John McDonnell: Hackney rise

Labour leadership candidate John McDonnell at a public meeting in Hackney

John McDonnell is just late enough for this evening's political gathering in Hackney to spark a few nervous cellphone calls from a few nervous organisers. 'He's on his way,' they report to the crowd after the first call. 'He's probably underground,' they say after several attempts at a second. 'He's at Bethnal Green tube station waiting for a taxi,' they tell us after the third.

So, things are a bit tense at the start. McDonnell's not the only one missing. The organisers - the Hackney TUC and the Leabridge branch of the Labour party - are concerned that there aren't enough people in the audience. Then suddenly, it becomes clear that are going to be too many, and that people will have to be turned away for health and safety reasons.

'Sign of the times,' people tell each other as people who can't find a pew sit on the floor. 'Sign of the times.'

Those who arrive early enough to be allowed into the meeting soon find that the ventilation at the Hackney Empire is garbage and that they can hardly breathe. Still, it's been a while since anybody had to fight for a seat and air on a regular basis at after-hours political meetings. McDonnell may still be preaching to the converted at these gatherings, but the point Gordon Brown and all other doubters should note is that more and more of the converted are turning out for the preaching.

'Tony Benn used to get 800 or 1000 people to these meetings when he was running for leader,' one doubter or other shrills across the room at one point. 'We would have booked the main auditorium and we would have filled it.'

'We were going to book the main auditorium, but we didn't think we could fill it,' the organisers admit. 'Now look. The fact is that we've had to lock the doors.'

Then McDonnell arrives, a bit scruffy and as red-faced and sweaty as the rest of us, and with his trousers pulled high and bucking weirdly down the front, but nonetheless on fine form. 'I apologise for being so late,' he grins. 'There was a vote in parliament... And then I was walking out and you wouldn't believe it, but my zip split on my trousers and I had to run... and get a safety pin from the Whip's office.' He carries on for the crowd, as well he might: this is now a night when things go well.

'I lost by 54 votes originally [when he ran for the Hayes consituency] early in the 1980s and I knew every one of the bastards... We occupied schools, and hospitals... we had to occupy them to keep the Tories out. We worked so hard to get rid of the Tories... I did not do all that to get this [Blair] government in. Labour has privatised more jobs in their nine years in office than the Tories did in 18.' He tells his crowd that he has a 'depth of anguish, not anger, about the way the last nine years have gone. In the last nine years, we have systematically alienated each group that supported us, just one by one... public sector workers, everyone...'

'What are you going to do about disarming the police and the army and the groups that are used to oppress and repress the working class,' John?' some minor anorak from a workers' party he does not clearly define yells angrily at one point. 'What are you going to do when you lose [the Labour Party leadership election]?'

Mc Donnell grins. He looks very hot. He seems almost high. 'You don't go into these things thinking about losing, or what you're going to do if you lose,' he says with some disdain. 'That's not what you do. You don't think about losing. I mean, when you're going to go on strike, you don't go on strike thinking 'Well, we'll be fucked next week, so let's go on strike,' do you? I mean, do you?'

There is much clapping at this, a lot of it aimed at the anorak. There has not been much tolerance for negative commentary from the left's many small and angry factions during McDonnell's leadership campaign so far. You'd expect that at a joint TUC-local Labour Party meeting, but still. Even the SWP and the Respect Party have thrown their support behind McDonnell, and they're there to help laugh down members of small left groups that haven't quite taken the hint. Respect members speak regularly at these meetings, too - Lindsey German in Hammersmith, Ken Muller in Islington, and Gill George from Amicus' National Executive Committee tonight.

It is George who gives by far the best speech of the evening. At the end of her tether with New Labour bullshit, she talks about the dubious pleasure that is trying to represent NHS union members in this time of 'the anti-union laws, the [government] assault on the NHS, the squandering of money on Trident, the vicious Islamaphobia, the running sore of the war with Iraq. What an appalling achievement by this government.' She points out that there 'isn't a financial crises i the NHS. That's a Labour party line that they used to cover making cuts.'

It's all about giving the massive money that is available in the NHS to private companies - the theology that Matt Wrack, the Fire Brigades' Union General Secretary who is also here tonight, calls 'the creeping privatisation - spending of millions of pounds of taxpayers ' money on reports by consultants who know nothing about the private sector. They always recommend getting rid of public services.'

'In my Primary Care Trust [City and Hackney], we're losing £17.8m this year,' George says. She really is angry. 'This [Hackney] is one of the most deprived parts of London. An Amicus member told me this story: an eight-year-old girl was in hospital with a serious heart condition and management decided to close down the ward that she was in for the weekend, to save money, and the girl was discharged on Friday and she died on Saturday morning at home.'

'I was in Cardiff this week, talking to Labour party activists there,' McDonnell says, 'and I can tell you that Welsh and Scots activists think it is an act of kamikaze keeping Blair in place [in time for] the local elections there next year. '

'I'm David and I'm unemployed,' one man says. 'You [the Labour party] said all of this in 1997. I want to know what are you going to do for me.'

A young woman - Kate Smith, 23, explains why she decided to come to the meeting. Quite a few youngsters are starting to turn out. 'My generation can't remember when Labour meant anything apart from New Labour. It's a crock. I'm really angry. We feel that there is nothing that we can do.'

She says that she is not very well informed about politics, so 'the whole idea is to get better informed, read up on my history.' She joined the Socialist Party about two weeks ago to try and do that. She's never belonged to a political party before or been much involved. Her family has 'strong socialist values,' but no history of political membership, or activism. She's a recent graduate in English and Film Studies at Kings College and she wants to do a fast-track journalism course early next year. She's working in a bar at the moment. 'I don't like the divisions on the left. I don't know enough about it, but I don't like that conflict. You can't have that.' She's had a look at McDonnell tonight and thinks he 'is a very smooth operator. Witty.'

'It's not about what I can do for you,' McDonnell says firmly to the unemployed guy. 'It's not 'What are you going to do for me.' It's 'What are we all going to do. It's a collective. It's a collective thing. Community socialism.'