For four years, I have warned
that the wealth and power of national and international, financial and other
business interests, combined with the latest 1984 micro surveillance and
communications control technology, would do whatever was considered necessary to
further a British “American Dream” using the criminal, the personally ambitious,
the racists and the misogynists to further their cause. For the past three
years I also warned that divisions within the Labour party over Brexit,
international and defence policy and between neo liberal and socialist
economics, would prevent Jeremey Corbyn becoming Prime Minister of a socialist
leaning government.
As I told members of Jeremy’s
campaign team in 2015, although I agreed with everything proposed in his prospectus
to be leader, I was not going to vote for him for two reasons. The most
important was that it was time for a power shift from men to women in general
and for the Labour Party in particular. I also feared that that Jeremy’s Parliamentary
and Public record of consistent international peace making, opposition to all
forms of racism, support for anyone the subject of injustice and unwillingness to
compromise political principles would divide the Party, given that the majority
of those elected to House of Commons or awarded seats in the House of Lords accepted international
capitalism, the structure and approach of the British ruling institutions and
had become out of touch with the response of the native white working class to
the open borders of the enlarged
European Community.
The only thing which surprised
me about the result of the 2016 referendum was that the majority to leave was
not greater, given the impact of the planned austerity, the extent to which Nigel
Farage played the race card and Tory Party leavers promoted the kind of retrospective
nationalism which combined with racism had brought Hitler to power over most of
Europe.
As I have also continued to remind
of what became evident when attending in the mid 1980’s, a four week international
senior general management course at Henley, the hatred of those working at
director level in both public companies and former nationalized utilities of
public services with principles and standards; the wisdom of moving headquarters
to countries with stable governments and low corporation taxation rates and
moving production units to countries with stable governments and little or no
trade unionism to keep wages low; the need for world wide relationships with
competitors to minimise the power of individual governments; a contempt for
politicians who could be bought; and the importance of strengthening the European
trading mechanism in the context of the development of the other international
trading blocks and the emergence of China as a world dominating economic power.
I spent six months digesting the
components of the course, ending with an overview paper, sending a copy to Michael Heseltine,
the Member of Parliament for Henley on Thames and a lifelong European. To my
surprise he not only replied but said he
was distributing copies throughout Whitehall just before he resigned from Office.
I received one follow up response from the Human Resources Director at the
Ministry of Defence in relation to the historically proven reality that political,
financial, business, social projects will all fail in their stated objectives
unless you are able to recruit those who share, are committed, and trained to
achieve the objectives.
Teresa May, who had shown
strength of character and courage during her tenure as Home Secretary, took the
right decision to call a General
Election in 2017, knowing that she had little prospect of getting a balanced
deal with Europe over leaving the European Community without being able to combat
those who formed the European Research Group within the House of Commons and
reducing the evident opposition from the Labour and Liberal democrat parties
for Remain, Ending the threat posed by Jeremy Corbyn was only one factor. She evidently
underestimated, as Tony Blair and others have since admitted, the personal
ability of Jeremy to communicate with
people, based on his proven record and coupled
with the growing awareness among well educated, thoughtful, responsible and
caring people of all ages and backgrounds, that change was needed and that the re-emergence
of the kind and level of politics which brought Donald Trump to power in the
United States of North America had to resisted.
It is clearly evident that Mrs
May failure has brought the British people to a moment in our history where the
choice is between Government by those of the dark or by those of the light. It is as simple as that.
It would be wrong to be
carried away by the fact that 2000 people in the North East accepted the
invitation to listen to Jeremey Corbyn at Newcastle’s Civic Hall on Saturday,
learning of the meeting on the Monday and of the venue on Friday and arrived in
their hundreds over an hour before scheduled time and then queued for upwards
of hour along opposite directions of Northumberland Street just to make the point
we know difference between an honest man and a self-interest unscrupulous liar.
The odds, it has to be
admitted are still stacked against us, and putting off the General Election is
essential until we leave the EEC with no deal at the end of October, the
present most likely outcome, or achieve a delay which should see the Tory Party
old order rid themselves of Boris, and where
I can still see Mrs May, Jeremey Hunt,
Phil Hammond back in temporary charge.
The two aspects of the meeting
on Saturday which gives me hope, was the repeated applause when the platform speakers
echoed Jo Cox, there is more that unites than divides, and we will not let the
passionately held differences about Brexit derail the issues to be decided at
the next General Election, and secondly the strength and quality of the next generation
of Labour women ministers.
The first speaker was the
Laura Pidcock, first elected as the Member of Parliament for North West Durham
in 1997 and appointed Shadow Minister of State for Business, Energy and
Industrial strategy in January of last year whose prepared speech was delivered
in a manner which matched the mood of the audience as well as saying what we
wanted to hear, following on from the electric, passionate and empathetic mood
throughout the Brighton conference.
