Archive
The shoe is on the other Foot – It’s not Labour’s left that’s stuck in a time warp
This is a cross-post by James Bloodworth
Julian Petley, co-author of the book Culture Wars, once observed that the British press had ‘perfected a way of representing the ideas and personalities associated with socialism as so deranged and psychotic that they presented a danger to society.’
It’s no secret that New Labour was evolved in part to counteract Labour’s image problems in the 1980s. The order of the day became finding the centre ground and sticking to it, rather than attempting to operate outside it and running the risk of remaining ‘unelectable’.
While many of us on the left did not necessarily agree with the political trajectory taken during the New Labour years, we understood that there was no inherent shame in trying to look like a credible party of government. The political landscape in the ‘80s and ‘90s was undeniably bleak for socialists, and reflected something the outgoing Labour Prime Minister Jim Callaghan had said several years earlier: ‘You know there are times, perhaps once every thirty years, when there is a sea-change in politics. It then does not matter what you say or what you do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of.’
As if by prophesy, 30 years later we are again at a moment of profound political change. The certainties that have shaped political discourse for so very long are again being challenged, if not by the political class then by workers and students right across Europe and beyond. Questions many of us have long been asking about our economic system are today routinely being raised by those with little history of political struggle – people whose sense of injustice has developed as they’ve seen living standards fall and prospects for the future become increasingly bleak.
The right’s response to the crisis has thus far been defined by a willingness to take the easy way out at every juncture. In place of solutions they’ve clung to ideology. Instead of compassion they’ve hacked away at living standards. Their plan for the long-term consists only of a global race to the bottom. In summing up, their response has been to dig in and entrench themselves further in the failed orthodoxy of laissez-faire capitalism.
Through it all, much of the media has portrayed murmurings of dissent not simply as illegitimate but as disorderly and threatening. They have casually dismissed the Occupy movements and thrown handfuls of mud at any figure who has evoked the most basic right every working person must have – the right to withdraw one’s labour – and, as if looking admiringly at the authoritarian capitalism of the east, called enthusiastically for further restrictions on this right at every given opportunity.
Yet, in the face of this torrent of hostility the public mood toward the economic policies of the right has hardened. The latest opinion poll published by the BBC finds 61% believe Wednesday’s public sector strike is justified, a total that includes almost four in five 18 to 24 year olds. This is on the back of a YouGov poll from a few weeks back which found that 44 per cent of Londoners supported the aims of the Occupy LSX group, with 30 per cent opposed and 25 per cent answering ‘not sure’.
Rightly or wrongly, many inside the Labour Party routinely go along with the evocation of right-wing policies when doing so brings electoral gain. As someone on the left of the party, I have lost count of the number of times I have been told that my ideas would make the party ‘unelectable’ if adopted – as if the sole purpose of politics was the abandonment of all principles in exchange for political office.
I have previously accepted, however, that at times they might have had a point: the outlook for the left was, for many years and for a number of reasons, downright depressing. Resentfully, I bunkered down and grudgingly toed the line.
Today however, things are different. If nothing else, the above-mentioned figures should make it clear that it will not be crass characterisations of the ‘looney left’ that will eat into Labour’s support at the next election, but an unwillingness to properly stand up for the rights of working people in the face of this unprecedented onslaught of austerity.
The Conservative Party rarely needs reminding that it is the party of capital; yet far too often the Labour Party seems intent on forgetting that it is the party of labour.
There has indeed been a sea change in politics. This time, however, the boot is on the other foot: it is most certainly not the left that is acting as a drag on Labour’s electoral chances.
What to make of Dave Prentis’ re-election?
No doubt the Conservative-LibDem coalition is breathing a small sigh of relief that UNISON, one of the biggest public sector unions, yesterday re-elected Dave Prentis by 67% compared to 33% for two Left challengers. The fact that there were two left candidates at all is itself ridiculous but it’s not the worst part of the matter.
In re-electing Dave Prentis, after the customary bureaucratic shenanigans that is part and parcel of UNISON internal politics, the union has given the Con-Dem coalition what they want; someone quite willing to further ossify the union as an adjunct to faux Tory populism rather than as an organisation that will defend jobs, pensions and working conditions.
By faux populism, I of course mean the recent headlines that Cameron and co have been calling on public sector employees to submit their ideas on how to save money. Prentis is lockstep with the Tories on this one, having already admitted that “union negotiators are being trained in public procurement negotiations and local government and health finances. The idea is to go through an employer’s books and suggest alternative ways to make savings.”
Why isn’t this a good idea? After all, to paraphrase David Cameron, if anyone knows where money can be saved, it’ll be the workers themselves – but the reality is that with a nominal figure of 25% involved, thousands of jobs are on the line and the only way to fix a problem external to the public services will be to squeeze more work for decreased remuneration out of a smaller number of staff. There’s no way to get around that, wherever the cuts fall.
