Labour Party

The Unite union helped with resources for Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign for Labour leader, and by all accounts Unite’s leaders are influential with the team round Corbyn. So a long article by Unite “chief of staff” Andrew Murray about Corbyn’s Labour, first published on the web in mid-October and widely circulated since, deserves analysis. It’s an odd article, written in the style of a jaded but worldly-wise oracle addressing young devotees. And vague when it gets to the point. It castigates Blair-Brown “New Labour” at length, chides Ed Miliband’s weakness, and observes that battles inside the...

The Stop the Labour Purge campaign against the expulsions and exclusions of socialists from the Labour Party reports: "The Bakers, Food and Allied Workers' Union has issued the following statement (see here for the original on their website). We very much hope other Labour-affiliated trade unions will do the same, and are working with supporters in a variety of unions to promote the campaign in the labour movement." The BFAWU statement is as follows: The Bakers, Food and Allied Workers' Union opposes the expulsion of socialists from the Labour Party; including the eight comrades expelled...

For the past three months, the very word “reselection” has been unmentionable in Labour left circles, for fear that even talking about it would represent an unwarranted provocation of the Labour right. But as recent events clearly underline, it’s time to break the taboo. At the very least, Corbyn supporters now have to — how can I put this gently? — engage in measured debate on how we approach the next round of trigger ballots for sitting MPs. Jeremy famously won’t push the nuke button, but do we want to drop the D-bomb? And if we do, how should we best go about it? I am, of course, going to...

The media, the political establishment and probably some in the Labour right want a UKIP victory in the Oldham West by-election on Thursday 3 December in order to destabilise Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership and prove left-wing politics cannot be popular. There is a big campaign to boost UKIP and thus boost the possibility of it winning. Obviously, this campaign is not built on nothing. Socialists canvassing in Oldham confirm that right-wing and nationalist attitudes are widespread among former and current Labour voters. UKIP already had 20 per cent of the vote in May’s election, coming second...

Councils lost about a quarter of their funding during the 2010-15 Tory and Lib-Dem coalition government. Now they face the same order of attack again. Libraries, social care, and all community services beyond the minimum councils are legally compelled to do face futher chops. Either Labour finds a new approach, or Labour councils will be reduced even more to local administrators of the Tories’ demolition job on our communities. Discussions and debates in local Momentum meetings have showed majorities saying that Labour councillors should refuse to make cuts, defy the Tories’ plans, and help...

Thanks to the Labour Party, tens or hundreds of thousands of families in Scotland would be worse off as a result of the Tories’ tax credit cuts. And the Labour Party’s campaign against those cuts was “disingenuous”. That was the line adopted by the SNP and its activists in response to the Tories’ plans — now abandoned — to slash the working tax credits introduced by the last Labour government! The SNP propaganda stunt was that the SNP had moved an amendment to the Scotland Bill under which power over tax credits would have been devolved to Holyrood. Because Labour voted against this they are...

Socialist Worker of 14 November calls for the Momentum group, launched as a follow-up by members of the Corbyn Labour leader campaign team, to turn away from "internal Labour Party battles". "Some in Momentum have been quoted as saying their task is to 'turn the attention of their supporters towards the battles that will take place within the Labour Party'. "Tensions inside Labour mean there is always infighting... But the strength of Corbyn’s election campaign was based on the hundreds of thousands of people who signed up looking for radical change. "It would be a shame if that potential was...

Over recent months Jeremy Corbyn, now Labour Party leader, and John McDonnell, now Shadow Chancellor, have made four major statements on economic policy. Corbyn issued a document, The Economy in 2020, on 22 July, as part of his Labour leader campaign. McDonnell spoke at Labour Party conference on 29 September, and wrote articles for the Guardian website on 12 August and 12 May. They are a step forward from what we had from Ed Miliband, let alone what we had from Gordon Brown or Tony Blair. McDonnell and Corbyn commit clearly to restoring union rights and to renationalising rail. They advocate...

The reaffiliation of unions like the railworkers’ RMT and the firefighters’ FBU to Labour, and new affiliations from never-affiliated unions, could help Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, and the left in our effort to politically and organisationally transform Labour. Reaffiliation could counter the immense rightwards pressure still weighing on Labour from the MPs, from the party machine, and from the media and the whole society around us. Argument: “There’s no need to rush into reaffiliation.” There has already been a kind of “rush” into the Labour Party. Tens of thousands of people, most of them...

The Corbyn surge could receive an important boost in the next month with the announcement that the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) will consider reaffiliation to the Labour Party. The union’s executive has called a recall conference on 27 November to debate affiliation. The FBU disaffiliated from the Labour Party in 2004 after a bitter pay dispute, where the Blair government intervened aggressively on the side of the employers. A combination of disgust with the disgraceful behaviour of Labour ministers, anti-political sentiment, nationalism in the devolved administrations and plans by some activists...