Britain’s
earthquake election
Consolidating the Corbyn revolution
In April Theresa May called
a snap general election with the Tories 20 points ahead in the polls –
expecting to win easily and to rout Labour. Then Jeremy Corbyn defied
Labour’s right wing and launched a radical anti-austerity manifesto. Now
May hangs by a thread, presiding over a split party in a minority
government – reeling from mounting anger at savage cut-backs epitomised
by the catastrophic Grenfell Tower fire. PETER TAAFFE writes.
Following the failure of Tory
prime minister Theresa May’s disastrous gamble to call a general
election, which was predicated on the assumption of the ‘inevitable’
crushing of Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party, the most popular dish in
Britain, certainly among bourgeois commentators and right-wing Labour,
is humble pie. In fact, there is a danger of a shortage, a run on the
shops which sell it!
From the beginning, the
Socialist Party said Corbyn could win on the basis of a radical
campaign. The Labour right and commentators spent two years vilifying
him – including during the election and after Labour’s poor results in
council elections on 4 May. They are now falling over themselves to
admit they were wrong. We are being treated to the nauseating spectacle
of hypocritical mea culpas from the likes of Polly Toynbee, whose
Guardian column supplied anti-Corbyn ammunition to the right wing of the
Labour Party. And from MPs like Harriet Harman and Owen Smith, the
defeated candidate in the second leadership challenge to Jeremy Corbyn.
Even Peter Mandelson, the
Blairite ‘prince of darkness’, congratulated Corbyn. Mandelson’s
‘master’ Tony Blair, however, has remained quiet so far, perhaps
conscious of the fact that his friend Bill Clinton commented when Corbyn
won the leadership that Labour had elected "the maddest person in the
room". The right are not motivated by principle or by a Damascene
conversion but by the lure of office, future rewards in a possible
Labour government. In addition, the most conscious right-wing figures
are well aware of their role as the ultimate guardians of capitalism
within the Labour Party. Not for nothing did Margaret Thatcher boast
that her greatest achievement was Blair, the organiser of the
counter-revolution against socialism and the left.
During the election campaign
Labour remained two parties in one, with the pro-bourgeois right wing
not letting up for a moment in their undermining of Corbyn. In fact,
there were two Labour campaigns. A number of Labour MPs and candidates
explicitly attacked Jeremy Corbyn. John Woodcock, MP for Barrow and
Furness, appealed for votes as a Labour candidate but specifically
opposed supporting Corbyn for prime minister. Another was Phil Wilson,
Labour candidate in Blair’s old Sedgefield constituency, who declared:
"People don’t like Corbyn; I don’t like Corbyn".
Others did not even mention
Corbyn or the Labour manifesto in their election literature. They were
preparing for the aftermath and the expected humiliation of Corbyn, when
they would be able to claim that it was purely their own efforts and
personal programme that guaranteed them success. Many of these
right-wing MPs, on the coat-tails of Corbyn’s radical manifesto, saw big
increases in their votes. The urge for unity is powerful in the labour
movement but it would be childishly naive to imagine that the right have
undergone a miraculous conversion to Corbynism and socialism.
Nor should the workers and
youth who enthusiastically backed Jeremy Corbyn pass over in silence the
scandalous sabotage by Labour’s headquarters machine, led by general
secretary Ian NcNicol and Tom Watson MP, Labour deputy leader. They
displayed unrelenting hostility towards candidates from the left, often
starving them of help and finance while showing gross favouritism and
bias toward the right-wing parliamentary candidates. The Labour
officialdom at national and local level is the same old Blairite
bureaucratic machine with a thin veneer of ‘radicalism’.
Manifesto game changer
The Socialist Party
energetically supported Corbyn, throwing in our resources and receiving
the thanks of Labour activists. We argued from the beginning that, if
Labour and Corbyn were to fight on a radical programme and manifesto of
consistent anti-austerity and socialism, it would find a huge response
among British people after more than a decade of brutal austerity. We
said that it could not be ruled out that Corbyn could win and a Labour
government brought to power.
Shadow chancellor John
McDonnell has argued correctly that, if the campaign had continued for a
few more weeks, Jeremy Corbyn would have crossed the finishing line as
the victor and would now be in power in 10 Downing Street. This is
confirmed by the post-election polls which show a dramatic increase for
Corbyn, who is now ahead of May and the Tories.
Our analysis was validated
and the gloomy prognostications – unfortunately from some trade union
leaders on the right, and the left as well – were ripped to shreds from
the moment that the manifesto was launched. It was a decisive moment, a
game changer. The promise to abolish tuition fees, particularly for
those who are starting university in September, ignited a youthquake,
with young people and workers turning out in mass rallies. Unprecedented
thousands attended, chanting like football crowds: "Oh Jeremy Corbyn!"
