 I'm going to hand over to Aaron now for this host then, here you are. Aaron is going to hand over to Aaron now for this host then, here you are. I was just commenting man, this looks like a space where you'd bring a kidnap politician. Can you imagine some Turkish style on this with that Erdogan shooting stars? Right, so... It does look like that, doesn't it? Good. So, I'll start from my left. We've got Max Shanley. Max, I believe you've worked with Jackman, haven't you? You collaborate with Jackman. Noted author of an article saying how all of the Blairites would be deselected. And that was about two months before I actually won the first time. So it's a very repressive intellect when it comes to the future of the Labour Party. To Max, it's right, I have Salina Todd, who is a Professor of Modern History at Oxford and a local Labour member. And your area of specialisation is History from Below, you were saying? Yeah. I wrote a book called People about the History of the Working Class that Jeremy Corbyn has got two copies of. He's got two copies of the shops, especially the independent ones. And I'm president of the Socialist Educational Association. A big shout out to our member Stephen Lomberman who's here. We're setting up a great Manchester branch. Please join. And then to my right, I have Lauren Stocks. Lauren is a... what? Is he? Yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah, that's right. I'm nowhere near as impressive as, actually, on Max, but I did go and slag off my GCSEs for two minutes on a life challenge or something. What makes him cool was at the BBC, I believe, for 13 years. It was at the BBC for 13 years. He made it worth watching. Nobody else does. And he's, of course, the most author of post-capitalism. And another Labour Party member, so we've got a full house. All Labour Party members are very good. So today's conversations about Labour and power. And, of course, because we're coming out of a period of two years of desolation, raft, taking on the establishment of winning. Big hand to everybody here for that. And winning. 72% of the delegates at conference were on the left. Not the Mickey Mouse left, the left. And that's really important. And now, of course, we're being told that we're being, you know, hubristic, hyperbolic, euphoric, just for saying, well, we've achieved something really momentous, which we have. So the question which we'll be talking about today about Labour and power isn't done from a position of hubris or hyperbolic necessity, OK? Because it's clear that a Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn, even with the programme of the kind we saw in the manifesto of the last generation, would face momentous challenges. And each of today's speakers will touch upon one or two or several of them. I'll start with Paul Mason. I think, Paul, you can give a brief overview of the kind of institutional political and economic challenges that a Corbyn Government might face in the opening several months or years. So maybe you want to touch on that. Well, thanks for inviting me. Can you hear me? So, I mean, the first thing to say is brilliant that this space exists. I know that people have been organised and it's brilliant to see it in its actuality. And I think to also say to you that despite, you know, there's all sorts of people, young people, people new to politics, I'm also seeing around the room, you know, people who spent their life on the shock floor at Haylewood, people who started out in politics in Derry in 1968. Friends, people I've known for years, we have an incredible, what you might call, capital for use of a once-in-a-better word, or political experience in this room. And I hope in the time available, we can all share it and learn something from each other. No, Theresa May has taken to defending capitalism. And if she made a speech this week where she's claimed that capitalism is, let me just read it out. The greatest driver of human progress ever created, driving us out of darkness into the light of modernity. Right, there's only two word answer to that. Ducey Bridge. Ducey Bridge is just around the corner. The Ducey Bridge is closed permanently, as it says on Google. And the bridge itself, you can walk across it as a leaf here. In 1842, a bloc called Frerick Engels wrote a book about the working class in Manchester. And not to, I mean, I don't want to read out the whole passage that he writes about Ducey Bridge, but the short summary is, Ducey Bridge is a shithole. It's full of slums, it's full of people forced into a life of crime, people who can't support themselves, people who are hungry, the buildings are destitute, they're falling apart, they're grimy, there's shit in the river. Walk across the bridge, 100, and what is it? 60, 70, 170 years of this great capitalist system, the great driver of progress and modernity. Later, Alan Turing, he met the computer here, the hydraulic system modernises Manchester here. It's the workshop of the world here in Manchester. On the other corner, you've got buildings that are unused, you've got buildings that are uninhabitable, you've got down here, the greatest centre of sort of Sodom and Gomorrah organised crime in Britain. That's what's wrong with capitalism. For all the fact that it revolutionises production, for all splitting the atom and inventing the computer, it is not dragging people out of an essentially relative position of being poor, being oppressed, being forced to live a life of ignorance in day-to-day and tomorrow's existence. That's the problem with it. So, look, we in the Labour movement are doing something about it. We're doing something about it at the last. This is what the