Thanks to All the Artists, Speakers and Organisers For Making our National Rally Such a Success.

Just a quick line to say thanks to all the artists, speakers and organisers for making today's national rally at the Shaw Theatre such an overwhelming success.

With just over 6 weeks of organisation the theatre was filled throughout the afternoon with over 400 activists coming to discuss the campaign and hear a fantastic range of music and witness some beautiful dance.

Representatives from trade unions, CLPs, MPs and numerous campaigns came along to voice support for our campaign.

The speeches were incredibly moving statements of commitment to the socialist ideals upon which our party was founded.

To listen to young people expressing their hopes and beliefs for the future and to hear the response of solidarity from speakers from the pensioners movement was just inspirational.

All this offered hope for the future.

Today we witnessed the birth of a new united progressive front within our movement.

Thanks once again to all the volunteers who organised to make this happen.

Global Women's Strike

Last night I spoke at a packed meeting in Camden organised by the Global Women's Strike, details here:
http://www.globalwomenstrike.net/England/JohnMcDonnellMeeting.htm

It was great to see a number of friends and comrades who I have worked with over the last twenty years on a variety of different campaigns, and discuss common ideas and strategies together.

The John4Leader campaign is built up on a coalition of different interests reaching out in a completely non-sectarian way to all manner of different campaigns and political groups who share our values. Meetings like this are classic example of this leadership contest's ability to foster cutting edge discussions and debates about a whole range of wide-ranging and often challenging issues. I am delighted to have the support of the many women and men who attended the meeting tonight from a variety of autonomous organisations and campaigns attached to Global Women's Strike.

We discussed the effects of inequality in our society on health, crime and anti-social behaviour; the culture of long hours and low pay and its effect on families and community networks - encouraged by a government that believes the only route out of poverty is work and pushes people into badly paid work with poor terms and conditions, threatening the removal of benefits if they won't comply; the necessity of challenging institutional sexism by holding officials accountable; ways of finding flexibility in local service provision where democratic representatives, service users and frontline staff make decisions together instead of decisions being imposed from above; the forced destitution of asylum seekers, the unwillingness of government to accept rape as torture and cowardly refusal to challenge the hard-right's stance on immigration.

I am repeatedly struck by the difference between these types of meetings and the way government policy is often formed. Last night there was a wealth of well-informed, intelligent comment from representatives of self-organised groups with direct experience of the effects of government policy. Contrast this with policy advisory groups dominated by private sector interests, shaping government policy in the interests of the rich without any understanding or concern about their impact on vulnerable groups. It's small wonder New Labour can seem bogged down in a one-track mindset of privatisation and managerialism, out of touch with the priorities and values of ordinary people. Last night we saw how through self-organisation, working class communities can come up with creative and new ways of adapting socialism to the twenty-first century that the government would do well to listen to.

Bring in Land Value Tax to replace Council Tax

As part of my platform for the Labour leadership, I'm advocating the replacement of Council Tax and business rates with a Land Value Tax. This is something long campaigned for by the Labour Land Campaign.

We all know that council tax is a regressive tax, with those in Band H paying only three times as much as those in Band A. Rises in Council Tax are therefore hitting the poorest hardest. There is also £1.8bn in unclaimed Council Tax benefit.

Last week the Lyons Review published a report into the Council Tax review, which recommended that the large homes of the super-rich should be charged double what they are currently paying to allow for a rebate of £150 per year for the poorest. This was immediately rejected out of hand by Gordon Brown's Treasury. As David Hencke writes in the Guardian: "The man who would be prime minister threw away an opportunity for a real change that would have hit the rich and helped the poor".

A Land Value Tax (LVT) would simplify matters and accords with our sense of justice. Land is a gift of nature and its value rises according to the social and economic environment to which all of us contribute - yet only landowners benefit. For example land values in East London have risen due to the Olympics, yet it is the investment of public money that has enabled the Olympics to take place and for land values to rise. A tax on land values will return some of this unearned wealth to the community and the income used to reduce or replace regressive taxes such as council tax.

LVT is fair, transparent, impossible to avoid (you can't store land in an offshore tax haven), simple to collect, and would help tackle the growing inequality of wealth. It also encourages efficient use of land in towns and cities for jobs, affordable homes and leisure and thus avoid urban sprawl.

In 1906, Keir Hardie said "The slums remain, overcrowding continues whilst the land goes to waste. Shopkeepers and traders are overburdened with rates and taxation whilst the increasing land values that should relieve the ratepayer go to people who have not earned them". 100 years later we have an opportunity to make LVT a reality.

Iran's Arrest of British Military and Mandelson Resurfaces

Iran; the Risk of Military Action.

We all want to ensure that the Bristish Service personnel detained by Iran are safe and secure and are released unharmed. However there are questions that have to be answered by all sides about what led to their arrest by the Iranians.

Where exactly were the British service staff operating?

In whose territory were they when they were detained?

What was their role or mission?

Similarly, where were the Iranian forces?

What was the Iranian operation?

Especially, what were the grounds upon which they detained the British personnel?

My fear is that already the hawks in the US are using the detention of the British military personnel as a further justification for military action again Iran.

Some of those surrounding Bush are content to use this incident to set Iran up for further provocative actions against Iran and even invasion.

Instead what is needed is calm negotiation to get to the truth of how and why the British were detained and how they can be freed safely.

One measured approach could be for Britain to request the UN to invite both Iran and Britain to meet to explain each other's version of events and to seek to negotiate a resolution to the present stand off. This potentially dangerous situation could be turned to everyone's advantage by bringing about a new point of contact for longer term negotiations.

A rush to threat of further sanctions and acts of military aggression will do nothing except exacerbate the present, hazardous sitauation.

Mandelson Resurfaces.

On a more parochial note, I hear on the news that Mandelson is calling for a challenge to Gordon Brown from a new generation of New Labour MPs and in the press Blair has let it be known through his aides that he is encouraging Miliband to run.

The depths of personal bitterness and nastinesss amongst the architects of New Labour never fails to surprise me. This group has worked closely together in their project to hijack the Labour Party, undermine the socialist principles upon which it was founded and destroy its mission to transform our society.

Now they are tearing each other apart for what?

Not because of any difference over political philosophy, ideas or policies. This is about naked ambition and bitter personal infighting.

Do any of them care about the future of our party or our government?

They are disgracefully putting their own political careers and ambitions and personal animosities above the needs of our movement. By making our party look so divided in this way they are undermining our support just before the elections in Scotaland, Wales and local government.

I am calling upon all of them to put the interests of our party first and to act with some dignity not like a pack of political hyenas fighting over a carcass.

Let us have a democratic election for the leader of our party.

Let's have a range of candidates standing based upon the range of different policy approaches within the party.

And for the party's sake let's end this persistent, personal backbiting within what's left of the New Labour clique.

We need a friendly, comradely debate over policies not this personality clash between the Blair and Brown factions of New Labour.