By August 2015, the Saudi Arabian Government had beheaded more people that year than terrorist group ISIS. The former is a British ally, the latter an enemy. The government sells vast numbers of weapons to the Saudis; relations are so cosy that when Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah died, Whitehall flew their flags at half-mast. David Cameron rejects any of this is a problem. The British state is a moral arbiter – but far more often in words than in deeds.

In his leader’s speech to Labour party conference, Jeremy Corbyn’s first message to Cameron went straight to the heart of this issue. He told the Prime Minister in no uncertain terms that it was time to intervene in Saudi Arabia, to stop the beheading and crucifixion of Ali Mohammed al-Nimr, who was imprisoned in 2011 at the age of 17 for joining anti-government protests.

Corbyn highlighted this case because it embodies the intensely corrupt nature of Britain’s dealings with Saudi Arabia and other countries across the globe. Despite countless allegations of human rights abuses, Britain has continued to replicate the Al-Yamamah arms deal, originally signed by the Thatcher Government in 1985, which sees the government trade arms for oil. Over twenty years this brought in £43bn in revenue for BAE. Such deals continue. After uprisings started in 2011, bloody state oppression of dissent rose and so too did Britain’s arms sales to the country. The contradictions run deep but that doesn’t bother Cameron; when there’s money to be made, democracy is low on the agenda.

The latest development to prove the suspect nature of this international affair surfaced just yesterday when it emerged that it looks as if UK has been vote-trading with Saudi Arabia so that both states make it onto the UN human rights council.

The British state isn’t interested in witnessing democracy flourish in areas of the global south where it’s absent; it doesn’t fit with foreign policy. That’s part of the reason why the Government put in a bid for the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) to train the Saudi Arabian prison service. This is a contract that would be highly lucrative, earning the department £5.9 million. But as ‘Jack of Kent’ blogger, David Allen Green has pointed out it’s wrong for the state to supply a customer in this way for profit, particularly as the MoJ oversees our law system. Corbyn demanded termination of this bid, the Government refused. Earlier this month they said they had to uphold the bid otherwise they’d face “financial penalties.”

The British state preaches belief systems it doesn’t live by, codes of practice it flouts in favour of flexing its power in the world. It’s refreshing that a Labour leader has lifted the lid on this. History – both present and long past – tells us that too often human rights are important to the state when it’s convenient. Britain’s foreign policy, its dealings with other countries and the way it conducts itself abroad, has to change.

So I’m back from Brighton and conferenced out for another year. I’ve danced and sung, thought and listened, discussed and debated. I’ve commiserated with former PPC who weren’t elected and celebrated with those who were.

And I’ve met Party members. So many of them. Those like me who have been members for years and those who have joined just recently enthused by Jeremy Corbyn, devastated by the election result and ready to play their part in Labour’s fightback.

What can these members expect from the Party and each other? We are not always a Party that is kind to each other. We have had a divisive leadership contest that frequently pitted members against each other in really quite disgraceful terms. All the talk of both Tories and Trots was explicitly slapped down by Corbyn in his conference speech and rightly so. Our record membership levels deserve a space where robust debate does not pour over into abuse.

We need to think very carefully about what our members want from us – new and less so. If we treat this upsurge in intake simply as leaflet fodder we will not keep them very long. They want to be involved at a much more satisfying level than that and we need them to take their enthusiasm out into their communities. We should not allow it to be blunted by the procedural mills that can be our meetings and decision making process.

Jeremy has also called for a wider democratic process in the Party. So far the details are yet to emerge. We know that it might mean a more sovereign conference  which is fine and a good thing, but the conference will not do for the number of members we have now. If you can’t take a week off to go, how do you get involved?

And what does this mean for the National Policy Forum? (I have an interest here as I sit on the NPF representing the Socialist Societies). This discursive body really came into its own over the last Parliament with real debates taking place and as a result of an exhaustive deliberative process, a consensus around the outcome. It would be kind to let us know the fate of this body.

MPs are under enormous scrutiny at the moment and this is going to continue. Everyone is expecting them to disagree with Corbyn sooner or later and how they do so will be instructive. Have they learned the lesson that is so clear from the leadership contest that heaping abuse on each other only further polarises us? MPs must respect the mandate the leader has been given and work constructively with him, and with our members, to make this work.

But we must also be kind to MPs – those who remain loyal and those who take occasional issue with the leadership. Sure we can disagree with them, but we should not and must not abuse them. Jeremy went against the leadership hundreds of times over the course of his career too don’t forget. MPs will not make these decisions lightly but because on some issues their conscience is unable to vote against their beliefs. I struggle with this (for example, I was disappointed with Labour MPs who didn’t vote to equalise marriage) but I know that where I have a right to say they have made a wrong decision, I don’t have the right to question their party affiliation.

Being kind is a choice. But it is not a choice you make once and forget about. We must be mindful and choose to be kind every day. Choose to have kinder structures that support and develop members. Choose to have more tolerance of disagreement but disagree in more tolerant ways. Choose to be a Party that lives it’s values in the small things and not just in primary colours.

Delegates liked his vision of a more comradely style of politics. His call for an end to personal abuse and cyberbullying in politics got the biggest cheer of the day. It helps that he matches his message. Corbyn was as unpolished as ever; sometimes struggling with the autocue but also passionate and charming. He is not a great orator, but his straightforward style should appeal to people sick of the soundbites and evasiveness of modern politics.

In a key passage he told delegates he would be a listening leader, who would not impose party policy by diktat. “I don’t believe anyone of us has a monopoly of wisdom and ideas,” he said. “I want open debate in our party and our movement. I will listen to everyone.” He promised the party as a whole would decide on policy.

But he also set out some red lines on things he will not compromise on. “I’ve been given a huge mandate, by 59 per cent of the electorate who supported my campaign. I believe it is a mandate for change,” he said. “Let me be clear under my leadership … Labour will be challenging austerity. It will also be unapologetic about reforming our economy to challenge inequality and protect workers better.”

That challenge amounts to the most ambitious plan to expand state intervention in the British economy since the 1983 Labour manifesto. It includes a more expansionist role for the Bank of England, a national investment bank to fund new infrastructure, technology and industries, a redistribution of the tax burden onto business and the rich, and more say for workers in the management of companies.

On foreign affairs Corbyn insisted Labour support the authority of international law and international institutions, particularly the United Nations. More controversially he spoke out about Trident – an issue delegates had voted not to re-examine on Sunday. “I’ve made my own position on one issue clear,” he said. “And I believe I have a mandate from my election on it. I don’t believe £100 billion on a new generation of nuclear weapons taking up a quarter of our defence budget is the right way forward.”

So while Corbyn tolerates shadow cabinet members voicing their opposition to his views, he is not going to let them have the last word on policy. How he does that it is the question. It is not certain he has the support in the unions and constituency parties to get his whole agenda through conference, particularly on Trident. It is also hard to see his inclusive frontbench surviving.

The party’s 160,000 new members are key. Will they get involved or be virtual recruits? And how will Corbyn harness their enthusiasm? The new politics do not appear to involve changes to how the party is organised, just a restoration of the supremacy of conference. He celebrated social media yesterday as a new, democratic form of communication, but not as a means of democratic participation. Surely more must be done to make the party truly inclusive.

14.25: Watson has just finished his tub-thumping address, finishing by rallying off a list of Labour’s achievements in government.

“In government we made this country a far, far better place: Record numbers of new schools and hospitals. Far better pay for public sector workers. Led the world on climate change and international development. The minimum wage. Tax credits. The pension credit. Civil partnerships. The Disability Discrimination Act. The Human Rights Act. The Gangmasters Act. Paid holidays. Maternity leave. Paternity leave. Union recognition rights. Temporary and agency workers’ rights. And literally a thousand more progressive things we did to change our country for the better.”

He also won applause for attacking the Lib Dems (“that useless bunch of lying sellouts”) and for saying that “there are too many Special Advisers at the top of the Parliamentary Labour Party.”

13.59: Tom Watson’s speech has just begun, and will be followed by the traditional rendition of the Red Flag.

Elsewhere, Steve Rotherham has been confirmed as Jeremy Corbyn’s PPS.Rotherham told the Liverpool Echo, his local paper that the experience would be “fascinating”. Rotherham had been unsure abut accepting the role, telling Corbyn: “I’m the wrong person because I’m no-one’s bag carrier.’ And he said, ‘That’s not how I think the job would be.’”

12.39: Shadow Home Secretary Andy Burnham has just finished his conference address. In a section on immigration, Burnham declared that free movement across the EU was “widening inequality” and attacked the “new-liberal, free market” model of the EU currently.

“I make no bones about it: I am on mission to win back those lost Labour voters from UKIP. Not by copying them in any way. But by being true to our own values, Jeremy’s vision of a social Europe – and rejecting the new-liberal, free market approach of today.

“For too long, Labour has gone along with the idea that free movement on the current rules benefits everyone and affects all areas equally. Well, you know what: it’s just not true. In places, it has benefited private companies more than people and communities. And the truth is this: free movement, as it currently works, is widening inequality.”

He said that he was setting himself a challenge to “reframe the debate about immigration”, and pledged to fight the Tories’ anti-trade union bill “with all we’ve got”.

10.10: Conference will be voting later today on a Unite backed emergency motion calling on the party to only back air strikes against Islamic State in Syria if it is endorsed by the United Nations Security Council.

Labour’s London mayoral candidate Sidiq Khan is speaking, following his appearance on the Today programme, in which he said he would be the capital’s “champion” and would occasionally “respectfully and fraternally disagree” with Jeremy Corbyn on some issues.

The Shadow Home Secretary Andy Burnham, Shadow Health Secretary Heidi Alexander and Shadow Education Secretary Lucy Powell are also speaking. After lunch the new Deputy Leader Tom Watson will close conference.

Wednesday, 9.55: Jeremy Corbyn has started the day with a round of media interviews. He restated his opposition to Trident on the Today programme and was asked if he would press the nuclear button as prime minister. “No,” he replied.

He also refused to rule out giving Labour MPs a free vote on air strikes on Islamic State in Syria. He explained that it was not yet clear what the government would ask parliament to vote on. A decision would come when that was known.

He was also asked if he actually wanted the job of Prime Minister in his heart of hearts. Yes, he replied, in his heart of hearts he is very happy.

16.09: Unite’s Len McCluskey has issued his reaction to Corbyn’s speech:

Today Jeremy treated us to a different kind of politics and I believe people will like what they see.  Principle, honesty,  fairness and dignity – our lifelong Labour values – are taking their rightful place in the public realm. 

He was inspirational – in setting out a new vision for our country he gave our tired politics a long-overdue shot in the arm.

Unite members will be especially heartened to hear that Jeremy believes in an active role for government – in protecting jobs, in using investment to build the homes families and young people urgently need and to keep our communities strong. 

Voters are now hearing a clear Labour alternative to the Conservative austerity project, an appalling dogma that is making our country more unequal, spreading insecurity and poverty – and it is being undertaken as a political choice, by a government wholly-owned by the hedge funds. 

Jeremy Corbyn drew a clear line in the sand today when he told the Tories that their mindless austerity is an affront to the British people and its time is well and truly up.

Labour can proclaim with pride that it is the only party of hope and fairness, the party of the people.  Labour values will make Britain great again.

16.05: Here’s Emma Burnell’s take on the speech:

Jeremy spoke of a kinder politics; a politics that engages on ideas. And there were some great ideas in there. The focus on housing was great. Reached straight to my sweet spot.

I’m concerned about the style. I hope that doesn’t make me a Blairite, or worse, a Tory. It wasn’t a tightly scripted speech and at times felt more like a sociology lecture than a speech designed to rally the country to our cause.

Corbyn has a vision of what is wrong with our country and what he wants to change. It was a vision the party today wholly endorsed. Now it up to all of us to take that vision to the country.

15.59: Jeremy Corbyn’s speech clocked in at 59 minutes long. Here’s immediate reaction from Marcus Roberts:

The risk for all commentary on Corbyn is that too much attention is paid to the details. So focus is given to how he handled the autocue or delivered a soundbite. Attention will be paid to the narrative of the speech – or perhaps the lack thereof.

But too much forensic examination of the minutiae of moments risks losing focus on that which really matters to voters. Because for all the talk of Islington and attacks on “the commentariat” important things were left out, like voters worries about Labour and overspending, Labour and welfare, Labour and immigration.

Instead Corbyn stuck to a classic, crowd pleasing old Labour script: more fairness, more state, more spending.

In short, what was in the speech was a list of the things that matter to Jeremy Corbyn and his rank and file but what was lacking was engagement with the electorate on the very issues the voters found Labour wanting on last May.

Sadly for Labour, having chosen not to speak to the nation he cannot be surprised if the voters choose not to listen.

13.00: Labour conference will debate air strikes on Islamic State in Syria tomorrow, according to the BBC.

Labour WILL debate and vote on taking action in Syria tomorrow ….

— Laura Kuenssberg (@bbclaurak) September 29, 2015

12.04: Today is the day that nationalising the railways becomes official Labour policy, with an NEC statement this morning and debate in the hall. Shadow Transport Secretary Lilian Greenwood told delegates that it was “in the public interest” to bring the railways back under government control.

Labour will now set up a rail taskforce to work out how to:

• Return private rail franchises to public ownership when they come to an end or through a break clause, when it is in the interest of passengers and taxpayers.

• Create a “dynamic public operator” to run the renationalised franchises and reinvest profits into cutting fares and rail infrastructure.

The party will also oppose any attempt by the government to privatise Network Rail.

Possibly the most interesting part of her speech, though, was her suggestion that Labour will continue to support HS2, and run it as a nationalised service:

“It is time for our railways to be run under public ownership, in the public interest, with affordable fares for all.

I want a new deal for the railways, with a strong voice for passengers, a modern intercity identity, an expanded London Overground and devolution for other local networks, putting commuters first.

And as part of a modern railway, we need to build 21^st century infrastructure to revolutionise the links between the cities of the Midlands and the North, to free up space for new commuter services, and take more lorries off our congested roads.

So let’s invest in high speed rail – and let’s make sure it can be run under public ownership, as a public service: an integrated national asset that the country can be proud of.”

Tuesday, 10.15: In his first Labour conference speech as leader, Jeremy Corbyn is expected to say that he wants to create a “kinder, more inclusive” politics. He will also say he won’t impose “leadership lines” on the party and that he wants a “bottom up, not top down” style of democracy.

It isn’t anticipated that Corbyn will make any major policy announcements, but he is expected to promise to champion the self-employed, suggesting they should have full access to statutory maternity and paternity pay.

Corbyn is also expected to say that he loves his country and stands for the values of the majority of the British people. “It is because I am driven by these British majority values, because I love this country, that I want to rid it of injustice to make it more fair, more decent, more equal.

More after lunch.

19.43: Matt Wrack hinted that the Fire Brigades Union could apply to re-affiliate to the Labour Party at the Labour Representation Committee rally this evening. The FBU General Secretary said that “the world has changed and my union, and other unions, will have to consider how to respond.” To shouts of ‘come back” he added: “we’re proud to have supported Jeremy Corbyn during the [leadership] campaign and after it, and as the fight goes forward.”

The FBU disaffiliated from the Labour Party in 2004 but is affiliated to the left-wing pressure group, the LRC, which was founded by John McDonnell. Its executive also voted to support and help fund Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership campaign. A decision to apply to re-affiliate would have to be taken at its conference next May, but its executive is meeting on Wednesday and will be discussing the political situation, including its relationship with Labour.

16.00: New Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Owen Smith promised to oppose the Welfare Bill “line by cruel line” in his speech to delegates earlier, a significant toughening of the stance the party took over the summer.

He said:

“We have to smash the Tory Welfare Trap with the clarity of our argument and the strength of our values. And we will start straight away with Duncan Smith’s pernicious Welfare Bill.

“It penalises children. It takes money from the poorest workers. It drives families from their homes.

“And we will oppose it, line by cruel line. That’s my promise, conference. Hold me to it.”

15.51: He’s a fighter, not a quitter. The Dark Lord has arrived. Peter Mandelson, who received such rapturous applause at Labour’s Brighton conference in 2009 (remember that?) has returned. However, that is not his greatest moment, which also came during that week: when he claimed not to have used a four-letter word in a telephone conversation with Rebekah Brooks.

While his reception may not be as warm this time around, former LabourList editor Mark Ferguson has spotted that some people are welcoming him with open arms:

Just spotted Peter Mandelson embracing @OwenJones84 at the behest of @YvetteCooperMP -unfortunately Owen fled before I could take a photo

— Mark Ferguson (@Markfergusonuk) September 28, 2015

14.25: Dan Jarvis attracted a large crowd at the Huffington Post fringe this lunchtime. The Barnsley MP was reportedly urged to run for the Labour leadership by MPs and is seen as someone with a big future in the party. The Huff Po clearly agrees, as its political editor Paul Waugh interviewed him one-to-one beneath a huge picture of the former para, inscribed with the words Dan The Man.

Jeremy Corbyn is clearly less of a fan, as he declined to offer Jarvis a job in his reshuffle. Asked about the frontbench, Jarvis said: “I wasn’t expecting to get a call and as it turned out I didn’t get a call.”

Jarvis also called for a free vote for Labour MPs on military action in Syria and said he didn’t think Corbyn should apologise about the Iraq war before the Chilcott report is published. Pressed on whether he thought there should then be an apology, he said that Corbyn should be careful not to sound as if he was criticising the British soldiers who served in Iraq.

Jarvis was also very pro-Queen. ‘The Royal family add a lot of value to our country,” he said. He added that it was important for the armed forces that they serve the monarch and are greeted by a member of the Royal family when they return from a tour of duty.

12.59: McDonnell has just finished speaking. He warned that the pre-2008 crash warning signs are coming again. As leaked prior to his speech he committed to balancing the books and “living within our means” and repeatedly said Labour weren’t deficit deniers.

He began by denouncing austerity and citing the case of Michael O’Sullivan, who killed himself after his benefits were removed as his reasoning for this.  He said that Labour would tackle the deficit fairly and that there would be cuts to the corporate welfare system, the subsidies paid to companies that take the money and fail to provide the jobs, cuts to the use of “taxpayers money subsidising poverty paying bosses” and cuts to the £13 billion tax breaks given to buy to let landlords for repairing their properties, whether they undertake the repairs or not.

He also made a plea in the name of unity and asked those who refused to serve in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet to “come back” and “help us succeed”.

McDonnell outlined that he would review the financial sector. “As a start I have invited Lord Bob Kerslake, former head of the civil service, to bring together a team to review the operation of the Treasury itself. I will also be setting up a review of the Bank of England”, he said.

The end of his speech was met with a standing ovation, shouts and cheers in the hall.

12.10: We’re waiting for John McDonnell to take to the stage to give his first speech to conference as Shadow Chancellor. He’s going to say that he’ll create a more progressive taxation system – according to The Telegraph which has his full speech.

“Where money needs to be raised it will be raised from fairer, more progressive taxation. We will be lifting the burden from middle and low-income earners paying for a crisis they did not cause.

“If we inherit a deficit in 2020, fiscal policy will be used to pay down the debt and lower the deficit but at a speed that does not put into jeopardy sustainable economic growth.

“We’ll use active monetary policy to stimulate demand where necessary” he will say.

11.40: Hilary Benn, Shadow Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, has now said what Labour’s position would be on airstrikes in Syria He focussed a large part of his speech on ISIS in Syria and Iraq and outlined his support for current airstrikes in Iraq. He said that Labour didn’t support “British boots on the ground” and stressed that there was a need for political, diplomatic and humanitarian solutions in Syria.

“We are right to be offering air support to the Government of Iraq in trying to defeat ISIL/Daesh, but let me be clear we do not want British boots on the ground in either Iraq or Syria.” 

Now, there’s been a lot of talk about airstrikes in Syria, but to bring peace, stability and security there we need a much broader, more comprehensive plan than just trying to deal with ISIL/Daesh. 

This will require political, diplomatic and humanitarian will too”, he said

11.08: Diane Abbott, Shadow International Development Secretary, has just spoken. She said war and conflict are a primary impediment to development. She spoke against military intervention and said that she will vote against bombing in Syria – though this isn’t in the text released by Labour press office.  It’s thought that there will be a vote on air strikes against ISIS in Syria soon but the exact details on the vote and Labour’s position on this are not yet clear. Corbyn is opposed to bombing but a number of shadow cabinet ministers are likely to be in support of airstrikes.

Abbott said that development should be women centred and Labour need to change the lives of working women in some of the world’s poorest countries.

10.48: Pat McFadden, Shadow Minister for Europe, stressed the need for robust reform in the EU. “We have to argue for a better EU … not just the status quo”, he said. He also highlighted that Labour have a “duty” to show leadership in the pro-EU campaign, in “every community we live in”. McFadden said this has to be a community-based campaign, not one run by “elites”.

10.14: Paul Kenny from GMB General Secretary has just finished speaking, he said Labour shouldn’t campaign alongside the Conservatives to stay in the EU.

Paul Kenny on the EU campaign: "We should not be fighting on any platform alongside the bloody Tories” #lab15

— Maya Goodfellow (@MayaGoodfellow) September 28, 2015

10.07: Maria Eagle, Shadow Defence Secretary has just addressed Conference. Her speech centred on the need for debate; she said that she will facilitate a debate on Britain’s place in the world. After praising the armed forces, she addressed the issue of Trident, recognising the divisions within the party.

“And it has been our position for decades too that Britain needs a credible independent nuclear deterrent while taking a lead internationally to push for a world without nuclear weapons. Labour in Government reduced the numbers of nuclear warheads and gave up our free fall nuclear bomb option – as part of multilateral disarmament efforts.

I know that some people have always disagreed that Britain should have an independent nuclear deterrent. But we all agree that more must be done to rid the world of nuclear weapons. I recognise and respect the different views in our party on the future of our nuclear deterrent.

Jeremy knew that I disagreed with him about this when he appointed me. And he still asked me to do the job.

At the last election, we were committed to having a much more transparent and public facing debate about our place in the world and how best we should fulfil it. Jeremy Corbyn has asked me to facilitate such a debate. And I will do that”, she said.

She was also met with applause from Conference for saying “There is an appetite out there, in our Party and beyond, for real issues of substance to be discussed openly in politics, rather than be decided just by Ministers in Government, behind closed doors or politicians in Parliament, subject to a Party whip.”

Monday, 09.58: And we’re back! Live from the conference floor, we’ll be reporting on what’s happening in Brighton today. Glenis Wilmott,Leader of the European Parliamentary Labour Party, and Alan Johnson, who is heading up Labour’s campaign to stay in the EU. As expected they both stressed the importance of campaigning to stay in the EU. Johnson said: “There is nothing patriotic about condemning our country to isolation”.

17.10: The 8 resolutions that will be debated at conference will be austerity and public services, employment rights, EU, refugee crisis, mental health, license fee, housing and NHS.

Here is the break down of how CLPs and trade union and affiliate organisations voted.

CLPs – Austerity 11.38%, Defence capability 7.10%, Employment rights 8.2%, Europe 5.25%, Housing 18.10%, License fee 0.76%, Mental health 7.83%, NHS 15.93%, Rail 2.26%, Refugee crisis 15.87%, Social security 5.61%, Syria 1.69%.

Trade unions – Austerity 24.9%, Defence capabilities 0.16%, Employment rights 24.75%, Europe 24.68%, Housing 0.10%, License fee 9.77%, Mental health 0.14%, NHS 0.14%, Rail 15%, Refugee crisis 0.35%, Social security 0.01%, Syria 0%

16.34: Conference will not vote on Trident nuclear deterrent, Christopher Hope reports.

BREAKING There will be NO vote on the Trident nuclear deterrent after all at the Labour party conference, sources tell me. M/F

— Christopher Hope (@christopherhope) September 27, 2015

Sources – party members have decided NOT to accept a Trident motion at a meeting of party officials. Relief for Corbyn who would have lost.

— Christopher Hope (@christopherhope) September 27, 2015

This is a divisive issue but it was expected that Trident would be one of the issues that would make it to a vote after it made it onto the priorities ballot. But there was resistance from some unions. Earlier today, Paul Kenny from the GMB said that the union would not support calls to scrap Trident. “People need to get real,” he said.

16.22: Both Nia Griffith, Shadow Secretary of State for Wales, and Carwyn Jones AM, First Minister of Wales and Leader of the Welsh Labour Party highlighted in their speeches their pro-European credentials. This comes following Labour making clear last week that they would campaign to stay in the EU, there was initially some confusion over whether Corbyn would commit to this.

Jones congratulated Jeremy Corbyn and Tom Watson and defended Labour’s new leader, saying ” There’s been a lot of guff, quite frankly, written about Labour’s commitment to winning future elections following Jeremy’s win. Let me tell you, as someone who has won a leadership election and an Assembly election – anyone who wins nearly 60 per cent of the vote can’t be anything but serious about winning elections.”.

He also denounced the “frantic nationalism” of UKIP and “fantastical nationalism” of Plaid Cymru and covered Welsh Labour’s successes, including a living wage for all NHS staff, cancer waiting times better than England and ensuring that Welsh students don’t pay £9000 tuition fees.

15.55: Kezia Dugdale, Leader of the Scottish Labour Party, has just address Conference. She began by praising Labour’s new leader, Jeremy as a “man of principles and conviction”. She said that Scottish Labour has “actually changed the way we do business” by giving members power over next month’s Scottish Labour conference. Dugdale was elected leader in August, following Jim Murphy’s resignation. Ahead of next year’s Holyrood elections, she promised to not just talk about change, but actually change the party. “The days of listening and not acting are over. I will change my party so that once again, together, we can change our country” she said.

15.50: Ian Murray, Shadow Scotland Secretary and Scottish Labour’s only MP, has just finished. He introduced himself with the day’s best gag so far, calling himself a “first time speaker, last man standing, Independent Socialist Republic of Edinburgh South CLP”. He also rules out another independence referendum, saying “I won’t let that happen, and I have this pledge for the people of Scotland today: I won’t put politics before Scotland’s best interests.”

15.07: When are the exciting bits at conference today? Most focus is on the contemporary motions vote, which will decide what certain topics to be debated and voted this week – including intervention in Syria and Trident renewal. The announcement of the vote’s results is scheduled at 16.55, just under a couple of hours from now.

We understand that a rule change in the Conference Arrangements Committee means that eight topics will have be chosen – in the past it could be as few as four. This increases the chances of Syria and Trident making the cut.

14.41: Harriet Harman received a raucous standing ovation as she took to the stage, having been introduced by Angela Eagle. Jeremy Corbyn handed Harman a bouquet of flowers as thanks for her service as acting leader, as a pink bus branded with the word “Harriet” flashed across the big screen above the stage. Cheeky.

Sunday, 14.08: Welcome to sunny Brighton, for what is expected to be one of the most fascinating Labour conferences in years – possibly even decades. We’ll be bringing you all of the news from conference this week, from conference floor to fringe events (including our own fringes) and everything in between. Got something to tell us about conference? At a fringe meeting you think we should be covering? Got gossip, rumours or news for us? Email us at mail@labourlist.org and you can be a part of it.

General secretary Iain McNicol kicked off proceedings this morning with a speech in the hall, where he welcomed the tens of thousands of new members, announcing that 52,000 have joined in the last fortnight, and 166,000 since the election.

During an attack on the Conservatives’ anti-trade union bill, he also revealed that Labour are on course to be debt-free by next year. It may have been hidden away in his speech, but that is quite a remarkable turnaround – reports from last year suggested that the party finished the 2013 £5.7million in the red.

Labour Party treasurer Diana Holland told conference in 2012 that the party was planning to wipe its debts by 2016, but the news will still come as a surprise, so her report to conference on Monday afternoon could be worth watching.

Ironically, losing May’s election could have helped Labour with the debt target, by allowing them to hold on to publicly funded Short Money. The vote by the Co-operative Group just days after the election to carry on with political subscriptions will also have played a big role in keeping the party’s finances stable.

On the Trade Union Bill, McNicol said:

“Does anyone really believe this Tory bill is designed to improve industrial relations? This Bill is designed to crush the British trade union movement, and to cut funds to the Labour Party.

I am proud that as your General Secretary, we have paid down the Labour Party’s debts, paid back our creditors and by next year we will be debt-free.