entire week of the Tory party conference will be lived in the shadow of, because for the first time, all like ten years, because I remarked that the conference in Brighton that's just ended, did feel to me a lot like the Brighton Labour Party conference of 1980. So that's 30 odd years ago. But it's not even then. But I saw Tony Ben stand up at the Brighton Labour Party conference of 1980 and do this speech, Nationalisation of the House of Lords. It was brilliant. And people like me on the far left said, right, that's it. I mean, I'm joining Labour. The problem was, Ben didn't win. He got a derisory vote when he stood to be a leader. The unions didn't even back any of the proposals he proposed at that conference. That's how historic what we have achieved is. We've achieved way more already than Ben is of. But what do we need to do to make it count? I think one thing we need to do is to just narrow down what a Labour Government means, so that it's not about just explaining it to your mum or to your apolitical brother or sister, but literally being able to explain it out here to the mini cab drivers, to the security guards, to people who live in the precarious economy. You know, when you ask them, you say join a union, anybody done this, to some news like Fairly Young under 22, sometimes they say, what is a union here? So we have a massive task. But to win it down and to simplify it, I would do it like this. You have trouble finding somewhere to leave. We're going to build a million houses. Some of them will be for rent, some of them will be to buy, some of them will be council houses. So there'll be no more rent fells. That's the first thing. The second thing is some things in society everybody should have. This is the fundamental difference between us and the neoliberal. You know, when you hear Blair rights, when you hear right wing Labour MPs say, ah, but giving students free education privileges the privileged. That's an argument that's in Milton Friedman's book 1962, Against Welfareism. It is the fundamental argument of the right, that if you give everybody something, it privileges rich people. Or we say that's worth it. Because what it then does is it gives everybody, including that rich person who gets sent to university for zero, zit, dillig squad, fees, a stake in the society you want to build. So we want basic things to be free for everybody. Healthcare, education at school, education at university, transport as far as possible, you know, and the benefits and disability benefits you need to be capable and can't work or can't find a job. The third thing I think we need to say to people outside, what we're going to do, is switch off the privatisation machine. That costs nothing. There doesn't need to be any kind of money tree, large or small, magical or realistic. To do it, you just switch off the machine that relentlessly hands public goods into private sector. Why is that important? It's not just about, say, water. So they say, okay, business is terrified of Labour. We're going to re-nationalise water. Why is that a problem? Well, the argument is, by nationalising it, by privatising it, they made it better, more efficient. Okay, there's a steady stream of profit set by the state. The state decides how much profit shareholders get and they own water shares. The state decides what standards the North West Water Authority, or what they're called, delivers to you. The state gave them the asset. The state regulates the asset. The argument is, only by being in private hands can you drive innovation. The problem is, one of the water companies, Welsh Water, is a non-profit owned by some workers, at least the most innovative one. See, the argument doesn't stack up. So in water it's a no brainer, but it's really important to switch off the machine that is constantly handing, constantly driving private sector forces into the public sector for this reason. The share price of Google, Amazon, Facebook is all based on the assumption that one day they will own the NHS. The share price is a way in excess of the profits they make. It can only be based on the idea that everything is privateised. So once we switch it off, we switch off a signal to the rest of capital. Fourthly, I think what we need to do is to understand that there will be a backlash when we do these things. Even these basic simple things, no more Grenfells, no more social cleansing of the estates, no more privatising the NHS, there will be a backlash. Now the nature of that backlash is different than the one I think that people like me saw, people who are slightly older than me saw in the 1970s and 80s, as some of them in Chris Mullinsburg, a very British coup, that the state in modern capitalism is far more controlled by law because you can always private companies running prisons, running water companies etc. There has to be more of a legal basis than there was when MI5 went across London, as it was said, bugging and burgling the Wilson labour government, which they did. So I'm not so bothered, I'm a bit bothered, but I'm not so bothered about what you might call the secret state. I am very concerned about what the markets will do, and this is why me and John McDonnell and others at that right conference talked in detail about it, because we want to get it out there. We think that Labour has a big offer to the financial sector, and the first part of that is we're going to stabilise the Brexit process. We'll make very clear what's going to be the outcome, and it's going to be the softest possible form of it if we can achieve it. The second thing is we're going to borrow £250 billion and spend it on infrastructure, spend it on raising