Addressing the UNISON Black members’ conference in Brighton this afternoon, Sadiq Khan MP issued a rallying call to delegates to increase their political involvement.
With European and local elections this year, and the general election next year, the shadow secretary of state for justice and the shadow Lord Chancellor stressed how important the next 18 months are, because the present government takes decisions without knowing how they impact on the majority of ordinary people.
Paying tribute to Del Singh, the Labour Party MEP candidate from the South East who was killed in a terrorist attack in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Friday, he said that the former development worker had decided to move into politics because “politics can make a difference.”
Saying that the current Labour Party – although “the best party in town” – doesn’t reflect the people it seeks to represent, he said that delegates could help to change this “democratic deficit”.
Delegates could not only become more active in the union, but should also consider whether to “stand for the council. Should you be thinking about becoming more active in the Labour Party” or standing to enter Parliament?
And in an echo of John F Kennedy’s “ask not what your country can do for you” speech, he continued by asking delegates to ask themselves: “What can I do to help determine the outcome of the next general election?”
Mr Khan praised the role of UNISON general secretary Dave Prentis and the union, who he described as “leading the way” in working politically.
But he also had a warning for conference: “There are many of you who are old enough to remember the 1992 election and if you think that the media then was hostile to Neil Kinnock,” he told them, “it’s nothing to the situation now”.
“Solidarity is as important over the next 16 months as it was over a 100 years ago” when the trade unions created the Labour Party, he told them.
“We made mistakes,” he said of Labour’s last period in government, but stressed that, “for every thing that we did wrong, we did five that were right”.
And he urged them, by getting involved, to help ensure that Labour had the right policies to go in the coming electoral process.
UNISON: political affiliations and support
Key issue: Challenging racism in the workplace
UNISON Knowledge: Race discrimination (member-only content)
