Another World Is Possible: An Interview with John McDonnell MP

(c) Sarah Evans

I had been chasing John McDonnell for an interview ever since he announced his candidacy. When I finally spoke with him, late last Thursday evening, he had just arrived at his constituency home after a day up in Liverpool speaking at the Fire Brigades Union conference. He was clearly tired after a long day of travel, but was also very keen to speak with me. He did, however, ask me to hold for a couple of minutes while he put some late supper on to cook for his son; ham, egg and chips, if you’re wondering.

It’s clear from the interview that McDonnell is one of those old fashioned things – a principle politician. His time in parliament has been characterised by the unwavering articulation of those principles in word and deed, which has seen him branded as one of the ‘awkward squad’ by members of his own party.

It’s also clear that McDonnell is a politician who has not forgotten who he represents and who put him into the position he holds. What struck me most was that in the interview he seldom referred to himself with the terms ‘I’ or ‘me’; it was almost always ‘we’ or ‘us’. I don’t think this is an accident. As the interview shows, McDonnell is a staunch socialist, and thinks of himself in terms of his place amongst a groups of people and workers, not distanced from them.

John Spence: Firstly, what are your views on the announcement that the deadline for leadership nominations has been put back to June 9th?

John McDonnell: The deadline has been put back because of our campaign. I circulated a letter to all the other candidates who had declared asking them to make representations to the party hierarchy, so that’s a victory for us.

What I’ve now done is also call for a reduction in the number of MPs that you need to have nominate you to get onto the ballot paper.  The reason for that is because we’re a smaller Parliamentary Labour Party now and, numerically, we’re at a situation where it’s going to be difficult to get a full range of candidates on the ballot paper, and so I’ve suggested that they halve it to  about fifteen and on that basis you could then get a sufficient range of candidates on board and I’ve also suggested that it would facilitate more women candidates coming forward, in particular.

JS:  Can you give any indication then, despite what you’ve just said, of how far along you are in terms of securing the 33 nominations from MPs to get you on the ballot?

JM: I can’t tell at the moment, and I’m not trying to prevaricate or anything like that. The reason is because a lot of MPs are not there.

Mike Wood is coordinating the collection of nominations. I think he’s got through the first ten today, but what we’re finding now is that there are hardly any MPs there because this week there’s no-one in Parliament, it’s just the swearing in. People won’t be back until next Tuesday and that’s one of the reasons why I wanted the deadline extended. So ideally we’re about a third of the way there, and what we have to do now is multiply that over the next week or so and try and get as many as we possibly can.

What’s also happening, and I think it’s marvellous really as it shows you what solidarity there is out there, is that individual members of the Labour Party are contacting their local MPs, and asking for feedback, asking that even if they’re not voting for me, at least nominate so we can have a debate so that members of the Party can hear what we have to say.

In addition to that, various unions now are contacting MPs that are associated with them, for example the Bakers’ Union have been contacting MPs who are part of the Parliamentary Bakers’ Group. Also unions that aren’t affiliated [to the Labour Party] but still have large Labour memberships, like the FBU today, have put out a statement at their conference urging support. The United Left of the T&G have done exactly the same thing; e-mailed all their members saying get in touch with your local MP, get them to nominate. The Unison broad left have also done exactly the same.

Tomorrow, in the Guardian, there’ll be a letter signed by 300 members of the Party – councillors, local reps, MSPs and the rest, calling for people to contact their MPs and ask them to nominate me, so that head of steam is building up within the Party itself and members of the Parliamentary Labour Party may well ignore it but in and of itself it has become quite an instructive exercise in building solidarity around a political programme.

JS: How does that level of support make you feel after the unsuccessful campaign in 2007?

JM: Well, I’ll be straight with you; I was reluctant to stand then, and I was reluctant to stand this time, largely because I’ve got a heavy workload in my own constituency and I’m preparing for the next Parliamentary session which is really going to be tough with the Tories and Liberal Democrats in control. I said to people I wasn’t keen on standing, I wasn’t last time, and I’m not into ‘challenging for position’ unless there’s a clear demand for it.

