ASLEF: First Trade Union to Announce Who It Will Support for Labour Leader
Yesterday the first union affiliated to the Labour Party announced who it would be supporting in the Labour leadership election. The national executive of the rail drivers trade union, ASLEF, met and took the decision to support me.
This is a real honour for me and a great gain for our campaign. I am a member of the ASLEF Parliamentary group and have worked with the union on a wide range of issues and campaigns of direct concern to the union and its members both nationally and locally.
In recent years many New Labour leaders and ministers have appeared to be embarrassed by any association with the trade union movement and I am extremely concerned that there are some who will be seeking to use the Hayden Phillips inquiry recommendations, to be published later this month, in an attempt to break or undermine the link between trade unions and the Labour party.
I am also anxious about the proposals being promulgated by some Labour MPs and in the New Labour leadership to significantly reduce the role of unions in our policy making structures. They seem to forget that the trade unions founded our party and have been its mainstays ever since.
I welcome the support and active involvement of trade unionists in my campaign. The New Labour leadership seems to have forgotten who our friends really are.
Rest assured, I haven't.
This is a real honour for me and a great gain for our campaign. I am a member of the ASLEF Parliamentary group and have worked with the union on a wide range of issues and campaigns of direct concern to the union and its members both nationally and locally.
In recent years many New Labour leaders and ministers have appeared to be embarrassed by any association with the trade union movement and I am extremely concerned that there are some who will be seeking to use the Hayden Phillips inquiry recommendations, to be published later this month, in an attempt to break or undermine the link between trade unions and the Labour party.
I am also anxious about the proposals being promulgated by some Labour MPs and in the New Labour leadership to significantly reduce the role of unions in our policy making structures. They seem to forget that the trade unions founded our party and have been its mainstays ever since.
I welcome the support and active involvement of trade unionists in my campaign. The New Labour leadership seems to have forgotten who our friends really are.
Rest assured, I haven't.
posted by John at 5:25 PM
16 Comments:
This is a great leap forwards for the campaign John. For too long the UK has gone on without an effective party to represent the labour movement, while deplorable as it is what is worse is that much of this time has supposedly been under a Labour government.
I hope that more unions will follow suit in order to put workers rights back on to the political agenda - without the unions we have seen what 'Labour' politics has become, a party of iniquity in which business favours are traded amongst the social elite - be it for supercasinos or peerages.
Great news John, well done. We're really on the map now. Hopefully my own union will be the next to support you...
Excellent news John, and it's about time we kicked off the election.
I think we need a May step down to settle the party, everyone seems to be kicking their heels waiting, waiting....
This is the first affiliated national union to back John, but you can't deny this has been coming . . . the RMT has backed John (sadly non-affiliated), as have the broad lefts in Amicus and CWU - and many trade union branches.
This is really the time for trade unionists to be redoubling their efforts to get similar nominations in their own unions. It's simple if you want a candidate who will back your union's policies, back John.
We can win.
John
If Dave Prentis has read The Mirror's editorial today he ought to come out and back you.
And a fortunate side effect of your blog today has been to increase my word power: promulgate - is to advertise' announce' broadcast etc according to my Oxford theosaurus!!
John
If Dave Prentis has read The Mirror's editorial today he ought to come out and back you.
And a fortunate side effect of your blog today has been to increase my word power: promulgate - is to advertise' announce' broadcast etc according to my Oxford theosaurus!!
I hope this means all the ASLEF-sponsored MPs will now be backing you too...
Interesting that the Guardian page on the leadership election has a section (albeit a small one, near the bottom) on Michael Meacher's supposed challenge but not John's...
I suspect that page has not been updated for quite a while. I believe Alan Simpson is the chair of the ASLEF Parliamentary Group? I trust he will now be supporting your campaign instead of trying to de-rail it by supporting other alleged candidates (ie Meacher)
e10 rifles,
It doesn't surprise me at all, the "moderate lefts" and other stooges of the bourgeoisie do just probably, and quite simply so, want to attempt to bar John from any kind of publicity. This, given that they know that he can (will :-))win, which is something of which they are very afraid to say the least.
Very glad to hear ASLEF and the RMT realise who is representing their members' interests ( Blair and Brown certainly haven't and won't).
No offense Mikael but I consider myself a moderate left winger / independently minded moderate democratic socialist and i support John McDonnell - and i suspect i'm not alone. The Guardian should be at the least reporting his candidacy even if they don't have the sense to back it.
It's rarely wise to describe yourself as not moderate in politics - most people like to think of themselves as moderate or 'centrist'. It's fine to say you're radical and progressive as long as you emphasise how sensible and moderate your reforms will be and how stupid and reckless your main opponents' policies are.
