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by Staff May 17, 2022

The winners of every league in Welsh rugby as 191 games go unplayed in ‘s***show’ season – Wales Online

The winners of every league in Welsh rugby as 191 games go unplayed in ‘s***show’ season  Wales Online

  • Health
by Staff May 17, 2022

Woman in ‘life threatening’ condition following crash – South Wales Argus

Woman in ‘life threatening’ condition following crash  South Wales Argus

Latest News

The winners of every league in Welsh rugby as 191 games go unplayed in ‘s***show’ season – Wales Online

May 17, 2022

Woman in ‘life threatening’ condition following crash – South Wales Argus

May 17, 2022

Wales celebrate Emma Raducanu’s memorable US Open triumph – South Wales Guardian

May 17, 2022

Llandeilo School joins Jubilee performance in Albert Hall | South Wales Guardian – South Wales Guardian

May 17, 2022
by Staff May 17, 2022

Australian election: Where is climate change on the agenda? – Al Jazeera English

Australian election: Where is climate change on the agenda?  Al Jazeera English

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Canberra, Australia – As southern Australia continues to recover from the destruction of the 2019-2020 ‘Black Summer’ bushfires, towns in Queensland and New South Wales (NSW) have just experienced devastating floods.

Some towns have even seen ‘once in 100 year’ floods occur twice in several weeks. In Lismore, an NSW town of nearly 30,000 people, the river rose more than 14 metres in late February, breaching the town’s levees and inundating people’s homes and businesses. Thousands of residents were forced to take refuge on their roofs.

Lismore flooded again in March. More than 2,000 homes are now considered uninhabitable.

While Lismore has flooded five times in the past 60 years, this year’s floods were 2 metres above the previous historic high. Across NSW and Queensland, 22 people died.

As with the Black Summer bushfires, the federal government has been criticised for being too slow to respond. Locals relied on their own communities to provide crucial assistance in the immediate aftermath of the disaster and Lismore residents later took their flood-damaged belongings to Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s official residence, dumping ruined armchairs and soft toys at his gate. Some held placards that read ‘Your climate inaction killed my neighbour’.

The cost of the floods is expected to exceed 2 billion Australian dollars ($1.44 bn), making it one of the country’s most costly natural disasters ever.

“Despite decades of warnings from scientists about climate change, Australia is unprepared for the supercharged weather that it is now driving,” said Hilary Bambrick, co-author of Australia’s annual assessment of progress on climate adaptation.

“Australia is at the forefront of severe climate change … Climate change means that Australia’s extreme weather – heat, drought, bushfires and floods – will continue to get much, much worse if we don’t act now.”

Despite this and voters’ desire for action, climate change has barely been a talking point in campaigning for the country’s federal election, which will take place in less than a week on May 21.

“Australians are hyper concerned about climate change,” University of Tasmania political scientist Kate Crowley told Al Jazeera. ”But the major parties, especially the [ruling] Coalition, don’t want to talk about climate change. For them, it’s done and dusted.

“The Coalition has a ‘never never’ target and no immediate plans to do anything, except ensure fossil fuels are in the mix.”

A crew member surveys the devastation caused by the flooding in Lismore. The government was criticised for being too slow to respond to the disaster [Bradley Richardson/Australian Defence Force via AFP]

Most politicians in Scott Morrison’s Liberal-National Coalition are climate change sceptics, if not outright deniers, as well as being economically and socially conservative.

Climate writer Ketan Joshi has been tracking politicians’ social media mentions of climate change.

He found that just four percent of tweets from senators and three percent of tweets from members of parliament mentioned climate in the first week of the campaign. Most did not tweet about climate change at all.

“Tweets are a proxy for discourse,” Joshi explained. “It’s a really simple read on [the issue’s] prominence, and it turns out that even when climate is mentioned in bad faith, it’s still only a tiny, tiny proportion of the discussion.”

Joshi believes there are two main reasons for the lack of discussion around climate change.

“One is that the issue isn’t prominent enough, considering its physical urgency,” he said. “The second is that when it is discussed, it’s always on the back of something going wrong, as opposed to an initiated effort to talk about a really important issue.”

Since I’m storing tweets anyway, I thought I’d create an auto-generating weekly summary of how politicians and the press gallery are mentioning climate, fossils and clean tech.

Here’s the first week. More features to come in the next report, but for now……you get the picture pic.twitter.com/1baUB5u9BC

— Ketan Joshi (@KetanJ0) April 18, 2022

The only moment when climate change has emerged as a serious point of discussion in recent weeks was when Queensland Nationals Senator Matt Canavan – claiming decisions on climate change could be left for 10 or 20 years time – declared net zero to be “dead” and “all over bar the shouting”.

“Canavan actually put climate on the agenda,” explained Crowley. “The Coalition were quite happy to ignore questions [on it] and just repeat policies … After all, they’ve got a target without really having a target.”

Most voters want action

Poll after poll has found that the majority of Australians want to see the government take serious action on combating climate change.

National broadcaster ABC runs Vote Compass, the country’s largest survey of voter attitudes. In this year’s poll, 29 percent of those surveyed ranked climate change as the issue most important to them. This was higher than any other single issue, even in the face of the increasing cost of living, which 13 percent rated as the biggest issue.

In mid-2021, a YouGov poll conducted for the Australian Conservation Foundation found that climate change was an important issue for 67 percent of voters, including 28 percent who said it was the single most important issue in determining who they would vote for.

Crucially, a majority of voters in all 151 of Australia’s federal electorates believe that the government of Scott Morrison should have been doing more to tackle climate change. Even in key coal regions such as the Hunter Valley, voters did not believe new coal and gas plants should be built.

Students in Sydney went on strike earlier this month to demand further action on climate change. Younger Australians are particularly concerned about climate issues [File: Loren Elliott/Reuters]

Polls have also found that young Australians are especially concerned about climate change. A 2021 survey from the Foundations For Tomorrow initiative found that 93 percent of Australians under 30 think the government is doing too little to tackle climate change.

Some 88 percent of Australians aged 18 to 24 are enrolled to vote, and voting is compulsory in Australia.

Assessing the policies

Many voters say they feel that there is little substantial difference between the Coalition and the Labor Party, who are currently in opposition, especially on climate change.

The Coalition has set a target to reduce emissions by 26 to 28 percent by 2030, based on 2005 levels. To do so, they say they will not move away from heavy polluters such as coal and gas but instead rely on carbon capture and storage, alongside new low emission technologies. The exact technologies have not been specified, mostly because they do not yet exist.

The Labor Party, led by Anthony Albanese, holds a 43 percent emissions reduction target by 2030, still below the expert-recommended target of 50 to 75 percent. If elected in May, Labor plans to invest heavily in renewables, creating more than 600,000 jobs in the process. Labor also has detailed strategies for supporting workers’ transition from fossil fuels to other sectors.

The Coalition and Labor agree that net zero should be achieved by 2050, yet both receive significant donations from the mining industry, more than any other sector. As with the Liberal Party, Labor will not sign the UN pledge to end coal fire power if elected.

Despite several high-profile commitments from energy producers such as AGL to shut down coal and gas plants earlier than previously planned, both major political parties have committed to continuing to support fossil fuels.

There are 114 new coal and gas projects on the government’s official register, such as the controversial gas extraction project in the Northern Territory’s Beetaloo Basin. Altogether, these projects would increase Australia’s emissions by more than 250 percent.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s Coalition and Anthony Albanese’s Labor party both remain supportive of the polluting coal industry, claiming it is a crucial part of the economy and provides vital jobs for the working class [File: Mick Tsikas/AFP]

Despite the public concern, the Australian fossil fuels lobby has proved remarkably strong, claiming that mining props up the Australian economy – it contributes about 10 percent of the country’s gross domestic product and employs 261,000 people – and that without it, financial disaster looms.

The lobby has also used class rhetoric to place coal mining as a central element of regional working-class politics, encouraging both major parties to see being pro-fossil fuels as a vote winner.

The Greens – a left-wing environmental party often referred to as Australia’s ‘third party’ – are the only group to have argued the need for Australia to do more on climate. It has set a lofty 75 percent target for emissions reductions by 2030 and wants to see net zero achieved by 2035 or earlier, primarily through ending the mining, burning, and export of thermal coal by 2030.

The Greens’ campaign material describes net zero by 2050 as “a death sentence”. The party is now calling for a moratorium on new coal, gas, and oil projects.

“The mining and burning of coal and gas are the leading causes of the climate crisis,” said the Greens’ Adam Bandt of the demand.

“Keeping coal and gas in the ground is the very first thing a government would do if they were serious about treating global heating like the climate emergency that it is.”

One big question remains, however.

Just how much will voters actually put their climate concerns first when it comes to election day?

At the polling station, local issues can sometimes seem much more urgent.

Australia has a powerful fossil fuels lobby and there are 114 new coal and gas projects on the government’s official register [File: Jason Reed/Reuters]

Inflation is at its highest in 20 years, with the price of everyday items like vegetables, meat, and petrol all increasing thanks to the war in Ukraine as well as the floods earlier this year.

Skyrocketing house prices and rents are also at the forefront of many people’s minds, as are key issues that were highlighted during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, such as aged care. And the central bank has just hiked interest rates for the first time since 2010.

“People have very much separated climate and politics,” agreed Joshi. “Someone can see climate change as an important issue, but still have a [negative] gut reaction to supporting the Greens.

“It’s worth noting that people will often express strong support for climate action in surveys, but have very confused and mixed views when it comes to its immediacy.”

by Staff May 17, 2022

Strong response to SEP final election campaign meeting in Australia – WSWS

Strong response to SEP final election campaign meeting in Australia  WSWS

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The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) stepped up its federal election campaign with a well-attended online public meeting last Sunday, six days before the May 21 national ballot. The live-streamed event can be viewed below, with speakers presented in designated chapters with accompanying graphs and photographs.

SEP National Secretary Cheryl Crisp chaired the meeting with reports delivered by Oscar Grenfell, Mike Head and Peter Byrne, who are contesting Senate seats in New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria respectively. Max Boddy, John Davis and Jason Wardle, the party’s other Senate candidates in Australia’s east coast states, answered questions during the meeting’s lively Q&A session.

