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After the May elections…
Can the anti-cuts movement find a political voice?
An electoral backlash against the Con-Dems has
begun. But what are the prospects of anti-cuts anger finding a political
outlet which can turn back the ‘age of austerity’? What is the role of
the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition in building this? CLIVE
HEEMSKERK writes.
MAY’S ELECTIONS FOR the Scottish parliament, the
Welsh assembly and English local councils were the first gauge on the
electoral plane of the gathering opposition to the Con-Dem government’s
austerity agenda.
The overarching verdict was a crushing repudiation
of the Liberal Democrats. They were disproportionately hit, compared to
their Tory coalition ‘partners’, largely because, after 13 years of New
Labour government, they had managed to position themselves as a
perceived ‘radical alternative’ to the two main establishment parties.
The subsequent disabusing of the hopes of many of their supporters when
they joined the coalition, produced a deeper reaction.
In the poll for constituency members of the Scottish
parliament (MSPs), the Liberal Democrats lost 55% of the votes they won
in the last Scottish elections in 2007 (168,518), and 52% of their
regional MSP list vote. In Wales they lost fewer seats – one assembly
member compared to twelve MSPs – but their absolute vote still fell by
one third. In the English local elections the Liberal Democrats lost 40%
of the 1,846 seats they were defending (748), and control of nine of the
19 councils they held before May. This was an electoral massacre on an
industrial scale.
The Tories, in contrast, did not suffer to nearly
the same degree. In Scotland they lost 17% of their absolute vote in the
constituencies poll compared to 2007, 13% in the regional lists, but in
Wales they marginally increased their vote. In the English local
elections they won an extra 86 councillors, largely at the expense of
the Liberal Democrats, and took control of a further four councils.
Over 9,000 council seats were up for election in
England, in every region with the exception of the London boroughs and a
handful of unitary authorities, but not even the establishment parties
contested every seat. A sample of 2,500 wards where they did, however,
in which 6.3 million people voted, gave the Tories a 38% share of the
vote, Labour 37% and the Liberal Democrats 16%. (Colin Rallings and
Michael Thrasher, The Sunday Times, 8 May) This compares with the
results in 2007, in the same local election cycle, when the Tories
polled 40%, Labour 26% and the Lib Dems 24%.
The referendum on changing the parliamentary
election system to the ‘Alternative Vote’ method, also held on 5 May,
mobilised established Tory voters and was probably one factor for the
more limited rebound against the Tories. But there were other factors as
well.
ICM have conducted a series of polls for The
Guardian newspaper tracking the rise in the number of respondents saying
that ‘the cuts go too far’. A majority agreeing with this was first
recorded late last year, after George Osborne’s comprehensive spending
review, up from 43% holding that view in September before the plans were
announced. But a class divide was also revealed, with 50% of so-called
‘AB’ voters agreeing that the cuts are ‘right or should go further’
while ‘DE’ manual, unskilled and unemployed workers were firmly opposed.
Opinion has moved further against the cuts – reflected in the massive 26
March anti-cuts demonstration – but the full impact of what they really
involve, and how widely they will hit, is still to be felt.
In reality, such polls are merely a record of a
lagging consciousness. The conference votes for strike ballots by the
National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) and the ‘moderate’
Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) union, and the open
hostility to the Con-Dems from bodies such as the Police Federation, the
Royal College of Nursing, and other NHS ‘professional colleges’, point
to how the opposition to the cuts will deepen and widen into a perfect
storm. Then both parties of the coalition will meet their electoral
nemesis.
A limited Labour recovery
THE MAIN ELECTORAL beneficiary as the mood against
the cuts further develops will be the Labour Party. This is not out of
enthusiasm for, or even a full awareness of, Labour’s own cuts policy.
