Saving Labour: part five

Another wee interview with a Labour party member on the importance of a leadership contest...

You can read interviews with other party members here

Dan Paskins likes to imagine a Labour leadership contest that starts with Gordon Brown, John McDonnell and Alan Milburn, and ends with Alan Milburn getting a total hiding. Paskins is not too crazy about Milburn - he's pretty sure that Milburn's brilliant ideas for modernising Labour played the fatal role in destroying the party's membership.

Paskins, who is a constituency party organiser and was until recently an Oxford City councillor, will settle for a contest between Brown and McDonnell, though, or Brown, McDonnell and anybody. It would be nice to see Milburn mashed like the wee turd he is, but we may all have to wait for that one. 'I think it will be weird if there isn't a contest,' Paskins says. 'It will be Gordon Brown wandering around on his own.'

Paskins wasn't particularly impressed with the idea of McDonnell in the first instance - 'I was against him' - but says that in recent times, McDonnell has started to make a certain amount of sense. 'This portrayal of him as an extremist is wrong.'

Paskins thinks portrayals of Blair as an extremist are wrong as well, and that party activists need to remember that. 'When people [activists] say that having Labour in power has almost been as bad as having the Tories in power, I don't accept that.' Some policy hasn't been brilliant - 'topup fees, that's a stupid policy. It's been as bad as people said it would be' - but investment in public services has been a plus, even if 'the link between spending more money on services and services improving,' could have been better made.

You don't have to be too brilliant, Paskins says, to understand that Iraq was the big mistake: his constituents made that perfectly clear on the doorstep at the last general election and at most meetings since.

'I was the constituency organiser and I think that if we had not invaded Iraq, we would have had the same sort of majority as we'd had before that. I don't think [Labour's term] has been ten years of betrayal [like some activists say]. Nothing is that simple.' Paskins says that in internal terms anyway, the last ten years for the party has been about 'a growing breakdown between the activists and the party [executive]. They seem to delight in taunting each other.'

Meanwhile, Paskins says, Rome has pretty much burned. The topics that matter to the party and to activists don't matter to the people the party and activists should be listening to.

'The issues that matter to people on the doorstep – they're not [things like] PFIs, or constitutional reform.' They're issues like crime, ASBOS and housing. 'Problems like landlords buying up a lot of houses – landlords who are only interested in making a huge amount of money. They're not caring about the condition of the houses. There should be some sort of windfall tax on some of these landlords. These are traditional socialist issues. That's what really appeals.'