But when Gordon Brown stood down, I was getting continuous phone calls, texts and e-mails saying, “You’ve got to run as a candidate again,” and I talked to people and said, “Look, I’ll be very happy to do it again, if you want, but I’ve got a lot on in the constituency and elsewhere. I’ll do everything I can, but what we need to do is recognise it’s going to be tough and actually even if we don’t get on the ballot paper, the most important thing coming out of this is bringing people back together again, reassembling the left, particularly in the Labour Party, and looking at how we campaign in the future.”

So that’s the attitude I’ve brought to it; it’s going to be tough, it’s going to be difficult. Hopefully we’ll get on the ballot paper, but even if we don’t what we’re doing is building and moulding some solidarity.

JS: Diane Abbott, who backed you in 2007, has declared her candidacy, a move you’ve publicly welcomed. Is there a concern, however, that two candidates from the Socialist Campaign Group (SCG) will split the Group’s vote, thus hobbling you both?

JM: I think it will split the vote. I’m a bit surprised that Diane’s come forward. It will split the vote and Diane nominated me last time, but [only] because her constituency party insisted. She was a Brown supporter, otherwise. That’s one of the reasons why we should try and secure a reduction in the number of MPs nominating so on that basis we could then get a spread of candidates including Diane.

I’m also saying that we do need, even from the New Labour side [of the Party], we do need women standing. We can’t be in a situation where we’re saying ‘we want to represent our community’ if we haven’t got a full range of candidates, either from women or ethnic minorities, working class candidates, that sort of thing. So, the argument I’m making for reducing the number of MPs that are needed for a nomination will help everybody concerned.

I’m amazed there haven’t been more women come forward. It is important that women come forward and stand in this election.

JS: If the attempted reduction is either unsuccessful or only partly successful, do you think you will form an agreement with Diane Abbott along the lines of the one you reached with Michael Meacher in 2007? [The agreement with Meacher involved the candidate garnering the lowest support transferring their support to the better supported candidate.]

JM: Yes, of some sort. It would be on the basis of seeing whether or not we could get anyone on the ballot paper. Diane’s politics are different from mine, and her form of socialist practice is different from mine, but that’s why I think we should have a range of candidates on the ballot. But what we’ve got to try and do is break this centralised, anti-democratic process that’s not just been installed in the Labour Party for the leadership elections, it’s for every Parliamentary selection and for every selection for representation throughout the Labour Party. That’s why I’m standing.

(c) Andy O'Donnell

JS: A lot of the SCG members who backed your campaign in ’07 have since retired from the Commons. You’ve said that Mike Wood is going to try and garner the nominations you need, so where within the Party are you reaching out to, to try and redress that gap in support?

JM: There have been a large number of new members that have come into the Commons this time round, and we’re trying to make sure that we contact them, but not on the basis of just asking them, “Will you nominate me?” but asking them, “Can we have a political discussion about how we’re going to work together in the future?”

If they can nominate me, great, but it’s more important now that we start looking at policy issues we want to address together, and how do we try and get the Parliamentary Labour Party somehow engaged in a political discussion which is linked with rank and file members, and in that way, maybe, we get a part of the process of reclaiming the Labour Party itself that will penetrate the Parliamentary Labour Party.

So we’re trying to use the leadership campaign to open a dialogue to see if we can work together on particular campaigns and issues.

JS: On the basis of expectations you have at the moment, do you think you will get enough nominations by the deadline?

JM: I think it’s really tough. Diane’s intervention is a bit of a problem if we can’t get the barrier of 33 [MPs for nomination] down. It’s going to be tough mathematically, because if you look at the range of New Labour candidates now we’ve got both the Milibands, we’ve got Ed Balls and we’ve got Andy Burnham. So that’s five candidates, and remember you’ve got a PLP of around 260, and some of them will clearly get more than 33 nominations, and there will be a large number of [current] frontbenchers who will not nominate as well, so we’re down to try and get 33 nominations out of a pool of maybe only forty-five or fifty MPs, so I think it’s going to be incredibly tough.

But, it’s never been easy, has it? So we just have to go for it! I’m hoping we will be nominated, but what I’m saying to people is, ‘don’t be disillusioned if we can’t.’ The whole point of this is to raise political arguments, to get some form of coverage for the policies we’re advocating in our political analysis, but then also to expose the anti-democratic nature of these election processes.

JS: Will you support another candidate, should you be unsuccessful?

JM: In terms of a New Labour candidate?

JS: Yes.

