flamingos

[…] As a British Bangladeshi, I saw my phone light up the moment Starmer publicly singled out the country as a source of illegal migrants, saying in an event hosted by The Sun that they were not being “removed” from the UK in sufficient numbers.
[…]
Starmer’s choice to single out Bangladesh was odd for a number of reasons. Bangladesh is not among the top five countries for asylum claims to the UK. Nor does it feature in data from Oxford University’s Migration Observatory on the top 10 nationalities of those who cross the channel in small boats.

The comments caused such a backlash that British Bangladeshi Labour candidates reached out to me to express dismay that their party leader had done this. One sitting member of Labour’s National Executive Committee described it as “dog whistle stuff”; the deputy leader of Tower Hamlets council, home to Britain’s largest Bangladeshi community, quit the party in protest.
[…]
We covered the story at ITV News, and asked Starmer if he was aware of the hurt that had resulted from his words. His answer, on camera, was fairly clear. He did not mean to cause any worry, concern or offence. He praised the contribution of the British Bangladeshi community. He mentioned that he had visited the country as an MP, and that he was simply highlighting that the UK has a new returns agreement with Bangladesh that it had signed earlier this year.

This explanation may satisfy some — but it is notable that Starmer did not say he was sorry. One senior community leader in the British Bangladeshi community was far from impressed with it. “It is always one excuse or another,” they told me, “just like the time he never meant any offence when he called the Black Lives Matter movement ‘a moment’ and never apologised.”

The problem for Labour is that this feeds into a narrative that it has a worsening relationship with the British Muslim community. Since the escalation of the conflict in Gaza, the situation has been fraught; as I have travelled around Britain both before and during the election campaign, I have heard from countless British Muslims who feel ignored and let down by the party’s failure to call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire. Data analysis carried out for ITV News found that Labour had lost 33 percentage points of vote share in areas that are majority Muslim, suggesting that the rift has had an impact at the ballot box.
[…]
Ultimately, the Labour party is a long way ahead in the opinion polls, and the upset over Starmer’s remarks on Monday night is unlikely to have any impact on a national level. What it does, however, is exacerbate a problem that has been building for quite some time.

Starmer and his team are aware that governing is very different from being in opposition. Theoretical ideas become life-changing policies. All governments seek to unite the country and all parties believe their policies can do that, but leaving one community potentially feeling alienated and ignored can undermine this, which in turn can ultimately erode trust among the wider population.

The Forde report, an independent inquiry into Labour’s culture that was published in July 2022, found that the party was an “unwelcoming place for people of colour” and had a “toxic” culture of factional disputes between the party’s right and left.

In March 2023, Mr Forde gave an interview to Al Jazeera in which he said that no one from Labour had been willing to discuss the recommendations further and highlighted concerns raised by ethnic minority politicians within Labour about racism in the party.

In response, it has now emerged that the Labour Party sent Mr Forde a robust legal letter, seen by The Independent, accusing him of acting against the party’s interests and advising him that it was “considering all of its options”.

Lawyers accused Mr Forde of having made “extensive negative and highly prejudicial comments” and questioned his professional conduct.

Speaking to The Independent this week, the respected barrister said: “I don’t know if it was an attempt to silence me. I mean, they’ve couched it carefully along the lines of ‘We’re reminding you of your professional duties,’ which I found mildly irritating because I am a regulatory lawyer, and I don’t like my professionalism or ethics being questioned ... but I felt it was more.

He continued: “I’m a private individual; they can’t silence me. I fundamentally object to people saying to me, ‘You don’t know how to behave as a professional.’ I’m afraid that Black professionals get it all the time.”

This week, in yet another setback to Rishi Sunak‘s efforts to showcase how the Conservatives have created – over a decade and a half – a robust economy, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reported that monthly growth in April in the UK had flatlined.

The British economy was said to be struggling with a faltering retail sector, a decline in manufacturing, and a reduction in construction output, after a 0.4% rise in March. The City’s pundits appeared to blame the weather and not the cost-of-living crisis for the lack of growth. The consequences of Brexit, as it seems to be so increasingly, was absent from the finger-pointing.