Crisp set the meeting in a broader and higher historical and global context by referring to the recent imaging of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy. This monumental scientific breakthrough was the result of coordinated work by hundreds of astronomers, engineers and support staff from 60 institutions across 20 countries.

This was an extraordinary example of “what international collaboration of human labour, science and technology can achieve,” Crisp said. She contrasted it to the reactionary nationalist response of capitalist governments around the world to COVID-19. The catastrophic death toll from the pandemic, and the rising danger of a third world war, along with worsening global poverty and other social ills, she said, were products of the nation-based capitalist profit system.

“If the approach which guided the study of Sagittarius A* was adopted to all aspects of society—conscious, scientific planning, international collaboration, the necessary resources allocated—the world would be a very different place. But that would require the reorganisation of society as a whole and the reallocation of society’s wealth from the tiny wealthy few to the mass of the world’s population.”

This historic mission, Crisp continued, could not be achieved by futile appeals to governments, capitalist parties or trade unions but by the international working class, united with science, in the struggle to overthrow capitalism.

Oscar Grenfell told the meeting that the federal election had sharply revealed the degenerated character of the political establishment and the rising mass disaffection and anger of millions of people. These processes, he continued, were being intensified by COVID-19, the US-led proxy war in Ukraine against Russia, and unrelenting government and big business attacks on the working class in every country.

The election campaigns of the parliamentary parties and associated media coverage, he said, involved a “conspiracy of silence” to suppress any discussion of these crucial questions. This was prepared by last year’s bipartisan anti-democratic electoral laws to deregister the SEP and other parties without parliamentary seats, in the leadup to the election.

“The coming together of Labor and the Coalition to pass these laws summed up the real political situation. Behind the insults and theatrics between Albanese and Morrison, Labor and the Liberals agree on all the substantive questions,” he said.

“Irrespective of which party forms government,” Grenfell warned, “its program will be massive spending cuts, aimed at forcing the working class to pay for the billions of dollars given to the corporations during the pandemic and to fuel the war drive.”

Mike Head pointed out that the SEP was the only party in the election opposing the reckless US-led war drive, now directed against both Russia and China. He reviewed the historical and economic roots of the Ukraine conflict and its catastrophic trajectory.

“The aim of the US-NATO operation is not only gaining access to the vast resources of Russia—oil, gas, countless strategic minerals. Washington views the defeat of Moscow as a decisive step toward a military confrontation with China to establish US domination over the entire Eurasian landmass,” he said.

“Our election campaign is part of the fight by our world party, the International Committee of the Fourth International, to clarify the immense dangers and mobilise the working class in a global anti-war movement and for socialist internationalism. This is the only way to end the threat of a catastrophic third world war.”

Peter Byrne’s report, which focused on the emerging struggles of the working class in Australia and internationally, used a segment of Eric London’s video presentation to the recent May Day 2022 online event to illustrate this new global reality.

The speaker drew attention to the collapse of the Sri Lankan economy and the eruption of nationwide demonstrations and two general strikes against soaring food and fuel prices and demanding the resignation of President Rajapakse and his entire government.

The speaker pointed to rising inflation in Australia and the escalating attacks on workers’ jobs, wages and social conditions. He referred to the SEP’s intervention into strike action by the Dyson bus drivers in Melbourne and reviewed the key demands outlined in the socialist action program for the working class set out in the SEP’s election statement.

Byrne said the SEP was not oriented to the rotten parliamentary set-up but to the emerging struggles of the working class, as seen in recent strikes by nurses, aged care and other health workers, teachers, bus drivers and others. He stressed that these struggles could be taken forward only through the establishment of workplace rank-and-file committees, independent of the trade unions, which had strangled workers’ struggles for decades.

Byrne pointed to the vital work being conducted by the Committee for Public Education, the Australia Post rank-and-file committee and the health workers’ rank-and-file group, which were initiated by the SEP. “This is just the beginning of what workers need to do to advance their interests on the basis of a socialist program of action,” Byrne said.

The SEP meeting stood in sharp contrast to the highly-orchestrated election meetings held by the Liberal-National Coalition, Labor and the Greens. These are anti-democratic events, with no questions or discussion allowed.

SEP election meetings encourage maximum participation and discussion about the party’s policies. Engaged audience members at Sunday’s meeting peppered SEP candidates for more details on the party’s program and analysis during the extended Q&A session, which is included in the video broadcast.

Questions were asked, and fully answered, about the NATO-led war against Russia in Ukraine, how to get accurate COVID-19 infection figures, Australia’s anti-democratic preferential voting system, the role of identity politics, the policies of the “teal independent” candidates, socialism and small business, the nature of parliament, political corruption and many other issues.

Almost $5,000 was donated to the SEP’s special election fund, a generous measure of the enthusiastic response to the meeting and the party’s campaign. Speakers urged all participants to join the SEP to help build the revolutionary socialist working-class leadership needed in Australia and internationally.

Please share the election meeting video widely on social media and get in touch with the SEP to join the party or assist in the final days of the election campaign.

Contact the SEP:
Phone: (02) 8218 3222
Email: sep@sep.org.au
Facebook: SocialistEqualityPartyAustralia
Twitter: @SEP_Australia
Instagram: socialistequalityparty_au
TikTok: @SEP_Australia

Authorised by Cheryl Crisp for the Socialist Equality Party, Suite 906, 185 Elizabeth Street, Sydney, NSW, 2000.

Join the SEP campaign against anti-democratic electoral laws!

The working class must have a political voice, which the Australian ruling class is seeking to stifle with this legislation.

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by Staff May 16, 2022

James Butler · Short Cuts: Limping to Success · LRB 26 May 2022 – London Review of Books

James Butler · Short Cuts: Limping to Success · LRB 26 May 2022  London Review of Books

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Early​ results matter in politics. The news on the morning of 6 May seemed to confirm a familiar story. Labour had taken two totemic Tory councils, Wandsworth and Westminster, piling on metropolitan voters but failing to ignite the electorate outside the cities. Tory losses were bigger than expected, and by the end of the day looked very bad indeed: the cumulative loss was 485 seats; before the election the Mail had warned that anything over four hundred should be seen as a ‘disaster’.

The Tories’ loss was so obvious that what has happened since seems puzzling. Many who had expected the Conservative collapse assumed that the party’s backbenchers would take the opportunity to dispatch Johnson in its wake. Some deposed council leaders did call for his head. But, so far, letters to the chair of the 1922 Committee don’t seem to be pouring in. Perhaps Tory MPs are persuaded by the implausible argument that changing leaders while Russia’s war in Ukraine continues would be irresponsible; or perhaps they are newly enthused by the prospect that Keir Starmer might be forced to resign over Beergate. Or maybe they read the success of the Liberal Democrats as a sign of returning political normality, and are seeking comfort in shopworn political wisdom: this is a midterm result, like 2003 or 2013, recoverable at the next general election; it’s unwise, after all, to base a national strategy on protest votes, or on a desultory turnout of people primarily concerned about bin collections. Other, cannier Tories might recognise that people can’t heat their homes with ever deferred promises of ‘levelling up’, or fill their stomachs with culture wars. Given the improbable geography of the Johnson majority, and the likelihood of recession and inflationary wage pressures before the next general election, Tory MPs of 2019 vintage would be fools to assume that the political volatility of the last several years is over.

If Tory MPs are sleeping surprisingly well it is also because there has been no flip to the other pole of British politics: were these results translated nationally they would result in a hung Parliament. Should the polls stay where they are, the next campaign will no doubt feature posters of Keir Starmer peering out of Nicola Sturgeon’s handbag. But Tory MPs should be wary of putting too much faith in myths about political change in Britain. First past the post electoral systems do often produce strong majorities, but in the 21st century significant shifts have been preceded by hung Parliaments: an element of stickiness persists in the system. Tories can take more comfort, perhaps, in the sense that the ideological architecture of British politics – what issues matter to the press, and the terms in which they can be talked about – remains stubbornly unipolar, especially when it comes to economics, immigration and crime. That conservatives of various stripes set the agenda sometimes leads non-Tories to dream of all non-conservative parties putting aside their differences and forming an electoral compact to dislodge the Tories from power. But it isn’t at all clear that voters en masse would be attracted to what could easily be painted as cartel politics.

Three interrelated stories emerged from the final results: the enduring importance of political geography, the re-emergence of third parties, and a dimming of the Brexit effect. The simplest part of the picture is the success of the Liberal Democrats, who gained 223 council seats. The Lib Dems toppled the Tories in West Oxfordshire, which includes David Cameron’s old seat in Witney (though Witney itself voted Labour), and one of the major threats to a future Tory majority comes from the southern marginals once swept by Cameron’s party. Yet what should draw just as much attention is the performance of the Greens. Since 2018 they have more than doubled their councillors in England, making 63 gains, including in areas – South Tyneside, Hastings – not typically associated with the party. They seem to have learned from the Liberal Democrats’ long experience in taking advantage of local political conditions, though the Greens still suffer under first past the post in progressive urban centres such as Lambeth, where their voters are under-represented. Had a right-wing populist party achieved something similar – sitting Ukip councillors were effectively obliterated in this election – the British press would have discovered in the results an urgent, previously unheard political demand. The Greens don’t have that luck: a difficult question for the party is whether its adaptability – sometimes, for example, it is able to modulate its politics through local hostility to development – renders it inchoate at a national level. Yet it is only at the national level that the Greens’ central political concerns can properly be grasped.

