Tagged with Derby

Reclaiming our Labour party – from the bottom up

red labourJAMES WEST reports from the inaugural meeting of the Derby Red Labour group

Recently, a few members of my local Labour party in Derby met up to discuss how we can make Labour more representative of our class, and of our communities. The meeting took place under the banner of “Red Labour” – an informal network of Labour Party activists which started out as a single page on Facebook.

We need to work to make our party stronger and more relevant to the people who so sorely need a Labour government to bring real change and better life outcomes for them and their families. Our local group, Derby Red Labour, has this as a mission statement of sorts: “Red Labour is about working to build the Labour Party we deserve – socialist in nature, and more representative of the working class and of the communities in which it’s rooted. It’s about coming together to help build a more vibrant and active party, more effective, democratic and relevant.” Continue reading →

Bombardier redundancies: does anybody care about Derby?

Thanks to my job as a business journalist, I can reel off facts and figures on topics from projected GDP growth in the Russian Federation to the outlook for tanker chartering rates. But I couldn’t tell you much about what they do in Derby these days. There’s no reason why I should know that, of course. But I had rather assumed the Treasury would be on the case, and factor wider considerations into government policy decisions.

Not so, according to the railway industry trade press. Lack of regional microeconomic data meant that nobody thought twice about what awarding a £3bn contract for 1,200 Thameslink carriages to Germany’s Siemens would mean for the East Midlands town.

Translation: Whitehall is insufficiently interested in what happens out in the sticks even to keep tabs on faraway places of which it knows little. Continue reading →