Cruddas and the bloggers

Yesterday gave The Daily a chance to join other bloggers in a conference call with Jon Cruddas.

The conversation was extremely positive, discussing the potential for the internet and blogging to be a positive new tool, not just for Jon’s campaign, but for the Labour Party as a whole.  What was also refreshing was that Jon actually listened to what all of us had to say about internet campaigning.

I think that’s one of the big differences between Jon and the other candidates - he seems to be actually listening to what people on the ground in the Labour Party are saying. That’s exactly the kind of change we need at the top of the Labour Party and this election is our chance to get it.

Labour Bloggers Awards

The Daily is very pleased to have won the best newcomer and best blog award on Bloggers4Labour.

OK, so the poll may not have been exactly scientific, but nevertheless, it’s a very nice thought that our readers and peers gave us that support.

As things in the blogging world start to slow down in an alcoholic haze before the Christmas holidays, we start to think of the new year, with new announcements and, hopefully, new exclusive stories.

The results for best blog were:

Candidate	Total Votes	%	Voters
The Daily	122	26.41%	20
Ministry of Truth	94	20.35%	16
British Politics	64	13.85%	8
Never Trust a Hippy	58	12.55%	13
let’s be sensible	32	6.93%	9
Jo Salmon	32	6.93%	8
None of the above	28	6.06%	4
Fisking Central	21	4.55%	7
Snowflake5	11	2.38%	5

While the Best Newcomer voting was:

Candidate	Total Votes	%	Voters
The Daily	163	38.17%	27
British Bull$h!t Foundation	84	19.67%	13
Freemania	79	18.50%	13
Union Futures	40	9.37%	5
Tha London Diaries	36	8.43%	10
Progressive Dilemmas	13	3.04%	4
None of the above	10	2.34%	1
Could have been a contender	2	0.47%	2

Alan Milburn - Supremo

Going back to a story that we covered some months ago, we look at the new offering from Keeping the Faith. The site had a bit of a going over from the blogs, including from yours truely, for being a barely veiled uber-Blairite attack group on Gordon Brown.

Well they have a second offering for us - the Labour Network. Which promises to be:

…a website for all Labour MP’s, Councilors, Members and Supporters to promote their own Labour websites and blogs online and will also provide some information about Labour Policies, latest Labour headlines, MP profiles and lots more extras too.

A kind of LabourHome or Bloggers4Labour for the shocktroops. There’s a lot in there, which we fully intend to come back to, but we’d like to start by taking a look at the Alan Milburn fan site they’ve built. It’s a bit remeniscent of the Lemon Lyman site in the West Wing, where Josh’s stalkers congregate to obsess about him.

The site says: “Please do NOT use  any of our work, photos and graphics for your own sites or alter them in any way.” It’s almost as if they could see what was coming. We had a think about it, and decided that they probably wouldn’t mind… so, we bring you…

Alan Milburn - Supremo

Vote Daily!

We’re proud to say that the Daily has been nominated for two of Bloggers4Labour’s blog awards.

Our nominations are for best new blogger and for the overall best blog.

Taking stock of our first six months of blogging, we’re pretty pleased with what we’ve achieved, in particular in scooping the Clare Short resignation from the Labour Party story.

If you like what we’ve been doing, then please vote for us here.

Tom Watson on the deputy leadership

Tom Watson has a poll on his blog about the Deputy Leadership race, which is well worth a look at.  We missed it when it first went, but it looks like it is still live.  Click here to answer his questions.

She who writes the rules

There was some comment on the blogosphere about the outbreak of hostilities between sources close to Harriet Harman and her putative deputy leadership rival Hazel Blears last week. Some light might be shed on this by another article in the Evening Standard, which we reproduce below:

LABOUR WANTS CASH FROM LEADER CAMPAIGNS
BY JASON BEATTIE POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT

CASH-strapped Labour officials have ordered leadership and deputy leadership contenders to hand over some campaign funds to the party. Under new rules, all candidates for the two posts must donate 15 per cent of money they raise to central funds. Any surplus at the end of the contests must also be given to the party. Insiders say that without the levy the party will be unable to pay for the ballots.    

