“To reassure, to show that it can be trusted, the Labour right must uphold the interests of capital and therefore attack and disappoint its own base. That includes constant attacks on internal democracy, albeit in the name of democracy, and imposing more and more bureaucratic controls over ranks and file MPs, councillors and members. As a result the Labour Party tends to atrophy at the base and therefore the right becomes ever more dependent on the capitalist media. A vicious circle.”

Yep…

Which Conservative politicians were phone hacked?

I cannot think of one -  though this would suggest that Tories have also been phone hacked.

Labour MPs that were victims of hacking seem to have been informed. Some of those who have, such as John Prescott, have been campaigning on the issue since, and particularly strongly, given that these are not private citizens (who it would be reprehensible to hack), but citizens with electoral mandates from many tens of thousands of people. If you voted for one of those MPs, this is as much a slight against your vote as it is against that MPs person.

One would have expected Conservative MPs, damaged in their duty to represent their constituents where confidentiality is required in their affairs, to have also kicked up a stink. There are currently 206 Conservative MPs, many of whom enjoy a quite welcome reputation for being relatively independent of mind.

If they have been hacked, it is their duty to protect the interests of their constituents and speak out – not to ignore their interests in order to protect Murdoch and co.

To his credit as a local MP, Soham’s representative in the Chamber, James Paice MP, has now spoken out. But he had also not been hacked. Thus far to my mind not a single Tory MP has publicly complained of being hacked.

Isn’t that funny?

Two supplementaries arise from this curiosity.

1)

• Have Conservative MPs been made subject to Parliamentary discipline of some kind over the issue?




• If so, why is David Cameron protecting News International against the constituents of his MPs?

2)

• If this is not so, why won’t Tory MPs that have been hacked speak out, on behalf of their constituents?

I have been having a bit of a twitter debate with The Old Politics, and largely agree with Helen Goodman on the issue. But I have to say, my view on the topic is ambiguous, because I feel that Blue Labour has made some innovations and contributions that are definitely worth us listening to, and I cannot argue that it has not started a debate. I also think that the debate tells us some important things about Britain’s contemporary working class, and should be seen alongside Owen Jones’s five star rated contribution to that particular debate (which it is better to buy from here).

I think Blue Labour poses questions which are both narrow (about Labour and where our political formations go) and wide (where is society, and what needs to happen to it). Both might be stood as starting with an analytical approach, and then implying a prescriptive one.

What these prescriptions actually are seem to be the main topic of debate between those in the party behind Blue Labour (who, for all the talk of James Purnell and David Miliband, seem mostly to be slightly left of the party centre), and those such as myself from the more established soft and hard lefts who are more comfortable with ‘progressive’ notions of cosmopolitanism and certain types of social fluidity (for example, liberalism on immigration). Last night’s Twitter debate seemed light on conclusions as to what Glasman, Cruddas and Rutherford are actually saying. But it seemed even lighter on what they actually prescribe as a remedy for the ills they diagnose.

I am keen to agree with them on questions of institutions and organisation, and I do essentially agree with their perception of the reasons for working class disconnect with politics generally, and with Labour.

But for people with a Gramscian heritage, it seems to me that where some seedling of a hegemonic project is in the offing, there is a total lack of analysis in Blue Labour thinking about issues of consciousness, and how  that overlays with perception. Let us consider for a moment stereotypical workerist views on immigration. What about the benefit passed to working class communities by immigration? Because that is not as evidently quantifiable, we end up with a bizarre situation whereby immigrants contentribute £8BN to the economy nationally, feeding job creation and running public services that working class people disproportionately rely on – but those who disproportionately rely on them fear them for it!

In this sense, working class people are happy to consider their own role as taxpayers or employees, absorbing the media narrative (as Gramsci might have it, ‘the common sense’) on immigration and the damage it does to them.

Competition in wages is cited, along with over-straining of local services. Of course, in many circumstances this might be real. But the fact that the positive effects are not taken into account in the mind of the disillusioned working class is symptomatic of a natural gap in perception filled by one-sided messages from the news narrative.

The identity of these perceivers as people reliant on public services (and thereby immigrant labour) via the state no longer exists. As Owen Jones might postulate, should he allow me to slot a few words in on his behalf, their self-identification as members of a certain class is dulled. The experiences many have of working with immigrants, such as my own time working in kitchens, are disconnected from a politics which has nothing to say about our daily similarities as members of the same economic class.

