I am unable to be at conference (I find having to hold down a full-time job something of a hindrance in terms of being able to be as active politically as I would want). I have never spoken at annual conference and it may well be that I never will but if I were to speak this year this is what I would say:
Mike Ion
Wrekin CLP
Conference
When Labour took office in 1997, Britain was suffering from what Tony Blair later described as a ‘progressive deficit.’ Some twelve years on and Gordon Brown recognises that today’s Labour party needs to renew and rebuild if it is to avoid its own ‘progressive deficit.’ What Gordon recognises– unlike David Cameron and the Tories - is that ‘change for change’s sake’ is not enough. The forthcoming election will be one of ‘big choices’, one that will shape the future direction of our nation for the next 20-30 years. It is for this reason that we have to be bold as a movement; bold in our ambition and bold in our strategy for how we achieve it.
Most of us here today joined the Labour party to help change the world not to change the minutes of the previous meeting! In seeking further change for the future however we must not forget what lies in store if we fail and surrender that future to Cameron’s Tories. We must not forget that the public sector experienced massive, near-fatal under-investment during 18 years of Tory rule in the 1980s and 1990s. The return of a Tory government would inevitably see the return of a two-tier system in terms of public services with, for example, the ‘best’ schools being either private or in the most affluent areas and access to the best healthcare determined not by need but by wealth. Let us remember that under the Tories the highest crime areas were in the lowest-income neighbourhoods; and public transport was most deficient in serving the most deprived housing estates. In Cameron’s Britain the affluent and the well educated will be given the choice to buy their way out of failing or inadequate provision and universal services will be replaced by services for the poor which will inevitably result in poor services.
Yet still the real challenge to the continuation of the pursuit of a progressive political agenda comes not from a resurgent Tory party but from the defeatists, pessimists and cynics that exist within our own movement. If Labour is to secure an unprecedented fourth term then it must urgently set about renewing itself, its message and its organisation. A renewed party needs to reflect the aspirations of ordinary people but it also needs to be realistic about the challenges that lie ahead. Ambition, hope and aspiration are far more appealing than a constant reciting of the achievements of the past ten years - telling the electorate that things are much better than they were in 1997 is the political equivalent of living in the past.
So if a fourth term is to be achieved Labour must continue with its progressive reform package, stop fretting about the opinion polls and how often Gordon smiles and above all else it must not (as it has so often done in the past) end up defeating itself.
Thank you
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Monday, September 07, 2009
scrap hospital car parking charges
More than half of cancer patients do not get free or discounted parking on hospital visits, contrary to government guidelines according to a poll carried out by Macmillan Cancer Support.
The founding principle of the NHS was that it would offer free-at-the-point-of-delivery healthcare. Surely this should apply whether you go to hospital as a patient, as a visitor or a member of staff. It's simply not fair to expect patients or visitors to have to pay when they come to hospital, when they may be suffering personal anxiety, stress or grief. For this reason I welcomed last year's announcement by the Scottish government (following on from a similar announcement by the Welsh Assembly earlier in the same year) to scrap car parking charges at the vast majority of its hospitals - 3 hospitals will be exempt because of PFI agreements and please don't get me started on that one!
It is hugely disappointing that the DoH does not believe it would be a "sensible use of limited resources" to subsidise car parking at hospitals in England. Really? The NHS ended this financial year with a £1.75 billion surplus, surely it would not be unreasonable to use a small amount of this total surplus to offset the £95 million that NHS Trusts took from car parking charges in 2006-2007?Government guidelines on car parking charges "strongly recommended" that NHS bodies introduce some kind of "season ticket" arrangement and allow free or reduced-price parking for patients with a long-term illness or those with serious conditions who require daily or regular treatment, and their prime visitors. The government has also suggested a weekly cap on parking charges at hospitals. One option that needs urgently to be looked at is the provision of free hospital parking and help with travel costs for all cancer patients. The other option is to scrap the charges in England completely.
The founding principle of the NHS was that it would offer free-at-the-point-of-delivery healthcare. Surely this should apply whether you go to hospital as a patient, as a visitor or a member of staff. It's simply not fair to expect patients or visitors to have to pay when they come to hospital, when they may be suffering personal anxiety, stress or grief. For this reason I welcomed last year's announcement by the Scottish government (following on from a similar announcement by the Welsh Assembly earlier in the same year) to scrap car parking charges at the vast majority of its hospitals - 3 hospitals will be exempt because of PFI agreements and please don't get me started on that one!
It is hugely disappointing that the DoH does not believe it would be a "sensible use of limited resources" to subsidise car parking at hospitals in England. Really? The NHS ended this financial year with a £1.75 billion surplus, surely it would not be unreasonable to use a small amount of this total surplus to offset the £95 million that NHS Trusts took from car parking charges in 2006-2007?Government guidelines on car parking charges "strongly recommended" that NHS bodies introduce some kind of "season ticket" arrangement and allow free or reduced-price parking for patients with a long-term illness or those with serious conditions who require daily or regular treatment, and their prime visitors. The government has also suggested a weekly cap on parking charges at hospitals. One option that needs urgently to be looked at is the provision of free hospital parking and help with travel costs for all cancer patients. The other option is to scrap the charges in England completely.
Thursday, September 03, 2009
Labour's crisis
Jon Cruddas has written a thought provoking piece on Labour's crisis in this week's New Statesman.
