The team are spending their second season in the FA women’s Premier League, and were last year’s league cup winners.

QPR is a club with a great history that we are very proud to be associated with, and we hope their ladies team in particular has an equally prestigious future.

It is important to note that its author, Peter Hain, is Labour MP for Neath, a leading member of recent Cabinets and, more significantly, someone uniquely equipped to write about his hero since Hain and his family were themselves victims of the disease called apartheid, the South African racial evil which, with savage irony, effectively created a global hero.

Hain, now 60, was born in South Africa and lived there until the age of 16. His parents were actively involved in campaigning against white supremacy before Peter was born; his mother and father were jailed for their activities and his father, an architect, effectively barred from work by the regime, which eventually led to the family moving to Britain in 1966. At the age of 10 Peter’s bedroom was invaded by South African security police searching for “incriminating documents” on his parents – an experience which probably shaped his life. In England, as a student, he became head of the famed Stop the Tour campaign in 1969 and 1970 whose objective was to disrupt the tours of Britain by South Africa’s rugby union and cricket teams. It was a landmark disruption against apartheid and an important element in the campaign to free Nelson Mandela from his long imprisonment on Robben Island. BOSS, the South African secret police, never forgave Hain. For years afterwards government security agents tried their hardest to frame Hain and even assassinate him.

Hain’s courage never wavered and British politics, notably the Labour Party, have been gifted, unintentionally, by the evil of apartheid, in having Hain with us, just as the rest of the world has been gifted by Mandela’s presence on the global stage. Which is why I start by reminding Tribune readers that while this book is important in discussing a massively significant and historic man it is also the work of a significant and courageous Labour politician of the left.

There have been previous biographies as well as Nelson Mandela’s own autobiography which he started in scribbled notes smuggled from Robben Island jail. Yet this biography is special for a number of reasons. It contains new material and additional research; it is well written in an easy style attractive to a wide audience and is superbly illustrated with new images of Mandela as he moved along that extraordinary, turbulent and historic road that led to the overthrow of a criminally cruel regime. Few, if any, contemporary stories can compete with Mandela’s march against what sometimes seemed impossible odds.

In his introduction Archbishop Desmond Tutu refers to his friend in these terms: “While in prison Mandela grew in stature. The 27 years were a crucible that helped to remove the dross, turning a young angry activist into a magnanimous icon who amazed the world with his generosity of spirit, free from bitterness; he inspired his people to walk the path of forgiveness and reconciliation rather than revenge and retribution.” That, briefly, is the story Hain now describes.

He takes us along the path of Mandela’s earliest influences and early education; his reading of Marxist books as he aspired to a legal career to equip his fight to liberate his people. We travel through the early tensions as the ANC developed with its Communist Party links and the contradictions in its struggle to find a credible strategy. We glean  fresh insights into the birth of the evil apartheid laws as they grew from a combination of white prejudice, material greed, blind stupidity and fear along with sheer cruelty by individual white leaders. We tour Mandela’s tortured private life, his attempt to build a happy marriage with Winnie and those long years in prison – where he endured torture and brutalities that can be likened to Nazi conduct in the concentration camps – that came near to destroying both their lives. Then the extraordinary turnaround at the end of 1989 when de Klerk amazed the world by freeing Mandela and opening the gates for the abolition of apartheid and the formation of a new South Africa. No matter how often repeated, the Mandela story remains  riveting reading.

There are still massive problems in South Africa, now under its  second successor to Mandela’s historic presidency. There are immense difficulties as this young nation struggles to contain  corruption, crime, political inexperience and therefore incompetence. Mandela himself, as well as his successors, draw criticism. Yet the real future, as Gordon Brown noted in his recent  African tour, is only just beginning for this fledgling nation  inspired by its founder.

His critics will doubtless continue their often malicious search for his flaws and taunt us with some notional imperfections.     But nothing can ever remove Mandela’s contribution to the global march against perfidy. In a world so empty of great leaders he remains imperiously standing out on his own.

