Labour promises tainted by austerity

Submitted by Matthew on 24 September, 2014 - 11:43 Author: Tom Harris

With under seven months to go until the General Election, the Labour Party held its annual conference in Manchester on 21-24 September.

So close to an election, the conference was expected to launch the key campaigns.

Speeches from senior Party figures were mixed at best. The rank and file did not get much input.

The Conference Arrangements Committee was able to rule out half the “contemporary motions” submitted from constituencies, as it has routinely done in recent years. The party machine got the CLP delegates voluntarily to forgo two of their four chances to get a subject debated, by bamboozling them into voting for priorities the unions had already selected.

The machine kept the Middle East and Scotland, and spiky NHS motions, off the agenda.

And eight out of 11 rule change proposals from CLPs, brought forward from last year, were ruled out.

The unions were carefully not rocking the boat, in line with their stance at the Milton Keynes Policy Forum, where all the unions bar BECTU voted against a constituency delegate proposal to commit the next Labour government to ending cuts.

On the face of it, some of the commitments made by Ed Miliband and others are positive. £2.5 billion has been pledged to the NHS, which Miliband claims will be spent on 20,000 more nurses, 8,000 more GPs, 5,000 more care workers and 3,000 more midwives by 2020.

Yvette Cooper also announced that a Labour government would scrap the Tories’ net migration target, saying the arbitrary figure had led to the government penalising international students and breaking up migrant families. Both of these announcements should be welcomed by socialists, but they are not nearly enough.

More worryingly, Ed Balls used his conference speech to warn of yet more fiscal austerity, and outrageously argued that a freeze on child benefit was a necessary measure to balance the books. Such a cut will hit working-class families hard, and do nothing to win over crucial voters in the election.

Socialists argue that the richest in society should pay for the capitalist crisis — Ed Balls clearly thinks ordinary children must pay instead.

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