John McDonnell leadership campaign: free unions

Report and interviews from Organising for Fighting Unions conference on 11 November

Update on JJB Sports strike status sent by GMB Thursday 16 November 2006

Wigan AFC and JJB Sports owner and premier-league wanker Dave Whelan wins this month's Supreme Corporate Arsehole Award, as far as the hundreds of people at today's Organising for Fighting Trade Unions conference are concerned.

Dave treats his staff in the JJB Sports distribution warehouse in Wigan like garbage. Their salaries stink, and their reasonable requests for better money and terms continue to fall on Dave's deaf ears.

So, they have begun to organise. Paid - if we can call it that - an average of £200 a week, JJB Sports distribution staff have taken several days of strike action to try and convince Whelan to raise and standardise their basic wage, and to put a fair bonus scheme in place for staff at the Martland Park warehouse distribution depot.

They nearly got it, too, says GMB organiser and JJB Sports staff member Chris Riley. They'd been negotiating with JJB CEO Tom Knight, who could see the sense of having distribution staff on the same pay and terms across the organisation. At the moment, some staff members are paid more than others - what you get, says Riley, tends to depend on the health, or otherwise, of your relationship with management.

'He [Knight] could see that it [equal pay] would work. If we were all on the same pay, he could move staff when he wanted in the organisation and he would have that flexibility.' Unfortunately, Dave Whelan got involved in the negotiations at that point. He 'came in and tore the whole thing up. He says if we go for union recognition, we will shut and they will replace us with agency workers.' JJB Sports made a pre-tax £18.2 profit in the six months to July this year.

Riley, who has two sons, earns about £180 a week. He says that kind of wage is impossible to live on. 'If it wasn't for the family tax credit, I don't know what I would do. I don't think I could do it.' He's been working for JJB Sports for four years. 'That's the part of it that is difficult. We don't know why Whelan is being like this about it. The majority of people [at JJB Sports] live and work in the area and they are long-term staff. They are from the area and they are committed to the area.'

About 270 distribution staff took part in the recent strike action. Riley, meanwhile, has been suspended from work for his union activities. Another union convenor was sacked.

Riley praises his union and says that he's been 'inspired' by the help JJB Sports workers have had from others. 'People are organising collections for us. Billy Bragg is going to do a support gig. The GMB has been great. They've helped us with hardship payments and they have been very, very supportive at every level - here locally, and on the national scale.'

Which is a lot more than can be said for Unison - the union, today's audience is told, that actively working with management at the Northumberland, Tyne and Wear NHS Trust to flatten union activist Yunus Baksh and his attempts to resist millions of pounds of cuts in the NHS in the North.

Baksh, a health worker and Unison branch secretary, says that he was suspended from work for his point-blank refusal to accept the cuts programme, and very likely for other fights put up to save health services in the North. 'We have stopped them closing old people's homes, and forcing women to work in dangerous conditions, alone on reception areas with patients with no support.' He says that management has enjoyed pay rises of 36.7% while all this has been going on.' He says management is trying to sack him.

Unison bureaucrats, meanwhile, have proven their usual hideous, New Labour-loving selves, and have sided strongly with management. 'They have placed our branch into regional administration,' Baksh says furiously. 'We can't have a ballot [on striking to resist the proposed cuts] without it going to a new shadow group that has been set up. My union,' he says, to an audience that is some way into the standing ovation by now, 'seems to have forgotten what it's for.'

Unison certainly appears to have forgotten that it's purportedly spearheading a national campaign to save the NHS from the endless profit-mad private companies that have distinguished themselves in the Blairite era by winning NHS contracts to provide half the service at twice the price. Recent government announcements of massive NHS deficits have led already to estimates of 22,000 job losses in the NHS, and the impact that this is having, says Geoff Martin of campaigning group Health Emergency, 'is catastrophic.'

He gives a few examples. In Tooting, he says, five neonatal cots are now out of service, because there aren't enough staff to keep them open. Premature babies are trucked around the country until somebody finds available cots. Staff in the Royal Free Hospital in North London are saying that there's nobody around to feed elderly people in wards, which means that those people aren't eating. Mental health services at the vital Maudsley Hospital in South London are also threateed. 'That is typical New Labour,' says Martin. 'They spend ten years driving you nuts, and then there's nowhere for you to go.'

There's plenty of money in the NHS: investment in the last five years grown at about seven percent per annum. The problem is that it leaves the NHS just as quickly, trousered by private contractors who win contracts to build hospitals and provide health services and then make an amazingly expensive shambles of both. Karen Reissman, a nurse from Manchester and a member of Unison's Health Service Group Executive, tells the audience that she can barely stand it anymore.

'PFI has cost more than £45b more than if they had done these building programmes in-house. That money is going right to the privateers. This is causing great bitterness among staff.' She says that there are 16 nurses in her mental health team, and that management want to cut this number to four. She says that management also 'wants to close our elderly assessment unit.'

Reissman says there is also talk of putting all mental heath care provision in Manchester out to tender, which means that the likes of BUPA 'could be in charge of mental health provision in Manchester.' This is the very same BUPA that was the subject of damning reports on care standards in at least six Bromley care homes for the elderly, and was recently fined £90,000 after an elderly woman in a care home died in a hoist accident ... just the crew to look after your vulnerable relatives.

'I think that the union leadership has let them [the government] off the hook,' Reissman says. '[The recent strike by] NHS Logistics showed that strikes are possible, that we could win the publicity and embarass the government.'

Solidarity action is the only answer to all of this John McDonnell tells the crowd. The Trade Union Freedom Bill he wants to put before parliament aims to lift the present ban on solidarity strike action. The big fights are only won if a whole workforce can stop the economy in its tracks. He says the various powers that still fancy themselves around Westminster have already been on the phone, to ask if he'd mind watering the bill down. 'I got this call when they said Look, can't we just do a deal around balloting [to relax stringent laws around balloting for strike action]. Can we bollocks, I said.'

He admits that the bill doesn't go as far as many activists would like. 'It is a minimalist bill - this is what the lowest common denominator would agree to.' Sadly, he says, the lowest common denominator doesn't include the New Labour Cabinet. 'Not a single member of the Cabinet has signed up to this [bill]. Solidarity is a concept that New Labour has forgotten about.' He describes his challege for the leadership of the Labour party as a demonstration of solidarity - a Gordon Brown coronation, after all, would hardly give people confidence that the so-called socialist arm of the Labour Party really cared.

John McDonnell out West

Labour leadership candidate John McDonnell speaks to us from Hammersmith 

It is 8pm on a grey, sticky Wednesday and John McDonnell is telling a Hammersmith Stop the War meeting a story about the sorry behaviour of some of the overpaid, moral-free assholes who run the New Labour-affiliated trade union UNISON. He's telling us the grisly true story of the fate of the union activists who walked out in protest against the Iraq War when Tony Blair was prattling through his keynote speech at the TUC conference in Brighton in September.

Publicly, UNISON supported the activists and the walkout - or agreed, at least, that Blair was probably past his best as an attraction - but behind the scenes, the union hierarchy turned on the members like the Reich. Union bosses chucked the protesting activists out of the conference and sent them home and, as McDonnell understood it, were now toying with the idea of disciplining the activists for their attitude towards Tony Blair - the union disciplinary process being a protracted procedural nightmare that could take years and ultimately lead to expulsion of the activists.

