Here are my 10 political New Year’s resolutions

My political New Year’s resolutions:

1) Campaign as hard as I can for our excellent local Labour council candidates and hardworking MP Andrew Smith. I’m not going to allow any disgruntlement I feel about the direction the party is going in nationally to deter me from helping us get the best results possible everywhere for Labour, but particular locally in Oxford where I live.

2) Put in some campaigning time for Sadiq Khan in London. We have a great mayoral candidate with a real chance of winning, he deserves support.

3) Play a part in the yes campaign in the referendum on EU membership  – probably the most important vote in my lifetime in terms of Britain’s strategic future.

4) Don’t allow the infighting going on nationally to seep into my local Labour Party. I’m lucky to be a member of the fantastic Oxford Labour Party, which is welcoming, inclusive, pluralistic and includes people who play a national role in various different groupings across the Labour spectrum, but work well together locally. I want to keep it that way.

5) Come up with at least one policy idea. If we want to get beyond a stale debate between 1980s ideas and 1990s ones, we need to generate some new policies for debate, even if they get shot down in flames.

6) Attack the Tories. They are trashing the country and getting off the hook because we in the Labour Party are too busy debating our own party’s future. I’ve got a platform on social media so, whilst a major theme of this column is always going to be commentary about internal Labour matters, I also need to use it more often to expose the Tories.

7) Get to know more new members of the party.

8) Try to keep the way I debate comradely, however angry events make me.

9) Get back up to speed with the detail of politics in other European states – I’ve allowed my knowledge of the fortunes, personalities and ideas of our sister parties in the Party of European Socialists to get rusty, and there is so much we can learn from each other.

10) Don’t mix drinking and bidding in auctions at local Labour Party fundraising dinners (that week in a Highland cottage with no phone signal three hours’ drive from the nearest supermarket seemed like a good idea at the time … I suppose it will be character forming).