Michael Meacher MP

As the nomination period for the Labour Leadership contest ends with David Miliband taking 165 CLP nominations to his brother’s 147 with the others far behind, and the prospect of a new era opens up, one sentence reported from the Mandelson memoirs came forcibly to mind about why this hadn’t happened long before – namely that the members of the Brown Cabinet knew for at least 18 months before the election that Labour was headed for a bad defeat, and likely a catastrophe, but believed they could do nothing about it.   Why not?   That says it all about the state of today’s Labour Party. (more…)

Diane Abbott’s squeezing past the post with the required 33 nominations just minutes before the 12.30pm deadline today is greatly to be welcomed.   Even a week ago when her tally was still confined to low single figures, it seemed impossible.   What made it possible was two unexpected events. (more…)

The Ed Miliband leadership bid announced today is a welcome alternative to his brother’s attempt to drag us back into the Blairite cul-de-sac.   If there is one certain message from the election, it’s that New Labour is now not only dead but buried, and for an unabashed Blairite like David Miliband to propose to draft the course of Labour’s renewal when Blairism is the cause of its demise is absurd.   Ed however has to prove himself.   Ed earned himself points at his tenure at Environment through his opposition to the third runway, his handling of the Copenhagen climate change summit, and his introduction of the rather arcane but very important feed-in tariffs (though rather less so for his advocacy of a nuclear power revival).   But he has so far showed no indication of his stance on the major issues of political and economic contention.

He now has to do so, and not with the camouflage of progressive waffle with which his brother launched his bid.   There are several searching questions to be answered: (more…)

As the race (amble?) for the Labour Party leadership gets under way, the composition of the new PLP is beginning to come into focus.   The PLP accounts for a third of the electoral college and any intending candidate must secure public signatures from at least an eighth of all its members (therefore 32 in the present case) in order to be officially confirmed as a candidate.   This matters when last time round the Left was unable to challenge Gordon Brown for the leadership because the selection system for parliamentary candidates had been so bent and manipulated to favour the preferred candidates for the Establishment for the 1997, 2001 and 2005 elections that there weren’t even 45 PLP members (the relevant number then) who were willing to sign up to a Left candidate.

This time round the figures are slightly (but not much) more favourable for a Left challenge.    Preliminary analysis of the PLP suggests there are some 40 Left-leaning MPs (out of the total of 251), about 160 Right-wing (Blairite, Brownite or simply loyalist), plus a further 50 new Labour MPs whose affiliations are not yet precisely known.   At the last election a week ago about 80 Centre-Right members either stood down or lost their seats, plus about 10 Left members.   What this analysis indicates is that a Left challenger, even if one did emerge, would only get a low percentage of PLP votes, but could get a much higher tally of CLP and union votes. (more…)

So Gordon Brown has now bowed to the inevitable, and after all the indignity and humiliations heaped on him by a poisonous right-wing press and hostile polls, we should respect both his past resilience against all the odds and now the dignity of his going.   It was clearly the right decision to stand down to pave the way for the root-and-branch renewal of Labour which is now so urgently needed.

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With a Tory-LibDem deal still uncertain, what are the priorities for the Labour Party?   The New Labour programme having been clearly rejected at the polls, what now is needed is a progressive renewal for Labour which will revive party enthusiasm and potentially offer majority electoral support.   (more…)

With plans for a Cabinet coup on Friday now being openly discussed in the media, what should those who genuinely have the real interests of Labour at heart be using the opportunity to achieve?   It’s being mooted that the Cabinet, using the ‘permanent unavailability’ rule in Labour’s Rule Book, would elect a temporary successor, to be endorsed by Conference in September, in order to engage in any negotiations that may take place with other parties.   (more…)

The latest media take on this election is that some major subterranean disturbance has occurred deep below the political surface, only nobody will be sure what it is until too late.   It really isn’t that difficult, if only our over-paid and often rather lazy media would look in the right direction and not avert their eyes from what is painfully obvious.   Sadly they won’t do that because it challenges their, as well as the politicians’, comfort zone.

It isn’t of course one mysterious thing that’s gone wrong, but a steady build-up in disillusionments.   And it’s pretty clear what they are: (more…)

The expulsion of Byers, Hewitt and Hoon is entirely justified  – and necessary  – when indeed nobody has done more to bring the Labour Party into disrepute (the grounds for expulsion under the party’s rules) than they have.      But the implications go far deeper.   We are witnessing the final denouement of what was infamously called New Labour.   The Blairite version never had a distinctive ideology of its own apart from taking over the Thatcherite one it inherited.   It was simply a power project from start to finish, and now its underlying motivations of self-interest, money-making and power manipulation have been nakedly revealed, reinforcing ever more strongly earlier examples from the Derek Draper ‘lobbygate’ scandal, the policy for sale exposed by the Ecclestone affair, the peerages for major donors to Labour’s 2005 election, and the Labour peers last year who offered to assist in amending legislation in exchange for substantial payment. (more…)

Ed Miliband has been tasked by Gordon Brown to take responsibility for preparing Labour’s manifesto for the coming election and has invited contributions and advice from within the party for this purpose. Some 45 Labour MPs, supported by dozens of Constituency parties and trade unionists, as well as Compass and the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, are now launching a Coalition for a Labour Victory based on a radical redistributive programme which we believe will resonate with Labour voters whose loyalties have been strained. We are therefore pressing Ed Miliband to focus Labour’s campaigning for the election around the following 5 key principles:
1 The recession should be tackled, not with cuts in essential public spending, but by a massive public investment programme in job creation in house-building, infrastructure improvement, public services, and the new green digital economy, in order steadily to reduce the deficit by getting people off dependence on benefit and into work paying tax, national insurance contributions and VAT.
2 Banks should be split up with their casino investment arms hived off. Publicly-owned retail banks should be required to meet new social and community objectives and support manufacturing, with lending to businesses and homeowners restored to 2007 levels. Pay and bonuses should be tightly regulated.
In addition there are 3 other key policy priorities:

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Gordon Brown’s twisting and turning in his speech today on social mobility and the middle class shows that last week’s coup against him wasn’t such a farce after all. It actually succeeded in forcing him to change policy direction and left him isolated against a revival of the Blairite ultras. No more talk now of Labour investment versus Tory cuts, no more talk of a tax on bank profits (like Obama’s levy to recoup bail-out costs), nothing now about a ‘core vote strategy’ aimed to help working class voters. Now the talk is all about ‘an expanded middle class’, social mobilityis social justice, and “a genuine meritocracy”. The change of tone and policy focus is unmistakeable.
The Blairite Right in the Cabinet have snuffed out the first glimmerings of Labour social democracy that have emerged in the last few weeks for the first time in 12 years, and the emphasis is now back again on public spending cuts as the first priority, as both Mandelson and Darling have immediately made clear. It’s still a core vote strategy, but this time Middle England is the core vote which has always been Blairism in its purest form. If Labour goes down at the election, it won’t just be Brown who’s responsible; it will be the whole New Labour fixation on the better-off and indifference to the lower-income, struggling working class half of the population who have been forced to the conclusion that Labour doesn’t represent them any more.

It’s refreshing to see Ed Miliband insisting that Labour can still win the battle of ideas. It shouldn’t be too difficult since the Tories haven’t produced any – apart from confirming (as Cameron did again today) that they would make much bigger spending cuts much quicker. But I was disappointed the Miliband article didn’t actually offer any new ideas, merely a set of aspirations that nobody would disagree with. It really isn’t good enough to say, as Ed Miliband does:
“Nor is it easy to find anyone in our party who believes we should be just for Labour’s heartlands or only for middle England”. Absolutely, but what exactly are the fresh and striking new ideas that are going to enthuse Labour’s working class and middle class base? Is it making the bankers pay for the economic crash they caused rather than the victims, our voters, and if so, how? Is it reducing the unfairness in society which now grates on so many now that inequality has gone stratospheric, and if so, how? Is it building the affordable housing that 1.8 million on the council waiting lists are crying out for? Is it creating a million jobs – a Green New Deal – to shorten the jobless queues, and if so, how? That’s just a sample of the questions that need answering. People need specifics.

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So Geoff Hoon has thrown in the towel. He saysrather plaintively that ” I accept that we made that opportunity and we don’t appear to have succeeded”. He can say that again. But what H&H don’t appear to have understood is that the problem isn’t the leadership – that’s been settled – it’s the policies. They’ve got to be made a lot more appealing, not only to Labour voters, but to all those who are fed up with the way the bankers are getting away with it, with the failure to tackle rising unemployment head-on, with the desperate shortage of housing which is causing acute hardship to millions, with the indifference to sharply rising inequality which is entrenching poverty ever more cruelly, and with the continual prioritising of the market over public need – all things which one would expect of the tories, not of Labour. In a speech I made yesterday in the HouseI emphasised strongly that the black hole in the Pre-Budget Report was not the opaqueness over cuts, as the tories kept shouting about, but the failure to focus on a major public investment programme in job creation in housebuilding, infrastructure, and the a new green digital economy.

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So, is Mr. Kaminski an anti-Semite or is he not? Not the most important question in the world, but one with surprising resonance in the current British political scene. David Miliband denounced this leader of the far-right group in the EU Parliament, to which the Tories have allied themselves, as a neo-Nazi extremist in order to smear the Tories with associating with Jew-baiters and even Holocaust deniers. It now emerges that Kaminski was indeed in his youth a member of the far-right National Revival of Poland party, but that he left it as a teenager and over recent decades has, according to the impeccable witness of the chief Rabbi of Poland, been friendly and supportive towards Israel and the Jewish cause in general. Nor, rather contrary to Miliband’s allegations, would the party he now leads in Poland, according to the chief Rabbi, be regarded as in any way extremist. The New Labour spin machine appears to have been caught out in the act of manipulating the evidence in order to defame its opponents. Nor is this the first time in a long shot that its spinning has got badly out of control.

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As with most conferences, so it has been in this last week at Brighton – it’s what is not said and what’s going on beneath the surface that is more interesting and relevant than what is said amd what is most visible. The Labour conference took a great deal further the underlying shifts in power that were already becoming apparent, away from the monolithic Blairite power imperium to a much more open social democratic party. Already the Government had been forced to drop the part-privatisation of the Royal Mail, to re-start Council housebuilding after a 12-year veto, and to tax the super-rich (albeit modestly). Now two crucial procedural changes have been achieved this week which together will once again turn Conference into a serious decision-making forum, not a leadership cult rally – essential for re-founding a democratic socialist Labour Party. One is that delegates will next year regain the right, which Gordon Brown took away two years ago, to submit motions which are debated and voted on on the floor of Conference, thereby securing once again the capacity to influence the policy of the leadership which is the essential condition of a democratic party. The second is that in future representatives to the party’s key National Policy Forum will be elected by all the membership (160,000), not restricted to a tiny number of Conference delegates (400). This is a much more open way of influencing policy, and should radicalise the motions coming before the NEC and Conference for debate.

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