everything, roads, buildings, schools, pension funds, long-term money like that. They like the idea of government borrowing, spending long-term, and a steady but low payback, because that's what pensioners live on. There is none of that because of all the money that's been created. Interest rates on long-term investment are close to zero. We can create a big incentive for the long-term money in the city of London and the World Financial System. What we can't do is I think assuage the short-term money, the hedge funds, the people who are in it for a fast book, 247 currency markets, and we must accept, I expect, that as Labour government comes to power threatening this fundamental change of favour of working people and ordinary people, they're probably going to try and stop us up to put it in a polite way. So we need to do things. One thing we need to do is reassure them and persuade many people, including even people who've bought Torino, that it will be better if capitalism were on our way more humane, more stable, more dynamic, more... Just even the kind of Nordic models what Sweden is like, applied to Britain, seems revolutionary because we're just so unwilling to do it. That's what was the beauty of when Labour proposed the beginnings of a national childcare system. It was only the beginnings in the manifesto. It's not like full Swedish model, but it's there, the beginnings of the idea that you have cheap childcare that everybody could afford. So we need to persuade a lot of people to do this, and that brings me to the final thing. If I have one worry about this movement, let's talk about the upsides of it. The upsides are, see, the British left, the far left when I was in it in the 80s, forget all the nominal membership figures. There was probably 5,000, 6,000 activists. Milliton just about filled the Albert Hall. SWP had a good number of people, but that was it. It's got at least 23,000, 30,000 members, and 100,000 on the mailing list. They're not the SWP, it's not a disciplined organisation. I don't want it to be that kind of organisation, but it's a big organisation, and it has a massive social footprint already. That's the upside. What's the downside is, and I think some of my colleagues from the era of the shop students movement and the era of free dairy and all the rest of it would agree, you've got a very attenuated, a very shrunken tradition of movement from below. That's why communism is attractive, because people feel so powerless that they think it's going to be started up here, it's going to be one guy, it's going to be a few people, it's going to be a Labour government, and then it delivers, because if you look at, say, if you're in that, look at those blogs by those Renfell people, they're blogging every day. It's going up in flames, it's going up in flames, guys. But nobody listens to them, because Labour councillors are not really on the case, to be honest, in that borough. What they're expecting is somebody to solve it from above because they're so powerless themselves. I think our biggest danger is that we go into this period of putting a Labour government in power without understanding the need for these 30,000 people and the 100,000 people around them and anybody outside on listen to do one thing. When we go to power, we want to be quite kind to them, because there'll be a shock to them. There'll be a big shock. We don't do anything hasty. But if they come for us, we've all got to do the same thing at once, spontaneously. And that thing isn't a revolution. It's just exerting the power from below of ordinary network people, working people, students, young people to say, no, you are not going to sabotage a democratic, a classically elected government. I, as you know, reported what happened in Greece. I reported what happened as well in Scottish referendum. Eleventon is in the Scottish referendum. All kinds of lies printed by the Treasury, the Bank of England, how terrible it would be. Bosses through Iron Group, Relief in Scotland, all of that, it'll happen to us. But we've got to, in a measured way, without panicking, work out ways of how people emerge from a building like this and do things lawfully, peacefully, in a way that says to, you know, the international financial system, you cannot do this to us. And it was the absence of being able to do that makes cities a lose. And I'm determined that we will not lose. Thank you. I'll ask maybe one question to each person or maybe the whole panel that will go to questions. The next speaker is Lauren. Lauren is going to talk about the relationship between Labour and power and the young vote. There is always the possibility of newly energised younger voters being the first to feel disappointment. So how can Labour in power warn against that kind of disappointment and stop Jeremy Corbyn becoming Nick Clegg 2.9? You've given me an extremely... Well, I don't understand. I don't think it's a difficult question to answer. No, no, no. Because we're going to have to compromise, inevitably. On something. Yeah, but like Nick Clegg, that's slightly offensive. No. For the first part, I'm just going to kind of split my speech into two parts. So first one is going to be kind of like how we can keep the youth vote by what we end up doing in the next election and we'll go up to that next election when it comes to young people. And then the second bit is obviously how we can appeal to younger voters and slowly change their perceptions on whether or not we actually give a toss about them because at the moment I don't think it feels like the establishment does give a shit about young people and if we have to become the establishment in the near future or