Hain The Hain Diaries

1998 - 2007
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-84954-889-2
Verlag: Biteback Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten

A selection of fascinating extracts from notes and digital recordings made by Peter Hain during his twelve years serving in government, The Hain Diaries offers an invaluable insight into the workings and workers of the New Labour Cabinet. Providing a unique record of the ups and downs of ministerial life, informed and enhanced by Peter's experiences before and outside politics, the diaries form a compilation of candid and thoughtful reflections on parliament, power and problem-solving. Peter's career in government was marked by daily struggles to reconcile rival interests and individuals in bold attempts to resolve some of the most historically sensitive political issues of the time - from Iraq to Northern Ireland to Europe - and it is these events that provide the backdrop to his writings. However, although he was a figure who achieved senior office and was directly involved in key Cabinet decisions, Hain fell into neither the Blair nor Brown camps and is therefore perfectly placed to offer a rare non-sectarian perspective of New Labour in power. Serving as a brilliant complement to his memoir Outside In (Biteback Publishing), this collection documents Peter's successes and failures - as well as the lessons learned from them - and makes absorbing reading for anybody interested in a genuinely personal account of government life.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hain, Peter

Leseproben

*** 24 June 2003:
Cabinet – The EU
Very soon after I had taken over as leader of the Commons, I asked Robin Cook to come and have a chat with me one evening. He seemed delighted to come, looking wistfully around the room he had once occupied. He described how he had been handling the whole House of Lords reform issue and that we needed to get back on top of that agenda. Of course things had changed a bit since he had been leader of the Commons, where he had been the leading Cabinet minister on Lords reform. There had since been established a Department for Constitutional Affairs under Charlie Falconer who now controlled the agenda on Lords reform. My role was to manage business and keep tabs on the mood in the Commons. Robin said that he hoped I would continue the modernisation process and that it was important that we continue to get more draft bills published. He said that we needed to look more carefully at the diary of the House of Commons and that he favoured Private Members’ Bills being shifted from Friday, where they had been held on thirteen of the thirty-five typical Fridays when Parliament was sitting, to after main business on Wednesday evenings at seven o’clock. The Cabinet meeting on 24 June was pretty well dominated by Europe, although Iraq continued to linger on in the background. Tony said that it was important that we put forward a strong message on Europe and that we continued to prepare for joining the euro and that we saw the intergovernmental conference negotiations on the draft constitution as being very much part of that whole issue. He would put a paper round on the issues and would provide a strategy paper in July. Gordon said that he wanted the debate on the euro in the House of Commons on the second week of July. Gordon had a habit, uniquely, of just demanding particular dates and usually getting his way, which for Hillary, as Chief Whip, and me as the House of Commons business manager, was pretty irritating, but that was just something you had to put up with. It was not an issue I was going to make a big fuss about. He wanted different departments to prepare reform policies on Europe and said that he was worried about the delay in the planned bill getting royal assent, because it was crucial to freeing up the planning system, creating the extra flexibility that was needed in order to make the economy more competitive and therefore more flexible; an essential prerequisite for going into Europe. There was an issue about whether there would need to be paving legislation or not and the Treasury were looking into this. There were also Inland Revenue bills that needed to pass through the House. Jack said that he was going to put forward proposals for involving Parliament in discussions on the convention and on the new constitution so that Parliament would be properly consulted about it, which I thought was a good idea during the coming Intergovernmental Conference (IGC). Tony said that it was important that everybody made speeches on Europe to show the clear dividing lines. Gordon said the strategy to win the argument on Europe would be that, first of all, being in Europe was in the UK’s national interest and, secondly, that Europe was reforming, progressing and improving. The third point Gordon made was that there were also many individual issues which MPs could take up and use in their arguments. Tony concluded that it would not happen unless we made it happen and he said that we needed to have a sense of real drive to boost our campaign. *** Summer 2003:
Media spinners