So as well as being in a situation where the facts behind the resentments developed are unbalanced and without effective solution, any accurate perception of the self and how one is affected is also being chipped away at. It’s what we on the analytical left tend to call ‘false consciousness’.

The challenge of all stripes of the left is often in navigating it without doing too much damage.

- – - – -

Yesterday a friend pasted this article describing working class decline/anger on facebook, and asked me what I thought of it.

I responded as follows:

I think it’s very jumbled up. People who are working class increasingly don’t identify as such. This is a trend in itself that has been going on for around 25 years, with a similar track of political de-alignment and disengagement…

The ‘common sense’ (i.e. pervasive ideology) has been changing since 1979. There seems now to be no common acceptance that being largely dependent on the proceeds of wages makes you working class.

At the same, time, the amount of people who do has actually increased as wealth has centralise, fewer people own housing capital, etc. etc.

The working class is growing, but one of the unspoken rules of our public debate is that we’re not allowed to admit that it is there, or that by virtue of being part of a class that depends wholly on selling our own work, we are part of it. You might be poor, you might depend on nightshifts, and your job might be precarious – but you can only be working class if you wear unfashionable tracksuit bottoms or have convictions.

Negative stereotyping *is* allowed.

Final thing, but in my view, the lack of class identity in an economic sense means that working class people tend also to believe that one cannot be both working class and Polish (see the piece).

This lies behind some chunk of contemporary xenophobia, and ideological formations seeking to accommodate and catch up (such as ‘Blue Labour’, as it has been clumsily termed).

For me, the death of class consciousness is the death of social solidarity.

Working class political identity has long been on a track towards divisive infighting and a socially atomised politics of personal resentment (against working class immigrants, perceived yet largely fictional hordes of benefits cheats, etc. etc.).

The sad thing is that I think the only way out of this is the rebuilding of community institutions in a contemporary form, to replace those destroyed by Thatcher.

We are on the wrong track, and getting on the right one will be a lot of hard work.

It is one thing trying to return to working class voters. But we do need to analyse and take into account what material and psychological state that class is in. At the moment, it is subject to a conservative ideological project via the usual means of bourgeois ideological propagation – pumped full of resentment and artificial division as a means of making it pay for the ruinous excesses of investment banking and over-reliance on fossil fuels. It is now politically weakened and without leadership or the common institutions Glasman rightly praises. The result is a big porous sponge for divisive views. As intended, it is turning on itself.

So what do we do?

Resentments on topics such as immigration but also benefits and taxation being so evidently unbalanced when it comes to facts and perception, should a response accepting these precepts be taken up as a prescriptive recommendation for left or Labour politics? Do we ignore what is wrong with the new absorbed ideology (let us call it ‘workerist populism’)? Do we then triangulate towards it as New Labour triangulated directly towards the rich, whose interest it was in the first place to inculcate these prejudices?

That is populism, but it is not socialism.

It might even be electorally successful – if you are happy being restricted to winning elections on terms like that. But I am a socialist. And herein lies the conflict Blue Labour finds with the Labour left. It comes over as wanting to opportunistically cave in to elements of our own reactionism.

Blue Labour’s biggest weak points in debate with the socialist left is that it refuses to be clear on these matters, and in doing so, refuses to separate itself from the likes of Purnell. Let us be fair – Purnell’s shade of Labour is very much purple. In itself, Blue Labour’s debating behaviour is evasive at best, and at worst highly mistaken. It also leaves behind the best aspects of the Gramscian approach that had recently popped up as an element of social-democratic as well as revolutionary socialist thinking. Those aspects are correct.

Once again on working class identity, why does anyone let Maurice Glasman (bizarrely, a man who specialises in organising black churches) fetishize the white elements of the working class?

Once again, this element of thinking is a deliberate rhetorical spiel from some years hence designed to split the working class into racial sections, and carries within the implicit idea that the working class experience is different for white and non-white workers. I’m sure many things are different, but the reason is not that they share working classness!

This tool, in my view, should be recognised as a tool of deliberate division, and repeatedly exposed and de-constructed by left-of-centre politicians. Accommodating the notion simply reinforces the implicit division (and subsequent resentment) as an element of the dominant ideology – politics, Orwell style.

Unless we appreciate the  danger of a wholly ‘accept and adapt’ approach to workerist populism, in ten years, we will have something worse to accommodate to. My worry about Blue Labour is essentially this.

My final point is on the Glasman approach to class and institutions. I prefer promoting actual policies to indulging in PC hair splitting. Perhaps I am a bad Gramscian. However, it is unfortunate that The Politics of Paradox puts into gendered terms the ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’ institutions of the labour movement.

