Vote Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition
Below is a five hundred word article, originally written for Claude Carpentieri’s Hagley Road to Ladywood blog, as part of his really excellent 2010 Election special series.
The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition isn’t going to win the next General Election. It probably won’t even get someone elected. Only forty-two constituencies will have TUSC candidates, all well-known local campaigners.
To put this into perspective, this is far smaller than the ninety candidates plus that the BNP are going to run at the election. Yet if you live in one of those constituencies, you should vote TUSC. Here are some of my reasons for supporting them, on the streets and at the ballot box.
First, no other party intends seriously to fight for workers’ rights. At every turn, Labour’s leadership have bowed and scraped before the Press and the Tories when they demanded a disavowal of workers’ decisions to strike. In fact, based on the consensus at Labour List, workers’ rights won’t even be on the agenda for this election.
Meanwhile, the Labour government has provoked PCS into a strike by trying to cut down on pensions and redundancy remuneration, to make it cheaper to fire people.
Whoever wins the election, workers will fight – for jobs, for wages and against the straightjacket of anti-union laws – and workers will be right. TUSC offers a platform that will tie together demands from different sections of the working class and develop them into a comprehensive political programme.
Second, after the election we’re facing cuts in public services. Perhaps 25,000 council job losses and many more central government jobs besides threaten to stretch service provision to breaking point.
Both Tories and Labour are trying to be as vague as possible – but in education, for example, our final wave of academy-funding was signed off Friday fortnight ago and headteachers are already whispering ‘the R-word.’
That’s redundancies, for the uninitiated. That’s larger class sizes and poorer lessons for your kids.
TUSC won’t have the chance to pass laws preventing this, but we will be out on the picket lines with your kid’s teachers, when they inevitably strike to protect their jobs and the quality of education.
Third, a lot of the cuts are likely to be trumpeted as ‘local democracy’. Concrete Tory proposals for local authorities will free them from the spending ringfences imposed by central government, and allow them to gut funding of the voluntary sector and public services. Unfavourable ‘public consultations’ will simply be ignored.
‘Local democracy’ is the catchphrase being used by Tories to annihilate the universality of public services. Through ‘top-up fees’, Barnet Tories plan to allow rich people to bunk queues and get additional services, while the general public can lump it, and, oh, have staffing levels in public services cut.
Only a socialist alliance, advocating working class solidarity and action from the ground up, can stand up to a class-based attack on what little wealth redistribution and equality remains. This won’t be Labour, still living in the shadow of its capitulation to Thatcherite economics.
It certainly won’t be the racist BNP, to which a lot of working class Labour voters have fled.
It can be TUSC.
As I’m a member of the Labour party in elected office, as well as co-blogger at Though Cowards Flinch, I should just state for the record that these are Dave’s views, not the Though Cowards Flinch position. I know that’ll be obvious to regular readers, but I make it clear just in case.
I’ve written a fair bit on here on why I think lefties should continue to support the Labour party electorally, and I suppose I really should try to summarise it in a 500 word statement too, not least because I think Bob Piper’s effort at Hagley Road didn’t really cover the key reasons I still support Labour, focusing as they did on Labour achievements in office rather than its potential for the future.
Briefly, though, I do respectfully reject Dave’s position that the Labour party can play no part in ‘a socialist alliance, advocating working class solidarity and action from the ground up, can stand up to a class-based attack on what little wealth redistribution and equality remains.’
As I’ve written, whether Labour wins, loses or draw the coming election there are real opportunities for a resurgence of the left in the LP, akin to that experienced in the early 1980s but, I hope, without the same mistakes. This conviction is, as agreed with Dave, a matter of qualitative judgment at the moment.
Second, there is a need to be crystal clear that a Tory government will be MUCH worse for the working class than a new Labour government, and for that reason TUSC should not be seeking to split votes and allow Tories (or LibDem connivers) seats via such splits.
It is easy to make the casual assertion (not something I accuse Dave of), from a leftwing standpoint, that Labour and the Tories are as bad each other, but it is not true. The Tories have specific plans for the dismantling of local authority services (which Dave alludes to)in a way which deliberately harms the poor; Labour does not. The fact that people in the Labour hierarchy fail to see the importance of what the tories are up to with their behind the scenes preparations is disappointing, but does not make what they are up to irrelevant.
