Extend This Successful Model

Toby Helm and Daniel Boffey write:

Ed Miliband has come under pressure to bring the rail network back into national ownership if Labour wins the next election, as more than 30 of his party's parliamentary candidates call for a bold new policy to improve services and control train fares.

In a joint letter to the Observer, the prospective MPs – many of whom will fight in marginal seats where they say the commuter vote could be crucial – argue that a policy of gradual renationalisation would allow fares to be kept under control and profits to be reinvested in services.

Their intervention comes as radical options for the future of the rail network are being considered by Labour's lengthy policy review, which is nearing completion.

It also coincides with a pledge in the Observer by two key figures in the Labour election team to present the most radical manifesto in a generation.

While Miliband has said he is interested in "innovative solutions" for the railways and is open to considering a greater degree of state control, shadow chancellor Ed Balls is said to be resistant to anything that would be portrayed by Labour's opponents as anti-business or a lurch back to the pre-Thatcher era of nationalised industries.

In their letter, the candidates say a big move on rail ownership and fares could prove a vote-winner on doorsteps, particularly in marginal seats in the south, which Labour must seize if it is to win an overall majority.

They argue that under the present franchising system, private companies can charge high fares and "walk away with hundreds of millions of pounds every year, despite running monopoly services and benefiting from £4bn of public investment in the rail network every year".

Instead, they want to extend the system of national ownership that has operated successfully on the East Coast main line since 2009, when the franchise run by National Express failed, and bring all franchises under state control as they come free.

"A commitment to extend this successful model to the rest of the rail network, as existing contracts come to an end, would mean that hundreds of millions currently lost in private profit would be available to fully fund a bold offer on rail fares," they say.

The letter, which shows the pressure Miliband is under to deliver more eye-catching policies in areas ranging from health to childcare, goes on: "Labour's response to this should be to offer a fairer deal to commuters as a part of Ed Miliband's response to the cost of living crisis.

"Just as Labour has pledged to freeze energy bills and reset the market to secure a better deal for customers, so it will be necessary to reform the rail industry to secure a better deal for passengers."

On Saturday night one of the signatories, Nancy Platts, who is seeking to overturn a 1,300 Tory majority in Brighton Kemptown, said:

"If I can have some concrete policies to sell on the doorsteps, that will make a big difference. Rail fares are a huge issue here and in other commuter areas. For many people who have to buy a season ticket, they are like a second mortgage. Changing the way we run the rail system is an issue of fairness."

An Opinium/Observer poll on the future of rail shows that more than three times as many people back some form of renationalisation of rail services (55%) as oppose it (18%).

When the idea of bringing franchises back under national control as they fall free was put to voters, three times as many Tory voters (60%) backed the idea as opposed it (20%). Among Labour voters 71% were in favour and 8% against.

Writing in the Observer with exactly a year to go until the general election, the chair of the party's election strategy, Douglas Alexander, and campaign co-ordinator, Spencer Livermore, pledge that Labour will deliver "the boldest, most radical, offer in a generation" to the British people to address living standards.

After a week in which the party announced it would intervene in the housing market by putting a ceiling on the amount by which private landlords can raise rents, they say markets must be made to work for those facing cost of living pressures.

"It is a crisis that demands we reform the market, while the fiscal problems we will inherit mean we must be reformers of the state too," they write.

Last a week a group of more than 40 Labour MPs met in the House of Commons to discuss Labour policy on rail, and backed steps to bring the system back under a greater degree of state control.

The left-of-centre pressure group Compass is also preparing to launch a campaign pushing for franchises to be brought back under state ownership with more transparency and accountability built into the system.

On Sunday, Miliband is expected to raise concerns about the planned takeover of UK drugs firm AstraZeneca by US rival Pfizer, increasing pressure for action to ensure British companies are not left at the mercy of predators by firms from overseas.

On Saturday former Labour trade minister Lord Davies warned that British business could suffer if "top industries" were left vulnerable to bids. He said: "I do wonder whether this deal is more about financial engineering rather than industrial logic."

Botched Thinking

America hardly uses the death penalty, and recent events remind us why not.

They also remind us why hardly anywhere still has it.

To revert to it would be to join some thoroughly insalubrious company, and would be downright bizarre on the part of those who defined themselves against Marxism and Islam, or by their affinity with the Old Commonwealth.

Abortion is an argument against abortion, not an argument in favour of capital punishment.

Wars of choice are an argument against wars of choice, not an argument in favour of capital punishment.

Mass deaths on the roads are an argument against the policies that give rise to mass deaths on the roads, not an argument in favour of capital punishment.

