Tom Miller

My name is Tom Miller. I’m into music, politics, and the odd book. Nothing special. I’m British but from a lot of places; London, Essex, Newcastle, Surrey. I work as a Media and Marketing Exec for Tribune.

I think before anything else I’m basically a blogger. That’s how I got involved in active politics. I have been involved with the Young Fabians, and currently sit as South East Rep on the National Committee for Young Labour. I’m intent on opening that organisation up.

I see myself as on the moderate left of the Labour Party, but only really because it has been so far to the right in recent years. I’m also quite green and personally liberal. In most countries I would be considered a straight-up Social Democrat, so I tend to identify strongly with internationalism and our sister parties. I have been strongly identified with Compass and helped to found its youth wing, but I now differ from it in some key areas and approaches. In particular, I think it is too friendly to leaders of non-Labour political parties, not involved enough in Labour, and not rooted strongly enough in local communities or the trade union movement. We need professionalism in the left, but we can’t depend upon a subsequent ‘professional left’.

So I suppose these days I’m a free floating Labour person, and would say ‘democratic left’, or a kind of ‘modern Bevanite’.

I think we need a more free, democratic and equal country, in other words more of the left. So we need a Labour Party that is electorally and organisationally strong, and indisputably to the left of the centre.

Anyway, I was born in 1985 and was 2010 Labour Parliamentary Candidate for Woking – a town (among others) which I consider home.

Not a great year for Labour politics, but it was still pretty cool.