Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet changes in full

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It’s goodbye to him: Michael Moore was the only casualty of the government’s Cabinet reshuffle. The others who lost their jobs were all in supporting positions.

This is not as much an article as it is a list of the changes made to the Coalition Cabinet and Labour’s Shadow Cabinet during today’s (October 7) reshuffles.

You will notice immediately that only one name has changed in the Tory-led Coalition Cabinet – Alistair Carmichael has replaced Michael Moore as Secretary of State for Scotland. It is rumoured that this is because Mr Moore had become too cosy with the SNP and the government wanted someone who was a little more likely to put up a fight.

Most of the government’s changes have been among ministers further down the hierarchy – for example Mark Hoban, the Employment Minister who proved he does not understand how the benefit system works, has been replaced by former Minister for Disabled People, Esther McVey. Her own replacement has yet to be announced and the full line-up of Coalition ministers is expected to be revealed tomorrow – otherwise, with Parliament resuming its activities, it will be quite hard to continue business.

Over on the Labour benches, the most significant developments are the removal of plastic Tory Liam Byrne from Work & Pensions, and the fact that Andy Burnham is staying at Health.

Byrne’s removal will relieve many voters – especially those concerned with the well-being of the sick and disabled – who feared that DWP policy under him in a future Labour government would be nothing more than a continuation of the disastrous policies of the last few years that have decimated the poorest and least able to defend themselves.

Andy Burnham’s continued stay at Health signals that recent claims by his opposite number, Jeremy Hunt, that he had covered up NHS failings while he was in government, have not gained credence with the Labour leadership. Mr Burnham himself has instructed his lawyers to write to Hunt and demand an apology.

Here’s the list of the new Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet:

Cabinet –

Prime Minister – David Cameron

Deputy Prime Minister – Nick Clegg

Chancellor of the Exchequer – George Osborne

Foreign Secretary – William Hague

Home Secretary – Theresa May

Justice Secretary – Chris Grayling

Chief Whip – Sir George Young

Health Secretary – Jeremy Hunt

Business Secretary – Vince Cable

Work and Pensions Secretary – Iain Duncan Smith

Education Secretary – Michael Gove

Defence Secretary – Philip Hammond

Communities and Local Government Secretary – Eric Pickles

Energy and Climate Change Secretary – Ed Davey

Leader of the House of Commons – Andrew Lansley

Transport Secretary – Patrick McLoughlin

Northern Ireland Secretary – Theresa Villiers

International Development Secretary – Justine Greening

Scotland Secretary – Alistair Carmichael

Wales Secretary – David Jones

Environment Secretary – Owen Paterson

Minister Without Portfolio – Kenneth Clarke

Chief Secretary to the Treasury – Danny Alexander

Leader of the House of Lords – Lord Hill

Attorney General – Dominic Grieve

Culture Secretary – Maria Miller

Conservative Party Chairman – Grant Shapps

Shadow Cabinet –

Leader of the Opposition and Leader of the Labour Party – Ed Miliband

Shadow Deputy Prime Minister, Party Chair and Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport – Harriet Harman

Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer – Ed Balls

Shadow Foreign Secretary and Chair of General Election Strategy – Douglas Alexander

Shadow Home Secretary – Yvette Cooper

Shadow Lord Chancellor, Secretary of State for Justice and Shadow Minister for London – Sadiq Khan

Opposition Chief Whip – Rosie Winterton

Shadow Secretary of State for Health – Andy Burnham

Shadow Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills – Chuka Umunna

Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions – Rachel Reeves

Shadow Secretary of State for Education – Tristram Hunt

Shadow Secretary of State for Defence – Vernon Coaker MP

Shadow Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government – Hilary Benn

Shadow Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change – Caroline Flint

Shadow Leader of the House of Commons and Chair of the National Policy Forum – Angela Eagle

Shadow Secretary of State for Transport – Mary Creagh

Shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland – Ivan Lewis

Shadow Secretary of State for International Development – Jim Murphy

Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland – Margaret Curran

Shadow Secretary of State for Wales – Owen Smith

Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs – Maria Eagle

Shadow Minister for the Cabinet Office – Michael Dugher

Shadow Minister without Portfolio and Deputy Party Chair – Jon Trickett

Shadow Minister for Women and Equalities – Gloria De Piero

Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury – Chris Leslie

Shadow Leader of the House of Lords – Baroness Royall of Blaisdon

Lords Chief Whip – Lord Bassam of Brighton

Also attending Shadow Cabinet:

Shadow Minister for Care and Older People – Liz Kendall

Shadow Minister for Housing – Emma Reynolds

Shadow Attorney General – Emily Thornberry

Shadow Minister without Portfolio (Cabinet Office) – Lord Wood of Anfield

Coordinator of the Labour Party Policy Review – Jon Cruddas

Labour and Atos – is it a distraction from the main issue?