As luck would have it, there's someone in the audience tonight who is able to tell the crowd exactly how a deep shafting from the union feels - a UNISON member several rows into the crowd reveals that she's been under investigation for about a year now after being expelled from the union's national conference in 2005 for publishing anti-Blair comment on a website via a union computer. Unfortunately, that's what happens to members of Labour-affiliated unions who air the wrong views on Blair and Iraq.

'UNISON goes through these purges from time to time,' McDonnell says. 'You've got people who walked out during Blair's speech [facing disciplinary action] by their own union. UNISON has some real issues with the people who make those decisions.' McDonnell has just driven from Brighton to London from the TUC conference and this little issue with the expelled activists hadn't been resolved by the time he left. He suspects that they won't be, because it'll be Thursday tomorrow and there won't be much conference left for the activists to rejoin, even if they're allowed to, which seems unlikely, given that they've all been sent home.

It strikes everybody as unlikely that Gordon Brown will liberate anti-war protestors from this sort of persecution. Much of the crowd has been enthused this week by the gripping event that is the gruesome scramble for the Labour party leadership, and everybody's keen to hear more from McDonnell about the whole circus. The people in this room are not jaded. The mainstream claim that nobody gives a stuff about politics feels thin when you see a turnout like this. There are trade union activists, Muslims, everyday punters, and members of the Labour party who've had to put up with nearly ten years of privatisation, modernisation and pro-war horseshit from their own party leader and are being lined up for more from Brown, or Johnson, or Reid, or whoever ends up bagging the poisoned chalice. Every anorak blogger and one-eyed mainstream commentator has already loftily observed that an old socialist like McDonnell, with McDonnell's history, will be disgraced even by leftie standards in this leadership contest, and they may be right, but there is nonetheless still much to be said for a night in a roomful of people who sequentially dream that Blair will drop dead, and like that means something.

The ones who so innocently leafleted for the New Labour circus a decade ago are particularly diseased. Gwen Cook has been a Labour Party member for 25 years in West London. She's still a member - 'just hanging on,' she says, tightly - and she seems genuinely stunned by the sweep of the shambles. 'It's just unbelievable that he [Blair] has been able to turn the Labour Party into a reactionary, capitalist party,' she says. 'I can't think of what else to say about it.' Cook joined the party in 1981. 'There was the height of the Tony Benn campaign. There were clear boundaries with the Tories. It looked like the Labour party was on the rise.'

She remembers what happened to Benn, though, and is bracing herself for the behind-the-scenes work that the Labour party's many neo-con nutters will do to stop McDonnell getting 44 MPs to support his leadership campaign and put his name on the ballot paper. For all that he is written off as the contest's no-hope candidate, Cook says, a lot of effort will be put into making sure that he stays that way.

'It would be good if he [McDonnell] could get somewhere [in the race], but I wouldn't say that the members here in this part of London would help. So many of the people who couldn't stand Blair and all those people have left the party. It's going to be hard getting past the establishment.' Cook says she hasn't enjoyed this year much. The Labour admininistration at Hammersmith and Fulham Council (where Cook works) was crucified at the local elections in London in May - one of the many councils that was punished, at least in part, for being Labour - and the new Conservative administration is making staff redundant at a rate that she didn't realise was legal and can't believe will make providing decent council services possible. 'It was a good council. It had not been a privatising council for a long time, but it's going now.'

Ertan Karpazli is 19 and the President of the Islamic Society at Middlesex University. He was born and brought up in COMMENT REMOVED AT INTERVIEWEE'S REQUEST. He doesn't belong to a political party, but says that he is probably 'closest in mindset to the Socialist party and Respect.' He describes Tony Blair as 'a modern-day Pharoah. He's a liar. He has no self-respect, no honour. He will be judged and pay for what he has done to the world, either in this life or the next one.' He thinks about this for a bit. 'Hopefully this one,' he says.

Karpazli also says that he would COMMENT REMOVED AT INTERVIEWEE'S REQUEST. So, what was life like several years ago, before the World Trade Centre and Iraq and the Axis of Evil and the rest of it? What was being Muslim like then?' Karpazli grins. 'I wasn't,' he says.

Karpazli says that of course McDonnell should have more success than he seems likely to in the leadership race, 'but I have my doubts, because of the higher powers in that politics. I don't want to say more, because I don't want to get into conspiracy theories. It's only that there are some things that are plain.'

'In the early 1990s,' McDonnell tells the audience, 'I was involved in a legal action about Saddam Hussein gassing the Kurds. I can't say too much about it, because I don't want to be involved in another legal action, but we were demonstrating about that [the treatment of the Kurds], and we were getting messages back from the families of the people who had been killed, and it was terrible what was happening there, and I can tell you that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were not involved in trying to help. They never got involved. They had no interest in any of the abuse directed at the Kurds by Saddam. So, why ten years later, was Saddam suddenly so terrible in their eyes?'

'Oil,' people say.

John McDonnell: Dave loves Gordon

Labour leadership candidate John McDonnell at a public meeting in Islington

There's a pleasing aspect to John McDonnell's public statements on New Labour-arselicking union leaders: he identifies the worst of these toadies by name, and encourages his audiences to laugh about it.

This is one of the more heartening experiences that shop-floor union reps and stewards have had for a while. Alas, one of the most depressing aspects of trade union activism in the last few years has been union bosses' reluctance to criticise New Labour and their active persecution of trade union members who dare to. Public sector union Unison in particular is famous for hunting down and disciplining any Unison member who comes to its attention for making public statements that suggest, for example, that Tony Blair sucks, or that the Iraq war is shit.

It is thus that a group of trade union activists comes within a few short breaths of collective rapture when a Unison member and Labour MP such as McDonnell stands before them and says that he thinks that even union bosses are starting to wake up to the fact that a relationship with New Labour brings absolutely no advantage. 'Even Dave Prentis [Unison's grey-man general secretary, who has allowed witch-hunts of anti-Blair activists and socialists to flourish in Unison in recent years] is realising that. Even within Unison [they're realising that].'

McDonnell's audience giggles. It's not often that they hear one of Unison's MPs imply that a Labour-affiliated union's hierachy is as feeble as it is useless, for laughs. People also enjoy statements from McDonnell such as 'this idea that the unions have that they can negotiate with New Labour is not working... What I'm trying to say to the general secretaries is that this stuff [decent pay and conditions for staff and workers] is non-negotiatable. Let's have a day of action, with everybody out. You know, like they do it in France. Everybody [leaves work] goes out on the streets. I think there are a number of trade unions that would sign up to this now.'

There might be, too. Tonight's meeting - called in Islington to discuss ways to organise against the private companies that are making ridiculous profits out of public-sector contracts at the expense of staff and services - has brought together a hall-full of very angry individuals who are almost all involved in appallingly difficult workplace battles to keep private companies out of public services like schools and home care. They are very, very tired of hearing that they - or the people they represent as trade union activists - have to put up with massive job and wage cuts because the private companies who now have the contracts to provide those services in Islington can make more money for their shareholders if they get rid of half their staff and pay the rest shit.

One of these people is Ken Muller, from the Islington branch of the National Union for Teachers. Muller is a veteran of the grisly fight to keep private companies out of Islington Green School and to save the school from being turned into one of Blair's ridiculous city academies - 'there'll be no comprehensive education left in in Islington if that happens,' Muller says.

Muller recounts the whole evil story of the government fibs, fraudulence, cheap shottery and treachery that is the Islington Green School narrative. It all began when, in 1997, the then chief inspector of schools, Chris Woodhead, overruled his own school inspectors' reports and said that Islington Green - which was until then an excellent school - was a failing school - that is to say, a school that could only be delivered from the brink if the public sector got out of it and the private sector got in.