Populist gestures such as public consultation are part of a savvy Tory war for the middle ground; if people not directly involved with these jobs (the majority of which are low paying) can be convinced that the cuts are necessary, it’ll undermine attempts at a fightback. Meanwhile Dave Prentis and his ilk can bleat that they had alternatives – but alternatives won’t save jobs and won’t save wages in this context. Standing up and fighting is all that will.
Don’t look to Prentis though, as apparently, “it is unlikely that we would take national industrial action over jobs.”
We can only hope that Tory efforts will be shattered by the pay freeze they have announced for all public sector workers earning over 21,000 GBP per year. This includes a big chunk of teachers and other groups regarded as ‘professional’ (despite the fact that their low wages deny them the opportunity to get on the property ladder in many British cities – where the work is).
With union density at a low point, and few enough signs of resistance emerging from the private sector, the labour movement faces a two-front war. The first, directly to fight against the government cuts and intentions to raise the pensionable age to 66, the second to begin a serious campaign of recruitment. ‘Procurement negotiators’ will be unnecessary if the unions can capitalise on the continuing antipathy that exists to the Tories and recruit amongst public and private sector – and the casualisation of the latter is crying out for unions to step up.
Thankfully this goes beyond one union, however big and however entrenched its ‘moderates’ are.
Prentis’ election throws a bunch of spanners into the works for the Labour Left (hard and soft alike). Despite rumblings about UNISON’s funding to Labour – the second largest single funder of the party, I believe – this was Prentis’ feint leftwards, to deprive Roger Bannister and Paul Holmes of their greatest campaign issue – the contradiction between continuing support for Labour and a Labour government that kept hounding the public sector.
Whereas a Holmes victory might have thrown UNISON weight behind a reform through Labour conference, and a Bannister victory would almost certainly have delivered the impetus necessary to disaffiliate from Labour and orient towards other disaffiliated unions and put a new working class party on the agenda, Prentis will back neither. Which could very well mean that, barring some shocking turn in Unite’s elections, Labour’s leadership might remain largely intact and Labour’s opposition to the Tories might remain spoken only.
This would surely seal the doom of Labour, if it won’t even speak up for the people whose needs should be the lifeblood of the party when in opposition. Worrying times ahead, I fear.
Has time run out for Labour socialists?
I can’t express in words how utterly furious I am that John McDonnell has been forced to withdraw from the Labour leadership contest. After a few days of faux outrage over his comment that if he could, he’d go back to the 1980s and kill Thatcher, and Diane Abbott’s mealy-mouthed supporters saying they think he should be the one to withdraw, despite her pledge to do so if he got more nominations (which he had, at that point), John has rightly judged that her supporters won’t come to him, so he’ll have to give his to her.
Not good enough. Every campaign for the next five years – against library closures, against service cuts, against the attempt to further casualise the public sector – is going to be fought outside of Labour. Only historical revisionists and morons believe that the anti-poll tax campaign was a Labour campaign. And yet the Left has kept the life support switched on, firmly demanding that people exercise the great contradiction at the heart of our democracy: loyalty to a Party the leadership of which does not care about them.
Is it time to pull the plug? Since 1923, we’ve faced the same situation. Labour is elected with high hopes for its success, disappoints those hopes and is then swept from office, leaving the Conservatives to pick up where they left off. Since the end of the great depression, after the war, when the exhaustion of the capitalist system allowed for greater state controls (which had been utilised during the war anyway and rubbed off the red taint they previously had), the journey has been backwards – trying to find a way back before the post-war settlement.
This is the mission of the Conservative Party, and ‘big society‘ is just its latest cover. What has Labour’s leadership done? Nothing. We have been losing the battle, and all the while desperately clinging to what Labour has achieved – scarcely anything new without sacrificing something old. So, of the last three parliaments, we got the minimum wage and a long-overdue rise in benefits (for example) whilst Labour set course towards undermining teachers’ unions and education, through faster deregulation of schools.
Meanwhile, Labour socialists – an endangered breed that I’ll deal with in a moment – ask their comrades and friends to hang on in a party that has been swamped by vapid twits. Anyone who goes to all the events touted by the Fabians, has been to Oxford or hangs out online can’t fail to know who I’m talking about. The twits claiming the legacy of Nye Bevan whilst backing Ed Balls, for example, without seeing the incredible disparity between the politics of the two. Whatever Bevan’s deficiencies and later demoralisation, he was no Balls.
