Reconnecting people with their values and their democracy

This is my speech for today's May Day March and Rally in Aberdeen. Written in the wake of yesterday's council election results it looks at the challenges facing our movement in our fight to have a better society for all, as the General Election approaches.

"We live in strange times.

We’ve had 7 years of a Tory government who have hammered ordinary folk

Poverty pay

Rises in insecure labour and zero hours contracts

Wages cap and vastly increasing inequality between the rich and the rest of us

Hideous caps on benefits and a benefits system described by Ken Loach at the STUC as “conscious cruelty” - “a campaign of systematic punishment” which leaves more and more of our children, disabled people and elderly in poverty and distress

Our young people hit particularly hard 

Cuts to the NHS and public services and a massive selling off of the NHS – our NHS (especially in England and Wales)  – to private companies running for profit not patient care.

Corbyn - a new kind of politics and a different kind of leadership

So here’s the thing that I am really struggling with. What exactly is wrong with Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party? I hear it time and time again but I have yet to hear anyone explain what it is that he should be doing that he isn’t or shouldn’t be doing that he is?

What is it that the majority of the PLP have found so lacking in Corbyn’s leadership that they would resign en masse in a co-ordinated strategy designed to undermine him in the most humiliating and public way possible?

Is he without a vision of what he wants Labour to achieve? Well that can’t be right. No one who has heard Corbyn speak can be in any doubt about where his priorities lie and what he will offer if elected to government. He has made it very clear that he wants to end austerity, and create a society where there is less inequality, decent paid jobs, good public services, an NHS providing health care at the point of need to all, where children do not have to grow up in poverty, where disabled people and older people can live lives of dignity.