The Joy of Six 1338

Chaminda Jayanetti examines the hidden impact of Labour's disability benefit cuts - from carer's allowance to railcards.

"When they receive the annual service charge statements, they find costs that bear no relation to the services they receive - street lighting for a block of flats, access to facilities they are not allowed to use, or simple paint jobs costing tens of thousands of pounds with no say over who carries out the work or how it is done." Labour MP Kate Osborne says the end of the feudal leasehold system cannot come soon enough.

Seventy years before congestion pricing landed in New York City, Lewis Mumford sounded the alarm on letting automobiles run amok in America’s downtowns. David Zipper tells his story.

Tim Radford reviews The Age of Diagnosis by the neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan: "How do you take on a real set of problems in medicine, concern about which can be seen as conservative-coded, without getting into bed with the vibes-based bores who will bang their hammy fists on tables in prejudiced agreement? The answer is: carefully. O’Sullivan is an excellent, fluid writer, and an eloquent speaker, but I’m bracing myself for braying allyship from right-wing broadcasters during her very well-deserved media appearances."

"At first, we didn’t know why Jamie, the perpetrator of the attack, did it. We knew he wasn't a product of abuse or parental trauma. But we couldn’t figure out a motive. Then someone I work with, Mariella Johnson, said: 'I think you should look into incel culture.'" Jack Thorne on writing Adolescence.

Luka Ivan Jukic casts light on an unexpected corner of European history: Latin remained a live language in Croatia until the middle of the 19th century.

The Tory response to Liz Kendall? She hasn't been nasty enough

Bad as Liz Kendall's announcement was - and it was awful - the Conservative response from Helen Whately was worse:

Where is the fit note reform crucial to stem the flow of people on to benefits? Where is the action on people being signed off sick for the everyday ups and downs of life? Why is the right hon. Lady planning to save only £5 billion when the bill is forecast to rise to over £100 billion? ...

Fundamentally, this is too little, too late. The fact is that £5 billion just does not cut it with a bill so big going up so fast. She needed to be tougher. She should be saying, “No more hard-working taxpayers funding the family next-door not to work, no free top-of-the-range cars for people who do not need them, no more sickfluencers helping people to claim money they do not need.”

I am reminded of Bernice Woodhall, the vicar of Royston Vasey:

“‘And he will give strength to legs that are weak and arms that tremble. The crippled will throw down their crutches and leap up and down in praise of his grace.’ Doesn’t say they need five car parking spaces outside Safeways now does it? They’re always empty, I only nipped in for five minutes to get a bottle of Taboo.”

Liz Kendall's Leicester West constituency party grows restive

From the Leicester Mercury:

Grassroots Labour members in Leicester have called on Liz Kendall to send a letter of support to party leader Jeremy Corbyn. 

The Leicester West Constituency Labour Party (CLP) passed a motion to applaud the Labour leader’s "long track record of opposing all forms of racism and anti-Semitism". 

CLP members agreed to write to Mr Corbyn expressing their support for him in the anti-Semitism row. 

And they requested that the Leicester West MP - who in 2015 ran for the party leadership against Mr Corbyn - do the same.

The Mercury says Liz Kendall attended the meeting but was not invited to speak on these motions. It also quotes her as saying, albeit between the lines, that she will not be writing any such letter.

An anonymous Labour member told the paper that the motions were not an attempt to oust Liz Kendall but that the constituency party does want her to be more supportive of Corbyn and the Labour front bench.

I have never quite bought Liz Kendall's ubermoderate act. I suspect she thought she had identified a gap in the market at the last Labour leadership election, only to find the gap was much narrower than she expected.

Nevertheless, these events in Leicester West may come to be typical of tensions between moderate Labour MPs and their newly expanded and more left-wing constituency parties.

Meanwhile, I have to confess that Mr Corbyn's long track record of opposing anti-Semitism has rather passed me by.

Why did Open Britain bother supporting Liz Kendall?

Remember Jack Hickey, the Conservative candidate in Leicester West?

He was the Spartan turned snowflake who complained that Open Britain were trying to "skew the vote" by campaigning in that constituency on behalf of Labour's Liz Kendall.

And the Open Britain site does indeed boast:

In this snap General Election, we campaigned for 29 current MPs to be returned to Parliament as a strong voice to stand up to a hard and destructive Brexit.

They must wonder if it was worth it.

Last night Liz Kendall followed Jeremy Corbyn's ordered and abstained on Chuka Umunna's amendment backing the continuance of Britain's membership of the single market.

Thanks to Alicia Butteriss on Twitter.

Leicester Tories to target Liz Kendall (with swords and sandals)

The Leicester Mercury tells us that the Conservatives have yet to select their candidates for the three city constituencies:

However the Mercury understands a number of Tory hopefuls would like a crack at Leicester West where Labour's Liz Kendall will defend a 7,000 majority. 

Leicester branch chairman Jack Hickey, who has said he will not seek to become a candidate himself, said: "West is the target. It's where we think we can do well. 

"We are huge underdogs. We are outnumbered, we are outmatched but we are like the 300 Spartans. 

"We are fewer but we are better."

All rather fanciful, particularly as West was the one Leicester seat the Tories failed to win in 1983.

