Can Labour Do Better in 2014?
Perhaps the correct question is not How can Labour do better? – but simply Can Labour do better?
Micheline Mason spoke to Vice Magazine recently for an article, How Can Labour Do Better In 2014?
. Micheline Mason, a 63-year-old disabled pensioner, recently left the party in order to help with Left Unity, a Ken Loach-backed attempt to build a party to the left of Labour. She told me, “I was raised working class and identify as working class. I thought the Labour Party was the party that represented that group of people, but it didn’t look or sound like that to me. I’ve voted Labour all my life and started going to meetings but I have to say I felt very… well, they were all in suits! I wasn’t expecting that. I don’t remember any sense that they were delighted that I was there at all.”
8 comments
8 responses to “Can Labour Do Better in 2014?”
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Labour’s business spokesman, Chuka Umunna, said this week: ‘The big difference between 1979 and 2013 is that we are all capitalists now.
The real big difference between 1979 and 2013 is that the social democrat leadership of the Labour party makes no pretence of it, if it ever really did.
Or a s Digby Jones (ex CBI president and minister in one of Blair’s Governments) put it so well – the Labour Party is the party of big business and the Tory Party is the party of small business. Labour is now so right wing that when Miliband comes out in praise of Roosevelt today it had to be the Republican version, Teddy Roosevelt rather than FDR who enacted serious reforms in the US in order to save the rule of capital. He knows that the only reforms the ruling class wants now are ones that reduce the standard of living of the working class.
Is it possible to vote labour without any delusions,yes.
Is there any point in voting labour when you get tory?
We know the working class get nothing back from the Labour party.
We know that Chuka Umunna is signalling that the current labour leadership is just as pro capitalist as the Blair government.
Can we urge the working class to vote for another Blair government?
I’m just about convinced to leave the Labour party and join Left Unity!
Come on, who cares about what Chuka says, Labour bought in the Tax Credits something that helps me pay my bills even now. At least Labour has a chance of getting hold of the levers of power in this land. LU doesn’t have a hope in hell’s chance of ever getting there.
OK Robboh – Off you go.
But i would not bank on your tax credits lasting much longer at the present rate – with or without a “Labour” Government. Incidentally, tax credits are a subsidy to low-wage employers, jjust as Housing benefit is a subsidy to grasping landlords.
And what pro working class policies are New Labour promising if they get in after the next election, Robboh ?
No matter how useless the Labour Party is we have to answer Robboh’s point. Robboh is expressing what all other Labour voters, and what other anti-tory voters will say. I will never again vote Labour they have trashed everything to the extent that Osborne can now be clear about who crashed the capitalist economy in 2007/8 and blame Labour who were to afraid of bankers to reject them.