Speech to Manchester People's Climate March

Watch it on Youtube

We are all part of the largest mobilisation about Climate Change ever.

Believe me, there is nothing we could be doing that is more important than being right here, right now.

Five years ago, after the last UN meeting to discuss Climate Change in Copenhagen, the G77 described the outcome as “a suicide pact”. We must do better this time.

So today we make history, because otherwise our civilization becomes history.

Here, in the Northwest of England, the key battle in the fight against Climate Change is fracking. If we can win this we will have killed off a new fossil fuel before it has even got going. That will be something.

Photo Steven Speed

Those of us at Barton Moss last winter were in the front line of that fight. We did well. I don't think Igas are coming back to Manchester in a hurry.

But the amazing thing to me about all this is that whilst we’ve had Direct Action like at Barton Moss, we’ve had rallies like this, we had people camping out through the worst weather imaginable, we had people in front of lorries every day for four months, we had an entire community rallying round to support the Protectors, we had the police bending the law in every way and apparently inventing a terrorist attack to frame us, but we have never had a political debate about fracking. Salford City council would not debate our petition. Trafford Council would not debate their motion. If you want to pay £350 for a ticket you can go along to Media City on Friday to meet the fracking industry, but they don’t really want to meet you.

Two thirds of the country is at risk of fracking whilst Climate Change will affect the whole world. The first step to beating the latter is to ban the former. The science is quite clear on this and we, the people are quite clear. But like so much of British politics, it seems we don't have a voice.

The Labour Party Conference will not decide the Party policy on fracking because that’s not what Party Conferences do any more. Wherever the meetings are being held to discuss the issue, you’re not invited. 

Frankly Britain, this is rubbish. You should not have to stand in front of a lorry or pay three hundred quid to make your voice heard in a debate of national…international importance. Politics should be more than just money talking to power. 

We have been locked out of the politics, and as Plato said the penalty for not being engaged with politics is that you end up governed by your inferiors.

So the Labour Party must listen to us on this one. You cannot bring a new fossil fuel online in the next decade and still keep our promises on Climate Change. You cannot condemn two thirds of Britain to air and water pollution and still pretend you are the same party that introduced National Parks and the Greenbelt.

Yes, that was the Labour Party. Clement Attlee’s 1945 Ministry.

Let me give you a bit more history, there’s plenty of it here in this, the first city of the Industrial Revolution, where the our first canal was dug, the world’s first railway station constructed, where the atom was first split and the first stored-program computer built.

The Midland Hotel, where the party conference is taking place, is where in 1904 Charles Rolls first met Henry Royce. Together they revolutionised the British car industry, something which barely exists today. 

It seems an unusual meeting now. Rolls, the money man, came up from London to meet Royce, the engineer with a factory in Trafford Park. I don’t think it would happen that way round today.

Today the City rules and manufacturing, which made this city great, has been liquidated executive bonuses. 

Today we have an economy that is prepared to sacrifice the climate in order to save the banks.

But today we make history. Today we stop saying what we don’t want and start to demand what we need to survive the future.

We need a new Industrial Revolution, one that will provide the wind turbines, the solar panel, the trains, the electric cars and the other technology that will give us a cleaner, brighter future.

We want an economy that will provide jobs, real jobs, not the temporary work for a few international contractors that the fracking industry offers, but jobs for Trade Union members like those who are supporting this march today.

To make that happen we need to reclaim politics for the people, because when you put a big decision like how to beat Climate Change in the hands of the many, there are many winners but if you let just a few decide, nobody wins. It just becomes a case who loses first. 

The first step in reclaiming the politics is reclaiming the Labour Party, the party that in 1945 really was the Greenest Government Ever. Climate Change is the issue that will tell us whether they have listened. When they agree to oppose Tory plans to frack under our homes without our permission, when they agree to ban fracking, and when they agree to give us One Million Climate jobs instead, then we will know we have reclaimed the power.

It will happen, because we are the people and when we use our voices in the right way we are unstoppable.

The SDP: Thirty Years On

"We tried out drugs and LSD, now we're trying the SDP. Talking about p-p-p-p-p-proportional representation" is what Spitting Image had The Who singing in 1981.

Not a strictly accurate account of Pete Townshend or Roger Dalrey's politics (Townshend is still Labour man whilst Dalrey campaigns for the Countryside Alliance) but it does say something about the left wing circles who the Gang of Four attracted round them in the early 1980s.

Hindsight has made the SDP a bit of a joke, with quips about David Owen crossing the road to get to the middle and urging tactical voting for the Tories because it was their turn next.

However they did briefly come very close to becoming the second party in British politics. The first-past-the-post electoral system, lack of union support and the 'Falklands factor' dropped them from a high of 50% in the polls at the nadir of Mrs Thatcher's first government, to 25% in the popular vote in 1983 but only 23 MPs - a poor showing considering 30 sitting MPs had defected from other parties prior to the election.

