No room for socialists in in Tony’s Labour Party
Socialist Outlook, February 2001
When I recently left the Labour Party, after twenty years of active membership, I was surprised at how few people asked me to explain myself. For comrades outside the party, it seemed a step that needed no explanation, and was indeed long overdue. For comrades remaining in the party, it seemed a step beyond explanation, and hopelessly “premature”.
To put it in a nutshell, I had come to two interdependent conclusions.
First, the cumulative impact of the changes imposed on the Labour party from the top down – in policy, ideology, structure, funding – has been to transform it into something like the Democratic party in the USA. Labour is now a highly effective servant of big business; it relies on working class votes but provides no representation to that class. Crucially, there are no means available to reverse the damage.
Second, the political and social context demands an electoral challenge to the New Labour-Tory consensus. The price of electoral abstention is becoming too high.
In the run-up to the 1997 general election, I was one of those who believed that, in government, Blair would encounter stiff resistance from party members and trades unions, and that under these circumstances the Labour left would revive. With the coming together of the Centre-Left Grassroots Alliance and the victory of four of the GRA candidates in the 1998 NEC ballot, it seemed our predictions were being born out. But now, after nearly four years of Labour government, and with another general election looming, New Labour is more firmly entrenched than ever, and a reassessment is required.
Since 1998, the Grassroots Alliance vote has fallen back; in 2000, Mark Seddon, who topped the poll in 1998, was unable to get elected – in a ballot conducted at the height of the discontent over the London mayoral stitch-up. Even taking into account the Millbank shenanigans, and the rather muted campaign run by the GRA itself, this was a disappointing result.
In the past, the internal politics of the Labour party reliably reflected changes in the political temperature within the working class. At the least, discontent with the Labour leadership, usually when it failed to deliver in government, was mirrored in increased support for left candidates in NEC elections and the like. In the year 2000, however, despite the palpable anger at the Labour leadership felt in working class communities, the left’s vote receded substantially.
Only 25% of party members bothered to take part in the NEC vote – the party’s only remaining meaningful national-level democratic exercise. Of those who did take part, more than 45% voted for the Blairite celebrity Tony Robinson, presumably on the grounds that he had once done a funny turn in Blackadder. In the highly-publicised vote on pensions at last year’s party conference – a rare setback for the leadership – a substantial majority of the CLPs voted with the government. Likewise, Geoff Martin’s campaign for London Labour party chair was scuppered not just by the Millbank arm-twisting, but by a shortfall in support within the constituencies.
These developments defy all the left’s predictions, and confirm impressionistic evidence of the changing social composition of the party’s membership, and, along with it, the social content of Labour party activism.
To put it succinctly, there is no longer any meaningful sense in which this Labour party, as a living social formation, can be described as “the mass party of the working class” or even a “bourgeois workers party”.
Many comrades point to Labour’s remaining links to the trade unions and argue that this is the decisive test. Yes, trade unions remain, formally, constituent parts of the Labour Party – a contrast with labour unions in the USA. But unions no longer have a vote in the selection of parliamentary candidates and play little role in CLPs; annual conference and the NEC, where the unions once deployed their political muscle, have been stripped of authority. In practise, the current degree of union participation and influence in the Labour party differs little from the situation in the Democratic party in the USA – where unions send delegates to conventions, union leaders sit on policy bodies, union money funds election campaigns and union members, by and large, vote Democratic. Overall, the unions are now merely one among a number of organised interest groups lobbying the Labour government – principally from outside the party structures.
Of course, the significance of the party-union link has never been merely a formal or constitutional one. It was a matter of lived history and a living presence, however contradictory, in working class communities. Today, as an organic phenomenon, the link barely survives. To the extent that political activity takes place at the base of the movement, in workplaces, union branches, trades councils, it does so in opposition to the Labour government and Labour councils. In the foreseeable future, any re-awakening of working class political consciousness is more likely to take the form of disaffiliation from Labour and support for left alternatives than a concerted effort to flex what’s left of trade union muscle through the structures of the Labour party.
As a result of a multitude of developments – political, social, cultural – the disconnection between the Labour party and the working class is now profound and systemic. Are there any means by which this connection can be reforged? If not, what prospects for the Labour left?
Yes, the valiant efforts of Labour left activists to use the existing system, to push motions through the policy forums, etc. do occasionally yield positive results. But these results are too meagre to affect the overall trend of development. As a consequence, the Labour left finds itself chasing an ever-receding horizon: the ground on which it is fighting (on policy, on party democracy) is being dragged ever further to the right.
