This is the Guardian Comment is Free I wrote yesterday, still running on its website today.
We need change now, Gordon
The Campaign Group had nothing to do with the coup attempt, but if Brown does not offer real change, I will back a challenge
About a month ago the weekly discussion meeting of the Campaign Group of MPs focused on the imminent electoral wipeout of Labour in the coming European and local council elections. We decided to write to Gordon Brown to seek a meeting with him to see whether any common ground could be found on the policy changes needed to win back support for the party. No response was received.
Over the following weeks we refused to be dragged into either the plotting to oust Brown or the positioning by others seeking to fill his shoes if he fell. Our line was straightforward – there's no point in changing the faces at the top if there is no change in political direction.
When I then learned that No 10 was briefing journalists that Campaign Group members were involved in the email plot calling for Brown to go, I wrote again to the prime minister requesting that his people desist from this covert briefing. I told him straight that allegations about our involvement in this backstage plotting were untrue and that whatever political differences we had with him they were always expressed openly and honestly. I got no reply.
Few realistically doubted that the prime minister would survive this half-hearted attempted putsch. Nevertheless at the parliamentary Labour party meeting on Monday a chastened Brown for the first time admitted to weaknesses and mistakes and assured Labour MPs that lessons had been learned and gave the strong impression that changes would follow with intensive discussions within the PLP and party, and that a raft of new policies would be announced.
Labour MPs have taken false comfort in the Tories not surging ahead in the percentage share of the vote, ignoring the role Ukip plays in siphoning off Tory votes in European elections that largely return to the Tories in general elections. They cling to the statistic that Cameron needs a 7% swing to win the next election, which has only been achieved twice in the last century, forgetting that they themselves were party to just such an achievement only 12 years ago.
On Wednesday the first of the policy announcements on constitutional reform produced typical Brown-like long-winded, turgid consultations and committees of inquiry, stretching well beyond the election and possibly into infinity.
If Labour is to stand any chance of surviving at the next election, real change has to be visibly under way and progress demonstrated at the latest by the autumn.
A consensus checklist of what constitutes real change is emerging from many sources. Securing jobs by intervening in manufacturing and restoring trade union rights; securing homes by a mass local authority house-building programme; stopping the squandering of public resources by ending the privatisation of public services; reasserting the government's green credentials with no third runway; for young people freezing, as the first step towards abolishing, student fees; for pensioners restoring the link between pensions and earnings; halting the attacks on welfare; paying for our programme by fair taxation and cutting out the waste on the likes of Trident renewal and ID cards; and making government ruthlessly clean, open and fair with immediate electoral reform.
Most of the policy changes are blindingly obvious and readily implementable to re-establish our credentials with each section of the broad coalition that enthusiastically ensured the rout of the Tories and Labour's election in 1997.
These all seem straightforward, sensible and popular. But what happens if Brown refuses to contemplate real change? If we go beyond November without real change visibly under way, what hope is left of Labour not only remaining in government but also surviving as an effective political force at all?
At that stage the only responsible act in the long-term interests of our movement would be to offer a real change in political direction by mounting a challenge to the political leadership of the party and letting the members of the party decide. Let me give notice now that this is the path I will take. If this route is blocked again by MPs failing to nominate, then the alternative is Labour MPs making it clear at the next election that they stand on a policy platform of real change as "change candidates".
Of course, they will be standing as Labour candidates but binding together as a slate of candidates committed within Labour to advocating a change programme, setting out the policy programme they will be advocating as a group and supporting in parliament if elected. Only in this way can we demonstrate to the supporters that want to come home to Labour that there is the hope and prospect of change.
17 Comments:
I hope that The Labour Party will see sense and implement policies that help people, not abandon them. I lost my permanent job almost a year ago and since have only had 2 short term contracts with no help from the government (which flies in the face of all the spin). I wish there was more like-minded MP's like John.
Eddie
I've been saying for a while that I think the (General) Election is already lost not helped by the fact that the BBC seem to have swallowed the Conservative's assumption of the past few years that they would be able to "make it back" as they say in Top Gun (much more fun to watch tonight than keeping up with domestic news! - though it's now time for Backstory on CNN which you should all watch if you want to see what's behind the news...). Anyway John's solutions are all good in that at teh end of the day someone has to be leader though they will need an amount of like-minded MPs/candidates also..derek Simpson of my union UNITE told it like it is (people are more worried about losing their jobs/repossessions etc than the miserly possible concessions Brown might make on electoral reform etc!)on Newsnight which I did catch the other night and we need to speak in this way to people. I don't think Brown will ever get it will he?
Anyway technology marches forward and the internet was much used by the opponents in teh iranian elections I was just hearing. AS well as Facebook and MySpace we must use Twitter.
We should also not type lazily and use good grammar as Dorothy pointed out!
Frank Field yesterday on Any Questions, About 36 minutes in..
"I think the position is much more serious than the panel's let on tonight"
"My worry is that the money markets, the debt market, will not support this weight of debt.... if that happens then the collapse comes very very quickly. Because the day the debt is not being shifted its reported back to the government, and the government have to make decisions before the markets open at something like 8 o'clock the next morning, and we will then have cuts, undreamt of now as panic measures"
The level of debt the Country is in, is endangering it's very survival on the International Markets.
