John McDonnell out West
Labour leadership candidate John McDonnell speaks to us from Hammersmith
It is 8pm on a grey, sticky Wednesday and John McDonnell is telling a Hammersmith Stop the War meeting a story about the sorry behaviour of some of the overpaid, moral-free assholes who run the New Labour-affiliated trade union UNISON. He's telling us the grisly true story of the fate of the union activists who walked out in protest against the Iraq War when Tony Blair was prattling through his keynote speech at the TUC conference in Brighton in September.
Publicly, UNISON supported the activists and the walkout - or agreed, at least, that Blair was probably past his best as an attraction - but behind the scenes, the union hierarchy turned on the members like the Reich. Union bosses chucked the protesting activists out of the conference and sent them home and, as McDonnell understood it, were now toying with the idea of disciplining the activists for their attitude towards Tony Blair - the union disciplinary process being a protracted procedural nightmare that could take years and ultimately lead to expulsion of the activists.
As luck would have it, there's someone in the audience tonight who is able to tell the crowd exactly how a deep shafting from the union feels - a UNISON member several rows into the crowd reveals that she's been under investigation for about a year now after being expelled from the union's national conference in 2005 for publishing anti-Blair comment on a website via a union computer. Unfortunately, that's what happens to members of Labour-affiliated unions who air the wrong views on Blair and Iraq.
'UNISON goes through these purges from time to time,' McDonnell says. 'You've got people who walked out during Blair's speech [facing disciplinary action] by their own union. UNISON has some real issues with the people who make those decisions.' McDonnell has just driven from Brighton to London from the TUC conference and this little issue with the expelled activists hadn't been resolved by the time he left. He suspects that they won't be, because it'll be Thursday tomorrow and there won't be much conference left for the activists to rejoin, even if they're allowed to, which seems unlikely, given that they've all been sent home.
It strikes everybody as unlikely that Gordon Brown will liberate anti-war protestors from this sort of persecution. Much of the crowd has been enthused this week by the gripping event that is the gruesome scramble for the Labour party leadership, and everybody's keen to hear more from McDonnell about the whole circus. The people in this room are not jaded. The mainstream claim that nobody gives a stuff about politics feels thin when you see a turnout like this. There are trade union activists, Muslims, everyday punters, and members of the Labour party who've had to put up with nearly ten years of privatisation, modernisation and pro-war horseshit from their own party leader and are being lined up for more from Brown, or Johnson, or Reid, or whoever ends up bagging the poisoned chalice. Every anorak blogger and one-eyed mainstream commentator has already loftily observed that an old socialist like McDonnell, with McDonnell's history, will be disgraced even by leftie standards in this leadership contest, and they may be right, but there is nonetheless still much to be said for a night in a roomful of people who sequentially dream that Blair will drop dead, and like that means something.
The ones who so innocently leafleted for the New Labour circus a decade ago are particularly diseased. Gwen Cook has been a Labour Party member for 25 years in West London. She's still a member - 'just hanging on,' she says, tightly - and she seems genuinely stunned by the sweep of the shambles. 'It's just unbelievable that he [Blair] has been able to turn the Labour Party into a reactionary, capitalist party,' she says. 'I can't think of what else to say about it.' Cook joined the party in 1981. 'There was the height of the Tony Benn campaign. There were clear boundaries with the Tories. It looked like the Labour party was on the rise.'
She remembers what happened to Benn, though, and is bracing herself for the behind-the-scenes work that the Labour party's many neo-con nutters will do to stop McDonnell getting 44 MPs to support his leadership campaign and put his name on the ballot paper. For all that he is written off as the contest's no-hope candidate, Cook says, a lot of effort will be put into making sure that he stays that way.
'It would be good if he [McDonnell] could get somewhere [in the race], but I wouldn't say that the members here in this part of London would help. So many of the people who couldn't stand Blair and all those people have left the party. It's going to be hard getting past the establishment.' Cook says she hasn't enjoyed this year much. The Labour admininistration at Hammersmith and Fulham Council (where Cook works) was crucified at the local elections in London in May - one of the many councils that was punished, at least in part, for being Labour - and the new Conservative administration is making staff redundant at a rate that she didn't realise was legal and can't believe will make providing decent council services possible. 'It was a good council. It had not been a privatising council for a long time, but it's going now.'
Ertan Karpazli is 19 and the President of the Islamic Society at Middlesex University. He was born and brought up in Walthamstow. He doesn't belong to a political party, but says that he is probably 'closest in mindset to the Socialist party and Respect.' He describes Tony Blair as 'a modern-day Pharoah. He's a liar. He has no self-respect, no honour. He will be judged and pay for what he has done to the world, either in this life or the next one.' He thinks about this for a bit. 'Hopefully this one,' he says.
Karpazli also says that he would 'like to be able to behave in a way that's not threatening to anyone, but my right to behave like this is being taken away from me. I'm seen as a threat. I can't behave in a way that's not threatening to people any more.' So, what was life like several years ago, before the World Trade Centre and Iraq and the Axis of Evil and the rest of it? What was being Muslim like then?' Karpazli grins. 'I wasn't,' he says.
Karpazli says that of course McDonnell should have more success than he seems likely to in the leadership race, 'but I have my doubts, because of the higher powers in that politics. I don't want to say more, because I don't want to get into conspiracy theories. It's only that there are some things that are plain.'
'In the early 1990s,' McDonnell tells the audience, 'I was involved in a legal action about Saddam Hussein gassing the Kurds. I can't say too much about it, because I don't want to be involved in another legal action, but we were demonstrating about that [the treatment of the Kurds], and we were getting messages back from the families of the people who had been killed, and it was terrible what was happening there, and I can tell you that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were not involved in trying to help. They never got involved. They had no interest in any of the abuse directed at the Kurds by Saddam. So, why ten years later, was Saddam suddenly so terrible in their eyes?'
'Oil,' people say.
