Socialism Today

The ‘unofficial’ mass movement which humbled the seemingly invincible Margaret Thatcher was another example of Marxism proving itself at the head of a mass movement. This article was written on the twentieth anniversary of the introduction of the poll tax to England and Wales, for the March 2010 edition of Socialism Today No.136.

The 1926 general strike and the battle against Thatcher’s poll tax in the late 1980s and early 1990s were probably the two most important events in the consciousness of the labour movement in Britain in the 20th century – although, for Marxists, the epic 1984-85 miners’ strike together with the Liverpool struggle led by Militant, now the Socialist Party, are on a par with these events. There were, of course, differences in the character of each of these struggles. The general strike involved the mobilisation of the mass of organised workers against the austerity programme of Baldwin’s Tory government of the day. The poll tax, while combining some of the features of classical industrial struggles – appeals to the trade unions to take action against the imposition of the tax, etc – was broader and more ‘social’ in the diverse forces that were mobilised. But the one overriding difference between the two was the vital issue of the role of leadership. The general strike, ‘led’ by the General Council of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), ended in a terrible defeat, while the poll tax resulted in a splendid victory which brushed the defeated Thatcher onto the slag heap of history.

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March 1980: To compensate for Tory government cuts Liverpool’s Labour-led council passes a 50% rise in rates (the local tax levy then), against opposition from Militant.

May 1980: Labour loses six Liverpool council seats and a Liberal-Tory coalition takes control.

August 1982: Croxteth Comprehensive School occupied to prevent closure plans.

April 1983: One day city-wide strike against privatisation.

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First published on the thirtieth anniversary of Thatcher coming to power in 1979, in the May 2009 edition of Socialism Today, No.128. This is the abridged version printed following her death in April 2013.

Margaret Thatcher was not cut from the same cloth as those representatives of British capitalism who preceded her at the head of the Tory party. Post-1945 Tory prime ministers, in the main, such as Harold Macmillan, presided over a ‘post-war consensus’, which prescribed that the government and the ruling class would seek to avoid a head-on confrontation with the organised labour movement. Following in the so-called ‘Whig tradition’, Tory grandees developed the special art of British statecraft, by bending with the class and social winds. This served them well during the post-1945 boom in accommodating to the tops of the labour movement in particular in ‘sharing out’ a growing ‘cake’. But the ‘slow inglorious decay’ of Britain was masked during the boom. When this ran out of steam it inevitably culminated in a collision between the classes. This took shape in the 1960s but intensified in the tumultuous 1970s and 1980s.

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First published in the November 2016 edition of Socialism Today, issue No.203, after Jeremy Corbyn’s defeat of Owen Smith’s summer leadership challenge, this article, carried here in abridged form, discussed the Corbyn movement in the context of an international wave of left-wing populism, its significance but also its weaknesses.

Jeremy Corbyn, through mass support, has fought off the attempted coup by right-wing Blairite Labour MPs and their supporters. Corbyn actually increased his majority in the second Labour leadership campaign in twelve months. But the Labour right and behind them the strategists of British capitalism still remain unreconciled to his victory, so the ‘civil war’ that has raged throughout the party since his initial election will continue unabated. The main reason for this is to be found in the determination of the pro-capitalist Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) and its supporters, backed up by the venal capitalist media, to continue their campaign, not even excluding a third attempt to unseat Corbyn.

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