The policies John backs are nothing but plain common sense - end expensive failures like rail privatisation , PFIs and the Iraq war and replace them with a working , properly regulated mixed economy with a strong public sector and an equally strong and properly regulated private sector.
I'm afraid phrases like 'stooges of the bourgeoisie' sound daft to me and i would avoid this kind of self-consciously Marxist rhetoric.
Very glad to hear ASLEF and the RMT realise who is representing their members' interests not to mention the interests of the vast majority of the electorate ( Blair and Brown certainly haven't and won't).
No offense Mikael - we probably agree on many things and certainly on supporting John - but I consider myself a moderate left winger / independently minded moderate democratic socialist and i support John McDonnell - and i suspect i'm not alone. The Guardian should be at the least reporting his candidacy even if they don't have the sense to back it.
It's rarely wise to describe yourself as not moderate in politics - most people like to think of themselves as moderate or 'centrist'. It's fine to say you're radical and progressive as long as you emphasise how sensible and moderate your reforms will be and how stupid and reckless your main opponents' policies are.
The policies John backs are nothing but plain common sense - end expensive failures like rail privatisation , PFIs and the Iraq war and replace them with a working , properly regulated mixed economy with a strong public sector and an equally strong and properly regulated private sector.
I'm afraid phrases like 'stooges of the bourgeoisie' sound daft to me and i would avoid this kind of self-consciously Marxist rhetoric.
On past showing i'm confident John can be radical enough to make radicals and progressives inside and outside the Labour party enthusiastic while getting the support of many other people who consider themselves moderate or centrist but will back the same policies - in my opinion at least he has to , he can and he will.
damn - sorry for the double post - thought the first one had failed cos of dodgy connection
Duncan - same here. Like all of John's supporters that I've met, I'm just a democratic socialist who wants an alternative to New Labour. I'm just relieved that there's a politician offering a coherent, modern form of democratic socialism that actually has roots in the labour movement.
To victory!
DuncanM, Alex,
"Stooges bourgeoisie" may sound like Marxist rhetoric (whether or not it is self-conscious I leave up to you). Now, though I would not describe myself as a moderate, I certainly despise extremism (a few years in the International Socialist Group have certainly tought how to do that), however, it is important to know on which side one stands. I am a Marxist, yes. Does this make me an extremist, certainly not. Now, the question is then: Who are those who would naturally oppose the election of a Labour leader such as McDonnell and who are those that would naturally support it? I do believe the most straightforward answer to this question to be that, those who oppose him would be the Bourgeosie (which by the way is not necessarily a Marxist term, in fact, it has been used since the late middle ages to describe a class of urban-dwelling bankers, mercantilists and some high-ranking members of the guilds... so its certainly been applied well before the days of Karl :-) )and that those who would support, and benefit from his leadership of OUR (Marxists, Democratic Socialist, Utopian Socialists, Social-Democrats and... unfortunately, for the moment even Nu Labourites included) party him would be the working class. Thus, we must stand beside the working class against the Bourgeoisie (call it as you like) and its "stooges" or "agents" or "supporters" or "backers" (its a semantic question, really, in a word all Socialist (whether hard, soft, moderate, Marxist, "Democratic" or otherwise)must join the effort to ensure John's victory. The future of our Party and the Labour is far too important for us to get bogged down into a question of my choice of words!
By the way, DuncanM, that's alright, no offence taken :-)
Thanks Mikael - that's very interesting about the origins of the word 'bourgeouisie' - thanks for enlightening me on that one - though i'm afraid a lot of people will tend to stop listening or be alienated by that kind of language.
While Marx's analysis of capitalism was spot on on some things(e.g that capital would become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands coming true through the growth of ever larger banks and companies) there are people of all classes and professions (and even ideologies) who are opposed to the Iraq war ,PFI etc and in favour of sensible alternatives.
Tony Benn was born an aristocrat but is a committed socialist and similarly there are working class thatcherites.
So i wouldn't write anyone off on the basis of class or profession (with some exceptions for profession - e.g arms companies and traders are unlikely to support arms export controls).
Even some millionaires and billionaires have some decency in them (e.g Branson, for all his imperfections is not nearly as bad as Murdoch for all that i'd like to see his rail firm renationalised along with the rest).
There's even one investment firm set up by charities and headed by a nun that buys shares in firms like Ford then puts pressure on them to treat their employees better.
So while i agree with you in general that this is the vast majority of the population against a small and extremely rich and powerful minority there are exceptions to every rule.
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