The Sunday Papers are saturated with the sparring between Blair's outriders, Byers and Milburn, versus Brown's appointees, Ed Balls and others. New Labour politics is looking more like an episode of "The Sopranos" than a political party seeking to repesent its members and govern the country.
On the one hand we have Byers and Milburn calling for a debate on the future of New Labour. This is clearly just a transparent attempt to play for time, keeping Tony Blair in power for as long as possible and in the hope that events may come to pass which either allow him to stay or facilitate the emergence of an annointed Blairite successor such as John Reid or anyone who is basically not Gordon Brown.
On the other hand we have Balls et al desperately arguing for "a stable and orderly transition" and denouncing any debate within the party as either "internal navel gazing" or a dangerous process when "factions" take hold. The Balls' logic is that there are "no fundamental divides" in the Labour Party and therefore there is no need for a debate within the party because we are all so united behind Gordon Brown's New Labour policies.
It seems almost inpolite to intrude on this internal infighting between the factions of New Labour but most of us Labour Party members are looking on aghast at these antics. The very people who are excluded from this critical debate on the future of the Labour Party appear to be its members. The "poor bloody infantry" of the Labour party who deliver the leaflets, sustain us with their contributions through their party and trade union subs and who undeservedly lose their seats on councils because of the unpopular policies of the New Labour leadership are all being prevented from having any realistic say.
The political argument between the militant tendencies of Blair and Brown also fails to address the real life issues the vast majority of our members are facing and the ideals which motivated them to become part of our movement.
When the Blair and Brown factions trade blows over issues like employment, globalisation, taxation, pensions, reform of public services, the environment and foreign policy, they speak in terms which are totally unrelated to the real life experiences or aims of the vast proportion of our members and supporters.
Employment for the many is increasingly insecure, unrewarding and stressful. Ministers' speeches extolling the virtues of globalisation and exhorting workers to embrace flexibile employment whilst refusing to address rights at work just ring hollow.
Policies which increase the retirement age and fail to protect workers' pensions whilst at the same time turning a blind eye to allowing company bosses walk off with massive pension pots prompt questions about the links between New Labour and big business.
Most see through New Labour calls for reform and modernisation and have come to understand that public service reform for both Blair and Brown means public service privatisation in all its different guises of sell offs, PFI, and the latest laughable euphemism of "contestablility."
Labour Party supporters also experience the consequences of our grotesquely unequal society, where cumulative disadvantage produces communities where life expectancy itself can differ by as much as 15 years beween rich and poor and educational opportunities increasingly under New Labour are accessed by fee paying.
Many New Labour ministers would do well to read Professor Richard Wlkinson's insightful work "The Impact of Inequality" which sets out in detail the wide ranging research linking many of the malaises of our society to inequality.
Labour Party members will not tolerate for much longer the unseemly public rucking between the Blair and Brown factions which puts next year's elections at risk and gives such an open goal to Cameron. In addition they will not accept being sidelined in any debate about the future leadership of the party and its future political direction.
Both Blair and Brown courtiers need to be reminded that this party belongs to its members not some New Labour Westminster elite.
Party members and supporters must have the opportunity to participate fully in the future of Labour debate. Neither the argument by Brown supporters against any debate nor the call by Blair supporters for a debate to delay change are sustainable.
I have consistently called for Blair to go. I announced that I would stand for leader of the party so that members and supporters would be given the chance of debating and having a choice over the future of the party. So my position on Blair is clear. But if we have to find a way forward before the Blair and Brown factions plunge our party into a civil war at a minimum it is critical that a timetable is set for this debate to take place with an assurance that if Blair will not go now then either the election for a new leader commences before the Scottish and Welsh elections next year or a clear announcement of a timetable is made before those elections. This should be the minimum demand of Labour MPs, trade union representatives and party bodies.
The New Labour and journalistic elite are undertaking their usual exercise of arrogantly and complacently dismissing any challenge from outside their coterie as hopeless. I believe that their inability to look beyond their inner London dinner party circuit leads them to completely underestimate the scale of support amongst rank and file Labour party members and trade unionists for a challenge to the New Labour narrow consensus.
