Labour Party

The shape of Miliband's Labour

David Osler, author of the 2002 study Labour Party plc , talked to Solidarity about prospects in the Labour Party. Q. According to Ed Miliband on 27 November, 43,000 people have joined (or rejoined) the Labour Party since the general election in May 2010. Do you have any assessment of what this little surge represents, and what its effects are likely to be? A. It’s dangerous to generalise from purely local experience, but the new recruits I have met have tended to be nice concerned thirty-something professionals who have not previously been members of any political party. Superficially they...

Diehard Blairites call for end to Labour's union link

Rupert Murdoch's Times newspaper and a bunch of diehard Blairites have started a vigorous campaign to push the new Labour leader, Ed Miliband, off balance, and marginalise the unions in politics. On Thursday 18th the Times reported former Blair henchman Alan Milburn as saying that "the unions should no longer have a 'structural relationship' with Labour". Milburn is no longer in Parliament. After resigning as health minister, he took a part-time job as "adviser", on £30,000 a year, for a venture capital firm heavily involved in financing private health care firms moving into the NHS. Now he...

North West Labour conference: "the most political in years"!

North West Labour Party conference was attended by 360 delegates and 700 over the weekend of 5-7 November. Organisers claimed it’s the best attended in years and that 5,000 new members had joined since May — 500 of those Labour students. A lot of MPs spoke and the message from all was: fight the cuts; link up with trade unions and community groups; be proud of our record in government, but we made mistakes. They also stressed that the Tories attacks were ideological and that they represented the interests of the rich. They definitely think that this can be a one-term Tory government. There was...

Phil Woolas: his shame, our gain

Phil Woolas, former Immigration Minister in the last Labour government, is in big trouble. As someone who remembers him from Manchester University Labour Club and the National Union of Students in the 1980s, may I go on record as expressing my great pleasure at the scale and nature of his shame? And on behalf of all the children of asylum seekers he had jailed in New Labour’s detention centres, may I hope he lives out his days in isolation and on the crappy minimum wage his government set. Woolas, an MP since 1997, held onto the Oldham East and Saddleworth seat by only 103 votes in the recent...

Miliband rats on union law

John McDonnell MP’s Private Member’s Bill, which would have stopped courts ruling out strike ballots on small technicalities, was defeated in Parliament on 22 October. Ed Miliband, when standing for Labour leader, volunteered to back moves to stop judges invalidating strike ballots on the basis of minor errors. But Labour’s front bench refused to back McDonnell’s Bill, and would not mobilise enough Labour MPs to get the Bill on to its next stage. A total of 89 Labour MPs turned up to support the Bill, including two who acted as tellers in a procedural vote of 87 to 27. But the Bill fell into a...

Lutfur Rahman is no socialist

Lutfur Rahman’s election as the first ever mayor of Tower Hamlets on 21 October — on a record low turnout — is a bad result for the working-class population of this deprived East London borough. Rahman is not, as the SWP and others claim, a socialist. His supporters include wealthy Brick Lane restaurateurs, George Galloway’s Respect party and political Islamists of the Islamic Forum of Europe. Cynical manipulation of race, religion and cults of personality — all that is rotton in a national politics devoid of a working-class political voice — were all present during this local election. Rahman...

Ed Miliband refuses to back John McDonnell's Bill

John McDonnell MP's Private Member's Bill, which would have stopped courts ruling out strike ballots on small technicalities, was defeated in Parliament on 22 October. Ed Miliband, when standing for Labour leader, volunteered in a statement to the unions that he would back moves to stop judges invalidating strike ballots on the basis of minor errors. But Ed Miliband's front bench refused to back McDonnell's Bill, and would not mobilise enough Labour MPs to attend the House of Commons to get the Bill on to its next stage. Labour shadow minister Nia Griffith refused to support Mr McDonnell's...

Democracy campaign launched

Labour and trade union activists have set up a "Task Force" to campaign for Labour Party democracy over the coming months of the official "review of party structure" decided by the Labour Party conference in October. At present, the "review" is configured as a stitch-up. Labour Party HQ will collect "submissions" between now and June 2011, and then the Joint Policy Committee (a body dominated by Shadow ministers) will draft a report to be presented to Labour Party conference 2011, probably on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. The Task Force will be campaigning for a more open review, and also to...

Assert trade unions' right to a political voice

Few things in British politics were as ludicrous as the outcry in the press and from Tory/ Lib-Dem coalition ministers against the trade unions’ role in electing Ed Miliband. And few things are as poisonous. The trade unions, the labour movement, must not — they try to insist — organise and act to secure effective working-class representation in Parliament. The response of the coalition and their media in effect says that when the unions begin to act that way — and what they have done to elect Ed Miliband is, of course, still a long way from doing it properly — they are entirely out of order...

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