Luke Akehurst, a Labour Party and trade union activist, has a thoughtful piece up on the LabourList website. Like many, Akehurst is supporting the TUC National Demonstration on March 26th. According to its organisers, this demonstration is designed to highlight that there is an alternative to the cuts in services made by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government. Akehurst notes that just because the Labour Party is against the government cuts, they are not a party of no cuts. He believes, and I concur, that those that campaign under the “No Cuts” slogan are campaigning for a “fantasy.” He states the following:
“No Cuts” is just a slogan. In fact worse than that it is a classic Leninist transitional demand. That’s a policy that sounds superficially wonderful but is deliberately unachievable and undeliverable by democratic politics, and hence cynically designed to disillusion campaigners about Labour and the democratic process so that they turn instead to the Leninist revolutionaries who started chanting the slogan in the first place.
At a local government level the scale of the loss of resources Pickles has inflicted on us has forced Labour councils to expose “No Cuts” as a fantasy.
He makes the following point
We have to be very careful in all the mobilisation work that we do for a huge Labour Party presence on the 26th March demo, whether that’s local leafleting or frontbenchers in the media, not to suggest Labour is the party of “No Cuts”.
He is right to make his point and it is one that Labour Party supporters should pay attention to. As he notes, not only is it a lie to pretend that the Labour Party would make no cuts, if they were to have such a “no cuts” policy, their economic credibility would be totally destroyed.
Campaigning for “No Cuts” should be left to the the lunatic Leninists who have no real understanding or care for the current economic situation and what can be done about it. These people (if they can be described as people: they are running dogs of international communism) have only one aim: violent revolution that will lead to an overthrow of parliamentary democracy and the installation of a dictatorship. Labour Party and trade union activists should shun them.
Hat Tip
