The latest publication of the GDP data for the EU shows three distinct trends but one unifying theme – slower growth.

In an important but dwindling group are those economies which are still expanding, led by Germany where GDP grew by 0.5% in the first quarter of 2012. In a larger group are those countries where the economy is stagnant. This now includes France which recorded zero growth in the quarter. The largest numerical group are those countries in recession, which includes Britain, Italy, Spain, Ireland, Portugal and Greece. The net result was that both the Euro Area group of 17 countries and the EU group of 26 recorded zero growth in the quarter.

If the focus shifts to the 12-month growth rates, comparing the first quarter of 2012 to the same quarter in 2011, the picture is even more stark. Outside of the Baltic States, which are still recovering from a 1930s-style Depression with the aid of substantial EU investment , only two countries recorded growth above 1.0%. These were Finland at 2.9% and Germany at 1.2%. The fact that the German motor of the EU economy is sputtering close to 1% growth is cause for alarm. It suggests that the entire EU economy is decelerating, and that the risk of renewed recession is increasing.

In fact this is the EU Commission’s forecast for 2012; a contraction of 0.3% for the Euro Area and zero growth in the EU as a whole. For the Euro Area 12-month growth is also now zero, and for the EU as a whole it is just 0.1%.

Even for the group of countries where growth has been strongest, growth is clearly slowing. The deceleration of the German economy is important for the entire European economy. These trends are shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1

But there are a growing number of countries that have headed back into recession, including Britain, Spain and the Netherlands – Figure 2. France has grown by just 0.1% in the last 6 months and maybe headed in the same direction. There is little to suggest that growth can accelerate with current policies.

Figure 2

The Euro Area has contracted by 0.3% in the last 6 months as has the EU as a whole. The crisis countries continue to contract sharply, led by Greece – Figure 3. However, the much greater weight of the Italian economy, seven times larger than the Greek economy, means that its clear slump is even more significant for the European crisis.

Figure 3

Formerly stronger economies are experiencing a slowdown in growth. Crucially this includes Germany. Other countries, such as Britain where growth had been stagnant have gone back into recession. This is also true for Spain and the Netherlands. France may be headed in the same direction. Significant falls in output are still occurring in the crisis-hit countries. These may now appear to be joined by Italy, where the crisis is deepening.

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It’s been a while since Jon Cruddas was a Labour Left pin up boy and even then the status was contested by some sections of the Left — his campaign for the deputy leadership being seen as a distraction from the non-event that the main event turned out to be. Since that campaign, he clearly felt comfortable neither in the role of standard bearer of the Left, nor in the Commons (leading the the Daily Mail to describe him as “an almost total nonentity in the Chamber“). Although Neal Lawson bigged him up as a possible leadership candidate, that was only because Jon and Neal didn’t properly talk about it. Then Compass took itself out of the party mainstream into a multi-party cul-de-sac and Jon badly miscalculated who was going to win the Leadership. Never mind, here at Left Futures, we think there are several reasons to be positive about Ed’s choice to lead the policy review. It’s not just that he’s a big picture, ideas and vision person, but here are ten really good things on his record:

1. His record on fighting racism and fascism – he was the Spectator’s Campaigner of the Year for his fight against the BNP in his Dagenham constituency.
2. He has long argued that New Labour had ignored its working class core voters, and that class needs to be central to our politics.
3. He opposed New Labour’s introduction of University tuition fees.
4. He opposed New Labour’s imposition of benefit penalties on single parents with children under 5.
5. He opposed the replacement of Trident.
6. He opposed Foundation schools.
7. He opposed New Labour’s continuing privatisation in the NHS.
8. He supports a referendum on the EU.
9. He supported John McDonnell’s Trade Union Freedom Bill and subsequent measures to defend the right to strike.
10. He is a long-standing supporter of the “fourth option” for council housing.