The experience of waking up in the morning and being blasted out of sight by broadcasters and the media generally over the Aneurin Bevan tax lecture controversy was unpleasant, but sobering. It made me even more focused than I had been before on the problem that we were perceived to have got into as a political class, because of our failure to communicate anything properly or intelligently with the public. Being at the top of government revealed to me how the media worked and how little anything that was printed by a political journalist resembled reality and how much spin there was on most of their stories. There were some notable exceptions in the lobby, probably Michael White and Patrick Wintour on The Guardian and Philip Webster from The Times. However, even a highly respected political editor like Andrew Grice of The Independent, with whom I was friendly (to the extent that a politician and journalist can be in this game), still felt on himself a tremendous pressure to produce sensational stories. Because of The Independent’s rather difficult circulation position, he always tried to get out a news item out of a story that they could stick on the front page and be reported by the Today programme in the morning and carried for the rest of the day. We were now in a situation in which journalists were not spectators or observers, but were players themselves. Instead of watching the game, they were on the pitch interfering with the game and helping shape its direction and its outcome. To some extent this had always been the case, but we now inhabited what I felt to be a little Westminster bubble. In this bubble there was a political class, that’s to say politicians, their staff and journalists, who discussed subjects and conducted debates in a way that had no relevance to the average citizen. Increasingly, I came across very intelligent people who said that they just couldn’t take politicians seriously any more or maintain a genuine interest in politics, because of the din of spin and sensation accompanying all politics in the modern media. Certain radio and television programmes were particularly guilty of making interviews unnecessarily confrontational and putting spin on news items, such as the Today programme and Newsnight. The political class seemed to revolve around these two programmes, regarding them with much more significance than the rest of the population did. I found that the discussion was often around an issue for which there was appetite for serious and intelligent debate with opposing points of view, where the public wanted to see real argument, with both sides of an argument really put through their paces. The present situation was very different, however. The media had their own agendas and tried to influence the debate. A typical example of this was the coverage of the Iraq crisis and the dispute that followed over the allegation by BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan on the Today programme that Downing Street – and, by implication, Tony Blair – had ‘sexed-up’ the dossier the government had prepared to support its case for invading Iraq, which I knew not to be the case. Actually, what people wanted to know was whether we were justified or not going to war against Saddam Hussein; was the evidence for it really valid and what were the issues? But what we had from the media was an argument between the different players in the political class which was alienating the public. I wrote an article about this for the Independent on Sunday for publication at the end of July 2003. The article formed the basis for a speech I had written for the Institute for Public Policy Research. The IPPR had asked me to do a debate on spin in politics and the media and this idea of mine about the Westminster bubble and the political class was at the heart of the article and provoked quite a lively interest from other journalists present. In fact, there was a growing recognition among serious commentators and some editors, at The Guardian, the Financial Times and The Times, for instance, that this was a problem. Nick Jones, a retired BBC journalist and a very fierce critic of the Peter Mandelson school of communications, had written several books about the issue. He was also fiercely critical of the way that BBC journalism had developed, often on an un-sourced basis and highly spun itself. The points made in this debate were important and they resonated with the public. Philip Gould, Tony Blair’s pollster, presented a report to a political Cabinet at the end of July 2003 that showed that there was a tremendous trust gap between the government and the public, which was to do with them turning off politics entirely. Philip made the point that actually this was precisely the agenda of the right and would pave the way for a Tory return because if you could make people disillusioned in the progressive politics that Labour represented, and cynical about how the political process, then it was an open door for the right to come in. There was also a more ideological reason; if people became angry with government, then they may well favour a smaller one, with less public regulation of key sectors and cuts in essential public services. Indeed, in my speech to the IPPR, I expressed concern about declining turnout in elections. It was a very complicated phenomenon because it was not only to do with the Westminster bubble and the way we operated, but it was also to do with the fact that in the kind of lifestyle people lead these days there isn’t space for the kind of political interests that underpin a healthy democracy. The truth is most people are getting on with their own lives most of the time, only displaying a fleeting interest in politics. A whole generation of people who once took an informed, if not active, interest as observers in the political process were now completely disillusioned. Politicians and the media were equally at fault. *** 11–18 September and 2 October 2003:
Tony Blair meetings
The recess had ended in September for the first time. It was part of modernisation reforms in sitting hours and we...