Belated shadow cabinet and front bench appointments comment

So, this was originally meant to be entered to Leeds Student for the 15/10/10 issue, but the repsonse to the Browne Report rightly took precedence.

Since the announcement of his victory in the Labour leadership contest, Ed Miliband has been under scrutiny from analysts and bloggers of all political colours who are trying to discern the direction in which he will lead Labour. It has been two weeks since the results of the shadow cabinet and front bench appointments have been revealed, and instead of confirming expectations, he bucked them and further confounded commentators. While his choices were unexpected, he must take care to ensure he is still making wise ones- and there are certainly a few that raised some eyebrows in and outside of Westminster.
Foremost, of course, was the decision to appoint Alan Johnson as shadow chancellor, denying the position to frontrunners Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper. Miliband confidently and knowingly prevented either one of Labour’s prominent economic experts from being the one to spearhead their response to the coalition deficit reduction plans. Alan Johnson’s appointment is likely to pacify those who feared the “lurch to the left” in the wake of Ed Miliband’s leadership victory aided by the trade union vote- those who, like Johnson himself, backed the leadership campaign of David Miliband. His position regarding deficit reduction is nearer to that of former Chancellor Alistair Darling’s- the pledge to half the budget deficit within four years- and it will appeal to those within the party who were more reluctant to strike down the spectre of New Labour that has dogged the party in the wake of their election defeat. He has already proved a strong counter to Osborne in the Commons, but the government’s rebuke- citing inexperience and “deficit denial”- is clear and damning.
Despite his comparative economic failings, Johnson may well be a more strategic choice than Balls. Ed Miliband will seek to avoid the kind of personality clashes that appear to have rocked the Blair-Brown relationship- elder brother David’s refusal to serve in the shadow cabinet might too be seen in this light- while exercising more of his own economic expertise over Johnson. Elsewhere, some of his chief allies within the party were appointed to key posts, with campaign manager Sadiq Khan becoming shadow justice secretary, while erstwhile lefty and unsuccessful leadership candidate Diane Abbott became shadow minister for Public Health. Conciliatory measures such as these showed an opposition leader intuitively taking control of his party, disregarding outside anticipations. Unfortunately, and confusingly, this intuition did not extend to all reaches of his party appointments.
Phil Woolas, MP for Oldham East and Saddleworth, was among those appointed to Ed Balls’ team of junior Home Office ministers. During the general election campaign Woolas and his team published a leaflet defending his “strong” stance on immigration, while apparently attacking Lib Dem candidate Elwyn Watkins on his party’s plans for an amnesty for certain immigrants who had come to Britain illegally. “The Lib Dems plan to give hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants the right to stay [in Britain]...Do you want the extremists to win?”, read one line on the leaflet, accompanied by inflammatory pictures of radical Islamist demonstrators brandishing signs with slogans such as “Behead those who insult Islam”. In the wake of other campaign material that featured doctored photos of the Lib Dem candidate being arrested, and false claims that he possessed a criminal record, Watkins issued a legal challenge to Woolas and his subsequent election victory.
Not only were the tactics of Woolas’s team churlish and petty, they were frankly offensive, and clearly designed to play on the fears of what prosecutor Helen Mountfield described as “the white Sun [reading] vote”. E-mails between election agent Joseph Fitzpatrick and Woolas speak of “[getting] the white vote angry” and going strong on the “militant Moslem [sic] angle”. Telling untruths about a candidate’s personal life or political manifesto is bad practice enough, but deliberately invoking racial tensions in the community in an effort to revitalise a flagging campaign is downright despicable; it is something for which the BNP were overwhelmingly rejected by the voting public this May.
If Woolas is defeated in court, he will be expelled from parliament and a by-election called. It would be the first major scandal to hit the opposition, and would surely bring Ed Miliband’s judgement into question. Left-wing bloggers have hit the roof over the selection of Woolas. His shadow cabinet decisions already made the headlines for their unexpected nature. If any one of his choices proves disastrous during Labour’s opposition, there will be no one else to blame.

