The Iraq Debate: The Prime Minister couldn't even bother to turn up.

The House of Commons debated Iraq today for the first time in Government time for two years.

You would have expected that the issue of Iraq was so critical that Parliament would have received a report on the progress of the US/UK strategy from the Prime Minister and MPs would have been allowed to vote on Britain's role in the future.

No chance! The Prime Minister refused to even attend the debate and the Government refused to allow a vote on its strategy.

Instead, Mr Blair attended a meeting with representatives from big business and, although MPs tried to engineer a procedural vote, the manoeuvring of Government whips made this impossible.

Apart from me not a single candidate for either leader or deputy leader of the Labour party condemned this display of contempt for Parliament or made any public statement today on the need for a change of strategy.

Virtually every week now at the beginning of Prime Minister's questions, the Prime Minister and MPs offer their condolences to the family of yet another British soldier, who has lost his life in Iraq.

Surely the continuing loss of lives on such a large scale amongst Iraqi civilians and both British and US servicemen and women warrants the Prime Minister accounting to Parliament for his actions.

In addition, there is now even greater confusion about what strategy the Government is pursuing as the Prime Minister hints at the withdrawal of some British troops later this year and yet the Bush administration has indicated that it would expect the scale of the British presence to be maintained.

What is increasingly apparent to both MPs and the general public is that there is no realistic British strategy to extricate ourselves from the nightmare that is Iraq and that the US strategy of pouring in more troops holds out no prospect of success and is more likely to replicate Vietnam.

It is even more imperative now for us to step up the "Stop the War" campaign on the broadest front to demand withdrawal. The longer the delay for withdrawal the greater will be the loss of life and human suffering.

The Need for Warwick 2

Today, the PCS union announced that their members had voted in favour of industrial action. These public and civil servants are the very people upon whom this Government relies to deliver its agenda.

They are taking this action, with an all-out strike on 31st January, because of job cuts and privatisation which threaten public service delivery as the National Audit Office and several Select Committees have already found. PCS members also voted to strike because of pay. Over a quarter of civil servants earn less than £15,000, and are currently threatened with a below inflation pay rise - meaning a real terms cut in wages.

Today was also the TUC lobby of Parliament, and was attended by union members from across the public sector threatened with privatisation, job losses and pension cuts. The Government is heading for a 'Spring of Discontent' in the public sector, unless we urgently change course.
That's why I'm calling for a 'Warwick 2', which should include:

• The immediate introduction of a Trade Union Freedom Bill in line with ILO standards
• The end of privatisation and the return of rail, air traffic control and other services to public ownership
• Support for free and comprehensive education, and an end to Foundation and Trust schools
• An increase in the basic state pension and immediate restoration of the earnings link, and new protection for company pension schemes
• A new Health and Safety regime with stricter powers, adequate enforcement resources and effective Corporate Manslaughter legislation
• The development of a dynamic and interventionist industrial strategy to protect and grow the UK's manufacturing industries
• A positive duty on the public and private sectors to promote equality, including mandatory pay audits to close the gender and race pay gaps

Stand Together

One of the key objectives of our campaign is create such a climate of radical political debate that people and organisations find it common sense to adopt our analysis and policies. Gramsci in the twenty first century!

What I am a bit surprised about is the rapidity of the acceptance of some of our ideas and the individuals who are now espousing them.

Her are just a few extraordinary examples.

On Saturday I spoke at a well attended debate with Harriet Harman convened by Nottingham South CLP. After I had raised the issue of council housing and in response to questions from party members Harriet agreed that the way in which the Government had failed to respond to the Labour Party's conference decisions on the need to invest in council housing was not adequate and housing policy must be reviewed. She also extolled the virtues of trade union rights but didn't go as far as endorsing our Trade Union Freedom Bill.

In the same week both Peter Hain, Hilary Benn and John Cruddas, all of whom voted for the war against Iraq, became critical of the Government's policy failures over Iraq and called for a new solution to the crisis.

On Sunday even I was a bit shocked to read that John Reid had announced that he was looking at splitting up the Home Office into two departments. We had only published a press release to this effect a week before, based upon discussions with representatives from the justice unions.

On Monday (today)Compass publishes its economic policy booklet and virtually repeats the tax proposals and support for Land Value Tax that we had adopted at the Labour Representation Committee conference in 2005.

And then we see reports that ideas are circulating in Government on the need to tackle international tax avoidance. This was an issue taken up by the Tax Justice Campaign and in 2005 endorsed by the Left Economic Adisory Panel (LEAP), the group of Left economists which I set up and chair.

I knew this run of success wouldn't last so I wasn't surprised to read of the leaked memo from David Bennett, Head of Number 10's policy directorate, setting out the policy ideas for Blair's legacy agenda, currently being discussed in joint working parties with Gordon Brown's people. This memo proposes a "clean sheet redesign of Whitehall" resulting in a "radical (50%) downsizing."

The leak comes on the eve of the TUC's lobby of Parliament on privatisation and public service cuts, plus the day before the announcement of the PCS ballot on compulsory redundancies.

It confirms the scale of the threat to our public services by the privatisation obsessed leadership of Blair and Brown and the need for co-ordinated action in support of public service workers under threat whether it is an NHS worker facing privatisation or a civil servant facing compulsory redundancy. We need to stand together.