Whither Labour and what alternative?
Party affiliation is a key organisational question for a Marxist, not one of sentiment. This is why, when New Labour published a sentimental campaign video hijacking half a century of social democracy, the reaction from many was disgust. We could not believe that New Labour saw itself as part of the pro-welfare state tradition even while dismantling it. Processes like this define the primary question for socialists: in or out of Labour?
Social processes and Labour’s role
There are two struggles worth speaking of and in both of them the Labour Party has played a negative role. The first is in the marketisation and privatisation of public services, essentially redistributing public funds into private coffers, with the added bonus of undermining workers’ rights. The second is in the prevention of a class based response to these and other pressures of capitalist retrenchment, resulting in an impetus towards right-wing populism and anti-politics.
I think these things are pretty obvious, so I’m not going to dwell on them. Equally evident, however, is the desire of many Labour Party members to oppose their leaders. There are several dozen MPs who signed the EDM demanding a TU Freedom Bill, who’ve opposed privatisations, illiberal terror laws, protested the dissolution of the welfare state and the victimisation of claimants as being lazy reprobates deserving of our moral judgment.
These MPs, and the number of internal factions which advocate certain policies, have failed to achieve them and on the vast majority of occasions failed even to moderate New Labour’s agenda. The choice to join the Labour Party is thus the choice to be considered part and parcel of a Labour government widely seen as corrupt, unaccountable and actively working against the material interests of the vast majority of its members.
As Labour moves towards opposition, the contradiction here will lessen and finally disappear. Labour will not be the Party demanding sacrifices from the electorate, on behalf of business, nor imposing tax rises and service cuts. If the 1994-1997 period is anything to go by, whatever survives of New Labour will roll around in radical rhetoric and proceed to criticize the Tory government for things they will do themselves if elected.
This can make membership of Labour easier to consider, but the realities of power within Labour won’t have changed.
Unions and the Labour Party
Labour is, or should be, in hock to the unions. This should be extremely evident from the progressive collapse of New Labour’s base of personal donors and loan merchants. Yet the unions themselves look preposterous. In 2004, the Warwick Agreement was negotiated between Labour the the unions, as being key to what the unions wanted from this parliament: the demands themselves are pitiful, and some, as with Royal Mail, were plainly ignored.
Bureaucratic conservatism has been a key arm of the New Labour ‘coalition’. Within those unions, impressive heads of steam have built up specifically centred around moves to disaffiliate from Labour. In at least one union, combative non-Labour activists have been specifically targeted for expulsion. The fragmentation of the Labour-union link is also evidenced by the disaffiliation of the RMT, the FBU and the recent strong call from the CWU.
These moves are class-driven: if the unions and Labour cease to adequately represent the working class, then there will be moves first against union bureaucracies and the Labour Party, then away from unions and/or politics in general or worse, towards fascist politics. This is not going to be corrected merely by skilled political argumentation; it must be corrected by a change in the objective anti-working class processes sustained by Labour in government.
Here too, of course, there is an element of confused consciousness. Once the Tories get into power, unions will simply blame all the world’s ills on them and advocate a vote for the opposition – Labour – a position not open to them when Labour is in government. Yet this dissipation of pressure will serve to cement the union bureaucracy and centrist panderers rather than take the challenge further.
The only ray of hope I can spot is that at an Electoral Reform Society poll of TUC delegates back in late 2006 resulted in a majority supporting John McDonnell over Gordon Brown for leader of the Labour Party. It would be interesting to see how this has developed since then, so we have some idea of the direction political consciousness is going in.
Composition and Constituencies
My most intense experience of Labour was while at university in England. Particularly considering that one of my two fields of involvement was Oxford, this may not make for the most representative sample. Yet my experience of these young people, supposed to be the future of the Party, was almost universally negative, up to and including the point where I actually had to argue with one person that inequality was a bad thing.
There are reasons beyond my own parochial experiences for assuming that all is not necessarily well in Labour constituency organisations. Most obviously, the Labour heirarchy has recently felt free to assert its authority, ousting people selected as candidates by local parties, suspending local parties and continuing practices of ideological vetting for national selection lists. It’s difficult to see what a small trickle of activists back to Labour can do.
