Some thoughts on the Labour Party prompted Jeremy Corbyn’s first 100 days as leader

Is it possible to be a rebel under Jeremy Corbyn‘s Straight Talking Honest Politics which encourages open debate on issues and policies?

Recently in a Guardian article Owen Jones said: “We need a more balanced debate about Jeremy”- Hew as talking out that debate in the mainstream media, but that debate needs to be taking place between members of the The Labour Party – whether left or right, Old Labour or New Labour.

My Labour Party has always been a broad church but at the moment there are too many narrow pews.

There are too many factions causing too much friction.

We need to clarify our differing opinions to appeal to a diverse electorate. I for one haven’t the time for in-fighting…time spent fighting amongst ourselves is time lost in talking about what we all mean by Labour’s values

We need to work together in spite our differences (of emphasis). We have the same goal – a Labour victory – in 2020 despite our different routes.

We need the momentum to progess our radical and progressive agenda to help people – an argument between Momentum and Progress helps no one (except, perhaps, the Conservatives?).

We have to put Labour first and foremost in our conversations – that’s Labour Party values first, not the values of Labour First.

We need open debate about the aims of the Labour Party – not debate about the merits of Open Labour.

We’ll end up with pointless in-fighting: Are you a member of the Judean People’s Labour Front? Or the People’s Labour Front of Judea?

It is absolutely necessary to have these conversations if we want a more equal, more just and more sustainable society.

But we need to have these conversations in good faith – with no *threats* of either “knifing in the front” or “deselecting” MPs who have differing views.

I like Corbyn – he represents a new, a different voice in politics and has got many new people to engage – but I don’t agree with everything he says and does.

And that said, I’m certainly no Blairite – but let’s remember want he helped deliver: 2,200 Sure Start Children’s Centres, introduced the Equality and Human Rights Commission, brought in Civil Partnerships, banned fox hunting, gave free entry to national museums and galleries, legislated for paternity leave of 2 weeks, allowed all full time workers to have 24 days paid holiday, and made sure we had the cleanest rivers, beaches, drinking water and air since before the industrial revolution. And much more.

We need to be grown up and realise that Blairites are not Tories. Corbynites are not Trots. We are all Labour – together. 

It’s a big, wide world out there so:

Lets pull together, not apart

Let’s get out and campaign positivity for OUR values.

Let’s abandon blinkered tribalism. and reject sniping and tolerance within the Labour party.

Let’s put aside our differences, look to the common bonds that unite us and start to attack the real enemies – the Tory party and the large companies that support them.

Let’s make our voice the voice that matters for those that need our support.

Let’s talk about policies and programmes to build support for Labour.

Let’s unite and fight FOR things that matter for me – social justice, a roof over everyone’s head, free legal aid, the safety net of social security.

Let’s campaign for the things that matter for the poor, the vulnerable, the disadvantaged, the caring, the homeless, the disabled, the long-term sick, the terminally ill.

Someone once said that “the hallmark of a civilised society” was a desire “each and everyone one of us being housed, educated, fed and kept in good health”.

And that someone? Jeremy Corbyn [in Morning Star, For Labour To Succeed It Must Get Real, 09 June 2015]

And who among us can disagree?

I haven’t got time for divided politics on the left, nor do the people who need us to fight for them  I don’t want us to fail those that need us.

I want to make a difference in a complex world – a world where aspiration has to be addressed at the same time as I challenge social and economic inequality.

Under Corbyn, Labour can – and must – become the most powerful force for progressive change in generations; moving from the old-style top-down politics to a new grassroots mass movement is going to be challenging, but we can do it. However,  believe that can only be achieved by evolution, not revolution.

And that means pragmatism as well as socialism.

As I work towards a more equal, more just and more sustainable society, please don’t spoilt it for me with all this bickering and division.

Illustration: Martin Rowson

Further reading:
John McDonell: Labour can be the most powerful force for progressive change in generations [Guardian, 05 December  2015]

Stella Creasy: Labour risks becoming a talking shop of protest and anger [Guardian, 12 December 2015]

Owen Jones: How can we have a more balanced debate about Jeremy Corbyn and Labour? [Guardian – Comment is Free, 15 December 2015]

From Guardian 12 December

Right and left, new and old: factions vying for the party’s soul

The political landscape of the left is changing fast following Jeremy Corbyn’s election, with new groups being formed and some dating back to the the 1970s and 80s reforming or re-branding | Patrick Wintour

Inside Labour

Set up by supporters of Corbyn
Regarded by figures on the party’s right as a secretive malign vehicle for far-left entryists that afford Corbyn and John McDonnell near cult status.

