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 Turning point in Britain
A new movement emerging
As a human wave of protest converged on Hyde Park on
February 15 the question was inexorably posed: how can this movement find a
political expression? In this respect, argues PETER TAAFFE, George Galloway’s
speech predicting splits from the Labour Party if Blair supports a war, was the
most significant of the day. Where could such developments lead?
FEBRUARY 15 WAS a day when the world was on the march, when
it was turned upside down, when the ‘dissenting minority’ became the majority.
The Bush junta, the Blair cabal, the crooked circle of Berlusconi, and the
rotten court camarilla of Aznar, cowered in their bunkers. The Guardian
newspaper, in one estimate, put the number of participants worldwide at 30
million, although once a movement reaches these dimensions it is virtually
impossible to give accurate figures. However, one thing is clear: such numbers
could not come out onto the streets without the latent colossal support of the
mass of the population behind them. Aznar’s argument that the ‘silent majority’
were opposed to the demonstrators is like a multi-storey building resting on
flea’s legs!
It is no accident that Britain, Spain and Australia, whose
governments slavishly support Bush, saw the greatest mass demonstrations in
their history. The Berlusconi government in Italy was also besieged by more than
three million demonstrators in Rome and millions more throughout the country.
One International Herald Tribune journalist, William Pfaff, spoke in Brechtian
terms about the isolation of Tony Blair and George W Bush: "The people can elect
new prime ministers, but the prime ministers can’t elect new peoples". (11
February)
This was the greatest international display on one day of
‘people’s power’ – not yet clearly working class in composition and leadership
but with significant sections of the working class and trade unions
participating. It signified that the mass of the people believe that they must
act themselves because bourgeois leaders and their parties in all their hues and
disguises cannot and will not prevent the world from sliding into the abyss of
war, poverty and degradation. Building as it has on the anti-capitalist mass
movement, this mood will not disappear. In this political reawakening is the
generosity, even naivety, which characterises the ‘spring’ of all mass
movements. There is an expectation that the bourgeois leaders must ‘listen’ and
act accordingly in the face of such a mass movement.
However, all the indications are that Bush and Blair’s drive
to war continues unabated. They calculate that a ‘quick victory’ over Saddam
Hussein would change the political landscape and win majority support. They are
mistaken, because the anger and bitterness at the refusal of these ‘democratic’
politicians to heed public opinion will be unabated even in the face of a bloody
‘victory’ over Saddam. Therefore, the call for more decisive action now, mass
civil disobedience, strike action and even a call for a general strike – made in
London even by people like Tim Robbins, the American actor – will grow apace.
As important as these initiatives – particularly for the
long term – is how to politically sustain this movement and at the same time
provide a mass political socialist alternative for those who are moving into
action, particularly the new generation of workers and young people. The absence
of such an alternative has left a huge vacuum with the consequent frustration
and discontent amongst working class people evident. The neo-fascist British
National Party (BNP) is seeking to occupy this space, garnering votes and a
council seat in Halifax on top of the positions they have gained in ruined
former mill towns in Lancashire.
In the past, when Labour was a bourgeois workers’ party –
with a leadership that always leaned towards the ruling class but working class
at the bottom – it was at least a reference point for working-class people,
sometimes a countervailing influence to reactionary views and ideas like those
of the BNP. Labour is now a bourgeois formation whose knee-jerk reaction is to
seek to partially borrow the clothes of the racists and the Tories on the
burning issue of immigration and asylum seekers. The Tory leader Iain Duncan
Smith in effect flags up the need to construct concentration camps for newly
arrived asylum seekers. The reaction of Blair and home secretary, David Blunkett,
is to seek to borrow this idea and combine it with suggestions that European
human rights legislation be put aside in the cause of stopping the ‘flood’ of
asylum seekers into Britain.