Prison suicides, like prison violence in general, are an argument against the regimes that so often prevail in prison, not an argument in favour of capital punishment.

Murders by released murderers are an argument against the policies and procedures that lead to those releases, not an argument in favour of capital punishment.

And there have always been released murderers.

The huge increase in the use of firearms in the course of crimes such as robbery predated the abolition of capital punishment, and began with the sentences handed down to the Great Train Robbers, who had not at that point killed anyone, or else they would have been charged with murder or manslaughter.

I regard it as a considerable scandal that none of them ever was later charged with manslaughter, at least. Had their actions caused the death of someone grander than the driver of a train, then they undoubtedly would have been so charged and prosecuted.

But no one had died at the time of their original trial and sentencing, after which it was universally remarked, while the death penalty was still in place, that "you wouldn't have got that for murder".

As a result, all manner of villains started to go on jobs tooled up as a matter of course.

The abolition of the death penalty did not cause that.

Any more than the abolition of the grammar schools caused the decline in social mobility among the working classes, who barely attended the grammar schools, and who barely attend the few that remain.

In fact, that decline was caused by the weakening of the trade unions and of their role in the Labour Party. Hence the fact that it did not begin until 1979.

Or any more than the smoking ban caused the present problems in the pub trade, which did not begin until later, when, you know, the global economy collapsed.

Had Britain retained the level of economic growth that there was on the day of the last General Election, then the smoke-free pubs would have been doing fine by now.

In Such A Different Light

Seumas Milne writes:

The threat of war in Ukraine is growing.

As the unelected government in Kiev declares itself unable to control the rebellion in the country's east, John Kerry brands Russia a rogue state.

The US and the European Union step up sanctions against the Kremlin, accusing it of destabilising Ukraine.

The White House is reported to be set on a new cold war policy with the aim of turning Russia into a "pariah state".

That might be more explicable if what is going on in eastern Ukraine now were not the mirror image of what took place in Kiev a couple of months ago.

Then, it was armed protesters in Maidan Square seizing government buildings and demanding a change of government and constitution.

US and European leaders championed the "masked militants" and denounced the elected government for its crackdown, just as they now back the unelected government's use of force against rebels occupying police stations and town halls in cities such as Slavyansk and Donetsk.

"America is with you," Senator John McCain told demonstrators then, standing shoulder to shoulder with the leader of the far-right Svoboda party as the US ambassador haggled with the state department over who would make up the new Ukrainian government.

When the Ukrainian president was replaced by a US-selected administration, in an entirely unconstitutional takeover, politicians such as William Hague brazenly misled parliament about the legality of what had taken place: the imposition of a pro-western government on Russia's most neuralgic and politically divided neighbour.

Putin bit back, taking a leaf out of the US street-protest playbook – even though, as in Kiev, the protests that spread from Crimea to eastern Ukraine evidently have mass support.

But what had been a glorious cry for freedom in Kiev became infiltration and insatiable aggression in Sevastopol and Luhansk.

After Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to join Russia, the bulk of the western media abandoned any hint of even-handed coverage.

So Putin is now routinely compared to Hitler, while the role of the fascistic right on the streets and in the new Ukrainian regime has been airbrushed out of most reporting as Putinist propaganda.

So you don't hear much about the Ukrainian government's veneration of wartime Nazi collaborators and pogromists, or the arson attacks on the homes and offices of elected communist leaders, or the integration of the extreme Right Sector into the national guard, while the anti-semitism and white supremacism of the government's ultra-nationalists is assiduously played down, and false identifications of Russian special forces are relayed as fact.

The reality is that, after two decades of eastward Nato expansion, this crisis was triggered by the west's attempt to pull Ukraine decisively into its orbit and defence structure, via an explicitly anti-Moscow EU association agreement.

Its rejection led to the Maidan protests and the installation of an anti-Russian administration – rejected by half the country – that went on to sign the EU and International Monetary Fund agreements regardless.

No Russian government could have acquiesced in such a threat from territory that was at the heart of both Russia and the Soviet Union.

Putin's absorption of Crimea and support for the rebellion in eastern Ukraine is clearly defensive, and the red line now drawn: the east of Ukraine, at least, is not going to be swallowed up by Nato or the EU.

But the dangers are also multiplying.

Ukraine has shown itself to be barely a functioning state: the former government was unable to clear Maidan, and the western-backed regime is "helpless" against the protests in the Soviet-nostalgic industrial east.

For all the talk about the paramilitary "green men" (who turn out to be overwhelmingly Ukrainian), the rebellion also has strong social and democratic demands: who would argue against a referendum on autonomy and elected governors?

