Labour should be leading the anti-cuts campaign

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Sheffield Cuts RallyBy Darrell Goodliffe

Something is stirring. It’s slow and nowhere near a complete movement and, far from commanding mass support at the moment it still consists mostly of a hardened core of campaigners. However, having said all that the anti-cuts movement is in its infancy and all these stages have to be passed through. In the polls we are beginning to see public support, far from being united behind this governments ideologically driven assault on societies most vulnerable, is beginning to fray at the edges. On the one hand there is a growing acceptance of their necessity but a growing question over their timing and actual long-term value. The logical route for this questioning to take is, in time, to undermine support for the very necessity of cuts themselves – especially as they are currently pushed with no strategy for better times ahead.

Labour’s failure to present a coherent alternative agenda has undoubtedly contributed to the acceptance of the cuts. Also, at least at leadership level, its attitude to the anti-cuts movement is currently at best described as ambivalent but frequently hostile in a passive-aggressive sense and sometimes lecturing. However, at the Yorkshire and Humber TUC demo in Sheffield last Saturday none of this was on display. Labour politicians addressed the rather wet crowd, Labour MP’s were amoung the massed ranks and generally, Labour was clearly present. Even Ed Miliband put in an appearance (even if it was as an image on a banner).

This is how it should be, because whatever our views on what the alternative to these cuts are, be you a dove or a hawk, we can agree that this is not the right way forward. However, we have to be careful; being in the lead and showing solidarity does not mean the exclusion of others whose politics we do not share. Whether we like it or not those to the left of Labour like the Green Party (and those further to the left) have every right to be a part of a broad movement and to exclude them or otherwise try and muscle them out would damage that movement.

Nonetheless it is Labour who should be taking the lead here; especially those comrades with strong trade unions links. They should be urging their local party to act in concert with bodies like the trade councils, campaigns like the Coalition of Resistance, and bend every fibre to make this movement successful. Historically, this party is much more than a electoral organisation, it aims to be the electoral representation of a much broader movement, the labour movement. It must remember that its role extends beyond the electoral cycle and we are duty bound to protect and further the aims of that movement.

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