An Open Letter to Ed Milliband

Dear Mr. Milliband,

I would dearly love the Labour party that I grew up with to regain power. I was born in 1945 and fully appreciate what the Attlee government did for ordinary working people and the consensus they created that kept most of the welfare state going even under Thatcher

I resigned my membership, my activism and my sometime candidacies in local elections around 2000 after I realised that Tony Blair had effectively killed off my sort of Labour Party.

I expected action on social housing – nothing. Housing policy was the Home Information Pack. I e-mailed one of the Housing Ministers – Caroline Flint – although she wasn’t the author of the policy – but she sent me back the usual managerial guff defending it unreservedly.

I can’t point to anything that the Blair and Brown governments did that merits admiration. But they did release the floodgates on gambling and drinking. How many people have problems because their personal weakness led them to take advantage of the opportunities provided by Labour Governance?

The Labour Government created a culture where quislings, informers, snoopers, and generally- as the phrase goes – little Hitler’s flourished. I have been reading a book on the Social History of the Third Reich and I could not believe that I recognised in Labour Britain some of the methods employed to influence and control the population of Germany during the 1930’s.

I could list quite a lot things but it is housing I keep coming back to – it could have been solved – there could have been housing for all. What an achievement that would have been! I know governments have a lot to deal with but getting one problem solved completely would have been lauded.

Then there are the Railways- they could have been taken back fully into Public Ownership. We have a system that charges excessive fares and creates excessive profits for private companies and receives massive subsidies. I grew up with Public Transport meaning public transport. Why couldn’t we have a policy to bring it back? The old system (including buses) employed a lot of people. I have seen the money wasted on IT systems and reorganisations of this and that and I bet it would have cost less to employ porters and guards and conductors etc., and keep people off benefits and give them dignity. Why does the Labour Party not become the party of Jobs for working people?