Outside England, the results in Britain cemented national divergences. Scottish Labour returned its best results in a decade, though they represent only a slight easing of the party’s nuclear winter (in 2012 it received 31.4 per cent of first preference votes; this time it was 21.7 per cent). Labour’s return to second place is an artefact of the cratering of the Tory vote after a brief surge under Ruth Davidson; Douglas Ross blamed Partygate, but the disappearance of the party’s sole likeable and competent leader played a more salient role. The SNP’s hegemony remains untroubled. In Wales, Labour made impressive advances. Mark Drakeford, the party’s leader in Wales, immediately capitalised by proposing – jointly with Plaid Cymru – further electoral reform to the Senedd. That idea remains taboo for Labour in Westminster: the party shares the Tories’ commitment to FPTP mostly out of inertia and inanition, but also because it still dreams of forming a strong majority and gaining untrammelled command of the state. Many of Labour’s strategists pride themselves on being hard-headed realists, steered above all by the facts. Here’s an inconvenient fact for them: the UK’s constituent nations have moved further apart. The national share projected on the basis of these elections looks similar to the profile of the 2005 general election, in which Blair won a majority of more than sixty seats. But without the Scottish seats it had then, Labour would find itself with a minority government at best.

The truly momentous event on 5 May was Sinn Féin’s victory in the Assembly elections in Northern Ireland. As Newsnight’s unusually honest and assiduous reporter Lewis Goodall put it in a clip widely shared on social media, this was a result that the North’s political constitution was once supposed to make impossible. It had been coming, however, and for three reasons: Sinn Féin’s modernisation, gradual demographic changes in the North, and – more recently – the reinvention of Alliance as a liberal centrist force. The DUP’s blundering also played a key role: the £300 million left unspent in the wake of its withdrawal from government in February has featured in every other party’s campaign. Northern Ireland has the highest rate of economic inactivity and the lowest productivity in the UK; it also has the longest NHS waiting lists. The cost of living crisis bites everywhere, but it is especially sharp here. The DUP’s objections to a Republican first minister have been replaced, since the election, by a refusal based on the Brexit protocol – which could delay the formation of a government, and the passing of a budget, for months. Commentary in Britain has focused on the prospect of a border poll: it’s true that these results make it thinkable, but they don’t make it likely anytime soon. Concerns closer to home – eating, heating, working – are more pressing. It is hard to imagine that voters will applaud Jeffrey Donaldson for blocking any chance to solve them. The government’s plan to rip up the protocol, which would probably plunge Britain into a recession, may give him the pretext for a climbdown.

A renewed conflict with Brussels may well also reanimate Brexit divides in England. For Labour, that would be ruinous. Concealed by its apparent stasis in England are signs that the party is profiting from voters repulsed by the Tories in government, including in its lost ‘Red Wall’ seats, where its share of the vote increased. There are reasons Labour doesn’t tell this story clearly. It requires admitting both that Corbyn’s Labour did well in 2018, when these seats were last in play, and that its results in 2019 were catastrophic. Every faction in the party dislikes one or other of these facts. Because of the successes of 2018, many of the reversions to Labour since 2019 – Kirklees, Wakefield, Bolton – don’t resonate as clearly as they might. Nor are they uniform: Grimsby remains lost and, outside the Red Wall, Dudley has embraced the Tories more closely. Taken with Labour victories in Leave-voting pockets of the South – Southampton, Worthing – the suggestion might be that the Brexit divide is waning. But however you look at it, this is not a picture of a party sweeping all before it: the humiliation of dire Labour administrations in Tower Hamlets and Croydon, and Bristol’s rejection of its high-handed Labour mayor – it voted to abolish the office altogether – do not suggest widespread enthusiasm. Labour has limped to success through Tory failure. It is a poor basis for hope.

Councillors are often annoyed by journalists’ habit of interpreting local results through a national lens. It isn’t just laziness: Britain does have a centralised power structure and weak councils. Constrained though they are, however, councils are not powerless. Labour policy may be in a deep freeze at national level, but some of its new councils have distinctive plans. Wandsworth’s campaign focused heavily on a council housing revolution to counterbalance the luxury glass acreage in the north of the borough. On the diminished Labour left, the Preston Model of insourcing and local regeneration still holds pride of place; adapting municipal socialism of this kind in a prosperous London borough will take ingenuity and careful strategic thought, not least to avoid spooking tax-sensitive local liberals. Even so, that such plans could even be considered in a borough once thought of as a laboratory for Thatcherism marks an enduring shift in English urban politics.

At a national level, though, the immediate future looks grim. Any political profit Labour might have turned from the elections has evaporated in the face of Beergate; now that Starmer has offered up his career as a hostage to Durham Constabulary, there will be weeks of press agitation as the investigation spins on. Even if he escapes a fine, the narrative will be either that he lent on the police, or that he has dodged resignation on a technicality. Every second spent on this is time not spent on the cost of living crisis, the single issue most likely to dislodge Johnson’s government. Starmer must know this, as he must also know that 1.3 million people will fall into absolute poverty this year, that 40 per cent of Britons will face fuel poverty, and that 6.8 million Britons already skip meals or eat less than they need.

The Tories should be worried, all the same, about the contents of the Queen’s Speech. The government’s legislative programme is thin, and targeted solely at its core voters. One official briefed that the time of ‘pain relief’ for the cost of living was over, and that it is now time for the ‘surgery the economy needs’. The bill on workers’ rights promised twenty times over has disappeared; promises to steamroller nimbyism in housing development have vanished and the manifesto promise to build 300,000 new homes a year has been abandoned. The proposed rolling back of human rights, clampdowns on protesters and asylum seekers, the privatisation of Channel 4: these are signs of a party out of ideas, disconnected from the real world, and running on autopilot.

13 May

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by Staff May 16, 2022

If the polls are right, he may soon be the next PM. So who is Anthony Albanese? – Monash Lens

If the polls are right, he may soon be the next PM. So who is Anthony Albanese?  Monash Lens

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Karen Middleton’s 2016 biography of Anthony Albanese concludes with a speech he made that year, on the 20th anniversary of his election to parliament.

“I’m patient,” he told his clapping audience. “I’m patient – I’m a Souths fan.” The South Sydney Rabbitohs is the rugby league club Albanese supports, which for the greater part of his adult life was notorious for its competitive under-performance.

The audience realised, of course, that in proclaiming his long-suffering dedication, Albanese was really alluding to his political vocation and his other underachieving “tribe” – the Labor Party.

Albanese’s journey in Labor politics has indeed been long and arduous. He was still a boy when he began accompanying his mother and grandparents to local branch meetings of the Labor Party; he remembers handing out for Gough Whitlam in 1972 when only nine.

He formally joined the ALP as a teenager. Up to his ears in student Labor politics as an undergraduate, upon leaving Sydney University he went to work for the elder statesman of the New South Wales left faction, Tom Uren. By his mid-20s he was assistant secretary of New South Wales Labor, and won the seat of Grayndler for the ALP in 1996 on his 33rd birthday.

Even his path to leadership has been unusually slow. One has to go back to the middle of last century for an opposition leader who was older (56) and who had served for longer in the parliament (23 years) when first elected to that position.

His wait for the chance to become prime minister has been of far longer duration than most of Australia’s recent national leaders. Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison averaged only around a decade between entering parliament and attaining office. For Albanese, it will be a quarter of a century if Labor wins Saturday’s election.

To continue the slow-burn theme, if Albanese is to be believed, his ambition for leadership formed late. Those who reach leadership positions are typically consumed with an aspiration for the top job from early in their parliamentary careers – if not before. They’re fuelled by a sense of their own prime-ministerial destiny.

Albanese is different. On his telling, it was only in 2013, on the defeat of Rudd’s second government, that he first entertained thoughts of becoming leader. Until then he had contented himself with the role of “counsellor and kingmaker”.

And still he had to wait. Despite winning a comfortable majority of the rank-and-file vote, he narrowly lost the leadership to Bill Shorten in 2013 because several of his left-faction Caucus colleagues defected to support Shorten. Albanese then had to stay his hand in 2016 when Shorten’s better-than-expected performance at that year’s election insulated him from a leadership contest.

When Shorten seemed poised for victory in 2019, Albanese must have figured his chance to be party leader had passed. But then came “Morrison’s miracle”, and Albanese emerged as the only candidate to succeed Shorten within a demoralised Labor caucus.


Read more: The story of ‘us’: There’s a great tale Labor could tell about how it would govern – it just needs to start telling it


Playing the long game has also been the hallmark of Albanese’s leadership over the past three years. Beginning with “listening tours” of the regions where Labor badly faltered in 2019 – most notably in Queensland – it’s been painstaking and unglamorous graft.

As journalist Katharine Murphy has observed, to his detractors his approach has been akin to a campaign of “attrition”. Those critics have harped on the theme of his leadership being a small target, and his program prosaic. This is not how Labor wins office, they’ve insisted.

Drawing on a sample size of three – the number of times Labor has claimed government from opposition since the end of WWII under the leaderships of Whitlam, Bob Hawke and Rudd – the critics have argued the template for Labor success is a bold, transformative reform program, and a charismatic, popular leader. Under Albanese, they complain, Labor has neither.

Albanese became leader of a demoralised Labor Party after its unexpected 2019 election defeat. Photo: AAP/Dan Peled.
 

One can quibble at the edges of the critics’ reading of history. Though Whitlam unquestionably heralded an expansive reform program in 1972, the Labor Party was sufficiently concerned about his image that it launched an unprecedented advertising blitz to humanise him in the eyes of the public.

When Hawke won in 1983, Labor’s program for government was all but subsumed by the leader’s messianic appeal as encapsulated in the slogan, “Bob Hawke Bringing Australia Together”.

Rudd’s victory in 2007 was on the back of a campaign in which Labor selectively staked out policy differences with the Coalition. The nerdy Rudd painted himself as more of a fiscal conservative than John Howard, and was reassuringly perceived as a kind of youthful version of the prime minister.

In short, the idea of Labor relying on larger-than-life platforms and leaders to win government is exaggerated.

A contrast of agendas

This is not to deny that under Albanese, Labor is running on a considerably less daring agenda than it did in 2019. Indeed, it’s an irony – or confirmation that ideological tags count for nothing in the contemporary Labor Party – that the right faction’s Shorten campaigned on an aggressively redistributive program spiced by “class war” rhetoric about the “big end of town”.

In contrast, the left faction’s Albanese has abandoned those redistributive measures, and has been emollient in his language towards business.

