Taking over Labour
Labours Old and New: The Labour Party 1970-79 and the roots of New
Labour
By Stephen Meredith
Published by Manchester University Press, 2008, £55
Reviewed by Tony Mulhearn
THIS REVIEW was a challenge. How do you dig up
anything new about New Labour? They appeared invincible, the new masters
of the universe, then the subprime mortgage crisis, and the London
mayoral and local election results signalled an explosion in the face of
the Blair/Brown project.
One of a series of academic works on the labour
movement from Manchester University, the editor predictably questions
whether the working class, socialism and the labour movement are
politically and historically redundant. Recent industrial action by
teachers, lecturers, oil workers and civil servants eloquently answers
that question.
Stephen Meredith examines the roots of New Labour,
the role of the reformist left in the Labour Party and, broadly, the two
wings of the right which he defines as the consolidators (around Anthony
Crosland and James Callaghan), and the revisionist right (led by Hugh
Gaitskell and, later, Roy Jenkins). He digs deep into Labour’s history,
revealing in incisive detail the existence of a deeply embedded trend
that favoured free-market capitalism. He describes the rupture of the
post-war consensus between capital and labour which hitherto had
accepted – reluctantly by the former, enthusiastically by the latter –
Keynesian policies (public expenditure and nationalisation of key
utilities) as a means of rebuilding Britain’s shattered economy.
The conflict between the two strands of the right is
viewed through the prism of the European Economic Community (or Common
Market, the forerunner of the EU). This was supported by the
revisionists, so-called because of their unalloyed hostility to public
expenditure and nationalisation, and who favoured legislation to
restrict trade union action, and the reformist right which supported the
‘mixed’ capitalist economy and drew back from trade union legislation,
which it opposed ideologically. The reformists also recognised the
almighty battle that would ensue if they took on the unions, and which
would end with probable defeat by party conference.
The author focuses on four distinct periods in
Labour’s evolution. Firstly, the attempt after the defeat in the 1959
general election by Labour leader Gaitskell to get rid of Clause 4 (for
nationalisation) from Labour’s constitution on the specious basis that
nationalisation was ‘unpopular’. This confirms the existence of a
pro-market, pro-big business strand of thought which, since the open
betrayal of Ramsey McDonald in 1931, had existed in the Parliamentary
Labour Party (PLP) and the tops of the trade unions since the party
became a mass force. This strand’s influence waxed and waned depending
on the relationship of forces between capital and labour.
Secondly, the attempt by Labour prime minister
Harold Wilson to impose legislation on the trade unions – outlined in
the 1969 white paper, In Place of Strife – which was fully supported by
the revisionists led by Jenkins, even at that stage an advocate of
pro-market policies that anticipated the monetarist and neo-liberal
policies embraced by the Labour leaders in the 1980s and 1990s.
Reflecting the pressure of rank-and-file trade union and party members,
and with the balance of forces still favouring the working class, the
right-wing consolidators uneasily blocked with the trade union leaders
and forced Wilson to retreat.
Thirdly, right-wing support for the Common Market.
This provoked huge and fundamental fissures within Labour’s ranks, with
Jenkins leading 69 Labour MPs to vote with the Tories in 1971 thus
gifting Ted Heath’s government success in a parliamentary vote in favour
of Britain’s entry. In the eyes of a still-confident labour movement,
Jenkins’ action was viewed as rank treachery, and wrecked any chance of
him ever becoming Labour leader.
The fourth period focused on revisionist hostility
to any increase in public expenditure, which was particularly pronounced
during the mid-1970s when Britain had declined as a world power and was
dubbed the ‘sick man of Europe’. The pressure of big business was
reflected inside the PLP through the right-wingers who demanded cuts in
public expenditure. The International Monetary Fund made the same
demands. Callaghan, Labour prime minister from 1976-79, and his
chancellor, Denis Healey, when faced with the possibility of throwing
down the gauntlet to the IMF and mobilising the working class in defence
of the Labour government’s limited programme of reforms, chose to submit
to the IMF and implement cuts in social spending. This retreat
inaugurated the monetarist policies that were subsequently taken much
further by Margaret Thatcher, who rode to power on the back of Callaghan
and Healey’s capitulation.
