An intriguing doorstep encounter in North Norfolk

The District Council elections in North Norfolk are now in full swing, or as near to ‘full’ as any swing is possible in this rather quiet area.  My vote this time will be in the Stody Ward. In previous elections my area was known as Glaven Valley: I stood as the Labour candidate in 2015 going down to a humiliating defeat.  The boundaries may have changed but the prospects, in one of the most rural swathes of Norfolk, remain unremittingly dismal.

Someone else is standing as the Labour Candidate this time, and he has already secured my postal vote – irrespective of my views on the national leadership of the Party.  We do however appear to be witnessing a determined fight between the LibDems and the Conservatives reflecting a battle for overall control of the Council.  Both groups are fundamentally non-political, indeed often anti-political.   The main issue that seems to be exciting local passions is the fate of the Sand Martins at Bacton beach: the birds were prevented from nesting on the cliff-side by nets erected by North Norfolk District Council in an attempt to attempt to combat cliff erosion.  Their fate made the national news and the Council swiftly moved the nets.

The local LibDem flier that I received was predictably bland. The Conservative leaflet was far more forthright and even ventured into politics “The Liberal Democrats are supporting a campaign to oppose Brexit and hold another referendum, disregarding the will of the British people. We cannot risk sending an endorsement of their divisive politics”.  Quite what the District Council can do about this I don’t know, but for a Tory to talk about divisive politics over Brexit merely underlines the adage that criminals always return to the scene of their crime.

However something else in the Tory leaflet attracted my attention. Our local candidate’s personal statement on the back page of a generic publication began “I’m a working class man who is passionate about creating opportunities for others…”.  I would not have expected such self-description: most of our local Tories like to pretend to be toffs. All was explained when the candidate came to my door.  We had a most unusual encounter: in fairness to the man I was deliberately provocative.

I began by reminding him of the mass defection of previously elected local Tories to form an Independent Group on the Council before going on to his motivation.  He told me that he had been brought up on a Council estate in West London; I responded by telling him that I too was brought up on a Council estate – in my case in South Wales.  He rather lost the thread by asking me why I was living in a nice big house in a nice village and not in Wales and then advanced his view that it was because Wales was a Labour area and “Labour areas are sh***oles”.My assertion that we had retired to Norfolk because of my wife’s family connections, and also I liked it here, did not seem to placate him in any way.  His next question was “why aren’t you standing for the Council here – why are you standing in North Walsham?”  Clearly he had me confused with someone else. I am not standing anywhere but have had letters published in the local press.  North Walsham does however offer the best prospect for Labour and he proceeded to describe this attractive market town as another ‘sh***ole’ – evidently this is one of his favourite expressions.

The encounter was as intriguing as it was revealing.   I do not want to be too unfair to our Conservative candidate as doubtless he has personal aspirations that are well intentioned.   Our exchange did however remind me that class politics and class prejudice are alive and well: they are simply taking a different form up here.

leftyoldman blogs will appear occasionally as the Brexit battle continues and the shape of post Brexit politics emerges.  If you would like to receive email notification of future blogs, please press the ‘followleftyoldman’ button on the left hand side above. I continue to tweet at @eugrandparents.

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The Banner Bright – a tribute

 

Providing it is isn’t pouring with rain, every spring morning I cycle three miles to the Co-op in nearby Melton Constable to buy my newspaper. There is little immediate employment in the former market town beyond a small number of retail outlets, a social club, and casual labour on one of the local farms; it is not unusual to see a group of migrant workers assembled at the bus stop waiting to be transported to their workplace for the day.  At its height Melton Constable was a railway town – the Crewe of North Norfolk – and was a junction for passengers and livestock destined for sale at the larger markets.

