WE MUST TRANSFORM OUR PARTY INTO AN EFFECTIVE MASS SOCIAL MOVEMENT

SINCE DECEMBER two questions have dominated most of the conversations and meetings about the election result among Labour Party members and supporters. They are: “What happened?” and “Where next?”

Of course we are all devastated and many of us are heartbroken with many of our dreams shattered.
I have apologised for the loss. When you are in leadership, you accept the plaudits when things go well, but you also have to take responsibility for when things go wrong. That’s leadership.

It is important that we understand what happened. Numerous reasons have been cited for why we lost so heavily.

Some have blamed Jeremy - especially those media commentators and MPs and others who did not support him in the first place and never failed to seize any opportunity to undermine him from the minute he was elected leader.

Jeremy was the victim of the worst lies and smears campaign by the media and its political allies that has been witnessed in recent political history. I predicted some years ago that as we got nearer power these attacks would escalate. Coup attempt after coup attempt also took place, including the notorious chicken coup with the shadow cabinet resigning en masse.

Johnson is now rewarding some of those former MPs with seats in the House of Lords. I say “Good riddance.” But for the behaviour of these plotters I believe that we would have entered government in 2017 and would still be in government now.

It was a disgrace seeing the most honest and principled human being I know being treated in this appalling way.

Do not think that this sort of attack will not be launched against any Labour leader who challenges the
wealth and power of the oligarchs that control our media. The lesson to be learned is that we must prepare to counter this.

Some others have argued that the 2019 manifesto was to blame. In fact the 2019 manifesto was hardly different from the popular 2017 manifesto that many judged nearly won us the election. It was based upon the same socialist principles of securing equality and social justice through democracy.

It was fully costed in the same way as in 2017 and was based upon a fair tax system reversing many of the Tory tax cuts to the rich and corporations and tackling the industrial scale tax avoidance inherent in our system.

So I say to comrades, do not apologise for a manifesto that promised to fully fund the NHS and end its privatisation, to scrap universal credit and eradicate in-work poverty, to resource our schools, FE colleges and universities and end tuition fees, to build a million homes, most of them council homes, to restore trade union rights, end zero-hours contracts and bring in a real living wage and to compensate the WASPI women for the injustice they have suffered.

Be proud of a manifesto that brought forward a detailed programme for a green industrial revolution to tackle climate change and also reshaped the Labour Party into a party committed to peace.

The real reason for the defeat was Brexit. What changed between 2017 and 2019 was that Brexit came to dominate political discourse and the country became fundamentally divided. It was an issue ideally suited for exploitation by right wing demagogues.

Labour tried to unite the country and represent a coming together of both leavers and remainers. It was impossible. We were caught in a vice - and weariness had set into the electorate who just wanted it sorted and over with one way or another.

It is critical now that, as a new leadership is elected, the party does not go back and resile from the principles underlying the political programme we have constructed over the last four and a half years.
If there is a lesson to be learned it is how we communicate and campaign for the values and principles upon which we stand and how the policy programme delivers those objectives. The failure was one of narrative not of political objectives or policy programme content.

Our task now is to ensure that we develop within our mass membership of nearly 600,000 members a programme of political education that creates a body of cadres who fully understand the economic and social system in which we live and how to transform it.

In this way through deep community campaigning, supporting every local anti-austerity initiative, trade union dispute and climate change action, we must aim to transform our own party from a traditional party structure into an effective mass social movement.