Third, there is TUSC itself, and the generality of new parties getting established as electoral forces. I have no problem with new leftwing parties seeking votes in principle. I am not one who believes in the immutable right of the Labour party to claim the votes of the left on the basis that they are the only ones who can win; nor do I believe that the Labour party is always destined to be the party that can most effectively represent the interests of the working class.
But I do think alternative left parties need to work first to put themselves into a position where they have a realistic chance of electoral victory before they stand in general elections. Part of this may be through the establishment of a local government base, though there are dangers in getting too hooked into the minutiae and relative unimportance of local government (only 5% of public spend etc.) in a way which detracts from the real business of trade union engagagement and solidarity. Quite simply, that groundwork has not yet been done (although of course I can’t say there won’t be a very special case or two anmongst the 40 odd local campaigners standing).
I have to say I like the idea.
With respect to Paul, and I do have a lot, Labour has been very weak on workers’ issues. Anti trade union laws have not been repealed. Not a single clause of the Warwick agreement has been made a reality. Internally, Labour-affiliated unions have been extremely harsh on critics of the Labour party.
And I’m not sure you’re right, Paul, in saying that alternative left parties need to be in a position of a realistic chance of victory before standing candidates. Dave is honest about the TUSC’s chances – the point is that this is a good time to make the need for better workers’ representation clear.
There is real workers’ unrest right now – postal workers, BA cabin crew, cleaners, careworkers, local government workers, civil service workers, etc, have all taken strike action in the past few years, often in response to government initiatives, and the TUC promises more. There is a crisis in the relationship between workers and their traditional Labour party representatives, and it’s no surprise that alternative outlets would be sought. Labour needs to acknowledge that its rampant chasing of the middle ground has left a lot of people out in the cold.
Dave – are you going to be writing further on this? I wouldn’t mind doing some interviews with some of the candidates, and then with some of the people I’ve interviewed on strike who’ve said they’d never vote Labour again. , but not if this is your territory, etc.
Yes, I would also make clear for the record these are my views alone – each blogger of TCF has their own affiliations – currently we’re split mostly between the SP and LRC/Labour Party, but we also have a US Democrat, an SWP member and an SSP member.
Sorry Paul, probably should have put that at the top of the article. Did you see HarpyMarx’ contribution to the series – Vote Labour (Representation Committee), also included by Claude at his place?
In reply to what you were saying, Paul, I don’t think a vote for TUSC and a vote for Labour are everywhere mutually exclusive. As most will know, there are few more vociferous defenders of the LRC than I. But in these 42 constituencies, I think it is important to turn out a vote for TUSC.
A key point is that in various areas, independent campaigns are also standing for the councils and some have a good chance of winning seats, as in Cambridge. Turning out a vote for TUSC PPCs will strengthen the vote for TUSC on councils – and there they are campaigning either with the Lib-Dems or with the BNP, as Labour is ceding territory to both at a frightening pace.
There are plenty of reasons behind this; one of them is that, for all Labour may have differences from the Tories, they have as I and Kate have said, failed spectacularly either to organise resistance to Tory plans while Tories have majorities on councils, failed to understand Cameron’s plan or in several cases – some of which you outlined to me – sympathised with them.
So the time for an alternative is now – because Labour has failed in its responsibility. Even the LRC has failed, despite its efforts at setting up local branches and knitting them together with local union branches. That alternative is TUSC, which has brought together independents, the SWP and the SP; union officials are watching it to see what happens. A good show could determine how effective and co-ordinated our resistance is in the coming period.
The General Election & the blame game of deception, deception, deception !
6th April 2010
In 1996 under the tories, the jobseeker’s allowance came into law & cut benefits to the young and 18 to 24-year-olds automatically got 20 per cent less in benefit, which was designed to replace unemployment benefit and income support.
The current Labour Government promised before gaining power in 1997 & made a pledge to scrap JSA – still to date they have betrayed the unemployed. Before the General Election of 1997 Labour shadow ministers did give clear indications that, if elected, they would tackle some of these issues. They gave assurances that, while it would be difficult to find parliamentary time to significantly change the Jobseekers Act it was most certainly their intention to make “speedy and far reaching reforms to eliminate the worse excesses” arising from it. This Statement was deception, decption, deception – they had no intention of scrapping the JSA act !!
Under old rules in 1995, if their National Insurance contributions where fully paid up, this age group received the same amount of unemployment benefit as other people.