Too many on the Labour left see Blairism as merely a conspiracy within the Labour Party. “New Labour” (or however it may choose to rebrand itself in the future) is the British facet of a global politics – and the political facet of a public culture promoted by global capitalism. The transformation of the Labour party cannot be separated from other, intimately related, social phenomena: the symbiosis between the professional political caste and the media, the elevation of the managerial prerogative above all other considerations, the spread of popular cynicism, the general degradation of democratic discourse, and driving them all, global capital’s quest to tame modern democratic societies. A challenge to New Labour also requires a challenge to these trends – a challenge that is stifled by continued party membership.
The Labour left also ought to take stock of its own performance over the years. The Grassroots Alliance has failed to become anything other than a place to negotiate slates for the NEC, NPF, etc. After the bright hopes of 1998, it’s non-performance will only have hastened the exit of yet more activists from the party. Like other initiatives on the left, it has been hampered by sectarianism, but that isn’t a satisfactory explanation for so many years of retreat. As someone who set great store by the Socialist Campaign Group, and encouraged others to do the same, I should come clean and confess my abject disappointment, not in the left MPs as individuals, but in the SCG as a collective force, an alternative leadership of the movement. At a time when the huge vacuum on the left of British politics has been acknowledged even by academics and media pundits, the Labour left is unable to project a message outside an ever decreasing circle.
Ah, but there is Ken Livingstone waiting in the wings. It’s disheartening to watch comrades pin such hopes on the campaign to readmit Ken to the Party. It’s a just and reasonable demand, but what does it really amount to? Since his election as mayor, Livingstone has gone to great lengths to reposition himself on two critical policy areas – economic globalisation and ‘law and order’. The one-time champion of the national manufacturing sector has reinvented himself yet again as a booster for global finance capital and a friend of the City. He’s toured New York with Mayor Giuliani, backed comprehensive DNA testing, more cops on the beat, and a tougher line with “anarchists”. Yes, Livingstone remains defiant on tube privatisation, and that is welcome. But he has also refused to lift a finger for the besieged people of Hackney, where a Labour-Tory coalition is wreaking havoc on public services. As Livingstone himself has made clear, he has no intention of “leading” the Labour left anywhere.
I’ve been astonished to hear Labour party comrades declaring in recent months that “(bourgeois) elections aren’t that important” – an ultra-left posture profoundly at variance with the Labour left’s own traditions. Universal suffrage is not the be-all and end-all of our democratic vision, but it represents a high-water mark in the struggle for human emancipation, and the major political conquest of the working class. Significantly, for the managers of global capital, taming the franchise, gutting it of meaning and effect, remains an inescapable priority – hence their interest in New Labour.
At the coming general election, Labour will seek a second term on the basis of jam tomorrow for public services (peppered by privatisation) and strychnine today for civil liberties and asylum seekers. Its manifesto will include major pledges which every socialist is duty bound to campaign against. The vast majority of its candidates will be individuals who will obstruct, rather than facilitate, working class representation. The election material will echo Jack Straw’s attempt to outflank Ann Widdicombe to the right. Any kind of complicity with such reactionary and dangerous nonsense ought to be unacceptable to socialists, and nobody should need reminding that silence is a form of complicity.
In private, many Labour Party leftists will vote for the Socialist Alliances or whatever other alternatives to New Labour are available. It seems a rather “do as I say, not as I do” approach to working class communities. Popular cynicism about the efficacy of any kind of democratic or collective action is one of the biggest obstacles socialists face. The evasive formulae being mouthed at the moment on the Labour left can only re-enforce that cynicism, not challenge it.
If socialists forego an intervention in the coming general election, they will only strengthen all those forces, inside and outside the Labour party, for whom it is vital that the entirety of British politics be construed as a choice between Blair and Hague, Straw and Widdicombe. By standing candidates in selected seats, the Socialist Alliance and other forces will at least be able to alert large numbers of people to the existence of alternatives to the prevailing consensus. Without that minimum activity, not only the ideas of socialism, but the immediate concerns of the poorest and most excluded will continue to be air-brushed out of public discourse.
After the election, the Labour left will wring its hands about low voter turn outs, but by its own ambivalence and inaction it will bear some responsibility for them. Against that disturbing and imminent eventuality, we are offered the highly speculative argument, unsupported by evidence, that the Labour Party can be “reclaimed” – at some unspecified time in the future, according to some unspecified political scenario.
It’s a sign of the changing times that these days the most intransigent proponents of abstention from electoral activity are to be found on the Labour left. I’ve also noted the recent emergence on the Labour left of the ‘lesser evil’ argument in defence of a Labour vote in the general election. Yes, Labour probably still is the lesser evil, but if all that remains of the argument for the Labour party is lesser-evilism, then it really has become the British counterpart of the American Democrats, and the case for socialist participation in the party has been lost.