The plan to curb franking credits was first to go under Albanese, followed by the dumping of plans for changes to negative gearing, capital gains and, most recently, family trusts. As well, Labor has announced that in government it will not repeal the third tranche of the Coalition’s tax cuts that benefit high-income earners.

Simultaneously, Albanese has portrayed himself as a friend of aspiration. He believes, he says, in an Australia “where nobody is held back and nobody is left behind”.

To be fair to Albanese, it makes sense Labor changed tack from 2019. The party’s review of that defeat blamed it on “a cluttered policy agenda that looked risky and an unpopular leader”.

In a speech to the National Press Club on the release of that review, Albanese indicated he had got the message: “Too many people were confused or even frightened by our policies.” Elsewhere, he’s pointedly noted none of Labor’s past successful opposition leaders campaigned on increases in taxes.

It’s little surprise Albanese has walked away from the crowded policy agenda that helped thwart Bill Shorten’s bid to be prime minister in 2019. Photo: AAP/Lukas Coch
 

If there’s a playbook to Albanese walking away from the Shorten program, then it’s from the other side of politics. In 1996, heeding the lesson of John Hewson losing the un-losable election three years earlier on a radical neoliberal manifesto headlined by a new tax (the GST), John Howard renounced the GST as well as other contentious policies from Hewson’s Fightback! program. Howard determinedly narrowed the points of difference with then PM Paul Keating, driving the latter to distraction.

Albanese has been unabashed about his strategy of not rejoining the battles of 2019, declaring he has no intention to “relitigate the past”. To those who cavil that Labor has abandoned its ideals by dropping the redistributive policies, he’s been equally blunt: “One of my Labor principles is for Labor to win elections.”

This might not be as caustic as Whitlam’s famed put-down of the Labor hard left, “Only the impotent are pure”, but the point is fundamentally the same. To change the nation, Labor first has to win at the ballot box.


Read more: Despite the polls, the federal election looks to be finely poised


The abandonment of the Shorten-era revenue measures has curtailed Labor’s scope for campaign initiatives. According to the Coalition, Albanese is like a thief in the night, trying to steal his way into office on a meagre policy program.

This is largely unfair. Beginning at a leisurely pace, Albanese gradually accelerated the rollout of policies.

Labor entered the campaign proposing, among other things, major investments in aged care, childcare and social housing, manufacturing renewal, greater support for TAFE and universities, an upgrade of the electricity grid, a national anti-corruption commission, and implementation of the Uluru Statement. During the campaign, this program has been buttressed by further promises in areas such as health, housing and pay equity for women workers.

Another conclusion of Labor’s review of its 2019 election campaign was that there was an absence of a clear narrative binding together the party’s policies. Albanese, too, has struggled in that space. In the second half of 2021, he seemed to be feeling his way there by talking about the reconstructive role of government following the crisis of the pandemic.

This was potentially redolent of a great Labor reformist era (post-war reconstruction), and a sharp contrast to Morrison’s “can-do capitalism” mantra. Yet his prosecution of the case for the transformative power of government has remained inchoate.

Albanese’s predilection, as exposed on the hustings, for wandering into verbal marshes hasn’t helped either in providing coherence of theme. But the lack of a compelling storyline also goes back to the abiding caution of his approach.

The party’s policy on a 2030 carbon emissions reduction target is an illustration. This is another area where Labor kept its powder dry, delaying the release of its target until after the Glasgow Climate Change Conference.

When Albanese finally announced a reduction target of 43%, it was almost as if the policy dare not speak its name. He declared it “a modest policy. We do not pretend it is a radical policy.” Hardly the inspirational stuff of “the great moral challenge of our time”.


Read more: Labor’s 2030 climate target betters the Morrison government, but Australia must go much further, much faster


Making amends for the disappointment of 2019 brings us squarely to the subject of leadership. If Shorten was a millstone on Labor’s vote, a perusal of opinion poll leadership ratings indicates Albanese, though not popular, has not been subject to anything like the antipathy that dogged his predecessor.

In the first half of this year, his leadership ratings edged into positive territory and, unusually for an opposition leader, he was nipping at the heels of the incumbent on the question of preferred prime minister. This was a good place to be.

While Albanese isn’t wildly popular, he’s also not as unpopular with voters as Bill Shorten was in 2019. Photo: AAP/Lukas Coch
 

Probably the most consistent take-out from the leadership polling over the past three years, however, is that Albanese hasn’t made a major impression on the public. The relatively high number of respondents who have nominated “don’t know” when asked to rate his performance has been an indicator of this.

The pandemic is one reason Albanese remained indistinct in the electorate’s mind. For stretches of the past parliamentary term, and particularly during 2020, he struggled for oxygen.

Yet undoubtedly the tepid response towards Albanese is also a function of the fact he’s bent over backwards to be a non-threatening rather than arresting figure. For someone once styled as a warrior of the left, there’s been nothing remotely incendiary from him.

That Albanese has journeyed a long way from his pugilistic younger days is a sign of maturity. But the charisma he displayed as a firebrand student politician has also leached away. He presents as a slightly rough-hewn, inoffensive type, workmanlike rather than exceptional. One senses he is more visceral than cerebral, with reserves of emotional intelligence. Colleagues testify that authenticity and decency are his defining attributes: a shorthand way of saying he is the antithesis of Morrison.

Altogether, Albanese’s is an unusually modest persona for an aspiring prime minister, which goes with his insistence he never had a sense of entitlement to leadership. At the same time, there is a core of resilience and self-belief. His inner strength is rooted in his hard scrabble backstory to which he routinely harks back. This is the story of being brought up as the only child of a single mother and invalid pensioner in council housing. His mother’s struggles are the lodestar of his political vocation.

My mum lived a lot of her life with a disability.

She had crippling rheumatoid arthritis.

Untreated, it meant she couldn’t do basic things like hold a knife and fork.

In her later years, mum started getting the support from government and the health system that she needed. pic.twitter.com/HgQ3Zijxj3

— Anthony Albanese (@AlboMP) December 2, 2020

In another way, though, Albanese was blessed as a child. Like past Labor luminaries, Whitlam, Hawke and Keating, he was the recipient of maternal special investment – what he remembers is his mother’s “absolute unconditional love” for him.

While he might not have believed it was his destiny to be prime minister, his mother harboured that ambition for him. Middleton’s biography records that she “believed he could go far – as far as a person can go in the Australian political system”.

What sort of prime minister can we expect Albanese to be if he wins power on Saturday? He’s referenced Hawke and, to the gall of Liberals, even invoked Howard as prime ministers he will take a leaf from.

The gold standard of modern Labor prime ministers, it’s hardly surprising that Albanese looks to Hawke as a role model. He says that, like Hawke, he’ll govern by consensus, bringing together business, unions and civil society.

The transactional business of forging networks of support is second nature to Albanese – a craft he mastered as a left-faction operative in the hostile environment of the right-dominated New South Wales Labor Party.

There’s evidence of his capacity for wrangling a middle ground. As leader of the House of Representatives during Gillard’s prime ministership, he was integral to the functioning of Labor’s minority government by closely liaising with the crossbenchers. Gillard later remarked: “Albo is a very persuasive person. He’s good at talking people into things.”

Albanese has said he’ll govern like his role model, Bob Hawke. Photo: AAP/Mick Tsikas
 

While Albanese’s leadership style over the past three years has largely escaped analysis, it’s notable he’s mostly kept Labor united in common purpose. The walking away from the redistributive policies of the Shorten era required extensive consultation to work through the changes within the parliamentary party and beyond.

In the end, the result was achieved with surprisingly little rancour. Albanese’s collaborative abilities are also attested to by the strong leadership team he’s assembled around him. In addition to his deputy, Richard Marles, and Labor’s talented shadow treasurer, Jim Chalmers, that leadership group includes Katy Gallagher, Mark Butler, Kristina Keneally, Penny Wong and Tony Burke.


Read more: Could the 2022 election result in a hung parliament? History shows Australians have nothing to fear from it


Like all Labor leaders since Rudd, Albanese insists he’s learnt the lessons of the dysfunction of that period of government. He will observe “proper” processes allowing genuine debate in Cabinet.

Albanese’s team approach is a welcome contrast to the Coalition side, with Morrison giving the impression of running the show himself. If elected, Albanese’s ability to orchestrate consensus will hold him in good stead for tackling thorny policy challenges – of which there’ll be many ahead.

Still, questions linger about whether Albanese has the stuff to be a substantial prime minister. Although a gifted transactional politician, does he boast the erudition and imagination to meaningfully shape the nation? He’s demonstrated a flinty pragmatism over the past three years, but less certain is whether he has the driving sense of purpose required to achieve hard-fought reform.

And, like the best leaders, has he the ability to modulate his approach? Can he switch to a more dynamic galvanising mode of leadership, or will the circumspection that has defined him in opposition shackle him in government? On the other hand, just maybe his unassuming leadership will provide for a dogged but conscientious form of government that suits Australia’s purposes.

With Labor enjoying a substantial lead in the opinion polls, Albanese’s patience looks set to be rewarded on Saturday. If the polls are right, on two-party-preferred terms, the ALP is on track to achieve at least as handsome a victory as when the party won office in 1972, 1983 and 2007. Albanese will have defied the critics and bent the template of how the ALP wins government from opposition. Non-heroic in leadership style, he’ll nonetheless be celebrated as a Labor hero.

But there remain gnawing fears in the Labor camp that a low primary vote, fickle preference flows and a patchy swing might yet deny them majority government. Should a hung parliament result from Saturday’s contest, Albanese’s persuasive capacities will be tested immediately in wooing the crossbenchers.

The probability is that in any negotiations he’ll have a stronger hand than Morrison because of an edge in numbers, and the fact he’s unencumbered by the same baggage as the Prime Minister.

It will be a final minor delay in Albanese’s protracted journey to the political summit.

This article originally appeared on The Conversation.

by Staff May 15, 2022

Who will you be voting for in the seat of McPherson? – ABC News

Who will you be voting for in the seat of McPherson?  ABC News

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McPherson is a southern Gold Coast seat that extends from the New South Wales border to Burleigh Heads, and inland west of the Pacific Highway to include Robina and Merrimac.