The jobseeker’s allowance simply stopped this. These attacks had a widespread impact on young people.
Every day, certain sections of the press and television voice concerns over the apparent lawlessness of young people.
This has led to calls for even more repressive measures against young offenders and for army-type discipline. Yet the link between increased property crime and depressed economic activity is well established. There is also a relationship between unemployment and crime, something that the old Tory / labour government denied. This is, of course, not surprising as the admission of such a link makes both government directly culpable for the subsequent expansion in crime over the decades.
Young people see a government persuing policies which stop them getting jobs and the same government withdrawing their entitlement to unemployment benefit. We should blame the cause, not the effects.
The introduction of the jobseeker’s allowance enabled the Tories to become the first government in history to actually abolish the unemployed. There will be no unemployed, only “jobseekers”. The old Tory government wanted to get rid of the word “unemployed” and to get rid of all responsibility for reducing unemployment in Britain.
Once again the tories, and this Labour government puts the blame at the door of the individual, saying: “It’s your fault you are unemployed. You don’t want jobs.” But when there are very few real jobs out there, it is meaningless.
The government and the capitalist class which it serves have created unemployment, but blame the unemployed who have no control over their lives when they are thrown out of a job and thrown onto the scrap-heap, lives ruined.
Despite increases in National Insurance contributions over the years, and since the JSA came into law in 1996 – entitlement to contributory benefit for unemployed people has been halved under the JSA from the old 12 months under unemployment benefit to six months. After six months, only the means-tested jobseeker’s allowance is payable. Even though you have lost the income from your job, even though you have paid more into the system, some people have been without any benefit at all.
In the first year of jobseeker’s allowance in 1996/97, 90,000 claimants lost their entitlement to benefit completely. Because of the harsher rules of jobseeker’s allowance and the new attacks facing those on the old incapacity benefit / employment support allowance, tens of thousands of sick and disabled people are being left without any benefit entitlements at all.
Women have be particularly badly hit by the contributory benefit cut-back. A higher proportion of women than men have lost benefit entirely after six months, because they are more likely to have working partners. Not content with cutting benefit, the government also made an unnecessarily strict benefit regime of which the tories brought us, even stricter.
All unemployed people now face a wide range of compulsory measures. Failure to obey these instructions mean benefit being lost for up to four weeks, with the possibility of there being no hardship payment.
An Employment Service officer has the power to give a formal direction at any time that a claimant or as they like to call us “customers”, must undertake a specific activity to assist her or him to find employment or to improve their so-called employment prospects. Changes meant that the description of people subjected to the procedure moved from being ‘Clients’ to become ‘Jobseekers.’ Prior to JSA the Employment Service described unemployed workers who were signing on as clients, the Act imposes the expression jobseeker. Part of the underlying purpose of both the Act and the change of nomenclature is to suggest that the State/Government has no role in job creation and that it is the individual who is responsible for his or her unemployment.
These “new direction” have enable officials to require claimants to improve their employability by, for example, requiring attendance at a course to “improve job-seeking skills or motivation” or by “taking steps to present themselves acceptably to employers” – for example, mean getting a haircut, new clothes, tattoos removed, etc. Failure to carry out a “reasonable” direction have resulted in the loss of two weeks’ benefit. To stop benefit under the Act if a claimant does not accept a job offer, no matter how ludicrous, is a clear denial of free choice of employment and that does not address the issue of any unfavourable conditions of work.
Both this government and the tories says that it wants to get rid of the “something-for-nothing” society. Unemployed people have paid for their benefits through taxes and National Insurance contributions, through which workers insure themselves against the loss of income from employment. The benefit they receive is paid for, and is not a handout.
It cannot be denied that whatever method of counting is used there are more people seeking work than there are job opportunities. The massive discrepancy between those two facts alone means that millions of people are living in poverty which, at best, is accepted by society and is arguably created by the social system itself. Individuals cannot change society, government can!
Agitate, educate, organise is still the slogan which, if put into practice, can create the conditions for preventing the return of a Tory government. The new government should not be government which appeases big business, fails to democratise the state and ends up attacking the low-paid and poorest sections of society, as happened in 1978-79.That would only pave the way for an even more right-wing Tory government.
