Though Cowards Flinch

Deep down I know that I’m still bitter that John McDonnell wasn’t able to stand as leader of the party – and I know very well that this view won’t be controversial to writers on this blog.

I knew that I wanted to see at least one socialist in the contest – though when I found out which one would be standing, from the Socialist Campaign Group, I remember thinking, in truth, oh but not that socialist!

I hadn’t the same problems with her as had other members of the Labour party I spoke to over the course of the many hustings I’ve attended. For example, her having been given a leg up by David Miliband didn’t make me think she was a token black/female/socialist (delete where applicable) candidate – we in the party have no reason to be tokenistic about such matters – nor did it make me feel that I should write her off full stop – there were other reasons for me to do that.

Miliband the elder obviously extended his hand to Abbott because her inclusion added to the debate – a worthwhile gesture I felt. For some, this was an obvious impetus to view Abbott as a non-candidate and frankly ignore her.

For me, this was not the case at all.

I did however share sympathy with the view Abbott is a hypocrite. Of course sending her child to a private school lost her credibility among leftwingers and many constituents. Though her reasons for doing so were surely worse (that she is a single Mum with a black son who could get involved with gangs, was part of her justification for her move).

This evokes another reason why one would be cautious of her: sometimes her criticisms of fellow leadership contenders went further than simply saying look at these middle class men, call this change? This was cheap, and was made cheaper when their race had been brought into question, like this means anything at all.

Questions of race ultimately lead sound minded people to conclude that it is no matter, that people are people and so on. Raising questions of race as a means to show change in the Labour party is not possible, is dreadful and not sound minded at all.

People said her campaign wasn’t effective. I imagine it just wasn’t loud enough, and let’s face it; we have all been more interested in the family feuds and Balls’ going forth on the economic illiteracy of Ozzy Osborne.

My own criticism of her campaign was that it was in places rather shallow and base. I had this to say in July:

I know the argument: stroppy teenagers and shop floor Mothers can’t relate to men in suits, yet they end up our representatives every time, and we wonder why people don’t engage with politics.

But hold on, how people related to politicians didn’t spur on the anti-politics saga circa the expenses scandal, but rather the other way around, politicians obviously don’t quite understand the electorate – and subsequently fairness and respect for tax payers’ money.

Frankly, this extends further to what politicians talk like, look like and smell like; if they don’t get, they don’t get it, and that trait transcends class, age, race and gender boundaries.

For this reason, there is a strange element to Dianne Abbott’s recent trouble making, when she called the other four leadership contenders “geeky,” in an interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg.

We’re used to the disengaged politician now, but it is patent nonsense for Abbott to suggest that she has more chance listening than they have.

I won’t recycle the fact that the only difference between her and her colleagues (apart from her colour, more of which in a moment) is she has never been a SpAd and that she has been an MP for longer. But she has made decisions, and has said things, where you wonder whether the 20 years spent listening to her voters has counted for anything, particularly the type of thing she implies here which is that she knows what people want.

The paradox: give me a middle class former policy wonk who admits to needing more knowledge any time, over a middle class, Cambridge educated, long time MP, who implicitly likens herself to Obama, and thinks she knows what the people want.

I mean that as much as I do today. But yet – and here is the surprise – I voted for her as my first preference.

Ed Miliband, who I felt was strongest to start with, quickly misread his place as unifier (the party being a broad church and all), holding back from laying into capitalism and instead attempting to spell out how he was going to reform capitalism or make capitalism better.

I must admit, I agree with John Gray, the author, when he points out that both Miliband’s wildly miss the point, raised most notably in this country by their Dad, that capitalism will appear to modify in the face of threat – like it did in the thirties, seventies, eighties and now – the point is not to change it, but to understand it (in a reversal of Marx’ thesis on Feuerbach).

In spite of this, I gave Ed Miliband my second preference. Though I’m sure he is serious about transcending the grip of New Labour folderol, I just don’t think he has it in him, nor do I think he knows what it means to do this. It is not simply ridding the party of New Labour architects, but it’s about coming into a new political landscape, and focusing on the politics to fit it. For me this is socialism, but to hear all candidates talk about socialism, you’d think it was a new idea not yet properly theorised or understood.

Yet – and this was the basis of my choosing Ed for second preference – many trade unions and socialist societies saw in him the man they want.

