John McDonnell says Labour backbenchers would force Miliband to abandon austerity

John McDonnell, MP for Hayes and Harlington, has warned that if Labour are the largest party in May, they may have to change some of their current economic policies because of opposition from MPs.

In an interview with the New Statesman, McDonnell, who is also Chair of the Socialist Campaign Group, the Labour Representation Committee and the Public Services Not Private Profit Group, said

“The first row will be around austerity unless we get this right … I think it will change, inevitably it will change. I think it will be clear from pressure coming back from constituencies and individual MPs that we need a Labour government quickly making a change”. 

He said that he would vote against any Budget or Spending Review that includes cuts and thinks that he’d be joined by another 30 or 40 MPs in doing so, meaning that the leadership wouldn’t be able to “ignore” their demands.

But McDonnell wasn’t entirely downbeat saying that there has been “a shift in terms of the Labour leadership’s thinking and even in terms of Ed Balls’s thinking” in the sense that “they realise you have to offer an alternative”:

 “You can’t come in with austerity-lite, it won’t work. Coming in with arguments that you’re going to cut services, not necessarily as much as the Tories, but you will still be cutting services, I think that argument is beginning to creak, I think that argument is beginning to fade. Increasingly now, the Labour leadership has recognised that, actually, you can tackle the deficit over a longer period of time, that way you avoid any cuts whatsoever. More importantly, you can tackle it by making our tax system fairer and that means tackling tax evasion and tax avoidance.”

However, austerity is not where the disputes end. When it comes to Trident McDonnell is clear that he and a number of other Labour MPs on the left of the party are opposed to renewal:

We’re not going to agree on that one … From the left what we’re saying to the Labour leadership is ‘give people a free vote, just give people a free vote’. It’s ultimately a matter of principle about the morality of using nuclear weapons, which would cause such loss of life and destruction the planet … If we can get to a free vote there’s the potential, then, of having a more rational debate”.

The former NUM and TUC official also noted that the number of MPs opposing Trident could grow after the election because as a survey conducted by CND found, there are a number of PPCs in winnable seats who oppose the renewal of the nuclear deterrent.

Despite his criticism of Labour’s approach to austerity and Trident, McDonnell remains extremely optimistic about Ed Miliband’s leadership. He predicted that Labour will be largest party and that he has a “sneaking feeling that we could win a small majority – because I think the Tory vote is really soft”. He went on to compare the current party with New Labour:

“The good thing with Ed is that whereas to go and see Gordon Brown or Tony Blair you literally had to prise the door open, or bang it down with a sledgehammer, to get any dialogue whatsoever, with Ed, and I think he does to all sections of the party, not just the left, I think there’s an open door policy. When we’ve had issues that we’ve needed to raise, meetings have been arranged and there’s a proper dialogue.”

“It’s so much more open and democratic, and, to be honest, friendlier, it’s just friendlier.”

However he like the rest of the Labour party are aware of the collapse of support for them in Scotland. McDonnell explained he thinks the party’s decision not to elect a left wing leader and deputy leader hasn’t helped with this:

“Let me be frank, if Neil Findlay and Katy Clark had been elected I think we would have been in a much stronger position to demonstrate that we had a clear agenda that was attractive to Scottish people. Without them, I think unfortunately we haven’t got the strength and the radicalism that they could have brought to the Scottish Labour Party. Even Jim Murphy, though, has shifted on a number of issue to demonstrate that the party up there needs to be more radical. I think the best hope that we’ve got is to try and make sure that we promote as radical an agenda as we possibly can.”