Cameron keeps his Coul(son)

With the Conservative Party conference proving the ideal platform for plans to slash Britain’s structural deficit- £109bn being the figure touted- one particular figure is yet to be cut from the picture. Andy Coulson, David Cameron’s media adviser, is facing fresh allegations from a senior journalist that, while editor of the News of the World, he listened to hacked voicemail messages obtained by reporters. Such a controversial claim, the like of which is very serious indeed, should alone be enough to warrant an investigation; but the actualities of the case seem almost more worrying than the claim itself.
The former NOTW executive, who spoke as part of Channel 4’s Dispatches program, threw light upon Coulson’s distorted sense of media integrity. He claimed that the former editor insisted upon seeing or listening to the phone messages in order to determine whether the proposed stories would include misinformation that might be subject to libel or defamation lawsuits. In what twisted world or journalistic immorality (if that concept is itself not a paradox) can a newspaper editor demand assurance that the illegally obtained material before him is legally viable to print? The answer, it seems, is the world of News International, the UK wing of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. His publications all but ignored the issue; The Sun gave a passing note on Scotland Yard’s ruling out of an investigation due to insubstantial evidence, and Cameron granted Coulson affirmed sanctuary. When last year a news anchor on US channel Fox, of which Murdoch is CEO and Chairman, asked the Australian to divulge, he was flatly met with refusal. The anchor replied: “No worries Mr Chairman, that’s fine with me”; and the interview continued anew. This kind of insidious contempt for freedom of the press must not be permitted shelter under the centre of Britain’s democracy.
The original allegations of Coulson’s involvement in phone hacking date back to 2007, when he resigned as editor of the tabloid newspaper following the revelations that Clive Goodman, at the time the paper’s royal correspondent, had hacked the voicemail messages of three members of the royal household. For one reporter’s illicit activities to go unnoticed by his editor is not beyond belief; but when claims began to surface of the widespread practice of phone-tapping within the NOTW offices, we are left to draw one of two conclusions. Either Coulson’s authority over his reporters was so weak as to be entirely irresponsible for their actions, or his denial of involvement and distancing from the allegations was watertight enough for him to elude suspicion. After all, Goodman was subsequently imprisoned for his role in the scandal, while Coulson managed largely to escape intense scrutiny and in a matter of months was appointed Conservative Party Director of Communications. Coulson has frequently and fervently denied his knowledge of his reporters’ practices, and since taking up his role within the innermost circles of the coalition government, seems to have benefitted from the protection of both Cameron and Murdoch, who owe much to one another following the News International union of newspapers’ full and unequivocal backing for the Tories in the recent election.
In a tumultuous few months, senior coalition figures have already been forced to bow out amid scandal and cries of foul play. David Laws, short lived Chief Secretary to the Treasury, was the first to go after details of his expenses claims were unnecessarily conflated with stories of his sexuality. William Hague had a turbulent week when he too faced “malicious rumours” regarding his own sexuality and relationship with his wife, after sharing a room with his aide on the campaign trail. Hague clung on, and rightly so; it would have been grossly unjust had he been forced to retreat under the pressure of the gossip-hungry hacks baying at his door. In the case of Andy Coulson, the same reporters who attacked Laws and Hague are those who hold positions Coulson himself once occupied: part of the same network of intrigue and backroom deals, whose reputations are made and veritably owned by News International. Now Coulson needs to be brought forward and made to account for himself, if not by tribunal then by Cameron himself, or by any senior Conservatives concerned for their party’s integrity. In this case, the allegations- unlike those regarding MPs’ sexualities- are of indiscretions that have absolutely no place in the upper echelons of government, and that further jeopardise the ever-questionable ethics of the free press. Here stands one figure whom I would be glad to see cut by the Tories.