TIME FOR LABOUR MPs TO UNITE -AND WIN!

From yesterday's Morning Star....

Labour movement activists urged MPs today to take a small step towards resisting the Tories' vicious anti-union onslaught next week.
Lobbyists swooped on Parliament in a bid to persuade at least 100 Labour MPs to turn up and support a private member's Bill introduced by left MP John McDonnell.
The Bill, designed to stop unscrupulous bosses from sabotaging strike ballots, is due for a second reading in the Commons on Friday October 22.
It is a simple measure which would deter employers from rushing to the courts to block strikes because of small mistakes in the conduct of ballots on industrial action.
But 100 Labour MPs will need to turn up to prevent wildcat anti-union Tory MPs from using arcane parliamentary procedures to crush Mr McDonnell's Lawful Industrial Action (Minor Errors) Bill.
Mr McDonnell was loudly applauded in a packed Commons committee room as he declared: "This Bill will be a small step forward. And by god we need a few victories at the moment."
He added: "We can win on this one" but warned that, if 100 Labour MPs failed to turn up and the Bill did not pass its second reading, "then the Tories will laugh at us."
Lobbyists carried a colourful array of banners and placards as they gathered on College Green opposite Parliament, reinforced by a big contingent from rail union RMT branches and regions.
Activists urged Labour's front bench to give strong and active support to the Bill and not just make sympathetic noises.
BA cabin crew, rail workers, bus workers and journalists have all fallen foul of the courts recently.
Mr McDonnell's Bill would change the law to protect unions which have shown "substantial compliance" with balloting procedures.
It would make it much more difficult for bosses to pick on trivial errors, such as the "failure" of BA cabin crew union Unite to announce that 11 members had spoiled their ballot papers out of 10,000 who voted.
RMT general secretary Bob Crow insisted that Labour MPs must turn up in force on Friday week to give trade unions a "golden opportunity" to resist growing attacks by "having a go back." Prison officers' union POA general secretary Steve Gillan said Mr McDonnell's Bill was a "very simple amendment to the law" but touched on "the very fabric of human rights."
Among MPs joining the lobbyers were Dennis Skinner (Bolsover), Ronnie Campbell (Blyth Valley), Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North), John Cryer (Leyton and Wanstead), Julie Hilling (Bolton West), Ian Lavery (Wansbeck), Grahame Morris (Easington) and Jim Sheridan (Paisley). Mr Skinner protested that "the judges have been creating havoc for the trade unions by forcing ballot after ballot after ballot."
And Ms Hilling said she felt so strongly about the issue that she would travel back to Bolton next Thursday for a long-standing constituency engagement but would return early on Friday to support Mr McDonnell's Bill.
Among leading trade unionists at today's Commons rally were Unite joint general secretary Tony Woodley, firefighters' union FBU general secretary Matt Wrack and journalists' union NUJ general secretary Jeremy Dear.

THE SHAME OF THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS

On Friday night I am going to be debating the AV system with local Tory MP Craig Whitaker and local Lib Dem councillor Nader Frekri.
My guess is Calder Valley's Conservative MP Craig will be against it and our Orange Tory in favour. I haven't quite ddecided how I am going to play it. But one thing I know is this.
That if I were still a member of the Liberal Democrats after abandoning every single decent pledge made in the last election camopaign I would hang my head in shame.
The U-turn on tuition fees will be the final nail in the coffin for many voters already disgusted with the Party's binning of of everything from commitment to child benefit to scrapping Trident. in their desperation for power.

