Originally published @ 6:23 pm, Sat 3rd Jul 2010
David Miliband visited Nottingham on Thursday evening and from talking to some who attended appears to have done well in front of an audience of 300 or so party members and supporters.
Taking responsibility for a bigger party, more organisers and fund-raising for the party came across. And a bit more came out about where he'd have differed from Gordon Brown in recent years, but for cabinet collective responsibility.
Many of the questions were about policy, especially in foreign affairs, but it became more interesting as first a former Police officer explained of the progress we'd made under Labour, and then his wife, a public services worker, explained how she felt at risk of redundancy and she and a few colleagues were finding out about their rights and joining the party.
As it happened, two final year student sisters sat behind me – one studying to be a child nurse and one studying to be a primary school teacher - were also to join that night.
Perhaps surprisingly, the meeting spent some time talking about former Nottingham politician (and historian and campaigner) Ken Coates, who had died on Sunday, but some of us were only just finding out. (Surprising given he left the Labour party in 1998 to stand against us.) David Miliband was able to reminisce on Sunday phone calls between Ken Coates and his Dad, and said we should keep finding reasons to be together than apart. I’ve found a couple of tributes -
but neither refer to his book “St Ann's - Poverty, Deprivation and Morale in a Nottingham Community”, described in http://www.spokesmanbooks.com/RevPDFS/STANNEVEPO.pdf which some Nottingham party members might think more significant to local politics.
I found that the campaigning work seemed a lot more exciting from outside of Nottingham than within. There is now much more progress been made on nuclear disarmament now that multilateral nuclear disarmament has come to mean that, and not adopting new weapons systems, a point David Miliband made very strongly. But we perhaps miss some of the focus on justice at the workplace which actually would have made us much more determined to act on agencies employing people from eastern Europe on cheaper wages – something that harmed local workers and harmed the reputation of the Labour party in their eyes.
The David Miliband meeting was a fair meeting, but there’s perhaps a feeling that a longer leadership campaign has been warranted, not so much for policy development, as for allowing the candidates to grow from former Cabinet members to would-be party leaders and prime ministers.
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