Ed Miliband and the politics of hope

The Labour government "contributed almost nothing new or imaginative to the pool of ideas with which men seek to illuminate human nature and its environment". This is not a comment about the Blair or Brown years; rather it is a quote from a 1954 New Statesman biographical piece about Clement Attlee and the 1945-1951 Labour government. Amazing as though it may now appear, some contemporary Labour figures of the period were lambasting Attlee's post-war government for its lack of ambition and for it not being "socialist" enough. History repeated itself yesterday when Ed Miliband lambasted the ‘old’ generation for failing to listen and for the ‘company’ it kept. In fairness to the new leader it is an established truth that most Labour members and supporters simultaneously hold opposing requirements. We want our party to be both passionately principled and sensibly pragmatic: to be a party that proudly honours its past while it shapes it and the nation's future; to champion the state while being part of the market; to tackle poverty but to also support aspiration.

When Labour took office in 1997, Britain was suffering from what Tony Blair later described as a "progressive deficit". What he meant was that Britain was far from being a modern social democratic nation. The constitution was failing, with Scotland and Wales denied proper government and hereditary privilege still the foundation of the House of Lords. Unlike many of our European neighbours, Britain lacked quality childcare and universal nursery provision or schools and hospitals with proper equipment and enough well-paid staff. In the years up to 1997, Britain was a country that had spent billions of pounds keeping able-bodied people idle because of boom and bust, where unemployment often exceeded three million, and where the absence of a national minimum wage condemned millions to poverty pay.

In its first few years in office Labour made significant headway in addressing this progressive deficit. On the constitution, Britain is now a much more pluralist democracy with devolution for Scotland and Wales, Mayors for London and others cities, House of Lords reform, freedom of information and the Human Rights Act. For working people, Labour delivered progressive rights that many other countries took for granted - a minimum wage, four weeks paid holiday, better maternity and paternity rights, the basic right to join a trade union. For communities and families torn apart by crime, anti-social behaviour, racial intolerance and drugs, Labour established major programmes of inner city regeneration, Sure Start, and additional investment in youth and sport facilities.

The truth is that many of the changes Labour made in 13 years of government - on the constitution, economic policy, the minimum wage and public services - are likely to last. The challenge for Ed’s new generation will be to secure a progressive consensus around the further changes and improvements that need to be made whilst at the same time challenging and exposing the Tory party’s obvious, ideologically driven desire to reduce the size of the state which will result in more charging, less investment, good services for the well-off and second-class services for the rest. However, the real challenge to Ed’s progressive, new generation politics will come not from the Cameron led, Thatcherite dominated Tory party but from the defeatists, pessimists and cynics that exist within the ranks of his own movement. The new generation politics needs to frame political debate in terms of progress versus conservatism and the world not in terms of right and left, but right and wrong. Throughout his superbly judged campaign Ed spoke about how all too often political debate seems irrelevant to the reality of ordinary peoples’ lives. He understands that too many voters feel that politics is too polarised, that parties and politicians portray their opponents as either pro-business or pro-unions, pro-growth or pro-environment, for civil liberties or against them, as progressives or dinosaurs.

Ed needs to use the coming weeks and months to rethink the direction and the very purpose of our party. History shows that the public trusts leaders who have the courage to lead. It is surely no coincidence that, in recent history, when governments have acted boldly on issues as varied as debt cancellation, the introduction of the congestion charge or smoking bans, public support has quickly crystallised behind it. If Labour is to win next time round then its best prospects lie not in appealing to what it has done, not in defending the status quo but rather in campaigning against ugly realities of health and education inequalities and showing why these warrant further state action.

The politics of optimism, of hope, worked for Obama and touched a chord with the mainstream in the US. Politics that seeks the liberation of people from poverty, injustice and persecution can be a powerful force for change. What Ed signalled yesterday was that it is time for the labour party to address its own progressive deficit, to be clear about who we are, who we were and who we want to become.

Why I proudly voted for Ed Miliband

As an ordinary, 'bog standard' Labour party member I voted for Ed Miliband and did so with pride and enthusiasm. The tabloid 'Red Ed' nonsense is cheap and without substance. What sets Ed Miliband apart as a politician is his passionate belief that government must do things with people; he sees political debate in terms of progress versus conservatism and the world not in terms of right and left, but right and wrong. Throughout his superbly judged campaign he spoke about one of the the main reasons for people being turned off politics being because all too often political debate seems irrelevant to the reality of their everyday lives.

