Compass

The achievement of Neal Lawson in founding the Compass organisation as a direction for the democratic left, and as a critic of many New Labour policies, is immense. From its small beginnings, it was able last week to muster - according to the Compass estimate - a conference gathering in London of around a thousand, produce a debate among the Labour leadership candidates, and organise17 workshops and seminars.

In his opening speech, Neal Lawson acknowledged that a good part of his audience were "people who had left Labour". But hey had still been willing to come back and discuss ways of what Lawson called a New Hope agenda. They showed they were no longer imprisoned in a New Labour groove, in spite of the presence of the Milibands and Ed Balls. An opening speaker was Caroline Lucas, the new Green party M.P. The workshops and seminars included ones on ending child poverty, how to make economic cuts fair, global poverty, climate change, moving housing up the agenda, a new foreign policy, immigration, tax dodgers, an equal voice for women, and other worthy subjects.

Many people resigned from Compass as well as New Labour in recent years. Those radicals who voted LibDem instead at the election know it was their anger against Labour which made them do this. The LibDem manifesto was actually more radical. The situation was much as it was when Labour lost the election under Harold Wilson in 1970, mainly because supporters were angry about his moral defence of the Vietnam war and the fact that he had almost decided to send troops to back the Americans.

The foreign policy workshop at Compass covered some of those reasons for disenchantment with New Labour. Seumas Milne from the Guardian made the point that NATO should now disband, the Cold War being over, the Warsaw Pact dissolved and there being no good reason for its continuation. This may seem controversial, but was in fact a stand taken 16 years ago( in a long article in our magazine the New Reporter) by Professor John Erickson, as director of defence studies at the University of Edinburgh. "... the defence of Europe, Europe at large (and very large at that) does not appear to fit within the confines shaped by NATO." The argument still continues.

Most of the Compass conference seemed to be preaching to the converted. What was lacking was the fire and anger which lost New Labour its support - that people's taxes had been used for the illegal war in Iraq, for the hopeless quest to keep "streets safe from terrorists" in an Afghanistan run by competing warlord, where foreign armies had been hopelessly beaten in the past; used for the illegal capture of people sent to the Guantanomo Bay concentration camp without hope of proper trial; rendition flights illegally taking people out of this country; the bringing in of ID cards; the mostly unreported horrors of what went on in the immigration camps; the invitations to people to spy on their neighbours and the build-up of regulations which was starting to share the ethos of Soviet or pre-Nazi societies.

And there were no outbursts, either, about the iniquity of a few big nations ruling the world, armed with enough nuclear weapons to wipe out the planet several times, and threatening intervention if any other country tried to get them. There were only calls for Trident to be reviewed or to be included in the defence review.

And, no workshop on the disgrace of the inhumanities of factory farming. Animals were pronounced to be sentient beings by the European Union years ago, capable of feeling the same physical and mental pain as humans. So what is the excuse for herding ducks where they never get near any water, imprisoning pigs on iron grids, away from the fields, and taking away their piglets at birth; cramming thousands of chickens into sheds with no room to move, exporting live animals thousands of miles without space, food or water, just so we can get cheap chicken, pork and duck for our fancy recipes? And forcing cows to have non-stop births of calves so they will produce unending supplies of milk.
Women make up roughly half of the world's population, do two-thirds of the work, but take only a tiny part in the decisions of the world's governments. If they had a half-share in making the big decisions, might the human occupation of the planet become less threatening?
Compass needs to shout louder and more bravely.
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