Osborne’s austerity plan aims for UK public debt to peak at 70.3% of GDP
in 2013-14 compared to Labour’s last budget target of 74.9%, which would
still have involved ‘cuts worse than Thatcher’s’, according to the then
chancellor, Alistair Darling. But Labour is still seen at least to be a
viable governmental alternative to the Con-Dems and, in the absence of a
mass working-class political alternative, electoral support will ebb and
flow between the parties, much as it does in the USA between the
Republicans and the allegedly more ‘labour-friendly’ Democrats.
This was one trend in the May elections,
particularly for the Welsh assembly where Labour put on 86,752 votes in
the constituency seats compared to 2007, a 22% increase in absolute
votes. This was replicated in some urban areas in north England and the
Midlands. Labour won an additional 857 councillors and took control of
26 councils, taking its total in England outside of London to 57.
But Labour’s recovery was certainly not uniform in
the English council elections. It gained Ipswich in Suffolk and
Gravesham in Kent. But, as the shadow culture secretary, Ivan Lewis,
conceded, "there was little sign of those squeezed middle voters in the
south-east, south-west and east of England returning to Labour". (The
Guardian, 12 May)
This year was the largest of the four-yearly local
election cycles, with 9,396 of the country’s 18,225 council seats up for
election. Before May, Labour was behind the Liberal Democrats in these
seats, with just 1,620 councillors, although that has now been reversed.
But Labour had cumulatively lost over 1,400 seats in this cycle since
1999 and those losses have not yet been recouped.
Where Labour did win, expectations will be raised
that the new councils will be a shield, at least, against the cuts. And
the cuts could be stopped in their tracks if the Labour Party took a
clear stand of opposition. If Labour leader Ed Miliband, for example,
was to commit an incoming Labour government to reimburse councils who
exhaust their reserves or borrow rather than make the savage cuts
demanded of them, then not one council would have a reason to make the
cuts.
The same pledge could be made to other public and
semi-public bodies like universities, health authorities, housing
associations, etc, to encourage them to incur ‘temporary’ deficits to
avoid implementing cuts. Almost one in five secondary schools and one in
ten primaries entered the 2010-11 financial year in the red, with a
total deficit of £161 million, the highest since records began a decade
ago. (The Guardian, 5 April) A NAHT survey found 37% of schools expected
to make redundancies for the new autumn term. (The Guardian, 29 April)
Labour could pledge to reimburse any school governing board that refused
to make these cuts and the jobs would be saved.
But Labour, nationally and locally, has shown it
will not take such a stance. Labour councils have lined up to pass on
government cuts, with no attempt at resistance. They have not used their
powers to lead the opposition to the NHS ‘reforms’, for example, by
organising consultative ballots or initiating ‘referrals’ to block the
preparations for the handover of health commissioning to the proposed
new GP consortia. In a letter issued after the alleged ‘pause’ in the
legislative process, David Nicholson, the NHS chief executive, claimed
that nine in ten local councils had applied instead to be ‘early
implementers’ of the reform provisions. (The Guardian, 16 April) Labour
is not a vehicle to resist the cuts.
The absence of a workers’ party, to call it by its
right name, is an important factor in how far the capitalists and their
political representatives will dare to go in pushing through their
austerity agenda. In the past, Labour was a ‘capitalist workers’ party’,
a party with pro-capitalist leaders but with democratic structures that
gave an opportunity for workers to fight for their interests,
principally through the unions. It had the potential to act at least as
a check on the capitalists, fearful of radicalising Labour’s
working-class base. But this is no longer the case. The review of
Labour’s structure introduced by Miliband in March as the election
campaign got under way – under the heading, Refounding Labour: a party
for the new generation – shows how far the Labour Party has already been
‘refounded’ as a ‘normal’ capitalist party like the US Democrats, and
the next steps planned in this process (see box).