Wednesday, September 02, 2009
Are people really turned off by partisan politics?
Too much of what passes for debate and argument in today's politics is driven by division and personal destruction and before people accuse me of hypocrisy, yes, I personally have been guilty of such things in times past. The American columnist, EJ Dionne in his book 'Why Americans Hate Politics' argues that one of the main reasons for people being turned off politics is because it (political debate) seems irrelevant to them, they feel that they are being manipulated because they are always being asked to make false choices: you're either staunchly religious or vehemently secular, pro-business or pro-unions, pro-growth or pro-environment, for civil liberties or against them, a progressive or a dinosaur.
The truth is, of course, that most people don't think like this, most people don't live their lives in this way, and most people long for a politics where we have genuine arguments, vigorous disagreements, where we don't claim to have a monopoly on what is right or wrong, where we don't demonise our political opponents. Most people want their politicians to engage in what Barack Obama has described a "fair-minded" approach to politics; politics that understands that truth and certainty are not the same thing. Being "fair-minded" is, it could be argued, a philosophical approach to politics. It is a philosophical approach that ultimately has as its goal the pursuit of the common good. Common good politics is primarily about empowerment; it is the politics that espouses cooperation not competition, the hand up and not just the hand out. The uncomfortable truth is however, that rather than some broad common good philosophy it has been what might be called an "uncommon-good", a rigid ideological approach to politics that has dominated the political landscape in the US and Europe over the past fifty years. Ideologues like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher believed that nations were best served by ensuring that the maximum concentration of wealth and power was in the hands of the right people. Whilst those that argued for the common good promoted the need for mutual responsibility, they were opposed by those that believed that in large measure people made their own luck, that there was no such thing as society. The belief that collective endeavour is both a strength and a virtue, that a problem shared is a problem partly solved was countered by often unilateral and isolationist policies - particularly in terms of trade and immigration. In contrast hose that adopt the "fair-minded" and common good approach to politics tend to believe that debate should be dominated by evidence and argument; that it is political philosophers that we need to embrace and political ideologues that we need to be wary of.
In a speech at Washington's Georgetown University, Bill Clinton said, "if you have a philosophy, it generally pushes you in a certain direction or another, but like all philosophers, you want to engage in discussion and argument. You are open to evidence, to new learning, and you are certainly open to debate the practical applications of your philosophy. Therefore, you might end up making a principled agreement with someone with a different philosophy."
However, Clinton went on to argue, if you have adapted a particular ideology then you already have your mind made up. You know all the answers, and that makes evidence irrelevant and argument a waste of time, so you tend to resort to assertions and and personal attacks. What we need are politicians who will devise policies that promote equal opportunity, shared responsibility, and inclusive communities.
In increasingly multi-cultural, multi-faith societies we need an approach to politics that both celebrates partisan differences whilst being humble enough to recognise that adherence to a particular ideology can be both debilitating and divisive. Impossible? No. A challenge? Most certainly.
The truth is, of course, that most people don't think like this, most people don't live their lives in this way, and most people long for a politics where we have genuine arguments, vigorous disagreements, where we don't claim to have a monopoly on what is right or wrong, where we don't demonise our political opponents. Most people want their politicians to engage in what Barack Obama has described a "fair-minded" approach to politics; politics that understands that truth and certainty are not the same thing. Being "fair-minded" is, it could be argued, a philosophical approach to politics. It is a philosophical approach that ultimately has as its goal the pursuit of the common good. Common good politics is primarily about empowerment; it is the politics that espouses cooperation not competition, the hand up and not just the hand out. The uncomfortable truth is however, that rather than some broad common good philosophy it has been what might be called an "uncommon-good", a rigid ideological approach to politics that has dominated the political landscape in the US and Europe over the past fifty years. Ideologues like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher believed that nations were best served by ensuring that the maximum concentration of wealth and power was in the hands of the right people. Whilst those that argued for the common good promoted the need for mutual responsibility, they were opposed by those that believed that in large measure people made their own luck, that there was no such thing as society. The belief that collective endeavour is both a strength and a virtue, that a problem shared is a problem partly solved was countered by often unilateral and isolationist policies - particularly in terms of trade and immigration. In contrast hose that adopt the "fair-minded" and common good approach to politics tend to believe that debate should be dominated by evidence and argument; that it is political philosophers that we need to embrace and political ideologues that we need to be wary of.
In a speech at Washington's Georgetown University, Bill Clinton said, "if you have a philosophy, it generally pushes you in a certain direction or another, but like all philosophers, you want to engage in discussion and argument. You are open to evidence, to new learning, and you are certainly open to debate the practical applications of your philosophy. Therefore, you might end up making a principled agreement with someone with a different philosophy."
However, Clinton went on to argue, if you have adapted a particular ideology then you already have your mind made up. You know all the answers, and that makes evidence irrelevant and argument a waste of time, so you tend to resort to assertions and and personal attacks. What we need are politicians who will devise policies that promote equal opportunity, shared responsibility, and inclusive communities.
In increasingly multi-cultural, multi-faith societies we need an approach to politics that both celebrates partisan differences whilst being humble enough to recognise that adherence to a particular ideology can be both debilitating and divisive. Impossible? No. A challenge? Most certainly.
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