In reviewing my book, Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay: A Short History of the Anti-Poll Tax Struggle (Thinkwell Books), you presented a comprehensive look at the Tories’ poll tax and our historic victory against it (Socialism Today No.278, June 2024). However, I disagree that I “mistakenly leave open the possibility of resuscitating Starmer’s Labour Party”.
Starmer has formed ‘New Labour 2.0’. However, where Blair faced better economic conditions, Starmer will have to confront dire socio-economic storms.
History shows Labour has swung repeatedly from left to right down the years. In its early years, clinging to the tailcoats of ‘liberalism’; in the wake of the 1917 Russian revolution, adopting Clause IV into its constitution.
Attlee’s Labour joined Churchill’s Tories in the wartime coalition but was pressured by workers to defeat them in the 1945 election. We saw the implementation of the ‘Beveridge Report’, the welfare state, the NHS, and the nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy. As welcome as these reforms were, however, they were a halfway house between capitalism and socialism. Labour failed to complete a socialist transformation and, by the early 1950s, the Tories were back in power.
The Labour Party passed through a series of internal battles – that continued through the premierships of Harold Wilson, into the 1970s, as Wilson struggled to hold the two wings of the party together. By then, the unprecedented post-war boom was already unravelling. Wilson’s new government (1974) refused to implement the leftwing policies on which they were elected. This provoked the so-called ‘Winter of Discontent’ series of strikes. Abstentions in the 1979 election let in the disastrous Thatcher government. We’re living with the consequences today.
In the early 1980s, some rightwing Labour MPs jumped ship to form the Social Democratic Party (SDP), strengthening Thatcherism. Our forerunners, the Militant Tendency, a strong influence in the party and trade unions, supported the year-long miners’ strike and led the Liverpool city council against rate-capping.
Labour leader Neil Kinnock launched a witch-hunt against Militant, specifically the Liverpool socialist councillors, leading to expulsion and surcharge. Purges intensified, despite our victory against the poll tax that saw the Tories dump Thatcher. We fought expulsions, refusing to give up our positions. Clearly, we could no longer effectively operate within Labour so formed our own party.
While we began the long task of re-building our movement, Blair’s landslide, in 1997, meant he could ignore those lefts within Labour. Blairites governed on behalf of big business, guaranteeing the return of the Tories. Cameron’s austerity cuts saw mass demonstrations and public sector strikes but union leaders compromised with the ‘Heads of Agreements’ deal. When the ‘Corbyn Accident’ happened, we saw another swing to the left for Labour.
Party membership swelled to 600,000 – the largest political party in Europe – a magnificent ‘youth surge’ behind it. The Socialist Party saw the possibility, at that stage, of affiliation to Labour. Accordingly, the ruling class, including the rightwing Labourites, pulled out all the stops to kill off anything that smacked of workers having a government that was on their side. Corbyn, fatally, compromised with the ‘Starmerites’ and we paid the price at the election in 2019. Since then, the rightwing have hounded out the left.
My point is, it doesn’t end there. As difficult as things are, the battle is not completely over. Starmer still needs to keep looking over his shoulder as his anti-democratic purges in the party collide with much of the membership. The recent ‘difficulties’ with Diane Abbott and Faiza Shaheen illustrate this, as do the protests of local Labour councillors against the lack of democracy in choosing their own candidates and in the local parties. His stance on Gaza has also sparked anger.
When ‘Blairism’ held union leaders in its grip, did we turn our backs on the unions? Clearly not. We worked our way into winning significant positions, gaining seats on some union NECs. Likewise, we should be prepared to work with the Labour rank and file and beyond. Millions of workers vote for Labour, but we’ve always said: ‘we go where our class goes’. Lenin said: ‘patiently explain’.
Starmer won’t last forever. Angela Rayner has a fair chance of becoming leader any time soon and, her zig-zags aside, is susceptible to the trade union movement and, potentially, a figure for the Labour left to gather around at some point. Some union leaders – Sharon Graham (UNITE), Dave Ward (UCW), Matt Wrack (FBU) and Mick Lynch (RMT) – are slowly beginning to kick against Labour’s policies; some are in for a rude awakening sooner than they think. It could be fertile ground to win adherents to socialism whether inside Labour or for TUSC.
We mustn’t forget: ‘economic conditions dictate political consciousness’.
Chris Robinson
Clive Heemskerk responds for Socialism Today:
Chris Robinson’s letter replying to a point raised in Socialism Today’s recent review of his book on the anti-poll tax movement is welcome. He poses important questions when he disputes that to “leave open the possibility of resuscitating Starmer’s Labour Party” is a mistake, as Eric Segal had argued it was in our review. In doing so Chris enumerates previous examples of swings “from left to right down the years” to conclude that, “as difficult as things are, the battle is not completely over” in the Labour Party.
Socialism Today has closely analysed the Labour Party, both current developments and the different episodes in its history, not least in the 40-page special edition produced in June 2020 (issue number 239) after Starmer’s ascent to the leadership, with the self-explanatory title, Lessons From The Corbyn Experience. But it is always useful to return to old questions from a different perspective, above all to check if the ideas worked out before still provide a reliable guide to action, as all theory must strive to do.
