As the Labour leadership contest enters its final leg, party members will be receiving their ballots in the post today. But while the national media is zooming in on a two-horse race between the two Milibands – one the candidate of continuity, the other of modest change – The Third Estate talks to Diane Abbott, MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, sofa star of This Week and the only contender for Brown’s vacant throne offering genuine left-wing reform.

“I am running for the leadership because I am the best candidate for the job,” Diane Abbott confidently declares. “The most immediate task is to rebuild and revitalise the party and no other candidate has my experience of the party.”

Drawing on her experience as a trade union official, a councillor, an MP, a member of the national executive and a veteran of many grassroots campaigns, Abbott believes she is better placed to engage with ordinary Labour party members than any of her rivals.

“I want to build on the best of the New Labour years, but I am the only candidate offering a fresh vision for the party,” Abbott says. It’s a vision that ranges from greater internal democracy to putting civil liberties back at the heart of its politics. At home, she wants to challenge, not just to the timing of government cuts but their scale, while abroad she wants to see new thinking about Britain’s place in the world by scrapping the Trident nuclear deterrent and withdrawing British troops from Afghanistan. Meanwhile, advocating bringing the railways back into public ownership, Abbott seeks to address one of the core failures of New Labour. “We need to admit that the market is not the answer for everything,” she says.

Labour’s defeat in May’s election has ushered in a new period of reflection for the party. But while most of her rivals are seeking to trim around the edges, pushing for centrist reform, Abbot is clear about her party’s mistakes and how they must be addressed.

“Ordinary people thought that New Labour was not on their side,” Abbot says. “Increasingly it seemed like an elitist project trapped in a Westminster bubble. New Labour became increasingly undemocratic. The Prime Minister was not listening to his cabinet and the Parliamentary leadership was not listening to its own members and supporters or the general public.”

Abbott argues that if ordinary party members had had a real say, Labour could have avoided some of its most damaging mistakes.

“Scrapping the 10p tax rate, the introduction of tuition fees, the failure to regulate the banks properly, the attempt to introduce 90 days detention without trial, locking up children in immigration detention centres, the failure to bring the railways back into public ownership, creeping privatisation in the NHS, and, above all, the Iraq War. These are all things that contributed to our defeat at the last election.”

It has been fifteen years since Clause IV was famously re-written and Labour became New Labour. But after thirteen years of New Labour government, on the day that Tony Blair’s memoir hits the shelves defending his decision on Iraq and urging Labour not to return to the left, what would Abbott say to disaffected left-wingers who have abandoned a party they feel abandoned them long ago?

“I cannot defend the many right-wing decisions that were taken over the past thirteen years and I never have,” Abbot says. “But I can offer an alternative. Under my leadership we will get back to the business of being the Labour party that delivers for the people of this country. Being in opposition gives us a chance to have a real look at the state of the party, and get back to the principles we were built on.”

While a spell in opposition may well be what the party needs to reflect on its many mistakes in government, the conclusions it draws will depend largely on who it selects as its next leader. Abbott’s candidacy, like those of Ed Balls and Andy Burnham, has been overshadowed somewhat by the Miliband brothers, and in particular the elder front-runner. But if David Miliband wins, will it prove the party has learnt nothing from the failings of New Labour?

“David Miliband is the New Labour continuity candidate, the heir to Blair,” Abbott says. “The majority of ordinary Labour party members were against many decisions of the New Labour project. However they see the desperate times we face under the coalition and some think that David Miliband is the quickest way out of it and back to power.”

Abbott believes voters will naturally return to Labour, but the sell will be a hard one. “My view is that the general public are not fools,” she says. “When the Lib-Cons have finished destroying our country we will certainly have voters that will naturally come back, but the rest will take convincing. There is nothing convincing about the same old, New Labour rhetoric, which offers no real alternative to the status quo.”

As a left-winger, and as the country’s first female black MP, Abbott neither sounds nor looks like the status quo of British politics. Her place on the ballot paper was far from secure, however, until fellow Socialist Campaign Group MP, John McDonnell, withdrew his leadership candidacy. By doing so, he said he hoped he could help ensure that a woman got onto the ballot paper of an otherwise testosterone dominated contest. But should politics be about gender, or race, or should it be about having the right ideas and the right policies?

“I am most grateful to John McDonnell, because his withdrawing did ensure that a woman made it on to the ballot,” Abbott says. “However he is a staunch socialist and would not have withdrawn for another principled progressive.”

Abbott agrees that politics is all about policies, but argues that in the 21st century, a winning progressive movement in any country has to reflect the views and concerns of women and minorities. “If we do not have a political leadership which looks like the community around us then it will lack the legitimacy we want to represent,” she says. “Politics should be about representing the needs of people and people come in many different forms. A lack of diversity and a lack of representation in any institution are instantly reflected in debate, policies and implementation.”

One policy that Abbott keenly supports is electoral reform which, more than any other, threatens to split the coalition government. A referendum on introducing the Alternative Vote (AV) system was, albeit rather too little rather too late, included in Labour’s manifesto and Abbott has pledged to back the key coalition proposal.

“It may not be the ultimate solution, but will certainly be fairer than the first past the post system we currently use,” she says. “It is more proportional, reduces the need for tactical voting and will help to reflect true public opinion of fascist parties. Groups like the BNP are very unlikely to get 2nd or even 3rd preferences.”

Like many of her fellow party members, however, she is somewhat less keen on the government’s decision to link the referendum on voting reform with boundary changes.

“I am appalled at the Lib-Cons attempts to use voting reform to bring about boundary changes,” Abbott says. “These are clearly designed to ensure that they maintain and gain more seats in further elections. Tainting the reforms with trying to maintain power is highly inappropriate and may mean that people will not vote for AV reform despite believing this is the best system. This in effect defeats the point of the entire reform.”

