<!--[He’s a rat leaving what he sees as a sinking ship

<!--[New Labour sucking up to the Tories with anti-working class policies just paves the way for the real thing to take over and put the boot in further.

The LRC combines a growing part of the Labour left as well as a few groups outside of the party who don’t stand in elections against it. Most significantly it has affiliations from a number of national unions (including the RMT and FBU) and branches and a good third of the 203 accredited delegates who voted in the National Committee elections were from affiliated organisations. Total attendance was around 270.

More than 200 delegates and visitors met at the Conway Hall on Saturday November 15th for the Annual Conference of the Labour Representation Committee, the organising hub of the left wing within the Labour Party and among trade union activists. There was a determined mood among those meeting. After years of right wing drift and domination of the labour movement, LRC members rightly felt that the crisis had brought out the urgency for socialist ideas to be heard and taken up. The Conference was opened by a stirring speech from Tony Benn.

By Jeremy Dear, General Secretary of the National Union of Journalists

Last year, Richard Desmond, the proprietor of Express Newspapers announced he was paying himself a chairman’s remuneration of some £52m - the equivalent of £1m a week.

It hardly raised an eyebrow. 

Although hefty by historical standards, it was not by contemporary ones. Just a few months earlier Lakshmi Mittal had paid himself a record £1.1bn dividend. At the time it was the highest private dividend on record. But that record did not last for long as high street retailer Philip Green topped it with a dividend of £1.2bn from his Arcadia Group – the equivalent of the annual pay of 54,000 people on average earnings.

Sometimes little incidents reveal much more fundamental truths.  This article from the Guardian on Tuesday September 09 which covered some of the fringe meetings at the TUC conference clearly demonstrates just how out of touch many of the New Labour careerists really are:

“One telling anecdote to emerge from the Compass gathering was when David Lammy, the schools minister, discussed his shock at finding one of his mother's pay slips, dated 1986. Lammy's mother, recently deceased, had worked both in the NHS and for London Underground. Going through his mum's things after her death, Lammy learned that her take-home pay 22 years ago was just £900 a month." 

So Peter Mandelson, the ‘Prince of Darkness’ is incredibly back in the government after having had to quit on two previous occasions. His is to take up the job of Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform - naturally.  People new to politics may wonder what all the fuss is about, not least since Mandelson has been hiding away in euro-bureaucracy land for the last four years as EU Trade Commissioner.

Labour is in electoral meltdown. The newspaper headlines are screaming ‘We’re all doomed’ on account of the world economic crisis. But they were desperately trying not to allow the real world to impinge on the surreal world inside Labour Party Conference. 

“The weirdest conference I’ve ever attended,” so said one experienced political commentator in reviewing this year’s Labour Party conference in Manchester. With Labour trailing badly in the opinion polls and having faced a series of bad to awful results in successive by elections, local council elections and the London Mayoral election, you might have expected the mood to be depressed and flat. And so for most it was.

The Forum took place against the backdrop of the disastrous by-election defeat in Glasgow East. This in turn was only the latest in a list of electoral humiliations over the past few months. The Henley, Crewe and Nantwich by-election defeats, the council elections and the defeat in London’s mayoral elections, are all a reflection of the utter frustration felt by the working class electorate after ten years of New Labour pandering to big business.

Put up or shut up!

“They’re tearing themselves apart, just like we used to do,” a senior Conservative MP said, beaming in the sunshine. “God knows why he’s done it now.” This is a quote from the Financial Times (31.07.08) about what the Tories think of David Miliband’s ‘coded leadership bid’.