quote:

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Senior officials in the Labour party, including Gordon Brown, could become personally liable for millions of pounds in debt unless new donors can be found within weeks, the Guardian has learned.

The party has five weeks to find £7.45m to pay off loans to banks and wealthy donors recruited by Lord Levy, Tony Blair's former chief fundraiser, or become insolvent. A further £6.2m will have to be repaid by Christmas - making £13.65m in all. The sum amounts to two-thirds of the party's annual income from donations.

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Its too bad. There is so much to be admired- envied by Canadians who settle for so little- in the organization of the Labour Party.

That started and was well established under Neil Kinnock. Smith's death made him a very short term phenomena with no impact on the trajectory of the party organization.

Whatever you think of the party's ideological and policy direction its membership started growing staeadily under Kinnock and continued to do so for the first several years of Blair's leadership- until Tony's Iraq adventure with Dubya.

[ 29 May 2008: Message edited by: KenS ]

Indeed, if Labour had made a coherent case for its unilateral nuclear disarmament position in 1987(a sensible position, given that everyone knew the Cold War was over by then and Mikhail Gorbachev had transformed the Soviet Union into a civilized nation that behaved according to international norms), they would have made strong gains that year on a clearly left-wing platform. Instead of doing that, Labour said nothing about Nukes and apparently hoped the Tories would be kind enough not to attack them on the issue (and, in hindsight, it really looks as if Labour threw the '87 campaign in order to purge the left, although this can't be clearly proven yet).

But that is simply incorrect. Membership grew with the rise of New Labour, and continued to do so until the Iraq escapade.

The membership started growing under Kinnock because people took hope in the new directions indicated. The debate about socialism was nowhere near as simple or dualistic as you portray it, but I'm not going to get into debating your gloss on the 80s and 90s. Suffice to say that from early on, and with Kinnocks strong support, everything was put up for debate. There will be no sacred cows. It was not "lets scrap socialism"... but what socialism is is up for grabs. If Labour members and supporters did not like this, membership would not have grown.

Labour has always had infinitely more internal debate than the pathetic shadow of it inside and outside the NDP.

Obviously, those debates were not run or 'won' from the beginning by New Labour. A lot hung in the balance. Kinnock was definitely soul mates with what came to be called New Labour. He was popular with the membership; but he wanted more change than they were ready for, and got tired of all the internal bickering at the top. And for the same reason of not being sure what they wanted the Labour Party to do, the members elected Smith to succeed Kinnock- who was acceptable to everyone [the typical North American solution]. Can't remember if part of Smiths appeal was the hope that the bickering at the top would stop.. or if that's just what I thought.

At any rate the party was debating and evolving. The party associations and clubs had a lot more particpation than they had for over 10 years previous. And the membership grew.

What Kinnock didn't get was that his two electoral defeats as leader were solely his fault.

Labour lost in 1987 almost entirely because he refused to make a positive case for unilateral nuclear disarmament. And that it was only unlateralism that Labour lost votes on.

After that, Kinnock launched a completely unjustified attack on the left and on Labour activists. Kinnock was actually expressing the idea, in his last four years as leader, that it WOULDN'T have been a betrayal for Labour NOT to be committed to a program that was to Callaghan's left.

Kinnock then lost again in 1992, not because the party was "still too left" but because he stupidly held a victory rally BEFORE election day. That was the only reason Labour lost that election.

And, whatever you think of Kinnock, you'd
have to concede that Blair's program was based on a clear rejection of all notions of socialism, internal party democracy(all Labour gatherings were meaningless apolitical sideshows during his tenure, and it goes without saying that a bland apolitical party conferences can't be worth having) egalitarianism, defense of the poor and powerless, or a foreign policy devoted to reducing conflict to the world. Certainly there was nothing remotely socialist in what Blair did in office. You stop BEING a socialist when you keep on privatizing. All privatization is an attack on working people and humane values.

Nobody in the Labour party saw what Blair was doing as socialist. Most simply accepted the myth that Labour had to give up its principles and fight for nothing more than power in name, simply to stop the damage. They assumed(wrongly)that nothing would move further right once Blair was in office.

Labour's membership did not grow because Labour moved right. It grew because voters got sicker and sicker of Thatcherism. It grew because the voters were moving left. To a lesser degree, it grew because some opportunists saw the voters swinging left, realized Labour would win, and decided to join up as a career move.

And I didn't say the RISE of Blairism led to the decline in membership. I said that the decline began under Blair because he made the party a dissent-free zone and a politics-free zone, because he pushed ahead on an insanely militaristic foreign policy of the sort that none of the "swing voters" were demanding, and because Blair created a public climate, in complete betrayal of all Labour values, in which more and more demonstrations and public expressions of dissent were restricted and silenced.

It was under Blair that a woman was arrested for standing in front of 10 Downing Street reading a newspaper article. To herself. No one in Middle England was demanding this.

It was under Blair that protestors, for the first time in British history, were effectively banned from protesting anywhere near Parliament. No one in Middle England was demanding this.

So it's all Blair's fault that membership has been collapsing, because he's created a party that no one has a good reason to join or remain a member of.

Can you at least agree that there's no good reason for Labour NOT to make a complete break with Blairism now, since the Third Way is now an extinct political force?

[ 30 May 2008: Message edited by: Ken Burch ]

[ 30 May 2008: Message edited by: Ken Burch ]

quote:

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Originally posted by Ken Burch:

And the misery the party currently finds itself in entirely due to Blair and the neo-Tory values he imposed on Labour.

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British Labour is still quite a bit further to the left than Canada's Liberals have been since Chretien. Our Liberals take some beating on the right.

[ 30 May 2008: Message edited by: Fidel ]