very close future, as I would hope, it's vital that we reinstate that. And I was like, alright, I'm just talking about sort of the youth vote. Anyway. So to keep people involved, you've kind of got, again I've made no notes here, just go easy on me. So we've got like this kind of, one in three people saw a momentum video on Facebook on Twitter. Well, if you look at the results of the 2017 election, sorry, you've got, I think it was 60% turnout, 64% turnout, so the 18 to 24 year old vote. Now 60% of those people voted for the Labour Party and there has to be a correlation between our social media use and the turnout that we managed to reinstate in the election. Now we've somehow managed through honest politics and through not like angle crosses authentic, we've somehow managed to create this trust and a relationship between an octogenary and the millennials. Now you would never ever think that those two would be a happy marriage but somehow they have been. And we've now got, so we've got like, I'm so tired, I'm so tired. So we've got like this kind of, which basically just got to keep going. We can't let, we can't keep we can't let the you vote die in the sense that we keep when we keep people in the dark. I find like, story time, right? You know prom night, right? So after prom, it was a house party. Now picture it. So we've got 40 to 50, 15 to 16 year olds who have come out of prom and they come in and they sit down and I came in late and the guy who hosted the party was kind of like, crap, we never thought you'd make it and somebody came up to me and there's three of them and they were like, listen we've just joined our, we've just joined the Labour Party when's our next local Labour Party meeting and I'm thinking we found it fantastic in doctoration time, right? So and literally at two in the morning we've got like a chance of teenagers going, oh Jeremy Corbyn I've never seen anything like it, right? And these people in the next two years or whenever a general election may be in 2018 or 2019 or 2020 these people are going to become old enough to vote and your concentration needs to be on the people that are currently sat in college thinking about how the hell they're going to afford their tuition fees and how the hell they're going to afford to eat and how the hell they're going to afford their bus passes. I paid £240 for my bus pass I only live about six miles away from my college and yet my parents have been fleeced of about a quarter of a crown and that's insane. We need to improve public infrastructure we need to improve the education system but it's how we managed to do that and it's how quickly we can get it done. Paul Bade an incredible point by saying we're going to have to be very, very careful and kind to the bourgeoisie in raising taxes and I do agree with that but we also have to, there's a treading there's a line we have to tread which is how quickly can we implement reforms that remove ridiculous trade fairs and remove the instinct of housing benefits for 18 to 24 year olds so an overwhelming population of the homeless don't belong to the male 18 to 24 demographic because quite frankly that's atrocious. It's things like that we just need to keep going and one of the things is that needs to do promise to tell people how it's going to be done it's a little bit like, do you know when you order a pizza from Domino's and you get like a four-stage thing so it says, your order has been received and then stage two, your order is being prepared order three, blah blah blah same thing, same deal if we can get across to people how we plan on doing this it's all well and good promising, yeah we're getting rid of tuition fees fucking tell them how you're going to do it and then they'll probably believe you a little bit more as soon as we get in we go right this is our four-step plan on how we're going to get rid of tuition fees we're going to talk to the universities or we're going to reduce the cost yearly by about two grand every six months or whatever, I'm not an economist I don't know how the hell we're going to do that but get someone who does know and get them on the BBC start a fight with Andrew Neil or something go for it but we need to be we need to be the kind of people that the youth vote can respect and we need to keep them engaged for as long as we can so that people are going to be who knock on the doors on windy or on Wednesday where nobody else wants to be on that door but you know they're the energy and they're the fighting force behind this movement and to to get them oh Christ how many people are in the lead so 70,000 people is it something you only built under the age of 27 so we've got to keep 90,000 90,000 thank you guys I always get a hard dyslexic mess so like 90,000 people were in the Labour Party at the age of 27 and those are the people who I've seen on the doors who are the most involved who care the most about being on the doors of being involved by making sure that people are listening to us you know they're the ones who come to things like this and for us to get for us to get into power and just be like we've done it and we just can't stay in place and that's what I'm trying to get at and this is really all winded and I'm not making sense but just bear bear with me so we've got like you know the education system I don't know how many of you have seen the guardian thing that did a while back I've had a lot of things on my mind that I wanted to say that I couldn't get out one of those is that 51 million is getting cut from the schools budget in Greater Manchester by 2021 10,000 teachers have left the profession from 2010 to 2015 60% of schools' costings are rising