See Dronfield...

I’m delighted to see Mark Thomas new book “The People’s Manifesto” is now available from the publisher as a traditional paperback and an ebook. It’s as razor sharp as any of his previous books & TV shows, and stunningly diverse because each policy was suggested and voted on by the general public in shows all over the country last year. I was at the Newbury gig. It was very funny. Definitely a present to consider for all thinking carbon based life forms in your vicinity....

FROM THE LETTERS PAGE OF TODAY'S GUARDIAN"Last lap for the Labour hopefuls.The ballot papers are due to go out in the Labour leadership contest (Labour contenders await Blair, 30 August). At the last minute each of the candidates has produced a manifesto, but (except in one case) these are tucked away in an obscure blog entitled Dronfield Blather, which is run by the Dronfield Labour party discussion group, which ran a three-month campaign to obtain them. It would be helpful if the voters could first see what they are voting for. The manifestos differ considerably in style and presentation. Andy Burnham's is entitled Aspirational Socialism and is some 9,000 words long. He is also pushing this via his own website. The others have not yet done this. Diane Abbott and David Miliband have...

The entry "Manifestos Of Intent - Read These Before You Vote" has been updated, as the blog "Dronfield Blather" has now received material from all five candidates in the Labour Leadership Election. See here.Now that they have all set out their stalls, we have something to judge the winners' actions by in the future. That will aid the democratic process within the Labour...

See the Manifestos from the Candidates in the Labour Leadership Election...

In response to the campaign run by "Dronfield Blather", Andy Burnham has today issued a Manifesto setting out the programme he would seek to pursue if he is elected as leader of the Labour Party. It is some 9,000 words long and can be viewed and/or downloaded from his web-site. It is a serious contribution and should be studied by all those with votes in the leadership contest. Andy describes his stance - "It begins with a definition of the philosophy that underpins my approach to politics and outlook on life. It is Aspirational Socialism. It means that we want all people to fulfil their hopes and dreams but knowing that this will only happen for those who have least if we work for a world where resources and power are shared".It is hoped that the four other contestants will set out their...

The Following is taken from the blog "Dronfield Blather".Yesterday as part of his Labour Leadership Campaign, Andy Burnham circulated an email in which he stated - "Next week, I will set out in my manifesto how I intend to rebuild our great Party from the bottom up, as an open and vibrant campaigning force with power vested in the hands of our members. ..... My manifesto – ‘Aspirational Socialism’ – is a coherent political philosophy and vision for our country. Keep an eye on my website at www.andy4leader.com for more information. You will be able to download my manifesto to read at your leisure." As we first reported on 2nd July, Andy's action is fully in line with a commitment he had then made to "Dronfield Blather". Following a further exchange of emails, he repeated his...

I’ve always been a bit lost as to why Billy Bragg’s vote is the most sought-after in the country.  I’m pretty sure he only has one vote, and I’m pretty sure he’s not perfectly representative of a large group of people, unless the number of ageing, slightly hippie folk guitarists has been on an exponential growth curve while I’ve not been looking.  Be that as it may, he’s got a piece on Labour Uncut today telling us what the new Labour leader will need to do to secure his West Dorset-based ballot sheet cross: The new leader would…. have to give me something to vote for. The party desperately needs to remember why it was formed; to defend ordinary people from exploitation by a financial system that refuses to accept any responsibility for...

Here.

There are several blog posts in the offing, and all of them seem in one way or another to feed back to a common theme: the direction of Conservative thought and practice.  They include: 1) An assessment of the Coalition’s plans for referenda on new housing developments in rural areas, which betrays the same remarkable lack of understanding of the dynamics of localities as was displayed just three weeks ago when the Tories came up with the wheeze about time-limited tenancies and people being forced to move house if they get a job. 2) An assessment of Cameron’s support for minimum alcohol pricing and how this reflects not just a lack of understanding about the realities (and prices) of alcohol consumption, but a wider , class-based discrepancy in the way social problems and...