We should bear in mind that a large number of people (including former members) now refuse to have anything to do with Labour, and when even openly socialist Labour MPs can worry about the collapse of a 10,000+ majority, because of New Labour’s policies. For all the ‘resilience’ of Labour’s core vote, these aren’t the faces in charge of local constituency parties. Many CLPs are dormant in any case, lacking engagement beyond Voter ID.
Returning to my own experience, over vast swathes of the country, Labour simply isn’t competitive. It has no engagement (nor empathy for) local union needs, though it bears saying in turn that local union organisations have largely atrophied as well, and are maintained or established in many cases by the force of will of individuals whose dedication is not to the Labour Party. Local unions aren’t everything, of course, but Labour’s disengagement from collective community politics, rather than the occasional nimbyism, is visible round ‘ere at least.
Inside CLPs, it also seems that the party is visibly ageing.
Anti-fascist work
A lot of Labour members are engaged with groups like Love Music Hate Racism and Hope Not Hate, or supporting Unite Against Fascism. Yet even Labour members fully acknowledge that it’s Labour government policies which currently sustain the atrophy of Labour support and the concomitant growth of BNP support in areas like Dagenham. Lee Walker, a Labour councillor in the area, has a lot to say on the subject.
Though Lee is part of Labour (and presumably advocates socialists joining) and though he attests that Dagenham is ‘very firmly Old Labour’, he reaffirms the view that with the wrong type of politico ensconsed in Westminster, the practical effect even of conquering the council is relatively small compared to what needs to be done to hold off the BNP, and provide the jobs and housing which that part of London cries out for.
Lee is convinced that through arguing the toss, that Labour members on the ground aren’t represented by their parliamentary cadre and national policies, we can stem the BNP and cites his own ward as evidence. I think there’s some evidence, such as from Nuneaton, to support this. Plenty of Labour members are also involved with counter-demonstrations against the BNP and the English Defence League, which help to mobilize local sentiment.
Yet even while some Labour members are doing this, there are Labour MPs, and the elements of the Labour Party they represent, which essentially buy into the BNP narratives on issues like immigration, calling for tighter laws, and fewer benefits, rather than advocating a massive house building programme, universal provision of services and jobs (to everyone, including the “white working class”).
This contradiction hinders the grassroots Labour attempt to stop the BNP, even if that effort mitigates them in some areas some of the time. As the Hope Not Hate map (left) shows, it’s in working class areas that the fascists really gather support – and its working class areas that do now and will continue to bear the brunt of New Labour and Tory attacks, for which some Labour figures and supporters prefer nationalist rather than class-based answers. Short term, joining Labour will not change that.
The argument from the Socialist Party, that standing ‘proper’ socialist candidates from independent parties can bring in votes unreached by Labour, potentially denying the BNP votes, is one I regard as unconvincing. What I do consider important is the intervention in local strikes and struggles, to force the unions to act against harmful council decisions and to give the working class confidence in its own power to drag change kicking and screaming out of local government.
In some areas, Labour is pretty good on this, and we should respect and support their efforts – but these efforts will pale when it comes to disrupting the agenda of a Tory government that will decimate social spending and push deprived former manufacturing areas towards fascism all the quicker. Labour is institutionally opposed to such efforts, preferring instead the straight-jacket of parliamentary activity.
Labour and the alternative
In recent struggles however, it is groups outside Labour which have been playing the key role – whether it’s the Socialist Party at Lindsey or engagement with the National Shop Stewards Network, the SWP’s Right to Work Conference, independent greens and socialists at Vestas and ClimateCamp and so on. Labour, on the other hand, seems to vary between declining to a slow ‘death’ and the determination to kill itself by squeezing out its last drop of left-wing credibility.
This inclines me to think that what pull on the working class that Labour exercises is residual, a phenomenon readily evident in countries like Germany, where ‘newer’ social-democratic parties have emerged to challenge the neo-liberal capitulations of the older parties. On the current trajectory, Labour may end up a model of the old Liberal Party remade for the 21st Century with ‘social justice’ as the new non-conformism.