Major centres include Coolangatta, Robina, Burleigh Heads, Palm Beach, Tugun and Tallebudgera Valley and Currumbin Valley. It covers 229 square kilometres.

ABC Gold Coast contacted each candidate and asked them to answer a range of questions commonly asked by voters. Their answers are below. 

Current status

MP: Karen Andrews (Liberal National Party) since 2010

Margin: 12.2 per cent

2022 candidates in ballot paper order

Karen Andrews | Liberal National Party 

LNP candidate Karen Andrews.(Supplied)

Incumbent Karen Andrews is the only woman standing in McPherson. She is the Minister for Home Affairs.

Prior to entering politics, Ms Andrews was a mechanical engineer at power stations in Queensland and petrochemical plants in Victoria. She also operated a human resources and industrial relations consultancy.

She is a mother of three.

What do you see as the key issues for your electorate?

“Household budgets are often stretched and cost of living is one of the biggest issues, particularly for those on fixed or low incomes.

“Transport infrastructure has also been one of our major issues as the Gold Coast continues to grow.

“I also think that drug use and drug-related crime is something that really concerns people across the Gold Coast.”

How would you make life better for people in your electorate?

“My first priority is always fighting for what we need on the Coast — helping local small businesses grow and create jobs, improving our local roads, making our community safer, delivering better health services, protecting our environment, supporting our seniors and veterans.

“That also means standing up for locals when it comes to issues like the Light Rail stage 4 route.

“I’ve always been of the view my first and most important job is to fight for local residents.

“[If re-elected] I’d also be focused on protecting Australia’s national interest in an increasingly complex world [by] keeping people smugglers out of business and ensuring the boats remain stopped.

“[I would] secure the services that all Australians rely on, through a continued focus on cybersecurity and protecting critical infrastructure like utilities and health care, and make sure our law enforcement and intelligence agencies have the resources they need to keep our nation safe, including right here on the southern Gold Coast.”

Kevin Hargraves | Pauline Hanson’s One Nation 

Pauline Hanson’s One Nation candidate Kevin Hargraves.(Supplied)

Kevin Hargraves was born on the Gold Coast and describes himself as a “successful businessman of more than 40 years”.

The One Nation candidate says he is running for McPherson because he believes in “smaller, smarter, more-efficient government that’s honest, transparent and accountable”.

What do you see as the key issues for your electorate?

“There are many [issues], but people in my electorate are concerned about the mandates, they are worried about the crazy increase in the cost of living, China and the new digital ID card.”

How would you make life better for people in your electorate?

“Reduce debt, end of mandates, and create a country that’s self-sufficient.”

Gary Pead | Australian Federation Party 

Federation Party candidate Gary Pead.(Supplied)

Gary Pead describes himself as a business and climate change leader “with a 23-year history of community, social and political involvement in the McPherson electorate”, having founded the group Sustainable Renewable Solutions.

What do you see as the key issues for your electorate?

“Over many years the local community groups and social enterprise groups, which include the very important retiree section of the Gold Coast demographic, have been ignored.

“I will pledge to support these groups with the allocation of 100 per cent of the McPherson electorate funding.”

How would you make life better for people in your electorate?

“I will get rid of the plastic pollution in their lives.

“[I will] change the housing finance system to cut the main living costs of mortgages, rentals and energy.

“Increased pay is an investment in people.”

Scott Turner | Greens

Greens candidate Scott Turner.(Supplied)

Scott Turner grew up in McPherson and attended Palm Beach-Currumbin State High School.

He began his career in scientific research and has worked in administration in the areas of health care, crisis accommodation, mental health and education and as a customer service agent for TransLink.

What do you see as the key issues for your electorate?

“Affordable housing is number one. Major party policies have driven housing costs up.

“It’s easier to buy your fifth home than your first, and a tight rental market is driving too many people into poverty and even homelessness.”

How would you make life better for people in your electorate?

“I’m running to take on the many challenges and opportunities the southern Gold Coast is facing, like growth, globalisation, the digital economy and climate change.

“I’ll fight for affordable housing for everyone.

“The Greens’ fully costed housing plan includes building one million affordable social homes across Australia over the next 20 years, a shared-ownership scheme so first home buyers can own a home for $300,000, a cap on rent increases, ending no-grounds evictions and banning rent bidding.”

Andy Cullen | Australian Values Party 

Australian Values Party candidate Andy Cullen.(Supplied)

Andy Cullen is a married father of four and a combat veteran with 17 years’ service in the Army. He said much of his career was focused on explosive ordnance disposal.

He retired as a major in 2012 and served for six years as a soldier in the Royal Australian Infantry and later as an officer in the Royal Australian Engineers.

Mr Cullen says he wants to “bring accountability, excellence and responsible leadership to the governance of Australia, so that we protect and progress the Australian way of life for future generations”.

What do you see as the key issues for your electorate?

“Loss of constitutional freedoms and governmental overreach, followed by economic instability and inflation.”

How would you make life better for people in your electorate?

“I would make life better for the people of McPherson by placing the needs of the people first.

“As a new politician from a new party, I am not subject to party politics, big business or lobby groups.

“I have no ulterior motive but to serve the people of Australia and achieve our three strategic objectives — a more enjoyable way of life, a self-sustainable Australian economy and self-sufficient security within our region.”

Joshua Berrigan | United Australia Party 

United Australia Party candidate Joshua Berrigan.(Supplied)

Joshua Berrigan says he has been married for 11 years and has “the two best kids in the whole world”.

He has degrees in law and international business but worked as a chaplain at Mudgeeraba State School for two years before becoming a pastor for 10 years.

What do you see as the key issues for your electorate?

“Housing affordability — we will cap the interest rate at 3 per cent to stop the rapid rental price increases which match the increased loan repayments.

“Government removing your rights — we will introduce a bill of rights to stop lockdowns, border closures, censorship and mandates.

“The cost of living — we will cut the crazy 50 per cent tax on your second job.

“The Light Rail — I have called for an immediate stop of this project for both stages 3 and 4.”

How would you make life better for people in your electorate?

“I ​will represent and serve my community from the ground up, not from the top down.

“I am not out of touch with the needs of people in my community. I listen and I care and I will strongly advocate for you above all else.

“We have solutions for the rising interest rate, rising inflation rate and rapid removal of our rights.”

Glenn Pyne | Liberal Democrats 

Liberal Democrats candidate Glenn Pyne.(Supplied)

Glenn Pyne is a physics teacher and former school principal and says he has been married for more than 20 years.

He participated in the Paralympic Games in Sydney 2000 in canoe/kayaking.

“I have a passion for libertarian politics in which we as individuals are responsible, for the most part, for our own lives.”

What do you see as the key issues for your electorate?

“Three of the key issues for my electorate are the Light Rail, the loss of business as a result of the pandemic mandates and border closures and juvenile crime.

“However on a more federal level, I believe the issues are more about government interference in people’s lives.”

How would you make life better for people in your electorate?

“As a representative of the people of McPherson, first and foremost I would listen to their concerns and advocate for them in Canberra.

“By pushing for many of the principle policies of the LDP, I also expect to be able to reduce red and green tape and stop big business and big government from riding roughshod over the people of the southern Gold Coast.”

Carl Ungerer | Australian Labor Party 

ALP candidate Carl Ungerer.(Supplied)

Carl Ungerer lives on the southern Gold Coast with his wife, daughter and “two German shepherds”.

He says he is an active volunteer on a local school P&C committee, the Currumbin Surf Life Saving Club and the Rural Fire Brigade.

Prior to running for McPherson, he had a career in international relations and represented Australia overseas as a diplomat.

What do you see as the key issues for your electorate?

“The issues that most people raise with me are the rising cost of living, Medicare and the government’s failure to fix the aged care sector.

“I think that many people in McPherson are looking for a government to end the climate wars, to take genuine action on climate change and build Australian manufacturing so we can be a renewable energy superpower.

“Locals are also concerned about transport infrastructure.”

How would you make life better for people in your electorate?

“A Labor government will build a better future for the Gold Coast by defending and supporting Medicare to make it easier to see a doctor.

“We will invest in the aged care system so that older Australians on the Gold Coast get the care they deserve.

“We will build a veteran’s wellness centre in Tweed Heads to service all of the southern Gold Coast so that veterans can be supported properly.

“We will create over 460,000 new fee-free TAFE courses and 20,000 new university places which will help re-skill students on the Gold Coast for the jobs of the future.

“We will restore trust and integrity to national politics by legislating a national anti-corruption commission by the end of the year.”

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by Staff May 15, 2022

Jeremy Hunt refuses to say Boris Johnson is an ‘honest man’ – South Wales Argus

Jeremy Hunt refuses to say Boris Johnson is an ‘honest man’  South Wales Argus

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Jeremy Hunt has declined to say whether Boris Johnson is an honest man and said he “hopes” the Prime Minister will lead the Conservative Party into the next general election.

The ex-cabinet minister again refused to rule himself out of a future Tory leadership contest, but said now was not the right moment.

Asked on the BBC’s Sunday Morning programme whether Mr Johnson is “an honest man” in the wake of the partygate scandal, Mr Hunt hesitated and then said that “talking about personalities is not a helpful thing to do” when faced with a “serious” international situation such as the Ukraine war.

Quizzed by presenter Sophie Raworth on whether the Prime Minister was the best person to lead the Tory party into the next election, Mr Hunt answered: “I very much hope so.

“I hope he can turn things round, because, as I say, I don’t think this is the moment for a leadership contest.”

Mr Hunt was the strongest opponent against Mr Johnson for the top job in the party in 2019 and has been touted as a possible candidate should there be another contest.

On that prospect, he said: “I don’t rule out a return to frontline politics myself, but I don’t think now is the right moment.

“Britain has been the most robust member of the Western alliance in the face of the first major war in Europe in our lifetimes and I think the only person who would rejoice if we had a hiatus of several months in the leadership in Britain would be (Russian president) Vladimir Putin.”

