In a recent poll women were twice as likely as men to say they don’t know who cares more about public services, Labour or the Tories. After record investment in schools, hospitals and early-years support women are still unsure that Labour is on their side, so the urgent questions must be: how can Labour convince women that we are still fighting for equality; and what exactly should we be prioritising in terms of furthering the cause?

Firstly, Labour needs to differentiate better between different needs. Women in Britain do not all speak with the same voice, have the same aspirations and use the same services. The difference in the well-being and life-chances of women and girls from different social backgrounds is striking. In addition to this, ‘Intersectionality’, or multiple discrimination, hits a huge number of women across the country; a shocking example of this is that 40% of ethnic minority women live in poverty, twice the proportion of white women. This isn’t to say that women’s characters are determined by their socioeconomic background, but certainly emphasises the fact that Labour needs to develop a greater understanding of the range of challenges faced by women in society.

While we should not underestimate the importance of fighting for policies which benefit women in the middle of the socioeconomic spectrum, for example by continuing and improving Sure Start, the tax credits system, and the rights of part-time and agency workers, Labour should prioritise the welfare of those most in need and battle for the representation of women at the top.

If you put together all the women who have ever sat as MPs since 1918, they would still be a minority in the House of Commons (today they make up less than 20%). Also consider the fact that 96% of directors of the UK’s top 100 companies are men, and we can see that there is simply not a powerful female presence in those spheres which make the decisions that affect us all on a day-to-day basis. Labour should continue its drive towards a more inclusive and gender-equal Westminster: not only by helping women get elected, but also by ensuring that those women, once elected, want to stay in Westminster, and are able to do their job effectively. Labour MPs should be actively working to redefine, in a gender neutral way, what it is to be a good leader, an effective speaker and powerful personality; setting the standard so that women are taken more seriously in their workplaces and communities. Reforming the practices of Westminster and Whitehall so that women are on a more equal footing with men will only enhance the quality of our democracy and our society.

Last, but by no means least, Labour needs to ensure that the Corston Report is not forgotten – the recommendations laid out need to be acted on ensure that the most vulnerable in society are protected. As it stands, the criminal justice system is set up for men and is consequently failing women. In January 2009, there were 4,199 women held in custody and around 77,000 men. Most women are in prison for theft or handling stolen goods- not for serious or violent offences- and nearly two thirds of women were sentenced to custody for less than 6 months.

Home Office research has found that 66% of women in prison have dependent children under 18 and that just 5% of these children remain in their own home once their mother has been sentenced. Women are, on average, less likely to re-offend if community based methods are employed, yet the government seem reluctant to act on the evidence put in front of it. Employing the recommendations in the report would go some way to lifting marginalized women and their families out of the trap of social exclusion; Labour should treat this as a priority and work harder to support those at the bottom.

Labour has worked consistently hard for women over the past decade and we should be proud to actively promote its record in the run-up to the general election. Yet to ensure that women still vote Labour, the party needs to have a vision for what it will do in the future to reduce gender inequality and improve the lives of women across Britain in the next decade.

Only by embracing Keynes’ teachings (the teachings that have been scorned and rejected by the right and New Labour for the 20 years preceding the crisis), was this disaster avoided. Nationalising banks, quantitative easing, slashing interest rates, and a hefty fiscal stimulus dragged us back from the brink. And at almost every turn, the British right, led by the Conservative Party, opposed these vital measures. Had the Tories been in power, we would now be facing a full-scale depression. Progressive politics and economics had been vindicated – the left was right all along!

How, then, do we find ourselves in such dire straits? How is Labour facing a ‘generation in opposition’? How have the Tories succeeded in convincing people that our now massive public debt is a result of a bloated public sector, and not a reckless financial one? Unarguably, Gordon Brown shouldn’t have deregulated, and he was foolish to think he’d broken the business cycle – but these are all things that the left were saying! The Tories were envious of Blair/Browns’ pro-market approach. They looked on at the New Labour-City of London alliance in jealousy and admiration, not disapproval. Things would have been then same, if not worse, under a Tory government.

We can point to Iraq, an ugly and uncharismatic leader, an abused expenses system, and 12 years in power as excuses for when we lose the election. Or we can do something about it now, and prevent the train-wreck that will be a Conservative Government. The left needs to get out there and let the public know that the last thing we now need are drastic cuts in public spending. Gordon Brown is right to say that GDP growth is the best way to reduce public debt, and Conservative policies would only hinder this. The Government should be dedicated to keeping people in work and improving our public services, not scaling them back.