He understands that many ordinary voters feel that they are being manipulated because they are always being asked to make false choices: you're labelled as either pro-business or pro-unions, pro-growth or pro-environment, for civil liberties or against them, a progressive or a dinosaur. Ed Miliband espouses a politics that looks for cooperation not competition, the hand up and not just the hand out.

The election of Ed Miliband as Labour Leader makes it clear that many others in my party believe that such sentiments are important, many in the country will also.

Faith and politics: lessons from America?

I have written a piece for Prospect on why those who espouse a so-called “progressive” political agenda need to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy.

This week's New Statesman

This week's New Statesman will feature the 50 people who matter. Who makes your personal top 5?

Faith schools: diversity or division?

According to the Catholic Education Service (CES), it is "spurious to suggest that to take away a religious community's right to firstly educate its own children and to instead give preference to others, for example, by introducing a 30% non-faith quota for Church schools, would aid social cohesion." Really? As someone whose teaching career has been solely in the VA RC sector, I would argue that it is neither spurious nor contrary to the mission of the Church. Indeed, I would go further and challenge the CES to publish a complete list of Catholic schools - particularly secondaries - where it is already customary that between 20-30% of the intake is from other faith (or non-faith) backgrounds.

I personally welcomed the defeated Lord's amendment to the 2006 Education and Inspection Bill on admissions to schools with a religious character. I would argue that such a proposal was a positive move towards greater social and educational inclusion. A truly "Christian school" would be one that seeks to be open to all - and which pays particular attention to the needs of marginalised and poorer communities. What is needed is a mature, open and honest debate about the type of educational system various faith groups would be happy to support and indeed help shape in the twenty-first century. Should it be an inclusive, comprehensive system that intrinsically values and caters for all pupils regardless of their spiritual, economic or social capital? Or should it be a two tier, elitist system that perpetuates privilege, does not help promote the common good and is contrary to the message of the gospel?

Why Labour should make a preferential option for the poor.

Since the advent of New Labour taking sides has been a rather unfashionable political stance. For many party members the past few years has seen Labour, as a party of principle, disappearing into the soggy centre ground. They witnessed Labour ministers turning into administrators and technocrats - competent but uninspiring. The new leader - my hope is that it will be Ed Miliband - needs to portray the modern Tory party for what it is, a group of right wing wolves in sheep's clothing. Our new leader needs to quickly go on the offensive and highlight the fact that David Cameron succeeded in modernising his party - back to the age of Thatcher.

The speech at conference will give the new leader the opportunity to set out some of the key themes and policy areas that a new, renewed Labour party will focus on. I believe that one of those themes should be about the need for Labour to make a preferential option for the poor. In today's modern world there is still an unjust distribution of goods and services whereby a relative minority of wealthy groups and ruling classes use their power and influence to perpetuate macro-economic and political structures which exploit the labour and lives of the vast majority of the planet’s population.

Politics that seeks the liberation of people from poverty, injustice and persecution can be a powerful force for change. At home and abroad perhaps it is time for Labour to make a preferential option for the poor. It is time to take sides and end the political cross-dressing of the 1990s. As a political party it is time to be clear about who we are, who we were and what we want to become.

Why Labour should scrap hospital car park charges in England

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 have long spoken out against hospital car parking charges - though of course this now only happens in England as they have been scrapped in Wales and in Scotland.

According to the DoH the NHS should ended the last 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 2008-2009? The reality thought is that the disparity in relation to car parking charges simply adds to the ever widening health care divide, under which patients in England are denied services and benefits enjoyed by those living elsewhere in the UK. For example in Scotland, NHS patients have access to more cancer drugs, benefit from free eye tests and get free personal care when elderly. In Wales prescriptions are free, while English patients must pay £6.85.

Labour needs to define what it is for as well as what it is against - framing policies around fairness and equity. The abolition of car parking charges at England's NHS hospitals would be a small, but 'emotionally' significant gesture and one that would illustrate that the party understands the worries and concerns of ordinary people.