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We know there’s more joy in heaven about one sinner who repents than about 99 just persons, but William Hague lauding the government’s green record and calling on colleagues (in a leaked letter) to “avoid losing global leadership on the environment” takes the biscuit. This is a government that seduced voters before the last election with the slogan ‘vote blue and go green’ and then claimed later with breathtaking hubris that it was ‘the greenest government later’. As it’s turned out, vote blue and it’s gone brown. The Tory Right, nearly a third of the parliamentary party, has been persistently up in arms against everything environmental, and to their shame Cameron-Osborne have caved in at almost every point. Here’s the 10-point record:

1. The wind energy industry, where Britain could be a world leader, has been thrown into disarray by a published letter to Cameron calling on him to withdraw subsidies to renewable sources of energy and stick with nuclear and fossil fuels,
2. Labour introduced feed-in-tariffs to encourage low carbon generation, but last October the Tories slashed FIT funding by 50% putting at risk 25,000 jobs in the industry and leaving 86% of households no longer eligible for solar subsidies,
3. After 1 year of this government the UK dropped out of the global top 10 for low carbon investment,
4. In February last year the government cut funding to the Carbon Trust by 40% so that the the R&D of many projects was haltedwhich the Trust estimated could have realised over £1bn in revenues for UK businesses by 2030,
5. In its so-called Plan for Growth the government U-turned on its commitment that all new homes would be sero carbon by 2016,
6. The government introduced the green investment bank with great fanfare, but then refused to fund it as a bank so that it couldn’t leverage funds from the private sector as any ordinary bank would,
7. The government’s grandly entitled Electricity Market Reform turned out to be a mechanism to deliver a hidden subsidy for nuclear which they had given repeated assurances would never be provided from public funds,
8. Cameron allowed Conservative MEPs to vote against increasing the EU carbon reduction target from 20% to 30% by 2020, despite it being a key pledge in his own Coalition agreement,
9. Though in October 2009 Cameron pledged to introduce rules requiring new power stations to be as clean as a modern gas plant, he reneged on this in November 2010 by allowing new coal plants to pump almost double that level of carbon emissions,
10. In the face of the decline in North Sea oil and gas, the looming early likelihood of peak oil, and the UK’s growing dependence on volatile African and Middle Easter state for its fuel, the government has no sure plan to prevent the lights going out at the end of this decade.

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Enthusiasm for François Hollande’s new government in France is understandable, as it provides a popular mandate for an economic alternative to austerity, and a programme for economic growth. As Trevor Martin exhorts in his recent Tribune article “Let us follow where Hollande leads”.

Michael Meacher sketches an outline of what Hollande’s policies would mean translated into British terms:

it requires a National Infrastructure Bank to launch a big increase in capital investment including for house-building, a revival of the role of the State in reversing the vicious spiral of economic decline, and a major rebalancing of the economy from an over-cossetted banking system to a lean and hungry manufacturing industry.

However, it is important to understand that Hollande’s project is also to restructure the French economy. Jeremy Cliffe explains:

international commentators have largely overlooked his longer-term vision for the French economy.

Thus it may surprise many to learn that the Socialist programme pledges to both decentralise and shrink state spending year-on-year, cut corporate taxation for companies that reinvest profits, establish both a national investment bank and an industrial savings bank devoted to small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), establish a ‘pact of trust’ binding employers, unions, banks and local authorities in a consensus-based system of co-production, lower VAT and introduce full proportional representation in time for the 2017 election.

What is more, Hollande was as good as endorsed by the national association of SMEs (CGPME), which praised his commitment to enterprise, explicitly noting the contrast to 1981. Unlike the 2007 Socialist candidate, Ségolène Royal, he met repeatedly with the national employers association (AFEP). He promises to put employees (or their representatives) on the boards of directors and supervisory boards of all companies with over 1,000 workers, and to write into the constitution an obligation to consult all relevant social partners before a given government or private bill goes through the legislature.

To understand this programme we need to understand the specifically French context, and how social-democracy in France has experienced a distinctively different history from British labourism.

While it is appropriate and necessary for the Labour Party to develop a credible anti-austerity policy for jobs and growth, this must reflect our own British conditions, and we should not be distracted by particularities of Hollande’s government that do not apply to us.

The state plays, and has played a much greater role in the French economy than in Britain. Charles de Gaulle’s 1945 government, which included the socialist and communist parties, not only nationalized the banks, coal mines, insurance companies, electrical and gas companies, Air France, and Renault Auto but they also instituted a regime of government planning.

Jean Monnet drew up a set of goals in 1945 of what the French economy should accomplish by 1950. In addition to achieving target outputs Monnet called for the modernization of French industry. Monnet noted that the French Government did not have the resources to reconstruct all of the French economy so he called for the public investment in key economic sectors. These key sectors included the transportation system, coal, electricity, steel and agricultural mechanization. Later fuel and fertilizers were added to the list. Monnet’s formulation, extended to 1952, became known at the Monnet Plan.
In each key sector under the Plan the details of the planning were left to the modernization committees made up of representatives of the Planning Commission, the major firms in the sectors, public enterprises and unions, and technical experts.

