What we need to do to win the next election.
(Tribune, 2 March 2007)
Perhaps if we continue as we are, we can still win the next election, although the latest Guardian opinion poll putting labour at 29% and the Tories at 42% suggests otherwise. What is incontrovertible is that we are hugely more likely to win if we now make the big changes necessary to win back the four million votes and half our membership that we have lost since 1997. That is why I am standing for the Labour Party leadership.
If elected, I would first speed up our withdrawal from Iraq, taking the advice of our own military commanders in Basra, not of the Bush Administration in Washington. We have been America’s puppet for too long; we need an independent foreign policy dictated by our own interests, not the US. We should be using whatever political clout remains to us to initiate a multilateral peace conference of all the main actors in the Middle East to negotiate a joint settlement of all the main outstanding issues together which from experience cannot be resolved one by one. That must include the future of Iraq, a Palestinian State, an international guarantee of Israel’s security along roughly its 1967 borders and a negotiated settlement with Iran not a military one . I would strongly reject, and give no support whatever to a US or Israeli attack on Iran.
Domestically, I would reverse the “new” Labour obsessions of replacing the public service ethos by the market. Equity, equal rights according to need, public accountability, a professional standard of care and integrity are being replaced by targets, cost cutting, PFI top slicing of public expenditure, a service fragmentation by private interests. This is the case of health and education housing, pensions, probation, rail, the Post Office and local government. There are even threats against public service broadcasting. Privatisation of our public services should be stopped and reversed.
Britain is now a more unequal society than under Margaret Thatcher. The average pay of chief executives of the FTSE top 100 companies, at over £46,000 a week is now 250 times the minimum wage – 500 times the state pension. Such grotesque divisions between rich and poor are known to generate much of the social pathology currently afflicting Britain –violence, worse health among poorer families, lower life expectancy, and higher teenage birth rates. I would raise the national minimum wage quickly to £6 an hour and then soon to £7 an hour. I would also establish a pay commission to advise what would be a fair ratio between top and bottom pay, bearing in mind that wealth creation is not an individual achievement but a team effort, so that any further increases in pay at the top would draw up the pay of those beneath.
I also want a government which listens to the party and the electorate, consults and does not disregard the results when they are inconvenient and respects conference decisions - or at least, if it loses the vote, sets up a joint body made up of members of the National Executive Committee and the sponsors of the resolution to flesh out a compromise. I want to see the Party chair elected by the party, not appointed by the PM and accountable exclusively to the party in conveying the opinion of the membership within the Cabinet.
I want a Government that genuinely treats planet survival as the greatest threat to human survival and the biggest challenge facing the world. That means making tackling climate change an absolute priority not only in energy policy, but in transport, industry, agriculture, building standards, public expenditure and foreign policy. Industry and power generation should be required annually to lower their greenhouse gas emissions while individual households should be allocated, according to their size and structure, an equal carbon allowance for all their activities including air and car travel.
Civil employment rights need to be strengthened. The balance of power in industry is very unfairly tilted against working people. I would want workers to have employment rights from the start of their job, to have rights in smaller companies below the current threshold of 20 employees to have a right of reinstatement where a tribunal rules for them in a dispute, to have equal rights where they are part time or agency workers, to be able to gain union recognition rights on the basis of a 50% vote, not on the basis of having also to win 40% of the eligible vote (on which criteria no post war government would ever have been elected).
There are so many other issues too where I would change the Government’s present course. But none is more important immediately than Trident. This would cost some £65 billion when even the MOD admits there is no foreseeable enemy against whom it might be needed. It is not an independent British nuclear deterrent. Getting the kit from the US would make us politically subservient to them again for the next 30-40 years, a price I would not pay. Replacing Trident would breach the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and act as a trigger to nuclear proliferation among the 40 countries (not just Iran) now technologically capable of producing nuclear weapons.
Peace, social justice, climate survival – these are the issues I am determined to put centre stage for the left.
