LABOUR Party leader Miliband said on Thursday that both national and local factors were to blame for the party’s massive defeat at the hands of Respect and George Galloway in the Bradford by-election. It definitely was not an issue of policy!
He, however, added: ‘We are not going to dismiss it as a one-off. There are issues here we have to take seriously and we will.’
Miliband does understand that it was not a one-off, lucky by-election break for Respect. He even hinted that it could happen again to the Labour Party.
The Labour leader told a group of 100 party supporters in the city, in an inquest into that defeat, that the party had not been ‘engaged’ enough in the community nor ‘understood’ some of its problems.
George Galloway, expelled by Labour in 2003, won the seat by by more than 10,000 votes, with the Tories getting just over 2,000 votes and the LibDems losing their deposit.
This was clearly a policy vote against Labour from the left, by workers and young people who feel that, as far as the capitalist crisis is concerned and what should be done about it, Labour is on the other side of the barricades.
Said Miliband: ‘Every constituency in this country must have a Labour Party engaged and understanding the community. That clearly did not happen in Bradford. We have to put that right in Bradford and have got to make sure that Labour is engaged with every community in every part of this country and every part of this region.’
The problem is that the Labour Party cannot get closer to the communities because it supports the Tory cuts and austerity measures and says that its number one policy is to rescue capitalism from its crisis.
In fact, Blair and Brown pioneered a Labour Party whose policy was to represent the interests of the bosses and bankers even better than the Tories did.
It championed globalisation, and supported bosses closing factories in the UK and moving them to areas of cheaper labour throughout the world.
Blair-Brown insisted with Bush that the UK would play a full part in the invasion and destruction of Iraq.
So confident were they in the capitalist order lasting for ever, they sold a huge chunk of the gold reserves for paper money, losing billions.
Now that the capitalist order is in full collapse, Labour under Miliband will not support workers who take strike action to defend their jobs, their wages and their pensions.
Labour under Miliband will not commit to restoring the Tory cuts and insists that it will also have an austerity programme.
Labour under Miliband insists that capitalism is the only possible system, and that the working class will have to make every sacrifice that is necessary to rescue it. He is continuing what Blair-Brown started!
This is why Labour did not lead a full-blooded opposition to the health reforms that are now law and will be used to privatise the NHS.
Instead of fighting to bring down the coalition, they urged the Liberals to rebel and sink the Health Bill, which they didn’t.
Miliband showed that his aim is to replace a Tory-LibDem coalition to save capitalism with a Labour-LibDem coalition to do the same. This is what the workers and youth of Bradford could not stomach.
The Labour Party leaders will not be allowed to forget what happened in Bradford, because it is gong to happen again and again as more and more workers and youth reject them and their Tory policies.
The issue of the hour is that the working class must have a leadership that will mobilise the trade unions in a general strike to bring down the coalition and then go forward to a workers government that will put an end to capitalism, and carry out socialist policies.
The only party with this programme is the WRP. Join it today.
