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Britain’s growing discontent
The general election in Britain returned New Labour to
power with a large parliamentary majority for the second consecutive time. But
far from being an endorsement of Blair’s policies, a deepening disillusionment
and anger with establishment politics has been exposed. PETER TAAFFE, Socialist
Party general secretary, analyses the election and outlines perspectives for
Blair’s second term.
ON THE SURFACE, the results of the June general election
signified no change of the political landscape of Britain. Yet the election
indicated a huge shift in the attitude of millions of people. Labour has secured
an overwhelming majority in parliament but not amongst the electorate. The
Tories have not advanced since the disaster of 1997 (indeed, have slightly
fallen back), while the Liberal Democrats have benefited with their opportunist
stance of situating themselves to the left of New Labour on the political ground
once occupied by ‘Old Labour’.
Yet the most decisive fact of the 2001 British general
election is the massive drop in the turnout, by 12.5%, of those who were
eligible to vote. Four out of ten electors – some 17 million people –
refused to vote. This was the lowest turnout since the general election of 1918
(when electoral administration was disrupted by the first world war); with just
over 26 million people voting compared, for instance, to almost 29 million in
1950 when the population was much smaller (by nine million or so) than it is
today. Even as recently as 1992, almost 34 million voted. Tony Blair is the
first prime minister since 1923 to discover the day after his election victory
that those who voted for him were outnumbered by those who did not vote.
Moreover, turnout was far lower amongst the young – only 38% voted – while
79% of the older voters turned out. Preliminary figures seem to indicate that it
was the 25-35 year olds who were the biggest abstainers.
Most significant was the disastrous drop in those who voted
in the so-called Labour heartlands. The lowest turnout was in Liverpool
Riverside where a mere 34% of electors voted. In a whole series of seats, the
turnout fell below 50%. In John Prescott’s seat, the New Labour deputy prime
minister up to the election, only 46% voted, a drop of 12% compared to four
years earlier. And yet at the last election, when the number of those who voted
was also down on previous post-war elections, not one seat recorded a turnout of
less than 50%.
Labour spokespersons, like the new foreign secretary, Jack
Straw, have tried to explain this turning away by millions from the electoral
process as an expression of the ‘politics of contentment’. Yet this election
took place against the backdrop of strikes amongst postal workers, the threat of
strike action by rail workers, as well as riots in Oldham, Leeds and big clashes
in Aylesbury. The election represents a significant deepening of the ‘Americanisation’
of British politics. The degeneration of the Labour Party into another
capitalist party similar to the Democrats in the USA has effectively
disenfranchised millions of ‘traditional Labour’ voters. This resulted in a
conscious, or semi-conscious, voters’ ‘strike’ in protest at the policies
of all the parties, but particularly by working-class people who feel abandoned
by Blair’s New Labour party.
John Curtice underlined this when he wrote in The
Independent: "Labour is no longer clearly the party of the working class or
of those on the left in Britain. Its support fell by four percentage points in
the most predominantly working-class seats, while the party held its own in
middle-class seats. Some of those votes appear to have been lost on an
unprecedented scale to parties of the far left…
"Despite the party’s attempts to appeal to its
heartlands during the campaign, there is still considerable disenchantment among
some of its core voters.
"Meanwhile, according to a telephone poll for the BBC
by ICM on Thursday, when it re-interviewed 825 people who had been contacted
over the weekend before polling day, Labour’s pattern of support acquired an
unprecedentedly middle-class character.
"Thus compared with the results of a similar BBC poll
in 1997, Labour’s vote was up five percentage points in the AB socio-economic
group, and down just three among C1s. But it fell by nine points among C2s and
ten points among DEs. Labour is now more likely to be regarded as a middle-class
party than a working-class one. According to the ICM/BBC poll, just under 57%
think that the Labour Party looks closely after the interests of working-class
people, while 68% believe it looks after the interests of middle-class people.
In 1987 the equivalent figures were 89% and 58%". (9 June)
Undoubtedly, there were objective factors which explained
the victory of Blair’s party in this election. On the one side, despite the
gathering economic storm clouds from across the Atlantic, the economic boom in
Britain has not yet fully exhausted itself. Sections of the population,
particularly in the South and the Midlands, swallowed the arguments of Blair for
more ‘time’ and another chance to implement policies beneficial to the
majority of the population. Moreover, the memory of the disastrous policies of
the Tories’ Thatcherite years is etched into the minds of the British people.