Meanwhile, the US and its European allies impose sanctions and dictate terms to Russia and its proteges in Kiev, encouraging the military crackdown on protesters after visits from Joe Biden and the CIA director, John Brennan.

But by what right is the US involved at all, incorporating under its strategic umbrella a state that has never been a member of Nato, and whose last elected government came to power on a platform of explicit neutrality?

It has none, of course – which is why the Ukraine crisis is seen in such a different light across most of the world.

There may be few global takers for Putin's oligarchic conservatism and nationalism, but Russia's counterweight to US imperial expansion is welcomed, from China to Brazil.

In fact, one outcome of the crisis is likely to be a closer alliance between China and Russia, as the US continues its anti-Chinese "pivot" to Asia.

And despite growing violence, the cost in lives of Russia's arms-length involvement in Ukraine has so far been minimal compared with any significant western intervention you care to think of for decades.

The risk of civil war is nevertheless growing, and with it the chances of outside powers being drawn into the conflict.

Barack Obama has already sent token forces to eastern Europe and is under pressure, both from Republicans and Nato hawks such as Poland, to send many more.

Both US and British troops are due to take part in Nato military exercises in Ukraine this summer.

The US and EU have already overplayed their hand in Ukraine.

Neither Russia nor the western powers may want to intervene directly, and the Ukrainian prime minister's conjuring up of a third world war presumably isn't authorised by his Washington sponsors.

But a century after 1914, the risk of unintended consequences should be obvious enough – as the threat of a return of big-power conflict grows.

Pressure for a negotiated end to the crisis is essential.

Welcome To The Big Time, Gerry

Not only was Sinn Féin going to top the poll again in the European Elections in Northern Ireland, but it was also, as an ostensible party of anti-austerity protest, looking likely to do so in all of the multimember constituencies in the Republic.

Sinn Féin at the top of the poll? Across the length and breadth of Ireland? It could not be allowed to happen. And now, it is not going to happen.

You said that you wanted to be treated like any other party, Gerry. Well, this is what that looks like, sounds like, and feels like.

The Great Mail Robbery

The case for a criminal investigation is now unanswerable.

 

Do not be sidetracked by the employee shares. They can keep those.

 

It is the others that must be taken back, and that at flotation price only. Alas, that might involve a diversion of the funds otherwise donated to the Conservative Party.

 

Although, no, this scam was not in that party's manifesto. However, it was in the manifesto of the Lib Dems.

 

From Orkney and Shetland to St Ives, and from Ceredigion to North Norfolk, wipe the Lib Dems off the map.

 

Labour, provide yourself with the local candidates to make that happen.

Home

Anyone who still doubted that the next General Election was effectively over, it most certainly is now.

You don't have to take my word for that.

You don't have to take Owen Jones's word for that, although his is a very good article on the hopelessness of the Coalition parties' response.

You can also take Tim Stanley's word for that, echoing the recent word, in the same venerable Tory organ, of Peter Oborne.

Let's see a full package: rent controls, the freeing and even mandating of councils to build, and the extension of the Scottish system of landlord registration.

Let's see the trustafarian hysteria of the Conservatives and the Lib Dems.

And then let's see the Telegraph titles, never mind the Mail titles, say anything other than "Vote Labour" with anything approaching a straight face.

I wrote a few days ago that Ed Miliband needed to strike at Toryland's Pearl Harbor. He just has.

Our Enemy's Enemy

On one side, the EU.

 

On the other, a state within our state, with (through a functionary of whom almost no one has ever heard) a veto on our legislation even though not subject to it, and which the Queen may not enter without special permission. Wall Street's tax haven, occupying British soil as surely as the American facilities that hide behind fake British names. The principal global base for dodgy money from the former Soviet Union. A sewer of drug abuse and sexual immorality.

To hell with the pair of them.

And onwards towards Labour capture of the Common Council of the City of London, leading to the City's eventual incorporation into the United Kingdom. The start has been made. The citadel has been breached by a Blue Labour stalwart.

 

It is downright hilarious to watch the likes of the Conservative Party and what is, as of yesterday, the more-or-less defunct UKIP, sincerely convinced that just because they do not know anyone whose state is that one rather than this one, then no such people exist.

 

Never has there been a more striking case of a conflict in which it was a pity that only one side could lose.

 

As everyone actually living, working, and trying to make up the tax shortfall from the freeloading City institutions (not the residents, who have to pay like everyone else), in the United Kingdom will tell you very, very, very cheerfully indeed.

 

Perhaps Labour ought to campaign next year using the slogan "The United Kingdom Independence Party"? After all, it will be available by then. No one else has any moral claim to it already.