Though Cowards Flinch

As I explored in step 1 of this five point organisational action plan for the Labour left, the ‘New (Urban) Left’ of the early 1980s displayed admirable levels of commitment and organisation to gain control of a significant number of Constituency Labour Parties and of council groups. 

A while ago, when Ken Livingstone was beaten by Johnson in the London mayoral elections, I stopped what I was doing to ‘pay homage to Ken and his ilk’, and I meant it.  There is a lot the Labour left of today can learn from the Labour left that struggled in the face first of a Labour government that had lost direction, and then in opposition to a Tory government which was much worse than anything Labour could have been (sound familiar?).

 But while we should celebrate and model ourselves on the successes of the 1980s Labour left, we should also take note of the failures.  These are failures which continue to have repercussions for the Labour left of today.

 In five point action plan article in Socialist Unity, Owen sets out this key failure, and its legacy, very well:

 ‘The left has ceased trying to appeal to the working class as a whole. All too often we focus almost exclusively on small minorities instead. Part of this is the legacy of the New Left of the 1960s, a movement which essentially felt that the working class had lost its revolutionary potential. They replaced it with oppressed minority groups like ethnic minorities, gays, or even students.’

 I have covered the intellectual history of this drift away from the working class fully elsewhere, and this need not detain us long, except to say that Owen is right (and this reflects David Harvey’s excellent analysis) to say that some of the responsibility for this drift can be attributed to the post-Marxist developments of the 1960’s, which only really took hold in Britain in the 1970s with the arrival/translations of intellectuals like Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau. 

Equally, though, it is important to recognize that part of the reason for the disengagement of Labour parties and the traditional working class was the reluctance conservative trade union movement of the 1970s to engage with issues beyond those of its white own segmented labour forces.  Like the New Left, they forgot about the primacy of the ‘working class as a whole’.

More important for our purposes than the particular circumstances in which this New Left disengagement from the working class took place, though, is how it was expressed in terms of local Labour parties’ organization and culture.

Of course, what Labour parties did and how they did it was principally determined by one thing – the arrival of a Conservative government intent on breaking the so-called post war consensus.

In many ways, that made life very easy for local Labour parties – too easy, indeed.  Local successes in the early 1980s came thick and fast as Conservatives were swept from power in some councils, and the Labour left took over in others. 

The Labour left adopted a new set of heroes, whether they were Ken Livingstone in the South, Tony Mulhearn and Graham Stringer in the North West, or David Blunkett in Yorkshire.  Life seemed good, and the Left was on the march.  Most of all, it seemed, the New Left had adopted a new openness to minority rights and causes, to the development of rainbow coalitions, that anything seemed possible.

 Except that it wasn’t.

 Hindsight is an easy thing, but looking back the theme that runs through all the New Left successes of the early and mid 1980s is strikingly obvious; they were all to do with elected local government, and little to do with the ‘real world’ outside the public sector.

In the places where the new breed of middle class Labour activist and councillor dominated, like Manchester and London, there was an understandable but misguided sense that taking control of a local authority was the biggest kicking you could give to Thatcher.  Certainly it made for good press.

 But in the longer term, it meant that links with the trade union movement, the lifeblood of the Labour party in terms of membership and finance, atrophied, as working class people started to feel ill at ease in the new type of party meeting, and agendas came to be dominated not directly by the relationship between capital and labour (and the political education surrounding that), but by public services, the workings of the local authority, and increasingly by the yearly campaigning associated with now all-important local elections.

 Even in Liverpool, where the rise of the Labour left was a more genuinely working class affair, an unhealthy and ultimately fatal (for the Labour left) distance developed between the Labour party and the unions, as the Labour party homed in on public housing (with some justification given the appalling housing stock of the late 1970s) and the upkeep of public services.

At the weekend at Socialism 2009, Tony Mulhearn of Militant fame set out what I suggest might be a slightly rose-tinted version of what took place.  According to Dave, who heard him speak:

 ‘Mulhearn outlined how the National Front wouldn’t show its face in Liverpool during the 1980s, such was the unity of the labour movement and the working class. The response of the Labour bureaucracy and the Trades Union bureaucracy was to try and crush militancy. The local Labour Party was suspended. Men like Ron Todd and Dave Basnett were ordered to ‘investigate’ the local labour organisations, to detach the district trades council from Labour, even though the members of their unions were receiving the best wages from the Militant/Labour local authority.’

 Note his emphasis on the importance of public sector wages.  It’s interesting to compare this with the more contemperaneous review set out in Mulhearn’s and Peter Taafe’s 1988 book Liverpool: A city that dared to fight:

 ‘At one stage, opposition to the measures of Tory and right-wing Labour governments gathered around the Trades Council and Labour Party, then a joint body.  At another stage, it was the Trades Council which provided the focal point of opposition.

 ’In the 1980s,the District Labour Party (DLP) became the movement’s main forum of debate and the focus of working-class struggle.  The Trades Council became an inconsequential body, with very little participation in its deliberations by the major trade unions.  It concentrated on secondary issues, which were of vital concern to the squabbling sectarian grouplets which dominated its proceedings but which left the working class cold.  This body was elbowed aside by the DLP, which now provided the leadership for all the main working class struggles in the area.  No strike, no picket line, no movement of a working class community, no occupation, took place in the area without the conscious intervention of the DLP and the leading figures such as Tony Mulhearn, Derek Hatton and Eddie Loyden.’