THE X FACTOR

I wonder whether blogging is in serious decline with the advent of Twitter. my guess is Yes.
As a recent arrivee in the twitosphere it was fascinating to jon in the virtual conversation as Labour twitters waited for news of the Shadow Cabinet appointments.
The collective gasp of horror as it became clear AJ was to be SC happened in real time - and it was what the internet is about. Increasingly.
I try not to tweet about what I had for breakfast but I love the challenge of encapsulating something in 140 words. Too many bloggers on the left write reams and reams which no-one is going to read . Twitter proves that less can be more which is why so many are getting involved.
It also gives you immediate access to all kinds of people - you just keep on adding.
This week is an important one. It's Ed Miliband's first PMQs and there will be no mercy from a media hell-bent on political destruction.
It also sees the debate in Parliament of John McDonnell's trade union Bill and a major TUC lobby at Westminster. I will be following all these events with interest.
It is now clear the real Shadow Chancellor will be ...Ed Miliband.
He is to share an office with Johnson who is basically a front-man. How, given his lack of economic skills, could he be anything else.
Most i know in the Labour Party were very disappointed by the appointment however, in Machiavellian terms, it makes some sense.
Despite the doe eyes, Ed M is a ruthless operator and the Tories will be threatened by a Shadow Cabinet which reflects far more a broader spectrum in terms of gender and race than they could dream of.Politically, it is very similar to what went before
However, Diane Abbott has been given a Junion Ministerla post in Public Health and I hear there may be jobs for Emily Thornberry and Karen Buck.No doubt I will find out quickest on Twitter.
In the meantime it is a glorious Sunday afternoon in West Yorkshire and I am off for a walk down the canal to enjoy the autumn sunshine and a Sunday lunch with friends.

WRONG CALL, ED

Alan Johnson should not be Shadow Chancellor. Fact. he knows about as much on economics as I do and has already confessed he needs a "primer" to even comment on matters money-like.
I was hoping Ed Balls would get the job. I thought Yvette would be great, too.
The appointment of Johnson is a slap in the face for the optimnistic ranks of Labour activists who wanted to see an alternative to the Tories draconian approach to the deficit.
As the shock subsides, one can only assume he will be acting on the directive of Those Who Understand how we launch an opposition to Osborne. It is impossible to think Ed Miliband appointed him for any other reason than to keep friends close, and enemies closer......days before the leadership election AJ rubbished Ed and my word he has a great reward for doing so

THE YORKSHIRE MAFIA......

Greetings from Yorkshire which is now the nerve-centre of the Opposition.
With nine out of 19 Shadow Cabinet members, including Labour Leader, now based north of Watford, the White Rose county seriously holds sway in Labour's future.
The fact that in Opposition Labour's Cabinet is elected made for some interesting results.
Ex-Tory Shaun Woodward and uber-Blairite Ben Bradshaw failed to make the cut along with Pat McFadden and Fiona McTaggart. But Liam Byrne scraped in one vote ahead of Islington South's Emily Thornberry , which is a shame.
I also think it reprehensible that Diane Abbott got nowhere near the Cabinet - despite being a leadership candidate.
My view on Abbott's candidacy was always that it was tokenist and purely an expedient to keep John McDonnell off the ballot. Borne out by the fact that all the blah from Davids Lammy, Miliband et al about "inclusivity " and "broad churches" disappears the minute Cabinet elections are on the horizon. Whatever, it was a gross discourtesy to Diane by a PLP which is now way to the right of the Party. But we are where we are.
Ed Miliband has a Cabinet which is not of his choice and with a few people I suspect would not be there if it were. I hope he does not bow to pressure and deny Ed Balls the job of Shadow Chancellor - Balls is by far the best person to come out fighting against Osborne. And Yvette Cooper would be a great oppo to Theresa May as Home Secretary