faster than their income we just need to sort that out I don't know it's literally that easy as keeping people from having mental breakdowns and making sure we can empower people to learn over pressurising them and hitting them over the head with if you don't do well in your school you're going to be sat on your ass watching Jeremy Kyle we can't I'm not making any sense I'm so sorry we bring so many people into this movement and we inspire so much hope and so much power and empowerment in these people that they can change things and they can make a difference and we turn our backs on them and say I don't want to pay their taxes and we don't know how to do that we don't know how to make Google pay their taxes because Google might go elsewhere or Brexit now we've got Brexit and there are actually 12 cakes in the package that are 10 10 cakes in the package that are 10 and actually we're kind of on the brink and we just fuck man we just sort it out I'm not sure what context I believe as a historian about the deep state about power, about the difficulties of governing from the left yes, I'll try a little bit of that within the movement the Labour movement I think we've got two traditions one that's a warning and one that's a real beacon of hope so to start with the warnings first the Labour Party has before in government and opposition gone to the brink with something really hopeful and so has the wider Labour movement and I just want to give three examples really briefly here that may well be familiar to many people in the room so I will be very brief first the general strike of 1926 something that we don't hear very much about but it was a massive defeat for the Labour movement basically the TUC came out on strike some unions came out on strike with TUC endorsement in favour of the miners to protect their right to collective bargaining essentially and there was a nine day strike in May 1926 and it brought out millions of workers including many of the TUC who had originally not wanted to come out on strike so as per usual the grassroots were more radical in many ways in the leadership and people came out in their masses a huge proportion of the workforce to the extent that the Tory government brought out the army Churchill was apoplectic and wanted us to bring out the tanks against the strikers and after nine days the TUC and the Labour party collapsed in the face of this and many ordinary workers were really disappointed they felt that there was an alternative that if we had just stayed out a bit longer we could have won and instead it was a massive defeat so that's won and with each of these examples it was never inevitable it's never ever inevitable that we back down in the face of in that case the military and the Tory government in the next case in the face of international finance which is in 1976 so in 1974 Harold Wilson's Labour party is elected on possibly the most radical Labour manifesto that we've seen before this year comes into government and within a very short space of time the IMF, the International Monetary Fund decides to use the international oil crisis really is an excuse this is my interpretation drawn on from many people including Tony Ben who was in government at that time as an excuse to demand that the government back down on its socialist principles and particularly on its public spending principles and the cabinet had an incredibly divisive meeting a meeting the legacy of which was still dividing the Labour party and informing many of those debates that went on in the 1980s and in the end the right one the right said we will have to do what the IMF say but there were many in the unions and even in the cabinet at the highest echelons of government who really knew what they were doing who had been ministers before like Ben who had been a cabinet minister in the 60s who said we do not have to back down we can communicate to the public what we want to do we can try and stand firm there are other places that we can go there are other alternatives and really their line was the same as Paul's it was essentially let's not panic let's not do anything in a rush let's take our time to consult to democratically consult with our movement to work out from our collective expertise what we can do as an alternative that didn't happen it was a big defeat because it helped to pave the way for thatcherism by giving ammunition to that great Tory lie that common sense is capitalism that the two are absolutely interchangeable there is no alternative the third perhaps even more shameful example comes in 1984-85 where we now know that what Aldis Gardlin the NUN was saying was absolutely true that thatcher had been planning this for years to confrontation with the miners that it was entirely political and the Labour party locally showed great solidarity as did many of the unions but nationally the leadership was a real letdown and again backed away from massive class confrontation in that case because they believed that it would make the Labour look unelectable what a mistake that was so those are some real lessons about what happens if you act in haste or on ill-judged assumptions that are made without consultation about what is economically viable or what makes you electable which in each case is never proven if we think about the IMF case in 1976 the actual consequences of what happened there were disastrous were constantly told by the press and so on that that cabinet made the only possible decision because the alternative would have been a disaster I'm sorry but given that economic inequality then rose hugely over the subsequent 20-30 years given the state that the country is now in that Paul