These committees did not have the power to enforce their decisions, compliance was voluntary. This process came to be known as indicative planning.

A series of five plans were implemented successfully through to 1970. In his 1975 book, the Socialist Challenge, Stuart Holland described the necessary conditions which allowed the French planning system to succeed.

Significantly, it emerged from a long standing French tradition of state involvement in the economy; but also the immediate post-war period the economy was constrained by supply side problems, not demand; which gave enormous confidence to investors anticipating growth. Government departments also had real powers of disposal of capital and technological resources, which made the private sector very responsive to government priorities. Reconstruction also meant that planning could occur based upon highly incomplete data, as various industrial sectors intuitively restored their pre-war capacity.

In addition, the purge of Vichy collaborators opened up the civil service for a wave of new blood, the most talented of whom were cherry picked for the elite Ecole Normal d’Administration, where the ideology and methods of planning were taught. These young men achieved high civil service office very early in their careers, and a high proportion were then recruited by industry. This meant that there was a horizontal layer of networked civil servants and senior managers in industry committed to shared objectives. Furthermore, the rivalry between government departments was minimised through centralisation, in British terms this would be equivalent of the Department of Business Innovation and Skills being part of the Treasury.

(A descriptive account of analogous processes of indicative planning in South Korea and Taiwan is included in Nigel Harris’s The End of the Third World)

In contrast, the brief flirtation with indicative planning by the British Labour Party inspired by the economist Thomas Balogh, special advisor to Harold Wilson, was abandoned after 1964 when it became clear that the economic preconditions for success were absent. Indicative planning can succeed in conditions of economic confidence, which of course it can help to sustain, but it cannot reverse an unwillingness of the private sector to invest.

Generally the French post-war experience created a specific state-capitalist mode of capitalist development, distinct from the Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic models.

Vivien Schmidt describes the three models as follows:

Government policies differed widely among European countries in the post-war period.

Market capitalist Britain’s liberal or ‘spectator’ state generally had arm’s length relations with business (Grant 1995). It sought to limit its role to arbitrating among economic actors while leaving the administration of the rules to self-governing bodies, although this did not stop it from providing aid to industry on an ad hoc basis and intermittently intervening through planning experiments, nationalized industries or government sanctioned, privately regulated cartels (Shonfield 1965).

Managed capitalist Germany’s ‘enabling’ state was instead focused on facilitating business activities through more targeted aid to industry by way of regionally provided subsidies and loans, support for research and development, as well as education, apprenticeship and training programmes, while often leaving the rules to be jointly administered by economic actors (Katzenstein 1989).

State capitalist France’s dirigiste or interventionist state, by contrast, sought to direct economic activities through planning, industrial policy and state-owned enterprises, in addition to all the ways the other states promoted business, while it administered the rules itself, as often as not through the derogation of the rules in favour of business (Hayward 1973; Hall 1986; Schmidt 1996).

Furthermore, state intervention in the economy has generally been a much less politically polarised issue in France, enjoying support not only from the left, but also parts of the traditional Gaullist right, and indeed from the far-right.

So Hollande’s government is dealing with a distinct national context of capitalist development, but to understand his programme it is also necessary to understand the specifically French experience of social democracy.

The second part of this article (which first appeared at Socialist Unity) will deal with the experience and legacy of the Mitterand government, and the different strategic tasks facing French and British social-democracy, which provide the limits to which the Labour Party can emulate Hollande’s programme.

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Ed Miliband has announced his minor re-shuffle following the departure of Peter Hain. He has clearly decided to hold off making any major changes at least until the Autumn. However, he has removed Liam Byrne from the role of coordinating the Policy Review, bringing in Jon Cruddas to perform this role, and appointing Angela Eagle to chair the National Policy Forum. Owen Smith, who backed Ed Miliband in the leadership election, has been moved from the Treasury team to act as shadow secretary of state for Wales.

The removal of Byrne is very welcome although not unexpected. There was clearly a major Blairite lobby to defend his position at the DWP. The appointment of Lord Adonis as an adviser on industrial policy looks like a further gesture to the Progress wing of the party.