I do not believe that the Labour Left, even impelled by a surge in working class militancy as a result of a frontal Tory attack on the last remnants of the welfare state, has numbers to rival the days of the height of its power in the 1970s never mind to bodily seize control of the Labour Party from New Labour, which has had years to entrench its favourite sons in ‘safe’ parliamentary seats.
Class struggle proceeds regardless of party affiliation of course. Labour is no longer in a position to be the sole – even the main – beneficiary of a new impetus towards class struggle, of workers linking up. I may be wrong, or the Labour Left fightback may be so impressive – bucking the trend hitherto – that our calculations are upset, and we’re called on to join Labour and battle even for the social democratic redistributive policies of old, in a climate of still further global capitalist retrenchment and greater demands for deeper neo-liberal reforms.
My impression, however, is that the Socialist Party is well positioned amongst activist elements in the unions and working class, and that most of the Labour Party will simply act as a conservative deadweight to those elements of the Labour Left who are similarly positioned – putting a brake on potential change coursing through CLPs, selection processes and so on. This is a direct refutation of a stance I held a few years ago.
With all this in mind, I don’t quite understand the decision of Phil, lead blogger at A Very Public Sociologist and long-time Stoke Socialist Party member to resign from the SP and join Labour, especially since he was a key person who I consulted before joining the SP myself.
I share his sentiments against standing candidates against moderate Labourites, and on the dismal prospects for the Socialist Party’s rather silly and opportunistic-looking Trade Union and Socialist Coalition electoral front. I can even surmise that, with him being in a very heavily Labour area and me being in a very lightly Labour area, our respective views on the ‘smaller links’ between Labour and the working class should be added together and divided by two to come to a proper appreciation.
What I can’t understand is how Phil reaches the conclusion that Labour’s direction of travel is an improvement on what it is currently. My generation has grown up not knowing ‘Old’ Labour, one element of which is more attracted by the flashy political campaigns of Bono and “Make Poverty History” than by the government, and another element to which is the product of persistent refusals to engage with real social ills: joblessness, poverty, terrible housing and crime, and couldn’t be more disillusioned if it tried.
If ever there was a time to explode the old trope that Britain hasn’t had a revolution because the British character is too moderate, now is the time to build the organisation for it.
It’s disappointing to see Phil go and, while I wasn’t surprised to see a post from him resigning from the SP, I was surprised at his decision to join the Labour Party.
I don’t know what things are like in Stoke but this is a fair summary of what the local CLP is like where in live in one of the strongest Labour areas in the entire country:
We should bear in mind that a large number of people (including former members) now refuse to have anything to do with Labour
I remember the former membership secretary of the local CLP telling me that membership had dropped from around almost 1000 in 2001 to less than 150 in 2007 when he resigned. If the age of local Labour councillors is any guide I would guess most of the remaining members are in their 50′s and 60′s at least.
The argument from the Socialist Party, that standing ‘proper’ socialist candidates from independent parties can bring in votes unreached by Labour, potentially denying the BNP votes, is one I regard as unconvincing.
I disagree with this though. As an active anti-fascist, I’ve looked through a vast amount of electoral statistics relating to the BNP over the last few years and come to the conclusion that the only left group which performs credibly against the BNP is the SP. Labour perform well against the BNP only when their campaign is linked up closely with Hope not Hate.
This is a viable strategy in the short-term, in that it prevents the BNP being elected in a specific election, but fairly disastrous in the long-term, as it firmly links opposition to the BNP with the discredited Labour Party.
If you have time to write up an article on the SP and anti-fascist work, including elections, Duncan, I’d be interested to read it. What shocks me, though, is that Phil comes from Stoke – which is at the sharp end of the fight against the fascists. Yet he considers Labour to be a better choice there than the SP.
I was planning a couple of articles on anti-fascist strategy in the run up to the General Election and I’ll dig out my file on BNP electoral statistics (I used to have a social life, honest!) sometime this week.
This will have to be brief for the moment as I’m due elsewhere but I did promise…..
It can also be brief as I’ve written copious amounts on why I think, broadly speaking, the Labour party is not a dead duck as far as proper engagement with the working class goes, and how it is important not simply to ignore the remaining resource base (money, people, institutional franework with unions) that go with it.
