The Socialist 27 January 2016

Housing: smash the Tory wrecking bill

Housing: smash the Tory wrecking bill

Davos summit: a broken capitalist system

Google pays pittance for avoiding £2bn tax

Red doors and wristbands scandal

Steelworkers may face benefit cut-off for not seeking bar jobs

Oscars snub black artists: fight racism and austerity in the arts

Labour councillor smears TUSC policy as 'BNP'

Them & Us

Top tweets: #TraditionallySubmissive

Teaching: a perfect storm is brewing

Teachers need national strategy for a national struggle

A day in the life of a teacher and mother

New wave of protests in Tunisia

India: student death exposes caste oppression

Tories 'Prevent' civil liberties

Labour councillor suspended for fighting cuts

Dave Nellist's byelection appeal to Jeremy Corbyn: 'let's discuss how to fight the cuts'

Labour election post-mortem: nothing to report!

The dark arts of Labour's right

Councillors must fight to defend our services

'People's budgets' and local democracy

Lewisham: no backsliding in council cuts fight!

"I have left work many times in tears" - a council worker

Trade union bill will stretch resources and limit action

Birmingham teachers strike to resist academy attack

24-hour tube strike suspended

Care services under threat in Haringey

Workplace news in brief

The end for deep coal mining jobs in Britain

Obituary: Dean Meehan 1962-2016

Letters

Protesting against closure of Huddersfield A&E

Coventry children's services closure protest

New Socialist Party branch fights against St Austell austerity

Socialist Party discusses the fight for socialism

Socialist Students bake-off

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The dark arts of Labour's right

New Labour's arch-right winger Peter Mandelson, photo by Wikimedia Commons (Creative Commons) (Click to enlarge)

Derek Macmillan

Having been decisively routed in the last year's Labour leadership contest the party's Blairite MPs and Lords, such as Peter Mandelson, continue to wage a guerrilla war against Jeremy Corbyn.

Mandelson (a former disgraced Blairite minister who once said he was "intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich") had derided the Labour leader as a 'quasi-Marxist trying to con the public into voting him into Downing Street'.

Mandy and his acolytes continue to snipe, most recently claiming that the party is haemorrhaging members due to Corbyn's policies.

However, a recent detailed Guardian survey of the Labour Party refutes Mandelson's claim and "shows overwhelming support for him [Corbyn], a decisive shift to the left and unhappiness with squabbling among MPs" (the Guardian, 13 January).

The survey also reports : "Membership jumped from 201,293 on 6 May last year, the day before the general election, to 388,407 on 10 January" and continues to increase.

Any sane person would say that it is the surge in members seeking a new kind of politics which thrust a socialist into the leadership of what was a capitalist party hell-bent on war and privatisation.

But while new members are overwhelmingly on the left, democratic control over the party machine is not guaranteed.

Those deepest in the counsels of New Labour have obeyed the instruction of Blair, Mandy and "dodgy dossier" Alistair Campbell to be more Tory than the Tories. The right aim to defeat Corbyn and the membership and maintain Labour as a capitalist party.

Small wonder that grassroots members are fed up to the back teeth with squabbling Labour MPs. The party's election system was supposed to prevent anyone on the left becoming leader. It failed. Now, instead of kicking themselves the Blairite rump is kicking Jeremy Corbyn.

In this issue

Socialist Party news and analysis

Housing: smash the Tory wrecking bill