Confronted by growing unemployment, France, Germany and Italy amongst others have experienced periods of massive social unrest over the last decade and as a result some gains have been made. It is a lesson that cannot be ignored as the innocent find themselves blamed for the predicament in which they find themselves. With many commentators expecting unemployment to rise, now is not the time to start blaming the victim. People who lose their jobs want help in getting new skills and new paying jobs, not make-work schemes that provide no pay, no prospects and not even any time to search for a new job.
We need a government committed to scrapping the jobseeker’s allowance and to the kind of policies that will benefit the vast majority of the people of Britain, which means taking on the powerful, vested interests of big business and the ruling elite. It must, therefore, be a Labour government of a new type – kept on course by a militant mass movement around an alternative economic and political strategy.
Can such a government be achieved, especially when the right wing leaderships of the Labour Party and TUC are striving to abandon left-wing policies and socialist principles and are rushing to embrace Europe and social partnership with big business?
In 2008 the Labour Government drove thousands of people off benefits into ultra low paid work & “work for dole” schemes. The former Unemployment/Pensions Secretary James Purnell unveiled his widely trailed package to “make sure a life on benefits is not an option.” The Labour Government wanted to make life on the dole hell – well I’ve got news for New Labour life on the dole is already hell.
On December 10, 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As proclaimed by the United Nations, I draw your attention to section 21 which states:
• Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment
• Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
• Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary by other means of social protection.
In many respects respects the Jobseekers Allowance, and their application by the Employment Service and Benefits Agency are contrary to both the spirit and the words of the declaration so solemnly signed by the British Government in 1948 and never rescinded.
History indicates that the balance of forces within the labour movement can be changed through debate and struggle. The truth is that there is no alternative to fighting the battle of ideas within the organised working class. Ultra-left and anarchist short cuts are, in reality, a dead end.
Richard Easson Jacques
Labour has clearly failed to deliver on a key promise, that’s easily acknowledged. But what has this to do with TUSC? TUSC is not an ultra-left short cut, it is firmly rooted within the labour movement and aims to struggle and debate for the democratic supremacy of its particular theories and methods.
I have spelt out my affiliations to Labour from a socialist persepctive before, and also have given my reasons why I think small splinter groups do much to split votes for a party that usually last about 10 minutes, but I will do the same here, unpacking my specific attitude to TUSC.
It shouldn’t put you off that leftist splinter groups pop up and are forgotten about ten minutes later (remember Respect Renewal, or the Alliance for Green Socialism. Where are No2EU this time around) if political bodies external to the Labour party are what you are after – but it does put some people off, and it puts me off too.
Now TUSC are not simply a group like this, but they do divide up the vote, and in my opinion serve to vindicate the right wing of the Labour party – who ae now not simply weird nomads, but are allowed to feel welcome inside it.
I will undoubtedly share a lot in common with what TUSC candidates say – I know this to be true with many far left groups – but I differ with regard to how I think the left should conduct itself.
Strictly speaking we have a social democratic party in this country that is home to many differing leftist perspectives, but that party has been home to a most suspcious group of arch-Thatcherites, the likes of which has not been seen since, well, Thatcher herself. That party is the Labour party; and the erroneous existence of the right has not only itself to blame, but the leftwingers who have accepted this fact and turned to splinter cells.
I’d like to avoid, as best as possible, tribalism, but how the left operates – particularly those groups like the socialist party whose identity is based around not working from inside the Labour party – is very nonsensical to me.
In some ways I think it renders possible the right wing tripartite system Britain has today, or it would were it not for the good work of John McDonnell and others in the Socialist Campaign Group, or the LRC generally.
I want Labour to win the next election. I must admit that I voted Labour last election with the “nosepeg” as Polly Toynbee called it at the time, but this time around I’m confident that changes are occuring where it is necessary to take a good look at what money is wasted, what cooperation and mutualism means, and in some ways where power should be and where it should not be (capitalism will not be dying out, but it will certainly be kept in check) – and all in all some serious attitude changes will take place in the Labour front seats.
No party will win believing it was a walkover, they will have to take consideration of what needs to be done to appease those to whom they are accountable – us. I think that picture will be clearer to a Labour government, who have, I believe, offered some of the best opportunities to society within the strict limitations of a capitalism that curbs opportunity. That said they have also done some stinking shit as well, which brings me to my next point…
I supported (from afar) some (only some, more of which in a second) anti-war candidates who were standing against pro-war Labour MPs, but only those who were standing up for “what Labour usually stood for”. In fact many people’s campaigns were centred around standing on a programme that has become more Labour than Labour itself – and to this I am sympathetic, though I skeptical of this as a widescale political position, and think has about as much life as some of the many splinter left groups this great country has been host to over the 13 years that New Labour have goverened.
