What is Labour for?

By Mike Stallard

COMMENT OF THE DAY 19/05/09
“With this post LabourList has grown up, and proved it. Painful reading for some I’m sure (reminds me of the soul searching in the early days of ConservativeHome). But if you don’t know where you stand how can you move forward?”
Dual Citizen, on The LabourList Poll Results.

Comrades! Communism crashed and burned in 1989. Old Labour has gone forever. Tony Blair saw that very clearly. New Labour was born when he came along. And let us not forget that the New Labour movement has been a roaring success: three elections running with huge majorities.

Now New Labour has had its day. Our Tony is a multi millionaire going for the Presidency of Europe.

Come on, let’s admit it: a sizeable number of the present set of MPs of every party are not in it for you and me, the ordinary people: too many backhanders, too many new Lords, too many apparatchiks. Champagne Socialism never meant that. It certainly never meant hob nobbing with the rich and powerful while taxing the balls off the poor and running up a huge debt which the poor will have to pay back. (We know that: the rich have always somehow escaped tax).

The working class movement to which we belong, certainly never meant the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. It did not ever mean a parliament with MPs doing all the things they forbid us ordinary voters to even think about (smoking in the Parliamentary bars, expense accounts which are criminal, travelling around in limos while spouting about carbon emissions).

It is all getting too “Animal Farm” for a lot of electors.

So, what do we want?

Well, for starters, how about looking after the poor?

How about letting poor people have some money back? It is easy to do if we are determined enough. Australia (Labour government) has just done this.

How about letting the (working class) Police do their job without interfering with them with ridiculous targets? How about actually electing the Police Chiefs? Can’t we trust our own voters?

How about letting schools be free of the State by restricting the enormous amounts of paperwork involved, most of it unnecessary, and letting the parents have vouchers so that they are in control of their children? How about putting Heads firmly in charge of the schools? How about letting some smaller schools exist?

How about cutting back on the mighty army of NHS administrators? Or are you telling me that nobody can see the difference between them and the front line staff? Does the NHS really need to be as big as it is? Wouldn’t it work a lot better without all that dead weight?

Oh – and while we are about it, how about doing the same in town halls?

Being Labour, we cannot reform the current abuses of supplementary benefits or the dole, can we. Even Frank Field was sacked for mentioning them. So don’t let us even discuss it.

How about introducing secret ballots into the House of Commons so that the Prime Minister, the whips and the unelected staff at No 10 cannot dictate micromanaged policy as they do at the moment?

I thought the Left wing was a mine of fascinating new ideas. So where, exactly, are they? All I can see at the moment is a mass of unexamined clichés – “Tory cuts”, “Women’s rights”, “gains in the polls”.

Buy – hey – we can’t think about all this! We need to win the next election!