The fundamental problem with Chris’s assessment of the possibilities for struggle within the Labour Party today, however, is its timelessness. He does not take into account the qualitive change in Labour’s class character inaugurated by Tony Blair’s 1990s transformation of the party into New Labour, another ‘normal’ capitalist party like the Democratic Party in the USA.
So drawing an analogy – “likewise” – between the trade unions and the Labour Party he asks, “did we turn our backs on the unions” when right-wing leaders dominated? It is true that unions can atrophy for even long periods with limited participation by rank-and-file members. But they remain at bottom working class organisations, looked to by workers as the means by which they can collectively defend their material and other class interests. Can that be said to apply to the Labour Party today?
It did apply of course – Labour seen as ‘our party’ – in the past. The party that adopted the socialistic Clause IV in 1918 which Chris refers to, was effectively a political extension of the trade union movement; with the channels there too for the involvement of different socialist organisations, the working-class co-operative movement, and other affiliates. One strikingly illustrative example of this is that of the first two Communist Party MPs elected in Britain, in the 1922 general election, Saklatvala Shapurji won his seat in Battersea North as the candidate of the joint Battersea Labour Party and Trades Council organisation. But is that type of party an organism of the same, or even a similar, character – politically or organisationally – as Blair and Starmer’s ‘New Labour’?
As the Socialist Party has consistently explained, Labour from its formation and until the 1990s had just such a dual character, as a ‘bourgeois workers party’ in Lenin’s words. It had a leadership at the top reflecting the requirements of capitalism – “clinging to the tailcoats of liberalism” as Chris describes it – but with a broad socialistic ideological foundation and a structure through which the working class could move to fight for their interests. Blair’s transmutation of Labour was not just another quantitative ‘swing from left to right’ but a qualitive change in its character into a capitalist party.
It wasn’t one act, of course, but a process, both ideological and organisational. To root out socialist ideas – the replacement of Clause IV was not just symbolism – and to destroy the democratic structures enabling the working class, through the unions in particular, to potentially control its political representatives. The transformation from a class-based party was recognised and lauded as such by Margaret Thatcher.
So why was Blair, of all the capitalist leaders of the Labour Party ‘down the years’, able to affect such a change? Whereas in 1960, for example, Hugh Gaitskill was unable to abolish Clause IV in the face of opposition from the workers’ movement? It was only possible because of the backdrop of the broad shift in the balance of class forces that developed after the collapse of Stalinism in Russia and Eastern Europe from the late 1980s.
Although for us the Stalinist regimes were a grotesque caricature of socialism – which is the democratic control and planning of the economy and society not the totalitarian rule of a bureaucratic caste – their demise was used to ‘prove’ that capitalism was the only viable way of organising society. This ideological defeat undermined the confidence of even the most active, politically conscious workers to resist the demands of the capitalist system – in the workplace and societally – with consequences for workers’ organisation, both in unions and parties.
The victorious anti-poll tax movement of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and particularly its aftermath, provides further evidence for this. With around a third of the entire adult population facing some form of legal action against them over a four-year period but remaining unbowed, the mass movement which we built on that bedrock and which defeated Thatcher remains one of the greatest episodes of working-class struggle in Britain.
But developing against the background of the unfolding collapse of Stalinism, however, this movement did not find its reflection in the Labour Party as the effects of the historic ideological defeat worked their way through the working class and its organisations. Instead, as Chris records – without reaching conclusions – the “purges intensified” and “we could no longer effectively operate within Labour”. By 1995 the trade unions’ role in parliamentary selections had been curtailed, their representation at Labour’s conference cut to 50%, and Clause IV abolished, the building blocks of the Blair counter-revolution. This was not just another cyclical ‘swing’.
But didn’t Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership represent “another swing to the left for Labour”, showing that its character had not fundamentally changed? On the contrary. His ‘accidental victory’ in 2015, enabled by the Blairites’ opening of the leadership election to workers and youth outside the party – and by ‘lending’ MPs votes to put him on the ballot paper! – did reveal, twenty years on, that the experience of capitalism unchallenged would generate a mass opposition that looks to ‘socialism’ in its broadest sense. This is because socialism is not just an idea but a reflection of the common, collective interests of the working class.
But while in this way ‘economic conditions’ do indeed, as Chris says, ‘dictate political consciousness’, it takes subjective factors for that consciousness to become a material force. As we warned in 2015 and throughout the four years of the Corbyn experience, unless there were decisive moves to mobilise workers and young people to effectively re-constitute the class basis of the party politically and organisationally, the theoretical possibility – which we ourselves had mooted – of a mass democratic workers’ party being born out of a capitalist party, would not be achieved. It is no consolation that we were proved correct.
Our ability to build on the great anti-poll tax movement into the 1990s was also cut across by the objective fact of the ideological triumph of capitalism after the collapse of Stalinism and its impact on workers’ consciousness and their organisations. But the 2020s and beyond are not the 1990s and new opportunities open. Only, however, if all the conclusions from the past are drawn.
‘Patiently explain’, absolutely. But for theory to be, not a set of immutable laws but a working guide to action, there should be no equivocation on the character of Starmer’s Labour Party; and the tasks that are necessary for the workers’ movement to build independent working-class political representation and fight for a socialist programme.