30.05.2001

Ipswich

Another defection

A leading member of Ipswich Labour Party joined the Socialist Alliance last week after deciding ?enough was enough?. Andrew Coates, who was secretary of a Labour Party branch in the town, said that he had been so disappointed by the performance of the local Labour MP, Jamie Cann, at a hustings on education on Thursday that he had decided to switch his allegiance. Comrade Coates has already put a Socialist Alliance poster in the window of his home and started leafleting.

The news of the defection, and of the Labour Party?s petulant response to it, made the front page of the local daily paper, The East Anglian Daily Times. Comrade Coates, who had been an active Labour member for 12 years, said: ?I don?t want to have a Tory government, and Labour is running a Tory government. The privatisation of the health service was the main factor in my decision.? He added: ?I thought Peter Leech, the Socialist Alliance candidate, made a creditable case for his party?s politics. To me the alliance?s politics on education make sense. I had a grant when I went to university, but New Labour has abolished grants and introduced student fees.? In an answer to a question about tuition fees Cann had claimed that it was one of the hard choices governments had to make.

The Labour Party certainly did itself no favours at the meeting that precipitated comrade Coates?s departure from the party. Faced with an audience made up of a number of sceptical teachers and hostile leftwingers, Cann quickly subsided into a defiant bunker attitude. For instance, in answer to one question about the excessive hours teachers were expected to do he first denied that teachers were working longer hours now than 20 years ago and then added that, in any case, professional people did not count their hours and should grin and bear it.

The alliance is busy distributing leaflets: at the major Sunday push 13 people turned out to help on one estate, and more leafleting is planned for every evening this week with stalls publicising the organisation?s policies. The leafleting sessions are developing into major seminars about politics and the way forward between people who before the formation of the alliance would have hardly spoken to each other.

Frank Rogerson