100 years ago this September the North Norfolk Labour Party was established at a meeting held in Market Constable.  It is commemorated in an excellent booklet, The Banner Bright, researched and produced by our local Labour archivist, David Russell.  Little is known about the formation meeting beyond the fact that it is likely to have coincided with the 1919 Railway strike, which, according to Wikipedia “was precipitated when the government announced plans to reduce rates of pay which had been negotiated by ASLEF and NUR during the First World War. After nine days of strike action, the government agreed to maintain wages for another year”.

Simply reading this reminds us of how much has been achieved subsequently.  What I wonder would those pioneers have made of the endless derogation of a Labour Government that, amongst many other achievements, introduced the minimum wage across all sectors of the economy?   I suspect that they would have little patience with the ready embrace of ideological purity at the expense of reaching out to achieve power in order to change things.

David Russell and his team have undertaken painstaking research. They have identified the many individuals who contributed to the development of the Labour Party and even listed the local streets that have been named in their memory. This impressive work, however, raises many questions that, sadly, in the absence of written personal recollections we will never be able to answer.  One that particularly intrigues me is how these previous generations of Labour activists communicated with each other and, indeed, how they ever managed to meet.  I have asked the older residents of my village how they travelled and the main answer seems to be they never went anywhere – beyond the three miles to Holt if they had a motor bike.  Less affluent people used telephone kiosks up to the 1960s  (we still have one in our village but I have never seen anyone use it) and letter post was the only alternative.

One question where we can attempt an answer is what motivated these pioneers. Their lives were hard; they were conscious that they were exploited; they wanted something better for themselves and their family.  The way forward was clear: Labour Party support was built on offering the working class policies that would advance their economic interests while creating a fairer, more just, society.  There was no conflict seen between what the individual desired and what was needed for society.  Success in North Norfolk was built on galvanising this working-class vote: big arable farms meant that there were large numbers of poorly paid labourers working together in close proximity – similar to the mines or the docks.

This organisation produced a succession of Labour MPs in North Norfolk, something that only ended with the defeat of MP Bert Hazell in 1970: the son of a Norfolk farm worker, he had left school at 14 to work on a farm in Attleborough, where his duties included scaring crows.  Again we should remind ourselves of how far we have come. Today many 14 year olds in Attleborough will be setting their sights on University – something for which the last Labour Government deserves much credit.

All of this history and more is documented in the centenary booklet.  The Banner Bright is a fitting tribute to generations whose sense of perspective was better than ours.  My congratulations to David Russell, Tim and Ruth Bartlett, Stephen Burke and Jasper Haywoood for reminding us of how much we owe these pioneers and the need to build on their legacy rather than drift into the irrelevancy of gesture politics.  North Norfolk Labour Party Executive please take note.

To obtain a copy of The Banner Bright please see the comment below from David Russell

leftyoldman blogs will appear occasionally as the Brexit battle continues and the shape of post Brexit politics emerges.  If you would like to receive email notification of future blogs, please press the ‘followleftyoldman’ button on the left hand side above. I continue to tweet at @eugrandparents.

Project(s) Reset

Given my South Wales background, two institutions have defined my identity.  Both are in a chaotic state.  One is Welsh Rugby: I saw my first game at the Arms Park when still at primary school. The second is the Labour Party which I joined at the age of sixteen.  l have an emotional commitment to both institutions but despair of them.  It’s like the pull of a family member who continually lets you down; you never give up and always remain hopeful of better behaviour.

The tribulations facing both entered a new stage earlier this month, a time dominated by the collapse of May’s Brexit strategy. Both institutions have been in continuous discord for some time and their latest upheavals mark another step along the road, but, importantly, a step that takes us no nearer a harmonious solution.

Lets start with rugby.  The governing body, the Welsh Rugby Union (WRU), and almost everybody else, has for a long time recognised that the current structure for our national game cannot be sustained commercially.  There are four professional teams in Wales and the solution the WRU offered was to merge two of the South Wales teams (Ospreys and Llanelli) and establish a new side in North Wales – hence Project Reset.  This solution, we were lead to believe, had secured wide agreement following extensive discussion and consultation.

