Interning or to some “declaring war on the Middle Classes”

I write this blog with a totally biased viewpoint, due to the fact that I am currently interning for this cornerstone of the political think-tank industry. Due to this I apologise for the semi auto-biographical aspects of this piece before hand. I further add that in the writing of this piece I WISH TO THANK PROGRESS FOR THIS GREAT OPPORTUNITY IN WORKING FOR THEM!

But I feel I have to voice my concerns for my fellow unpaid workers across the political sector and many others that use unpaid interns in the running of their organisations. Unlike myself, many of my fellow brethren do not even get paid expenses for what they contribute and are part of the unseen exploitation of many of our new graduates.

I welcome therefore the Government’s proposals to offer graduates like myself paid three month internships, and six months for people from the poorest families. However, some did not see it this way, Chris Grayling, the shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, described the idea as; "This is all about Gordon Brown fighting class wars." I know students are known for indulging in marxism, but I don’t think the battleship Potemkin has docked on the Thames recently.

For those of you who are unaware the basic principle of an internship is that the individual is offering free unpaid work for the opportunity to gain work experience within their chosen sector. This process, of interning for companies/organizations, is becoming gradually the norm for the increasing amounts of young graduates entering the work place for the first time.

Although this a great opportunity, it is also a sacrifice. An intern is offering not only his free time but also his personal income to contribute to these organizations. This sacrifice is greater depending on the economic background of the intern, with average graduate dept currently around £17,500 per student, and working for free even around a part-time job is extremely costly.

Furthermore, it is also sometimes too great a sacrifice for some to offer. I am of course speaking of those graduates who cannot afford to move to London from their homes up and down the rest of the country. I worked alongside one intern who was older than myself and who had to work for two years before he could afford the move down to the bright lights of London town to take up the opportunity as an intern.

But the crux of the problem is that the vast amount of graduate jobs for the specific sector I wish to work within (just like many others) are based in London. Therefore one has to work for free in the most expensive part of this country without an income or with a limited one. In effect I, like many others in my situation, have been forced to become an unpaid labourer in order to enter the workplace. I know friends who have slept on other friends couches and bunked the tube in order to be able to intern. I know of one individual who rekindled an old relationship in order to crash at her west London address to make it to work, needless to say he now is employed in advertising.

   In other sectors the situation can be just as depressing. A ‘runner’ within the film and television industry, is required to become the unpaid skivvy performing all manner of mundane tasks in order, according to one website offering positions, to gain “entry-level experience”. In other aspects of the media industry, such as journalism, interns can be employed for months on end with no pay or promise of a job at the end of it. A recent survey by the NUJ found that: “42.7 per cent were told a placement could lead to a permanent paid job, only 24.1 per cent of those were taken on.”

The move by the government to increase the amount of internships available is commendable and as I doubt many interns will actually have much say on the matter due to the fact that we cannot offer certain members of the House of Lords money to lobby on our behalf the bloggosphere is where this should begin.

Therefore the first thing I call for in order to reform the internship process is that internship places funded by government money are tied to guarantees of future employment. Otherwise in a downturn we will just see organizations using this facility as a means of procuring cheap highly skilled labour.

I welcome my fellow interns in all sectors to comment and add suggestions…

Obamamania

Previous posts on this blog have tackled the expectations surrounding Obama and the Obamamania that has taken over America in past months. Whilst working on the campaign in the autumn I was struck by the demand for stickers, yard signs, badges and posters - anything to save a piece of history. For some however Obamamania has gone much further. A quick Google search reveals the amusing, the moneymaking and the downright weird paraphernalia that has been on sale over the past few months.

First on the list comes this toy – an action doll we can believe in. Alongside this are products such as this birthday card and nothing less than Obama lipstick adorned with the phrase ‘I Kiss Obama’. Obama fans can also purchase these stylish flip flops and those wanting to celebrate in style on election night could treat themselves to some Obama wine. Not forgetting of course the famous Spider Man comic.

My particular favourite is Ben and Jerry’s newest ice cream flavour – Yes Pecan. Sadly not available in the UK.