Significantly for how Labour is now perceived by
many workers, in the first three unions with a political fund to ballot
for national strike action against the cuts – the PCS civil service
union, the National Union of Teachers (NUT) and the University and
College Union (UCU) – there is no broadly-supported call being raised
for affiliation to the Labour Party, and certainly not as a means of
enhancing the unions’ anti-cuts struggle. There are 1.673 million trade
unionists in TUC-affiliated unions (out of a total TUC membership of 6.2
million) who pay into a political fund in unions not affiliated to
Labour – PCS, the RMT transport workers’ union, the Fire Brigades Union
(FBU), NUT, UCU, etc – or, in Unison, the public-sector union, members
who choose to pay into the general political fund and not the affiliated
Labour Link fund.
Twelve unions are still affiliated to Labour, with
2.727 million members who pay into their political funds. But in the
‘big three’ in particular, which organise in the public sector – Unison,
and the Unite and GMB general workers’ unions – the question will be
relentlessly posed in the anti-cuts struggles ahead: if Labour is not
the vehicle, what needs to be done politically to resist the cuts?
As a result, two processes can develop in tandem as
the anti-cuts movement builds. Labour can pick up electoral support,
including in ‘the south’, as the first alternative to hand in the
polling booth against the Con-Dem hatchet-men. At the same time, amongst
increasingly broader layers drawing on their experience of fighting the
cuts, opposition can grow to Labour as well. This could include new
forces which, if rooted in a mass opposition to the cuts, including in
the trade unions, will not necessarily be completely ‘squeezed out’ on
the electoral field.
Other outlets for protest
MAY’S ELECTIONS GAVE some early signs that this
‘dual process’ is already underway: that while Labour will regain ground
electorally, other outlets of protest can develop too. This was
certainly shown by the results in Scotland.
The Scottish elections were a disaster for Labour,
its worst result in the country since 1931, with the Scottish National
Party (SNP) gaining an absolute majority in the Scottish parliament with
69 MSPs. Labour lost votes compared to its already poor performance in
2007 – 71,856 in the regional list vote (12%). Although it fared better
in the constituency vote – a loss of 17,913 votes (3%) on 2007 – because
of the collapse of the Con-Dems, particularly the Liberal Democrats, the
SNP picked up 32 constituency MSPs, with Labour losing 20.
"Labour’s invitation to back the party as the best
way of giving David Cameron a bloody nose", wrote John Curtice of
Strathclyde University, "was one voters felt able to refuse". (The
Guardian, 7 May) The results confirmed the findings of a pre-election
survey conducted for The Scotsman newspaper which showed that 50% of
Scots – more than voted for the SNP – believed that "the SNP would do a
better job of standing up for Scotland against the coalition" than
Labour. (The Guardian, 3 May) ‘Standing up for Scotland’ means, of
course, different things for different people and classes. The SNP,
their campaign bankrolled by big business figures, are proven defenders
of capitalist interests – which will mean them attempting to meet the
costs of the economic crisis by attacking jobs and services. But for
Scottish workers and big sections of the middle class it means, above
all, fighting savage austerity.
There is a parallel here with the situation that
began to develop after Thatcher’s third election victory in 1987 when
she moved to introduce the poll tax in Scotland a year ahead of England
and Wales, despite having no ‘mandate’ in Scotland – there were just ten
Scottish Tory MPs out of 72. Seventeen months after the general
election, in November 1988, there was a by-election in the rock-solid
Labour seat of Glasgow Govan. The SNP triumphed, overturning a 19,509
Labour majority, with two main slogans: ‘We’re not paying the poll tax’
and ‘the feeble fifty won’t stand up to Thatcher’, referring to Labour’s
50 Scottish MPs.
The SNP subsequently refused to support a campaign
of mass non-payment of the poll tax, with SNP councillors, in the main,
going along with Labour in implementing punitive enforcement measures
against non-payers. The resultant political vacuum, that the most
conscious anti-poll tax fighters had no political outlet, was an
important factor in the early electoral successes of Scottish Militant
Labour (SML), the predecessor of the Socialist Party Scotland, when it
was formed in 1992. SML won four seats on Glasgow council in May 1992,
just weeks after another Tory victory in the April 1992 general election
(in which Tommy Sheridan came second in Glasgow Pollok with 6,287 votes,
19.3%). From May 1992 to February 1994, SML polled 33.3% of the total
votes cast in 17 local council contests with Labour (36.1%) and the SNP
(22.8%), winning six.