Let's surprise them.
19 Comments:
John, I agree with your views expressed in the post and also share your hope that the Labour Party members and trade unionists will steer the debate.
I've just posted a piece on my blog about my views on the issue and the immediate future of the Labour Party.
I'd be very grateful if you'd have a look :)
We really do have to challenge the Blairite propoganda that any challenge to them is hopeless, that the left can never win ("the left is unelectable of course" and " of course the left can't win" they say even though the policies they actually want are far lefter than New Labour) amongst our friends and family who may not have read the kind of material available on this website and in left publications as of course anything left wing at all is usually not allowed air space in the media these days unless it's tied to a single issue such as anti-war oppostion, then it might get on the BBC etc but there is no analysis of the wider context, of how things would be different under a left wing government.
Even in the seventies and eighties when things went so far to the right opposing voices on the left and CND etc were at least heard and had a lot of publicity and support although they didn't win at that time but now we don't even have that as the Blairites and Tories have done such a good job of rubbishing us, as if we were as way out as the BNP which is a complete fallacy. We on the left are also Labour party members on whose votes the party has relied and we have a right to be heard and we should not believe their hype that we are unelectable and our views should be dismissed as loony left! More like they are the rampaging right!
In fact the sort of MPs we support had the highest swing towards them at the last election wheras the strongest advocates of these views such as Twiglet and Oona King have already lost their seats at the last election so as a matter of simple proportion we can argue that we need to be heard; the NEC results have also demonstrated that and we will make sure our representatives there make our voices heard. That was also a victory for women by the way when you look at Christine and Anne's share of the vote(although they were incumbent) but still it's another step towards more equality in the party. It's also proof that campaigns work, they may take a few months or years but even the simple reminders we put out on the left for everyone to remember to vote in these elections must have helped although it was a low turnout but we still won four out of six!
As John says, let's surprise them. Keep the Dream Alive said Jesse Jackson said in Hyde Park on the big anti-war demonstration, we musn't give up before we've begun and we musn't stop acknowledging our dream of better things, we have to acknowledge it before we can pursue it, if we allow New Labour to dismiss the fact that we even hold a dissenting view how can we work/fight whatever you like to call it for it to be enacted??
It's crucial to stay in/rejoin Labour and thereby help win it back from the New Labour imposters and we must remember that this may thake some time, witness how long it took the civil rights movement in America to achieve their objectives, we can't give up so soon just because Blair is ignoring our anti-wart marches etc we have to keep up the pressure and make it even bigger than before and eventually he and his supporters will cave in.
This talk of "transition" disenfranchises the membership of the party. We must have democracy and the leadership must have a current mandate. I read that each year the leadership is waived through with little or no debate. Surely this paves the way for an individual to change course (or even idealogy) without the explicit support of the labour members?
I think it's a crying shame that some MPs appear to seek office through sycophantic measures and it's an embarassment that leaders will appoint such ministers rather than the best person for the job. Is there so little free speech at Westminister that the closest we get to dissent is sitting on the fence? Labour needs to modernise - with the use of the internet, this stifling of opinion will never succeed. Lead by example and concensus - not by suppression.
Yes, we are sleepwalking into becoming the Tory party - please don't tell us that leaning to the left will split the party and thus lose us the next election. If the leadership is not fought fairly then grass roots Labour members will lose the next election whoever wins at the polls.
I have joined the party recently due to my fear that at the next election I will have no true labour party to vote for. And that situation IS a dictatorship. Please keep up the good work John, you have many many more supporters out here.
me again to say that if Miliband is a "senior" Minister (so says the BBC's website) then when you look at John's exoerience I think he is more than senior enough to take on Brown.
Thanks to the Daily Mirror's Kevin Maguire for revealing the true delusions of the Blairites - hope it's a rallying cry for us.
