Though Cowards Flinch

I’m writing this article in response to Peter’s article, which immediately precedes this and is entitled “Time to Jump Ship.” In it, and in the subsequent comments, he argues that our frustration and anger with the current leadership should now have reached tipping point and we should be prepared to leave the Labour Party. I disagree with his assessment and have laid that out on several occasions, but now do so directly.

While I’m at it, I intend to take issue with Paul Kingsnorth and his hero worship of David Davis, particularly Davis’ laughable resignation speech.

Tarnishing the ideal that surrounds the Labour Party is nothing new to Labour governments. MacDonald, Attlee, Wilson, Callaghan, Blair and now Brown have all in their own way betrayed the hopes of those who put them into office. Civil liberties, cosying up to the enemy, choosing prescription charges and nuclear weapons, attempting to limit the unions, privatisation.

Whatever the issue, Labour Prime Ministers are often in it up to their necks.

The Party organisation is authoritarian and undemocratic: when groups opposing the Party line have made themselves too much trouble, they have simply been expelled or forced to wind down. Entire CLPs have had their leadership dismissed and have been taken over by the NEC. The TUC has done the same with any affiliated District Trades Council it didn’t like the attitude of.

At the last national conference, the unions were persuaded by Brown to introduce rolling policy forums instead of allowing conference to debate and submit oppositional motions as was agreed the last time the leadership wanted to shut down the vote of conference. Instead of CLPs having four and the unions having four motions, everything is now subsumed into just another bureaucratic wet dream.

The litany of abuses and offences on the part of the Labour leadership and its cronies in the trade union leadership is long and inglorious.

Buried within the Labour Party, however, are solid groups of MPs and activists who have much greater concern for all the political g-spots of the socialist Left. Despite being targeted for de-selection and facing the onward march of time with no hope of socialists being chosen to replace them, the parliamentarians of socialism still fight on.

A genuine socialist alternative is lost to the present generation, the passing of which can be marked by the decline into ignominy of the Socialist Campaign Group.

I don’t suggest that they ever represented a socialist alternative, but they achieved such status largely because of the strength of the labour movement itself. As that waned, so did they. Yet our choices now will shape the potential of my generation, which is still growing up. A realistic assessment of what our choices are is paramount.

If we’re to leave the Labour Party, as Peter demands, where would we go? Answering that question requires a concrete analysis of how society, economy and politics are organised. Are political parties simply random accumulations of people with similar views? Thus the individualist explanation would have it.

On that basis, the only thing a new party or a third party would have to overcome would be the entrenched support of the other parties. A smart media campaign, the inducement of activist-led democracy, having the right policies: with all of these things a third party could overturn the others and race to government.

I do not accept that analysis.

Labour represents organised Labour. Its current state represents the decline in power of organised labour and the disconnection of the labour movement from the masses of people oppressed by the capitalist system of wage-labour. It is the left-wing of capitalism, fulfilling a function required by our socio-economic system: that of safety valve to the drive for change. It has been that way since the 1832 reform act.

The Tories represent Capital: they are the allies of the CBI and pillars of the establishment. The retrenchment of capitalism, the destruction of any gains secured by an active labour movement and the breaking of that movement is the point of any party of Capital. Ultimately both parties are two different sides of the same coin, preventing reform beyond certain boundaries.

Should the contradictions that destroyed the old Liberal Party be reversed due to the weakened labour movement and the Liberals supercede New Labour as the left-wing party of capitalism it will be little different. Conservative and LibDem libertarians may say what they like but they’ll not reverse the powers granted to the state through the new anti-terrorism bill.

This is something I’ll return to when I discuss the case of David Davis.

Regardless of what people say, this is an immutable fact of capitalism. In 1924 when the first Labour government took over, it didn’t reverse the powers assumed by the Tories to undermine the potential for striking unions to affect the country. When Attlee took power, the ability to intern communists in certain circumstances wasn’t reversed. And so with Blair and Brown and their support for anti-union legislation.

Reformists will ultimately always fail to deliver the change that we want. The mistake reformists make is in regarding the State as a neutral instrument for the exercise of power. It isn’t: this forms one of the enduring left-wing critiques of the State common to many more strands than simply the Marxist tradition.