Jimmy ReidI always remember as a young 11 year old scout seeing the River Clyde for the first time as we neared the end of the slow and dreary overnight 14 hour voyage from Dublin to Glasgow. Dreary was the voyage trying to catch some fitful sleep in the basic “steerage” class in the bowels of the antiquated Burns and Laird boat “Irish Coast” which carried a mixture of cattle and people. I looked at the cattle with envy as they disembarked three hours before us at Port Glasgow; to this day I’m convinced they had the better deal. Dreary was the voyage and dreary was the wet drizzly morning as we edged up the river to the centre of Glasgow. But as we went up the Clyde I looked open mouthed at the miles and miles of shipyards with their slipways to the river, enormous sheds and...

Washington hates Chavez because he's raised living standards for the poor. (and because he won't bow to the giant corporations) That's why he's pilloried in the media, because his socialist model of democracy doesn't jive with America's slash and burn-style of capitalism. Chavez has enacted land and oil industry reform, improved education and provided universal healthcare. He's introduced job training, subsidies to single mothers, drug prevention programs, and assistance for recovering addicts. Venezuelans are more educated than ever before. Illiteracy has been wiped out.Chavez's policies have reduced ignorance, poverty, and injustice. The list goes on and on. Venezuelans are more engaged in the political process than anytime in the nation's history. That scares Washington. US elites...

Others have already commented on this witless tripe in yesterday's Observer, in which Catherine Bennett fires a broadside against the "new" mantra of choice in public services. (DK has a particularly fruity comment piece up.)It's worth reading in full, but the short version is: We don't want such choices. We are all too fucking thick to understand the difference between a good school and a bad school. What we really want is for a benevolent State to take away that choice and just cater for our basic needs, as demonstrated by......the much cited experiment with jam, by the US academic Sheena Iyengar, which found consumers were more than six times more likely to buy a pot if they had to choose from six varieties, rather than 24. If uncertainty about preserves is a problem one can probably...

"You want me to what now?" All through this year and last year, as strike after strike was brought down by employers’ opportunistic legal attacks – on any grounds they could possibly muster, whether those grounds had any material effect on the situation or not – I said that laws governing strike ballots were draconian and poorly constructed, failing to fulfil their stated aim of protecting the democratic rights of workers in trades unions. Employers’ group, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, have underlined my point with a recent demand that the government tighten laws on strike ballots, and consider banning strikes altogether and introduce compulsory arbitration in “key” industries. There’s no pretence that tightening...

Staff on strike at HMP Elmley In 2008, following Gordon Brown’s announcement of severe inroads into the public sector workforce, and the services which people depend on, the TUC meeting in Brighton declared that there would be co-ordinated action to stop the cuts. Two years later, this demand is again on the lips of members – and again little is likely to be done. Unions likely to be involved in strike action aren’t looking for pay-rises, they’re looking to defend the services they operate against pay cuts. In services like prisons, where a Damoclean sword hangs above Senior Officers and where recruitment has been frozen, the attitude of the government to spending puts lives at risk. It also puts crime rates at risk; as Brian Caton, one of the leaders of the Prison...

Reading the Economist this week, I noted an article which might provide the opening lines to the epitaph of Sunny Hundal’s idea (responded to by myself and Madam Miaow) that the right-wing Tea Party movement are somehow more successful at taking control of the Republican Party than their leftie counterparts. The usual ideas (clichés?) are floated by Sunny – we socialists are all too busy fighting amongst ourselves etc, they’re more pragmatic while we’re more idealistic etc – but in actual fact, the seeming drift of the Republicans towards the Tea Party movement doesn’t change the nature of the Republican Party at all. Fiery rhetoric about slashing state powers on the ground, continuing corporate welfare when not stumping. The Economist...

Here’s our MMT guru Warren Mosler bemoaning, sort of, increased economic confidence in Europe: Unemployment working its way lower in tiny increments unfortunately causes politicians and mainstream economists to think their measures are ‘working,’ including revised down deficit projections from the automatic stabilizers, and that it all just need lots of time due to the severity of the downturn. …..And it is very bad for people forced to wait years before their lives can begin to recover, as with modest improvement in GDP a fiscal adjustment that could drastically accelerate the move back to full employment is highly unlikely. At age 60, it’s not looking like I’ll get to experience how good this economy could be for everyone if we understood monetary operations and...