This last comment perhaps best reflects Abbott’s philosophy. A socialist, a democrat, a thorn in the side of the Blairite establishment, but Labour through and through.

“We have difficult times ahead,” Abbott says. “I love my party and believe that we will rise to this challenge. But to do this we need every disaffected activist in the Labour movement behind us. They are a group of people who understand solidarity and I am certain they see the importance of uniting against the Lib-Cons.”

The task ahead for Abbott, and for her party, will not be an easy one. In less than a month it will choose which direction it will take. And contrary to the retired rhetoric of the Mandelsons of this world, that choice is not between backwards and forwards, but between left and right. If, after thirteen years of Blair and Brown, after Iraq and Afghanistan, after the systematic rollback of civil liberties and human rights and the stark betrayal of its socialist roots for a market-orientated philosophy, Labour elects David Miliband, it will have learnt nothing from the failings of a leadership that sacrificed genuine progressive principles for power for power’s sake. If, on the other hand, it chooses Diane Abbott, reported to be the favoured candidate of Miliband’s Marxist mother, voters may once again find themselves faced with a genuine choice at the next election and the Labour Party may find itself saying out with the New and in with the old.

An interesting discussion has been taking place about the routes of New Labour’s illiberalism. In a piece limited by an evident lack of understanding about the history of the Labour movement or of British marxism, Francesca Klug argued that traditional Marxist influences in the party were to blame. (Francesca says that Marxists were uninterested “in the state as a potentially oppressive force” until Ralph Miliband in 1969. LOL.”  Lenin’s tomb hit back  with a well worth reading piece arguing that the strong state ironically  is routed in Neo-Liberalism. Meanwhile Guy Aitchison at our kingdom has written a thoughtful piece once again emphasising the significance of Marxism in stimulating New Labour’s disregard for liberty.

Where Guy is correct is in identifying a tendency within old labour which emphasises ends over means and which justifies restrictions on liberty on the basis of social welfare. An ex -ide to Gordon Brown once said that the best way to convince him of anything was to put up an oOHP  with a graph showing the worst off in society getting better off. There is most certainly a tendency with old labour which says that “real freedom is bread on the dinner table” – a tendency which at its worst treats the working class as though they want nothing more than to be fed and watered.

But  the analyses of Guy Aitchison and Francesca Clug are undermined by their unnuanced perception of old Labour and the labour left.  It is worth remembering sometimes that Bevan – the ex miner, the radical, and the father of the welfare state – was fiercely anti-communist. At its inception the labour party was characterised by a struggle between ideological socialists – many of them Marxists – and trade unionsts who were concerned, sometimes exclusively, with pay and conditions and living standards and who regarded the first group as dangerously ideological. It was a tension that continued right through the history of old Labour. And it is these bean counting social democrats – not the Marxian influence within the Labour party – whose tradition has shaped the authoritarianism New Labour. It is in this tradition that the Labour Party lined up behind the smoking ban, on the grounds that any level of intrusion and interference could be justified on the basis of improved life expectancy.

What New Labour also draws upon is a tradition of well meaning technocracy. 21st century policy wonkery is in many ways infused with the spirit of 1920s bloomsbury. It is infused with the spirit of those like the Webbs who seemed to believe that the masses could effectively be bypassed and that a few clever people – equipped with powerful state machinery – could put right societies moral and material failings. Equally their good friend Keynes – hero of the old Labour soft left and an anchor point of post war social democracy – was sometimes forthright on the need to insulate the management of the economy, and other aspects of policy, from democratic pressure.

Clugg and Aitchison, meanwhile, offer no explanation as to why those members of the Parliamentary Labour Party who appear closest to Marxists traditions and politics – such as Jeremy Corbyn and John Mcdonnell – have been amongst those most opposed to New Labour’s attacks on civil liberties.  Klug argues that there was an “intellectual tradition which never really saw the problem with the state – provided it was in the right, or rather left, hands” – yet Marxists more than anyone have understood that gaining elected office does not in itself alter fundamental aspects of the state and the way it operates. As did my comrade Tony Benn who entitled one of his memoirs “Office Without Power”.

Drawing a straight line between a caricatured vision of Marxism, and the policies of a decidedly non-Marxist new labour government illminates little. But Klug nonetheless has done us a service by raising important questions about the relationship between socialism and liberty.

To contact Reuben email reuben@thethirdestate.net

Working class universalism is not enough. Labour does not deserve our unwavering loyalty

Power to the people!

It’s Friday evening. I should be out partying or down the pub. Instead I’m sitting in front of my computer, wondering what wondrous topic to opine upon for my column. I’ve scoured the news. David Cameron’s doing God and Boris, hopes for a climate change deal this year are looking scandelously dismal, British soldiers are getting shot in Afghanistan and American soldiers are getting shot at home. But what’s really caught my attention tonight has been the debate on Though Cowards Flinch which emerged from an article Guy Aitchison wrote for The Third Estate on Power2010. The discussion on democratic reform, whilst interesting in and of itself, is not really what’s piqued my interest in this thread, rather the disagreements on left wing organisation within and without the Labour Party.

I very rarely get involved in internal left-wing organisational disputes anymore. Partly because, despite their utility to a point (and it is a definite point), they bore the hell out of me. And this is speaking as someone who considers themselves switched on. For the wider public, sectarianism is to socialism as talking about your ex is to sex. It’s a turnoff. More crucially, however, these sorts of debates in the end only serve to distract us from our common goals, our common enemies, and the wider issues facing us in a very unjust world. While we’re bickering about the best way to rally the British workers to our cause, Iraqi civillians are getting blown up, Afghanistan’s tearing itself apart, kids are slaving away in sweat shops, Palestinians are having their homes knocked down, the ice caps and glaciers are melting and David Cameron’s doing God. And Boris.