In fact it fell apart on the day it was announced, with the Osprey’s Chairman tendering his resignation.  The Welsh XV players, due to take the field in a crucial game against Scotland that weekend, then lined up to express their anxiety and concern. To quote from the distinguished ex-player and now TV pundit Jonathan Davies: “It was a total shambles – the timing, how it was handled”. When asked if this debacle would be a distraction for the team and affect their performance, he replied “With Welsh Rugby there is always a distraction somewhere or other”. He was correct: the team won the game and the underlying problems remain deadlocked.

Now, despite dire opinion polls, the Labour Party leadership has not embarked on a Project Reset, nor is it likely to do so.  So long as Momentum retains control of the Party at local levels, and Jeremy Corbyn is unchallenged, nothing matters to the leadership faction. Those of a more social democratic persuasion who leave the Party in disgust can be dismissed as Blairites – ignoring the fact that Blair himself ceased be leader twelve years ago.

All credit therefore to Deputy Leader Tom Watson for very publicly establishing The Future Britain Groupto, according to his blog,  ‘restate those social democratic and democratic socialist values’. [i]Press Reports state that Neil Kinnock, Peter Mandelson, David Blunkett and John Prescott attended the launch event in the House of Commons, together with the alternative leaders of the Parliamentary Party, including Yvette Cooper and Hilary Benn.   If the immediate intention was to persuade rank and file members not to leave the party he could hardly have assembled a stronger cast.

Given all this my dismal best guess is that both Welsh Rugby and the Labour Party will carry on underperforming for some time to come but terminal decline will be avoided.  For my part there is no way that I will change my allegiances however inept the leadership of both institutions.  I will continue to take my seat at the Principality Stadium.  I will also continue in membership of the Labour Party.  It is possible that some hard questions will be asked, both in the Norfolk party and nationally, after the May local elections.  Then we may see some progress.  For Welsh Rugby much will depend on the performance in this autumn’s Rugby World Cup. Time to be patient and see how things unfold.

[i]https://www.tom-watson.com/please_don_t_leave_the_labour_party

leftyoldman blogs will appear occasionally as the Brexit battle continues and the shape of post Brexit politics emerges.  If you would like to receive email notification of future blogs, please press the ‘followleftyoldman’ button on the left hand side above. I continue to tweet at @eugrandparents.

Love me like I’m leaving

As I settle into comfortable retirement in our village, BBC Radio Norfolk is one of life’s real pleasures.  I particularly enjoy the predictability of the phone-in football programme, ‘Canary Call’, which follows the final whistle after every Norwich City game.  Comments from those who not only didn’t see the game under discussion but haven’t seen one for decades are always treated with the utmost courtesy.

My favourite however will always be ‘Rodeo Norfolk, Radio and Norfolk’s Country and Western Programme’,which goes out between 0900 and 1200 on a Saturday.  Half way through, the feature is ‘Your Country Collection’: listeners send in six records and the excellent presenter, Keith Greentree, chooses three to play.  I am proud to say that my selection has been played on four occasions and I have just submitted a fifth.  This pride was punctured when I met one the BBC executives who told me that, unusually for a listener, I always identified the right artist and song title and was able to spell their names correctly; it was this, rather than any musical judgement, that had provided the platform for my success.

It was no surprise therefore when, on Monday 18^thFebruary, I received a phone call from the station.  I thought it was a query about my latest country collection submission, but in fact the call was a request for the radio interview that is reproduced the blog immediately below.  It was a response to the major news story of the day: that a group of seven Labour MPs had formed an independent group as a reaction to the current Labour Party leadership.

Listening to the clip I wish I had been a little clearer that I am not currently planning to leave a Party that I joined over 50 years ago. I wouldn’t have changed anything else I said  – I am disgusted by the anti-Semitism and by the behaviour of those, including North Norfolk Labour Party Members, who defend the leadership’s inept handling of the issue.  To his immense credit Labour’s Deputy Leader, Tom Watson, hit the right note with his statement the following day.  To quote: “The instant emotion I felt, when I heard the news this morning that colleagues were leaving Labour, was deep sadness. I love this party. But sometimes I no longer recognise it”.