Indeed, a mass rally took place at Tranmere Rovers football ground in
Birkenhead, Merseyside.
Labour secured a dramatic
increase in support from young people with an estimated 63% voting for
Corbyn. They also provided the shock troops for a stepped-up campaign on
the doorstep. This support was particularly expressed through social
media which assumed a bigger importance in this election for Corbyn and
Labour, with an estimated 56% of voters consulting and participating on
Facebook. The Tories ascribed their victory over Ed Miliband in the 2015
general election to their more effective social media campaign, but the
tables were decisively turned this time with the mobilisation and
channelling of the energy of youth to help to secure the huge advance
for Corbyn.
Jeremy Corbyn has pointed out
that Labour added 3.5 million votes in this election, the best results
for Labour since 1945. Some of the individual results were nothing short
of spectacular. In Bristol West, for instance, the majority for the
Labour candidate, Thangam Debbonaire, was just 400 votes less than the
total number of votes Theresa May received in her own constituency!
London swung massively
against the Tories. The capital now occupies a similar position to New
York, where the Republicans have been reduced to a small minority.
Likewise, London has come out for Corbyn and Labour with just a few Tory
enclaves remaining. London is now a ‘tale of two cities’, one inhabited
by the rich and the other by a growing army of the poor and working
class that supplies the sweated labour to keep the city running. A
searing class polarisation exists between a handful of the rich – many
of them absentee foreign billionaires – living cheek by jowl, sometimes
separated by just a street, with the poor and working class who live in
unspeakable deprivation and poverty.

Deadly austerity
The terrible Grenfell Tower
fire has illuminated this perhaps even more than the general election
result itself – and has driven further nails into May’s coffin. The
tower stands in the Kensington constituency, in Britain’s richest
borough, and saw the election of a Labour MP for the first time just a
week before this disaster. The Labour candidate, Emma Dent Coad, had
campaigned against the scandalous Thatcherite housing record of the
Tory-dominated council.
This illustrates the
gathering mass opposition that exists on many issues in the capital,
particularly housing with unaffordable sky-high rents and ruthless
landlords. The election was the heat lightning flashes of the storm to
come. This has now taken place as a result of the creation of this
monstrous crematorium for workers and their families, including helpless
and terrified children.
It is no accident that the
rollcall of the dead – more accurately, of those killed by capitalist
neglect arising from the lust for easy profits by ‘developers’ and their
cronies at national and local government level – is made up in the main
of immigrants and people of colour from the very poorest backgrounds.
Moreover, the outpouring of sympathy and solidarity in the wake of the
tragedy – not to say, the selfless heroism of the firefighters – has
given the lie to the capitalist myth that working people are too
selfish, narrow minded and impervious to the message of socialism, of
the working class banding together to change society.
The roots of this catastrophe
are to be found in the Thatcherite Tory-led counter-revolution – also
backed in practice by Blairite Labour councils. The savage cuts in
housing combined with the sale of council housing, the bias against
‘social housing’, and the denunciation of so-called ‘red tape’
(necessary health and safety regulations). It was only a matter of
chance that this catastrophe unfolded in a Tory-led council. ‘Labour’
councils have also turned a deaf ear to safety concerns in their own
high-rise flats. They have carried out savage cuts which endanger
workers’ lives.
Tory propaganda neutralised
These events have naturally
evoked enormous interest and support in Britain but also internationally
among the new layer of radicalised and resurgent young people. Bernie
Sanders, who is at the head of a mass movement in the US –
unfortunately, still imprisoned within the framework of the capitalist
Democratic Party – participated briefly in Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign and
greeted his advance in the election, as has the labour movement in many
countries.
This is a harbinger of a new
internationalism and the resurgence of socialism. And, remember, this is
the result not of an electoral victory but of a dramatic advance for
Corbyn’s radical programme, as with the movement around Sanders in the
US and Podemos in Spain. The irony is that the alleged victor, May, is
in fact the loser, while Corbyn is seen as having won! The Corbyn
phenomenon is a promissory note for the convulsive movements – the leaps
in consciousness among workers and youth – that will inevitably come in
Britain and worldwide because rotten and outmoded capitalism does not
open up a new vista.
