Though Cowards Flinch

Forty Labour MPs have put their name to a document which lays out five key areas in which the government is deviating from the wishes of most Labour members, and calls for the restoration of party democracy as a means to ensuring that the voice of its members is heard in future. The signatories range from the MPs of the LRC and the Campaign Group to Compass and a couple of unaffiliated people added in.

The key recommendations are as follows:

A. The recession should be tackled not with cuts in essential public spending, but by massive public investment in house-building, infrastructure and the de-carbonisation of the economy.

B. Banks should be split up with their casino investment arms hived off. Publicly-owned retail banks should be required to meet new social and community objectives and support manufacturing, with lending to businesses and homeowners restored to 2007 levels. Pay and bonuses should be tightly regulated.

C. A clean break must be made with market fundamentalism – deregulation and privatisation. Public provision should be expanded – in health care, education, housing, pensions, energy and transport. Royal Mail must remain wholly in the public sector.

D. In the face of huge and unacceptable growth of inequality, a big redistribution programme must swing resources away from the rich to provide sizeable increases in pensions, the minimum wage, the lowest benefit levels, and to fund job creation and improved public services. Union rights must be restored – it is in economic crisis that workers are most in need of that protection.

E. To achieve the 80% carbon emission reduction target by 2050, renewable sources of energy should be promoted on a far bigger scale, industry (including airlines) should be required to reduce its climate change emissions by at least 3% per year, household carbon allowances should be introduced, and the UK targets should be fully met by domestic action and not by carbon offsetting abroad.

We also believe that if Labour is to revive its membership in numbers and activity, it must fully restore its internal democratic procedures so that the voice of its individual and affiliated members is listened to and taken account of. This process has begun with the adoption of all-member voting rights for the National Policy Forum.

But we believe that several further reforms are needed, in particular to restore to the elected NEC full supervision and control over the party’s operation and finances, to introduce a charter of members’ rights and a Party Ombudsman to enforce them, and to renew for all party employees the core civil service values of impartiality, integrity, honesty and objectivity in the development of party policy and selection of party candidates.

I broadly agree with all of this, though it’s easy to quibble over language. It’s easier still to say that it doesn’t go nearly far enough. The type of state-led banking sector advocated by B, when tied to the increase in state-operated enterprises, is almost guaranteed to go disastrously wrong – taking the UK back to China c1980, where loans were used, via bureaucratic planning, to ‘support community objectives and support manufacturing’ such as the agricultural communes and heavy industry in the northern rustbelt. These were the least efficient parts of the Chinese economy.

Let’s be absolutely clear; there is nothing here which directly and finally challenges capitalism. However, there’s no point calling for the maximum programme when one has to fight even for the minimum programme to get a hearing, so I’m content with what is said, particularly about wealth redistribution and the restoration of trades union rights. These two things alone would go a long way towards strengthening the labour movement and provide the means to halt and reverse the fragmentation of working class power.

Reorganising how finance capital works in the UK involves reaching out to other labour movements internationally, so breaking up banks and attempting to impose a new settlement (think of it as Bretton-Woods II perhaps, though I’m not a Keynesian or neo-Keynesian) would have benefits in terms of providing impetus towards the construction of a network of globally planned, democratic, interdependent economies the premise of which is not the accumulation of wealth by the individual and its transformation into structural advantage for the individual.

What concerns me most about this document, as fabulous as it is to see Labour figures who have previously attacked each other lining up behind it, is that I think it is essentially hollow. What happens when it is ignored? This is something these forty MPs need to sit down and work out with each other, as representatives of whatever passes for the Labour Left these days. They need to get their CLPs involved with the discussion, and various Labour-orientated membership based groups like the LRC, Compass and so on.

If the government ignores the document entirely, and carries on its merry way, and no response is forthcoming from ‘the Left’ (however broad), especially one geared towards actually creating a coherent plan for government on the basis of these tenets, then it sends a very bad signal to the Labour activists and politically interested Labour voters on the Left.

In those circumstances it would instead provide a barometer of the ability of the government to use the Left as a figleaf for its less popular policies, like privatisation, because Gordon Brown et al are safe in the knowledge that on the doorstep the key line for activists is, “I know they voted for that, but us members didn’t support it. Plenty of Labour MPs didn’t support it. Our local guys didn’t support it.”

Wording about a members’ charter, and an ombudsman to enforce them, hides from the core problems; declining numbers of activists, the inability of the membership to rein in the Parliamentary Labour Party, the ability of the union leadership to throw their New Labour cronies a rope every single National Conference through rigidly whipped delegates (and as a side note, the impotence of conference anyway), the damage that Labour in government does to the reputation of the Party and how this is only even partially salvaged by the continuing unpopularity of the Tories.

Simply put, I’d have signed the document too, if it was put in front of me – but a signature on a piece of paper doesn’t mean anything. Building associative links between CLPs and the internal Left-wing campaigning organisations can flesh it out, so I wait with baited breath to see Step 2.

See also A Very Public Sociologist for another Labour outsider’s take.

Signatories are as follows:

MP Signatories
Diane Abbott
John Austin
Colin Burgon
Ronnie Campbell
Colin Challen
Michael Clapham
Katy Clark
Harry Cohen
Michael Connarty
Frank Cook
Jeremy Corbyn
Jim Cousins
Jon Cruddas
Ann Cryer
Ian Davidson
David Drew
Bill Etherington
Mark Fisher
Paul Flynn
Neil Gerrard
Fabian Hamilton
Dai Havard
David Heyes
Kelvin Hopkins
Lindsay Hoyle
Brian Iddon
Lynne Jones
Andrew Mackinlay
John McDonnell
Michael Meacher
Alan Meale
Austin Mitchell
Chris Mullin
Gordon Prentice
Ken Purchase
Linda Riordan
Alan Simpson
Marsha Singh
Graham Stringer
Paul Truswell
Joan Walley
David Winnick
Mike Wood