In 1983 Neil Kinnock, love him or loathe him, used his skills as a great orator to capture the mood of labour supporters with a series of warning that if Margaret Thatcher were to win the election then
‘I warn you not to be ordinary
I warn you not to be young
I warn you not to fall ill
I warn you not to get old’
Prophetic words followed by the deeply divided society of ‘loadasmoney’ and mass unemployment, private medicine for the rich but decaying hospitals for the poor, Eton education for speculators and crumbling schools for the rest, poverty with no minimum wage, fuel prices that made the poor cold and vulnerable but the newly privatised shareholders wealthy beyond their dreams. These are the same stark choices we face today.
Cameron had the audacity to claim in his last speech of the campaign that he will protect the poor and the vulnerable and the elderly. He is a calculated and blatant liar. Just how would £6 billion of cuts predominantly from welfare payments to the poorest, the weakest, disabled people and children, and pensioners become ‘protection’.
If we wake up tomorrow to the nightmare of a Tory administration it will be a nail in the coffin of the New Labour project. If we wake up to the potential of a Lib Lab pact then we must use our industrial muscle to hammer that nail home ourselves. Labour's late recovery in the polls did not coincidentally occur because Brown managed to smile. It was because Labour found its voice to connect once again to the working people who have and would benefit from progressive left values. A living wage, not a minimum wage.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/election_2010/8658615.stm
A state prepared to defend interventions to protect jobs, invest in public services, in capital construction, and dare we say it job creation projects. The New Labour hawks will be gathering to pick over the bones of their project and salvage from it a claim to the Labour Party. Brown declared voters should ‘come home to Labour’.
What we say is ‘Labour come home to us’.
Anna Rose