But I have to tell you honestly, if the Trade Union Bill goes through, the consequences for our party’s finances will be huge. You can’t fight elections without cash to pay for them. And of course the ruthless Conservatives know this full well.

They are a political party, using the power of the state, to restrict opposition and stifle debate.

We’ve seen it in tin-pot dictatorships, but it has no place in a democracy. We will resist the Trade Union Bill because it is pernicious, unfair, unjust and un-British.”

Jeremy Corbyn won a prolonged standing ovation from a packed conference hall in Brighton today for slamming the culture of online abuse – specifically misogynistic attacks.

Members queued for over two hours to get into the hall to witness Corbyn’s first conference speech as Labour leader, and he used the opportunity to appeal for a “kinder politics”. During the summer’s leadership election, some raised concerns over the level of abuse between supporters of different candidates. Liz Kendall used her Twitter account to highlight some of the sexist abuse directed her way, while Yvette Cooper called on the Government to do more to tackle misogynistic abuse online.

The packed conference hall in Brighton today rose to applaud new leader Corbyn as he slammed the “cyberbullying”:

“I want a kinder politics, a more caring society. Don’t let them reduce you to believing in anything less.

So I say to all activists, whether Labour or not, cut out the personal attacks. The cyberbullying. And especially the misogynistic abuse online. And let’s get on with bringing values back into politics.”

The hall laughed as Corbyn mocked recent media portrayals of him, noting that he had been criticised for wanting an asteroid to wipe out humanity, and accused of being a supporter of communism for riding a bicycle. He quoted an article that reported he is often seen “riding a Chairman Mao style bicycle”, and joked: “We have to conclude that whenever we see someone on a bicycle from now on, there goes another supporter of Chairman Mao.”

He finished by quoting Keir Hardie, the Labour Party’s first leader, as he made a rallying call to put “people’s values back into politics”.

“The last bearded man to lead the Labour Party was a wonderful great Scotsman, Keir Hardie who died about a century ago this weekend and we commemorated him with a book we launched on Sunday evening. Keir grew up in dreadful poverty and made so much of his life and founded our party.

Stood up to be counted on votes for women, stood up for social justice, stood up to develop our political party.

We own him and so many more so much. And he was asked once summaries what you are about, summarise what you really mean in your life. And he thought for a moment and he said this:

‘My work has consisted of trying to stir up a divine discontent with wrong.’

Don’t accept injustice, stand up against prejudice. Let us build a kinder politics, a more caring society together. Let us put our values, the people’s values, back into politics.”

You can read the full speech here, and see some instant reaction on our conference liveblog.

Friends, thank you so much for that incredible welcome and Rohit, thank you so much for that incredible welcome. Rohit, thank you so much for the way you introduced me and the way our family and you have contributed so much to our community. That was absolutely brilliant. Thank you very much.

I am truly delighted to be invited to make this speech today, because for the past two weeks, as you’ve probably known I’ve had a very easy, relaxing time. Hardly anything of any importance at all has happened to me.

You might have noticed in some of our newspapers they’ve taken a bit of an interest in me lately.

Some of the things I’ve read are this. According to one headline “Jeremy Corbyn welcomed the prospect of an asteroid ‘wiping out’ humanity.”

Now, asteroids are pretty controversial. It’s not the kind of policy I’d want this party to adopt without a full debate in conference. So can we have the debate later in the week!

Another newspaper went even further and printed a ‘mini-novel’ that predicted how life would look if I were Prime Minister. It’s pretty scary I have to tell you.

It tells us football’s Premier League would collapse, which makes sense, because it’s quite difficult to see how all our brilliant top 20 teams in the Premiership would cope with playing after an asteroid had wiped out humanity. So that’s a no-no for sure!

And then the Daily Express informed readers that – I’m not quite sure how many greats there are here, but I think there are three or four – great-great-great grandfather, who I’d never heard of before was a very unpleasant sort of chap who apparently was involved in running a workhouse. I want to take this opportunity to apologise for not doing the decent thing and going back in time to have a chat with him about his appalling behaviour.

But then there’s another journalist who had obviously been hanging around my street a great deal, who quotes: “Neighbours often see him riding a Chairman Mao style bicycle.” Less thorough journalists might just have referred to it as just a ‘bicycle’, but no.

So we have to conclude that whenever we see someone on a bicycle from now on, there goes another supporter of Chairman Mao. Thus, the Daily Express has changed history.

But seriously Conference it’s a huge honour and a privilege for me to speak to you today as Leader of the Labour Party.

To welcome all our new members.

More than 160,000 have joined the Labour party.

And more than 50,000 have joined since the declaration of the leadership and deputy leadership election results.

I’m very proud to say that in my own constituency, our membership as of last night had just gone over 3,000 individual members and 2,000 registered supporters. 5,000 people in my constituency.

I want to say first of all thank you to all of the people of my constituency of Islington North and Islington North Labour party for their friendship, support and all the activities we’ve done and all the help and support they’ve given me in the past few weeks. I’m truly grateful to you. Thank you very much indeed to everyone in Islington.

Above I want to welcome all our new members to this party, everyone who’s joined this party in this great endeavour. To change our party, change our country, change our politics and change the way we do things. Above all I want to speak to everyone in Britain about the tasks Labour has now turned to.

Opposing and fighting the Tory government and the huge damage it is doing.

Developing Labour’s alternative.

Renewing our policies so we can reach out across the country and win.

Starting next year.

In Wales.

In Scotland.

In London.

In Bristol.

In local government elections across Britain.

I want to repeat the thanks I gave after my election to all the people who have served the Labour Party so well in recent months and years.

To Ed Miliband for the leadership he gave our party, and for the courage and dignity he showed in the face of tawdry media attacks.

And also for the contribution I know he will be making in the future.

Especially on the vital issues of the environment and climate change.

Thank you Ed. Thank you so much for all you’ve done.

And to Harriet Harman not just for her leadership and service, but for her commitment and passion for equality and the rights of women.

The way she has changed attitudes and law through her courage and determination. The Equality Act is one of many testaments to her huge achievements. Thank you, Harriet, for everything you’ve done and everything you continue to do.

I also want to say a big thank you to Iain McNicol, our General Secretary, and all our Party staff in London and Newcastle and all over the country for their dedication and hard work during the General Election and leadership election campaigns.

And also to all the staff and volunteers who are doing such a great job here this week in Brighton at this incredible conference we’re holding. Thank you to all of them. They’re part of our movement and part of our conference.

Also I want to say a special thank you to the fellow candidates who contested the leadership election for this party.

It was an amazing three month experience for all of us.

I want to say thank you to Liz Kendall, for her passion, her independence, determination and her great personal friendship to me throughout the campaign. Liz, thank you so much for that and all you contribute to the party.

I want to say thank you to Yvette Cooper for the remarkable way in which she’s helped to change public attitudes towards the refugee crisis.

And now for leading a taskforce on how Britain and Europe can do more to respond to this crisis. Yvette, thank you for that.

And to Andy Burnham, our new Shadow Home Secretary, for everything he did as Health Secretary to defend our NHS – health service free at the point if use as a human right for all.

I want to say thank you to all three for the spirit and friendship with which they contested the election.

Thank you Liz.

Thank you Yvette.

Thank you Andy.

I want to thank all those who took part in that election, at hustings and rallies all across the country. Our Party at its best, democratic, inclusive and growing.

I’ve got new people to thank as well.

The talented colleagues working with me in the Shadow Cabinet and on Labour’s front bench.

An inclusive team from all political wings of our Party.

From every part of our country.

It gives us the right foundation for the open debate our Party must now have about the future.

I am not leader who wants to impose leadership lines all the time.

I don’t believe anyone of us has a monopoly on wisdom and ideas – we all have ideas and a vision of how things can be better.

I want open debate in our party and our movement.

I will listen to everyone.

I firmly believe leadership is about listening.

We will reach out to our new members and supporters.

Involve people in our debates on policy and then our Party as a whole will decide.

I’ve been given a huge mandate, by 59 per cent of the electorate who supported my campaign. I believe it is a mandate for change.

I want to explain how.

First and foremost it’s a vote for change in the way we do politics.

In the Labour Party and in the country.

Politics that’s kinder, more inclusive.

Bottom up, not top down.

In every community and workplace, not just in Westminster.

Real debate, not necessarily message discipline all the time.

But above all, straight talking. Honest.

That’s the politics we’re going to have in the future in this party and in this movement.

And it was a vote for political change in our party as well.

Let me be clear under my leadership, and we discussed this yesterday in conference, Labour will be challenging austerity.

It will be unapologetic about reforming our economy to challenge inequality and protect workers better.

And internationally Labour will be a voice for engagement in partnership with those who share our values.

Supporting the authority of international law and international institutions, not acting against them.

The global environment is in peril.

We need to be part of an international movement to cut emissions and pollution.

To combat the environmental danger to our planet.

These are crucial issues. But I also want to add this.

I’ve been standing up for human rights, challenging oppressive regimes for 30 years as a backbench MP.

And before that as an individual activist, just like everyone else in this hall.

Just because I’ve become the leader of this party, I’m not going to stop standing up on those issues or being that activist.

So for my first message to David Cameron, I say to him now a little message from our conference, I hope he’s listening – you never know:

Intervene now personally with the Saudi Arabian regime to stop the beheading and crucifixion of Ali Mohammed al-Nimr, who is threatened with the death penalty, for taking part in a demonstration at the age of 17.

And while you’re about it, terminate that bid made by our Ministry of Justice’s to provide services for Saudi Arabia – which would be required to carry out the sentence that would be put down on Mohammed Ali al-Nimr.

We have to be very clear about what we stand for in human rights.

A refusal to stand up is the kind of thing that really damages Britain’s standing in the world.

I have huge admiration for human rights defenders all over the world. I’ve met hundreds of these very brave people during my lifetime working on international issues. I want to say a special mention to one group who’ve campaigned for the release of British resident Shaker Aamer from Guantanamo Bay.

This was a campaign of ordinary people like you and me, standing on cold draughty streets, for many hours over many years.

Together we secured this particular piece of justice.

That’s how our human rights were won by ordinary people coming together. Ordinary people doing extraordinary things – that is how our rights and our human rights have been won.

The Tories want to repeal the Human Rights Act and some want leave the European convention on Human Rights.

Just to show what they’re made of, their new Trade Union Bill which we’re opposing very strongly in the House and the country, is also a fundamental attack on human rights and is in breach of both the ILO and the European Convention on Human Rights.

Now I’ve been listening to a lot of advice about how to do this job.

There’s plenty of advice around, believe me.

Actually I quite like that. I welcome that.

I like to listen to advice, particularly the advice which is unwelcome. That is often the best advice you get. The people that tell you, “yes, you’re doing great, you’re brilliant, you’re wonderful”. Fine. Thank you, but what have I got wrong? “Oh, I haven’t got time for that.”

I want to listen to people.

But I do like to do things differently as well.

I’ve been told never to repeat your opponents’ lines in a political debate.

But I want to tackle one thing head on.

The Tories talk about economic and family security being at risk from us the Labour party, or perhaps even more particularly, from me.

I say this to them. How dare these people talk about security for families and people in Britain?

Where’s the security for families shuttled around the private rented sector on six month tenancies – with children endlessly having to change schools?

Where’s the security for those tenants afraid to ask a landlord to fix a dangerous structure in their own homes because they might be evicted because they’ve gone to the local authority to seek the justice they’re entitled to?

Where’s the security for the carers struggling to support older family members as Tory local government cuts destroy social care and take away the help they need?

Where’s the security for young people starting out on careers knowing they are locked out of any prospect of ever buying their own home by soaring house prices?

Where’s the security for families driven away from their children’s schools, their community and family ties by these welfare cuts?

Where’s the security for the hundreds of thousands taking on self-employment with uncertain income, no sick pay, no Maternity Pay, no paid leave, no pension now facing the loss of the tax credits that keep them and their families afloat?

And there’s no security for the 2.8 million households in Britain forced into debt by stagnating wages and the Tory record of the longest fall in living standards since records began.

And that’s the nub of it.

Tory economic failure.

An economy that works for the few, not for the many.

Manufacturing still in decline.

Look at the Tory failure to intervene to support our steel industry as the Italian government has done.

So, as we did yesterday in conference, we stand with the people on Teesside fighting for their jobs, their industry and their community. The company has said that it will mothball the plant and lay the workers off, therefore it is not too late now, again, to call on the Prime Minister even at this late stage, this 12th hour, to step in and defend those people, like the Italian government has done. Why can’t the British government? What is wrong with them?

There’s an investment crisis.

Britain at the bottom of the international league on investment.

Just below Madagascar and just above El Salvador. So we’re doing quite well!

Britain’s balance of payment deficit £100 billion last year.

Loading our economy and every one of us with unsustainable debt for the future.

And the shocks in world markets this summer have shown what a dangerous and fragile state the world economy is in.

And how ill prepared the Tories have left us to face another crisis.

It hasn’t been growing exports and a stronger manufacturing sector that have underpinned the feeble economic recovery.

It’s house price inflation, asset inflation, more private debt.

Unbalanced.

Unsustainable.

Dangerous.

The real risk to economic and family security.

To people who have had to stretch to take on mortgages.

To people who have only kept their families afloat through relying on their credit cards, and payday loans.

Fearful of how they will cope with a rise in interest rates.

It’s not acceptable.

The Tories’ austerity is the out-dated and failed approach of the past.

So it’s for us, for Labour to develop our forward-looking alternative.

That’s what John McDonnell started to do in his excellent speech to conference.

At the heart of it is investing for the future.

Every mainstream economist will tell you that with interest rates so low now is the time for public investment in our infrastructure.

Investment in council housing, and for affordable homes to rent and to buy.

John Healey’s plan for 100,000 new council and housing association homes a year.

To tackle the housing crisis, drive down the spiralling housing benefit bill and so to make the taxpayer a profit. A profit for the taxpayer because the benefit bill falls when the cost of housing falls. It’s quite simple actually and quite a good idea.

Investment in fast broadband to support new high technology jobs.

A National Investment Bank to support investment in infrastructure.

To provide finance to small and medium sized firms that our banks continue to starve of the money they need to grow.

A Green New Deal investing in renewable energy and energy conservation to tackle the threat of climate change.

The Tories of course are selling off the Green Investment Bank. They are simply not interested in this.

This is the only way to a strong economic future for Britain.

That’s sustainable.

That turns round the terrible trade deficit.

That supports high growth firms and businesses.

That provides real economic security for our people.

The economy of the future depends on the investment we make today in infrastructure, skills, and schools.

I’m delighted that Lucy Powell is our new shadow Education Secretary.
She has already set out how the education of every child and the quality of every school counts.

Every school accountable to local government, not bringing back selection.
We have aspirations for all children, not just a few.

Now my first public engagement as Labour leader came within an hour of being elected.

I was proud to speak at the ‘Refugees Welcome’ rally in London. I wanted to send out a message of the kinder politics we are pursuing and a caring society we want to achieve.

I have been inspired by people across our country.

Making collections for the refugees in Calais. Donating to charities.

The work of Citizens UK to involve whole communities in this effort.

These refugees are the victims of war – many the victims of the brutal conflict in Syria.

It is a huge crisis, the worst humanitarian crisis in Europe since the Second World War. And globally it’s the biggest refugee crisis there has ever been.

But the scale of the response from the government, Europe and the international community isn’t enough.

And whilst the government is providing welcome aid to the region, especially in the Lebanon, we all know much more needs to be done. Because it’s a crisis of human beings just like you and just like me looking for security and looking for safety. Let’s reach out the hand of humanity and friendship to them.

Now let me say something about national security.

The best way to protect the British people against the threats we face to our safety at home and abroad is to work to resolve conflict.

That isn’t easy, but it is unavoidable if we want real security.

Our British values are internationalist and universal.

They are not limited by borders.

Britain does need strong, modern military and security forces to keep us safe.

And to take a lead in humanitarian and peace keeping missions – working with and strengthening the United Nations.

On my first day in Parliament as Labour Leader it was a privilege to meet the soldiers and medics who did such remarkable work in tackling the Ebola crisis in Sierra Leone.

There is no contradiction between working for peace across the world and doing what is necessary to keep us safe.

Today we face very different threats from the time of the Cold War which ended thirty years ago.

That’s why I have asked our Shadow Defence Secretary, Maria Eagle, to lead a debate and review about how we deliver that strong, modern effective protection for the people of Britain.

I’ve made my own position on one issue clear. And I believe I have a mandate from my election on it.

I don’t believe £100 billion on a new generation of nuclear weapons taking up a quarter of our defence budget is the right way forward.

I believe Britain should honour our obligations under the Non Proliferation Treaty and lead in making progress on international nuclear disarmament.

But in developing our policy through the review we must make sure we all the jobs and skills of everyone in every aspect of the defence industry are fully protected and fully utilised so that we gain from this, we don’t lose from this. To me, that is very important.

And on foreign policy we need to learn the lessons of the recent past.

It didn’t help our national security that, at the same time I was protesting outside the Iraqi Embassy about Saddam Hussein’s brutality, Tory ministers were secretly conniving with illegal arms sales to his regime.

It didn’t help our national security when we went to war with Iraq in defiance of the United Nations and on a false prospectus.

It didn’t help our national security to endure the loss of hundreds of brave British soldiers in that war while making no proper preparation for what to do after the fall of the regime.

Nor does it help our national security to give such fawning and uncritical support to regimes like Saudi Arabia and Bahrain – who abuse their own citizens and repress democratic rights. These are issues we have to stand up on and also recognise in some cases they are using British weapons in their assault on Yemen. We have got to be clear on where our objectives are.

But there is a recent object lesson in how real leadership can resolve conflicts, prevent war and build real security.

It’s the leadership, the clever and difficult diplomacy that has been shown by Barack Obama and others in reaching the historic deal with Iran. A deal that opens the way for new diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict in Syria.

The scale of the destruction and suffering in Syria is truly dreadful.

More than a quarter of a million people killed.

More than ten million driven from their homes.

I yield to no-one in my opposition to the foul and despicable crimes committed by Isil and by the Assad government including barrel bombs being dropped on civilian targets.

We all want the atrocities to stop and the Syrian people free to determine their own destiny.

But the answer to this complex and tragic conflict can’t simply be found in a few more bombs.

I agree with Paddy Ashdown when he says that military strikes against Isil aren’t succeeding, not because we do not have enough high explosives, but because we do not have a diplomatic strategy on Syria.

That’s the challenge for leadership now, for us, for David Cameron.

The clever, patient, difficult diplomacy Britain needs to play a leading role in.

That’s why Hilary Benn and I together are calling for a new United Nations Security Council resolution that can underpin a political solution to the crisis.

I believe the UN can yet bring about a process that leads to an end to the violence in Syria. Yesterday’s meetings in New York were very important.

Social democracy itself was exhausted.

Dead on its feet.

Yet something new and invigorating, popular and authentic has exploded.

To understand this all of us have to share our ideas and our contributions.

Our common project must be to embrace the emergence of a modern left movement and harness it to build a society for the majority.

Now some media commentators who’ve spent years complaining about how few people have engaged with political parties have sneered at our huge increase in membership.

If they were sports reporters writing about a football team they’d be saying:

“They’ve had a terrible summer. They’ve got 160,000 new fans. Season tickets are sold out. The new supporters are young and optimistic. I don’t know how this club can survive a crisis like this.”

We celebrate the enthusiasm of so many people, old and young, from all communities.

In every part of the country.

Joining Labour as members and supporters.

And we need to change in response to this movement.

Our new members want to be active and involved.

Want to have a say in our Labour Party’s policies.

Want to lead local and national campaigns against injustice and the dreadful impact of Tory austerity.

Want to work in their local communities to make people’s lives better.

They don’t want to do things the old way.

Young people and older people are fizzing with ideas. Let’s give them the space for that fizz to explode into the joy we want of a better society.

They want a new politics of engagement and involvement.

Many of them are already active in their communities, in voluntary organisations, in local campaigns.

And we’ve convinced them now to take a further step and join our Labour Party.

What a tremendous opportunity for our Labour Party to be the hub of every community.

The place where people come together to campaign.

To debate, to build friendships, to set up new community projects.

To explain and talk to their neighbours about politics, about changing Britain for the better.

That’s going to mean a lot of change for the way we’ve done our politics in the past.

Our new Deputy Leader Tom Watson is well up for that challenge. He’s leading the charge and leading the change of the much greater use of digital media as a key resource.

That is the way of communication, it is not just through broadsheet newspapers or tabloids, it’s social media that really is the point of communication of the future. We have got to get that.

One firm commitment I make to people who join our Labour Party is that you have a real say, the final say in deciding on the policies of our party.

No-one – not me as Leader, not the Shadow Cabinet, not the Parliamentary Labour Party – is going to impose policy or have a veto.

The media commentariat don’t get it.

They’ve been keen to report disagreements as splits: agreement and compromise as concessions and capitulation

No.

This is grown up politics.

Where people put forward different views.

We debate issues.

We take a decision and we go forward together.

We look to persuade each other.

On occasions we might agree to disagree.

But whatever the outcome we stand together, united as Labour, to put forward a better way to the misery on offer from the Conservatives.

There’s another important thing about how we are going to do this.

It’s a vital part of our new politics.

I want to repeat what I said at the start of the leadership election.

I do not believe in personal abuse of any sort.

Treat people with respect.

Treat people as you wish to be treated yourself.

Listen to their views, agree or disagree but have that debate.

There is going to be no rudeness from me.

Maya Angelou said: “You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.”

I want a kinder politics, a more caring society.

Don’t let them reduce you to believing in anything less.

So I say to all activists, whether Labour or not, cut out the personal attacks.

The cyberbullying.

And especially the misogynistic abuse online.

And let’s get on with bringing values back into politics.

So what are our first big campaigns?

I want to start with a fundamental issue about democratic rights for Britain.

Just before Parliament rose for the summer the Tories sneaked out a plan to strike millions of people off the electoral register this December.

A year earlier than the advice of the independent Electoral Commission.

It means two million or more people could lose their right to vote.

That’s 400,000 people in London. It’s 70,000 people in Glasgow.

Thousands in every town and city, village and hamlet all across the country

That’s overwhelmingly students, people in insecure accommodation, and short stay private lets.

We know why the Tories are doing it.

They want to gerrymander next year’s Mayoral election in London by denying hundreds of thousands of Londoners their right to vote.

They want to do the same for the Assembly elections in Wales.

And they want to gerrymander electoral boundaries across the country.

By ensuring new constituencies are decided on the basis of the missing registers when the Boundary Commission starts its work in April 2016.

Conference we are going to do our best to stop them.

We will highlight this issue in Parliament and outside.

We will work with Labour councils across the country to get people back on the registers.

And from today our Labour Party starts a nationwide campaign for all our members to work in every town and city, in every university as students start the new term, to stop the Tory gerrymander. To get people on the electoral register.

It’s hard work – as I know from 10 years as the election agent for a marginal London constituency.

But now we have new resources.

The power of social media.

The power of our huge new membership.

Conference, let’s get to it. Get those people on the register to give us those victories but also to get fairness within our society.

And, friends, we need to renew our party in Scotland. I want to pay tribute today to our leader in Scotland, Kezia Dugdale and her team of MSPs in the Scottish Parliament.

I know that people in Scotland have been disappointed by the Labour Party.

I know you feel we lost our way.

I agree with you.

Kezia has asked people to take another look at the Labour Party.

And that’s what I want people across Scotland to do.

Under Kezia and my leadership we will change.

We will learn the lessons of the past.

And we will again make Labour the great fighting force you expect us to be.

We need to be investing in skills, investing in our young people – not cutting student numbers. Giving young people real hope and real opportunity.

Conference, it is Labour that is the progressive voice for Scotland.

There’s another big campaign we need to lead.

David Cameron’s attack on the living standards of low paid workers and their families through the assault on tax credits.

First, remind people over and over again David Cameron pledged during the election not to cut child tax credits.

On the Question Time Leader’s debate he said he had rejected child tax credit cuts.

It’s a shocking broken promise – and the Tories voted it through in Parliament just two weeks ago.

How can it be right for a single mother working as a part time nurse earning just £18,000 to lose £2,000 to this broken promise?

Some working families losing nearly £3,500 a year to this same broken promise.

And how can it be right or fair to break this promise while handing out an inheritance tax cut to 60,000 of the wealthiest families in the country? See the contrast

So we’ll fight this every inch of the way.

And we’ll campaign at the workplace, in every community against this Tory broken promise.

And to expose the absurd lie that the Tories are on the side of working people, that they are giving Britain a pay rise.

It was one of the proudest days of my life when cycling home from Parliament at 5 o’clock in the morning having voted for the national minimum wage legislation to go through.

So of course it’s good to see a minimum wage.

But the phoney rebranding of it as a living wage doesn’t do anyone any good.

And the Institute of Fiscal Studies has shown Cameron’s broken promise mean millions of workers are still left far worse off.

They can and must be changed.

As I travelled the country during the leadership campaign it was wonderful to see the diversity of all the people in our country.

And that is now being reflected in our membership with more black, Asian and ethnic minority members joining our party.

Even more inspiring is the unity and unanimity of their values.

A belief in coming together to achieve more than we can on our own.

Fair play for all.

Solidarity and not walking by on the other side of the street when people are in trouble.

Respect for other people’s point of view.

It is this sense of fair play, these shared majority British values that are the fundamental reason why I love this country and its people.

These values are what I was elected on: a kinder politics and a more caring society.

They are Labour values and our country’s values.

We’re going to put these values back into politics.

I want to rid Britain of injustice, to make it fairer, more decent, more equal.

And I want all our citizens to benefit from prosperity and success.

There is nothing good about cutting support to the children of supermarket workers and cleaners.

There is nothing good about leaving hundreds of thousands unable to feed themselves, driving them to foodbanks that have almost become an institution.

And there is nothing good about a Prime Minister wandering around Europe trying to bargain away the rights that protect our workers.

As our Conference decided yesterday we will oppose that and stand up for the vision of a social Europe, a Europe of unity and solidarity, to defend those rights.

I am proud of our history.

It is a history of courageous people who defied overwhelming odds to fight for the rights and freedoms we enjoy today.

The rights of women to vote.

The rights and dignity of working people;

Our welfare state.

The NHS – rightly at the centre of Danny Boyle’s great Olympic opening ceremony.

The BBC.

Both great institutions.

Both under attack by the Tories.

Both threatened by the idea that profit comes first, not the needs and interests of our people. That’s the difference between us and the Tories.

So let me make this commitment.

Our Labour Party will always put people’s interests before profit.

Now I want to say a bit more about policy – and the review that Angela Eagle has announced this week.

Let’s start by recognising the huge amount of agreement we start from, thanks to the work that Angela led in the National Policy Forum.

Then we need to be imaginative and recognise the ways our country is changing.

In my leadership campaign I set out some ideas for how we should support small businesses and the self-employed.
That’s because one in seven of the labour force now work for themselves.

Some of them have been driven into it as their only response to keep an income coming in, insecure though it is.

But many people like the independence and flexibility self-employment brings to their lives, the sense of being your own boss.

And that’s a good thing.

But with that independence comes insecurity and risk especially for those on the lowest and most volatile incomes.

There’s no Statutory Sick Pay if they have an accident at work.

There’s no Statutory Maternity Pay for women when they become pregnant

They have to spend time chasing bigger firms to pay their invoices on time, so they don’t slip further into debt.

They earn less than other workers.

On average just £11,000 a year.

And their incomes have been hit hardest by five years of Tory economic failure.

So what are the Tories doing to help the self-employed, the entrepreneurs they claim to represent?

They’re clobbering them with the tax credit cuts.

And they are going to clobber them again harder as they bring in Universal Credit.

So I want our policy review to tackle this in a really serious way. And be reflective of what modern Britain is actually like.

Labour created the welfare state as an expression of a caring society – but all too often that safety net has holes in it, people fall through it, and it is not there for the self-employed. It must be. That is the function of a universal welfare state.

Consider opening up Statutory Maternity and Paternity Pay to the self-employed so all new born children can get the same level of care from their parents.

I’ve asked Angela Eagle, our Shadow Business Secretary, and Owen Smith, our Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, to look at all the ways we can we support self-employed people and help them to grow their businesses.

And I want to thank Lillian Greenwood, our Shadow Transport Secretary for the speed and skill with which she has moved policy on the future of our railways forward.

