Without power, we can not make things better!

Without power, we can not make things better!

It’s also true that without will, we can’t make things better and the Labour front bench’s, with their so-called Labour-to-win outriders, constant return to competence as a differentiator from this corrupt Tory government, their rejection of our core and even peripheral supporter’s interests and a lack of clear opposition to austerity using sound finance as an excuse will lead to a situation where a Labour Government, a Labour Government, will privatise hospitals, privatise schools, make higher education harder to enter for working class people, start the surveillance state, introduce workfare and fail its own people on regional policy, capping this sad litany off by supporting the US in an illegal war.

The front bench owe Labour’s member’s a duty to put a manifesto that is agreed by the Party; but their current vision is one of capture of the Party, funded by donors, with policy designed by psephologically informed experts and ‘clever’ people, appealing to voters and attempting to create an electoral coalition informed by ‘triangulation and jeopardising the loyalty of the young and ethnic minority voters.

Blair once famously said,

Let me make my position clear – I wouldn’t want to win from a traditional leftist platform. Even if I thought it was the route to victory, I wouldn’t take it.

Tony Blair

This is permission for everyone that disagrees with policy to say what they want.

What I want is a manifesto and front bench intent on building a better society not replacing the Tories with themselves; for some, it’s just about red boxes, ministerial salaries and government cars and asking us to be grateful that they’re not Tories because any Labour Government is better than a Tory Government. We need a manifesto that excites the membership and unions who’ll then defend the Government when they are blown of course by the powers of conservatism.

We should hope for and promise more!

I doubt that a Labour front bench will be as corrupt as Johnson, or as vacant as Truss, or as cruel as Osborne but this political strategy, can only fail. If the disgust with the Tories wasn’t as bad as it is, it’s questionable that Labour would win on a centrist and austerity platform and even if they do, the dangers of a Labour austerity government leading to a one term government looms large. All Labour Governments have failed because they forget who put them there. …

Chilling Effect

no entry

Lauren Townsend, a Labour Milton Keynes councillor and cabinet member has been blocked from standing as a Labour MP for her own seat. This was allegedly done for showing support for an opposition party by ‘liking’ a tweet from Nicola Sturgeon on her -ive covid test. Aydin Dikerdem found that candidates who have been approved for the selection have also liked tweets from other party members. As he said, this should be a permitted act of free speech. The decision to bar Lauren is biased, probably improper, potentially based on unlawfully and unfairly obtained data and designed to create a chilling effect. She had been nominated by several unions which should guarantee her a place on the long list, how long will they put up with this?

 …

Reeves and Immigration

There I am sitting in my living room, considering that maybe Starmer and Reeves domestic policy promises weren’t so bad, playing with my phone when a clip from Sky News comes on with Rachel Reeves, saying that the problem with the Tory immigration policy is there aren’t enough deportations. This is the moral sink that competing on competence takes you. Labour’s Conference Policy at lab19 and lab21 is clear and based on an anti-racist, internationally legally compliant, rights based, compassionate, and humane approach. We must do better than this.  …

Summary impressions of #lab22

Summary impressions of #lab22

 #lab22 was very quite and extraordinarily managed. There was some good chairing by Alice Perry and Dianna Holland, and some dreadful chairing by the rest, Wendy Nichols, Angela Eagle and Gurinder Singh Josan. Does Starmer’s speech sum up what we’ve become?, a mild social democracy domestically (but to the right of Callaghan on public ownership if not on wages and collective bargaining), an atlanticist foreign policy (differing from Ed Miliband & Corbyn), and a vicious internal management regime suggesting continued bad behaviour if they get into government where they’ll control, the Dept. of Justice, Home Office, and the intelligence services.

I make this conclusion from Starmer’s speech; Conference wants more but we’ll see what the front bench does; front benches of both factions have a habit of ignoring what they don’t want. The silence and de-emphasising of benefit cuts is also worrying as is the silence on the hostile environment.

My other fear is that no Labour Government has ever been more left wing than its manifesto, is what they want enough to build a more equal society and do the leadership want that? It could have been worse, many of us were fearing a full on blue labour manifesto and I am not yet cleat that the debt fetishists are in retreat. …

Left Right power

The two key votes on which the relative strength of the factions can be measured are Card Vote 7 reported in CAC2, and in my article, “The Rules debate”, and the vote for the National constitutional committee reported in CAC4.

On CV 7, the pro-CLP vote consisted of 42.2% of the CLP vote, versus 56.8%. For the NCC vote, the Momentum/CLGA candidates got 28.5% of the vote, which was only open to CLP delegates. This is very disappointing and a significant collapse from 2021.

Momentum claim that they won the battle of ideas, we’ll see.

