By John McDonnell MP (article originally written to promote the now-cancelled conference A Labour Movement Agenda for a Labour Government. First published at Labour Hub, slightly amended here to take account the the conference’s cancellation).
The discussion over the need to scrap the callous two-child benefit cap – led by the likes of the Archbishop of Canterbury and Gordon Brown, but reflecting the long held feelings of anti-poverty campaigners and organisations – has shone a much needed spotlight in the ‘mainstream’ media and political discourse on the horrendous levels of child poverty in this country.
The facts are stark and the situation bleak.
Absolute poverty is now at 18%, and on child poverty, UNICEF reported in December that child poverty levels in the UK are the worst among world’s richest nations.
Yet in the House of Commons week after week the Tories refuses to even acknowledge not just the scale of poverty in our country but also the depths it has reached with one million children experiencing destitution, in other words, not having the basic essentials to even get by.
We are then in the midst of a poverty, debt and destitution crisis for many of our people.
Yet at times there seems to be a cross-party conspiracy of silence not to mention the seriousness of the crises we are facing, not only in terms of poverty, inequality and the cost-of-living emergency, but also the climate emergency.
This poses an urgent necessity for those of us on the left to break up any emerging consensus for continuing inhumane austerity – and instead initiate a serious discussion on the policies that can address 14 years of Tory misrule and its catastrophic effects.
It’s the same head-in-the-sand approach from the Tories when it comes to the climate crisis, and the situation facing our public services after being starved of essential resources for years on end.
On climate, it was reported that the UK is facing food shortages and price rises after extreme weather. Many countries we rely upon for food imports are also suffering shortages, often due to drought, with Morocco as a chronic example.
This is all within an international context where the UN has warned the world is on the verge of a climate abyss.
A recent Guardian survey found that hundreds of the world’s foremost climate experts expect global heating to soar past the international target of 1.5C.
Yet despite all this evidence of the impact of climate change, the government colludes with the fossil fuel industry in expanding fossil fuel exploration and supply. They also starve the alternative green energy sector of the resources it needs.
The political bankruptcy of this government has been exposed in dealing with these twin crises, and also in terms of our public services.
In the NHS, waiting lists are at a record high, almost double since 2020, with heart patients forced to wait over a year for treatment in England.
And not a week goes by without more stories of the disastrous effects of water privatisation, with just one of the latest examples being that Thames Water could raise bills to £627 a year to help fix leaks.
Meanwhile, local councils are literally going bust.
As a result of their lack of solutions to these crises, the Conservatives have reverted to type – attempting to suppress resistance with authoritarian legislation and combining this with the scapegoating of migrants and refugees.
People are desperate for an alternative to get rid of the Conservatives and so it’s not surprising that there has been a sustained lead for Labour in the polls.
It’s obvious that the Conservatives will leave behind them a toxic legacy.
Yet as Andrew Fisher and I looked at in the Labour’s In-Tray report, there is little detail coming from Labour on how they will fund the scale of the changes we need in a whole range of areas including public services, and often not enough recognition of how deep-set the challenges Labour will face are after 14 years of austerity.
Worryingly too, there has also been a continuing pattern of watering down or abandoning radical policies even though they have been demonstrated to have sizeable popular support.
Public ownership of water and the Green New Deal, which was developed in practical detail over a number of years, are just two clear examples.
Still standing at the moment, one policy that is genuinely transformative is the New Deal for workers, in that it does shift an element of power away from the powerful. But as it threatens the Party leadership’s tacit pact with the establishment, there continues an intense lobbying campaign from elements inside and outside the Party to water it down.
With Labour almost certain to form a government, the concern is that it will not come into power with the scale or nature of programme needed to tackle the challenges ahead.
The objective reality of the crises Labour will face will demand the adoption of a radical programme for change if the incoming Labour government is to have any chance of success. Even if there is an unwillingness to accept this now before the election, this will become an obvious necessity very soon after Labour takes office.
At the conference that has now been cancelled, sessions would have covered the need to fully defend the New Deal for working people against corporate lobbyists and their ‘New’ Labour-era allies inside Labour, how we stand up to the privatisers, the profiteers and the polluters to put people and planet at the centre of socialist solutions to the crisis, and the need to roll-back the ongoing Tory offensive on our right to resist.
From each of these sessions we had hoped to contribute to building a transformative policy platform that clearly puts public need before corporate greed – and which together will form the core of a real labour movement agenda for the next government, the creation of which is an urgent matter for our movement as a whole.
- Conference: A Labour Movement Agenda for a Labour Government.THIS EVENT HAS NOW BEEN POSTPONED
Speakers would have included John McDonnell MP // Mick Lynch, RMT General Secretary // Rebecca Long Bailey MP // Fran Heathcote, PCS General Secretary // Asad Rehman, War on Want // Ellen Clifford, Disabled People Against Cuts // Danny Dorling, Professor of Human Geography // Lord Prem Sikka // Mary Robertson, Lecturer at QMUL // Andrew Fisher, IPaper Columnist //Jess Barnard, Labour NEC // John Hendy KC, IER // Jacqui McKenzie, Human Rights Lawyer // Ann Pettifor, author, The Case for the Green New Deal // Andy McDonald MP.
The event was called by Claim the Future and supported by the Rosa Luxemburg London Office.
Image: John McDonnell, MP. Author: Sophie Brown, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
Shiraz Socialist (Second Run) 