At a time when the party is moving away from the Fukuyama-type notion that unregulated capitalism has emerged successful and it is non-party political to allow the markets to be unfettered, we need someone to lead who is in debt to unions – who will be at their most pertinent when the coalition government tries to fob off public sector workers with pay freezes while turning a blind eye to outrageous banker bonuses and tax evasion – despite this, too, being a “non-party political” issue.

David Miliband, too, has union backing, and the advocacy of the so-called voice of the intelligent left, Jon Cruddas. But, not only has this Miliband been the most uncomfortable with criticising the record of New Labour, his leadership will be easy pickings for Tories and Liberal Democrats when it turns out – if indeed he was – complicit in the use of torture. Indeed, he has already had his fingers burnt when denying the Britain’s role in torture, and if an investigation turns out evidence of his direct complicity this will be electoral poison for the Labour party – already on its back feet pleading forgiveness for a war gone totally awry.

So at this stage you might be saying: well, Carl, if you dislike your two preferences so much, how much must you dislike your third, fourth and fifth? You’d be surprised at my answer. My third preference was Ed Balls – who I was most impressed by, for all the obvious reasons. He came across the most economically literate, while remaining astute enough to tackle questions on society, particularly the education sector which he still maintains a careful eye on.

So why didn’t I vote for him, in spite of Paul’s well explained reasons as to why I, and you, should? Honestly, for character I find him displeasing – a trait I recognised around the time Sharon Shoesmith fought for and lost her job. But on an economic narrative to counter the one being passed off as orthodox by the coalition government, Balls has it spot on – there is an alternative to cuts in order to reduce the deficit in the quickest speed possible, and he has proved himself totally capable of projecting that – even if some, such as Don Paskini, see this as politically a dangerous move.

In short: I don’t want a Balls leadership, I see in Balls a shadow chancellor; a job he should have probably had anyway under Brown.

So, in sum, I voted:

1) Dianne Abbott

2) Ed Miliband

3) Ed Balls

4) Andy Burnham

5) David Miliband

But to look at that in isolation doesn’t tell you the whole story.

Ed Miliband is the realistic contender and I prefer him to his brother so, realistically, I hope he gets the job, which is why he got my second preference vote. But I desire to see a socialist as leader of the party, and now I think is the perfect time. Abbott is a socialist, and though I think she is a problematic candidate – for reasons spelt out above – it is for this reason she got my first preference.

The two people who are most affiliated with the left out of all five candidates are Diane Abbott and Ed Miliband. Following the lack of policy discussion in my last post concerning Abbott, I decided to read up more on policy for Miliband and, at the end of this article, I will try and compare them to each other. Concerning Ed, I will focus on three areas; Ed’s interpretation of social democracy, the Graduate Tax and the living wage.

Ed, who has been categorized as the “alternative” candidate for the lefties out there, has shown some promise in what he has had to say. When I went to the Hustings in Newcastle a couple of weeks ago, he was the one who gave the best closing speech and was most personable and answered directly to the people asking the questions.

Social democracy: Hustings aside, in his speech on Social Democracy on June 29th 2010, a long speech outlining his ideas and beliefs in what he wants the Labour party to become and in ways criticise the New Labour era, as he put it “while Old Labour was seen as anti-business, New Labour made an alliance with big business. The truth is that we need to be the champions most of all of small business.” In ways I cannot disagree with him here, I do believe the Labour party should be champions of the small business, but should we really reject the big business and the big executives in the private sector?

I don’t know much about the big wide world of economics and banking, but I do think idealistically that we should support the smaller business and I fully support imposing the Robin Hood Tax on the banks and bigger business, to help combat the deficit and also support frontline services such as the NHS.

Living wage: Evidence of Miliband’s efforts to support worker’s rights is through the initiative he has adopted into his campaign policy which is the living wage. He uses an analogy of a cleaner working in a governmental department, and how we ‘no deep in our soul’ that they should be paid enough to live on. I fully advocate and support this idea of creating a living wage, so that everyone in the country can have a sustainable life; maybe not an affluent life, but at least they will be able to live comfortably, which personally is right for all people who work hard, long hours.

Miliband justifies this as a key policy for the Labour party, and says that it is ‘because it touches our deep sense of justice, of fairness and of a belief in the dignity of work’. I couldn’t agree more [again], I have always believed in the dignity of working. What Miliband and other supporters of the living wage realise is that increasing the proliferation of low paying jobs reduces that dignity, and that benefit dependency is only made more attractive without a living wage.

