Tony Blair

Will the long-term jobless really benefit from a private sector presence in welfare?

Surely people who live like this deserve sympathy, education and support, rather than corporate rape:

For Natalie Langford and her partner Kelvin, this month's primary unpleasantness will be the formal loss of their ten-month-old daughter. She was taken away from them just after she was born, and will shortly be adopted out by social services. Such are the joys of life as a junkie, says Natalie.

'So, my daughter was taken off me and I never get to see her again. I only get photos,' Natalie says. 'I won't see her now until she is 16 and [if she] wants contact. I was nicked for shoplifting (just after the baby was born) and I was taken to Holloway for two months. They didn't give me a chance to look after the baby. All I have is letterbox contact now, because I was on methadone. I stopped taking drugs and everything. I was trying to go into detox, but I couldn't get into detox, because they didn't have funding and all that shit, so like, it weren't happening. So, my daughter was taken off me and I never get to see her again.'

It is a story that calls, Kelvin says, for a drink. He and Natalie and five or six of their friends are already working their way through the beers. They're drinking at the top end of Deptford High Street. They all look pretty horrific. Natalie is only 35 and she is personable, eloquent and political, but you'd be pushing the romance if you said she was something to look at. She's got thinning hair, bleached-looking irises and the pale, pimply skin of a user. Her skin is so inflamed in places that her face looks misshapen. Kelvin, who says he's ex-Army, could be anywhere between 35 and 60. He's grey-haired and sallow, and also has the faded irises.

We continue our 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.

A bit of holiday reading until we surface round the New Year: John McDonnell earlier this month on the falling Labour party membership discussed later this month. You can enjoy a few interviews with crushed and disillusioned members and ex-members of the Labour party here .

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.