The success of SML laid the basis for the
development of the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP), which was able to win
representation in the Scottish parliament from 1999 to 2007. Tragically
this position was thrown away as a result of the subsequent political
mistakes and actions of the SSP leadership, including their role in the
prosecution and jailing of Tommy Sheridan, leaving a clear field for the
SNP in the Scottish parliament for the last four years. (See:
www.socialistworld.net for a full analysis of the Scottish results.)
But now there is no hiding place for the SNP, even
if the Con-Dems in Westminster concede amendments to the Scotland bill
on corporation tax or higher borrowing powers for the Scottish
parliament. The SNP will generate new opposition, and new opportunities
to rebuild independent working-class political representation, as it
attempts to preside over projected cuts of £3.3 billion to jobs and
services in Scotland.
Testing the Greens
AT THE OTHER end of Britain, in the south coast city
of Brighton, the Green Party emerged as the main electoral outlet for
opposition to the cuts. With 33% of the city-wide vote, the Greens
surged from 13 to 23 councillors, displacing the Tories as the largest
group (down from 26 to 18 councillors), while Labour remained with 13
seats.
The Greens also gained councillors in Bristol,
Bolsover, Kings Lynn, Solihull, Stafford, Reading – where they now hold
the balance of power – and Norwich, consolidating their position as the
second party in a ‘hung council’. They now have 130 councillors in 43
local authorities.
The Greens’ record in local government, however,
shows that they will disappoint those who see them as a shield against
the cuts. In the south London borough of Lewisham, for example, for four
years (2006-10), two Socialist Party and six Green councillors sat in a
hung council, with Labour as the largest party but without an overall
majority. The Socialist Party and Green councillors sometimes voted
together against all the other parties, for example, in opposing plans
to cut local hospital A&E services, or in support of the 2008 national
teachers’ strike. But the Greens more often opposed the Socialist Party
councillors’ proposals to resist the establishment parties’ pro-market
agenda, siding with New Labour on key votes, or abstaining to help give
it a majority, including votes on cutting council services, homes
privatisation plans, and academy schools.
Such vacillation by the Greens is not accidental.
Public representatives such as councillors or MPs who stand out are put
under extreme pressure from the establishment politicians, backed up by
the media and senior civil servants or, locally, by council executive
officers, to ‘be realistic’, to accept ‘officers’ guidance’, and
generally follow the logic of pro-capitalist policies. The Green Party
has not emerged as an expression of the political interests of the
working class, with no acceptance amongst its members of a class
analysis of society and not based on working-class organisations, in
particular the trade unions. Neither does it have a clear alternative to
the capitalist ‘free-market’ system. When the stakes are high,
therefore, the majority of Green councillors will be unable to resist.
The Brighton Greens have now formed a minority
administration, promising a review of the previously agreed £24 million
council budget cuts. But their own ‘alternative budget’, which they
presented to the March council budget-making meeting, accepted that deep
cuts had to be made, ruling out the idea of setting a ‘needs budget’
that would not pass on the Con-Dems’ cuts. While the Greens may continue
to pick up electoral support in the vacuum that exists, they will not
provide an effective political voice for the anti-cuts movement.
The TUSC election campaign
MAY’S ELECTIONS TOOK place just five weeks after the
half-a-million plus Trades Union Congress (TUC) organised anti-cuts
demonstration on 26 March. But this magnificent manifestation on the
streets of the enormous latent power of the working class and its basic
organisations, the trade unions, did not transform consciousness as it
could have done, at least immediately.
