriage with the bright young face of the “new politics”, was encouraged to conduct himself differently from his predecessors. According to the media narrative, Gordon Brown was the Machiavellian tyrant, who enforced his will by tantrum and the occasional thrown telephone; Tony Blair was the obsessive centraliser, the king of sofa government who selfishly prised his Ministers’ fingers off the levers of power; in contrast, Cameron chose to become chairman, rather than captain of his Cabinet.  He allowed his ministers plenty of freedom to run their own departments, an arrangement closely aligned to the ideal of Prime Minister as “first among equals”.

But it also had its costs. Many of the reforms contained within the Health and Social Care Bill appear to have been concocted by the Andrew Lansley, Secretary of State for Health, with little input from Cameron. Unison denounced the bill as a Lansley “vanity project”, and it is certainly true that some of his proposed reforms- especially those encouraging a competitive market in healthcare provision- did not reflect the policy goals of the Conservatives as outlined in their manifesto.

In recent weeks, Lansley has been heavily criticised for the Bill. But so has Cameron for letting his minister ‘off the leash’, and allowing poorly conceived ideas to escape the secrecy of the Cabinet and damage the coalition’s reputation. This led to embarrassing scenes for both men when Cameron publicly overruled Lansley on the pace of reform, and subsequently initiated a “listening exercise” on the legislation. The experience forced the Prime Minister to dive headfirst into the detail of the bill to restore the image of calm control he has so patiently cultivated.

His reputation as a domestic legislator may now sink or swim on the passage of the Health and Social Welfare Bill, as Blair’s did with the battle over academies six years ago.

There is nothing wrong with Cameron’s style of government. He is exhibiting a mature attitude by granting his ministers the freedom to develop policies within their own departments. However, he is now aware of the risks involved in letting Ministers’ pet projects wriggle from his grip.

No matter who the original culprit is, the PM is the one in the firing line when policies go awry.

Louie Woodall is a Young Fabian Member and Assistant Editor of the Young Fabian blog.

Happy Birthday NHS, you might not survive to see 64

Ahead of tomorrow’s Young Fabian Science and Society Network event with Shadow Health Secretary, John Healey, Young Fabian member Amanjit Jhund argues the Government’s reforms are just cuts by any other name.

On Tuesday the NHS turns 63. It’s a time for many of us to celebrate: for most of us it is difficult to imagine life without it.

Yet the Health and Social Care Bill is an attack on the NHS on an unprecedented scale. The concerns for many on the left and in the medical community is that while the aims of the coalition proposals are laudable they are simply being used to mask both spending cuts within the service and the increased privatisation of the NHS.

In fact,  many of the GPs that I have spoken to are fully aware that their budgets for commissioning will only be a fraction of those administered by Primary Care Trusts currently. One GP told me recently that “it’s just a way of pushing through cuts”. While most GPs are pragmatic about the changes and will do their best for their patients no matter which system they have to work within, it is vital that the coalition are held to account on this issue.

With David Cameron purporting to defend the NHS, we must expose the hypocrisy of his words as he presides over changes that will not only slash budgets but will also take the ‘N’ out of ‘NHS’.

Happy 63rd birthday NHS. I just hope you’re still around when I’m 63.

Further reading:

• NHS needs evolution, not Tory revolution
• Briefing: Exposing the continuing flaws in the NHS reorganisation
• NHS forum GP admits private patient doubts

Introducing our blog’s new Assistant Editor

This is just a quick post to let you know we’ve appointed an Assistant Editor to help me with the blog: Louie Woodall.

As recently as two years ago, the Young Fabians didn’t have a blog. Since then it has evolved from a place where Exec members and notable guest contributors occasionally published their thoughts (I can’t begin to explain some of the difficulties in sourcing regular content for the blog in the early days), to a space where members, the Executive and others regularly post their views on a broad range of topics. It is in keeping with this evolution that Louie will support me as a Young Fabian member, and with no formal position on the Executive committee.

Louie has previously written for the blog and stood for the special co-opted position of web officer we recently advertised, losing out to Hetty Wood. As an Executive Committee this year, we’ve tried to harness the enthusiasm and ideas of members who have unsuccessfully stood for co-option – my colleague Anna-Joy Rickard has led the way by developing a network of membership ambassadors, for example.

Here’s Louie in his own words:

Louie is an undergraduate student taking Modern History and Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London. Since joining the Young Fabians, Louie has enjoyed contributing to the 2010 Policy Commissions and the YF Blog, and been encouraged to increase his level of involvement in political communications.

This year, he volunteered for the Yes! AV campaign in his native town of Cheltenham and was elected Communications Officer for RHUL’s RAG society. Louie is an enthusiastic writer and blogger, and besides contributing to the Young Fabians writes for E-IR, a global forum for students of International Relations and all those interested in world politics.