As Socialist Appeal has reported in the past, Progress is the right-wing Blairite organisation inside the Labour Party which has been funded by Lord Sainsbury and other big business backers. It still has considerable support in the parliamentary Labour Party in particular and its current president is MP Stephen Twigg, shadow minister of education.
As Socialist Appeal
has reported in the past, Progress is the right-wing Blairite organisation
inside the Labour Party which has been funded by Lord Sainsbury and other big
business backers. It still has considerable support in the parliamentary Labour
Party in particular and its current president is MP Stephen Twigg, shadow
minister of education.
Progress admits to having ‘members’ of its own, as well as
full-time officers and publications and it actively organises inside the Labour
to push a right-wing, neo-liberal agenda that includes cuts in living standards
for working class people. A recent circular advertising a Progress conference
in June was circulated to all CLP secretaries, drawing attention to the fact
that it was to be addressed by the Labour Party’s general secretary, Iain
McNicol, as well as Harriet Harman MP and Caroline Flint MP. Their conference,
ostensibly to “re-launch the campaign for the party to rebuild its presence
throughout the country” was in reality a campaign to increase the presence of Progress within the Labour Party.
But the mis-named ‘Progress’ is not having all its own way. Now,
many CLPs have written to the Labour Party national office expressing their
anger and objecting to the fact that the general secretary is addressing this
meeting and questioning why the rules used to ‘proscribe’ the Marxists in the
past (notably the supporters of the newspaper Militant) are not used against Progress.
According to an article in The Guardian, leaders of the big trade unions affiliated to the
Party are also objecting to the power and influence of Progress. A policy
document by Labour’s largest affiliate, Unite, argues that “Labour Party
policies are often determined by a small group of advisers – far too often
dominated by old thinking, neo-liberalism and the organisation Progress.”
Now the GMB union is drawing up a resolution for this year’s
Labour Party conference designed to ban Progress and, according to the
Guardian, “an offer by the Unison union’s south-east region to let its
headquarters be used for a Progress meeting…has been withdrawn and the union’s
regional secretary has said he will no longer speak at the event…”
It is clearly as a result of the campaigns of the union rank
and file that Ed Miliband, at a recent union conference, made the comment that “the
old orthodoxies about our economy, our society and our policies are crumbling
before our eyes.” This modest comment is a million miles away from advocating
the socialist policies that are necessary to maintain the living standards of
the vast majority of working class people but if it is an indication of the
pressure being put on the Party leadership by the aspirations of millions of
trade union members, it is a step forward. The unions need to follow this up
with a campaign to draw their members into activity in the Party to reclaim it
from the Blairites who have dominated it in the past.
But the answer to the influence of Progress is not bans and
proscriptions, because these are too often used against the left. Labour’s
neo-liberal right wing need to be answered politically
and their business links exposed. If, as Iain McNicol says in defence of
Progress, “the Labour Party is a broad Church”, then that maxim must be applied
to all, including those on the left
and the Labour Party full-time apparatus should not act as recruiting sergeants
for the old and discredited policies of Blairism.
