2013: a year in review

It’s been a momentous year, with lots of unpredictable events that have unfolded before us. I’ve had a wonderful year personally too. 2013 was a big year in politics and world events – locally, nationally and internationally. The next round of local and European elections are now almost upon us, with the year’s events having done much to shape their likely outcomes. We are now less than 18 months from the next general election and the economy and our national debate has shifted, making Labour’s task of taking back the country all the more urgent. We have lost two great and very different statespeople - Baroness Thatcher back when the year was relatively young, and Nelson Mandela near its end. And globally, we have seen both progress and tumult, though as ever, it often seemed like the latter sadly outweighed the former.

 

Southwark/BOS Politics

Neil Coyle’s selection
 

There have been perhaps two big events in Southwark politics this year, both to do with the next general election. The first was the selection of our Labour PPC for my home seat of Bermondsey & Old Southwark (BOS), the fantastic Neil Coyle, back in June. Neil is a disability campaigner and a councillor for Newington ward, one over from my home of Elephant & Castle in Cathedrals ward. Since then, he has knocked on doors and attended community events all other the borough, showing the party's strength as we head into 2014. Unfortunately, this vote wasn’t without controversy, as I’m sorry to say the candidate I greatly regret to have voted for in the selection responded to his narrow loss in a fair selection by scrubbing his claim to be “Labour through and through” from his Twitter account and throwing his money behind a new party, dedicated to attacking Labour and helping the Southwark Lib Dems by splitting our vote. Disunity is always sad to see. As Neil has pointed out, it was divisions within Labour that helped elect Simon Hughes 30 years ago in the controversial Bermondsey by-election in 1983, and it would be a sad repetition of history if it happened again.

Simon Hughes joins the government

 The second came very recently, with Simon Hughes’ announcement that contrary to his previous vows not to join the government front bench, he would do precisely that, becoming a junior minister under Chris Grayling at Justice (the definition of an odd couple, perhaps). Hughes himself pointed out a few years ago that come 2015, not having served in the government will be a benefit to many endangered Lib Dems, something Lib Dem president and leadership hopeful Tim Farron seems keenly aware of (indeed, some read Hughes’ decision as ceding Farron’s frontrunner status in the next leadership contest). Hughes has already voted against the interests of his constituents on bedroom tax and a host of other issues – and he also bizarrely abstained on equal marriage this year (saying that marriage was “gender complimentary” and “traditionally ordained by God as between one man and one woman”) - but up until now he has had the ability to say progressive things while quietly voting loyally with the coalition. Now he will be bound by collective responsibility, and thus less able to pull off his balancing act. This gives BOS Labour a new opportunity to show him for what he really is and place a truly progressive MP in the seat.

Cathedrals news

I’ve also watched politics evolve in my home ward of Cathedrals. I got involved with Southwark Labour fairly soon after moving to the borough in September 2012, but didn’t really embed myself in campaigning again until the start of this year. Since then, I’ve gotten to know our local organiser, the brilliant Tom Heys, and some of the concerns of the ward’s residents. In Cathedrals Labour we’ve spent much of the year fighting tooth-and-nail against Mayor Johnson’s plan to close Southwark Bridge Road fire station, an illogical act of austerity which will deprive the fire service of a training base and put residents at significantly greater risk by raising response times by several minutes in an area with many students and high-rise blocks. We’ve collected hundreds of signatures, and still hope to turn back the plans before the closure goes through in April 2014, but we will have to see what the new year brings on this front.

In July, we put faces on our campaign to oust Cathedrals’ three Lib Dem councillors by progressing with our selections – employment lawyer Heys and local magistrate and small businessman Sirajul Islam (early in the new year we will be selecting a third replacement candidate, ideally a woman in line with Labour’s commitment to diversity). Labour already runs the borough council and has frozen council tax, improved Southwark’s council housing stock in the midst of austerity and delivered free school meals for 5-7 year olds since 2010.  Interestingly, this last measure was adopted by the national Lib Dems as a 2015 pledge during their conference in September, despite their local Southwark party’s vigorous denunciation of the policy as a “bad choice” and a “expensive scheme that…doesn't work” (Simon Hughes was similarly caught on record against, having written that the “Labour-run Southwark Council are wasting extraordinary amounts of money” on free school meals in a public letter). This U-turn shows that Southwark’s Lib Dems aren’t yet ready to govern, and that electing more Labour councillors in wards like Cathedrals to keep the borough red should be a top priority. With the local elections drawing near, I’ll be proud to keep pounding pavements with our fantastic local candidates, and I’m confident we can take back Cathedrals for Labour and promote genuine progressive values here. Roll on 2014.