It was wonderful to see Conference this morning agree our new plan to bring private franchises into public ownership as they expire.

Labour’s policy now is to deliver the fully integrated, publicly owned railway the British people want and need. That’s the Labour policy, that’s the one we’ll deliver on.

Housing policy too is a top priority.

Perhaps nowhere else has Tory failure been so complete and so damaging to our people.

In the last parliament at least half a million fewer homes built than needed.

Private rents out of control.

A third of private rented homes not meeting basic standards of health and safety.

The chance of owning a home a distant dream for the vast majority of young people.

There’s no answer to this crisis that doesn’t start with a new council house-building programme.

With new homes that are affordable to rent and to buy.

As John Healey, our Shadow Housing Minister, has shown it can pay for itself and make the taxpayer a profit by cutting the housing benefit bill by having reasonable rents, not exorbitant rents

And we need new ideas to tackle land hoarding and land speculation.

These are issues that are so vital to how things go forward in this country.

I want a kinder, more caring politics that does not tolerate more homelessness, more upheaval for families in temporary accommodation.

A secure home is currently out of reach for millions.

And John Healey has already made a great start on a fundamental review of our housing policies to achieve that.

And we are going to make mental health a real priority.

It’s an issue for all of us.

Every one of us can have a mental health problem.

So let’s end the stigma.

End the discrimination.

And with Luciana Berger, our Shadow Minister for Mental Health, I’m going to challenge the Tories to make parity of esteem for mental health a reality not a slogan.

With increased funding – especially for services for children and young people.

As three quarters of chronic mental health problems start before the age of 18.

Yet only a quarter of those young people get the help they need.

All our work on policy will be underpinned by Labour’s values.

End the stigma, end the discrimination, treat people with mental health conditions as you would wish to be treated yourself. That’s our pledge.

Let’s put them back into politics.

Let’s build that kinder, more caring world.

Since the dawn of history in virtually every human society there are some people who are given a great deal and many more people who are given little or nothing.

Some people have property and power, class and capital, status and clout which are denied to the many.

And time and time again, the people who receive a great deal tell the many to be grateful to be given anything at all.

They say that the world cannot be changed and the many must accept the terms on which they are allowed to live in it.

These days this attitude is justified by economic theory.

The many with little or nothing are told they live in a global economy whose terms cannot be changed.

They must accept the place assigned to them by competitive markets.

By the way, isn’t it curious that globalisation always means low wages for poor people, but is used to justify massive payments to top chief executives.

Our Labour Party came into being to fight that attitude.

That is still what our Labour Party is all about. Labour is the voice that says to the many, at home and abroad: “you don’t have to take what you’re given.”

Labour says:

“You may be born poor but you don’t have to stay poor. You don’t have to live without power and without hope.

“You don’t have to set limits on your talent and your ambition – or those of your children.

“You don’t have to accept prejudice and discrimination, or sickness or poverty, or destruction and war.

“You don’t have to be grateful to survive in a world made by others.

No, you set the terms for the people in power over you, and you dismiss them when they fail you.”

That’s what democracy is about.

That has always been our Labour Party’s message.

You don’t have to take what you’re given.

It was the great Nigerian writer Ben Okri who perhaps put it best:

“The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love”.

But they’re at it again.

The people who want you to take what you’re given.

This Tory government.

This government which was made by the few – and paid for by the few.

Since becoming leader David Cameron has received £55 million in donations from hedge funds. From people who have a lot and want to keep it all.

That is why this pre-paid government came into being.

To protect the few and tell all the rest of us to accept what we’re given.

To deliver the £145 million tax break they have given the hedge funds in return.

They want us to believe there is no alternative to cutting jobs.

Slashing public services.

Vandalising the NHS.

Cutting junior doctor’s pay.

Reducing care for the elderly.

Destroying the hopes of young people for a college education or putting university graduates into massive debt.

Putting half a million more children in poverty.

They want the people of Britain to accept all of these things.

They expect millions of people to work harder and longer for a lower quality of life on lower wages. Well, they’re not having it.

Our Labour Party says no.
The British people never have to take what they are given.

And certainly not when it comes from Cameron and Osborne.

So Conference, I come almost to the end of my first conference speech, and I think you for listening OK, alright, don’t worry. Listen, I’ve spoken at 37 meetings since Saturday afternoon, is that not enough? Well talk later.

So I end conference with a quote.

The last bearded man to lead the Labour Party was a wonderful great Scotsman, Keir Hardie who died about a century ago this weekend and we commemorated him with a book we launched on Sunday evening. Kier grew up in dreadful poverty and made so much of his life and founded our party.

Stood up to be counted on votes for women, stood up for social justice, stood up to develop our political party.

We own him and so many more so much. And he was asked once summaries what you are about, summarise what you really mean in your life. And he thought for a moment and he said this:

“My work has consisted of trying to stir up a divine discontent with wrong”.

Don’t accept injustice, stand up against prejudice.

Let us build a kinder politics, a more caring society together.

Let us put our values, the people’s values, back into politics.

Thank you.

On the left and right of British politics, there has been much speculation about Labour’s position on Europe lately. So yesterday’s comments by Alan Johnson at the party’s conference in Brighton were a welcome reminder that Labour is firmly committed to back Britain’s membership of the EU.

We are safer, stronger and better off as part of Europe, and putting this at risk would be bad for our country.The economic case for being in the EU is overwhelming. Almost half of our exports go to other EU member states. For our industries, this has helped to boost growth and create countless jobs all across the country.

In services, it has helped to establish the sector as the UK’s prime economic engine, and has empowered London to be the unrivalled financial capital of Europe. This is why most businesses and trade unionists are unambiguous about their support for Britain to stay in.With the UK’s strategic position as a major English-speaking economy within the world’s largest free trade area, our membership of the EU encourages thousands of businesses to locate their headquarters and production in Britain.

The EU is vital to our economy, and isolating ourselves would be disastrous.But being in the EU is not merely about economic benefit, and it is imperative that we communicate just as clearly what EU membership means for workers.

From paid holidays to maternity and paternity rights to redundancy protections, EU measures improve life and work conditions for millions of Brits every day. And as Alan Johnson rightly points out, it is dangerous to assume that the UK government would protect all these rights if we left.

So too, Europe provides protections for consumers by bringing down the cost of a supermarket shop, foreign flight, or making mobile phone calls abroad.

These are just some of the reasons why Britain has to be courageous and unequivocal about Britain remaining in Europe. It is clear that the EU is far from perfect, but being ambivalent or putting conditions on our support is playing right into the hands of UKIP and other Outters, who are jeopardising the opportunities for young people.

Britain’s future is safer, stronger and more prosperous within an EU focussed on jobs and rights at work.To secure it, we have to be in this fight to win.

Will Straw is Executive Director of the In Campaign

If there had been a decision to push ahead with a vote on Trident renewal at Annual Conference it could have resulted either in defeat for Jeremy Corbyn at the hands of conference floor, including three of the four largest trade unions (GMB and Unite represent the Trident workforce and USDAW also opposes unilateral disarmament), damaging his authority as Leader just two weeks into his term. Or the vote on scrapping Trident could have passed which would have ripped apart a Shadow Cabinet team that had only just been formed, caused frontbench resignations, angered the party’s main union funders, and lumbered the party with a policy stance that is a deal breaker for many swing voters, with 62% of the public opposed to it according to YouGov last week.

Instead conference delegates stayed level-headed and decided not to prioritise a debate on Trident. The appetite for a divisive battle over an issue which, far from being “contemporary” the party has repeatedly debated since the 1950s, just wasn’t there. Many delegates who on principle oppose Trident knew that a fight on this issue was the last thing the party needed straight after the leadership election.

The conference can now focus on domestic and economic issues where there is either unity or at least an acceptance that Jeremy Corbyn has a huge mandate to promote an anti-austerity agenda and test its electoral popularity.

The Trident issue revealed some weakness, confusion and poor strategising on the part of the party’s now ruling left. It is astonishing that they did not foresee that the GMB and Unite would have to oppose vehemently a policy that would destroy thousands of their members’ jobs. And astonishing that the left did not pick up the mood of delegates was not to have this debate and warn Jeremy this was the case so that he and his inner team could have briefed the media accordingly. And it is disturbing that having painfully negotiated with new Shadow Ministers to get them to serve, a red line that had been cited by many would have been casually crossed. Power means compromise and not just going all out for totemic but divisive policies just because you have always had a CND badge. Corbyn’s team need to develop a mechanism for getting the grassroots left to calm down and pick their fights more judiciously or they will face defeats at conference that won’t enhance the Leader’s reputation.

Meanwhile the party’s moderates, who had been expected to be sat in Brighton’s bars crying into their beers, were reinvigorated by the prospect of a vote on an issue they care passionately about, and came out fighting. For the first time in 15 years there was a moderate leafleting operation informing delegates as they arrived at conference alongside the left’s “yellow pages”. The Labour First network of moderates I am secretary of hasn’t bothered to hold a fringe meeting since the 1990s. We booked a room over a pub expecting 20 people to turn up. 200 people arrived and we had to turn it into an open air rally in the street outside, with speakers including Tom Watson and Yvette Cooper. It isn’t just the left of the party who can do movement politics and fire up passion about politics – the leadership election has left the whole spectrum of Labour’s internal politics revitalised.

Next year, now that it is clear that conference is again the stormy forum where Labour will decide its direction, not just a fun week by the seaside being lectured by frontbenchers, I expect that CLPs up and down the country will see hotly contested elections to be a conference delegate. No one has seriously organised to actually get people elected as delegates for decades. Both left and moderates will now. I think that’s very exciting, very democratic, and a welcome development.

A new politics needs a new economics which was the message from the speech by Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell today.

His speech was driven by four key themes – how we tackle the deficit, how we build a stable economy, how we change the economic discourse and how we create an entrepreneurial state. The themes and speech received a warm response from business roundtable this afternoon as we started our engagement.

We know that Osborne’s plans have failed to achieve the outcome he hoped. He promised to balance the books by 2015 but the deficit is forecast to be £69.5bn this year. In August borrowing was £1.4bn higher than August last year. Recent figures showed a rise in unemployment in every region, and household debt is also on the increase. Next year almost three million families will see a cut in their household income of an average of £1300. Productivity is lower in the UK than others in the G7.

Today we have said we will manage the economy in a fairer more progressive way. Competent but compassionate, adopting an approach that will see us develop policies for sustainable growth – building on the foundations laid by Ed Balls and Chris Leslie, and offering an approach different from Osborne by shifting from short-term thinking to long-term thinking.

Labour will tackle the deficit and will live within its means. By investing to grow and sharing the proceeds across all parts of the UK, supporting key industries and sectors to see long-term sustainable growth that reaches all.

We will build a stable economy. A radical review of the national institutions that manage our economy is being launched today – reviews of the mandate of the Bank of England, HMRC and the Treasury to ask whether there needs to be any reform to better drive growth. And we will ask that we have access to modelling of the Bank of England and the Office of Budget Responsibility, so that we can ensure our policies are rigorously tested, workable and affordable.

Our thinking will be complemented by Labour’s new Economic Advisory Committee, bringing together economists including David Blanchflower, Mariana Mazzucato, Simon Wren-Lewis, Thomas Piketty, Joseph Stiglitz and Ann Pettifor. A rigorous, evidence-based approach that asks new questions will be vital to ensuring we win back confidence to run the economy and do it better than the Tories.

We will change the economic discourse by launching a national debate offering the electorate a real alternative to the lack of support for industry and low pay economy. Public sector receipts will come through growth, reform and tackling tax avoidance and evasion. We need to see a shift in the burden from the low- and middle-income earners who are currently paying for a crisis they did not cause.

This is an opportunity to think differently, to challenge Osborne on his record as well as shift the national conversation on the economy. It’s the first step in building our offer for the next election.

As an active government Labour will improve our workers skills, tackle the productivity crisis that the Chancellor continues to ignore, and shift towards a more long-term, sustainable and fairer form of growth.

Seema Malhotra MP is Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury

Yesterday I wrote to Meg Hillier, the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee asking her and the committee to investigate the Chancellor’s proposals for paying for a new nuclear power station at Hinkley Point C.

I have serious concerns about the value for money this deal provides for bill payers, the likely impact of such a deal on the most vulnerable in society, and have serious questions about the bid process itself.

As I will set out in my speech to the Labour Party conference tomorrow this Tory government are seriously risking our country’s energy security, and the ability of Britain to play its part in the fight against climate change.

Dear Meg,

This week Chancellor George Osborne announced he is pressing ahead with plans to build a £24 billion new nuclear power station at Hinkley Point in Somerset.

The proposed deal would sign up families and businesses across our country to pay double the current whole sale price of electricity for 35 years to subsidise the large Chinese and French state-backed energy companies who are behind the project.

European regulators have calculated that total subsidies from the public for this project could total a staggering £17.6 billion. Some energy experts are saying it may be the most expensive conventional power station ever built anywhere in the world. One estimate suggested it will cost bill payers more than the Olympic Games, Heathrow’s Terminal 2, and Cross rail combined.

I support a role for nuclear power to keep our energy supplies secure and to cut carbon pollution from electricity generation but not at any cost and not when more affordable opportunities exist, which could offer households a better deal.

I am worried about the impact of this investment on energy bills, which is why I am writing to you in your capacity as chair of the Public Accounts Committee. I fear that too much of the costs of this deal will be shouldered by the most vulnerable in society leaving pensioners and those on low incomes facing sky high energy bills. I also want reassurance that those winning public bids commit to paying their taxes in the UK. We should not allow a situation where companies receiving UK tax payers money are not paying their faire share of tax in the UK.

The recent delay to the proposed Hinkley Point C project could provide an opportunity for the PAC to scrutinise the proposed agreement and to investigate whether a more competitive process – with stricter value-for-money criteria – could ultimately lead to a more cost-effective agreement for consumers.

I hope you will consider launching an investigation.

Very best wishes,

Lisa Nandy

Shadow secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change

For all of 2015 the world’s eyes have been on Greece. The Syriza government elected in January under the leadership of Alexis Tspiras threatened to shake up the European economic status quo with its radical, anti-austerity politics. When Syriza’s challenge to the EU was put to the Greek people in a referendum the party and its allies won a stunning 61% vote in support of Oxi, No. And then, a few days later, the Greek government under immense pressure from the EU was forced into a climbdown. Next up Syriza called and fought a second General Election in the space of less  than a year with the party challenged on its left by a block of the party’s dissident MPs and members who have formed the Popular Unity Party. Against all the odds, and with a reduced turnout, Syriza won that election. An extraordinary nine months in the life of a nation and one thing is certain, the story of Greek resistance is not over yet and will continue to dominate European politics for some considerable time.

Kevin Ovenden has written a thrilling account of the background to Syriza’s rise to become the most important party of the European radical Left, its trials and tribulations in office and the vision Syriza, despite the climbdown. continues to project that another Europe is not only necessary, but possible. Syriza: Inside the Labyrinth is a must-read for all those interested in the prospects for a radical Left, at home and abroad. 

Philosophy Football  is immensely proud that in an act of practical solidarity we have helped fund Kevin’s unrivalled reportage from Athens in 2015, provided free for radical media across the world. Kevin’s book is in large part the product of his eyewitness account of Greece’s year of change.

Published by Pluto Books the newly revived Left Book Club’s very first book is Syriza: Inside the Labyrinth

The book is available exclusively at £3 Off Just £9.99 in a special edition signed by the author from Philosophy Football

In May 1988, a group of around 20 writers and academics spent a weekend at Wortley Hall, a country house north of Sheffield, loudly debating British politics and the state of the world. All drawn from the political left, by that point they were long used to defeat, chiefly at the hands of Margaret Thatcher. Now, they were set on figuring out not just how to reverse the political tide, but something much more ambitious: in essence, how to leave the 20th century.

Over the previous decade, some of these people had shone light on why Britain had moved so far to the right, and why the left had become so weak. But as one of them later put it, they now wanted to focus on “how society was changing, what globalisation was about – where things were moving in a much, much deeper sense”. The conversations were not always easy; there were raised voices, and sometimes awkward silences. Everything was taped, and voluminous notes were taken. A couple of months on, one of the organisers wrote that proceedings had been “part coherent, part incoherent, exciting and frustrating in just about equal measure”.

What emerged from the debates and discussions was an array of amazingly prescient insights, published in a visionary magazine called Marxism Today. In the early 21st century, that title might look comically old-fashioned, but the people clustered around the magazine anticipated the future we now inhabit, and diagnosed how the left could steer it in a more progressive direction. Soon enough, in fact, some of Marxism Today’s inner circle would bring their insights to the Labour party led by Tony Blair, as advisers and policy specialists. But most of their ideas were lost, thanks partly to the frantic realities of power, but also because in important respects, Blair and Gordon Brown – both of whom had written for the magazine when they were shadow ministers – were more old-fashioned politicians than they liked to think.

At the core of Marxism Today’s most prophetic ideas was a brilliant conception of modern capitalism. In contrast to an increasingly dated vision of a world of mass production and standardisation, the magazine’s writers described the changes wrought by a new reality of small economic units, franchising, outsourcing, self-employment and part-time work – most of it driven by companies and corporations with a global reach – which they called “Post-Fordism”. Computers, they pointed out, were now being built from components produced in diverse locations all over the world; iconic companies had stripped down their focus to sales, strategy and what we would now call branding, outsourcing production to an ever-changing array of third parties. As a result, economies were becoming more fragmented and unpredictable, as the bureaucratic, top-down structures that had defined the first two-thirds of the 20th century were pushed aside.

Politics and society reflected all this tumult. The conversations at Wortley Hall touched on the decline of class politics, new conceptions of identity more complex than the hoary category of “worker”, how an insurgent women’s movement had highlighted huge changes to the fabric of everyday life, the rising importance of green politics, the increasing expectation of personal autonomy – and how seemingly unstoppable forces were weakening the traditional nation state. While the right had turned these changes to its advantage, far too much of the left still lived in a world that was fast disintegrating beneath its feet. As one Marxism Today editorial put it, the Labour party and the trade unions were “profoundly wedded to the past, to 1945, to the old social-democratic order … backward-looking, conservative, bereft of new ideas and out of time”.

Union membership was declining fast. By 1988, Labour had lost its third consecutive election to Thatcher’s Conservatives. The party had moved on from the unapologetic old-school socialism that it had presented to voters in 1983 and painstakingly worked on more modern policies and presentation, but in retrospect, its thinking was still largely built around enduring articles of traditional socialist faith. Labour people still believed that Thatcher’s success amounted to a flimsy con-trick – and it was Labour’s job, as their 1980s leader Neil Kinnock put it in one of his impassioned conference speeches, to “deliver the British people from evil”. The means of doing so still revolved around the big, beneficent, centralised state, the promise of stability and security through paid employment, and the idea that people’s identity could usually be boiled down to their lives as workers.

Three decades later, the impact of the economic and social changes that Marxism Today identified is undeniable – and the politics it prescribed are, if anything, more relevant today than ever before. But apart from a few cosmetic updates, today’s Labour party still essentially clings to the same old shibboleths. Indeed, with the election of Jeremy Corbyn, its collective faith in them looks to have been renewed. Just before the last general election, Corbyn assured one interviewer that his was “a class-based socialist party”; throughout the recent leadership campaign, he extolled the wonders of nationalisation and at one point suggested that some British coal mines might be reopened. Meanwhile, centre-left politics all over Europe remains locked in a deep crisis, sidelined by the dominance of the centre-right, and further unsettled by the rise of new populist and nationalist parties from both ends of the political spectrum. In the delirium of Corbynmania and the arrival of tens of thousands of new members, the cold reality of Labour’s predicament has been somewhat forgotten. At the last election, it won its second-lowest share of the vote since 1983.

In leftist circles today, one frequently hears the argument that the world was changed for ever by the crash of 2008. But a much older point has still to be satisfactorily answered: has the left ever really understood the consequences of the economic and political changes that began to reveal themselves in the 1970s, defined the 1980s, and have been hugely accelerating ever since? On the evidence of his pronouncements over the last 30 years and the messages he dispensed during the leadership campaign, Corbyn does not seem to. Even Blair and Brown, who were at pains to stress their understanding of the late 20th century, failed to convincingly remodel their party’s politics for this new age.

This is the case for the continued relevance of a magazine that published its last issue in 1991. As this summer’s Labour leadership election showed, there is a need for a modern, radical politics, more ambitious and forward-looking than either reheated New Labour or a revived hard left. But it is nowhere to be seen – and that absence arguably sits at the heart of the Labour party’s ongoing crisis, and the sense that the left, here and across Europe, is all at sea.

***

For most of its life, Marxism Today – founded in 1957 – described itself as “the theoretical and discussion journal of the Communist party”. But in its peak period – from 1977 to 1990 – it was far from what those words suggested. Though published from inside the belly of the Communist party of Great Britain (CPGB), it spoke to a whole swath of the British left, and particularly the Labour party. Moreover, what it said was not academic and abstract, but vivid and urgent.

These were convulsive times. A run of watershed events began with Thatcher’s first election victory in 1979, and the 1980 arrival in the White House of her ideological soulmate, Ronald Reagan. After austerity and recession, the Falklands war came in 1982, ensuring another Thatcher election win a year later. British coal miners began a year-long strike in 1984 and were defeated in 1985; the printworkers who took on Rupert Murdoch began a similarly doomed struggle in 1986. The same year, the Thatcher government abolished England’s Metropolitan County Councils, and the Greater London Council (GLC), and thereby snuffed out a loud municipal revolt led by Labour politicians; a year on, the Conservatives won a third Westminster term. In 1989 came the most seismic change of all: European Communism breathed its last, and the free-market politics championed by Thatcher and Reagan was proclaimed triumphant.

Such were the birth pangs of a new order, as an innovative kind of accelerated capitalism spread across the planet. In the everyday world, this transformation took the form of a turbocharged consumerism, so that as old certainties collapsed, the world was suddenly painted in deep and dazzling colours. Marxism Today captured the mood: I read it avidly as a politics-obsessed teenager, and in my memory, its bold, brazenly modern covers sit in the same place as the 1980s’ iconic record sleeves.

As Britain and the wider world were transformed, the magazine set out on a journey based on three big ideas. One, the work of the renowned historian and lifelong Communist Eric Hobsbawm, was a clear diagnosis of the crisis that had confronted Labour and the trade unions. Another was a prescient analysis of Thatcherism, a term invented by the Jamaican-British thinker Stuart Hall, and used to describe not just a political project, but its embedding in millions of ordinary lives in the form of basic ideas about common sense and everyday life. When the magazine’s thinkers subsequently came up with what they called the “New Times” project, they wrapped up these previous insights in an all-encompassing analysis of profound changes, running much deeper than politics.

By the 1970s, the British Communist party was almost irrelevant as an electoral force, but its senior members included high-ranking trade unionists, and its organisation was partly built around a national network of shop stewards. Its offices in Covent Garden were bugged by MI5; its daily paper, the Morning Star, came out each day, buoyed by a Soviet subsidy in the form of up to 15,000 copies bought each day, and flown out to the USSR. The party’s once-rigid orthodoxies had been shaken by the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 – and the latter episode in particular had galvanised a young generation of Communists intent on pushing their politics somewhere new, in defiance of the pro-Soviet diehards known as “tankies”, in honour of the military vehicles that had rolled into Budapest and Prague. One of these activists was Martin Jacques – a native of Coventry, the son of Communist parents, a graduate of Manchester University, and by 1967, a member of the party’s executive committee.

I met Jacques, now 69, in his mansion-block apartment nudging Hampstead Heath, where we sat in his kitchen, talking over the endless gurgle of a fishtank and drinking green tea. He was preparing for one of his regular trips to China, the global power he analysed and explained in his bestselling 2009 book When China Rules the World, but he happily cast his mind back to the passions that had driven him nearly 50 years ago, when his life was changed by the student militancy that spread across Europe in 1968. In Manchester, he and other students were embracing the more political aspects of the 1960s counterculture – but his perspectives were decisively shifted when he spent a week in and around Prague, two months before the Russians arrived. “I know what I thought then. I can remember it vividly. I basically said: ‘Everything is contingent now, and how things relate to my membership of the CP” – he paused – “I don’t know.”

By the mid-1970s, British Communists of Jacques’s ilk had an increasingly clear sense of who they were. Their big theoretical inspiration was Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Communist who had died in Mussolini’s jails, and left a political legacy built around the concept of “hegemony” – in essence, the means by which capitalism maintains its dominance through culture, social institutions and the everyday stuff of supposed common sense, all of which would have to be turned around by a politics much more creative and outward-looking than the European left had so far managed. Gramsci’s devotees now looked not to the USSR, but Italy, where the national Communist party was blazing a trail for the open, nuanced and self-consciously “Gramscian” politics increasingly known as Eurocommunism.

In the CPGB, Eurocommunism began to amass momentum and influence, and just before the party congress of 1977, Jacques was approached by the party’s general secretary, Gordon McLennan – a representative of what Jacques characterises as the Communist party’s “centre ground”, whose politics were dutiful and dull, rather than sharply ideological. McLennan had an offer: would Jacques give up his life as an academic at Bristol University, start a new working life at the CP’s offices, and edit Marxism Today? He would be paid the “party wage” of around £8,000 a year, and take his place in a small office partly staffed by volunteers.

Jacques recalled how his new job initially worked. “When I started, there was Doris Allison, who was 82, and like this – ” he walked around the table, bent double – “and she was in charge of subscriptions. There was Minnie Bowles, who was my part-time secretary. She was 75: a very sexy woman of 75. She just had something about her. And there was Margaret Smith, who would put in a day or half-day every week, and she was 65. Effectively, I was on my own. And that was the beginning of a new start.”

***

In three months spread across 1978 and 1979, Marxism Today published the two essays that started to set out a new mission for the British left. The Forward March of Labour Halted? [pdf download] appeared in September 1978. The work of Eric Hobsbawm, then in his mid 60s, it was initially delivered as the Communist party’s annual Marx memorial lecture. By modern standards, it was a somewhat pedestrian read, but its message was clear enough: if the Labour party and wider labour movement had understood themselves to be hopefully trudging onwards and upwards, their progress had long since stalled, as class consciousness had waned and Labour’s support had started to dwindle. There had been a superficial increase in union militancy in the 1970s, but most of it had been about increasing wages rather than heightening class consciousness. “It seems to me,” Hobsbawm wrote, “that we are now seeing a growing division of workers into sections and groups, each pursuing its own economic interest at the expense of the rest.”

The growth of white-collar employment and the mass entry of women into paid work were both part of this fracturing; in 1979, a third of the UK’s trade unionists would vote for Thatcher. “The forward march of labour and the labour movement, which Marx predicted,” Hobsbawm told his readers, “appears to have come to a halt in this country about 25 to 30 years ago.”

The second watershed text that Marxism Today published was a piece titled The Great Moving Right Show [pdf download], written by Stuart Hall, the pioneer of cultural studies who would become Marxism Today’s most insightful thinker, and one of Jacques’s closest friends. Written in the somewhat chewy language of cultural and political theory, it was an analysis of what had been quietly happening to politics – and Britain at large – since the 1960s, and which was now being taken to a new level by Thatcher, despite the fact that she was still keeping her brand of zealously free-market economics somewhat hidden.

Hall knew that what the Tories were doing was much more ambitious than simply ramping up orthodox Conservatism: he talked about their new use of a “rich repertoire of anti-collectivism”, which fused with “popular elements in the traditional philosophies and practical ideologies of the dominated classes”. Thatcher and her allies, in other words, were living out Gramsci’s ideas about hegemony, by pursuing their politics on the terrain of common sense: kitchen-table economics, the comforts of self-sufficiency, the necessity of property ownership.

As well as coining the word “Thatcherism” six months before Thatcher had even taken power, he wrote about “the doctrines and discourses of social market values – the restoration of competition and personal responsibility for effort and reward, the image of the over-taxed individual, enervated by welfare coddling, his initiative sapped by handouts by the state”. And he identified something at the heart of Thatcherism that would serve the Tories well for the next four decades: “in the image of the welfare ‘scavenger’,” he said, the new Conservatives had hit upon “a well designed folk-devil”.