These are things that the public would agree with, if only we managed to get that message across. What we need is a clearer message, emphasized and reiterated over and over again. The labour leadership needs to get a grip of itself, of the arguments, of the media, and start the fightback.

The financial crisis should have lead to a renaissance of the left. However, Labour were too slow and too embarrassed to pick up on this. We didn’t seize the initiative, so the right did. Guido Fawkes and other right wing bloggers are setting the pace for grassroots politics, and the media seem to be captivated by them and their nasty message. But it’s not too late; the facts are on our side. If we write, organize, and campaign, we can, and will, turn the tide. We have to show that the choice facing Britain is one between Labour growth or Conservative cuts. If we can get our message across then we can win the election and ensure a better future for both the British Left and for Britain.

A further chapter was added to the narrative this month, when E-ON, the energy company who manages Kingsnorth power station, revealed they had shelved plans to make it the first “clean carbon” power station in the UK. The controversial plans would have involved building an entirely new power station on the site, which would use experimental technology to try and increase the efficiency in the process of generating energy from coal.

But while climate activists celebrated this decision as a blow to the future of coal-fired power stations, it raised questions of how Britain’s energy future will look. Scientists in support of such “carbon capture and storage” technology argue it is a way-station on the road to low-carbon energy production, but admit that the technology needs significant investment if it is to be viable: even the Carbon Capture and Storage Association describe the “significant technical and financial risk” which carbon capture schemes entail.

So where does the government stand on the issue of adapting the energy industry? The Labour party has promised a “step change” in energy supply, based on an “£100 billion blueprint for renewable energy”, but the specific details of this plan are hard to come by. The Labour government has so far showed an extreme lack of vision for Britain’s energy future, perhaps due, in part, to the fact that the government has seen 15 Energy Ministers in the past 12 years.

This lack of direction is all the more dangerous for the fact that many British power stations, including four of the ten nuclear reactors currently in use, will go out of action in the next few years. Already, the UK relies heavily on imported gas, yet we lack appropriate storage facilities to maintain reserves: Britain can only store 15 days’ supply of gas in comparison to France’s 99 days and Germany’s 122 days.

In the face of all these challenges to energy supply, the Conservative Party has produced a 38-page downloadable policy booklet laying out plans for a “decentralised energy revolution”. The policy, based on the widespread introduction of feed-in tariffs, would allow individuals to generate their own energy and sell excess back to the national grid. Although David Cameron’s commitment to use the “power of profit” as an incentive for improved energy security may be seen by some as the same market-led approach which led “Beyond Petroleum” BP’s to invest nearly £1.5 billion into extracting oil from Canadian tar sands this year – a process which generates four times more carbon dioxide than traditional drilling – the Labour government’s reluctance to initiate such incentivisation has only disempowered home owners from becoming part of the energy solution.

This is supported by Ofgem’s recent prediction that domestic energy prices will rise by 14-60% in the next 10 years; strikingly, the “Green stimulus” scenario, where the government would invest in renewables, nuclear and carbon capture and storage to support economic recovery and the transition to greener energy, would lead to the lowest rise in energy cost (14%), in contrast to the “Dash for energy” scenario, where concerns about the security of our energy supply could push prices up some 60%.

A recent report by the Committee on Climate Change (an independent advisory body created under the 2008 Climate Change Act) comes to the similar conclusion regarding greater investment in new energy resources. Specifically, the CCC recommends the government build 8,000 new wind turbines, four new coal power stations using carbon capture technology, and three new nuclear power plants, which together would cut emissions from the energy industry by 50% by 2020.

The strong commitments of this government to cut national carbon emissions suggest that we are at a turning point for British energy. Despite concerns over burdensome national debt, investment in the energy sector would be a significant positive legacy of the Labour government, and would help set Britain on the path to sustainability and self-sufficiency. With around 35% of the UK’s carbon emissions coming from the energy sector, the time for hesitation has passed. If we believe in the power of our society to adapt to environmental change, we must demand that our politicians take on this message of significant, immediate emissions cuts, and lead the initiative in the transition to low-carbon energy.