outlined for us so eloquently I think that that decision in 1976 was economically disastrous so these are all decisions that were taken in haste without due thought and process and we need to learn from that but we do have examples of really good practice as well and many of us who were at the events earlier in this building upstairs were reminded of them they come out largely of the trade union movement which is a longer run part of our movement than the Labour Party which only came to being in the 20th century but the TUC, the trade union movement was founded here in the first half of the 19th century and we can really learn from that because and I won't go on about examples and I know some comrades in the room were upstairs and others have been massively involved with the recent campaign in Wales workers and we've seen some really notable victories and encouraging signs within the Labour movement generally, nationally and internationally over the last few years and I think what those victories show as with the movement in the 19th century is that anything is possible because they told us back in the 19th century that we couldn't unionise we weren't articulate enough we didn't have an education many of us weren't literate and yet people got together and organised and by the end of the 19th century had collective bargaining rights none of those employers wanted to give collective bargaining rights they had no interest in negotiating with people many of them were using unskilled workers who they stood could easily be replaced and if any of the workers made any threats then they would be out on their rear and yet we did it because actually we stood firm, united and more and more people joined not just because they thought oh well they're getting something so I'll join them but because, as it's been intimated here and as Jeremy Corbyn intimated his speech at conference, people yes they do think about bread and butter issues but they also want better for their kids and so they have got always the capacity to be imaginative to be political to think ahead and the trade union movement makes sense whereas employers in the end very often just looking to make a fast book and have their own future so their interests are always disconnected to ours in the end and we've seen in recent years as well that kind of the older Labour common sense of you can't unionise unskilled workers you can't easily unionise workers who were born outside the UK because it's all been shown to be a line I saw someone speak from the international trade union movement into UC recently and it was quite entertaining because there were some big multinationals at the table and they sent her where can't you unionise and she sat back and she folded her arms and she smiled at them and she said we can unionise anywhere the hell we want where there are workers who you haven't got in your shades we can do anything because if there were any limits on our collective power we would not suddenly in our saying this is the home of the TUC because there was no feasible reason for that to succeed as to history, how do we learn from that in terms of the next of the next government they've got to hit the ground running and that means having strong policies the manifesto was a star but I absolutely welcome the NEC's decision on the commission on Labour Party democracy because we need full consultation to make sure we've got strong robust policies in all areas they're not there yet we need that, we need a hundred day program now that consultation we need to make sure it's totally democratic from the top the Labour Party is doing absolutely the right thing with that commission organisations like momentum we've got to do our part as well at the moment there are various people who Labour talked to John McDonald is an absolute star because he searches far and wide for experts but those of us who are in connection with shadow ministers know that they are still under threat from the right of our party they don't have all the time in the world but they are in the right area have got to make sure that other experts of their experience to comrades who can lend support get to those tunnels so we don't get back to that dreadful situation that I used to cringe at where the people who were close to Tony Bear were always sort of saying to him oh Tony sir, Alice did help me you know Gordon has said I mean it's just awful isn't it and actually one of the things I like about meetings with shadow ministers is that they need to call in Jeremy or anything like that they're trying to be very democratic so those of us who are lucky enough to have some kind of ear with them we need to make sure we spread the love we get the word out, we get other people in we also need to make sure though that we've got good outriders which is a term that I've nicked from Owen Jones's The Establishment excellent chapter in there about the right of got outriders including Liberal ones like Polly Timeby on social media, use it as much as we can but also all of us who've got a social media presence use that to get the word out that common sense is about socialism we also need to make sure that within the local party and regionally as well that we've got the grassroots with us and we have and that is something which is so new because all of those examples that I talked about in the past even in 76 where the cabinet was split the top echelons, the leader of the party was of the right essentially wasn't one of us so we've got this amazing opportunity now which is very very new which is right at the top of the party the left is represented and we've also seen that at the top of many of our trade unions