That was really that for them and the years of the Alliance with the Liberals was just a prelude to merger into the Democrats which has then been followed by electoral suicide in the form of coalition with Cameron's Neoliberal Tory Party.

So was the SDP just a flash in the pan, a transient political party cashing in on a few protest votes from disaffected liberals who hated equally the Thatcher cuts and Labour civil war?

To a large extent it was, and the derision with which the party is now held is in no small part because, The Guardian's Polly Toynbee aside, there is nobody who is still prepared to admit to voting for them. Not only did the unions turn their back on the party, but the sensible wing of the Labour Party, who saw off the Militants, regard them as both turncoats who jumped ship in the middle of the battle and closet Tories who should never have been in the party at all.

Glossop Labour Club for instance have a special place in their hearts for Shirley Williams. Allegedly, on the eve of her defection, she visited the club and gave a speech on loyalty to the party. The next day she was on the news as one of the Gang of Four and a few days after that they received a bill from her for the dry cleaning of her fur coat, which she's got oil on after trapping it in the door of the Lada belonging to the local volunteer who'd kindly picked her up from the station.

However if we look beyond the personalities to the politics, the picture becomes less clear. Michael Foot's 1983 Labour manifesto, which included such ideas as nationalising the banks, doesn't seem half so daft now as it did then, but three years after the Winter of Discontent and in the midst of Labour infighting with the Militant tendency, it was never going to be an election winner.

Ignore David Owen's gradual drift to right as the 1980s wore on, the SDP's 1983 manifesto, with voting reform, mild trade union reform and support for the public sector would be popular today if Ed Milliband was to propose it. You can argue that New Labour had become the SDP, but I think they were more right wing than that and resembled, if I'm charitable, Gladstone's Liberal Party.

However politics is about more than just policies, and looking back the SDP appears to be made up of an odd bunch of uncharismatic politicians, most of whom were damaged goods in one way or another. Even the least odious of them, Roy Jenkins, was persona non grata after working for the EU, inspiring the Yes Minister quip that the only way back into British politics after Brussels was to form your own party.

Could these misfits have ever made up a government? Without the Falklands War the 1983 election would have been very different, and if the SDP had become the main opposition party could they, perhaps under Paddy Ashdown's leadership, have beaten John Major's Tories in 1992?

Maybe, but probably not. The Labour Party wasn't about to disappear overnight and would surely have siphoned at least as many votes off the SDP as the Democrats did from them in reality.

And there lies the problem. Three party politics has done the left no favours at all. If you read the figures one way you can see that Blair's big achievement was not to steal voters from the Conservatives, but from the Democrats. As long as there's a strong third party Labour can't form a majority.

Which makes the next election look quite promising for Ed then.

Back to 1980s? Hopefully.

So it was the big day at the Labour Conference, so what did we get?

Well no big surprises, there was the usual biographical stuff you expect from a new leader, although at least with the Miliband family they don't have to try too hard to make it interesting, and the predictable mea culpa from a Party that has just been given a kick up the pants by the electorate.

What we also got, in fairly lightweight form admittedly, was also a bit of the old The Crisis of the Left. How did the Party of Keir Hardy and Clement Attlee end up mired in Iraq and taken for a ride by the wide boys in the City? How did Labour become the party of Liberal Interventionism and Neoliberal Economics?

The current Crisis of the Left goes back to the 1980s. By then virtually everything the social democrats wanted had been achieved. True, Britain lagged a bit behind the rest of Europe, but basically we were there. The workers had power, the people had rights and the NHS, schools and social services had money. It didn't necessarily work as well as it should, but the basics of civil society were there.

This left the Left in a quandary. Is it Onwards to the Glorious Revolution still, or do we become the new conservatives, defending the status quo against the forces of the right? The result split the left. Meanwhile the ongoing collapse of the totalitarian communist countries in the East gave succour to a Right that had just discovered it's own revolutionary doctrine. Cloaked in the language of freedom beloved of the Flower Children of the now defunct New Left, Neoliberalism made the parties of the Right the new revolutionaries.

The result was a bloody and brutal decade in which what was left of the ideals of the nineteenth century and the 1960s were crushed, literally so in the Battles of Orgreave and the Beanfield, metaphorically so in the hearts of those who were to form New Labour.

Blair, Brown, Mandelson and the rest accepted this and through a mixture of naivety, realpolitik, arrogance, greed and plain old stupidity sought to achieve the ideals of the old Left using the tools of the new Right. The result was an Iraqi imbroglio, a Credit Crunch, a massive PFI bill and all the rest.

And so in walks Ed.

Hopefully out goes Liberal Interventionism, formerly known as the White Man's Burden. Nobody has the stomach for any more wars, not even the Generals who in Basra and Helmand have had to suffer the worst indignity a British Army can ever endure - being rescued by the Americans.

Neoliberallism will no doubt linger a little longer, but a system that has brought massive inequality, environmental devastation and an economic collapse every five years or so must crumble at some point.

In 1985 Neil Kinnock had to acknowledge the failure of the tactics of the NUM and shout down the Militants who wanted to hang onto an old dogma, long past its usefulness. Kinnock did both whilst reaffirming the compassionate values at the heart of the Left.