Since the beginning of Ed’s campaign he has successfully moved away from the ideas of New Labour, much more than his brother, David. In his speech on the living wage to Citizens UK on May 28th 2010, in London, he clearly showed a sense of the end of the New Labour movement of mangerialism and move towards an idea of mobilization. A party which, as Miliband stated, must become a ‘genuine popular movement’ in order to win the next general election.

Graduate Tax: Another of Ed’s proposed policy (if to become leader) is to introduce the Student Graduate Tax, which would mean abolishing tuition fees and stop Universities from placing their own fees on students. A Guardian article from last year stated that research had shown students are not deterred by tuition fees.

As a student about to enter University, never has it crossed my mind that I will be in debt for the most of my life, to me University is an investment in my own future, adding to my opportunities. But the next generation faces being hit hardest with a big hike in tuition fees and the potential removal of the fee-cap. This will hinder the progress of many from poorer backgrounds, and if Universities are allowed to place their own fees, we’ll see the development of a two-tier education system; the Russell Group for the rich and brightest versus everyone else.

This is why I think a graduate tax would be better than getting rid of the tuition fees cap and allowing Universities to make students pay how the Universities want you to pay. Of course, graduates will be paying money back for a long period of time, but they will have invested in a future that will reap the rewards if they did not go to University.

Conclusion: On comparing the two ‘left’ candidates, personally Ed has come out on top; though Diane is the long-time running lefty, she doesn’t seem to hold a strong mandate for helping to progress the party, mainly though her lack of policy ideas. She has indeed, set out her ways in which she would reduce the deficit, especially through the replacing of Trident, which both candidates agree on. However, due to Ed’s influence within a government ministerial position (though a New Labour one), he does show a sense of grounding and wanting to change the party for the better and like I said at the beginning of the piece, he was an excellent speaker at the Hustings a few weeks ago.

My Order of Preference (currently)
Ed Miliband – 1
Diane Abbott – 2
David Miliband – no score (as of yet)
Andy Burnham – no score (as of yet)
Ed Balls – no score (as of yet)

I can’t express in words how utterly furious I am that John McDonnell has been forced to withdraw from the Labour leadership contest. After a few days of faux outrage over his comment that if he could, he’d go back to the 1980s and kill Thatcher, and Diane Abbott’s mealy-mouthed supporters saying they think he should be the one to withdraw, despite her pledge to do so if he got more nominations (which he had, at that point), John has rightly judged that her supporters won’t come to him, so he’ll have to give his to her.

Not good enough. Every campaign for the next five years – against library closures, against service cuts, against the attempt to further casualise the public sector – is going to be fought outside of Labour. Only historical revisionists and morons believe that the anti-poll tax campaign was a Labour campaign. And yet the Left has kept the life support switched on, firmly demanding that people exercise the great contradiction at the heart of our democracy: loyalty to a Party the leadership of which does not care about them.

Is it time to pull the plug? Since 1923, we’ve faced the same situation. Labour is elected with high hopes for its success, disappoints those hopes and is then swept from office, leaving the Conservatives to pick up where they left off. Since the end of the great depression, after the war, when the exhaustion of the capitalist system allowed for greater state controls (which had been utilised during the war anyway and rubbed off the red taint they previously had), the journey has been backwards – trying to find a way back before the post-war settlement.

This is the mission of the Conservative Party, and ‘big society‘ is just its latest cover. What has Labour’s leadership done? Nothing. We have been losing the battle, and all the while desperately clinging to what Labour has achieved – scarcely anything new without sacrificing something old. So, of the last three parliaments, we got the minimum wage and a long-overdue rise in benefits (for example) whilst Labour set course towards undermining teachers’ unions and education, through faster deregulation of schools.

Meanwhile, Labour socialists – an endangered breed that I’ll deal with in a moment – ask their comrades and friends to hang on in a party that has been swamped by vapid twits. Anyone who goes to all the events touted by the Fabians, has been to Oxford or hangs out online can’t fail to know who I’m talking about. The twits claiming the legacy of Nye Bevan whilst backing Ed Balls, for example, without seeing the incredible disparity between the politics of the two. Whatever Bevan’s deficiencies and later demoralisation, he was no Balls.