Tom Watson continued: “The tragedy of the hard left can be too easily tempted into the language of heresy and treachery.  Betrayal narratives and shouting insults at the departed might make some feel better briefly but it does nothing to address the reasons that good colleagues might want to leave”.  Too true, Tom.  My inbox the following day was full of communications from various Labour factions and included the following gem from Momentum: “[Leslie and Chuka] are attacking Labour for “weaken[ing] our national security”, supporting “states hostile to our country” and being “hostile to businesses large and small”.In short, their agenda is for war and big business”.  Work your way through that tortuous logic!  It illustrates why I cannot currently make the effort to attend North Norfolk Labour Party meetings while Momentum exercise control.

So, as Tom Watson so eloquently articulated in his statement, if the Labour Party is to survive time is short; it is vital that the scale of the problem is recognised if further defections are to be avoided.  Ironically such sentiments were captured perfectly in one of my songs submitted for the Country Collection.  It is ‘Love me like I’m leaving’by Sugarland: a recognition that a relationship can only be rebuilt if the emotions underpinning imminent break-up are recognised.  I hope that Keith Greentree will play it one coming Saturday – but not on 23^rdMarch when I will be in London for the Remain rally.

leftyoldman blogs will appear occasionally as the Brexit battle continues and the shape of post Brexit politics emerges.  If you would like to receive email notification of future blogs, please press the ‘followleftyoldman’ button on the left hand side above. I continue to tweet at @eugrandparents.

 

Letting down a generation

Evidence of the harmful impact of Brexit mounts by the day. The UK car industry will be particularly damaged: on February 3^rd Nissan announced that it would now build its X-Trail car in Japan rather than Sunderland.

In an excellent recent New Statesman article, Jonathan Powell, Chief of Staff under Tony Blair, argued ”The Prime Minister and many of her colleagues knew they were doing something that would do great harm to the country but did not dare stop it for fear of being unseated by the extremists in their own party”.[i]  In her defence nobody, and that includes the Prime Minister herself, fully realised how much harm would be done; the electorate were seduced by dishonest Brexiteers who pretended it would be easy to forge new trade deals.   Nissan has demonstrated the fallacy of that assumption, which, amongst other things, disregards the complexity of supply chains in high value manufacturing and precision engineering.

Here I have some professional interest.  I spent my career in management education and training and, in the latter part, specialised in skills development and apprenticeships. In November 2013 I was asked to give evidence to the Select Committee of the House of Lords Inquiry into EU (European Union) action to tackle youth unemployment.  I presented a case study of a success story. It related to a factory based in Llanelli, South Wales. Part of the German owned Schaeffler Group, the factory employed 220 people producing high specification bearings for motor engines. It was an exemplary organisation and to quote one of my published articles:

“The company faced increasing competition from low labour cost countries as group production capacity was placed in Eastern Europe (Slovakia and Romania) where wages are a fraction of those in the UK.  The company responded by developing the capability to deliver higher value added products. There was a planned focus on continuous improvement, cost reduction and, as an integral component of the process, a sustained attempt to up-skill the workforce”.

On reading of the Nissan decision I plucked up courage to update my knowledge of the Llanelli factory and was saddened, but not surprised, to find the following headline in a 6^th November article in WalesOnline: 220 jobs axed with closure of Llanelli auto parts plant due to ‘Brexit uncertainty’. A link to the article is set out below.

 

https://www.walesonline.co.uk/business/business-news/live-updates-250-jobs-axed-15377458

This is a tragedy.  The plant was established in 1957 and offered high quality apprenticeships in an area of high unemployment and limited opportunities.  It was, together with an Indian IT consultancy based in Bangalore, the best managed organisation I encountered in over twenty years researching the subject.