In an earlier engagement, Dave, I think we’ve jointly acknowledged that an overall answer on whether SPdom is more better than LPdom is more effective is difficult because we simply don’t have the information base for a national scope analyis. How many active members are there really? How many were there? What are their real ages? Who’s really coming in and going out, getting less active/more active? To what extent are unions really engaged? None of this we really know, so we rely quite understandably on anecdotal and experential evidence. As you rightly suggest, my experiences in Lancashire are very different from yours in Oxford and Canterbury.
But therein lies a key issue, I think. My simple view is that where the LP is so weak as to be useless, socialists should affiliate elsewhere, including with the Greens where need be. Where the LP is strong enough to work with, join that, and the same for the SP. It’s simply a question of working with what you’ve got and trying to build alliances where you can. Yes, there’s the question of electoral affiliation (standing with/standing against) but we should try not to let that get in the way, especially at local council level – remember that local government politics overblows its own importance, not least as ony 5% of publuic spend goes via local authorities; the real action is elsewhere.
I sympathise with your predicament, where there is simply no organisational set up to align to where you live and work. That kind of situation is always at the back of my mind when I bang on about creating local blog/activist platforms. These can operate, I suggest, independent of left organisational structures; those structures will come to find the activist platform if they have any sense, and add to the resource base.
There’s a lot of interesting comment at Phil’s place on the historical trajectory of the LP, and the suggest (esp from David Coates’ work) that the LP is on an inevitable road to nowhere. I disagree, though I see what they’re getting at. I’ve set out, again in some detail, how control might be wrested back within the party structures. The LP is in much the same place, in many ways, as it was in 1979. What we need to do is learn the lessons of the the Labour left in the 1980s, building on what they achieved in terms of new member momentum but avoiding the pitfalls (identity politics over class, and too great a focus on local government and local economic development) which led to short term gains (and glory) becoming a long term barrier to left growth. To stay historical, one way to do that is to take on board for an electronic age the lessons of the 1890s about the almost (well in some cases, real) evangelical spreading of the word and action. For the Clarion, read the local editions of Though Cowards Flinch. That can happen in and out of the LP; the important thing is that it should happen.
Yeah, I know I sound like a broken record. Would be interesting to hear Phil’s view on my argument, as he notes in a tweet that he found my earlier dronings about this ‘persuasive’.
No time to cover the growing international aspect, maybe later. Sorry this is rushed.
I agree, in large part, with this argument – which reduces the question to location, and which group has the best potential in a given location. On those grounds, I’d have thought Stoke was a dead-duck for the Labour Party, which is why I really wouldn’t mind seeing what Phil says.
In such an area, it is surely less complicated to be part of a non-Labour socialist group that will put up its own candidates and prevent the swing away from Labour becoming a swing towards the BNP.
It is all well and good viewing Labour or the SP in terms of a strategic base to keep the BNP from gaining councillors, or heaven forbid an MP, but does this go any way into defining the correct site of trade union support, working class universalism, all things that should define us ourselves as socialists.
If something has displeased a member of the SP in Stoke, where a defection to the CLP is necessary, does this not demonstrate a personal issue and not a strategic issue. For the SP not to stand someone against a moderate Labour candidate is a strategic move (a very admirable one, and as this is not the case, I’m inclined to agree with Phil’s move) but aside from strategy, where is the proper site of the labour movement, irrespective of current forces from within that site? For my money that site is the labour party, which is why I no more muck around with splinter groups, whose only use is to vindicate the right wing of the labour party.
I don’t see how groups like the Socialist Party “vindicate the right wing of the labour party”.
As for the ‘proper site of the labour movement’, there is no such site independent of current forces and strategy. In fact, I would argue – and I’m sure others will agree – that the whole reason the Left finds itself in such a mess is because the previous ‘proper site of the labour movement’ as viewed by most workers, labourism, is so riddled with contradictions as to threaten the very party on which it centered.
Because of these contradictions we have different localities in which the correlation of forces, and dictations of strategy, make Labour absolutely unviable as a vehicle for any sort of Left-wing, pro-working class campaign. In other areas, the contradictions are ameliorated by strong socialist sentiments on the ground, which have retained control of the local Labour organisations, reinforced by and reinforcing local union networks.
