Andrew Fisher Profile picture
Columnist for The i Paper https://t.co/FCkd1My1lw Democratic Socialist, Labour member. Former Executive Director of Policy & Research Trade unionist: NUJ & Unite
Dame Chris🌟🇺🇦😷 #RejoinEU #FBPE #GTTO🔶️ Profile picture William Hite Profile picture dougienewman Profile picture 3 subscribed
Mar 14 13 tweets 5 min read
#OnThisDay in Labour history 10 years ago … 🌹

Tony Benn passed away at the age of 88

Benn was a former Cabinet Minister, one of Labour’s longest-serving MPs, and an inspirational figure on the Labour left for decades … he inspired me 🧵 Image Although he never led Labour, or even held one of the great offices of state, he is in the rare company of having a political philosophy named after him: ‘Bennism’.

He left a legacy Labour party reform, anti-war activism, constitutional reform, and popularising politics ... Image
Feb 29 4 tweets 2 min read
19 councils have had requests for 'Emergency Financial Support'* agreed by Government

As I've said for a few years now, the crisis in council finances is not a few bad apples, but the whole barrel-load of austerity passed on by the Government

*This isn't funding. It's debt. 🧵 Image Councils in England are getting c.£15bn LESS in central government funding than they were in 2015.

This announcement does not provided any of these 19 councils with a penny more from Government

Instead, it allows them to sell council assets to pay for under-resourced services: Image
Oct 12, 2023 9 tweets 2 min read
🌹Well done to those Labour MPs who have distanced themselves from the appalling comments of Keir Starmer & Emily Thornberry in the last day or so

It should be entirely uncontroversial to support international law and universal human rights

So well done to those that have 🧵 Richard Burgon
Jul 6, 2023 5 tweets 2 min read
#OnThisDay in Labour history 7 years ago ...

The Chilcot Report was published showing that Tony Blair exaggerated the case for war, that Iraq posed no military threat to the UK, that Blair had committed the UK to war come what may, and that there was no post-invasion strategy 🧵 Military families who had lost loved ones in the war called for Blair to be prosecuted for war crimes. Sadly, 7 years on, the alleged war criminal remains at large.

This is how the nation's newspapers reacted ...
May 16, 2023 8 tweets 3 min read
#OnThisDay in Labour history 6 years ago ...

The 2017 manifesto was launched at Bradford University

"Our manifesto offers hope … Our manifesto is for the many, not the few", said Jeremy Corbyn

🧵 Image It was described as "Corbyn's sharp left turn" by @theipaper

The front page emphasised tax rises on the rich, scrapping tuition fees, public ownership of water, energy and rail

And the pledge to build "at least 100,000 council and housing association homes a year" ... Image
Apr 4, 2023 10 tweets 3 min read
Nigel Lawson was undoubtedly the most influential Chancellor of my lifetime.

Although in his later years he was rightly regarded as a French villa-dwelling Brexiteer hypocrite and a climate change-denying crank, in his prime he reshaped the British economy and state ... 🧵 As Thatcher's longest-serving Chancellor he was key to her project

“our policies aimed at a conscious break … with the entire post-war political consensus … to change the change the entire culture of a nation from anti-profits, anti-business, government-dependent lassitude”
Mar 27, 2023 5 tweets 1 min read
Parks are for loitering in ... that's the bloody point of them! Note as well, he says it's fuelling "anti-social behaviour", not "crime".

ASB is a dangerous catch-all term for "things people complain about".

ASB is simply a device for criminalising non-criminal behaviour - simultaneously wasting police time and harassing young people
Feb 23, 2023 9 tweets 3 min read
On this day in Labour history 🌹

Labour won the 1950 election, but only narrowly …

The landslide of 1945 general was all but wiped out, with Labour’s majority reduced from 146 to just five … 🧵 There had been major boundary changes since 1945, which favoured the Tories.

The Conservatives gained 90 seats on just a 2.8% swing.

Turnout was 83.9% - the highest ever in a UK general election
Feb 18, 2023 12 tweets 3 min read
"Zero tolerance of antisemitism, racism or discrimination of any kind"

Really? 🧵... What about Barry Sheerman - an MP on the right of the Labour Party?

He sent two clearly antisemitic tweets in August 2020. Was the whip withdrawn? Was he suspended? No
thejc.com/news/uk/labour…
Jan 16, 2023 4 tweets 2 min read
NEU ballot result: teachers have voted overwhelmingly for strike action:

✅Teachers in England 90% on a 53% turnout✅
✅Teachers in Wales 92% on a 58% turnout✅
✅Support staff in England 84% on a 46% turnout
✅Support staff in Wales 88% on a 51% turnout✅ All teachers and support staff deserve an inflation-proofed pay rise.