But this news of the parlous state of the British economy comes amidst more of the same. The UK’s labour productivity had increased by just 0.4% annually over the 12 years following the financial crisis – half the average growth rate seen in the 25 wealthiest OECD countries – and has resulted in a cumulative loss of £10,700 in wage growth for the average worker’s annual salary.

Middle-income individuals in the UK are now 20% poorer than their counterparts in Germany and 9% worse off than those in France.

[…] [T]he UK’s parlous goods exports would be far worse if you did not include the UK’s ‘empty calorie’ trading of global gold. If you took out such high frequency precious metals trading, it would mean that the UK’s goods exports are down some £44 billion since 2018. And that the UK’s goods exports are down, the UK’s service exports are up.

[…] The one silver lining in this dire economic news is that service exports are buoying up the UK economy. Indeed, last year the UK ranked second in the world for such exports – including ICT (Information and communication technology), education, culture, and finance.

The leading nation the UK exports such services to is the United States, where the $129.7 billion of services provided equates to over a quarter of the UK’s entire service export economy (27.6%).
[…]
The Lawyer has noted a 41% year on year increase in revenue by the top 50 US law firms in Britain since 2018: a jump from $5.7bn to $8.1bn. Even factoring in inflation, the rise is 13%. According to The Lawyer in 2021, the top American law firm in the UK was Kirkland & Ellis, and whilst their UK company house listings might not capture all of their UK earnings, it shows a 70% declared rise in profits last year.
[…]
Last month, it was reported that another American law firm, Quinn Emanuel, was offering its newly qualified lawyers in London an eye-watering £180,000 a year, an 18% hike from the year before. Those five years out of qualification will see salaries of £290,000. […] To put this all into context, the London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, earns £160,976. And the London Living Wage is currently set at £13.15 or, roughly, £27,352 a year.
[…]
The income per person in the UK’s richest local authority – Kensington and Chelsea (£52,500) – now stands at 4.5 times that of the poorest – Nottingham (£11,700).
[…]
Last year, hundreds of homeless families were permanently displaced from London by local councils, with little notice, or choice. The escalating rents in the capital, which have surpassed the local housing allowance (LHA) – the amount private tenants on housing benefits are entitled to for rent, varying by local authority – have driven these forced relocations.

The campaign group Housing Action Southwark and Lambeth (HASL) reported in 2023 that 319 households accepted private tenancies outside London. These families were frequently given 24-hour ultimatums by council officials to accept homes outside the capital or risk being classified as “intentionally homeless” for refusing the offer.

Archive/No Paywall

A Labour manifesto that brings the railways into public ownership, strengthens workers’ rights and removes tax exemptions for private schools (all policies from 2017 and 2019 manifestos) should be universally welcomed.

But what lies beneath is far more sinister. The 2024 Labour manifesto bakes in austerity for our public services. By ruling out redistributive taxation, it de facto accepts existing spending plans that the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) says mean cuts to unprotected departments of between 1.9 per cent and 3.5 per cent per year. Austerity baked in.
[…]
The IFS has said there is a “conspiracy of silence” between the two major parties about the scale of cuts that is baked into the current economic plans. The Resolution Foundation estimates that implies upwards of £19bn of cuts in non-protected departments.

Nothing in Labour’s manifesto changes that analysis. The tax changes Labour has announced (mostly reforming non-dom status and removing tax breaks for private schools) amount to around £7bn in extra revenue – and that has already been earmarked […]

Across the public sector, from nursing to care workers, from teachers to junior doctors, there is a recruitment and retention crisis. Unless you restore public sector pay, you will not solve those staffing shortages, or tackle the NHS backlogs. It’s also not clear from the manifesto where any additional funding would come from to fund the private sector operations that shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting has promised, leaving the worrying conclusion that they may come out of existing NHS budgets.

[…] Both councils and universities need an injection of cash, or we will all lose out. The courts have massive backlogs and child poverty has risen to 4.3 million due to decades of benefit cuts – none of which are being reversed by Labour’s new manifesto.
[…]
But as Labour has become ever more reliant on wealthy and corporate donors, so it seems their tax policy has been diluted. He who pays the piper calls the tune.

If you want a snappy summary of Keir Starmer’s “changed Labour Party”, it was pithily provided by Kay Burley earlier this year: “Labour’s happy to cap child benefit, but not bankers’ bonuses”.