Just this once, however, I’m going to throw in my two Euro cents. The impetus for this is a comment by Carl Packman in response to my damnation of the Labour Party and everything it stands for these days.

I see what you’re saying Salman, but take something that Mark Fischer said, when he gave a lecture on Marxism recently at Eton: ‘I assured the audience that the whole point of Marxists’ identification with the working class was its universalism.’ The very reason British Marxists should remain tied to the Labour party, and not join fringe yoke like SWP, or any of the other Trot splits, is because the party is historically linked to the Labour movement, and is henceforth the site of working class universalism. New Labour neo-liberalism is its inappropriate thorn, those careerists should not be vindicated by socialists jumping ship.

I tend to avoid discussing Marxism in 19th (or indeed 20th) century terms anymore. The last time I used the words bourgeoisie and proletariat were in an essay on The German Ideology. I believe many of Marx’s ideas remain fundamentally relevant to the modern world, but the modern world is dynamic and disjunctive and theory must remain equally adaptable in its adoption. Creationists, after all, are laughed at in modern Europe. Christians who have successfully incorporated Darwinism into their world view remain part of relevant discourse. The reason I personally feel this point warrants discussion however, is because it’s a debate I’ve had with Reuben many times. It’s a very old idea and one that has never failed to leave me feeling cold.

No political party reserves the right to go unchallenged. And no left-wing organisation deserves the right to be reified, to become a concrete fact in and of itself, to demand the unwavering loyalty of the workers regardless of its political positions. If that party is not the right vehicle for change, we should not be in it. I simply cannot accept that because the Labour party was once the locus for progressive working class political activity that it should always be and will always be, irrespective of its current leadership and its present policies. That is the political equivalent of Creationism. It relies on nothing more than blind faith. Not least the faith that New Labour – a neo-liberal, neo-conservative, repressive war machine that, by gutting the Labour movement and accepting the basic tenets of Thatcherism has done far more damage to the country and the world than the Iron Lady ever could -  is simply a transient thorn. It isn’t. It’s been here for the best part of two decades and will remain for the forseeable future. Labour may be heading for a spell in opposition, but the fight against Cameron as he does God and Boris won’t be led by the old class warriors. It will be led, most likely, by David Miliband. Or another obsequious, spineless, supine, Blairite clone with a pretty face and ugly politics.

And it is precisely this kind of faith-based thinking which will continue the New Labour project long after Brown’s government has faded to a dim, uncomfortable and embarrassing memory.  New Labour is not a transient thorn. Its intelligent, educated and very bourgeois (look what you’ve made me do!) architects made a calculated, and very correct, decision that they can afford a sharp swing to the middle ground because whatever they do, their core support of left-wing voters will back them come what may. As long as they believe they can get away with that, New Labour will remain entrenched and the British working class will find nothing more than a few empty platitudes.

The workers of Venezuela once owed their loyalty to the loosely social democratic Acción Democrática party. Indeed their largest trade union remains linked it it. But AD was not the right vehicle for a country that desperately needed change. That’s why Chavez rose to fill a gap in political representation, without any reliance on historical links or organisational ties, because he is the right vehicle and the right voice at the right time. That time is now. Parties cannot just be viewed in terms of their history. A week’s a long time in politics and a decade’s even longer. We have to look at their policies here and now and make informed decisions about the change they are likely to bring. Otherwise we’re betraying our own principles, all in the name of some ideological committment to a homogenous, united, organised, class-conscious working class of the last century that thanks to Thatcher, Major, Blair and Brown, no longer exists.

Interview by Dan Swain and Lorna Finlayson

"Revolution isn't rational anymore, but a breath of fresh air would be"

Ted Honderich is Grote Professor Emeritus of Mind and Logic at University College London. Since 9/11 he has written several books on the subject of terrorism and war, most recently Humanity, Terrorism, Terrorist War, and has become a vocal advocate of the right of the Palestinians to a state, and to the means of achieving that state. We interviewed Honderich following his paper at Cambridge University’s Moral Sciences Club – their anachronistically named answer to a departmental seminar – where he laid out his views on Zionism, neo-Zionism, Gaza, Iraq and Afghanistan, arguing that support for the Palestinians includes acknowledging their right to terrorism. The discussion was mostly cordial, though it was clear that most of the philosophers and students present were sceptical.

Honderich is, in fact, very critical of the institution of academic philosophy and its role in politics: “The contribution of the overt and the more common covert conservative political philosophy is the same. It is to pretend that the political tradition of conservatism, as in the case of New Labour as much as the Conservative Party past and present, does actually have an arguable principle of what is right and wrong to support the self-interest of an economic and social class. In this, the tradition of conservatism in general is different from the tradition of the Left and of old Labour. Liberal political philosophy, as in the case of John Rawls, escapes the viciousness of conservatism, but lacks resolution in thought, feeling and action, and seemingly always will.” His interests haven’t always been in this area – and he continues to work, for example, on the philosophy of consciousness – but he sees a connection between a wider commitment to philosophy and his recent focus on politics: “These interests arose more or less accidentally, but maybe less accidentally than I have supposed. I take it that all decent philosophy is a concentration on — not sole ownership of — the logic of ordinary intelligence. That comes down to clarity, usually in the form of analysis, and consistency and validity, and completeness. What goes with that has to be generality, and truth as against convention. Any philosopher aspires or pretends to aspire to that logic, whatever his or her area.”

“I wouldn’t come now.”