Miliband will no doubt be his own man, but I hope he will be the new Kinnock, not the new Blair.

RIP New Labour

A week after John Major's disgraced and discredited government finally shuffled out of office I was being interviewed on a sofa by Davina McCall for the Big Breakfast. I'd just been turfed out of my camp on the proposed site of Manchester Airport's Second Runway and Davina wanted to know what we were going to do next. "Well" I replied, "We've got a new government. Hopefully they'll listen to us and start taking the environment seriously."

Oh how naive I was!

New Labour not only had no intention of stopping new runways in the north of England, they were planning them in the south as too. Jets were good, they made money. But the best jets of all, like the best schools, and the best hospitals, were private ones.

If I had to pick one object that typified where New Labour went wrong it would be the private jet.

Private jets carrying the Master of High Finance around the world to convince us all that Greed is Good and prosperity is round the corner......and private jets taking terror suspects to torture and illegal detention.

When Blair eventually left office he even got is own so he could fly round the world with his message of hope, which included trying to tell the world to take Climate Change serious. Seriously.

When New Labour came into power in 1997 those jets were very bust ferrying people to and from South East Asia as financial turmoil gripped the markets there. New Labour listened to the Masters of High Finance and refused to let the Tiger economies rescue their own banks. "Don't worry, it can't happen here" we were told. Ten years later we are in the same boat as the Indonesians, the Koreans and all the rest.

And what was New Labour doing on the eve of the storm braking? Getting ready to launch a crackdown on Incapacity Benefit. Six months later sick banks were being handed billions to stave off total disaster. Socialism is alive and well, but only for the rich.

Public finances, already groaning at the cost of privately financed schools, hospital and prisons finally gave up the pretense of being balanced and sank inexorably and terminally into the red.

And so here we are, in debt up to our eyeballs, with two and a half million officially unemployed, a million odd under-employed.

Thirteen wasted years have come to an end and I really can't be bothered to get upset about a Tory PM as it's hard to see how they could be worse.

They've allowed BP to drill for oil in the deep water west of Shetland (and set the Security Services on Greenpeace when they tried to stop this) using technology that has just gone disastrously wrong in Gulf of Mexico. They've tried and fail to get us to grow GM crops, they've planned a new generation of coal fired power stations. So much for putting "the environment at the heart of policy-making."

They've bungled two wars, one of them definitely illegal. They've fluffed electoral reform.

They've ................ gone. That's all that counts.

Now, will you give us the Labour Party back please?

Political wipeout

They were once the leading left wing party of British politics, with a Prime Minister so popular that he could have been dictator for life if he's wanted to. But then came trouble. Firstly a war, which split the party and led to ministerial resignations, then there were the unfortunate compromises with the political right. Finally trouble in the Middle East and a cash-for-peerages scandal toppled the Prime Minister and then in the General Election that followed they finished a dismal third, with a hitherto minor party taking up the torch of progressive politics.

No, not my prediction for May 6th, but the result of the 1922 General Election.

There were a few differences between then and now. Lloyd George was a political genius and in the First World War he at least did all the right things. He also didn't just steal Tory policies, he governed in alliance with the party, and whilst he did sell peerages shamelessly, he did so because he considered such honours useless and any man willing to pay for them a fool who deserved to loose his money. The Middle East crisis was in Turkey and, although the country was terrified of getting entangled in another European war, everything worked out all right in the end.

However I suspect 1922 is a date that we could be hearing rather a lot about soon - the year the Labour Party overtook the Liberal Party as the progressive voice in British politics.

There were several reasons for this. The Liberals, formerly the aristocratic Whig Party, had been changing gradually over the last century as the franchise increased. When the rise of the Trade Unions and the formation of the Labour Party took the votes of the ordinary working class from them (the Independent Labour Party had the votes of the radical Middle Class) there was nowhere else left for them to recruit new supporters from

The First World War had also split the party, with Lloyd George, the ultimate political outsider, governing with the support of the Tories, non-conformist back-benchers and the popular support of the country as a whole. In opposition was virtually the whole of the pre-war Liberal government. Lloyd George was probably the best British politician of the Twentieth Century, but he was almost a man without a party which meant that when the chips were down he had no-one on his side.

And so the party that won the First World War, introduced National Insurance and laid the foundation of the Welfare State was ousted, and in it's place came the party that gave us the NHS, gave India its independence and introduced National Parks, state funded Care Homes and the greenbelt.

So is it the 1920s all over again? Should we look forward to a new Jazz Age of hedonism, fashion, music and fun? Art Deco, Dada, Cabaret, a General Strike and England winning the Ashes with some dodgy bowling? Possibly.

Or perhaps coalition government, Prohibition in the USA and the inevitable aftermath of economic (or maybe this time environmental) crash and the rise of fascism? Possibly rather more likely.

Endless articles in the press comparing then and now? Almost inevitable, but at least I got mine in first.