WE ARE THE RADICALS NOW

Let anyone listening to David Cameron's speech be in any doubt. The nasty party is back with a vengeance. Determined to dismantle the welfare speech, reward the "winners", tear apart the NHS and make the poor pay for the mistakes of the rich.
The triumphalist tone of Cameron's speech should shame every single Liberal Democrat MP who continues to collude in this right-wing, punitive Government which today brought Thatcher back from the dead and next week will celebrate her 85th birthday in Downing Street.
At the Tory Party Conference, Tories quaffed wine costing £1200 a bottle - roughly the same as a year's child benefit. Compassionate Conservatism? I think not.
i haven't blogged much this past week as I have been ill with flu'. Today I'm ill listening to rhetoric which throws us back to the 1980's - and which Labour must fight with all its might in the coming period.
Today Neil Kinnock was scoffed at by the man who many misguidedly thought represented a kinder kind of Tory. There is no such animal.
We should be glad , as Kinnock said, that we do "have our Party back" and that Labour has a renewed sense of purpose. We have one enemy - the Coalition.
And we have a Leader who has pledged to be different to Blair - he will have to be.
New schools are being abandoned, libraries and council facilities closing down. Public sector workers facing an attack which on October 20 must be opposed full-on by the Labour Party.
Osborne's utter misreading of the child benefit furore shows just how much the Tories are out of touch. It is merely the start of a full-scale onslaught of the state with £15billion worth of welfare cuts on the way. Attacks on trade unions, attacks on pensioners.We are all in it together. For all the talk of the "new kind of politics" it is the same old enemy. And time to fight back

THE NEARLY MAN - AND WHY I'M GLAD HE LOST

Today I am back at work after a few days at Labour Party Conference and few days battling a seriously vile sore throat and chest infection. There was a lot of it around in Manchester......with various speakers and politicians losing their voices.
I bailed out early Tuesday morning but hotfooted it home to catch the Leader's Speech live at 2,30pm. What to make of it all. ..
In the two days since there has been ad nauseam footage of the Miliband drama. While in Europe workers take to the streets and set fire to vehicles in protest at the cuts., here journalists comment on David Miliband's Paul Smith shirt and obsess on the brotherly psycho-drama
On my return to the office this morning, otherwise sane people were nodding sagely and warning that Labour was on its way back to the 1980's.
As Ed Miliband himself might say, come off it !
Labour's new Leader is mildly left of centre yet even this is too much for a media so used to neo-liberal New Labour that they are hurling bile and venom in a way not seen since the Kinnock years. A timely reminder that even pale pink social democracy is too much for the establishment.
But Labour simply cannot allow the howls of anguish to send the Party back on a right trajectory.
The Blairites are causing mischief enough and doing all they can to undermine Ed Miliband without us on the left piling in and heaping coals before we know who is in the Cabinet and what policies are likely to emerge in the coming months.
We know it won't be an agenda of mass mobilisation against the cuts, we know the "Red Ed" tag is a nonsense.
But we should also recognise that we have a job to do and we are in a beter place to do it than for a long time.
Nearly 40,000 people have joined the Labour Party since May and that for many a left agenda is awhat they are seeking and what they perceive the Labour Party to now be returning to. The fact they are actually wronmg does not mean we can't put the pressure on from below to make it so
The famously sentimental Neil Kinnock apparently roared with glee that "We've got out Party back" at the first Tribune rally for aeons . It was, to say the least of it, over-egging the pudding.
But the rejection of Blair's heir must be a positive for the grassroots - and a cause for cautious optimism.

A FOOTNOTE ON JON CRUDDAS......

A few years ago I got a fair amount of gyp for daring to suggest Jon Cruddas was not the aspiring born-again leftie he was cracked up to be.
But JC's complete misunderstanding of the zeitgeist and recent backing for David Miliband showed just how right many of us were to be sceptical about his so-called credentials.
Well, what goes around comes around and I learn from an impeccable source that Cruddas did not come clean about his backing for the pro-Iraq Miliband until VERY late in the day.
I also learn that several close former allies on the left were tearing their hair out at his support for New Labour's chosen heir. They regard it as abetrayal and want no more truck......
I am no cheerlleader for Ed Miliband - but let us at least give him some credit for avowing a different stance on civil liberties and speaking out against Iraq. And let's remember that "leading left winger" Cruddas voted to lock people up on the 42 days issuye , was in favour of ID cards and of course voted for the war. Hope he shuts the door on his way out........