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Real change required: Sacking Atos would be a cosmetic difference if DWP policy remains unchanged under a Labour government. Let’s have an announcement about that! [Picture: Skwawkbox blog]

Having had time away to think about this, it has occurred to me that in discussing whether Labour is right to say it will fire Atos – or whether it will even fulfil that promise – we are barking up the wrong tree.

Atos does what the DWP tells it to do. We can all say it does this work very badly, but that would be splitting hairs. The orders come from the Department.

Getting rid of Atos won’t make any difference if the policy stays the same – and Labour’s record on social security has not been good since neoliberal ‘New Labour’ took office in 1997.

So I reckon more pressure needs to be exerted on Mr Miliband and his front bench, to expel all traces – not only of Atos, but of Unum, the real influence, and to put forward a new policy that is, above all, humane to claimants of disability/sickness/incapacity benefits.

What he says on this subject will be very interesting. But he must be pinned down.

New policy.

No Unum.

No Atos – or any other unqualified overseers of our medical health.

Humane treatment for benefit claimants.

(And sack Liam Byrne!)

Closet Tory Liam Byrne is cosying up to the Coalition – and will cost Labour the next election

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Liam Byrne wants Labour to adopt Conservative policies but carry them out in a different way. Why would anyone vote for that?

Now what’s that creepy Liam Byrne up to?

First he warned the Coalition that plans for further, hugely damaging, cuts in social security spending will cost around £1.4 billion more than they save.

Then he offered to help Iain Duncan Smith, of all people, to save Universal Credit, of all things!

The Torygraph has claimed this is Labour’s “strongest backing yet” for Universal Credit.

Is Ed Miliband, as Labour’s leader, blind to the amount of damage this will do to his party?

It seems likely that Byrne is trying to improve his position ahead of a shadow cabinet reshuffle, but Miliband would have to be stupid to keep him on, after the shadow work and pensions secretary caused one disaster after another.

Look at the Guardian article. The lead paragraph declares: “The coalition’s benefit cuts have descended into “chaos” that will cost an extra £1.4 billion because of delays, extra claimants, waste and complaints, Labour claims.” [Italics mine]

What about the human cost, then? What about the huge damage that these Conservative-led policies will cause to hard-working people up and down the UK? We know that the benefit cap has already caused huge harm to working-class people, and the bedroom tax is doing the same – and these are only recent examples of stupid, cruel Tory policies (forget the Liberal Democrats – they’re only around to rubber-stamp the plans of a Tory government).

This is telling us that Labour actually agrees with the ideology behind these schemes; it is in the execution of them that the parties differ. Here’s proof of it in the Guardian article: “The focus of Byrne’s speech will not be challenging the substance of reforms brought in by Iain Duncan Smith… but criticism of his failure to deliver them properly.

That is a terrible, terrible mistake for Labour to make and, as leader, Ed Miliband should be putting a stop to it at once.

The Guardian says, “he will pledge to ‘bring social security spending under control’.” That’s what the Tories say! Labour should be promising to bring fairness back to social security. Labour should be promising the removal of Atos, Unum and any other profit-making concerns from the business of the Department for Work and Pensions and Labour should be pledging to bring in a new system that concentrates on the needs and abilities of each claimant, as determined by proper medical evidence and not some silly made-up tick-box computer questionnaire that was devised to make it easier to sell bogus insurance schemes.

Why is Byrne making such silly promises? Because, the Guardian says, Labour wants to “shake off Tory claims that it is too much on the side of benefit claimants over working people”. In other words, he and they are worried about what the Tories say, and not about the torture through which they are putting ordinary people like you and me. They won’t win any elections that way!

Attacking the Tories over the way they are doing things, rather than the things they are doing, has of course left Byrne wide open to any kind of attack the Tories wished to launch and, sure enough, an ‘aide’ to Iain ‘Returned To Unit’ Smith dismissed Byrne’s claims as “laughable”.

Quoted by the Guardian, she said this was “yet another disastrous speech, void of any ideas”. It’s a rare situation in which I am forced to agree with a Conservative!

“Same old Labour is in the wrong place on welfare,” she continued. “They want people on benefits to make more money than the average hard-working family earns.” Now that – of course – is utter nonsense, but it will stay in people’s minds because the claim that the speech has no new ideas to offer, coupled with one that it is a “last-ditch attempt… to keep his job in the shadow cabinet” rings true.

