|
War on the home front
Tony Blair, in the role of special envoy to the US, has
travelled the world shoring up the war ‘coalition’. Under the cover of media
preoccupation with Afghanistan, the New Labour government has pursued its
privatisation programme and cuts in social spending. With an economic recession
looming, PETER TAAFFE looks at the situation facing Britain.
IN ALL CAPITALIST wars the government of the day invariably
bangs the drum of ‘national unity’ as a means of mobilising the population
for its war aims. Sure enough, Britain’s official parliamentary ‘opposition’,
the Tories, have fallen in behind the Blair government with almost military
precision, appropriate for a party now led by an ex-army junior officer. So it
also was in the Falklands/Malvinas conflict – where the Labour front bench led
by Michael Foot ultimately fell into line behind Margaret Thatcher’s
government – and in the Gulf and Balkans wars.
But never, perhaps, has the official ‘opposition’ been
more timid or supine than now: "Far from giving himself elbow room, IDS’s
[Iain Duncan Smith] shoulder was thrusting to push ahead of TB’s [Tony Blair’s]
in mutual bondage". (Hugo Young, The Guardian, London, 11 October 2001)
Charles Kennedy’s Liberal Democrats have also lined up behind Blair, albeit
with the usual ritualistic wringing of hands at the ‘humanitarian’ fall-out
of the Afghanistan war. Indeed, we have in Britain now a strong element of an
unofficial ‘national government’ in place.
Blair has also achieved, for a short time, the compliance of
right-wing national trade union leaders who waved the white flag over issues
such as privatisation at the recently truncated Labour Party and TUC
conferences. In parliament to begin with it was just lone voices, such as the
courageous left MP George Galloway, who attacked the war, warning that the
Moslem world ‘from Gaza to Jakarta’ would be inflamed and that the bombing
and military action in Afghanistan would create the conditions where ‘10,000
bin Ladens’ would arise.
Such warnings seemed to have as much effect as a drop of
water on a hot stove. However, the chorus of opposition has now been joined by
figures from the most unlikely quarters of the Parliamentary Labour Party. Paul
Marsden, who by no stretch of the imagination could be described as on the left,
attacked the brutal bombing campaign in Afghanistan and called for it to be
halted. This earned him a vitriolic dressing down by Chief Whip, Hilary
Armstrong, who compared those who opposed the war to the ‘appeasers of Hitler’
in the 1930s.
The storm of criticism with which this was met compelled
even Blair to repudiate the comparison and to give his benediction to opponents
of the war – Blair’s dog licence to dissent – as long as, of course, they
remain a tiny minority. However, it is not just Marsden but those in the
moderate and centre wing of the Labour party who have also questioned the ‘war
aims’ of the government and the US-led coalition. Peter Kilfoyle, right-wing
witch-hunter against socialists, Marxists and the left in the Liverpool Labour
Party in the 1980s, now busy painting himself as a left champion of the working
class, has also questioned the war.
They have been joined by a powerful extra-parliamentary
voice in the growing anti-war movement which is developing in Britain and,
surprisingly, by the daily tabloid newspaper, The Mirror, up to now a slavish
supporter of the government. The Mirror’s stance on the war is partly
motivated by a big shift in the views of its readers – a recent poll showed
that the majority of the British people now favour a pause in the bombing
campaign – and partly by the pique it feels at the grace and favour accorded
to its arch-rival, The Sun, by the Blairista spindoctors. (It was recently
revealed that Downing Street exclusively informed The Sun of the date of this
year’s general election before it was officially announced.)
Replying to Blair’s critics of the war as lacking ‘moral
fibre’ The Mirror declared: "New Labour does not like criticism. It
expects us to tow the line, agree with what it is doing and keep our questioning
minds firmly to ourselves". (29 October) It has re-employed the well-known
left-wing journalist, John Pilger, to write a searing indictment of the real
purposes of US and British imperialism’s aims in this conflict: "This war
is a fraud". The Mirror, while distancing itself from some of Pilger’s
criticisms, nevertheless attacked the idea that the bombing will eradicate
terrorism: "When the IRA started blowing up innocent people in Britain, we
did not react by sending fighter jets to Belfast".
It is not likely that The Mirror will remain constant in its
criticism of even some aspects of the war but the same will not be the case with
the British people. Dick Cheney, US vice-president, said that this is a ‘war
without end’. The main burden of this will be borne, as it already has, by
working-class people. The inevitable economic retrenchment, particularly in
government expenditure (apart from a bloated and increased military budget), is
a guarantee that opposition to the war will merge with resistance by
working-class people, the unions and the labour movement generally.
