Manchester, so much (for the council) to answer for

 A new series on BBC2 last night looked at the property boom in Manchester city centre.

Manctopia's main theme is how property development in the city is pushing locals out as overseas investors buy up sites and erect skyscrapers of flats for rent (the latest trend is small flats with communal kitchens and bathrooms which, if not warehouses for the poor, as an American poet once described high-rise public housing, will no doubt end up as overcrowded containers for the precariously employed), contrasting a wealthy divorcée from out of town with a million to spend on a city centre penthouse and a single mother from Winton evicted and facing homelessness before being rehoused in Engels House in Eccles.

The roots of this development can be traced back to the early eighties when the city took a double hit with deindustrialisation, as the docks and engineering factories shut, and central government cuts combined with rate-capping restricting the amount of revenue that could be raised locally. The right to buy scheme introduced then also saw a sharp decline in the council's housing stock.

At first, the solution seemed to lie in the election of a Labour government, but as that prospect receded through the decade - and the party moved to the right both in the city and nationally - a new strategy for funding projects emerged, finding private investors to pay for infrastructure improvements (at a profit to themselves of course), hence the failed bids for the 1996 and 2000 Olympics, the successful one for the 2002 Commonwealth Games which saw the construction of the City of Manchester Stadium and other sporting facilities to regenerate Bradford, a deprived and deindustrialised district of east Manchester, latterly in conjunction with the autocratic rulers of Abu Dhabi who bought the stadium's tenants Manchester City in 2008, an abortive attempt to open a "supercasino" next to it, partnerships with Chinese investors to build a new economic hub at the airport and to gentrify the so-called Northern Gateway along the River Irk through Collyhurst, as well as expanding the council tax base by increasing the number of people living in the city centre from a couple of hundred before the Provisional IRA bomb remodelled most of the new Northern Quarter in 1996 to tens of thousands now.

There are of course counter-arguments to those who criticise any of this, including the absence of alternative funding for these projects which probably wouldn't have been built without private investment (although in some cases that would have been no bad thing) and that outside the city centre rents and house prices are still far lower than in London and the south-east, but it is undoubtedly the case that the planning process for construction in the city centre and its adjoining districts is extremely opaque and unresponsive to local needs, with councillors complaining about a lack of consultation or oversight of decisions affecting their wards and power seemingly being in the hands of the Leader of the Council, his Cabinet and Chief Executive and other unelected officers who routinely allow developers to evade legal requirements to include "affordable" housing below market rates, or pay for it elsewhere in the city. Allegations of "backhanders"  of course abound, but I think the truth is more prosaic: the council's desire to generate revenue, and the movement of senior staff between local government and the private sector, so that those in charge of making decisions come to see things solely through the eyes of the developers.

A sign of how bad things have become in the city centre is the announcement that one of its oldest pubs, the Jolly Angler near Piccadilly station, has been sold off for redevelopment by its owners Hydes Brewery, along with, apparently, the Albert in Rusholme, a proper Irish pub which I used to drink in and blogged about here.

Labour in vain

BBC Two last night showed a documentary filmed throughout the campaign for June's General Election, Labour: The Summer That Changed Everything, which followed four anti-Corbyn Labour MP's who hoped that a Tory landslide and a heavy defeat for their own party might just finish off a Leader whom they themselves had spectacularly failed to oust with an, at times farcical, parliamentary coup the summer before, ultimately fronted by the comically inept and now almost forgotten figure of Owen Smith.

The highlight of the programme for me was the moment when the exit poll was announced as voting ended at ten o'clock on polling day, showing that Labour had actually gained thirty seats, the Tories had lost their slim House of Commons majority and their hopes of Corbyn resigning had just evaporated, with Stephen Kinnock, next to his father, the failed ex-Labour Leader and now Baron of Bedwelty, Neil in a social club in South Wales and Lucy Powell amongst besuited young activists in the City Arms, long a meeting place for Manchester councillors, being just round the corner from the Town Hall, both attempting to suppress their obvious disappointment as their hopes for a swift return to what they still no doubt see as normal politics were finally dashed by the electorate.

The programme then skipped forward to the Labour Party conference in Brighton a few months later, with the four looking rather forlorn and friendless amidst the, admittedly a bit gushingly admiring, youthful Corbyn fan club. Having twice failed to persuade the membership to elect one of their own as Leader in successive years, you felt that deep down their thoughts were pretty much identical to those which Bertolt Brecht famously assigned to the Stalinist dictators of East Germany in 1953 after the Berlin building workers' strike sparked an uprising against their rule: "Would it not be easier.../To dissolve the people/And elect another?"

The most bizarre Labour Party-related TV moment of the night had already occurred earlier in the evening, when one-time Cabinet minister and Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls brought the ex-Communications Workers Union General Secretary Billy Hayes onto BBC One's Would I Lie To You?, not a programme I normally watch, but which I happened to catch five minutes of while flicking through the channels, and introduced him as his former partner in a Lionel Richie/Diana Ross karaoke tribute act.