Hall and Hobsbawm quickly came to define Marxism Today’s intellectual core. According to their old comrades, they were as different as could be: Hobsbawm an imposing, exacting Communist whose debates with others would evoke “the weight of history”; Hall a more open operator who was never a member of the CPGB (“he did have an ego, but he was very willing to let people speak, and listen – he gave people permission to do their thing”). But in some Communist circles – and beyond, in left-wing academia, the Labour party and the trade unions – the pieces they wrote provoked the same controversy. In the New Left Review, the stentorian Marxist academic Ralph Miliband – the father of two sons who would eventually speed to the top of the Labour party – charged them with retreating into “new revisionism”, and contributing “in no small way to the malaise, confusion, loss of confidence and even despair which have so damagingly affected the left in recent years”.

“Thatcherism was widely rejected when we first came up with the idea,” Jacques told me. “Tony Benn said: ‘Nonsense, it’s just the same old Toryism, but tougher.’ There was that cautious, conservative thinking which was unable to respond to change in the real world.” What he said next applied to what happened in the 80s, but he phrased it in the present tense. “One of the biggest problems is, the Labour party can’t think. And it never really has been able to think, of its own accord.”

Hall called the magazine’s detractors “the pessimists”: people who seemed to think “that we mustn’t rock the boat, or demoralise the already dispersed forces of the left”. He responded to them by quoting an injunction from Gramsci: “to address ourselves ‘violently’ towards the present as it is”.

Beatrix Campbell was another important voice within MT’s pages. A fiercely clever, ideas-hungry Cumbrian and another child of Communist parents, she had come to London to live in a commune, and met and married a musician and journalist called Bobby Campbell. He was a folk violinist and boxing correspondent for the Morning Star, and he encouraged his wife to work for the paper, first as a subeditor and then a reporter. In 1970, she had her first encounter with the women’s liberation movement, at a meeting in Hackney: “I can see the people in the room as if it was now. Being in a room full of women, which was unprecedented … the allure was awesome.” She and other feminist members of the party started a new feminist journal titled Red Rag; when the CPGB leadership insisted they needed official permission, they carried on regardless.

Having been repelled by the loud sexism of some of the Morning Star’s senior staff, Campbell worked first for the London magazine Time Out, and then City Limits, the co-operatively run challenger founded by former Time Out staff after that magazine was forced to abandon its collective model of working. Thanks to her journalism, she became closely acquainted with the “metropolitan radicalism” Ken Livingstone was exploring at the GLC until the Thatcher government abolished it in 1986, and a strand of Labour politics that obviously intersected with what Marxism Today was saying. The GLC had an Industry and Employment unit, which not only involved itself in some of the capital’s businesses, but tracked the kind of economic changes the magazine was interested in. One MT article captured the way the politics of the GLC had taken root beyond the usual structures of the Labour party, in myriad “community papers, women’s groups, trade-union support units, peace groups, legal advice centres … [and] tenants groups”, and said that the council “has tried to see itself as giving strength to … the innumerable groups from which [its politics] sprung”. As Campbell saw it, “the genius of Livingstone was that he read London brilliantly: he saw that class was only one dimension of being a Londoner who was dispossessed. If you only had a class agenda, you didn’t get it.”

Campbell was recruited as a writer by Jacques, and eventually given her own column, titled Bea-Line (for which, after some negotiation, she was paid). Among her commissions was a March 1987 interview with the infamous Tory minister Edwina Currie: “She was up for anything – looser, more open-minded and more connected to popular culture than a lot of Tories would be. And she was shameless. And the thing that was great about that time was saying, ‘You’ve got to talk to Tories, to find out why they’re thinking what they’re thinking.’ The labour movement didn’t do that.”

There was always a tension in Campbell’s relationship with Marxism Today. “The MT boys were not interested in feminism,” she said. “Martin absolutely never got it … Stuart [Hall] didn’t really get it. Hobsbawm didn’t get it.” Nonetheless, the magazine gave space to feminist writers, and as it exploded leftwing orthodoxies, there was a sense of common ground. “For us, the death of socialism was its sexism – that was a catastrophic part of its history. So there was this funny convergence: we were writing about that, and the way that British Labourism produced a politics dedicated to inequalities, at the same time as Hobsbawm delivered The Forward March of Labour Halted? From a different direction, we were addressing the same problem.” The result, she said, was that “I felt like a Marxism Today person. I was terribly proud to be involved in it. It was so engaged, and restless. And thinking, thinking, thinking.”

Throughout the 1980s, Jacques and his writers carried on unsettling the left, in often delicate circumstances. Tempers were frayed by Marxism Today’s occasional habit of giving space to dissenting voices from the eastern bloc. In 1981, a leading British Communist called Monty Johnstone went to Poland, and came back with not only an interview for Marxism Today with the deputy prime minister, but also a smuggled-out cassette on which he had recorded a conversation with Lech Walesa [pdf download] , the leader of the insurgent Solidarity movement (“I am not a good politician. I am first of all a consumer and I want something to consume,” Walesa said – probably not the most welcome words to Communist ears). Twelve months later, Jacques ran an article by the renowned dissident Roy Medvedev, which triggered a letter from the central committee of the Communist party of the Soviet Union – to the more orthodox high-ups at the British party, the equivalent of an intervention from the headmaster – which, Jacques told me, “complained bitterly about it”.

In the same issue, there was an article that took another candid look at the increasingly troubled predicament of the trade unions, and drew fire from the old-school Communists at the Morning Star, who published a piece calling it “a gross slander on the labour movement”. The ensuing controversy gives a good flavour of the grim comedy of 1980s Communist politics: motions decrying Marxism Today were passed by the party’s London district secretariat and East Midlands district committee; the Action Rail trade union ranch complained about “the latest outrage to our class”.

Jacques believes the stink was kicked up at the behest of the Russians. “I think these guys were in cahoots with the Soviets. And for me, that was the beginning of the end. I thought: ‘The CP has had it.’” Soon after, in fact, the Morning Star was effectively captured by his adversaries, moved out of the Communist party’s control, and confirmed for keeps as the voice of a staunchly traditionalist, hard-left, union-based position (which – against not inconsiderable odds – it retains to this day).

Amid these factional battles, Jacques managed to remain focused on the magazine to which he was devoting most of his waking hours. Almost none of Marxism Today’s writers were paid, but he insisted that most pieces were rewritten two or three times – though if that seemed unnecessarily arduous, he could always point to the travails of his own existence. “Basically, my life was lived in a state of permanent emergency. That was what I felt like. It was like camping. No money, working all the hours god sends. I got ill on several occasions. ME-type illness. The first time was ’83, the second time was ’85. The worst was ’87. I was knocked out for a lot of ’87. I was in a state of total exhaustion. Money can buy you a weekend away, or a quick holiday, or a bit of fun, and we didn’t have any. And then there were all these incessant attacks. At the core of it all, there was this total devotion to creating a great magazine, and getting the best writers, and getting the most interesting ideas. That was my life.”

Julian Turner was a Cambridge graduate and CP member who was briefly Marxism Today’s production editor, before he became its business manager, at the new Communist party offices near Smithfield market in London. “It felt very exciting,” he told me. “It was a little island of youth in the CP building. There were about a dozen people permanently there, but that would expand to many more when we needed envelopes to be stuffed, or the magazine to be sent out, or whatever. Then you’d have this army – I don’t want to make out that our motives were anything other than intellectual and political, but usually extremely attractive people would arrive, and end up socialising afterwards, which was definitely part of the attraction.”

“Everybody that was employed on the magazine was on the party wage. The party wage was the same for everybody. It was £8,600 when I started. I think it went up to £9,800 – that may have been the peak. One of the formative experiences of my life was standing up in front of the party congress, and asking them to let me pay the advertising staff commission. How did that fit into their utopia? I had to explain why it was an equitable idea, and why it was pragmatic, and worth doing. We got that through.

“I think a lot of people at the magazine had very mixed feelings about Marxism Today,” he went on, “because they were able to develop themselves professionally to a very high standard, and they grew a lot of their skills. But it was very exploitative, I think. Martin is quite unforgiving: he’s not an easy person to work with. I would spend some time repairing the human damage that was wrought by pursuing a quality standard that we all believed in, but struggled to stick to. We had a lot of people who over-committed; who felt that the demands made on them were unreasonable.”

Suzanne Moore, the Guardian columnist whose journalistic career decisively began when she edited the back section of the magazine, which she renamed “Culture”, echoed these memories when we met in a pub near her north London home. “It was Martin’s magazine, and there wasn’t a word in it that didn’t go through him,” she told me, as she recalled long days spent at MT’s office. “He would phone me up at 4am. It was not a normal job. Because it wasn’t a job to him. It was a way of life.” She lasted six months as a member of staff, before she simply stopped going into the office, and even then was confronted with Jacques’ exacting approach to people-management. “He’d come round to my house on his bike and try and get me out of bed.”

***

By 1988, Marxism Today was attracting huge attention and selling around 20,000 copies a month, partly thanks to the fact that it was stocked by WH Smith. To some extent, it had turned itself into what Jacques called “the intellectual forum for the Labour party – I didn’t approach it like that, but that’s what it became”. A handful of senior Labour figures – Bryan Gould, a former academic who served as Neil Kinnock’s shadow industry secretary and in-house intellectual, was the best example – made a point of appearing on its pages, and the impression that Kinnock was busy modernising the party was boosted by the energy and attention Marxism Today had generated, as well as sympathetic coverage in its pages (in October 1984, one MT cover had simply featured a Kinnock headshot and the words “the face of Labour’s future”).

As the magazine’s success increased, there was talk about changing its title. “It was a problem,” Jacques told me. “But, you know, changing the name is quite tricky. And it became a joke: ‘Marxism Today? The only Marxism is in the title.’ Very early on, one of the designers said to me, ‘Why don’t you slowly reduce the size of ‘Marxism’, and increase the size of ‘Today’?” The arrival of the Today newspaper in 1986 killed that suggestion. “Another idea was to call it ‘MT’, but there was another magazine called Marketing Today.”

An altogether bigger concern was to do with the magazine’s momentum. “By this point, I thought we’d run out of steam a bit, really.” Jacques told me. “We were influential, but I thought we needed a fresh impulse. And there had to be fruit on the trees: we needed some new writers.”

So it was that in May 1988, Jacques convened the seminar at Wortley Hall, a sumptuous mansion owned by a collective of trade unions. Among the people who took part were Hobsbawm, Hall, Campbell, and Moore (“I said: ‘Oh, that’s nice – a weekend away in a country house’. They said: ‘It’ll be £180 each’”). Also in attendance were two twentysomethings who were new to the magazine. Charles Leadbeater was a one-time researcher on the ITV current affairs programme Weekend World – where he had worked alongside Peter Mandelson – who had then moved to the Financial Times, and begun enthusiastically writing for Marxism Today, as well as joining the CP. “I said to Martin, ‘How do you get involved in Marxism Today?’” Leadbeater recalled. “He said: ‘Well, you really have to join the Communist party. And I thought: ‘Sod it. Alright, I will.’” Alongside Leadbeater sat Geoff Mulgan – not a CP member, but another new discovery who had begun his post-Oxford career at Livingtone’s GLC, before completing a PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he shared the company of people working on the nascent internet. He would soon start work as an adviser to Gordon Brown.

The weekend’s conversations were sometimes difficult. When Leadbeater presented a paper about the modern expectation of choice and the need for the left to understand individualism, Hobsbawm seemed scandalised. “I went for a walk,” Leadbeater told me, “and after lunch, Eric came back and said: ‘It’s good to come to places like this and have debates, but I think we went a bit far this morning.’” Beatrix Campbell also recalls clashing with Hobsbawm thanks to what she saw as his antediluvian attitude to the women’s movement: “He was terrible on feminism. Awful … he was the kind of person who … will make you feel crap.”

The discussions led to a special issue titled New Times, published that October. “The uptake was fantastic,” Jacques told me. “There were articles in newspapers about it. Extracts were published. This was a major point of departure.” The central idea was “post-Fordism”, a term that captured western societies’ transition from what an opening editorial characterised as “mass production, the mass consumer, the big city, big brother state, the sprawling housing estate, and the nation state” to a new reality of “flexibility, diversity, differentiation, [and] decentralization”.

The term “Fordism” – a reference to that 20th-century kingpin Henry Ford – came from Gramsci, but the concept had been updated in 1970s by a group of French Marxist economists known as the Regulation School. In its British incarnation, the idea of post-Fordism was the work of an economist called Robin Murray – another thinker who had cut his teeth in the tumult of 1968, and who based his thinking in the real world, rather than theoretical abstractions.

Murray had played a key role at Livingstone’s GLC, where he worked as the grandly titled director of industry, and set up the Greater London Enterprise Board, aimed at giving the council an active role in the capital’s economy. At first, he and his colleagues had decided only to work with companies larger than a minimum size, thinking that Thatcherism’s fetishisation of small business was something to oppose. But when they took control of a bankrupt furniture factory in the Lea Valley that had 1,000 workers, they discovered it was being trounced by competitors in Italy – whose businesses were far smaller, did not have huge production lines and often worked co-operatively.

This realisation led them to immerse themselves in a new world of so-called flexible specialisation, and industries increasingly organised along much more agile, fast-moving lines, not least in retailing. When they worked with people from London’s music industry, the upshot was even more obvious: even if Fordism still defined large swaths of the world, in the late-20th century’s leading economies, Henry Ford’s world of vast production lines and standardisation – which had arguably been tested to destruction in the Soviet Union – was clearly on its way out, and this conclusion had huge implications for politics. “The forms of organisation – the Labour party, the trade unions, all these things – had all been formed around the same model as the corporate innovations we’d had in the early part of the century,” Murray told me. “It was all Fordist. So another theme was a critique of those structures, and how you could have much more open, democratic forms.”

Today, Geoff Mulgan – who was a protege of Murray at the GLC – calls his old mentor “the great unrecognised prophet of Britain. People like Hall and Hobsbawm are famous, but in many ways, Robin better understood where the world was going.” Now 75, Murray still brims with enthusiasm and insight: when we spent two hours together in a cafe next to the London School of Economics, he talked with infectious passion not just about the work he did for Marxism Today and the GLC, but his trailblazing efforts in what we now know as fair trade, and the nitty-gritty of environmentalism.

With Jacques’ help, Murray poured his thoughts into an article titled Life After Henry (Ford). As well as the economics of post-Fordism, he wrote about its political manifestations: not least, a new politics of consumption, rather than production (“the effects of food additives … the air we breathe and surroundings we live in, the availability of childcare and community centres, or access to privatised city centres”). He talked about what we would now call the “work-life balance”. He emphasised the need for decentralised public services and structures of government. He pointed out that post-Fordism was widening the gap between the job market’s winners and losers, and that any future Labour government would have to “put a floor under the labour market, and remove the discriminations faced by the low-paid” (it would be another decade before the introduction of a British minimum wage). And he asked profoundly difficult questions to people still attached to the idea of jobs-for-life and the postwar settlement: “How real is a policy of full employment when the speed of technical change destroys jobs as rapidly as growth creates them?”

This was one of the best texts the magazine ever published. Murray had drafted it while on holiday in the Lake District, sporadically discussing it on the phone with Jacques and receiving requests for rewrites via the postman. “We had three weeks away,” he told me. “And I spent the whole time working on it. On the way back, we broke down. The AA had to come. It was two in the morning. And my wife has a picture of me at some service station, sitting on a suitcase, correcting this document.”

***

In late 1989, as communist Europe underwent a series of largely peaceful revolutions, the “tankies” were in abeyance, and the politics of Marxism Today dominated what remained of the CPGB, whose membership was now down to around 7,500. A new party mission statement, titled Manifesto for New Times, was being put together. Here were the ideas of New Times – indeed, the whole project pursued by MT over the previous 12 years – in the form of programmatic politics. The manifesto made the case for proportional representation, a written constitution, a strong emphasis on environmental sustainability, the possibility of an English parliament, a guaranteed citizens’ income, “the potential of information technology to decentralise and strengthen local control”, and the writing-off of developing-world debt – and had a prophetic view of Scotland, where “a new confidence” and “aspiration for self-determination” were emerging.

Jacques explained these ideas as the keynote speaker at the party’s annual congress, but by that point, it was clear that the CPGB was expiring, at speed. As Campbell put it, the new dominance of Marxism Today thinking in the party represented “a triumph over a corpse”. With its characteristic chutzpah, MT commemorated the end of European communism with a cover featuring an iconic portrait of Marx splattered with eggs and tomatoes. And it carried on for another two years, soon negotiating its financial independence from the party.

Having run a brief piece by Gordon Brown [pdf download] about the New Times agenda in late 1989, it then carried an article by the Labour party’s shadow employment spokesman, one Tony Blair. “He rang me one day,” Jacques told me. “He said, ‘I’d like to write for Marxism Today – would that be possible?’ I worked on what he wrote with him; it went through several drafts. What’s the lightest boxing division? Featherweight. It was lighter than that.”

Blair’s piece appeared in October 1991, titled Forging a New Agenda. It suggested he had done a speed-reading of the Marxism Today canon, and then regurgitated it in the form of political nothings: “The notion of a modern view of society as the driving force behind the freedom of the individual is in truth the implicit governing philosophy of today’s Labour party.” In retrospect, it also suggested the magazine was running out of momentum.

Two months later, just as the Soviet Union ceased to exist and the CPGB wound itself up, Marxism Today published its last issue. Apart from anything else, Jacques told me, it was finished off by the leaden weight of its associations with communism. “After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the atmosphere was very triumphalist, and if you’d been associated in any way with the 1917 project, or Marxism, you were dead. It was very difficult to escape that. But also, I just wanted to stop. I was exhausted. I’d been worn out by it, and as wonderful as it was, I was feeling trapped.”

There was one last weird twist: in November 1991, the Sunday Times discovered old Soviet papers which revealed that, contrary to its leaders’ claims that the CPGB had struggled through the 1970s with no help from the USSR, at least two secret payments had been made to the party’s former assistant general secretary, Reuben Falber, who had kept some of the money in the loft of his bungalow in Golders Green. Jacques says he instantly resigned his membership; Campbell is not sure there was any party left to leave by this point. “I’d been assured that that in my political lifetime, we’d never taken any money,” said Jacques. “For me, it was an act of betrayal.”

“I still remember the moment when Martin rang me,” Campbell told me. “He said: ‘Are you sitting down?’ And then he told me. It was a scalding shock. Because our raison d’etre in the Communist party was that something in this revolutionary project could be redeemed. And the discovery of this sordid distribution of Soviet money … what it revealed was that what we had tried to do in the 70s and 80s had all been impossible. There’s no way we could have been allowed to win.”

Thatcher had been toppled by a Tory revolt in 1990, but the Labour party went on to lose its fourth consecutive general election in April 1992. Meanwhile, Jacques and Turner spent a year working on a possible successor to Marxism Today. It was to be a monthly magazine with an international focus; the working title was Politics, but it came to nothing. Jacques then helped Geoff Mulgan set up Demos, the thinktank that would attach itself to New Labour and supply it with no end of policy ideas. After a spell spent writing for the Sunday Times, Jacques then became deputy editor of the Independent between 1994 and 1996.

When Tony Blair became the leader of the Labour party in 1994, Jacques initially dispensed warm words. But three weeks before Labour’s great victory at the 1997 election, he and Hall announced in a piece for the Observer that, before the party had even taken power, it had been pushed in completely the wrong direction. “Blair embodies the ultimate pessimism – that there is only one version of modernity, the one elaborated by the Conservatives over the last 18 years,” they wrote. “He represents an historic defeat for the left, the abandonment of any serious notion that the left has something distinctive to offer.” The whole point of New Times, as they saw it, was to understand the new world and then set about challenging its injustices with a fresh kind of left politics. New Labour had attempted the first part, but replaced the second with a doctrine of surrender.

The seeds of this swingeing take had actually been planted nine years earlier – when Hall and Jacques warned in 1988 of the danger that Labour would “produce, in government, a brand of New Times which in practice does not amount to much more than a slightly cleaned-up, humanised version of … the radical right”. All this came to a head in November 1998, when Marxism Today returned with a one-off issue on “the Blair project”, preceded by another two-day seminar. The old typefaces and in-jokes returned; on the cover was a photograph of Tony Blair, and the word “Wrong”.

Marxism Today had floated policy ideas that New Labour had taken up. Blair and Brown had written for the magazine, and were now being advised by ex-Marxism Today writers. But its writers and thinkers now wanted to kill the idea that the magazine had anything in common what the government was up to. Citing the Asian financial crisis that had begun in 1997, Hobsbawm perhaps got a little ahead of himself, and wrote a piece charging Blair and Brown with “not recognising that the age of neoliberalism is over”. And in a long essay titled The Great Moving Nowhere Show, Hall harked back to the magazine’s peak, arguing that while Blair had touched “the modernising part” of Marxism Today’s ideas, he was “framed by and moving on terrain defined by Thatcherism”.

Mulgan had gone from Demos to a job as the head of Blair’s Downing Street policy unit. He also attended the MT seminar on Blair – and wrote an irate piece published in the one-off issue. “I was really annoyed with them all,” he said. “I thought they were deeply indulgent, and in their comfort zones: tenured academics, pontificating from on high.” At this point, he fell out with Jacques. “I haven’t seen him for years. He thought I’d betrayed him.”

All that apart, Mulgan is now candid about the gap between what people like him had envisaged and what Labour actually did with power. The first article he had written for Marxism Today – published in December 1988 – was titled The Power of the Weak. “Governments,” it said, “remain quintessentially strong power structures, devising policies and programmes at the top and passing them down to through a hierarchical bureaucracy to the people at the bottom.” When we met earlier this month at Nesta – the gleamingly futuristic “innovation charity” he runs in London – he agreed that New Labour’s record turned out to be a case in point. “There was the Mandelson view of what a party should be, which was very centralised and top-down: Leninism plus Saatchi-and-Saatchi advertising. One of the things we failed to do was to get a really active debate going about the shape and nature of the state. Tony Blair’s instinct was more, ‘Get some levers and pull them from the top.’”

“One of the dynamics of New Labour was, ‘You’ve got to change, because the world’s changing. If you don’t do it, you’re going to be out of a job,’” said Leadbeater, who worked as a government adviser in the early New Labour period, assisting Mandelson at the Department of Trade and Industry, and writing speeches for Blair. “They used that to get change in the party. But that was combined with two things. One was a notion of branding, and discipline. But also, there was something that developed in the first term.” This, he said, was a mixture of modern management consultancy and “the Brownite big state”, and it amounted to “super-Fordism … very mechanistic, and about setting targets. It didn’t become a bigger story about Britain. It was about delivery.”

“I remember going to an awayday with Blair and his policy team at Chequers, about two years in,” Leadbeater told me, “and saying, ‘The state can’t solve everything. If you think social goods are going to be represented by state spending, you can’t work that way now. You have to imagine how people can create social solutions in a different kind of way, with a different kind of state.’ They were interested. But actually, if you’re there in the middle of government, it becomes about pulling all these levers.”

He then turned his thoughts to more recent developments. “What if when Blair left office, you’d had a new generation of politicians who were capable of taking it all to a different kind of place: reasserting ethical values, being modern, but also embracing a more participative, open, decentralising kind of politics? Why wouldn’t that have been possible?” His face darkened, and he answered his own question. “It wouldn’t have been possible within the New Labour framework … and all that younger generation” – a reference to politicians such as the Miliband brothers, Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham – “were schooled in that way of thinking”.

***

I met Leadbeater in an elegantly shabby cafe on Highbury Corner in Islington, north London, where we spent 90 minutes considering the Marxism Today legacy, and the real-life politics he now saw echoing the ideas MT had explored. “I see it in cities: in London, Manchester, Leeds,” he told me. “I see it in social media politics; in that huge response to the refugee crisis. I see it in the wave of people who want to be social entrepreneurs, and the soul-searching of lots of people involved in capitalism who think it’s in crisis. I see it all over the place. Just not in the Labour party.”

A few days later, he sent me an email containing an off-the-cuff text he had written about the rise of Jeremy Corbyn. “At first sight, it might seem strange to think that a politician who has not changed his views since the late 1970s might be an innovator,” Leadbeater wrote. “Yet that is what Jeremy Corbyn has managed to become while appearing blissfully – and, to some, charmingly – uninquisitive about the changing world around him.” He went on: “Corbyn has created what Roberto Unger, the Brazilian political philosopher, calls a ‘high-energy’ politics – tumultuous, passionate, participative, dynamic, unfolding … It’s just possible that some of what Corbyn and his young team might try – open-sourcing questions for PMQs, involving the party in constant rolling debate – might work by being more participative than old-style politics … So the lesson in all of this is perhaps above all not to be sniffy, not to turn our noses up and not to make assumptions, but to learn, and fast, about what Corbyn, the unlikely innovator, is telling us about the world.”

Other Marxism Today alumni were pessimistic. One pointed out that, as a Haringey borough councillor and then London MP, Corbyn – a regular contributor to the Morning Star – was party to the leftwing tumult in the capital that blurred into Marxism Today and the GLC. The new shadow chancellor John McDonnell, indeed, served as the GLC’s deputy leader. But, they said, “the good bits of the GLC were essentially ’68 politics. And the weird thing about McDonnell and Corbyn is that they were almost pre-that: culturally untouched by the 1960s.”

“If Corbyn was a woman of 35 or 40, we’d be in business,” Robin Murray told me. “But he’s missing 100 tricks. I wish he’d speak about the future, not the past.” He gestured at the copies of Marxism Today I’d brought with me. “And I wish he’d take things out of all this. I suppose my hope is that he listens to young people, because he believes in democracy.”

“Corbyn is, in a way, a throwback,” Jacques told me. “But his message seems more relevant than it did then.” For a moment, I got a sense of what it would have been like in one of those Marxism Today seminars, throwing around ideas and arguing for the fun of it – as Campbell put it, thinking, thinking, thinking. “You can’t just extrapolate from the past and think in straight lines: that’s what I learned from Gramsci,” Jacques said. “I thought the Labour party was dying, and I don’t think that’s true now. In some measure, it’s being revived.

“There are ironies there, but I quite like them,” said the man who mapped out the future from inside the doomed British Communist party. “It shows you we’re in a new period.” •

This article was originally published in the Guardian on 29 September 2015 – http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/sep/29/marxism-today-forgotten-visionaries-whose-ideas-could-save-labour

But protest alone won’t win the next election.  As Opposition Leader, Jeremy also has to become Labour’s Proposition Leader with a credible economic alternative to the suffocating neoliberal orthodoxy of cuts, shrinking the state, privatisation and job insecurity.

The starting point must be a strong defence of the economic record of the last Labour government, because otherwise we will be trapped in that neoliberal orthodoxy just as sadly we were in the last Parliament with an austerity-lite policy.  In truth the banking crisis created the mountainous debt and deficit, not ‘Labour over-spending’.

But the alternative to Osborne’s neoliberal mission to shrink the state needs to be much more vigorous than Labour’s limp call since 2010 for “sensible savings” and hints at where Labour cuts might fall. For that left us neither credible to our right on the deficit, nor credible to our left on anti-austerity, losing us the 2015 election.

Equally the alternative is not new Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell’s plan to eliminate the deficit by Labour tax rises rather than Tory cuts.

In my book Back to the Future of Socialism, just published in paperback with a post-election update – citing leading economists and hard-headed evidence – I show that through faster, fairer, greener growth, the public finances can be brought into balance, and the national debt and deficit reduced without further austerity.

That is not some unelectable platform of ‘tax and spend’, but a modernised Keynesianism: the only way to reconstitute the natural majority in Britain for Labour’s values of social justice and a strong economy delivering prosperity for all.

For before the election the Institute for Fiscal Studies noted that if Oxford Economics’ estimate about the amount of spare capacity in the UK economy is correct “the government would not need to implement any additional fiscal tightening after 2014-15 in order to achieve a current budget balance” (i.e. excluding public investment).  Faster growth would cut Britain’s budget deficit and bring down the debt burden.

Yet George Osborne plans to squeeze the economy in the next three years much tighter than he did over the last three. Local government – and through inevitable cuts in its care services, the NHS too – faces catastrophe.

 This has been the slowest recovery from recession in the post war period. Labour should be demanding growth rates of over four per cent per year until the economy is firing on all cylinders again, kick-started by a £30 billion boost to public investment for each of the next two years centred on housebuilding, infrastructure, skills and low carbon investment.

