Cllr Steve Munby and Cllr Pat Karney had a great letter each in the Guardian on this point yesterday. Made me smile as I sat on the train to London.

Cllr Steve:

The debate is not between a return to the past and New Labour. It is between the dwindling group of Blairites and the majority of the party. Should reform of public services be based on “what works”, or private provision at any price? Should our foreign policy be based on progressive interventionism and an ethical foreign policy, or the prime minister’s embrace of neo-conservatism and the primacy of military measures? Is Labour committed to ending child poverty and developing a more highly skilled, productive economy or abolishing inheritance tax and fuelling a property boom?

Cllr Pat:

In Manchester we are neither old or new Labour but Manchester Labour, which puts our residents first. Wilby’s facile polemics offer our residents nothing, so we will work around the clock for a fourth Labour government.

As the idiots for Labour are currently on holiday, it falls to me to comment on the nonsense written by a former NS editor in today’s Guardian. Peter Wilby appears to think that the solution for all Labour’s troubles would be to find some good future ministers in their forties, and, as we can’t do that, he doesn’t want us to win the next election. Leaving aside the profound political insight that anyone aged 45-55 could be a good Labour minister, regular readers will know my opinions on poor discouraged woollies who want us to give up all our ability to change things in favour of a bunfight for ideological purity. With party members like this, who needs the Tories?

Update: Bloglines is playing silly buggers today, so I hadn’t realised that Bob had already laid into Wilby, or, more embarassingly, over two hours ago, Al at New Jerusalem had posted an article wittily called “Peter Wilby is an idiot”.

I was looking for things to do for the bank holiday tomorrow, and came across this new site - the Oxford City Guide. One of the irritations of the internet is that searching for generic phrases like “what to do in …”, “hotel in …” and “sightseeing in …” usually brings up vast numbers of commercial sites with little content but excellent search engine marketing. But OCG is a little gem - pretty much entirely up-to-date, no huge errors that this eight-year resident could see, and lots of useful little features such as the lists of shops by street. It also has an RSS feed of weekly Oxford listings, which is what I was looking for in the first place. Now all I have to do is persuade Jo that she wants to spend her bank holiday at a craft and country fair at Blenheim Palace!

The only quibble I have with the site is that it sometimes slips into an odd Americanese - “Clarendon Center” being the obvious example. Anyway, if you’re planning to visit our beautiful city anytime soon, do take a look.

This week’s international edition:

Fed up with workplace discrimination, women are now fighting back in the equal-opportunity environment of the blogosphere. Ana Marie Cox broke into the scene a few years ago with the political blog Wonkette (wonkette.com), in the United States. Now women across the Atlantic are catching up. Lynn Featherstone (lynnefeatherstone.org), a member of the British Parliament in the Liberal Democrat Party, and Antonia Bance (antoniabance.org), Labour councilor on the Oxford City Council and a Labour Parliamentary candidate in the 2005 general election, both keep blogs that mix professional and personal anecdotes and heated opinions.

Very flattering, if badly subbed. At least they only got my URL wrong - they mispelled Lynne’s name, despite the rather obvious clue in her website address!

This story has been on rotation all day - Margaret Beckett is “rocked” by 37 Labour party members from her Derby South constituency defecting to the Lib Dems. The supposed reason is that they are furious with the government over its policy on the Israel-Hizbullah war.

I was glad to find that I wasn’t the only one to smell something fishy in this. After all, as Nicola points out, if when you’re still in the party after the invasion of Iraq, it doesn’t make sense that your last straw is the government not calling for an immediate ceasefire in Lebanon.

Fair Deal Phil’s got the inside story, and it’s a similar reason to most defections - not politics, but personalities:

Last Wednesday, Mr Peeno was rejected by local members of Normanton Labour Party in his bid to become a Labour candidate at next May’s local elections in Derby. 24 hours earlier, local members of the Labour Party in Arboretum rejected Abdul Majeed, another of today’s defectors, in his bid to be Labour’s candidate in Arboretum ward.

Both attended recent meetings of Derby South Constituency Labour Party attended by their MP, Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett. Strangely, none of them raised the Lebanon question, the reason the broadcasters tell us is why they have joined the LibDems. [...] All they actually talked about wasn’t Lebanon at all, but issues on how they could secure the nomination to be Labour candidates.