The observation that New Labour is now firmly within the tradition of conservatism is clearly a saddening one for him. He calls the old Labour party “the great party of humanity and civilization in British history”, and the reason he came to Britain from Canada: “I wouldn’t come now.” But what about the hope over the Atlantic, Obama? “Chomsky, the great reality-judge of our age, is not hopeful. I myself think we can still expect more from Obama than from anybody else you could have dreamed would be president. Certainly I haven’t given up. The plain fact is that he is the president of the most powerful of the hierarchic democracies. Its national strength, it seems, is or contributes greatly to the power of the economic and social classes near and at the top. Surely it is also clear that as an astute and morally decent politician, so appallingly superior to our criminals against humanity Blair and Brown, he is judging what is possible and going forward in that rationality.”

For Honderich the modern democracies presided over by Obama and Brown are profoundly hierarchic. We ask what he sees as the alternative: “The alternative is real or realer democracy, of course, where not only two heads are better than one and more heads better than two, but the heads are equally free in expressing their judgements and wants. The question brings back to mind Colonel Rainborough’s moral truth in the Putney Debates in the time of the English civil war. ‘Really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he….’ Are there tanks in those army barracks somewhere around Pimlico? I think some successor to Rainborough should think on him, and on our society, where not only the poorest but at least the six bottom economic deciles are being cheated of fuller lives. He should arrange for his tank to break down in Parliament Square for a while, only long enough for our political class and the telly to become aware of it, and then take himself back to the barracks, and also take his punishment for his civil and other disobedience. Revolution isn’t rational anymore, but a breath of fresh air would be. It might have a little effect on our coming election . Maybe remind some of our low politicians that the response to a question isn’t an answer, that selling isn’t their proper line of life, that the House of Commons isn’t the Student Union in Oxford, and that our elections shouldn’t be Afghanistan with drapery.”

Turning to the questions of terrorism. Words like terrorism, radicalism and extremism have developed a strange currency in recent years. As we are learning, one can be a domestic extremist merely for attending a demonstration or going to the wrong meeting. Honderich is struck by the speed of this development: “It has surprised me that transparent terminological means, such as persuasive or loaded definitions, or indeed the pretence of actual definition, have been so successful in the forming and manipulating of public feeling and opinion. This has something to do, presumably, with a new and larger role of the media in society. The effect is more pervasive than supposed, far wider than the effect of such organs as The Daily Mail.”

Precision in terminological definitions is crucial here. ‘Zionism’, defined as the project of establishing a Jewish state in 1948 and within those borders, is a project Honderich defends. It was justified in part by the horrors of the holocaust, he says, and the reality of that state now requires the defence of it. He is an implacable enemy of what he calls ‘Neo-Zionism’ – “the taking from the Palestinians of at least their liberty in the last 5th of their homeland”, and is critical also of ‘semitism’ – “the prejudice in favour of Jewish people right or wrong.” Whilst justifying the creation of the Israel, and therefore a commitment to what is commonly called a two-state solution, is a common (though far from universal) opinion amongst the Palestine solidarity movement, one of his reasons for it seems odd. In Humanity, Terrorism, Terrorist War… he attaches considerable significance to the question of whether the Palestinians were ‘fully a people’ in 1948, arguing that they were, but that it was reasonable to believe otherwise on the basis of the best information available at the time. Why is this so important? “I have the feeling that you have hit on the weakest point in that book, as some others have. But I still stick to it. The Principle of Humanity, in short, is that we should take rational steps to get and keep people out of bad lives — with bad lives defined in terms of deprivation of the great human goods, these being length of conscious life, bodily well-being, freedom and power, respect and self-respect, the goods of relationship, and the goods of culture. A people not organized into a state and society, I take it, not well-defined as a group, are not open to a kind of insult, a kind of disrespect. They are also less likely to have already achieved the other great goods. That is a beginning of a reply.”

"As for the pro-Palestinian student occupations, I am absolutely for them"

Over the past few years the question of Palestine has played a controversial role in universities. There is anger over the government’s requests for lecturers to spy on students, the way in which Islamic societies are being monitored and clamped down on, and controversy over strategies for delivering solidarity. There has been much concern over the desire of the government to channel funding towards such ‘key issues’, with terrorism being a primary one. Honderich puts this in perspective: “In a society as morally stupid as ours, nearly always a stupidity owed to ignorance and the success of keeping people in that ignorance, I am tempted to have the feeling that research funding should not be at the forefront of our concern. The cosmeticism of New Labour comes higher. So does not forgetting about the estate agents and the private schools along with the bankers. So does Noam Chomsky not having a Nobel Prize.” What about two of the most controversial solidarity strategies on campuses? “I have not myself joined the academic boycott of Israel, which so to speak has left me with a bad conscience as well as a good one. The main difficulty, as always, is a factual one. Same as with terrorism. Will a boycott serve the end of the Principle of Humanity and more particularly the cause of the Palestinians? There are arguments both ways, but maybe I am moving towards the boycott. As for the pro-Palestinian student occupations, I am absolutely for them. They don’t come to much, incidentally, against the neo-Zionist and semitic activities in the universities.”

“I suspect my view is easily the majority view in the world, however quiet people are about expressing it”

This year we mourned the death of Marek Edelman, the heroic resistance leader of the Warsaw Ghetto. The widespread respect for him surely shows that the notion of legitimate armed resistance is something people are, at least historically, happy to assent to. Why, then has Honderich’s position made him such a controversial figure? “I wonder if the explanation has partly to do with a perception of philosophy, not only a popular one. It is a perception, even in this degraded society, that carries with it respect, even in the midst of our monstrous plague of the celebrities. That a member of a respected profession and line of life, not gone over entirely to journalism, holds particular views, gets him or her attention. The explanation also has to do, of course, with the convention that we leave such judgements to governments, and in particular our hierarchic democracies. I suspect my view, on Zionism and neo-Zionism and Palestinian resistance to or self-defence against neo-Zionism, is in fact easily the majority view in the world, however quiet people are about it, however reluctant to express it.”

The Moral Sciences Club meets Tuesdays during term time in St. John’s College Cambridge.

