First and Foremost

Labour First supports the role of trade unions, and the powers of elected local councillors rather than of unaccountable "residents' groups" and what not (including, one might add, overmighty municipal officers).

I am very sorry that it has made a red line of Trident, to which Roger Godsiff has long been opposed, and which is now opposed by Keith Vaz.

That Labour First's conference was held on the same day as the Fabian Society's indicates how far removed from the Labour Right's own mainstream the voice of right-wing trade unionists and councillors is choosing to make itself.

While the Director of the far less sectarian Progress was listening to Jeremy Corbyn, the Deputy Director was listening to Michael Dugher, and man of whom no one had ever heard until Corbyn sacked him.

Jokes about how "defence policy used to be made by men with four stars, but is now made by the Morning Star", apart from being stuck in the Cold War, raise the question of why the men with four stars were ever involved in policy at all.

And since they were obviously never involved in making the policy of an Opposition party, such remarks express a pining for the days when a nominally Labour Government simply did as it was told by those who would soon thereafter be heading off, with their generous pensions, to even more lavishly remunerated positions in the arms trade.

Even were there no such revolving doors, the determination of foreign and defence policy by the Armed Forces was and is contrary to the principles on which many Labour First stalwarts would and do resist the cession of their own powers to their clerks.

The measure of Labour First, as indeed of Progress, is now how it reacts to the Leader's remarkable speech today, and most especially to its proposals on employment rights, on dividends and the real Living Wage, and on pay ratios.