An early start for the Salford Labour Students saw us travelling to Blackpool for the North-west Young Labour Conference 2011.
We were welcomed into The Imperial Hotel with individual passes and freebies courtesy of Unison. We all gathered in the Young Labour conference area for the morning greeting from Chris Webb, organiser and Iain McNichol, general secretary of Young Labour.
By November, 2011 there are a total of 4,000 young labour members and it has its biggest active membership yet.
There has also been a new campaign, proposed by Iain McNichol, due to be launched next year named ‘Access all areas’. This aims to spread Labour throughout the country. As it stands there are no Labour MEPs in the South-West of England; Access all areas hopes to overcome this.
Iain also added that Labour failed to support new councillors in elections, so their momentum was lost and they lost that seat in the next election. This is another area in which the ‘Access all areas’ campaign is going to help.
Re-founding Labour is another key policy of which the Labour party have proposed. Since the last general election, there has been an increase of 65,000 members to the Labour party. In this figure, one quarter of the 65,000 new members are of the age 27 and under. This could indicate that the new mass election vote could swing in Labour’s favour.
The highlight of the event was a 50 minute speech from Ed Milliband. However, before this, Ed addressed Young Labour alone.
In this address, Ed stated points about how important the members of Young Labour are to the re-founding Labour campaign. He stated that young people are the way in which parties renew themselves, with young people and fresh ideas.
Mr Milliband also stated that with the re-founding labour campaign, Young Labour has been given independence, with its own voice and choices. “To succeed, we need many voices” He added.
His last point in his address to Young Labour was that Labour needs to be the voice of hope with this current government. With one in five young people being unemployed, tuition fees rising to £9,000 and the loss of EMA and all the broken promises from this government, Labour needs to give support and hope to those in need. Ed Milliband proposes that we tax the banker’s bonuses and invest the revenue in the young people of today.
Mr Milliband then gave his speech to the whole of the conference in the main hall of the event. He started off by stating how much of a failure Cameron was at the G2 summit this year. Ed could not believe how Cameron had gone to Summit and not created plan of how to get out of this recession. Mr Milliband said that this was a complete failure of leadership.
He then added to the comment which he mentioned in the address to Young Labour on how our communities are hurting. With the recent unemployment records, he said, makes him feel as if he’s back in the 1980’s with the closure of the pits. We need to make a difference; it really is the case of the one per cent versus the 99 per cent.
Ed stressed that if we see someone in the street who claims it would be the same under Labour, we must argue that it wouldn’t be the same under Labour at all. “We can make the difference.”
We are in a state where we cannot rely on financial services anymore. The banks should make it their duty to help small businesses get off the ground and thrive in their sales. Mr Milliband also stated how he will go by doing this. He wants to put a regular, every day worker at the top level of every job, so they are in touch with the people at regular level. As most CEO’s and other high ranking jobs do not know what it feels like to be at the bottom.
The 1980’s was the wrong ethic and this is what the current government are bringing back. We need to build a different economy for a better future and make it easier to hire people, not to fire them.
A strong point that Mr Milliband made that this current government is an utter disgrace to the NHS. They have destroyed our beloved healthcare system, which many countries strive to have. This is not acceptable for the welfare of our society. We have to overcome oversity, but this is forgotten.
He ended his speech on the notes that we must never to fall to fatalism and this is not a conservative country and we need to stand up to it.
There were many points brought up in the Q&A section of the conference, but the strongest point which stood out that Mr Milliband made was that he could never promise anything to us, because he can only do as much as he can. For example, he can’t promise to lower tuition fees to lower than £6,000 because there is so much he can push into government at a time.
Overall it was a fantastic day at the conference in Blackpool and with this Salford Labour students would like to congratulate our members, Amy Coffey and Tim Miles on their appointments to the Young Labour Committee following the speeches and elections on that day.