All this hype did make me wonder if we’ll be seeing anything similar in the next UK general election. A quick email round returned the following ideas:

A "Darling" range of valentines day merchandise (2.5% more lovin')
Osborne's First Book of Economics
"Adonis, for men. Calvin Klein."
Do you love anyone enough to give them your last Primarolo?
"The Audacity of Phil Hope" the man, the vision.
Jim Knight Chess set
Liam Byrne range of incense and incense burners with Andy Burnham matches
Just William - one mans’ quest for someone who agrees with him internationally
A selection of Eric pickles

Any other ideas? Comments welcome!

What we're reading: Progressive blogs

Anger at bankers’ bonuses…at Davos
There have been one or two comments that the entertaining Dragon's Den-style final plenary session 'One Idea to Make Britain Fairer' at the Fabian conference veered too dramatically off to the left…

…While the proposals are not likely to be heading straight into an election manifesto, we are not the only ones. Indeed, there may be some danger of the left being outflanked by the Masters of the Universe
Posted by Sunder Katwala at Next Left on 29 January 2009

Labour needs to get local and expose the Conservative record in power
Labour's record in power nationally needs to be juxtaposed with the record of Conservatives where they are in power at a local and county level and in London. David Cameron's Conservatives should answer for the choices Conservative-run authorities have made since the last general election. This will show their true colours in diverting support away from childcare, closing play centres, weakening affordable homes targets, increasing charges for services to the vulnerable or watering down policies aimed at tackling inequality.
Posted by Theo Blackwell at Labour List on 28 January 2009

Four Lords Allegedly a-Lobbying
Reading the Sunday Times stuff about Lords Snape, Truscott, Moonie and Taylor has reinforced my belief that Labour shot itself in the foot by not fundamentally reforming the Lords years ago.

The problem is that unless a Peer is a Minister, they don't get paid a salary. So they have to have outside jobs. And if you are allowed as a Peer (as long as you declare all the relevant interests) to own a company, to run a charity or NGO, be a non-exec or executive director of a company, a lawyer for various clients, or a PR person for various clients, it is understandable that the current fudged position exists whereby you can sell political consultancy in the form of advice to clients, but not offer paid advocacy i.e. not talk to people on behalf of clients. The argument over the Sunday Times story is whether or not any of the four peers offered to advocate for clients rather than just advise them - if they did then they definitely broke the rules.
Posted by Luke Akehurst on 26 January 2009

The real reformers
With the recession, it would be tempting for Gordon Brown to ignore the importance of reform in these areas. But if the recovery is to be successful, we need to improve access to health and patients' choices, we need to get long term unemployed people back to work and we need better school results. After some initial suggestions that he was backtracking on the agenda initiated by Tony Blair, there are many encouraging signs that the Prime Minister is keen to pursue a reform agenda. He must continue to find the time to devote to it in these difficult economic times.
Posted by Conor Ryan at Conor’s Commentary on 28 January 2009

Ken Clarke’s return
But Clarke's failings, which played to Cameron's advantage in the leadership campaign could return to haunt the Tory leader now the former chancellor is part of the Shadow Cabinet…

…although he has a reputation as a moderate, he was an authoritarian home secretary and a traditionalist on education. He is no moderniser.
Posted by Martin Bright at Bright’s Blog on 19 January 2009

Red Tories

The latest edition of Prospect magazine, which has just hit the newsstands, leads with an intriguing essay by Phillip Blond, director of Demos’ recently-launched Progressive Conservatism project, on The Red Tory Moment (illustrated with a striking, and somewhat frightening, picture depicting a cross between Mrs Thatcher and Che Guevara).

Blond urges David Cameron to use the current crisis to do no less than sweep away the postwar settlement of British politics and develop a ‘red Tory’ communitarianism that is socially conservative and anti-big business.

Blond’s essay makes for a fascinating read and, if his proposals were adopted by the Tory leadership, it would radically change the landscape of British politics. But whatever people make of Blond’s advice to the Tories, some in the Labour movement may well be irked by his assertion (not backed up by any evidence) that ‘New Labour is intellectually dead’.