JM: No. I’ll do what I did last time which was that if I wasn’t even going to be on the ballot paper, I wasn’t going to support Gordon Brown, and the reason was political, it wasn’t personal.

I can’t support people who have voted for things like the Iraq War, for privatisation, for cuts in welfare and benefits, for the implementation of the renewal of Trident. I can’t support candidates like that because I think it undermines our credibility, and what we’ve got to do is keep a clear distance from those people who have brought about a Tory government (sic) because of their support for these policies.

JS: Turning now to the election; what’s your assessment of the election result, firstly, in terms of the Labour Party?

JM: The Labour result was better than expected, because what we saw was an element of class solidarity where people went to the ballot boxes and decided they wanted to keep the Tories out.

So it was clear that there was a positive Labour vote on the basis of opposing the Tories, but it wasn’t by any means, certainly in my constituency, and based on discussions I’ve had with others across the country, it certainly wasn’t an endorsement of New Labour policies. It was one of solidarity against the Tories and, in places like Dagenham, against the fascists with… regret… about what New Labour has done to the Labour Party.

Now, if you look at what happened in the election itself, it was exactly what we predicted: the coalition of people that we put together, as we always do when Labour is elected, was systematically alienated by New Labour policies – public sector workers alienated by privatisation; trade unionists alienated by a lack of trade union rights and the failure to address the issues of their wages and conditions and the security of their work; students alienated by tuition fees; pensioners alienated by a failure to address pensioner poverty and a refusal to restore the link between pensions and earnings; peace campaigners alienated by the Iraq War and Afghanistan; people who came to us because they saw us as the party of honesty against Tory sleaze alienated by expenses.

So you can see how every element of our coalition was alienated in some form, and that’s what brought about the breakdown in trust, and people no longer recognised the Labour Party as the party they knew and had trusted over the years. New Labour destroyed that bond between working class people and the Party itself, and it was only anti-Toryism that got us those voters out at the end of the day.

The issue for us now is how we re-establish that trust, and I think what people were saying on the doorstep is they want Labour back. We’ve got to re-establish the ‘Labour Party’ because New Labour has destroyed trust in us.

JS: What is your assessment of the Coalition Government in its early days?

JM: First of all, these arguments that the Coalition is going to fall apart are pretty fallacious. I think the Lib Dems and the Tories will cling together as long as possible and it may well be the full five year term.

They’ve got an interest in hanging together and in addition to that the ‘Orange Book’ Lib Dems, Nick Clegg and others, have taken over their Parliamentary Party and are basically Tories, so they have a common interest with the Tories themselves, not just in terms of survival, but also in the political direction that they’re taking.

The second thing is, I don’t think people should underestimate the ruthlessness of this government. They will seek to solve this crisis on the backs of working class people; they’ll cut services and be ruthless about it, they’ll come from pay cuts, they’ll come from pension cuts and they’ll come from people’s basic services. I think we’ll see a growth in inequality in the same way that we did in the 1980s, and we’ll also see a growth in poverty and deprivation amongst working people whilst others make themselves richer and more prosperous. The discussion we’ve got to have now is about how we organise the resistance against that.

There will be things done by this government, the part of the Lib Dem agenda, that the rest of us [on the Labour left] have been calling for anyway – the scrapping of ID cards, restoring elements of the right to protest, things like that, but that shouldn’t mask or cloud the class nature of this government. The class nature is about the restoration of the casino economy, restoring profitability to the City in particular on the backs of working people through cuts in public services, wages, pensions and the rest.

(c) Pete Grubb

JS: Given the policy agenda articulated in the Labour manifesto ahead of the election, can the Labour Party in its current guise actually be an effective opposition to the new government?

JM: The problem at the moment is that New Labour is implicated in bringing about the economic crisis that we now face – the deregulation of the City, the continuation of the policies of Thatcherism from the 80s and 90s, into New Labour and through to 2010.

They’re completely implicated in it and, actually, have completely adopted the ideas and ideology of Thatcherism. They believe in ‘the market’, they believe in privatisation as the best option for the delivery of services, and as a result of that it’s very difficult to see how [the candidates closely attached to new Labour] could have some Damascene conversion to socialism or even weaker forms of social democracy, and I think that’s what is going to hobble them, particularly if we get a new leader like one of the Milibands, or Ed Balls or Andy Burnham. If they come from the New Labour stable then ideologically they’ve adapted themselves to neoliberal policies anyway.

