A call on the next leader of the Labour Party to redefine Britain’s role in the world

Type: Other
Date: 8 September 2015
Campaigns: General

The Labour Party leadership election has generated a debate in British society, not merely around personality, but also around values and politics. The powerful notion that ‘there is no alternative’ to the way our current economy and society is organised has been challenged. The policy of austerity has been confronted, inequality has been raised as a defining problem of our times and the erosion of democracy has been critiqued.

At the heart of these debates lie questions of power. Who controls the world’s resources and who benefits from that control? How can we challenge the power of global elites in order to create a fairer society where everyone is able to fulfil their potential?

In a country like Britain, these questions have implications for the whole world. The decisions of our government, our corporations, even our media, impact on enormous numbers of people across the planet. Our ownership of nuclear weapons has been critically raised during the Labour leadership campaign, an issue on which the voice of the British people has been ignored for decades.

But we want to go deeper. We want to use the debate that’s been generated to question the role of our country in the world more fundamentally. We want to challenge the way our economic and social policies too often create poverty, conflict, inequality, forced migration and environmental destruction in other countries.

This must stop, not just for the millions of people around the world affected by these anti-social policies, but for the British people too. A powerful financial sector, unfair trade practices, ideologically-driven privatisation, and many other policies, which we inflict on the world, also serve to make our own country more unequal, with deep pockets of poverty aside incredible levels of wealth.

We call on the next Labour leader to address these issues head-on. True, it may make our country less ‘important’ at the top table, but that is a price well worth paying for a fairer world, and a happier society. In the following pages, we will lay out some policies, which we believe could begin to turn our vision into reality.