Labour Party

Alan Johnson, a prominent Blairite in the 1997-2010 governments and Shadow Chancellor until January 2011, has re-raised the call for the union voice in the Labour Party to be reduced. In an interview with the right-wing Labour magazine Progress, Johnson denounced union leaders as "fat, white, finger-jabbing blokes on rostrums shouting and screaming". He himself is a white bloke, not too slim, and he has been happy enough with "finger-jabbing" and "shouting and screaming" as long as it is directed at militant trade unionists. He proposes that the trade unions should be cut down from 50% of the...

The AGM of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (CLPD) on 23 February in London approved a plan for a "Charter for a Democratic [Labour Party] Conference". Noting that at present delegates get only 18% of the conference time for their debates, the charter demands that they should get at least 50%. It also demands an end to the present array of obstacles to submitting motions or rule-change proposals and getting them debated, and the right for conference to vote on National Policy Forum documents in parts. The Charter will be discussed further at the next CLPD Executive, on 23 March, but I...

According to Labour leader Ed Miliband, speaking on 14 February: “Over the last three decades or so, less than 15 pence of every additional pound Britain has made has gone to an entire half of the population... 24 pence in every pound has gone to the top 1 per cent of earners”. Inequality soared under the Tories, continued to increase under Blair and Brown, and is zooming under the coalition. The policies Ed Miliband proposed in that speech would come nowhere near reversing that trend. “We would tax houses worth over £2 million... We would... reintroduce a lower 10 pence starting rate of tax...

This week Manchester City Council’s executive committee meets to discuss the proposed budget for 2013. Included in the discussions are plans to close our local library and swimming pool here in Levenshulme, Manchester. We had a community planning meeting, attended by more than 60 people and four local councillors. During the meeting Julie Reid, councillor for Gorton South, said “over our dead bodies will we let these pools close”. Julie Reid represents one of the poorest areas in Europe, where child poverty, unemployment and poor health are high. Manchester has been named the child poverty...

Tim Thomas previews Ken Loach’s new documentary, The Spirit of ’45. Ken Loach’s documentary, to be released in March, is probably not going to be seen at your local cinema. You are more likely to be offered Sylvester Stallone in Bullet to the Head (two stars and totally worthless). Spirit of ’45 should be shown in every cinema in the land but it won’t be; you can maybe catch it on Film Four. You might guess the reason why! The production team (Sixteen Films) are letting groups book it for public film showings. Getting this film shown depends on you. It is a film about the General Election of...

Manchester Labour councillors Julie Reid and Aftab Ahmed have said they will vote against the City Council’s cuts budget. Other councillors may also vote against, and some will abstain. The spending cuts in Manchester mean not only a further 900 council jobs to go — 2,000 had been cut last year — but also the closure of five swimming pools, six libraries, and a Council Tax rise of 3.7%. Our city had already been hit with a £170m government funding cut. we now face a further £80m of government funding cuts for 2013. Top all this off with the changes to the benefits system, Bedroom Taxes...

Entire local services could close in many part of the UK, taking hundreds of jobs with them, as councils seek to make further budget cuts in 2013. Southampton City Council plans to cut nearly 300 jobs and close their entire youth and play service, as well as the council’s only remaining children’s care home. Newcastle City Council’s cuts plan will see 10 libraries close, its entire arts funding programme abolished, the closure of the youth and play service, and many other cuts, amounting to over 1,000 job losses. North East Lincolnshire Council’s cuts average out to a £150 per person reduction...

The attack on the Egyptian Revolutionary Socialists member Taha Magdy poses in a most brutal fashion the failure of the strategic orientation over many years of the SWP, which has influenced the Revolutionary Socialists. In The Prophet and the Proletariat (1994) the late SWP leader Chris Harman argued: “The left has made two mistakes in relation to the Islamists in the past. The first has been to write them off as fascists, with whom we have nothing in common. The second has been to see them as ‘progressives’ who must not be criticised...” Harman concluded that revolutionary socialists should...

The late Ralph Miliband made his name as a Marxist theoretician through detailed elaboration of the proposition that the Labour Party can do absolutely nothing for the working class. His two boys, or so the lefty joke has it, have very loyally done their best to prove the old man right. Now it looks as if Ed is trying to vindicate his father’s analysis of Britain’s royal family as well. On p.189 of his 1973 book, The State in Capitalist Society, Ralph displayed a sophisticated understanding of how the bourgeoisie utilises the House of Windsor for its own ideological ends: “The unifying and...

If Southampton’s new Labour council fails to make cuts as required by the coalition government, then, says Mike Tucker ( Solidarity 266), “commissioners will come in and run the council”, and after that “the Conservatives could come back into power”. Under the Local Government Act 1999 s.15(6), Eric Pickles, as the minister, can personally or through “a person nominated by him” take over “a specified function of the authority” if he is satisfied that the council is failing to make “arrangements to secure continuous improvement in the way in which its functions are exercised, having regard to a...