It is a popular line to take, for those on both the left and the right, but it is not borne out by the evidence. For signs of intellectual life in the New Labour movement, Blond need look no further than Progress’ policy group white papers launched late last year, the fruit of months of discussion, debate and consultation.  

Hope for choice

Barack Obama once again showed his intention to live up to the hopes of those progressives who cheered him to victory in November by overturning the ‘global gag rule’ last week.

Whilst opening himself up to attack from the powerful anti-abortion lobby in the US, in this move Obama has demonstrated his commitment to women’s rights. The lifting of this ban will make a huge difference to the promotion of women’s health, particularly in developing countries.

The global gag rule prohibits US funding to foreign family planning agencies that give information about or promote abortion. It has deprived women of information about contraception and forced those seeking to end unwanted pregnancies into illegal and dangerous abortions. The Planned Parenthood Federation of America have proclaimed Obama’s move ‘a new day for women’s health’.

A restoration of funding for sex education and cuts in funding for abstinence education are important next steps in rolling back the conservative ideological agenda of the previous administration. We can only hope that last weeks' move by Obama is the first of many in reasserting a woman’s right to choose in America and across the world. 

A little bit of good news for Friday

We're getting used to hearing more and more bad news about the economy, so readers might like to hear about two snippets of good news I came across which are a direct result of a Labour government.

The first is that latest stats show smoking at its lowest levels since records began and, particularly importantly, that it’s fallen by 4% in routine and manual households. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to link the fall to the introduction of the smoking ban in 2007 - a bold Labour move heavily criticised by the right at the time.

The second is a little known boost for mums-to-be from the government’s introduction of a Health in Pregnancy Grant in April. It’s difficult particularly for poorer mums to afford good food and vital, but expensive, things like nappies and prams when they are pregnant. Here’s a direct amount of cash, at a not insignificant sum of £190, which can make life easier at an exciting but often stressful time.

The Tories certainly wouldn’t have introduced the smoking ban (Cameron was said to oppose it until it became obvious that it would happen), and as for the second, well it’s the sort of thing that would be good fodder for a new Conservative administration hellbent on finding cuts. In themselves these things aren’t much, but when you add in all the other things Labour’s made a priority in government you realise what’s at stake.

The British Obama? Ummmmm ...

Is it just me who thinks the obsession in some parts of the media with searching out The British Barack Obama is all a little bit silly? In her column in the Times on Wednesday Alice Miles scans Labour’s ranks for likely contenders to the role. Like the New Statesman’s former political editor Martin Bright before her she pinpoints ‘the charismatic Labour candidate for Streatham’ Chuka Umanna as one ‘hotly tipped’ prospect. ‘Although,’ Miles concedes, ‘that may be partly because Mr Umanna is black. And he is only 30 and not yet an MP, which is obviously a problem.’ Well quite. Forgive me for seeming churlish, as I have no doubt Mr Umanna is a talented individual who, if elected, is likely to have a glittering career in the Labour party ahead of him. But might it not be sensible to wait until he is at least in hailing distance of the backbenches before promoting him as a future Labour leader and heir to the 44th US president?

The Tory "Red Ken"

If Cameron thinks, in the portly shaped Ken Clarke, he has a ‘yes man’ who will listen to the collective wisdom of his cabinet then he would be mistaken of thinking whom he would be saying yes to and which collective wisdom he would be listening to. The three times spurned leadership hopeful may find he has more in common with his new opposite number Lord Mandelson than just having George Osborne as a dining partner. Commandante Clarke, who is known for his cigar totting left of Tory policy ways, having just finished reading a book on the left wing Labour party leader Michael Foot, now finds himself returned to the front bench as the Shadow Business Secretary. Despite recently decrying a return to front line politics because; “It's tedious being an opposition spokesman.” 

So could there now be a fifth columnist on the Tory front benches?

