Labour Party members

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.'

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.