Remember I posted about my local secondary school, Peers, going into special measures after getting one in five of its pupils through five good GCSEs? Well, in the results out today, they’ve made a substantial improvement, with 26% of this year’s pupils reaching that benchmark. Congratulations, and let’s hope it’s just the start.

In today’s Oxford Mail, the head teacher says:

“We would have been happy with 23 per cent of pupils achieving A* to C and really happy with 25 per cent, so we’re absolutely delighted to achieve 26 per cent. These are the best results for several years.
I think the turnaround has been attention to detail and keeping a close track on how all the children and teachers are doing.
We have got a long way to go, but we’re on an upward trajectory. There’s a really good plan in place for next year and we’re in the process of securing resources to help us put it into place.”

Yesterday, Luke issued a challenge to Labour bloggers:

I’ve set out below my instinct that Labour currently lacks a policy big idea to deliver in this term in government, let alone the big idea(s) for the next manifesto that will win us the 4th term.

So here’s a challenge. Post your ideas here. Conditions - whatever its merits, changing the leader does not constitute a “big idea” (we’re assuming that will happen anyway and we’re talking policy not personnel here); the big ideas have to be ones that would unite the Labour Party not divide it; and they have to be ones either Blair or Brown might reasonably be expected to implement (so leaving NATO and joining a defence pact with Iran and North Korea is also a no-no). And in net terms they need to be designed to increase the Labour vote not reduce it. Also, none of these ideas can have already featured in the 1983 Manifesto as that would prove they failed the test just mentioned.

Scale - “big” - e.g. minimum wage, NHS, not cones hotline or citizens’ charter.

So, here’s my pitch. Let’s do it. Let’s end child poverty once and for all.

Why is it the big idea?
It’s distinctively Labour - neither of the other parties have signed up to our pledge to abolish child poverty. The end unites our party, even if all the means may not. Ending child poverty is the unifying theme that brings together policies across education, health, housing, local environment, social services, local government and devolution, work, industry, crime and youth offending.

How do we do it?
By increasing family incomes:
- Raise child benefit and pay an equal rate to all children
- Extend child benefit to pregnant women
- Link the combined value of child tax credit and child benefit to average incomes or prices, whichever is rising more quickly
- Sort out tax credits and benefits – ensure they get the right amount to the right people at the right time
- Reduce the disproportionate burden of taxation on poorer families
- Ensure the national minimum wage provides a living wage
- Get more people into jobs and more people into good jobs

Improve public services for children
- Give greater weighting to poor children in education funding
- Introduce school uniform grants and school activity funds to make sure all children can take a full part in school life
- ‘Poverty proof’ all policies across all government departments
- Introduce free, good quality, universal childcare

Extra help for the poorest children
- Reform the social fund to give grants not loans for essential items and benefits at times of key transition
- Ensure that all children, regardless of immigration status, qualify for benefits and inclusion in mainstream services
- Put in extra support for poorer families, organised through children’s centres

(Shamelessly stolen from CPAG and End Child Poverty’s 2005 general election manifestos)

How much will it cost?
It won’t come cheap. The JRF reckons:

The Government could meet its target of halving child poverty between 1998 and 2010 by spending an estimated £4 billion a year (0.3 per cent of GDP) more than currently planned on benefits and tax credits.
Getting the second half of children out of poverty between 2010 and 2020 will be far harder. If the Government relied primarily on tax credits and benefits to achieve this, it would have to add about a further £28 billion (1.6 per cent of GDP) to planned annual spending, an unlikely scenario.
To make further inroads into child poverty, the Government will need to extend its policy of increasing redistribution to low-income families, but that this will not be enough on its own to meet the targets. In addition, this will require parents to fare better in the workplace, with improved pay and opportunities. Long-term policies working in this direction include better education and training for disadvantaged groups, improved childcare and the promotion of equal pay for women.

Whaddaya think? Better than “choice”? Worthy of a fourth term?

Just got the agenda through for the next Oxford city council south-east area committee.