Bevan occupies, as one might notice, the strapline of this blog. His sentiment, that one should not stand in the middle of the road, that one should not be afraid to take a position has been my personal code all my life. It is far from the attitude of the Labour leadership and their coterie. It is a party rotten through and through, corrupt, full of patronage and seeking after patronage, unprincipled. It isn’t really socialist at all. In seeking after patronage, people learn to talk with a certain vocabulary, highly technocratic and bloodless. Totally removed from ordinary people.

Labour socialists of the Labour Representation Committee number somewhere below 1000 people – that’s less than one percent of the total party membership (excluding the trades unions). They are condemned by the Labour Right for being backwards. They are excoriated by those who exist as rootlessly as Labour’s London elite for being too provincial, too unwilling to work with other groups (whatever that means, as every Labour campaign I’ve ever seen has involved LRC members and parliamentarians). But they are the last remaining socialists in Labour.

The last election demonstrated that this clique will not exist forever. The Parliamentary group of the LRC was halved, to say nothing of the destruction wreaked about its bigger, less socialist sister, the Socialist Campaign Group. And even this doesn’t account for the wacky behaviour of a bunch of the members of these groups, like Michael Meacher, supposed Left veteran…who nominated Ed Miliband for leader, even though Ed had cleared the bar and with room to spare. So long as the fortunes of this group are tied to Labour, it exists within a contradiction – urging (critical) support for a leadership that will kick the poor when it’s opportune whilst claiming to represent them.

The leadership contest has demonstrated that no matter how well people like John McDonnell work, no matter how much support they gather, they’ll be outmanoeuvred by Labour’s Right, which can rely on the cowardice and (ironically) the uncooperative nature of Labour’s ‘soft’ Left. Harriet Harman and Ed Ball’s nominations for Diane Abbott play the diversity card but in reality are simply intended to prop her up into a slightly more credible candidate (still not very credible, from a political point of view) and force McDonnell out. All he has done is bow to the inevitable.

Abbott has the nominations – she’s on the ballot – but she’s not going to change the Party. Forgive my cynicism, but I’ve met too many soft Lefts. Despite her feminist credentials, she doesn’t have the detailed critique of the Party that is the remit of the LRC – and that would set free the feminist and radical energies that people were quick to impute to her. Indeed when she does her media appearances – the last I heard in-depth was on a Radio 4 discussion programme on Friday about two months ago – she can even be quite conservative. So good luck to her and her supporters – she’ll be better than the other four, but I don’t have any faith in her, and am rather sickened by how heavily she has stressed the fact that she’s black and female – like these are somehow politically relevant, except as tokenism.

John’s letter to Labour members, in which he announces his decision to stand down, acknowledges that despite enormous grassroots pressure – e.g. Tom Harris’ admission that he and other Labour MPs were deluged with letters and emails to demand McDonnell get on the ballot – the Labour bureaucracy and PLP were unmoved. His final appeal is to the strength of the Labour Left, that the fight against the cuts should be continued and that a Conservative government be denied the chance to have everything its own way.

With this, every socialist will agree – but I will not use my energies to electrify the zombified party that Labour has become, and I am one among many. Campaigns dominated by socialists will come together, and as last time, Labour’s leadership will do what it can to hinder them, so long as they aren’t tied to the apron strings of mother Parliament. They will face no backlash from their members, as the membership have nowhere else to turn. The odd constituency party might endorse the LRC, but even these constituencies can’t seem to get their MPs in line. And this is before the vast and reactionary weight of the trade union bureaucracy is employed by said leadership.

Are we simply to say that time has run out for socialism in the Labour Party? My anger at McDonnell’s withdrawl howls Khrushchev’s famous retort at the PLP and its groupies, “History is on our side. We will bury you!” And yet…

Marxism is not an exact science. Having shaken my socialist eight-ball, the answer comes back “Indeterminate”. This is the truth. The struggle for socialism in Labour is indeterminate. Socialism within Labour may be buried beneath the avalanche of bureaucratic indifference and then made irrelevant by the emergence of an organisation outside Labour that can combine within itself all the loose strings from every campaign the Left fights. The failure to do this after the poll tax campaigns, and after the anti-war campaigns has been the life-support of Labour’s Left.

These failures are contingent – failures of tactics, rather than of principle – and a success in this field will remove that last remaining leg. On the other hand, the failure of Labour’s Left to conquer the Labour Party (whilst a rather taller order than the first) is equally contingent, one of tactics and not of principle. Everything flows, and there will be more mass campaigns thrown up by the intrinsic processes of capitalism meeting the contradiction of the indestructible basic solidarities of the working class. These tactics will have longer to test themselves out until the impulse either to utterly change Labour or to leave it will move even the conservative behemoths of UNISON and Unite.