UK

Eastleigh

Nationally, the year started out with election action in Eastleigh, triggered by Chris Huhne MP’s conviction for perverting the course of justice. At the time this was viewed as a potential opportunity for Labour to flex its electoral muscle and test our ability to pull disaffected voters from the Lib Dems, but this proved a long-shot in a Lib-Con marginal seat where Labour had always struggled. Nevertheless, the final result delivered two kicks in the teeth for the Tories – the Lib Dems held the seat, while UKIP surged into second place behind them,  despite the Tories having mounted a UKIP-lite campaign fronted by a Sarah Palin-esque candidate.

UKIP

 Eastleigh was also just the latest in the string of somewhat strong UKIP showings that had begun in 2012, and was a harbinger of UKIP’s performance in the English local elections held three months later in May. Capturing a notional 23% of the vote, UKIP netted 147 council seats, prevented any of the big three parties from clearing 30% of the vote for the first time and held the Conservatives to their lowest vote share since 1982. UKIP also beat the Conservatives to second place in the South Shields parliamentary by-election that was held on the same day, triggered by David Miliband MP’s sad announcement that he was leaving British electoral politics behind to run International Rescue in New York (Labour held the seat with 50.4% to UKIP’s 24.2%, with working-class social worker Emma Lewell-Buck succeeding the elder Miliband to become the area’s new Labour MP). Despite still having no MPs or major councils, UKIP began dogfighting with the Lib Dems in the polls for the position of Britain’s third party, though as the year drew on polls began to diverge on how they are now performing. UKIP’s first closely-watched conference in September was also a disaster, marred by the latest in a string of gaffes from senior party spokesman Godfrey Bloom MEP. It is now widely speculated that UKIP may come first in the May 2014 European elections, (though UKIP hasn’t led Labour in the EU-specific polls since May 2013, I’d remind – Labour led by 7 in a recent poll). Whether a strong showing in May 2014 will set them up to win any Commons seats or in any way significantly influence the course of the 2015 election remains to be seen, but UKIP’s performance in 2014 will likely remain a major political story.

Europe Referendum

One of the issues that has been associated with UKIP’s electoral rise has of course been Europe (though research by Lord Ashcroft and others tends to suggest that issues such as immigration, Tory anger with this year’s historic legalisation of equal marriage and disaffection with the current state of politics are also key factors – Stephen Bush described voting UKIP as “simply the closest thing to writing ‘It’s all gone to pot!’ on the ballot paper”). In January, David Cameron promised an in-out European referendum for 2017 (though proving the Bush/Ashcroft thesis, this failed to staunch UKIP’s rise or prevent their relative electoral successes, and Tory backbench MPs James Wharton and Adam Afriyie subsequently brought forward clearer referendum bills). Despite longstanding debate about how Labour would respond if and when Cameron made such a pledge, Labour’s formal response to the referendum has been somewhat unclear and politically risky. In May, this prompted the launch of Labour for a Referendum (LfR) by senior Labour backer and JML owner John Mills, though as of yet the party’s stance has not shifted despite the support of Mills, Jon Cruddas, Frank Field, Tom Watson, Owen Jones and many other influential figures for a referendum. This will be something to watch in 2014. Immigration also hotted up as an issue, with Labour clarifying its line on the issue and the Tories hardening theirs with Theresa May’s despicable “go home” van campaign. From January 2014, the arrival of Bulgarian and Romanian immigrants in the UK and Western Europe will only intensify this, as Nigel Farage and UKIP appear keenly aware.

Thatcher
 

April saw the death of Baroness Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s the longest-serving and first female prime minster, and perhaps the most divisive political leader of our time. This prompted much soul-searching on the left and the right about her legacy, and what it might tell us about the direction of our national discourse or the very nature of political leadership. Her passing was a sad and profound occasion, even for those such as me who disagreed with much of what she did.