Jon Cruddas, although he has followed a rather maverick path since backing David Miliband for the leadership (perhaps because he assumed he would be a certain winner and had been offered the role of party chair), will undoubtedly be much more open to progressive changes in policy direction than Byrne. Also the fact that he is not much of a House of Commons person is actually encouraging in this role.

Whilst it is very disappointing that, once again, the leader assumes the right to appoint the chair of the national policy forum (although last time there was at least a formal election by the forum), Angela Eagle will probably be an improvement on Peter Hain. Although she voted for David Miliband in the leadership election, she is undoubtedly an Ed-loyalist and, as the former chair of the LabOUR Commission on party democracy a few years ago, she has a record of supporting members involvement in policy making.

Completing the reshuffle, Catherine McKinnell joins the Treasury team replacing Owen Smith, and in another welcome development, Lisa Nandy replaces her as shadow minister for children & young people.

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With the smart money on an early Greek exit, the two main questions to arise are: what will happen to Greece, and what future then for the Eurozone? If Greece leaves, the exchange rate will drop sharply from 340 drachmae to €1 at entry to the euro to perhaps 1,000 drachmae, a loss of value to the national currency of around 75% as happened to Argentina in a similar situation in 2002. But though in the latter case savings were decimated and import prices trebled, Argentina, released from an untenable dollar-peso parity, recovered strongly. So probably will Greece, given the introduction of capital controls and administrative controls to ensure vital supplies reach key enterprises. Removing the pressure of unbearable debt, boosting competitiveness from the intial collapse of the currency, lifting austerity, and paving the way for a much needed industrial restructuring should, after a painful transition, see Greece through. But what of the other 26?

The pressure will quickly switch to Spain where already 10-year bond yields have risen above 6.3%. But a great deal will then depend on how significant, as opposed to the communique’ rhetoric, are the concessions on increased flexibility wrung out of the Germans at today’s Hollande-Merkel meeting. It seems that they will give a bit on inflation and bigger pay rises in order to boost domestic demand and help to inject some life into the ailing eurozone economy. They also seem willing to agree a bit more capital for the European Investment Bank to lend for some more infrastructure projects. The Balls-Mandelson package is very similar. But it’s all too little and too slow to materialise.

It also raises two big political questions. Why go on with austerity at all when there’s no evidence it’s working, and why should Greece, Spain and France stick to these policies when the voters in Merkel’s own heartland of North-Rhine Westphalia have thrown them out? Secondly, the real fundamental flaw of the Eurozone – that German industrial strength and competitiveness is incompatible with the relative economic weakness of the southern and eastern fringes of the EU – is still not being addressed at all. It is a steamroller flattening one country after another, with all the counter-measures written out of the script. The conclusion must be, if the Eurozone has a future at all, it is only one after substantial restructuring (far more than yet envisaged), not simply through dropping the weakest member.

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JW Marriott Hotel, Seoul: Over the last 30 years, I have watched from afar the transformation of South Korea from a military dictatorship to a parliamentary democracy, and from an emerging market to a card-carrying OECD member developed economy.

This week I am getting a chance to see the country for myself, thanks to a programme for international journalists sponsored by a local television station. There are a lot of heavyweight hacks along for the ride, including a Pulitzer prize winner, who turns out to be a surprisingly down-to-earth guy with which to have a beer.

Obviously, the scheme is in place for ideological reasons. This is a place where the Cold War lives on, and tomorrow’s visit to the demilitarized zone is likely to prove the highlight of the trip. But all of this remains by way of obvious subtext and – so far, anyway – our hosts are not hammering home the point.

Then again, they don’t have to. We all know that on the other side of the DMZ lies a country that officially advocates Juche, or  self-reliance, and yet cannot feed its population, even with a considerable amount of foreign food aid. Ironically, much of the assistance was provided by the US, at least until it was withdrawn recently following Pyongyang’s unsuccessful long-range missile launch.

This peninsula highlights a number of questions of socialist theory: are property relations in North Korea in any sense ‘post capitalist’, and therefore some sort of gain that should be defended by the left? Does the recent history of South Korea put paid to the idea that countries can no longer undergo bourgeois revolutions in the classic sense? But common sense alone gives some idea of the answers.

There is a danger that the undeniably lavish hospitality we are enjoying here will compromise the judgement of participants, including me. But I’d like to think I can withstand the bribery element and remain objective in my assessments, of which I hope to provide a few more in the days ahead.

