Cloning New Labour
The next leader of
Britain’s main ‘opposition’ party will be one of four New Labour clones.
None of them offers any alternative to the millions of people about to
suffer savage attacks by the Con-Dem coalition. Despite claims by some
on the left, the idea that the Labour Party could now be reclaimed by
working-class activists is a forlorn hope. HANNAH SELL reports on the
leadership contest and why the need for a new mass workers’ party is
ever more urgent.
THE STRUGGLE AGAINST
public-sector cuts will overshadow all other issues in the coming months
and years. Building a movement powerful enough to defeat the cuts will
be the first task on the agenda of the workers’ movement. For some, the
question of achieving political representation for the working class may
be relegated to a problem for a later day. In reality, however, creating
a political force which stands firmly against the cuts is a crucial part
of the battle to defeat the axe men.
The Trade Unionist and
Socialist Coalition (TUSC) – involving the Socialist Party, other
socialists and, crucially, an important layer of militant trade
unionists – stood in 41 seats in the general election in order to
prepare the ground for the development of a mass independent party of
the working class. As we expected, the pressure many workers felt to
vote Labour to try and stop the Tories meant that the political support
and sympathy TUSC received was not reflected in its vote. However, over
the next period, we believe that TUSC can come into its own and can act
as a catalyst for the development of a new mass party of the working
class. It is to be welcomed that, since the general election, all
participants in TUSC have agreed to continue and to make plans to stand
the widest possible slate of candidates in next year’s local, Scottish
parliament and Welsh assembly elections.
An important role for
socialists in the coming movement will be to promote TUSC as widely as
possible. However, it is also necessary to examine the arguments of
those who believe that independent workers’ representation will be
achieved by other means. New Labour’s ejection from power has raised the
hope, albeit faintly, that it may be possible to reclaim it for the
working class. This would mean changing New Labour back from the
capitalist party it is today into ‘old’ Labour, a party which, while it
had a capitalist leadership, was a workers’ party at its base and could
be pressured by the working class via its democratic structures.
The obstacles to reclaiming
Labour are enormous. New Labour is a shell of a party, with no
democratic structures at national level. The difficulties with
reclaiming it were thrown into sharp relief by the recent leadership
campaign of the left-wing MP, John McDonnell.
John McDonnell is widely
recognised in the trade union movement as the MP who has done most to
campaign in parliament in support of workers’ demands. That is why he
received a standing ovation at the PCS civil service union conference
this year, where he announced his intention to stand for the Labour
leadership, and why the Labour-affiliated Unite union conference,
against the recommendation of its executive, correctly passed a motion
calling for Unite-sponsored MPs to nominate John McDonnell.
Despite this widespread
support, however, John McDonnell has not even been able to take part in
the leadership contest. New Labour’s undemocratic constitution means
that the support of a conference representing 1.6 million trade
unionists is not enough to get on the ballot paper, it is also necessary
to have the support of 12.5% of Labour MPs. This was originally
increased from 5% to try and stop Tony Benn standing in 1988, as the
right-wing grip on the Labour Party increased. Today, the overwhelmingly
right-wing, pro-capitalist nature of the parliamentary Labour Party
meant that John McDonnell never had a chance of getting on the ballot
paper.
What’s left?
SOME MAY SUGGEST that this is
an unduly negative view given that Diane Abbot, a member of the
Socialist Campaign Group who nominated John McDonnell in 2007, scraped
into the contest. Unfortunately, this is both a sign of the weakness of
the left in New Labour and of Diane Abbott herself, not their strengths.
MPs from New Labour’s rightwing – including David Miliband, Jack Straw,
Phil Woolas and Stephen Twigg – felt able to nominate her in order to
demonstrate the party’s diversity, without fearing the consequences.
Diane Abbott is not a New
Labour clone like the other candidates – David and Ed Miliband, Ed Balls
and Andy Burnham – and when she has appeared in debates she has been to
the left of the others, but not by much. As one witness at the
leadership debate at the Compass 2010 conference, an Abbott supporter,
sadly put it: "She put in a pretty woolly performance, failing to land
any killer blows". (Labour Briefing, June) When she appeared on BBC’s
Newsnight leadership candidates debate, she did not even oppose
public-sector cuts unequivocally. Extremely timidly, she went no further
than saying: "Well, I certainly think that before we cut peoples’ jobs
and cut peoples’ public services we should look at things like a wealth
tax". She added that she would cut spending on the Trident nuclear
weapons system and save money by having a "staged withdrawal" from
Afghanistan.
