Michael Meacher

Why you should vote for me

The author wants to succeed Tony Blair as PM

A leadership election opens up, uniquely, the opportunity to debate and decide on the future course of a government. I am standing because I believe there are several areas of policy where a fundamental change of direction is now needed. And though Spectator readers may initially be sceptical about the relevance of my policies to them, I believe that if they read on with an open mind, they’ll find much that they agree with. I’m sure they’ll agree, for instance, that New Labour and Tory policies have become similar, almost overlapping, which means that politics has become increasingly fixated on personalities, as though a blanket consensus on policy had been achieved. This is ridiculous. Old-style Toryism was rejected in 1997, and now New Labour — the continuing moving-right show — has clearly faded. It’s time, not for Old Labour either, but for a mainstream Labour approach — which may well represent majority opinion within the electorate but has been suppressed for over a decade — to be reasserted as a modern progressive politics with new solutions to today’s profound problems.

First, we need a foreign policy which asserts our fundamental British interests and is not cringingly subservient to the US. We must stop being America’s glove puppet — over Iraq and Lebanon, and now even more worryingly over Iran. Britain should insist that the nuclear stand-off against Iran must be resolved by negotiated means or through UN-imposed sanctions, not militarily, and should strongly discourage and oppose any US or Israeli attack, the longer-term consequences of which are incalculably dangerous.

To try to end the horrendous daily carnage in Iraq and to speed up our troop withdrawal from Basra, where our own military are openly saying our presence is actually exacerbating the security situation, we should, with EU partners and hopefully the US, be seeking to initiate a wider international peace conference bringing together all the relevant actors for a joint settlement of the interconnected Middle East issues of contention which experience has painfully shown cannot be settled singly.

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