The response of those sitting
immediately around me was one of WOW, this is someone who will be at the forefront
of the Party in the future. Back home I discovered
that Laura comes from a political family and that as a child she attended demonstrations
against Thatcher and apartheid, obtained a degree in politics at Manchester
University and in 2012 completed a master’s degree in Disaster Management and
Sustainable Development.
I have spoken with Chris Peace,
Labour’s candidate to win the marginal seat of North East Derbyshire before and
who at present is the Cabinet Member for Health and Care on Sheffield City Council
. We had a chat at the entrance to Big
Meeting as she handed out leaflets and
pressing for support for an independent inquiry into Orgreave, which Jeremey
announced from the platform later that day and Diane Abbot will announce on her
first day in office as Home Secretary. Chris is a qualified teacher who then
qualified as a criminal lawyer.
It was also good to hear again
Nick Brown, who spoke at a Momentum members meeting in Newcastle several years
ago. He has been chief whip for Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and for Jeremy since 2016 and since then has
organised parliamentary defeats against Cameron and May before achieving defeats for every vote Boris has attempted since the Tory party chose him to destroy the One
Nation party. Nick, a southerner like me, by birth, also went to Manchester University,
moving to Tyneside in 1978 when appointed legal adviser to the GMB and elected
a Newcastle City councillor in 1980, before his election as Newcastle East M.P. after
the sitting member defected to the SDP. His role in keeping the Parliamentary Party
together should not be underestimated.
Ian Lavery, the Wansbeck
Northumberland MP who is one of the proud sons of Ashington along
with the footballing Millburns and Charltons and cricketing Harmisons and Mark Wood among
many others. He has been Chairman of the Labour Party since 2017 and is one of
two National Campaign Coordinators, a role for which he is well fitted. He is
very much traditional North East Labour of the kind who made my life as a chief
officer for 18 years difficult although I never forgot that such individuals
reflected the reality of the life of the men in their communities.
After the interval, the tone
of the meeting changed, because of two of Labour’s highly intelligent future
female Ministers. The Member of Parliament
for Newcastle central, Chi Onwurah, is not a natural soap box campaigner
but is one of several Labour Shadow women Ministers with interesting backgrounds.
Her Newcastle born mother married an educated Nigerian who successfully studied
to become a dentist at the Newcastle University Medical school back in the 1950’s
when racism in the North East and other
industrial northern towns was strong.
Born in Wallsend, then in Northumberland,
and now North Tyneside, she went with her parents to Nigeria in 1965, a few
months after her birth, returning with her mother two years later when the
Biafran War commenced, her father joining the Biafran Army. In 1987 she
graduated from Imperial College London with a degree in Electrical Engineering,
I believe one of the few qualified engineers in the House of Commons, working
on both hardware and software development and with work experience in the
United States, Demark, France and Nigeria while also studying for a master’s in
business studies at the Manchester Business School.
Chi is one of Tyne and
Wearside Members Parliament, also rooted in the traditional trade union and
Labour movements of the North East, a firm supporter of Remain, supporting Andy
Burnham and the Owen Smith in the two leadership campaigns and this was
recognised by the initial response of the audience to her contribution compared
to those speaking before her. My impression is that people did listen to the
wisdom of what she said, underlining that despite strongly held differences in
approach and on individual issues we had to come together to achieve a Labour
Government.
I knew nothing of the speaker,
Lauren Dingsdale, chosen to introduce Jeremey, the Labour candidate for Conservative
held seat of Middlesbrough and South East Cleveland, whose diminutive youthful appearance
masks a powerful intelligent political brain which saw her gain more than twice
the votes at selection than a local woman councillor. Lauren also trained as a
lawyer after graduating from Oxford with a degree in Philosophy, Politics and
with help from throughout the region should quickly become a member of the extended
government team.
Risking the commentators
curse, ever since Boris was elected the Tory Party Leader and assumed the
office of Prime Minister, Jeremy in both manner and what he has said, looks a
man who knows he will be the next Prime Minister because of the hundreds of
thousands of individual members of the Labour Party who will do what is
required to ensure that he is. This explains the willingness of the Scottish Nationalist
Party to work with him but not the Liberal Democrats, who fear as much as the Tories, that once in
position as temporary Prime Minister to
prevent a No Deal Brexit, the myth created as
Bogey man will be ended and the Lib Dem hopes of spearheading a new
centre right party will also end.
The message given by the 2000 who queued around Newcastle Civic Hall for an hour or more on
Saturday is that come the General Election 2000 will become 200000 thousand and
counting.
