Llanwyfan - Penycloddiau Hill Fort Circular Walk

Off message but spent Christmas in North Wales visiting family. In between visits (and eating and drinking lots) Gill and I had some fantastic walks. We hired a cottage near Llanwyfan which is about 4 miles from Denbigh. There use to be a large TB hospital at Llanwyfan (I will post on its remains another time). 

We could start hill walking from the cottage. On the Sunday we walked left along the country road then up a footpath to climb to join the Offa’s Dyke path (a long distance footpath that goes across Wales) to the Iron Age hill fort Penycloddiau. You can still make out the earth defences of the fort. At the top is a modern monument to mark a Bronze Age burial mound. The views were also spectacular. You could see Liverpool in the far distance. The weather was lovely (as always in Wales of course). 

We then walked down along Offa’s Dyke path and turned back along the Clwydian Way. Which was very muddy in parts but the views of the Vale of Clwyd were stunning. The mud was probably due to 4 wheel drive “enthusiasts” churning up green lanes and tracks. We could see a convoy in the distance and during another walk we actually came across a convoy. 

A few years ago we were walking along this same track when BBC radio rang wanting to interview me on housing workers facing violence at work. Much to Gill’s annoyance she had to stop and wait until the interview was over (they never used the clip after all that). 

The track took us nearly right back to the cottage. The walk was about 5 miles long with only 1 real climb uphill and took about 2 hours. Perfect little walk.

TUC head calls on labour movement to pull together and avoid “self-pity” and “recriminations” in New Year message

“Working families won’t be sorry to see the back of the 2010s. It’s been a decade of austerity and pay stagnation – putting real pressure on family finances, the NHS and the public services we all rely on.

Looking to the next decade, we face big challenges as new technologies like artificial intelligence become common in the workplace, and cutting carbon emissions across industries becomes ever more urgent. As the world of work changes, unions must win agreements with employers so that everyone gains – not just those at the top.

There is so much at stake for working families.

Boris Johnson says he has been ‘loaned’ blue collar votes - and that he will have to earn their trust. He will be tested earlier than he thinks. His party forced working people to pay the price of the global financial crash. Now it’s payback time. The policies that unions champion - stronger rights at work, a ban on zero-hours contracts, action to get wages rising and fair trade deals - are popular, whichever party people voted for and in every part of the country.

In 2020 the trade union movement will hold Boris Johnson’s feet to the fire on his promises to invest in schools and hospitals, get real wages rising and deliver stronger rights at work. We will resist his attacks on the right to strike and on the very organisations that help people get a better deal at work – unions.

We will fight to make sure that the UK’s Brexit trade deals protect labour standards and good jobs – and to stop Donald Trump getting his hands on our NHS.

And we will stand against the far right, and their attempts to divide workers. Whatever our background, race or religion, unions will always stick up for working families. On the frontline are our legion of elected workplace reps. In 2020, we’ll be by their side, helping them break down prejudice and racism, and build respect and tolerance.

What working people need now is for every job to become a decent job. Good work gives people dignity and control. We should all be able to feel proud of earning a fair wage for hard day’s work. We need a fair share of the gains as productivity rises, and a real voice in how change happens.

As we face the challenges of the 2020s, all parts of the labour and trade union movement must pull together. We must be a broad church - and a bigger one too. Unions’ first duty is to win a fair deal for working people. But to do that we must rebuild our numbers - fast.

My message to the labour movement for the year ahead is this: now is not the time for self-pity or recriminations. Our job is to fight for working people, not against each other. We need to learn the lessons of the 2019 election and listen to the working-class communities we exist to serve. We need to show humility, reflect – and then pick ourselves up and prepare for the battles ahead.

Trade unions are the first resort and the last line of protection for working people. Union workplaces are safer, pay more and treat people better. In 2020, the TUC and the whole trade union movement will step up our efforts to making sure many more working people can benefit from the protection, support and solidarity of a union workplace.