Abbott even praised former
prime minister, Gordon Brown, for doing a "great job at the start of the
economic crisis". She did not say a word about how Brown bailed out the
banking system at the expense of the taxpayer, while leaving the banks
under the control of the ‘banksters’ who wrecked it in the first place.
Nor has she featured the
question of the anti-trade union laws in her campaign, despite this
being a critical issue for trade unionists. That a campaign of the kind
that Diane Abbott is running could be considered to be on the left at
all is an indication of how far New Labour is removed from the Labour
Party of the past. Even the 1987 Labour election manifesto, at the time
the most right-wing since 1945, written by the right-wing, witch-hunting
leadership, pledged to introduce a wealth tax on the richest 1%. Today,
Abbott only dares to suggest that it should be ‘looked at’.
It is completely utopian to
imagine that the current, extremely enfeebled, Labour left could ever
wrest the party back from the capitalists. It would require new forces
entering the scene on a large scale for there to be any chance of a
serious struggle to reclaim the party. Len McCluskey, who is standing
for the position of general secretary of Britain’s biggest trade union,
Unite, declared that "
has promised that he will lead a
serious campaign to reclaim the party.
Funding New Labour
UNITE LEADERS HAVE promised
this before, however. When Tony Woodley first stood as general secretary
of the TGWU (now part of Unite) he said that he would "campaign to put
the Labour back in the party". He would "call a summit of affiliated
trade unions to discuss how to get Labour back representing
working-class people" (The Guardian, 2 June 2003). These promises,
however, came to nothing. Two years later, Unite supported the 2005
Labour election manifesto which made no promise to repeal the anti-trade
union laws, further extended privatisation of public services, and
supported the continuation of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
However, if Len McCluskey
were to launch a serious campaign to reclaim Labour it would be a
thousand times more effective than the efforts of the Labour left alone.
For starters, Unite is a major financial contributor to New Labour. In
the nine months before the general election, it gave £3.318 million, 30%
of all the funding the Labour Party received. In total, the unions were
responsible for 61% of all donations to Labour over the same period of
time.
Unfortunately, the size of
union donations to New Labour bears no resemblance to their power or
influence within the party. The increased proportion of New Labour’s
funding which comes from the unions is purely due to the fall in
big-business funding. It is not because the party has moved left but
because it has become less electorally successful as a result of
following pro-big business policies!
During New Labour’s ‘glory
years’, big-business donations poured in as the capitalists rightly
recognised New Labour as the best party to govern in their interests. In
1999, for example, trade union donations fell to just 30% of New
Labour’s total funds. Slavishly following the interests of capitalism
and the City eventually led to a collapse in New Labour’s popular
support. Tossing it aside like a used plaything, big-business funding
then switched from New Labour to the Tories. Nonetheless, big business
still calls the tune.
A comparison can be drawn
with the US Democrats – which has always been a capitalist party. Unlike
the situation in Britain, US unions have no formal links with the
Democrats but there is a long history of the labour movement giving
support to Democratic candidates – as was also the case with the Liberal
Party in Britain prior to the creation of the Labour Party. In the last
US presidential election, for example, the AFL-CIO union federation set
aside a budget of $53 million to support the Democrats. But this
financial support does not give the US labour movement any influence
over Democratic policy.
The end of party democracy
FUNDAMENTALLY, THE SAME is
true of the union movement’s relationship to New Labour in Britain. The
raft of rule changes introduced in 2007 – the latest in a long series –
removed the last vestiges of democracy from the party. When it was
founded over a century ago, the Labour Party was the first political
party in Britain to have a democratic annual conference which was the
sovereign body of the party. This has now been so utterly destroyed that
one constituency delegate at last year’s conference complained that,
despite the fact that he and other delegates had "shown the party
officers our pre-written speeches and accepted their corrections, [we]
were still not called". (Labour Briefing, November 2009)
The process of fundamentally
undermining the democratic structures of the Labour Party was given
impetus with John Smith’s introduction of One Member One Vote (OMOV).
This was a means of using the more passive members – those sitting at
home and seeing debates within the party via the capitalist media –
against the more active layers who participated in the democratic
structures of the party.
At the same time, the union
block vote at conference was reduced from 70% to 50%. The organised
working class was able to pressurise the Labour leadership via the block
vote. It is true, of course, that right-wing trade union leaders often
wielded the block vote against their own members’ interests. This is why
Militant, the predecessor of the Socialist Party, called for democratic
trade union checks over the block vote as part of our programme for
democratic, fighting trade unions. Nonetheless, the reduction of the
block vote was an essential part of transforming Labour into a
capitalist party.
