Labour Party

31 January has been set as the deadline for consultation over part two of “Refounding Labour”, the Labour leadership’s botched promise of a review of Labour Party structure. Part one ended with the Labour Party conference in Liverpool at the end of September being presented, at only a few hours’ notice, with a slew of rule changes from the leadership, and instructed to vote yes or no to the whole package with effectively no debate, while rule change proposals from local Labour Parties were ruled off the agenda on spurious grounds. However, the unions stood firm on most of the bad changes...

The very viability of the Labour Party, or of any union-based political party, could be thrown into question on 22 November, when the Committee on Standards in Public Life (CSPL, a sort of quango, set up in 1994, with members appointed by the Government and the three big parties) publishes its long-brewed report on party funding. According to the Guardian (28 October), the CSPL will propose: • Parties get £3 in public money for each vote they receive in a general election; • Donations to political parties be capped at £50,000. It is not clear whether union affiliation money for the Labour...

Liam Byrne, Labour’ s Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, has told chancellor George Osborne that he should not include pensions in a Tory plan to not increase benefits in line with the 5.2% inflation rate recorded in September. The plan will save £10.4 billion for the government. But Byrne stayed silent on other benefits! Does he think that some of the most vulnerable in society could be receiving even less cash in real terms? Labour should not be calling for only pensioners to be spared the axe — everyone should see their benefits increase, and financial support should be scaled up not down.

In a recent Observer article, and in interviews and conference speeches, Labour leader Ed Miliband has been making statements that make it seem like the Labour Party is beginning to side with protest movements and is supporting the demands of public sector unions on pensions and job cuts. Miliband says the Occupy London protests raise deep issues that society can’ t ignore; that the Tories are in touch with the richest 1% but not the other 99; that we must tackle the “irresponsible predator capitalists”; that we can’ t allow high levels of youth unemployment to continue; that we shouldn’ t be...

Bad as the right-wing press is, the world of socialist papers and journals is too often a dispiriting and unappealing alternative. The left press is usually tightly controlled by political organisations which discourage any debate. The result is lifeless, dreary publications with little or no influence. And it is a peculiarity of many left publications that their readership is smaller than their circulation, as so many purchases are expressions of solidarity rather than genuine interest in content. There have been honourable exceptions to this picture. The Miner newspaper was eagerly gobbled...

Since leaving office in 2007, former prime minister Tony Blair has, according to the Daily Telegraph, amassed a £20 million fortune (estimates vary). How’s he done it? Selling himself to the highest bidder. On the very same day he handed over to Gordon Brown, Blair stepped into the job of official representative to the Middle East for the UN, EU, USA and Russia. He then set about collecting a series of consultancies, advisory positions and board memberships for institutions like JP Morgan Chase, Zurich Financial Services and the UI Energy Corporation — a South Korean oil firm that operates in...

The Scottish Labour Party special conference on 29 October will mark the official start of the party’s leadership contest in Scotland. One of the lessons Labour has drawn from the debacle of May’s Holyrood elections is that the party in Scotland needs to be more “Scottish”, i.e. it should have greater control over its affairs than it exercises at present. The 29 October conference will therefore be voting on four packages of rule changes which effectively “devolve” power from the Labour Party at a national level to the Labour Party in Scotland, including the power to elect its own leader and...

By Martin Thomas Myself, when I first read Ed Miliband’s Labour Party conference speech (27 September), I dismissed his attack on “predators” as an unmemorable empty throwaway remark. I was wrong. If it was throwaway, then it was thrown away onto a terrain where it has been a stifling consensus in mainstream politics for decades to be “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich” (Peter Mandelson, 1998), and yet where now, with the crisis, millions can see that the drive for filthy riches has made society ever more cruel to the majority and economic life ever more destructive. The...

This year’s Labour party conference [25-29 September, in Liverpool] was, according to Campaign for Labour Party Democracy secretary Pete Willsman, the most lively in years – more support for references back, more support for speeches against the leadership line, and some political debate. This is the second year we’ve had contemporary motions back on the agenda, after they were abolished by Gordon Brown in 2007 and restored in 2011. Dave Prentis, general secretary of the public service Unison, got applause from the majority when, speaking on the Unison motion about public services and the...

Ed Miliband's attack on "predators" in his Labour Party conference speech has generated much controversy and comment in the media. A sharp and unexpected assessment came from Peter Oborne in the Daily Telegraph (30/09/11). The "Thatcher settlement, like Attlee's, proved enduring. Indeed, it was formalised after the general election of 1997, when the victorious Labour prime minister Tony Blair (supported by his chancellor Gordon Brown) explicitly accepted and developed the economic and moral insights of his great predecessor. The financial collapse of September 2008 drew a line under this...