Sunday 2 October 2016

The World Transformed, Indeed

In the manner of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the Labour Party Conference was held for little apparent reason except to provide an opportunity for Momentum to hold its own.

Likewise, the enormous demonstrations against Conservative Party Conferences are now pretty much the point of holding them. What else about those Conferences would be remotely newsworthy?

If the answer is that that party would win a huge a majority at a General Election next week, or next year, or even when there is going to be one, then look at who its candidates at that Election are going to be.

People who take a sometime-never approach to Brexit (many of the demonstrators are far more staunchly anti-EU than that), and who support statutory controls on pay disparities within the private companies that on the boards of which they would require there to be elected workers' representatives, effectively trade union appointees.

Those candidates also want to abolish the Work Capability Assessment, which is very likely to have been done by 2020, and want to hold an inquiry into Orgreave, the only conceivable purpose of which would be to vindicate the NUM, a vindication that would extend to the entire Miners' Strike.

There is more to come, such as outright protectionism for the steel industry and for who knows what else. John McDonnell's first refusal option for workers when a company is to be sold is also right up Theresa May's street. And taking back each rail franchise as it came up? Why ever not?

At the very front of today's march are the Durham Teaching Assistants. One of their number, the redoubtable Megan Charlton, is to address the rally. One hopes that Durham County Council is watching and listening. This is what the real Labour Movement looks like, and sounds like.

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