Bevan occupies, as one might notice, the strapline of this blog. His sentiment, that one should not stand in the middle of the road, that one should not be afraid to take a position has been my personal code all my life. It is far from the attitude of the Labour leadership and their coterie. It is a party rotten through and through, corrupt, full of patronage and seeking after patronage, unprincipled. It isn’t really socialist at all. In seeking after patronage, people learn to talk with a certain vocabulary, highly technocratic and bloodless. Totally removed from ordinary people.
Labour socialists of the Labour Representation Committee number somewhere below 1000 people – that’s less than one percent of the total party membership (excluding the trades unions). They are condemned by the Labour Right for being backwards. They are excoriated by those who exist as rootlessly as Labour’s London elite for being too provincial, too unwilling to work with other groups (whatever that means, as every Labour campaign I’ve ever seen has involved LRC members and parliamentarians). But they are the last remaining socialists in Labour.
The last election demonstrated that this clique will not exist forever. The Parliamentary group of the LRC was halved, to say nothing of the destruction wreaked about its bigger, less socialist sister, the Socialist Campaign Group. And even this doesn’t account for the wacky behaviour of a bunch of the members of these groups, like Michael Meacher, supposed Left veteran…who nominated Ed Miliband for leader, even though Ed had cleared the bar and with room to spare. So long as the fortunes of this group are tied to Labour, it exists within a contradiction – urging (critical) support for a leadership that will kick the poor when it’s opportune whilst claiming to represent them.
The leadership contest has demonstrated that no matter how well people like John McDonnell work, no matter how much support they gather, they’ll be outmanoeuvred by Labour’s Right, which can rely on the cowardice and (ironically) the uncooperative nature of Labour’s ‘soft’ Left. Harriet Harman and Ed Ball’s nominations for Diane Abbott play the diversity card but in reality are simply intended to prop her up into a slightly more credible candidate (still not very credible, from a political point of view) and force McDonnell out. All he has done is bow to the inevitable.
Abbott has the nominations – she’s on the ballot – but she’s not going to change the Party. Forgive my cynicism, but I’ve met too many soft Lefts. Despite her feminist credentials, she doesn’t have the detailed critique of the Party that is the remit of the LRC – and that would set free the feminist and radical energies that people were quick to impute to her. Indeed when she does her media appearances – the last I heard in-depth was on a Radio 4 discussion programme on Friday about two months ago – she can even be quite conservative. So good luck to her and her supporters – she’ll be better than the other four, but I don’t have any faith in her, and am rather sickened by how heavily she has stressed the fact that she’s black and female – like these are somehow politically relevant, except as tokenism.
John’s letter to Labour members, in which he announces his decision to stand down, acknowledges that despite enormous grassroots pressure – e.g. Tom Harris’ admission that he and other Labour MPs were deluged with letters and emails to demand McDonnell get on the ballot – the Labour bureaucracy and PLP were unmoved. His final appeal is to the strength of the Labour Left, that the fight against the cuts should be continued and that a Conservative government be denied the chance to have everything its own way.
With this, every socialist will agree – but I will not use my energies to electrify the zombified party that Labour has become, and I am one among many. Campaigns dominated by socialists will come together, and as last time, Labour’s leadership will do what it can to hinder them, so long as they aren’t tied to the apron strings of mother Parliament. They will face no backlash from their members, as the membership have nowhere else to turn. The odd constituency party might endorse the LRC, but even these constituencies can’t seem to get their MPs in line. And this is before the vast and reactionary weight of the trade union bureaucracy is employed by said leadership.
Are we simply to say that time has run out for socialism in the Labour Party? My anger at McDonnell’s withdrawl howls Khrushchev’s famous retort at the PLP and its groupies, “History is on our side. We will bury you!” And yet…
Marxism is not an exact science. Having shaken my socialist eight-ball, the answer comes back “Indeterminate”. This is the truth. The struggle for socialism in Labour is indeterminate. Socialism within Labour may be buried beneath the avalanche of bureaucratic indifference and then made irrelevant by the emergence of an organisation outside Labour that can combine within itself all the loose strings from every campaign the Left fights. The failure to do this after the poll tax campaigns, and after the anti-war campaigns has been the life-support of Labour’s Left.
These failures are contingent – failures of tactics, rather than of principle – and a success in this field will remove that last remaining leg. On the other hand, the failure of Labour’s Left to conquer the Labour Party (whilst a rather taller order than the first) is equally contingent, one of tactics and not of principle. Everything flows, and there will be more mass campaigns thrown up by the intrinsic processes of capitalism meeting the contradiction of the indestructible basic solidarities of the working class. These tactics will have longer to test themselves out until the impulse either to utterly change Labour or to leave it will move even the conservative behemoths of UNISON and Unite.
