Listen to the people, not the dinner party activists

By John Prescott

We might be in recess, but after our RBS anti-bonus campaign, I’m now getting ready to go to Cyprus for a Council of Europe environment meeting. We’re hoping to lay the groundwork for a successful climate change conference in Copenhagen in December.

But as I flicked through the papers on the train this morning, I saw that I was not the only person in the news – Harriet is in several of them too.

It reminded me of last September. Back then the papers were full of talk that Labour was finished, Gordon Brown was going to be replaced and rumours of coalitions – all trickled out by a combination of London political journalists, political advisers who’d probably seen too many episodes of the West Wing and a handful of MPs that I dubbed the ‘Bitterites.’

That led to us to establish Go Fourth – to fight to end distracting talk of leadership and campaign for a fourth Labour term. The result was that talk subsided within a few weeks, even with reports of regrets by some of the protagonists.

Five months on, we’re in the middle of the biggest financial crisis for decades but thankfully Gordon’s in control and leading us through. He recapitalised and saved the banks to keep people in their homes and in their jobs. His economic stimulus package has been adopted around the world, as we’ve just seen with President Obama – which of course, was opposed by Republicans in US just as Cameron’s Tories did here.

Now we’ve just conducted a successful campaign to stop RBS bankers handing out £1b of our public money to reward failure by using simple people power.

More than 31,000 signed our petition at www.giveupthebonus.co.uk and more than 11,000 joined our Facebook campaign group – all working together to bring about change.

We ended up presenting our petition to John McFall ahead of RBS Chief Executive Stephen Hester giving evidence to the Treasury Select Committee. John even passed it on to him afterwards. It led to Mr Hester calling me to discuss RBS and for me to be an advocate for our supporters.

I’m glad to see he listened to what we had to say, and as I’ve said, it’s a 93% victory – the bonuses being 7% of last year’s pay out of £2.5billion and £825 million less than what they were reportedly going to hand out this year. (Though I’d like a little discussion on these ‘deferred awards’).

The lesson I’ve learnt about our online campaign is that a powerful pressure group of people can influence events without the political interpretation or instigation from North London dinner party activists!

This London political chattering class, often led by articles from Polly Toynbee, Rachel Sylvester and Jackie Ashley, are quite happy to feed the media with talk of a leadership challenge – just as they did last September.

Can I suggest they leave those dinner parties and talk to REAL people who want to see this Government tackling the problems that effect millions of people. People who would find it inexcusable to conduct such destablising campaigns in the middle of a global crisis.

Let’s never forget, this was not caused by the Government but by greedy bankers all over the world.

And as we’ve seen yesterday, it’s people using new media not listening to the old media, who are now making the difference.

Still, at least I’ve given a few columnists something else to write about!