But having won in 1997 on the back of virulent hostility to the Tories, Blair in two further elections then achieved the biggest loss of voters of any party in modern times.

The Labour vote collapsed by almost four million from 13.5 million in 1997 to just 9.6 million in 2005. For someone who was such a monumental failure to claim any credibility in predicting political success takes one’s breath away – like someone who’s engineered a train crash lecturing on how to cut the accident rate.

Even leaving that aside (which I wouldn’t), his constant refrain that the party will lose if it resorts to its ‘comfort zone’ is a non-sequitur that flies in the face of all the evidence. Of course Labour has got to win substantial support from the middle class and from voters in the south of England – everyone knows and accepts that. But equally if Labour ignores, spurns and repudiates its own natural voting base, it will assuredly be consigned to electoral oblivion. It’s the balance between these two not incompatible principles that’s at issue.

The figures from the last four elections tell a very different story from the fiction constantly being peddled by Blair et al. We didn’t lose the election in 2010 because we sacrificed the support of the middle classes (defined by the voting surveys as ABC1), but because we sacrificed the support of the working class and those so poor as to be dependent on the State long-term (the C2DE classes). In 1997 Labour won 31% of the ABC1 vote, and still retained 26% of it in 2010.

But at the other end of the scale, having won 59% of the C2DE vote in 1997, Labour could win only 40% of it in 2010 – a disastrous slump of 19%. Or put it another way: in terms of actual votes, Labour lost just 0.5 million AB voters since 1997, but a whopping 3.2 million C2DE voters.

Then we are told in the Guardian last week that David Miliband would pose the greatest threat to the Tories. How convenient for David that this alleged private remark of David Cameron’s has hit the headlines, via an unidentified ‘well-placed’ source, just a few days before voting starts for the Labour leadership. It is, of course, the oldest trick in the political book – ever since the children’s story of Brer Rabbit and the Fox and the briar bush – to pretend when one is under threat that the one thing the political enemy fears most is X (in this case a vote for Miliband Senior) in order to get gullible supporters (or foxes) to do precisely that. Only later – if at all – do they find out that it was just a ruse to escape a threat, or win an election.

But even if Cameron did make the remark attributed to him (which is highly unlikely), that David Miliband stood the best chance of reaching out to middle Britain, the comment is way off the mark.
Who now is middle Britain anyway? There is a serious misperception that it reflects people such as teachers, managers, doctors, architects, surveyors, stockbrokers, who are largely in the £50,000-£100,000-plus income bracket.   But the average wage in Britain today is £24,000, and 90% of people in the UK earn less than £40,000 a year. They are far more concerned with making ends meet in a climate of austerity, where the deep cuts being imposed haven’t even started yet to bite, than  the lofty aspirational images of Blairite propaganda would have us believe.

The Blairite picture is a fantasy, fabricated for one purpose only – to preserve its failing hold over the party, even though the actual evidence from the last four elections exposes it as a complete canard.

There is one silver lining though. To be attacked by Blair and Mandelson, who led Labour down an electoral cul-de-sac for 13 years and frittered away the unique once-in-a-century opportunity that the victory in 1997 represented, can only be the strongest recommendation that one is on the right course and should stick to one’s guns.

Michael Meacher has been Labour MP for the Oldham West constituency (now Oldham West and Royton) since 1970

Not, I hasten to add, that my life is dreadful today, let alone that I’ve given up hope for the future, still less that I think I can turn the clock back. But recognising that some of life’s past highs are unrepeatable and remembering them with fondness are not in themselves pathological symptoms. On the contrary, the person who feels that there is nothing worth looking back on with yearning is surely as miserable as the person who feels that there is nothing to look forward to.

As in life, so in politics. This week Peter Mandelson caused a minor stir with his remarks to The Times, warning of the danger that Ed Miliband as Labour leader would somehow create a “pre-New Labour future for the party” and dismissing “people of a certain age like Neil Kinnock and Roy Hattersley” whose support for Miliband junior was the result of their wanting to
“hark back to a previous age”. Paradoxically, however, that’s just what he was doing himself.