Union membership has been growing slowly – but in 2020 we will up our game. That means making the case for unions in all sorts of workplaces. It means transforming ourselves to meet the expectations of today’s workers. It means getting concrete wins on wages and fairness in places where we are already strong – and using those successes to persuade working people that change is possible, and that workers don’t have to just put up with whatever the government or the boss throws at them.

Workplace by workplace, we can bring the benefit of unions to today’s working class.

And in all we do, we’ll keep working for a prosperous and fair country where people with diverse backgrounds and differing views can work together to achieve the things we all want: a decent life for ourselves and our families, for our workmates and our neighbours.

I wish you and your loved ones good health, happiness and success in 2020 and always.




Frances O’Grady’s New Year message

Newham in east London has steepest house price rises of the century

Hat tip The Guardian. This is NOT a good thing

The Death of Stalin

I watched “The Death of Stalin” on Netflix last night. It is billed as a comedy. While there are some comic moments it is not for the faint hearted. 

An account of a gangster state changing its leadership. I wonder how accurate it is? Strange to see Paul Whitehouse in a drama. 

Makes you wonder what will happen when Putin goes? Also, why does Russia seem prone to be ruled by monsters? netflix.com/title/80208631

#NewhamDemocracyCommission Have you had your say?

Democracy and Civic Participation Commission - tell us what you think. To join the conversation online, and for full details of all events visit: https://www.newhamdemocracycommission.org/

#NewhamDemocracyCommission

A Christmas gift from “Battling Bessie” Braddock

An early Christmas present were these historic Labour Party cuff links. My cousin is friends with an elderly Labour supporter in Dolgellau, North Wales who wanted me to have have them. Which is very kind of him.

What is particularly fascinating is that the cuff links were given to him by Liverpool MP and Councillor, Bessie Braddock (1899-1970)

Bessie was a trade union activist and former communist before becoming a Labour Councillor, wartime ambulance driver and from 1945 to 1970 a MP.

Bessie was at times a fiery and controversial figure, she was the first female M.P. to be suspended from the House of Commons. She has also been criticised in Wales for her role in the drowning of the Tryweryn Valley to provide water for Liverpool.  When she died Labour leader Harold Wilson paid tribute "She was born to fight for the people of the docks, of the slums, of the factories and in every part of the city where people needed help“. 

Merry Communist Christmas

Hap tip Stroppy

Newham’s Rough Sleeper Xmas Shelter

“Volunteers are hard at work putting the final festive touches to the rough sleepers Christmas Shelter which opens today in Stratford at 2pm. It’s the second year #Newham Council has supported the project run by Stratford Seventh Day Adventist Church and the Docklands Settlements.

The Shelter offers a warm bed, food and companionship to #Newham's rough sleeping community over the festive period. Thanks to all who have donated and volunteered to help. The Shelter will now remain open 24 hours a day until 2pm on 2 January 2020.

If you see a rough sleeper please direct them to The Carpenters and Docklands Centre, 98 Gibbins Rd, London E15 2HU”

#NewhamRoughSleepingteam

Hat tip Newham Council

A view from the right

Hat tip free markets think tank  CPS for this article by Glen O'Hara.

The real reasons Labour lost

Labour should not have lost this election. Only once before has any modern British government going for a fourth term won the approval of the voters. Real wages have been stagnating for years (though they are rising now). Prime Minister Boris Johnson is deeply unpopular. Public services, especially the National Health Service, are in a mess. And yet the official Opposition was not just defeated – it was utterly eviscerated. How can this have happened?

The explanation is complicated, despite what you might hear from the crossfire of the Forever War that has raged within the Labour Party since at least summer 2015. For their part, Labour’s leadership wants to make this all about Brexit – to say that the party’s pivot to a second referendum alienated Labour’s Leave voters, especially in the North of England. Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell was on the BBC making this case within moments of the exit poll breaking.