World economic prospects
IN THE RECENT past, chancellor Gordon Brown boasted that his
‘prudence’ and economic management had banished the capitalist ‘boom and
bust’ economic cycle, if not from the whole world then certainly from Britain’s
shores. But like king Canute, with the waves around his midriff, he was
compelled to declare at October’s New Labour conference: "No country can
insulate itself from the global economy". This has not stopped the National
Institute for Economic and Social Research picking up Brown’s discarded mantra
to claim: "The chancellor has achieved his aim of abolishing boom and bust
and that Britain is likely to emerge almost unscathed from the global economic
slowdown".
This is in the teeth of all the evidence to the contrary,
particularly the developments in the world economy, with big areas either
already mired in recession – the US and Japan – or moving into that
situation – Europe. The UN has warned of a "vicious circle of downward
adjustment" rippling out from the battered US economy to the rest of the
world. The European Union has cut its projected growth rate from 2.7% this year
to 1.8%. Japan is virtually stagnant. As the Financial Times reports: "The
Bank of Japan abandoned any hope that the world’s second largest economy will
grow this year and predicted instead it would shrink sharply while deflation
would last for at least two years". Industrial output fell by an annualised
rate of 12.7% in September, which on a year-on-year basis represents the largest
drop since May 1975. A similar situation is developing in Germany. The
International Monetary Fund in September expected that the advanced economies
would grow by only 1.3% this year and 2.1% next. These were predictions made
before the 11 September attacks in the US.
The US economy is key. The Economist baldly states:
"Economists now agree on something. Practically all of them now say that
the American economy is in recession. They could not make any other conclusion
against the background of a 5.8% loss in US output in the past 12 months, which
is already greater than the recession of 1990-91. Moreover, in September
industry’s capacity utilisation fell to 75.5%, its lowest since 1983".
This is a searing indictment of capitalism. The system is only capable of
operating by leaving almost 25% of productive potential idle.
"Profits have already taken a beating", with
reported profits of companies in the S&P 500 index falling by 60% in the
year to the second quarter. This leads The Economist to conclude: "Even
taking a four year quarter moving average, [profits] fell by 30%, the biggest
decline since the 1930s. This means that profits in the non-financial corporate
sector fell to 8.1% of gross domestic product in the second quarter, down from
12.5% in 1997".
Alarmingly from the point of view of the capitalists, The
Economist declares: "Even with a mild recession in America, this could
still turn out to be the most severe world recession since the 1930s. Such a
recession is commonly defined as an annual growth of less than 2%". As we
have seen, the IMF and many other bodies estimate that growth in the advanced
industrial countries will be less than 2%. Therefore, amongst capitalist
economists, the fact of a present recession and its repercussions in every part
of the globe is given.
Superimposed on this could come massive financial and
currency turmoil ignited by a default in Argentina. This would be similar to the
default in Russia in 1998, which triggered a worldwide financial crisis. Total
collapse was only prevented by the intervention of the US Federal Reserve. An
Argentinean default could trigger a similar situation in neighbouring Latin
American states and have a spiral effect throughout the world.
The seriousness of the situation has compelled even the most
orthodox capitalist economists to reassess and change their position. Thus The
Economist, ideological bulwark of the Thatcher-Reagan monetarist
counter-revolution in the 1980s – strict control of money supply, slashing
public expenditure, ‘letting the market rip’ – now states: "Keynes is
back in fashion". It unashamedly comes out for a boost in public
expenditure and tax cuts, not aimed primarily at the rich as Bush is doing, but
at boosting consumption: "Second tax cuts aimed at low earners are more
likely to be spent than handouts to the rich… income tax rebates are more
likely to be spent if they are permanent, temporary cuts tend to be saved".
It warns: "Keynes’s solution to the Great Depression was that governments
should even be willing to pay people to dig holes and fill them in again.
America should avoid such a deep slump, but its policy makers are in danger of
digging their own economic – and perhaps political – grave". (27
October)
However, Keynesian measures, priming the pump of increased
expenditure, have done nothing to extricate Japan from its economic abyss. Yet,
desperate conditions demand desperate measures. The world economy was in a
tailspin before 11 September but this event and the subsequent war have
enormously compounded its problems. The Gulf war knocked about 0.5% off world
economic growth and it is not excluded that the effects of this long drawn-out
‘war’ could be similar, if not worse.