Hurray! Ed Balls and Ed Miliband have announced that they were actually against the declaration of war on Iraq. The battle for the soul of the Labour Party is won! Pfft. Do me a favour. The announcements from Balls and Miliband are designed to position themselves as populists without having to promote any popular positions on policy.

“People always felt as if the decision had been made and they were being informed after the fact.” [...]

“I was in the room when a decision was taken that we would say it was that dastardly Frenchman, Jacques Chirac, who had scuppered it. It wasn’t really true, you know. I said to Gordon: ‘I know why you’re doing this, but you’ll regret it’. France is a very important relationship for us.”[...]

“It was a mistake. On the information we had, we shouldn’t have prosecuted the war. We shouldn’t have changed our argument from international law to regime change in a non-transparent way. It was an error for which we as a country paid a heavy price, and for which many people paid with their lives. Saddam Hussein was a horrible man, and I am pleased he is no longer running Iraq. But the war was wrong.”
-Ed Balls

One can’t help but notice that the wrongness of the war didn’t stop Balls from accepting a parachute into a safe Labour seat from the New Labour heirarchy, nor a series of well-paying jobs from the very people who inaugurated the war. Quite the heavy price. But all of this is nothing compared to Balls’ admission that he’d have voted for the war.

So not that against the war.

“As we all know, the basis for going to war was on the basis of Saddam’s threat in terms of weapons of mass destruction and therefore that is why I felt the weapons inspectors should have been given more time to find out whether he had those weapons, and Hans Blix – the head of the UN weapons inspectorate – was saying that he wanted to be given more time. The basis for going to war was the threat that he posed.

“The combination of not giving the weapons inspectors more time, and then the weapons not being found, I think for a lot of people it led to a catastrophic loss of trust for us, and we do need to draw a line under it.”
-Ed Miliband

Clear moral leadership there from Miliband. Or not. It may just be a poor choice of words, but what Miliband is saying seems to be that the Labour government lied, and that it’d be really nice if people would just forget about it. Sure, Hans Blix should have been given more time, but there’s no actual critique of the war there.

Millions of people marched against the war – millions who did not support the objectives of the war, who did not want to risk British lives and who plainly disbelieved every word the government uttered. The best Ed Miliband can come up with is that the weapons inspectors should have been given longer, and that the failure of the invasion to find them led to a loss of trust. Lukewarm.

I can’t help but wonder if the Guardian stirring up this issue simply as a backdoor endorsement to Ed Miliband, which Ed Balls has neatly shafted. In reality, each interview is a key failure – it demonstrates categorically that both Balls and Brother Ed see government in the traditional way: you can disagree with the decision but it ultimately belongs to the Ministers and the Parliamentary Party.

Election to government of a Labour Party with these men at the top would thus not be substantially different to New Labour.

Both Ed and David Miliband have begun their rhetorical repositioning for the leadership campaign. The by-line of the Guardian article on Brother David reads, “Former foreign secretary woos the party’s left…” but the reality is probably more accurately exposed by Paul Waugh’s summary over at the Evening Standard. David Miliband has set himself up as the ‘clean hands’ candidate – nodding to the past, nodding to the thousands of activists who had to watch dumbfounded as Labour waddled from mistake to disaster and so on.

Meanwhile, brother Ed has turned to rather naive-sounding guff about New Labour not having a sense of mission, but falling into the mindset of ‘technocratic caretakers’. His pitch is that Labour needs to hook up once more with the core vote, but that New Labour ‘asked the hard questions’ – that something can be saved. Some people seem to think that Brother Ed is appealing to the working class, and he picks out ‘real world’ examples, saying that we should prefer the realities visited upon people instead of abstract economics.

The harsh reality, of course, is both were cabinet ministers (one under Blair and both under Brown). They aren’t reformers, and a latter-day conversion towards Labour members having a greater say is opportunistic in the extreme. When we see concrete proposals on this ‘having a say’ bit, I’ll be sure to return to it, but the ‘feel’ of their speech is that there may be institutional adjustments and gasping policy announcements and lots of talk about ‘renewal’ but that very little will change. This is virtually inevitable if Brothers Ed and David don’t move beyond Blair – and I don’t think they will or can even imagine how to.