Organisers have also sparked controversy by saying there should be no cap on expenditure. The move has prompted fears that the deputy leadership race will be skewed in favour of candidates with well-off backers. ‘It creates an imbalance in the election,’ said one contender.

Five names have entered the deputy leadership race so far: Alan Johnson, Peter Hain, Hilary Benn, Harriet Harman and Jon Cruddas. Mr Johnson is thought to be close to securing the support of supermarket tycoon Lord Sainsbury.

Mr Hain has the backing of Shaun Woodward, another Labour multi-millionaire.

The requirement that any surplus campaign funds be donated to the Party will be of particular concern to Harman, who had already promised donors that any surplus would go to charity. Weeks after making this promise in her appeal for funds, a Code of Conduct was whisked through an NEC Organisation Sub-Committee meeting, under the eagle eye of Hazel Blears. The Code puts Harman in the tricky situation of banning her from keeping a promise she has already made. Harman’s team smell a rat, and there are other aspects of the Code of Conduct that may well also be viewed askance by those who suspect Blears of having a hand in its drafting.

Whether there is any substance to these suspicions or not, it does show the difficulty Blears will have in trying to run a shadow campaign while Party Chair. On the one hand, she is involved in drafting the rules and is refusing to say whether she is standing; on the other, her allies are spinning her candidacy in the media and signing up MPs. It threatens to leave a hint of stitch-up lying over the whole campaign - the very last thing the Party needs.

The demand for 15% of all funds to be donated to the Party will also be controversial in some quarters - some of John McDonnell’s potential donors may be reluctant to see their money swallowed up by Party HQ, for example.

As an aside, the support of Tory defector Shaun Woodward for Peter Hain may prove a double-edged sword, providing some cash and one more nomination, but painting him firmly in soft-Blairite colours rather than the more leftish image he sometimes portrays.

Enough is Enough: useful idiots for big business

It was with a heavy heart that the Daily saw the Enough is Enough adverts back in the dead tree press.

To reprise, Enough is Enough is a well funded organisation, bankrolled by city bankers, that was set up by Pete Myers (pictured below) lobbying for reform of political parties.

The group is lead by bankers, who have decided to spend large sums of money on political adverts to stop people like bankers from spending large sums of money on politics.

They seem to be fairly well meaning people, but their proposals to cut political donations would probably actually make things worse.

Their proposals are: limits of £10,000 on donations, donations from private individuals only and state funding for parties.

The upshot of this, of course, would be to cut organised labour out of politics. It would be fine for a host of wealthy individuals to pay into parties, but it would be completely illegal for a group of people to band together in a democratic organisation and have a small part of their subs given to a party collectively.

Not only are Enough is Enough uber-individualists, but they also seem to want the Tories to be by far and away the best funded party. The Tories have a far wider base of wealthy supporters, who could be persuaded to pony up ten grand here or there. With the trade unionists out of the picture, the Labour Party would have to look for even more business donors to keep up with the funding base that Enough is Enough would allow the Tories.

It’s also interesting that they are not willing to undergo the same rigorous declaration of donors that the “cr£p” political parties have to go to. All they will say about their donors is that they are: “funded through voluntary donations by its members”. Very revealing indeed.

These people have passed from being quaint wackos to being the rich and powerful’s useful idiots. The Daily is laying down a challenge to Pete Myers and his secret friends. Why don’t you want members of unions to pay collectively to a party? and why won’t you even reveal who your funders are?

Prescott on the deputy leader election

Prescott got stuck into the debate over who should replace him yesterday:

“Deputy [Labour] leaders are there … to help the connection between the Labour party and the government, and to reorganise. I’m not sure every candidate seems to have in mind that they just want to be a deputy [Labour] leader. I think probably they might well want to be the deputy prime minister, but I remind them, that is the decision of the person who becomes the prime minister.”