NHS

 Meanwhile, one enduring national institution that even the headstrong Thatcher could never fundamentally change – the NHS – has seen considerable tumult, even as it rung in its 65^th birthday in July. Crises dating from Labour’s own time in government – Mid Staffordshire, Brian Jarman’s mortality revelations and the Francis, Keogh and Clwyd reports – rocked the service, and briefly called into question Andy Burnham’s position as shadow health secretary. However, Burnham managed to face them down, in no small part due to the various components of the rod in the Tory eye that prevented them criticising the troubling speck in Labour’s. We saw the finalisation of the unwanted £3 billion Lansley Act reorganisation in April with the abolition of Primary Care Trusts and Strategic Health Authorities and their replacement by Clinical Commissioning Groups (many of which were unready by the deadline) and the centralised “daddy of all quangos” that is NHS England. Jeremy Hunt’s NHS 111 rollout was a disaster, more frontline staff were sacked, Darzi centre closures prompted a Monitor investigation, waiting times and rationing of cataract and joint ops rose, and the service even saw a rare summer A&E crisis. More generally, the service continues to face a daunting and near-unprecedented financial challenge – Hopi Sen’s June post ‘The Coming Shitstorm: NHS edition’ was a frighteningly good summation of how hard a post-2015 Miliband administration will have it on this front.

 

However, it wasn’t all doom and gloom on the NHS front, as we saw two good developments this year. One was Andy Burnham’s rollout of Labour’s ‘Whole-Person Care’ agenda for the NHS, which will put both integration and a degree of much-needed localism (we must "trust local government again and give them a proper job to do", Burnham has said) at the heart of Labour’s health policy. It was also one of the clearest policy proposals Labour has so far fleshed out and it allows the party to put forward an alternative vision to the current chaotic Tory NHS. It also has common features with the integration agenda that Lib Dem health spokeman Norman Lamb this year furthered in government (he has announced a series of “integration pilots” and allocated £3.8 billion in funding for them) and Burnham spoke highly of Lamb at a Progress event in December 2012, so Whole-Person Care is a potential basis for consensus should a Lib-Lab coalition emerge when the dust settles on the 2015 election. However, the challenges of determining how it will all be funded and how integration can be achieved with the bare minimum of structural change (both of which Andy is well-aware of) remain.

The second hopeful prospect for the NHS was the announcement of a new chief executive to run the service in England. David Nicholson, who had led the service since 2006 and been personally damaged by Mid Staffs, agreed to step down, and will now be replaced by Simon Stevens in April 2014. Stevens is an international health policy expert, served as a special advisor to Blair and Milburn and was one of the lead architects of Labour’s ambitious NHS plan 2000, which brought about many of the improvements the health service saw in the previous decade. The NHS may be in dire straits, and it is worth noting that the reorganisation has in some respects downsized the role of Chief Exec compared to what the role meant in Nicholson’s time, but Stevens was described by Health Service Journal editor Alastair McLellan as the “cleverest health policy thinker I have ever met” and has a proven record as a progressive reformer. If anyone can improve the NHS’s prospects, it’s him. I wish him the best of luck when he assumes his duties in the new year.

Labour

 Back at the beginning of the year, the party was rocked by the Falkirk selection scandal, which prompted Ed to announce some of the boldest internal reforms in the party’s history (acknowledged as such even by Tony Blair). Ed’s reforms will change our historic funding link with the trade unions so that individual union members will contribute directly. This is fair and right, and creates a sharp contrast with the Tories, whose corporate funding remains as shadowy and undemocratic as ever. However, the details of its implementation still need to be fleshed out, and this could lead to further battles with Len McCluskey and other union leaders in the new year. Ed Miliband’s shadow cabinet reshuffle in October elevated some of the party’s new rising stars such as Tristram Hunt and Rachel Reeves, though the unfortunate demotions of Jim Murphy, Liam Byrne and Ivan Lewis did earn the reshuffle the tag of a “Blairite cull” at the time. More recently, Ed announced that Labour “big guns” like Alastair Campbell and Alan Milburn were being brought back into the fold to help the election effort.

