A voice of reason

And that is that neoliberal market economics don't work, never have worked and never will work.

The rancid dogma of Milton Friedman and Margaret Thatcher is and has always been a lie and, what is worse, a lie that requires continuous intervention in the so-called free market by government to keep it going at all.

This paper and its readers have always known that simple fact and declaimed it from the rooftops to anyone who would listen.

The leaders of the working-class movement in this country, if they are honest with themselves and their members, have always known it.

They could hardly avoid knowing it, with the evidence, in terms of the erosion of their members' terms and conditions, continuously in front of them and their jobs vanishing by the hour.

And, yet, a sad and unfulfilled loyalty to the Labour Party in government, combined with the desperate hope that there are depths to which Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his minions won't sink - a hope that is more optimism than realism - has resulted in a dogged determination not to betray the party, not to drive it out of office or to embarrass it in public.

Despite the fickle flirtations of Mr Brown and his tatty band of political Lotharios with any old right-wing hussy ready to wave a few quid at them, the trade union movement has stayed faithful, to the point of stupidity, to its errant partner in Parliament.

It has been politically cuckolded at every cut and turn, deceived, exploited and abandoned to its fate time after time.

But still the trade union movement has returned, cap in hand, to its flighty partner, pleading its case for just another chance, emptying its pockets into the coffers of Labour whenever asked, certain that, one day, the marriage will work, one day the Westminster dragon will turn into the sweet compliant young thing that the unions' fantasies envisaged.

But the party of the working class has been turned into the party of business by a leadership that has not even a nodding acquaintance with political principle.

And that leadership is not about to come to any accommodation with the unions, romantic or otherwise. But Labour is not autonomous, however much it may claim to be.

It may shell out millions to its sweethearts in Northern Rock. It may pay and pay to get its lovers in the banks out of the Bear Sterns trap that their gambling has got them into, all the while refusing a pathetic few millions to save the jobs of thousands in Remploy.

But it does so because the trade union movement allows it to get away with murder. And the murder is going to have to stop.

It is long past time that the movement said: "Enough is enough." It is long past time that the Labour Party got a lesson in respect for working people - and its freedom to adopt policies that suit no-one but the bosses and their representatives, the parasites who call themselves new Labour MPs, curtailed.

It is time that the Labour Party was called to heel and Mr Simpson has outlined, in terms that brook no denial, just why this must be done.

And, if policy change is beyond Mr Brown's boys, then it is not beyond the wit of the trade union movement to draw the obvious conclusions.