But it does give me an excuse to use this photograph of a Loughborough chip shop I took yesterday.

Six of the Best 612

Stephen Williams suggests that a progressive alliance could transform British politics.

"The lesson I take from what’s happened in both our main political parties is that you never win an argument by pandering to it, or ignoring it and simply hoping it goes away. You win by taking the argument head on." Read the keynote speech to Reform's 2016 annual dinner by Liz Kendall.

Jonathan Fryer explains why he has written Eccles Cakes - a childhood memoir.

"Bands now look at ticket sales, or engagement on social media as indicators of their reach and impact. And those are the things, rather than hit singles, which traditionally sustain careers." Mark Savage says the singles chart is now almost irrelevant.

Join A London Inheritance on a photographic exploration of the building of the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank after the Second World War.

Paul Talling discovers the source of the River Lea and traces its early course through Luton.

Dan Jarvis is benefiting from Kieron Dyer Syndrome

View image | gettyimages.com

Labour's leadership election was depressing for the party even before the dawn of Corbynmania.

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago:

The problem for Labour is that the candidates who have something to say - Liz Kendall and Jeremy Corbyn - do not expect to win. That is why they can say what they really think. 

The two front-runners, Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper, are so anxious about alienating different constituencies (the press, party members, the wider public) that they find it hard to say anything at all.

It was partly for that reason that I concluded that the next Labour prime minister is not in this leadership election.

I also suggested that the next Labour prime minister would be Dan Jarvis.

That is where I would put my money, and there can be no doubt that staying out of this election will only help Jarvis's reputation.

But maybe he is benefiting from Kieron Dyer Syndrome.

Let me explain.

In the day when we all believed that England's 'golden generation' (Ferdinand, Campbell, Beckham, Owen, Scholes Butt) was going to win us the 2002 World Cup, there was just one problem. We  had no one to play in an attacking role on the left.

But there was an answer. Kieron Dyer had broken into the Ipswich side as a teenager and then signed for Newcastle. He looked a great prospect.

He was injured in the run up to the tournament and could not play in any of the warm up games. But the odd thing was that the less he played, the more certain the pundits became that he was the answer to England's problems. His stock could hardly have stood higher.

At last Dyer was fit to play for England. And everyone saw that he wasn't very good.

So maybe Dan Jarvis's growing reputation is a an example of Kieron Dyer Syndrome. Labour must hope this is not the case.

The next Labour prime minister is not in this leadership election

View image | gettyimages.com

Ed Miliband's approach to the last five years reminded me of Neil Kinnock's failure in the 1980s. Both thought that constantly reminding the voters how selfish Conservatives would be enough for Labour to win.

Yes, the Tories are extraordinarily selfish. The problem that Labour faces is that many voters agree with this analysis but still vote Conservative anyway.

In part this is because we are all selfish to some degree, but it also has a lot to do with Labour's inability to convince voters that they are competent to run the country.

It follows that in order to win Labour need to do something more than attack the Tories: they need to sound like a government in waiting.

Note that this does not necessarily mean sounding more right wing: it just means sounding different and more competent than they do at the moment.

The problem for Labour is that the candidates who have something to say - Liz Kendall and Jeremy Corbyn - do not expect to win. That is why they can say what they really think.

The two front-runners, Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper, are so anxious about alienating different constituencies (the press, party members, the wider public) that they find it hard to say anything at all.

Mary Creagh and her short-lived candidacy gave the clearest example of this. Her replies to Justin Webb's questions were so convoluted that he had to summarise them for her.

For this reason I suspect that the next Labour prime minister is not taking part in this election. I also suspect that his name is Dan Jarvis.

Liz Kendall: "Doggedly party-focused"

So far the Labour leadership contest has failed to excite the wider public. (How unlike...)

The greatest point of interest has been this - Liz Kendall's "the country comes first" reply to Andy Burnham.

But, writing in the Evening Standard, Andrew Neather remembers another side of her:

She’s always seemed doggedly party-focused to me, devoting years of her life to pursuing safe Labour seats before landing Leicester West. 

Before that, in 1996-97, I worked for Labour: just after I’d started at Millbank, I slagged Tony Blair off to Kendall, who lived near me. The 24-year-old loyalist promptly grassed me up to my new Policy Unit boss.

A Leicester monument to the last Labour government

From the Leicester Mercury last week:

New face-recognising equipment at the Post Office will be used to record the identity of foreign nationals in the city. 

The Post Office downstairs in WHSmith, in Gallowtree Gate, Leicester, unveiled its new "biometric unit" yesterday. 

Officials demonstrated how the equipment can read fingerprints and analyse faces of people applying for a Biometric Residence Permit, which were first launched in 2008.

Orwellian "face-recognising equipment" installed in a Post Office crammed into the basement of a shop because the Crown Post Office has been closed. What better monument could there be to the last Labour government?

It seems that Labour agrees with me. According to this tweet from Liz Davies, all three of the city's MPs turned up to watch.

At launch of#Leicester biometric residence permit service in WHSmiths w @keith_vazmp @jonashworth 1st non-crown post office location in GB
— Liz Kendall MP (@leicesterliz) September 21, 2012