I joined the picket lines again today to support the Unite Cabin Crew members, who are on strike. For the second weekend running I spoke at a rally of the pickets in their temporary headquarters at Bedfont FC. I have many Cabin Crew staff in my constituency and they need all the support we can give them. Many of them are in no doubt now that Willie Walsh, BA's Chief Executive, is aiming to break the union and many consider that he is willing to destroy the company to achieve this. Despite all the provocations from the company and denunciations from politicians the Cabin Crew are holding solid and are maintaining a dignified willingness to negotiate a settlement that is in the long term interests of both the staff and the company. I filmed Len McLuskey's speech to the Unite Cabin Crew members at the rally.

In the debate on the Government's Fiscal Responsibility Bill this week a consensus emerged across the main political parties that ordinary working people will be forced to pay for the economic crisis with cuts in services and jobs. In the little time I was allowed to speak in the debate I sought to challenge this grotesque consensus.

You can see my contribution to the debate on www.john-mcdonnell.net

My New Year's resolution is to find time to start blogging again.

This is an article I wrote for the Guardian's Comment is Free website. I was asked to comment on Purnell's article in the paper. The political control of the Guardian by classic New Labour dilettantes and hangers on means that it is virtually impossible to get published or even mentioned in the printed paper but occasionally it is possible to get an article onto the paper's website Comment is Free.

Coming back from my friend David Taylor's funeral and reading all the usual self serving rubbish from Purnell, Balls, Miliband and Cruddas over the weekend really got my goat. Hence this article.

New Labour's rootless pretenders

The late David Taylor was a principled Labour MP, rooted in his community. Balls, Purnell et al have lost touch with this tradition

John McDonnell guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 12 January 2010 16.00 GMT Article

On Saturday, after an intensely moving ceremony, David Taylor was buried in the churchyard near to his home in the village where he was born and brought up in and which – after years of stalwart campaigning – he represented so well in parliament. Rooted in the lives of the people who sent him to parliament and in the traditions and values of the Labour movement, he always spoke truth to power. That meant that despite his obvious talent and depth of experience in the real world, his opposition to wars, his incisive critique of the privatisation of public services and his refusal to support attacks on benefits and civil liberties meant he would never be allowed near office under New Labour.


Over the same weekend the young guns of New Labour – Ed Miliband, Jon Cruddas, Ed Balls and James Purnell – placed articles in the national media, ostensibly to set out their recipes for winning the next election, but in reality probably aimed at positioning themselves for the post-election leadership scramble. These "thought pieces" follow a standard pattern: some genuflection to an admission of past mistakes, the assertion that all is not lost for Labour in the election, a few examples of alternative policies that could save a Labour government and then usually an appeal for vision, radicalism or leadership.


A generous interpretation of this phenomenon would be to see this group as the "lost boys" of New Labour. In this light the various articles become desperate attempts to find some meaning to the role they played over the last decade in the Labour party and in our society. In contrast to the life of David Taylor, rooted in his community, these young men have been the hired guns of New Labour. Recruited into the particular gang of individual members of the warring New Labour elite and eventually rewarded with safe parliamentary seats to continue their gang member roles in government office, these people are rootless.


In a significant coincidence, all their recent articles have appealed to figures such as Keir Hardie and the historic traditions of the Labour movement in an attempt to associate themselves with what is left of the Labour party – the party that their New Labour has contributed so much to destroying. When the collapse and isolation of the activist base of the Labour party becomes all too evident to them, they turn to reference other activist movements such as London Citizens or climate change campaigners as examples of what can be. They refuse to appreciate that these movements flourish because they are populated by the same people who – but for New Labour – would be the mobilising, activist base of the party and its supportive allies in the wider Labour and trade union movement and civil society.


They also mistakenly see virtual organisations – based upon a large list of email addresses, an expensive website, and a fickle coterie of Guardian journalists guaranteeing nauseatingly uncritical coverage – as an alternative to a party of committed activists, rooted and working within their communities, standing up and mobilising on issues of principle, even when they are not immediately seen as popular causes. Even the Obama campaign, which genuinely mobilised the largest surge of political enthusiasm in recent US history, is now learning the lessons of standing its impressive electoral army down just when it needed to be maintained and transformed into a genuine, democratic political party.


Similarly, at the time when there is cross-party consensus that ordinary people will pay for the economic crisis with large-scale cuts in public expenditure, the people of Iceland have shown how to confront the divide between the political class and the people by direct action. If as the cuts bite in Britain, and people here also see their potential to act, there may come an opportunity for political principles and a record of committed, grassroots activism to become the basis of securing political representation within the Labour party again.

What follows is a sequence of films of the historic cricket match at the weekend between the Labour Representation Committee and the Hands Off People of Iran. For the commentary I can only apologise. As for the cricket I can only urge comrades not to give up their day jobs on the picket lines, marches and demonstrations.

