"Why on earth is he suddenly the bloody messiah?"

A friend of a friend on Facebook made the following comment about Labour leadership candidate, Jeremy Corbyn, "He's made no impact in 22 years as an MP apart from campaigning to ban the importation of foie gras. Why on earth is he suddenly the bloody messiah?"

Overlooking the inaccuracy of  the remark "in 22 years as an MP" (he has actually been there for 32 years, maiden speech 1st July, 1983),  I have to say that there is much more to Jeremy Corbyn than just an aversion to pate!

He has one of the highest levels of support from voters in any constituency in the country, and in the recent election managed to increase his majority to around 21,000,  an increase of almost 6% on 2010.  Not many Labour MP's managed that, did they?

He is very aware that the money he spends as an MP on his office, staff and expenses comes from our taxes, and he is as careful with it as he can be, which is why he has one of the lowest expenses records of all 650 Westminster MPs.  He is often seen travelling around London on his bicycle or on the bus, as this is both economical and environmentally friendly.  How many MPs do you meet on the bus?  

His strong advocacy for the rights of women, LGBT persons, and ethnic groups has been in evidence since his arrival in Parliament, and his support for maintaining a publicly funded NHS that provides the best service available free at the point of use goes has its origins in his days as a NUPE full time official. 

He has campaigned on behalf of many victims of miscarriages of justice, and is passionate about protecting the poor, the vulnerable, and our human rights.  Just recently, as one of the 48 Labour MPs who really understand that the opposition party's role is to oppose and not to abstain, he voted against the Tory's Welfare Reform Bill, when the official party line was to abstain.

He has been travelling around to rallies (around 70 of them so far in a matter of 7 weeks), attracting crowds of up to 2,000 people in (and sometimes outside of!) huge venues all round the country,  all of whom are wanting to hear him speak, because what he says resonates with them.

He is connecting with and inspiring people who had walked away from the Party under the Kinnock, Blair, Brown, Miliband leaderships,  and bringing them back to the party, but more than that, he is inspiring a whole generation of youngsters who have not seen anything worth voting for in recent elections and who felt that politics wasn't relevant to them as no-one listened to their points of view anyhow.  He listens.

Thousands of new members have flocked to join, or return to, the Labour Party as full members, registered supporters or as trade union member supporters as they re-engage with the political process, so that the number eligible to vote in the Leadership election is now over 610,000.

Come 12th September the final result will be in, and the party will have a new leader.  Until then, just watch and wait, and take notice of how many people are actually talking about politics again, is this something we can call "the Jeremy effect"? 

Less than a week to go... have you done it yet?

It is the final week for anyone to register as a supporter of, or to join as a member of, the Labour Party and have a vote in the forthcoming leadership and deputy leadership election. So if you are a supporter of the Party and want to have your say but have not got round to it yet, now is the time to do it!  The closing date is Wednesday 12th August, 2015, 12 noon. 

All fully paid up members, affiliated and registered supporters who have submitted their applications by noon on 12th August 2015 are eligible to vote. You can become the Labour Party’s newest member at https://join.labour.org.uk and you can sign up as a registered supporter by heading to https://supporters.labour.org.uk/leadership/1.

Signing up as a supporter will cost you just a measly £3, full membership costs around £3.88 per month, with reduced rates for juniors, retired, unwaged, and trades union members.  For your support / membership you will be able to vote for 

• Leader of the Party
• Deputy Leader of the Party
• London Mayor (if you live in London)

If you care about the Labour Party's future and share its values then why not add your support?  You can read more about the various membership options here:
http://www.labour.org.uk/

Same old, same old... blah blah blah

I keep reading comments, from various Labour MPs, that they will not serve in a Cabinet under Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Minister.  Personally, I think that's incredibly foolish of them to say so, and assumes that they are going to be asked to so serve!

The earliest that a GE should happen would be 2020 and those Labour MPs who are currently griping may lose their seats then, if the voters in their constituencies are as disillusioned with their performance as appears to be the case in many areas. Perhaps if I say Welfare Reform Bill and abstention, it might prick a few consciences!

But something else I have not heard mentioned anywhere is that, with the current resurgence in politics, amongst both the young and the not-so-young, disillusioned electorate, there is a strong chance that there will be a raft of new candidates standing on a traditional Labour values platform, who do win seats and who would be more than pleased to serve in a Corbyn-led Cabinet.

The pinky-blue Labour MPs need to think long and hard about where their true allegiances lie, about the harm they are doing to the people of this country, and whether they are truly representative of Labour values.

Why MPs should care about the impact of the new EU VAT rules

Short answer: because 2015 is an election year!

Long answer: We are already being bombarded with candidate flyers, despite being 3 months away from the day, but this made me think about MPs and how (or even if!) they take on board the worries of their constituents, especially if those concerns are at odds with the policies of the MPs political party.

I should say that whenever I have raised an issue with my MP (the LibDem's Tim Farron, Westmorland and Lonsdale ) he has always listened to what I had to say and raised the issue with the relevant dept. or minister on my behalf, so I have no complaints there. It was more an idle wondering, in the wake of the template letters in response to constituents writing to MPs about the EU VAT issue I wrote about yesterday,  as to whether MPs as a whole have really thought about the effect the new EU VAT rules are having, and what this means in terms of the social impact on the country.

Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that Britain will come to its knees because small businesses and sole traders have to register for VAT. What I am saying is that there are a lot of people who make a small but adequate income from doing what they do, whether it be selling mp3's of their music, downloadable ebooks, online magazines, creating apps for phones, writing software, doing a bit of website hosting or selling advert space on one to help defray the cost of their own website, licencing photos or graphics for use by others, or even creating patterns for crafters. Those folks may be full-time students earning a bit to help them through uni, they may be parents with young children to look after, they may be carers for elderly or disabled family members, they may be retired and doing something which helps out with the pension, or simply be using their skills to create a product that will never have a big demand but which fills a small niche market.

For whatever reason they are selling digital goods and services online, they are earning a small income, and for many of them that income may be the difference between not claiming benefits and being forced to do so to get by. 

So, if small digital product sellers are being forced out of business by the lack of a sensible threshold for cross-border sales, the country loses out. It loses people who are working and earning, and instead gains people who need to claim financial support benefits. Surely that cannot be a good thing for the UK?  The cost to the country of a population on benefits is surely much greater than the revenue that  would be lost by allowing a sensible cross-border sales threshold for VAT.

Over the past decade or so there has been a lot of encouragement for individuals to start their own businesses. We are told that the digital economy is growing. More and more shopping is being done online. A whole raft of public services are online. We have been encouraged to get online and do all sorts of stuff, and as a country we have done just that, with 89.90% of us with internet access. The latest figures from the Office of National Statistics (.pdf, 482kb) state that there are 4.6 million self-employed and sole traders in the UK. If even 10% of them are selling digital products (and the bottom line is, we simply don't know how many are yet!) that means almost half a million traders are affected by these awful, unworkable new rules. .

So we now have a whole sector of the business population who are being walloped by the EU or put out of business for doing just what our government has encouraged us to do. It's just plain wrong!.

Further reading: Heather Burns writes about web design law, strategy, and what matters to the profession https://idea15.wordpress.com/2014/11/24/how-vatmoss-is-the-end-of-small-enterprise-in-britain-and-how-we-can-change-it/