Nevertheless, it claims that Dad has been under-emphasised, and I would certainly agree with that. I don’t think Labour’s 13 years in Government can be rightly characterised as some kind of Fabian renaissance based on earnestness and technocracy, but the hard-headed building institutions of the movement, in particular the unions, were left aside. There was no real organising effort for the left of centre within the political labour movement either.

But I think Glasman needs to understand that the ideology of ‘progress’ was as key to these movements as it was to ‘Mum’ institutions such as the think tanks. Much of the Trade Union movement at its most successful rested on the Communist Party, Syndicalists and other elements of the revolutionary left.

And to say that Co-operatives are practical rather than progressive is ridiculous. Like unions, they are both.

Labour should not be afraid of its institutional background being forward looking. Nor should it be afraid of shaping a society and policy framework as yet unseen. In fact, if it is to be a ‘democratic socialist party’, that is the point of it. Given that we have never lived in any kind of socialist paradise, it would be mad for socialists to limit the scope of their ambitions to protecting traditional institutions, particularly when new currents (such as UK uncut and Climate Camp) offer many exciting ideas for the broad left, organising and campaigning. Of course we should protect the strength of traditional institutions of the left, like Trade Unions. Firstly, though, those forces, even at their strongest, have never been enough. Secondly, they need their strength expanding, not just defending. Thirdly, there is no reason at all not to concentrate on new configurations such as some of the new activist groups.

Progress can sit alongside that which already exists, and successfully. And for the left, progress should be playing a part inside our traditional institutions in the first place. Imagine if unions had done no work from the 1960s onwards to involve women, LGBT or black members? As a certain manifesto once proclaimed, let us face the future.

I think socialists are right about women, gay people, immigration and a range of other touchy issues for people with a distorted worldview. I believe that the distortions are anti-working class, and I don’t care whether the people that hold them are working class or not – save for in the context of how they can be combated within the working class. In the meantime, and I agree with Blue Labour on this, I would suggest we move to tackle the neoliberalism and overarching ideology at the root of Labour’s malaise, and build forward looking institutions with which to build a truly working class common sense. Red Labour.

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance.

The most recent edition of the Willesden and Brent Times carried several articles and a letter criticising the council’s decision to close several libraries. This is the wrong target.

Nobody pointed out the enormous size of the Tory/Lib Dem cuts being faced by the Council. Everybody knows that the government is demanding an enormous cost to services, that it is legally in control regardless of what the council chooses to do, and that Labour councils like ours are facing far bigger cuts than Tory and Lib Dem councils elsewhere. That is what is really politically motivated.

Some might suggest that decisions to close libraries are a ‘political stunt’, but that effectively pretends that Brent’s grant has not been savaged, or there are millions worth of less essential services to cut. What else should Councillors do?

The reality is that at least one of Brent’s MPs has voted for the to legally impose the cuts, and that alternatives such as cutting youth services or those for the vulnerable and elderly are even more unpalatable than the library cuts we face. Good public libraries are very important indeed. Nobody wants to cut them, apart from George Osborne and those who support him. Forced into cuts, should the council cut local services for the disabled instead?

It is unfair not to compare the alternative local cuts the council would be forced into, and secondly unfair to let the government and Sarah Teather, cutting far far faster and deeper than they need to, get away completely without blame. The council are legally forced to carry out their decisions, and the Government is backed up by reserve legislation from the 1980s if councillors refuse.

For people to either pretend the national cuts are not happening, or to blame the Labour council for this completely misses the point.

For local Lib Dems to engage it is beyond shameful.

Britain could cut far more slowly if at all, and stop strangling us by concentrating cuts on boroughs like Brent. It could do both easily.

The problem is the Government. If we want local services like libraries, it must change course, or be kicked out.

Inspired by earthquake geology, I figured that plotting these tremors might help pinpoint the coming Spartacist cataclysm we solemnly face. Only vigilance of a type that makes Joe McCarthy look measured and reasonable can save humanity. And especially those bits of it who unfortunately just earn too much to pay their tax like the rest of us.

So I’ve decided to keep an eye on this one.

Though this annoyingly lazy journalistic choice of lexis started off being used against those associated with liberalish-lefty-semi-labourites Compass, the purported culprits have been… well, pretty much anyone who isn’t widely accepted to be a tribal Blairite.

Since those hallowed words were first penned, the field of inclusion in the lurchers’ first 11 has widened significantly. Even unto the founding minds of New Labour, and their most avid disciples.