When Britain’s prime minister, Rishi Sunak, stood in the pouring rain last week to announce a general election, there could hardly have been a less auspicious beginning to the Conservative Party’s campaign. In the space of a few days, it has gone downhill from there.

Eighty-five Tory MPs have shown their confidence in their party’s ability to win another term by declaring their retirement. These include the former PM Theresa May, long-serving minister Michael Gove, and erstwhile Tory leadership contender Andrea Leadsom. Twenty-two of these MPs have served in the Commons for fewer than ten years, and ten of them were only elected in 2019.
[…]
They are right to be worried. What is happening to the Tories is the culmination of the long-term decline and decomposition of their vote, which was accelerated by Brexit, Boris Johnson, the Truss debacle, and Sunak’s time in office. As I have argued in detail elsewhere, during the 2010s, the party became increasingly dependent on a coalition of propertied interests, with its core mass base provided by elderly voters.

These layers of the electorate were shielded from the direct consequences of the 2010–15 Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government through protection of pensioners’ incomes via the “triple lock” — a guarantee the state pension would rise in tandem with average earnings, inflation, or a baseline figure of 2.5 percent (whichever is the highest).

Deft manoeuvring around the “need” for cuts and judicious scapegoating helped ensure the Tories then escaped the political consequences of systematic cuts to public services, especially the National Health Service, that this demographic cohort depends on. But there was more to this loyalty than the consequences of Tory policy from 2010 onward.

First of all, there is the social location of being a pensioner. Because the incomes of pensioners tend to be fixed and cannot be made good in an emergency by reentering employment, their experience is analogous to that of the petty bourgeoisie. As many Marxists have observed, dependence on one’s own modest capital and ability to labo[u]r produces a political disposition toward stability and a hostility to real and imagined threats.
[…]
The second factor, which you might call the “strong force,” comes from [pensioner's] tendency to acquire property over time. […] This has had two significant political consequences. For the elderly property owner, it has strengthened the tendency to right-wing, authoritarian politics that was already latent in the social location of pensioners. In contrast, for younger people — today’s under-fifties — the housing shortage has severed the link between aging and the propensity to vote for the Right which, in the British case, means the Conservatives.
[…]
Sunak’s election campaign is the last gasp of a historically exhausted party. The task of trying to turn the situation around by appealing to working-age people is difficult, because his own political outlook (and that of the Tories in general) seeks to undercut any demands made on the state.

Steps to addressing the housing shortage would cut against the interest that the existing Tory coalition has in keeping property values high and maintaining the private rental sector. A move away from a politics of scapegoating would deprive the Tories of a tried-and-tested method of binding their supporters together.

As a result of Johnson’s stupidity, Truss’s recklessness, and Sunak’s do-nothing attitude, the age at which someone is more likely to vote Tory has more than doubled since 2019, from thirty-nine to seventy. To prevent complete disintegration at this hour, all the Tories can do is double down and hope there will be a viable enough rump left from which to fight back after the election. Even such a limited measure of success could well prove to be out of their reach.

Direct PDF Link, PDF archive. I'd suggest bookmarking the archive as parties have a habit of deleting stuff from past elections (e.g. Labour have deleted the PDF for their 2019 manifesto).

Lot's of waffling but here are the key policies I managed to pick out:

• Ban 0-hour contracts, "ensuring everyone has the right to have a contract that reflects the number of hours they regularly work, based on a twelve-week reference period"
• End the practice of fire-and-rehire
• Worker protections from day one
• Merge the current three-tier employment status into two categories of 'worker' and 'genuinely self-employed'
• Strengthen redundancy rights
• Strengthen protections for the self-employed
• Family working
  • Make 'flexi-time' contracts the default (work hours that fit around children)
  • Ban firing women for six months after returning from maternity leave
  • Review the parental leave system within the first year of government
  • Right to bereavement leave for all workers
• Ensure that surveillance technology can't be introduced without consultation
• Make it so minimum wage considers the cost of living when calculating it
• Remove age brackets from minimum wage
• Remove the lower earnings limit and waiting period for statutory sick pay
• Ensure hospitality workers receive the tips they earn
• Ban unpaid internships, except when part of education or training course
• Establish a new 'Fair Pay Agreement' for adult social care workers
• Reinstate the School Support Staff Negotiating Body
• Remove "unnecessary restrictions on trade union activity and ensuring industrial relations are based around good faith negotiation and bargaining"
  • Repeal the Trade Union Act 2016 and Minimum Service Levels (Strikes) Bill and the Conduct of Employment Agencies and Employment Businesses (Amendment) Regulations 2022
  • Allow electronic and workplace balloting for union votes
  • Remove the requirement for unions to prove at least 50% employee support to be recognised and make final ballot a simple majority
  • Give unions the right to access the workplace for recruitment and organising purposes
  • Strengthen protection for trade union reps
• Close the gender pay gap
  • Include outsourced workers in calculations
  • Require firms with >250 staff to publish ethnicity and disability pay gaps
  • Require employers to provide support to employees going through menopause
• Establish a single enforcement body for worker rights to replace the current fragmented system
• Double the time limit where employees can bring a claim to an employment tribunal to six months
• Allow workers to raise grievances to ACAS collectively
• Extent the Freedom of Information Act to companies that have public contracts and publicly funded associations
• Require public bodies to asses if work can be done more efficiently in-house before outsourcing to the private sector
• Ensure public contract take into account 'social value' when being given out (e.g. local jobs, pay, trade union recognition)

Promises with no real policy attached:

• Strengthen protections for whistleblowers
• Help carers in the workforce
• Give rights to people who work from home to be able to separate life from work
• Ensure "regulations on travel time in sectors with multiple working sites is enforced and that workers’ contracts reflect the law" (this is copied verbatim twice across the document)
• Bring employment tribunals 'up to standard'
• Review health and safety regulations
  • Review guidance on working in extreme temperatures
  • Protections for people with long Covid
  • Increased legal duty for employers to tackle sexual harassment

They also say the terminally ill deserve "security and decency", but don't actually propose anything other than encouraging employers and trade unions to sign the Dying to Work Charter.

A thing not picked up above, but this document spends a lot of time batting for employers. Every mention of improving protections or abusive practices is accompanied with some statement along the lines of "most employers are already really good to their employees" or "ensure there is a good talent pool for employers".

Archive

The last few years have seen a sustained effort on the part of the UK government to clamp down on protest labelled ‘disruptive’ and ‘illegal’. After the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act of 2022 and the Public Order Act 2023, we are now presented with John Woodcock’s ominously titled report Protecting our Democracy from Coercion. It targets not just certain activist groups but our understanding of democracy itself. Emphasising the ‘rule of law’, the report imagines a democracy reduced to a fixed set of rules and institutions insulated from popular control and contestation.

[…] [John Woodcock's] 291-page report focuses particularly on non-violent activists on the left, such as climate and pro-Palestine groups, who employ strategies of disruption and lawbreaking. The threat of these, Woodcock claims, lies in the economic damage they may cause, in the draining of police resources, and in their potential ‘to undermine faith in our parliamentary democracy and the rule of law.’ Although recent changes in policy would suggest otherwise, he insists that these dangers have so far been overlooked and little understood. The recommendations of Woodcock’s report range from establishing channels for businesses to claim compensation from protest organisers, charging them for the cost of policing, and calling on governments and elected representatives not to engage with or consult any activists employing strategies of lawbreaking.

[…] Championing ‘the rule of law’, he writes ‘that if a movement advocates systematic law-breaking as the means for political change, then that organisation crosses a line for what is and is not acceptable.’ This disregards the fact that protests that involve lawbreaking and civil disobedience have a historical legacy of democratisation that extends from the suffragettes to the US civil rights movement — and are recognised as democratic practices by liberal democratic theorists such as John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas.

Woodcock, in contrast, insists that all this is obsolete because ‘the UK’s liberal democracy’ guarantees citizens’ right to vote. This reduces the people to an audience allowed to express their consent or disapproval every few years on the invitation of the government. It also disguises the reality of a corporate lobby drowning out electoral voice. The ‘independent advisor’ Woodcock is himself a case in point: it is difficult to believe that his activity as a paid lobbyist for arms manufacturers and fossil fuel companies did not affect his report’s recommendations to constrain climate and pro-Palestine activist groups in particular. Making acts of popular protest more and more difficult ultimately also makes it easier for corporate power to shape government policy in its interest.