10 OULC volunteers

4 nights

8 tents

3x 6 hour shifts

4 broken cider machines

1 day of being impressed with the port-a-loos

5 torrential downpours

4 days of cold showers

3 packets of wet wipes

1 karaoke night

6 free drinks & meals

1 night of unlimited alcohol

£1,200 raised for OULC

Ben Lyons’ dancing: Priceless

Photo: sheepback.cabin

Deep recession. 2.5 million of the UK’s workforce unemployed. A collapse in share prices of over 50%. Forced closure of leading national banks. Sound familiar? What about all of this followed by an historic Labour Party victory? Given the current media coverage, this might not be how you expect the story to end. But in 1929 the country entrusted economic recovery to the party who promised the most radical shake-up of the national economy; the party who was the boldest and shouted the loudest. It was a national leap of faith. Labour had only formed a government on one previous occasion – even then it had been for just a single year. Labour’s appeal to the electorate was not based on their previous record in government – a tactic pursued by Alistair Darling who was already writing the epitaph on Labour’s 12 years of government at their conference in Brighton: “when the history of the past few years comes to be written, this government and this party will be proud”. Neither did they play the game of “they stole our policies”, a popular pastime doing the rounds at Westminster today. Labour castigated, rather than mirrored, the policies of embourgeoisement pursued with vigour by the Tories during the inter-war years. The party chastised the “Tories tax on the poor” and promised an overhaul of the railways and coal industry as well as a progressive programme of national insurance reform. They bravely set the dividing lines between themselves and the Conservatives and it struck a chord with the electorate.

This does not mean that Labour should pledge itself to a programme of (re)nationalisation or indeed the formation of a ‘Socialist Co-operative Commonwealth’ as the party promised in 1929. Yet much can be learned from the visionaries of the late 1920s who fought tooth and nail to secure only the second Labour government in British political history. If you had suggested to a voter in 1929 that Labour and the Tories were essentially the same party they’d have shown as much faith in your political opinions as Germans did in the Weimar Republic. Now the saying “they’re all the same” typifies the apathetic mood of the country. Voters find it very difficult to imagine how a Conservative government might differ from a Labour one – they just have a hunch that its time to find out. Both parties will have to make spending cuts, both present them as “tough choices”. Both parties plan to cut incapacity benefits and the next Chancellor, of whatever hue, is likely to raise VAT to 20%. And, to the probable dismay of Daniel Hannon, spending on the NHS will be ring-fenced and protected. Where are the dividing lines?

The problem is that they exist – Labour just expends too much energy claiming that the Tories have stolen their policies. Frustratingly this claim is not unjustified. Labour initiated reform of incapacity benefits in 2007; the Tories new independent schools – Michael Gove’s cure-all of the education system – sit not a million miles to the Right of Labour’s independent academies; and George Osborne admitted at the Conservative conference that he would retain, temporarily at least, the new 50p tax on top earners. Labour must stop being so reticent in areas where a bold policy initiative might give them the upper hand at the next election. There were positive signs at the Brighton conference. Labour no longer appeared so comfortable fraternising with the ‘filthy rich’ as they once did. Brown admitted that whilst the party once “gloried in a neo-liberal economic policy when it gave us the boom…we now believe you have to intervene”. This is a definite change in tack by the party and one which, if pursued, could redefine economic and financial policy. Darling has expressed his opposition to a cap on bankers bonuses but his plans to link those bonuses to long-term performance and to ensure banks have new minimum financial reserves should be posited as evidence of Labour’s new enthused efforts to crack down on the financial system. Presenting a sea-change in Labour policy would not only represent a popular appeal to voters; it might also shun the accepted, misconstrued Tory argument that Labour got us into this mess but the Tories can get us out of it. It was notable that David Cameron made virtually no mention of bankers or their bonuses at his party conference speech – it was Brown’s record as Chancellor which came under-fire.