You know, people who gave loads of money to investment bankers, and that. Pinkos.

So I thought I would start of with this peach from Peter Oborne’s sub-editor, and follow, quick fire style, with another, like the chatter of an illicit American M16 in the sweaty hands of a ‘centrist’ Nicaraguan Contra death squad.

Until we are drowned under relentless waves of crypto-communist Labour moderates, or hacks stop pumping out this tired, empty nonsense -

KEEP LURCHING, COMRADES.

Laurie, you are somebody with your heart in the right place, and an excellent writer, the most provocative comment writer of your generation, as far as I can see. You are also a principled and effective activist, a credit to what you do.

I agree that the SWP are crap and the other parties sell people short. Unfortunately though, with the greatest of respect, what you are writing is confused and perhaps symptomatic of a lot of the problem our generation of the left faces – a kind of laudably independent ‘left-populism’, but without aim or direction, which still manages, lord knows how, to be intolerant of other traditions which share at least some of its objectives.

Let me put it this way.

We are a fresh start. We have had years of defeat. Old tactics and organisations have manifestly failed to fight for our generation, its values, or its interests. I’m not sure why you think this is, and suspect like myself that you think there are a myriad of reasons. I would put the fact that we tend not to vote right up the top. If we are not prepared to support anyone or get off our arses even on polling day, there is no incentive for anyone to legislate in our interests, and there is also no incentive for ossified organisations, Labour to Lib Dems to SWP, to pay us any attention.

Your basic thrust is that you don’t want them anyway, which is fair enough. But then I am moved to ask why you ever expected anyone to listen to you in the first place?

It would be nice, but it’s a bit unrealistic, isn’t it? Although it does give us an excuse not to put a cross on a bit of paper, which, once again, is fair enough. But I am always wary of solutions to problems which involve you making fewer decisions and/or doing less work.

I think, once again with respect, that what you are writing is reflexive, rather than well fought out. You are dismissive of Ed Miliband’s wish to be seen as a ‘voice’ for younger voters. For a start, I would say it is a mistake to be dismissive of anything. What stops you occupying Topshop and expecting the leaders of political parties to actually listen you you? Or indeed to open up access to themselves by removing barriers? Secondly,you dismiss Miliband as trying to provide a fluid and grassroots movement with ‘leaders’.

I didn’t read this into his piece at all, and can’t understand where it came from? As someone who has spent significant time (with some successes) trying to make Labour more of a bottom up, grassrootsy party of the left, it seems funny to me that this is your conception of political party activism. Do the people you know who are members of the LRC or (genuinely) dissident Lib Dems really seem to you to be bound by their party leaderships?

They are taking a responsibility with greater stigma than those you are prepared to shoulder yourself, but you dismiss them rather easily.

Thinking for a moment about the anti-cuts movement (for that is what it has become), I basically want to agree with you. In many ways, the cuts are a positive thing for this generation, if only in the sense that they are character building, and like a battering ram to the locked doors of apathy. A tremendous spree of innovation has taken place, in terms of demonstration techniques, occupations, strikes and local campaigns. Lobbying of the existing democratic structures via local councillors and MPs has also exploded far beyond the narrow activist circles we both experienced before this government came into office, often run by the Trotskyist parties, or local Trades Councils.

I suppose the question I wanted to ask is where you think this is all going.

We see that the current upsurge in activism directly results from the cuts the Government is making.

But why do we protest, occupy, write letters and go on the radio? Write for the Guardian? What are we doing it for?

I believe that there are two plausible objectives shared by everyone in the movement, From Trade Unionists and students of various stripes, Anarchists, through Trots, Social Democrats, and the as yet unpoliticised/non-aligned.

We want:

1) To minimise the cuts, and if we can, stop all of them.

Simple.

From the point of view of those trying to practically achieve the above, by closed implication this demands either:

2) A massive and radical change in Government policy

or

3) The radical recomposition or outright fall of the Government, founded on the altar of massive cuts before any other policy

As far as I can see, demonstrating has proven successful insofar as it has altered public opinion and drawn attention to the hardship caused by the political choice to cut jobs and services. It is absolutely essential that an ongoing extra-parliamentary campaign is kept going.

There will be various points of view between yours (that this should be as organic and spontaneous as possible) and others.

Such views will include those of Leninists of various stripes, who will argue that the movement should be politically directed towards various communisms and strategigised as such over the long term, through Len McCluskey who wants some central coordination and support alongside spontaneous leadership (my position), and those on the Trade Union right, who will call for officialism and back room labourism. All of those approaches require some level of centralisation and planning, and towards various different intermediate ends. Even though they all work to the same long-term objectives. This is a potential split and needs watching.