The struggle will be, yes, within the Labour Party from the rank and file, but I think also the struggle will be from within the communities themselves, with trade unions and other social groups coming together to resist what this government seeks to do. Eventually, I think the PLP will catch up with what’s happening in wider society.

JS: Turning now to policy related areas, how will your 2010 campaign differ from the 2007 campaign?

JM: It has moved on. 2007 was pre-major credit crunch. I was arguing the case then in the book that we did ‘Another World Is Possible’ that we needed to come to terms with the world as it then was, which was facing the impact of globalisation, how it had created a new world, new forms of exploitation, the opening up of the welfare state in this country to privatisation and profiteering, how it had undermined old securities in terms of state provision of housing , trade union rights, and how it had allowed the plundering of our environment for profit.

So I was trying to explain, at that stage, what globalisation meant, and how we needed to understand the world before we could organise in a way to combat the impact of globalisation in this country and in others across the world.

That was the intellectual debate we were having in 2007. The credit crunch then hit almost as predicted, in terms of a classic crisis of capitalism. What we are now into doing is sharing that understanding of how the capitalist system has gone into crisis again, but more importantly there is a sense of urgency now about what the implications are of that for working people. I think now it’s about motivating people to recognise they’ve got to stand up and fight back, that there will be a movement of resistance and they’ve got to join it.

This is no time for passivity; this is a time for resistance. I’ve been touring around trade union conferences and there’s a sort of quietude at the moment because it’s the lull before the storm, but people know there is no other option now but to fight back to protect their living standards and protect their local communities. That’s the nature of my leadership campaign at the moment, to try and build those mechanisms of solidarity and understanding about what we’ve got to do over the next year.

This government that’s come into power, I repeat, it will be ruthless, absolutely ruthless, no matter how much of a charming smile Cameron or Clegg has, they will be ruthless in the implementation of their policies on a class basis.

JS: What are the other key planks of your policy platform?

JM: What I’m trying to say is, let’s understand the world as it now is, let’s understand why this crisis came about, and let’s have a look at those policies, therefore, that we now need to put in place so we can demonstrate to people that there is an alternative.

It’s straightforward. The most important question that people face now is, “Who is going to pay for this economic crisis?” The government has quite clearly made its decision that working people are going to pay for it.

Our argument is, no, it doesn’t have to be like that, there is an alternative, and the alternative is basically that we start planning and controlling our economy. It means basically that instead of tackling the deficit by cutting services, you tackle it by introducing a fair taxation system where the corporate sector is paying its way, we tackle avoidance and evasion of taxes, we introduce a transition tax, it was called a Tobin tax, we now call it the Robin Hood Tax, and in that way we introduce a system whereby we tackle the deficit straight away, but we increasingly use mechanisms for regulation and public ownership that give us control of our economy in the long term.

At the same time, we do recognise that if people are going to have the opportunity to resist they need the tools to do that, so what we’re campaigning for basic civil liberties and the restoration of trade union rights that can arm people with the arguments with which they can control their lives in the long term.

It’s also about trying to explain to people that there are very simple solutions to our problems. We’re the fifth richest country in the world yet we have a housing crisis with homelessness doubling under New Labour. The question is “How do we tackle it?” and the way we tackle it is by building council houses again in the way we haven’t done in the last 13 years.

We pour money into public services, but see more and more of it laundered out for private profit. The simple solution is that we end privatisation.

We want our children to have the best education possible, but they’re deterred from that, because instead of having free education we’re now charging them for their education. How do you overcome that? You scrap tuition fees.

If you want to tackle pensioner poverty, with two million pensioners in poverty at the moment, you increase the state pension and you restore the link with earnings. It’s the same with child poverty, you simply increase child benefits to the level which cover the cost of rearing a child.

If you want to ensure that families can lift themselves out of poverty, you increase the Minimum Wage to a ‘Living Wage’.

All of these are simple solutions, and they’re all premised on the redistribution of wealth which in turn is based upon primary control of our economy.

JS: The main audience of ‘The Vibe’ will have grown up under the Thatcher government, like me, or the Major and New Labour governments. How would you go about rationalising your policy agenda to that age group, specifically?