This is a problem of presentation as much as substance: Labour should go to greater lengths to espouse its reformist agenda rather than relying on the mantra that the Tories are the party of cuts. Other proposals too need to be pursued. Electoral reform should be given serious consideration. First-past-the-post does entrench a two-party system and a move to reform this inequality might be seen as a brave step by the party to democratise British government – a welcome tonic after a summer of duck-houses and second-home renovations paid for by expenses. The fact that the Conservatives are anti-reform could be left unsaid but at least implied. Labour too should become champions of the environment. The Conservatives have stolen the eco-friendly ground from beneath Labour’s feet but there are still concerns that the Tories will struggle to satisfy investment in the environment with their penchant for spending cuts. Conservative MPs voted against green investment in the budget and Ken Clarke’s recent faux pas on wind-farms seemed to reveal the depth of division and hostility inherent within the party to investment in the environment. Labour could still seize the initiative on one of the most pertinent issues to modern, everyday life. A green drive might expose the shallow depths of the Conservative commitment to the environment as well as providing a positive response to recession: investment now could make Britain a leading exporter of green technology in the future. Part of this is also about reengaging with the British worker: no one wishes to repeat the plight of Vestas workers on the Isle of Wight witnessed over the summer. In 1929 Labour promised to protect “wage-earners, shop-keepers…lower-middle classes…workers”. As the financial system receives a painful scalding and bankers a severe telling off Labour should look to its core support and consider how best to protect the interests of workers in the services industry and in manufacturing. Labour’s electoral victory in 1929 was a close-run thing but a bold agenda and hard fought campaign transformed them from a party of relative obscurity into a party of government. Similar bravery needs to be shown 80 years on.

I have my darker political moments, the days when it becomes difficult to hold onto that progressive optimism in an age when every main party is talking the language of austerity and cuts whilst banks are given blanks cheques signed by the taxpayer. Socialism, it would appear, can be ever so attractive to the rich when their precious market crashes and burns.
Quite what we here on the ‘Left’, whatever that highly generic term means anymore, are supposed to think when one of our last great public services struggles for a cash injection to modernise whilst banks only to need click their fingers to gain instant financial relief, is not clear. No one seems to be asking that vital question of why the hell it is the irresponsible rich have screwed up and receive instant recompense whilst men and women across the country are now faced with picking up the tab.
For years we’ve had the same story of low public expenditure, low taxation and liberal job markets and have enjoyed our secular worship of the twin gods of supply and demand. As our generation has been indoctrinated in this market run society in which wages drifted into murky waters of insufficiency we’ve all accepted that if we want to get anywhere in life we’ve got to take onboard a lifetime’s worth of debt.

One David Harvey, wrote about this bank bailout being a massive consolidation of the banking industry at the expense of the populace in general; nothing new there. In fact there is a particularly relevant precedent in the case of Mexico in 1982 when the IMF mandated austerity for the populace in order to protect the banking industry and the New York Stock Exchange. However the real point he made was that credit finance has been a mainstay of our economic system since the late 1970′s as a means of covering the shortfall between what the labour force has been earning and what it has been spending. Since we live in a consumer society, which lets face it, loves to hate the poor, spending was always likely to run ahead of the earnings that have been sunk by the declawing of the Unions in the mid 1980’s.
Given that we have a Labour party who “are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich” and seem to have, at a basic conceptual level, gone for the self-interest virtues of the market over any fuzzy socialist notions of co-operation; it becomes difficult to see its current political compass as being part of the solution at all.
Of course it was quick to rediscover Keynesian policies and exhume them when the banks came rattling their collection tins outside Parliament, which leaves a lot of us who now face higher taxes, a higher retirement age and a future in which we’re all going to struggle under the ‘burden’ of increased public expenditure wondering just why it is that our government were happy to enforce this on us after years of telling us that to they couldn’t afford to raise taxes to pay for public services, or education or health or maybe even the poor, which to be honest don’t seem to have got any richer recently.
What this situation has entailed is the now cast-iron certainty of a Conservative administration stepping into power come the next general election and even more reasons to despise tax and despise government ‘meddling’.
Lest we forget, we’ve got a generation of people singing songs of market supremacy when they owe their health and their education to the large-scale edifices of the socialist experiment of the Attlee administration. I for one know that if it were not for the social democratic institutions that exist within this country I’d be lucky if I could read, let alone write this little rant, let’s not even go into the health side of things.

Most importantly, none of this was achieved by simply giving up.

Renewal and change, pleasant buzzwords in a world of class division and social injustice; if I could make such words mean something I would make them mean the rediscovery of Democratic Socialism, and the recollection that we’ve a duty not just to the under-privileged of today but to those of tomorrow. I don’t think that socialism is about bowing to the market or a mere managerial style of government, I happen to think it is about continuing the work towards a classless and equal society. So if like me you’re subject to the doubt that comes when faced with a looming Conservative government the message is; “This is our chance to reclaim our party, reclaim our principles and carry on this fight.”

