As we reported previously, the Labour Party conference was overwhelmingly on the left. In the conference fringe, both the Tribune meeting and the Campaign Group meeting, both left-wing gatherings, were large and very full. Here, a conference delegate reports on the second of these fringe meetings.
By Andy Ford, member of Warrington South CLP
The Campaign Group is the socialist grouping of Labour MPs, set up originally by Tony Benn. They are the only group of MPs who are reliable allies of Jeremy Corbyn and so he had to try and staff his key shadow portfolios from within its ranks. At present they number just 20 out of 262 MPs, and beyond them is the soft left, a vacillating Tribune Group of around 70, and then about 150 outright opponents of Corbyn’s leadership.
The Campaign group held their Conference rally on the Tuesday night, just after the dramatic Supreme Court decision and Jeremy Corbyn’s inspiring address to conference. The rally took place in a large marquee at The World Transformed, the Momentum festival close to the conference.
Richard Burgon opened the event and he looked far more relaxed than when speaking to his portfolio at the conference itself. He was a good host in front of a friendly crowd. The marquee was packed with dozens of people stuck outside, unable to get in and straining to listen.
The first speaker was the MP for Kensington and Chelsea, Emma Dent Coad, who rose to national prominence after the Grenfell fire in her constituency, just days after her election in 2017. She described the meticulous community organising that lay behind her surprise win by just 20 votes, in what is usually regarded as a natural Tory territory.
Next was Ian Mearns, MP for Gateshead. Perhaps reflecting his background in the LPYS and as an ordinary worker and GMB member, his was a more sober speech, capturing a tone of working class anger at what has happened to his area. “Mines, shipbuilding, engineering – all gone! And what is there to replace those good quality, union jobs?” he asked.
Ian Lavery, also from the north-east and ex-President of the National Union of Mineworkers, recalled how Peter Mandelson once said to him “That little room on Corridor W is like a coffin where we will bury you and your old ideas”. Ian’s declaration from the stage was fitting: “Well, whose been politically buried now? Us – or the ‘Prince of Darkness’?” He raised a laugh about Bois Johnson when he said that you shouldn’t make fun of people’s names “But there weren’t too many kids called ‘De Pfeffel’ where I went to school!”
Next the MP for Brighton Kemptown, Lloyd Russell-Moyle, described the co-existence of affluence and dire poverty in Brighton itself, and how private security had needed to be hired to patrol Kemptown after a plague of hate crime attacks on the gay community following the Brexit vote. He has himself been assaulted and threatened.
Marsha de Cordova, the Battersea MP, elected in 2017 after overturning a Conservative minister, explained the appalling misery and poverty inflicted on her disabled constituents by the Tory welfare reforms, (she is herself disabled) and the effect of austerity on London’s ethnic minority communities.
Dan Carden, the MP for Liverpool Walton, which is the country’s safest Labour seat, talked about his father’s experiences as a sacked Liverpool docker in the late 90s and, again, the extreme poverty and distress he sees in his surgeries. Dan is also the shadow spokesman on International Aid and Development and he discussed how he would like to decouple aid from business and help transfer green technologies free of charge to the ‘global south’.
Rebecca Long-Bailey from Salford told us how on being elected to parliament she thought she would be “the only socialist” but then was invited to the Campaign Group meeting in Corridor W of the Commons, where she found a small but like-minded group – the Campaign Group. She explained her vision of a ‘Socialist (cheers) Green New Deal’ of harnessing the power of modern technology for the common good with projects for electric vehicles, solar and wind power. She said she had to keep “pinching herself” to remind her that it was all real – Jeremy Corbyn as leader and socialist policies at the heart of Labour.
It is a good point – five or six years ago Jeremy Corbyn would have been a disregarded figure on the margins of conference, and instead of the lively and moving contributions from delegates at the podium we would have had stage-managed appearances by shadow ministers and horrendous smarmy creeps trying to build their careers on the back of our movement. Instead of a real left wing programme as an alternative to austerity we would have had dead policies triangulated with the Tories to within an inch of their lives. Half the Parliamentary Labour Party would like to go back to those days.
Richard Burgon spoke on his plans to help the poorest actually get access to the law and justice and the next speaker was Diane Abbott. Diane got a tremendously friendly welcome from the audience – we all know what she has gone through with abuse and threats.
The rally finished with John McDonnell, reaching back to his roots with a discussion of Marx, the cyclical nature of capitalist crisis and a pledge to make a fundamental change in British society, to wild applause.
So, not a challenging audience but the sincerity of the speakers shone through, and a hope invested in them by the hundreds at the rally and millions across the country.
September 7, 2019