Well, when we consider some of the views of the new Shadow Business Secretary, one has to wonder where he and his opposite number on the government benches disagree. In fact, this extract of an interview during the Tory leadership election back in October 2005 shows what he really thinks of Team Cameron:

"He was Michael Howard's right-hand man all the way through to the last election… he is a bright guy but I never thought of him as being particularly on the left of the party.. …[being] involved in the last election campaign and the party's presentation of itself. I have never previously looked on any one of the other three [Mr Davis, Mr Cameron and Liam Fox] as being a centre-ground politician."

Other examples of derision of his new boss are not hard to come-by. Notably, he described Cameron and Osborn’s Bullingdon days as “stupid” and that the former was too easily swayed by the tabloid newspapers. He called Cameron’s proposed plans to scrap the Human Rights Act back in the summer of 2006 as, “xenophobic and legal nonsense”. Cameron’s flagship policy of recognizing marriage in the tax system is not only something Clarke is against but also it was he dismissed when Chancellor.

But hang on I hear you say; The ‘Big Beast’ has been brought back to take on the Tory slaying Lord Madelson, what does old disagreements matter?

It would seem Clarke agrees with Lord Mandelson more than his party leader. Only last November in The Times water again opened up between Cameron and Clarke on the economy, Cameron described the VAT cut as “a criminal waste of money” compared to his new Shadow Business Secretary who endorsed the idea and agrees in principle with the Fiscal Stimulus. In another area where they both agree is on Europe.

Clarke, who is a long advocate of further EU integration and joining the Euro, not only supports the Lisbon Treaty but he also agrees that there should not be a referendum on the matter. In effect what the new appointment of Kenneth Clarke does is shine a mirror up towards the re-branding of the Conservative party by David Cameron. What is shown back in the reflection tells us that their Damascene journey, to centre ground politics, appears not to have been able to pass the gates of Jerusalem.
What may also be interesting though, is something that went unnoticed in that article in the The Times last November. It’s something that might give us an insight into where Clarke’s experience might actually come in handy for Team Cameron. Ken admitted of being involved:

“in fighting successfully for tax cuts only to get into power and find it was impossible. We've fought elections on tax cuts when you can't afford them and usually we've lost - we did actually win one in 1992, which was a considerable embarrassment to me when I was Chancellor because there wasn't the slightest chance of any tax cuts.”

This might be a warning and something to remember when we hear Cameron talk about cutting basic-rate income taxes on savings, and any other pre-election bribes. But if we really should trust this former Chancellor who left a “Golden Legacy”, then we should take his advice and do the first thing he did as Chancellor… not listen to Cameron’s economic advice and not employ him!

How to make a complete hash of living in the 21st Century

Compass – allegedly the faction for Labour’s soft left – has been running a competition, “How to live in the 21st Century” where it has asked its members to submit policy proposals which will then be voted on by the Compass membership - forming the policy priorities for the organisation to campaign on.

Unfortunately many of the proposals owe rather more to the hard left than the soft, or appear to be the products of the “soft in the head”. The vision of a shiny Compass society that they reveal is truly nightmarish.

Amongst them are:

• “The employment contract (i.e. the wage-earning system) is the Achilles’ heel of the capitalism system”
• A Maximum Wage.
• Bringing back the Poll Tax – seriously “Reform of the domestic council tax based on the number of service users rather than on property size” – justified with the arguments “The poll tax almost worked in Scotland but the collection process was poorly implemented by Thatcher’s Government” and “all minds would be focused on reducing costs”
• “Re-Nationalize the utilities Electric, Gas ,and water”
• “Nationalise all land in the UK”
• “A law that allows people to directly determine, via referenda, important decisions of governance at a local and national level”
• “Anybody detained by the police should either be charged with an offence or released after at most 96 hours.” What, even if they hauled in Osama Bin Laden?
• “Scrap percentage pay rises”
• “England needs powers devolved downwards from Westminster” so that the Tories can wield them presumably!
• “Create a society based on limits to growth, voluntary simplicity, ecological sustainability and fair and just relations between all life-forms.” And where we all live in yurts, happily knitting organic yoghurt.
• Voluntary extra taxation to be spent on the causes the taxpayer wants. Sure to be hugely oversubscribed.
• Restrictions on exchanging Sterling (the author accepts the minor obstacle that this is “not accepted by the IMF”).
• “The bricklayer should be paid the same as the accountant and lawyer.” Argued for with “The collapse of gamblers capitalism means cost is irrelevant, capitalism is finished.” And apparently proven to work because it worked in “Cuba & parts/times of the Soviet Union.”
• “Tax business turnover, not profits”.
• “Tax people on what they consume and take out of the planet not on what they earn and put into it.”
• “Make the twenty-hour week the new full-time.”
• “Provide Everyone with Simple Accommodation and Living Expenses” because then there would be “No pressure to do anything if you don’t want to. Do something interesting and worthwhile only when you are ready to do so.” “If there is no pressure on anyone to do anything that they don’t want to it will change the whole dynamic of society.” It certainly would!
• “Like being called for jury service, electors could be called to observe the workings of their local council.” How to turn people off democracy for ever…
• State-funded Gap Years for 18 year-olds.
• Scrap the UK’s nuclear deterrent.
• “Restrict the pay in public service jobs to 12 times the National Minimum Wage.” So that the public sector loses its entire top staff to the private sector?
• Give offenders a say in running the criminal justice system.

