Labour Party

Pulling together the left after 6 May

Pete Firmin is a Communication Workers Union activist and joint secretary of the Labour Representation Committee. He talked to Solidarity about the conference. "After the Election, Join the Resistance", which has been planned by LRC for 15 May (from 10:30 at ULU, Malet St, London), and is co-sponsored by the Socialist Campaign to Stop the Tories and Fascists and other groups. We're hoping the conference brings together activists from the unions, from within the Labour Party, from other struggles, against the war in Afghanistan and so on. We'll be in a new political situation after the election...

"The ultimate fulfilment of the New Labour mission"?

"The ultimate fulfilment of the New Labour mission." BBC political reporter Nick Robinson says : "That is how one senior Labour figure described... the prospect of a Lib/Lab deal in the event of a hung Parliament". According to Patrick Wintour in the Guardian of 20 April : "Beneath the dispute is a concern that some figures are using Labour's campaign as a vehicle to bring about the formation of a progressive coalition between Labour and the Liberal Democrats. "Some cabinet members were deeply concerned..." In the late 1990s, as Blair pushed through his "coup" in the Labour Party, it was often...

The Walsall by-election of 1976

In November 1976 the IS (which the next month would change its name to SWP) stood a candidate in the Walsall North by-election. The article below, from Workers' Action no.29 of 9 September 1976, presents the reasons why the majority in the AWL (then called I-CL) advocated a Labour rather than an IS vote in that by-election, and our arguments against a minority in the I-CL who wanted to back IS. IS/SWP had recently become the strongest grouping on the would-be revolutionary left. The "Healyite" WRP/ SLL had just switched to drawing money from Arab states and the PLO to sustain its daily paper...

Who is Ed Balls?

Ed Balls has been the Labour MP for Normanton since the 2005 general election. His elevation to the Labour Cabinet (in 2007 as the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families) could have been his reward for being Gordon Brown’s adviser from 1994 to 1999 and chief economic adviser to the Treasury from 1999 to 2004. In the latter post Oxford and Harvard-educated Balls was called the “most powerful unelected person in Britain”. For nine months between 2004 and 2005 Balls was employed by the Smith Institute, Gordon Brown’s favourite political think tank. His renumeration was reported to...

Labour Party: bringing people back on a principled basis

To judge from the official manifesto, Labour appears to have learned some lessons about the last thirteen years. But not enough. The manifesto fails to make a challenge to the financial system. It leaves the banks in private hands, free to start the casino economy again. It maintains a taxation system that allows the rich to escape the cost of maintaining public services. It continues to allow privatisation of our public services. We have seen a lot of anti-immigrant coverage in the press in recent days. I am fearful that comments by both Labour and Tories on immigration are playing into the...

The unions control Labour? If only that were true!

The Tories have used the BA dispute, and the membership of BA workers in the Unite union, to depict the Labour Party as a “prisoner” of the trade unions. Their campaign is being supported by right-wing papers like the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail, with the latter publishing an “expose” of a supposed Communist Party plot to take control of the Labour Party and the government. They say Unite is controlled by the Communist Party. The Lib Dems have also chimed in, with shadow chancellor Vince Cable using his 29 March TV debate with Alistair Darling and George Osborne to attack Labour for being...

John McDonnell says: probe links between the top of New Labour and big business!

After the Byers-Hoon-Hewitt affair, there should be a wider investigation into the links between Labour ministers and big business. I have seen evidence again and again of a revolving-door relation between the aviation industry, for example, and government, both in Number Ten and the Department of Transport. Positions in Number Ten and the Department of Transport are populated by people who either come from the aviation industry, or are on their way to jobs in the industry. An unhealthy relation between Labour front-benchers, and their top advisers and officials, and big business, started in...

New Labour, inequality and class

Published February 2010 “Harriet Harman puts class at heart of election battle,” shouted the Guardian front page on 20 January, while the 21 January Telegraph proclaimed “Harriet Harman reopens class war with speech on inequality”. What prompted all this? Harman had given a speech to the left-Blairite pressure group Compass, in which she said: “Since 1997, we have stopped the trend of rising inequality and have made good progress on tackling inequality and improving people’s lives through focussed Government intervention. But we inherited a vast legacy of inequality which dated back to a...

Can the left ever unite?

What Is the Bolshevik-Trotskyist Tradition? Our Fragmented Tradition Unite the Left? The Left and Left Unity In the Perspective of History (1998) The Road to Left Unity (1999) Unity? The Left Must Reorientate!(1999) Can the Left Unite? (1998) Left Unity? Yes. But Why Is the Left Divided Now? Unite the Rational Left to Stop the Fascists Socialist Alliance Ended: We Still Need Left Unity! Left Unity: the SWP Presents Its Left Unity Initiative (2009)

The "Socialist Campaign for a Labour Victory": British Trotskyists face the Tory threat in the 1979 general election

[This interview on the 1978-9 "Socialist Campaign for Labour Victory" appeared in International Communist magazine, a forerunner of "Solidarity", number 9, August 1978. Socialist Unity was a vehicle for the IMG (today's successor: Socialist Resistance; in 1978 a relatively visible and active group, with about 700 members). The Socialist Unity/ SWP slate for the general election, mentioned in the interview, never happened, and nor did the mooted link-up with the CP. SU in the end stood six candidates, not 12. The SWP did not stand any candidates at all. A central SWP leader, Duncan Hallas, told...

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