Momentum regards itself as an attempt to harness the grassroots energy in and out of the Labour party that gravitated to Corbyn in the summer. Now racing to set out a democratic structure and codify a clearer relationship with other left-wing parties.

Long-standing base of party moderates
Regarded as a secretive malign Blairite cancer at the heart of Labour by figures on the left.

Progress sees itself as the voice of moderates and Blairites, and following criticism of funding mainly by unions [PB: my criticism is that major funder is Lord David Sainsbury of Turville and one of one of the 100 signatories of the ‘Limehouse Declaration‘and went on to be a member of the Social Democratic Party], has done more to be tranparent.

It is adjusting after Liz Kendall’s catatstrophic campaign for party leader.

It runs a montlhy magazine, website, weekend schools and some candidate training.

In response to the party’s shift to the left, it is restating the basics of its politics including the fight for equality, equality and responsible capitalism.

New group formed to what it regards as a space for what was once described as the ‘soft left’.

Open Left will explore whether members still support the kind of politics associated with Ed Miliband’s leadership campaign. It’s success may well depend on funding and leadership.

It may attract some new younger members alienated by Momentum’s association with the hard left/

Labour First

The home of the party’s traditional right.

Labour First regards MPs such as John Spellar as its natural supporters in Parliament.

It knows how to organise for positions in the position in the party, runs an e-mail list but until recently had been marginalised by Progress.

Leading figure Luke Akehurst has an encyclopaedic knowledge of party campaigning.

A meeting at the party conference was so oversubscribed it was held in the street.

Inside Labour

Once the driving force of the soft left in Labour with roots going back to the Labour Co-odinating Committee.

Compass has often been linked with the likes of Jon Cruddas, Jon Trickett and Neal Lawson.

it ended its exclusive work in the party and operates alongside progressives in the Greens, Liberal Democrats and of no party.

Formed in 2013, it has had the most open debate of any far-left group on how to respond to Corbyn’s election.

Left Unity held a conference last month in which a move to dissolve the party, and to seek to affiliate to Labour was lost. Instead it decided it would not put up candidates against Labour for the moment.

The conference also agreed: “Left Unity welcomes the establishment of the grassroots network called Momentum. Left Unity encourages members to join the network to promote campaigns and also ensure Momentum is an open, democratic organisation.”

The premier Trotskyist organisation in the UK with luminaries such as Paul Foot, Tony Cliff and Alex Callinicos, the Socialist Workers Party dominated the landscape to the left of the for at least tow decades since forming in 1977 with its dyamic weekly newspaper, Socialist Worker, but has been hit by splits.

Regards the Corbyn leadership as a new site of struggle, and placed to recruit members disillusioned by the leader’s predicted failure.

In essence, the Socialist Party is the continuation of the Militant Tendency, an entryist Trotskyist group that plagued Labour and Neil Kinnock’s leadership in the 1980s and was finally expelled in a brutal battle.

It has a weekly newspaper called Socialist, and has recently called for Labour MPs who do not support party policy to be expelled.

It has taken an antagonistic approach to Momentum, saying its: “leadership seems to think that the only way we can strengthen Jeremy’s leadership is by mollifying the right and, for example, backing away from reselection.”

Its activists have in the part forced Momentum to take a tougher approach.

The Alliance of Workers Liberty publishes a weekly paper called Solidarity and was formed out of Socialist Organiser – a group expelled form the party.

AWL disbanded in the summer.

It is active within Momentum, trying to get the group to campaign for opposition to Labour councils implementing spending cuts. It is running a Stop The Purge campaign.

Others

Labour Representation Committee is a Labour-orientated group, most closely associated with John McDonnell, the Shadow Chancellor, and the magazine Labour Briefing.  It has a national committee, runs a lively twitter feed, and has a slightly more economic and union emphasis than some left groups.

Once dismissed as a SWP front, Stop The War Coalition managed to mobilise tens of thousands to oppose the Iraq was in 2003.

Jeremy Corbyn acted as its chair for many years, but has resigned owning to work pressures.