The school was placed in special measures, at which point, needless to say, all the teachers and pupils with other options (including Tony Blair's children, who were in the zone) fled the scene. The stage was thus perfectly set for a so-called charity by name of Ark (which stands for Absolute Return for Kids, or something equally, and unbelievably, daffy) to offer itself as a sponsor for the school's transformation into a city academy. The remaining teachers and parents at Islington Green weren't too thrilled at these plans - the Ark 'charity' and the whole Islington proposal involved hedge fund managers, the Church of England and other sharks, and teachers and parents weren't convinced that a committment to comprehensive education figured high on the agenda of any of these parties. The upshot was that parents and teachers launched a major protest campaign against Ark. Ark, amazingly enough, took the hint - or came fast to the view that there must be other, more tranquil, villages and villagers to rape - and bowed out of Islington sometime last year.

It was, as Muller rightly says, a great victory, but alas, it was not a permanent one. Now, the City of London has got in on the act and proposed itself as Ark's replacement as a local city academy sponsor. The whole freakshow has kicked off again, only with a different sponsor's name on the bill.

Muller is clearly amazed that the second attempt has even been made. 'Not one person supports this city academy here. We are fighting it, and we fought it, but the plans for the city academy just roll on.' Like so many people here, Muller is wondering, in a roundabout way, how a government gets to be so arrogant that it geuinely believes an ideology that has had local people protesting in the streets will lead to that government's re-election.

Muller is passionate about a problem he describes as 'a crisis of representation.' He talks about the 'two million people [who protested] on the streets against the Iraq war,' in 2003, and the thousands of people who protested outside the Labour party conference in Manchester only a week or so ago, 'and still they ignore us. There is a crisis of representation at the moment.' He says he finds it 'sickening that there will be a coronation [to Gordon Brown, for the Labour party leadership]. We need fighting trade unions. There is nothing that working class people have achieved that they haven't had to fight for.'

That includes care services, which are also in shambles on the local scene. Those residents of Islington who have the misfortune to require home or residential care now have the very doubtful pleasure of the services of the massively lucrative private home and residential-care company Care Uk . Islington Unison deputy branch secretary Andrew Berry tells listeners tonight that Care Uk - as keen to drink to good health as it is to milk it - made some £80m for its shareholders last year and aimed to raise its profits in the coming financial year by 12%. (Care UK's numbers to May 2006 look even better than that - turnover and operating profits are both up 18% and the company describes its growth as continued and strong. Its financial reports also observe that there will be even more growth opportunity through NHS reform).

The bad news is, says Berry, that the good times are not enjoyed by either the people who use these services, or the staff who have to provide them. One of the ways, for example, that Care Uk plans to realise its dizzying fiscal returns is to cut staff pay by 50% - and after Islington Council promised care staff and their unions that Care Uk was a good employer, from whom staff had nothing to fear.

'People [the low-paid and black women staff who work in this industry] will have to work for 60 hours a week just to get by, just to get a living wage,' Berry says. 'It's like the council is scuttling around giving a bung to Care UK.' As Berry points out, these services are not cheaper under privatisation. Wages are lower - they're being stolen from low-paid black women and given to rich white blokes who own companies, if we can put it that way - but that's it.

Still, the privatisation train steams on. It's not cheaper - in fact, it's often much more expensive than providing services in-house. No end of failed public-private partnership projects stand as testimony to that. It's not better - it creates a low-paid, understandably disgruntled workforce which rightly can hardly be bothered turning out for work, let alone making an effort if it does get there.

'Ideology,' John McDonnell says. 'It's all about ideology. It's not about what works, or what is cheaper. Some of these private companies have performed so badly that they're taken back into public ownership. We fix them up and then the contracts are let it out [to the private sector] again. It's unbelievable... the drink sodden clique of MPs and journalists in Westminster have underestimated the feeling of anguish. We had the largest majority of a Labour government in history and we've blown it.'

Last out

A bit of holiday reading: John McDonnell earlier this month on the falling Labour party membership discussed later this month.

An interview with John McDonnell at Dagenham about his campaign for the Labour Party leadership so far

First - the good news, John McDonnell says. The good news from the six months he has spent on the campaign trail through the grassroots is the enthusiasm that people are showing for socialist (let's call them non-Blairite) ideas, and the fact that they're turning out in large numbers to hear them. There was a full house here at the Barking and Dagenham Civic Centre tonight, where McDonnell talked to a GMB branch meeting about the Public Not Private campaign and the million different ways that the private sector is cheerfully ripping off the NHS, local government and any mode of public transport you care to name. 'That enthusiasm is definitely a high,' McDonnell says. 'We have a large coalition of people who are getting organised [at ground and shop level around the campaign].'

The bad news, he says, is the dire state of the Labour Party membership: this might still finish all of them. 'Everybody in the Labour Party is in a state of anxiety about the membership,' McDonnell says. He does look concerned, too, as anybody who a) feels the Labour Party should have a future and b) may shortly be trying to solicit leadership votes from the Party's fast-disappearing members might.

Six months of public meetings and question-and-answer sessions with thousands of everyday punters across the UK has thrown the Party's membership problem into sharper focus than McDonnell wanted, or, apparently, expected. He knew, but now he's having his nose rubbed in it. 'I'm realising how little of the Labour Party is out there. There's almost none of them out there. I'm not joking, you know.' He throws his hands up. 'I'm serious. Half of them have left! '

The party's finances are, likewise, in an appalling state. There are those who say the Party couldn't afford to hold an election. McDonnell is one of them. 'It's much worse than [whatever the Party is saying],' he says. 'Whatever they're saying, it's much, much worse than that. The party is laying off thousands of staff across the country. We know it's much worse than that.'

McDonnell's getting a few heavy hints about the extent of the problem himself. He says that he's been invited round to the Chief Whip's next week to talk about a new initiative which involves leadership candidates such as McDonnell giving 15% of any campaign funds they raise to the party, so that it can afford to run the leadership race. 'Can they do that?' he laughs. 'I don't know - can they do that?' He says he doesn't really care at the moment. 'Even if we have to, we'll still be in credit.' He laughs again.

A few at these meetings say McDonnell is too disloyal for leadership - he's a Labour MP who tells people that the Party is an economic and orgnisational shambles in the hope that they'll see the point of rescuing it by joining it - or rejoining it - and voting for what McDonnell describes as his 'radical new direction.' Other (let's say most) meeting attendees couldn't care less. They say the Blairites are the ones who've sold the Party out, along with the needs of its core membership. They say McDonnell can put the boot into his Party's leadership all he likes.

Certainly, that's the main message that's coming from the floor at these public meetings - 'like probably everybody in this room, I left school when I was 15 and I've worked and worked and worked all my life and now they're are going to take away my pension,' a furious GMB member spat at this evening's event, to considerable applause. McDonnell agreed and said there would be plenty for pensions if 'we lifted the top on National Insurance,' so that the very wealthy paid more tax, and if big business found tax avoidance less easy. He also mentioned the small matter of the obscenely big bonuses paid to City worthies. It's not about generating wealth, McDonnell said. It's about the distribution of wealth. A Labour government is supposed to be about the fair distribution of wealth.