Continuing the electoral reform debate
What reform and how can we achieve it? These are questions which have been asked on this blog repeatedly when it comes to demands for changing the means of electing our representatives. So what impact will be had by Gordon Brown’s announcement that Labour intend to pursue primary legislation before the General Election ensuring a referendum on the Additional Vote system?
Short term electoral advantage seems to be the order of the day, with a sop to the Lib-Dems and a potential wedge between a Tory minority government and a potential Lib-Dem coalition.
Overall, like Sunny, I doubt it will have much effect, though for different reasons. There are good and bad things to be said about most of the proposed systems, but no application of any of them anywhere in the world has been shown to make politicians less corrupt, more inclined to listen to people, less accessible to a business and political elite etc.
It is naive, in my view, to believe that AV will re-establish faith in the current system. It is routinely cited by pressure groups and columnists that the last Labour government was handed a massive majority with only 36% of the vote, but I don’t really see how playing with numbers until someone in each constituency has more than 50% makes the result any more legitimate.
One would think the whole concept of having a first preference will mean that this is the person you want elected; if he or she is not elected, then are you not going to be disappointed? In any case, each MP having 50%+1 of the vote doesn’t increase engagement by the millions who don’t vote, and it won’t increase the legitimacy of governments that act to harm the interests even of those who elected them.
Is anyone saying, for example, that under AV we might not have gone to war in Iraq? The most egregious acts of British democracy are often committed with the full support or tacit acceptance of the Opposition. Will it protect our civil liberties? Not if the Australian SIO Act 2002 is anything to by; despite John Howard’s tight (AV based) majority, this legislation was arguably more punitive than UK law.
So what is the point of the kerfuffle about electoral reform? It is more representative of those who have voted (and in some countries, where it is tied to compulsory voting, more tied to the entire country) but, in that a majority voted for what’s on offer. It doesn’t challenge, however, the processes which shape what is on offer, and as I’ve consistently argued, that is the key to a real democracy. Nor, incidentally, will it change some other side issues like safe seats (touted as correlating to outrageous expenses claims) – there will still be plenty of those.
Many, most recently Ben Bradshaw, have made a great deal out of the ‘crisis of legitimacy’ of British parliamentary politics. The call for electoral reform is usually tacked on somewhere in here, but I think this is a distraction.
Populist issues like individual corruption (or, for that matter, ceding power to the European Union or to quangos) aren’t the core of our undermined democratic legitimacy. It’s because the most important decisions – the ones that have an impact on jobs, healthcare, education, housing, transport and pretty much every other fundamental public issue – are taken on the basis of other considerations inimical to the well-being of the British people.
Policy is at fault here, not the meta-issue of British parliamentary mechanisms.
For the British Labour Party, despite a huge reserve of political capital, and the ever-present aid of an Tory opposition still stigmatized by the arrogance of its eighteen-year rule, policies at odds with what people perceived as its mandate have gradually eroded popular support. As this tide goes out, it exposes a deeply disconnected Labour. This creates a crisis of legitimacy for parliamentary democracy because the illusion of a party, any party, that will stand up for jobs, working people and spotted dick pudding, is shattered.
Faltering Conservative poll leads as their actual policies are discussed should give us pause for thought. Suddenly people realise that no party likely to form a government really speaks for them. Thus arises talk about PR and the majoritarian tyranny of FPTP. Without question, however, this problem will not be fixed by any variation on proportional representation.
The right policies, of redistribution, of intervention in the economy, or reinforcing the social welfare system, might restore the illusion, but the real fault is the inability of the Left to secure structural accountability of politicians to the members of their parties (the sort of thing which might encourage political engagement on the part of the average joe), or of parties to their delegate conferences, and of policy to the mass movement which would lend its life and weight to these things.
Meanwhile, a lack of accountability and the resultant turn towards the establishment-friendly centre attracts exactly the sort of chancers who can accommodate themselves to whatever politics are in fashion, with a side-helping of house-flipping thank you very much.
Barack Obama’s continuing dismal performance surely proves my wider argument, since his presidential campaign managed to whip up a huge movement, only for the realisation to spread that the movement existed on Obama’s terms and not vice versa. American disillusionment has resulted in falling opinion polls, defeats in formerly safe Democratic states and the looming threat of a new Republican Revolution this November, just as continuing disillusionment threatens a Tory victory by default here in the UK.
I’m encouraged, however, that some amongst the Parliamentary Labour Party have begun to take an active interest in the problem. It may be too little too late, but the world doesn’t end with a Tory election victory. Labour in opposition must be stiffened and transformed. I suspect, with a democratic, accountable party and a combative style capable of gathering and sustaining a mass movement to defend our ideas, the legitimacy of our electoral system will return to being an academic question.
(For an alternative, class-based, critique, see Liam’s, “Stay Awake! Electoral Reform is important!”).
Recent Comments