Moreover, it was not in the
main a revolt against Brexit by ‘remainers’, particularly on the part of
the youth, even though bourgeois commentators maintain that this was the
principal cause of Corbyn’s advance. If this were so why did the Liberal
Democrats crash, who were the leading advocates for Remain and a second
referendum, followed by the resignation of their leader Tim Farron? The
majority understood that the caravan had moved on. Even most remainers
realised that it was impossible to reopen the issue without risking mass
protests. In addition, a big proportion of former UKIP voters swung over
to support Corbyn and Labour. Why? Because the overarching issue in this
election was austerity and a determination to punish its main
architects, the Tory government.
Corbyn’s stress on austerity
ensured his dramatic advance. Even the two terrible terrorist attacks in
Manchester and London did not allow the Tories to divert attention to
the ‘security’ field – though they tried. After these incidents – with
the help of the media, and working on the principle that ‘when it hurts
go to nurse’ (ie May) – the Tories sought to blame Corbyn for being
‘soft’ on terrorism. It did not work even with the police, as Labour
unexpectedly evoked sympathy from them by turning the tables on May
because of Tory government cuts to police numbers. Indeed, so evident
was the anti-austerity mood of the police that many openly fraternised
on demonstrations against the bombings, even suggesting they take
selfies with the marchers!
When the media tried to
exploit Jeremy Corbyn’s connections with Sinn Féin and some of his
mistaken positions in the past, this cut no ice, particularly with the
new generation to whom the ‘troubles’ in Ireland are a distant past.
This and the failure of the media, particularly the gutter press, to
shape the election in favour of the Tories – partly because of the
counterweight of social media – meant that Corbyn was able to break
through the propaganda barrage and get his anti-austerity message
through to working people, young people and even disgruntled sections of
the middle class.
This was especially so with
the emphasis in the manifesto on the nationalisation of energy, water
and the railways. This was and is the most leftward-inclined programme
of any of the new left parties which have developed in Europe in the
recent period. Although, in truth, it was quite a mild social-democratic
programme, the context in which it was put forward – decades of
neoliberal policies, privatisation, the driving down of wages –
represented a dramatic change in course.
The manifesto did not propose
to go back to the programme of large-scale nationalisation put forward
by François Mitterrand in France in the 1980s, or even to the proposals
of the Labour Party in the same decade. Labour at that time included the
call for the nationalisation of 25 major companies. Nevertheless, it
dramatically altered the perception of Jeremy Corbyn and Labour,
particularly in the eyes of radicalised new sections of the population,
especially young people although not exclusively. The older generation
responded enthusiastically to the pledge to maintain the winter fuel
payment and opposition to ending the ‘triple lock’ on pensions.
May left hanging
To compound the problems, May
scored a spectacular own goal by threatening to make the elderly pay for
their social care after death by seizing their assets. This was
immediately interpreted correctly as a ‘dementia tax’. This had a
similar effect to that felt by Gordon Brown in 2007 when he proposed an
inheritance tax so elderly people would pay for their own social care.
It was the opposition of then shadow chancellor, George Osborne, and his
promise to fight the proposal in any possible election, which compelled
Brown to cancel his plans for an early election. This postponement
ultimately led to the Con-Dem coalition coming to power in 2010.
May was compelled to
effectively abandon the dementia tax – unprecedentedly, in the middle of
the election. Although it did not result in her defeat, she was severely
wounded, returned to office not with a thumping majority as she hoped
but in a hung parliament. The Tories are only able to survive through a
tawdry deal with the sectarian Protestant Democratic Unionist Party
(DUP).
However, this brings its own
contradictions. While opposing same-sex marriage and maintaining a ban
on a woman’s right to choose, the DUP supported Brexit in the 2016
referendum. It could prop up the government while extracting a big price
in terms of increased public expenditure, on which Northern Ireland is
more dependent than Britain as a whole. Moreover, Tory luminaries such
as former prime minister John Major and Michael Heseltine – together
with Peter Hain, former Labour Northern Ireland secretary – have warned
that the ‘peace process’ could break down and the Good Friday Agreement
could be scrapped because of a reinforcement of naked sectarianism. In
reality, this has never ended but has been contained up to now.
So precarious is May’s
position that her government could be brought down at any time. One Tory
admitted: "[May] can last for one month or five months… Who knows?" One
thing is clear, the split within the Tory party is of Grand Canyon
proportions, is naked and open. "We will split. We hate each other",
declared a Tory MP anonymously.
