johninnit

“…is to face them down.”

A very good speech that, solid social democratic territory. Straight through. No grovelling, even where he admitted mistakes. “I’m not going to change to something I’m not”.

A coherent vision around ‘fairness’ and a ‘new settlement for new times’. Clear new policies that illustrate the fairness vision and that should be popular – computers for kids, free prescriptions for cancer patients, nursery places from 2. An illustration of the huge challenges of the current environment, and how the ‘new settlement’ leads naturally to action to regulate financial markets and on climate change. A roundup of the good work of the rest of the cabinet. Straight through a solid defence of continued investment in public services and praise for public servants (though conveniently not a sausage on their pay deal). (more…)

Waiting for Gordon to come on the telly. Interesting choice of music to settle the crowd in the conference hall, courtesy of Manchester legends James. Cracking tune obviously and has us humming nostalgically, but I’m sure the diarists are going over it already: (more…)

Look at this. It certainly looks the business.

In recent years, Labour seem to have eschewed the Tories’ strategy of slick New Media launches, aimed at offline column inches rather than online impact. From ‘Dave in India’, through Webcameron’s diminishing returns, to the recent banner ads, the Tories have very pragmatically spent online in order to look innovative to the offline majority, who will never actually bother with this politico-geekery themselves. It didn’t matter really what they did, so long as they looked stylish, modern and open, and had enough buzzwords on-site to impress the scribblers.

Put against this, Labour seem in the last year to have taken this web stuff all a bit too seriously. Rather than media launches, they’ve worked through a bunch of policy consultations, and tools designed to up their supporters’ web literacy. The byzantine MPURLs system is a world away from Webcameron, and seems to show a party actually looking for ways to take the technology seriously. Focusing internaly has had benefits in building a core of activists who are web literate, and I think is the correct strategy long term, but it’s let the Tories lap us more than once in the race to be seen as innovative. (more…)

Have you had a go at LabourSpace yet? It’s a sort of Big Brother for NGO campaigns. Every month there’s a new theme, and relevant lobby groups add their favourite campaigns. Users to the site vote on the campaigns, and the winner gets to have tea with Tony and Hazel and bend their ears a bit.

Anyway this is ‘work month’, which means unions are up for the prize. And so far there are 3 union campaigns in the house, two from the CWU and one from the TUC. They are:

Give Safety Some Teeth! (TUC)

Fines for work safety breaches are stupidly low in comparison with other corporate offences (compare £980,000 for Nationwide’s slip up in potentially revealing customer information with Granite Ltd’s £10,000 fine for not securing slabs which crushed an employee to death). Hundreds of people are still being killed at work in the UK every year, for want of some very simple safety measures. But bad employers will look at the tiny fines they might get and decide they can swallow lots of those rather than just pay up to play safe. Raising the level of fines will be simple, quick, uncontroversial with any decent employers, and save lots of lives.

Justice for Agency Workers (CWU)

Labour has done a lot of good in upping the UK’s stautory minimum working conditions, but there’s a gaping hole in this otherwise excellent work, which temp workers often fall through. A lot of people like agency work, but it’s also the case that many do it because so many companies are shirking their employer responsibilities by outsourcing that they can’t get a full time job. Whatever the reason, people working as temps shouldn’t be forced to take a huge hit in rights that everyone else now takes as a minimum standard. The Government has put back legislation on this recently, so this is an opportunity to keep up the pressure.

Save Gloucester Mail Centre (CWU Gloucestershire)

A reminder that unions are about standing together to protect their members in local disputes comes from the third campaign, which is seeking to get Royal Mail to reconsider plans to close a mail centre that would affect 400 staff working there. Instead they want to see the company conduct a proper study into the stated reasons for the closure, which look to be a smokescreen for cost cutting, or at least provide more serious support than is currently proposed for affected staff. The branch fear that this could be the start of a round of cutbacks in regional mail provision.

So if you’d like to see some tanks on the No10 lawn (or at least some union campaigners in the Cabinet Office), pick up your mouse and get clicking at LabourSpace.com

Still a lot of speculation about who will get the union votes in a Labour leadership contest – Amicus are cheering for Brown, and the non-affiliated RMT declared for McDonnell – Everyone else seems to be waiting to see the final cut, and maybe see what they might get from any of the candidates.

Whoever gets it though, and whoever promises unions the most, it’s nice to see we’ll all know very clearly who’s promising the least for people at work. This sort of thing should focus minds nicely come the next election:

Ridiculous Politics: David Cameron: I’ll make it easier for companies for fire you