Britain and the world
ALREADY THE US working class is paying a heavy price in the
fall out for 11 September and subsequent events. The AFL-CIO trade union
federation estimates that at least 527,000 workers have lost their jobs since
then, with half of the redundancies concentrated in the transport, hotel,
entertainment and tourism sectors. More than 100,000 New Yorkers lost their jobs
in the month after the attacks. This alone is bound to have a serious effect on
spending, which was already contracting before 11 September. The propensity of
the US consumer to spend, at the cost of savings, was a lifeline of the world
economy as the US became the market of last resort.
How then, against the background of the most serious
economic crisis for at least two decades, can the British economy escape?
Geographically, Britain may be an island but it is closely integrated into the
world and, particularly, US economies. Developments there have already struck a
savage blow at the British economy and at Brown’s expectations for the future,
although the full effects have not yet been felt.
Like Napoleon’s generals, Brown has been ‘lucky’ in
having been installed as chancellor during the 1990s boom. But that is all about
to change. It is true that third quarter growth was higher than expected and it
is possible that Brown’s growth forecasts of between 2.25% and 2.75% could
even be reached this year. But the idea that could be sustained beyond this year
is a chimera. Increased spending fuelled by climbing household debt and a slower
than previous decline in manufacturing industry, are the prime explanations for
this blip. This growth has been consumer driven, with household lending at a
ten-year high and savings at a 30-year low.
The shadow of growing redundancies will dramatically alter
this pattern. Moreover, manufacturing and exports are in the casualty
department, with manufacturing production having fallen for six successive
months. A recent survey by the CBI showed that export prospects were at a
21-year low. The engineering industry faces its "worst recession since the
early 1980s" (The Independent) with warnings of more than 300,000 job
losses over the next two years. Even members of the Bank of England’s Monetary
Policy Committee have suggested that a 10% devaluation of the pound is necessary
in order for Britain to compete, particularly in Europe. In a contracting
market, however, Britain’s rival capitalists and ‘the market’ are not
likely to accede to this. We will therefore see a further attrition, both
relatively and absolutely, in the economic position of British capitalism.
The economic after-effects of 11 September, coming on top of
floods and foot and mouth disease, will be keenly felt in Britain. The tourism,
hotel and leisure industries are already in crisis. Up to now, the decline of
industry has been compensated partially by the growth of ‘services’, the
financial expertise of the City and so on. In Britain’s two-speed economy
between mid-2000 and mid-2001, manufacturing output fell by 3% while services
grew by 3.4%. But the idea that services will offer a permanent lifeline to
compensate for the decline of manufacturing has been shattered by the CBI. It
has warned that huge job losses in Britain’s financial services industry will
accelerate dramatically over the next three months.
It is likely that employment will drop for the first time in
five years. Manufacturing and financial services make up one-fifth of the
economy. Moreover, Britain has benefited from outward investment, particularly
to the US, and from the inward investment of foreign capitalists. But the latter
has begun to dry up as the world economic climate for investment, particularly
abroad, has begun to change.
Impact on public spending
ALL OF THIS means that, rather than the rosy future painted
by Blair and his apologists, the British economy and the room for manoeuvre of
the Blair cabinet have been savagely reduced. This will have devastating effects
on the spending plans in key social fields which, in turn, will produce
political convulsions, which will put into the shade the opposition we have seen
so far, even within sanitised New Labour. Such have been the savage reductions
in public expenditure – now lower than under the last Tory prime minister,
John Major – that, rather than cutting immediately, Blair is frantically
urging ministers to spend the £6.8 billion allocated but not spent. Indeed,
last year government departments underspent by more than 3% of their collective
budgets, with shamefully the biggest shortfalls in areas such as schools,
hospitals and transport. The Department of Education "underspent by £5
billion, enough to pay for an extra 50,000 teachers, while the Department of
Health underspent by £500 million". (The Independent)
The cuts have gone so far that it is estimated that there
would have to be a 10% rise in spending and public services this year for all
the money already allocated to be used. What are the reasons for this? The cuts
culture in Whitehall – Brown and Blair’s fanaticism until now to out-Tory
the Tories in cuts – has led to a situation where "civil servants…
[are] unused to having such large sums at their disposal". Tell that to the
nursery workers and parents, hospital patients, teachers and kids in overcrowded
classrooms, and to those whose special needs facilities are being closed by
local authorities, that this is due to civil servants being organically
incapable of actually spending money, our money.