I think the movement should be spontaneously led, and in that sense am partly with you.

But with no strategy whatsoever for making our desires and our protests into real life as it unfolds, that leaves you and I on an island – an island with lots of people who have nobody holding them accountable or in place, or making sure that they are at their  most effective, or making sure that they are coordinated, or making sure that they are not all damaging each other’s public arguments.

Rather than trying to redress the problems (you must admit there are some problems?) with indiscipline and inefficiency in our movement, I personally think it is best to maintain overall efficacy by taking a ‘one foot in, one foot out’ approach to Parliamentary strategy, which is crucial to points 2 and 3 above ever happening.

Only making sure that someone listens and legislates appropriately can we bring an approach acceptable to anyone from the meekest social democrat to the outright insurrectionist.

Even Lenin depended on the weakness and collapse of a Government in Parliament. So did Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher. So will our generation. Dismissing the politics of parties outright leaves us marching about and achieving very little. If that goes on for long enough, the inevitable result is political depression and disillusion.

You have to ask yourself whether that is what you are fighting for.

Instead of taking lines on what sort of means you regard as acceptable in the movement, would it not make more sense to also think about what your ultimate ends are and whether you are really serious about achieving them?

I am, and as such, I am not willing to dismiss parliamentary politics, or, therefore, the party financially linked and constitutionally semi-dependent on the people who will suffer most from the cuts, the broad working class.

Parliament and political parties must be a weapon in the armoury of any movement that has an idea of what it wants and is serious about getting it; even if large chunks of said movement despise the institutions involved.

This doesn’t mean Ed Miliband will tell you how to protest.

Nor does it mean that you get a 100% win, and that he, Cameron and Clegg will all say ‘no cuts’ and send you a nice card and a bottle of fizz.

It means that at least some part of the movement has to be serious about winning battles and forming policy inside those parties that show the remotest interest.

Bearing this in mind, we should probably stop giving them such a bloody hard time about it, and instead welcome any indication that we might add at least some of their policies to our extra-parliamentary activities. Do we really have to choose between that and a broad movement outside of Parliament?

Bearing in mind that we are bottom up and plural, however much Young Labour charges people to join, as an anti-cuts activist, you don’t have to join the Labour Party if you’re worried it would mean making to many personal compromises. Whatever Ed says.

Over the years Labour membership has put me through several crises of conscience, and I took my choices, because I still thought it essential to a successful democratic left. Even for one penny, you don’t have to join, thrilled as I would be to have you fighting with me.

But please at least welcome a statement of intent on the part of Labour to compromise with you (let’s face it, who else will?). Maintain at  some respect for those comrades among us who are left to do the unfashionable dirty work? It doesn’t mean we’re against samba bands or flashmobs.

My own view as a socialist and anti-cutter is that it is important to remember we are going somewhere, we have objectives to achieve beyond anger, and that political parties, especially Labour, are important to this. I march in solidarity with those whose objectives are the same but do not share my view on this. We are all important, and all real people worthy of respect.

Apart from the bloke who threw a petrol bomb at some of his own co-marchers (oops) over my head a few weeks back, who I would have laid out myself if I was convinced he had run out. Instead I ran away. Side point.

The two basic things I am trying to say are that we need to have some sense of direction towards something, and that we need to accept that our various perspectives can all be applied and work alongside each other. E Pluribus, Unum, as they say.

If this movement is really serious about remaining bottom up, and welcoming diverse traditions alongside spontaneous randoms with chaotic political aspirations, we are going to have to march in mutual solidarity for a lot longer.

Unity is strength.

UPDATE: More here from HarpyMarx, The Great Unrest, Though Cowards Flinch, Lenin, and Latte Labour, all left of me with the exception of the latte. Sorry, latter. Which is where I am. On the posts themselves, I think I agree with the points raised by pretty much all of them, especially at TCF generally, and latterly at HarpyMarx, with special regard to the uselessness of the Lib Dems.

I would like to invite Laurie to knock on some doors with me in some sampled areas to see what we mean when we criticise them. Just because you voted for them as your last hope, it doesn’t mean they are of the left.

Unlike Ian I have fought bitterly on a number of fronts for All Women Shortlists and gender quotas within a number of organisations. As gender rules tend to disadvantage non-dominant factions in parties all over the world, this has often been to the detriment of the left and centre-left of Labour in the UK, those parts with which I am most commonly associated, if we have to see it in such terms.