“I think that talking about personalities is not a helpful thing to do”

Health and Social Care Committee Chair Jeremy Hunt responds to Sophie Raworth asking if Boris Johnson is “an honest man”#SundayMorning https://t.co/0qbgF5fMxE pic.twitter.com/BKKmvASjiu

— BBC Politics (@BBCPolitics) May 15, 2022

Mr Hunt acknowledged that his party has “a big mountain to climb in terms of winning back the support of many of our core voters”.

He described it as a “mistake” to put the Tories’ losses in the local elections down to mid-term blues, saying the party is failing to offer voters economic growth or the prospect of lower taxes.

Mr Hunt appeared to back the Prime Minister in his dispute with the European Union over the Northern Ireland Protocol.

“The situation we have now in Northern Ireland is not sustainable. It is just not acceptable that you can’t export goods freely from England to Northern Ireland,” he said.

“I think it is right to say that we have to be prepared to do difficult things because what we have now isn’t working.”

Mr Hunt said he understood why the EU was “annoyed” that the UK might pull out of the protocol, but said a trade war could be averted with “goodwill on all sides”.

by Staff May 14, 2022

With Climate 200, Political Action Committees Have Arrived to Australia – Jacobin magazine

With Climate 200, Political Action Committees Have Arrived to Australia  Jacobin magazine

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As the 2022 Australian federal election rapidly approaches, a wave of blue-green independent candidates standing in upper-middle-class electorates has Coalition MPs hot under the collar. According to Liberal polling, this “teal tsunami” looks likely to claim the blue-ribbon seats of Kooyong and Goldstein from treasurer Josh Frydenberg and assistant minister Tim Wilson, respectively.

The most recent YouGov poll, published in the Australian, backs up this estimate. Teal independents are mounting serious challenges elsewhere, including in the Australian Capital Territory, Queensland and New South Wales. Unlike other independents, the teal ones derive their hue from Climate 200, a group whose mission is to fund candidates who align with its values on the environment, government integrity, and gender equity.

Politicians and pundits across the spectrum are entranced. Former Liberal prime minister John Howard has derided the teal independents as “anti-Liberal groupies.” Deputy PM Barnaby Joyce has warned of “chaos” if teal independents win. Meanwhile, patrician small-L liberal outlets have celebrated the Climate 200 independents as a grassroots-led reinvigoration of democracy. The skeptical have accused the organization of being a party in all but name, or of entrenching the power of “dark money” over politics.

Climate 200 may be a relative novelty in Australian politics, but not so in America. In essence, it’s a political action committee (PAC), an organization that pools donations to fund campaigns and candidates. Progressive or not, by their nature, PACs are political organizations that maintain and reinforce elite control over politics. Far from repairing democracy, PACs are part of the problem.

Son of Australia’s first billionaire, Simon Holmes à Court established Climate 200 after being expelled from Kooyong 200, a Liberal Party fundraising group from the electorate of the same name. Before becoming a green-energy entrepreneur, Holmes à Court spent time in Silicon Valley helping to develop the gone-but-not-forgotten internet browser Netscape. Upon returning to Australia, he went to work digitally automating the water irrigation systems on his father’s eight Northern Territory cattle stations.

This election is not Climate 200’s first rodeo. In 2019, it attracted support from thirty-five investors, including Mike Cannon-Brookes. It backed twelve independents, including Helen Haines, who kept the North East Victorian seat of Indi in teal hands. This time around, Climate 200 lists twenty-two supported candidates.

Climate 200 rightly argues that corporate donations are a major factor behind the major parties’ dogged commitment to fossil fuels. The Liberals, Nationals, and the Australian Labor Party receive hundreds of thousands in donations from fossil fuel companies. Indeed, in 2021, the coal, oil, and gas industry paid over $1.7 million in donations, an increase of 30 percent compared to 2020. This sum is dwarfed by the $60 to $70 million that mining billionaire Clive Palmer will spend to promote the United Australia Party, which recently announced it will preference the Liberals in a number of key marginal seats.

Climate 200 raises funds to counter this influence. Holmes à Court acknowledges that this “spending to influence” ethos is like fighting fire with fire. The sentiment echoes the views of Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons, who Holmes à Court credits as one of his “favorite contemporary thinkers.” In 2013, Lessig founded the Democratic Party–aligned Mayday PAC which spent $10 million in an attempt to elect congressional candidates committed to passing campaign-finance reform. As Evan Osnos wrote in the New Yorker, “It was a super PAC designed to drive its own species into extinction.” As Lessig commented at the time, “Yes, we want to spend big money to end the influence of big money. . . . Ironic, I get it. But embrace the irony.”

The Mayday PAC was not successful; all the candidates it funded lost. Climate 200, however, seems set for better results. So far, they have built a war chest of just over $7 million, with a target of $15 to $20 million, allowing it to give its candidates much more than the major parties spend on most of theirs.

In the blue-ribbon seats of Wentworth, Mackellar, North Sydney, Kooyong, Goldstein, Warringah, and Curtin, Climate 200–backed independents have already outspent their Liberal counterparts by a fair measure. According to Facebook and Google transparency reports, the independent candidate and neurologist Dr Monique Ryan has spent more than $170,000 on digital advertising to try and unseat treasurer and deputy PM Josh Frydenberg. For his part, Frydenberg has spent $140,000 so far, including $25,000 worth of targeted digital content designed to associate Ryan’s campaign with uncertainty.

Climate 200 is also a response to political realities. As the Liberal and National parties lurch to the right, they have alienated the well-off, socially and culturally progressive small-L-liberal voters who formed much of their historic base. In previous years, the Greens sometimes fought for these voters beyond Labor’s reach in electorates like Kooyong, in Melbourne’s genteel, leafy inner east.

Under Adam Bandt’s lead, the Greens have shifted in a more social democratic direction, taking the space once occupied by Labor’s left. Their most hopeful campaigns are built on patiently recruiting, organizing, and training hundreds of new members and volunteers. This shift has created an opening for Climate 200 candidates, who are now busily cornering the “tree Tory” market. Even former Liberal prime minister and investment banker Malcolm Turnbull has thrown his support behind the teal independents, as a way to “thwart” the hard-right factions that now dominate his party. In sum, Climate 200 is pitching to the kind of educated, wealthy, metropolitan voters who would previously have been represented by the Liberal Party’s moderate “wet” faction.

This is reflected in its list of candidates. Out of twenty-two candidates, six have been executives, directors, or CEOs of either large businesses or NGOs, usually with an environmental connection. Three are current or former small-business owners. Ten are from senior professional backgrounds, including lawyers, senior academics, a film and theater producer, an ABC journalist, a former Wallabies player, and a doctor. Three are sitting MPs. They are standing in some of the most privileged seats in the nation, including in well-above-average-income parts of Melbourne, Sydney, Perth, the Adelaide Hills, and Hobart. The few regional seats with teal challengers are also comparatively well-off — for example, the North Coast of New South Wales or Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula.

The majority of Climate 200’s candidates are women, reflecting widespread disgust at the Coalition’s ingrained culture of misogyny. While these candidates identify as feminists, there are no candidates representing or advocating for predominantly female industries such as eldercare, nursing, and education, whose low rates of pay underly the gender pay gap.

Climate 200’s candidates are also overwhelmingly white. This stands in stark contrast to the Greens’ Victorian Senate ticket, for example, which is the first in the state’s history to be made up entirely of First Nations candidates. Labor, too, is fielding a considerably more diverse array of candidates, reflecting the breadth of electorates that the major party needs to contest.

In short, Climate 200 is a home away from home for Liberals who like their lawns green, their representatives cultured, and their corporations woke. Holmes à Court summed it up well in his February speech to the National Press Club:

These candidates don’t need to go into politics to be successful; they are already successful. They are business owners, doctors, lawyers, journalists and athletes. They’re in it for the right reasons.

Both the Australian and the Australian Financial Review have argued that Climate 200 is a rehash of the now defunct Australian Democrats. Others in the Coalition have argued that it’s an undeclared “secret party.” Responding to these arguments, Holmes à Court has insisted that Climate 200 is not a party because its backing is given “with no strings attached,” and that it only advises its candidates. As he explained to the National Press Club,

Many people are having a hard time wrapping their heads around the community independents movement. They cannot see it through anything other than a party lens. The movement is nothing like a party . . . there is no hierarchy, no leader, no head office. No coordinated policy platforms. . . . It’s a spontaneous, autonomous and entirely individual set of responses across the country to community dissatisfaction with “politics as usual.”

It’s true that Climate 200 reflects and reinforces a groundswell of sentiment that has attracted many volunteers and many donors. More importantly, it’s also true that Climate 200 is not a party.

Ideally, political parties maintain a mass membership that agrees with the party’s program, attends branch meetings, pay dues, and volunteers during elections or other campaigns. In return — again, ideally — party members have a say over preselection of candidates, policy, and party leadership. With the exception of the Greens, Australia’s major parties fall far short of this ideal. But at least their structures, constitutions, and platforms retain some vestigial commitment to this far more democratic form of organized, mass politics. By contrast, Climate 200’s volunteers and donors have no say whatsoever — unless they are major donors or well-connected thanks to social networks derived from their status and class position. If a political party is the family home, Climate 200 is a pricey Airbnb in wine country.

This is why Climate 200 should be seen as a US-style PAC. PACs are formed for the purpose of raising and spending money to elect and defeat candidates in line with the PAC’s perspective and the interests of its backers. Indeed, Climate 200 is more like a super PAC, a relatively recent development on the model defined as an “independent expenditure-only political action committee.” Super PACs may raise unlimited sums of money and engage in unlimited spending to support political campaigns, include advertising. At the same time, they are not allowed to either coordinate or make contributions to candidate campaigns or party coffers. They are supposed to have no say when it comes to policy decisions.