I’ve just read this post over at Max Atkinson’s blog, which admittedly I would have never encountered were it not for an eye catching tweet containing the link, which insinuated that if elected, Ed Miliband would take the Labour Party back to the dark days of 80′s class warfare. The basis of the argument laid out in the post is best summed up in the following paragraph; Now that Ed Miliband has won the backing of the big unions, whose support Ed Balls had been hoping for, the question is: can Labour afford to back Ed Miliband on his journey back to 1979 and the wonderful world of old Labour? The implication, that Ed Miliband is some sort of militant figure one might expect to find on the hard left, wo is comparable to the likes of Michael Foot or Tony Benn, is...

A substandard comment on the Labour party would have slipped past my otherwise observant radar, were it not for the collation of good and bad blog entries by the super observant blog of Poumista. Hywell Williams, in a piece entitled Nye Bevan: the Militant Godfather, states unapologetically that: Bevan created a party within a party and together with his Bevanites he brought a Leninist skill to the business of organising internal dissent to Clement Attlee and Gaitskell. All the typical stuff about Bevan being a Marxist and entryist to bring about his rancid communist beliefs in a normal decent party (my bombast). Not true, but even so, the point about Bevan creating a party within a party (as though this had a direct effect on the militant tendancy of the eighties – can Bevan...

A comment on Duncan’s piece on goings-on in the BNP got me thinking. It’s all very well, ran this comment, people gearing up to protest the latest march of the EDL or the BNP, but what about actually getting something done? This is much less ‘sexy’ (so runs a certain strand of opinion) and therefore attracts less attention than marching all over the place. Such opinions are regularly levied at various lefties occupying students union councils up and down the country. They’re too concerned with Palestine, say the centrists and right-wingers, and not concerned enough with what’s going on in our own university, with our own students etc. The truth is a little different, I think. This comes out when lefties propose solidarity demonstrations with unionised...

Diane Abbott has agreed to this request to issue a manifesto spelling out how she would act if elected as Leader of the Labour Party. Andy Burnham was the first to agree to do this. Responses are still awaited from the other three candidates. They were first contacted on the matter over a month ago. Subsequently David and then Ed Miliband had the matter brought to their attention at public meetings. Whilst Ed Balls has been contacted on the issue by one of his parliamentary nominees.So we could yet get 5 out of 5. If you have a vote in the Labour Leadership contest, then you can sign up to this campaign...

A couple of weeks ago I was spouting about the need to get back to the basics of what money is, and start to challenge deeply entrenched  assumptions about the need to pay down debt, and hence the need to cut public spending.  Paul S and Barney, two of TCF’s coterie of intelligent commenters, have given interesting responses: I just feel that the papers you refer to just aren’t convincing. They are almost pre-scientific in their analysis, and all of them are far too brief to adequately cover the ground (Barney). But look how long and complicated your blog post it. In politics, if you’re explaining you’re losing.  And if you’re explaining at that length in that detail (without accredited economics qualifications that enable you to argue from authority, however unfairly)...

This week's White House meeting between leaders will bring little comfort for a Democratic  president  battling for survival. I'm sure the American people will limit the damage he has done to one term....

I see Ed Miliband and Ed Balls are trying to out-graduate tax each other.  ‘[A Graduate tax] would prevent the burden being put unfairly on students and their families, and link to their ability to pay,’ says Ed. I argued for a graduate tax, because it was a fairer system which meant no upfront costs and no assumed debt for students and their families. says Ed. How you are spoiling us, Ed & Ed, with all your new talk of fairness. Unfortunately, their proposals are only slightly fairer than the current proposals to increase tuition fees.  They are still unfair. Ed & Ed seem to have conveniently set to one side that, just 20 years ago, we had a system that was actually fair. It’s called general taxation. It is disappointing, to say the least, that both Ed &...

Sunny tweeted an article at me this morning (the blog-equivalent of being flipped the bird?) entitled “The problem with the Left and their political parties“. It makes a variety of assertions – that the Left blame of leaders is leading to despair and that Right is more pragmatic and inclined to think strategically than the Left, or that really the Left can’t fix that much, so why bother trying? The conclusion of the article is that Lefties are too focused / aren’t focused enough on parliament, and that we’re all infighting-happy. Truthfully, if the people’s front of Judea had been mentioned, I think we’d be on track for highest number of clichés in the one article. So allow me to make the case for the defence. First contention; the Right...