They are doing this because they want to avoid blame themselves. But their self-serving excuse is a gross oversimplification at best, and a total nonsense at worst. According to pollsters Datapraxis, Labour lost between 900,000 and just over a million of its Leave voters: but 1.1 million of its Remain supporters. And between 200,000 and 250,000 of those Leavers went to the Liberal Democrats or the Greens – hardly an indication that a hard-core Leave policy would have scooped them all up.

In fact, two interrelated crises blew up in Labour’s face this year. The first is a long-term dealignment of lower income workers from Labour and labourism, speeded up by Brexit and reflected in those defecting Labour Leavers; the second is its sectarian and closed-minded leadership clique. Either one of these would have weakened the party: taken together, they blew its electoral coalition apart.

Labour went into an election with Jeremy Corbyn as the most unpopular Leader of the Opposition ever (at a net rating of -60). It alienated voters and party members alike by insisting on installing favoured Corbynites over local choices (as in Bassetlaw), even as it sent its activists into an offensive battle that they never had a chance of winning.

Labour ignored its own internal polling. Karie Murphy was moved from serving as Head of the Leader’s Office to headquarters with zero experience of ever running anything like an election campaign. Only in the last days of the campaign were defensive ditches dug in Labour seats. By then, it was far too late.

Labour is now so deep in a hole that the light must look like a mere pinprick: it would need to gain 123 seats on a swing of over 10% to gain a majority, and 75 seats to govern in alliance with the Scottish National Party (if the latter again returns 48 MPs). To gain even the latter objective, it would have to overturn the Conservatives’ majority of 5,507 in Northampton North on a swing of 7%. To put that into perspective, that would be the largest national change since 1945, with the exception of Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide.

There is no hope even of minority government without winning back many of the seats Johnson wrested from them last week. These towns – and for the most part they are towns – are resentful of London’s dominance of the economy and national debate; feel the economic and social life draining out of their high streets and communities; experience every day their pathetic public transport and have gained the impression that Labour actually disdains, if not despises them.

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What can the party possibly do to win them back? Perhaps the answer lies in detail. Labour offered everything to everyone this time, in a highfalutin melange of absurdist promises that floated far above people’s actual lives. Free broadband? Free tuition fees? Free school meals? Cheaper train fares? We can deliver it for you wholesale, all at the same time, right away.

As soon as they printed their dozens of fantastical pledges, Labour not only detonated its own credibility, but also removed the moral and contractual leaven of what they were doing – when they could have focused on elderly care, better hospitals, smaller class sizes, more reliable buses. It was no wonder that many voters assembled for focus groups simply laughed when shown Labour’s promises. Contrary to one’s normal advice, the Left really should sweat the small stuff.

For the big offer that you could ‘win a speedboat’ never touched the sides. Indeed, in a strange way, it made things worse, because all the big talk and the huge pride-before-a-fall came across as somehow patronising, another trick from a untrustworthy political elite. They drove straight into the tank trap that the Prime Minister’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, had dug for them.

Cummings wanted the election to face ‘the politicians’ with ‘the people’. So Labour said they’d reorder the economy and nationalise the utilities – that they would do things to the country and to people, rather than let people (shall we say) take back control over their own lives. In an election that saw province and periphery revolt against centre in so many ways, Labour’s impression of statism and centralism was fatal.

So Labour has big problems. But it has small problems as well. Any new leader must address both if they are to have even a hope of success. They must talk in a language people can understand about the real issues affecting their lives, promising legible rather than ridiculous changes, clearing out the entire upper echelons of the party’s management. Can it be done? It is possible. But as Labour’s inner circle go to war to protect their legacy, and the party’s many factions gear up to put their own case, the early signs are deeply gloomy. The British Left may have to toil in the wilderness for a while yet.

A view from the hard left

Hat tip my libel pal David Osland's (seen here with me and his partner Cllr Stroppy) article in last weeks Telegraph.

“For the hard left - and yes, I’m proudly part of it - it’s time to wake up and smell the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign organic fairtrade coffee.

For the second time in four years, a leadership drawn from our side of the party has led Labour to electoral devastation.

