Gordon Brown must be shaking in his boots at the prospect of Huddersfield MP Barry Sheerman ousting Tony Lloyd from the chairmanship of the Parliamentary Labour Party. The notion is being touted up ’ere as a move that “could put the Prime Minister’s job in peril”.
Now, I yield to practically everyone in my admiration of the pro-foxhunting, Spectator-award winning chairman of
the schools select sommittee, a former churchwarden of St Margaret’s, Westminster. Indeed, I think we must all yield to Sheerman in this respect, since he has given Ir’n Broon a scary deadline to shape up or ship out.
“I’ve always said I’ll give the Prime Minister until the end of conference to see if he’s delivered on his promise”, warns the sage of Huddersfield. “I’ve been very discontented with the powerlessness of the Parliamentary Labour Party over the past year at a crucial time in the party’s history.”
Such discontent has been a pretty constant theme down the ages, and it’s very kind of Sheerman to put himself at the head of it now, with a possible view to the defenestration of the premier from Room 16 on the Committee Room corridor, where the PLP usually meets.
But somehow, I don’t think it’s going to happen. The story hasn’t taken off, not even in his local paper. Nor, I suspect, will Barry’s plot. If Gordon Brown is not still Prime Minister at the end of conference week, I will eat the Treaty of Maastricht.
Brrring! That can’t be an MP on the phone, because they only make transfer charge calls these days, such is the pervasive hysteria over expenses. But yes, it’s Denis MacShane, the former Foreign Office minister, on his well-trodden path to the Sky TV studio.
He’s powerfully exercised: indeed, he’s rarely anything else. This time, it’s the criminal folly of the Tories in Europe. David Cameron’s clowns are in league with some of the nastiest elements in the Strasbourg Parliament. There’s more than a whiff of anti-Semitism in the air.
Veteran Conservative MEP Edward Macmillan-Scott was unceremoniously bundled out of the party for objecting to his leader’s shotgun marriage with far-right Michal Kaminski, the Polish politician who now heads the European Conservatives and Reformists Group, including Cameron’s gang.
Kaminski leads the National Revival of Poland Party, which quoted Mein Kampf in its manifesto. He’s also charged with condemning President Alexander Krasniewski for apologising over the massacre of hundreds of Jews in the Second World War.
“This alliance cannot last”, MacShane argues. “It would be better for Britain if Tory MPs simply acted as an independent group in the European Parliament.” Better, no doubt, but unlikely to happen, because Cameron has made a Faustian pact with his Eurosceptics to get him through the election with this weak flank protected from internal criticism.
But not, as MacShane demonstrates with characteristic style, from our side. The Leeds region has a large Jewish community, many in marginal Labour seats. MacShane is too polite (or too canny) to mention it, but the Jewish vote is important. It is hardly likely to warm to a Tory/fascist alliance in Europe.
East Anglia never struck me as a particularly radical place. How wrong can you be? Fresh from a Labour fundraising dinner in Clacton on Sea, where party stalwarts raised both money and morale for a fight to oust the odious Tory MP Douglas Carswell, I attended the launch at the TUC in Liverpool of a biography of Wilf Page, the agricultural union hero.
Page, a lifelong Marxist and sometime Labour agent who defected to the Communist Party, fought the good fight for farmworkers and their families for decades in the unforgiving world of rich men’s agriculture. Self-taught but eloquent, he once said in a TUC debate on land nationalisation: “From history we know that men – hungry men who stole a sheep from the common – found themselves on the scaffold, while men who stole the commons from the sheep found themselves sitting in the House of Lords.”
Mike Pentelow’s excellent short biography, Norfolk Red (published by Lawrence and Wishart), records how Page once travelled to Clacton to address a meeting and found he was the only one there. At least I managed to attract near on 50.
And la lutta continua. Unite, home to the old NUAAW, having fought off an SNP bid to abolish the Agricultural Wages Board in Scotland, may find a similar fight on its hands in England if the Tories get back in. There are probably fewer than 100,000 full-time landworkers these days, but more than twice as many migrants have come in to work in the food industry.
Making their employers obey the wages laws is a full-time job for the Gangmasters’ Authority, a body of which Page, who died in 2001 aged 87, would have been proud – even if he did resign from the Labour Party because Clement Attlee’s Government wasn’t socialist enough.