The six tribes of Labour

At the end of the most interesting Labour Conference for a couple of decades, the media is focussing on divisions between the left and right in the party, mainly over Trident, but also to a lesser extent over Europe, Syria and the economy.

Those divisions are real and important but what's often overlooked is the differences in background and class that have shaped Labour politics throughout the party's history. I can think of half a dozen such groups in the party:

1. Upper middle-class Nonconformists, often from a Radical Liberal background: tend to the left and towards vegetarianism, teetotalism, pacifism and mild eccentricity. Tony Benn and Michael Foot are the classic examples.

2. Middle-class professionals, especially academics, journalists and lawyers: tend to the right. Current examples include Tristram Hunt, Gerald Kaufman and Keir Starmer, and in the past Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Harriet Harman, Jack Straw, John Smith, Bryan Gould, Paul Boateng, Jack Cunningham, Harold Wilson, Shirley Williams and Roy Jenkins.

3. Working-class, former blue collar trade union officials: to be found on the right (Alan Johnson, and in the past Ernest Bevin) as well as on the left of the party (Ian Lavery, David Anderson, and in the past John Prescott, Eric Heffer and Aneurin Bevan).

4. Working-class, former white collar trade union officials or activists in local government, the public and voluntary sector or campaigns and pressure groups: tend to the left. Current examples include Diane Abbott and John McDonnell, and in the past Ken Livingstone, Tony Banks, David Blunkett and George Galloway.

5. Politicos/staffers/policy wonks: people who've never had a job outside Westminster, graduating straight from student politics to working for a MP or a left-of-centre think tank, in the party or an affiliated trade union's research unit or as a speechwriter or special adviser to a minister. Lots of current examples including Andy Burnham, Stella Creasy and Tom Watson, and in the past Ed Balls, both Miliband brothers and Denis Healey. Tend to be lower to upper middle-class, occasionally working-class, and on the right of the party. The network of ex-NOLSies (members of the National Organisation of Labour Students) who came from this background were key to creating the New Labour project in the early to mid 90's.

6. Business donors: not many examples, but, unsurprisingly, influential, at least in the recent past, given their ability to donate large sums to the party's coffers and access to other fundraising contacts and networks: Geoffrey Robinson, Lord Levy, Lord Sainsbury.

I'm sure I've missed a few people out and there are of course others who fit into more than one category: Corbyn is a mixture of 1. and 4. and both Benn and Foot worked as journalists too. Let's hope that in the future we see more of 3. and 4. and a lot less of 2. 6., and especially 5.

St George's Square

Returning from West Yorkshire to Manchester last Sunday evening, I changed trains at Huddersfield.

Huddersfield railway station stands on St George's Square which while it might not be quite up there with St Mark's or St Peter's Square is still a pretty impressive space. As well as the neoclassical station with its two pubs, it also has a statue of Huddersfield-born Prime Minister Harold Wilson facing the George Hotel, the birthplace of rugby league.

It's also where I made my screen debut while working for Granada TV as an extra in the early 90's (briefly, at 49.33).

Close the Coalhouse door

I listened to the Radio 4 play Close the Coalhouse Door by Alan Plater on Saturday afternoon.

Based on the writings of ex-miner Sid Chaplin, Close the Coalhouse Door is about the Durham miners' union from the strikes to achieve recognition in the 1830's through the Depression and post-war nationalisation.  It's also well known for the songs in it by Alex Glasgow which as well as Close the Coalhouse Door include As Soon As This Pub Closes and Socialist ABC.

Alan Plater wrote the play in 1968, before the coalfield battles of 1972, 1974 and 1984-5, so director Sam West brings the play up to the present day with an "alternate history" in which Thatcherism never happened. If only...

Here we go again...

Ahead of the start of Labour Party conference in Manchester this weekend, Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls has argued that an incoming Labour government would need to radically cut public spending.

According to Balls, "The public want to know that we are going to be ruthless and disciplined in how we go about public spending. For a Labour government in 2015, it is quite right, and I think the public would expect this, to have a proper zero-based spending review where we say we have to justify every penny and make sure we are spending in the right way."

To help Ed out, here's a list of things he could do to cut a few billion from public spending in his first Budget:

1. reverse privatisation in the NHS and education and on the railways, ending the flow of public money to private sector bosses.

2. cancel the replacement of Trident.

3. announce a council house building programme, hiring unemployed building workers and young people as apprentices so benefits costs go down and tax revenues go up.

Now that would be radical.

Taxing granny?

It's no surprise that the Labour Party has jumped on the Chancellor's decision in this week's Budget to phase out higher personal allowances (the point at which you start paying income tax) for pensioners, dubbing it a "granny tax".

I'm not quite sure of the rationale behind higher personal allowances for pensioners.  There are obviously rich as well as poor pensioners just as there are highly paid as well as low paid workers.  While poorer workers and poorer pensioners don't pay income tax, they do pay far more proportionately in taxes and duty on food, petrol, heating and beer (a mixture of mild and old ale is nicknamed "granny" incidentally).

The way to help poor pensioners and workers is to raise personal allowances for everyone, increase the minimum wage, link pensions to wages and phase out indirect taxes in favour of a progressive income tax.