Humanity, Terrorism, Terrorist War is published by Continuum. Ted Honderich’s personal website is here.

Labour are warning that the far right are becoming more dangerous – perhaps it’s time for them to stop being complacent.

John Denham announced a new government initiative on the weekend to address the concerns of the white working classes who he said had been “exploited” by the far right. The government, it seems, has finally taken its head, ostrich-like, out of the sand of middle class suburbia and realised that in their absence the right wing have filled the void that their disinterest in traditional Labour heartlands has created.

As secretary of state for communities and local government, Mr Denham has actually helped to deepen the class divide that has led to traditional Labour areas becoming a breeding ground for racists. In a speech he gave to the Fabian Society only a few months ago – a speech, aimed at wooing the middle ground of voters – Mr Denham said that the old ideal of egalitarianism that had “dominated much left-liberal thinking since the 1960s” was over. In other words people were now willing to accept disparities in wealth and we should stop kicking against the system. This is sort of the political theory equivalent of “shit happens”. He also said:

“If you think you are in the middle, policies and language aimed at ‘the poor’ leave you out. And if you are in the middle, you are more likely to be concerned about whether ‘the top’ is doing better than you, than you are about ‘the bottom’.”

Well, guess what John? Those people at ‘the bottom’ are now in danger of becoming a major thorn in the side of the Home Counties voters New Labour has been so busy attracting for the last 12 years.

The far right are making gains, they aren’t large gains yet – they are, however, getting a lot of publicity. In the vacuum of any decent opposition to them on the ground, that publicity is starting to win people over to their crude and ignorant ideologies. Every time the media shows someone from the BNP or the English Defence League on TV they are in isolation. If anyone from any of the major political parties deigns to even comment on them, it is usually from the despatch box at Westminster. The logic being: “you are ‘down there’ and we are ‘up here’”. Unfortunately, ‘down there’ is in the grass roots of the constituencies – i.e. where the voters are. A good, if maverick, example of how this optical illusion works can be seen in Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ (bear with me). When Romeo talks about how attractive his latest crush Rosaline is, his friend Benvolio says to him:

“Tut, you saw her fair, none else being by,

Herself poised with herself in either eye”.

In other words, in the absence of any comparison, she looked like a good thing. So it is with the BNP. Those who say that Nick Griffin should not be given the platform of a respected programme such as Question Time to air his racist opinions are missing the point. It is exactly the platform that they need to be seen on. They need to be engaged with in a respectable environment so they can be compared to mainstream politicians – and completely annihilated.

Ignoring the problem has not and never will make it go away – just as ignoring working class voters, your own traditional constituency, will only make them turn against you. Complacency, combined with a recession that has hit the poorest and most marginalised in our society the hardest, is the ideal breeding ground for fascism. Necessity is the mother of all reinvention. Labour may lose the next election, but for the good of the country as a whole they need to remember who they are and win back the working class.

In the same week Jon Cruddas argued that Labour needs to reconnect with its roots or suffer a “catastrophic” defeat at the next election, Derek Simpson, general secretary of UNITE, said in an interview with The Guardian:

Labour has got to be more clear that it is on the side of working people, rather than give the impression it backs big business. You save the banks, invest in the banks, relieve them of toxic debt, leave people running them that ran them before, don’t act incisively on the bonus culture and see 10,000 ordinary bank workers made redundant. What conclusion do you draw from that?

That’s all well and good, but isn’t it a bit late in the day? It was the precisely the calculation by New Labour strategists that their core supporters amongst the unions would back them no matter what, which allowed them to move so far to the right. With noteable exception, this has been the case, and despite Simpson’s criticisms, his decision to back Brown regardless of whether Labour takes them on board, is a large part of the problem. Labour’s on its last legs, the sun’s setting on Brown’s reign and it’s too late to expect any radical shift in policy. One can only hope that the next leader of the opposition is willing to move in a new direction. Brown will just go gentle into that good night.

To many of my generation, who were born in Thatcher’s Britain and whose politics were shaped by the stark reminder one morning in September 2001 that history was far from over, Tony Benn is a hero. It was another left-wing icon, Bob Dylan, who described a hero as “someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.” And whether he’s speaking to two million people in Hyde Park on the largest demonstration in British history, to a packed out Left Field every year at Glastonbury, or to one interviewer for The Third Estate, Tony Benn – a former cabinet minister under Wilson and Callaghan who retired from Parliament to “spend more time involved in politics” – has always known what that responsibility is. To inspire. Perhaps that’s too strong a term for a man of Benn’s unassuming humility. But to encourage? “If anybody asked me what I want on my gravestone, I would like ‘Tony Benn, he encouraged us’,” he once said. And in this dark climate, amidst war and recession, occupation, terrorism and environmental destruction, Tony Benn was kind enough to talk to me about the future of the Labour Party, about Afghanistan and Iraq, and to give me a few words of encouragement.

Benn has the distinction of being the second longest serving Member of Parliament in the history of the Labour Party. When he left Parliament in 2001, Labour had never been more popular. Last month, at the European Elections, the party suffered its worst defeat in almost a century. I ask Benn why he thinks it has lost so much of its support. “Well, the economic circumstances are very difficult,” he says. “A lot of people have lost their jobs and lost their homes, and they’re very, very worried and that always affects the government of the day.” But for Benn, it cannot simply be a factor of the accident of economics. “I think the policies that New Labour followed under Blair and Brown have made the situation worse, not better. We’ve had the Iraq war going on for years, now we have the Afghan war going on. Huge commitments to nuclear weapons that nobody wants, and ID cards and privatisation and so on. I think the policies of the government are very unpopular and I think for the first time in my life, the public is to the left of what is called the ‘Labour’ government.”