Frank is one of the few ex min isters from the Government I have time for. He was sacked by Blair for his forthright views and no doubt the BBC will have marked him down as a trouble maker.
Whatever direction the Party is to be guided towards must note that action has to be taken to reduce this debt, if that means pain for the Public Services then probably better now than much worse later. We can rebuild when the public finances are once again stable.
Never again must any Government be allowed to fuel an economic boom on the back of unsustainable asset values. Correction not only did Gordon Brown allow it he encouraged it.
That man has betrayed us all.I admire his vision on the eradication of child poverty and a fairer system but he has gone completely the wrong way in trying to deliver that.
I'm wondering at what point you, John, and your colleagues, realise that to stay in a Party like this one is wasting your life and the life of the country.
We only live once, you're acting like our life-spans are about twice as long as they actually are.
We've known since the mid-90s what Blair, Brown, Mandelson, and Campbell stood for.
When are you going to stop the useless words, and start the useful actions?
Your policy changes aren't radical enough either. We don't just want 'electoral reform' (a meaningless, deliberately vague phrase), we want a total revolution.
And I'm not misusing the word 'revolution' either.
We, the majority of the country, the mainstream, the ordinary, the middle-of-the road, want a revolution.
Do you get it yet?
Anyone can get behind ruthless openness for government, and I'd love to see the end of "safe seats" and those annoying graphs that come out every election saying "that party can't win here". I also can't see the point of "buying nukes so we can get rid of them". I'm also cool with the "pay for civil support/education by taxing the rich" side of things too. And we now have an opportunity to finally do that what with the tax havens slowly deflating.
So far so agreeing, but I have my differences:
I quite like the current welfare system, but I would like to see it shift towards "what can you do". Imagine what would happen if we turned incapacity assessments from justifying your illness to creating a specification for prospective employers. That would make such a difference to people with mental problems, as instead of saying how useless you are every month, instead you would be imagining things you can do and how to cope with it. Way more positive.
But I'm not sure what you mean by interfering in manufacturing. Are you talking about things like proact here in wales? I certainly wouldn't support paying to make things people don't want. It seems acutely pointless!
And I like unions; I'm always encouraging my friend to talk to his union rep when he gets an injust deal of things, but surely they are already working? Doing strikes when things get stupid, talking to people, bargaining etc. So to me any extra powers would need to be justified by something more than "that's how it used to be".
Plus you haven't mentioned how you'd deal with the people scared about the debt of the country. I heard part of that new labour thing was being radical while still keeping the conservatives on side, and that will be tricky. I suspect that the strange way Gordon has been behaving on the runway and on planning has something to do with that very calculation. His method is failing, but you will need a replacement.
The simplest one, if it works, is just to wap up the top rate of tax and match all spending to inflation until you pay the loan off. But I suspect that it's not as simple as that!
I second the call for revolution. All the means of production should be under workers control and ownership. Parliament set ablaze.
Capitalism is one hundred years out of date. The whole system is rotten, and the people are finally waking upto the FACT.
June 17, 2009
"GEAB N° 36 is available! Global systemic crisis in summer 2009: The cumulative impact of three « rogue waves »"...
"(1) Not even the « jobless recovery » many experts are trying to make us believe in. In the United States, United Kingdom, Eurozone and Japan, it is a « recoveryless recovery » we must expect, i.e. a pure invention aimed at convincing US and UK insolvent consumers to start buying again and keeping US T-Bonds’ and UK Gilts’ country purchasers waiting as long as possible (until they decide that there is really no future selling their products to the lands of the US Dollar and British Pound."...
http://tinyurl.com/metdxs
This is what happens when we listen to ultra right fools like the austrian school of economics.They have got us into a right mess.
Working people in this country need to take notice of the French workers. The French won't allow right wing governments push them around and neither should we here.
I think all workers in this country should down tools as part of a general strike against the right wing establishment in this country.
To hell with the anti-trade union laws, the workers and ordinary people in this country have the real power and if we only used it we could grab these self-serving right wingers by the balls.
It is time the unions stopped being so timid and toothless and started getting tough with the new labour government and the tories. Action is needed, direct, focussed and effective.
John : From Monday to Wednesday the Commons discusses the various stages of the 2nd Reading of the Parliamentary Standards Bill. Have a glance at an alternative approach to putting the expenses scandal to rest, here -
http://threescoreyearsandten.blogspot.com/2009/06/my-submission-on-mps-expenses.html
I faced raised this approach with the Nolan Committee back in 1995 -
http://threescoreyearsandten.blogspot.com/2009/06/i-told-them-so-14-years-ago.html
Oh anonymous you silly boy... we haven't had a free market system. Reagan introduced over 30 different protectionist trade measures, and 22 tarrifs against external trade!!! NOT EXACTLY FREE MARKET IS IT YOU DUMB FUCKFACED SHITHEAD.
All of you boneheads preaching Marxism should fuck off to North Korea. If you hate capitalism so much, why the fuck do you use the internet? It is provided for you by a BIG BUSINESS. You pay that big business to provide a service!!! SUPPLY AND DEMAND YOU FUCKERS!!!!!! MARKET FORCES!!!!
The bullying anti-semitic wanker who owns this blog still fails to answer my questions, and his equally wankish wanker followers of his ''word'' have never once answered my questions. I shouldn't be too surprised to find socialists are thicker than a sick pig's shit.
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