JM: The whole point of every political discussion at the moment should be about breaking through the mystification of the economic crisis. We can control the future of our lives. We can control the future of our economy. We can control what happens within our workplaces and our local communities, and the solution is through democratic control of our lives and our economy.

What the Tories have done, and what New Labour have done also, is that… the Tories have told us there is no alternative, while New Labour have told us there is only one alternative, and that alternative is to allow the markets to run free and allow privatisation to happen with limited government intervention at best.

What we have got to reassert for this generation is that it doesn’t have to be like this! What we should be doing now is saying “We should control our lives, and to control our lives we have to control our economy.” To do that we have to band together and use the democratic mechanisms available to us, and if we do that we can control our future.

For three decades now there has been a defeatism inculcated in people. What we have to do is break through that and say, “We’re not putting up with this anymore! We don’t believe the lies. We don’t believe it’s complicated.” There are simple solutions, but they will only come about if we assert control.

JS: Your support for traditional labour elements such as trade unions and public sector workers has been unstinting in the face of wider political, media and private sector hostility. To put it bluntly, what do you think makes you right and them wrong?

JM: Let’s go back to the economic crisis. You can look at this from any part of the cycle you like, but let’s start at the beginning.

If you suppress trade union rights, that allows employers to suppress wages. If at the same time you stop building council houses and you rely solely upon the private market and you create a shortage of houses then that means house prices are going to go up.

If you’re a worker whose wages have been suppressed by privatisation, outsourcing or a lack of trade union rights the one thing you need is a roof over your head. If there is a shortage of housing because no council houses are being built and house prices are going up you have to borrow to buy a property. If at the same time the government deregulates the City and they can lend to you and charge you whatever they want, you’re forced to borrow at en extortionate rate, leading to the build up of a debt bubble which is unsustainable, and then a credit crunch occurs.

That is reality of what happened. It stems from the undermining of trade union rights and the balance of forces between labour and capital being deliberately skewed in the favour of capital. There is a clear analysis there of why the credit crunch occurred, and now we’re having to pay for it, and what we’re being told to do is replicate the same circumstances, – suppress trade union rights, cut wages and public services so the casino economy can spin again.

I think that when the process of how we’ve arrived at this point is explained to people, and people understand what is happening as it reflected in their real lives than I think people will get angry, and they want to vent that anger. Our job politically is to mobilise that anger and use it to make political change.

(c) Simon Green

JS: Do you think you’ll get the space and airtime in the mainstream media to articulate those points?

JM: No. A few years ago someone described me as being like a cult movie – you’ve sort of heard about it, but you’ve never seen it. It’s because most of the mainstream media aren’t interested in any detailed political discussion; it’s all 24-hour, short, sharp, media hits.

Even newspapers like the Guardian, which are supposed to be more liberal and open-minded, are not interested in a proper discussion of radical policies or fundamental analyses of society, so they’re as glib as most of the others as well.

So what we’ve got to do is create our own media. Part of that is using whatever we can in terms of new technology, of course, but also going back to traditional mechanisms like word of mouth, talking at large meetings, small groups, demonstrations, picket lines, climate camps… using the mechanisms that social movements are using all the way across the world to provide an alternative media to enable people, not just to receive information because it’s not about talking down to people, but to get involved in the dialogue and the debate.

I’ll tell you, when the climate camp came to my constituency a couple of years ago as part of the Third Runway campaign, nearly two thousand people turned up, they created a village overnight in a sustainable fashion, they stayed for a week, they had seminars and discussion groups and then political activity for a whole week. I learned more about climate change in a week at climate camp than all the reading and all the debates in Parliament ever taught me. That sort of alternative action, debate and dissemination of information I think is an ideal mechanism for bypassing the mainstream media.

JS: Last question; If you were successful in the final ballot, what would be your first action as leader of the Labour Party?

JM: I’d go out to people and tell them we’re now going to produce our own Bill of Rights which would restore trade union freedom, which would restore local democracy, and which would give people social rights – the right to a decent home, the right to a decent health service, the right to a decent education all of which would be enforceable and also the right to have a say, not only in your local community but also when you go to work as well.

I think the whole basis of having a real Labour government is about establishing freedom and that Bill of Rights would establish people’s freedom to control their own lives.

All information in the interview is correct as of 20 May 2010 – John S.