Why the Left must not allow the right to hijack debate about faith

In 2007, when addressing the 50th anniversary convention of his own denomination, the United Church of Christ, the then Senator Barack Obama, argued that the religious right had “hijacked” faith and divided his country by exploiting issues like abortion, same-sex marriage and school prayer. More interestingly he then went onto praise the people of faith who were using their influence to try to unite Americans against problems like poverty, AIDS, the lack of universal health care, Darfur and the effects of climate change.

In the UK we tend to discourage our politicians from talking about faith, we famously ‘don’t do God.’ Why? I believe that it has long been the case that too many people - particularly those who take a left of centre approach to politics - make the mistake of failing to acknowledge the power of faith in people's lives. With debate raging about the rise of the far-right and the failure of the body politic I wonder if it isn't time for those who espouse the "progressive" agenda to debate just how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy. Too often politicians try and avoid any discussion about religious values altogether - fearful of offending anyone and claiming that politics and religion should never mix.Yet surely the reality of all political engagement is that we have to meet people where they are - even if we do not agree with or even approve of where they are. If so called ‘progressive’ politicians are to communicate their hopes and values in a way that is relevant to the lives of others, then they cannot abandon the field of religious discourse.

In my view secularists are wrong when they ask – more often insist – that believers leave their religion at the door before entering into the arena of public debate. The majority of great reformers in British history – from Wilberforce to Keir Hardie - were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. I recognise that democratic engagement will and should make demands of religious believers. It will demand that those who are religiously motivated act to turn their concerns into universal, rather than faith-specific, values. Democratic engagement will also demand that the values espoused by people of faith be subject to argument and debate.What is needed is a sense of proportion and a willingness – on the part of both believers and non-believers - to engage in public debate openly and fair-mindedly.

Many people in Britain today are looking for a deeper, fuller conversation about religion and politics.This then is the challenge for those who describe themselves as progressive politicians. They too must become more "fair minded" more willing to engage with people of faith so that they might recognise some overlapping values that both religious and secular people share when it comes to the moral and material direction of modern Britain

Flights for 50p

If you have ever taken a flight with Ryan Air you will love this.

Will Fiona Millar be backing Ed Miliband?

Fiona Millar has written a thoughtful and timely piece for the Guardian's CiF on the need for Labour's leadership hopefuls to say more about how education policy will be different if elected.

This passage in particular caught my eye:-

'Whoever gets the job, it will be a tough call, demand deft political footwork and a willingness to offload baggage from the past. Of all the candidates Ed Miliband seems the most prepared to do this, even if the details of what he would actually do are hazy.'

Not quite an endorsement but welcome nonetheless.

Tory MP Daniel Kawczynski and the courage of his convictions

In July of this year the Tory MP for Shrewsbury wrote a piece for the Conservative Home website that the AV electoral system would unfairly create two classes of voter. Mr Kawczynski is the chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for the promotion of first-past-the-post and his seat of Shrewsbury is one that is clearly vulnerable if AV were to be introduced at the next election. He is quoted in The Sun (July 2010) as follows:

"This is just something the liberal elite wants. My constituents are interested in health services, schools and infrastructure."

In the debate last night he stated:

"As chairman of the all-party group, I am in a difficult position. Do I go with my gut reaction and vote against this legislation or do I fulfil my obligations and loyalty to my party leader, our Prime Minister, and to the party?"

One would have thought therefore that Mr Kawczynski would have had the moral courage to follow his convictions and vote against the AV Referendum Bill. He didn't - though 10 Tory MPs did. Why did you bottle it Daniel?

Why I am not excited about the visit of Pope Benedict

The Pope is coming to Britain but for some reason I am not at all excited or pleased. If you read the strap line of my blog you will see that it reads as follows: "Aspire not to have more but to be more." These were the words of Oscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador, who was assassinated in 1980 by the pro-US military junta who then ran El Salvador. Romero was an advocate of what became known as liberation theology, a movement which took root throughout Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s and focused on helping the poor and oppressed, even if that meant confronting political powers. It was a theology that was later to be severely criticised as a "fundamental threat" to the church by one Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who is now better known as Pope Benedict XVI.

