Labour Party Follow

The stench of corruption around the Labour party is becoming overwhelming.

What a cowardly bunch of timeserving lickspittles Labour backbenchers are. Last week they were offered the opportunity to vote for an official inquiry into the Iraq war.

A new book and exhibition tell the story of the Labour Party through newspaper cartoons. We look at individual cartoons and the period they represent

The 1910 general election saw 42 Labour MPs elected. Labour had made an agreement with the ruling Liberals that gave it a clear run in a number of seats. In return, Labour agreed to support the Liberal government that was returned with no overall majority.

The end of the First World War coincided with a huge wave of workers’ uprisings across Europe, fuelled by the Bolsheviks coming to power in the 1917 Russian Revolution.

By 1943 workers were already stepping up pressure for radical social change - and for the implementation of previous promises - even though the war against Nazi Germany was still raging.

Left wing Labour MP Aneurin Bevan led the biggest rebellion in the history of the Labour Party in the early 1950s. Many Labour Party members were angry about the growing consensus between the Tory government and the leadership headed by Hugh Gaitskell.

Harold Wilson’s Labour government was elected in 1964 and re-elected in 1966. Wilson had presented himself as a "moderniser", but over the next four years his government turned away from socialist policies, held down wages and presided over rising unemployment.

Reading extracts from David Blunkett’s diary took me back to a time when the Labour Party looked very different to the one we see today.

The Labour conference underlined just how right wing the party’s leaders have become.They are for war, neo-liberalism and for preventing real debate.

For a brief moment there was a whiff of the 1980s about the conference last week. There was a real sense of left against right as a motion against NHS privatisation passed with a big majority against furious opposition from the party’s leaders. 

John McDonnell spoke strongly at conference fringe meetings promoting policies against war and privatisation, and for workers’ rights.  He was not called to speak from the conference floor.