Notes on the Campaign Stomp: Heartening and Motivating

Someone asked me to blog about it was like to be on the campaign trail. To get a flavour here's just the last few days.

On Wednesday night I was at a great meeting in Leytonstone talkng with Labour Party members and ex members. There were about 120 people at the meeting enthusiastically debating national and local politics. The local MP, Harry Cohen, and Katy Clarke MP joined me. Harry is not only well known as a really hard working constituency MP but he is also a principled socialist who has consistently campaigned in Parliament on a wide range of progressive causes. Katy was elected at the last election and quite simply is one of the best hopes for the future of the Left in Parliament and the party. She's a superb advocate of our policies.

On Thursday the encouraging news came through that ASLEF executive had taken the decision to support me for leader of the party. As this was the first union to declare its nomination this was seen as a real breakthrough. You would have thought it would merit at least a small column inch in the Guardian so even I was a bit surprised that there was not even a mention in the paper. Nevertheless the news of the nomination spreads throughout the day.

On Friday I attended my local youth parliament to talk about local issues but was pleasantly surprised when a group of young people came up to me at the end to offer their support and help for the leadership campaign. Later that day after speaking to the NUJ national Executive I was on the campaign trail in Norwich.

First I spoke at an early evening meeting of about 80 to 90 students and some trade unionists at the University of East Anglia. They had range of fascinating questions. Later I addressed a meeting for local Labour Party members. There were about 20 to 30 members, with the local MP Ian Gibson. Ian has consistently and barvely spoken out on issues like the Iraq war and Trident and with his academic and scientific background speaks with an authority which surpasses Ministers and their advisers. The discussion with Norwich party members demonstrated yet again that despite the media people want the right to have an election for the leader based upon policies not personalities and many want change.

On Saturday (today) we have had a brief meeting of the co-ordinators of the different elements of our campaign. Everyone is really buoyant and reporting back widespread activity and enthusiasm from the local meetings to the different campaigning groups such as the pensioners4John or the womens group, the Punjabi community campaign or the Socialist Youth Network. We have planned a rally livened up with music, stand up etc for the afternoon of 31 March at the Shaw Theatre in London.

Artists and speakers are being booked as we speak but as always it is a rush job and we are all a bit edgy about whether we can pull it off. But if you don't try you don't succeed. If there is any one out there with music and arts connections let me know. Does anyone know what Soweto Kinch's politics are and how he could be approached? If you have heard him you will know why. He is just superb.

After the meeting I dashed to the demonstration outside Harmondsworth Detention Centre and spoke to the demonstrators. Harmondsworth is in my constituency and I have been visiting the centre for over 20 years. It used to be a few small huts with about 20 detainees. Now it is a massive prison like insitution with 400 inmates and with another 400 in the Colnbrook centre next to it. My constituency office deals with detainees' cases every day.

At the demonstration I met the campaigners I have been working with who are trying to expose the Government's policy of deporting people back to Iraq. On Monday they told me the Government is deporting up to 40 detainees back to Iraq by military airplane from RAF Brise Norton. I raised this issue in Parliament two weeks ago and yet the Government persists in sending people back to a war zone. Where is the humanity in that?

This is just a brief description of a few days on the campaign stomp. For me it combines the exhilaration of meeting good people who want to talk about what socialism means in the twenty first century with the heartrending consequences of the existing administration's policies towards asylum seekers. These experiences both hearten and motivate me.

Tackling Pensioner Poverty

The Government's Pensions Bill will be returning to the House of Commons in the next month.

I have tabled amendments to the bill to restore the link between pensions and earnings, to uprate the basic state pension to the Pension Credit level, and to make the proposed rises in the state retirement age contingent upon increased life expectancy among the poorest.

In the early 1980s, Thatcher abolished the link between earnings and pensions. As a result, pensioners have lost out on around £50 per week. The current state pension is £84 – the lowest in western Europe. The Pension Credit takes this to £114 via the means-test, but by the Government's own figures up to 1.6m pensioners do not receive their entitlement. That's why we must restore the earnings link and increase the basic state pension.