‘Sites of resistance’ Before I got waylaid by other pressing matters, I had started on a series of posts trying to set out some ideas on how the left might move past the rhetoric of how important it is to resist the coalition’s cuts, and start preparing actually to resist the cuts. The first post concerned itself with advising against the kind of action that can be comforting for the left, but which isn’t actually very effective.  This includes the careful organisation of  mass demonstrations, often in London, where everyone turns up on coaches, is carefully controlled by the police, waves some banners, listens to Tony Benn or some other venerable notable, and goes home again.  All this takes a lot of time, energy and money, and acts as a useful...

Garland. Daily Telegraph 9 July, 2010.In batches between 20 and 28 June I emailed 141 of my former Labour parliamentary colleagues seeking support for them to back a call to the Labour Leadership Candidates to issue what some of us have called "Manifestos of Intent". Our proposal is explained here. The candidates themselves have been approached three times since 18 June on the matter, with an extra copy of the request being handed over by me directly to David Miliband at a meeting at Sheffield. The matter was also raised with Ed Miliband at a meeting on Friday. He had not seen it. These various efforts have so far received only two responses, both of them positive. One from John McDonnell giving his support and the other from Andy Burnham accepting our proposal. The two Eds, whom I have...

At the Fabian sponsored Labour leadership hustings held last month, Emma Burnell asked the $64,000 question to the candidates, with the chair Gaby Hinscliff challenging them to answer the question in one line: what does socialism mean to you? The results were not necessarily to be expected. David Miliband was most indirect, admitting he was happy with the words ‘democratic socialism’ on his membership card, clearly uncomfortable with aligning himself with it; Ed Balls laboured over “collective action” and having no truck with ridding the state, unlike the right who will do anything to resist responsibility; Ed Miliband took the line that socialism is more about being able to criticise and challenge capitalism than actually getting rid of it; Andy Burnham told us he has...

So for the next five posts I am going to discuss the Labour Leadership race, by discussing each candidate in turn. This week I am going to start off with whom I personally believe to be the most controversial candidate of the whole leadership battle. Prior to the beginning of the Leadership race, I must admit that I had never heard of Diane Abbott. The only candidate that I had heard of was David Miliband, due to the obsessed love for him by an old school friend. I have to admit that I was in support of Miliband, due to my political naivety and the only one I knew about but decided to check out the other candidates and this saga of posts will help me to come to a comprehensive decision before September comes around. Diane Abbott, the only female and black women to have entered the race,...

The Socialist Health Association are backing the call for candidates in the Labour leadership election to issue "Manifestos of Intent". Andy Burham is the only candidate who has so far agreed to do...

Counter-intuitive thought for the day: beat the Tories or this man may be your next Prime Minister Prior to the election, I wrote a piece asking people to support TUSC – the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition. In the immediate aftermath of the election, like so many others, I was buoyed by what seemed a shocking victory by Labour – yes the vote had been slashed and the parliamentary majority had been lost, with Labour dropping to second-party status but it didn’t quite feel like a defeat. Despite my previous resignation of Labour membership, despite the constant barrage of attacks by the tabloids and despite Lib-Dem pre-game triumphalism about a drop to third place, Labour defied expectations and I was euphoric. This was supplemented by the electoral annihilation of...

(This continues Dave Zachariah’s paper. Below are parts 4 and 5. Also have a read at parts 1 and 2, and part 3.) 4. The State in a Capitalist Economy: The total labour performed in the capitalist sector results in a product that is distributed among the agents in Figure 1. People who administer the state hold a position in the economy that gives them opportunities to privileges, wealth and power through its capacity to levy taxes. The state provides the capitalist sector with a juridical system and laws without which it could not operate, but at the same time the state is dependent on tax revenues from the incomes in the sector and credits in order to act in the world economy. This dependence forces state managers to be concerned about maintaining the economic activity,...

The call which appeared here, has received a positive response from Andy Burnham (photo) and has the backing of John McDonnell. It is a request for the candidates in the labour leadership contest to issue "Manifestos of Intent" related to the democratic socialist principles contained on the back of Labour Party Membership Cards.The other four candidates have today been sent this fresh email - "Dear Diane Abbott, Ed Balls, David Miliband and Ed Miliband,A fortnight ago I emailed then posted you a request to issue a "Manifesto of Intent" for the Labour Leadership Campaign. Manifestos which it was hoped would be issued widely amongst those with votes in the selection. I also handed a copy of the request to David Miliband that day, at a meeting he addressed in Sheffield.So far Andy Burnham...