The idea that the government is going to bestow largesse on
local councils is a mirage. It is true that Brown did amass a cash mountain of
£19 billion – 2% of GDP – up to the financial year ending in March, due to
his ‘prudence’ (read savage cuts in public-sector services and jobs). During
the boom, government revenue was boosted by tax receipts by increased employment
but that will now be reversed. Indeed, in Labour’s first period of office,
revenue consistently exceeded budget forecasts. The opposite will be the case in
the next period.
Spending is now due to increase. Moreover, the government’s
contingency reserve of £2.8 billion has already been raided to pay for foot and
mouth compensation. In addition, the costs of the war could soar. This, together
with the slowing of the economy, means that a government surplus could swing
abruptly into an estimated £7.7 billion deficit next year. This deficit could
be lived with if the present economic downturn was temporary and significant
growth was expected in the future. But even Eddie George, governor of the Bank
of the England, is now warning of a prolonged, three-year downturn.
The government therefore faces a ballooning budget deficit
which could be resolved by increased taxes, which Brown flagged up in his Labour
Party conference speech; borrowing, which seems unlikely from this most ‘prudent’
of prudent chancellors; further restrictions on public spending; or, a
combination of these.
It is certain that the working class will be called upon to
foot the bill. Estimates already suggest that the ‘war against terrorism’
could cost Britain £13 billion and the "loss of more than 100,000 British
jobs before Christmas". (The Observer, 21 October) Thirty-six thousand jobs
have been lost since 11 September, including redundancies at Rolls Royce and BT,
with a predicted 75,000 jobs to be shed in the tourist industry. It is
conservatively estimated that it will cost each person in Britain £200 to
prosecute this war. That does not take into account the knock-on effects of job
losses, the drop in house prices (already starting), and cuts in housing,
education, health and social services.
Official unemployment has risen to over 1.5 million, a
53,000 increase in the three months to August and the biggest rise in more than
eight years. And the number of claimants masks the real unemployment figure. At
the same time, it is estimated that Britain now has "one of the least
generous benefit systems in the Western world. The ‘replacement rate’ –
the amount of income made up by the state when someone becomes jobless – for a
normal British family is about 18%. Compare that to Denmark where it is over
60%". (The Guardian, 1 October)
A recent report from the Audit Commission showed that
waiting times in Accident and Emergency departments are worse than when New
Labour came to power in 1997. This even led to The Mirror calling for the head
of arch-Blairite health secretary and ‘ex-Trotskyist’, Alan Milburn. Not
only is Milburn sanctifying a further undermining of the NHS by promoting the
discredited Private Finance Initiative but he has also attacked the ‘centralist’
legacy of Aneurin Bevan, who set up the NHS, for his alleged preoccupation with
‘nationalisation’.
The trickle of redundancies is now threatening to turn into
a flood, which will exert ferocious pressure on the government to take measures
to ameliorate the conditions of working people. For instance, the thousands of
redundancies in Derby represent the most savage attack on employment in that
town for a generation. In 1972, when Rolls Royce threatened to go bust, the Tory
government led by Ted Heath stepped in and nationalised the company in 24 hours.
It is a measure of how much to the right New Labour has moved that there is not
even a hint that such a radical measure could be taken today.
Yet, the division between rich and poor has never been
greater. London has some of the richest areas in Western Europe, but also some
of the poorest. A shocking picture has emerged from the first report by the
London Office of Children’s Rights Commissioner (ORC). This shows that 43% of
the 1.65 million children living in the capital live in poverty, a higher
proportion than in any other part of the country. More than a quarter of
schoolchildren in London are eligible for free school meals, rising to
two-thirds in some boroughs such as Tower Hamlets, higher than in any other
region of the country.
High property prices mean people spend a higher proportion
of their income on housing in the capital and elsewhere. A new health crisis
looms in the winter, particularly in hospitals, and one-quarter of general
practitioners are so overburdened that they want to quit ‘within five years’.
A crisis also exists in education, reflected in the
government’s hasty retreat over tuition fees in England and Wales. Stunned by
the anger on the doorstep during the general election, even Blair has now hinted
at following the example of the Scottish parliament and, probably, the Welsh
assembly in abolishing tuition fees and restoring the grant. However, all
indications are that this will be a partial retreat from tuition fees to a ‘graduation
tax’, in other words, deferred tuition fees.
