Wright Leadership Speech, Manchester

[Jack Wright]

Jack Wright addressed Labour Party and Trade Union members in Manchester

Leadership Speech:

“Thank you! I gotta be honest with you. I never, not once, expected to be up here, addressing a crowd to announce my intention to run for the Leadership of our Labour Party. I don’t look like how a modern Labour Leader is supposed to look. I don’t speak like how a modern Labour Leader is supposed to speak. My CV isn’t full of aspirational awards, certificates, and accomplishments like a modern Labour Leader is supposed to have - in fact, I’ve never had a CV, at all, and with mercy I never will. I’ve never charmed donors with silver-tongued oratory at galas - really the only gala I’ve attended is the only one I imagine I’d ever be comfortable at - the Big Show in Durham every July. Fortunately, this campaign isn’t about me, and I don’t intend to make it so. This campaign is about reconnecting the Labour Party to its grassroots which have been ignored, turned away, undermined, disrespected, and disempowered time and time and time again by Tony Blair and his New Labour allies. This campaign is about - to paraphrase my comrade Tony Benn - watering the roots of socialism in Britain, once again, because the grotesque neoliberal consensus embraced by every Government since 1979 is fundamentally rotten to its core. In essence, this campaign is about reclaiming this once great movement of ours for the working class it was created to serve.

If Labour had won 400-plus seats in an election while I was working as a docker, I can only imagine the jubilant celebration that would ensue amongst my comrades. We would toast the new government, knowing that it would fight for our interests, and for the rights of working people everywhere. That it would aggressively redistribute wealth from the idle fat cats to the communities that created it in this country. We’d be gleeful knowing that it would win us greater power in our workplaces, greater control over our lives. We’d be proud that there would be a British Government undeterred from expressing solidarity with global movements for justice and equality. After all, that was what that great Labour Government of 1945 did with its majority. After all, that was the exigency of our great movement founded a century ago.

While I must imagine what the celebration would have been like, I don’t have to imagine what my working colleagues’ reaction would have been if that Labour government not only failed to fulfill its founding obligation as the political vehicle of the working class, but actively worked to entrench the exploitative order that has condemned the many to misery over the past two decades so that the few could enjoy more. The 2001 election featured the lowest turn-out in recent memory. Working people in communities across Britain felt so alienated, so atomized, and so abandoned by the too clever for its own good New Labour clique that they made the perfectly understandable decision to stay home. Labour lost 70-plus seats and if the election had lasted a week longer may have been condemned to a hung parliament.

Tony Blair and his project’s successor candidate don’t seem to be too bothered by the fact that the their actions in Government have resulted in such a miserable result. Instead of reflecting on why so many working people felt that this incarnation of Labour was neither worth defending nor voting for, the New Labour project has spent the last week wasting precious time in Government - time that we could be using to forge a better future for working people after decades of privatisation and austerity - defending Peter Mandelson in light of very serious allegations of corrupt dealing. These are the political instincts of the people who claim that they must have an ironclad grip on this party for they have cracked the electability code.

Comrades, I am no polished spin doctor. My lines are crafted by focus groups or extensively conducted polling. But I know that Labour cannot squeak by in another General Election by defending sordid votes to gut social security for single mothers, by continuing to privatize away what little the public has left, by pandering to real estate billionaires, and by exerting energy defending and voting to exonerate people credibly accused of alleged corruption. We cannot afford to spend our precious days in power tinkering at the margins of a fundamentally rotten order. The politics of New Labour are simply untenable. We must move beyond them with a movement untainted by votes to undermine working people, a movement capable of channeling the justified anger and alienation felt in communities throughout Britain toward the cause of economic and social justice.

The socialist tradition maintains that change comes from below, and history has proven it to be accurate, comrades! Despite our slim majority after squandering much of the last four years, if we present a bold, radical agenda that speaks to the interests of the many, I believe that we can inspire a movement capable of laying the foundation for a just and fair Britain that will improve the lives of working people who have learned to cope with misery and despair for far too long. Our movement will emphasize the following three things and if we are well organized, if we tap into the anger felt by millions upon millions of people who felt betrayed and let down by decades of consensus politics - I believe we can win them.