It comes as no surprise that Tony Benn is amongst the staunchest critics of New Labour’s move to the right. But even as Blair abandoned Clause IV and accepted the Bush doctrine, did Benn ever feel tempted to resign from the party? “No,” he says without a second’s hesitation. “I’ve lived so long, I’ve seen it happen before. In 1931, Ramsay MacDonald, one of the founders of the Labour Party, Prime Minister of a minority government, joined with the Tories and the Liberals, formed a national government and described the Labour Party as Bolshevism gone mad, there were only around 50 Labour MPs left, and 14 years later there was a landslide. So I think you have to take an historical perspective on it.” Benn describes the policies of New Labour as essentially Tory policies. “If Labour does badly in the General Election, it will be a verdict on Blair and Thatcher together because those policies have been the same.”

Does that mean Benn thinks a defeat for Labour could bring the party back to the left? “I don’t think it’s a sort of ideological test,” he says. At this point he reels off the names of myriad micro socialist parties that would be straight from satire if they did not exist. “It’s a sort of theological splintering where everybody seems to be more concerned to destroy each other than deal with the real problems. People look at politics to see if it actually helps meet their needs. They don’t want some ideological test. They want to know have we got jobs, have we got homes, good schools, health, medicines. That’s the way people see it.” Benn has always been a rebel. From campaigning to be permitted to renounce his inherited peerage in 1963 to calling for the abolition of the monarchy in 1991 and for a mass campaign of civil disobedience on the outbreak of the Iraq war, if there’s a parapet, Tony Benn’s head is above it. It’s hardly surprising then, that as most young radicals find themselves growing more conservative with age, Benn has bucked that trend. “I’ve gone more to the left as I’ve got older,” he says. “And socialism explains the world. That doesn’t mean I’m trying to convert you or anybody else to my particular view of what socialism means. I think that’s the mistake that sectarians make.”

Benn does not know whether or not Labour will find a way to reconnect with its socialist roots. “I can’t forecast the future because it’s not my business,” he says. “My job is to try and influence the future.” Benn pauses after this wonderful soundbite as his mobile rings. “I go round the country,” he continues when the phone stops ringing, “I did eight public meetings last week, one yesterday, one today, another one tomorrow, another one on Sunday, and as I go round I’m pretty persuaded that the public is to the left of the Labour government. They don’t want the war, they don’t want the bomb, they don’t want ID cards, they don’t want privatisation, they do want civil liberties and so on. I think the system will have a chance of correcting itself provided we take up these causes and fight for them.”

The first time I heard Tony Benn speak, I was a sixteen-year-old A Level student taking up a cause and fighting for it. It was 2001, the twin towers had been reduced to rubble, Britain and America were bombing Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance had just forced the Taliban from Kabul and Tony Benn was speaking to 100,000 people in Trafalgar Square who saw the way things were going and wanted to make a difference. I remain convinced that, although we could not stop either of the Bush-Blair wars, opposing them was the right thing to do. But whilst I have always advocated the immediate withdrawal of British and American troops from Iraq, the situation in Afghanistan seems to me more complex. I ask Benn if withdrawal is the right thing to do if it means leaving the Afghan people, after all they’ve been through since 1979, to the mercy of the Taliban?

“We didn’t go into Afghanistan because of the Taliban, we went in, we were told, because they wouldn’t hand over Osama bin Laden to the Americans after the Americans asserted that he was responsible for 9/11.” Once again, Benn is keen to take an historical perspective. “There’s a long history – we invaded Afghanistan in 1839, eighty years before I was born, and then we were driven out. We went in again in 1879 and had to withdraw. And we went in in 1919 after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The Russians went into Afghanistan and I led a delegation to see the Soviet ambassador in London and he said there were terrorists there. Who was he referring to? Osama bin Laden. And who was funding Osama bin Laden? President Bush’s father, the other President Bush.”

After one of the bloodiest weeks for British forces in Afghanistan, Gordon Brown argued that the campaign is a ‘patriotic duty’ to keep the streets of Britain safe. “I think it’s a complete fraud,” says Tony Benn and there’s no doubt from the tone of his voice that he means it. “There weren’t any terrorist attacks in Britain until we invaded Afghanistan. None of the arguments are valid. It’s an unwinnable war. Every country has to work out its own internal problems. You can’t solve them with an invasion.” It’s a position to which he has remained consistent, despite his own political sympathies. “If we’d invaded South Africa to end Apartheid, there’d be bloodshed from that day to this.” But Benn is not a pacifist in the strictest sense of the word. “Everyone has the right to defend themselves. That is why the Afghans are absolutely entitled to defend themselves as their country is being invaded.”

Tony Benn once said that “all war represents a failure of diplomacy.” His own diplomacy saw him flying to Baghdad in February 2003, one month before the invasion of Iraq, to interview Saddam Hussein in an effort to prevent the war. But was the war ever Saddam’s to prevent? “No,” he says. “Bush had decided to invade Iraq and topple Saddam before 9/11. That came out quite clearly. And he told Blair that was his intention. And I think Blair said to him, ‘I could not persuade the British Parliament to support an invasion on those grounds, so let’s pretend it’s about weapons of mass destruction’. And Bush said ‘well it will take me months to get my troops there, so if you want to have a few months on the weapons inspection, then good luck to you.’ Hans Blix was sent in, totally ignored and frustrated. And I went to see Saddam; I said ‘do you have weapons of mass destruction?’ He said ‘no’. I didn’t know whether to believe him or not, but he was actually speaking the truth. He said he didn’t have links with al Qaeda, and I knew he didn’t, because Osama bin Laden called on the Iraqis to overthrow Saddam because he was a secularist.”