What he was talking about was Ed Miliband’s argument that Labour’s highest immediate priority in electoral terms is to win back the support of working-class voters, outlined in a Fabian essay last month. Mandelson believes that Labour needs instead to appeal to a cross-class coalition of voters.

For what it’s worth, I think both Miliband and Mandelson are right. On the one hand, the so-far scanty data show that Labour’s loss of support between 1997 and 2010 was proportionately greater among manual working-class voters (the C2DEs) than among clerical workers, managers, professionals and executives (the ABC1s). On the other, the manual working class thus defined is a declining proportion of the population as a whole and Labour has never won a general election by concentrating its efforts solely on attracting its members.

The real argument here is not about whether to reconstruct a winning electoral coalition but about how. Ed Miliband thinks Labour can gain from an explicitly redistributionist message (a permanent 50 per cent top rate of income tax, a high pay commission on top salaries, a living wage); Mandelson thinks such measures would scare off rich and, more importantly, wannabe-rich voters.

Being of a certain age, I recognise this disagreement from long ago – the aftermath of the 1992 general election, which Labour lost after promising (very modest) income tax increases on higher earners to pay for (very modest) income tax cuts for lower earners and (very modest) increases in key areas of public spending.  Rightly or wrongly, these promises were blamed by the party leadership for the election defeat – and well before Tony Blair became leader and inaugurated the age of New Labour, they had been unceremoniously dropped.

Of course, Labour won in 1997 promising “no new taxes”, and bliss it was in that dawn to be alive for every Labour supporter. I hark back to it myself and so, even more, does Peter Mandelson.
There’s nothing wrong with that in itself, nor is there anything wrong with arguing that Labour today can learn from the 1980s and 1990s. But we’re not where we were then. What was toxic about Labour in the 1980s and still toxic in 1992 is not, on the whole, what is toxic today. Then it was the legacy of the inflation and union militancy that undid the 1970s governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, the continuing fallout from Labour’s bitter early-1980s left-right schisms over Europe, defence and economic policy, the general air of incompetence around the party.

Today, like it or not, it is parts of New Labour’s record that need to be flushed out: the culture of spin and the poisonous personal rivalries of the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown years, Iraq, MPs’ expenses, loans for peerages and, yes, the ever-increasing inequality that led so many onetime Labour voters to believe that the party had abandoned them while indulging the rich.

To suggest that Labour needs to go beyond reheating the leftovers from the 1990s and early 2000s is not to retreat into old Labour sentimentalism but to begin to face up to reality. Mandelson is not only part of the problem but, in his insistence that Labour should simply be accentuating the positives of its 13 years in office, much more of a nostalgic than those he berates.

A period of silence on his part would be welcome.

The weakness of the old approach was demonstrated in the Academy Bill debates. Shadow ministers accurately charted the reversal of policy involved in snatching high-performing schools. They made capital out of the undemocratic way the bill was rushed through and the aim of giving the Secretary of State control over academies through control of finances. Ultimately, though, most people cannot tell the difference between a Tory academy and a Labour one.

The key innovation in Michael Gove’s bill is the unlimited power given to the Secretary of State over schools. This has not been effectively opposed because there is no commitment to reduce the power of the Secretary of State by a future Labour government. Local democracy over schools is off the agenda. Thus the direction of travel has been identical for the past 25 years – and because of this Labour remains unable to get back its poll lead on education.

Exam reform has been scarred by political intervention since the 1980s. To be fair, Labour came to recognise that this was destroying public confidence in the exams system, with Ed Balls setting up an independent regulator, the Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation. But Ofqual failed to gain the public’s trust and there was no outcry when Kathleen Tattershall resigned as head of the exam watchdog over Gove’s plans for political intervention.

