Labour Party

Westminster University was the venue for the The Labour Finance and Industry Group (LFIG) Labour leadership hustings on 25 August. A full capacity of over 300 academic folk looked on as the Miliband brothers and Ed Balls regurgitated their finely orchestrated rhetoric. Before the speeches an introduction by LFIG was given which couldn’t have been less “socialist” in sentiment: “One of the failures of the left is the emphasis which should be put on the need to produce. We see production just as important as distribution,” said the LFIGer. This statement is so far off the mark that is just isn’t...

Gordon Brown responded to the launch of Tony Blair's autobiography by announcing that he will spend his time on unpaid work for good causes. As the press reported, this was “widely seen as a side-swipe at the millionaire lifestyle of Tony Blair”. Brown still gets £66,000 a year as an MP. He is touting for trade as a paid public speaker to rich audiences, and will put the revenues in the bank account of a specially set up company from which he can draw in later years. For “good causes” he will be working with people like the Queen of Jordan. By New Labour standards, all this seems proletarian...

As the Labour leadership contest drew to an end David Miliband worked hard to distance himself from Tony Blair — Blair personally, more than the New Labour government. But it was all deeply unconvincing. In an interview with the Independent (29 August) Miliband accused David Cameron of thinking up policy by way of “positioning”, rather than by deciding what was good for the country. Ironically this is precisely what Miliband did in the rest of the interview. Miliband’s attempt to distance himself from Blair involved little more than a shameless rationalisation and vacuous rebranding of himself...

So the dictionary says. And now the incongruous career of former Blair backroom boy Jon Cruddas as a supposed hero of the unions and Labour democracy should come to an end. In 2007, Cruddas was backed for deputy leader by the big Unite union, and puffed himself as the candidate who would "reconnect" Labour with its working-class base. He has worked closely with the semi-left-ish Labour pressure group Compass, which claims ten thousand members. Now Cruddas has backed David Miliband for Labour leader, saying that David Miliband is like "Tony Blair at his best... fantastic from 1994 to 2001". It...

At last year's Labour Party conference, the leadership promised an all-up-for-grabs review of Labour Party structure and the undemocratic changes pushed through by Tony Blair in 1997 ("Partnership in Power"). The review is due to be launched at this year's Labour conference, starting on 26 September in Manchester. But no specifics are available, even to members of Labour's National Executive. The record of the front-running contenders for Labour leader, and a series of undemocratic manipulations already under way for the Manchester conference, warn us that unless the unions and the local...

From the CLPD newsletter : In summer 2007, shortly after he became Leader, Gordon Brown submitted a document (‘Extending and Renewing Party Democracy’) to the NEC recommending a number of changes to Annual Conference procedures. Both the NEC and later Annual Conference accepted these changes. The main thrust of these proposals was to replace ‘Contemporary Motions’ by ‘Contemporary Issues’. Before the advent of New Labour, every CLP and Union could send motions and amendments to Conference and the whole agenda of Conference largely revolved around these motions. Tony Blair changed all that...

Ballot papers for the Labour Party’s leadership election were sent out on Wednesday 1 September. As the contest reached its last stages, Tony Blair, while promoting his memoirs, intervened to defend (his) New Labour record and implicitly to back David Miliband over his brother Ed. Blair fears that Labour in opposition could be pushed to the left. He thinks David Miliband becoming leader could stop that. For once Tony Blair is not wrong. If David Miliband becomes leader it will galvanise those suited careerists in the Labour party and unions who think with fondness about New Labour political...

Ed Miliband, writing for a Fabian Society round-table of leadership contenders, has called for Labour to “escape” from the “comfort zone” of Blairism. The motivation for this call comes from Labour’s defeat. Although the core vote held up better than expected — especially in the north of England — the data shows a more detailed and worrying picture. Miliband writes that “Five million votes were lost by Labour between 1997 and 2010, for every one voter that Labour lost from the professional classes ... we lost three voters among the poorest, those on benefits and the low paid ... Add in skilled...

In 1972, the Tory government told local councils to implement the “Housing Finance Act”, designed to claw in a bit of extra money by increasing council tenant's rents. The context was in some ways similar to that of today – an aggressively pro-profit, anti-worker Tory government seeking to make working-class people pay for economic instability created by capitalism itself. There was significant working-class resistance to the Act, with several Labour councils initially stating that they would refuse to implement it. We reproduce below articles from Workers' Fight (the paper of the forerunner...

The AWL’s national committee thought we should argue for a critical vote for Diane Abbott in the Labour leadership contest. But not everyone agrees. “We should propagandise for a spoilt ballot” No-one in the AWL is claiming Abbott to be a decent or even passable candidate. We recognise her candidacy was in some way a buffer to stop a serious class-fighter like John McDonnell getting on the ballot. But we over-estimate any advantages in using her candidacy as a propaganda tool; and she doesn’t talk about the things we use as reasons to support her. One of the main arguments in her favour in...