Labour party

Warming up for a blogging restart with fantasies for 2008: We @ hangbitch like to think that 2008 will be the year that furious trade union members finally put a fatal gumboot into the traitorous Labour party. We want this to be the year that the majestically hopeless Gordon Brown pays for privatising public services and jobs, and fragging the standards of both for the forseeable future.

We also like to think that this will be the year that trade union members go after the Labour party butt-kissers who run the big public sector unions. Just a fantasy at this stage, but one we're spending a lot of time on. We're getting sick of hearing that left-leaning union branch secretaries are being disciplined on trumped-up charges by their very own unions, etc. We're particularly keen for 2008 to be the year that the career of Linda Perks, the evil New Labourite witch who doubles as Unison London regional secretary, meets a globby end after gross, and very public, hostilties. Slag.

But anyway... here we are, at an unofficial meeting of a large group of union branch secretaries and reps in a cold Houses of Parliament committee room, talking about the malignant environment that branch-level union reps are having to operate in. We won't be naming the meeting attendees on this occasion, in case that crone Perks decides to discipline union members for showing their faces at an unofficial union meeting. That would totally be her style. Attendees aren't in the most festive of tenors as it is: Fighting for the lowest-paid workers and the public services they provide isn't a picnic and this has been a difficult year. It ain't ending on a high note, either.

Bitch story with interviews with Young Labour members on the future of the Labour party is at the New Statesman site. Feel free to comment over there. Can't sort it out here at the moment too wrecked

John McDonnell's leadership challenge

Labour leadership candidate John McDonnell at a public meeting in Islington

There's a pleasing aspect to John McDonnell's public statements on New Labour-arselicking union leaders: he identifies the worst of these toadies by name, and encourages his audiences to laugh about it.

This is one of the more heartening experiences that shop-floor union reps and stewards have had for a while. Alas, one of the most depressing aspects of trade union activism in the last few years has been union bosses' reluctance to criticise New Labour and their active persecution of trade union members who dare to. Public sector union Unison in particular is famous for hunting down and disciplining any Unison member who comes to its attention for making public statements that suggest, for example, that Tony Blair sucks, or that the Iraq war is shit.