Tony Blair then went further
and completely stripped the Labour conference of its power. It became
merely a consultative body. If that was not enough, Brown went further
again, implementing a system where each union could only move one
‘motion’ at the conference – of ten words or less! This could not be on
any issue already covered by the National Policy Forum. The ten words
cannot be agreed by the conference but have to be sent back to the
National Policy Forum for ratification or otherwise. The National Policy
Forum was, until last year’s conference, made up of handpicked
constituency and parliamentary representatives, with only one sixth of
its members coming from the trade unions. It is hard to imagine a more
Kafkaesque negation of democracy.
At the 2009 conference, the
Labour left claimed a tiny victory against the leadership when it got a
rule change passed introducing OMOV for the election of constituency
representatives to the policy forums. Workers’ democracy has been so far
removed from New Labour that, today, the very measure that the rightwing
used to gain an iron grip on the party is now seen as a step forward!
A campaign to reclaim Labour?
THESE UTTERLY UNDEMOCRATIC
structures could never be used by Unite to reclaim Labour. New,
democratic structures would have to be rebuilt from scratch. Far better
for the trade unions to disaffiliate and to use the money to begin to
build a party that actually stands in the interests of its members.
Nonetheless, a serious campaign to reclaim Labour would be infinitely
preferable to the current strategy of most trade union leaders of
clinging to New Labour politicians’ coat-tails – after paying for the
coat!
A serious campaign would have
to combine rebuilding democratic structures with the demand that Labour
adopts a socialist programme. Key demands would include the repeal of
all the anti-trade union laws and opposition to all cuts in public
services, not just in words but in action. Up and down the country, New
Labour councils are going to be implementing the government’s massive
cutbacks ‘under protest’.
Len McCluskey rightly defends
the struggle of Liverpool city council in the 1980s. Part of the
struggle to reclaim Labour would be to demand that New Labour councils
refuse to implement cuts, mobilising the workforce and population in a
mass campaign in their support. Such a campaign of defiance by Labour
councils could quickly bring down the Tory/Liberal government. It would
also be necessary to demand that the pro-capitalist and pro-war
Blairites and Brownites be ejected from the party.
If such a campaign succeeded,
Marxists would have to re-evaluate the situation and change our
orientation accordingly. Equally, if such a campaign failed, McCluskey
and others would have to draw the conclusion that a new party was the
only way forward. We think that this would be the outcome of the
experiment. To successfully reclaim Labour would mean organising tens of
thousands of trade unionists – not just to join New Labour passively but
to fight tooth and nail to rebuild it from the ground up.
Shifting attitudes to New Labour
SOME HOPE THAT this may
happen as a result of workers looking at the Con-Dem government and
concluding that there is no choice but to return to the ‘safety’ of
Labour. This will not work. Firstly, because the memories of the crimes
of New Labour are so fresh. At the end of New Labour’s 13 years in
power, the gap between rich and poor was at its highest point for 70
years. The anti-trade union laws were not only intact, they were being
used in the harshest way against workers taking strike action. Hundreds
of soldiers had died in the brutal occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Free university education had been abolished. Any worker under 40 has
only experienced Labour as the brutal capitalist party responsible for
these policies.
And even now, in opposition,
New Labour, as would be the case with any capitalist party, is not
really opposing massive public-service cuts. It just suggests that they
should be started a bit more slowly. If New Labour had been re-elected
it would also have decimated public services. In many areas, Labour
councils had already begun vicious cuts under the previous government.
Kirklees in Yorkshire is just one example. There, £400 million is being
cut from council spending over four years, resulting in 2,000 job losses
and the first local authority compulsory redundancies. Now the pace of
cuts will accelerate dramatically with New Labour councils carrying out
the government’s programme.
If they were to refuse to do
so, this would create a pole of attraction for mass struggle. Far more
likely, unfortunately, like the Labour councils that jailed poll tax
non-payers while weeping about the iniquity of the tax, we will see them
doing the government’s dirty work. They will use the argument of the
‘dented shield’ that Labour councils used in the 1980s: that it is
better, at least, for a ‘friendly hand’ to wield the knife. This will be
less effective even than it was then, however, both because of the depth
of the cuts – the worst since the 1920s – and because of the memory of
New Labour in office.
This does not mean that there
will not be any workers who join the Labour Party. However, the numbers
that Labour report having joined since the general election – estimates
between 13-20,000, many of whom are, reportedly, ex-Liberal Democrats –
are a drop in the ocean compared to the 150,000 plus who left New Labour
while it was in power. And, of those who have joined, few will attend
more than one moribund local party meeting, if they can find one to
attend at all.
