26.07.2006

Confident campaign

John McDonnell was bullish about both the Labour Representation Committee conference and the prospects for his leadership campaign when he spoke to Mark Fischer

Are you pleased with today?

Very pleased. This is the third LRC conference and they are bigger and better every year. Estimates for attendance this time are about 450 - bigger than we anticipated. We have also had delegations from major trade unions: for example, the fact that the chair of the Broad Left of the T&G spoke and the general breadth of union participation was very encouraging. This participation included Amicus, Unison and the smaller unions that are affiliated to the LRC, of course.

A very significant thing about today is that we also organised a youth fringe meeting - with 30-plus young people there - and the LRC's Young Socialists will be formally launched on Monday July 24 at a meeting in the House of Commons.

So, all in all, a very good start.

Despite the general enthusiasm for the campaign, some people I have spoken to have expressed some disquiet about the way it was launched. It appeared to be the decision of an individual or a small group rather than something collectively debated and decided on by the Labour left itself.

In fact, it was a tactical decision. We debated whether we should wait for the conference, or whether it was wise to go earlier. I took a lot of advice from different people and the reason for going earlier was that we calculated that we would maximise the publicity for today's meeting. So the idea was to use the launch of my candidacy to build momentum towards this conference and have a rigorous debate here to put the whole thing on solid political foundations.

The next step will be in September to coordinate meetings around the country as a proper launch, then on from that to the TUC and Labour Party conference. The timing thus far has therefore been influenced by tactical decisions about building today's important event and maximising the publicity it gains.

And it has worked. We did have a worry that we might give people the impression that they were being bounced into a campaign, but everyone I have spoken to seems to think it was generally the right thing to do. You have to make these sorts of nuanced tactical decisions in politics all the time and I think the success of today shows we got this one right.

Now the whole thing is up and running, what about its prospects for success? Labour MPs are susceptible to pressure, of course, but you are really going to have to go some to get 40-plus of them backing you, aren't you?

Not really, no. There is definitely a lot of spin going on along the lines that 'John has an impossible mountain to climb' - this sort of negative flak from some.

If you look at the key votes in the recent period, the left has managed to pull anything up to 70 Labour MPs on some key issues. Eventually, this question of the leadership is going to be seen as a key issue. So I'm confident that we can get the 42 MPs we need - in fact, what I am looking to achieve is double that amount to demonstrate the seriousness of this challenge.

Double? Really?

That should be our target, yes.

But that will come at the end of the campaign rather than at the beginning. The problem of the left in the Labour Party is that for generation after generation, on individual campaigns, we have been hidebound by the narrow parliamentary focus of our politics. What we have to do is get back to grassroots, rank and file campaigning activity.

I was involved in the Benn campaign and Tony did not initially have the support in parliament, even though at that point we had an 80-strong Campaign Group of MPs. People were timid; they were a bit cowed and shied away from supporting the campaign for all sorts of reasons. Once the campaign started, once it picked up momentum in the unions, then the parliamentary support appeared.

That's exactly the pattern we are looking for. What I definitely didn't want to do was launch a campaign with a parliamentary focus. If we had done that, it would have immediately sent out the message that this was not a rank and file campaign. I wanted to make sure that the people who are the campaign's focus - individual members of the Labour Party, activists in the trade unions, plus supportive elements outside the Labour Party as well - all recognised that we are waging this fight on the basis of winning the battle of ideas.

Then in due course - as that battle hots up - we will look for parliamentary support.

The last thing I wanted to do was present the launch of our campaign like some dull, stage-managed Tory launch, where you drudge along to a House of Commons committee room, you have the candidate up on the top table, with 25 or 40 MPs lined up behind them. That would send out totally the wrong message for us.

Might your candidacy flush out new contenders, both on the left and the right? Here has been talk on Michael Meacher, for example.

First, let's talk about the right. I'm sure there are figures on the right wing of the Labour Party who would want to stand. But Gordon Brown's tactics have been to push hard up against Blair so as to remove the potential political space that a rightwinger might occupy.

Then, there is a problem for any potential candidate of the centre or soft left. Most of the rank and file support - in the constituency parties and the trade unions - has little in common politically with this section of the party. In terms of the Iraq war, for instance, it is very difficult to envisage any credible candidate from the centre-left who voted for that war. It's the same in virtually every policy area. How can a soft-left candidate that supported cuts in benefits realistically expect support from a rank and file that firmly opposed them?

Our campaign has a resonance precisely because on every issue it chimes with that set of principles that the rank and file of the movement adhere to. The left of the party is not arrogant, but it is simply a fact that on every one of those issues we have proved to be right. Whether it was tuition fees, or the war, or cuts in benefits, or the refusal to increase state pensions - you name it - the left was right.

So I can't see in this leadership election any other dynamic playing itself out other than a polarisation between us and Brown himself. That will be the real fight.