It has been damaged by posting two articles on its websitre – subsequently taken down – that were at best ambivalent about the ultimate responsibility fro the Paris attacks.

The conduct of a recent meeting in Westminster – when it was accused of refusing to allow a group from Syrian Solidarity to speak – prompted protests from the political activist Peter Tatchell and Caroline Lucas, Green MP for Brighton Pavilion.

And for a bit of fun:

Buzzfeed: Which Labour Party Faction Do You Actually Belong To?

You are Momentum. You are full Corbyn. You were there at the start, you watched with delight as the Labour leader took control of the party, and you’ve never felt this way about a political before. You think Blair ruined Labour and you want radical policies now. You like to talk about Owen Jones articles at parties.

You are Progress. You can’t admit it in polite company – or on Facebook – but you secretly lust for the return of Tony. Every time you switch on the TV and see Jeremy Corbyn you just hanker for the sweet caress of Peter Mandelson. You are the third way. You are three election victories in a row. You are yearning for Liz Kendall. You are completely marginalised within your own political party.

You are Open Labour. You are the soft left of the Labour party. No one’s quite sure what that means but you have a strange attraction for Ed Miliband and quite like the idea of winning elections, even if that comes with the need to compromise.

You are Labour First, the old right-wing of the Labour party. You view Jeremy Corbyn as a threat that needs to be destroyed. You are a fan of hand-to-hand political combat to control Labour’s future and talk about Momentum as ‘bloody Trots’. You are angry as hell and don’t mind who knows it.

Progress | We need a candidate who’s not from a safe seat

17 August 2015

We need a candidate who’s not from a safe seat

The success of ‘Fortress Exeter’ should show the way for Labour, says Ben Bradshaw

As we visit deputy leadership candidate Ben Bradshaw in his Westminster office, ‘Corbynmania’ is at its zenith. The politics of the mob has found new voice in the Labour leadership race, most stridently in its hunts for ‘Tories’ lurking in the Labour party. The new online McCarthyism is often led by people whose support for Labour in the past has at best been intermittent or itself questionable.

Bradshaw is clear where he stands on this uncomradely behaviour. ‘I deplore personal attacks whether they are against people like me or Liz [Kendall] who are lifelong Labour members who have spent our lifetimes fighting the Tories … we should be playing the ball – not the man or the woman.’ He hints, though, that such debate, the nature of its conduct aside, might itself be inevitable. ‘We can’t avoid the debate we should have had five years ago, or possibly even [eight] years ago.’

It is clear that Bradshaw thinks that the party needs a long, hard think about where it went wrong. Labour’s failure at the ballot box was almost inevitable given its failure to come up to scratch on the big questions that voters ask themselves when making their choice. ‘We lost the election because of the wrong political strategy, we weren’t trusted on the economy and we had a massive deficit on leadership,’ he says.

Bradshaw is clear too that the road to No 10 in 2020 runs right through the seats that now look increasingly like Tory heartlands. ‘The stark reality is that four of the five voters that we are going to have to win back at the next election voted Tory on 7 May.’ The party performed weakly among ‘traditional’ supporters and terribly among others. ‘We had a three per cent lead among workers in the public sector; we had a 17 per cent deficit among workers in the private sector.’

This too is one of the former cabinet minister’s chief motivations for his bid for the deputy leadership of his party. Member of parliament for Exeter since 1997, and the first Labour MP for the city to win the seat while his party lost a general election, he explains, ‘My motivation for joining the race was trebling my majority in a former safe Tory seat of the kind we are going to have to win back in spades to have any hope of ever forming a government again … I thought it was very important that there was at least one candidate, on one of the ballots, who wasn’t in a safe seat’.

‘I’m chair of the 12-strong southern group of Labour MPs now, was [10]’, he continues. Labour slipped backwards in this electorally vital region in May. Could he have said or done more to make Labour change course? He replies that when he took the group to see Ed Miliband, ‘Almost universally, all of the candidates said we needed to have a more aspirational offer to win seats like Reading West, Swindon and so forth. And we were listened to, but I don’t think we were really heard – and that was the problem.’

