John McDonnell campaign meeting 30th Oct, Victoria Hall, Sheffield, about 50 present

The meeting was introduced by John Campbell, Labour councillor, chairman of Sheffield Trades Union Council and Sheffield UAF. The first speaker was Martin Mayer of the TGWU general council. He gave an unsurprising intro, telling us there was much anger at New Labour (really?), and that privatisation, top-up fees and the Middle Eastern wars were bad. However there was no political economic analysis of the neo-liberal onslaught. The implication was that Tony Blair and his court were privatising everything just because they fancied it. Similarly, the reason for the wars was glossed over, and certainly it was not suggested that the root cause lay in the decline of US hegemony and the decline of capitalism itself. Indeed John Campbell, in his introduction, declared that ‘we all had our own ideas about the reasons for this war [Iraq]’. Needless to say, this is not the way to conduct debate amongst so-called socialists. A spade is a spade, and an imperialist war is an imperialist war. Martin also decried the Trident replacement, which seemed amusing given the extreme unlikelihood of any reformist party being willing or capable of nuclear disarmament in this country.

The next speaker was Bill Mikey, former MP and member of the Socialist Campaign Group in the Labour Party. Bizarrely, he admitted that ‘…as an MP, you actually have no power at all’ which seemed to raise the question: why bother then? It was a nice speech, and you could tell that Bill and the other candidates were very much sincere. But Bill’s stated aim of creating a ‘more loving, more caring, more prosperous society’ was the height of petty-bourgeois Grauniad-socialism obfuscation.

Not much more was to come from Mike Woad, MP and SCG member. In fact, although I should have made more of an effort for the purposes of this report, I just have ‘nothing of note’ written down for Mike. Oh, he pointed out that Labour are likely to lose the next general election if they do not make a turn to the left. Well, yeah. The prospect of Labour losing seemed to preoccupy all the speakers. Though they went for the populist jive that New Labour are as bad as the Tories, the idea of any Labour cabinet -even a New Labour one- losing horrified them absolutely. John McDonnell claimed that were the Tories to win the next election, Labour would be out for a generation, and all hope for change with it. This is understandable for those who think only Labour can be the vehicle for change. John told us how bad the Tories were, and how bad New Labour was. Well, duh, John, that’s why these people are here. When will people attending meetings like this (and Respect, SWP meetings) realise that the reason they just tell us things we already know in an eloquent and emphatic manner is because they don’t actually have anything positive to say?

There was a short time for questions after, though no critical voices were raised- there wouldn’t really have been any point anyway. It was only, however, at the suggestion of an audience member that the idea of actually getting some organisation into the campaign in Sheffield was addressed by the speakers, who hastily decided to take names and addresses of those interested. And the idea of broadening the campaign to create a ‘Left Opposition’ in the Labour membership had to be suggested from the floor as well. These speakers weren’t just bourgeois social democrats- they were badly organised bourgeois social democrats. The idea of expanding the leadership challenge to a broader movement, which would carry on if and when John loses, did not appear to have crossed the minds of the speakers. It was all about McDonnell. It was at this point I realised that the plan for the ‘meeting’ really had been to just have a small rally and to convince us that John was serious in his bid.