From a comfortable retirement base in North Norfolk I feel very angry.  Not just about the dishonesty of Brexit – the charade of ‘we’ll make Britain great again’ – but about the dismal performance of the national leadership of the party that I joined in South Wales fifty years ago.  Local Labour representatives in Llanelli, including the excellent MP Nia Griffith, are doing their best; Jeremy Corbyn and his acolytes wouldn’t began to understand what a supply chain is and are in hiding in the hope that a catastrophe will propel them to power.  That is a heavy price for a generation of school-leavers to pay: it is easy to destroy opportunities; it takes ages to rebuild.  Once factories like Schaeffler Llanelli have gone they are gone for good, taking the quality jobs with them.

So I make no apologies for, in a very modest way, continuing the fight. Following my previous blog in which I drew attention to problems here in North Norfolk, I received a reprimand from the current Chair of the local Labour Party.   He is the fourth person to occupy this position in the four years since Momentum took control and the third in succession to try to tell me off for the contents of my blog. He wrote:  “even though we may disagree on Labour policy issues we are all members of that broad socialist church”.  While the Labour leader behaves in this way, and unscrupulously avoids engaging in the major question of the day, I have no intention of joining Mr. Corbyn and his acolytes where they choose to worship.  I will carry on writing as I please.

[i]Jonathan Powell, The rise and fall of Britain’s political class, New Statesman, 30^th January 2019

leftyoldman blogs will appear occasionally as the Brexit battle continues and the shape of post Brexit politics emerges.  If you would like to receive email notification of future blogs, please press the ‘followleftyoldman’ button on the left hand side above. I continue to tweet at @eugrandparents.

Internationalism or nostalgia?

Tony Benn on the platform

Next week there is the opportunity to halt, or even reverse, the long slide to a catastrophic EU withdrawal. After a summer break Parliament will debate the House of Lord amendments to the Brexit Bill.  Endless calculations of the Parliamentary arithmetic will be made, but all will depend on courageous Conservative rebels and, more importantly, the attitude of the Labour leadership.

We should all rejoice that there has been a shift in Labour’s position.  It appears that the Party’s current stance is for the softest possible Brexit: to stay in the customs union, while seeking a relationship with the EU that gives the benefits of the single market without membership. This is of course nonsense. As a country we have received repeated indications that this it would be unacceptable to the EU. Such a position can only be regarded as an opportunistic debating stance with an eye on the main chance of forcing and winning a general election.

Sadly the current Labour Party leadership and their most enthusiastic adherents believe this is all that matters: use any sleight of hand to keep the Labour Leave voters in the old heartlands on side and hope to take advantage of the chaos that results from Brexit.   There is little interest in the wider case for internationalism or for growth through frictionless trade; hence membership of the EU is incidental to progress to the idealised socialist nirvana.  Judging by his actions this is Jeremy Corbyn’s stance to date and, since he is certainly a man of principle, we need to ask why.

Everybody looks back fondly to the day when they discovered their politics, especially if it marked a period of successful activism and personal advancement. For Jeremy Corbyn that period was the late 1970s and early 1980s. I remember that time well.  I was a young economist in the nationalised coal industry and an active member of Corbyn’s fractious North Islington Labour Party.

In that period the ‘alternative economic strategy’ (AES) developed by Tony Benn defined the economic thinking of what were then called the new left.  Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and Diane Abbott were keen disciples. The AES was about centralised planning: elements included an investment bank (the National Enterprise Board), planning agreements with private sector companies (which simply never happened) and an extension of public ownership.  It was a credible instrument in its time and its successes and failures deserve careful analysis in any consideration of the effectiveness of Labour in power.  At the time Benn led the hostility to what was then called the common market on the grounds that it was an international capitalist conspiracy and, if outside, the UK would be able to create some sort of socialist state.

We are forty years on; times have changed.  However the AES continues to have a disproportionate influence on the left of the Labour Party, especially the more elderly members of Momentum. They fail to appreciate that 21st century economic and social problems require international co-operation.