Romero spoke out for a theology that preached about the "preferential option for the poor". Ordained priests like Gutiérrez, Sobrino and Boff argued that when the Catholic church failed to speak for the poor and the oppressed, and when it refused to take the side of the persecuted and downtrodden, it did not exercise neutrality. Instead it abandoned, indeed abdicated, its moral responsibility. During the 1960s and 1970s, military dictatorships ruled much of Latin America, including Brazil, Argentina and Chile. The region's anti-communist rulers often clashed with radical priests, whose confrontational preoccupation with class struggle brought them into conflict with the rich and powerful as well as the Vatican itself. Yet the movement seems to have all but disappeared. Under the present pope – and in fairness the previous one as well - the Catholic Church of 2010 encourages its flock to "render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's", it advocates the view that politics and faith are separate arenas and that the two cannot, indeed should not, mix. The result of such a narrow-minded stance is that the church is in danger of becoming completely irrelevant to the life of the modern man. By modern man I, of course, mean the "poor man". It is easy to forget that the vast majority of people who inhabit the planet with us live below the poverty line, the vast majority live in poor housing, have no access to proper health care and have a life expectancy that is decades shorter than that of the minority who live in the affluent west. Today there is an even greater need for the voices of liberation to be heard. There is the unjust distribution of goods and services whereby a relative minority of wealthy groups and ruling classes use their power and influence to perpetuate macro-economic and political structures which exploit the labour and lives of the vast majority of the planet's population. The church is, all too often, silent on this issue. Or take the deep and widespread oppression of women, along with the elderly, and children dependent upon women, in all patriarchal societies around the globe where women and their dependents are dehumanised and depersonalised. Is the Catholic church working to further liberate women in these settings, or does it silently support the structures that keep things as they are? So we either need a new liberation theology or we need the church to be liberated. We need a church that offers hope - not a jam-tomorrow kind of hope, rather the hope that the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard described as the "passion for the possible".

We need a church that can show that it understands that what people need is to believe that things will, and can, be better. In other words, we need the church to renew itself and we need a theology that will actively seek and proclaim the liberation of people from poverty, injustice and persecution - all people, regardless of their faith or their background. The true message of liberation will always result in some people feeling uneasy. To side, as many liberation theologians in the 1960s and 1970s did, against injustice, to commit one's life to the poor is not a political stance but a moral one. The true message of hope, of a promise that the world can be fairer, more just and less divided often results in giving comfort to the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.

The present Pope does not apparently share this view; indeed he believes people like me are a “fundamental threat” to the church. So I wish the Pope well on his visit to Britain but I look forward to one day welcoming a Pontiff who will be proud to talk about making a preferential option for the poor and encourage us all to “aspire to be more, not to have more.”

Charter schools are not the answer

The following article also appears in this week's edition of Tribune

Can you really run a state school for a profit? Education Secretary Michael Gove seems to think so. However, what Gove has either ignored or missed is that, in the United States, for-profit charter schools have been a huge disaster for the children in the cities where they were first imposed.

In 1997, the US Congress passed the Charter Schools Act – forcing local school districts to allow private enterprise to take over or set up schools. The justification for this was that the competition of “market pressures” would force both public schools and charter schools to perform well and deliver a quality product. The record shows otherwise. For example, in Michigan, more than 75 per cent of charter schools are run by for-profit companies. While these schools are funded with public money, the public does not control them. Since these schools are run by private companies, they don’t have to reveal how they have used their money or how much profit they have made. As far as local communities are concerned, the schools are no more than big holes into which money gets poured.

Companies such as Edison are adept at finding ways to make a profit. Schools set up shop in abandoned premises, including supermarkets, large office complexes and old school buildings. These buildings are often owned or leased by a management company that is owned by the for-profit charter school company. The charter school, run by the same firm, gets state education money for each student – some $9,000 a year in the state of Michigan. The school then pays the management company hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in rent.
The educational quality in most cases is worse than in the public schools. In 2007, students at the charter schools in the Detroit area scored lower than Detroit public school students in the Michigan statewide test.

How could it be otherwise? The profit taken out of these schools is money not spent on the education of students. So for-profit schools end up having a high number of unqualified teachers; a high turnover rate, with sometimes several teachers teaching the same class in a school year; and even classes taught by a string of temporary service employees.
It was recently confirmed that in the 10 schools run by one company, Charter School Administrative Services, 62 per cent of teachers were unqualified. This is a private company which received more than $40 million from the state of Michigan in 2008. This is money that did not go to the public schools. And that is just one company, 10 schools. There are more than 200 charter schools in Michigan alone.

