There’s so much defeatism around, and it wasn’t helped by Gordon Brown’s capitulation to the cuts agenda at the TUC Conference rather than fighting on how a crisis caused by the bankers’ greed should be handled (i.e. by switching public funding from propping up the banks to major public investment programmes aimed at massive job creation, and making the banks liable in due course to repay taxpayers’ money spent on bailing them out). Maybe New Labour has thrown in the towel, but as we approach an election in which once again all three main political parties appear to be united in opposition to the British people, there is an overriding need to promote and fight for an alternative manifesto – one which Labour would always have supported in the past – and which could still save the Labour Party from virtual extinction and the country from gratuitous disaster. Such a manifesto or charter would have 6 main points.

Even at this very late stage the promulgation of half a dozen key objectives could set the desultory Labour campaign alight and provide the inspiration to fire the enthusiasm of Labour voters otherwise resigned to defeat:
* The banks should be strictly regulated (i) to enforce high levels of lending to businesses and homeowners (currently stagnant) to head off rising unemployment, (ii) to prevent bankers’ greed and recklessness generating another financial collapse in future, and (iii) to make the banks repay the public funds expended on bailing them out,
* Massive swingeing cuts in public sector pay and services should be abandoned in favour of a huge public investment programme in housing, construction and infrastructure as the best way to steadily reduce the budget deficit by getting people off benefits and into work, when by contrast big cuts now will simply push the precarious recovery into a double-dip recession,
* Privatisation and de-regulation, which lie at the heart of this crisis, should be ended and the role of the State should be expanded where the market has clearly failed, not only in health and education, but in aspects of housing, pensions, energy, transport, banking (including the proposed Postbank), and in strengthened regulation of the private sector to achieve social and environmental objectives currently neglected or marginalised,
* Reduction of the budget deficit should be assisted by abandoning ineffective, wasteful or unnecessary public expenditure programmes (including Trident, ID cards, and massively costly government IT databases) and by redistribution to make the super-rich pay their fair share in taxes and to reduce indefensible levels of inequality,
* The most vulnerable sections of society should be shielded from being made the victims of an economic slump for which they are in no way responsible by having their income protected (a higher minimum wage and safeguarded pensions), their employment rights at work strengthened, and the rapid expansion of social housing provision made a top priority.

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