Well-known Tory commentator
Tim Montgomery was prepared to go on the record in the London Evening
Standard, calling for the head of Theresa May: "Every day she remains in
charge is a wasted day. Every day the country inches closer to an
election for which Jeremy Corbyn will have added more activists to his
impressive turnout machine… Mrs May’s flat-footed response to the
Grenfell Tower tragedy was not just further proof she’s not that good at
politics. It was another moment of not rising to the occasion as a
leader with vision would do… We must not underestimate Corbyn. Voters
who yearn for change may well roll the dice if forced to choose between
Corbyn and ‘the same old Tories’." Meanwhile, the Observer warned that
May "could be facing her own poll tax moment over botched responses to
the [Grenfell] disaster". Osborne, now editor of the Evening Standard,
openly speculates that May could be gone in a matter of weeks.
Historically, the Tory party
has been the most successful bourgeois party in Europe, the voice of the
British ruling class, the ‘natural governing party’. British capitalism
took great care to hide its divisions, in particular from the gaze of a
rising labour movement which would seek to exploit any weaknesses. It
even invented a special form of hypocrisy, ‘cant’: parliamentary
language and etiquette to disguise its divisions. Not anymore. There is
open discussion about the coming civil war within the Tory party. We
have pointed out that this is potentially the biggest split in the
Tories since the schism over the Corn Laws in the first half of the 19th
century. That saw the Tories out of power for decades. Europe has been a
running sore in the Tory party ever since Britain entered the Common
Market in 1973.
Labour right bides time
It is mirrored in the ongoing
and parallel civil war within Labour which has not been settled by
Jeremy Corbyn’s success in the election campaign and subsequent events
like the Grenfell Tower fire. Corbyn intervened well on that issue,
correctly calling for the requisition of empty properties to house the
survivors. This kind of demand and language, which the Socialist Party
has consistently raised as a solution to ever-growing homelessness, has
not been heard from Labour Party leaders for decades! Together with the
bold demand for nationalisation, it shows the potential for a Corbyn-led
government to be pushed even further by mass pressure. Equally, it is
this which makes the bourgeois even more determined to try and prevent
this happening.
The deep roots of the
conflict are to be found in the fact that neither side – the Blairites,
their core thinkers and fellow travellers, or Corbyn’s radical base
among young people and in the trade unions – can be fully reconciled
even after Corbyn’s success. The majority of the Parliamentary Labour
Party (PLP) is still steeped in the ideas of Blair, of Labour remaining
within the framework of capitalism, and ultimately being prepared to bow
to the pressures of the system, including implementing austerity
policies, albeit of a ‘softer’ character.
They are not socialists,
whereas the ranks, the broad support for Corbyn and Labour, are
implacably opposed to further austerity and are moving towards embracing
socialism. While some of the right present themselves as being at ease
with Corbyn, the veteran witch-hunter John Spellar compared his success
to being freed from execution on a Friday only to face a life sentence
on Monday! The rest of the right, the majority, are biding their time.
Only Owen Smith has been taken into the shadow cabinet – a big mistake
on Corbyn’s part – and given responsibility for the Northern Ireland
Office, the equivalent of a Siberian power station!
The overwhelming majority of
the PLP come from Blair’s political stable of managing capitalism at
national and particularly local level, acting as a transmission
mechanism implementing the Tory government’s savage cuts. They have been
a fifth column constantly seeking to undermine and eventually overthrow
Corbyn, thereby preventing Labour’s shift towards the left. However, it
would be more accurate to describe them – with only a small minority of
new MPs coming from the left – as the ‘four-fifths column’, the fraction
of the PLP who showed no confidence in Corbyn in the last two years.
They may try to disguise
their political position, with some masquerading as ‘soft lefts’. There
have been reports of an attempt by Yvette Cooper and others to resurrect
the Tribune newspaper around which a section of the left gathered in the
past. Tribune fell into a state of disrepair as the Blairites
strengthened their grip on Labour. Cooper and her friends do not
represent a genuine attempt to organise a fighting left wing but a
screen around which a discredited right can regroup.

End Tory cuts
Wishful thinking,
particularly in conditions of crisis – and we face a profound crisis in
Britain, both of an economic and political character – is a grave
mistake. The right have not undergone a deathbed conversion. Not only in
the PLP and Labour headquarters but at council and other levels they
remain in control. They intend to carry out the bidding of the
government if the Tories manage to cling to power. What will that mean
but a continuation of the cuts which laid the basis for the disaster at
Grenfell Tower? The cabal in charge of Kensington and Chelsea’s Tory
council deliberately refused repeated demands by the tenants for
adequate safety measures to be installed, while they had £273 million in
reserves!
There can be no more
conciliation with right-wing Labour. If they are not confronted, they
will continue to pass on the Tory government’s cuts. Jeremy Corbyn
should act in the same bold manner as he did over Grenfell Tower and
issue an immediate call to arms, instructing all Labour councillors and
cabinets: ‘No implementation of Tory cuts. No school closures, sacking
of teachers or local government workers. Implement no-cuts budgets’.