The Telegraph article says Byrne has called for cross-party talks to clear up the “‘mess’ of delays and IT problems that he says have hit the policy.” Again, no mention that the policy is wrong. In fact, the article later states, “The project… is a good idea but needs to be rescued from the ‘disaster’ that it has become under [Mr Returned To Unit], he will claim.” A good idea? Universal Credit?

It’s a shame that he has decided to support the principles of the Tory regressions (we can’t call them reforms, and changes isn’t strong enough), because he did come up with a decent comment, that is also a truism: “There is now a private joke in Whitehall – to err is human, but to really foul things up you need Iain Duncan Smith.” But of course Byrne ruined it by saying it was Smith’s fault his harmful reforms are in crisis, rather than pouncing on them as bad ideas in their own right.

The Guardian article says “Shadow cabinet members are under pressure from Labour grandees to start spelling out their policies more clearly.” If this is Byrne’s idea of a Labour policy he should be dumped – not only from the shadow cabinet, but from Parliament and the Party – with haste.

Byrne has always been a dangerous liability – remember the damage he caused with one silly note about there being no money left after the 2010 general election?

He persuaded hundreds of Labour MPs to abstain from voting against the Tories’ hasty plan to legalise their robbery of millions of pounds from thousands of Jobseekers – the Jobseekers (Back to Work Schemes) Act – in March, claiming that he had secured “concessions” that would make it worthwhile.

The first was a guarantee of appeal rights – a safeguard that had always been in place and that the Conservatives had not suggested they would drop.

The second was an independent review of the sanctions regime, with an urgent report and recommendations to Parliament. It is now nearly six months since that concession was made. Has anybody – anywhere – heard any more about this “urgent report”?

Byrne was hoodwinked into giving way on a policy that is hugely damaging to the financial security of millions of people and receiving nothing at all in return. That’s not even mentioning the damage caused to the Labour Party by this and other unnecessary concessions to the Conservatives.

Now this.

The only sane choice for Ed Miliband is to sack Byrne on the spot and announce a reversal of Labour policy that will halt any support for regressive Conservative austerity measures that harm not only hard-working people and jobseekers who want to get onto the employment ladder but also the economy in general.

But Miliband seems weak – or at least indecisive. It seems he needs encouragement.

His email address is ed.miliband.mp@parliament.uk and he is on Twitter as well: @Ed_Miliband

If you feel strongly about this, give him a piece of your mind.

Labour’s problem isn’t the unions – it’s the leadership

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Enemies of the people? Ed Miliband, Ed Balls and the entire Labour shadow cabinet have created a strategy that will lose them the next election and could plunge us into decades of servitude under Tory ‘austerity’. THIS MUST CHANGE. If they refuse to adopt policies in line with the wishes of the majority of Labour members, they’ll have to go.

The way things are going, we all need to reconcile ourselves to the possibility that the Labour Party won’t win the 2015 election.

This will not be because the Conservative Party has better policies (it doesn’t) or because it has won the ideological argument about austerity (it hasn’t – the state of the economy clearly demonstrates this).

It will be because Labour’s leaders are doing their absolute best to distance themselves from everything that makes the party a distinct political force.

They seem to think turning Labour into a pale copy of the Conservative Party will win over voters from the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives, while retaining the party’s current grass roots. It will do neither.

Considering the situation as it stands, one has to ask: Is it time for a ‘no confidence’ vote in the entire Labour front bench?

Look at the cock-eyed way they are handling the row over candidate selection in Falkirk. This is a silly sideshow that has been blown out of proportion by the other Parliamentary parties in an attempt to capitalise on discomfort that Labour did not have to endure.

On the face of it, the problem is that a union (Unite) allegedly tried to rig the selection process for a candidate in the next election. Unite’s stated strategy, according to the BBC, is to “shift the balance in the party away from middle-class academics and professionals towards people who have actually represented workers and fought the boss” – in other words, away from the career politicians and so-called ‘Blairites’ who currently occupy every noteworthy position in the shadow cabinet.

Why is this important to the largest union in the country? Well, let’s look at the reason the Labour Party was formed in the first place – to provide a voice in Parliament for the unions’ aim, which has always been to improve conditions for workers and working-class people in the UK.

It has become transparent, over the last few weeks, that the current Labour Party’s shadow cabinet has no interest in that ambition. If it did, it would not have given up the argument over austerity, saying it would continue Coalition economic policies if elected. Instead, it would abandon austerity in favour of a programme of investment in employment-generating, economy-boosting programmes that would bring a greater return into the Treasury than it would cost.

It would also be announcing policies to change the direction of the Coalition’s murderous – thousands of people have died because of it – attack on people receiving benefits, particularly the long-term sick and disabled. Instead, incredibly, Labour supports this policy.

