Chuka Umunna, "the unions' representative in Parliament", hits choppy waters

By Mark Wallace
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I doubt today's Sun on Sunday was popular at Chuka Umunna's breakfast table. A leaked memo written by former Unite political director boasts of the influence the union has over Labour's business, regulation and wages policies.

By coincidence, the ultra-smooth Shadow Business Secretary and his Constituency Labour Party have received a whopping £47,000 from various unions over the last 5 years.

This is yet another addition to Chuka's growing reputation for being two-faced. He's cosying up to Tony Blair in public, wooing Labour centrists, while simultaneously taking a fortune from the unions and pushing Unite policy in Parliament. When someone claims to be a Blairite and a McCluskeyite at the same time, suspicions start to grow that they might not have any principles at all.

He reportedly secured the Streatham nomination by convincing a number of different cliques that he was their guy - but I suspect that trying to be all things to all men won't wash forever, and certainly not at a national level.

The Sun's leader column delivers a direct warning - something they only normally do if they intend to pursue an issue further:

"If he wants to live up to his reputation then he needs to stop acting as the unions’ representative in Parliament and start behaving as a man focused on helping business prosper."

It seems the glitter is starting to wear off "Britain's answer to Barack Obama". Will he change his ways, or stick to his tried and tested tricks?

Labour's Posh Boys (and Girls)

By Mark Wallace
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Back row: David Miliband, Ed Miliband, Ed Balls, Harriet Harman.

Standing in middle: Hillary Benn, Chuka Umunna.

Front row: Fiona McTaggart, Tristram Hunt, Tessa Jowell.

It's become a regular refrain from Labour ranks that the Tories are posh. The infamous Bullingdon photo, which Carla Millar today mimics above, is used as shorthand to pick at the number of privately schooled men and women in the Cabinet and in the Parliamentary Conservative Party.

The failed attempt by Labour to make class an issue in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election, with activists dressed up in top hats and tails, stands out as an example of their enthusiasm for the subject.

Lambeth Labour face further questions over taxpayer-funded propaganda

By Mark Wallace
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Lambeth Council - whose high taxes I have the misfortune of paying - have a long track record of propaganda at taxpayers' expense. In the past they have run poster campaigns making political attacks on austerity and welfare reform, and published costly newspapers attacking the Government, all the while complaining that they don't have enough money for actual services.

This time, they've sunk even lower - which by the standards displayed so far is pretty low indeed. A new series of leaflets and posters seeks to scaremonger about changes to the fire service - presenting as a news headline a completely fabricated story about children dying in a Lambeth school fire.

After I tweeted the latest misuse of taxpayers' money on Wednesday night, the issue has been taken up by the Evening Standard and the Daily Mail.

Labour must answer questions about why taxpayers' money is being used in such a disgraceful fashion by a supposedly cash-strapped Borough.

It's no use passing it off as a council campaign or nothing to do with senior Labour figures, either. The council's posters are conveniently being used as free materials for Labour's party political campaigns, including the Save Clapham Fire Station Facebook page - where the below picture has surfaced:

According to the caption, it shows "local residents concerned over these massive cuts". Some  may well just be ordinary residents, but the lady slap bang in the cenre in the red jacket is none other than Councillor Lib Peck, Labour Leader of Lambeth Council. The gentleman to her right is Labour Councillor Christopher Wellbelove, who leads the party's campaign against Boris' Fire Station policy.

This is all very useful for Lambeth Labour - the council they run coincidentally churns out and distributes alarmist leaflets at taxpayers' expense on a topic which they happen to also be campaigning on in the run up to next year's elections. When local residents spontaneously meet on the issue, there are Lambeth council posters aplenty, the council Leader centre stage among them and a photographer on hand to supply pictures for the Labour Party's Facebook publicity.

So what of Labour's other prominent figures from Lambeth? Does rising star Chuka Umunna, the Shadow Business Secretary and MP for Streatham, endorse this behaviour by his local Labour councillors? How about newly elected Croydon North MP Steve Reed, who until he won the by-election in November was the Lambeth Council Leader who oversaw the start of this culture of taxpayer-funded propaganda?

Labour's growing civil war over candidate selection

Earlier in the week, I wrote about Len McCluskey's development of a "party within a party" of Unite MPs on the Labour benches. Now, further concerns are mounting about the extent of the unions' power over the Labour Party's selection procedures.

Jim Pickard of the Financial Times has carried out research which shows that 16 of the 43 Parliamentary candidates selected so far enjoyed direct trade union support in their nomination campaigns. (For the record, the six candidates Unite has so far laid claim to are Lisa Forbes in Peterborough; Clive Lewis in Norwich South; Suzy Stride in Harlow; Sarah Owen in Hastings; Carol Dean in Tamworth; and Adrian Heald in Crewe and Nantwich.)

They have also sought to skew the pitch for future selections. As Jim Pickard puts it:

"...the rules were recently changed, making it harder for non-union candidates without deep pockets to become a general election candidate. (Unite itself claims on its website that it was responsible for this change, saying its interventions had ‘changed the Labour party rule book’.) Candidates now need to run campaigns for 11 weeks instead of four and send out more mailshots than previously."

On yesterday's Daily Politics, Labour rising star Stella Creasy was challenged over the issue, and she conceded that it is now "difficult" to be selected for a parliamentary seat without the backing of the unions.

As Osborne's accent dives downmarket, Chuka Umunna moves upmarket. He slams "trash and C-list wannabes" on "exclusive" website

By Paul Goodman
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Oi, mate! Over in the blue corner, there's George Osborne with his newly-acquired glottal stop.

I say! Over in the red corner, there's Chuka Umunna, looking for classier company.

The Labour front-bencher turns out, according to the Sun, to be "a user of he Small World site, dubbed MySpace for Millionaires". The Daily Mail, never one to miss a telling detail, reports that "the invitation-only website, which was founded by Swedish investment banker Erik Wachtmeister, currently features an article about ‘mile-high hook-ups’ on private jets. It has also been described as a hunting ground for ‘sugar daddies’."

‘Is it just me or is there a serious lack of cool places to go in central London at the weekends.
‘Most of the West End haunts seem to be full of trash and C-list wannabes, while other places that should know better opt for the cheesy vibe', Umanna wrote, adding that he had found only one venue with a “cool international crowd”.  I've said it before, and say it again: you get a better class of person in the Labour Party.