Saving Labour: part four

Here are more interviews with Labour party members about the party's future at a time of falling membership, undecided leadership and confused policy direction.

There are interviews with party socialists here
There are interviews with party moderates here
There are interviews with party Blairites here

Party members Nick Parrott, Max Freedman, Omar Salem and Mazher Hussain are as clear as most of us on the key to saving party's future: re-train Labour's straying focus on the domestic agenda, and aim policy at those constituents Labour was meant for.

'Blair maybe put too much of the focus on Worcester Woman and Mondeo Man,' Freedman admits. Re-engaging with Labour's traditional, and presently very sad, supporters will also go some way to keeping that smiley wanker David Cameron in his box. Everybody knows that Cameron will rat the masses out, particularly in areas like housing - everybody is already all too aware of the large and nasty gap that yawns between Cameron's warming, right-on hippie rhetoric and the evil social policies that his Conservative activists, especially in local authorities, are developing and implementing on the ground as we speak.

Hammersmith and Fulham is an excellent example: less than a year has passed since the Conservatives took that council from Labour, and they've already washed their flabby white hands of the needy and the not-so-fabulously rich. Schools are being earmarked for sale to developers and housing centres for closure, housing staff are being made redundant and the Council's committees section is no longer quite staffed. A similar rape of services that are desperately required by the beleaguered poor is underway at the Lib Dem-Conservative Camden council. The Conservatives are not here to make friends.

And it is thus that Parrott, Freedman, Salem and Hussain think that Labour should direct any new energy it finds post-Blair into traditional Labour social policy, especially around housing: finding adequate and affordable housing is an issue that affects just about everybody, and not always in a great way. Housing is exactly the sort of social issue, Freedman says, that makes Labour Labour. The London housing crisis needs addressing across the whole dimension, from council housing to affordable housing for middle-class constituents who already spend a disproportionate amount of income on a decent home.

Parrott, a Kingston CLP member who missed a place in the Norbiton ward on Kingston-upon-Thames Council in the 2006 elections by just 11 votes, says council housing is particularly problematic in that borough. '[The tenants] have voted twice against a stock transfer, but [that means] they are out of the policy centre and process [because tenants refused to take up the government's preferred ALMO option and because the party executive has refused to take up party conference's preferred fourth-option for continued council-managed housing].'

As a result, the tenants of Kingston are stranded in a perverse development and maintenance wilderness - they're not an ALMO, but they're not much else, either - they can't take up the fourth option for housing as long as the government refuses to accept the people inside and outside the party who keep voting for a fourth option want one. Existing outside the policy loop as Kingston does, how can they expect to upgrade to Decent Homes, or make any sensible policy decisions about a future for council homes? (The government, of course, argues that it's all taken care of). Whatever the case, Salem says, Labour needs a better emphasis on decent homes and housing solutions as vote-winners. 'Fifty percent of children live in poverty in London [and that] poverty is in direct relationship to their housing.'

Outside of housing, the path is a little less clear. Hussain, an East Ham member who joined about four years ago, says the Prime Minister 'has done a fairly good job,' as Prime Minister, especially on initiatives like restoring the minimum wage. He also says that investment in public services has been good under Labour.

'My predictive text doesn't even recognise the word 'underinvestment',' Freedman says. It seems to recognise the words 'private sector,' though. Freedman says he doesn't have a problem with the private sector having a role in the public sector - '[the private sector] can be used to increase capacity' - but contracts needs to be handled in such a way that huge profits for private companies are less of an option than they seem to be now, and the wages and conditions of workers are protected.

'I see no alternative to Gordon Brown, really,' is his comment on the topic of a new leader for the party. He doesn't mind Jon Cruddas as an option for deputy leader: Cruddas, he says, 'seems to be around the midpoint of the party, refocusing the party on issues that we have been neglecting, like housing.'

Parrott '[hopes] there is a [leadership] contest,' although he thinks one between the present contenders is highly unlikely. Some of John McDonnell's ideas have merit, though, Parrott says, and the ones that does ought to have wide appeal to a variety of constituents. 'The Trade Union Freedom Bill - well, who wouldn't [support that]?' he laughs. He thinks 'Blair may have misjudged the middle ground' on that one - that workers' rights and freedoms areas much an issue for voters who occupy the middle ground as they are for trade union activists and people who are perceived to occupy fighting leftist territory.

'I think that McDonnell has raised a lot of interesting issues,' says Salem. He just doesn't think McDonnell is in a great position to become the party's leader.

'I think [party] people are scared of debate,' Parrott says.

So, how about a debate on the party's foriegn policy?

Well - it's time to look to the future on that one, all four say. It's easy to talk about how Iraq might have been without the US/UK intervention, Salem says, but now people need to focus on the situation as it stands. 'We need to focus on what people want. It's difficult to say how Iraq [will] play out. It's difficult to say what will happen. We have got the US elections are coming up. There is a case for getting back to domestic issues.'

So... what about the war? Are the government's many adversaries on this one right to keep up the abuse?

The problem with anti-war groupings like Respect, Parrott says, is that they want to go back to the time before the invasion, and undo the invasion. They have nothing useful to say about now.

'It's important that we stay the course [now, in Iraq], see democracy there,' Hussain says. 'We can't go back and not fight the war. We're there.'

That's right, Parrott says. We need to find a way to support the Iraqi people, and maybe find an international solution to the problems we're having supporting them at the moment. He says the party also needs to find a better decision-making process in the process of re-drawing itself. 'I believe he [Blair] genuinely thought he was right [on Iraq]... we need to look at how we make policy decisions [in the party], so that this does not happen again.'