In return, according to this article from the Welfare News Service, “disabled voters, who have supported Labour in past elections, are abandoning the party in droves”.

Clearly Labour’s leaders will not retain their voter base if they continue in this fashion.

I’ll come back to the Unite situation in a moment, but let’s stick with the WNS article because it features revealing comments from ordinary people about the cack-handed way Labour is handling cuts to social security benefits, following the leaders’ admission that they will not promise to reverse any coalition policies.

One person described it as “Labour’s cowardly cop-out on welfare”.

John Currigan of Tipton said: “Old Labour values have been consigned to the political scrapheap.”

Neil Anderson of Machynlleth said Labour’s “now-Tory attitude to social security means I will definitely never vote for them again”.

Phillip Hurley of Pontyclun voiced a fear that has been growing in many minds: “I think they wanted the Tories to get in, knowing they would make these cuts that they [Labour] were afraid to implement.”

At a time like this, with former supporters openly voicing their disgust with a Labour Party that has been gleefully running to join the right wing of the political spectrum ever since Tony Blair became leader, is it any wonder that dismayed union members may have tried to stop the rot?

(We must be honest with ourselves; Labour is rotting from the inside, and will continue to rot, as long as right-wingers who do not support the party’s original purpose are sitting around the shadow cabinet table.)

Len McLuskey, leader of Unite, says he personally had nothing to do with any attempt to influence the vote on a new Falkirk candidate by signing up 100 or more members to the constituency party, and at this time I am prepared to believe him.

The dissent against the Labour leadership’s wrong-headed, potentially-disastrous, and above all, STUPID policies has come from the grass roots; the working classes; the people they are – on the face of it – supposed to be representing. That is why it seems likely that, if this plan was carried out, it was hatched by people in the grass roots of the union and not its bosses.

There is hope; it seems that our political commentators are aware of the problem, and serious questions are being asked in Labour’s backbenches.

Owen Jones, that paragon of principled left-wing opinion, wrote in The Independent on Sunday, under the headine What’s killing Labour? A thousand failures to oppose the cuts: “Labour’s leaders… fail to challenge myths, and even occasionally feed them. It is utterly self-destructive.

“They think they are buying back credibility, rather than shoring up policies that should be seen as sunk, ruinous, shredded. By failing to offer a coherent message, they risk a sense of ‘at least you know where you are with the Tories’ bedding in.

“But the cost is not only to Labour’s electoral prospects: it will be to the working, disabled and unemployed people whose pockets will continue to be emptied.

“Our futures and those of our children are at risk. That’s not hyperbole. It’s the appalling truth.”

And in his blog, headlined Labour members in the country are crying out for policies they can believe in, Michael Meacher MP wrote: “I have just attended my party’s monthly General Committee meeting in my constituency and the mood was more despairing than any I can remember. They simply cannot understand how the party leadership can be accepting time after time whatever callous and unjust cuts Osborne throws at us – bedroom tax, withdrawal of benefit for the first seven days of unemployment, and now a welfare cap which even the Tories themselves haven’t yet defined.

“Is there no limit to how far this surrender goes, they ask?

“They don’t want to talk of betrayal, but they are bewildered, hurt, disoriented and despairing.

“None of them want Labour to out-Tory the Tories over cuts. They want three things: that Labour has a positive vision for the next Labour Government that they can believe in, that Labour has a plausible alternative to endless austerity, and that Labour campaigns across the country with bold policies to build the alliance to throw out the most vicious Tory government in modern times.”

I DO want to talk of betrayal – because that is precisely what we are all facing: Betrayal by party leaders who claim to be on the side of the workers and the working-class, but whose leaders have cheerfully joined the Westminster Gravy Train and are lapping it up as though this nightmare ‘austerity Britain’ is a party that will last forever.

Here in the country, Mr Meacher is quite correct: We ARE crying out for policies we can support. Labour’s leaders aren’t simply failing to give us those – they are actively REFUSING to mount any meaningful opposition, in the face of the overwhelming wealth of weaponry they could use.

The fact is, the vast majority of Labour members do not support the policies being foisted on us by the leaders. They are a shambles; they will be a disaster for the country, whether Labour is returned to office at the next election or not (and on these policies, as mentioned above, I don’t think they will). While the leaders persist, stubbornly, in forcing these policies on us, we have a classic case of “the tail wagging the dog”, and we cannot allow this to continue.

I have no confidence that they can win the next election. Even if they did, I have no confidence that they will pursue any policies that will benefit the UK as a whole. We will be swapping one gang of self-interested gangsters for another.

So I repeat: Is it time for a ‘no confidence’ vote in the entire Labour front bench?

If so, who wants to put the process in motion and how soon can we get it done?