The TUC leadership organised nothing to follow up
the demonstration. The possibility of co-ordinated strike action on 30
June by 750,000 civil servants, teachers and lecturers against the
attack on public-sector pensions has come about only because of the
initiative of the left-led PCS union (with Socialist Party members to
the fore) and the NUT. The inspiring ‘Hardest Hit’ demonstration on 11
May to defend people with disabilities against the vicious government
assault was organised and built for by the UK Disabled People’s Council,
the Disability Benefits Consortium, and charities like Mencap, Sense and
the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB), but not the TUC
leaders. The momentum from 26 March was dissipated, even though its
effects on thinking – the confidence it gave millions of workers – will
resurface.
Instead, the TUC leaders diverted attention to the
elections, a ‘lower form of struggle’. Elections are always just a
snapshot of a moment in time, an episodic conjuncture, rather than a 3-D
film of an ongoing process. But it was at this conjuncture – with a
royal wedding diversion thrown in just a week before! – that the Trade
Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) conducted its first local
election campaign.
TUSC was set up last year to enable trade unionists,
community campaigners and socialists who wanted to resist the
pro-austerity consensus of the establishment parties to stand candidates
in the 2010 general election. It came out of a series of discussions by
participants in the No2EU-Yes to Democracy coalition, which contested
the 2009 European elections with the official support of the RMT, the
Socialist Party, and others – the first time a trade union had
officially backed a national electoral challenge to Labour since the
party’s foundation. It is a coalition with a national steering committee
which includes, in a personal capacity, leading officials of the RMT,
PCS and NUT, including RMT general secretary Bob Crow. The Socialist
Party, involved from the outset, and the Socialist Workers Party (SWP),
which joined later, are also represented on the committee.
TUSC was established as a federal ‘umbrella’
coalition, with an agreed core policy statement endorsed by all its
candidates but with participating organisations accountable for their
own campaigns. For the local elections, a policy platform was agreed at
a conference in January that committed TUSC council candidates to a
clear anti-cuts stance. This included opposition to all cuts to council
jobs, services, pay and conditions, a rejection of above-inflation
increases in council tax, rent and service charges to compensate for
government cuts, and opposition to the privatisation of council
services, or the ‘half-way house’ transfer of council services to
‘social enterprises’ or ‘arms-length’ management organisations. When it
came to government cuts to council funding, TUSC had a clear position
that councils should refuse to implement the cuts, supporting the use of
reserves and prudential borrowing powers – or a needs budget with an
identified deficit if that was the only way to avoid cuts – as a prelude
to mobilising the mass campaign that is necessary to force the
government to make up councils’ funding shortfall.
The TUSC intervention was an extremely modest start.
Exaggeration only underplays the scale of the task ahead – and there are
limits to what can be gauged from results measured in hundreds rather
than thousands. Nevertheless, the 177 candidates standing under the TUSC
umbrella, in 50 councils, together polled over 25,000 votes. (A full
breakdown of the results is available on the TUSC website at
www.tusc.org.uk). Unfortunately, three sitting councillors were
defeated, while polling over 30% of the vote. But in 19 seats TUSC
candidates polled over 10% and, in nearly a third of wards contested,
the TUSC vote was more than 5%. TUSC outpolled a Liberal Democrat
candidate in one out of every eight seats where there was a contest.
Overall, in the wards TUSC contested, Labour polled
245,000 votes. In other words, for every ten Labour voters there was one
person who voted for TUSC. In some areas the ratio was better: one TUSC
voter for every seven Labour voters in Salford and Walsall, one-to-four
for the seven TUSC candidates in Rugby. Labour won Gravesham in Kent –
where Miliband held his post-election photocall – but failed to make
further breakthroughs there, despite having targeted the county as a
‘gateway’ to the south. In the Kent seats contested by TUSC there was
one TUSC voter (1,967 in total) to every five for Labour (9,210).
In eight wards contested by TUSC the Labour Party
was so moribund that it either did not stand a candidate or stood for
less than the total number of seats up for election. TUSC candidates in
these wards included an RMT regional president, a Unite branch
secretary, a Unison branch officer and a NASUWT teachers’ union
association officer – trade unionists whose only means of fighting the
cuts on the political plane was by picking up the TUSC banner.
