Michael Meacher organising for a Coalition for Labour Victory

By Alex Smith / @alexsmith1982

There’s been an interesting addition tonight to the discussion on the future of the Labour Party, the policy directions it might take, and the personalities who may seek to influence that direction in the future.

Michael Meacher, who initially stood against Gordon Brown as Labour Party leader in 2007, has tonight sent out the following round robin email to a number of Labour Party MPs and activists, calling for a broad coalition across the Labour movement:

Dear —,

After discussion with several parliamentary colleagues, leading trade unionists and various organisations of Labour Party members about how to mobilise Labour voters across Britain in the forthcoming General Election, and the policies we need to win, I am appealing for your support for a Coalition for Labour Victory.

Please let me know whether you support the following statement – we will publicise it when I have gathered a sufficiently broad range of support from all sections of the movement but, as an indication of its breadth, it does have the active support of both Compass and the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy.

A COALITION FOR LABOUR VICTORY

In order to mobilise the maximum number of Labour voters in preparation for the next election, we believe that Labour should now focus its campaigning around the following key principles:

A. The recession should be tackled not with cuts in essential public spending, but by massive public investment in house-building, infrastructure and the de-carbonisation of the economy.

B. Banks should be split up with their casino investment arms hived off. Publicly-owned retail banks should be required to meet new social and community objectives and support manufacturing, with lending to businesses and homeowners restored to 2007 levels. Pay and bonuses should be tightly regulated.

C. A clean break must be made with market fundamentalism – deregulation and privatisation. Public provision should be expanded – in health care, education, housing, pensions, energy and transport. Royal Mail must remain wholly in the public sector.

D. In the face of huge and unacceptable growth of inequality, a big redistribution programme must swing resources away from the rich to provide sizeable increases in pensions, the minimum wage, the lowest benefit levels, and to fund job creation and improved public services. Union rights must be restored – it is in economic crisis that workers are most in need of that protection.

E. To achieve the 80% carbon emission reduction target by 2050, renewable sources of energy should be promoted on a far bigger scale, industry (including airlines) should be required to reduce its climate change emissions by at least 3% per year, household carbon allowances should be introduced, and the UK targets should be fully met by domestic action and not by carbon offsetting abroad.

We also believe that if Labour is to revive its membership in numbers and activity, it must fully restore its internal democratic procedures so that the voice of its individual and affiliated members is listened to and taken account of. This process has begun with the adoption of all-member voting rights for the National Policy Forum. But we believe that several further reforms are needed, in particular to restore to the elected NEC full supervision and control over the party’s operation and finances, to introduce a charter of members’ rights and a Party Ombudsman to enforce them, and to renew for all party employees the core civil service values of impartiality, integrity, honesty and objectivity in the development of party policy and selection of party candidates.

Yours sincerely,

Michael Meacher MP