22nd March 2002

Europe must be more like the USA, under Bush, said the Prime Minister at the Barcelona Summit working closely with Berlusconi the most right wing Italian leader since Mussolini.

The trade union movement, whom he has implied are "wreckers" will apparently be told that British membership of the Euro will allow the Bankers to cut back on their rights in favour of a more flexible system of production allowing workers to be laid off without protection just as the Dockers were, years ago, under the brutal system known as casual labour.

And if we must become more like the United States will we also have to ditch the NHS, because the USA does not have one and there are forty million Americans who have absolutely no health care provision and that must help to keep taxation low for the super-rich and make the workforce much more flexible and obedient to their bosses for fear of losing their jobs.

Hearing this seems to suggest that the prime minister himself has, in effect, now decided to leave the Labour party and go off on his own without bothering even to consult his own colleagues in the cabinet, parliament or the party and even the argument that this might lose him votes may not influence him for it is not entirely clear whether he himself actually intends to fight another election personally, and if he does not it would explain his lack of concern for what happens next.

To alienate the Police, the Postal workers and the London teachers at once, all of whom are immensely popular with the public, is almost unintelligible and at the Central Hall last Saturday when a huge rally of postal workers took place I had a chance to talk to some of the teachers who had been on strike and joked with the police outside by offering to go on their picket line whenever they needed me, which seemed to be very welcome to them.

I cannot, in my own life-time in politics recall a situation anything like this and the movement has to consider very carefully how it should respond, bearing in mind the fact that the public look to us to defend the services on which they depend.

Everything we say and do must be thought out to retain that public support because in the end it will be public opinion that can be decisive and for this reason we have to learn some lessons from the past, the most important being to avoid personalities and stick to the issues for two very powerful reasons.

This is not because we are a lot of goody-goodies but for two very powerful reasons and they are these.

First because the public support that we need to stop the war against Iraq, protect the public services, restore trade union rights and promote our cause, critically depends on us getting our arguments across in a clear and entirely positive way that is reassuring, and not frightening, so that the media cannot portray it as a bitter personal feud which it certainly is not.

Secondly because we ought to know by now that getting rid of a leading political figure very often fails to get rid of the ideas for which that person stood, as we will remember when the slogans were "Thatcher,Thatcher, Thatcher Out, Out Out", which no doubt helped to get rid of her but did not get rid of her ideas, many of which are alive and well in New Labour.

And the chants, at the time of the Vietnam war, "Hey Hey LBJ how many kids did you kill today" which no doubt helped the American people to learn the hard lessons of that war did not prevent them from electing a new president who seems ready to launch wars against an even larger number of nations, using Britain as one of its puppets.

This time we must take the initiative with a flood of ideas coming from the Movement itself around which we can campaign with conviction and knowledge designed to consolidate the support we know we have.

It is a great mistake to think of politics only in terms of polling day and candidates as if the ballot paper was our only weapon - important as it is that we should use it to see that we are represented effectively in the Commons and Whitehall.

We have all too often been content to respond to what successive governments have proposed, instead of taking the lead and demanding what we want accompanied by the publication of well thought out plans that would make them possible, based upon the unique experience of those who are doing the job at the working level.

The Rail Unions, for example, are by far the best qualified to say exactly how the railways should be run dispensing with the layer upon layer of strategic authorities and regulators, advised by well-paid consultants who hover ineffectively over companies that are only interested in their dividends.

Similarly teachers are by far the best people to develop programmes that best advance all their pupils and know what is wrong and how it can be put right far better than those who are undermining comprehensive education or, like Chris Woodhead used OFSTED to demoralize those who do the job.

The old Union of Post Office Workers - the UPW, now a part of the CWU, was deeply committed to Guild Socialism or industrial democracy and this is the moment when we should revive that tradition to defeat the battery of advisers, bankers and business men who are planning to dismantle the public services so as to grab hold of the budgets they command and do so in the name of modernization.

22/3/02