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The opportunity for Ed Miliband to rebalance his shadow cabinet should not be missed. LabourList urges caution — it is only seven months since the last one so people haven’t quite had time to prove their (un)worthiness so best wait until Autumn. And, after all, though the anti-Ed briefings haven’t stopped, they’ve “lost much of their initial bile”. But there’s another view:

In the last reshuffle, we argued Ed had strengthened his own support within the shadow cabinet but only slightly. When the anti-Ed briefings were coming thick and fast back in January, even those who voted for him were strangely silent. Perhaps that’s the way it is with the “rising stars”. When the going gets tough, they’re not so keen to lay in to their Progress friends. Now, since the Blairites decided they couldn’t stomach backing Balls or Cooper, and didn’t have a candidate of their own, they have been quieter. And Ed has had a good few months and a good election. But he can’t afford to bank on it staying that way. He needs a few more people around him who can be guaranteed to back him and not to mince their words. Michael Dugher, Helen Goodman, Jack Dromey are possible additions. In the interests of rebalancing the shadow cabinet politically, Diane Abbott also surely deserves a place.

As to who should  join Peter Hain in departing, even if she does not go now, Tessa Jowell must surely go when her current role on the Olympics disappears in little more than two months. The outstanding other candidate is Liam Byrne.

Believe it or not, we are eighteen months into a policy review for which Liam Byrne has been responsible throughout. After the infamous “I’m afraid there is no money“note to his successor as Chief Secretary of the Treasury, you’d have thought he would have been working hard to re-establish a reputation. There have been over a million contacts with the public, he reported to a NPF telephone conference last December, and dozens of shadow cabinet working groups and policy papers. There have been several rounds of policy papers, none of which seem to lead to the next.  Nothing has yet been endorsed by conference or the NPF. In some cases, they’ve not even been discussed. Labour’s very own omnishambles. It’s hard to find an insider who disagrees.

Perhaps, it would be worth remaining cautious about removing Caroline Flint and Ivan Lewis for now, and about moving people between portfolios – although StephenTwigg had earned party members distrust within a week of his appointment. But there is no excuse not also to rebalance the middle ranks with the promotion of Lisa Nandy, Ian Lavery, Graham Morris, Ian Mearns and Kate Green.

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It is almost incredible that after failure upon failure the monetarists have still not yet been run out of town. Even after the decisive anti-austerity presidential election in France a week ago, the ejection of all austerity-accommodating parties in Greece, and now the drubbing of the German Conservatives in North-Rhine Westphalia, it seems the best we can hope for from the Hollande-Merkel clash is a growth pact to run alongside an un-renegotiated fiscal austerity pact – a classic EU fudge since the former is not possible without a substantial easing of the latter.

It almost defies belief that after every monetarist project has run into the ground – Fisher’s quantity theory of money, Friedman’s ‘natural’ rate of unemployment, Thatcher’s financial deregulation, Blair’s privatisation of services, Brown’s PFI, and now Osborne’s oxymoronic expansionary fiscal contraction – instead of being shamed by their successive humiliations, they still return to the charge with yet another canard. This time it’s supply-side reforms, code for yet further cuts in labour rights.

The Treasury was at it again, following up the Queen’s Speech with the spin that it was about growth. Yet the only item remotely relevant about supporting businesses was the proposal to make it easier for firms to get rid of employees. In other words the monetarists’ latest wheeze for boosting growth comes down to cutting workers’ protections against unfair dismissal! The sheer effrontery and inanity of such an idea takes some beating. But instead of being hounded out with derision, the monetarists are still clinging on with arguments that are palpably ridiculous.

When is the Labour Party in the UK, and the Left throughout Europe, going to go on the offensive with a few central facts? The huge goverment borrowing of the last 4 years has nothing to do with social-democratic spending sprees – the budget deficit was 3% of GDP in 2007 and only rose to 11.6% in 2010 for three reasons: the abrupt drop in tax receipts as a result of the sharp recession, the big rise in benefit payments from the large increase in unemployment, and of course the cost of the bank bailouts.