Now the coalition’s Education Secretary has exam reform in his sights. He is virtually unopposed over the IGCSE at 16 plus and a return to traditional A-Levels at 18 plus. Labour has failed to make an effective response and it was left to Oxbridge to outline the shortcomings of these half-baked plans. Labour remains hamstrung by its record of political intervention in the exams system, contributing to what the head of the Office of Fair Access described as “grade inflation”.  The new leadership must take academic standards seriously.

Few things lost Gordon Brown’s Government more support over education than its attempt to float a work-based diploma as a replacement for A-Levels. In doing so, it withdrew support for the International Baccalaureate, destroyed the Advanced Extension Award and abandoned the pledge of the 2005 white paper to have an inquiry into the A-Level exam in 2008. The inquiry was postponed until 2013 – sowing suspicion over Labour’s intentions – and will now not happen.

Every time that Jim Knight as schools minister stood up to claim the diploma was worth more than three-and-a-half A levels and that every vocational qualification was of equal or more worth than existing academic GCSE or A-Level exams, Labour lost credibility. The Tories were able to pose as the defenders of academic education. But academic education is a socialist cause and it is inverted snobbery to claim the contrary.

Labour still does not see that exams are an Achilles heel for both parties. Central intervention, in particular the modularisation of GCSE and A-Level exams to break them into bite-sized chunks, the pressure to achieve ludicrous university admissions targets and the failure to back apprenticeships properly because diplomas dominated its thinking all contributed to Labour’s failure. The party should accept the past decade was a disaster for exams and pledge to reverse the direction of travel on exam reform. This can no longer be driven by the whims of Westminster politicians.

Gove is as likely to prove a disaster on exam reform as elsewhere, but a paradigm shift will be needed to exploit his flaws. The tendency has been to accept the Thatcher programmes in their essentials. Continuing the line of advance set down by the 1988 Education Act would be a huge mistake.

Labour cannot oppose Gove effectively unless it alters its own course. Exams will be crucial to this, and Labour must take control of exam reform away from the Secretary of State. As the leadership campaign enters its final weeks, the contenders will need to embrace the necessary paradigm shift needed and proclaim that exams must no longer be a political football.

Trevor Fisher is a member of the Socialist Education Association and editor of its journal, Education Politics

* * *

Can you really run a state school for a profit? Education Secretary Michael Gove seems to think so. However, what Gove has either ignored or missed is that, in the United States, for-profit charter schools have been a huge disaster for the children in the cities where they were first imposed.

In 1997, the US Congress passed the Charter Schools Act – forcing local school districts to allow private enterprise to take over or set up schools. The justification for this was that the competition of “market pressures” would force both public schools and charter schools to perform well and deliver a quality product.

The record shows otherwise. For example, in Michigan, more than 75 per cent of charter schools are run by for-profit companies. While these schools are funded with public money, the public does not control them. Since these schools are run by private companies, they don’t have to reveal how they have used their money or how much profit they have made. As far as local communities are concerned, the schools are no more than big holes into which money gets poured.

Companies such as Edison are adept at finding ways to make a profit. Schools set up shop in abandoned premises, including supermarkets, large office complexes and old school buildings. These buildings are often owned or leased by a management company that is owned by the for-profit charter school company. The charter school, run by the same firm, gets state education money for each student – some $9,000 a year in the state of Michigan. The school then pays the management company hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in rent.

The educational quality in most cases is worse than in the public schools. In 2007, students at the charter schools in the Detroit area scored lower than Detroit public school students in the Michigan statewide test.

How could it be otherwise? The profit taken out of these schools is money not spent on the education of students. So for-profit schools end up having a high number of unqualified teachers; a high turnover rate, with sometimes several teachers teaching the same class in a school year; and even classes taught by a string of temporary service employees.

It was recently confirmed that in the 10 schools run by one company, Charter School Administrative Services, 62 per cent of teachers were unqualified. This is a private company which received more than $40 million from the state of Michigan in 2008. This is money that did not go to the public schools. And that is just one company, 10 schools. There are more than 200 charter schools in Michigan alone.