Spin, sleaze & the growing opposition
THESE ISSUES, TOGETHER with the growing revolt against
privatisation – partially pushed into the background after 11 September –
will re-emerge in a sharp form in the next period even if the war continues.
Under the cover of war, the government attempted to bury ‘bad
news’, in the words of the unspeakable apparatchik, Jo Moore. This creature of
the Blairite counter-revolution has been a long-time hitwoman for the Labour
rightwing. Moore’s dark arts of ‘spindoctory’ were first honed in the
bureaucratic struggle she and her cohorts conducted against Militant supporters
and the left in the Labour student organisation in the 1970s and 1980s. She did
nothing new on 11 September to what she had done previously, that is, spin, lie
and vilify opponents on behalf of the New Labour hierarchy. Moore’s crime in
their eyes is not that she did what she did, seeking to exploit the fact that
people’s attention was concentrated on the World Trade Center tragedy to ‘bury’
unpopular New Labour decisions, but that she was caught out by a stupid e-mail.
Despite the attempts of the New Labour tops to say that this
incident has led to a line being drawn under their past methods, nothing could
be further from the truth. Because it has been built on a lie from the outset,
disguising its intention to destroy Old Labour and the struggle for socialism,
New Labour is compelled to carry on doing so. The bourgeoisification of the
Labour Party, pointed up by incidents like this, has also led to the evidence of
financial malpractice in the Geoffrey Robinson affair. This has now been
followed by the allegation that Henry McLeish, Labour leader of the Scottish
parliament, claimed expenses to which he was not entitled. In Labour’s
rightwing are the people who accused great fighters for socialism and the
working class, including the socialists and Marxists in Liverpool from 1983-87,
of corruption, ‘literal corruption’, in the words of Roy Hattersley.
Now, events are going to severely undermine the grip which
Blair has exercised in the 1990s. Already, within months of its re-election, the
government has performed more U-turns and body swerves than a circus acrobat.
Thatcher was ‘not for turning’. This led to her downfall when she refused to
abolish the poll tax, which Major promptly accomplished when he came to power.
However, this government is busy jettisoning every unpopular policy which it
introduced in its first term of office. Byers carried through the
renationalisation of Railtrack by the backdoor, earning himself the scorn of the
City for his ‘confiscatory’ measures in place of the plaudits which he
previously received.
The significance of this step should not be underestimated.
It marks the first breach in the 20-year programme of privatisation begun under
Thatcher. It is a ‘state capitalist’ rather than a socialist measure: Byers
has been compelled to rescue an industry ruined by the capitalists and will seek
to renovate it and sell it back to private owners at a later stage. But ‘the
appetite increases with eating’. How workers besieged by factory closures and
redundancies will view this action will be entirely different to the fat cats of
the City and the boardrooms.
There will be pressure to take over failing industries.
Labour MPs are now exerting pressure on the government to reconsider the recent
privatisation of air traffic control – the National Air Traffic Service (NATS)
– which is already facing collapse because of the contraction of the airline
industry following 11 September. However, the government is hell-bent on
proceeding with its programme of privatisation of London Underground, in local
authority services such as education, and in the health sector. The bust-up
which was temporarily averted at the TUC and Labour Party conferences will take
place in the next period. Local government workers are incensed at the savage
retrenchment programme which has been carried through, usually by Labour
councillors at local level.
Workers’ experiences of New Labour in office have resulted
in an unprecedented questioning of the links of the trade unions with the Labour
Party, as the Socialist Party predicted. This was underlined in a recent Labour
Research survey of 301 trade union branches on the links with Labour. Two-thirds
of the branches were affiliated to at least one Constituency Labour Party and
yet "the results displayed an unprecedented antipathy to the party the
unions created. Branches arguing for the links to be maintained and strengthened
were outnumbered almost three to one by respondents who criticised the way the
relationship is currently working".
Tameside Unison branch secretary, Noel Pine, comments:
"Locally, we have more privatisation under New Labour (housing and leisure
trusts, privatised care of the elderly) than the Tories". The comments of
Roy Gladden, secretary and convenor of the GMB’s 413 branch on Merseyside, are
highly significant. Although he was one of the 47 councillors who defied
Thatcher and the right-wing Labour leadership by carrying through an ‘illegal’
budget in Liverpool, he ended up supporting the rightwing, and Neil Kinnock in
particular, against the socialists and Marxists around Militant (now the
Socialist Party). He now says: "For the first time in my recollection I
have activists who supported Labour all their lives openly discussing whether
the unions should continue to give their political levy or any other financial
support to the party, locally or nationally".