I hope the LRC's meeting in Manchester with John on Thursday @ the Mechanics' Institute gets a good turn-out. Please all get there if you can.
Great to see a left wing still in the party.
Consider myself a young socialist and have been invovlved in smaller groupings, but have been put off by the sectarianism of these groups.
I come from a traditional Labour/union background but have resisted the temptation of voting for new labour, as they are totally alien to what i stand for.
However, this campaign and seeing what John stands for has made me consider joining the party.
There is a huge pool of disenfranchised young people radicalised by the war and social issues such as pay and college fees who would respond to a campaign such as this.
I just hope that the Blairites have not permanently damaged the name of the Labour party.
Cheers, Mark. Worcester.
C'mon on in Mark, the water's lovely on the left bank :-)
Kevin Maguire said soon after John launched his challenge that he couldn't possibly win it but reading this actually made me immediately think the opposite: ie that there would be no question that we would win it as Kevin's stuff is always a rather watered down version of what is actually happening on the left.
I'd be the first to take my hat off to him and The Mirror for at least raising left and trade union issues and giving a few column inches to some of the left campaigns thorough his page as it's more than you'd get from most of the papers except the Morning Star of course and The Mirror does tell it like it is on many social and public sector issues; Tony Blair should be made to read it so he can find out about the real peopel he has so lost touch with. (This is not to say that I agree with everything The Mirror publishes as particulary from a feminst perspective there is still much room for improvement) but I think it's content is now quite a lot different from it's general reputation! Actually Tony Blair should be made to read women's magazines as well as trying to get on Blue Peter etc.Surely children's programmes are supposed to be impartial to politics, very worrying indeed.... I remember the one North Korean children's programme of the day being shown when they did the Axis of Evil series - it was in short a cartoon of presumably goverment soldiers shooting some enemies a lot to uphold their regime and the ten year old North Korean kid wisely opted to do her homework instead! Perhaps Tony Blair will be appeating in the next free Bookstart book all babies get at eight months...! they must be getting desparate and anyway John has already been on BBC 2 so he has beaten Blair to it! Or perhaps he's copying...
To get back to what I was going to say I was reading a recent issue of Best magazine (a mainstream women's weekly magazine) while in hospital with my son recently and there was a detailed article about a Lebanese/British woman with young baby triplets who had been in Lebanon on a family visit and was one of the people evacuated on one of the British warships when the recent bombings began. The woman had orignially intended to return to her husband in England months before the conflict began but had had to stay in Lebanon for most of her pregnancy with the triplets as she'd developed complications. She was so busy caring for the babies as any Mum would that be that she hadn't watched any news and hadn't even realised that the conflict had started until she eventually switched on the tv much later. By the time she got to the British consulate to get passports to get back to the UK she could literally hear the conflict going on around her and she and her sister's families were both evacuated but she had the agony of knowing that most of her friends were not and that children she knows may well die. Yet sometimes women's magazines run articles interviewing Tony Blair on a cosy sofa quizzing his policies for women and other serious issues as well as personal questions but still in an admiring sort of way so the Lebanese article was such a contrast like an injection of the stark reality of the consequences of the policies he is condoning in the Middle East in the last place you'd expect to find it but it was devastatingly effective as the reader identified with the woman on a human level as an exhausted Mum caring for triplets who was then unbelievably put in a situation more horrendous than she could possibly magine while she was waiting to hear if she could get out of Beirut - yet she was actually one of the lucky ones and of course we've all now seen the pictures of the families that were not so lucky.
I can't imagine Tony Blair ever being interviewed for that magazine again after this story so how he has the bare-faced cheek to want to go on Chris Evans's show and Songs of Praise.... the mind boggles!
Hi Mark,
the Socalist Youth Network
www.socalistyouth.org.uk are trying to appeal to the huge pool of disenfranchised young people you mention in your post above.
I hope you'll have a look and join us were open to all under 30's.
Have your say on the Labour Leadership contest by visiting Labour-Leadership.com and have your say (or rant!).
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