More generally, with the 2015 election now one year closer and another round of local and European elections nearly upon us, Labour still has huge challenges to surmount. A post three days ago by UK Polling Report’s Anthony Wells on the six main political trends of 2013 summed them up nicely; Labour’s average lead has narrowed this year (from 9.9 in January to 6 by December), people became more optimistic about the economy, the Tories established a consistent lead on economic credibility (compared to a neck-and-neck situation early in the year) and Ed Miliband’s leadership ratings are now worse than they were in January (despite a spike in September following his agenda-setting conference pledge on energy prices). According to Mary Ann Sieghart of the Social Market Foundation, one shadow cabinet insider commented that it’s still not impossible that Ed Miliband could be replaced as leader in Spring 2014 if things don’t improve. To make matters worse, in December, Ed Balls also took a battering over his performance during the Autumn Statement.

However,  despite the plaudits George Osborne appears to have earned, its well-worth remembering two things: 1) the economic “recovery” is built on the same old bubble and is not yet being felt in people’s pockets, and 2) George Osborne has this year missed his self-set economic targets to protect the UK’s AAA credit rating and be on track to eradicate the deficit by 2015, instead defaulting to deficit-reduction plans less radical than those laid out by Alastair Darling in 2010. Getting this across and further fleshing out Labour’s own plans will be crucial in 2014 – Ed Balls has now launched a zero-based spending review to this exact end.  Furthermore, the remaining two 2013 trends Anthony Wells noted were more positive for Labour. The crucial one is that as the economy has improved but failed to benefit people directly, other issues – including cost of living – are rising in prominence, offering Labour more of a chance to articulate its own message and shift the agenda further. The second is that UKIP will end the year with slightly more support than they had in January, meaning the Conservatives should be having more nightmares about right-wing vote splitting in 2015, not less. And above all, despite the Labour lead having narrowed, a lead is still a lead. Despite the year’s trials, there is still hope.

Worldwide

Mandela

Much has already been written about Nelson Mandela’s death on December 5^th. I did not write about it at the time, feeling it was hard to add much to what had already been said about a great man who changed a nation and amazed so many with his bravery and decency. I’ll simply echo what Ed Miliband’s team said at the time:

"The world has lost the inspirational figure of our age. Nelson Mandela taught people across the globe the true meaning of courage, strength, hope and reconciliation. From campaigner to prisoner to President to global hero, Nelson Mandela will always be remembered for his dignity, integrity and his values of equality and justice. He was an activist who became President and a President who always remained an activist. Right to the end of his life he reminded the richest nations of the world of their responsibilities to the poorest. Above all, he showed us the power of people, in the cause of justice, to overcome the mightiest obstacles. He moved the world and the world will miss him deeply. During the struggle against apartheid, the Labour party was proud to stand with the people of South Africa in solidarity. Today we stand with the people of South Africa in mourning."

The US

However interesting and complicated UK politics can get, events on the other side of the pond never cease to fascinate me, and this year was no exception. Like us, they made progress on equal marriage, with the US Supreme Court striking down the discriminatory 90s-era “Defence of Marriage” Act and California’s Proposition 8 ban back in June. Later in the year, a pair of events brought about two rapid sea-changes in the mood of US politics. First, the Republicans triggered a highly irresponsible and unpopular government shutdown in September-October, reminiscent of Newt Gingrich’s nasty tactics against Bill Clinton in the mid-1990s. For a few weeks, the mood of US politics turned very much against the Republicans, with Democrats rising in the polls and winning a few state and local elections on the back of it. For a brief time, it even seemed possible that the Democrats might have been able to ride the GOP’s unpopularity all the way to the November 2014 midterm elections. However, in October when the centrepiece of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act reforms came into place – a set of websites that most uninsured Americans will be legally required to use to obtain subsidised and regulated health insurance  – problems emerged, as the main federal Healthcare.gov website was found to be incredibly buggy. Also significantly politically, some Americans lost insurance plans they were happy with because they didn’t meet new statutory requirements, appearing to break Obama’s “if you like it [your current health insurance plan], you can keep it” pledge, which had been key to selling the PPACA to a sceptical and change-adverse US public. This shifted many polls back against the Democrats, to some extent cancelling out the damage of done to the Republicans by the shutdown.