But of course TUSC, at this stage, was not able to
emerge as the ‘political wing’ of the anti-cuts movement: even to the
degree, for example, that Scottish Militant Labour (SML) was able to
develop in the aftermath of the victorious anti-poll tax struggle.
Similarly, the Socialist Party in Ireland won councillors and then a
parliamentary seat (in 1997) initially as a result of leading a mass
movement against water charges, paving the way for the presence of five
United Left Alliance TDs in the Irish parliament today, including the
returning Joe Higgins. These experiences, however, do show how a vehicle
for working class political representation, or at least a pre-formation
of one, can be built out of mass struggles. And these will develop, on a
far greater scale than even the anti-poll tax struggle, in the coming
movement against the cuts.
TUSC is not a ‘finished product’ (see box) and other
forces, perhaps based on trade unions thrown into action against the
cuts or mass community campaigns, may emerge as the ‘political voice’ of
the anti-cuts movement. But it is a portender of what needs to be done –
and which still could achieve electoral breakthroughs in the events
ahead – for building working class political representation as part of
the struggle to turn back the ‘age of austerity’ and for socialism.
Next steps for TUSC
THE IMPORTANCE of the Trade Unionist and
Socialist Coalition (TUSC) for the Socialist Party lies, above all,
in its potential to act as a catalyst in the trade unions, both in
the formal structures and below, for the idea of working class
political representation.
Trade unions are still the basic organisations
of the working class, which gives them enormous social weight. It is
not for nothing that the capitalist media routinely denigrate the
unions or demonise the most combative figures, such as Bob Crow, for
‘holding the public to ransom’ or ‘crippling the economy’. The 26
March demonstration was a glimpse of the social reserves the unions
still possess.
A new workers’ party which could fill the
present vacuum, revealed again by the lack of a political voice for
the anti-cuts movement, will not necessarily develop through the
official structures of the unions. It is almost certain that a
majority of the larger unions, at least nationally, would not
initially embrace a new party – in the same way that the biggest
unions continued to back the Liberal Party in the early days of the
Labour Representation Committee (the forerunner of the Labour
Party). But the anti-cuts movement, as it develops, will again and
again pose before trade unionists in struggle that there must be an
alternative. TUSC can play a critical role in developing this
consciousness.
It must also play a role, perhaps even an
equally vital one, in enabling anti-cuts campaigns to step into the
political domain. The road to a new workers’ party in the age of
austerity is through the anti-cuts struggle, in the unions but also
in community campaigns.
This conception of the role of TUSC is not
universally accepted, however, even amongst some TUSC supporters.
Some argue for the national steering committee to be restructured,
to be composed of representatives of small socialist organisations
and delegates from geographically organised bodies of individual
members. But such proposals would eliminate the most important,
trade union component of the coalition.
This approach was one of the arguments that was
used by trade unionists against the Socialist Alliance, a ‘left
unity’ organisation established in the mid-1990s. The then FBU
general secretary Andy Gilchrist, for example, unable to advance
positive reasons why the fire-fighters’ union should continue to
fund Labour, fell back on the problems with the Socialist Alliance,
"in terms of accountability and representation". Because the
Socialist Alliance was "not actually constituted so that
organisations can affiliate", he argued, trade unionists could not
have a collective voice in it. (Red Pepper, September 2002) But TUSC
is different.
The leading national trade union officials
presently on the TUSC steering committee are not in a position to
win support in their unions for formal affiliation to TUSC at this
stage, so they participate in a personal capacity. Does this federal
approach create a ‘democratic deficit’ in TUSC? No. They, and any
other national union figures who join the committee in the future,
are accountable to the ‘public opinion’ of their members. It is
therefore justified at this stage for them to retain their rights on
the steering committee, with decisions taken only on a consensus
basis, principally to endorse candidates and election policy
proposals.