Fundamentally, I would rather make sure we got the base right in terms of gender than secure a free run for people I agree with on policy. But like so much else in Young Labour, the changes which the NEC has recently imposed on our organisation are a mess.

A commitment to gender fairness does not excuse botched, unworkable or plainly defective solutions to that problem. This is what we now have. Even though the old system worked.

It also does not give any moral weight to solutions imposed undemocratically, or without consultation. This, once again, is what we have got.

Anyway, this is how I responded to Ian (with a bit of cleaning up). It seems to me that we desperately need a return to the previous system, which did work.

Dear Ian,

A couple of responses to you points (I am currently the SE rep on the national committee and as such, unfortunately, am not allowed to re-stand, as I am male).

Firstly, I want to make clear that I support gender quotas as long as there is sexism in the Labour Party. It is important to reverse prejudice where it takes place. If we on the left are not willing to make that case, what case exactly are we prepared to make?

Second point, but this letter was not actually from Young Labour, but from the Labour Party. Young Labour had no knowledge of the changes until we received the letter ourselves.

I am appalled by the fact that the NEC did *not* consult the current executive or Chair. This is very worrying.

Secondly, I am also alarmed that the election rules are not covered as part of our constitution, but am not surprised as our constitution is completely dysfunctional and unfit for purpose.

Finally, there was no point in changing the previous system, and I would definitely advocate returning to it.

It was complicated, but it basically involved removing the winning men who did worst in the regional elections and replacing them with the women who did best, until the executive was gender balanced.

This system had two big advantages over the current one in that:

1) It reflected merit as well as seeking to redress discrimination in term of votes and/or candidatures where it may exist – it was a meritorious quota rather than an arbitrary one

2) It would have allowed regional reps such as myself to re-run and get on if we had done a good enough job. This is important, as Reps could do with the incentive of re-election once they are initially elected.

3) It would allow fresh young males with something to offer to also get involved, whilst still providing a gender balanced executive.

The NEC has called this one very badly, and I hope to see a return to the old system – along with a whole other bunch of constitutional reform.

To find out a bit about those other problems and possible cures, I suggest you read Christine Quigley’s manifesto at http://www.christinequigley.org

In itself, it seems silly to me that the NEC makes decisions over our election process full stop.

Young Labour should be part of the Labour Party run by young members.

Christine herself does not have a declared policy on this specific issue, and nor do NEC candidates.

But it seems clear to me that at the very least we should be setting the rules democratically ourselves, perhaps with something like a Control Commission or some collected YL veterans.

In so many ways Young Labour is essentially a broken organisation. This should be much more unacceptable to the wider party than it is currently seen, especially if we are to drive on youth recruitment.

Until it is reviewed in full (this is one of Christine’s policies), it will never properly represent thousands of its own members, and never have any measure of independence.

Stop bossing us about, and going behind our backs.

We might be young, but we are also adults. We deserve a bit more respect.

I would be very interested to hear what Chair and NEC candidates have to say.

Merry Christmas!

The behaviour of the Liberal Democrats in spearing ninety per cent of their own promises to the electorate is a disgrace. It is also a disgrace in which Brent Central MP Sarah Teather has loyally supported.

Above all of the already demolished promises – the VAT rise, cuts, Trident – stands the totem Lib Dem issue of tuition fees.

I am in a strange position as a Labour supporter as, like Ed Miliband, I have long supported the previous Liberal Democrat policy of a graduate tax. A progressive graduate tax more strongly linked to income would provide a far fairer system of funding, and should be matched by contributions from businesses who benefit from graduates, as suggested by lecturers.

It is one thing that the Liberal Democrats have now decided to triple fees. It is quite another that the reason for this is an enormous cut to university funding which will see universities like the London School of Economics lose close to all of their current state funding, in line with the Lib Dem cuts agenda that they also specifically opposed when they asked us to vote for them. The LSE is now said to be readying itself for privatisation.

We need our society to support institutions like the LSE. The tripling of fees is a mask for the exact opposite – a policy of social neglect, individualisation of the cost of public services, and a complete reversal of everything Ms Teather told us she stood for. At least the banks will be getting a huge corporation tax cut while the rest of us pay more.

No party is perfect, but the very fact that Ms Teather and her serially dishonest government were allowed into office shows the importance of schools like the LSE – we electors could all clearly do with more of an education in economics and political ethics.

Yours sincerely,

Tom Miller
Mapesbury