The Labour Leader will stand down sometime next year and we will then elect a new Leader by the autumn of 2007. Everyone presumes it will be a Gordon Brown coronation, but in my view that would be entirely wrong.
What must be done is for the party to have a debate about the direction it wants to go after Blair. That is why I am supporting a leadership campaign by John McDonnell MP for when the Prime Minister resigns - see After Blair Link on left.
I do this not because I think he will win, but because I want the party to have a debate - do we want more Blair/Brownism, or do we want to refocus our policies on the hopes of ordinary working people ? Or do we want something that steers a course between the two ?
With David Cameron re-energising his party by blatant opportunism (though no doubt causing heart attacks in the blue rinse brigade) maybe it is time for Labour to spell out some significant differences between us and the Tories ?
John McDonnell wants a leadership debate that is about choices for the party:
- between promoting public services or continued privatisation;
- between free education or trust schools and tuition fees;
- between increasing the state pension and restoring the link with earnings or forcing more people onto the means test;
- between allowing councils to build council houses once again or high rents, escalating housing costs, homelessness and overcrowding;
- between energy from green power sources, conservation, and British clean coal or the costs and risks of nuclear power;
- between promoting civil liberties and trade union rights or reactionary incursions into the right of free speech, assembly and trial;
- between a government committed to peace, withdrawal from Iraq and nuclear disarmament or backing Bush's wars and wasting £24 billion on Trident.
2 comments:
Good move. McDonnell may be lampooned in the media as being too far left for Mr Murdoch's liking, but without a principled socialist candidate the leadership contest will most likely consist of a simple continuation of the Blair government's agenda.
What exactly is so radical about his views, one wonders. Peace, the environment, trade unionism, civil liberties, PUBLIC services, social welfare - surely why most people *joined* the Labour Party?
Well it was why I did.....
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