There will be a continuation
of the trend seen in the general election, with significant sections of
workers voting Labour through gritted teeth in order to stop the Tories,
in the belief that the cuts would have been less severe under a Labour
government. This mood can strengthen as the government’s cuts start to
bite and a certain rose-tinted view of New Labour in power develops
among some workers. However, this does not mean that large numbers of
workers will join the Labour Party, or see it as means to struggle
against the cuts.
This has not been the
experience in other European countries when the ex-social democratic
parties have lost power. In countries as varied as Sweden, France,
Greece and Germany these parties have remained empty shells when thrown
out of office. They have sometimes gained electorally at a certain
stage, as the ‘lesser evil’, but this has not led to a rejuvenation of
the party. PASOK in Greece, for example, was elected with a large
majority. Just months later, it is facing an uprising of the working
class in opposition to the brutal cuts it is carrying out.
Significantly, however, SYRIZA – the new left formation in Greece – came
into being and reached 18% in the opinion polls while New Democracy, the
equivalent of the Tories, was still in power. The fact that it has since
sunk in the opinion polls has nothing to do with PASOK’s popularity, and
everything to do with the failure of the SYRIZA leadership, at least up
until now, to sufficiently differentiate itself from PASOK with a clear,
fighting, socialist programme.
Break the union-Labour link
THE ATTITUDE OF workers in
Britain to New Labour will be fundamentally the same as was the case in
Greece when PASOK was out of power, giving similar opportunities for new
formations to develop. This is very different to what happened in the
1970s and early 1980s. When Labour was thrown out of power in 1979 a
strong leftward move developed in the ranks of the Labour Party. This
culminated, in 1981, with Tony Benn losing the deputy leadership
election by less than 1%. However, this process had already begun over
the previous decade. While Labour was still in office there was already
a strong left wing which opposed the government’s regressive policies.
It was at the Labour Party conference in 1978 that a Militant supporter
successfully moved a motion rejecting the ‘5% limit’ that the government
had imposed on workers’ wages. This opened the floodgates to the
industrial movement now known as the winter of discontent.
All kinds of other radical
motions gained an echo at the conference, including the demand for the
reselection of MPs, which was finally won in 1981. At that stage, the
increased militancy of the working class, and anger at the capitalist
policies of the Labour government, found a strong echo within the Labour
Party.
That has simply not been the
case during New Labour’s rule over the last 13 years. On the contrary,
whenever workers have moved into struggle, particularly against the
government, the call to break the link with New Labour has grown
dramatically. The fire-fighters’ strike of 2002 led directly to the FBU
breaking the link. One result of the postal workers’ strike was that, in
2009, in a referendum of London CWU members an astounding 98% voted to
break the link. If a similar referendum had been carried out in other
regions, there is no doubt that a majority would have also voted in
favour of disaffiliation.
In addition, within the
affiliated trade unions, increasing numbers of members do not give
permission for part of their dues to be paid to the Labour Party via the
affiliated political funds. As a result, whereas the Labour-supporting
trade unions paid affiliation fees for 3.2 million members in 1997, this
had fallen to 2.5 million in 2006. In the local authority and health
union, Unison, only 32% of members now pay into the Labour Link fund.
The proportion of new members is even lower, at 27%. Many of those
paying into the affiliated fund do so out of historical inertia, rather
than support for Labour. In the 2007 Labour deputy leadership contest,
only 8% of affiliated members voted – and almost a sixth of the ballots
were spoiled because voting members had not ticked the required box
saying that they agreed with Labour’s policies!
When trade union activists
appeal to workers to join Labour to fight to change it they are met with
blank stares, at best. By contrast, the appeal to break the link with
Labour and begin to build a new party gains enthusiastic support,
particularly among the most militant layers. This is shown by the recent
Unison general secretary election where Socialist Party member, Roger
Bannister, received 42,651 votes (19%), standing clearly to "stop
funding the Labour Party and to start to build a new trade union based
party".
This was the fourth
consecutive Unison general secretary election in which Roger has stood.
Unfortunately, in every one of these elections, the left vote was split.
Each time, the argument of those left activists who have refused to
support Roger is that his call to break the link with Labour is
unpopular. Each time, Roger has decisively beaten the other left
candidate. It is time that others drew the conclusion that it is the
Socialist Party’s programme which has the best chance of mobilising
rank-and-file Unison members to win political representation.