This ‘questioning’ on the basis of the hammer blows of
the events workers are about to experience, will turn into a massive active
movement for the trade unions to break with right-wing, bourgeoisified Labour.
Already, the leader of the GMB, John Edmonds, has threatened that his union will
stand candidates against Labour. These verbal threats can be transformed into
action as it becomes clear that all the avenues previously open to the trade
unions for transforming the Labour Party have been dynamited away by the
Blairistas. Therefore, the struggle will be on to combat a form of ‘non-political
trade unionism’, which is a contradiction in terms, and link this inevitable
revolt with the idea of creating the basis for a new mass party of the working
class.
The opposition from below will, moreover, create schisms
even within the heavily Blairised and bureaucratised Labour Party. The fact that
the government has been pushed back on student fees, on the use of vouchers for
asylum seekers (albeit accompanied by an attempt to introduce identity cards,
which will be widened to the whole population if they are successful) and on
other issues will encourage more manifestations of open revolt and possibly
splits of groups of MPs from New Labour itself.
Norms of politics overturned
WAITING IN THE wings, as improbable as it may seem as an
alternative, is the Tory Party. The election of IDS has further driven a wedge
between the right and the ‘centre’ Clarkites. The latter wing of the party,
including Kenneth Clarke himself, has refused to serve in the shadow cabinet.
Their contempt for IDS is open, with one shadow cabinet member commenting to The
Guardian: "His pronouncements are half-baked, immature ideas. Iain is not
the sharpest knife in the drawer".
While IDS has attempted to present a more caring image –
for instance, supporting the abolition of the homophobic Section 28 and
outlawing the Tories’ right-wing, racist Monday Club – he and his party are
still cast in a decidedly right-wing mould. So much so that Hans Nicholls, a US
Republican, is scathing about the present Tory Party and its leadership.
Comparing Bush’s ‘compassionate conservatism’, now called ‘outreach
conservatism’, he shows that by electing Duncan Smith the Tory Party has
demonstrated that it is "averse to any sort of change – even the sort of
political evolution that is benefiting Bush". He shows that "to call
Bush a moderate would be as inaccurate as calling him articulate".
Nevertheless, Bush is surrounded by advisors who have compelled him to appeal to
parts of the former Democratic ‘constituency’ – minorities, Latinos,
African-Americans and, to a lesser extent, lesbians and gays.
There is no such hope that Duncan Smith’s Tory Party could
travel down the same round as Bush in the US. Nicholls compares the fate of
today’s Tory Party to that suffered by the Republican Party in California,
whose prospects are now so bleak that they are "busy recruiting the
Austrian-born Arnold Schwarzenegger to run for governor". Yet, such are the
political convulsions that could flow from the government’s failures,
resulting from the economic catastrophe which looms in Britain, it is not
entirely excluded that even a right-wing Tory Party led by Duncan Smith could
achieve the almost-impossible and come to power.
Peter Riddell in The Times pointed out: "The current
one-party domination of Labour will not last forever. It could be ended by
developments in the campaign against terrorism… and at some stage these
(discontent) will boil over into anger against the government". At the
moment, the Tories do not appear to be a viable alternative and, in fact, the
political arithmetic of elections means that they would need a huge swing to
come back to power. But 11 September has ushered in a disturbed period in which
the norms of politics have been thrown up in the air.
The Liberal Democrats hope to be able to benefit from the
split within the Tory party and the inevitable disenchantment with Labour. All
they need to do is stand still and they will appear to be on the ‘left’ to
disenchanted Labour supporters, such is the rightward evolution of Labour.
We have entered an unprecedented period of economic, social
and political turmoil. The seething discontent at the conditions which
working-class people face in Britain is partly smothered by the war but that
will not last forever. The very repercussions of the war will compel working
people to move into action to defend and change their conditions. The seeming
tranquillity of the 1990s is over once and forever. The broad consciousness of
the mass of the people has not yet caught up with objective reality. But that it
will do so, and in convulsive leaps, is certain. This has laid the basis for the
re-emergence of a broad anti-capitalist, anti-globalisation mood but with a
growing minority looking towards the ideas of socialism and Marxism. The
Socialist Party, which has rooted itself in key parts of the working class and
labour movement, is destined to play an important role, both in the growing
anti-war movement and in preparation for creating a mass socialist force that
can show a way out of the horrors of capitalism revealed by 11 September and its
aftermath.
|