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Five steps to the return of Labour - Jeremy Corbyn

23rd September 2009

The latest crop of opinion polls make grim reading for Labour. Cameron’s Tories are now getting consistently over 40 per cent. The Conservative leaders’s message of tough cuts is clearly resonating well with the coalition of meanness that propelled Thatcher to office 30 years ago.

Then, as now, the Tory agenda was obsessed with attacking the presence of the state in people’s lives. A constant media drip feed is designed to portray services as unnecessary and expensive.

The Tories do not need or want the support of the most needy and desperate in society.

They are proposing individual education and health budgets in a bid to undermine public services and universal provision. Under their plans the better off would be encouraged into subsidised private provision and the rest would be forced to try to survive with a diminishing choice of last-resort public services.

From 1979 onwards Thatcher and her government pursued this agenda relentlessly. They were eventually ejected amid plunging standards and a decline in the quality of people’s lives.

The problem now is that much of the Tory agenda is built on new Labour rhetoric about “choice” and individual budgets.

Last week, Health Secretary Andy Burnham compounded all this by announcing that everyone is to have a choice of which GP to go to. “Successful” practices are to get bigger and others will reduce in size or close.

This will encourage competition between GPs and choice for some patients - the young, mobile and healthy - but no choice for the car-less, immobile and infirm. A similar approach elsewhere has already put inner-city schools and smaller hospitals in the firing line.

The media has latched on to the current high level of public borrowing, which is due to rise to 12 per cent of GDP this financial year. In response, most papers are demanding drastic cuts, means testing of benefits, public-sector salary cuts and job losses. All the proposals will hit the worst off the hardest.

The Lib Dems were on the verge of outbidding the Tories in the cuts stakes before Ed Balls upped the ante with a £2 billion offer based on some dodgy mathematics about the number and salaries of head teachers. This kind of absurd auctioning is going to dominate politics up to the election unless an alternative is put forward.

As chancellor, Gordon Brown oversaw deregulation post-1997 and encouraged others to do the same. The 2008 crisis, when collapse was only avoided through bank nationalisation and reregulation, marked the end of this era of profligacy and accumulation of personal wealth. Or did it?

The banks now want to return to their failed bonus culture and are urging the state to sell its shareholdings and return the banking system to private hands.

But the huge public investment that has been made in the banks should be accompanied by the appointment of directors who will run them in a socially responsible way, with the profits invested elsewhere in the economy.

At the TUC last week, Brown appeared not to have recognised the mood that has swept the unions over the past five years. Blind subservience to the Labour leadership is now long gone and many unions have been forced by conference votes to disaffiliate from the party that they helped found.

Brown’s message about cuts was tempered slightly by a pledge on the minimum wage and some criticism of bankers. Nevertheless, tough questions must now be asked and demands made.

The surprise TUC Congress decision to back the People’s Charter set a new benchmark for union demands and should serve to inspire union members.

The charter’s clear and collective demands offer the best way to defeat the xenophobia and racism of the BNP and far-right. Brown needs to recognise this and try to meet that new mood.

There are five policies which could help do just that.

We live in a grossly unequal society and taxes on the wealthy are too low. A recession is a good time to close loopholes and raise taxes on the wealthy, who contribute very little to the real economy.

Corporate taxation is also far too low. It has been reduced repeatedly over the years, yet the biggest companies still squirrel funds away offshore to avoid tax. This includes Telegraph owners the Barclay Brothers - the list is very long, but the sanctimonious Telegraph means that this pair warrant special mention.

Labour can make the world safer by abandoning the disgraceful waste of Trident replacement and the planned new generation of nuclear missiles.

It should take note of sullen resentment of the growing surveillance society and cancel the expensive ID card fiasco.

It should also save lives and generate hope by announcing the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan.

Next week the Labour Party meets for its conference in Brighton. It will be a chance for Labour members to assert themselves. It could do worse than taking the lead from trade unions for once.

*Jeremy Corbyn is Labour MP for Islington North. He can be contacted at(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

This article first appeared in the Morning Star

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