But the idea that there is some objective ‘ideal’ “site of the labour movement” is a bit nonsensical.
Well you said yourself that we have reduced the question to location – and this one should take account of, but what I think we spend less time doing is locating where our natural affiliations lie as a matter of course in this country as socialists. If the SP is a force to reckoned with in Stoke, where the LP are not, then it’s obvious where you’re going to drive, but this is mere strategy – therefore I think the question of “site” might seem nonsensical, but it doesn’t mean we should ignore it, it is a relevant question. If the last 13 years has anything to show, it is that new labour has, among other things, not shown itself to be worthy of the working class vote, but why do we still hanker for it, why is it still not yet a dead duck? I think these questions have something to do with what I’ve identified as “site” and should thus be explored.
My point is that, if we consider ourselves scientific socialists, we have no ‘natural affiliations’ except to the strategy that will most quickly and effectively deliver socialism. This is not inherent to any party, I would contend.
If you’re hinting that Labour might be the “natural site” of socialist activism because it still retains the loyalty of some activists, or the loyalty of some working class voters, well I think there’s more than above in my article and Paul’s reply to answer that.
It’s got nothing to do with “natural affiliations” and everything to do with local potential, specific experiences and being worn into one’s groove, in some cases – as with others on this blog with whom I have argued.
With regard to voters, there are a lot of people who are trades unionists – and the extent of political consciousness is “trades union=vote labour”. Eighteen years of Tory rule, and the benefits (however small) that unions bring coupled to the unquestionable link between the most visible part of the union (its leaders) and the Labour Party can instill a tribalism.
My point is that things have now got so bad that this very tribalism is in flux – and I would contend, though Paul is right to remind me of the limitations I set for my own analysis due to the absence of figures, that this tribalism is a thing of the past – it is residual. And there are groups within Labour that mirror this almost primeval link, but which also seem residual – like the LRC.
So things come down to strategy, and the balance of forces in the areas we’re called on to intervene – the local comnmunity, our union branch etc – and the best way to go about achieving the goals we seek to achieve.
Well I think in that case perhaps I am less interested these days in appealing to scientific socialism (S-S), but I would contend that there is a dilemma in equating S-S only with local strategies (but I’m sure this is not what you mean). That is not to say that there isn’t something inherently strategic about S-S (as you say “the strategy that will most quickly and effectively deliver socialism”) but is there something inherent to S-S that dictates that factionalism is the answer, or isn’t there something inherent to S-S that calls for change to made from the inside? I’m more tempted by the latter than the former.
I’m happy to accept that I might be might be moving away from S-S, even if that is because I feel it necessary to appeal to the Labour party, but the road to S-S – to my thinking – was to remain a part of the “site” of the labour movement. Just to repeat, I can see where this falls short on a local strategic level, but I feel this is the attitude to take on a universal level.
I don’t really know on what level to argue with you, if not scientific socialism.
You seem to be arguing that because Labour Party has the right ‘feel’, to you, that it is the ‘universal’ site of the labour movement. Yet the universal is merely the sum total of the local, and if locally the Labour Party is not just not the site of, but is directly at odds with, the labour movement and its needs, then on the universal level too, the two will not completely line up. This countenances, of necessity, factionalism.
The question is not, however, what is, it is where things should be going – the process. Thus strategy, the current balance of forces and the objective process involved inside Labour and which Labour is involved in are all relevant, ultimately depending upon empirical argumentation. This is why it is easier to break things down to localities – for which we actually have direct experience and information.
My argument has consistently been that the attachment you spoke of earlier is residual, it is fading, and the needs of the moment are more pressing than to spend our time trying to reverse that, especially since the Labour Party no longer has a monopoly on the most advanced layers of our class. Trying to reverse the direction of Labour thus takes energy away from engaging with our class – in my locality at least.
With factionalism there seems to be a constant cycle, that often it seems less time consuming to oppose it and employ a kind of entryism. But for there to be a method of entryism, there has to be somewhere for where to enter in. Was this not the method of Lenin, in criticism of what he identified as the left communists, that certain tactics should be employed – inkeeping with the revolutionary mode of socialist deliverance – with parliamentarian wings and moderate trade unions.