Unless we somehow find a way back from that, and to win next time, our vision for Britain faces obliteration as definitive as that witnessed under Thatcherism. It’s a painful undertaking, and it begins with owning the defeat.

The urgent first move is to eradicate anti-Semitism, mainly because that is the right thing to do anyway. But even on the base level of electoral calculation, it’s costing us seats.

Never again should Labour canvassers feel trepidation when knocking on a north London suburban door to which a mezuzah is nailed.

Then, stop stitching up selections, which demoralises activists, but impose rigid quality controls where local parties make the choice, because it’s better than having to disown wronguns' mid-campaign.

The everything-but-the-kitchen-sink manifesto was an unforced error. The message was too diffuse, too much to take in. You really can have too much of a good socialist thing.

Recognise that the ‘MSM’ is called the mainstream media for a reason. You do not single-handedly offset the impact of the millions of Tory-leaning newspapers sold every day by phoning amateur hour spindoctor hot tips to uncritically adulatory one-man websites.

But one factor dominated everything else. Sadly, the few who foresaw the extent of the kicking about to be imparted on account of Brexit were dismissed as namby-pamby nay-sayers.

In hindsight, we’d have been better served shucking off the Lib Dem guilt trip and sticking to the 2017 position of respecting the result. Ironically, that was probably Jeremy Corbyn’s private judgment as well. Yes, it would have hurt in London and the South. But voter haemorrhage would have been less severe overall. All that is by the by anyway. Hard Brexit is now happening whether we like it or not.

Disaffection among what New Labour euphemistically dubbed ‘the heartland vote’ hardly commenced under Corbyn, of course. The malaise dates back decades, allowing the Brexiteer-led ‘party of the metropolitan elite’ critique to gain traction.

Scotland looks a lost cause for at least a generation, after Ed Miliband’s disastrous decision to campaign alongside the Tories in the 2014 independence reference. The Red Wall may not be so beyond repair, but won’t be rebuilt by London calling to the faraway towns.

Where we should not resile is in justifying Corbyn’s four-year stint as leader. Indeed, if you want to get all Marxist about it, you could even call it historically inevitable.

By the 2000s, Labour had moved well to the right of where any left of centre party ever has any business being. Without what City pages call a long-overdue market correction, it would likely be languishing with the sort of single-digit poll standings afflicting many continental counterparts. Even after this week’s collapse, its vote share remains higher than under Brown and Miliband.

It’s not Labour’s reloved economic leftism that is unpopular. If it was, the Tories would not have ditched four decades of orthodoxy and pay lip service to tax-and-spend economics, solely in the name of electoral expediency.

So to paraphrase a popular National Rifle Association bumper sticker, New Labour can have the party back when they pry it from our cold dead hands.

Yes, Corbyn himself has made it plain that he is going, and the ‘process of reflection’ may prove shorter than he ideally wishes. Luckily the hard left retains sufficient membership support to secure the succession.

Rebecca Long-Bailey will likely be designated to carry the flame, but needs to prove she is more than merely a favourite daughter. The right may well stand Jess Phillips, who possesses bucketloads of the charisma Long-Bailey transparently lacks. But some rightists fear her overtly confrontational style makes her too divisive a proposition.

An overcrowded field of soft lefts, semi-Corbynistas, Brown leftovers and centrists such as Angela Rayner, Keir Starmer, Emily Thornberry, Clive Lewis, Yvette Cooper and Lisa Nandy could all make credible unifiers. I’ll reserve judgment until I see the platforms.

So congratulations, Mr Johnson. You now have your mandate to Get Brexit Done, open up the NHS to US Big Pharma, get us all eating chlorinated chickenburgers, create a Singapore-on-Thames that will reduce much of Britain to Detroit-on-Teesside, and such other deleterious schemes as may strike your fancy.

Just don’t forget that most of the electorate didn’t vote Tory, and you may only have your parliamentary majority on loan.

David Osland is a former member of the Labour Representation Committee national committee and ex news editor of Tribune