Here starts the credible economic case for abandoning austerity while still tackling the budget deficit. But will Jeremy and John be bold enough to grasp it?

*Former Cabinet minister Peter Hain was Labour MP for Neath 1991 to 2015. Back to the Future of Socialism is published by Policy Press.

Despite all of this campaigning, the one thing I never thought I’d do was to join a political party. Yet  here I am, speaking as a member of one, so I’d like to explain how that happened. Since 2011, we’ve been having major social movements in Spain. It started with the occupation of the squares by the Indignados, which polls showed were backed by over 70% of the population. These were followed by an explosion of social movements:  from neighbours preventing families from being evicted by banks, to doctors that locked themselves in hospitals to avoid their privatisation; everybody seemed to be on the streets and fighting for a better society. Yet later that year, we had elections and the conservatives, which had been the party spear-heading the cuts as well as the one with most corruption scandals, won the election with absolute majority.

You can probably imagine how frustrating this was. And yet, when you thought about it, it actually made sense: the reason why the outrage in the streets wasn’t finding a translation into the ballot boxes was simply because it had nothing it could get translated into. The two main parties completely ignored what was happening in the streets, and the smaller ones were generally too busy fighting amongst themselves as to reach anybody who wasn’t already on their side.  This victory of the conservatives, and the devastating cuts and policies that followed, taught us two key lessons: first, that it didn’t matter how much we shouted from below if there wasn’t anybody at the top willing to listen. This is not to say social movements are not important. They are crucial, but they are not enough. Second, that we weren’t living in a democracy. Because there can be no democracy if institutional politics can entirely ignore society and get away with it. There can be no democracy if all the important decisions are already taken before even cast our vote, and all we get to choose is the face that will impose austerity. Yes, we still got to vote every few years, but in practice our institutions had been hijacked by a privileged minority, and our politicians had become butlers of the rich and wealthy, instead of messengers of the people.

It thus became clear that in order to redress this situation, social movements weren’t enough: we needed a political tool capable of using the bits of democracy we had left to take back the institutions and place them at the service of ordinary people. A tool that took democracy, transparency and participation so seriously that made them fundamental pillars of its very structure, but that at the same time was effective enough to fight in a very tilted terrain, where most of the resources and the power were on the enemy’s side.  And that’s what Podemos was born to be.

Three months after its creation, and with an entirely crowd-funded budget, Podemos obtained 5 MEPs in the European elections. It has since tripled that amount of support in the regional elections, and participated in citizen platforms that are now governing the councils in many of Spain’s towns, including Barcelona and Madrid. Councils which are showing how another type of politics is possible, that it’s not true that there isn’t an alternative. In two months, they’ve stopped thousands of evictions, they’ve launched platforms for citizen initiatives to get council backing, they’ve made sure all children had access to two meals a day despite the schools being closed, and started municipal debt audits, among many other things. And all of that, while actually saving money by being efficient and renouncing to some of the outrageous privileges previous councils had. The new politics has thus already arrived at the local and regional level. Now we’re hoping to extend that change that to the national one in the December elections.

Most importantly, Spain is not isolated in this wave of change. Across Europe, people are reclaiming democracy and demanding a new type of politics that does something as simple as putting people’s wellbeing first  I see this in Scotland with all the movements associated to the referendum, and now also in the rest of the UK with the Corbyn phenomenon, and the great excitement and hope it’s triggered. I see it as well in Greece, where twice in a year people chose to  put democracy before fear. And yes, they lost, but think about this: if Greece, a tiny country economically speaking (not even 2% of Europe’s GDP), managed to create such an earthquake, forcing the European elites to drop any pretence of caring for democracy and human rights,  imagine what a medium-sized economy like Spain or a large one like UK could do.

So while I don’t believe in utopias, I am extremely excited about the next few years. Because I see people in Spain, and across Europe realising that this idea that there is no alternative is nonsense, that another Europe is not just possible but necessary, and in fact already emerging from the bottom up.  And that to me, is far more  exciting that any utopia will ever be. 

As Corbyn forms his new shadow cabinet, analyses, commentary, and speculation are rife across the political spectrum. This is not a transformation that just affects the Labour Party, but one that has implications for the Green Party, the Liberal Democrats, the SNP, Plaid Cymru and social and political movements across the UK. It raises important questions about how we work together across party lines, and how we ensure that a new politics develops that is open, democratic and participatory.

Whatever you think about Corbyn, his policies, or the Labour Party, there is no doubt that this could be a massive shift in politics – a shift that comes with huge opportunity, risks and responsibility that are far bigger than any single party.

It’s complex and we’d love to hear your thoughts. What do you think this means for broader progressive politics? What could a collective, progressive response to the new leadership look like? What are your hopes and fears? 

We’ll collate all the best responses and send them to Jeremy, and Compass will look to steer itself on the basis of what you say. Keep it short and punchy – focusing on what you think the biggest threats and opportunities are.  

We’ve gathered some articles and I’m sure we’ve missed many. Join our discussion below, share your thoughts and any interesting blogs or articles.

Jeremy Corbyn is redefining opposition – come what may - Zoe Williams

Corbyn victory energises the alienated and alienates the establishment - Gary Younge

5 reasons to be happy with Jeremy Corbyn’s victory - Ellie Mae O’Hagan

Corbyn’s golden opportunity - Anthony Barnett

From welfare to Trident: top challenges facing Jeremy Corbyn - Rowena Mason

How should Greens respond to Corbyn? - Adam Ramsay

Dear Labour Leader - Compass (written before Corbyn’s victory)

We need bold ideas and we need to win. With the decision made there is now a fresh opportunity to pitch proposals.  Here’s mine…

Public services look very different today from how they looked in 2010. With further expenditure cuts on the way, not to mention the brutal ideological choices that are being made about the remaining resources, the public realm will be ruthlessly diminished and transformed by 2020. We should work together now on a set of proposals for the future of the public realm post 2020 that are as fundamental and as fearless as Beveridge in 1942. Not tweaking but transforming; building, as did Beveridge, out of very little and seeking to shift the discourse as well as to transform the system.

The plan should be developed in open conversation through a collaborative inquiry proactively sourcing the crowd. Strengthening the progressive cause is not just about electing parliamentary leaders but about engaging and empowering us all.

And, most important, the work should start now:  If Jeremy Corbyn is to succeed as party leader, and I hope that he does, he needs a public service narrative.  If he doesn’t succeed the next generation of candidates will need a far more adventurous promise than Burnham, Cooper and Kendall had to offer this time around.

As a starter for discussion I suggest that the plan might be built around 4 organising principles:

A sharing state.  Building on the person-to-person examples in the sharing economy but focused instead on shared care. The excellent “Shared Lives” organisation has prefigured some of this approach for a long time and of course fostering is well established. What if the approach was better resourced and better supported and extended to support older people, young families and others in the community and in their own homes? Perhaps the Bedroom Tax could be converted into Bedroom Credit for converting and furnishing spare rooms for single people – not only homeless people but others like single elders who might prefer to live in a self contained unit but close to others.

Asset, not deficit, based:  How do we best build on the strengths of individuals, families, communities? The much-vaunted “Troubled Families” programme is a good illustration. Instead of picking off a few families with longstanding and deeply entrenched problems what about a universal, “Stronger Families” programme – acting earlier, equipping us all to be good parents with the same support that parents receive before birth now extended into childhood.

Built on deep value relationships:  Not a new idea but it might just as well be, we see so little of it in our public services at the moment. Politicians have occasionally talked about “deep value” services, “personalisation”, “relational welfare” for years but only committed to it on a very small scale. Suppose we explored a far more radical transformation of local support services with the creation of a new profession modelled around the principle of a key worker, small case loads, deep value relationships  and embracing / replacing  multiple disciplines. The work in Lancashire, led by the Police but involving health care, children’s services and others has begun to show the way but it is exceptional. Make it the rule.

Better to prevent now, than pay tomorrow:  It might seem counter intuitive but public spending cuts make a shift towards prevention more rather than less viable.  Services once delivered by local councils are being increasingly outsourced. It used to be argued, for example, that enabling an older person to stay happy and safe in their own home may have freed up a care home bed but one empty bed made almost no difference to the cost of the institution whilst the additional community care carried a new unit cost. Now that more and more services like care for the elderly are spot purchased from the independent sector rather than run by the public authority public budgets are much more sensitive to changes in demand/ need.  Reducing need really does save money. And the saving can be immediate. A large scale, Treasury led, Early Action Loan Fund would be the kind of policy initiative that could drive widespread transition to an early action state.

Atlee said of 1945 that Labour won because it was looking to the future whilst the Tories were looking to the past. After this tumultuous summer it will be hard for progressives to turn from endless re-examination of our recent history to projects that are practical and purposeful and looking to the future but turn we must, and turn now.

I attended the first Stroud constituency group since the Corbyn surge on Friday. It was a packed house with a couple of great talks, one on Human Rights and the other on the local response to the Refugee Crisis. I chatted to a couple of new members, but I think the three of us, out of around fifty or sixty people, might have been the only new members there. Which you might think a little disappointing given the national surge in members, and if the numbers of locals joining the party on my Facebook feed are anything to go by. But I’m not sure people did.

The thing is, as far as I can tell, that Labour has never really had a good system for welcoming new members, what they call in business jargon ‘on boarding’. At present you are sent a welcome pack, which includes your card, and if you are lucky you’ll get added to the local email list. I did receive a ‘welcome’ call from party HQ, but it wasn’t very welcoming. Instead it was just a list of questions about who I’d voted for before and whether I’d ever been a member of a different party. It wasn’t a welcome call it was a vetting call.

This attitude of vetting new members goes to the heart of how labour needs to change. Instead of seeing new members as people that need to checked to see if they should belong to our gang; new members need to be embraced and supported to achieve the change they, the individual new member, want to see in the world. Instead of being asked whether you’ve ever voted for a different party, you need to be asked what do you want to see change and how can we the party help you achieve that. For members that don’t have something they want to do, then the party just needs to make them feel loved and that they belong.

Sadly this is very far from what is happening; and it is potentially fatally wounding for team Corbyn and profoundly damaging for Labour. Many of the new members are young people who have never been involved in politics before. They will have however be members of other things like 38 Degrees, Greenpeace, Amnesty, Tesco Clubcard, The Costa Club to name a few. Each of these makes it very clear that you are hugely valued by them and that they exist in a major part to serve you. With the real clincher being that they don’t want much back in return, either a few clicks of your mouse or a few pounds spent. Labour on the other hand makes it clear that they expect you to support their vision, and right from word go you are bombarded by emails requesting more and more of your cash and time. This model of top-down politics will alienate many of the new members, and as the tough business of opposition starts many will drift away, feeling as if no one really listened to them.

This cannot be allowed to happen. If Labour is to stand any chance of winning in 2020 these new members need to be cared for and not taken for granted. Corbyn’s team right now should be creating a new onboarding process for each member where their starting position is to ask: not what can you do for the Labour Party, but what can the Labour Party do for you?

We don’t want to pre-empt the result on Saturday but having thought about it we decided that our advice, if you wish to take any of it, would be essentially the same whoever won and we know you will be inundated with ideas as soon as you actually become Labour’s leader – so we thought we would get in first. Here goes.

First we wanted to spell out the three ways in which we believe you should use the power of your new job to build firm foundations for the political transformation of our country. Being the Leader of the Opposition is often frustrating – but you are already much more powerful than you perhaps think.

 1. Power through the party

The only tangible thing, which you can directly change, is the party, so more than anything we urge you to use the party to prefigure a good society – one that is much more equal, democratic and sustainable. The way we change the party will help people understand how we want to change the country.

You have become leader in incredible circumstances, around 400,000 people joined Labour or became supporters since the election. In an age when political party membership was presumed dead, Labour showed it’s still a screen onto which so many people can project their hopes. The party has been transformed in weeks and will never be the same again. How you react to these new people is key. Your job, more than any other, together with the new Deputy Leader, is to help change the party to harness their energy and attract even more people so that our collective and democratic ability to transform our society is unleashed. Sadly what these keen new people will find is a 20^th century top down, disempowering machine. It needs to change, and fast.

Here we get to the essence of political leadership in the 21^st century – it is to take a firm stand on key moral issues but more importantly it is the help build the spaces and platforms on which people make change happen together. Just stand back and look at what happened over the last few weeks. The contest came alive because of the people joining – being part the wave. And many will leave as soon as they joined if the openness and empowering sprit of the campaign is lost. Today attachment is more fleeting – people have to be involved and find their voice – or they will go elsewhere. The incredible outpouring of solidarity over asylum is just another example of this people led change.

Whether you are more Bennite or Blairite is beside the point – both traditions had tendencies that wanted to impose and control. But this is the politics of the past. The future will be open and pluralist – defined by the sentiment of Facebook and not the Factory, a world that is negotiated not imposed. The good society can only be created for and by the people. You can show this.

What we have witnessed over this remarkable summer is the inversion of elite theories of change, whether by reformists or revolutionaries, in which the vanguard carries the masses – today the masses in the form of social media and social movement waves carry the political elite.

It is why a shift to proportional representation is now the base camp of the politics of the future.  Neither you nor any candidate made it an issue during the election campaign. It is essential you do so now. It is about how Labour can be in power and govern effectively but it is about doing the right thing because it shows we trust people. You can’t change the country through short cuts and rigged results. Majorities will have to be assembled for what we believe in – which means deep and long conversations within parties and across parties. There is no alternative.

2. The power to convene

The second great power you have is the ability to convene. You can now ask almost anyone in the world to help you and they will respond. The days ahead are going to be tough. Don’t shrink into a small core of people who already agree with you. Instead open out and up. Be challenged. Get the best brains in the world and the most committed and energetic people in the country to help shape Labour’s vision, policy and organisation. They are waiting for your call.

Here we come to the need to forge a Progressive Alliance. No party has a monopoly of truth or share of the progressive vote. The days of two-party dominance are over. Labour is the biggest tent in the progressive camp site – but the Greens often have the better policies, the SNP now look dominant in Scottish politics and Plaid Cymru have radical ideas and may be soon needed in government – why waste time and effort battling them when they could be persuaded to work with Labour to create a socially just and sustainable world? This is the politics of the ‘open tribe’ to which more and more people are responding enthusiastically.

3. The power to reframe the debate

The leadership election campaign has proved already that political leaders, even aspiring ones, can change the terms of debate. What you say matters. Just by putting different and challenging ideas on the table the discourse of the nation is transformed.

It needs to be. For while Labour discussed its future the summer saw huge challenges come into sharp focus: the mass movement of people; the threat of another economic crash; reminders about climate change beyond our ability to cope; the displacement of work through new technology; regressive policies that will increase poverty and inequality; the fostering of extremism, and more.

But more than anything your election comes at a unique conjuncture – a moment when capitalism’s ability to reproduce itself is under strain as never before, combined with the emergence of a networked society. When social upheaval meets social media change happens at speed and scale.  It is as challenging as it is opportune.

So here are just few concrete recommendations on what to do next based on the fact we know the next election is almost five years away:

• Start a two year values, vision, organisation and policy review- make it as open and expansive as possible – and join the initiatives up – they must support each other.

• If the party is what matters most then together lets find ways to enable the membership to democratically determine priorities and policy.

• Make a reality of the community organising role of local parties, started by your predecessor but aborted all too soon. Look at ideas like a Movement Council to bring the party together with the unions and social movements locally and nationally.

• In particular, help initiate a citizens and civil society led Convention for a New Democracy – learning from the Scottish Constitutional Convention –which built the ideas and forces to make democratic transformation irresistible.

• Form a Shadow Cabinet of all the talents – be bigger than any recent party leaders by involving MPs from across the party’s spectrum.

• If, as is possible, both you and the Deputy Leader are men, move immediately to reach agreement for the appointment of a second, female, Deputy who could be the female candidate who did best in the ballot. The party needs to do more to reflect the diversity of the population in what it is and what it does.

• Show Labour takes the environment and pluralism seriously by inviting Caroline Lucas MP to chair a commission into the future of sustainability and the economy.

• Jump on a train to see Nicola Sturgeon and with Leanne Wood and Natalie Bennett form an anti-Tory Progressive Alliance.

• Bring in all the leaders of Labour councils across the country – there is so much we can learn from them and do with them.

• Radically reform and rename the Whip system in Parliament to build consensus through negotiation not force.

• Your first big event is the Labour Party conference, don’t make a long dull speech. Instead open it up and get delegates and visitors talking to each other – sitting in small groups – they know the answers already and can make them happen. We have found that this works really well in engaging and enthusing people at our own gatherings.

• Start developing an open election winning strategy, building on Labour’s 30% share of the vote last May but with no presumption that any single vote is safe. So how do we forge an alliance of workers, the precariat, the professions, the cultural and creative sectors, social entrepreneurs, the self-employed, digital workers etc?

Finally, two friendly warnings. First don’t confuse the enthusiasm for Labour over the summer for the reversal of the long-term decline of social democracy being experienced the world over that we described in Downfall. Labour has been given a chance – that is all. We know that things move so fast now that anything can happen at any time. So be brave – the art of political leadership is to make the desirable become feasible. Do today so that tomorrow you can do what can’t be done now. Always build your intellectual and organisational forces. Play the long game.

And lastly, despite this letter being directed at you – this is not about you – it is about all of us. Our country will change for the better when millions of its citizens believe it can change, must change and are prepared to help make it change. Your job is to help them. We search for something, not someone.

Good luck – we are here for you as critically constructive friends – just as we are for everyone who wants a good society.

Love Compass

Admittedly, this is governing at a small-​scale and what I want to focus on here is the reverse relationship – of governments protesting. It would seem as if this Conservative government is a queen of protests – promising to protest about European migration policy, European economic arrangements and European human rights.

Of course, these declarations of protest target a level where the British government appears unable to easily act since decisions are made by groups of states or trans-​European officials. And of course the dichotomy voiced by Gordon Brown is all about the capacity to act. Thus, when it comes to domestic decisions, a British government does not have to protest; it does things. A Party that protests is a Party out of power.

But power isn’t like a monopoly gas supply such that you can be “in” or “out” of it. One lesson privatisation should have taught British governments and mainstream parties is that political power is far more dispersed. There are huge limits on what governments can do. This is recognised by the Labour Party mainstream when they call Jeremy Corbyn unrealistic or unelectable (obscuring the question of whether his politics would be desirable if they were politically – and not just electorally – possible). Labour moderates recognise that political power is constrained by an ambivalent, in-​need-​of-​wooing electorate, by a shortage of funds in the nation’s piggy bank, and by the volatile, prone to cold and itchy feet behaviour of global corporations. Yet, these constraints are set aside when it comes to Labour’s choice: take up power or spend a generation in the wilderness (see previous post). For the Labour Party, it would seem, there is only one route to Power and this route doesn’t wind through Protest (or the wilderness).

I don’t want to spend longer on the complexities of power. Whether understood as relatively stable forms of domination or as the means of generating effects, different kinds of power are exercised in different ways and from different places, something leadership contender Liz Kendall recognises in her Compass article on local democracy – even as her call for government to “give people power” assumes a central repository, able and available for the dispersal of political authority.

If, then, we understand government and protest as modes of interlaced activity that exercise power, what work is the repeatedly cited dichotomy of government and protest doing, with its implication that “real” power only attaches to the former, to a government that is and can only be “national”?

“Protest”, I think, functions here as a proxy for politics – understood not simply as disagreement over particular policies or positions but as a conflict of paradigms. The French political theorist Ranciere, who has written extensively about politics as the expression of ways of thinking, seeing and hearing that challenge conventional forms of order, bringing into speech what previously appeared as noise, remarked in Dissensus, “Politics, before all else, is an intervention in the visible and sayable… re-​figuring space, that is in what is to be done, to be seen and to be named…”

Many have commented on how Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign challenges the “business as usual” approach that has dominated Labour thinking. But the challenge is not just in the explicit aims and agendas his campaign expresses. It is also in the articulation of politics as something that has a place, a proper place, a political place, that should not be swept aside by a mantra which dismisses politics as the left’s infantile toys, objects of past desire that have somehow escaped the confines of the locked attic box in which they were so securely, it seemed, placed.

As Labour externalises politics, as they place it somewhere over there, somewhere distant that is cold, windy and over-​excited, what gets ignored is the necessary emergence of politics wherever individual harms and the idiomatic fatalism of “that’s life” are re-​framed as collective problems, sustained relations of power, and revocable ways of doing things.

Of course, mainstream Labour may reply, politics is important; we do politics when we govern (since on another reading, politics is all about governing and the minor disagreements of politicians); we do politics when we debate policies and laws. Once decisions are made, though, they must be introduced in a proper disciplined manner if Labour is to be, in contender Liz Kendall’s words, “a serious party of government”. Undisciplined politics, unruly politics, not only challenges the necessary logic of good housekeeping and national wealth-​making which define good decisions, unruly politics also fails to abide by the Decision.

The question of obedience to the majority decision, which dominated Labour debate in the 1980s (from all directions, not just anti-​leftist ones), has again resurfaced. On the one hand, Corbyn’s loyalty and capacity to lead are questioned since he has regularly defied the whip; on the other, what to do when a majority of voters in the leadership election seem to want a left-​wing radical is questioned as well.

How and when we should follow our conscience rather than the dictat of others is a complex matter of politics, of ethical judgment when the decision of what to do isn’t clear-​cut, that cannot and should not be swept away. Nor should it be converted into a formalist account where all acts of non-​compliance with the collective “will” are necessarily equivalents (even apart from the pressing question of how non-​compliance is done).

Thus, while worrying, it is not surprising that a competing political logic, the logic of the coup, rises murmur-​like from newspapers, alluding to a Party counter-​current that may need to act to deny an “unfavourable” Corbyn outcome. They will act in the name of the Party’s future, its survival, even in the name of democracy, acting in ways that may be unruly in order to protect the rule. But if they can, they will prevent the incursion of politics through legal and technical means, targeting as cheats those who seek to make government an activist one of the left (rather than the right) on the grounds they have failed to play “by the rules”, whether because they belong to more than one party or don’t support party values and principles, even as they have joined in order to vote for a candidate who clearly does belong to the Party.

Or is this what is in doubt?

The Labour Party has long been described as a “broad church” or, in its more secular idiom, a “big tent” – an appellation that invokes a culture of mutual respect and willingness to work together across different wings. What this episode has made plainly clear is that while the Labour mainstream wants left support when it comes to votes and money, the invitation to take part in the Party is a conditional one: You can be in our Party providing you remember that it’s “our” Party, that you are a guest, an affiliate, a supporter – nothing, it would seem from what is now being performed, more.

The unexpected event of Corbyn’s electoral popularity (far more than his mere standing, whch moderate Labour MPs enabled) demonstrates how narrow the conditions of welcome are. In so doing, it also begs the question, muttered from different quarters, of whether a single Labour Party can hold such a vast range of centrist, progressive and left-​wing perspectives together in one organisation.

Some have suggested centrists and right may leave if Jeremy Corbyn wins, resettling a new version of the Social Democratic Party established by their forerunners when they too exited the Labour Party some decades back.

Or, depending on events, it may be the left who goes.

Perhaps, who leaves is not paramount. If the Labour Party splits, as catastrophic warnings by Yvette Cooper and other senior Labour party figures suggest, a party of the centre-​left may find itself facing a new left-​wing electoral force, a loose coalition of greens, feminists, and other radicals seeking to participate in parliament and government.

In this way, the current actions of the Labour mainstream, in their urgent disavowal of a prefigurative politics that seeks to voice political desire rather than busy itself fruitlessly with the task of political measurement, may bring tomorrow’s protest voices into “power”.

Dav­ina Cooper is Pro­fessor of Law and Polit­ical The­ory at Kent Law School, Uni­ver­sity of Kent. This article first appeared at https://davinascooper.wordpress.com/

Salary: £25 000 – £30 000, depending on experience
Days per week: 5 (35 hours)
Location: London
Application deadline: Wednesday 16 September 2015
Interview: Monday 21 September 2015 

About us

Compass is the pressure group for a good society – one that is more equal, democratic and sustainable.

We’re interested in exploring big questions. How are we going to fix the mess we’re in and build a good society? From climate change and growing inequality, to a broken and undemocratic electoral system – things need to change. At Compass, we know politics needs to change. We now know that no one political party, organisation, individual or group can make real systemic change. We need to work together strategically and in solidarity with each other if we’re going to win on the big issues. 

That means we experiment; with ideas, events and campaigns. There’s no blueprint but a good Compass intervention will always start by asking how do we move towards a good society? It asks the deep, strategic questions, collectively develops ideas and thinking, and brings together a diverse range of people from grassroots groups to political parties to frame the terms of the debate and influence decisions and actions. For instance, our campaign on pay inequality shifted the conversation around high pay and forced the issue onto the mainstream political agenda.

Working with Compass is fast-paced, energetic and fun; it’s more than just a job to us. You’ll work directly with the National Organiser, a host of activists and volunteers and be lightly managed by the Chair.

If you have ideas about how we can continue to grow our thinking, how we can use ideas to influence the political agenda and how to connect ideas with practice and make them accessible and popular, then this could be the job for you.

About you

You’ll care deeply about creating a more equal, democratic and sustainable society and are open, inquisitive and creative. You’ll enjoy working with ideas and people. We believe strongly in living according to our values, so the how is at least as important as the what. You’ll care deeply about diversity and making Compass a political home that is open to all.

The job is to help develop and implement the ideas output and events of Compass and to make sure complex visions, policies and strategies are accessible to our members, supporters and the wider public as we look to combine leading thinking on society, politics and systems change with participatory political education. You’ll demonstrate a strong track record of working with ideas, and an understanding of how to make them accessible and popular.

We each do our fair share of the admin and core office work (about a day a week) the pay off for which is that we’re all also involved in working out the strategy and developing the projects. This means you’ll be flexible and open and happy to get involved and do what’s needed. It’s a small office but in reality the team is much bigger than the 3 staff – with activists across political parties, areas of work, campaigns, academics and newcomers to politics all mucking in to make Compass what it is. If this sounds like something you’d like to be part of, we’d love to hear from you.

We particularly encourage applications from women and people from all groups under-represented in our areas of work, and politics and activism in general.

Key elements of the job

• Work with the National Organiser to make sure Compass is strategic, lives by its values and delivers projects and ideas in a creative, open and impactful way 
• Work with the broader Compass network, members and supporters to develop ideas and thinking
• Communicate and share those ideas through our networks in exciting and accessible ways
• Develop platforms and participatory events to deepen our thinking together with the wider Compass network
• Work with the National Organiser to develop and implement participatory political education
• Work with the National Organiser to perform core work, to keep things running, including admin, website maintenance (no technical skills necessary), social media, and communications (we’ll figure out who does what together)
• Work with the National Organiser and wider Compass team on engaging with and growing our supporter base and membership
• Willing and able to work occasional evening or weekend with time offered off in lieu

Person specification

We’re interested in fast learner and an open and enquiring mind rather than someone with all of the experience or formal qualifications:

Essential

• Have an understanding of and care passionately about creating a good society
• Happy to work on your own and as part of a small but busy team 
• Excellent interpersonal skills; warm, friendly and positive personality
• Proactive and organised, with the ability to manage multiple priorities
• Knowledge and understanding of the political landscape
• Experience developing and running successful, participatory ideas based campaigns and projects
• Be comfortable working with a diverse range of people
• Writing and editing skills, with an eye for detail
• Decent IT skills (Microsoft Office)
• Decent communications skills, including active use of social media 

Nice to have

• Experience of creating and facilitating participatory events
• Project management experience
• Networks in relevant communities
• Working in a membership-based organisation
• Fundraising experience
• Experience using CRM systems
• Design skills (Adobe or equivalents)
• Be comfortable speaking to the media 

To apply

If this this sounds like a job you’d love and be good at, send a 500-word covering letter that shows how you meet the job description and person specification with a CV, including 2 referees or references by email to jacqui@compassonline.org.uk by 16^th September

We especially encourage women and people from groups who tend to be underrepresented in politics, campaigning and activism to apply. Please get in touch with Jacqui on email or mobile (07746 330422) if you’re thinking about applying and want to have a chat, especially if you’re feeling unsure! I’m very happy to meet up for a coffee or chat on the phone with anyone interested in the role. 

