More than 200 delegates and visitors met at the Conway Hall on Saturday November 15^th 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

In the morning Darrall Cozens moved a resolution on behalf of ‘Socialist Appeal’, calling for nationalisation of the entire banking system and of land and the building industry under workers’ control and management. This would enable us to build the houses we need. The demands, based on the programme of the IMT published on this website, went on to call for nationalisation of the energy companies and a socialist plan of production. The resolution was passed overwhelmingly.

Jeremy Dear, General Secretary of the National Union of Journalists, made a fighting speech which we are publishing in its entirety. Matt Wrack, General Secretary of the Fire Brigades Union, brought fraternal greetings from his union. He denounced the bank bail-out as the “socialisation of losses.” “We did not create this crisis,” he went on, demanding no repossessions and a programme to build social housing. Criticising the drive to privatisation and PFI he declared that “if the bankers can’t run their own industry, don’t invite them in to run anything else.”He was not ashamed to advocate the ‘n’ word – nationalisation – and concluded by warning the boss class, “Your system created this mess, your system should pay.”

Similar conclusions were drawn by Katy Clark, MP for North Ayrshire and Arran. “If you can find the money to prop up the system,” she pointed out, “You can find the money for the workers.” She praised the retention of the Post office card account by Royal Mail as a small but important victory for working class pressure, but pointed out we have a long way to go. A century later, “We have less trade union rights than we did at the time of Taff Vale” (the anti-union court case that caused the trade unions to set up the Labour Party in the first place).

In the afternoon Conference rejected a resolution from the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty which called for the LRC to become a Workers’ Representation Committee, using trades councils and other bodies to campaign for “a political voice for the working class”. Their resolution denies that the working class has a political voice – called the Labour Party – and calls upon us in effect to campaign to set up a new workers’ party. In a sharp debate delegates pointed out that the resolution was in fact calling upon the LRC to commit suicide. Ian Aylett pointed out that the AWL resolution would achieve what the right has always wanted. “The right wing wants us out.” The question we should be asking instead is, “Why won’t the trade union leaders support John McDonnell?”

Solid programmatic resolutions were passed on the Royal Mail, trade union rights, housing, public transport and education, and against the threat of racism and fascism. Conference did not neglect the internationalist duty of socialists, with fraternal greetings from socialists in Norway and Iceland, resolutions on Iraq and Iran and the war danger, and a survey of global injustice and struggle from Jeremy Corbyn MP. Those attending went home with a renewed determination to get involved further in their labour movement locally, convinced that a socialist programme will gain an increasing echo, and that the Conference itself was a small landmark in the campaign to reclaim the Labour Party for the working class and socialist policies.