22.09.2004

Abortion aberration

At a Respect meeting in Teeside, candidate John Bloom predicted that "one day people will come to regard abortion as a holocaust". Steve Cooke reports.

Teesside has hosted two Respect events in the last week, each addressed by prominent figures from the unity coalition’s national executive and its candidate in the September 30 Hartlepool by-election.
The first meeting, held in Middlesbrough on Wednesday September 15, had a disappointing turnout of only 15 people, compared with the second, an election rally in Hartlepool itself on Tuesday September 21, which attracted an audience of around 50.

John Bloom is Respect’s candidate to replace Peter Mandelson as MP for Hartlepool. Unlike Yvonne Ridley, who headed Respect’s regional list in the recent Euro elections, he has a strong track record of campaigning for working class interests. The comrade is best known locally for his leading role in the campaign to save Hartlepool’s general University Hospital from closure and his prominent anti-nuclear activism in a constituency with a nuclear power station. As a result, his candidacy has been well-received by the many Hartlepudlians who are disillusioned with the Labour government and the now confirmed suspicion that their ambitious MP, so closely associated with creating the New Labour project, had simply used the town as a convenient postal address for his curriculum vitae.

The early start to the Bloom campaign, his high profile and credibility in the local community, together with the town’s recent history of electoral rebellion (most infamously resulting in the election of independent mayor Stuart Drummond - aka ‘Angus the Monkey’ - whose main manifesto promise was free bananas for every school pupil), forced New Labour to abandon plans to impose another Blairite policy wonk on the town. Instead they have nominated Iain Wright, a young Hartlepool councillor, whose political inexperience is rumoured to have led party minders to remove his mobile phone to prevent him speaking to journalists without supervision.

Mindful of the success of an independent candidate on an anti-closure platform in Kidderminster in 2001, Labour is very anxious about the hospital issue. Secretary of state for health John Reid visited the constituency and assured residents that he did not want the hospital to close. The populist mayor of Middlesbrough, Ray ‘Robocop’ Mallon, has also endorsed the Wright candidacy. Mallon is a popular figure in Hartlepool, having developed his ‘zero tolerance’ image as head of its police force, and he is now actively courting New Labour, following his stated desire to enter national politics.

Again in contrast to other Respect candidates, comrade Bloom has pledged to take a worker’s wage if elected. The remainder of his salary would be used to establish and run a constituency office - something that Mandelson neglected to do during his 12 years as the town’s representative.

Comrade Bloom’s impeccable leftwing credentials must have added to the surprise shown by his co-speaker at the Middlesbrough meeting when he answered a question about his views on abortion. Whilst looking moderately uncomfortable as he said that he had “real problems with abortion, not from a religious point of view but a philosophical angle”, Socialist Workers Party member and prominent Stop the War Coalition leader Lindsey German was visibly taken aback when Bloom went on to predict that “one day people will come to regard abortion as a holocaust”. He believed that the term limit for legal abortions was “arbitrary” and thought that Respect should follow the practice of other political parties and allow its representatives the right of conscience when voting on legislation relevant to such issues.

Comrade German said that “as a socialist, I disagree with John on a woman’s right to choose”, but she did not see it as a key issue for Respect and thought it irrelevant to the Hartlepool campaign. Respect, she reminded the audience, was a “broad coalition” of people with different views on some issues. She agreed with comrade Bloom’s view that Respect should allow a free vote on this and similar issues, citing the Scottish Socialist Party as an example of this approach. It certainly “isn’t an issue worth splitting over”.

Comrade Bloom came back and said that abortion was a “personal morality issue”. He repeated the ‘holocaust’ phrase again, but said that stronger support systems needed to be put in place for women before it would be possible to seek further restrictions on abortion.

Other than this aberration, Respect’s campaign style in Hartlepool has been reminiscent of the days of the Socialist Alliance. Lindsey German’s speech in Middlesbrough described Respect as representing “the values of old Labour”.

At the Hartlepool rally, Respect’s national secretary John Rees (SWP) emphasised issues such as the economic insecurity that is leading to increasing bullying in the workplace, the need to support pensioners and his contempt for the government ministers who had benefited from a free university education, only to “pull up the ladder behind them” and impose fees and loans on those seeking to enter higher education. He said that there were people in every town throughout the country who would be better at running the country than the current government. Working class people, Rees argued, “have only ever won anything by organising themselves” to fight for change.

After a moving testimony from the family of Gordon Gentle, a 19-year-old soldier who died in Iraq in June this year, Rees pointed out that the army was largely made up of people who were “economically conscripted”, especially in north east towns like Hartlepool. The government, he claimed, were the people who really deserved to have ‘anti-social behaviour’ orders placed on them rather than the young people they spend so much time condemning.

No questions from the floor were permitted at the second meeting.