I want a Labour Party that doesn’t protest cuts, it reverses them

On Saturday I went on a demo.

I went into the middle of Oxford where I live, with my wife, a city councillor, our ten year old who is actually fairly politically savvy, and our four year old who obviously isn’t political but likes drums and trumpets and flags and all the other exciting stuff at demos.

And we marched through the drizzle and the shoppers and the bemused Japanese tourists to the tunes of a fine street band called Horns of Plenty, with the banners of Oxford Labour, Wolvercote Labour, Bicester Labour and even Wantage Labour proudly in front of us.

We were marching because a Tory government and a Tory county council had been proposing shutting every single one of the county’s 44 children’s centres in order to save £8m. Even David Cameron’s mum had signed a petition against the cuts. Public pressure has forced the council to continue to fund some services at 11 of the centres until 2017 but the bulk of this act of vandalism is still going ahead.

The city of Oxford itself doesn’t elect any Tory councillors at all to its own City Council or to the county council but the crazy two tier local government system means all the main services like schools and social services are controlled, colonial style, by Tory grandees from the Cotswolds or Henley whose understanding of the levels of need on Oxford’s council estates must be sketchy to say the least.

I’m pleased we protested. Silence can be taken as acquiescence and I do not acquiesce in the dismantling of everything the last Labour Government invested in. It is vital that good people stand up and fight and shout and scream to try to stop the erosion in the name of austerity of public services that are about giving our children the best start in life.

But I have never felt more powerless and full of impotent rage.

Just a decade ago we were in power investing in all these services, trying and generally succeeding in making life better for every citizen but particularly the most vulnerable.

Now we are on 27% in the opinion polls according to ComRes and 14% points behind the same Tories who are making these despicable cuts.

If anyone tells you there is no difference between a Labour government and a Tory one, that we are all Red Tories, I want to show them Oxford’s children’s centres, opened by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and shut by David Cameron.

If anyone tells you that winning elections isn’t important, that it’s better to have the purest doctrines than compromise with swing voters, I want to show them those closed children’s centres and ask if it is their children whose life chances are being damaged for the sake of their principles.

I thought Jeremy Corbyn was elected to take the fight to the Tories on austerity if nothing else.

But when I marched on Saturday I knew my local Labour Party was there but I didn’t feel we were part of a bigger struggle.

I don’t hear the political hammer blows being struck against these cuts by our national leaders.

Every time they are interviewed this is the message they should be driving home.

We ought not to be able to move for piles of leaflets about these cuts arriving from head office.

We ought not to be able to go online for the volume of tweets expressing outrage about this and putting forward an alternative vision of social justice.

Where is the Labour Party’s national demonstration against the cuts?

Where is the national anti-cuts narrative for our local election campaigns in May?

Where are the plans for a summer of festivals and street stalls against them?

Where is the mobilisation by the national party of all the new members to not only come and march with us but also leaflet and canvass with us?

Where’s Momentum when it could be campaigning on this?

Where is the messaging that the whole party could unite around?

Instead the life is being sucked out of the party by a divisive and arid debate about Trident, where we all rehearse views we have argued every decade since the 1950s, in a mock defence review we all know the outcome of has been pre-fixed to suit the leadership, and we all know from today’s polling and historic election results will lead us even further into electoral oblivion but the unilateralist side appears not to care.

How much time and energy are CLPs spending debating Trident when we could be planning how to fight the cuts?

How much time and energy are our politicians devoting to fighting each other over defence in party meetings and in the media when they could be telling the public what is being done to their public services?

I am sick of marching in protest.

I want to go back to a Labour Party that can and does win power and doesn’t protest cuts, it reverses them.

Where is Jeremy and his team’s route map to get us there?

How come these clever people with their sophisticated scientific analysis of the crisis of capitalism, who can successfully plan the transformation of Labour’s membership base and the capture of the party leadership, and have all manner of blueprints for our defence and foreign policies and for changing the internal power structures of the party, are so remarkably, desperately silent when it comes to a plan for how we stop these Tories wrecking our country and get Labour back into power?

That’s the day job – opposing this Tory government and its disgusting cuts, and making Labour electable again.

Either do it or let someone else do it.