Even more worryingly, a recent report from the Civil Rights Project at the University of California in Los Angeles found that nearly 80 per cent of Michigan’s black charter school students attend intensely segregated minority schools. Why does this matter? Research shows that attending racially diverse schools significantly improves students’ academic achievement, graduation and college attendance rates. In 2007 the US Supreme Court held that, along with achieving diversity, reducing the racial isolation of students of colour in schools is a compelling state interest. Yet black and Latino students attending charter schools are more often typically in schools where 90 cent or more students are non-white than are their counterparts in traditional public schools.

Some years ago, the now notorious Lehman Brothers issued a report predicting: “The education industry may replace healthcare as the focus industry.” In the US, that’s exactly what for-profit charter schools are: private industry taking over public education, squeezing out all the profit they can and leaving children with a far worse education.  Is this really what “progressive” Tory education policy looks like?

Mike Ion is a former deputy head teacher

* * *

The Government started to dismantle the national education system and intends local government to have little or no involvement in education. We have already seen plans to build new schools abandoned, all schools invited to become independent and development work on new qualifications abandoned.

Parents will find it increasingly difficult to find local school places for their children as admissions become a free-for-all. Meanwhile, teachers’ national pay and conditions will be replaced by schools deciding their own arrangements. The national curriculum is at risk. Things that help poorer children to achieve, such as the extension of free school meals, will be withdrawn, because ministers regard them as social engineering. Even careers advice is under threat, as it not regarded as valuable.

Labour needs to set out its educational policy as a matter of urgency. Ending the love-in with academy schools and selection where it remains would be a good start. Most importantly, the party must guarantee all children the education that will maximise their life chances.

Labour should propose no primary school class over 25 and all class sizes reduced to 20 by 2020. Education for 14-19-year-olds should become the responsibility of the government department for business, skills and universities so that all students can benefit from combining academic and vocational learning instead of seeing them as separate routes and having to choose between them. Funding should follow the student, with further education colleges and schools funded on the same basis.

Apprenticeships should be regarded as part of the educational system. Where appropriate, higher education should work with employers to help develop and deliver content.

University education must work more closely with employers and offer greater flexibility, thereby extending opportunities to a wider range of people who may wish to attend later in life or part-time. The student loan system should go and be replaced with a graduate tax paid when students’ earnings reach a certain level – but only paid for a limited time to reflect the cost of the course. The school building programme should be reinstated and include FE colleges. There should be no return to the Private Finance Initiative or a quango like Building Schools for the Future.

All schools and colleges must be adequately funded and accountable for their performance. Labour’s priority has to be high standards for everyone, with government intervention if necessary. The purpose of that intervention is to work with schools and college to address any lack of achievement by students.

The examination system needs major changes. GCSE and A-Level examinations must be modernised.  Early years provision needs to remain universal, but a later start to formal schooling would bring us into line with the rest of Europe. While lifelong education is still seen as a minority interest, many adults wish to develop new skills. Diplomas should be extended to include adults instead of being as seen as a 14-19 qualification. Ways should be found to provide financial support to help adults who want to add to their qualifications, especially those who missed out at school.

This is a way to beat the recession and avoid a situation where many of the most qualified generation of school students cannot go to university because there are insufficient places.

Labour must develop a vision for education to benefit the whole country. That would transform its chances of winning the next general election. So far, there is little sign of that happening.

Graham Lane is a former chair of the Local Government Association’s education committee

The manifesto included a full page picture of Debbie Scott, now Baroness Stedman-Scott after being ennobled in the coalition’s first list of peers. The arrangement was agreed with the Tories after David Cameron, as Leader of the Opposition, put Ms Scott forward for a peerage. At the time she insisted that her party connection would not affect the charity’s independence. She told Third Sector Review magazine: “We will continue to work across all parties to feed in potential solutions. I will do everything in my power to make sure Tomorrow’s People’s integrity is not compromised.”