In that sense, the Iraq war was not a failure of diplomacy because there never was any diplomatic option. It’s an argument Tony Benn has made time and again from speaker’s podiums across the country. But with his son Hilary as a member of the Cabinet, who supported the invasion of Iraq, does he ever find himself having those arguments closer to home? “He has his position and I understand it. He knows my position.” Benn’s understandable reticence on the subject reminds me – just as the many Conservatives and Zionists I met at Cambridge whom I now count amongst my closest friends remind me, like his own friendship with Enoch Powell – that although the personal is so often the political, the political is not always the personal. And there is nothing that leads me to believe that he is anything other than deeply proud of his son’s achievements as Secretary of State for International Development under Tony Blair and Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs under Gordon Brown.

At 84, Tony Benn is a man who has been at the heart of many of the great political challenges of the last century. What does he consider to be the greatest challenge we face as we enter the next decade? “I think the economic crisis is a big one and it’s very linked to war because depression in the 1930s played a part in bringing the Second World War about. And there’s all the nonsense of religion being the cause of conflict, it’s not true at all, but they use it. There’s the threat of nuclear weapons, very, very dangerous. There’s the whole question of civil liberties, world population, environment. There’s a huge list of problems to tackle.”

Against such a huge list of problems, against all the odds, against all the setbacks the Left has faced, the wars, the privatisations, Thatcher and Blair, what keeps Benn fighting? “I’ve been interested in politics since I was a child. I campaigned when I ten years old in the 1935 elections and I’ve still got some of the lists I pushed through the letterbox. I’m interested in it genuinely and I engage amongst communities, which is why I left Parliament. I’ve got ten grandchildren and I worry about their future. I’ve written thirty-six letters to them and I’ve got a book being published in October called Letters to My Grandchildren.”

Tony Benn was elected President of Stop the War Coalition in 2004. Through his writing and his activism, through his speeches and his television appearances, and through the many thousands of people he has encouraged, he has undoubtedly accomplished much since leaving Parliament. A 2007 poll by BBC2’s The Daily Politics declared him the UK’s ‘political hero’, narrowly beating Thatcher into second place. I ask him why, then, in the same year, he expressed an interest in standing again for Labour in Kensington at the next General Election. “That’s not quite true,” he says. “After Brown became leader there was a rumour that we’d have an immediate election. We didn’t have a candidate here and I foolishly said to the local party, if you’re looking for somebody, I’m available. Thank God it never happened, the last thing I wanted to do was to go back into Parliament.”

The reason for this is that Benn finds it easier to encourage an audience when he’s not asking them to vote for him. That’s the responsibility he has realised in his freedom from Parliament. That’s what makes him, in Dylan’s terms, a hero. But who are Benn’s political heroes? “The three greatest moral leaders of my lifetime, all of whom I have met personally, not one of whom was white or European, were Gandhi, Mandela and Desmond Tutu. Gandhi against war, Mandela for civil resistance, Tutu, Truth and Reconciliation. Things that have been very, very relevant to our needs. Meeting them has been a special pleasure.”

And speaking to Tony Benn has been a special pleasure for me. It’s hard not to be impressed by his sincerity, by his integrity and by his passion. In a world where the star that burns brightest so often burns shortest, it is reassuring to see that Benn’s has never dimmed. Not because he is a hero. But because, with his encouragement, we can all be heroes for more than just one day.

Friends, lefty bloggers, socialists, I’ve got a guilty secret. I’ve been actively campaigning for the Green Party in the upcoming European Elections on June 4th.  It’s been a difficult time for me politically. With the split in Respect, the failure of John McDonnell and the Labour left to leave a scratch on the New Labour hegemony and the absence of that new mass party of the working class that’s been promised for so long, I’ve found myself in search of a new political home. To a lot of people on the left, the Greens are, unfairly I think, still perceived as a soft option, a middle-class environmentalist party first with a few social policies tacked on. This is an image that many in the Green Party are seeking to shake off, and none more so than a certain human rights activist who stood for Labour in 1983, stood up to Mugabe in 1999 and wouldn’t stand for homophobia or hypocrisy when it came to The Pogues in 2007. In a Third Estate exclusive, I quizzed Peter Tatchell on what makes the Green Party much more than just a green party, their prospects for the future and why they are the only thing standing between Nick Griffin and the European Parliament.

The Third Estate: You’ve traditionally been a supporter of a red-green alliance and helped launch Green Left. Many socialists, however, continue to view the Green Party as a largely middle-class environmentalist party. Do you think, in light of Labour’s shift to the centre and the failure of Respect, that the Greens can fill the vacuum in British politics left by the absence of a genuine working-class socialist party?

Peter Tatchell: As Labour has shifted to the right, the Greens have moved to the left. We are now the party of social justice, as well as environmental protection. On trade union rights, for example, the Greens are much stronger than Labour. We support the Trade Union Freedom Bill, Labour opposes it. We are more radical than Labour on every issue – from jobs to health, education, housing and pensions. Many Green Party members are left-wing socialists like myself. Many of us resigned from Labour, appalled by its pro-big business policies and its support for privatisation, war-mongering and its attacks on civil liberties, such as the draconian anti-terror laws. The Green Party’s Manifesto for a Sustainable Society sets out a radical agenda for fundamental social change, to benefit working class people, end the impoverishment of two-thirds of the world’s peoples and to save our planet from devastating climate chaos.

The Third Estate: In the current elections the Greens have been going out of their way to present themselves as much more than a single-issue party, highlighting in particular their social policies, whilst you yourself have a very strong record on human-rights. Do you feel the message is getting across and public perceptions are changing? What more do you think could be done?

Peter Tatchell: For more than two decades, the Greens have had a very progressive social agenda. Unfortunately, the media tend to cover us only when we campaign on environmental issues. That is beginning to change. As a result, more and more voters recognise that we have imaginative policies for a fairer society on a wide range of issues. That is why many of our new supporters are ex-Labour voters, left-wing independents and disillusioned voters who gave up voting years ago. They are fed up with the way Labour has ditched the working class and the trade unions. They saw Labour take us into an illegal war on false pretences and how Labour pandered to George Bush. Increasingly, people realise that the Greens offer a progressive alternative.

