Labour Party

Demand the Labour Government concede to the postal workers and sack Mandelson. Download pdf (see "attachment").

A Labour Party activist long centrally involved in battles for democracy in the party spoke to Martin Thomas about the vote at Labour Party conference this year to have OMOV (direct election) for the constituency places on the National Policy Forum. This was the best thing that has happened at conference for thirty years. The unions and the constituency parties united and took on the whole party machine and won. That hasn't happened for a long time. It was fundamental if only as a symbolic issue: the constituencies and the unions united against the party machine. What happens now depends on...

Gordon Brown used the opportunity of Labour Party conference to pick on a group of people who are poor, powerless and not much older than children. Did it make him feel big when he announced “from now on all 16 and 17 year old parents who get support from the taxpayer will be placed in a network of supervised homes”? Did he feel like a proper pillar of the establishment when he assured the tax paying public that “these shared homes will offer not just a roof over their heads, but a new start in life where they learn responsibility and how to raise their children properly”? He knew that the...

By their friends shall ye know them : the decision of the Sun (or, rather, Mr Rupert Murdoch) to back New Labour at the General Election should come as no great surprise. The Sun and its proprietor fell out of love with the Tories when Thatcher was dumped (or "betrayed" as the Sun still says) and Black Wednesday confirmed their disappointment with John Major. They have been flirting with Blair ever since. And, of course, Murdoch likes to back winners - especially winners who will be making decisions that might affect, say, whose little decoding boxes are allowed onto our TV sets. In Australia...

A long-time Labour Party activist reports on some of the things at Labour Party conference which didn't reach the newspapers or the TV coverage. The Labour Party leadership put a lot of effort into trying to stop the rule change to have the 55 constituency Labour Party (CLP) delegates to the National Policy Forum elected by the membership at large rather than by a few hundred CLP delegates at national conference. Pat McFadden, Chair of the Labour Party National Policy Forum, was having delegates called out of the hall to meet him so that he could pull them into line, yet in the vote we had a...

As the Labour Party approaches its annual conference (Brighton, from 27 September), tensions within the party are increasing. Whether they will find expression on conference floor is another thing. Successive restructurings have turned the "conference" into a glorified photo-opportunity. The "Partnership in Power" rule changes of 1997 was followed in 2007 by the banning of current political motions from trade unions and local Labour Parties in favour of "issues" to be safely remitted to the National Policy Forum. Even the Labour Party conference was usually lively, conferences coming just...

[At each stage in the transformation of the Labour Party by the Blair-Brown coup, Workers Liberty has analysed what that meant for working class politics. Here an editorial in Workers Liberty Journal assesses the situation in 1997 and explains why we were saying "Vote Labour" in the upcoming General Election. THE labour Party and Labour-Trade Union relations have changed greatly in the last 13 years, so, of course, no mechanical inferences for the 2010 General Election can be drawn from this 1997 analysis.] Tony Blair and his friends in the so-called "Millbank Tendency" intend to radically...

An article from Workers' Action (a forerunner of Solidarity: no.153, 22 September 1979) on the prospects, as we saw them, from the big upheavals then underway in the Labour Party. The outcome will probably determine the character of the Labour Party for decades. Either the left will go on from a victory on democracy at Brighton [Labour Party conference, 1979] to consolidate the Labour Party as a genuinely socialist party seeking to overthrow capitalism on the basis of the class struggle of the working class, and build up a mass membership around such policies. Or the left will be purged and...

Introduction to the December 1980 pamphlet published by Socialist Organiser, "Labour democracy and the fight for a workers' government". This pamphlet contains a selection of articles from the newspaper Socialist Organiser. The Organiser is published fortnightly by a national network of supporters' groups, consisting of individuals in the Labour Party and trade unions whose politics cover a wide range on the far Left. Socialist Organiser has played an important role in the labour movement in the last period. We initiated the Rank and File Mobilising Committee, which united most of the Labour...

Val Graham was a delegate to Unison Labour Link Forum on 6-7 July and was surprised by the speech which Unison general secretary Dave Prentis made there. Unison Labour Link Forum is the special conference, made up of regional delegates from Unison members who are also Labour Party members, which is supposed to decide Unison policy in relation to the Labour Party. Val spoke to Solidarity about the conference. I was genuinely surprised by Dave Prentis’s speech. Last year at Labour Link conference he was still pleading with us to be patient with Gordon Brown, and a motion from my region, East...