Just as interesting as those who have thrown their hat into the ring is who has not.

Jon Cruddas has ruled himself out of the leadership race, which probably removes the only chance the soft Left ever had at influencing the thing, beyond gushing pronouncements in favour of Ed Miliband, who is viewed as the more Left of the two brothers. Wannabe softie, James Purnell, is pushing the same line as Cruddas at the moment; re-connect with the vote (among C2 voters), move slowly, re-energise the Party. This seems to be standard for the so-called centre Left; thus too pressure group Compass’ post-election statement. Evidently Neal Lawson and the rest of that self-admiring cohort don’t think they’ve done enough damage with their urgings to vote ‘tactically’ for the Lib-Dems, to keep out the Tories.

All of this talk about renewal and reconnecting etc, from the centre-Left, is meant to fill the bloody great hole where actually doing something fits in. Around the world, indefinite strikes have been pronounced – here at home, workers (often against the wishes of their trades unions) are gearing up to fight the incoming cuts, whether from private business or the public sector…and meanwhile the lions of centre-left socialism are doing little but mewl in the press. Which is exactly what I and others expect, so that at least is gratifying.

A centre-Left candidate may yet emerge, of course. In the meantime, those who have been casting rather silly aspersions at John McDonnell’s potential candidacy find themselves in the unenviable position of wanting ‘a clean break from the policies and practices of the New Labour era’ while opposing the only leadership candidate likely to achieve it. Former MP Bob Clay’s article on the subject departs from reality entirely, with a mention of Michael Meacher as a more likely candidate (Meacher got three endorsements and crumbled at the 2007 debate).

McDonnell ran in 2007 and though he failed to get enough endorsements, his campaign was like a fresh wind through the often sterile internal debates of the Labour Party. Even a Cruddas candidacy, though more likely to gain enough nominations, would not necessarily provoke this – Cruddas is, after all, basically a Blairite, and support for him would still place the  soft Left in contradiction to themselves – wanting a change from New Labour, a return to an older form of social democracy, while supporting a candidate who wants nothing of the sort. We’re spared making this argument because Cruddas isn’t running. His own reasoning (if such banalities deserve the title) can be read here.

This makes the attacks against John McDonnell seem all the more surreal. Without an alternative candidate of even basic Left credentials, McDonnell is the natural choice for any socialist remaining in Labour. What all the arguments against McDonnell clearly miss, of course, is the chance that a McDonnell candidacy gives the LRC – a group based around members, union branches and CLPs – to get a foothold in Labour around the country, to kick off real debate and to set up mini-groups of supporters who can deepen and broaden LRC support by campaign activities. Only this long game offers a glimmer of hope for the Left; otherwise they should get out of Labour and stay out.

Key among campaign priorities before the election demanded the full attention of every activist was the People’s Charter, which is solid Left stuff that appeals far beyond the narrow confines of the Labour Representation Committee. This is the sort of thing which could get off the ground, certainly in time for conference in the autumn. What plenty of the nay-sayers also neglect to note is that there are several McDonnell supporters running as the Left candidates for leadership of different unions. Paul Holmes, interviewed here, is a key one, over at UNISON.

This is a chance to energise and mobilise the whole Left – both its union and party elements. Meanwhile those people saying that John McDonnell is hostile to or likely to alienate the unions because of his opposition to union bureaucratisation need to catch themselves on. McDonnell is the only candidate who, as leader, would have any intention of mobilising parliamentary and extra-parliamentary elements of the movement to slam dunk the Trade Union Freedom Bill.

Whatever platitudes we get from the soft-Left, that fear of extra-parliamentary action will always keep them bottled up – that is why we need a candidate like McDonnell. The other regular rebels – like Jeremy Corbyn – will likely fall into line behind McDonnell, especially with the unanimous backing from the LRC’s National Committee put firmly on record, in the aftermath of Saturday’s conference, sponsored by the LRC, whatever remains of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy and various unions.

If McDonnell doesn’t win, then Labourites face years of a Tory government whose best friends are the Labour leadership, as under Thatcher and Kinnock, when everything possible was done by the Labour heirarchy to smother mass activism and militancy, in fear that it could damage the credentials of the Party to lead ‘the nation’. Then, I guarantee you, that space outside of Labour for a Left party, which people are saying has closed or is closing, will be blasted wide open in no time at all. Tomorrow’s article concerns just that.