This line of tax-the-rich chat may irritate the hell out of anybody who considers themselves a rational, we-can't-hate-big-business being, but it's going down very, very well at these public meetings, and McDonnell sounds as rational and as reasonable as Blair when he deliver it. People know inequality when they see it. They know it especially when they're on the rotten end of it. It is clear that attendees at these meetings don't see increasing higher-end tax as a regressive step back to Old Labour. They see it as a vital part of shaping the future - as the most logical and reasonable way forward for the less well-off.

At the very least, anybody who has attended these meetings and talked to union and Labour Party (or ex-Labour Party) members knows that McDonnell is right when he says that the Labour Party and its MPs 'will be forced to have a debate [about its shape and future] whether it wants to, or not. They can't ignore the momentum of this [McDonnell leadership] campaign. They're not going to be able to wait [to show their hands] until Blair declares [when he's going to leave]. They're getting that pressure already from their constituencies.'

That is all he will say about the support he has at the moment, in Parliament and otherwise. He won't give numbers. He won't say if his numbers are good, or bad.

He'll talk about Iraq a bit. He won't be drawn on the apparent collapse of the rebel vote on the recent Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru motion for an inquiry into the Iraq War: he prefers to focus, as he probably would, on the 100 MP signatures that appeared this week on the rebel amendment at the end of the Queen's speech debate. The amendment called for the government to review Iraq policy and to present its Iraq strategy to the Commons for examination. Unfortunately, MPs weren't given a chance to vote on it.

McDonnell says his own strategy for withdrawal from Iraq is taking shape as we speak, in the form of an early-day motion that he is putting together with Jeremy Corbyn. He says an immediate withdrawal doesn't necessarily mean a total withdrawal of Britain: he seems to be saying that some acknowledgement needs to be made of the mess the UK has made there.

'We could have mediators, and human rights advisors, people supporting a civil society. We'd give trade union assistance - a lot of work is already being done to strengthen links between their trade unions and ours. We need people on the ground, to make sure that their oil isn't ripped off anymore. We couldn't be there even as peacekeepers. We can't be there in a military role. We have no credibility. Nobody would tolerate us in that role.'

And of Tony Blair? How crazy is he, exactly? How did he get Labour here? 'I'd say he's a brilliant, whatdoyoucallit, method actor. I don't know him very well. He doesn't strike me as particularly charismatic. He's just a great method actor. How much of it he believes, I don't know.'

Tonight, anyway, McDonnell credits Peter Mandelson with the shambles that is the Party's membership. 'The Mandelson line was build a party around more of a Republican party format, [where you] have the party machine, but fewer of the supporters. The theory was that the party could get away with that, not focusing on the electorate, but having the machine.'

2 December 2006

Saving Labour: part four

Here are more interviews with Labour party members about the party's future at a time of falling membership, undecided leadership and confused policy direction.

There are interviews with party socialists here
There are interviews with party moderates here
There are interviews with party Blairites here

Party members Nick Parrott, Max Freedman, Omar Salem and Mazher Hussain are as clear as most of us on the key to saving party's future: re-train Labour's straying focus on the domestic agenda, and aim policy at those constituents Labour was meant for.

'Blair maybe put too much of the focus on Worcester Woman and Mondeo Man,' Freedman admits. Re-engaging with Labour's traditional, and presently very sad, supporters will also go some way to keeping that smiley wanker David Cameron in his box. Everybody knows that Cameron will rat the masses out, particularly in areas like housing - everybody is already all too aware of the large and nasty gap that yawns between Cameron's warming, right-on hippie rhetoric and the evil social policies that his Conservative activists, especially in local authorities, are developing and implementing on the ground as we speak.

Hammersmith and Fulham is an excellent example: less than a year has passed since the Conservatives took that council from Labour, and they've already washed their flabby white hands of the needy and the not-so-fabulously rich. Schools are being earmarked for sale to developers and housing centres for closure, housing staff are being made redundant and the Council's committees section is no longer quite staffed. A similar rape of services that are desperately required by the beleaguered poor is underway at the Lib Dem-Conservative Camden council. The Conservatives are not here to make friends.

And it is thus that Parrott, Freedman, Salem and Hussain think that Labour should direct any new energy it finds post-Blair into traditional Labour social policy, especially around housing: finding adequate and affordable housing is an issue that affects just about everybody, and not always in a great way. Housing is exactly the sort of social issue, Freedman says, that makes Labour Labour. The London housing crisis needs addressing across the whole dimension, from council housing to affordable housing for middle-class constituents who already spend a disproportionate amount of income on a decent home.

Parrott, a Kingston CLP member who missed a place in the Norbiton ward on Kingston-upon-Thames Council in the 2006 elections by just 11 votes, says council housing is particularly problematic in that borough. '[The tenants] have voted twice against a stock transfer, but [that means] they are out of the policy centre and process [because tenants refused to take up the government's preferred ALMO option and because the party executive has refused to take up party conference's preferred fourth-option for continued council-managed housing].'

As a result, the tenants of Kingston are stranded in a perverse development and maintenance wilderness - they're not an ALMO, but they're not much else, either - they can't take up the fourth option for housing as long as the government refuses to accept the people inside and outside the party who keep voting for a fourth option want one. Existing outside the policy loop as Kingston does, how can they expect to upgrade to Decent Homes, or make any sensible policy decisions about a future for council homes? (The government, of course, argues that it's all taken care of). Whatever the case, Salem says, Labour needs a better emphasis on decent homes and housing solutions as vote-winners. 'Fifty percent of children live in poverty in London [and that] poverty is in direct relationship to their housing.'

Outside of housing, the path is a little less clear. Hussain, an East Ham member who joined about four years ago, says the Prime Minister 'has done a fairly good job,' as Prime Minister, especially on initiatives like restoring the minimum wage. He also says that investment in public services has been good under Labour.

'My predictive text doesn't even recognise the word 'underinvestment',' Freedman says. It seems to recognise the words 'private sector,' though. Freedman says he doesn't have a problem with the private sector having a role in the public sector - '[the private sector] can be used to increase capacity' - but contracts needs to be handled in such a way that huge profits for private companies are less of an option than they seem to be now, and the wages and conditions of workers are protected.

'I see no alternative to Gordon Brown, really,' is his comment on the topic of a new leader for the party. He doesn't mind Jon Cruddas as an option for deputy leader: Cruddas, he says, 'seems to be around the midpoint of the party, refocusing the party on issues that we have been neglecting, like housing.'

Parrott '[hopes] there is a [leadership] contest,' although he thinks one between the present contenders is highly unlikely. Some of John McDonnell's ideas have merit, though, Parrott says, and the ones that does ought to have wide appeal to a variety of constituents. 'The Trade Union Freedom Bill - well, who wouldn't [support that]?' he laughs. He thinks 'Blair may have misjudged the middle ground' on that one - that workers' rights and freedoms areas much an issue for voters who occupy the middle ground as they are for trade union activists and people who are perceived to occupy fighting leftist territory.

'I think that McDonnell has raised a lot of interesting issues,' says Salem. He just doesn't think McDonnell is in a great position to become the party's leader.

'I think [party] people are scared of debate,' Parrott says.

So, how about a debate on the party's foriegn policy?

Well - it's time to look to the future on that one, all four say. It's easy to talk about how Iraq might have been without the US/UK intervention, Salem says, but now people need to focus on the situation as it stands. 'We need to focus on what people want. It's difficult to say how Iraq [will] play out. It's difficult to say what will happen. We have got the US elections are coming up. There is a case for getting back to domestic issues.'