It only needs someone to suggest the creation of a workers’ militia, and Compass will have transformed its policy programme into Militant’s version of Trotsky’s Transitional Demands.

If it wasn’t sad that there are educated adults coming up with this balderdash, it would be hilariously funny.

Luke Akehurst

We need better ideas to win the next election

This blog is a bit late I'm afraid, but this week is production week for the Progress Magazine and it always throws us a little.

On Saturday I went to the annual ‘must be at’ event of the political New Year aka the Fabian’s one-day conference. Having been part of organising conferences for Progress for the last two years, I always like to look at how others put together their programmes since we’re always trying to break out of the perennial format of keynote, seminar, lunch, seminar, panel debate. The Fabians have opted for the (relatively) new innovation of the Dragon’s Den for their final session. The challenge this year for conference delegates was to come up with one idea to make Britain fairer, and five individuals had the unenviable task of trying to get their idea past the judges and audience and into the (hypothetical) Labour manifesto.

As a format goes, it can’t be faulted and makes for a lively wrapping up session. But I couldn’t help feel rather depressed by the five ideas that were finally presented. It wasn’t that the ideas were completely merit-less, just that most of them sounded like the sorts of propositions I came up against as a student debater around ten years ago. Things like maximum salaries, shaming rich tax avoiders, capping private school entry to Oxbridge, giving free childcare to parents made unemployed in the downturn, and abolishing the means test for pensions while uprating the amounts to Germanic levels.

All of these could be argued as ways of making Britain fairer, (though some seemed a little under-ambitious – why free childcare for the newly employed when a full rollout of universal childcare might have had more oomph?) But they were all characterised by a real lack of political nous. Would the public really think we were a party bent on serious change if we went around spending public money on adverts in Tatler in an attempt to shame rich people into bringing their money back from offshore havens? And actually, how fairer would it really make Britain? Yes the extra billions could be ploughed back into relieving child poverty, but only if Labour were in power would this be a priority.

And this is my main point – these policies aren’t ones which look like Labour’s gunning for a fourth term or would be likely to help Labour win that historic fourth term. It’s as if Labour had never been in government for 11 years, and we’d simply remained in opposition with the luxury of coming up with uncosted, unworkable and publicly unappealing ideas, but which nevertheless made us feel righteous and revolutionary. Or maybe it’s a reflection of being in government for so long that we want to take the easy options. It’s too sensible and world-wearying to admit that there aren’t quick fixes, or silver bullets, or any of those dreadful clichés, if we want to get working class young people into Oxbridge or increase social mobility for the least well off.

Having said that, there are still good ideas in government. Liam Byrne’s recent white paper on social mobility shows that by combining support throughout an individual’s life cycle the state can start to help shift disadvantage. And some of the recent evidence suggests that Labour’s extra investment has perhaps helped to increase social mobility since 2000. But I have to admit that wouldn't sound particularly sexy enough to get the votes in the Dragon’s Den…