Labour Representation Committee

By Martin Thomas The lion gave voice. It was more like a squeak or a groan than a roar, but it was the lion rising to its feet and holding forth for the first time in decades. In a fringe meeting at Labour Party conference in Bournemouth on Wednesday 1 October, five big trade unions, CWU (post and telecom), GMB and TGWU (both general unions), Amicus (engineering, electrical, scientific-technical, financial), and Unison (public services) organised a joint meeting to announce a campaign to 'put Labour back into the party'. As Tony Woodley, general secretary elect of the TGWU, noted, it was "a...

Support Iraqi workers; end the occupation Rebuild the health service; no two-tier NHS Scrap anti-union laws Free education Things are changing for the better in the labour movement. The election of new trade union leaders is beginning to impact on the Blair Labour Party, to which most of those unions with new leaders are affiliated, though the left-led civil service union PCS is a notable exception. New Labour's party conference, due to start on 29 September, is a very much reduced shadow of the old Labour conference. For nearly a decade it has been no more than a showcase for the Labour...

By a TUC conference delegate Highlight of the fringe at TUC conference was the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs meeting as part of their recent 'Save Our Party' tour. Speaking to a packed room, several union general secretaries spoke about their commitment to change inside the Labour Party, not on the basis of behind-the-scenes deals with Blair - a strategy which, in any case, is clearly not working - but on the basis of genuine rank-and-file involvement in building real democratic structures inside the party. There was much discussion about positive and active involvement in change inside the...

Labour Representation Committee Founding Conference. Saturday 3rd July 2004, 9am - 4pm, TUC Congress House, Great Russell Street, London WC1. The Labour Party was formed by trade unionists and socialists at the turn of the last century to give working people, their families and communities, political representation for the first time. Based on the principles of eradicating the evils of poverty and inequality in our society, the Labour Party was founded on a belief in the redistribution of wealth, power and opportunity into the hands of the many. Too often in the recent period many party...

Time to organise labour representation Underground pay referenda: Vote No! TGWU: why Dromey won University lecturers Support John Page Vote Agenda for Change Time to organise labour representation By Maria Exall At the Socialist Campaign Group Rally at Labour Party Conference Mick Rix called for trade unionists and Labour Party members to unite to ensure that the voice of labour was heard in the Labour Party. The idea of labour representation, the very idea on which the Labour Party was founded, is as necessary now as it was in 1900. The voices of working class people are mainly absent from...

New transport union leader Tony Woodley has pledged to coordinate a trade-union drive "to get Labour back representing working-class people". After winning election as the new General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers' Union, Woodley declared on 1 June that: "A fighting T&G will help coordinate like-minded unions to campaign to put the 'Labour back in the party' on a range of issues. I'll fulfil my promise to call a summit of affiliated unions to discuss how to get Labour back representing working-class people... "It means representing members rather than ministers as we take the...

Text for use in drafting motions to CWU conference . This Conference has no confidence in Tony Blair as leader of the Labour Party. Therefore we resolve to maintain the current level of affiliation to the Labour Party but: 1. To use all remaining moneys from the political levy to promote CWU policy and support CWU political campaigning, including joint campaigning with other unions as in point 6 below. 2. To give financial and practical support only to Labour candidates who are loyal to the labour movement and to trade-union and working-class principles. 3. To instruct the PFMC to review...

From Solidarity 3/14, 11 October 2002 Before the Labour Party conference last week in Blackpool, the Labour leadership was assiduously briefing the media to tell them that "Labour Party conference no longer decides party policy". Those media briefings showed two things. First, that the New Labour hierarchy knew they would be defeated at conference on central issues, and wanted to discount those defeats in advance. Second, that they were confident that they could get away with blatant dismissal of democracy. In fact there has been no formal, constitutional abolition of Labour conference's power...

A Labour-dominated Parliamentary committee of MPs has declared: "Never in peacetime has a prime minister gathered around himself such an assemblage of apparatchiks unaccountable to parliament..." Tony Blair, and other New Labour ministers like Stephen Byers, have constructed a little political machine autonomous from the traditional civil service. That machine is also autonomous - even more autonomous - from the labour movement. Around Tony Blair and his ministers, a whole army of spin-doctors, advisers, political assistants, and so on has been recruited. It is big enough to make up the...