Even more worryingly, a recent report from the Civil Rights Project at the University of California in Los Angeles found that nearly 80 per cent of Michigan’s black charter school students attend intensely segregated minority schools. Why does this matter? Research shows that attending racially diverse schools significantly improves students’ academic achievement, graduation and college attendance rates. In 2007 the US Supreme Court held that, along with achieving diversity, reducing the racial isolation of students of colour in schools is a compelling state interest. Yet black and Latino students attending charter schools are more often typically in schools where 90 cent or more students are non-white than are their counterparts in traditional public schools.

Some years ago, the now notorious Lehman Brothers issued a report predicting: “The education industry may replace healthcare as the focus industry.” In the US, that’s exactly what for-profit charter schools are: private industry taking over public education, squeezing out all the profit they can and leaving children with a far worse education. Is this really what “progressive” Tory education policy looks like?

Ed Miliband is right about grammar school ballots

Ed Miliband is right; the process by which parents can vote on whether to maintain academic selection simply doesn't work. Yes, we need a review: justice demands it. The policy that Ed Miliband wants to review allows selective entry into grammar schools to remain unless a majority of local eligible parents vote for it to change or grammar school governing bodies decide to change their admission policies to admit children of all abilities. To date, no governing bodies have done this. Before a ballot can be held, 20% of eligible parents in the areas concerned must sign a petition calling for a ballot.

To require all of the 164 grammar schools in England to take children of all abilities would need 48 petitions and ballots.Crucial to the present legislation is the definition of an eligible parent. This differs depending on whether the ballot would be an area or feeder ballot. Area ballots would be needed to end selection in the 10 local authorities defined by the regulations as fully selective (Bexley, Buckinghamshire, Kent, Lincolnshire, Medway, Slough, Southend, Sutton, Torbay, Trafford). Here, all parents living in the area are eligible to sign a petition and ballot, including those with children below school age or those living outside the area but with children in the schools within the local authority. For the 38 ballots in the other 26 English local authorities with grammar schools, only parents who have children in the feeder schools to the grammar schools would be eligible. Feeder schools are those that have sent a total of five or more pupils to the grammar schools in question in the year the signatures are being gathered and the preceding two years.

The only ballot to be held was in Ripon in 2000, where two thirds of eligible parents who took part voted to keep the status quo. This was a feeder ballot. One success was that it showed up the bizarre effect of the feeder school ballot regulations. Private school parents are over-represented in feeder ballots, as many private schools exist to coach pupils to pass the entry tests to grammar schools. In Ripon, private school parents made up a quarter of the electorate, although a parliamentary question at the time revealed that only 4.6% of primary children in North Yorkshire were in private education (Hansard 2000).

In feeder school areas, many local parents, even those sending their children to schools near the grammar schools in question, are ineligible to sign petitions and vote. In Barnet, campaigners trying to collect signatures found that parents of children at a primary school next door to a grammar school were not eligible to sign the petition, as not enough of the children at their school had passed the entry test. The second largest group of the Ripon electorate after private-school parents were parents of children in a school 10 miles away, while some Ripon parents were ineligible.

So the promise in Labour’s 1997 manifesto - "Any changes in the admission policies of grammar schools will be decided by local parents" - has not been fulfilled.What can be done? There are several options that the government might pursue in order to make the present system fairer and more transparent. If ballots have to remain:

• Make all ballots area ballots (remove the option for feeder ballots).

• Reduce the 20% threshold figure to 10%

• Allow people to sign up for petitions electronically (similar to the ePetitions on the Downing Street website)

• Reduce the time period for the collection of signatures for petitions.

Other options that the government might consider include:

• A requirement for governors of selective schools to vote regularly on proposals to end academic selection as a criterion for admission to the school.

• The extension of Para 3.17 of the 2003 school admissions code of practice "Academic selection should never be used to decide entry into primary education" to include entry into secondary education.

• Commission a report that looks into the impact of academic selection on standards and social inclusion.

The time is now right to review the arrangements to allow local people a greater say in the shape of secondary-school provision in their area. One would hope that Ed’s call for a review will be pushing at an open door; after all, there is cross-party agreement that academic selection is a bad thing, isn't there?