"Immigration has become an important issue in this election and it is an issue that says a lot about how we feel about our country and what kind of country we want to live in. I want to play my part in building a Britain where we can all say: There is no more room for intolerance. There is no more room for racism. There is no room for bigotry or zenophobia. But there is more room for people who would like to come and live and work in this country.

 Immigrants have played a vital role in every single stage of the development of this nation: often times it has been immigration generated by the desires of our ruling classes to pull cheap labour from the rest of the world to benefit themselves. Every single step of every change, every progression, every success and every failure has been built with the foundation stones of immigration into these islands. To pretend otherwise is to utterly delude ourselves.

 I was reading the interesting NHS Blog Doctor and was struck by the latest round of debate about the various merits of private healthcare as opposed to "socialised" healthcare a la the NHS.

Readers of this blog might not be in need of any justification themselves for publically funded health care, but we should all be equipped with some facts and figures becauseincreasingly this argument is coming up, and is gaining currency even within circles that twenty years ago would not have dreamed of suggesting that profit should be anywhere near health care. This is the legacy of New Labour - now privatising the NHS isn't anathema.

While UNISON health delegates ponder their decision on the three year pay offer from health workers, the new issue of the Nursing Times is published today with details of their online survey.

It shows that 71% of the 2400 people who took part don't want this deal.

Obviously this is just a quick snapshot but given that band 5 nurses are amongst the groups who stand to do the best, it is indicative that healthworkers do recognise a pay cut when they see one.

I was carried through my night shift last night by the buzz from attending the demonstration to defend Karen Reissmann held in Manchester yesterday. It was a truly inspiring event - lively and loud.

Over one thousand people, by my estimate, came to join the march despite the rain and to shout and clap and sing in defence of the right of trade union activists to carry out their basic trade union duties of defending the jobs and services of their members.

Karen was suspended and has now been sacked by her employer and, unusually in these cases there isn't even the pretence of it being about anything other than trade union victimisation. Karen was sacked for speaking to the press in her capacity as a trade unionist against the privatisation of mental health services. In fact, her "offence" was to truthfully point out that voluntary sector organisations pay less well than the NHS and can therefore not attract the same highly experienced staff to stay with them.

I had the good fortune to be at the Barnet Fremantle workers' demonstration on Saturday 10th November. As well as a pleasant time meeting up with old and new friends, I found a great deal of inspiration in the struggle that these low-paid workers are waging against their “third-sector” employer.

The slogan of the dispute: Older People Matter, shows precisely how the struggle of workers for better terms and conditions at work and the struggle to win the public services that people need are complimentary and intertwined. Too often, the government portrays public sector workers as greedily taking money out of public service delivery – just look at the coverage over health service pay rises or public sector pensions.

Despite the fact that it was his birthday and not mine, Nick bought me a lovely present that arrived today in the post. Its a t-shirt demonstrating through flow-charts the difference between science and faith. I've made that sound much duller than it is. Its actually pretty funny.

Anyway, I wore said shirt as we went out to Nick's birthday dinner tonight and it provoked much discussion from the kids who both wanted to work their way through each flowchart and were very pleased with the "science" one.

Gregory then said somewhat out of the blue "I don't like Christians. Not just because they are so barmy wrong, but also because they make it look like men are superior to women."

It's Nick's birthday today. Not necessarily a big turning point in the class struggle, but nonetheless a little thing for us to celebrate.

I've been feeling increasingly miserable as the day has worn on and the prospects of John McDonnell making it onto the ballot paper receded further and further away. And having sat down at the computer several times to blog something about it, I've struggled to think of how to express how much I've been mourning the loss of what the campaign could have been like.

But then I thought, screw that.

I'm not going to be sad, I'm going to be bloody angry. Right here is the relaunch for the Campaign For Labour Party Democracy and the Labour Representation Committee rolled into one. We have been disenfranchised in the determination of who the leader of our Party will be. What clearer example could there be of the need for a revolution in working class representation?

Dave Anderson, Bob Marshall-Andrews and John Austin all profess to be members of the Socialist Campaign Group, but have nevertheless nominated Gordon Brown in the upcoming leadership contest in the Labour Party.

What is the point of them being part of a minority organisation that exists to push the PLP to the left and bring some socialist priniciples back to parliamentary politics if they are simply going to join the herd of Labour MPs mooing their support of Gordon Brown's premiership?

Thankfully most of the rest of the Socialist Campaign Group have remembered why they joined that group in the first place and have declared their support for the left candidate, John McDonnell.