as well so that is something we can really build on and we've got that with the grassroots as well so we need to make sure though that that is reflected in how our local parties operate and those of us who are within the Labour Party know that Labour Party politics is not fun, it's really boring a lot of the time so I know we've been talking in our local party about the need to bring new members in and members who aren't as active in stuff like this days where people can bring kids those kinds of events that bring people in that make them going to branch meetings a bit less purgatory when they come in we've got to do that because the councils will be really really important a lot of Labour's policies, if you look at say education are about devolving to local areas so these right wing Labour councils potentially have a lot of power but we've got leverage of them we know we have because we're already seeing it even in Manchester where the right wing council is very very powerful so we need to make sure that we keep the pressure on yes branch meetings are dry if we can just make sure that these councillors and these MPs know that their careers depend on us then we've got a bit of leverage and I stress that here because I know that I'm among friends and I also have seen how the right have operated since the election with that well we've changed a bit and you know we just want a broad church and we just want to represent all of you I'm sorry to sound factional but they are talking crap we've not changed one iota because we know that they are still selecting their friends when positions come up within the Labour party when there are positions for councillor with the MPs we know that they are still resisting what is going on at national level within the PLP so we have to be really really cautious when they try and call us out and sort of suggest that we're being factional we are somehow being hostile to them and say yeah we are that's exactly what we're doing actually you know you're with us or you're against us and historically like in 1976 with the IMF sometimes our worst enemies have been the ones who are closest to us so we need to be very very careful with the right in the Labour party just to end on how do we take on the multinationals that always seems like such a huge thing these huge global corporations and as Paul's intimated that's why there's got to be really well thought out socialist policy at the top of the party before we even get into government and there is from people like McDonald but let's also remember many multinationals operate locally they operate as some of us have heard this afternoon from Unison as social care providers they operate as sponsors of academy chains in our schools those are only two examples those are places where we can get them we are already organising around that we can organise against things like academy schools and we can look for the links between those who are trying to take apart a Labour government and those local providers on the ground and we can go for them as long as we've already worked out local campaigns for unionising and organising in those workplaces and against things like the academy of our schools so those local campaigns can really come into their own I think we need to use social media and we need international networks as well because that will help to be able to have the international trade union movement on our side but in the end I haven't got any specifics on how we do what Paul said and as he intimated we need the expertise of comrades in the room to start thinking about this what we do if we find that the banks and the multinationals and the branches and all the rest of them take it on we know that Corbyn and McDonald and the rest of them are going to stand up and say bring it on and that is massive and we need to at the very least be solid with them because as I've tried to say socialists got nowhere without taking a leap of faith because everything that we've done has been about bread and butter issues but very often we've had no precedent for what we've done we've just had to look at the future and say we think we can do better with our imagination, with our potential and we're just going to take a leap and see what happens and in the end when that exit poll comes out say Labour is won by a fucking landslide we are going to drink ourselves to death and then we are going to get off at 6 o'clock next morning and link arms and we're going to take that leap of faith Any difficulties you endure in the coming months and years just remember that moment that exit poll or you know spectulate about dim will be space Jeremy Corbyn in the car the Jag on the way to Buckingham Palace next is Max Max obviously we had a brief discussion prior for talk what would you like to speak upon etc Max just said the party so with that in mind I'll leave it to Max So Labour in power what does Labour in power mean Well for Labour in power for me means a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of wealth and power in favour of working people and their families that's what I was always brought up to believe that Labour Party stood for and that's what we've got to do When I say to Aaron I wanted to talk about the party the reason I wanted to talk about the party is because the party is our vehicle for fundamental social change and as it's presently structured as we have seen over the course of the past few years with the domination on the high from the south side is that what they are very keen to do is to control us and the reason they are keen to control us isn't because they are all nasty controlling individuals it's structural it's because all