If we accept that, and recognising that how ‘progressive’ Labour ever is has always depended upon more than merely the opinions of its leaders, then we should realise that our focus should not be parliamentary. A powerful, well-organised labour movement will exercise a powerful progressive influence on politics. We should be questioning how to create and sustain such a movement and give it political direction.

We should be trying to evolve structures which are democratic and provide maximum accountability. We should agree a minimum programme under which banner each recognised faction can have a publication and a platform. Most importantly any such movement should have direct and structural engagement with workplaces around the country. That means involving the trade unions at a local level.

How one votes at a local, national or European level is fairly irrelevant when compared to that task. It is an individual’s choice – the ballot is secret for a reason. How such a Party serves ‘my values’ is determined thereafter by how much I’m involved, by how well I can argue my case within that Party and how effectively I can organise a platform. These are the basic tenets of democratic centralism. The alternative is that we can inhabit forty different parties, all irrelevant to the labour movement.

For the present, either until we can change Labour (if that’s even possible) or until we are ready to take the final step in creating such a Party, my place is within the Labour Representation Committee and within the Labour Party. The LRC in the Labour Party offers the only parliamentary group worth a damn, despite its imperfection, and crucially it is well organised amongst the unions and well respected amongst activists.

Through the LRC we have access under a friendly, well known and well respected banner to the multitudes of people who need support in their day to day struggles and how are fighting to develop their own political perspectives. That is not an option under the essentially middle class banners of the Liberal Democrats or the Green Party.

These parties, and indeed the libertarian wing of the Conservative Party occasionally come up with good policies. Who on the left hasn’t admired arch-reactionary Edward Leigh’s attempts through his chairmanship of the Public Accounts Committee to gore Labour’s wasteful policies? Who didn’t think Evan Harris was the avatar of wingéd victory in his dissection of the disgraceful amendments to the HFE Act (2008)?

Nevertheless, whatever such individuals can contribute to our immediate goals of preventing abortion being wound back or providing evidence contrary to the privatisation juggernaut, they don’t represent an alternative to the current corrupt to and fro of Parliament. David Davis is another individual among these, though I very much think that his principled resignation, though admirable, is misdirected and ill-judged.

First of all, the references to the Magna Carta by Davis and others on the anniversary of its signing in 1215 are ironically chosen, bearing in mind that the Magna Carta was designed merely to secure the freedom of the barons from the King and the Church. The benefits for the peasantry were accomplished because it ensured the Barons would have some popular basis of support. It didn’t stop the peasants’ revolt.

This is highly indicative of Davis’ attitude and that of the Conservatives in general: they are the guardians of our freedom, which we delegate to them. When Paul Kingsnorth refers to how David Davis might be a man in the vein of John Lilburne, leader of the Levellers, my response to that is, “Oh do fuck off.”

The Levellers and the Diggers were persecuted for fighting Cromwellian tyranny; their goals were as much social as political. Davis is simply indulging in propaganda of the deed.

Otherwise Davis is correct in his summation of Labour’s attacks upon civil liberties. The erosion of the right to a trial by a jury of one’s peers, increasing lengths of detention without trial, the surveillance society, CIA rendition flights, tagging criminals and so on and so on. Yet his resignation should be as much directed against his own Party as it should be directed against anything that Labour has done.

Cameron has already appointed a successor and rumours suggest that Davis is a casualty in a wider struggle between the libertarians of the Conservative Party and those who actually would have voted for the government bill if they’d been given a free vote. Widdecombe is far from the only member of the Tory Party guilty of that. Trident, the Iraq War, schools; with how many issues have the government relied upon the Opposition to pass their bills? This would simply have been one more.

Ultimately you have to respect him for having the courage of his convictions, but in the final analysis, Davis’ protest is meaningless and rendered moreso by the theatric spectacle of former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie, a supporter of the 42 days’ detention, running against Davis. If we’re genuinely opposed to the detention, we’re not going to bother with the voyeuristic nonsense sure to follow in the press about the bye-election.

We’ll be too busy trying to build a forceful movement to grind the country to a halt should the government use these laws.