Labour’s 179 seat majority in parliament will not be taken by Tony
Blair as a mandate for progressive social reform. Instead it is going
to be used to impose the most right wing economic policy of any Labour
government in history.
In the period between now and when the voters, trade unionists and party
members start to realise this, Blair will use the good will he starts
out with to move as fast as possible — starting at this year’s
conference — to suppress the mechanisms whereby alternative policies
could be expressed within the Labour Party.
The left wing of the Labour Party, centred on the Socialist Campaign
Group in parliament, some of the trade union lefts and campaigns like
the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy and Labour Women’s Action
Committee, have already made clear that they are not going to go along
with such policies. That is already a step forward.
At the very first meeting of the new Parliamentary Labour Party, Dennis
Skinner pointed out the double standards of a leadership which says MPs
must stick to the letter of the manifesto but then pulls Gordon Brown’s
move on the Bank of England out of its hat. Ken Livingstone made the
same point on the front page of Socialist Campaign Group News and as
did Diane Abbott on Newsnight.
No matter how isolated this left may appear in the first afterglow of
the election, sooner or later it is going to be joined by ever-widening
layers of allies in all those sections of society who will suffer as
a result of the government’s policies.
A harbinger of what is to
come was seen at some of this year’s
trade union conferences where the bureaucracy’s efforts to keep
in step with Blair for as long as possible already started to meet serious
resistance from the ranks. The Communication Workers’ Union — which
has lost Blairite general secretary to the House of Commons — threw
out the Labour into Power document and the civil service union PTC rejected
the Maastricht convergence criteria.
Fire Brigade workers had already continued their industrial action in
Essex through the general election campaign.
The student movement, which voted massively for Labour, will enter a
period of enormous political upheavals once students grasp that Blair
is going to abolish grants and try to impose tuition fees.
Women, who closed the gender gap between Labour and the Tories on 1
May, will now find Frank Field equally, or more, reactionary than Peter
Lilley in his attacks on single parents and on pensions.
Scotland, with the lowest Tory vote in the UK, will become an immense
thorn in Blair’s side because the Scottish Assembly will create
an independent base of political activity for the Scottish labour movement.
The black communities will be horrified when Blair’s economic
policies not only slam into the poorest people in Britain but also create
a base for a new rise of racism and fascist groups like the BNP.
Blair’s right wing policies will also meet opposition from pensioners — the
only group who swung away from Labour on 1 May — in Ireland, and
amongst every other group whose hopes he betrays.
Obviously, however, realisation of what Blair will mean to peoples’ lives
will take time to sink in. Having ended 18 years of Tory rule, Labour
supporters will give the government a period of grace.
That is why Tony Blair will be looking for an early opening to show
the media and money markets that he will crush left wing opposition — before
the left is reinforced by extra-parliamentary movements in all these
areas of society. This will pose tactical problems for the left in parliament.
But before very long, the left MPs will be facing issues where millions
of Labour voters understand that Blair or Frank Field or Alan Howarth
are attacking their vital interests.
Because the right around Blair will rapidly exhaust whatever credit
it retains in the unions, the soft left around Peter Hain and Clare Short — organised
in the What’s Left group of MPs — is going to play a vital
role as Blair’s ambassadors and left cover. They will be supported
in this by John Prescott and Robin Cook — who is manoeuvring himself
into the position of the next ‘left’ leadership candidate.
But this soft left starts out so far to the right that it has already
suffered a series of splits to its left. These started with Bryan Gould’s
resignation — which Hain publicly opposed — over front bench
support for Britain joining the ERM. They deepened with the shift of
Tribune newspaper to the left, under the editorship of Mark Seddon.
The debate around the Labour into Power document, which in essence gives
the Prime Minister control of both policy-making at conference and the
NEC, resulted in a further split — and also illustrated the cleavages
likely on other issues.
The class struggle left — organised in the Keep the Party Labour
umbrella group and the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs — took a
clear position against the document and adopted tactics to maximise unity
with any part of the soft left prepared to defend any aspect of party
democracy. This meant, for example, calling for the vote to be delayed
until 1998 to allow proper discussion.
The soft left split
The Labour Reform Group which supported OMOV and
revision of Clause IV, rejected many of the attacks on party democracy
and, in particular, launched a campaign for the vote to be delayed.
Peter Hain and Derek Fatchett, on the other hand, welcomed the document
and gave it a left cover in the party. When the What’s Left group
of MPs rejected Labour Reform’s proposal to defer decisions to
allow proper consultation, Labour Reform issued a press release announcing
their withdrawal from the What’s Left group. They are now working
closely with Keep the Party Labour on those issues on which they agree.
The same political division appeared in Tribune newspaper — though
without a split. Front page articles by John Blevin extolled the virtues
of Labour into Power claiming the document was ‘a genuine attempt
to strengthen and extend internal democracy’ (7 February) which ‘has
come down firmly in favour of a rebuilt partnership between membership
and leadership’ (31 January).
In contrast to its own front page, Tribune’s editorial said Labour
into Power’s aim was to ‘effectively downgrade the NEC’ and ‘neuter
Labour’s annual conference’ turning it into ‘a rubber-stamping
jamboree’. The editorial called for decisions to be deferred to
1998.
Adopting the appropriate tactics towards the soft left — to distinguish
between those, like Hain, who provide a left cover for the right and
those, such as at present Tribune newspaper or Labour Reform, opposing
such attacks — is absolutely vital for the class struggle left.
Winning over the middle ground is the only way to win majorities in the
trade unions and Labour Party on individual issues. If the class struggle
left does not do this, it will find the tables turned upon it with the
soft left tending to peel away sections of its support.
In this context any concessions to ultra-left sectarian currents, at
present notably Workers’ Liberty, will simply aid the right against
the left. For example, through their front organisation Keep the Link,
Workers Liberty simultaneously gave a left cover to trade union leaders
who were pushing support for Labour into Power and, at the same time,
opposed precisely the proposal — to delay the vote on rule changes — which
cemented relations with the soft left in defence of party democracy.
The tactics of the class struggle left which flow from this situation
are clear. It is the only current in the labour movement which supports
virtually every progressive struggle. It must therefore itself remain
organised and resist any pressure to dissolve into the soft left, because
its support is vital to people fighting imperialism, black people fighting
racism, women protesting against the assault on the welfare state, workers
on strike and every other progressive struggle. Central to the support
it can provide is to fight for a coherent alternative to that of Blair,
knitting all of the individual issues together around an alternative
economic policy to reverse, rather than continue, Thatcherism.
But the class struggle left is, and will remain, very much a minority — and
a minority which Tony Blair will try to eliminate. By far its largest
and most influential component remains in the left wing of the Labour
Party. It should try to stay there because this provides a more powerful
platform to fight for a majority in the labour movement than anything
which exists outside. The Labour left represents a third of the constituency
membership, has significant support in the unions and a smaller minority
of Labour MPs.
The first priority is to maximise the forces who understand and oppose the Labour into Power proposals.