William Hague, the Tory leader, conjured up the spectacle of a return to that
period when he appeared alongside the ‘Mummy’, Thatcher herself, in the
course of the election. Given the disastrous state of the public services in
Britain, in comparison even to the more developed capitalist countries of
Europe, the programme of Thatcher of further tax cuts accompanied by savage
reductions in education and the National Health Service (NHS), repelled the
overwhelming majority of the British people.
The favoured party of capital
YET DESPITE THE economic situation, there was little
enthusiasm – indeed massive discontent – expressed in the election,
especially by those who have not benefited from the lopsided boom of the 1990s,
the poor, single parents, workers in the public sector and ordinary trade
unionists. The disenchantment with New Labour is reflected in the election
statistics both in general and towards Blair and New Labour luminaries’
performance in the election. The 10,707,000 votes for New Labour were actually
less than the number that Labour got under the defeated Neil Kinnock in 1992.
Moreover, there was a 6,000 vote drop in those who voted for Blair in his own
constituency in comparison with 1997 – a 10% fall in turnout. Voters took
revenge on the aristocrats of New Labour in areas where the Millbank machine
imposed, in an authoritarian manner, their favourite sons on local Labour
Parties. For instance, Tory defector, Shaun Woodward, who ran the anti-Labour
propaganda for the Tories in the 1992 general election, managed to reduce New
Labour’s majority in the St Helen’s constituency by 50%. The three
alternative left-wing candidates standing against him dented Labour’s vote by
a combined 4,100.
New Labour spokespeople, in answer to arguments such as the
above, have pointed to the higher turnout in the marginal constituencies as an
indication that the ‘politics of contentment’ really held sway. Undoubtedly,
where a closer battle was fought in the 150 or so marginal seats (out of 650
seats contested) the battle was more intense and interest was higher. But even
there the turnout was significantly down on 1997.
Highly symptomatic, however, of what would have happened if
a radical, fighting campaign had been conducted, was indicated by the result in
Wyre Forest. Here a retired doctor defeated a Labour minister on the issue of
the closure of a local hospital and its removal to a distance of 18 miles away
from where most people in the area lived. Here the turnout was significantly
higher (68%) than the national average.
Elsewhere, however, except where the socialists, against
great odds, presented a case, there was nothing to galvanise the millions of
dissatisfied into voting in this election. The campaign was the dreariest and
dullest in the history of elections in Britain. Even capitalist commentators
remarked that the choice on offer between New Labour and the Tories was a ‘managerial’
one, between two groups competing for control of capitalist Great Britain plc.
Indeed, as far as the overwhelming majority of the
strategists of capital were concerned, Labour was their preferred choice in this
election. In the past, in periods of economic or social difficulty in
particular, the capitalists were compelled to tolerate a Labour government.
However, the dual character of the Labour Party, with a bourgeois leadership at
the top but a working-class, socialist base, always presented a latent danger
and a source of concern for the capitalists. Hence, when the ‘Moor had done
his duty’, that is, Labour had stepped in to bale out capitalism in its
difficulties, Labour governments were usually undermined and subsequently
defeated. This was the fate of the Labour governments of Ramsay MacDonald of
1924 and 1929-31, as well as the last Labour government before Blair’s
government, between 1974-79. From the standpoint of capitalism, the purpose of
Labour governments was to hold the working class, and particularly the trade
unions, in check. When it no longer proved capable of doing this, the colossal
power wielded by the capitalists through the media was used to create the basis
for bringing down or defeating such governments.
But the counter-revolution carried through by the Blair-Mandelson
axis, in policy and organisation within New Labour, has removed this threat.
Labour is now a completely capitalist party. This was reflected in the election
by the overwhelming support of the capitalist press for Blair as opposed to
Hague. Not just ‘traditional Labour’ papers, like The Mirror, came out in
support, but the ‘heavies’, the broadsheets, such as The Guardian, The
Independent and even the organ of finance capital, the Financial Times, weighed
in on Blair’s side. Only the Telegraph supported the Tories. Most remarkably
– and unprecedented – was the support in this election by ‘the Thunderer’,
The Times, for New Labour. It is true that the Times has now been ‘Murdochised’
(it is controlled by the media tycoon and philistine, Rupert Murdoch) and is,
therefore, no longer the unofficial voice of British capitalism. Nevertheless,
its endorsement of Blair says everything about the character of New Labour in
this election and in the future. Their justification for supporting New Labour
is brutal and simple: ‘We feel comfortable, as never before, with the case for
Labour’. They go on: ‘If New Labour turns out to be the vehicle by which
Thatcherism is consolidated and extended this would fit an historical pattern.