There’s been quite a lot of talk about Jeremy Corbyn shifting back to the much disputed ‘clause iv’ of the Labour Party’s constitution. But its important to recall that the clause’s wording which the neoliberals under Blair and Brown repudiated was the 1944 version 2 of the clause, which aimed at public ownership, interpreted as nationalisation. But Sidney Webb’s 1917 version spoke about the need:

“To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.”

Whilst the interpretation of ‘common ownership’ can be much disputed, to my mind that clause iv v1 is a great foundation vision for the Next Economy, an economy which is post growth, post capitalist, economically democratic and true to the socialist ideals which are the origins of the Labour Party. Corbyn would do well to consider how to update this vision to help support the flourishing of the Next Economy

Beyond state versus market

If Corbyn really has ambitions to move us beyond the dead dialectic between state and market, collective versus individual then now is the moment to do so. Its no surprise that Blair could not do so, as to all reactionaries and neoliberals anything which smacks of collective solutions are anathema.

But surely someone who purports to be a radical reformer ought to be able to tune into the emergent Next Economy, learn from it and support it. Doing so could represent a vital renewal, not just for Labour, but for politics in general.

Forget the Road to Serfdom, think more Road to Selfdom – an era in which the responsibility and rights of the self are understood in terms of the greater community and p2p relations as in Aristotle’s idea that the individual has no right nor expectation to flourish unless they are an active participant in the flourishing of their community.

Surely we have now learnt enough about the true, collective not selfish, nature of mankind from the worlds of cognitive science and sociology to shake off the fears of totalitarianism and think again about collective and social solutions to the ills of our times?

The emerging Next Economy

Whether Westminster likes and supports it or not, the Next Economy is growing day on day to what Rifkin calls an ‘eclipsing of capitalism’. Indeed, Professor Gar Alperovitz, a leading thinking and practitioner in the next economy, has recently said “just below the surface of media attention literally thousands of grass roots institution-changing, wealth-democratizing efforts have been quietly developing.”

This emergent next economy leaves behind the market versus state, Keynes versus Hayek schism and seeks to empower a p2p economics and politics truly of, by and for the people.

The ideals and principles of this next economy recognizes and learn from the alienation and inequality driven by the ‘market and private enterprise will solve all’ mindset and also the tendency to assume a centralized bureaucracy has the answers to all our ills. It will put responsibility and power into the hands of the people, driven and powered by a digital democracy and p2p energy that Smith, Keynes and Friedman could not have dreamt possible.

The market will still play a role, and the Partner State will support this next economy, as it already has started to do in places like Bristol, Italy’s Emilio Romagna, the Quebec Social Economy and participative budgeting in places like Porto Alegre and Paris.

The p2p politics and democracy, which underpins this, will be about a radical devolution of power and control of the economy to the citizens and the local. It will inevitably entail huge change to the way the market functions, with for instance the inevitable end of private banks being able to create money. It will mean a shift to economic democracy in which consumers, producers and communities control and own the means of production and where the profit motive takes at best a back seat to the key focus of the economy which will be sustainably satisfying our needs to live good flourishing lives.

This and much more is what we are focusing on with the www.realeconomylab.org. We are celebrating and supporting the building of a movement for the next economy bringing the best thinking and practitioning together. It’s about the Commoning movement led by people like Silke Helfrich, new co-operativism of people like John Restakis and Jason Nardi with the Ripess social solidarity movement, Michel Bauwens and the p2p Foundations work on the Partner State, the Transition Towns movement, alternative currencies, the Maker and fablabs movements.

Whilst much of this is still emergent, disconnected and just beginning to come together into a movement with a narrative, set of values and principles and an early roadmap to change, it is a real economy. There really IS an alternative.

Jules Peck is convenor of the Real Economy Lab, and a founding partner at strategy consultancy Jericho Chambers.

It’s a cliché but if a week is a long time in politics, the seven months since the announcement of today’s increase in the National Minimum Wage (NMW) feels like an eternity. Back in March, the announcement that the minimum wage would rise by 20p to £6.70 an hour felt a little cautious given it was the same 3 per cent bump as the previous year, despite the economy appearing to be in better health. It seems the chancellor shared that impression.

Fast forward to today’s increase, and though it shouldn’t be sniffed at – it directly boosts the wages of 1.4 million workers – it now looks more like the calm before the storm. From next April, the new ‘National Living Wage’ (NLW) will see the UK’s wage floor embark on a new phase of much faster rises.

Today’s increase is nonetheless a useful opportunity to evaluate how the NMW’s role has changed since its introduction and what lessons can be learned to equip us for the next few years.

Findings from the Resolution Foundation’s forthcoming Low Pay Britain report illustrate how the minimum wage’s impact has grown since 1999. Just after its introduction, only one in every 60 employees earned at or below the NMW. By last year, it had risen to one in 20.

That is due in part to a serious ratcheting up of the NMW’s value. An intentionally-low initial rate coupled with analysis that suggested a higher wage floor was affordable has meant the NMW has risen faster than the wages of typical workers. The chancellor’s new wage floor takes that ambition to new levels. We estimate that one in nine workers will gain directly from the NLW in 2020, when its value should be over £9 an hour.

The first question this raises is whether there will be negative employment effects. The OBR has projected that 60,000 jobs will be lost as a result, while our analysis finds that in most industries the policy will add less than 1 per cent to wage bills.

That doesn’t mean we can be complacent about its effects – the pressures will be felt more in low-paying sectors like hospitality and social care – but it does underline that the NLW’s effect on jobs shouldn’t be the only concern as the policy is brought in.

The minimum wage has evolved from being an absolute minimum for a small minority of workers to something of a ‘going rate’ in some industries. The question of progression off the wage floor is more important than ever. Some wage compression will be inevitable; it’s one of the ways employers have dealt with the higher labour costs brought by the NMW.

But because the remit given to the Low Pay Commission – the body tasked with recommending the NMW’s rate – focused on the minimum wage’s impact on employment, less attention was given to the consequences of more and more workers being bunched together at the bottom rung.

We know that only about one in four workers currently manage to escape low pay over a decade. The fear is that without an emphasis on opportunities to climb the pay ladder, the NLW may worsen that situation.

The next few years will be virgin territory on low pay and minimum wages. What’s needed is a detailed vision for how the NLW will be implemented successfully.

That should go beyond minimising the impact on low-paid jobs to helping the people working in those roles to move onto higher wages over time. A greater emphasis on skills, apprenticeships and training will be crucial to make sure the National Living Wage doesn’t become a wage for life.

Conor D’Arcy is a policy analyist at the Resolution Foundation

However you measure it, London is among the world’s top five richest cities.

But according to the Equality Trust, London has the largest pay gap in the country, with the average pay of someone in the richest 1 per cent almost 15 times that of someone in the poorest 1 per cent.

Broaden that out and the London Assembly has estimated that, in London, the top 10 per cent of earners have a weekly income, after housing costs, of over £1,000, whilst people in the lowest 10 per cent have less than £94 a week to spend.

Cost of Living Crisis

Falling wages and rising costs have exacerbated the cost of living crisis for people across London with thousands of working Londoners finding it harder to make ends meet.

So how has the mayor responded? He is very keen on promoting London as a leading financial centre, which suits bankers and international business interests; but what else?

Boris Johnson has certainly spoken out in support of the London Living Wage; but beyond that little action has been taken to encourage uptake. That has resulted in over 360,000 more people now earning less than the London Living Wage since he came to power.

London families struggle

The impact was made clear in a recent Trust for London report which illustrated how many families struggle to cope with the increased costs of housing, transport and childcare in London.

The conclusion was stark: that the cost of living in London has resulted in one in three Londoners not being able to afford a decent standard of living. What nobody wants to see is a London where only the rich can afford to live.

We’ve learnt from Boris that warm words alone make little difference. Back in 2008, of course, the mayor pledged to end rough sleeping by 2012, the year of the London Olympics. In reality, the number of people sleeping rough in the capital has gone up every single year and is now double what it was when he came to power.

In contrast the number of million-plus properties being built in London is at a record high. Some of them have installed ‘anti-homelessness’ spikes near doorways to prevent rough sleepers taking shelter.

I know of so many individual examples of people in my constituency who regularly face hard choices in terms of making ends meet. I was touched in particular by an elderly man who told me he had been forced to start spending the money he had been keeping safe to pay for his funeral. He doesn’t know now who is going to bury him.

Government policy hits the worst off

With the government’s economic policy set to continue hitting the least well off, we need a mayor who is willing to stand up for ordinary Londoners more than ever.

Take the government’s intention to cut tax credits for example. Research released after the chancellor’s 2015 budget showed that 1,069,800 London children live in families who could see their tax credits cut in real terms. Of those families 68 per cent are in work, forced to rely on top ups as a result of the high cost of living in the capital.

There is little doubt that, if the tax credits are cut, many of these families will be forced out of the capital. The proposal to cut tax credits was the strongest sign yet that the chancellor is intentionally targeting the poorest in our community, particularly those already struggling on low wages.

The government, and the mayor, should be focused on tackling the causes of poverty, such as London’s rocketing housing costs, not removing support for those who are already struggling to get by.

Looking after the rich

What would London look like today if for the last eight years we had seen a mayor who was genuinely focused on shrinking the pay gap, building affordable homes and supporting childcare; rather than making sure London is a city increasingly reserved for the rich?

Does Boris Johnson really care? If he did, surely he would be interested in finding these facts for himself. He would have commissioned the very reports mentioned here and we should be able to see the data on the GLA website together with a plan to address the key issues. Search all you like for this: you won’t find anything.

In one of the world’s richest cities, this startling level of inequality is a scandal. Next year, Londoners have the chance to find a new mayor, one who is interested in helping all Londoners begin to make ends meet.

Jennette Arnold OBE is the Labour London Assembly member for Northeast London. Follow her on Twitter

A year into the campaign against the Islamic State, the American-led coalition has precious little to show for it. Tactical victories in Kobani, Tikrit and Tel Abyad have been more than offset not only by the negative long-term side-effects of those victories but by direct IS military gains in the present – notably the capture of a third provincial capital in Ramadi, the capture of Palmyra and a push into Homs and southern Syria; as well as increasing IS infiltration of Idlib, an area cleared entirely of IS by a rebel offensive in early 2014.

All three victories of Operation INHERENT RESOLVE – Kobani, Tikrit and Tel Abyad – are tactical successes that evince what has gone so wrong with the campaign.

Kobani became a major symbolic fight in late 2014. With the overwhelming concentration of Allied air power IS were eventually driven back in January 2015 after a four-month siege, but they were back in June. Nothing lasting was achieved and, even had it been, it would scarcely have mattered to the overall health of the Takfiri Caliphate.

Tikrit was a short-term success at the expense of Iraq’s long-term stability and the broader war with IS. The anti-IS ground force was led openly by Qassem Suleimani, the commander of the expeditionary wing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp, the Quds Force (IRGC-QF), and Shi’a militias like Kataib Hizballah (KH) that are proxies of the IRGC-QF responsible for killing and wounding more than 1,000 American soldiers in Iraq over the last decade. Suleimani, IRGC-QF, and KH are U.S.-designated terrorists.

Their ground operation stalled and only succeeded in driving IS from Tikrit with the help of US airstrikes. What the US thought would be gained by being the air force for Iranian terrorists against IS terrorists was never clear. The Iranian-led forces committed atrocities against Sunni civilians during and after the Tikrit offensive. With Iraq’s armed forces still incapable of leading an operation to liberate Mosul, it would be left to the militias, who as every Mosulawi now knows make no distinction between IS and a military-age Sunni male. In short, the Tikrit ‘victory has solidified IS in Mosul.

Tel Abyad was a more positive development, cutting off a key supply route for IS’s foreign fighters and revenue via oil and antiquities smuggling. But it was accomplished by the YPG, the Syrian Kurds, who are the only force inside Syria that can call in Allied airstrikes.

The YPG cannot and (quite reasonably) have no interest in pacifying areas too far outside Kurdish-majority zones. Defeating IS requires Sunni Arabs to take control of security in that swathe of territory now under IS control. The reliance on Shi’a and Kurdish forces is thus not only unsustainable in defeating IS; it is counter-productive, playing into a major IS narrative and recruiting tactic that says only IS can defend Sunnis.

Likewise, another major success claimed by the coalition is degrading IS’s financial infrastructure, namely disabling the IS-run oil refineries. Unfortunately this has done more harm than good. Many observers said that IS’s oil trade should be disrupted in transit because hitting the refineries would mostly cause misery to local populations, denying then fuel over winter and more generally collapsing whatever economic activity there was, leading to a spread of extreme poverty and its attendant cousins, hunger and disease. This is now becoming evident

Hassan Hassan recently reported that his native Deir Ezzor has fallen so deeply into poverty and hunger as a result of the coalition airstrikes against the oil facilities that families are sending members to join IS simply to provide food.

The coalition had hoped that by denying IS revenue it would cause IS’s governance to fail and induce an internal revolt. But the coalition did nothing to help the tribal revolts against IS that were out down with unmerciful slaughter last year and, for all its failings, IS’s parasitic administration is not that much worse than what preceded it and it does at least provide order – a reasonable trade-off for many after years of chaos.

The US train-and-equip program for the Syrian rebellion looks to a cynic as if it was designed to fail and now duly has – providing those who never wanted to do it in the first place further ammunition for doing even less to help a desperate population in revolt against a tyrant whose downfall is our stated policy.

The folly of the politically-motivated ban on boots-on-the-ground is also now making itself evident. Beyond these individual policy errors, however, is a mistaken overarching strategy.

Put simply, the United States is treating Iran in Syria and Iraq as a stabilising agent and partner. For more than two years now Iran’s remorseless arrogation of power on the ground has proceeded with de facto American support. This is catastrophic: Iran thrives on the same sectarian and destabilising dynamics that IS does; they are symbiotic, and a rise in Iran’s power is an increase in IS’s power.

The most recent development in Syria, the open intrusion of Russian ground forces and soon-to-be airstrikes on the side of the Assad regime is the inevitable consequence of outsourcing Middle East policy to Vladimir Putin two years ago over the calamitous chemical weapons redline. President Obama’s defenders might like to pass that episode off as something other than a defeat for the West and Western-aligned Syrian rebel forces, and a victory for Russia, Assad, Iran, and the Salafist insurgents, but nobody else is fooled.

Russia is presenting its intervention in counter-IS and counter-terrorist terms while funnelling IS volunteers from the Caucasus to Syria and running reconnaissance missions that target non-IS insurgents. Russia’s coming attack on the insurgents on Idlib is going to remove the principle barrier to IS’s efforts to move back in and aide the Russia-Iran-Assad effort to make Syria a binary choice of Assad-or-IS, but it won’t help fight Islamic terrorism or improve the situation for Syrian human rights.

The coalition’s campaign has managed to combine a feckless military component with a misaligned strategic vision that sees the arsonists in Moscow and Tehran as potential fire-fighters. Little wonder, a year on, that IS looks stronger than ever.

Kyle Orton is a Middle East analyst. Follow him on Twitter

At the mental health charity Mind’s conference event yesterday, the newly appointed shadow minister for mental health Luciana Berger described how the good will that UK mental health services have been running on for years is ebbing away.

Since the Health and Social Care Act introduced the concept of ‘parity of esteem’ between mental and physical health care in 2012, there has been a widening gap between the rhetoric and reality of this supposed equality.

This is because the very same legislation also fragmented all aspects of the health service to the point that access to mental health care is, as the panel put it, ‘almost nonexistent’ for many people.

Because there are now so many bodies involved in administrating healthcare, it is difficult for decisions or changes to be made expediently. The Health and Social Care Act disrupted what is known as the ‘patient pathway’ – the route a patient takes between first GP contact and the completion of their treatment in whichever department they need for their condition.

Because the HSC Act increased competitive tendering in the NHS, providers are more mixed than ever. This has led to the pathway becoming increasingly convoluted and made it difficult to trace accountability.

So while the National Commissioning Board is responsible for commissioning primary care, community and hospital services are commissioned by a variety of clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) supported by a commissioning support service. Sound confusing? It is, and it is damaging standards of care.

York Central MP Rachel Maskell gave the example yesterday of Bootham Park Psychiatric Hospital in York, which has just been ordered to close. In 2014 inspectors found a number of serious problems with the facilities, not least a prominent old sign reading ‘Lunatic Asylum’.

Inspectors found ligature points and doors which could be barred, presenting serious suicide risks. They inspectors ordered urgent improvements but when they returned earlier this month found these had not been made. According to Maskell this was partly because there are so many different bodies involved in the running of the hospital that the decision-making process slows to a halt.

Fragmentation also means that it is incredibly difficult for someone with a mental health problem to ‘get in’ to the system to begn treatment. GPs may be unsure which services are available locally, leading patients to ‘fall through’ the gaps, passed off as ‘too severe’, ‘not severe enough’, or not fitting age criteria.

Somebody in crisis – who has attempted suicide, for example, or been hospitalised for an eating disorder – will always be given the emergency treatment they need. But this will often be followed up by the news that there is a year-long waiting list to see a counsellor. This is hopeless. It puts people’s lives on hold, leading to relapses, job losses and worse.

The lack of integration of services also means that a  patient’s treatment is often left to the discretion of the first point of contact. Some GPs will put medication at the centre of treatment plans, whereas others will be more likely to prescribe a ‘talking cure’. There needs to be integration of these services so that nobody misses out on receiving the treatment most suitable for them.

Of course, long waiting lists are also down to a lack of funding. Under the coalition there was a £50 million cut to children’s mental health services, and a loss of 3,300 specialist mental health nurses and 1,500 mental health beds.

Research by the charity Young Minds found that over one in in five local authorities  have either frozen or cut their CAMHS budgets every year since 2010.

Despite a government pledge to increase spending on mental health, freedom of information requests made by Labour earlier this year suggested that 50 of the 130 CCGs who responded plan to reduce the proportion of the budget they spend on mental health for 2015/16.

The Conservatives have yet to practice the parity of esteem that they preached. This is an opportunity for Labour to step up and show that they still understand healthcare as a system that prioritises patients, not market competition.

Ruby Stockham is a staff writer at Left Foot Forward

Since Kerry McCarthy became shadow environment secretary it has seemed highly likely that a fresh approach to food and farming will be on the menu. Her comments comparing meat to tobacco provoked a fair amount of controversy – slammed by both the farming industry and many in the media as being ‘out of step’ and ‘whacky’.

But surely McCarthy has a point about the need for a public awareness campaign on meat consumption?

Her first speech at Labour’s annual conference as shadow environment secretary signaled that she was going to challenge the government’s approach when she called for farming that is environmentally, as well as economically, sustainable.

She also hit out at government’s plans to allow bee harming pesticides into our fields, and outlined how she wants to address the decline in nature and tackle food poverty.

Kerry McCarthy has a strong track record on farming issues and is well placed to take forward this bold new agenda: she has opposed the badger cull, has spoken out on bees and pesticides and supported Friends of the Earth’s Sustainable Livestock Bill.

And she is right to say that in order to move towards a sustainable farming system we need to address the environmental and health impacts of meat production and consumption.

Meat – should the government tell us what to eat?

It’s widely accepted that our diets have to change. With rising global populations increasingly adopting Western-style high meat diets there is severe pressure on land, water and other resources, along with a significant contribution to climate-changing emissions.

In fact, according to Chatham House and DECC we have to tackle meat consumption if we want to tackle climate change, with Chatham House stating that ‘dietary change is essential if global warming is not to exceed 2C’.

Cutting down on meat in our diets will have huge health benefits too. Eating too much red and processed meat is linked to heart disease, strokes and some cancers, and a study has found that adopting lower meat diets in the UK could prevent 45,000 early deaths and save the NHS £1.2 billion a year.

Framing is crucial – it’s about less and better meat consumption and production

The message is simple and does not have to alienate livestock farmers. We need less and better meat consumption and production. This would mean an end to the drive to produce ever more, ever cheaper meat, and an end to the demand for mega-factory farms in the UK.

We can’t compete with the US and others on volume – and with the animal welfare and environmental impacts, why would we want to? Our farmers should be properly rewarded for producing food to high standards – and this will need concerted action from supermarkets and governments.

The ‘less and better meat’ message is gaining momentum. Two years ago Friends of the Earth helped found Eating Better – an alliance on action for less and better meat consumption, from a plethora of perspectives:  health, environment, animal welfare, farming, religious, business and international development. Now 50 organisations strong, it is growing into a mainstream movement for change on diets.

Food and farming – quality or quantity?

Kerry McCarthy’s plans, outlined in her conference speech, has started to reframe the broader food and farming agenda around quality, diversity, health and resilience in the face of climate change – and to help people reconnect with their food. The previous Labour government’s Food 2030 strategy was a pretty decent start, welcomed for its integrated approach to sustainable food consumption and production in the context of climate change, unhealthy diets and food security.

This approach sharply contrasts with the government’s industry-led 25-year plan for food and farming, which looks set to be predictably narrow, focused mainly on short-term growth and boosting exports, rather than the long-term, integrated strategy we need.

Labour must show leadership where the government is failing. Yes, there are some challenging discussions to be had – but as new research from Which? shows, people get pretty miffed when they realise that no-one has told them about the impacts of their food on climate change, and they are willing to change their eating habits.

There is a role for government, as well as the food industry, in helping make it easy for people to have a healthy, sustainable diet. Kerry McCarthy looks set to seize a golden opportunity to reframe the debate.

Clare Oxborrow is Friends of the Earth’s senior food and farming campaigner, and also chairs the Eating Better alliance

A bold and refreshing vision for the UK’s energy future was spelled out yesterday by Lisa Nandy, the shadow energy and climate change secretary, at the Labour party conference. It wasn’t only about her commitment to clean energy –  she spoke of Labour’s plans to ‘democratise [energy]’ in Britain by putting ‘people back in charge’.

With seven million people in the UK living in fuel poverty and one in seven globally living without access to energy, Labour’s vision for a fairer energy system is much needed. Global Justice Now has been a fierce advocate of energy democracy both here in the UK and globally. It would mean energy is fairly distributed, democratically controlled and managed to recognise the planet’s limits.

As Nandy rightly explained, moving to ‘community-based energy companies and cooperatives’ could provide a ‘new powerhouse’ in the UK and ensure a more just energy system for us all. Energy municipalisation – giving the people back control of their energy system – is an effective way of challenging the monopoly held by the big six energy companies. This monopoly currently sees fuel poverty for millions in the UK, and increasingly unaffordable energy bills.

Critics of Corbyn’s shadow cabinet might attempt to accuse Nandy of ‘pie in the sky’ idealism, but the fact is that this transition to energy democracy is already taking root and thriving in many parts of the world. Here’s a taste of just three of them:

1. Nottingham and Robin Hood energy

Indeed, as mentioned in Nandy’s speech, this process of energy democracy has already begun here in the UK. In Nottingham the local council has set up a not-for-profit energy supplier, Robin Hood Energy, and estimates it can save customers up to £237 a year on bills.

Already their first customer has had their annual energy bill cut from £2,000 to £1,400. Companies like Robin Hood Energy in Nottingham being run for people, rather than just for profit, demonstrates real alternatives to the Big Six’s domination of energy markets.

2. Hamburg, Germany

Much has been written about Energiewende, Germany’s transition not only from fossil fuel generated power but also from centralised to decentralised energy production.

But the changes aren’t just stopping there. In Hamburg, the second largest city, citizens voted in September 2013 for their local council to buy back the energy grid from multinational companies E.On and Vattenfall. The change came following the Our Hamburg – Our Grid campaign which argued that these companies were failing to act in the best interest of local people and were delaying the shift to renewable energy.

Similar plans are being brought to the table in Berlin too.

3. Uruguay

Uruguay is one country with public ownership of its energy system which is showing how a more just energy system could be achieved. The government has set ambitious targets for both ensuring everyone has access to energy and also shifting to more sustainable energy sources, both for electricity production and for other services such as transport. To date, 99 per cent of the population of Uruguay has access to electricity and almost two-thirds is produced from renewable sources.

Energy efficiency also plays a major role in Uruguay’s plans to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. The labour movement in Uruguay not only played a major role in fighting off attempts to privatise the energy sector in 1992, it is now engaging in proposals to democratise the state-owned energy company, UTE.

4. The UK pushing for the opposite in Nigeria

With energy privatisation having been such a disaster in the UK and in so many other parts of the world, it seems ludicrous that the Department for International Development (DfID) is determined to use UK aid money to implement this failed model of energy privatisation in countries such as Nigeria. DfID is presently spending nearly £100million of UK aid money, via free-market fundamentalists, Adam Smith International, to support the privatisation of Nigeria’s energy system through a program called the Nigeria Infrastructure Advisory Facility (NIAF).

Ken Henshaw from Social Action in Nigeria said that when he met with DfID over the disastrous programme: “They admitted the privatisation has failed, but when I talked about energy democracy, about communities owning and generating their own renewable electricity, it seemed they’d never thought of that.”

This persistent adoption of energy neo-liberalism isn’t restricted to DfID – it’s characterised numerous government departments, from the Treasury through to the Department of Energy and Climate Change. Nandy’s speech at the Labour conference is finally breaking with this dated consensus and pointing the way to what a modern and forward thinking energy system might look like – just, sustainable and democratised.

Sakina Sheikh is an administrative and fundraising assistant at Keep Our NHS Public. She writes in a personal capacity

This week marks the 20 year anniversary of the Oslo II Agreement between Israeli and the Palestinian Authority (PA).

What was meant to be an interim agreement on the route towards a final status deal became the last major diplomatic breakthrough between the Israelis and the Palestinians. 20 years on, an end to the conflict remains elusive and the cycle of violence and occupation is ongoing.

Spoilers on both sides are now thriving; they share a maximalist and uncompromising narrative. On the Israeli side, there are those (including some in the current Israeli government) who wish to deny Palestinian statehood and Palestinian history at all costs – believing in their biblical or god-given right to the Land of Israel.

On the Palestinian side, incitement against Israelis and Jews thrives – Israel is compared to ISIS and Palestinian President Abbas recently spoke of Jews ‘defiling’ the Al-Aqsa Mosque ‘with their filthy feet’. A similar ideological maximalism portrays Israelis as settler-colonialists with no right or any legitimate claims – and thinks 1948 and the establishment of the State of Israel were historic mistakes that can and should be reversed.

In this difficult moment for the two-state solution, it is vital that the Labour Party keeps its head and continues to empower the moderates and the peacemakers on both sides. In his speech to conference, Hilary Benn did just that:

“It is now time for the Palestinian people to have their own state so that they and the people of Israel can live in peace.”

To mark the 20 year anniversary of Oslo II, the online journal Fathom: for a deeper understanding of Israel and the region  – where I am assistant editor – has released Two States for Two Peoples – an eBook collecting 25 essays and interviews drawn from our pages.

The basic ingredients of the conflict remain the same now as they were 20 years ago: two entirely distinct national groups, both with legitimate claims to national self-determination in the same piece of land. The question we must ask ourselves now is, “Where does the peace process stand 20 years after Oslo II, and what must be done to keep it alive?”

The essays in Two States for Two Peoples offer thinking about the conflict orientated to understanding its complexity and how it can be resolved within a framework of recognition of rights on both sides. They reflect the following principles.

1. Fair thinking: how can we target the drivers of conflict and encourage forces for peace and coexistence on both sides? On the Israeli side that may mean targeting settlement construction. On the Palestinian side it may mean targeting extremism, incitement, and antisemitism. On both sides it should be mean embracing and supporting those groups working within their own societies to promote peace as being in their nation’s own interests.
2. Practical thinking: How can we improve the present reality, and ensure things don’t get worse? If a bilateral political agreement is currently beyond reach, are their unilateral or incremental steps that would improve the situation and the chances for a future agreement, reversing the current negative cycle?
3. Creative thinking: If the conventional two state model envisioned by the Clinton Parameters has proven inadequate, are there new creative ideas that can solve old problems? There is no one-state alternative, but might there be unconventional ways in which the core demand of both sides – for distinct national sovereignty – be realised in overlapping spaces?

Many now believe that the Palestinian statehood will only be achieved through isolating, sanctioning and boycotting Israel. Nothing could be further from the truth. Such actions will only empower the anti-peace, anti-compromise isolationists in the Israeli right and weaken the compromise-seeking moderates.

