Meeting Report from Mark Langabeer, Newton Abbot Labour Member
Over 1000 people attended a zoom meeting on March 1st, organised as part of Arise – A Festival of Labour’s Left Ideas. The principal speakers were former shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, Richard Burgon, the Secretary of the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MP’S, Mark Serwotka from the PCS civil servants’ union and Steve Turner of Unite.
Opening the meeting, Apsana Begum MP called for a people’s budget, highlighting Tory failure in dealing with the virus, and demanded support for those who are required to self-isolate. Sarah Woolley of the Bakers Union then added that the Tories have continued their anti-union agenda with the abolition of Union Learning funding. She also expressed disappointment with the political direction of the current Labour leadership.
Mark Serwotka spoke of the need to learn lessons from the past and called for unity in resisting public sector pay freezes and attacks on pensions. PCS had started its resistance by balloting 3500 members at the DVLA in Swansea which has the highest Covid infection rate in the UK. Myriam Kane of the Black Liberation Alliance demanded a zero-Covid strategy and declared that if the BLM can topple Trump, then we can topple the Tories. Laura Pidcock, a member of Labour’s NEC, argued that workers shouldn’t pay the price of the pandemic. She concluded that the crisis was a result of the capitalist system.
Steve Turner argued for an alternative to austerity with a programme of one million new green jobs. It has been low paid workers that have kept Britain going during the pandemic, not the CEO’s of the large corporations, he said. Dr John Lister pointed out that the NHS had been ill-equipped to deal with the pandemic due to £35 billion cut in funding during the last decade. A speaker from the ‘ We Own it Campaign’ stated that public services are under threat and demanded that bus services should be publicly owned.
John McDonnell drew on all the points made from previous speakers. He stated that 900 health workers had died as a result of Covid and that a people’s budget must address workers’ concerns. Transport companies had received £1 billion from government without any conditions. He pointed to fire and rehire practices and declared that the Tories practice class war, rather than just talk about it. He outlined a program of a one-off windfall tax for those companies that had benefited from Covid.
Richard Burgon MP concluded the meeting by stating that the current crisis is a ‘1945 moment’ and that Labour must offer answers now, not in three years’ time. He said that 40 years of neo-liberalism were being exposed by the pandemic and a called for a people’s bail-out to deal with growing poverty and inequality. In my view, Burgon is emerging as the left leader of the Labour movement, similar to Bevan and Benn in years past.
There is a new mood of resistance developing within the workplaces which will have an impact on the Labour leadership, whether Starmer and Co like it or not. A bold socialist programme, that includes the public ownership of the major companies that control our lives, would sweep Labour into power and transform society for the benefit of the many, rather than the few.