Mr Gladstone’s reforms were legitimised by Benjamin Disraeli and Lord
Salisbury, not by the unsuccessful late Victorian Liberal Party. Mr Asquith’s
version of the welfare state was embraced by Stanley Baldwin for the
Conservatives and Ramsay MacDonald for Labour and not by the Liberal Party which
imploded in the 1920s. Mr Attlee’s programme was protected by Winston
Churchill and Harold Macmillan while Labour spent the same thirteen years out of
power and plagued by civil wars – a haunting precedent for modern Tories’.
Neo-liberal policies
IN OTHER WORDS, despite Blair’s mild disclaimers of
Thatcher, ‘but not all aspects of Thatcherism’, during the election
campaign, he is perceived for the moment as the most successful guardian of
capitalism. Indeed, during the election campaign, Tony Blair puffed up like a
bullfrog and clearly expecting victory on 7 June, arrogantly promised to extend
Thatcherism even further. Flatly contradicting the manifesto of 1997, the 2001
manifesto promised further privatisation in the NHS, education and other public
services.
Initially, the bluntness of Blair’s anti-working class,
anti-public services, anti-union statements were covered up because the
manifesto was launched on ‘whack Wednesday’, when the publicity was for John
Prescott who punched a Countryside Alliance protester and when Straw was shouted
down at the Police Federation conference. However, once the small print had been
examined and after Sharon Storrer dramatically confronted Blair with the
disastrous situation facing her ill husband in a Birmingham hospital, New Labour
was forced to change its mood music.
Indeed, Sharon Storrer’s outburst encapsulated the anger
of millions at the horrors of the semi-privatised NHS. This message was
reinforced by a searing indictment of the state of Britain by the German
magazine, Stern, which contemptuously referred to the ‘English patient’. It
showed a country where ‘its poor live in third-world conditions, a fifth of
the adult population is illiterate, its public services are third rate, 25,000
people unnecessarily die annually from cancer and the environment is casually
disregarded’.
This was followed by Jack Straw’s son demanding ‘an end
to student fees’. NHS consultants also denounced the private finance
initiative (PFI): ‘The high cost of private finance initiative has resulted in
money intended for patients being channelled away from patient care and into the
coffers of business. Evidence from the first wave (of PFI hospital schemes)
shows planned reductions in NHS beds of 30% and cuts in staff budgets of up to
20% to meet the escalating costs of using private finance’. (The Independent)
NHS doctors also warned that their families would no longer
use the NHS because of its inadequacies. This was followed by the revelation in
the Observer by Nick Cohen that in private hospitals, ‘the death rates are
five times above the NHS average’.
In the very midst of the election campaign, the revolt
against privatisation was evident and vocal. In education, for instance, twenty
authorities, most of them controlled by New Labour, have begun to outsource –
in practice, privatise – aspects of education. What this will mean is already
evident in Glasgow where privatisation has resulted in a big increase in class
sizes, six swimming pools have been closed, and teachers complain of fewer and
smaller classrooms.
Faced with the avalanche of criticism at the prospect of
further privatisation in vital public services, in the last two weeks of the
campaign, Blair and Gordon Brown switched their approach. In place of the
manifesto promise to privatise everything not nailed down, they launched the
slogan: ‘Education and hospitals first’. If they were honest they would have
added at the end the phrase, ‘to be privatised’. That is precisely the
programme they are going to implement although the impression was undoubtedly
given that, as opposed to Hague’s proposals to cut taxes and slash spending,
Labour was going to dramatically boost the health service and education.
Undoubtedly, under the whip of overwhelming public pressure
to act, the new government will probably be compelled, at least in the first
period, to increase spending. But this will be in the context of a further
extension of privatisation, through the medium of the PFI and similar schemes.
This will meet with ferocious resistance from ordinary working people and by the
trade unions. Privatisation is now massively unpopular. In polls, 72%
consistently support the immediate renationalisation of Railtrack, and even
sections of the capitalists, such as writers in the Financial Times and The
Independent, have made the case for ‘capitalist renationalisation of the
railways’. Even writers in the ultra-rightwing Daily Mail have suggested that
the railways be taken back into public ownership. In an opinion poll 42% of
those questioned suggested that even British Telecom should be renationalised.