Israel’s Opposition and Labour Party Leader Isaac Herzog, who has criticised Israel’s PM Netanyahu for not doing enough on the peace process, described the campaign to boycott Israel as ‘an error Europe should not make if it wants to bring about a real change in the Middle East.’

Palestinian statehood will only be achieved through a negotiated two-state solution The compromises required to make the deal will be painful – for they involve giving up either territory or deeply held ideological and religious attachments. Hilary Benn rightly said that ‘Britain’s voice, Britain’s influence, can and should help’ achieve a Palestinian State alongside the state of Israel.

The movement should translate Hilary’s words into supporting those groups in Israel and the Palestinian territories that advance reconciliation and coexistence, such as One Voice.

Although the situation between the Israelis and the Palestinians now seems bleak, veteran Israeli peace campaigner Amos Oz recently reminded us that  it is not irreversible:

‘Anyone who remembers the birth of the State of Israel three years after the Holocaust, who saw Egyptian President Anwar Sadat getting off the plane at Ben-Gurion Airport, and Menachem Begin welcoming him and then returning all of the Sinai for peace, who witnessed the absorption of a million immigrants in a very short span of time, who saw Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres shaking hands with Yasser Arafat, who saw Ariel Sharon’s bulldozers uprooting Sharon’s settlements in Gaza and the northern West Bank, who saw Mikhail Gorbachev dismantle the Communist world, should be careful about using the term “irreversible.”’

Lorin Bell-Cross is a researcher at BICOM and assistant editor of Fathom Journal. He is writing in a personal capacity. Follow him on Twitter.

As the country’s right-wing press sharpens its cutlery ahead of Jeremy Corbyn’s speech to Labour conference, it’s worth noticing how coverage of the event already displays bias along political lines – and to keep this handy when the Conservative party conference is covered next week.

Consider this your cut-out-and-keep guide to newspaper bias this conference season. 

Here are five general trends to watch out for:

1. Prominence – while the Left-leaning Mirror and Guardian have treated the Labour conference as a national story worthy of their front page, most of the conservative press has kept the conference off its front page (Times, Daily Mail, Daily Express), or relegated it to second or third story (Telegraph).

This is on the morning after Labour’s shadow chancellor gave a speech laying out the party’s economic policies.

One exception is the Sun, which melds its stablemate paper the Times’s splash about Mars with the conference to attack and ridicule the new Labour administration.

This is not the first time this has happened. Earlier this year the Times kept the Labour party’s general election manifesto off the front page, where the Tory manifesto was featured positively.

Will the same newspapers keep the Tory conference off of page 1 next week?

2. Hostile editorials – while the Sun’s front page story is more an opinion column than news coverage, the dedicated editorial pages of the other newspapers are already pummeling the Labour conference.

The Mail’s columns are perhaps the most robust, though supposedly more serious papers like the Telegraph are not far behind.

As ever, this partisan coverage is written with the general public’s best interest at heart…

Will the same newspapers be as critical of the Tory conference, or will they write as critical supporters of the party?

3. Irreverence and mockery – As the Sun recently proved, mockery of politicians (an important practice) is not something the press applies without prejudice. Political sketches of the Labour conference and newspaper cartoons will similarly ridicule Labour with more gusto – today’s Sun front page being a good example.

Can we expect the same treatment for the Tory conference?

4. Ideas described as out of date – Economic, social and defence policies floated by Labour are called old-fashioned and a ‘return to the 1980s/70s’, despite their being the roughly the same vintage as those of the Tories.

Will the policies of the Conservative party be characterised as a return to the past?

5. Splits and disagreements amplified – There is certainly a big gulf between different tendencies within the Labour party over its direction with Corbyn at the helm.

But as the Tory top brass jostle for position (who was the MP and Oxford contemporary who gave Lord Ashcroft the pig story…?) ahead of their own leadership election before 2020, and as splits over the European Union bubble on, threatening to cripple David Cameron’s EU referendum campaign, their conference will surely yield plenty of comparable material.

Will the papers explore (and revel in) these warring factions within the Tory party?

Now it’s over to the papers. Let’s see how their coverage of the Tory conference resolves these questions.

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Adam Barnett is a staff writer at Left Foot Forward. Follow MediaWatch on Twitter

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Labour’s emerging economic policy is coming under intense scrutiny – from friends and foes alike. John McDonnell’s surprise statement that he intends to back George Osborne’s fiscal charter – committing the government to running a surplus during ‘normal times’ – was labelled ‘insanely stupid’ by one of the economists who had formerly given his economic platform a broad welcome.

Caroline Lucas, no doubt voicing the doubts of many of Labour’s new members, said McDonnell had ‘fallen into Osborne’s trap’.

The context for why Labour needed something like Corbynomics – and conversely why John McDonnell feels compelled to endorse the Tories’ fiscal charter, if only his own interpretation of it – was set out recently by the IPPR. Research they have published pinpoints two main reasons for Labour’s defeat in 2015.

First, it wasn’t trusted on the economy, with the 2008 financial crash blamed on Labour overspending. Second, it didn’t give voters on the left enough of a reason to vote for it.

This is the bind Labour finds itself in. Over the last Parliament, Labour tried to regain the public’s trust on the economy by pledging that it, too, would make cuts to reduce the deficit. The main effect of this strategy was to confirm the Conservative narrative and amplify the noise around an issue for which Labour was widely blamed.

To those on the left, meanwhile, it was toxic, Labour coming across as Tory-lite.

To have a hope of winning in 2020 Labour is going to need to appear both credible and principled. Commenting on the IPPR’s research, its director Nick Pearce was sceptical that Corbynomics could deliver both:

“The issue for John McDonnell and others is whether that forthright opposition to austerity simply cements the view amongst the public that your answer to economic problems is to spend money.”

In truth there is no need for Labour to see its options in such either/or terms. There is a substantial body of expert opinion which criticises Osborne’s economics on theoretical grounds. A variety of economists and commentators, not least Keynes’ biographer Robert Skidelsky, have given a broad welcome to Corbyn’s economic platform. Labour can make a credible case for anti-austerity policies.

What this will require is reframing the entire debate on economic policy. This is essential, because for as long as Labour is playing within the rules set by George Osborne it will be on to a loser. But it is also a massive undertaking, since it means swimming against the tide of received opinion.

Until this week, Corbyn’s leadership team did not quite look up to this considerable job. The very fact Labour’s new economic platform has been referred to as Corbynomics – with all its crackpot overtones – has been a problem. Given some of John McDonnell’s past remarks, his appointment as shadow chancellor has presented further challenges. Neither has it helped that the guru behind Corbyn’s economic policy has been reported as an ‘accountant from leafy Norfolk’.

In this context, John McDonnell’s speech to Labour Conference was a major step forward. Its most significant feature was the news that Labour is establishing an Economic Advisory Committee, including Nobel laureate Joe Stiglitz. This might seem too much a matter of process to be that interesting, but its potential importance cannot be overstated.

At long last we might see the opening up of lines of communication between the leadership of the Labour Party and heterodox economists who can mount an intellectual challenge to the basis of neoliberalism and the politics of austerity.

This Economic Advisory Committee will be needed to refine the content of Labour’s economic policy. But their biggest job will almost certainly be to convince first the shadow cabinet, and then the PLP, that such ideas could be credible as well as popular.

One concern is whether they will be involved enough (it’s reported they will meet four times a year) to have a decisive influence. Partly for this reason, there is perhaps a case for in addition appointing a chief economic adviser – not just to advise, but even more to be the public face of Labour’s anti-austerity economics.

Even in the best-case scenario this will be a long and difficult process, given the intellectual hegemony built up by the case for austerity. Labour MPs, let alone middle England, may take a lot of persuading – and that is the point: MPs will need to see that middle England can be convinced before they can sign up to it themselves.

So how about this? Labour could build on the appointment of its Economic Advisory Committee by launching an inquiry into how to get the economy working again, for every region and sector of society. Such an inquiry could take evidence from a range of expert opinion, not just those already among its advisers – allowing Labour’s emerging ideas to be fully tested in debate.

And it could take evidence in public around the country, and hear both from businesses and local people about their needs and abilities, and where the current economic system was not meeting them.

By making such an effort to listen, Labour might win the right to be listened to. The extended nature of such a process might win credibility for new ideas by their very repetition – and convince people over time that a new approach was worth a try.

Bill Blackwater is associate editor of Renewal: A journal of social democracy

As a result, the issues facing Outer London are on the agenda in a way they were not previously with policies to win over the Outer London ‘doughnut’ sure to form a growing battleground.

Yet despite his pledge to be a mayor for all zones, many of the changes promised to Outer London remain undelivered. There is no doubt that Outer London has been let down by Boris Johnson, who quickly fell into a ‘central London first’ focus.

Outer London boroughs are defined by their diversity with varying histories and cultures, unlike the shared identity of Inner London. This has led to vastly differing characteristics, from the ‘Third City’ of Croydon to the villages of Havering.

Fiercely independent with varying character

From these experiences come wildly divergent ambitions. Some boroughs, such as Bromley, are concerned about the impact of rapid growth, while others, like Barking & Dagenham, actively seek it, developing impressive plans for an Artist Enterprise Zone and whole new communities.

To appeal to these communities it is imperative that we understand each of the unique areas, crafting twenty Outer London strategies, one for every borough.

Despite Boris Johnson’s alleged ambitions for Outer London, the policy challenges facing these boroughs have rapidly become more acute.

As Inner London becomes unaffordable, Zone 3 and beyond have seen many demographic and social shifts, absorbing the younger and more ethnically diverse populations who have been pushed outwards. This has created intense pressure on the social and affordable housing stock of Outer London.

The ‘trickle-out’ result of the mayor’s refusal to face up to the housing crisis has meant Inner London boroughs rehousing many families in Outer London. In response, Outer London boroughs have also seen prices pushed up forcing them to look outside of London altogether if they are to rehouse families that can no longer afford to live there.

Housing crisis spilling out from central London               

The next mayor’s challenge will be to solve an entrenched housing crisis, retaining the unique characteristics of Inner and Outer London boroughs whilst at the same time preventing the capital becoming unaffordable, not only to  low-paid workers but to the middle classes seeking room to expand.

Boroughs are reporting large losses of work space, no doubt compounded by the government’s decision to relax planning laws to allow business space to be converted into residential. This leaves local authorities with limited planning powers to shape their areas and little opportunity to benefit from business rate retention.

As a result, many of Outer London’s unique high streets and district centres have suffered, with little if any intervention from the mayor. The growth of charity shops, pound shops and payday lenders is changing the nature of our Outer London towns, and not for the better.

The proposed Opportunity and Intensification Areas designed in Outer London to accommodate future economic growth are also doomed to fail if there is no strategic plan. The next mayor will need to have vision and focus to make regeneration projects like Brent Cross and Old Oak Common successful and relevant to Outer London Boroughs.

More than dormitory suburbs and feeder towns              

While struggling economic activity is bad for Outer London itself, it also damages London in its entirety. Boris Johnson’s blind eye to the needs of Outer London has meant an ‘everything central’ approach, strengthening central London’s pull on jobs and services, relegating Outer London to feeder commuter towns.

These ‘dormitory’ suburbs inevitably place even greater strain on London’s public transport and road network, as well as the police and emergency services; something for which Boris shouldn’t be let off the hook.

Increasing the attractiveness of Outer London as a place to live and work must be a priority for the next mayor. To win the hearts, minds and votes of those in the outer ring of the ‘doughnut’ the next mayor will need to understand the diversity of Outer London and have solid policies that not only comprehend and counter the threats to its appeals, but seek to maximise new opportunities for growth.

This will require a new way of thinking, moving beyond the empty promises of Boris Johnson and accepting that there is more purpose to Outer London than just to feed the centre. While these challenges are significant and will take inventive policies to overcome they are a crucial ingredient for electoral success on the way to City Hall.

 Navin Shah is the Labour London Assembly member for Brent and Harrow.

Labour can no longer let its intellectual conservatism hold it back, writes David Butler

Labour finds itself within a gilded cage of intellectual conservatism. The party must understand and offer solutions to a range of complex issues: the productivity puzzle and secular stagnation which threaten to curtail future growth prospects; the problems of an aging society and housing shortages; and populist anti-elite sentiment. To win again, the party must escape these confines.

Intellectual conservatism is a rigidity of analysis. It is a lack of curiosity about alternative policies and institutional arrangements. It is the creation and defence of shibboleths that do not serve those they are supposed to help. It can offer great comfort; the failure of ideas and policies can be blamed on some ‘other’ (be it political opponents, the media, or the voters). Intellectual conservatism is not just a cage, but a gilded one too.

There are two consequences of intellectual conservatism. First, inflexible and unrevised analysis can lead to a misdiagnosis of the causes of contemporary problems; for example, thinking that the behaviour of developers is a cause, rather than a symptom, of the perversities of the housing market. Second, intellectual conservatism can lead to inappropriate policy responses. Rent controls are a classic example of this; there is substantial evidence that controlling rents leads to underinvestment, a black market and a two-tier system. Yet the calls for controls on rents are perennial on the left of the party.

Intellectual conservatism is a feature of Labour history. In his book A Strange Eventful History, former Labour trade secretary Edmund Dell wrote that the party would trap itself in ‘a hidebound frame of mind which limited its capacity for fresh thought’. There is a multitude of examples of Labour’s past intellectual conservatism from the rejection of trade union and industrial democracy reforms in In Place of Strife and the Bullock report respectively, to the long grind since the 1980s to recognise the consequences of globalisation for social democracy.

This intellectual conservatism, fused with (perceived and real) political constraints, is best captured in Labour’s reaction to the post-Wall Street Crash slump. The Labour government of 1929-1931 failed to embrace the proto-Keynesian economics of loan-financed works, tariffs to protect the balance of payments and the budget, and devaluation. The party, with its utopian socialism, was wedded to free trade, the gold standard and in-year balanced budgets. Seeking to maintain a balanced budget, through cuts to unemployment relief, eventually split the government and led to Ramsay MacDonald forming the national government. Labour’s intellectual conservatism was perhaps best captured by Sidney Webb’s response to that government’s subsequent sterling devaluation and protectionist tariffs: ‘nobody told us we could do that’.

To understand how Labour can break out of this self-imposed constraint, the deep roots of intellectual conservatism must be diagnosed. Core to this is the relative strength of ideology over pragmatism (and a subsequent dislike of revisionism). Labour does not have a well-developed equivalent of Tory pragmatic statecraft. Instead, it has suffered from an ideological rigidity over the mechanisms of social justice that cannot be shifted without great struggle. Simply put, as an attachment to ‘means’, not ‘ends’. Even when such revision takes place, as in the 1950s and the 1990s, there is a reaction against this (from Tony Benn in the late 1970s to Jeremy Corbyn now).

Tied to the relative strength of ideology is Labour’s sentimentalism. The myths and misunderstandings of the Clement Attlee government are symptomatic of this. The ‘Spirit of ‘45’ version of the government is a distortion which excludes the complexities of the era and the more moderate aspects from fiscal conservatism to Nato and the Bomb via Attlee’s dislike of faddish radicals and his willingness to withdraw the whip from the hard left. The myth of 1945 as some Labour nirvana belies the pragmatic reality of the Attlee administration. This sentimental approach to history is grit in the engine of intellectual innovation and attempts to move away from, or reform, the institutions and policies of the Attlee era.

Another root of intellectual conservatism is the perceived and real fragility of progressive gains. Labour has always had a fear of the reversal of progress by conservative forces. The historical memory and reality of Thatcherism have heightened this fear. It is, in part, a function of being a party that seeks economic and social transformation; Hannah Arendt’s observation that the most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution is fitting. This has meant that there is an inbuilt bias towards being defensive rather than realising that the protection of gains requires perpetual renewal and constant adjustment of the policies and institutions of social justice to meet the demands of modern society.

David Marquand in Britain Since 1918 writes of four traditions existing in 20^th century British politics: democratic collectivism, Whig imperialism, Tory nationalism and democratic republicanism. Labour, he argues, has been a democratic collectivist party with elements of Whig imperialism and democratic republicanism. Democratic collectivism is a gradualist tradition favouring technocratic, state-centric progress and sceptical of decentralisation; it is best embodied by the Fabians. By contrast, democratic republicanism is the perpetual outsider, seeing the expansion of republican liberty, an absence of domination, as central to Labour’s mission. The grip of collectivism over the party, coming at the expense of republicanism, has led to the dominance of statist and technocratic solutions to socioeconomic problems at the expense of market, decentralised and civic-based alternatives.

Intellectuals within the Labour party must share some of the blame. Many have failed to understand the workings of politics and power, ignoring Neil Kinnock’s maxim that the victory of ideas must be fought for. Those intellectuals who bridged the gap between the ivory tower and the frontbench, such as Tony Crosland, often did so at the expense of continued intellectual revision; Crosland, the great revisionist, failed to recognise the changes in the British economy and ended up opposing James Callaghan and Denis Healey’s International Monetary Fund deal.

Breaking out of the confines of this intellectually conservative tradition is not an easy task. A full toolkit will be needed. The leader sets the direction of the party; if the leader wishes to be willing to embrace fresh analysis and policies, then they can march even a reluctant party in this direction. Another useful mechanism would be greater cognitive diversity. The writer Ian Leslie has argued that collective wisdom is enhanced through the presence and interaction of different mindsets; this means expanding beyond Oxbridge graduates and thinktankers and bringing people into the heart of the party from a range of cognitive backgrounds that will challenge the leader and hopefully lead to a more open intellectual culture.

However, a top-down approach has its limits; if the leader is intellectually conservative or too weak to impose their own direction, then the bonds will not be broken. Change must also come from the bottom up. Wales, our big cities, and the new combined authorities, perhaps the only places where we will have power for a while, should be laboratories of social democracy, experimenting with policies that can generate lessons that can be shared and incorporated into future manifestos. More widely, those in the republican tradition should organise, argue and create a network of institutions and organisations that promote new analysis, intellectual pluralism and fresh policies while understanding and seeking to gain power.

An intellectually open, pluralist and more republican Labour party would be a different beast. It would accept that, in the words of Richard Reeves and Philip Collins, the ‘good society is messy and unpredictable because it vests power in people’. The move towards republicanism would be the modern equivalent of the party’s shift from classical to Keynesian economics. It would embrace and strengthen the emerging peer-to-peer social justice networks and organisations. It would enable the building of individual assets through the tax system and capital grants, promote alternative forms of corporate ownership (from employee-owned firms to community interest companies), and promote new, local initiatives to help those left behind by new technologies to enable to build their skills. The party would balance this by using a coordinating, strategic state that smoothed out inequalities of wealth and power between individuals and communities. It would not be afraid to pinch ideas, if they fit with our values, from elsewhere.

The gilded cage of intellectual conservatism traps Labour in the past, weakening us as a party that delivers real, meaningful and lasting progressive change which expands the liberty of all. It is up to us, those of us who want an intellectually open party, unafraid of new ideas and the modern world, who must forge it in our own image. It is a long, hard task. We have to be big enough to take it on. Together, we can break out of the gilded cage.

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David Butler is a member of Progress

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Photo: Dominic Campbell

Has the public changed its mind about immigration? Sunder Katwala investigates

A casual observer could be forgiven for struggling to understand British public opinion on immigration. How could the same voters who backed the United Kingdom Independence party in the 2014 European elections, and ranked immigration consistently in their top three issues facing the country before the election, have ended up pressuring the prime minister three months later to accept more refugees from Syria? How could David Cameron sweep to victory in a general election while barely mentioning immigration at all? Yet public attitudes on this issue have in fact remained broadly consistent – and more moderate and nuanced than many think.

Immigration did not decide who won and lost the 2015 general election, as some thought it could. But the campaign offered important and sometimes surprising lessons about an issue that could well dominate this parliament as much as the last, perhaps even more.

The Conservatives certainly did not win the election on immigration. They won an unanticipated majority despite their record and reputation on the issue. Trust in the party to manage immigration had collapsed, with the Tories falling behind Labour, as well as Ukip, as the best party on the issue, having led Labour by 38 per cent at the same point in 2010.

With Cameron’s flagship policy of reducing net migration in tatters, Conservative strategist Lynton Crosby took the view that the party should seek to reduce the salience of immigration, fearing that it would give oxygen to Ukip. He focused instead on economic recovery, leadership and security in uncertain times, leading immigration to have a much lower profile in the national campaign and the media than had been widely anticipated. In the short term, trying not to talk about immigration proved somewhat successful, as the Conservatives won the votes they needed exactly where they needed them. This still leaves the government with the longer-term headache, however, of what to do about its failed net migration target, even if this has now been downgraded to an ‘ambition’.

Labour did not lose the 2015 election on immigration. It lost on political leadership, economic credibility and having too narrow a pitch to persuade voters in either Scotland or England that they would stand up for their interests fairly amid competing demands in a United Kingdom in flux. The party worried about what it should and should not say about immigration. Public disagreement among the shadow cabinet, over who would or would not drink from a coffee mug with Labour’s ‘controls on immigration’ message on it, epitomised a party agonising over how to find its voice, and whether or how it could seek to appeal to both ‘left behind’ voters and to cosmopolitan voters in big cities and university towns who might be attracted by the Green party.

Survation’s post-election polling for British Future shows that almost half of voters (46 per cent) thought that Labour talked too little about immigration in the election campaign, while a similar proportion thought it got the balance about right. Only one in 10 thought that Labour put too much focus on immigration. This proportion was similarly low among ethnic minority voters, who were four times more likely to say that Labour had talked too little about the issue as that it had said too much about it.

Labour candidates felt more confident talking about how fair rules in the workplace could prevent exploitation and undercutting, which worked well enough for Labour loyalists. But the party remains much less confident on the more important drivers of public concern such as cultural questions of identity and integration. Too often, Labour voices sound as if they hope to change the subject, back to jobs or housing, whenever issues of immigration, identity or Europe come up.

By contrast, most voters (51 per cent) felt that Ukip talked too much about immigration. A third of the electorate thought it got the balance right, and immigration certainly helped Ukip to win nearly four million votes. But the party was disappointed to go into the election with two seats and to come out of it with one. Ukip provided a voice that many of its supporters thought had been missing for too long from mainstream politics – but it also put most voters off, even those who were sceptical about the pace and scale of immigration.

The party’s difficulty in turning votes into seats reflected the public’s doubts about Ukip’s tone of voice on immigration. Survation’s poll for British Future shows that a majority of voters at the end of the campaign felt that Ukip was both too loud and too divisive; that the party was not firm enough on keeping extreme voices out; and that it talked too much about immigration and too little about the economy.

Few would have predicted, a year earlier, that the party to gain most seats in 2015 would not be the most anti-immigration party but the most welcoming. The Scottish National party surge had immensely more to do with the fallout from the independence referendum than nationalists’ inclusive and (moderately) liberal approach to managed migration. But being pro-immigration proved no barrier to a historic landslide in a country where public attitudes are only moderately less sceptical than across the rest of the UK.

If immigration featured less heavily in the campaign than many had anticipated, it quickly hit the headlines again afterwards. The quarterly net migration figures rose in May, and again to record levels in August, putting the government under pressure over its failure to cut the numbers. Yet by September Cameron found himself conducting an unanticipated U-turn under public pressure to take more Syrian refugees. This again demonstrated that public attitudes to immigration are more nuanced than is often realised.

Most people want Britain to maintain its tradition of refugee protection, yet they also remain wary about levels of immigration. What changed this summer was a rebalancing of the usual asymmetry of immigration debates, where those with the strongest anti-migration views give the issue more salience than the liberal minority who are comfortable with immigration. On the refugee issue, this was reversed, with an unprecedented mobilisation of liberal sentiment.

With pictures in the media of refugees in Calais, desperately trying to make it into the UK, the general public struggles to accept the argument that other countries are doing more to help refugees. But it became impossible for the government to claim that we were ‘doing our bit’ and upholding that proud tradition without making a clearer commitment to take more refugees. It is now important to show that there are good local plans for integration, in order to avoid the negative consequences for public attitudes of poorly designed schemes to distribute asylum seekers.

Following the election, Labour leadership candidates struggled to get to grips with the politics of immigration. Early acknowledgements that Labour had ‘lost touch’ with the public gave way to a realisation that the immediate audience of party members and supporters were strongly pro-immigration. New leader Jeremy Corbyn has shown scant interest in engaging with public anxiety on immigration, suggesting that the party should talk about the economic and cultural benefits of immigration, and duck questions about numbers and the scale of immigration.

Unusually, the party’s modernising flank tends to agree. Immigration, globalisation and Europe often seem to fall into a ‘no compromise with the electorate’ category on that wing too. The desire of right and left to defend the gains of immigration is noble. But this should not be done in a way that fails the ‘what works’ test. Stressing the net contribution of migrants to the exchequer preaches to the converted; it is a demonstrably ineffective way to persuade those who do not already agree. People simply do not believe the statistics when trust in the government’s handling of immigration is so low.

The need for effective arguments on immigration will become all the more important as we approach the European Union referendum. If the referendum is lost, it will be lost on immigration, as this is the main way in which the public thinks the EU affects their lives. Ukip risks toxifying the ‘Out’ campaign if it is too strident; but existing pro-European arguments – about Britons being able to work abroad, and net contributions to the economy – work primarily for the confident, the educated and the mobile, who are voting ‘In’ anyway. To other voters they seem like a dismissal of their concerns, as likely to push persuadable sceptics into the ‘Out’ camp as to win them over.

Once the referendum campaign begins in earnest, both sides will need to stop scoring own goals on the issue of immigration – and reach out beyond their existing support to the anxious middle of British public opinion.

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Sunder Katwala is director of British Future

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Photo: Josh McKible

Good news – the delegates to Labour party conference still understand the power of unity. In turning down the wish of some for a rushed debate on Trident, they have decided in favour of measured policy consideration rather than grandstanding.

Perhaps they actually took Jeremy Corbyn’s call for a more inclusive new politics at face value.

Unlike many of my colleagues and friends, I cannot make a claim to having been attending Labour party conference since I was a child – that is because I used to have a real job as a teacher and just could not have taken the time off to go to whichever seaside town was hosting the annual political jamboree. A cheap jibe? Yes, a bit, but the serious point is that most Labour party members, including some of our most active and dedicated, are not in Brighton this week. And most members of the public will view the goings-on with a certain bemusement – if they notice them at all.

I have, however, experienced the small amount of policymaking that takes place at conference through the contemporary resolution process. I arrived at a compositing meeting clutching my constituency Labour party’s motion in a sweaty determined hand and emerged delighted that I had managed to get a whole sentence from my original motion inserted into the final motion. After a scant hour’s debate, the motion was passed on the conference floor. There had been little real debate, no wider engagement with anyone outside the conference hall who might have been knowledgeable about or concerned with the issue, and the vote made zero impact.

I have also attended the National Policy Forum where there is some real debate informed by discussions back in CLPs and even an attempt from some active CLPs and NPF members to engage more widely. Of course, there are also stitch-ups in corners and an effective trade union veto or trump card due to their numbers on the forum so I am open to reform. But let’s not get carried away with the idea that policy positions determined by a party conference on the basis of emergency resolutions are more democratic or representative of the party, let alone the British public.

For this reason, I really welcome the idea that the party will be reaching out more widely than before – the constitutional forums that Jon Trickett is set to lead could be a real opportunity. Party members, new and old, will have important things to say, but so do the British people who we need to vote for us. For that reason, I think I might have started with what people feel about their work and standard of living prospects, but reaching out on any policy area is a good thing. However, that has got to be a real exercise and what people say to us has got to be reflected in the final positions taken.

And one of the most fundamental roles of government is to secure our people and our place in the world. To take a new position on Trident (whatever it is) based on an unprepared and narrow debate held for political reasons, not because there is an urgent need to come to a position, would have rendered the calls for ‘a new politics’ as empty rhetoric. If we are serious about a new approach to policymaking, we must not let internal party appetites for political score-settling trump a real chance to widen our policymaking including by involving the people who will ultimately decide if we win again or not.