Through circumstance, many leftwingers and political figures who fight for justice are in the Labour party. Many who aren’t usually have been in the Labour party. Whether we like it or not the Labour party is a hub, and I don’t think that should change. It seems silly that my only advice to vote for a TUSC candidate would be to make sure that a) you’re not in a marginal seat – keep the tories out and b) make sure the Labour candidate isn’t a leftie. I respect TUSC voters because they are socialists and so am I, but my advice is campaign within the Labour party; don’t allow the Labour right shit on us forever.
You’ll have to forgive my lapses on comments threads this month as life is getting pretty busy (and half-termish).
I think the essential difference between us is that Dave and Kate are primarily deciding the best tactical course of action based on a judgment of Labour’s record to date, while I (and Carl) do so on the basis of what we consider to be the potential for the left in Labour in the next couple of years. Dave and Kate have given up on Labour as the best hope, based on experience. Carl and I haven’t.
This (on my part) is not to ‘turn a blind eye’ (Kate on twitter) to New Labour’s failings; they have been many. It is to suggest that there are now real opportunities within Labour.
But there is also the little matter, which keeps slipping by as a seeming irrelevance, that any seat lost by a divided vote is a seat nearer a Tory majority.
I am, of course, somewhat constrained in what I say about TUSC by the party rules to which I have, by dint of my party membership, signed up. I regard party discipline and abiding by the rules – even the ones I may disagree with – as important, and wish more senior Labour figures e.g Frank Field would do so. The rules I sign up to are the rules until I and others argue/organise hard enough for them to be changed. One key rule is that Labour party members do not support any other party, and that includes TUSC. It is also one key rule I would like to see reviewed by the party, if only iniitally at local electoral level, in recognition that we are not now in the 1950s, and that it may now make sense for local Labour parties to work hand in hand with socialist parties more active and with more electoral potential, with the longer term aim of drawing those smaller parties back within a remodelled Labour infrastructure. Until such time as I/we win that argument, I cannot advocate a vote for TUSC in any circumstance, even though I can recognise the point that in certain circumstances where local candidates do stand a chance of election success (and would join with Labour members on councils to oppose Tories) it might look reasonable.
However, in the general election, TUSC remains a distraction in the battle to keep the Tories out, and to give Labour another (I accept possibly final) chance to get it right.
I’ll do a 500 worder on ‘why vote Labour’ later.
raincoat – TUSC is essentially the progression of No2EU. Indeed, TUSC was more commonly known as ‘son of No2EU’ whilst negotiations were still taking place. Alliance for Green Socialism also were never an actual alliance, they were and are a small fringe far left party, although I take on board your general point about the longevity of left of Labour alliances.
I like this blog, but sometimes it is a little too highbrow for me, so apologies if I don’t keep pace. But surely when discussing the future potential of the LP the bottom line is economics? Specifically, how do socialists within the LP wrestle their party back to its traditional social-democratic position? It strikes me that the neo-liberal current within the LP is stronger than a mere ‘Thatcherite faction’. Indeed, it isn’t just the LP – social democratic/labour parties the world over have pursued a Hayek/Friedmanite neo-liberal economic agenda for the past decade plus. Neither are the neo-liberals a minority. Even if – and it is a big if – the will to move to a more workerist and egalitarian position existed within the LP, how exactly would it be possible? How would the LP in government disentangle themselves from the global current, from the neo-liberal machinations of the EU, the IMF, etc? Surely this would require a combative approach that would bring the LP into direct conflict with many of its bedfellows? It is also wrong to suggest the neo-liberal current within the LP only goes back as far as Blair – the roots are much older.
Back onto TUSC, and I am sure this is a point that has been made numerous times already, but I do find this contradictory attitude towards it from Labour lefts curious – either it is a temporary lash-up which will fail then disappear, or it is threatens to split the Left vote. How can it be both?
TUSC … either it is a temporary lash-up which will fail then disappear, or it is threatens to split the Left vote. How can it be both?
Guess you already know this, but if TUSC survives for the next month only, it’s achieved both.
Well, no, that doesn’t work. Either they attract votes or they don’t. It is mutually exclusive.