There is a dilemma of how to involve individual
supporters of TUSC who are not members of the Socialist Party and
the SWP – who have representation on the steering committee – while
not diluting the role of the trade unions. The Socialist Party is
sponsoring a proposal that the recently-formed TUSC Independent
Socialist Network should also have a committee place.
There will be discussion on these points, and
the May elections campaign and future plans, at a TUSC candidates’
conference in July. But one thing is clear. While TUSC, undoubtedly,
is still a work in progress, it is a coalition that should continue
with the vital task of preparing the necessary forces to take
forward the argument for a new political vehicle for the working
class.
‘Refounding Labour’?
THE DISCUSSION paper, Refounding Labour: a party
for the new generation, that accompanied Ed Miliband’s announcement
in March of a review of party structures, shows how far Labour has
been transformed into a ‘normal’ capitalist party – and the next
steps planned to continue the process.
Devastating facts are revealed on the state of
the party’s organisation. "We began 2010", the paper says, "with
half as many members as we had 20 years ago". In too many
constituencies, it goes on, "our party barely functions… activism
among Labour members has diminished… members nowadays get involved
less often in canvassing on doorsteps, delivering leaflets,
attending meetings, signing petitions or even displaying election
posters". Tellingly, it comments that, "where once there were
numerous union activists in almost all constituency parties, now
they are few and far between".
The number of constituency parties (CLPs)
represented at Labour’s annual conference fell to "only 412 in 2010,
or under two thirds the total entitled to attend. Are too many local
parties moribund?", the paper asks. "In many Labour-held seats", it
admits, "a wide variety of organisational tasks previously performed
by volunteers" are now done by MPs and councillors. And, of course,
"representing Labour", it notes, "is now remunerated at all levels",
including substantial councillors’ ‘allowances’. What is this if not
a description of a self-serving apparatchik party?
Even a capitalist party, however, needs an
electoral base, so Labour’s organisational atrophy is a problem for
its tops. But the ‘solutions’ proposed are firmly rooted in the path
set out by Tony Blair to transform Labour into New Labour. Peter
Hain, chair of the national policy forum and overseeing the review,
refers approvingly to the abolition of the socialist ‘Clause Four’
in 1994 – "hugely important" – and the "one member, one vote
reforms", which severely curtailed the role of trade unions in the
party structures.
The paper notes that "the last round of party
reform gave constituency parties the option of moving to all-member
meetings instead of having a general committee". This should be
extended, it argues. But actually, "the distinction between the two
options may be marginal given that the trend has been towards open
discussions with all views being summarised and forwarded [not
decided but ‘forwarded’! To where? – CH] rather than voting on
old-style resolutions that come down firmly on one side of an issue"
– trivial things, presumably, like whether Labour councils should
implement the cuts or not!
The model is clear: "The delegate system could
be abolished except perhaps for election to a CLP executive which
managed the administration of the party". That would leave
‘campaigning and policy direction’ to be discussed at occasional
all-member meetings, "with the option of adding in registered
supporters" and "recognised consultee groups".
These new categories could also be involved in
leadership elections (and candidate selection?), according to Hain
at the review launch, in the electoral college section for
affiliated trade unions, further diluting their already diminished
position. (The Guardian, 29 March) What is this but a version of the
US primary system?
The Labour Party was born in 1900 as the product
of growing sections of workers looking to politically express their
collective interests against the capitalist class and their
political representatives, the Liberal and Conservative parties. Its
formation was an important step: an independent party bringing
workers together to struggle and discuss collectively impels
different sections to move beyond their own particular interests to
develop a broader class consciousness. This is necessary both for
the task of ending capitalism and the building of a new, socialist
society.
Remnants of Labour’s past still exist in its
structures. This review, with recommendations to go to Labour’s
autumn conference, will be another step in their eradication, making
Labour ever more like the US Democrats, with workers and their
organisations, the trade unions, mere supplicants to capitalist
politicians.
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