Perception is important, and there can be little doubt that the 2008 conference, and the shift of the BBC to Greater Manchester, has a great deal to do with the government’s decision to delegate more powers to a city region.  Economically the case is already proven. The City Region of Greater Manchester already accounts for a fifth of the North’s economy, adding £47 billion to the UK accounts. This is more than Wales, which has its own Assembly, on both a raw numbers and per capita basis.

Yet since 1986, with the dissolution of the Metropolitan Counties, the city has been punching far below its weight. The siphoning off of £500 million designated for improvement of the Metrolink system to in effect prop up London’s Jubilee Line in 2004 ensured that many voted against the congestion charge this year, sceptical that money would be forthcoming. While Manchester is paralysed by the effect of deregulation, Transport for London remains a public concern. When politicians and civil servants keep public transport in public hands where they live and work, one must conclude that they consider it to be the most reliable system. Which begs the question why, and by what right, they subject the rest of the country to chaos. That such a progressive city as ours pours millions into the pockets of Stagecoach boss Brian Souter, an anti-gay, anti-union fundamentalist, rather than back into the local economy via a public service is a travesty.

With all this in mind, it is important that pressure is applied to our political leaders for greater devolution of powers. The Manchester City Region needs its own authority to match its own identity. It needs a council drawn from each of the fifteen districts, and most importantly it needs a mayor. We can then strip away the bureaucracy of the North West regional assembly, and confusing muddle of the county councils. Each district can elect a local council for local issues, and a representative for the City Council.

With the political infrastructure in place, this city would have a voice on the national stage, while its citizens would still have a direct link with their representatives. Under the current arrangement, impotent and anonymous local councils take decisions which people then ascribe to national government, and complain to their MPs about. Constituents do not get their problems addressed, councils are not scrutinised, and MPs divert time from holding the government to account to being social workers. A devolved assembly would bring transparency to the system.

The strength and determination with which this old, industrial giant has renewed itself is something every citizen should be proud of.  It has survived the decimation of its industry, the machinations of Margaret Thatcher and the devastation of the IRA, and it has come back stronger. Though I like the weather, I am not a North-Westerner. Though I like the history I am not a Lancastrian. I am a Mancunian, and my city deserves a voice: as one city, united.

The constituency of Crewe and Nantwich was a Labour safe seat until 2008; a seriously safe seat, in fact. It had been held for the 25 years since its creation by the formidable Gwyneth Dunwoody, so when she died, it seemed a given that Labour would be able to hold a coronation for whoever they wanted to replace her. The local MP is now a spry, Cameroon Tory in his mid-30s, Edward Timpson. If we’re thinking about how to win an election in 2010, we need to ask ourselves; how do we stop the Crewe and Nantwich by-election repeating itself on a national scale?

The short answer is “Don’t make it about class”. Labour strategists thought Timpson could be defeated by dressing activists up in top hats and mocking his millionaire public-school background. The seat swung 17.6% to the Conservatives, and the lesson was that class politics just doesn’t wash with the electorate any more. Yet more than a year on, the Left is still harping on the same tired theme of the ‘toffs’ across the aisle. Say they’re out-of-touch with the concerns of working families. Say that their economic policies are callous and will put hundreds of thousands out of work. Say that they will set back the agenda of social justice by 30 years if they get in to power. Once you’ve said all that, the fact that some of them went to Eton doesn’t seem so terribly compelling any more.

I don’t mean to suggest for a moment that a responsible Labour agenda shouldn’t deal with the incredibly troubling issues of equality and social mobility, but we have to talk about it in the right way. We should talk about the fact that a child born in Britain today has only a 5% chance of being in a different income bracket from its parents, and we should take pride in the fact that we expect people earning six-figure salaries to make more of a contribution to paying off the national debt because we think they can. Whilst doing it, though, we have to remember that equality and class aren’t the same thing; one is the vital heart of a modern progressive agenda, and the other is a dead paradigm that people just don’t find sympathetic any more. Every time Harriet Harman gives a speech vowing to end ‘class discrimination’, I feel like I’m watching a documentary about the early 1970s.

