Jeremy Corbyn
End of Session (The Morning Star)
Late summer in Parliament is a strange time; nearly everyone is in a bad mood. The weather is hot and humid, most MPs have their minds on being somewhere else and Ministers feel very uneasy at the impending Ministerial shuffle.
It is also contrived that the House rises on Tuesday to avoid a further Prime Ministers question time. This year it is not just Ministers who are nervous; as with all things, we need Shakespeare to help us understand a process. His most adept phrase is “uneasy is the head that bears the crown”.
Tony Blair has said he will not contest the next election and this has ensured that at every turn the speculation turns on who will be the successor. The conventional wisdom in the Labour Party is that a leader cannot come from the Left and it is the Left of the Party who must start with the first compromise and back somebody from the centre.
Normally elections for Party leader are held following an electoral defeat (1980, 1983 and 1992) or in an atmosphere of crisis, such as the famous Wilson resignation in 1976, or the death of John Smith in 1993. This time it is different as there has been little but speculation since the 2005 general election.
One of the many problems the media (particularly television) have is that they are unable to distinguish between policies and individuals. Thus every debate becomes the career path of an individual. This in turn is fed by the tabloids who then try to build up or destroy a personality and ignore the policies.
Again, this time it is different.
By founding the Labour Representation Committee to unite people of the Left in the Party, and those who have resigned or never joined, there is a forum for debate and this is the motive power of the next leadership election.
Last weekend’s conference in Congress House attracted five hundred delegates and showed a remarkably united front on all the major policy issues.
There are three areas of policy difference with New Labour, all of which have cost the Party heavily in the loss of support.
Nobody disputes that increased expenditure on health, education, childcare, transport infrastructure, housing improvements is not welcome and well overdue. The cuts the Tories made in the 1980s had a devastating effect on the lives of millions. Unemployment topped 3,000,000 in the 1980s. New Labour is not about direct public investment or administration; their whole raison d’etre is to give primacy to the private sector in everything. Thus having invested in the NHS, for example, they proceed to enforce private finance in new hospitals and thus hand the running over to a company who can then trade their contract, like any commodity. The same applies in New Labour’s attitudes to all services, with the private sector running large contracts on behalf of the public, costing more and reducing accountability. Transport is another example, with the chaos of Railtrack having been replaced by a wholly publicly owned free standing company - Network Rail - yet the Train Operations and carriage leasing were allowed to remain in the private sector. In reality, a publicly protected opportunity to make enormous sums of money out of the public investment in the infrastructure.
This in turn has not advanced the interests of public sector workers, who increasingly are forced to use private sector bench-marks on employment conditions.
The second big area is of policy difference includes liberties and law. Sometimes I wonder if the editor of the Daily Mail is actually in the cabinet, and has a final say on all new legislation. Whilst in opposition Labour voted against the Prevention of Terrorism Act as an attack on free speech and liberties, this has been replaced by a series of measures since 1990, which are a very serious attack on free speech, and have sent shivers down the spines of minority communities who fear the sort of suspicion profiling that happened to the Irish in the 1970s and 1980s. ID cards were presented as being essential to the war on terror; the computer consultants of the world were licking their lips at the prospects of the £16 billions to be paid out for their introduction. Opposition and over-hype may have ended this waste.
The biggest phenomena of the recent past has been the domination of international politics on the national scene. After 2001 Blair rushed to Washington to declare his “all” for George Bush Junior and since then we have paid the price, literally in blood, with British soldiers dying in Afghanistan and Iraq. Tens of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan people have perished and the world has been made in infinitely more dangerous place as a result. This has been a policy led by the Prime Minister, not the Foreign Office, and it sometimes appears that the Neo-cons’ are actually writing it.
The next big debate is on nuclear weapons. On the eve of the 2005 election New Labour inserted a sneaky clause in the manifesto about nuclear weapons and then claimed the Party was bound by it. There is no binding on the debate about replacement or otherwise. This time we have a chance to adhere to international law, namely the Nuclear Non proliferation Treaty and refuse to buy into threats of world destruction by new weapons.
By declaring his readiness to be the candidate for the leadership of the Party, John McDonnell gives us an opportunity to reach out and unite those who have become disillusioned and disaffected. Last Saturday’s conference gave the opportunity of recognising that the Labour Party is far more than what happens in Parliament or the dubious dealings with big business. It is about the political voice of ordinary people being heard and acted upon.
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As the House broke up yesterday it seemed unreal. In the Lebanon over 500,000 people have already been uprooted by the invasion of Israel. Blair and Bush still seem incapable of calling for the minimally obvious - a ceasefire with immediate effect. Instead it seems they want Israel to partition Lebanon and have an international force placed in the South to fight Hezbollah on behalf of Israel.
Three weeks ago there were signs of political movement and hope in Palestine which would have forced Israel into talks with Hamas and recognition. These were destroyed by the bombardment and occupation. Hezbollah were moving in a political direction with involvement in national Government in Lebanon. The Israeli Right who run the Government and Military as an arm of the Neo-cons’ fear this whole process and the result is the terrible, criminal destruction of Lebanon.
This crazy and brutal killing must end; the unity of opposition to the invasion of Iraq is being re-born with demonstrations from Tel Aviv to Washington, and all points in between last week.