So... what about the war? Are the government's many adversaries on this one right to keep up the abuse?

The problem with anti-war groupings like Respect, Parrott says, is that they want to go back to the time before the invasion, and undo the invasion. They have nothing useful to say about now.

'It's important that we stay the course [now, in Iraq], see democracy there,' Hussain says. 'We can't go back and not fight the war. We're there.'

That's right, Parrott says. We need to find a way to support the Iraqi people, and maybe find an international solution to the problems we're having supporting them at the moment. He says the party also needs to find a better decision-making process in the process of re-drawing itself. 'I believe he [Blair] genuinely thought he was right [on Iraq]... we need to look at how we make policy decisions [in the party], so that this does not happen again.'

Saving Labour: part one

Active young Labour party members on joining, staying in, and making a future for the party in these grim times of falling party membership, faltering ideology and other well-documented horrors.

First up: the socialists

Owen Jones, 22, Marsha-Jane Thompson, 26, Tim Flatman, 22, Mary Partington, 22 and Vino Sangarapillai, 25, are extremely clear about the party's options, or option: socialism is Labour's future. Blairism, on the other hand, strikes them as tantamount to political suicide, what with its thousands of dead Iraqis, collapsed party membership, flaming thirst for a lengthy rape of the public sector by the private one, burgeoning list of cash-for-honours delinquents, et cetera. Everybody normal, they say, knows that they're seeing the end when they look at Blairism.

'Opinion poll after opinion poll shows that people support the Public Not Private campaign ,' says the articulate Jones. 'We ran an opinion poll that showed only 17% of people support privatisation of public services. Three-quarters of the population supports renationalising the railways , and the war in Iraq - two million people marched against it. All [of these people] are left out completely in the cold from the political establishment. It's absurd.' You'd do your head in, Jones says, trying to get it around Gordon Brown, crazy John Reid, Blair himself, and that weird and wonderful group of Blairite/Brownite hangers-on, wonks and toadies who genuinely think that the masses are dying for more, but who should have been at least a year in the crash position by now.

'Even (declared deputy-leader candidate) Jon Cruddas has realised that we need to reconnect with [the party's traditional supporters],' Jones grins. Cruddas has made a reasonable online impact with his calls for a renewed focus on inclusive politics, with a special emphasis on leaving the warm confines of the Houses of Parliament, and getting out amongst it to knock on constituents' doors. Jones says that'll only work if the candidates who do the knocking have sensible things to say on topics like keeping the NHS public, providing affordable housing and a living wage, but this group does think that Cruddas' recent, if teetering, steps are headed in the right direction.

'He used to be New Labour,' says Thompson, 'but he's actually learned because of what's happened [the pressure for socially-responsible policy] in his constituency.'

John McDonnell is the man as far as everybody in this group is concerned. Most of them support and/or are working on, McDonnell leadership campaign. They refuse to accept that their support of a left-wing candidate means they're terminally deluded. Delusion is for the young Blairites, they say - they're the ones, after all, who are falling over themselves to follow Tony and Gordon off the plank.

This group says their numbers prove a shift to the left for Labour is not only feasible, but well underway. These numbers come and go a bit throughout the afternoon, and are anecdotal at best for now, but here they are: hundreds of emails of support to the John4Leader campaign website, 220 members of an online discussion group on McDonnell in its first few weeks as opposed to 80 on one for Gordon Brown, more people signed up for the launch of a new Socialist Youth Network next week than attended a recent London Young Labour City Hall event sponsored by Unison, and great, if hard-to-quantify, youth enthusiasm for organising upcoming John4Leader events in Norwich and Great Yarmouth.

This group thinks that McDonnell, with his anti-war, free education, pro-union, pro-public services platform, strikes a chord particularly with youth who were politicised by the Iraq War. Partington, a recent Oxford graduate who has been a party member since last summer and works in McDonnell's office, says that she found no comparable outlet, even though she spent a long time looking.

'I was what you would call a drifter. I was going along to various demos or whatever from when I was about 12 years old. I developed a belief in socialism and struggled to find a place where I could be active and struggled to find a place where I could partake democratically. On the one hand, you had the Labour party which went to war with Iraq. That was something so demoralising for a young person who went out on a march with millions of people, and then for that not to count for anything. [On the other hand] you had extreme, small organisations [on the political left] which I also felt didn't represent my views.' She says that's the reason politicised youth tends to work on issue-based campaigns like Stop the War and climate change, rather than join political parties -'People and Planet is one of the most successful things in Oxford.'

Tradition still plays its part in drawing a few people in: Flatman, for instance, remembers the party's history as the people's party and seems to view Blairism as an interruption to that history, rather than a terminal departure from it. Flatman is unemployed at the moment. He joined the Labour party six years ago, and says he is 'slightly more optimistic than everybody else [here], because in my area where I joined, which is Wakefield in West Yorkshire, the local Labour party was doing stuff for people where I lived. My first political memories are [of] going canvassing with the local Labour party, trying to get central heating for people who didn't have it and stuff like that. They were standing for people who didn't have anything, [the people] who had been screwed over by everyone else.'

Flatman thinks there is plenty of room for that ideology in a post-Blair world. 'I want better affordable housing, and asylum seekers to be defended and not pilloried, and people to be paid the kind of wages that they deserve, rather than having to work 50 or 60 hours a week.'

Jones says tradition's the reason that he's there as well - 'otherwise, the Labour party is the last place that I would have joined. [I would have been put off by] the policies that New Labour has pursued - education fees, topup fees, policies that criminalised young people like ASBOS, and then more widely, the Iraq war, which politicised so many young people.' Jones is a Masters student at Oxford, and works part-time on McDonnell's campaign team. He joined the party in 2000, when he was 15. Both of his parents (his mother was an academic, and his father worked for Sheffield City Council in economic regeneration) belonged to the party and were involved in the Young Socialists group as it was then.

Jones agrees that the trend right now is for politicised youth to focus on single-issue campaigns, like Stop the War , or Public not Private. 'People have no natural political home.' Even young Blairites do a good line in single-issue campaigning, Jones grins. 'Like, you'll find that they'll support all Blairite policies except for tuition fees.'

Thompson's special interest is making union affiliation to New Labour work for union members, rather than New Labour. She's a youth worker, the UNISON Greater London Regional Young Members Convenor, and Unison's National Young Members Forum member. Thompson did join the Respect party briefly, when she was looking to participate in politics, but she was only active in that party for a couple of months. 'It wasn't really what I was looking for,' she says tactfully.

'Respect is pretty much a party in decline,' Jones grins, a little less tactfully.

Thompson agrees that the conservative aspects of Respect's programme leave socialists a little cold. 'In Tower Hamlets Respect, there have lately been the leaflets that they (the Respect party) have been putting around about the Labour councillors on the council not letting them talk about closing sex clubs down. (Respect in Tower Hamlets recently launched a campaign to close the clubs). That is really sort of rightwing.'

Thompson joined the Labour party about 14 months ago, 'mainly because of my work with the unions. I started getting involved in union work at a regional level and I found that there were a lot more people in the Labour party (at Unison regional level) and they were working to try and change the party.' She is especially interested in pressuring for changes to the dynamic of Unison's Labour link - the dynamic that presently involves the union paying substantial money to the Labour party, which then ignores the policies that the union and indeed the Labour party vote for at their various conferences. The shonky punters on the winning end of the cash-for-honours scandal get splendid returns for their generous donations. Union members, in Thompson's view, get bugger-all for theirs.

