On Monday, the GMB union passed a motion to outlaw progress. Oh sorry, that’s a typo. On Monday the GMB union passed a motion to outlaw Progress. A resolution will now proceed to the Labour party conference to that effect.
Progress is a New Labour pressure group. It publishes a magazine and holds seminars and conferences. Lord Adonis is its current chair and Stephen Twigg its Honorary President.
A few weeks ago Progress held its annual conference. The keynote speaker was Ed Miliband, Leader of the Labour Party. So, clearly, this is an organisation infested with hardcore neo-liberals that needs to be rooted out.
This absurd motion shows quite how intimidated some people in the Labour party are by any alternative voices. What a great idea it is to tell David Sainsbury, who funds Progress, to get lost. Why not line up the most generous donor in the party’s history, who was an excellent Science Minister, and tell him you don’t want his ill-gotten money?
Slowly, surely, insanely, there is a plan in the Labour party to silence these alternate voices and plant the party in a place from which no victory is feasible. The political strategy of Unite explicitly attacks Progress. The man who proposed the GMB motion stood against Labour in 2005 for Socialist Unity. If the perpetrators of this idiocy even knew what irony was, they might be able to detect some in the fact that Progress is being accused of being the new Militant by people who were members of the original.
Time now for the vast majority of sensible Labour people to kick up a fuss. When this motion is brought to the Labour conference they should pack the hall and boo.
Outlawing Progress | Philip Collins
On Monday, the GMB union passed a motion to outlaw progress. Oh sorry, that’s a typo. On Monday the GMB union passed a motion to outlaw Progress. A resolution will now proceed to the Labour party conference to that effect.
Progress is a New Labour pressure group. It publishes a magazine and holds seminars and conferences. Lord Adonis is its current chair and Stephen Twigg its Honorary President.
A few weeks ago Progress held its annual conference. The keynote speaker was Ed Miliband, Leader of the Labour Party. So, clearly, this is an organisation infested with hardcore neo-liberals that needs to be rooted out.
This absurd motion shows quite how intimidated some people in the Labour party are by any alternative voices. What a great idea it is to tell David Sainsbury, who funds Progress, to get lost. Why not line up the most generous donor in the party’s history, who was an excellent Science Minister, and tell him you don’t want his ill-gotten money?
Slowly, surely, insanely, there is a plan in the Labour party to silence these alternate voices and plant the party in a place from which no victory is feasible. The political strategy of Unite explicitly attacks Progress. The man who proposed the GMB motion stood against Labour in 2005 for Socialist Unity. If the perpetrators of this idiocy even knew what irony was, they might be able to detect some in the fact that Progress is being accused of being the new Militant by people who were members of the original.
Time now for the vast majority of sensible Labour people to kick up a fuss. When this motion is brought to the Labour conference they should pack the hall and boo.
Twitter: @PCollinsTimes
Notes