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Jacqui Smith is a former home secretary, writes the Monday Politics column for Progress, and tweets @Jacqui_Smith1

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Photo: atc

Thirty years after Neil Kinnock’s Bournemouth speech, Robert Philpot recalls the fight to save the Labour party from the hard left

In September 1985, two years after Neil Kinnock was elected its leader in the wake of the devastating landslide defeat which saw Margaret Thatcher re-elected with a majority of 144, the Labour party gathered for its annual conference in Bournemouth.

There were few signs that, after its critical collision with the electorate, the party was close to coming off life support. Even as the government headed into the middle of its term, Labour was recording only anaemic opinion poll leads, thanks in part to a resurgent Liberal-Social Democratic party Alliance. Four months previously, the party had lost 124 councillors in the local elections as the Alliance – which had also inflicted the Tories’ only two by-election losses since the general election – gained 302.

The roots of Labour’s difficulties were not hard to discern. Despite having been behind the party’s humiliating loss in 1983, the hard left showed few signs of chagrin. Tony Benn, ejected by the voters of Bristol, had returned to parliament in a by-election in 1984. On the party’s National Executive Committee, Benn continued to lead a noisy opposition to any attempt by Kinnock to, as the left put it at the time, ‘compromise with the electorate’. As Arthur Scargill intended, the year-long miners’ strike, which had ended in humiliation in March 1985, saw him, as president of the National Union of Mineworkers, become the focus of opposition to the government.

As Peter Mandelson, soon to become Labour’s director of communications, later recalled: ‘The party was again associated in the public mind with the vote-killers of 1983: ideological infighting, rhetorical excesses and trade union militancy.’ Focus group findings presented to the party in the autumn of 1985 brought nothing but bad news. The imagery associated with the party – ‘reds’, ‘commies’, ‘you will do what you are told’, ‘strikes’, ‘Scargill’ and ‘Militant’ – meant that even many of those who had voted Labour in the past had already ruled out doing so when Thatcher next went to the country.

These perceptions of the party were not simply drawn from tabloid lore. In many of its traditional heartlands, a ‘new urban left’ had emerged and – unchecked by the Wilson and Callaghan governments – had grown in strength during the 1970s. By the 1980s, this new left saw local government as both laboratories for its leftwing policy agenda and citadels of opposition to Thatcherism.

The vanguard of this movement was Militant, a Trotskyist organisation committed to an ‘entryist’ strategy to pursue its Marxist programme through the Labour party. With 140 full-time staff – more than the Liberals and SDP combined – a weekly newspaper, 5,000 members and control of Labour’s youth wing, the Labour Party Young Socialists – it had been the subject of a damning report by the party’s national agent, Reg Underhill, in 1975. Finally, in 1982 and early 1983, the party began to awake from its slumber, declaring Militant ‘ineligible for affiliation’ and expelling five members of the paper’s editorial board.

But in June 1983, Militant scored a victory which threatened to wreak havoc on Kinnock’s leadership: as the party crashed to defeat nationally, Labour won control of Liverpool city council. For nearly two decades, Militant had been stealthily gaining control of the Liverpool party. Now, the council’s new deputy leader, Derek Hatton, later wrote, ‘Militant could show what it was made of, and Liverpool … could become a “showcase” city, a platform on which to demonstrate what could be achieved.’

For Hatton, who in reality led the council, ‘showing what it was made of’ meant staging a confrontation with the Thatcher government. In the summer of 1985, the council passed an illegal budget with a £100m deficit, thereby daring the government not to step in with additional funding to keep services running. It was a fatal miscalculation: having defeated the miners, Thatcher was in no mood to compromise with Militant. Behind the scenes, an increasingly frustrated Kinnock warned the Liverpool councillors that such ‘gesture politics’ risked inflicting grave harm on those who depended on council services.

It was thus a combination of principle and political calculation which led Kinnock to decide to use his speech in Bournemouth to denounce Militant. Just days before the conference opened, the council provided the Labour leader with his opening: with money running out, it hired a fleet of 30 taxis to hand out redundancy notices to its entire 31,000 workforce. ‘I’ve got them. This is where it ends, in a shambles,’ Kinnock told his chief of staff, Charles Clarke.

When he rose to his feet on Tuesday 1 October, few were prepared for what was to come. Having delivered a series of attacks on the Tories and Alliance, he moved on to warn the Labour party that ‘implausible promises do not win victories’. And then he delivered the hammer blow: ‘You start with far-fetched resolutions. They are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code, and you go through the years sticking to that, outdated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end up in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers.’

It was, recorded Robert Kilroy-Silk, then a Labour member of parliament, ‘as if a bomb had exploded’. From the floor, Hatton yelled: ‘You’re telling lies.’ Seated on the conference platform as a member of the NEC, Liverpool MP Eric Heffer got up and walked off the stage. While most of the conference floor stood to applaud, Kinnock – ‘looking so small and vulnerable,’ wrote Kilroy-Silk – waited while the mixture of cheering and booing subsided, before continuing: ‘You can’t play politics with people’s jobs and with people’s services or with their homes.’ Benn recorded in his diary that he had left the conference and wept.

For once, a leader’s speech deserved the plaudits it received. Denis Healey’s judgement that Kinnock’s words were of ‘historic importance’ proved prescient. Over the coming months, Militant’s leadership was painstakingly rooted out and expelled. For Kinnock, who had long been averse to expulsions, it was less Militant’s ideology, distasteful though he found it, but its secrecy – ‘they actually deny the existence of an organisation and a membership’ – which was ‘dishonest and disreputable’.

Kinnock’s decision to take on Militant led to a marked shift in the party’s internal dynamics with long-term significance. David Blunkett, then the leader of Sheffield city council and a popular figure on the party’s NEC, had often sided with the hard left and initially sympathised with Liverpool’s strategy. But a visit to the city shortly after Kinnock’s speech exposed him to the reality of the bullying and intimidation employed by Militant. He not only backed the expulsions, but became an increasingly important Kinnock ally. Tom Sawyer, the deputy general secretary of the NUPE trade union, had also often backed the hard left in NEC votes. Like Blunkett, he was shocked by what he witnessed in Liverpool. ‘Some of the things I saw,’ he recalled, ‘have more in common with the extreme right … than the left.’ Out of what Kinnock’s biographer, Martin Westlake, terms this ‘realignment of the left’ would grow the forces which would forge Labour’s rebirth in the 1990s.

While Labour never succeeded during the next 18 months in establishing a potentially election-winning opinion poll lead over the Tories, Kinnock’s speech led to an immediate drop in support for the Alliance from which it was never to fully recover. Moreover, the polls showed an immediate rise in the Labour leader’s ratings: for the first time, voters indicated they thought he would make a better prime minister than Thatcher.

By spring 1987, with the economy growing strongly and the Tories relentlessly exploiting the antics of ‘loony left’ councils, the Alliance began, once again, to threaten Labour. Moreover, many of the policies which had contributed to the ‘longest suicide note in history’ four years previously were still in place. But, as Mandelson, who was to play a key role in the 1987 campaign, recognised, Labour had one potential asset: the reputation Kinnock had established in his 1985 conference speech. Clips of his attack on Militant formed a central part in Labour’s ‘Kinnock’ election broadcast.

The broadcast – together with Kinnock’s strong performance during the campaign – ensured that, as Westlake writes, ‘if Labour lost the electoral battle for office, it won the right to remain the major opposition party in British politics’. That had not been a given: at the start of the campaign, Labour led the Alliance by two points. On election day, it was eight points ahead. Philip Gould later summarised the 1987 result by saying: ‘Labour never looked back; the Alliance never recovered.’

Kinnock’s words on 1 October 1985 probably saved the Labour party. Alone, they were insufficient: even after he slaughtered the hard left’s sacred cows after the 1987 general election, Labour lacked a sufficiently positive appeal to win the 1992 election. Neither did Kinnock save the party alone: as Dianne Hayter has detailed, the ‘St Ermin’s group’ of moderate trade unionists worked tirelessly in the early 1980s to wrest the NEC back from the Bennites and thus provide Kinnock with the votes he needed to defeat the hard left.

More than a decade after Bournemouth, Kinnock quoted the words of the philosopher George Santayana as he recalled the lessons of his assault on Militant: ‘Those who forget their past,’ he told his biographer, ‘are doomed to relive it.’

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Robert Philpot is a contributing editor to Progress

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Photo: BBC

Mandatory reselection could reduce Labour MPs to the status of delegates

The idea of mandatory reselection of Labour members of parliament was born out of the frustration with the 1960s and 1970s governments which, according to the Labour left, routinely ignored Labour conference decisions and the policies carefully crafted by the National Executive Committee. Specifically, it was Harold Wilson’s avowal of Labour’s Programme 1973 which had called for state control of the 25 biggest private companies.

Mandatory reselection has echoes of the Paris Commune, and of the Russian Soviets, where delegates were subject to recall if they displeased their local citizenry. It rests on the idea that leaders will always be tempted to sell you out, once they get power. It found theoretical expression in Trotsky’s Transitional Programme, when he argued that ‘the historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership.’

Trotskyists inside and outside the Labour party have always argued that the main obstacle to socialism in Britain is not the Conservatives, the civil service, the security service or the army, but the NEC, leader of the Labour party and the general council of the Trades Union Congress. In the Labour party, ever since Ramsay MacDonald, this myth of betrayal runs deep. It was not Margaret Thatcher but Neil Kinnock and TUC general secretary Norman Willis who blocked real socialism in the 1980s.

But the appeal went beyond the Trots. The idea of mandatory reselection is that a Labour MP should face a reselection in every parliament, so that none becomes complacent, cosy or lazy. Before the policy was adopted at the 1980 conference, many Labour MPs with safe seats lived and worked in London, and visited their constituencies a few times a year to attend their general management committee and make a speech or two. Many had little or no relationship with their local parties outside of elections.

Writing in 1983, Peter Hain noted that, ‘MPs now take more notice of their local parties than they used to … one of the results of reselection has already been … to increase pressure on MPs genuinely to represent local residents, rather than taking them for granted as often happened in safe Labour seats.’

So what is not to like? The problem is that mandatory reselection is a policy designed to enable the hard left to take over the Labour party. In the early 1980s, it was used as a weapon of fear and intimidation. Before Twitter, the hard left called Labour MPs ‘Tories’ in Gestetnered newsletters, and to their faces, in speeches at Labour party meetings.

Roy Hattersley in 1982 told the Sunday Times that, ‘hard-working and devoted MPs have been dismissed without reason or warning. There have been purges of moderates on general committees and pogroms against delegates who listened to their consciences and obeyed their mandates, but offended the prejudices of little tightly organised sects.’

In The Battle for the Labour Party, published that same year, the authors, David and Maurice Kogan, state that, ‘much of the behaviour of the left, though constitutional in principle, was coercive in practice. The constant public harrying of MPs and councillors, the scrutiny of their voting behaviour, the strident attacks on hard-working party members and elected representatives … and the ruthless removal from office of people with a long record of fighting progressive causes do not constitute comradely or even civilised behaviour.’

It is no coincidence that it has been top of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy’s shopping list since the mid-1970s, even before being adopted by Tony Benn and the Bennites. It remains the number one CLPD goal, and it is submitting model resolutions to this year’s conference. It wants to change from the current system of ‘trigger ballots’ which allows a local party to get rid of a Labour MP who really has fallen asleep at the wheel, and instead force every MP in every parliament to face a lengthy and costly reselection.

Their logic is that an MP faced with the prospect of being ‘sacked’ by a few dozen local activists will act in their own self-interest and endeavour to keep the local party sweet. If the price of a seat in parliament is voting for Pete Wilsman for the NEC and Jon Lansman for the conference arrangements committee and to abolish Trident and leave the European Union, then it may be a price they will pay. It ends the idea that a Labour MP is a representative of their community in parliament, and reduces them to being more a delegate from their constituency Labour party. This is politburo politics. The party selectorate – close to 600,000 – becomes more important than the 9.3 million working men and women who voted Labour in 2015.

Tom Watson warned in the dying hours of the leadership campaign that mandatory reselection is a recipe for chaos and conflict. He is right. The Corbyn camp was forced to deny this is their aim, just as Benn did in 1980 when he wrote in his diaries, ‘it was never intended to start a vendetta against certain members of parliament’.

Yet those behind Corbyn, the shadowy Bennites who have waited 30 years, will be identifying parliamentary seats and totting up delegate numbers before the dust of the leadership contest finally settles.

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Photo: Parliament

I am no less proud to be a member of the Labour party than the day I joined. I am proud of everything we achieved in government. I am proud to be a party member today. And I know that the best hope for people in this country remains a united, radical and popular Labour party.

There is no contradiction between celebrating the success of our Labour governments and in understanding that we need to change. New Labour was, above all, about change. We won because we changed. We were able to use power to make millions of lives better because we changed. Changed our party from what had become stale in the past and changed to reflect the different attitudes of the modern electorate. That is what we have to do now. Have the courage to recognise that change is needed but to have the courage too to listen to what the electorate are saying.

We can’t either retreat to either an Old or New Labour comfort zone. We have to create something different, to renew and reinvent ourselves once again. As in Scotland, the way forward does not lie in holding on to old labels and past divisions, it come from offering a positive vision for the future.

It will be difficult but the alternative to changing is that the voters move on without you. And the way back only becomes harder. A lesson we learned the hard way in Scotland.

After an election defeat we always say we have to listen. We said it in Scotland in 2007 when we narrowly lost power. We said it again in 2011 after a catastrophic defeat. Last year we had another painful message from the electorate. The lesson for me is not that we should listen to the voters, we should prove that we are listening by acting.

That is why we have taken a new approach to organising our party, with a focus on our core values and priorities. We have taken action to bring in fresh talent and new faces. And we are taking renewing our organisation from the ground up.

We have an amazing opportunity with the thousands of new members not just to welcome them to the party but to use their energy and enthusiasm to engage with the electorate. To have a real conversation with them about what it is they want in their lives. Because our purpose is not to convert people to a particular strand of Labour party thought. It is not to argue with ourselves. It is to persuade the electorate that we understand their lives, their fears, their aspirations.

I have a challenge to the rest of our movement on behalf of Scotland. I am clear that I lead the Scottish Labour party. We are an autonomous part of the Labour family. But never forget that we are part of the Labour family. We need and want a return to Labour government just as much as any part of our United Kingdom. We need to get rid of the Tory government that has the wrong ideas for our future and to replace a nationalist government that has the wrong priorities and is stuck in the past.

The nationalists want progressives in the rest of the UK to believe that Scotland is ‘a different country’. Don’t believe it for a moment. We can’t do this alone, we can only do it together.

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Kezia Dugdale MSP is leader of the Scottish Labour party. She spoke at the Progress Rally at this year’s Labour party conference

The portrayal of midwives often suggests that all midwives do is deliver babies, and often the entire focus of maternity services policy seems to be on the time of birth and the need to ensure that at this point we keep mothers and their babies physically safe.

This is, of course, of critical importance, but it is by no means the whole story, and if we are to help the public with the challenges of raising children, public policy needs to take a much broader view.

Three important points that public policy needs to take into account are:

• That the midwife has a responsibility to look after women during the entire period of pregnancy, labour and after the birth;
• That virtually all pregnant women access maternity services and for some of them this will be their first or one of their very few encounters with health services;
• That women trust midwives, who are generally seen as people who are there to help them.

Public policy needs to recognise the huge opportunity that exists if the country invests in high-quality antenatal and postnatal care for women. The midwife should be supported to work in partnership with women to help women maximise their ability to mother. Antenatally the midwife can help a woman to understand how to look after herself in order to maximise her baby’s potential even when still in the womb. She can discuss many public health issues which impact on the future of the child such as smoking, obesity, infant feeding. She can help the mother to think her mental health. Postnatally again the midwife can support the mother and the whole family, including fathers, as they cope with the transition to becoming a family. She can detect and get treatment for those problems that may impede the ability to cope such as the development of postnatal depression.

Policymakers may of course argue that current maternity policy supports high-quality antenatal and postnatal care. However, all the evidence suggests otherwise.

First of all, resources are not adequate. There are not enough midwives to ensure cover for all women throughout the entire childbearing period and our midwifery leaders report that they frequently have to move midwives from antenatal and postnatal work to cover the labour ward. A starting point for any Labour government has to be to commit to not only training but also employing enough midwives.

However, it is not all about resources. Antenatally women report in surveys that they do not receive the kind of personalised continuous care throughout their pregnancy that allows constructive discussion about a multitude of important issues. Women report that they see a different midwife at every antenatal visit and postnatal care is currently rated poorly compared to the rest of maternity services with women struggling to see midwives or seeing different midwives and getting conflicting advice.

What women want is to know and trust their midwife. When this is the case midwives are enabled to play a constructive part in supporting women to raise their children. When it is not the case the opportunity is lost and sadly it is those women who need help most – the socially disadvantaged, the women who find services hard to access, the women with mental health problems – who suffer the most. A Labour government needs to commit to the provision of services that deliver personalised women centred care rather than the institution-centred fragmented care we see at present.

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Cathy Warwick is general secretary of the Royal College of Midwives. She tweets @cathywrcm

She was speaking at The politics of motherhood: How does public policy shape families and can it do it better? at Labour party conference, an event by bpas and Progress. To see details of the other speakers please see here, and catch up on what was said with the Storify of the event, here

We might not have got it right but we did think about what we could do for business at the last election – though we appear not to be doing that now.

This was the gist of Chris Leslie’s message to a Progress event on the opening day of Labour’s Brighton conference. ‘I appeal to the frontbench to be careful with the rhetoric about business and avoid aggressive tones,’ he said, because ‘dialogue matters’. Portraying business as a bunch of predators was as ‘bonkers’ as threatening to nationalise the commanding heights of the economy, he went on. Not only was he not impressed with ‘people’s QE’ – ‘If we hoodwink people by saying there is a magic solution to the deficit we will fail’ – but it was ‘nonsense’ to believe that there was £120bn in unpaid tax to be found.

Discussing ‘How does Labour rebuild Relationships with Business’ the former shadow chancellor, who declined any possibility of serving in a Corbyn top team, claimed that the pre-election offer to business – certainty on Europe, reforms to help small businesses and targeted investment – was made up of sound policies but presented together they may have given the impression of wanting to control companies more, though that was never the aim. The ‘anti-business’ jibes had stuck and we did not do enough to counter them, even though the Tories’ increasingly laissez-faire approach does not help business in the way that government should, he said.

Labour should not rely on employees’ natural hostility to business-owners as this usually does not exist – genuine partnership needs to be a valued in any programme to rebuild public services, tackle poverty and grow our way out of austerity. Good business – which values its employees, cares about its community and seeks sustainable approaches to trade – is not uncommon and is as likely to be found among major corporates as the country’s five million SMEs. He accepted that there could be a role for business and the workplace as social partners with government, perhaps on the public health agenda; and he praised the Co-operative Councils movement for being both innovative and inclusive in creating new relationships with local businesses, foreseeing a greater role for cooperatives, mutuals and social enterprise in the economy. We need a successful banking industry but not one built on excessive risk, while the separation of retail and investment banking would be welcomed by business.

What started as a conversation between Leslie and Tim Hames of the British Venture Capital Association grew animated as the meeting became a dialogue between Leslie and the sympathetic audience. We saw more evidence of the first part of his philosophy of ‘passion with prudence’, and his call for evidence-based policymaking was close to exasperated. He ended with a rallying cry: fairness, social justice and equality are Labour values, he said, while exploitation and unearned advantage are nothing to celebrate. ‘Success needs to be tempered by responsibility to the common good’ in business as elsewhere: ‘hear, hear’ to that.

The youngest member of the 1997 parliament is still young and has benefitted from a forced five-year career break from 2005. With his broad understanding, inclusive and common-sense approach Leslie deserves to be the next Labour chancellor; he will not scare the horses and he will listen to business’ legitimate concerns while engaging them as partners in enterprise. Who knows where he will be in five years’ time? Or will it be 10?

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Tom Levitt is former member of parliament for High Peak. He tweets at @sector4focus

Imagine for a moment that you work on the minimum wage. You are over 21, so you are looking forward to it going up on 1 October from £6.50 per hour to £6.70. But you know that, in reality, an extra 20 pence per hour (or an extra £33 per pay packet) is not really going to make much of a difference because of the price of food and utility bills going up.

You work normal hours, 37.5 per week. So, with little chance of promotion, you talk to your boss about overtime, about getting an extra shift each week to help bring some more cash in. It will be tiring, but, after all, it will soon be Christmas, and you’ve got kids to buy presents for.

This is real life for more than a million people in Britain. Those who work in shops and nursing homes, clean office buildings and hotels, and carry out the ‘entry level’ work in our industries.

This is real life for those who are not making enough to get by, and whose main option is: do more work. For far too many, the route to a better job – for one reason or another – is blocked. And once this phenomenon is added together, once the work of all of us is summed up, what this amounts to is the so-called productivity puzzle.

This means that, while the economy looks like it is growing, on a per head basis it is actually stagnating.

I think always of the time I spent work shadowing women in the laundry of a care home. They worked very hard. Plus they worked with people who had incontinence or other illnesses that made the laundry less than straightforward, and large in volume. It is a physical job, and one that, as I saw, was made tougher by long hours and low pay. In fact, the lowest pay possible: the minimum wage.

You might hope that such great people who dealt with difficult circumstances and hard work would steadily get promoted, and earn more. But this is just not the case. CIPD research has demonstrated that those on low pay are not optimistic about their chances of progression.

In fact, only four per cent of their low-paid respondents thought that getting better skills would provide an opportunity to earn more money in the next year, leaving the vast majority believing they had little chance.

You might think that the development of new technology and robotics might be driving out such low-paid work from our economy. But it’s not happening. Back to the future is still out of reach, as capital investment into companies for new technology has failed to fulfil its promise of higher productivity and better jobs by creating an even larger gap in skills that educational systems and current workplaces are failing to fill.

In the end, if you are going to innovate your way into growth, rather than just flog your workforce harder, you might think that you would need an ever more skilful population. Sadly the Tories’ record has been the opposite. There are thousands of jobs remaining unfilled due to a lack of candidates with the right skills. The Employer Skills Survey has shown that this has increased from 16 per cent to 22 per cent over the last few years, leaving us with the equivalent of 146,000 skills shortage vacancies.

So what does this pattern mean for the United Kingdom?

Growth in our economy has been achieved by people working more hours, not by people earning more per hour that they work. We are working harder as a country to produce the same output of goods and services as we were as long ago as 2007, before the global financial meltdown. We might have expected to have bounced quickly out of this; in fact, it has been the slowest recovery since records began.

Bank of England governor, Mark Carney, says that their forecasts show only modest growth for the year ahead, which means yet another year of stagnation. The more we go on like this, the further the long slow climb back to where our economy was at back before the crash.

Further, this is yet another way that any effort to rebalance our economy has failed. London out-indexes the other regions on productivity. Possibly because of skill level. Or infrastructure investment over many years.

But in any case, the only way to improve productivity in the UK is to have a relentless focus on the regions outside London, as well as Scotland and Wales. These areas have great higher education institutions, and strong productive industrial sectors. The problem is growing these parts of our economy in a way that also improves the prevailing skill level of the people in that area. Not an easy task, but skilful economic management and proper industrial plans would be a good start.

Then we need to really tackle the barriers that stop people moving on and moving up. Those currently in low-paid work need to be given both a proper chance to learn and make the most of new technology. And better infrastructure of all kinds for our economy – from broadband to buses, access to childcare and current accounts – must be directed at those parts of our country that are least productive.

And just in case you think that GDP ain’t nothin’ but a number, let me remind you what hard work, over long hours, for the lowest possible pay really means.

For those people in that situation it means forever juggling family responsibilities with getting to work. It means little or no time to think about study, retraining for fulfilling ambition. It means that whatever pride you rightly take in your work, knowing that our country does not prioritise your becoming what you might wish. Rather, you have to work longer hours, and run faster to stand absolutely still.

This kind of work is bad for people. It wears them out, without the promise of better.

Aneurin Bevan wrote that ‘Discontent arises from a knowledge of the possible, as contrasted with the actual.’

It’s no wonder, then, there is so much discontent around.

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Alison McGovern MP is a former shadow minister. She tweets @Alison_McGovern

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JOIN US FOR …

Britain left behind: How can we boost productivity to benefit working people? in partnership with IPA
7.30pm, Tuesday 29 September 2015
Wagner Hall, Regency Road, Brighton, BN1 2RT

Alison McGovern MP Wirral South
John Longworth Director general, British Chambers of Commerce
Nicola Smith Head of economic and social affairs, Trades Union Congress
Chair: Nita Clarke Director, the IPA

Refreshments provided. Wheelchair access available.

Adam Harrison with the latest from the wonk world

Last month Tanked Up reported that Policy Network would be continuing the long-running ‘southern discomfort’ series of studies into Labour’s electoral (mis)fortunes. The problem is now extremely serious, and Patrick Diamond and Giles Radice’s latest instalment takes the form of an entire book.

It makes for grim reading, opening: ‘The Labour party suffered a crushing defeat at the May 2015 general election, finishing nearly 100 seats behind the Conservatives. This was one of the worst results in our history’. The new polling the book presents is then thoroughly depressing for those of us who believe the Labour party is the best vehicle for greater equality in the country. It turns out too few people agree, and not only in the south, though the problem is acuter there. When asked which party is the most trusted to achieve greater equality, 20 per cent of voters overall say ‘Labour’, while the Tories are not too far behind on 14 per cent. In the south itself, Labour’s figure slips to 15 per cent while, devastatingly, the Conservatives overtake Labour on this measure here. A similar reversal of fortunes is revealed when the electorate are asked which party is better on social mobility.

The picture is similarly bleak on public services where ‘too many voters fear that Labour will waste money and give in to producer interests. It is a tragedy that Labour, the party that built the welfare state and institutions such as the National Health Service during the post-1945 Attlee governments, is no longer trusted to manage public services efficiently.’ Voters’ unvarnished feelings about Labour make for painful listening, but sound familiar to those of us who campaigned in marginal seats: ‘When asked to choose which term best described today’s Labour party, 44 per cent of voters in the south selected “incompetent”: across Britain, the figure was 37 per cent.’

Despite this, Diamond and Radice manage to sound a note of hope: ‘We say that the party should not despair. Labour can win. However, to achieve victory in 2020, we have to recognise both the scale and nature of our defeat, accept that the world has changed and launch a major revision of our ideas, strategy and policies.’ They warn against a plunge into policymaking – surely wise given the failure of the eventual splurge of policies under Labour 2010-15 to alter the public’s views of the party. The next step may even involve a new Clause IV. ‘The new Clause IV was a revision that ought to have taken place in the 1950s, rather than the 1990s. Today, the party needs … a modern affirmation of social democratic values as a marriage of social justice and individual freedom augmented by a commitment to internationalism and environmental sustainability.’ They conclude, ‘Labour is a party which voters believe has its heart in the right place, but has too often lacked the courage to take tough decisions and see through change in difficult times.’

Meanwhile, last month Progress released a new paper, ‘Is “southern discomfort” spreading?’, by Lewis Baston. Looking for trends that correlate with Labour’s poor electoral performance in the Midlands, Baston identifies the ‘car indicator’. Between the 2001 and 2011 censuses, the number of households owning cars rose to close to the levels across the south of England, hinting at more individualised and more privatised lives. At the same time, the lack of ethnic diversity across swaths of this crucial region – in contrast to the much more diverse south-east where its performance since 1992 has, surprisingly, actually improved slightly – also tallies with Labour’s ‘Midlands Misery’.

Discovering a winning formula that marries an appeal to Midlands towns with the more metropolitan urban centres which are now the Labour party’s modern-day base is no mean task. That, of course, is before disaster in Scotland is factored back in, alongside creeping Welsh weakness in the face of a Tory challenge identified in Baston’s paper. If there is anything for the party to salvage from the verdict in May it should be the time and space over the next five years to work out where a 21^st century Labour party stands and how it genuinely moves on from its past.

Meanwhile, progressive proposals for straitened times are still being made. Last month IPPR spelt out a different approach to the spending review. It recommends a lower surplus by 2019-20 and making ‘government spending more preventative, integrated and devolved, while boosting employment and economic growth.’ Whatever happens inside Labour, progressive thinktanks will need to continue to be a furnace of ideas for centre-left politics.

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Adam Harrison is deputy editor of Progress. He tweets @adamdkharrison

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Photo: Flickr