'They're pissing on us,' Thompson grins. '[The Labour link] is dominated by Blairties. I thought I should be a Labour party member as well [as a union member] and decide where that money goes to in the Labour link. The membership is completely annoyed and it's inspiring them to get up and do something about it. One young member who is 18 is running for the [Unison] NEC on a left platform.' Thompson herself is running for an NEC seat for the London Region. 'It's inspiring a lot of us, knowing that we're going to take our union back.'

Hear, hear says Sangarapillai. Sangarapillai is committee clerk in local government, and he is not best pleased with local government in Blairite times, or the evil effects that the Blairite era has on an already-beleaguered public-sector workforce.

'I've noticed from my (council) union work the way that certain workers have been contracted out - they have been parcelled out with contracts, and it's been more difficult for the union to organise.' New Labour's spectacular failure to address any aspect of Thatcher's anti-union legislation has been specially bad news. 'We thought they [the Blair government] would have made it easier for unions to take secondary (sic) action, but it retains the conservative legislation, which has made it easier for employers to hire and fire.'

Sangarapillai joined the Labour party when he was 17, largely because he found the 1999 version of Blair impressive. 'It seems a while ago now,' he grins. 'I've been dismayed at the direction of the party and the fact that the right has taken over.'

The right will certainly take over if the Tories come, says Thompson: that's a fight that the left needs to be ready for. 'It's the contrast between David Cameron's fluffy Tories and what the Tories are actually doing.' She holds Hammersmith and Fulham Council up as a special example, as a growing number of people do. Labour lost Hammersmith and Fulham at the May 2006 local elections. Just eight months later, Hammersmith and Fulham's new Tory administration has rid itself of committee and advisory staff, proposed to sell schools for property, put IT staff into a joint-venture company with the council's private-sector strategic partner, disbanded its joint staff negotiating forum and removed references to the Disability Discrimination Act from council sickness procedures. 'And New Labour wants to fight for those voters who believe in this.'

Choice, says Jones, rolling his eyes to the skies. 'The [New Labour] MPs and their public school media allies talking about choice, as though anybody in the country has any interest in talking about the fucking choice agenda. It's an absolute joke.'

Saving Labour: part three

Are you a member of the Labour party? We want to interview you about the direction you think the party should take. Contact us and we'll call you.

The young Blairites

You can read Labour young socialists' views on the Labour party's future here
You can read Labour young moderates' views on the Labour party's future here

More interviews to come on all

Legendary online Blairite Shamik Das, 27, thinks a contest for the Labour party leadership is vital for the party, but implies that no sane man toys with the notion that John McDonnell will be anywhere near it. 'Arrrrgh,' he laughs, placing a hand on a pained forehead. 'Arrrrggh. Arrrrrrrgh. No.'

Das would prefer the debate about the party's future to take place at the deputy-leadership level, with the centre-left's Jon Cruddas at the plate for party members of a socialist bent, and Hilary Benn doing whatever it is that he does for the right. Das will support Benn, but he thinks he can probably stand Cruddas, at least for the duration of a contest. It's true, Das says, that Cruddas has made a few socialist noises in his campaign, but he's so far steered clear of serious fruitcake rhetoric. 'He [Cruddas] is not as barking as some of them are,' Das laughs. 'His [voting] record is quite sound from my point of view.'

Another very big Cruddas plus, Das says, is that the McDonnell crew hate him. Whatever the case, Das is very sure that the party needs to use the opportunity that will be presented by Tony Blair's departure to have a debate. 'It wouldn't look good [for Brown] to have a coronation,' but '[the debate] can't just be in the party between the centre left and hard left.'

It'll be a sad day when old Teflon Tony does finally flake off, though. Das joined the party ten years ago (in Brent), largely because he admired Blair, and the light has yet to dim as far as he can see.

He says there have been two triumphs in particular: Blair's contribution to securing (the on-again off-again) peace in Northern Ireland, and the party's record in delivering public services. He feels the result in Northern Ireland thus far has been especially impressive. 'They've got a communal government, with both sides [involved in it]. You've got the possibility, which was unimaginable [once], of Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams in parliament together running Northern Ireland. A few years ago, with Mr Paisley's thoughts, that simply would never happened.'

Das thinks that the delivery of good public services, meanwhile, has been impressive enough to be a key Gordon-for-leader calling-card. '[Brown] has got to go on the economy and public services. That's got to be the pitch.' Das says that as a service user, 'things have improved since Blair - with transport, the health service, although thankfully, I've had not that great a use of it. The school I'm at now (Das is a teaching assistant at Preston Manor) has been been transformed [by its relationship with the private sector].' Das says he's not sure about the specifics of that relationship: 'I think that it's one of those PFIs things.' He says that schools like Preston Manor and Haverstock have been 'completely done up' and are able to work with the private sector to make money by leasing out their new facilities, and so on.'

Das doesn't have a problem with PFIs, or with private organisations providing public services: he thinks the public sector continues in need of various aspects of the private sector ethos. 'I'm not against private capital, or shareholders making money per se. They [the public sector] don't have the discipline of the private sector... sticking to budgets, providing services and facing competition. If you've got a monopoloy, you've got no competition, and with competition, if you're not up to scratch, you wither and die. The actual numbers of frontline staff have gone up [in the NHS in the last ten years]. If these people [private sector providers] want to make money, they are going to provide the best service possible. He says that the McDonnell argument is that 'as long as it's [a service] is publicly-owned, it doesn't matter, so long as those [private sector] bastards aren't making money out of it.'

Anyway, it's all a lot better than life with Thatcher, which was a genuine bitch. Das feels that one of the problems with younger members of the party right now - the ones who want Blair and Blairism out and the hard left in - is that they're simply too young to remember what the Thatcher and Major years were like. They barely remember a time before New Labour, or even a time when New Labour struck the populace as promising - 'they only see what they know as Evil Blair.'

Das doesn't consider the Iraq sortie a mistake - far, far from it. He says a British contribution to the Iraq invasion was very important. 'Looking at it as I did in 2003, with what we knew then, and what we thought we knew. There was Saddam's record, and the post 9/11 situation, the fact that the US would have gone anyway,' and the concerns about Saddam's big and bad weapons of mass destruction. He admits that the fact that one of the reasons that people believed that Saddam had WMDs was that Blair pretended he did is a sticky point.

He moves on.

He says he isn't sure why some on the left thought the UK ought to give the whole scene a wide berth. 'Why would they have been happy for it to be solely American? it needed to have some British presence - as a a brake, a lever.' He does think that Blair has some leverage with Bush, or, at the very least, if anyone was going to have leverage with Bush, it would be Blair. 'If Blair had said no to him (Bush) in 2003, Bush wouldn't have had to listen to anyone. He wouldn't even have to pretend to listen to anyone.' Das also thinks that the impetus for Sunni and Shia insurgents would have been there, even if the US and UK hadn't turned up.

And the effect of Blair's premiership on the Labour party itself? Das agrees that the rate at which members are leaving the party is a bit of a concern. He says people have to remember that the membership 'did go up after Blair got in - probably to about 400,000,' he grins. 'So... it's probably fallen back to where it was before then, although I'm not entirely sure.' He laughs. And anyway, he says - whatever people say about the party, the country itself is sitting firmly in the centre ground, so he does not want to hear any more yap about returning to the left. 'That is why, all those years ago, Blair had to change the party to get elected, because the old model of policies that Labour was following wasn't winning elections. They're [the party left] are all whining about poll numbers now being as bad as they were way back when, without realising that it was their policies that put them there [way back when].'