The problem is that voters don’t, for the most part, identify themselves by class anymore. It was said of Labour’s problems in combatting Harold Macmillan that “people had ambitions for their children, rather than their class”, and if it was a problem in the 60s, it is understandably a much bigger problem today. A few things have destroyed the sense of class identity that once mattered in Britain; unions have declined, and feminism, multiculturalism and the gay-rights movement have all encouraged the development of different ideas of identity. This means that class conflict has largely gone. There was a poignant moment in John Prescott’s documentary about class last year when he asked a girl living on a Newcastle council estate if she considered herself “working class”, to which she replied “Naaa-I’m middle class. How can I be working class? I don’t work”. Voters are interested in who will advance their interests; there seems to be no necessary reason that the Conservatives can’t do this too. Indeed, whilst Labour have vowed a public sector pay freeze and scrapped their own 10% tax rate, the Tories led the charge on closing the loopholes for non-domiciles. If that’s all people see, then it doesn’t help to say that the Tories themselves have money; we need to instead be reminding people that it is the same party that wants massive spending cuts and a £1 million inheritance tax threshold.

We aren’t even playing class politics well; the one-dimensional stereotype won’t wash with voters whilst ‘Dave’ is trying his best to be a man of the people. The photo of Cameron and Johnson on the steps in Peckwater Quad in full Bullingdon uniform is trotted out a lot, but all it seems to speak of young men with too much money spending it badly, not a callous disregard for the poor. The top hats in Crewe, or the drama scenes in ‘When Boris Met Dave’, make it look like Labour doesn’t have anything to say about the present, only an incompetent and unbelievable view of the past.

There is another, perhaps more insidious problem, with Labour using the ‘politics of privilege’, which is that it’s not entirely clear that Labour aren’t the party of privilege. The caricature of the Tories as a party full of posh people is at best false and at worst hypocritical, and voters can see this. Cameron and Johnson maybe Old Etonians, but Tony Blair’s school, Fettes, is often referred to as “the Scottish Eton”, and Ed Balls, Alastair Darling and Harriet Harman all went to private schools. David Miliband’s father may have been a great Marxist theorist, but David inherited his Primrose Hill mansion worth £1.5m; Shaun Woodward claimed mortgage interest on expenses in spite of being a multi-millionaire. The strategy used in Crewe and Nantwich of attacking hereditary advantage seems weakest when we remember that the Labour candidate, Tamsin Dunwoody, was the daughter of the previous MP. On the other side, Eric Pickles and David Davis were both born in to socialist families with manual jobs, whilst William Hague could hardly be said to be a public-school toff. If we want to claim that we are the party without privilege, we’re going to have to get a better PR strategy (and perhaps some more convenient back stories).

Equality and progress matter enormously. By defining the parties by class interests rather than real policies and beliefs, we lose our biggest advantages; whilst class lines are far from clear, there is a very real difference when it comes to the challenges of education, welfare, tax and discrimination. Boris and Dave aren’t wearing the Bullingdon tailcoats anymore, but they’re still not living in the real world; the electors of Crewe and Nantwich were allowed to forget that, but the country mustn’t be.

Beyond its role as an outreach organisation the Women’s Caucus of OULC acts as an autonomous body. In this capacity we hope to act as an unthreatening forum to generate political debate. We promote gender discussion within the club and consequently help to push the debate outwards from the united body. By organising as a single sex grouping the caucus is identifying the fact that women wishing to be politically involved often start from a disadvantaged level. We feel this is partly also a symptom of a culture in which women are less likely to self-promote, possibly due to the inherent masculinity of the qualities often ascribed to successful leaders. By organising in this manner those women who already feel confident enough to put themselves forward can help encourage those who do not. The caucus provides a base for women’s agitation and organisation while simultaneously hoping to externally educate in the name of gender equality.

Aside from all this seriousness we are also a social group. The caucus is a place where like minded left-leaning women can congregate in a unique environment. The actions of the Caucus are very group directed and so we hope to incorporate a range of different functions including that of an informal social society. We hold regular ‘Women’s Drinks’ as well as our main event of the term: the ‘Ladies in Red’ extravaganza.