For me, I’d go a step further than Lenin, socialists should enter into the labour party with the aim of changing the labour party first, then society second, whereas Lenin’s ‘tactic’ was to use the parliamentarian wings the way a journalist might woo a junior member of the local government’s media team, so as to achieve a groundbreaking story (I use the entry to change the party, then to change the world, Lenin uses the party to change the world, and then drops the party – in short). As negative as this all may sound to a revolutionary socialist, this doesn’t seem totally opposed to what Engels described as scientific socialism.
The universal organs of the working class are the trades unions – and the Socialist Party is very definitely embedded in these, as are numerous other non-Labour political groups. Lenin argued against the creation of disparate “communist” trades unions, and for the capture of the older ones – on the basis that in order to capture them, activists must win round the working class to a socialist platform.
My argument is that Labour does not occupy a position from which analogy can be drawn – not from the trades unions today, certainly not from the Labour Party of the early twentieth century.
Your argument, change Labour first and society second, misinterprets how things work. You can’t change Labour without changing ‘society’, by which I mean re-organising and re-arming the working class. The contradictions evident within Labourism, however, have opened the space to do this outside Labour. The final political form of these developments is not assured – it is possible, and I have routinely admitted as much, that the developments will take the working class back to Labour.
I don’t see it though, either utilizing my experience on the doorstep, as it were, or from watching the development of political consciousness inside the unions. The move is currently away from Labour, and though there will definitely be a small move backwards after the election, I’m not convinced that a) this will take in a meaningful proportion of the working class, who will remain appalled by Labour but unconvinced by Tories and Libs and b) that it will have any discernible effect on Labour’s leadership and bureaucratic centralism.
There is also the question of the role that Labour’s leadership will play in the inevitable surge of class struggle; if it mirrors the role of Kinnock and the TU leadership in the 1980s, then this will reinforce the vista for operations outside of Labour – in fact it will necessitate them, just as I said earlier.
If mass convincing is what you’re concerned about, are you convinced that a meaningful proportion of the working class will flood to a separate leftist group like the SP, Respect, or the SA (who a large portion of my concern at splinter cells is aimed at, who do stand against labour candidates whoever they are, and have members of the SP stand for them, which is why it is of no surprise to me what happened in Stoek to make Phil walk). For this reason alone it might be worthwhile pulling our weight from inside, you mentioned the LRC, why not?
I don’t accept your premise; the Socialist Party and other groups do not stand against Labour candidates “whoever they are”. Actually there’s a broad strand within the SP who support John McDonnell and the LRC cadre of MPs.
I’d like to know more about the Stoke Labour MP before I make up my mind on that specific instance – but it’s one of degree, not of black and white principle. It must take into account who the MP is, and what the party can achieve by running, versus what damage might be done. I suspect Stoke SP will have taken these things into account – and if was against someone like Hazel Blears, I would almost unquestionably support a Socialist challenger.
I’m fairly certain that a “meaningful proportion” of the working class won’t turn out to vote for TUSC, for Respect or for the rest. You use the words meaningful proportion like it’s meant to reflect my contention that such a proportion won’t flood back to Labour. But we’re working off a disparity; Labour are a huge party with a massive media profile. Of course a lot of workers will vote for them – that doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do.
It doesn’t mean that joining or rejoining is the right thing to do either.
I’ve already given you a bunch of reasons why I think it’s not, which was the purpose of the article.
At any rate, as I’ve suggested, the electoral insufficiencies of TUSC notwithstanding, the working class link with Labour is, in my view, residual. At the very most it’s due to inertia; workers won’t desert Labour because there’s nowhere else to go. This is a testament to the endurance of a certain level of class consciousness, rather than to any inherent merit of Labour, except that it has the virtue of not being the Tories or the Libs. And a lot of people aren’t ready to vote fascist, thankfully.
The IMT as you know also supported John McDonnell, but this was in part to do with their opinion that they should operate from within the labour party (that is when they aren’t being expelled from it). I don’t know as well as you what the attitude from within the SP is, but does it have this same attitude? From the outside it doesn’t seem so. This has nothing to do with Stoke, because I, too, would care to read a little more – which I hope Phil will (unless you know of somebody else?).