Saving Labour: part two

The young moderates

You can read Labour young socialists' views on the Labour party's future here

Labour party member Tom Miller, 21, thinks that the party desparately needs a leadership contest, not a Gordon Brown coronation: he just doesn't think that John McDonnell offers much by way of credible competition. 'I don't think that John McDonnell is an alternative. We are not a socialist revolutionary party. He [McDonnell] will not get on the ballot paper and he would not win an election.'

That said, Miller hasn't a lot of time for the party's 'Blairite outriders' either. 'I think that Blair has annoyed the bulk of the party.' And that said, he thinks that Brown is probably the party's best leadership option. 'He has made indications that he could bring the soft left and the soft right together. You can't help feeling that he will be more distributive.'

Fair and equal distribution of life's happier aspects is one of Miller's preoccupations as a party member. He joined the party when he was 16, just a few months before Blair decided to go to war with Iraq. ('I felt like ripping my [membership] cards up [when the war began], but I decided that I didn't want the Labour party to be dominated by extremists, right or left.'). He joined the party because he thought that party membership would complement his A-level studies. Now, he's a final-year law and politics student at Manchester University and a member of the Labour students group there.

'I thought that I was joining a party that had been through a lot of changes, but that it would head back in a leftward direction. There used to be a lot more emphasis on distribution with the party. I think the current direction is a manifestly bad thing. I can't figure out why we don't try and pull society leftward.'

He thinks that areas the party ought to focus on in particular include 'extending the minimum wage, [developing] a stronger green policy, and improving education and public services.' He says the party has done well in areas like setting the minimum wage and he likes the PFI initiative as an idea, at least. 'I think [the problem with PFIs] is that they haven't been well-managed. I'm not an expert on it, but I would say that there's something wrong with the tendering process. We're basically spending too much and getting too little. We've been getting more hospitals, though, so we can't really complain about that.'

The party leadership campaign being a disappointment to date, Miller will support Jon Cruddas' campaign for the deputy leadership and says that 'it's really important that the [Cruddas] campaign gets going.' Cruddas is particularly critical of the government's handling of healthcare, record on social housing and eagerness to use (or abuse) cheap migrant workers to keep labour costs down and the workforce flexible - or low-paid and sackable, as Cruddas implies.

Miller thinks the Iraq crusade has been a complete shambles - 'Iraq has been opened up to terrorism by military intervention.' He says that it is almost impossible to get people to join the Labour party now. What has his success rate been recently? 'Absolutely none,' he says.

----

Kris Brown, 21, tries his best to see the funny side of the horror that is the expiring Labour party membership: he goes about it a bit like David Attenborough doing one of his countdowns for doomed pandas. '[I think it's something like] a Labour member leaves like every 20 minutes. For every member that joins, seven leave. At this rate, by April 5 2013, they'll all be gone.'

Brown is a councillor on the Tory-held Enfield Council. He represents the Edmonton Green ward, which is one of the most socially-deprived areas in the country - the area that Enfield council Tory deputy leader Michael Lavender described so charmingly at a recent council meeting as a 'UN feeding station.'

Brown says the issues in his ward are as you might expect in an area that is not a Tory council's priority: unemployment, inadequate housing, few training opportunities, a high teenage pregnancy rate and a population that tends towards the young, angry and disillusioned. He joined the party in 2002 when he was 17, because he wanted to do something about those problems: he didn't come from a political family, but he 'always had an interest in politics' and wanted to give something back to area in which he had lived all his life.

He didn't have a problem with Blairism at the start ('there was a need for the party to modernise') but he's got a big problem with it now. 'There's this awful decline and distance between the party members and the executive. It's awfully hard to get people back into the party. [We have to] bring back membership, bring back policy.'

The party executive's consistent ignoring of party conference votes on policy like the fourth option for housing, the emphasis on privatisation, the chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan - these are all turning people away from the party, Brown says. If David Cameron has been bright enough to figure that the masses are gasping for a centre-left turn, why is it taking so long for Labour to rally from the coma?

Brown says the party needs a leadership contest because it needs to debate its shape, or die: unfortunately, he says, he doesn't think there will be a contest. He says he did support McDonnell's leadership bid at the start, but that he changed his mind. 'You have to be realistic... we can't get back to the policies of the eighties. If McDonnell did get on the ballot paper, that would be good, but I don't think he will.' He says McDonnell's problem is that he's supported by hundreds of people who are, alas, not in the party - hence McDonnell's grassroots support and healthy constituency majority. Kris Brown says that McDonnell is just not popular in the party, although he might get a few votes from ultra-Blairites who want to stick it to Gordon and pals.

A coronation will be problematic for Gordon Brown - 'he hasn't got a mandate, so he will be constantly watching the polls.' Like a few of the moderates who want a contest, Kris Brown plans to devote his energies to the Cruddas deputy leadership campaign. He doesn't see 'any indication' that Gordon Brown would be better than Blair on policy, but he thinks Cruddas might be a useful instrument of the centre-left as deputy leader. 'He [Cruddas] has the right idea about housing (more of it) and immigration (wants a debate on it, because he believes cheap migrant labour is tacitly being used to deregulate labour markets). Kris Brown says he believes there is a chance of winning the next election if there is a renewal of policy. '[But] if we continue with more of the same... well, I don't want that to happen.'

T Blair goes down and lifts the left

Labour Party leadership candidate John McDonnell says he's within striking distance of getting his name on the leadership ballot.

A full and rowdy house of trade union activists has rolled up for this evening's John4Leader public campaign event in Euston. The attendees are not all geriatric either: the youth wing of the Labour left is a noticeable force now at many McDonnell events.

The star turn appears on excellent form, not least because the government isn't. Lord Levy has just been chucked in the jug again, and McDonnell tells his very enthusiastic audience that the word - and the hope - on the ground is that one A C L Blair might not be too far behind.

'I think there is a prospect that the Blair government will unravel very quickly now,' McDonnell says with no small pleasure, as he outlines the many encouraging potentials offered by Levy's second exit with the fuzz. 'Things could speed up [with the investigation] even over the next few days.'

If they do, McDonnell says, he and the large number of union members, young activists, reinvigorated leftwing Labour party members and everyday punters who are turning out to these meetings up and down the country will take the opportunity to tell the voting public all about the real traitors to the Labour party.

'We need to explain to people that they [the Blairites and Brownites] are not the Labour party,' McDonnell smiles, possibly in response to critics who stridently observe that McDonnell himself has a loyalty problem, because of his ongoing refusal to toe the party (Blairite) line. 'They are the parasites,' McDonnell says.

Indeed, McDonnell seems to be feeling so confident that people will see that point that he is almost happy - which he has not been - to publicly indicate the number of MPs that are prepared to support his leadership bid (he needs the support of 44 MPs to get his name on the leadership ballot paper).

'My view is that we are over the halfway mark,' he says. He says he thinks there are about 15 to 20 to go. He says again that a key part of making up those 15 or 20 minds will be 'how this police thing (Levy's arrest and the investigation into Number 10's unusual email arrangements) unravels. We need to give confidence to those 15 or 20 MPs. We are within striking distance of getting on the ballot paper. That will shock them.'

McDonnell also says he is fairly sure he has the support of Constituency Labour Party groups - such as they are in these times of tiny membership - and 'the majority of organised support in the trade unions.' The problem, he says, remains the Parliamentary Labour Party, which continues to refuse to wake up to the fact that it's dead.