If you are interested in getting more involved, sign up to the women’s mailing list by emailing: martha.mackenzis@sjc.ox.ac.uk

In his 2002 autobiography, Interesting Times, the justly revered Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm dwells extensively on his experience of student politics in the ‘Red Cambridge’ of the 1930s. An ardent member of the Communist Party, he had a lot more to argue his way out of than modern Labourites; if you thought the 10p tax was tricky, try winning an argument on the Nazi-Soviet Pact. “We accepted the new line, of course,” he remembers, “Was it not the essence of ‘democratic centralism’ to stop arguing once the decision had been reached? And the highest decision had obviously been taken.” It seems that ‘calls for unity’, issued by closed party elites taking the wrong decisions for the wrong reasons, are nothing new in left wing politics.

Some of us, like Hobsbawm in the 30s, might not have a problem with this. As he explains elsewhere, his loyalty to the Comintern was all but unconditional, at least until the last, faintly ludicrous years of Stalin’s tyranny and the brutal crushing of the Hungarian revolt in 1956. To him and millions of communists around the world, the Soviet Union – however flawed – was a beacon of ‘really existing socialism,’ a non-negotiable rallying point for a fiercely disciplined international movement. Similar arguments, in essence, have long been bandied about in reference to Labour’s mis-steps over the past decade. The mere fact of government is an automatic justification for any betrayal of principle. Tribalism and ‘discipline’ have become substitutes for engagement. An unholy trinity of Prescott, Campbell and Mandelson preach ‘put up and shut up’ at every opportunity. 

In reality, any number of shadowy representatives from the ‘public affairs’ industry can now command more attention from the party leadership than any mere CLP could ever hope to; the proof lies in the changed nature of Conference, which helpfully combines fringe events where much is discussed and nothing changes with setpiece speeches where nothing of any significance is ever said at all. Such are the rigours of democratic centralism in the age of Sky News. But where do we come in?

On a national level and in the long term, it is clear that the British left is still stuck in a limbo of sorts, no longer able to advocate the interests of a withered union movement yet seemingly incapable of marshalling the better natures of the silent majority of British citizens who would vote for a social democratic movement that unashamedly shared their desire for a reformed society. Tightly controlling leaderships and an addiction to the news cycle leaves party membership a profoundly disempowering experience. The collapse of a political culture and public sphere worthy of the name is a well-documented phenomenon, which has served to hollow out the membership of all three political parties – although Labour has fared by far the worst. As an unusually strong and active university Labour club, we are in a position to do some hard thinking about what our role should be in relation to the party as a whole, at a time when the leadership’s stranglehold on internal debate has perceptibly weakened, and the process of politics itself is an increasingly prominent political issue.

A clear choice is open to us in this context. We can humbly receive gracious emissaries from the wonderful world of Westminster, beg them for some choice Blair anecdotes, and send them away reassured of our campaigning zeal and happy to offer some of us internships. We can hold endless policy forums without ever bringing policy motions, or exploring ways in which we can actively influence party policy through the formal and informal avenues open to us. Or we can do what students do best, what student politics should be all about – getting angry and getting even. Lord knows each and every one of us has things they disagree with the leadership about. We are not a think tank: we are an affiliated, campaigning Labour organisation. We earn our right to have our say in the wider movement by the work we do here in Oxford for the local candidates we admire and care about. No member of the cabinet deserves our deference. No policy, local or national, is immune to our scrutiny.

The way ahead is clear: we must work harder to campaign for change within the party whilst continuing to build support for Labour in the wider community. Few would disagree that, in any democratic political organisation, these two aims are inseparable; the right to the first is conditional on the second. Moreover, it is critical to realize that unless Labour is seen to be an organisation whose members can mobilise to make a tangible difference to party policy, then we wish shutting out huge numbers of principled, politically active people – especially the young – who see themselves as being ‘of the left’ but are rightly disgusted by the monied, militaristic excess of the past ten years, and mourn the death of their natural home.

This is not an issue of loyalty Vs betrayal, unity Vs fragmentation. It is deeply perverse that we seem to be much keener on putting in incredible effort on behalf of those in power than actively influencing what they do in our party’s name. Redressing that balance is key to OULC’s continued renewal, and it’s up to all of us to bring more policy motions, ask more difficult questions of speakers, and provide a broader range of clear mandates for our delegates in national organizations. As we go into another year and another freshers’ recruitment drive begins, a proclamation of the end of deference towards party elites would be the best possible advert for the vitality and relevance of our organisation.