As a parent and trade unionist, solidarity with @NEUnion members ✊
theguardian.com/education/2023…
Dec 2, 2022 11 tweets 3 min read
#OnThisDay 80 years ago …

A report entitled ‘Social Insurance and Allied Services’ (which became known as the Beveridge Report) was published on 2 December 1942 ... 🧵 Labour MP and Minister without Portfolio, Arthur Greenwood, in charge of reconstruction in the wartime coalition, had appointed Liberal peer Sir William Beveridge in 1941 to inquire into social insurance ...
Nov 30, 2022 4 tweets 3 min read
Starmer leaning into this Daily Mail headline at #PMQs asking how he can justify tax breaks to private schools? Sunak replies it's an attack on hard work and aspiration.

You can have all the aspiration and hard work you want, and still be nowhere near affording £40,000 a year school fees to these fake charities
Aug 11, 2022 4 tweets 1 min read
Some thoughts on Gordon Brown's proposals:

Brown is right to say Government should “pause any further increase in the cap”, and then negotiate separate company agreements to keep prices down after examining profit margins and available social tariffs.
1/n
theguardian.com/politics/2022/… The proposal for equity financing to energy companies is not necessarily bad - which means the Government takes shares in the companies for every penny it loans them.

We put something in, we get something in return.

2/n
Aug 6, 2022 9 tweets 3 min read
#OnThisDay in Labour history, Robin Cook died 🌹

The former Cabinet Minister, who resigned in protest against the Iraq War in 2003, died on 6 August 2005 while walking in the Scottish Highlands ... 🧵 Former minister Chris Smith wrote of Cook that since resigning, he had been setting out a vision of "libertarian, democratic socialism that was beginning to break the sometimes sterile boundaries of 'old' and 'New' Labour labels"
Aug 2, 2022 4 tweets 2 min read
Just a reminder that 10 years ago George Osborne proposed regional pay in the public sector, starting with the civil service ...

Liz Truss can try to revive it, but it will be defeated again @pcs_union
bbc.co.uk/news/uk-174111… New Labour also tried to pilot regional pay in the Department of Constitutional Affairs (now Ministry of Justice) in 2007 ...

Here's then minister Harriet Harman defending it:
Jul 31, 2022 6 tweets 3 min read
Quite astonishing the number of BAME Labour MPs & councillors who have in recent days spoken out about anti-black racism in Labour post-Forde.

And yet no public response from the Party or any interest from political journos

Start with this by @Taj_Ali1🧵
novaramedia.com/2022/07/29/it-… .@HackneyAbbott, who was abused by senior HQ staff - subject to “expressions of visceral disgust, drawing (consciously or otherwise) on racist tropes”, as Forde put it - has called on Starmer to act ...

theguardian.com/politics/2022/…
Jul 26, 2022 5 tweets 2 min read
#OnThisDay in Labour history ...

This was the front page of the Evening Standard, as Clement Attlee's Labour Party won by a landslide in the 1945 election - 77 years ago today ...🧵 The Labour manifesto had a clear economic analysis:

"The great inter-war slumps were not acts of God or of blind forces. They were the sure and certain result of the concentration of too much economic power in the hands of too few men"

Public ownership was the solution ...
Jul 25, 2022 5 tweets 2 min read
Economically illiterate.

"Shadow chancellor says policies do not fit within her plans to restrict public spending" - public subsidy has INCREASED since privatisation

Leave state subsidising private profit and public ripped off by higher bills and fares
independent.co.uk/news/uk/politi… Liar.
Jul 14, 2022 6 tweets 3 min read
#OnThisDay in Labour history in 1998, Chancellor Gordon Brown announced the Sure Start programme🌹

"bringing together quality services for the under-threes and their parents—nursery, child care and playgroup provision, and post-natal and other health services" 🧵 An evaluation of the policy in 2019 found that the Sure Start programme saved the NHS millions of pounds.

It had a “big positive effect on children’s health”, the IFS concluded ...

theguardian.com/society/2019/j…
Jun 11, 2022 11 tweets 5 min read
#OnThisDay in Labour history 35 years ago …🌹

The 1987 General Election took place, and saw the first black Members of Parliament elected.

Diane Abbott (Hackney North & Stoke Newington), Paul Boateng (Brent South) and Bernie Grant (Tottenham)

🧵... Boateng became the UK's first Black Cabinet Minister in 2002, and later High Commissioner to South Africa

Grant established and chaired the Parliamentary Black Caucus, and in 1993 co-founded and chaired the African Reparations Movement

Abbott...
Jun 9, 2022 7 tweets 3 min read
It's true that it would be better for housing benefit to go to paying a mortgage than to subsidise the property empires of corporate landlords ...

But, even if banks will accept housing benefit as mortgage payment there are still some obstacles ... 1/n Most banks have a max. loan-to-value (LTV) ratio of 90% - meaning benefit claimants would need a 10% deposit

In almost every part of the country that exceeds the DWP maximum savings limit of £16,000

(If you have >£16k in savings you legally aren't entitled to most benefits) 2/n