Ditto, McDonnell says, for the union dinosaurs who are still trying to sell the idea that union members have or are benefiting from affiliated union links with New Labour. He holds up a the latest issue of Unison's Labour Link magazine, to show the crowd a photo which features every Labour party leader and deputy-leader candidate, except McDonnell. 'Isn't it amazing?' McDonnell grins. 'Everyone [in the photo] has voted for anti-union policy,' and yet here they are, held up by Unison as the only, and glowing, examples of a beautfiully-functioning trade union-Labour party relationship.

McDonnell says he amazed that the big four unions still seem to think they will be able to negotiate with Gordon Brown. 'What for - a Warwick [Agreement] Two? That's great, isn't it - the concept of having a Warwick Two that builds on the non-implementation of Warwick One? Dont you find that amazing?' McDonnell asks the crowd again.

'No,' several members of it say.

30 January 2007

A few words from those who don't think John McDonnell can count

Young Labour members on rescuing the party...

Bitch story with interviews with Young Labour members on the future of the Labour party is at the New Statesman site. Feel free to comment over there. Can't sort it out here at the moment too wrecked.

Saving Labour: part five

Another wee interview with a Labour party member on the importance of a leadership contest...

You can read interviews with other party members here

Dan Paskins likes to imagine a Labour leadership contest that starts with Gordon Brown, John McDonnell and Alan Milburn, and ends with Alan Milburn getting a total hiding. Paskins is not too crazy about Milburn - he's pretty sure that Milburn's brilliant ideas for modernising Labour played the fatal role in destroying the party's membership.

Paskins, who is a constituency party organiser and was until recently an Oxford City councillor, will settle for a contest between Brown and McDonnell, though, or Brown, McDonnell and anybody. It would be nice to see Milburn mashed like the wee turd he is, but we may all have to wait for that one. 'I think it will be weird if there isn't a contest,' Paskins says. 'It will be Gordon Brown wandering around on his own.'

Paskins wasn't particularly impressed with the idea of McDonnell in the first instance - 'I was against him' - but says that in recent times, McDonnell has started to make a certain amount of sense. 'This portrayal of him as an extremist is wrong.'

Paskins thinks portrayals of Blair as an extremist are wrong as well, and that party activists need to remember that. 'When people [activists] say that having Labour in power has almost been as bad as having the Tories in power, I don't accept that.' Some policy hasn't been brilliant - 'topup fees, that's a stupid policy. It's been as bad as people said it would be' - but investment in public services has been a plus, even if 'the link between spending more money on services and services improving,' could have been better made.

You don't have to be too brilliant, Paskins says, to understand that Iraq was the big mistake: his constituents made that perfectly clear on the doorstep at the last general election and at most meetings since.

'I was the constituency organiser and I think that if we had not invaded Iraq, we would have had the same sort of majority as we'd had before that. I don't think [Labour's term] has been ten years of betrayal [like some activists say]. Nothing is that simple.' Paskins says that in internal terms anyway, the last ten years for the party has been about 'a growing breakdown between the activists and the party [executive]. They seem to delight in taunting each other.'

Meanwhile, Paskins says, Rome has pretty much burned. The topics that matter to the party and to activists don't matter to the people the party and activists should be listening to.

'The issues that matter to people on the doorstep – they're not [things like] PFIs, or constitutional reform.' They're issues like crime, ASBOS and housing. 'Problems like landlords buying up a lot of houses – landlords who are only interested in making a huge amount of money. They're not caring about the condition of the houses. There should be some sort of windfall tax on some of these landlords. These are traditional socialist issues. That's what really appeals.'

Once were Labour

Random interviews with present and past members of the Labour party

'I like to read The Sun in the loo
Its quite a lot of fun
And if a bit later
I run out of paper
I can use it to wipe my bum.'
- Steve, on a bus from London to leaflet against Tony Blair.

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A very small, elderly, wide-faced, elfin-looking man with bat-wing ears sits near the front of a bus that is heading north from London to an anti-war event. The old man looks like Mickey and Wayne Rooney. He says he is a great-nephew of Noel Coward. His name is Michael Coward. Until recently, he was a committed member of the Brentford and Isleworth branch of the Labour Party and had been for many years. He contributed a lot of money to the Labour party over the years (he was a butcher, and made a lot of money out of his successful business in West London) and he leafleted and campaigned for the party for most of his working life. He was a regular branch delegate at Labour party conferences. 'You don't have to be without money to be a socialist,' he says. 'I did make a lot of money and I can retire and travel a lot now, but I always belonged to the Labour party.'

He left the party in 2003, disgusted at Blair's decision to go to war, and New Labour's privatisation plans for schools, hospitals, lidos - the works. He couldn't imagine life without some sort of political activity, though, so he started to go to political meetings here and there. He decided to start find out a bit more about the Respect party after hearing George Galloway speak at an anti-war meeting. He isn't sure if George will be able to fill the gap properly, though.

'Leaving [the Labour party] was very hard. I was in the branch for a long time and I had a lot of friends there. I still have a lot of friends there. The problem was that I got disillusioned. There are not that many socialists there any more. It wasn't the party that I belonged to. It had been the same party for a long time and we never even thought about what we were doing there, but then in the last few years, it's all changed.' He says he's 'not disappointed with the party's economic success. I think Gordon Brown has been a good chancellor,' but he says that isn't really the point.

He says he met Noel Coward a few times when he was younger. He points this out, he says, because everyone asks when he tells them. 'He seemed like a nice person,' Coward says.

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Patrick Clifford from Queens Park was a welder for British Rail for 25 years. He was a member of the Labour party for many of those years, but he left in the end, because of Tony Blair. 'I never wanted Blair. He's worse that Thatcher. Everything that was for the working class has been taken away. Health, education, even water. Those things were for us. When Blair says he's going to go, and the leadership contest is declared, I'm going to rejoin the party, so that I can vote for John McDonnell.' He says that he'll see what happens then before he decides whether or not to leave again.

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Bob Mitchell from Battersea left home at 14 and worked in a munitions factory. Later on, he installed telephones. 'People were always very pleased to see me.' He was a shop steward, and went on strike without asking why. 'Everything Blair has handled has been bad. Schools, hospitals, power, essential services. Gordon Brown is another Tony Blair. He's the same. There's no difference. Nothing would change.'

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Louanne Tranchell was a Labour councillor at Hammersmith and Fulham from 1994 to 1998, and is probably as flamboyant as such a person can be. She has crazy grey hair and a lot of stories to tell and she tends to start somewhere the middle of them. She was a costume-designer and went on to become an architectural assistant.

She has been a member of the Labour party all of her adult life, as has her husband. Her three children were members until the recent Israel-Lebanon war. They all left then, 'because people kept asking them why they were members.' She says that she can't really imagine not being a member. She doesn't blame Blair for the party's woes, though.

'I feel very uncomfortable with all this 'Down with Tony Blair,' she says as she joins the Time to Go march on the Labour party conference in Manchester. 'So much of what has happened is about globalisation and capitalism. I find it very, very hard to look at one person and say well, that person is responsible for everything.'

She admires John McDonnell. 'He's very heartening. He has confirmed, through time, that our job is to represent labour [working people].' Like the low-paid, bullied women who walked out of the film processing plant they worked in 30 years ago at Grunwick in protest at their appalling pay and treatment? 'Yes,' Tranchell shouts, stabbing the air with a finger. 'Yes, that's it!'