In practice, they exert a huge influence. Bernie Sanders’s 2020 campaign in the Democratic Party primaries attracted far more volunteers and small donors than any of his rivals, and in many places drew on preexisting leftist organizing. Despite this, Bernie’s rivals vastly outspent him, in large part thanks to fundraising by establishment PACs and super PACs. This was a crucial ingredient in Joe Biden’s victory in the primaries. The dominance of PACs in US politics is a symptom of a party system designed to exclude genuine mass participation, in which campaign committees direct funding granted from above. PACs don’t sidestep the problem of political parties — they are quite compatible with the worst, least accountable parties. US political parties don’t have members, after all, only registered voters, making them more reliant on sponsorship from the ultrarich and less reliant on their base.

Climate 200 reproduces this method by approaching candidates as a financier would investment opportunities. According to Holmes à Court, the group isn’t interested in “early-stage startups.” Referring to a Western Australian candidate they interviewed, he recounted how

we said “come back to us when you’ve got a hundred grand in the bank and you’ve got a candidate.” And with our guidance they very quickly got themselves together.

The language is telling. It’s true, as Holmes à Court says, that Climate 200 doesn’t start the campaigns, choose the candidates, or dictate their policies. They simply choose the most promising ones and “give them a leg up with funding and support.” That Climate 200 treats their candidates like an elite group of protégés goes some way to revealing the investment-fund logic behind the project.

While this doesn’t preclude mass engagement, it does make it a transactional affair. Indeed, the Climate 200 model gives candidates a financial incentive to engage with the communities they wish to represent. For example, Kylea Tink, who is running in North Sydney against Liberal MP Trent Zimmerman, says Climate 200 has matched funding against independent donations from the community to the tune of around $50,000. “It evens the playing field,” says Zoe Daniel, the ex-ABC journalist now vying for Melbourne’s wealthy bayside electorate of Goldstein.

Naturally, Climate 200 candidates echo Holmes à Court’s rhetoric about grassroots participation. Daniels describes how, suddenly, “grassroots community movements” have triggered a rejection of party-aligned candidates and a surge in demand for “values-aligned” ones instead. And it’s true that they have attracted thousands of volunteers. But then, so do many elite-backed centrist and liberal political campaigns. Climate 200 is to a mass movement as GetUp! is to a general strike.

Two candidates in the Tasmanian Senate race encapsulate the gulf between a politics that can speak for the voiceless and Climate 200: Tammy Tyrell and Leanne Minshull. Tyrell is standing as part of the Jaqui Lambie Network and hoping to unseat hard-right Liberal senator Eric Abetz. Minshull is standing with the Local Party, and is one of Climate 200’s chosen.

In a campaign video depicting scenes of everyday life for working-class Tasmanians, Tyrell explains how she and her husband Tim have “worked all our lives. He works night shift in aged care. I’ve worked in paddocks, factories, and offices.”

“I’ve felt what it’s like,” she continues, “to be unemployed, to be on Centrelink.” One wonders how many Climate 200 candidates could say the same.

After stating that Abetz has voted for pay cuts and cuts to social services for decades, Tyrell argues that Tasmania needs someone

who gives a damn about a hospital system that’s broken, who gives a damn about locking a whole generation of kids out of education, who gives a damn about an aged care system that’s been cut so badly that carers have been asked to do dishes and clean floors instead of actually caring for people, because there’s not enough money to pay for staff.

Compare this with Leanne Minshull’s campaign video, set to a soft acoustic guitar, in which she explains that

when I became a lawyer, I immediately started using my skills to make real and positive change. And I haven’t stopped! I use my legal and problem-solving skills in every part of my life: to grow my small business, to fight for real and meaningful action to address climate change, to understand complex economics and legislation, and to stand up to the bullies who choose to hurt our community.

Both candidates are independent of the major parties, both are women, and both represent an alternative to the status quo. You’d expect Minshull to push for a grants program directed at diverse, sustainable small businesses. Meanwhile, you’d expect Tyrell to fight for jobs, public housing, and hospitals. Minshull would nod sympathetically while asking you to fill a shift at short notice, while Tyrell would help you find a job after being laid off for refusing.

If Climate 200 helps unseat the Coalition, of course that’s a cause for celebration. But let’s not pretend it will reinvigorate democracy. It’s a blue-ribbon movement led and funded by those who are frustrated that their historic party no longer amplifies their well-educated, well-heeled, and well-respected voices. To combat climate change, we will need to nationalize swathes of industry, rebuild social services, reinvigorate unions and dramatically boost public spending to restructure the economy. We will need to tax the rich and radically reform our political structures. One doubts that many Climate 200 candidates would vote for any of this — it might harm their ethically invested stock portfolios.

In his press club speech, Holmes à Court noted that “in David and Goliath battles, we know that David sometimes wins.” Be that as it may, Climate 200’s candidates are not David. Nor are they Goliath. But let’s not bullshit — they’d be OK with Goliath if he set a somewhat more ambitious carbon emissions reduction target.

by Staff May 14, 2022

Finland’s president tells Putin: We will apply to join Nato – South Wales Guardian

Finland’s president tells Putin: We will apply to join Nato  South Wales Guardian

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Finnish President Sauli Niinisto has told Vladimir Putin that the militarily non-aligned Nordic country that shares a long border with Russia “will decide to apply for Nato membership in the coming days”.

Mr Niinisto’s office said in a statement that he told the Russian president in a phone conversation how Finland’s security environment had changed after Moscow’s February 24 invasion of Ukraine, and pointed to Moscow’s demands for Finland to refrain from seeking membership in the 30-member western military alliance.

“The discussion (with Putin) was straightforward and unambiguous and was held without exaggeration. Avoiding tensions was considered important,” said Mr Niinisto, Finland’s president since 2012 and one of few western leaders who has held regular dialogue with Mr Putin over the past 10 years.

Vladimir Putin (Mikhail Metzel, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo/AP)

He pointed out that he told Mr Putin at their first meeting in 2012 that “each independent nation would maximise its own security”.

“That is still the case. By joining Nato, Finland will strengthen its own security and assume its responsibilities. It is not something away from anybody,” Mr Niinisto said.

He stressed that Finland, despite its likely membership of Nato, wants to continue to deal with Russia bilaterally in “practical issues generated by the border neighbourhood” and hopes to engage with Moscow “in a professional manner”.

The phone call was conducted on Finland’s initiative, Mr Niinisto’s office said. The statement did not disclose any comments from Mr Putin or the Kremlin on the conversation.

Finland shares an 830-mile border with Russia, the longest of any European Union member.

(PA Graphics)

Mr Niinisto and Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin on Thursday jointly endorsed the country’s Nato bid and recommended that the country “must apply for Nato membership without delay” to guarantee the nation’s security amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Europe’s changed geopolitical and security landscape.

A formal announcement from Mr Niinisto and Ms Marin that Finland intends to apply for Nato membership is expected on Sunday, a day after the likely endorsement by Ms Marin’s governing Social Democratic Party.

Neighbouring Sweden is set to decide on its Nato stance on Sunday in a meeting of the governing Social Democratic Party led by Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson.

US President Joe Biden held a joint call on Friday with Mr Niinisto and Ms Andersson during which, according to the White House, he “underscored his support for Nato’s Open Door policy and for the right of Finland and Sweden to decide their own future, foreign policy and security arrangements”.

by Staff May 14, 2022

Mark Drakeford interview: Jim Griffiths and future of the Wales Office – The National Wales

Mark Drakeford interview: Jim Griffiths and future of the Wales Office  The National Wales

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THE Welsh Government’s cabinet room normally has picturesque views of Cardiff Bay but today the rain is thrashing down on the windows.

Dull weather is a common feature of Wales, after all, along with song, rugby and other symbols in the marketing playbook. But in more recent times so is the more substantive issue of devolution.

On a wet morning in the capital, this week the first minister sought to reverse a decades-long scandal: the airbrushing of Jim Griffiths, the founding father of a nation’s young democracy, from Welsh public life.

A bust of the first secretary of state for Wales now overlooks the hall of the Senedd.

Unlike other appearances, for our interview the First Minister is relaxed. He enters from his private office, wearing a woolly jumper and beaming when I hand him two gifts. One is a biography of Griffiths by D Ben Rees; the other a book with essays from J Beverley Smith and the subject himself on his life in politics.

I ask why it has taken so long to recognise the contribution of a leader the South Wales Evening Post described as an “elder statesman” after his death in 1975.

“I think that’s a really good question,” the First Minister says, sitting at the head of the cabinet table: “And it’s hard to find the answer… given the significance of his political career. Not just in the Welsh context, but as one of the genuine architects of the welfare state.”

READ MORE: Bust of Jim Griffiths, first Welsh Secretary, unveiled at Senedd

We both agreed that Griffiths’ career deserved to be “better, more prominently recognised,” but I point out the fault of the Labour party who for so long worshipped the celebrity appeal of Aneurin Bevan over the understated man from Betws: “Well, I think that is probably part of the explanation, isn’t it?”

Yet in the end, it is Jim Griffiths who has arguably won the day on establishing Labour’s identity and political direction in Wales.

The party – now formally distinct as Welsh Labour – has become synonymous with cradling Welsh nationhood (including an embrace of the language) in a way that is far from the bitter internal debates of the entire twentieth century. And the First Minister recognises this struggle, too.

“If you look back over the longer run of the Labour party’s sometimes difficult discussions in relation to Welsh identity and a Welsh political persona, [Griffiths] represented a very continuous thread of those people who were both the product of industrial Wales… [and] at the same time, very much associated with a Welsh cultural, linguistic identity.”

In that way, Drakeford points out, Griffiths was a “rare figure” reflecting a multi-faceted picture of the nation – something other political giants, like Bevan, struggled to do.

Mark Drakeford with The National’s chief political commentator Theo Davies-Lewis.

Griffiths is celebrated for many achievements but his appointment as the first Welsh secretary often trumps them all, the first concrete step to devolution in terms of the creation of a substantial political office.

With the advent of the National Assembly in 1999, an institution which Griffiths championed later in his life, the Welsh Office struggled for relevance after collecting powers decades after 1964.

Today rebranded as the ‘UK Government in Wales’, led by a Conservative MP who only seems to enjoy commenting on the nature of the devolved process to much fanfare, what would Griffiths have thought of his beloved office’s role in politics today?