There’s only one candidate who has said they would be a fill-time deputy leader and decline any government portfolio. 

If Prescott would like to add a “I’m backing Cruddas” logo to his website, he should click here.

Rules for rebuilding the party

There are a very interesting series of blog posts on Jon Cruddas’s website as Nick Lowles, Jon’s campaign director travels around the US looking at campaigning methods used by the reinvigorated American left.

One that really jumps out is on community organising groups in Chicago. Many of the groups are founded on the community organising principles of Saul Alinsky, who’s book Rules for Radicals is like a text book for organising underprivileged communities.

There are plenty of descriptions of the campaigning “rules” in the book on the web. As Nick says:

His strategy was about engaging communities on the issues that really mattered to them. This involved a listening process and an acceptance that local people knew best about their local area and local communities often know the solutions to their problems. It involved leadership training and recognition that the key issue was power; who has power and how you obtain power.

I remember joining the excellent local Labour Party in Finchley in 1993. The party had a huge network of supportive community groups. The Young Socialists had helped to save the Phoenix Cinema in the 1980s, many party members had worked to set up the East Finchley Community Festival. These networks not only helped the community, they also helped Labour form the first ever Barnet Labour-led administration in 1994 and then take Thatcher’s old seat in the 1997 election. It remains a strong, committed Party, but local parties across the country seem to have lost many of those links.

Nick quotes David Ostendorf of the Centre of the New Community:

“We need to get back on the ground and build relationships with communities. You have to build a trust base and trust relationships with each other. That is where the fabric of society has been ripped apart. People have been customised to compete against each other, to blame each other when things go wrong. We need to help rebuild the bonds within communities, to get people to begin to work together around improving social justice for all”

That is really the key. My big hope for the deputy leadership election is that we will finally be able to debate how we renovate the party and rebuild the coalition of support within the very communities that we are here to work for.

Today on the blogosphere

A quick welcome to two new additions to the blogosphere - firstly the British Bullshit Foundation, a blog by some of the older and possibly wiser Labour researchers, going by the collective name of Hamer Shawcross, which casts a cynical eye over portayals of life in the Westminster bubble by both the media and some of their fellow staff.

This description of the life of a researcher certainly brought back some memories for this correspondent. It’s also interesting to see another blog written by a collective, like The Daily.

The Provisional BBC only has one post but that is sufficiently amusing to be worth a read. Hat-tip to Don Paskini for that one, and he also writes an excellent piece on the leafleting versus pamphleting sub-cultures of the Labour Party here. We concur with both his description and his prescription.

Also interesting is the reaction from Blairite hard-liners to John Harris’ application to rejoin the Labour Party.

It’s fair to say that some of Harris’ writing during the last general election annoyed this correspondent - indeed, I was one of the candidates who he advised voting against. Other comments were just badly researched, like his description of Kettering’s Campaign Group MP Phil Sawford as a Blairite.

On the other hand, some campaigners in marginal seats found him useful in persuading liberal-left voters to stick with Labour.

More important, though, is the obvious point that we need to win back people we’ve lost if we’re to maintain any kind of electoral success. We must win people back from the Lib Dems if we are to stop them becoming a permanent threat to our base.

A strategy of refusing to win over new voters and relying on an ever diminishing core is the kind of suicidal prejudice that used to mark the hard left of the Party. It is reminiscent of an incident in ”Red” Ted Knight’s candidacy in 1979, where he canvassed an entire road without finding a Labour voter, got to the last house and at last met a supporter. He asked him what he did as a job. “I’m a senior civil servant” replied the voter. Knight declared, “I don’t want people of your class voting for me!”, turned on his heel and strode off.

Now it is the hard right who declare “no compromise with the electorate” and refuse to accept support from the wrong sort, with Luke even going so far as to call for a return to the days when GCs routinely blackballed new members that they didn’t like the sound of.

So, let’s just be quite clear. If people have seen through the Lib Dems and come home to Labour, that is a good thing. Welcome back.