The build-up to Labour’s first conference after the July general election saw excited commentary in some corners of the capitalist media about a ‘showdown’ over the early measures of Keir Starmer’s new government, in particular the withdrawal of the winter fuel allowance from more than ten million pensioners.
“Labour faces conference fight over winter fuel as unions push for U-turn”, was the headline from PA Media, the news agency owned by, amongst others, The Daily Mail group and the News Corp titles. Anticipating a leadership reversal, it pointed to billboards placed by the Unite union across the conference host city of Liverpool “with the slogan ‘Defend the winter fuel payment’, and [its] plans to stage a demonstration” outside. (22 September)
Unite, with the Communications Workers Union (CWU), had submitted a motion on winter fuel payments which also called for a wealth tax and an end to the government’s ‘fiscal rules’ justifying cuts to public spending. This was selected by the eleven trade unions which remain affiliated to Labour, out of the 48 unions that are members of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), as one of the six that they are allowed to table at the annual conference.
In the event, although the debate was shunted to the closing day after the headline cabinet member speakers had come and gone – a move denounced by the Unite general secretary Sharon Graham as trying “to silence the voice of pensioners, workers and communities” – the motion was passed on a show of hands. The Guardian reported “loud applause” for Sharon Graham in a “noisy conference hall”, and argued that “the defeat will come as blow to Downing Street”. (25 September)
Any rebuff in any forum to the new austerity agenda of Starmer and his chancellor Rachel Reeves can only be welcomed. But it does raise the question how best can pressure from the organised working class be leveraged onto the government. And more broadly what did the conference in its totality reveal about the possibility of ‘reclaiming Labour’ precisely as the voice of ‘workers, pensioners and communities’, a political instrument that could be used against the capitalists and the demands of their system?
One thing that is clear is how few party members remain of those who were inspired to join Labour by Jeremy Corbyn’s unexpected victory in the 2015 leadership election. Membership surged from 193,754 in 2014 under Ed Miliband to a peak of 564,433 in 2017, according to the official annual returns submitted to the Electoral Commission. The same source has membership at 370,450 in 2023, a net decline of nearly 200,000 as the influx of Blairites after 2019 was dwarfed by the outflow of Corbyn supporters.
This was confirmed by the conference. While it was attended by 20,000 people the actual delegates were outnumbered more than ten to one by visitors, staff, media and lobbyists, from businesses, thinktanks, professional institutes, and the voluntary sector. This was not a deliberative conference of working-class representatives but a US-style ‘convention’ of the political managers of British capitalism and their supplicants and hangers-on, reflecting the re-Blairised character of the party five years now after Corbyn’s leadership. Just 116 motions had been received (and 78 ruled out) from the over 600 registered Constituency Labour Parties (CLPs) and the affiliated unions and societies.
The re-constitution of Labour as capitalist New Labour Mark II was further shown by the results of the contest for the nine CLP seats on the party’s governing national executive committee (NEC), elected biennially and announced before the conference. In 2016 the leading left candidate won the votes of 97,510 individual party members, in a clean sweep for Jeremy Corbyn supporters. This year, under the single transfer vote (STV) system introduced in 2020, the combined first preference vote for the left candidates was 11,682, with just three elected.
That’s the context in which the conference theatre must be placed. Like the US Democrats, and of course the Tories here, capitalist parties are not monoliths but an agglomeration of different interests and competing views on how best to administer the system as a whole. Grappling with the problems of enfeebled British capitalism in this era of global turmoil, the experience of Starmer’s Labour will be no different to that of other capitalist governments, riven by ministerial resignations, organised factions and bitter schisms – and more conference clashes to come. The early rivalries just months into the new government, including the recent defenestration of Sue Gray as Starmer’s chief of staff, are just the start.
Divisions in a capitalist party – including their expression on a conference floor – can be utilised by the workers’ movement to its advantage. But only if they become a step to deepen and cohere the independent activity of the working class, in the workplaces and politically towards its own political party, not bound by capitalist interests.
The first meeting of the Unite executive council after the Labour conference agreed to step up the union’s Defend the Winter Fuel Payment Campaign. This includes the possibility of a Unite-sponsored MP Rachael Maskell presenting a private members bill on the issue, having won the opportunity to do so in the parliamentary ballot. This approach, of not being constrained by Labour’s formal procedures from promoting the union’s own independent political agenda, is the way forward and needs to be developed further.
Unite, unlike other affiliated unions, did not give any funding to the central Labour Party during the general election but instead backed 106 individual candidates with donations worth £646,000. They should all now be approached to actively back the winter fuel campaign or lose their union support. The Unite-sponsored MPs include six of the seven MPs suspended from the Parliamentary Labour Party in July for voting against Labour’s retention of the two-child benefit cap. If they back the winter fuel campaign, and if when their suspension ends in the new year they are not re-admitted into the PLP, they should still remain as Unite-sponsored MPs.
Moreover, the motion from Unite and the CWU included a call for a wealth tax. In the run-up to her first budget (introduced after Socialism Today went to press) twelve Labour MPs – eleven of whom are Unite-sponsored – signed a joint letter with Jeremy Corbyn to Rachel Reeves demanding a new 2% tax on assets worth more than £10 million. The union should back them and, again, call on all its sponsored MPs – and the thousand or so Unite members who are Labour councillors – to support union policy here too.
Such steps would take the debate in Unite – and in other unions also, Labour-linked or not – beyond the question of ‘affiliation or disaffiliation’, which for broader layers appears as a technical issue remote from their everyday experience. Instead, they would point to how a workers’ bloc of MPs could be established now, as a parliamentary tribune of the working-class movement. That would transform the political situation in Britain and bring real leverage on the government into play.
As it became clear that the Unite motion was going to be moved from its Monday slot where it would have been a direct counter-point to Rachel Reeves’s conference speech, Sharon Graham responded that “when this becomes widely known there will be real anger among everyday people. Real anger”. But times have changed from when ‘everyday people’ looked with expectation towards the Labour Party – including its conference debates as when Neil Kinnock clashed with our fighting Militant Liverpool Labour councillors in 1985 – as the class character of the party has changed.
The real anger, growing by the day, is stoked not by the Blairites’ conference shenanigans but the concrete actions of the Starmer government. Turning that from the restrictive confines of what happens or not within the rules and procedures of the new New Labour party and forging in the coming months a united industrial and political campaign – an independent workers’ politics – will echo a thousand times louder than even the most fiery speech or challenging resolution smuggled into next year’s jamboree.
Clive Heemskerk