The proposal to raise the state retirement age to 66, 67 and 68 is supposed to reflect increased longevity. While average life expectancy has risen, in some of the poorest areas it is still under 70. I have tabled an amendment so that the state retirement age can only rise to 66 in 2024 if average male life expectancy for the poorest 10% of the population has reached 76, and 77 for the rise to 67 in 2034, and 78 for 2044.

I am not prepared to accept a rise in the state retirement age that would mean 24 months of retirement before death for the poorest people. This amendment would encourage the Government to tackle health and other social inequalities.

I am calling on all MPs from all political parties to support my amendments to the Pensions Bill. I will be campaigning with local and national pensioner organisations to restore the link between pensions and earnings and ensure that there is a just pensions system for today's pensioners and those in the future.

Restoring the link is easily affordable and I am appealing to the Chancellor of the Exchequer not to block my amendments. In 1997, the Labour manifesto said, "We believe that all pensioners should share fairly in the increasing prosperity of the nation". Ten years on, I am tabling amendments to make sure this happens.

Meanwhile the Royal Mail (majority owned by the Government) has announced it will end its final salary pension scheme. If I was a postal worker today I would feel completely betrayed by the Government. Under the terms of the Warwick agreement, we gave the unions clear undertakings that public sector pension schemes would be protected.

At a time when Royal Mail is making an annual profit of £355 million, and awarded its Chief Executive with a £2.2 million bonus in 2005 in addition to his regular millionaire's salary, it is a disgrace that they are treating their own workforce with such contempt. I am calling upon the Government now to step in at once and facilitate meaningful discussions with the union to ensure that the final salary pension scheme for postal workers is properly preserved for both present and future employees.

ASLEF: First Trade Union to Announce Who It Will Support for Labour Leader

Yesterday the first union affiliated to the Labour Party announced who it would be supporting in the Labour leadership election. The national executive of the rail drivers trade union, ASLEF, met and took the decision to support me.

This is a real honour for me and a great gain for our campaign. I am a member of the ASLEF Parliamentary group and have worked with the union on a wide range of issues and campaigns of direct concern to the union and its members both nationally and locally.

In recent years many New Labour leaders and ministers have appeared to be embarrassed by any association with the trade union movement and I am extremely concerned that there are some who will be seeking to use the Hayden Phillips inquiry recommendations, to be published later this month, in an attempt to break or undermine the link between trade unions and the Labour party.

I am also anxious about the proposals being promulgated by some Labour MPs and in the New Labour leadership to significantly reduce the role of unions in our policy making structures. They seem to forget that the trade unions founded our party and have been its mainstays ever since.

I welcome the support and active involvement of trade unionists in my campaign. The New Labour leadership seems to have forgotten who our friends really are.

Rest assured, I haven't.

It isn't just whether loans were obtained for peerages, it is that people believe this could have happened under a Labour government.

Nearly a week on from the arrest of Lord Levy and the revelation of the second Police interview of the Prime Minister, the furore over the loans for peerages is unabated. All through last week I was continuously asked by the media whether I thought the Prime Minister should step down.

My response was that for at least two years I have been calling for the Prime Minister to go because I disagreed with his political ideology and many of the policies which stem from it but with regard to the loans for peerages issue I adhered to the straightforward principle of innocent until proven guilty whether it is the Prime Minister or any other citizen.

I left it at that. However I made it clear it was critical that the Police should be allowed to get on with their investigation and that they should be given the fullest co-operation.

My main concern was for the reputation of the Labour Party and the standing of politics more generally. That is why on Tuesday I urged that the Labour Party should act to protect its reputation by appointing an independent person to liaise directly with the Police inquiry so that we could demonstrate that the Party was doing everything it could to co-operate with the inquiry and to be completely open and transparent. In this way we could overcome any allegations that the Party was involved in any cover up.

Many New Labour advisers, surrounding both Blair and Brown, hope that nothing will come of the Police inquiry and once it is over they can return to politics as normal. This misses an important lesson of this whole episode.

A critical concern for every Labour member and supporter must be not just whether loans were obtained for peerages but the fact that a large proportion of the electorate believe that under a Labour government this could have occurred at all.

We need to think very carefully about how we have so lost the trust of a large section of our community that they could even contemplate this happening under a Labour government.