The Party Blogs

[Blakesley]

[Dame Amelia Lockhart]

LabourList

Labour’s Historic Mission
April 2019
By Andrew Harrop, General Secretary of the Fabian Society

The unexpected resignation of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party places the party at a crossroads.

Whoever seeks to replace him must answer two questions: firstly, how they would deal with the stain of anti-Semitism present in many parts of the party? Secondly, who do they think Labour exists to serve and how our policies fit that?

For nearly four years, Labour has had one of its most left-wing leaders in history. It became a party that re-discovered its ambition, moral clarity, and conviction. Bold new thinking was presented on reshaping the economy, and meeting the challenges of the future. Nothing was off-limits for the party, except it seemed Labour’s historic mission: ending poverty.

The previous Labour government committed to ambitious targets on reducing child poverty. It fell by a quarter between 1997 and 2010, with nearly a million fewer children in poverty. And we legislated to end child poverty.

Over the past nine years, we have seen Conservative politicians slash our social security system, fail to tackle rising insecurity in the economy, and deliver sustainable prosperity for all. As a result, poverty has sky-rocketed - and child poverty is rising fastest.

Had Labour won in 2017, too little would have changed for the most disadvantaged in society. Perhaps child poverty would have stopped rising dramatically, but it wouldn’t have been cut. Too many of the policies adopted over the past four years would have failed to help the most disadvantaged in society. The latest manifesto promised rising living standards for the top half of society, and it falling for the bottom half.

Abolishing tuition fees would have been paid for by low-income workers, as well as the super rich. Labour fell into a ‘something-for-nothing’ trap by offering lots of free entitlements for advantaged families, and asking the most disadvantaged to pay for them.

Nationalisation was prioritised over ensuring every family had the financial security to live a good life and over reversing social security cuts. Too often Labour sought to expand the role of the state for its own sake, rather than expanding egalitarianism - and ignored the importance of lifting low-income families up.

Currently we have a Labour Party committed to widening the gap between the richest and the poorest - and the next leader must end that. We cannot go into an election, one that we can reasonably expect to win according to the polls, with a manifesto that fails to tackle poverty. Whoever the next leader is, we need to rediscover our historical mission to spread power, wealth and opportunity, and end disadvantage.
Amelia

[Kayla Gray]

Tribune

Post-Brexit Britain: Our role on the international stage
By James McLaughlin MP

Our world is rapidly changing, and has been for decades, and our role in the world must change alongside it. Brexit can be a turning point for Britain, a new dawn for a better future in which we begin to take a new path with a new approach to our economy and to our foreign policy. I voted leave in the referendum to get a chance to bring about this change to the future of our country, and now we must take this opportunity by the horns to build a foreign and defence policy for the many, not the few.

Our reputation on the international stage has been diminished by the likely illegal and definitely counter-productive invasion of Iraq, done to advance the interests of oil companies, and the calamitous approach the government has taken to Brexit over the last 4 years. What we must now do is instead look to build a new Post-Brexit internationalism which does not serve the interests of the most well off in society, but benefits all of us.

At the heart of any future foreign policy for Britain must be four principles: peace, diplomacy, human rights and international law. Peace means that we must do all that is possible to avoid violent intervention, as it rarely works and when it achieves the goals it was set out to, it only does so through the deaths of innocent people which were entirely preventable if another path to a resolution was attempted and a violent intervention avoided. Alongside this, diplomacy means that Britain will exhaust all diplomatic options in order to bring about peace around the world. Britain must stand up against human rights abuses around the world, and condemn anyone who breaks international law, even when they are a traditional ally of ours, such as the United States, and end arms sales to nations which are alleged to have broken International Humanitarian Law, such as Saudi Arabia.

One thing that is vital to change is the ‘Bomb first, talk later’ approach pursued by successive governments, most notably, unfortunately, from a Labour Prime Minister in Tony Blair with the invasion of Iraq alongside other military interventions that have been undertaken in recent years. We must learn from the mistakes of the past and recognise that violent interventions in a modern foreign and defence policy only cause more instability and more conflict in the future. The policy of bullets, bombs, conflict and catastrophe has failed the world and must be ditched.

In order to bring about this new foreign policy, Britain must take bold steps to bring about peace and security for the world, and that means taking unilateral action to scrap nuclear weapons, as well as using diplomatic channels to work towards our long term goal of a nuclear weapons-free world. Our nuclear weapons cost Britain’s tax-payers billions per year and accomplish nothing that benefits Britain. The only thing they would accomplish is a nuclear holocaust against civilians if ever deployed. They do not bring us safety, they do the opposite. Any government serious about protecting Britain would modernise our defence policy for the 21st century and scrap these cold war era weapons which are obsolete in a modern foreign policy.

While on the topic of things that are obsolete and borne out of the cold war, NATO has been desperately looking for ways to stay relevant since the 1990s and the fall of the Soviet Union. NATO is becoming less about defence and more about American military and economic dominance. There is debate to be had about the role and purpose of NATO to begin with, but at least in the Cold War era there was a debate to be had. The issue for NATO is that it has been searching for it’s purpose since the end of the cold war, so much so that in 2014 at the summit in Wales you could practically hear the relieved gratitude to Putin for giving it some semblance of purpose in his annexation of Crimea.

NATO is now being used as a vehicle for the United States to expand it’s influence in Eastern Europe, even risking violations of agreements between Russia and NATO made in the 1990s. Simply, the US is drumming up tension in the region just as much as Russia is. Additionally, remaining allied with NATO also means we are obligated, under Clause 5, to fight to protect a “racist semi-dictatorship” in Turkey, as was argued by Charlotte Austin in her 2017 piece titled ‘Why Britain Should Leave NATO’. In the piece they set out a sound argument for leaving NATO in more detail than I have here and I would encourage you to take the time and read through it.

NATO is an increasingly destabilising force in the world and it’s role in Britain’s future foreign policy should not go unquestioned. Quite the contrary in fact should be the reality, it is in the interest of Britain and global peace that we leave NATO behind, back in the 20th century where it, arguably, had a purpose.

We need to move forward to a 21st century foreign policy, and this is how we begin to do that. Brexit is an opportunity for change both at home and for our role on the international stage, and this is how we can commence with making a positive impact on the globe again and reversing the damage done by modern-imperialism promoted by NATO and Britain’s foreign policy for the last few decades.

(Approval from Mac)