However, without the charity’s trustees seeing the final details, Debbie Scott provided quotes and a picture of herself for the Tory manifesto in April. The charity has since complained to the Conservatives about alterations to the text and the prominence given to her words which, they insist, was changed “without their knowledge or consent”.

The Charity Commission says the trustees failed to discharge their duties and the charity compromised its independence by appearing to endorse Tory policies. It says its contribution could be seen as endorsing wider policies and condemns its “novel and high risk” approach by delegating the detail of the deal to subordinates, so the full board never saw the final version of its contribution.

In a statement the charity said: “Tomorrow’s People accepts the Charity Commission’s position on this matter and has since put in place more robust processes to ensure that the Commission’s guidelines are met”

Mr Livingstone, who is running against Oona King, Seton During and Emmanuel Okoro to become Labour candidate for Mayor of London in 2012, said: “The scale of the government’s cuts is truly breathtaking. London stands to lose £45 billion – that’s £5,625 for every Londoner. These cuts go far beyond Margaret Thatcher’s wildest dreams and threaten to inflict poverty and division on an unimaginable scale.

“It is vital that Labour’s candidate for Mayor sets out a progressive alternative to these cuts and does not accept the Tories’ agenda.

“We need a candidate who can stand up to Boris Johnson and David Cameron because Boris Johnson fought tooth and nail to get the Conservatives into Downing Street. The government’s cuts are his cuts.”

He added: “Thanks to Boris and Cameron, in London 126,000 children will miss out on the Child Trust Fund, 140,000 mothers-to-be will lose their Health in Pregnancy grant and thousands of young Londoners will lose much needed help and support to find work now that the Future Jobs Fund has been axed.

“I will stand up for Londoners and defend the investment that delivers vital public services – from Sure Start centres to Safer Neighbourhood police teams.”

After a long, hard summer spent campaigning with the other candidates at hustings up and down the country, as well as speaking at Constituency Labour Party and trade union meetings and giving dozens of media interviews, most of the talking is over and the voting has started.

David Miliband appears to be just ahead, on first preference votes as well as nominations from CLPs and Labour MPs, which is why his supporters believe he will win. Ed’s team, on the other hand, thinks he will come through on the basis of second preference votes. Under party rules, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated until one has a simple majority of more than 50 per cent of the total votes cast.

The publication of Tony Blair’s memoirs threw a stone into the political pond. But Mr Blair – and Lord Mandelson – seemed unclear as to whether their endorsement of David Miliband would be a help or a hindrance to their protégé. Meanwhile, Ed Miliband positioned himself very clearly to the left of his brother in an article in The Observer.

Ed Balls, the Shadow Secretary of State for Education, and the candidate who has spent most time since the election directly taking on the Tories, put down a marker to be the next Labour Chancellor with a powerful speech on the economy.

Speaking at Bloomberg, on the same platform as George Osborne a week before, he said: “I believe that – by ripping away the foundation of growth and jobs in Britain – David Cameron, Nick Clegg and George Osborne are not only leaving us badly exposed to the new economic storm that is coming, but are undermining the very goals of market stability and deficit reduction which their policies are designed to achieve.”

He attacked the Tory-Lib Dem policy of “cutting billions of pounds from public services and taking billions of pounds out of family budgets this financial year and next” as “not just unfair, but both unnecessary and economically unsafe.”

Raising the ghosts of “Keynes in 1925 and 1931 and Alan Walters in 1990”, he said Mr Osborne’s plans have “about as much economic credibility as a pyramid selling scheme”.

Mr Balls added: “On the grounds of prosperity and fairness Labour needs a credible and medium term plan to reduce the deficit and reduce our level of national debt, but only once growth is fully secured and over a markedly longer period than George Osborne is planning” and set out “the building blocks of an alternative economic strategy rooted in economic history as well as our country’s shared values”.

Voting in the electoral college – split into thirds between party members, MPs and trade union levy payers – began on September 1. The winner will be announced on September 25, on the eve of this year’s Labour Party conference in Manchester.