And it is not just in Britain where this mood exists. In California, the
experience of ‘deregulation’ resulting in blackouts has led to a clamour for
the electricity industry to be taken back into state ownership.
Nevertheless, Blair and Brown and the whole of the New
Labour cabinet, are locked into a programme for further extension of neo-liberal
policies which have been at the core of the government’s raison d’être over
the last four years. Blair may wrongly imagine that his massive parliamentary
majority will insure him against revolts. The state of the Tory Party, in
particular, which in the aftermath of ‘black Thursday’ faces meltdown and
civil war, could encourage him on the parliamentary level to drive through his
programme.
Conservative meltdown
THE TORIES HAVE had the worst results in this election since
the 1830s. The so-called ‘left’ of the Tory Party, led by Kenneth Clarke and
the former ‘wets’ like Michael Heseltine, have clearly pursued a policy of
‘counter-revolutionary defeatism’ of their own party. They wanted the
biggest possible defeat of Hague in the election in order to ‘bring the Tory
Party to its senses’. They saw what happened to Labour in the aftermath of the
1983 election defeat, which provided the rightwing in the Labour Party with the
excuse to swing the party towards the right. This eventually destroyed it as a
working-class party. Similarly, Clarke and Heseltine want to repeat the opposite
process within the Tory Party, of shifting it more towards the ‘centre’ or
the ‘one nation’ Toryism of Edward Heath and the earlier Tory prime
minister, Macmillan. However, the character of the present Tory Party militates
against this, with its entrenched Thatcherite membership and a further influx of
hardened Thatcherites into the Tory rump in the House of Commons.
It is therefore likely that a bloody civil war leading to a
split in the Tory Party could take place. The collision over a euro referendum,
when and if it takes place, will be an additional bone of contention between the
different wings of the Tory Party. It is possible that the Tory Party will be
effectively marginalised and defeated in a third general election, so out of
tune are they with modern Britain. The election of a reinvented Michael
Portillo, or even Clarke, as a replacement for Hague, or a combination of both,
with the Tories situated more in the ‘centre’, may not allow them to make a
comeback.
Hague’s campaign, which harkened back to discredited
Thatcherism with a heavy dose of xenophobia, has further reduced the Tory Party
to an English national party. Indeed, it is more now a southern ‘Home Counties’
party with London in the main hostile territory for the Tories. The recapture of
one seat from the Scottish National Party (SNP) by a handful of votes in
Scotland does not alter the picture of the modern Tory Party reduced to an
English rump.
It is in this context that the Liberal Democrats have
undoubtedly set out their stall to replace the Tories as the main second eleven
of capitalism, with Blair captaining the first team.
The vote for the far-right, semi-fascist British National
Party (BNP) in Oldham, however, which came third in two constituencies with a
combined 11,643 votes, is a warning to the labour movement and socialists.
Interviews on television afterwards showed that their support came from
disillusioned workers in run-down council estates who feel let down and angry
with New Labour, as well as in some middle-class areas. The Oldham riots and the
speeches of Hague during the election about Britain becoming a ‘foreign land’
and his attacks on asylum seekers have fanned the flames of racism and laid the
basis for this vote for the BNP, the highest for any far-right party since 1945.
This shows that the worsening of the economic and social
situation of capitalism will not automatically benefit the left, as the example
of the growth of the far-right in Europe indicates. Only by politically winning
workers and sections of the middle class, which entails digging roots in
working-class areas, will socialists and the left be able to counter the
pernicious and divisive ideas of those far-right organisations like the BNP.
Working-class opposition
A FAR MORE serious threat to Blair emanates from the
resistance which is already evident amongst ordinary working-class people and at
the base of the trade unions. The promise to privatise even during the election
provoked unprecedented upheavals in unions, such as Unison, with veiled threats
emanating from the leadership of public-sector union opposition in the aftermath
of the election. The Communication Workers Union (CWU) conference also showed
the resistance that will come to attempts to privatise or ‘outsource’ parts
of the Post Office. The decision of the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) conference to
free the funds of that union to allow financial support to candidates who
support the union’s policies, rather than to New Labour, is also a portent of
what lies ahead.
