Lead story

Labour needs left policies

by Daphne Liddle

LABOUR lost the election and is now embroiled in sorting out a new leader. The Party is polarising between those who want a return to “New Labour” and Blairism and the left wing who want Labour to return to its working class roots.

John McDonald MP, who heads the Labour Representation Committee, has ruled himself out of the contest but proposed that the party sort out its policies before rushing to choose a new leader.

“There’s been a lot of self-serving nonsense talked about why Labour lost the election and what it has to do to win in the future. We’ve just witnessed a well-planned media blitz of failed New Labour ex-ministers and their new-wave protégés blaming Ed Miliband with all the old Blairite mantras that Labour has failed to be a party of aspiration, to occupy the middle ground and appeal to middle England.

“This drivel from Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson and others is to shirk New Labour’s responsibility for what happened last week. No party has won an election when trailing in economic-competence polls. When the Tories shamelessly accused the last Labour government of crashing the economy, they were right, but for the wrong reasons.

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Labour needs left policies

Thank you for the victory!

by New Worker correspondent

“SPASSIBO za pobedu!” (Thank you for the victory” and “Slava geroyam” (glory to the heroes) were the chants that rang out loudly from hundreds of Russian voices in south London last Saturday.

They were saluting Russian and British veterans of the Second World war at a massive ceremony at the Soviet War Memorial in Geraldine Mary Harmsworth Park last Saturday, 9th May, to celebrate the victory of the Red Army over the military might of Nazi Germany — and to remember the 27 million Soviet citizens who lost their lives in that titanic clash.

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Thank you for the victory!

Editorial

The struggle continues

THE GENERAL Election result has been a disappointment to us all and the labour movement is now engaged in flurry of post mortem and analysis at all levels. But there is no excuse for despair. We know we live in a bourgeois state that is designed to prevent the working class ever gaining any real power and we know the capitalist system is in crisis and is not going to give us an inch of comfort or even an illusion of fair play.

We need to keep our main aim in clear sight and that is not a Labour majority in a bourgeois parliament. Our aim is a socialist revolution to overthrow this cruel and unstable system and replace it with a workers’ state. A Labour government might have given workers in Britain a marginally better living standard — and some confidence towards fighting for the better world we want to build.

But elections are only one part of the struggle. Whoever gets elected can only try to manage capitalism but has no power to control it. That power lies in the giant global financial institutions: the banks, the International Monetary Fund and so on.

Our urgent task is to build the confidence of the working class in our own potential power. We create all the wealth by our labour. The rich one per cent need us to keep on working. We do not need them. We are many and they are few. What we need is unity and organisation to deploy the strength of our numbers effectively.

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The struggle continues