Area committees are monthly meetings of the councillors for each area (in our case, Rose Hill and Iffley, Littlemore, Blackbird Leys and Northfield Brook) which hear updates from council officers, the police and health service; decide on other matters such as the allocation of small grants to local organisations; and decide on planning applications. More information and the dates of future meetings are here.

This last point is controversial: one of the few votes lost by the minority Labour administration who ran the council 2004-6 was about the removal of planning from area committees, as it puts councillors in the invidious position of not being able to represent the views of their constituents, but instead having to be neutral in order to make “quasi-judicial” decisions. Although there have been few such controversial decisions since I’ve been on the council, I can see it must be infuriating to have to stop being a representative of an area, and make decisions for that area taking only planning considerations into account, rather than the wider needs and opinions of residents. In particular, making these decisions in local community centres in front of one’s electorate means there may be a powerful incentive to make politically-wise decisions. In these days of targets for planning decisions upheld at appeal and financial penalties for poor performance, it seems a silly system to me.

Planning - “can this building have an illuminated fascia?” “can this house have a porch?” - also takes up vast amounts of time. The system works quite well for major applications, which are still decided centrally by a committee of councillors called the strategic development control committee - councillors from the south-east area get to comment on those in our areas, but don’t make the decision. But where it comes to the more minor decisions, it just doesn’t seem like the best use of eight councillors’ time. I’d rather have a real chance to hold local services to account on behalf of residents of Rose Hill and Iffley, and give local people the opportunity to stand up and have their say. I’d happily attend a city-wide planning meeting at another time, either as an advocate for local residents if there’s something controversial, or to be part of a panel deciding on applications for other areas. Members of the licensing committee (like me) aren’t allowed to decide on licence applications for pubs in the ward we represent; why is planning different? By all means let’s devolve decisionmaking as much as we can, but it’s not meaningful devolution when you end up with four-hour long meetings discussing alterations to buildings, by the end of which there are just the councillors and clerks in the room, even the Oxford Mail journo having given up.

Having said all that, as a conscientious and diligent (well, I’m trying!) councillor, I dutifully take part in the planning section, trying to make the best decisions I can.

Thankfully there’s not a lot of planning on next month’s area committee meeting, to be held at 6pm on 4 September at Blackbird Leys Leisure Centre. Items on the agenda include:
- commenting on the demolition of Remy Place and its replacement with a new block of sheltered housing
- a reportback on the introduction of neighbourhood policing on the Leys and Rose Hill
- the review of community centres in the city
- installing floodlights on Rose Hill Rec and CCTV at the Oval shops

As always, get in touch with any comments or questions. Hopefully the agenda will appear here for download sometime soon.

Following Stephen Byers’ call to abolish inheritance tax, and subsequent press releases where he justified it with reference to certain marginal seats Labour might lose without just such policies, I’ve received the following from Emily Thornberry, the MP for one of the seats he singled out. Good for her, eh?

No one likes paying tax and I’m sure there are a few people who would vote for me if I said let’s abolish inheritance tax. But I’m not prepared to chase a few votes by pretending to be a Tory - I’m Labour and abolishing inheritance tax isn’t. Most people in Islington realise we’re one community here and the only way to tackle problems is to share our resources and stick together.

Stephen Byers doesn’t understand the real Islington if he thinks abolishing inheritance tax is what people want. Islington is not all leafy lanes and coffee shops - we’ve got 13,000 families on the waiting list for social housing and over 40% of Islington primary school children get free school meals. If Mr Byers came to one of my surgeries many of the stories would break his heart.

I’d be happy to introduce him to people on estates across Islington who would remind him in no uncertain terms that only a Government based on Labour values would be investing £157m in improving their homes at the moment. We’ve achieved a lot, and we need more real Labour policies in the future, not a tax break for the wealthy.

From today’s Oxford Mail:

Beat officer Pc Ben Henley, of Thames Valley Police, said they had been surprised at how well youngsters had cooperated with the dispersal order, which allows police to move on gangs in designated areas.
He said they had made 13 dispersals on The Oval, where most of the trouble is reported - three in Ashurst Way and four in Lambourne Road.
Police have the power to arrest anyone who refuses to disperse or who returns to a designated dispersal zone, but Pc Henley said this had not yet been necessary.
He added: “So far there have been no arrests and the youths on the estate have been surprisingly engaging.”