There is a live debate in the Labour party at present about the value of ‘voter ID’. What did those more than four million conversations get us, some are asking. Bradshaw is unrepentant in his belief in the value of door-to-door campaigning. ‘But it can’t just be, “Are you Labour or Conservative? Right, OK, well goodbye, we’ll never speak to you again.” It has to be an engaging conversation.’ Some of the most successful campaigns in 2015 were, he argues, where candidates were able to develop their own narrative. ‘[In Exeter] we ran very locally branded campaigns around sense of place, around the candidate, obviously pro-business campaigns. We tore up the national script.’

‘If I hadn’t had the second-highest contact rate of any CLP in the country, 75 per cent in Exeter … I would never have had the result I had.’ He is bullish about his record: ‘Every leadership and deputy leadership contender’s contact rate should be made public, and I’m prepared to publish mine.’ Contracts for members of parliament stipulating contact rates should also become part and parcel of what it means to represent Labour in Westminster, and the former secretary of state for culture, media and sport attributes Labour’s struggles in Scotland to failings in this area. ‘Scotland is a classic example here of complacency, very little campaigning, very low membership.’

Change also needs to come at the top of the party, and Bradshaw backs increasing the number of councillors represented on the National Executive Committee, as well as the leaders of Scottish and Welsh Labour. But, he adds, ‘I also think we should have an ordinary party member, from Scotland and Wales, reflecting what I would want to see as a more federal party structure’. He is conscious too that, ‘We [Labour] haven’t run anything nationally in quite a long time’ and so ‘it’s really important that the party leadership at Westminster, the PLP, and the party in the country recognise and appreciate the contribution that’s being made by Labour in local government, and listen to their advice’.

It is clear that the Labour party is going to have to change if it is to survive. But what does a successful party look like? To approach this in a different way, we ask the deputy leadership contender: if the Labour party were an animal, which animal would it be? After a period of reflection, Bradshaw muses, ‘It would have to combine stamina, resilience, intelligence, wisdom, enough aggression. So it would probably have to be a predator … It would have to a be lion, wouldn’t it?’ Whatever the deputy leader election result, as the party surveys the inhospitable territory before it, Bradshaw’s experience and Fortress Exeter triumphs should surely be some of the guides leading the pride of Labour lions to higher ground.

Progress Online | We can end UK homelessness by 2030

03 August 2015

We can end UK homelessness by 2030

Martin Edobor and Sam Stopp

Homelessness continues to rise and the government’s policy on housing and the welfare cap will exacerbate the situation. We are not building enough social or affordable homes, rights for those in the private rented sector are weak and landlords continue to act with impunity. This is contributing to an unstable housing sector, leaving millions of individuals and families to live with uncertainty, only a monthly rent away from being evicted onto the streets.

Due to the differences in the process of recording between national governments of the four United Kingdom nations, there are no official national figures for how many people are homeless. Local authority statistics on the number of people defined as statutory homeless or seeking emergency accommodation do, however, provide useful context. Yet, it is likely that these statistics underestimate the severity of the problem, and the recorded homelessness level is just the tip of the iceberg.

Homelessness is not simply about sleeping rough on the streets; the picture is more complex. Many people live in temporary accommodation as they have no other options available, often surviving in poor quality housing or overcrowded accommodation. People end up in this situation for a range of reasons, from the rising cost of short-term private tenancies which provide little security, to being unable to have a steady income due to wider social issues such as substance misuses or mental health problems.

The housing crisis is not purely a symptom of social ills or down to personal choices. Rouge-landlords, lack of affordable housing and limited options available to local authorities have all contributed to the rise of homelessness. We believe that these issues can and should be corrected through government policy.

‘The labour campaign to end homelessness’ was born out of frustration with government policy. Its purpose is ambitious, but simple. To end UK homelessness by 2030. As a first step towards this, we hope to persuade the Labour party to include our aim as a pledge in their 2020 manifesto.

In addition to this the campaign, will provide a forum for Labour party members discuss and debate ways in which we can tackle homelessness.

We believe that the tragedy of rising homelessness across the UK is a blight which no progressive party can ignore. Whenever Labour governments have been in power, homelessness has fallen. But we believe that the next Labour government must go further and ultimately ensure that every British citizen not only has a roof over their head but a home of their own.

If you are a Labour party member or supporter and you share our simple aim, we hope you can join our campaign and we welcome your support.

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Martin Edobor is vice-chair of the Young Fabians and Sam Stopp is a councillor in the London borough of Brent. They are co-founders, Labour Campaign to End Homelessness.