For years the few have aggrandized themselves by raiding our public services, organizing them to pad their own pockets while services worsen and workers are given the shaft. With a proud socialist in Number 10, we will end the dark age of privatization. We will take our water, energy, and rail back into public ownership and organize them to meet human needs, so that nobody is condemned to fuel poverty, gauged when they travel, or quality is slashed all so that obscenely wealthy executives can pocket a quick quid.

Our movement will fight to expand trade union rights and protections - something that any Labour Government worth it salt should do on its first day in power. We will legislate to end Thatcher’s absurd prohibition on the right to secondary picket and make it easier for trade unions to advocate for the vulnerable. The Tories understood that breaking the back of the workers’ movement was necessary to unleash the full breadth of their unequal, atomized, exploitative order. We understand that - as the saying goes - “there is power in a band of working folks, when we stand hand in hand”. Aa strong trade union movement is an essential prerequisite to forging an equitable and just order for all and we will fight to strengthen ours.

And our movement will recommit to the cause of social housing in Britain, guaranteeing that affordable housing is a right. We will resist the pernicious influence of the real estate industry and instead commit to build and repair three million social housing units in five years, while ending the obscene reality of rough sleeping in one of the most prosperous countries on Earth, in that time as well.

These three steps will have a transformative impact upon our society and speak to the interests of those left behind, alienated and exploited. They’re not only policies that Labour should have pursued all along, but they’re necessary to have a fighting chance at the next election.

Comrades - this leadership election will ultimately be spun by the press as a referendum on New Labour as a political project. The factions within New Labour have set aside their aesthetic differences and united behind a candidate for a reason - they understand that this is an essential turning point for our future as a party after an embarrassing general election result. If the New Labour clique receives an overwhelming victory of the membership vote, they’ll interpret it as a vote of confidence to continue further down their disastrous course. A course that will entail the selling off of more what is ours, under public ownership. One that will see further “means-testing” experimentation with our social security. One that may even see the party that kept us out of Vietnam pursue a war-mongering foreign policy. Comrades, Britain already has a party of capital - it's called the Tories. We must organize and vote in this election so that workers can have a party of our own, once more. Our movement has been through a lot. We’ve won great victories, including the greatest health care system in the world, the post-war period of high wages, and ensured the stability of those who worked for a living. In this period of inequality and alienation we must return to the cause of socialism, to our grassroots to guide us to a better world. Thank you very much.

[Barclay A.A. Stanley]

In a word, rousing. The Labour contest, in a lot of ways, mirrors the Conservative one: there is an establishment figure, and an outsider; the outsider is connected to the bread-and-butter of the party membership, while the establishment figure is the odds-on favourite who has the ear (and wallet) of the well-heeled party people. Likewise, in both races, the outsider is a firebrand with a takes-no-prisoners, accepts-no-substitute attitude who will not stop short of railing against their party's establishment. Enter: Jack Wright, the big bald northerner with a thick Manc accent.

This speech hits at the heart of what the old guard in the Labour Party feel. Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson, Gordon Brown and the lot of them have cast aside working people in order to suck up to the so-called middle class on their near-six-figure salaries. There is a lot of apprehension among the Labour old guard, who are represented in the Socialist Campaign Group, about what this new "Tory-lite" Labour is bringing to the table and what it means for their beloved working class communities, and Jack hits the nail on the head with it.

But will this speech win him the leadership of the party? Almost certainly not. With Labour's rules the way they are, Wright is facing a massively uphill battle, trying to win over the Unions and the Parliamentary Party on a platform of rugged British socialism is not as easy as it might have been twenty years ago. But that doesn't mean that he can't win, and it doesn't mean that he and his comrades won't gain from it.

+2 XP and a groundswell of party membership support, especially in the north.