I usually look at the the attendance numbers; for CV7 there were 293,621 votes. The Labour Party reported 432, 213 members as at the qualification date. The reported membership includes those in arrears, which I estimate as 28K. This means that 68% (of the membership) or 72% (of members in good standing) of CLP votes were cast in CV7. Thus I calculate that 101,000 votes missing based on my estimated membership number. This represents about 172 CLPs as far as I can tell and 27% of the membership in good standing. I estimate that 15,000 of those missing will be the London Parties whose delegations were prohibited or Parties suspended. …

Health and NHS

Health and NHS

 I was a delegate from Lewisham Deptford CLP and we had proposed a motion on Health. We composited our words into the motion and got seconding rights. We called for decent GP services and an end to ICSs while the Socialist Health Association motion called for a reversal of privatisation; other CLPs wanted an emphasis on failing mental health services. We got seconding rights, and Louise Irvine of Lewisham Deptford made speech. The motion was of course carried overwhelmingly. It’s the NHS. The words are available in CAC2 Addendum. …

Ukraine

Ukraine

The debate on the composite was introduced by a speech from Lesia Vasilinko, a Ukrainian MP and co-chair of the British Ukrainian Friendship society; the session is on video. Ms Vasilinko’s speech starts at this book mark and I have created a text version (or https://bit.ly/LesiaVasilenkoSpeech ) of the speech.

Ukraine has been invaded by the Russian Federation, a country with a track record of military actions in contravention of the UN Charter and a dreadful record in front of the ECtHR. Ukraine has chosen to fight and I support them in their acts of self defence and their right to national self-determination. Conference now agrees.  

Sadly there are some aspects of the motion that divert attention from this act of solidarity.

Within the motion, there is a call for increased investment in weapons production, I argue that we need a defence policy/strategy based on the needs of British and our allies’ security not on the needs of arms manufacturers, which is what we’ve had for too long.  The two topics, defence policy and Ukrainian solidarity should have been disaggregated. By not doing so, the proposers gave people a good reason to vote against the motion which is unfortunate, and a number of delegates did.

The words of the motion make no mention of the Russian peace campaigner, or refuge for Russian draft dodgers. It makes no reference to Ukraine’s recent anti Trade Union laws nor of its record in front of the ECtHR, nor that Ukraine’s rating on the 3rd party democracy indexes is low, albeit higher than Russia’s. Our solidarity must ensure that a post war Ukraine continues on the route to democracy.

Sadly it makes no mention of the UK sanctions, and the need to get Russian money out of British politics. We need to publish the secret parts of the Russia Report and ensure that those involved in funnelling Russian money into British politics are found and held to account particularly for their intervention in the Brexit referendum and funding the Tory party.

Labour List also reports on the motion, their article contains the words of the motion, Composite 13, which are also available in CAC 2 Addendum.

None of this justified a vote against. Russia invaded a neighbour that chose to fight. Ukraine has chosen to fight for its independence, this needs to be supported. …

Starmer speaks

Starmer speaks

This is available on youtube and as text, it is to my mind one of the best he’s given; he’s clearly more comfortable with the role than previously. The last 11 months of a polling lead which was to leap the following day will have helped, but I hope they don’t believe their propaganda that the May 22 elections were a validation of Starmer’s Labour, there were victories and also losses.

I welcome the promise of a sovereign wealth find, made by Rachel Reeves earlier in the week, and on the surface the promise of GB Energy seemed to be a significant step towards state participation in the energy market and would explain, but not excuse, why the delegates supporting the ‘Green New Deal’ were excluded from the composite meeting; it would have been embarrassing if conference had called for the wholesale nationalisation of the energy industry while the Leader announced a half-way house, or as later commentators note suggests a waypoint. Starmer repeated Louise Haigh’s promise made yesterday to nationalise the railways again.

Back carbon capture. Commit to green steel production. New renewable ports. New gigafactories. And insulate 19 million homes.

Sir Kier Starmer – lab22

I am disappointed at the absence of sensible position on the EU and Trade Friction, interestingly, Cooper was allowed to grandstand on cancelling the Rwanda programme, but left it to Kier to announce that Labour would introduce a points based immigration system. Neither mentioned repealing the hostile environment.

In the 80s we had a point system for people coming to the UK for work. you got one point for speaking English, one point if you had a job offer, one point if that job offer was competitively paid, one point if the job was highly skilled and one point if there was no local labour to do the job. if you had five points you could enter the country. The Tories have replaced highly skilled with highly paid, and the inconvenient truth is that British labour shortages or not restricted to highly skilled, highly paid work. The economy needs hospitality workers, agricultural workers,  and care and health service workers. The UK’s exclusion from Horizon Europe is another policy failure that limits UK science’s access to highly skilled research scientists. Any point system will need to ensure that workers across the full range vacancies can enter the country. Any other system will be a barrier to growth. It is clear that many skilled workers originally from Europe have returned to the home countries because they feel unwelcome after the Brexit vote and harassed by the hostile environment which seeks to turn landlords and banks and the NHS into border guards. It needs to go!

I annotated the text speech on diigo and made a copy of those notes on my wiki; I attempted to extract the specific policy promises from the anti-tory and feel-good rhetoric. …