Faced with this, New Labour has sought to disguise its
privatisation programme by declaring that, for instance, the NHS will be ‘free
at the point of delivery’. In other words, it doesn’t make any difference
what method is used to provide the service, either public or private, so long as
it is ‘free at the point of delivery’. However, the Royal College of Nurses
(RCN) dismisses this argument by pointing out that nearly 75% of nurses believe
that the creeping privatisation proposed by the government has significantly
eroded the underlying principles of the NHS: that healthcare should be free at
the point of delivery. Nearly 75% of nurses believe patients will have to pay
for at least some routine operations, such as treatment of cataracts and hip and
knee replacements, by 2010. The nurses believe that universal, free treatment on
the NHS has been totally undermined by the ‘increasing use of private
hospitals and services’. As one Socialist Party member working in a hospital
expressed it at a public meeting during the election, ‘the health workers are
opposed to privatisation to a man and woman, the public don’t want it’. And
yet the government will proceed with this programme.
By pointing to the small print in their manifesto, New
Labour may imagine that they have a mandate for what they intend to do. However,
elections are merely a snapshot of a mood at a particular moment. The reality of
what happens in the daily lives of ordinary working people is far more
significant. And when the working class is convinced that their rights and
conditions are to be undermined, no matter from what quarter this comes, it will
fight back. During the general election, Will Hutton in the Observer quoted from
a poll, The State of the Nation, by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust. It
reported that 81% of British people agreed that ‘if governments do not listen’
peaceful protests and blockades are legitimate ways of expressing concerns. It
further states: ‘Only just over half – some 53% - think that the governments
should stand by the policies that won them general elections. A growing
proportion of Britons think that government should be permanently responsive to
changing events and opinions’.
This attitude is a direct reflection of the example set by
the anti-poll tax battle which laid down a tradition of mass resistance to
unpopular government measures. Cosseted by a huge parliamentary majority, Blair
will make the same kind of blunders that Thatcher made over the poll tax.
Holding their noses, millions of workers, particularly the older generation,
gave the government the benefit of the doubt, ‘another chance’ in this
election.
This meant that Blair is the first Labour leader to win two
successive terms. However, given the underlying economic and social situation in
Britain, it is problematical whether he will serve his full term. A recession or
even a slump will drastically undermine the position of the government, as will
opposition on a whole series of measures that they plan to impose.
Little commented on in the election was the fact that the UK
registered the worst trade deficit since records began more than 300 years ago.
This underlines the precarious economic situation of British capitalism and of
the government. The closures in Corus (steel) and in Motorola could be an
indication of what is to come for big swathes of the British workforce. The
resistance of the last four years will be as nothing to what will be coming in
the next period. If Blair imagines that it will be ‘business as usual’ he is
in for a rude awakening.
A significant aspect of this election was the increased
support for socialist candidates. The Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) and the
Socialist Party in England and Wales doubled the average votes in the seats they
contested as compared with 1997. There was a significant vote also for other
Socialist Alliance candidates and the Socialist Labour Party (SLP), although its
average share in the constituencies in which it stood has gone down compared to
1997. In Coventry, Dave Nellist, a prominent Socialist Party member, received
the highest number of votes of any socialist candidate standing in the election.
And these results have been achieved in a general election
in which the terrain has not been the most favourable to argue the case for the
socialist alternative. The British system used for parliamentary elections has
an in-built bias against smaller parties. Moreover, in the light of the success
of the SSP in Scotland on the basis of proportional representation, Blair during
the general election made it clear in an interview with The Times that he was
opposed to the introduction of proportional representation in England because it
gave ‘disproportionate power to small parties’. Notwithstanding this, the
challenge from the socialists will increase in the next period.
This will not be restricted to the electoral plane. The
movements of the working class in the period opening up will be largely in the
industrial and social spheres. Events are going to favour the conscious forces
of socialism and Marxism. This election has revealed that the consciousness, the
understanding, of broad layers of the British population, and particularly of
the working class, is still affected by the post-collapse of Stalinism period.
Only a minority at the moment are searching for a socialist alternative.
However, this audience will grow on the basis of the hammer blows of events and
the intervention of forces such as the Socialist Party in England and Wales.
The 2001 British general election may have been one of the
most boring in history. But it has ushered in a period which will be anything
but boring. It will be a period in which mighty events will once more propel the
working class into action and put socialism back on the agenda.
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