Andy Beckett's Blog, page 5

Starmer has mastered the speeches about Tory ‘chaos’ and ‘decline’, but Britain needs hope – where is it? | Andy Beckett

The Labour leader needs to say what is wrong with the country, but people need to know how he will make things better

To win power, opposition parties need to say something compelling about the status quo. This isn’t necessarily as easy as just advocating “change”, the word Labour has chosen to emphasise in the speeches and backdrops of its big election events and on the side of its battlebus.

Promise too much change, as the party did in 2019, and voters either won’t believe you can make it happen, or will be put off by the potential disruption. Promise too little change, as Labour did at the 2015 election, and voters will remain unengaged.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist. His book on Diane Abbott, Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour left since the 1960s, The Searchers: Five Rebels, Their Dream of a Different Britain, and Their Many Enemies, is out now

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Diane Abbott might now be allowed to stand as a Labour MP, but the damage is done – and it’s deep | Andy Beckett

Keir Starmer will need broad support to undertake a ‘decade of renewal’ in office. This sordid episode suggests he won’t have it

It’s not every day that you see Keir Starmer’s increasingly ruthless electoral machine in a state of confusion and disarray. But its chaotic approach this week to the question of whether Diane Abbott, a Labour MP for the past 37 years with one of the biggest majorities in the country, could stand in the general election – a question seemingly finally resolved on Friday by Starmer saying that she was “free to go forward as a Labour candidate” – has been very revealing about the condition of the party and of our wider politics.

The whole messy episode could be significant in the election, but also in the longer story of the Labour party and its fractious but pivotal relationships with the left, London and Black Britain. If those relationships with three of Labour’s traditionally strongest bases of support break down – and this week considerable damage has been done – then it may become much harder for it to gain and hold on to power, and for these millions of voters to be properly represented in parliament. Abbott’s ordeal, and her apparent survival of it, matter to many more people than her angry, baffled and now relieved constituents in Hackney North and Stoke Newington.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist. His book on Diane Abbott, Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour left since the 1960s, The Searchers: Five Rebels, Their Dream of a Different Britain, and Their Many Enemies, is out now

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please .

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‘I’ll stay an MP for as long as I can’: Diane Abbott’s tumultuous political journey – podcast

Britain’s first black female MP faced hostility from the media and political establishment from the start. Nearly 40 years on, she is still not giving up. By Andy Beckett

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It’s Corbyn’s last stand. But can he beat Labour's Starmerite machine? | Andy Beckett

By running as an independent, the Islington North MP will give constituents a chance to rebel against the Westminster consensus

For supposedly one of the biggest losers in Labour’s history, Jeremy Corbyn has certainly won a lot of elections. Two leadership contests by huge margins, and 10 consecutive victories in his parliamentary constituency, Islington North. Since first being elected there 41 years ago, he has increased his majority from a modest 5,607 to a formidable 26,188.

So his announcement that he is running as an independent in the general election, a plan that he has hinted at for months, has a degree of confidence behind it. In the bustling, congested streets of his traditionally left-leaning constituency, seemingly everyone knows “Jeremy”, and the famously conscientious MP knows them. “He may have the highest constituency name recognition of any MP in the country,” a local Labour councillor told me.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist. His book on Corbyn, Abbott and the Labour left, The Searchers: Five Rebels, Their Dream of a Different Britain, and Their Many Enemies, is out now

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please .

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How a Labour MP became a rightwing figurehead – and enabled the clampdown on protest | Andy Beckett

The transformation of John Woodcock exposes the authoritarian potential that can lurk in Britain’s centre left

During the final, beleaguered stages of the last Labour government, one of the stern young party functionaries who used to cluster protectively around the prime minister, Gordon Brown, on his visits to public places was John Woodcock, then one of Brown’s special advisers. Despite the government’s disintegrating poll ratings, Woodcock still had that New Labour cockiness, giving journalists disdainful glances as he strode past in a close-fitting suit.

At the 2010 election, despite Brown’s defeat, Woodcock became MP for the relatively safe Labour seat of Barrow and Furness. Three years later I interviewed him there for an article about the defence industry, of which he was a strong supporter, partly because Barrow is where Britain’s nuclear submarines are built. He was surprisingly affable company – perhaps seeking election had softened him – but his unyielding, militaristic politics were clear nonetheless. Talking about the local submarine business, he said: “This is a sort of shark. It’s got to keep going forward.”

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

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From the archive: The age of perpetual crisis – how the 2010s disrupted everything but resolved nothing – podcast

We are raiding the Guardian Long Read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors.

This week, from 2019: In an era of bewildering upheaval, how will the past decade be remembered? By Andy Beckett

• Read the text version here

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From the archive: The age of perpetual crisis: how the 2010s disrupted everything but resolved nothing – podcast

We are raiding the Guardian Long Read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors.

This week, from 2019: In an era of bewildering upheaval, how will the past decade be remembered? By Andy Beckett

• Read the text version here

Continue reading...

After this week's squalid experiment, see voter ID for what it is: a Tory scam to steal elections | Andy Beckett

This exercise in shrinking the electorate to Conservative advantage must not be the new normal. Labour, in office, should scrap it

Unlike Boris Johnson, did you remember to take ID when you went to vote yesterday? Did you remember to take the right kind? Or, like one in seven Britons, did you have no idea you needed ID to vote? Or, like at least 2 million Britons, did you have no acceptable voter ID at all?

Until last year, when the 2022 Elections Act came into effect, British elections were free of these questions. For centuries, despite the slow, sometimes hugely contentious expansion of the electorate, and the acrimonious and distrustful character of our politics, voters were not required to produce documents in polling stations to prove who they were. This country did not believe in identity cards, many of our politicians proudly told us – particularly Tories. As the then shadow home secretary, Chris Grayling, put it in 2009, shortly before his party returned to power: “ID cards … are both an affront to British liberty and will have no place in a Conservative Britain. They are also a huge waste of money.”

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

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The cost of living crisis has made the UK a poorer, more anxious nation – and worse is yet to come | Andy Beckett

Instead of buy-one-get-one-free offers, everyday life now involves carefully comparing prices and feeling increasingly powerless

Under capitalism, prices are supposed to be the centre of everything. They are the key agreement between buyer and seller. They are the one clear and reliable piece of information, on which the whole often opaque and unstable system depends.

So it struck me as strange when some of my local London shops stopped displaying the prices of some goods a couple of years ago. It started with upmarket fishmongers, and I wondered whether this was because wealthy customers didn’t need to count their pennies. But then the practice spread to corner shops and greengrocers, with a wider clientele, and to everyday purchases such as fruit and vegetables. There was a cost of living crisis going on, the worst in Britain for 40 years, but parts of Hackney seemed to be in denial.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

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‘I’ll stay an MP for as long as I can’: Diane Abbott’s tumultuous political journey

Britain’s first black female MP faced hostility from the media and political establishment from the start. Nearly 40 years on, she is still not giving up

Six weeks ago, the Conservatives’ biggest donor, Frank Hester, was revealed by the Guardian to have spoken at a meeting of his healthcare company, the Phoenix Partnership, about one of Britain’s longest-serving and most pioneering MPs. “You see Diane Abbott on the TV and … you just want to hate all black women,” Hester said. “I think she should be shot.”

The meeting had taken place in 2019, when Abbott was Labour’s shadow home secretary. As a lifelong defender of civil liberties, a radical leftwinger and a close ally of the then party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, Abbott was notably different from previous holders of the role. But there was an anger and viciousness to Hester’s remarks, which are being investigated by the police, and also a limit to the Labour support for her that they prompted, which was very striking.

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