The Guardian's Comment is Free website asked me to comment on the Purnell/Cruddas Demos "Open Left" exercise. I wrote this article on Friday after we heard the Norwich North result. I had in mind the work that Ian Gibson had put in in trying to prevent New Labour bringing in tuiton fees. Just one of the New Labour policies that has contributed to undermining our support.


If the Norwich North byelection result tells us anything it is that it's time to tell it straight about what and who has brought us to a situation where the Labour party gets hammered in a seat where it should come safely home, and which has clearly opened the door to a Tory government.

So in that spirit of telling it like it is let me say that my first reaction to James Purnell's Demos Open Left project was how dare they bloody well use the term "left".

This is about the fourth or fifth, (I lost count some time ago), attempt by former New Labour apparatchiks to try and reinvent themselves. We have had former Blair/Brown insider advisers Neal Lawson and Jon Cruddas with Compass, Charles Clarke and Alan Milburn with 2020 Vision, and now James Purnell and Jon Cruddas with Demos's Open Left.

No matter how clever the project's title, how well its re-launch statements are drafted and how smart its website, none of them can escape from the objective history of the part they played in creating and supporting the reactionary, political deviation that was New Labour, a political project that has brought the Labour party to the edge of extinction.

Between them all they have either been the architects of, the advisers to, the parliamentary lobby fodder in support of or the ministerial implementers of policies which have left at least half a million innocent people dead in Iraq, doubled the number of homeless families in Britain, privatised more public sector jobs than Thatcher and Major put together, undermined long-cherished basic civil liberties and forced through so brutal an attack on the recipients of welfare benefits that even the Thatcher government refused to implement.

Quoting past Labour party theoreticians, intellectualising justifications for betrayal in the language of an A-level sociology paper, and speaking left while voting right will not wash off the blood of the murdered Iraqis or stem the tears of a single parent forced off benefits or help explain to the unemployed person how they can live on £65-a-week jobseeker's allowance.

Some among this crew realised sooner than others that the only hope for their future political careers was to jump ship from New Labour and to rebrand themselves on the left. They have been assisted by parts of the media that are implicated in delivering the Labour party and the country up to Blair, Brown and Mandelson, and who are also trying to distance themselves from the creature they helped create.

Asked what was the difference between the left and right, Italian philosopher Norberto Bobbio replied that the left always seeks greater equality and the right always produces greater inequality. New Labour has created a society scarred by inequality, more unequal than at any time since the second world war.

The debate about the future of progressive advance in this country cannot be left in the hands of the guilty people who pursued the policies that inflicted this inequality on our community. They deserve to be swept away.

Instead, a progressive future is being debated and determined by others, especially those forging their ideas while taking action. The real debate about a progressive future is among the workers occupying the Vestas factory, among the blacklisted workers, among the cleaners fighting for a living wage, among the climate campers who will take the debate to the streets of the City of London in August, and among those Labour party members, trade unionists and others on the left whose credibility has not been undermined by association with the degenerate policies of New Labour.

This is the press release I put out on the announcement of the Norwich North result.

Shocking result for Labour in unnecessary by-election, says McDonnell

Labour has been defeated in the Norwich North by-election caused by the barring of former Labour MP Ian Gibson from standing at the next election.

John McDonnell MP, LRC Chair, said:

"What is clear is that the Brown / Mandelson stratgey is not working. However hard they spin it this is a shocking result for Labour.

"The first thing that Gordon Brown and the Labour Party NEC should do is to apologise to Ian Gibson and his family, the people of Norwich, and the Labour Party members nationwide for robbing them of a decent, hard-working, principled MP, who was greatly respected in his local area.

"If we are going to learn anything from this defeat, the Prime Minister has to stop obeying the diktats of Peter Mandelson and start listening to the people."

I was approached to support the campaign to save the jobs and the operation at the Vesta wind turbine company. I tabled the following Early Day Motion in Parliament on Thursday and have now sent a message of solidarity to the workers occupying their factory. It is critical that we build solidarity with this vitally important campaign. These workers are at the forefront of the struggle to save their jobas and our planet.

EDM 1925 Vesta

That this House expresses its concern that, at the very time when the Government is launching its drive for developing renewable energy sources in the UK, the Vestas company, specialising in renewable energy plant, is shedding 600 jobs and is closing; and calls on the Government to intervene as a matter of urgency to ensure the future of the Vestas operation and the protection of jobs.

After reading the briefings in the media on the report to be launched today by Alan Milburn it is clear that it is just another cop out.

The report is merely a statement of the blindingly obvious and a complete cop out of tackling the real issue of the growing inequality in our society. We know already that private schools with their massive resources are better crammers to get their privileged students into universities and that middle class parents are able to subsidise their children through the unpaid work needed to enter professions like the law and journalism. The lack of social mobility is just a symptom of the grotesque inequality gap in our society which New Labour ministers like Alan Milburn caused to widen under their watch.