political parties reflect the type of society and we live in a capitalist society and so the Labour Party which structures, practices and modes of idea reflects capitalist world that's why the Labour Party is an extremely top-down body it's just like capitalism you have a few people at the top a small minority you tell the masses what they are about and what they are about to do and we're all supposed to go along with it now if you are in favour and I assume the majority of people in this room are anybody you is in I'm kidding what that means is that if we are to transform society then the first step is to transform the party democratise the party to democratise the state to democratise the economy because unless you democratise the state you will never be able to democratise the economy and if you don't democratise the economy then you'll never have socialism so otherwise you just have a sort of more nicer version of capitalism and I don't know about you but I don't really fancy being exploited for the rest of your life I don't even really want to work either that's why I'm really pro the post work society you know I'm in the lounge about it in bed all day watching Rick and Morty on Netflix and chatting to my mates and you know that's what life should all be about but anyway I digress Morty as we're presently structured we're geared towards a specific type of politics the politics of electoralism that it's all about getting the vote out and that nothing else matters but the fact remains that we can't afford to do that anymore because there are millions of people out there who need our help now we can't wait until election time and even when and even when we do the election which I'm sure we will win the next election at least I hope so it won't be enough simply to elect 300 odd Labour MPs give them a pat on the back and go on lads short-term now because they will face pressures from all sides and even from inside now this is why we then go back to the question of the party because the limits of party democracy itself reflect the limits of casteist democracy we've had this big awful debate around the issue of mandatory reselection as a party but nobody's really trying to explain what it actually means what mandatory reselection means is that within the lifetime of each parliament the constituency party would get together and decide who they were going to run for the next election now what that allows you to do is to make your prospective candidate if they were a former, if they were an existing member of parliament for your constituency accountable for the actions and the things that they do in the name of Labour so it's not as frightening as it sounds but the reason why it's so frightening to the press bans and back-back chambers is because it challenges the logic of casteist democracy that are represented as supposed to be up there and once they're there they do all wonderful things and they're so nice and lovely goes back to the ideas of Edinburgh in the 17th century this was a man who is now famed famed for his contributions to the thought of parliamentary democracy but he only visited his constituency three times in 20 odd years you know, having to take a person and what our representatives to be basing themselves on being a party in many cases that is what we've got and so this then brings us to the task of local parties and government and in national government that means how to organise the unorganised it's not enough just simply to sign them up to register to vote because as we've said that isn't enough because we mean to tell about it from now and that means organising it organising the unorganised and organising them in such a way as to empower them to liberate them in themselves to give them the tools they need to understand the world around them and to change things now there's a wonderful comrade just over there in a pair of glasses hiding at the back named Tom Blackburn now Tom Blackburn is kind of all I would say the best of the new generation of party theorists that is coming up inside the party now and he's written an excellent piece called Corbynism from Below which basically says we're not going to wait to be in government to start helping our people we're going to start organising them we're going to create temptations to go out against road land awards we're going to upgrade food banks so our people get the food that they need to survive childcare services Sunday schools all that work just to improve people's lives in the here and now and to give them something to aspire for look at all the things we've been able to do outside of power give us the keys and we'll change the world the task ahead and the road ahead is going to be a long and long period there will be times when we will as a party membership be angry with our leaders I supported Jeremy right from the off within an hour of him announcing I was going around telling people that we were going to win, they all laughed that somebody had to but he's not God him and Jeremy Jeremy and John are not gods they're not going to be able to change the world on their own they're not going to be able to democratise the state on their own by being nice and civil service who will oppose pretty much every measure we do because they're a bunch of leonids they need us to provide pressure from below so that they can then provide pressure on top and do what I like to call people's abstraction you pincer the state in the middle it has no option, you squeeze as Dennis Healy said you squeeze until they're picked that's the only way we're going to win and we have to prepare ourselves for that because if we don't who knows if we'll win at all