I have enjoyed Labour Party Conference in Manchester, apart from its famous daily rain. I failed to bring an umbrella so many thanks to everybody who has kindly shared an umbrella with me. The highlight clearly was Ed Miliband’s outstanding speech. At yesterday’s Question and Answer session people around me commented how Ed from a distance (this photo shows how far back I was) looked like Tony Blair as he came on stage. Today Martin Kettle in the Guardian makes a more political comparison, and if you are pressed for time skip to his last paragraph summary.
Ed is not another Tony Blair and as his commanding comprehensive Leader’s speech demonstrated he has his own history. What they do share are the ability to win elections and the ability to unify the Labour Party. Looking back now with the divisions with Gordon Brown more known, it gives a false view of what life was like in the Labour Party when Tony Blair was Leader.
On the ground in 1997, 2001 and 2005 the Labour Party was never more unified and committed to winning so that we could introduce a minimum wage, lift children and pensioners out of poverty, ban fox hunting and make a difference to people’s lives. Never more unified than until possibly now. I sensed in Manchester the same commitment that Labour has previously had, perhaps even more so.
Labour Party members believe that if you earn £1,000,000 a year then £523,495 after tax should be more than enough to get by on. David Cameron and George Osborne supported by the Liberal Democrats believe that is not enough and that £565,790 is more appropriate. I think this is wrong and I think the overwhelming majority of British people agree that an extra £42,295 to the wealthiest people in society at a time of austerity is unfair. Plan A for most of us, Plan B if you are a millionaire!
I note also that Ed Miliband’s £40,000 figure in his speech shrewdly rounds down from £42,295 by £2,295 the money that will be taken from sure start centres, womens refuges and rape crisis centres and given to each millionaire tax payer.
Coming away from Manchester I am inspired and determined with other Labour members to change this. Bring on the plebiscite!
> I think this is wrong and I think the overwhelming majority of British people agree that an extra £42,295 to the wealthiest people in society at a time of austerity is unfair.
Plus the fact that following up wealthy tax-dodgers is totally half-hearted.
> One-Nation Labour.
I remember that a friend of mine Liverpool working-class background Classics at Oxford was deeply offended when Tony Blair said we’re all middle-class now. That is not one-nation, and Labour old and perhaps new has always been infinitely more one-nation than the Con-Dems.
Don’t think you can have One Nation when one half spends most of its time using media that calls the other half bitc*es and wh*res. Until women as taxpayers’ basic human rights to be portrayed by the mainstream men’s media as whole human beings, with opinions, feelings and lives that need to be respected, the One Nation is dead on its feet for one half of the nation. As a taxpaying female, I don’t feel that the daily violence and bigotry I receive from the other half of the nation is being tackled – at all. I for one am fed up with seeing bunch after bunch of politicians sideline the basic human rights of half the population not to be to be used and treated as bonded labour in the production of children, hit, spat on, pushed over, verbally, physically and sexually abused by the other half of the population and for it to be treated as a joke. And that’s just the schoolboys. Three women are carried out of their homes in body bags because of sexist violence and yet politicians still treat sexism as a joke and violent sexist propoganda (pornography) a freedom of speech issue. Freedom of speech cannot be used to defend freedom to tell lies about a genre of people in order to incite violence against them.