Labour Party

Tottenham CLP backs victimised councillor

A long-serving Tottenham Labour councillor has had the whip withdrawn for three months after speaking out against cuts to adult care services. As a result of the budget of £70m cuts over three years passed by Labour-run Haringey Council in 2014, the Haringey cabinet meeting on 10 November 2015 voted to close day centres for adults with dementia and disabilities. Birkbeck Road Day Centre in Hornsey, Always Day Centre near Muswell Hill, the Roundway Centre, the Grange Day Centre and the Haven Day Centre are all set to close. At the meeting, Tottenham councillor Gideon Bull was reported to have...

Fighting Brighton’s cuts

On 30 January around six hundred people joined the first major protest against the latest round of cuts in Brighton on 30 January. They were trade unionists and seasoned campaigners. The one group notable by its absence was the local Labour Party. Just a couple of weeks before, a lively debate at a meeting of around two hundred Labour members voted for a weakened motion to campaign agains the “Tory” cuts, but fell short of committing to opposing them at council level. The Labour administration is proposing a budget that will make £68 million of cuts to vital services, shedding jobs and...

What's coming up at the Momentum national committee?

The process of preparing for Momentum’s first national committee meeting has had negatives but also definite positives. Things seem to be taking a step forward. We need to make the most of the positives to push things forward further. A sort of NC meeting was due in January, made up entirely of appointees. There was outcry, the meeting was delayed to 6 February, and a system of elections was put in place, with local groups electing delegates to regional meetings, which elected delegates to the NC. Even then, there were only three weeks to meet and elect delegates, leading to various problems...

Labour activists support junior doctors

Normally when we do a Labour Party stall for my branch, we get on average half a dozen people over an hour or two. If we have a petition, and do well, we might get a hundred signatures. We had a stall on Saturday 23 January in support of the junior doctors, for about two and half hours. We had on average 20 people there, about 30 involved in total. We got 700 signatures! Our local Tory MP [Broxtowe is a marginal seat], cabinet minister Anna Soubry, refused to meet a delegation in advance that would have been led by one of our doctors. Soubry initially wrote that she believed the Labour Party...

Expropriate the banks, not go for AES!

Dave Osland ( Solidarity 390) is right that Jeremy Corbyn’s and John McDonnell’s opposition to austerity is to be welcomed, and opens many more exit doors from the Thatcher-Blair-Brown-Cameron neo-liberal consensus than anything previously-established powers of the Labour Party had come up with for decades. He is also right that Corbynomics is far from “Leninism”, “all power to the Soviets”, or even “socialism in the strict sense of the term, namely the dominance of social ownership of the means of production”. However, he indicates that this remoteness from socialism proper, this closeness...

Setback for Trade Union Bill

The House of Lords has taken issue with the parts of the Trade Union Bill which relate to party funding and have referred them for closer scrutiny in the committee stages. However the Lords approved key measures which further restrict the right to strike. Overall, the Bill remains a hugh threat to trade union organising. Labour peers put a motion in the Lords which was passed by 327-234, that the bill was “not being conducted in the spirit of a report by the committee on standards in public life’s report, which urged cross-party talks to get a consensus on reforming party funding.” The TUC is...

What does Corbynism have to offer?

Turning Britain into an extended 1950s Czechoslovak collective farm tractor station forms no part whatsoever of the political project advocated by Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell. Yeah, I know, this shock revelation will sorely disappoint their detractors. But what is striking is that, ever since the two men took the leading positions in the Labour Party four months ago, serious measured analysis of what they actually stand for has been almost non-existent. That’s partly their own fault, of course. The Little Red Book stunt and the casual Christmas party quote from Enver Hoxha have made it...

The Socialist Party returns?

The Socialist Party is in a bit of a pickle. In 1991, most of what had been the Militant tendency left the Labour Party, reconstituting itself firstly as Militant Labour and then as the Socialist Party (SP). And to justify their exit, they argued that the party had changed fundamentally, transforming from what Lenin called a “bourgeois workers’ party” (which socialists should try to intervene in) into a straightforward “bourgeois party”. This idea of Labour’s irretrievable degeneration has functioned as something like an origin myth for the SP, serving not only to explain past history, but...

Be bold, change opinion

As Clive Lewis says ( in Solidarity 388 ) there are many definitions of socialism. That makes it all the more important for socialists to debate ideas. Lewis says a shift from austerity and neoliberal capitalism to (or a return to) welfare-state capitalism would be a gain for the working class. Indeed, taxing the rich, free education, a NHS, well-funded schools, social housing, higher wages, public services would be real and important improvements, for the working class as opposed to the Tories dark, dystopian future. However all of these things can only be won, or re-won as a result of class...

Momentum NHS organising

As previously reported in Solidarity , Labour Party supporting NHS activists have launched Momentum NHS to build links between Labour, the wider labour movement and NHS campaigns — and build pressure for Labour to take the lead in the fight to save the Health Service. We had our first planning meeting after the Save Lewisham Hospital conference on 5 December, have been getting social media in place and drawing more people in, and are now holding an organising meeting on Saturday 16 January, 3pm (email for venue details). The meeting will discuss proposals for mobilising local Labour Parties...

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