The next facts are that only a boost in public capital spending (initially on infrastructure and housebuilding) will give the private sector the confidence in future growth to be willing to invest. If it is left to the private sector alone to initiate the growth, they will only do it at knock-down, recession bombed-out prices that have cut a swathe through the asset values of British industry and commerce – a price that non-one in their right mind (except the monetarists) should be prepared to pay. The Left has the answers and all the evidence behind them; the Right is utterly bereft and skint of ideas. Why don’t we go on the attack?

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Firstly, I have to say I was disappointed. The Progress Annual Conference on Saturday wasn’t as unpleasant an experience as I’d expected. The last Progress meeting I’d attended was horrible — a crowded, hot and sweaty fringe at last year’s annual party conference, with speaker after speaker stridently promoting ideas and policies that seemed totally alien to me. Though I heard plenty of things I disagreed with yesterday, the ideologues present seemed strangely muted and defensive. As if they knew the party was no longer theirs. The Labour movement surroundings helped too, the TUC’s Congress House, and there no sign of the corporate world that made Labour Party conferences so horrendous when Blair was in government. And nor was it the sort of stage-managed rally which party conference remains.

And then, of course, there was Ed. I had been instinctively critical of his presence there at all. Why should Labour’s leader repeatedly speak at events of an organisation so opposed to making the break with New Labour which he has said is necessary. And yet, not only did he speak really well, but in the way he challenged the audience, I couldn’t have asked for much more. He took them where they always want us to be – outside the comfort zone. He told them how Labour in government failed to stand up to the rich and powerful:

the British public lost faith in who we stood up for. They thought that we had lost touch. They thought that we were too close to the powerful interests. Not willing to take on the banks, until it was too late. Not willing to take on the utilities enough as they began to drive up prices. Not willing to take on the media giants, even though everyone knew that things were not right.

The British people thought we were not always willing to stand up for the country, even when it needed it most. We became one of “them” rather than one of “us”.

He talked about how he’d also been warned against speaking out against Murdoch, against bankers bonuses and against electricity and train companies since becoming leader (by shadow cabinet members associated with Progress though he didn’t say that bit). But he had one so because it was right to stand up “against unaccountable concentrations of private and public power.”

And he used the anti-politics stance of so many to justify why Labour had to challenge the neoliberal view of the impotence of governments in the economy:

At our party conference I began challenging the old story. The story that globalisation means we are powerless. That we must tolerate irresponsibility at the top. That ever-more flexible labour markets are good for people.

He criticised the democratic credentials of New Labour in government:

In the old days, it was said we listened to the party membership but not the public. Then it was said we listened to the public but not the party. The truth is that by the time we left office, it seemed like we had stopped listening to both the party and people.

And in outlining his vision, he dared to use the “c” word:

A country not riven by class, wealth and income. A country where the economy works for all working people, not just a few at the top. And a country where we show politics can improve people’s lives.

It was hardly Bennism, but it made up for him being there. Even his gratitude to Progress for its contribution to internal party debate (“challenging old orthodoxies and championing change“) was double edged.

Stephen Twigg, former Chair of Progress, speaking in a break out session on “public service reform”,  was one of those who seemed ultra-cautious and defensive. It was hard, for example, to find fault with the 5 principles he outlined which he said should govern reform:

1. It should be based on evidence not dogma;
2. It should be focussed on user needs;
3. It should take account of professional advice;
4. Power should be devolved.
5. It should provide new solutions, and break down the silos and barriers which divide current services.

These are principles which would have prevented many of those New Labour reforms driven by the dogmatic urge to privatise and marketise, which centralised power and which ignored both users’ views and professional advice. Still, new Fabian general secretary, Andrew Harrop, was able to inject some additional and sensible cautionary advice — maybe 2015, after years of devastating cuts and facing continuing financial pressure, services could do with a period without major change.

It took the breakout session on “What should a modernized link look like?” to remind me just how far removed Progress are from the mainstream. The answer to the question seems to be “just like USDAW and Community“, only with a political fund that is “opt-in” rather than “opt-out”, and consulted but with little direct say over Labour Party policy. There was a great deal of hostility for the leadership of the affiliated unions that weren’t USDAW or Community, and even more for the leaders of some of those that aren’t affiliated.

Thousands of teachers were represented, it was said “by donkeys“. And particular animosity was expressed for those Labour MPs who were happy to share platforms with union leaders in the SWP or Socialist Party. “We know who they are“, said a member of the audience. I thought I did too, and was rather surprised when the main culprit was named as Tom Watson, formerly associated with Labour First.

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