Just when you thought it was okay to vote labour.. it’s dead
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New Labour is dead, according to Derek Simpson, joint general secretary of the Unite union, who reckoned the public doesn’t buy the concept anymore. It was time for the party to get back to its left wing ‘Old Labour’ ways if it wasn’t to be defeated at the next general election, he said.
“If you want to go down the New Labour route it is suicide,” he said. “People are sick to the back teeth of that approach. Our people are being told to ‘**** off’ on doorsteps by people who would historically be Labour supporters.“
Urging Gordon Brown to step down and let the Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband take over, Simpson told the Daily Mirror: “New Labour is dead. It’s like the parrot in Monty Python. Anybody who is going to take over and lead us down that path is taking us to certain defeat.”
In what is seen as an attempt to pacify the unions before the TUC conference, the Prime Minister has invited 15 trade union leaders to Chequers.
However, Paul Kenny, general secretary of the GMB union, was not optimistic. “The Prime Minister will walk us through where the government is in terms of the recovery, what their plans are,” he told The Times. “If that is the only purpose of the meeting, to get a pep talk, then I think it will be a missed opportunity. I think we would want to be pretty direct and blunt about how things are on the street.”
Praising the Tories and saying that the Mayor of London Boris Johnson is “not quite the buffoon” he thought he was, went on: “At the moment you would get pretty long odds on Labour winning. In some ways I feel quite sorry for him. I’m afraid the public will have made up their mind about him well in advance of the election, although I hope it can be changed.”
When asked about possible replacements for Brown, Kenny said: “Who do I wake up each morning excited by? Nobody. I’m not trying to hedge a bet.”
UPDATE: the daft left has returned! How stupid is this?
Derek Simpson:
Derek Simpson was born and educated in Sheffield. He joined the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) on becoming an apprentice at the age of 15. He became an AEU shop steward at Balfour Darwin in 1967 and held a number of increasingly senior union positions in workplaces where he was employed, learning his politics in what described as “the socialist republic of South Yorkshire”. In 1981 he became a full-time union official, becoming the AEU’s District Secretary for Sheffield. He was still working for the union in that city when he stood for the position of Joint General Secretary in 2002.