The struggle for workers’ representation
THE COUNTER ARGUMENT of
Labour lefts is twofold. Firstly, it is suggested that the failure to
create a new mass workers’ party over the last decade shows that it is a
futile goal. Secondly, that a new formation would split the Labour vote
and thereby condemn the working class to an eternity of Tory government.
Neither argument is new.
John Burns, one of the first
Labour MPs, condemned the Independent Labour Party’s 1895 general
election result, when Kier Hardie lost his seat, as "the most costly
funeral since Napoleon". (Origins of the Labour Party, Henry Pelling) He
did so because he still orientated towards the Liberals, which were seen
by most workers as the ‘lesser evil’ of the time. TUSC’s general
election result was met with similar prophecies of doom, although not
the hostile response from the public that the ILP sometimes got. In a
Barnsley by-election in 1897, the candidate was driven out of one
village by Liberal Party supporting miners in a hail of stones (Pelling).
TUSC, by contrast, received a very friendly response in the recent
general election.
Despite the considerable
difficulties faced by the forerunners of the Labour Party, the TUC
conference voted to found the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) just
four years after the 1895 general election. There were 129 delegates at
the 1900 conference to found the LRC, but they represented half a
million trade unionists. Even so, at that stage it was only a minority
of TUC-affiliated trade unions that sent delegates to the conference –
many were still tied to the Liberals. Some of those who attended then
hesitated and withdrew their affiliation. In the 1900 general election,
the LRC received a modest vote of 1.8%.
It was the effect of the Taff
Vale judgement – a vicious anti-trade union law – which made growing
numbers of trade unionists determined to create their own political
voice, independent of the Liberals. The affiliated membership of the LRC
grew from 375,000 at its foundation to 861,000 in 1903. All this
happened under a Tory government. In 1906, the Liberals were elected on
a landslide (their last!) and were forced to repeal the Taff Vale laws
as a result of the pressure of the LRC, which had had 29 MPs elected.
Foundations of a new party
THERE ARE MANY lessons that
can be drawn for today, but the most important is that it will be as a
result of their experience in struggle that workers conclude that they
need to build their own party. There are many other examples that could
be given. In the 1992 general election, Tommy Sheridan stood in Glasgow
Pollok as Scottish Militant Labour (then the name of our sister
organisation in Scotland). He had never stood in a general election
before and yet received 6,287 votes, 18% of the total. He achieved this
not by a fluke but because he was a leader of the 18 million-strong
anti-poll tax movement (in prison at the time for his role), which had
brought down the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher. Had we stood candidates
in England and Wales during the anti-poll tax movement, there is no
doubt we could have had similar successes.
Last year, Joe Higgins, a
member of our sister section in Ireland, gave another glimpse of what is
possible when he was elected as a Socialist Party member of the European
parliament (MEP) for Dublin – receiving over 50,000 first-preference
votes. Again, it was Joe and the Socialist Party in Ireland’s record in
struggle – defeating the threat of water charges, fighting the bin tax
(for which Joe was sent to prison), involvement in countless workers’
struggles, like the GAMA dispute (where Turkish migrant workers won a
brilliant victory) – which was crucial to the election victory.
The same can be said, on a
smaller scale, of the councillors that the Socialist Party has been able
to win in England and Wales. Even this year, when we lost council seats
– as a result of the increased turnout caused by the local elections
coinciding with the general election and workers’ fear of a Tory
government – the votes our councillors received were the highest ever as
thousands of workers tried to make sure that, at least, they had proven
fighters representing them at local level. We are confident that our
record in struggle will mean that we can retake the seats that we have
temporarily vacated.
The profound crisis of
capitalism and the unprecedented attacks that are going to rain down on
the public sector will mean that the working class in Britain will have
no choice but to struggle. Socialists will have a very important role in
putting forward a strategy that can unify all of those under attack –
public-sector workers and service users, young and old, the unemployed
and workers – around a programme against all cuts. A mass demonstration
will need to be quickly followed by a 24-hour general strike – probably
of the public sector, initially. Events on this scale will lead to a
profound alteration in the consciousness of those who participate. That,
combined with the brutal, crisis-ridden nature of capitalism, will lead
many thousands to draw socialist conclusions.
This does not mean that there
will not be complications, a legacy of the confused consciousness of the
last decades. The far-right BNP can make further gains, especially
electorally. Another layer may temporarily think ‘to hell with politics’
and concentrate on the industrial struggle alone. Nonetheless, there
will be a growing demand for workers to have their own anti-cuts,
socialist candidates. TUSC can play a crucial role as an instrument for
the creation of a mass party of the working class.