 This is not an attempt to sully the reputation of Tony Mulhearn and other brave Militant members who fought with him; there are as many interpretations of the Militant era in Liverpool as I’ve had hot dinners, and I do not claim to know them all.   I may not agree with all their tactics, but I do know they were brave, committed socialists.

What is striking, however, is the apparent dislocation between the rhetoric of working class unity and the increasing focus on the local authority as the main site of struggle, and local councillors (three of them named) as the key leaders.  Interestingly, despite the mention of strikes and pickets, there is nothing in Taafe’s and Mulhearn’s book to suggest that the DLP was involved with industrial disputes beyond the public sector which operated under its political control, and even these strikers were somewhat tepid (the all-out strike proposal of September 1985 was rejected by council staff in favour of a one-day stoppage). 

Certainly, when the day came and Militant members were expelled, there was nowhere, in terms of an organisation outside the grip of the Labour party HQ bureaucracy, to fall back on for support, and in time the whole labour movement in liverpool was weakened to the extent that there has been nigh on 20 years of Libdem control of the council.

 What is also striking though, and encouraging, that in Mulhearn’s apparent revisionism 20 years on, he refocuses on the need for unity with working class/trade union organisations; even if his comrades got their tactics wrong then (and of course he would dispute that and blame a right-wing union bureaucracy for its treachery), he recognises the importance today.

What does this brief exploration of the Labour left tells us about how we should organise this time around.   I think it tells us three main things.

First, and most obviously, we should cast off any lingering thoughts – if we have them – that a Tory government in 2010 would not be such a bad thing, because it will allow the left to get its act together in opposition locally.   Quite aside from the fact a Tory government will actively bring material harm to the working class, what I have sought to set out above is that, while short-term local success may come our way, it will be the type of success most likely to harm our wider prospects; much better to re-engage with the working class under a government which might be supportive of material change in favour of the working class, if the working class can force it to do so (see section 3).

Second, and related, local government, and electoral success, is a panacea, but it is not the real deal.   While public services are important enough, they are simply not as important as the relationship between capital and labour (of course there is an overlap when it comes to public sector employment, and that should not be underestimated).  Further, we are kidding ourselves if we think democratic control over local authorities is the most important thing to concern ourselves with, given that just 5% of public expenditure is actually under local authority control anyway.

 Put simply, there are often more important things to do for CLPs to do than to spend most of their time in the murky world of local election campaigning.  If members are interested in public services, it’s the health services and central government welfare services, alongside the quangos like the LSC and the RDAs where the real action is, and it’s there where our action should be too. 

But alongside this is the real priority of starting to draw members in from the trade unions, and to encourage unionization/workplace in places where there isn’t any, whether through direct or indirect financial support and through the renewal of proper functional and delegate links to CLPs (many of which have simply withered over time, including the re-establishment of ‘Trades Councils’ (under whatever name) on an equal footing with CLPs.  

This is no easy task, but I’ll come tomorrow (in step 3) to the main incentive that the Labour left needs to develop to make it happen – the promise of much greater real say over the party’s affairs through a process of disaffiliation of unions at national level and re-affiliation at local level as a way of reversing the financial flows within the Labour party itself.

In addition to re-engagement with unionism, there is the work to be done in supporting and developing community-based action, particularly around job creation, including through social enterprise (see tomorrow also).

In terms purely of  local party organisation, this is what CLP and branch agendas need to be about, and this is what our leaflets should become – not councillor/local government publicity, but real news about the real world (see also section 4 on the reconceptualization of campaigning.

Third, and related to the first two, councillors need to know their place. 

Labour councillors from the time of Herbert Morrison have tended to rule the local party roost, and have come to expect that all party business revolves around them and the MP (if there is one).  But as I’ve set out above, in the context of their limited material importance to the working class, the resources devoted to and expected by councillors and wannabee councillors is not justified (and people not involved in local government recognise this readily enough).

Councillors need to get on with doing their job, reporting back as and when required to their branches/CLP, and (increasingly) seeking to do what is set out from them by the CLP membership.  They should be part of the whole party operation, and be recognised as only a part.

This is not an easy transition to make (though easier than the transition MPs will need to make, and which I’ll cover in section 3) but it is an important aspect of the overall transition of local Labour parties from their overwhelming focus on the electoral cycle towards real politics.

These three organisational shifts taken together, you start to get a different local Labour party set up – one not closed in on itself, and one which focus on the priorities of the working class, not the priorities of a local political class and their public servants.

Coming up in the next steps this five point action plan……..

Step 3 (Tuesday): Hitting New Labour’s power base where it hurts

How the only way the Labour left can seize back power from the New Labour institution is to develop a radical new contract with the unions which bypasses the traditional entente between union and party leadership through a disaffiliation/reaffiliation process.

 Step 4 (Wednesday): The reconceptualization of campaigning

How the Labour left must tear up the part of the Labour party rule book which makes members leadership campaigning fodder, and give a whole new meaning to what it is to campaign for Labour.

Step 5 (Thursday): Working with the best of the rest of the left

How the Labour left needs to tear up the rule book about working with other left parties, to get humble about what the Labour party has been and is, and earn the trust and comradeship of socialists who have learnt to hate Labour.  If this means Labour thrives and subsumes other parties in time, so be it. If it means Labour is subsumed by other parties in time, so be it.