A good example is one that emerged during the May Irish referendum on abortion.  Electoral integrity was potentially compromised when paid advertisements financed from overseas appeared on social media; anxious to avoid serious government intervention both Facebook and Google banned such advertisements.  Important issues were raised here: current electoral law is no longer appropriate to deal with the impact of international social media. What is certain is that this is just the first of many complex problems that will arise with social media companies. They cannot be resolved by nationalising the companies concerned – they are global players – and appropriate regulation can only be developed and implemented internationally.  There is a common agenda to be developed across Europe. Moreover, the left’s concern that greater state intervention will be made more difficult in the customs union and single market has itself been hotly contested – see for example the thorough analysis by Andy Tarrant and Andrea Biondi in Renewal http://renewal.org.uk/blog/eu-law-is-no-barrier-to-labours-economic-programme.

So, if the electorate decided to vote for the Alternative Economic Strategy, or variants thereof, there is no reason why it could not be implemented within the single market.  Opposition to the EU on these grounds is based on nostalgia and gut reaction rather than any analysis of the facts. There is no sensible reason remaining for anyone of left-of-centre views to equivocate on Brexit. Next week’s Parliamentary decisions will go down as a turning point for the Labour Party and have an impact way beyond the immediate issues.

 

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It’s more than tribal loyalty

In May one of my LinkedIn Contacts was elected to a London Borough Council – as a Liberal Democrat.  I had always enjoyed a good professional relationship with him and sent him a congratulatory message.  He replied that he followed my blog, found it interesting (for which thanks), and continued: ‘I remain baffled that you actually want to have Corbyn in number 10 and (much worse) McDonnell in number 11!’ This is a fair point and deserves a response.

Let me start by saying there is much substance in what he says.  Alastair Campbell, Press Secretary in the Blair Government, speaking at the Progress Annual Conference (available on The New European website) described the 2017 General Election as a battle ‘between competing visions of the past. 70s v 50s, with little to match the sheer scale of challenge facing both the country and the world’.  He continued ‘frankly I am finding life and politics tough right now. I’ve been lucky enough to be on the winning side of arguments a lot of my life in politics. Today, whether on Brexit, Labour v Tory, or the direction of the Labour Party, or the spread of populism, it doesn’t feel like that any more.’ 

This all struck a chord with me, and I could also relate to the passage that followed: ‘I am also a very tribal person. Short of Putin and Assad leading a consortium to buy Burnley, for example, and installing Johnson as chairman and Rees-Mogg as manager, nothing will challenge my football tribalism’.  For me the side is Cardiff Blues which, like Labour Party membership, is part of my DNA.

However I recognise that the above paragraph does not offer much to those outside the Labour Party tent. Come inside and suffer alongside us is not a compelling argument.

Pointing to those who remain and are increasingly vocal offers a better argument.  Here I must applaud Neil Kinnock for his recent forthright interventions: writing in the Independent he warned that Jeremy Corbyn is about to commit a ‘serious evasion of duty’by refusing to back a plan to keep Britain in the single market.  David Miliband followed two days later by saying that the Labour Leader will ‘be the midwife of a hard Brexit that will harm Britain’s poorest unless he fights to stay in the single market.’  I am sure that these two interventions and others that will follow are co-ordinated and are building up to a crescendo at this September’s Labour Party Conference.

Neil Kinnock, who I knew from my South Wales days, and David Miliband, represent the two Labour different strands: working-class traditionalist and North London intellectual. Together these two strands shaped the party I joined.  While they are prepared to fight for the future within the party so, in a very modest and isolated way, am I.  Add in Yvette Cooper, David Lammy, Alison McGovern and Rachel Reeves and there is more than enough to make me continue to hope.  Indeed I am prepared to take another hiding as the candidate in Glaven Valley in the 2019 District Council elections. In 2015 I polled 78 votes. I do not expect any improvement: the return of Labour to mainstream politics will not start until Brexit is well behind us.

 

 

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