As an independent your charge about the choice between a socialist and someone like Hazel Blears I completely adhere to – but that is to say that I feel there is something disconcerting about the place of someone like Blears in a party that is predicated on support for the working class, and what I feel this means.
I feel that to link the working class to a set of ideals is largely conjecture, but am normally encouraged by what is concretely born out of workers movements, which is why I see trade unions – usually – as a pretty safe marker of what it is my politics appeals to. My attitude towards what counts as class consciousness is pretty close to what most socialists would count this as. As the disparity between what mass workers movements and trade unions appeal to and what the labour party stands for grows it will be hard for those loyal to the labour party to stand their corner, but it just doesn’t seem fair that the hard work that has been achieved from within the labour party, and by the labour party, risk being ruined forever by people who many others don’t think have a natural home inside the party.
I think where we’ve reached Dave is that you think energy could be better spent elsewhere because scientific socialism transcends parliamentary party loyalty, whereas I see the foundation of the labour party as enough to want to restore that for socialism today, and from a strategic nexus, saves the (often unrewarding) labour of faction creating. Would you not say?
A little mistake – my comment on the first paragraph should have read – “which I hope Phil will write” on the subject of Stoke – I meant not to imply Phil needed to read more on the subject of Stoke, I’ll kindly let him be the judge of that (I’ve no reason to doubt that he knows it like the back of his hand).
With regards the ‘whither Labour’ aspect of the post, it all depends on how the election goes in May. If they manage to cling to power, or force a hung parliament, then as a party Labour will continue to operate on the centre-right, where it can attract middle-England (after all, that’s where most elections are decided) and rely on support in the North and the South Wales Valleys to keep its share of the vote pretty high.
If they lose the election to the Tories (I winced as I typed that), then there will be plenty of scope for reform, but I fear such reform will resisted from the top-down, even if it is demanded by CLPs and the like.
The lack of any alternative has kept the trades unions and party members tied to Labour for too long as it is, in my opinion. An election loss could be seen as an opportunity, and the inevitable class war that will kick off against Conservative economic policy will provide an excellent opportunity to rebuild class consciousness and rally working class support behind a new entity.
I think that the possible future of Labour can be seen by looking at what happened to the SPD in Germany, where the left-wing of the party broke away because they were tired of the ‘neoliberal’ behaviour of the party in its governing coalition with the Greens. The new party grew from what was initially a grouping within the party, much like the LRC is within Labour now.
The new party had a high-profile leader (which the LRC lacks, with the greatest respect to john McDonnell – Tony Benn would probably be good but I don’t think he’s ready to leave), and the media gave them a fair bit of attention, which helped, but their performance in last year’s federal election was encouraging.
Germany and the UK are not so different politically and culturally, and in the economic circumstances we find ourselves in, British people are more receptive to Socialist politics than they have been for about 30 years. The hard part is getting the message out there and recreating class consciousness within the working class, many of whom are turning to a nationalistic, xenophobic outlook, and straight into the arms of the BNP.
Even with all the challenges involved with creating a new party and building a network of members and activists from scratch, I still believe this is a far more promising alternative than reforming the Labour party as is, which has far too many NuLab MPs in high places to turn back to the left now. 13 years of power has an unsettling affect on some people’s sense of moral responsibility, unfortunately.
I think we should be careful in assuming that New Labour is some kind of discrete and homogeneous entity. The narrative of New Labour – a break from intervention in the market, acceptance of the new ‘consensus’ that the ruling class had constructed under the Tories – was broadly accepted within the party because at a time of sustained economic growth there could be noticeable investment in infrastructure and services.
That’s collapsed along with the banks. The action of the govt to rescue the economy from a slump has led to a realisation that intervention in the market is possible – necessary even – and as a result calls for common ownership have a greater traction with Labour party members and supporters. Since you can’t control what you don’t own, there’s a flak that Labour MPs and councillors will get from factory closures, offshoring, etc. – and there’s a model for the alternative to letting things go to the wall…
Many of those who were loyal to the New Labour project have developed a sudden interest in cooperative and mutual enterprise – and I don’t think that this is completely cynical (there are those who will see CMEs as a way to ‘do’ marketisation/privatisation of public services to fulfill Blair’s model of the ‘enabling state’ where services are outsourced).