Ken Coates died on Sunday. He had a great capacity for what others would call work; whether it was political writing, academic output, establishing bodies which integrated publishing with group organisation, being a member of the European Parliament or participating in the dialectics of debate with adult students or political activists. But none of the above were chores to Ken. What he saw as the real work he undertook in his life was when he was a coalminer from around the ages of 18 to 26. But even (or especially) in those days he learnt a great deal from various of his workmates and those he socialised with about Trade Unionism and Labour Movement Politics. So when he went to Nottingham University to study Sociology in what I will later show was the key political year of 1956, he...

The headquarters in Moscow of the former KGB, now the Federal Security Service Senior Ex-KGB Man Claims 400Russian Spies In U.S.  I think most Americans new who he was?...

What follows is a paper presented by Dave Zachariah to the conference for the Swedish labour movement’s researcher network. Today’s article includes chapters 1 and 2, Introduction and Conceptions of the State. Chapters 3, 4 and 5, 6 then 7 will follow at intervals on this blog. Dave asked to have this posted here to see if an activist feedback would be forthcoming. 1. Introduction: How did social democracy turn from being one of the most successful political mass movements in history into a series of national parties in political crises and deep ideological confusion within one hundred years? The thesis in this article is that the crisis of social democracy is a long-term result of the fundamental problems that the political strategy of any reformist workers’ movement...

Paddles! 20mg Epi! Stat! Get this social movement on its feet! What follows is a summary of the ten pages of notes I took at Saturday’s BlogNation event, organised by Sunny Hundal under Liberal Conspiracy’s banner. On a personal note, it was great to meet Paul Sagar, Paul Cotterill, Carl Packman, Kate Belgrave, Cath Elliott and Sunny himself, as well as seeing a bunch of other blogoland people I’d met before. Especially gratifying was the piss up afterwards. There were four main elements to the conference; over the first two, six people spoke from the front of the room about upcoming battles for the Left and how we should address them. After three speakers had their turn, each table discussed the issues, what they thought they could add to what the speakers said and...

In my last piece, I said that fiscal deficits as a problem are a convenient fiction for the right, and that it is perfectly logical for a country with its own sovereign currency to have as high a deficit as is needed to guarantee full employment. Barney poses his regular, perfectly understandable, question: why won’t we get inflation if we ‘just print money’? Paul Sagar raised the same issue when I saw him on Saturday, but I was keen to get to the pub. Now, I could just ask them to read the links I’ve already provided which cover this (see below), but he’s right that I should try and summarize the issue myself as I don’t think I’ve ever put it in my own words. So if you’re sitting comfortably…..let’s do brief fundamentals. Two basics we’ll take as read. 1)...

What’s getting my goat There are bleeding millions of words floating about the leftie blogosphere and media telling us how terrible the cuts are going to be.  There are not quite as many words, but still bleeding loads, telling us how we should resist the cuts because they are really, really bad for a) public services b) the economy. With notable exceptions, these articles don’t tell us anything about what we might actually do.  Take this lead article, just for example, in the most recent Red Pepper (chosen simply because I am now their favourite writer and want to advertise the fact shamelessly).   It’s fine in its own way, but it does go through the all too common ritual of a) giving us a headline to tell us we’re going to be told how to resist the cuts b) setting...

No doubt the Conservative-LibDem coalition is breathing a small sigh of relief that UNISON, one of the biggest public sector unions, yesterday re-elected Dave Prentis by 67% compared to 33% for two Left challengers. The fact that there were two left candidates at all is itself ridiculous but it’s not the worst part of the matter. In re-electing Dave Prentis, after the customary bureaucratic shenanigans that is part and parcel of UNISON internal politics, the union has given the Con-Dem coalition what they want; someone quite willing to further ossify the union as an adjunct to faux Tory populism rather than as an organisation that will defend jobs, pensions and working conditions. By faux populism, I of course mean the recent headlines that Cameron and co have been calling on...