A4e: the bigger con

Police are continuing to investigate "welfare to work" outfit A4e over allegations that its staff falsified documents to meet targets for finding jobs for the unemployed. There is now speculation that the Department for Work and Pensions is about to suspend its contracts with the company.

In concentrating on the media allegations against A4e there is a danger of overlooking the wider scam the company is engaged in.  Even if A4e staff haven't been falsifying records, or senior executives were unaware of it, the company is still running a massive swindle.

A4e's "welfare to work" approach consists of dragooning unemployed people into overcrowded premises, delivering cod-psychological motivational speeches to them, forcing them into unpaid "work experience" and ignoring the fact that there are far more people out of work than there are jobs.  In many cases, it subcontracts work to one of dozens of competing local agencies, slicing off a large share of the money as profit and leaving them to fight over the scraps. Even it was finding jobs for unemployed people, that is work that should properly be done by DWP civil servants whose numbers have been cut by the last Labour and current Tory-Lib Dem governments at the same time they were awarding A4e multi-million pound contracts.

A4e and its founder Emma Harrison share one thing with benefit claimants: they depend for their entire income on public money.  Harrison has awarded herself close to £7 million in bonuses, charged luxury overseas trips to the company and lives in style at Thornbridge Hall, a country estate in Derbyshire.  She has been invited to Downing Street and to Buckingham Palce to receive a CBE. As the saying goes, steal a penny and you're a thief; steal a million and you're a lord.

Good riddance Lord Gould

It's a commonplace argument that you shouldn't say anything critical about someone when they die, however dishonest, unprincipled or objectionable they were in life.  It's a view that I completely reject, as I shall now demonstrate.

Lord Gould, the advertising man the Labour Party hired in the mid-80's as a pollster and strategist, has died aged sixty-one after a long illness.  His track record has been predictably eulogised by other "architects of New Labour" including spin doctors Lord Mandelson and Alistair Campbell as well as Tony Blair.

Mandelson claimed that "Philip was as brave in his illness as he was in his politics, always doing things differently."  In fact, the opposite is true.  Gould pioneered the use of focus groups and policy making according to opinion polls rather than principle.  His so-called "bravery" in politics consisted of transferring the techniques of the advertising agency to it, adopting or dropping policies not according to what he thought right but the whims of media-influenced public opinion.  Given that  media was largely owned by Rupert Murdoch, another toxic influence on New Labour, Gould's role in the labour movement was akin to the cancer that killed him, spreading a life-threatening poison.  Rather than "doing things differently", he helped to ensure that the 1997 Labour government was a continuation of the Thatcher-Major governments that preceded it, maintaing the anti-union laws and bowing down to big business over the minimum wage.

Blair, Campbell and Mandelson are right that Gould's legacy will outlive him.  For those of us who have to live with that in terms of a hollowed out Labour Party, the only reason to join his funeral cortege would be to make sure the coffin lid is firmly nailed down.

Libraries, Labour councils and the Lansburys

The High Court yesterday ruled that Brent Council in North West London can close half its public libraries. It's been a busy few days for Mr Justice Ouseley, the judge in the case, who earlier this week airily dismissed the educational and health needs of Irish Travellers at Dale Farm in Essex and gave Basildon Council the go ahead to evict them.

One of the libraries set to shut is Kensal Rise (pictured left), opened in 1900 by Mark Twain, and the campaign to stop its closure has attracted support from local literary celebrities including Alan Bennett, Philip Pullman and Zadie Smith. The council closed all its libraries yesterday morning and then once they'd got their judgment reopened half of them and boarded up the ones set to close.  Labour leader of Brent Ann John - channelling the American general in Vietnam who said he'd had to destroy a town in order to save it - hailed the court's decision as meaning that "we can push ahead with our exciting plans to improve Brent's library service and offer a 21st-century service for the benefit of all our residents".

In 1985, then Labour leader Neil Kninnock used his speech at the party's annual conference to launch an attack on the Militant-led Liverpool City Council, famously declaring his contempt for "a Labour council, a Labour council, hiring taxis to scuttle round the city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers."  Not a peep from Kinnock's successor Ed Miliband yesterday, maybe handing out redundancy notices by taxi is what Labour leaders object to.

The standard defence of Labour councillors making cuts to jobs and services is to blame the Tories and Lib Dems (whose local MP Sarah Teather has hypocritically backed the Kensal Rise campaign) and claim that if they defied  the government over them worse cuts would be implemented by an appointed official. Leaving aside their spinelessness, it's hard to see in this case what an official could have done worse, apart from shutting all Brent's libraries.

That there has been a very different sort of Labour councillor was also highlighted yesterday, the ninetieth anniversary of the release from prison of future Labour leader George Lansbury, his daughter-in-law Minnie and their comrades on Poplar council in East London who had defied the Tory-Liberal coalition to defend wages and services in one of the poorest boroughs of the capital.

h/t to Janine Booth for alerting me to the anniversary; her book about the Poplar revolt, Guilty and Proud of It!, is available here.