The book is shot through with turgid and often
incomprehensible language, revealing the continuing attempts by the
pro-capitalist right to mask their main objective of freeing capitalism
from the restraints imposed by the organised labour movement. It is also
a treasure trove for collectors of Orwellian doublespeak. For instance,
one source used, A Socialist Case for Joining the EEC, is a speech by
then Labour MP David (now Lord) Owen, future leader of the Social
Democratic Party. Another is Gaitskell’s Campaign for Democratic
Socialism, the object of which was to establish the pre-eminence of the
free market. Then there was the Manifesto Group which admitted it
adopted the name because it opposed Labour’s ‘left-wing manifesto’ of
1974.
But it is the trade unions that are "perceived by
the future New Labour modernisers as representative of some of the worst
excesses of old Labour governance". The author poses the question: "To
what extent does it support the claim that it was the trade union
question that formed the ‘crucial subtext’ of the departure of the
Social Democratic Alliance [MPs led by Jenkins and Owen who split from
Labour]?"
Callaghan, Crosland and Healey, etc, recognised the
pivotal role of the trade union leaders in maintaining the structures of
the party both financially and as a conservative ballast against the
‘wild men’ of the constituency Labour Parties. Although they would have
preferred legislation to control the ‘excesses’ of the trade union rank
and file, they knew they would face defeat at party conference. In
contrast, the hard right in the Labour leadership were ideologically
convinced that legal control of the trade unions was a key element in
reviving the fortunes of British capitalism.
This issue was played out with Wilson’s failed
attempt at shackling the unions through to the aborted Tory Industrial
Relations Act of 1972. Coming to power again after a wave of industrial
struggle, Wilson repealed the act in 1974. It was then re-imposed in a
more draconian form when Thatcher took office.
Dick Taverne, a right-winger who openly broke with
Labour when he stood as an independent in Lincoln in 1972, summed up
their outlook. Leaving Labour, he said, "had as much to do with the
attitude to the unions as it did with the Common Market". As an MP for a
"very strong left-wing trade union constituency", he said that his
support for In Place of Strife "made them [the unions] very bitter
towards me".
Such constituency parties, of course, have long been
either closed down or purged by the Blair/Brown bureaucracy. They
continually boast that, having retained Thatcher’s laws, Britain’s trade
unions are the most regulated in the western world.
The book, while studiously avoiding any reference to
Militant, describes the emergence of Tony Benn as a tribune of the left,
rule changes to facilitate the removal of MPs by their local parties,
and the transfer of the power to elect the party leader from the PLP to
the party conference, with the trade union bloc vote being a decisive
factor in the process. These developments towards the left finally
pushed the right-wing strands to coalesce into a bloc which eventually
declared the creation of a new formation, the Social Democratic
Alliance.
It is not the purpose of this study to analyse the
Kinnock/Blair/Brown impact on the Labour Party, which is already well
documented. Suffice it to say that the position of the neo-liberals was
enormously strengthened by the decisive shift in the balance of forces
in favour of capitalism following the defeat of the miners’ strike of
1984-85, the isolation and eventual defeat in 1987 of the Liverpool 47
councillors (led by Militant, the predecessor of the Socialist Party),
and the collapse of the smokestack industries.
These events were compounded by the witch-hunt in
the Labour Party of Militant supporters, led by Neil (now Baron) Kinnock
in collaboration with the trade union leaders, through their appointed
hit-men, Tom (now Lord) Sawyer and Peter Kilfoyle, who wielded the
knife. Kilfoyle later manoeuvred through the selection procedure to take
over the seat left vacant by the death of Eric Heffer, the left-wing MP
for Liverpool Walton. Thus, the hitherto minority trend that supports
free-market capitalism (first monetarism, later neo-liberalism)
conquered the very pinnacle of working-class representation and
transformed Labour into a tool for the enrichment of the capitalist
class.
This book explains the methods the strategists of
capitalism used to capture the Labour Party. It provides a tool for a
new generation of socialists to understand the methods capitalism will
adopt in its attempts to undermine the class integrity of a future new
mass workers’ party.
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