The Third Estate: In the past, Muslim voters have often tended to gravitate towards the Labour Party. The election of George Galloway in Bethnal Green and Bow in 2005 was, perhaps, the clearest indication that Muslim voters are increasingly abandoning Labour in the wake of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. With Respect not standing in the 2009 European Elections (and specifically endorsing the Green Party in the North West), do you feel the Greens can offer a natural political home to disenfranchised Muslim voters?

Peter Tatchell: The Greens took a strong, unambiguous stand against the Iraq war, right from the outset. Before the war began, I did a one-man protest; running out in front of Tony Blair’s motorcade, forcing his limousine to halt. It was a small symbolic gesture, but it was great to see Blair’s exasperated expression. For Muslim (and non-Muslim) voters who are disaffected with Labour’s pro-war policies the Greens offer a comfortable, welcoming, progressive political alternative. Many Muslims will, I think, also be attracted by the Green Party’s anti-consumerist, anti-materialist message. We emphasise quality of life, not quantity of possessions. Ours is a people-centred party that puts people’s needs first. Unlike the other parties, we are not obsessed with economic growth and GDP. We want everyone to have a decent standard of living – here in the UK and worldwide – but we also recognise that there are many other important things that are essential for happiness – a loving family and friends, good neighbours, clean air to breathe and a safe neighbourhood. Empowering people to support each other and sustain good community relations is part of the Green agenda.

The Third Estate: You’ve been campaigning in the North West where you’ve argued that a vote for the Greens is the surest way to stop the BNP. How is the campaign shaping up and what do you think the chances are of a red/green/anti-racist alliance succeeding in preventing Nick Griffin from winning a seat?

Peter Tatchell: A big vote for the Greens is the surest way to stop Nick Griffin and the BNP. The battle to win the last seat in the north west is between the Greens and the BNP. This means that a Green victory will keep Griffin out. The BNP is a divisive, bigoted, sectarian, nasty party. All that it offers is rage and hate. It has no practical solutions to the economic crisis, mass unemployment, climate chaos and the corruption of parliament. It has a sick history of scapegoating and vilifying black, Jewish, gay and Muslim people. Lots of people realise that the number one priority is to stop the BNP. When out canvassing, we have met many people who will be voting Green for the first time, partly to defeat Nick Griffin, partly to show their anger at the expenses scams by Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs, and partly because they have decided that the Greens have the best policies. Right now, the Greens are on 9% to 13% in the opinion polls. If this level of support holds up, and our supporters turn out to vote, Nick Griffin will be toast and the people of the north west will elect an anti-racist MEP, Peter Cranie of the Greens.

The Third Estate: By all polls and results, it would seem support for the Green Party has seen a steady increase in recent years. Can you envisage this support translating into MPs at the next General Election?

Peter Tatchell: In the wake of the banking and economic crises, a lot of people are realising that the Greens offer an alternative that is both credible and radical. Our support is rising. We have a good chance of electing MPs in Brighton and Norwich at the next general election. We would get many more MPs – perhaps 40 – if Britain had a fair voting system. That’s our biggest problem. The election method is rigged to favour the big three parties. We are pressing for major constitutional reform to enhance democracy and popular participation in politics. As well as proportional representation and fair votes, I want to see other reforms like an elected head of state, an elected second chamber, a written constitution, a Bill of Rights, the right of voters to recall their MP and the devolution of power to democratically elected regional parliaments. Changes like these will help make our political system more open, representative, accountable and fair.

www.petertatchell.net

Its been quite a week for Labour party. I don’t want to dwell any further upon the ridiculously entitled smeargate. I think I was far more incensed by reports of James Purnell charging the tax payer up to £400 a month for his groceries. As the man in charge of social security, he expects the unemployed to meet all their needs on a little over half that sum. Meanwhile, if Purnell’s plans go ahead, the long term unemployed could be forced to go out litter picking in return for their entitlement to such vast sums. Now that’s the kind of policy to make Daily Mail readers cream. Anyway, today the number of unemployed workers is 4 or 5 greater than the number of vacancies. And Purnell’s insistence that unemployment can be cut by hitting benefit claimants with a big stick are looking more and more ridiculous.

For the past decade principled members of the Labour party have been hammered over the head with the need to be pragmatic, the need to get things done and to stay in power. The left have been presented as a political liability, as a bunch of self-indulgent idealists – selfishly interested in the purity of their ideology rather than actuallly being in government long enough to offer help to people who need it. Today however it is clearer than ever that electoral millstone hanging round Labour’s neck is not the Trade Unions nor the left. It is men like Purnell – who have been determined to bleed the taxpayer dry for personal gain, regardless of the political and electoral risk, who have been so shortsighed as to have spent years baiting the unemployed (3 million voters by the next election) – that has made reelection a distinct improbability.

Yet before we proclaim the death of labour as a progressive force, it is worth looking a bit outside our chronological bubble. When Britain faced the great crash of 1929, the ordinary people of this country face an even greater betrayal at the hands of labour politicians, who pursued a brutal policy of Laissez-faire. Fifteen years later the Atlee government was elected. Once this sorry circus comes to an end, members of the labour party will be asking questions. They will be asking ‘what have we become?’. And they will be asking how Labour can win back power. And they will be aware that the great Blairite truth – that you win elections by adandoning your principles and racing to the centre – has well and truly had its day.

And one more thing. I will be deeply unhappy when the tories return to power. But I cannot pretend that I do not relish the possibility of some of watching the likes of James Purnell experiencing a David Mellor moment, as somebody on another blog put it.