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Ongoing battle for equality requires strong Labour Party

Issued : Monday 13 August, 2007

I am delighted to be here today particularly because of the theme
chosen for this session - the Labour Movement.

It echoes a debate that is being kick-started within the Labour Party by our leader Pat Rabbitte. Last month he spoke at the Tom Johnson Summer school and I would like to quote some of what he said as an introduction to today's discussion.

"I believe we must embark on a root and branch examination of the role and function of the Labour Party in modern Ireland. At the last election we set out to win more seats for Labour and to change the government. We offered the people a clear alternative- Fianna Fail and the PDs on the one hand and Labour and Fine Gael on the other with the possibility of the Greens. For much of the campaign it looked like we might succeed. Fianna Fail were at or below 38% in a series of polls and the PDs were facing extinction. Fine Gael were polling at or above 26 -27% and we had a number of polls that put us in the region of 12 -13%. It was always going to be tight. In the event we narrowly missed out. In our multi-seat system of PR the margin between success and failure can be wafer thin.

There was a shift in the last week back to Fianna Fail at our expense, but not only at our expense. Why did this shift occur? Conventional wisdom has it that, in the end, fear of a weakening economy overcame the desire for positive change.

Perhaps the easiest explanation to fall back on is that the electoral strategy was wrong. The fact that Fine Gael bounced back almost to its traditional position is taken as giving credence to this argument. But if fighting Election 2007 on an independent strategy was the secret to our success , it must be asked why did the greens not make the expected breakthrough? They could not have entered the contest in more favourable circumstances. After the Northern Ireland settlement the same could be said about Sinn Fein and the socialist party were restrained by any alliance with an "establishment " party. In a country preoccupied with the state of our health service hospital candidates fell like ninepins.

Did the Leaders debate influence the outcome? Did the Late Late Show?
These were all factors. So too are the financial resources available to the other parties and equally the form of constituencies that pertain. All these concerns lead us to look at others rather than at ourselves and how we are seen by modern Irish society."

This is a long preamble to the simple and stark challenge that we in the Labour Movement face. Whatever about meeting the challenge I am absolutely convinced that there is , more than ever before a need for a social democratic party presenting and promoting labour values in the political space.
Which means what exactly?

At their core our values are rooted in those of 1798 and earlier. In today's world they are to be found in the Universal declaration of Human Rights . Distilled down they form three concepts - freedom, equality and solidarity.

Freedom , as an idea, has been commandeered by the Right as in the free market or free enterprise.... The PDs when they were alive, used freedom as a kind of watchword to disguise what they actually meant which is an extended privilege based on elitism - the freedom of the shareholder superseding all else as we can see in the current battle by the Shannon community , the freedom to choose private over public education, private over public healthcare, Its time that we on the Left claimed back the concept of individual liberty. The freedom of individuals - whether women or gays or marginalized people - to live their lives as they choose has in many ways been fought for by the Left yet we are hesitant to express our commitment to individual liberty. The liberal agenda was largely won by the Left who had the courage to drive change against powerful forces over decades and there is still unfinished business.

The freedom to have a home, a job, and a decent quality of life are at the heart of left politics. Ireland is a highly unequal society. There are now of course, more opportunities but the life chances of children born today vary enormously and depend on who your parents are and where they live.

One of the difficulties of concentrating on such inequality is that the Labour Movement is easily pigeon holed into the cloth cap , social welfare stereotype. The poor - often regrettably perceived as the "undeserving poor" - are increasingly ghettoized. The electoral power they hold is largely untapped and in tackling inequality we have to ensure that it is not to the exclusion of the hard-working, tax paying low to middle income earner who is struggling to meet the demands of commuter travel, childcare and high mortgages.

In the last election Labour set out some universal principles to tackle inequality - one year free preschool to every child, universal health insurance to guarantee healthcare on the basis of need not income. Such policies go some way towards reaching into the public consciousness and establishing the possibility that we can create a truly successful society built on a successful economy.

In the end Fianna Fail were able to ring-fence the election to the economy alone and enough of the electorate chose to stick with nurse for fear of something worse. Such an outcome should not deter us from pursuing a politic vision whereby we in Ireland could achieve dramatically more as a society than the old 'private good , public bad' model that dominate the last governments thinking.

At a time of rapid globalization and environmental crisis the principle of solidarity is crucial to progressive politics. One of the great strengths of the Labour movement has been its internationalism. It is an underdeveloped strength. The Labour Party is a member of the PES at EU level. We are sister parties of the British Labour Party and the SDLP and in Northern Ireland we have established a Labour Forum which is slowly building within the new dispensation that now exists in Northern Ireland.

International labour law, the protection of workers rights globally have increasingly relevance for us here in Ireland. At a time of rapid globalization and environmental crisis the principle of solidarity is crucial to progressive politics. The success of global capitalism in escaping any social or democratic control is unsustainable and unjust. Yesterdays Sunday Times revealed:
"One of Britain's richest men is profiting from Asian workers paid less than £6 a day to make clothes for the latest Kate Moss range for Topshop. Factories supplying Sir Philip Green - who is taxed in Monaco and is worth nearly £5 billion - employ hundreds of Sri Lankan, Indian and Bangladeshi workers in Mauritius where they labour up to 12 hours a day six days a week.

Workers said that were recruited in their home countries by self-employed agents who promised wages up to five times what they receive. They pay up to £1,070 to get the job equivalent to seven months earnings. Once in Mauritius they receive as little as 32c to 60c an hour, about 40% below the local average wage.

Green largely avoids personal tax by paying dividends to his wife Lady Tina who lives offshore. In 2005 she was paid £1.2 billion which amounted to £3.3 m for every day of the year."

We cannot depend on national constructs alone to secure standards of pay and conditions. The strength of the labour movement globally to combat such exploitation has yet to be developed. The same can be said about the issue of climate change. We have to co-operate at a world level if we are to tackle seriously the environmental challenges ahead and in a sustainable way.

Over centuries the Labour Movement has provided an over-arching philosophy of solidarity . Today solidarity needs to find expression in a way that recognizes that unless a right is universal it is nothing more than extended privilege, here and across the globe.

Wherever I go I carry a battered copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It provides a touchstone from the past. How we translate its principles into the world of today and tomorrow is our project. Flawed and all as the record of the Labour movement may be it is still able to inspire us to take our fundamental principles and apply them in a new and complex context.

Allowing for the exigencies of electoral contest and the limits of parliamentary practice it is still a challenge that is worth pursuing.

At a time of plenty as a people we must expect more from our Government and more from our democracy . The Right keep telling us to look back and thank God for small mercies. Labour looks to the future and asks ; what's next and how can we bring about a successful society that is underpinned by human and communitarian values ?