So on the one hand there are those who recognise the importance of common ownership and aren’t bothered by the terminology of nationalisation (it’s clear that what’s meant isn’t Morrisonian public corporations, btw) and on the other those who recoil from such talk, but are strongly supportive of cooperative and mutual enterprise in the private sector as a more ethical way to do business.
That’s a valid point James; New Labour isn’t homogeneous. As you say, there are different strands attached to different ideas, but all of which broadly reflect the neo-liberal triumph over embedded liberalism.
I have a hard time seeing any New Labour types talking about co-ops and mutualisation who aren’t clearly seeing it as a way to preserve the agenda of Blair et al: making state provision of services ever more fluid and responsive to the market. Certainly this should be evident from the Tories recently jumping on board.
Also consider that the “Left” arm of the Blairite project, people like James Purnell, were very busy trying to carve up what remains of the welfare state while they were in office – and their subsequent rebellion was against a Labour government presiding over the expansion of state spending, a return to Keynesianism (albeit without a lot of the social content).
I don’t see that the feelers being extended by some New Labourites are anything to get excited about, when it comes to the future of the Labour Party. As I have pointed out above, Kinnock etc were much more “Left” than the current soft Left, and yet still played a preposterously reactionary role, both internally disciplining any dissenters and externally trying to restrain struggle.
The fact that building societies on the whole took less risks in the domestic housing market than those demutualised building societies had led some MPs to see the need for more CMEs in the private sector. That’s what I was alluding to – there’s more than just a focus on the public sector, though I admit that it’s weaker because the enthusiasm of the capitalist class and the Tories will be to chop up public services.
You have outlined how internal discipline has happened, but not *why* it happened. From Kinnock up to the recent witch-hunts in Unison, the motive has been to secure a particular model of the Labour Party – as accepting neoliberalism. But the situation we are in – state spending rescuing private enterprise from slump – has shaken things up a bit. Oh, and the prospect of Labour losing power…
I think that comrades like Phil can successfully campaign for socialist policies in the Labour and Co-operative Parties because there is an openness to alternatives. Consider how Labour’s acceptance of neoliberalism has meant that there has been little intervention to stop offshoring and outsourcing – the feedback to party members from the doorsteps is that ‘Labour doesn’t care about us’. There’s a quiet desperation about the inability to create jobs, to halt closures.
The explicit justification for the move towards the centre was to make Labour ‘electable’ – and this argument still lurks there when it comes to Left wing policy ideas. The Labour Party is still very definitely in the grip of neo-liberal policies; I don’t recognize the description you give of things being “shaken up”, to any meaningful extent.
When you talk about how open the Labour Party is to “alternatives”, you generalize – I would be specific. A number of Labour members are open to alternatives and they always have been; the PLP is not, local council elites are not, certainly not the wave after wave of careerists streaming in via Labour Students and attached via the various policy bodies and think tanks which make it their business to sterilise Left ideas.
In fact, an element of the PLP – with Brownite appointees in tow – are moving in the other direction: against state expenditure, towards the Right.
So successful has this been that, in my experience, large swathes of Labour are neither Left nor Right but depoliticised. Their role is to recite the talking points on the doorstep about “Labour’s achievements” – a suicidal strategy since people have often been harmed by the stings in the tail to these achievements. This depoliticisation, and disorganisation, means a lot of the membership sways on the tide of newspaper and leadership narratives.
One of my core arguments is that the battle to dig out the entrenched element, and their union buddies, to combat depoliticisation and the neoliberalism which has never been explicitly grasped by the grassroots but does lurk there as ‘common sense’, is not going to succeed, or at least not in the short term – and the short term will be decisive in determining whether the key space is in or out of Labour, to organize the fight-back against Tory cuts.
All of which doesn’t touch on numberous other points, as regards the current direction of Union Lefts and the most radical, most active elements in the various campaigns that have exploded onto the scene recently despite – rather than because of – Labour.