Labour Party

Extracts from an AWL leaflet distributed at a regional meeting of the National Shop Stewards Network, held in Glasgow on 1 December. “In backing the Labour Party rule changes (to ban unions and CLPs from submitting motions to annual Labour Party conference), union leaders have effectively disenfranchised millions of trade unionists who remain organisationally affiliated to the Labour Party. The issue here is not just one of union democracy – i.e. the fact that none of the union leaders had a mandate from their membership to back the rule changes. The much more fundamental issue is that the...

After the "cash for peerages" row, the New Labour party of Gordon Brown and Tony Blair is now deep in another scandal about dodgy funding from millionaires, one which has already brought a police investigation and forced the resignation of Labour Party general secretary Peter Watt. Labour's affiliated unions should tell their representatives on the Party's National Executive to demand an emergency Executive meeting to decide on and install proper measures of accountability. As in the previous scandal, Labour Party treasurer (and TGWU deputy general secretary) Jack Dromey says he was kept in...

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Between fifty and sixty per cent of the population identify as “working class”. Despite the term “working class” vanishing completely from the language of the Labour Party, the proportion claiming this now-unspoken identity has been fairly stable since the 1950s. To be “working-class”, whether you know it or not, is to be at one pole of a pair. The other pole is the capitalist class. The picture is blurred by what Marx called “the constantly growing number of the middle classes, those who stand between the workman on the one hand and the capitalist and landlord on the other. The middle classes...

Party should be “committed to socialist policies” now lacks any means by which it might be carried through. The only practical suggestion was that, given the dramatic loss in Labour Party membership, it was now much easier for the left to take over moribund constituency parties (and presumably the smaller they get, the better, as it then becomes even easier). John McDonnell argued very strongly that Brown’s victory without a fight by the unions was a turning point. Rather than proposing anything practical to reverse it, however, he seemed to say the game was up and “the old strategy was over...

Down to the 1880s there was no “labour movement” [in Britain] in the continental sense at all. There were strong trade unions (of skilled workers), and these unions were politically-minded — but the only parties were the two ruling-class ones, the Tories and the Liberals. The trade unions expressed themselves politically by serving as the arms and legs of one or other of these parties — usually the Liberals, though in an area such as Lancashire and Cheshire where the employers were strongly liberal the trade unions might retort to this by supporting the Tories! The political prospect of the...

Alistair Darling’s pre-Budget statement on 9 October promised real wage cuts for public sector workers through to 2011, as well as choking back health and education spending and decreeing extra job cuts in the civil service, especially the Department of Work and Pensions. The statement decrees “public sector pay settlements consistent with the achievement of the Government’s inflation target of 2 per cent” right through to the financial year 2010-11. Actually, the Retail Price Index currently shows inflation at 4.1%. It has been above 4% pretty much all this year — 4.8% at one point — and is...

Their triumphalism has been a little chastened. New Labour politicians these days are not quite as bold as Tony Blair was when he told Jeremy Paxman on BBC Newsnight before the 2001 election that he was not bothered about a widening gap between rich and poor. “Paxman: Is it acceptable for gap between rich and poor to widen? “Blair: The key thing is not... the gap between... the person who earns the most in the country and the person that earns the least... The issue isn't... whether the very richest person ends up becoming richer. The issue is whether the poorest person is given the chance...