Nobody can pretend that such an approach would not be popular. Indeed,
Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins wrote: "People are entitled to the city
they want. When in the 1980s Liverpool’s Militant movement asked
Everton’s inhabitants what should be done with their towers, the reply
was pull them down and give us back the streets. It was done".
If Labour groups and council
cabinets refuse to change course, the demand must be for them to step
aside and be replaced with real fighters who are prepared to mobilise
working people. The Socialist Party always starts from what is in the
interests of the working class. It will not only be the Trade Unionist
and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) which will come into conflict with Labour
councils, and even be forced to challenge electorally the ‘little
butchers’ who preside over cuts as early as next year’s council
elections. It will be sacked teachers, local government workers, nurses
and NHS workers who will be driven to oppose them in the elections.
If Corbyn does not act, his
triumph could dissipate over time. The same approach must be adopted
towards changing the rules of the Labour Party to ensure that its
National Executive Committee is in tune with the new membership. The
first responsibility of this committee should be to implement mandatory
reselection of MPs. But Corbyn should go further and boldly act as he
did with the manifesto. He appealed over the heads of the right and got
support for his radical proposals. That confronted the right with a fait
accompli! He should do the same by presenting his own democratic
constitution to a referendum of all Labour Party members – full and
associate – which would have at its heart mandatory reselection and the
replacement of the bureaucratic machine, with power resting in the hands
of the membership, particularly new members and the trade unions.
Transforming Labour
It should also enshrine the
principle of a federal arrangement which would lead to the re-admittance
of all expelled socialists and organisations back into the Labour Party.
After all, Zoe Williams wrote in the Guardian (19 June): "The Fabian
Society has always existed as a group thinking independently of the
party, but not an existential threat to it: this needs to be replicated
for other voices. Greens and green-sympathisers… need structures and
organisations within Labour, from which to pursue their agenda. Even
without the Greens, Labour is de facto a multiparty party… It should be
possible to stand as a joint candidate, Green and Labour, or Women’s
Equality Party and Labour: this isn’t unprecedented. It’s been done by
the Co-operative Party for years".
Williams’s idea is for a
cross-class, so-called ‘progressive alliance’, including the Liberal
Democrats who participated in the austerity government of David Cameron
and Nick Clegg. We reject this. But her proposal has some common
features with our call for a federation of socialist organisations
within Labour. Such an approach would shatter the plans of the right to
pursue a rear-guard struggle to frustrate and delay the real involvement
of workers and youth in a revived, socialist Labour Party. The unions,
particularly the biggest, Unite, also have a responsibility to ensure
that no bureaucratic constitutional manoeuvres stop the implementation
of this demand, which is overwhelmingly supported by the ranks of the
labour movement.
Jeremy Corbyn should also put
his full weight behind the call to open up Labour, to welcome
enthusiastically and integrate the new members – not just as election
fodder but as fighters for a socialist programme and a new society. Down
with the deadweight of bureaucratic tradition! Open up Labour to the new
socialist forces which include the Socialist Party. Readmit those who
were expelled not by the new membership but by the bureaucratic
right-wing, Blairite machine which should be relegated to the dustbin of
history.
The right still have their
contingency plans for a split as Yvette Cooper is seeking to use her
position as chair of the Home Affairs Committee in the Commons to create
an ‘all-party’ approach towards Brexit. She is trying to create a
counterweight to what the labour movement should be demanding, and which
the Socialist Party has gained support for: a workers’ Brexit. This
emphasises the class interests of British workers and their brothers and
sisters in Europe by emphasising the class issues. Cooper’s proposal –
‘all pals together never mind the weather’ with some Tories and Liberals
– on the issue of Europe contains the outline of a possible future
political realignment: a split within Labour and possibly other parties
leading towards another attempt at a ‘centre’ party.
Both Jeremy Corbyn and John
McDonnell have opposed the capitalist single market, as we do, with its
overwhelming bias towards the employers. It allows work to be shifted
from one country to another thereby undermining wages and conditions,
and rules against public ownership and state intervention. This does not
mean that we want to retreat to a kind of British autarky leading to
import controls, banning goods from one country against another, to the
detriment of all European workers through the growth of unemployment.
Fighting for a socialist
policy and creating a mass party that consistently advocates the
struggle for power is the best way of laying the basis for a victory
leading to the democratic socialist federation of Europe. That would
pave the way to abolishing all the ills of capitalism on a continental
and ultimately a world scale. Britain, especially the labour movement,
has entered a new phase when socialism and Marxism can become a decisive
force for change!