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Ten questions for Labour’s deputy leader candidates
REGULAR junk mail is bad enough but my recycling bin’s overflowing with discarded letters from would-be councillors, aspiring Members of Parliament, and candidates for the Labour Party deputy leadership. This, despite nobody knowing what a deputy leader is supposed to do.
All want my support. Few offer any policies that might attract it.
Whatever the area of what used to be public services, New Labour’s spin machine tells us relentlessly that what we want is choice.
Two choices New Labour doesn’t offer are a choice of leader and a choice of policies. So, since there was no choice of putting questions to leadership candidates, here are some to deputy leadership candidates:
1. Why do we need a leader at all?
We didn’t have one for years. In a truly democratic party, a leader’s real job is to implement its democratically decided policies.
In the 1940s, Attlee was ‘Primus inter pares’, first among equals, not paid large amounts for presentation and spinning skills. In the 1960s and 1970s it felt as if we had evolved beyond the cult of and need for leaders. Margaret Thatcher brought it back.
Tony Blair has exploited it mercilessly, with unprecedented, Presidential-style powers over government and the Labour Party. Why do you want to be part of that?
Click here for candidate's response
2. What are you going to do to provide decent schools for all without competition and/or fee-paying?
My grandchildren don’t want choice. Like most parents they want a good, local, state primary school fit for their children within walking distance of home. There is none.
Local school boundaries have been redrawn so they no longer include the area where they live. Their choices? Pay for private schools they can’t afford while paying for state schools that won’t take them or drive many miles. PFI schools and academies are run by companies and religions, their inflated running costs taken on by councils, the debts borne by council-tax payers, while management, including the right to award themselves lucrative, long-term contracts, is handed to all kinds of gamblers and people with minority beliefs.
Click here for candidate's response
3. How will you provide the regular public transport we were promised instead of the need to use cars?
Bus systems and railways have been broken up, outsourced and sub-contracted to a degree that gives us anything but safety and punctuality. Fares for users are enormous. For those concerned about the environment, and we should all be because it is our survival, it is crazy that it costs more to go by train to Scotland or even the Midlands, than to fly to exotic foreign destinations.
Click here for candidate's response
4. What are you going to do about Iraq, in particular about the plight of widows there?
No official statistics exist but as their men are killed, largely as a result of the illegal military invasion you all supported,
an estimated 100-150 women are being made widows each day.
The increasingly fundamentalist society does not support them and denies them the right to work. As a result of your vote, these women’s lives are being destroyed, their country destabilised and in ruins. How are you going to put that right?
Click here for candidate's response
5. What are you going to do about inequality here which has grown so much worse under your policies?
Old Labour managed to reduce inequalities. Where does all the money go in New Labour society? Why are there so many millionaires and billionaires when so many people are starving? We know the salary of the CEO of Blackstone, a US private equity company operating here, was nearly half a billion dollars last year, his shared bonuses much greater.
One UK private equity boss actually criticised his multi-millionaire colleagues for paying less taxes than their cleaners, most paying only 10 per cent tax on their vast profits. How long will you allow this secretive, unregulated, vulture and parasite enterprise to deprive the economy of the resources needed to provide health, education, care and transport?
Click here for candidate's response
6. Talking of cleaners, what are your policies on the basic services needed to keep hospitals and schools clean and safe?
Cleaning services are contracted out, standards fall, the cleaners’ situation becomes ever more precarious.
With costly new buildings and PFI contracts to finance, health trusts and local authorities are forced to sack experienced doctors, nurses and teachers. Can you deliver a workable programme to provide real care for the elderly and disabled without wrecking their families’ lives?
Click here for candidate's response
7. Major computerisation and outsourcing projects have exceeded cost estimates and/or failed in almost every area of government, reducing funding for services even further.
Will you continue to pay increases and award new contracts to companies that consistently let us down?
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8. Will you take a stand to stem the country’s dependence on casinos and gambling in all its forms, including making money out of human misery by privatising services for education, the handicapped and especially old people?
Click here for candidate's response
9. I know you all support development of new nuclear power stations. Would you spend as much on renewable energy?
Click here for candidate's response
10. Are you prepared to press the button personally and who would you aim Trident at?
Click here for candidate's response |
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