Labour Party

Union leaders have not woken up yet

A union delegate to Labour Party conference spoke to Solidarity. She was speaking anonymously because the union has instructed delegates that they should not speak to the press without authorisation from the top union leadership. At the Labour Party conference I hope we'll see that Diane Abbott got a good vote, because, despite many shortcomings, she has been the only candidate even to begin to address the real concerns of the labour movement. And I hope we'll see a wider understanding that the Labour Party now has to change fundamentally. Unfortunately the union leaders don't seem to have...

Dennis Skinner: Blair's poodle yaps

Dennis Skinner, one of the ghostly superannuated "lefts" in the Parliamentary Labour Party, has come out in support of David Miliband for Labour leader. He calls on others to back "the man the Tories fear most". Skinner, a one-time miner, has been an MP for 40 years. Unlike many of the career "leftists" in the old Parliamentary Labour Party, Skinner had real left-wing credentials. He knew which side of the class divide and the class war he was on. He backed strikes, and backing them was more than a matter of policy and calculation: it was something he felt in his guts. Politically, though...

Alan Milburn joins Government as "social mobility" advisor

David Cameron’s “big tent” is beginning to look like the Millenium Dome. It’s hard to keep up with those disaffected New Labour ministers and MPs and advisors who have agreed to serve the coalition as a “tsar” or an “advisor” for state initiatives. Latest to join up was Alan Milburn. This former member of the International Marxist Group has become an adviser on “social mobility”. Well “mobility” is something political invertebrates know all about. Milburn joins Frank Field who is a poverty tsar (specialising in 100 ways to chuck people off benefits), and John Hutton is looking at public sector...

Labour leadership election: let the cleaners decide?

Westminster University was the venue for the The Labour Finance and Industry Group (LFIG) Labour leadership hustings on 25 August. A full capacity of over 300 academic folk looked on as the Miliband brothers and Ed Balls regurgitated their finely orchestrated rhetoric. Before the speeches an introduction by LFIG was given which couldn’t have been less “socialist” in sentiment: “One of the failures of the left is the emphasis which should be put on the need to produce. We see production just as important as distribution,” said the LFIGer. This statement is so far off the mark that is just isn’t...

Gordon Brown: proletarian by New Labour standards

Gordon Brown responded to the launch of Tony Blair's autobiography by announcing that he will spend his time on unpaid work for good causes. As the press reported, this was “widely seen as a side-swipe at the millionaire lifestyle of Tony Blair”. Brown still gets £66,000 a year as an MP. He is touting for trade as a paid public speaker to rich audiences, and will put the revenues in the bank account of a specially set up company from which he can draw in later years. For “good causes” he will be working with people like the Queen of Jordan. By New Labour standards, all this seems proletarian...

David Miliband: "It wasn't my fault"

As the Labour leadership contest drew to an end David Miliband worked hard to distance himself from Tony Blair — Blair personally, more than the New Labour government. But it was all deeply unconvincing. In an interview with the Independent (29 August) Miliband accused David Cameron of thinking up policy by way of “positioning”, rather than by deciding what was good for the country. Ironically this is precisely what Miliband did in the rest of the interview. Miliband’s attempt to distance himself from Blair involved little more than a shameless rationalisation and vacuous rebranding of himself...

"Crud": "loathsome, despicable, or worthless"

So the dictionary says. And now the incongruous career of former Blair backroom boy Jon Cruddas as a supposed hero of the unions and Labour democracy should come to an end. In 2007, Cruddas was backed for deputy leader by the big Unite union, and puffed himself as the candidate who would "reconnect" Labour with its working-class base. He has worked closely with the semi-left-ish Labour pressure group Compass, which claims ten thousand members. Now Cruddas has backed David Miliband for Labour leader, saying that David Miliband is like "Tony Blair at his best... fantastic from 1994 to 2001". It...

Labour: will talk of restoring democracy come to something real?

At last year's Labour Party conference, the leadership promised an all-up-for-grabs review of Labour Party structure and the undemocratic changes pushed through by Tony Blair in 1997 ("Partnership in Power"). The review is due to be launched at this year's Labour conference, starting on 26 September in Manchester. But no specifics are available, even to members of Labour's National Executive. The record of the front-running contenders for Labour leader, and a series of undemocratic manipulations already under way for the Manchester conference, warn us that unless the unions and the local...

Labour democracy campaigners comment on promised review of structures

From the CLPD newsletter : In summer 2007, shortly after he became Leader, Gordon Brown submitted a document (‘Extending and Renewing Party Democracy’) to the NEC recommending a number of changes to Annual Conference procedures. Both the NEC and later Annual Conference accepted these changes. The main thrust of these proposals was to replace ‘Contemporary Motions’ by ‘Contemporary Issues’. Before the advent of New Labour, every CLP and Union could send motions and amendments to Conference and the whole agenda of Conference largely revolved around these motions. Tony Blair changed all that...

Vote Abbott, transfer to Ed Miliband, organise the left!

Ballot papers for the Labour Party’s leadership election were sent out on Wednesday 1 September. As the contest reached its last stages, Tony Blair, while promoting his memoirs, intervened to defend (his) New Labour record and implicitly to back David Miliband over his brother Ed. Blair fears that Labour in opposition could be pushed to the left. He thinks David Miliband becoming leader could stop that. For once Tony Blair is not wrong. If David Miliband becomes leader it will galvanise those suited careerists in the Labour party and unions who think with fondness about New Labour political...

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