More aspects of the PPACA will kick in in 2014, some of which will likely court further controversy. Additionally Obama’s approval ratings have been flagging this year due to a perceived lack of direction and several scandals (including the NSA/Snowden, among others) and midterm elections rarely favour the incumbent president’s party, meaning 2014 may unfortunately be a tough year for Obama as well. Nn two of the three biggest elections the US saw this year – for the Virginia governorship and the New York City mayoralty – Democrats were victorious, though, defeating rabid religious fundamentalist Tea Partier Ken Cuccinelli in Virginia and making pro-equality left-winger Bill de Blasio the first Democrat to lead NYC for 20 years. However, outspoken moderate-conservative (by contemporary Republican standards, at least) Governor Chris Christie was also re-elected with 60% of the vote in the heavily Democratic state of New Jersey and has now taken on the rotating chairmanship of the Republican Governors Association, further boosting his profile as a potential 2016 Republican presidential prospect. Some early polls do show him performing fairly well in both the GOP primaries and matchups with Hillary Clinton and other Democrats, although it remains to be seen whether he is quite conservative enough to survive the Republican primaries. Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton, Vice President Joe Biden and others have begun to position themselves for the 2016 Democratic primaries – in 2014 as they hit the campaign trail on behalf of Democratic midterm candidates, we will learn more about their possible intentions.

 

Other elections

US Democrats weren’t the only progressive party to face trials this year. This year Labour’s sister social democratic parties have fallen from power in Iceland (April), Australia (September) and Norway (September) and remained out of power in Israel (January). Even where social democrats gained or retained power it was mostly via coalition, whether as a lead partner (Austria, and Italy since February) or as the junior one (as in Germany, where the SDP will now have to endure another grand coalition with a popular Angela Merkel). Labor’s implosion in Australia also means that all but one of the Anglophone “five eyes” countries is now led by its centre-right party (Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the UK, with only the US staying in the progressive column because of Obama). Michele Bachelet and her centre-left ‘New Majority’ coalition did recently win in Chile, and in September 2014 Sweden’s Social Democrats are likely to regain power, but nevertheless, this year it has continued to be true that the centre-left appears to be losing more elections than it is winning. This is a trend we sorely need to reverse.

 

The rest of the world

In the Vatican, we saw the Archbishop of Buenos Aires Jorge Mario Bergoglio become the 266^th Pope (as “Pope Francis”) and the leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics. Predictably he has some views of the which I disapprove – just yesterday the Bishop of Malta claimed that Pope Francis was “shocked” by the practice of gay adoption and had endorsed a sermon against the policy – but he has also proven himself a true adherent to the Latin American Catholic doctrine of liberation theology, speaking out loudly on social justice issues as well (likewise, Britain’s new Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby has this year spoken against austerity and payday lenders). This was encouraging.

In Egypt, President Mohammed Morsi was ousted from power in a controversial coup, as the implications of 2011 Arab spring became ever clearer. In Iran, a historic but controversial temporary deal was struck over the country’s nuclear programme following the electron of moderate president Hassan Rouhani, though in 2014 we will have to see whether a better final deal can be fleshed out. If not, the threat of military action may return. Civil war rumbled on in Syria and August saw a gas attack in Ghouta, triggering brief speculation that the US, UK and France might launch military strikes to punish the Assad regime for its breach of international law. Parliament and the Obama Administration failed to hold their nerve, however, with profound consequences for internationalism (though a deal was at least struck with Russia for the removal of all chemical weapons from Syria).

In Africa, meanwhile, the French proved themselves much more willing than us to uphold liberal interventionism, deploying troops in order to prevent Islamist takeover in Mali and genocide in the Central African Republic. South Sudan, the world’s youngest nation following its formation in 2011, has now sadly fallen into conflict however, and in September, Kenya fell victim to Islamist terrorism when al-Shabaab militants from neighbouring Somalia killed 72 people at a shopping mall in Nairobi. Lastly, in November we saw both the worst of nature and the best of human nature when Typhoon Haiyan ravaged the Philippines, taking over 6,000 lives and publics and governments around the world have sent hundreds of millions in aid and deployed troops to country. In 2014, the test will be to see if the world remembers to keep helping, or whether Haiyan will become another soon-forgotten tragedy.

 

Conclusions

We’ve had all this and more in 2013. I wish for a more peaceful and progressive world in 2014 - happy new year to all!