The First Minister is diplomatic – he deflects, at first, stating it is “impossible for me to say” – perhaps because Simon Hart will be at the event unveiling Griffiths’ bust later that day.

But he acknowledges that over the last ten years, the role of secretary of state “has become more to represent the UK government in Wales, rather than the interests of Wales at a UK level.”

READ MORE: The Simon Hart interview: ‘Drakeford’s unionism is independence by another name’

I push him further. Surely Griffiths would have recoiled at the Welsh Office being used to attack the democratically elected leader of Wales and measures such as the expansion of the Senedd.

“Yeah, I think he was certainly not expecting for it to have developed in that way,” he concedes: “As I say, I think the fundamental part of the shift there is he would [have] regarded the Welsh Office’s essential job to represent Welsh interests in Westminster. And to be a voice for Wales and to make sure that Welsh interests were always understood in other parts of Whitehall.”

Many of Drakeford’s own backbenchers, passionate advocates of devolution, now see the Wales Office as a relic of the past; a department which, as alluded to by the First Minister, contributes little positive to political life.

Sitting with Drakeford at his cabinet table, red dragon in the corner and the bilingual ‘First Minister of Wales’ plaque on the wall, it is hard to disagree. Alas, on this day of all days, it pains me to ask: should we scrap the Wales Office altogether?

“I myself have long believed that the days of an individual territorial secretary of state for each of the nations is over,” Drakeford states.

“That will be my own personal view. I’ve said that in times when there’s been Labour secretaries of state. It’s not a partisan point in a political sense.”

He points out that a single government ministry and a separate minister for all the four nations has been mooted as an idea before. And, he adds: “the case for that is pretty strong.”

READ MORE: Dafydd Iwan: The fight for the Welsh language is our life

Leaders of Wales have often found themselves battling for years to make the case for their beloved cause: the rights of the language through to a devolved parliament.

The First Minister faces his own challenge to do so in the context of proposals for a bigger Senedd, which has led to accusations that this new “proportional” system is not so equal to all parties.

Like Griffiths, who argued over several decades before he managed to secure a pledge to establish a Welsh Office in a Labour manifesto, Drakeford now finds himself trying to convince politicians and the public of another step forward in the story for self-government.

“I think it’s a continual conversation you have to have with people,” the First Minister says: “The idea that there’s only one direction for devolution, I think, is a dangerous one.

“You’ve got to always be in discussion with people about the case for the changes that you are proposing. You think: Jim Griffiths becomes a secretary of state in 1964. While he is still in parliament, the Kilbrandon Commission is established. So, within less than a decade, that charter development is being overtaken by further debates and further possibilities. And Kilbrandon, of course, proposed a parliament for Wales with 100 members in it back then. So, in some ways, we’re still engaged in some of that debate.”

The big difference, Drakeford points out, is that the debate now is not about whether to have the Senedd but how you make it “properly effective.” He is bold about his intentions: “Give it the numbers of people and the structures that it needs to discharge what is a very, very different set of responsibilities to the ones that were originally envisaged 25 years ago.”

It’s a heavy responsibility, I suggest, one that Jim Griffiths was aware of when following in the footsteps of liberals, socialists and nationalists that came before him. The First Minister – the heir to this devolution tradition – feels the burden on his shoulders.

“I’ve always thought about Welsh politics in that slightly more eclectic way. The faultline in Welsh politics is between those parties that regard themselves as broadly left of centre and the one party in Wales that regards itself as to the right of centre…The key thing for my party is always to make sure that we are safeguarding that boundary, rather than allowing other boundaries to emerge.”

As in Griffiths’ time, the First Minister sees a “broad coalition of interests” across the nation; there are “people who have broadly progressive views on social and economic matters, and those people whose views are of a different sort which have never commanded a majority.”

READ MORE: Theo Davies-Lewis interviews Plaid Cymru leader Adam Price

As politicians and the public look at the bust of Jim Griffiths, it should be a reminder of how far Wales has come on its journey to self-governance.

Griffiths became secretary of state in his seventies; it was a culmination of at least half a century of arguing to get to that point.

“So what we’re marking today is not just the fifty odd years since the Wales Office was established,” Drakeford says: “But the 100 years and more that have led to where we are today. Surely any member of the Senedd who’s interested in the political journey of Wales would want to know more about it and to understand the significance of some other contributions to it.”

What is in no doubt is that Griffiths would be enthralled with the direction of travel the current leader of Labour in Wales is taking the party and the nation. He would marvel at the cabinet office, the sign on the next door room which reads ‘First Minister’s Office.’

Later, at the ceremony, surrounded by some greats of modern Wales such as Lord Morris of Aberavon, the former Carmarthen MP Gwynoro Jones quipped it was a gathering of the “last of the devolutionists.”

Funny, but not quite true.

In Drakeford, Adam Price et al, the devolutionists are growing ever stronger, more powerful and popular than ever before – guarding the inheritance they have been left, and guiding Wales further along a path Jim Griffiths was astute enough to find in the first place.

If you value The National’s journalism, help grow our team of reporters by becoming a subscriber.

by Staff May 13, 2022

DUP faces accusations of damaging democracy as Assembly sits – South Wales Guardian

DUP faces accusations of damaging democracy as Assembly sits  South Wales Guardian

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Northern Irish political parties rounded on the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) for failing to elect a Speaker to the Assembly on Friday.

The decision by the DUP, led by Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, not to elect a Speaker largely blocks the normal functioning of the Assembly.

It came in addition to the party’s decision to block the formation of a powersharing Executive as part of a plan to oppose the Northern Ireland Protocol.

The stance was lambasted by several politicians in the Assembly, including by Sinn Fein vice-president Michelle O’Neill.

It came during a debate on the election of a Speaker, which saw UUP MLA Mike Nesbitt and SDLP MLA Patsy McGlone both unsuccessfully nominated to the role.

Ms O’Neill, whose party emerged with the most seats in the election, told MLAs that the public is hoping that Northern Ireland’s elected parties have “the maturity and courage” to take responsibility, adding that “there is absolutely no reason we should be in a rolling crisis, even for one second”.

“It is the job of politicians to “properly fund” the healthcare service and to agree a three-year budget and invest in the health service, Ms O’Neill said.

“This is our hour of decision, not tomorrow, and not for a moment longer can the DUP deny democracy, punish the public, boycott this Assembly and executive, and prevent us from putting money in people’s pockets.

“Every one party in this chamber told the electorate that they would turn up on day one. Well, the DUP have failed on day one.”

Naomi Long used her Assembly speech to challenge the DUP to change its mind.

Sinn Fein Vice-President Michelle O’Neill walking out of the Northern Ireland Assembly Chamber on Friday (Liam McBurney/PA)

The Alliance Party leader said: “We are here today in order to elect a speaker so the Assembly can go about its business so that those who have been elected can serve the people who elected them.

“We come here with a can-do attitude and a commitment to serve the people who elected us.

“Many of us in this chamber represent people who did not consent to Brexit in the first place. And yet we turned up for work.

“We also don’t all have equality. Some in this chamber are more equal than others and myself and my 16 colleagues’ votes will count for less in this next election than everyone else in this chamber. So if we’re really committed to equality, we will also be committed to reform of these institutions.

“To turn up here, to sign in, to take salaries and to refuse to take seats is a slap in the face for every family that struggles to make ends meet, for every person who sits on a waiting list.

“I would appeal to the DUP to think long and hard before they insult the electorate by doing so today.”

Ulster Unionist Party leader Doug Beattie urged that an Assembly speaker be elected so that the public’s concerns can be addressed.

After standing in silence before MLAs for several seconds, Mr Beattie said: “Silence. The same silence we were subjected to for three years when Sinn Fein walked out. The same silence we’re now going to be subjected to if the DUP don’t support a speaker.”

“People will go cold and hungry in their homes, and from this place there will be silence,” he said.

“We can today make the point in regards to the protocol, but also elect a speaker in order to do some business so we don’t have silence.”

SDLP MLA Matthew O’Toole told the Assembly that he was happy to nominate party colleague Patsy McGlone as speaker.

But he said: “All of my words are clearly in vain because the DUP has decided to thwart democracy.

“They are also demeaning democracy.

“In stifling the creation of an executive and the election of a speaker, the DUP has demeaned the entire democratic process.

“Shame on them.”

People Before Profit MLA Gerry Carroll called it a “manufactured crisis”.

The DUP defended its stance in robust terms, with DUP MLA Paul Givan telling the Assembly that his party would not be supporting the election of a Speaker.

Mr Givan told MLAs: “The DUP received a mandate to remove the Irish Sea border and our mandate will be given respect. Our message is now clear, it is time for action, words will no longer suffice.

“It is because we want these institutions to endure that we are taking the action we are taking today.

“Northern Ireland works best when we work together. Those who now call for majority rule need to recommit themselves to the principles of the Good Friday Agreement.

“We will not be dictated to, we will be treated with respect and equality. Now is the time for action.”

The DUP position was backed by Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) leader Jim Allister.

Mr Allister, the only MLA returned for his party in the election, said: “Since the leverage is in respect of this Assembly, that is why the mendacious Prime Minister we have has to be brought to the point of choice. Does he want to save the protocol or does he want to save these institutions?

Sinn Fein’s Gerry Kelly (third from right with blue folder) walks with party colleagues into the Northern Ireland Assembly Chamber (Liam McBurney/PA)

“Until this protocol becomes moribund, then this Assembly must be moribund.”

Towards the end of proceedings, outgoing speaker Alex Maskey urged MLAs not to continue making speeches, warning that it would only serve to inflame tensions.

“At least allow the public to get out of their misery,” he joked.

Earlier, Mr Maskey had thanked his Assembly colleagues, as well as his family, in a speech to the Assembly.

He also told MLAs that politicians in Northern Ireland had come through political difficulties before.

Mr Maskey said: “I recognise that we are currently in a difficult political situation.

“Since 1998, we have all seen our fair share of those. Those of us who were here in 1998 and since then had big issues to deal with. However we did come through them.

“The last two years we were able to meet the challenges of getting the Assembly re-established and keeping the Assembly functioning to take important decisions during the pandemic.”

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