Anti-working class policies
THE LIST OF betrayals and broken pledges is endless and
grows by the day. On the issue of top-up student tuition fees, a ‘mainstream’
Labour backbencher Eric Guisely declared in the Commons: "This is a betrayal of
working people in my constituency. It will be the equivalent of taking out an
extra mortgage and it will mean university is not for people like my family". If
the children of MPs are denied a chance at university, what hopes are there for
the working class? Blair and his crew have climbed up the ladder of education
provided by the ‘welfare state’ in capitalism’s boom years and are now snatching
it away. This will deny working-class young people the chance to go on to higher
education which has been enjoyed by their parents in the past. Or, after
completing their education, they will face the risk of becoming, like Chinese
peasants of old, crushed by debt for the rest of their lives.
Almost half a million teachers were offered a derisory 2.9%
wage increase, apportioned in such a way that teachers are divided against one
another. Some in inner London, for instance, will receive significant increases,
while others, even in the immediate vicinity, will receive very little when
increases in national insurance are taken into account. This, at the same time
as the Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine – he of grossly expensive office wallpaper –
was offered 12.6% a year (£22,000), more than a fire-fighter’s total salary.
Soldiers in the Gulf are also being asked to risk their lives for a 3.2%
increase. This is at a time when £8.6 million of taxpayers’ money, our money,
was spent on champagne receptions by British ambassadors! This has been
compounded by Blair’s support for an appointed second chamber – a new House of
Lords – against the opposition of Robin Cook and many in his own cabinet and in
a clear ‘material breach’ of New Labour’s 1997 election manifesto.
But the issues which have finally brought things to a head
are the vicious actions of Blair and his ministers towards the fire-fighters
and, of course, the war. Deputy prime minister, John Prescott, an alleged
‘friend’ of the unions, was used as the club to beat the fire-fighters,
threatening to bring back the 1947 Fire Services Act (repealed in 1959), thus
allowing the government to unilaterally impose pay and conditions on the
fire-fighters. This earned a stinging rebuke from the Daily Mirror who
characterised Prescott as ‘a working class zero’. Its political editor, Paul
Routledge, who has sung his praises in the past, wrote bitterly: "John Prescott
is a child of the unions. He was educated by his union; sent to Ruskin College,
Oxford, by his union – the National Union of Seamen. He got to parliament as a
union man. He lived in a union flat". This sense of betrayal displayed by
Labour-inclined Fleet Street hacks was palpable but is nothing to how the
working class as a whole feel. Routledge furiously added: "The Labour Party is
finished". Not quite yet, Paul, we would add but the forces that could
significantly break the influence of bourgeoisified New Labour over the British
working class and the organised trade union movement are rapidly maturing.
The attack on the fire-fighters added to the sense of
outrage felt even inside the ranks of the sanitised New Labour Party. Combined
with Blair’s poodle-like acceptance of Bush’s war plans it has brought divisions
out into the open. Blair is completely isolated on the war, with open hostility
towards him displayed by the Labour ranks in parliament (70% of his own
constituents are also opposed to his position on the war). The loss of authority
of the ‘king’ has led to an unseemly and public jousting within the court circle
(cabinet) on issues such as ‘foundation hospitals’ (Blairspeak for
privatisation) and on tuition fees.
This in turn is linked to a collapse in the already depleted
Labour Party membership, which officially stands at 180,000, half of what it was
when Blair assumed the leadership. This has compelled Labour ‘fundraisers’ to
scramble desperately for donations to help pay off an estimated £5.5 million on
its new Westminster headquarters. Donors have been promised a ‘place in Labour
history’ with an annual £100 donation gaining a ‘silver membership’ and an
invitation to a garden party, while £500 a year secures a ‘gold level’ pass to
regional and national receptions as well as Labour’s annual conference (The
Guardian, 17 January 2003).
Collapse in support
MATCHING THIS ORGANISATIONAL meltdown is the plummeting of
New Labour in the opinion polls, with the February poll in The Times showing
them to be on just 35%, 1% ahead of the inept Tories. The Times revealed that
"more than half of the public says that their view of Mr Blair has changed
because of Iraq, a third less favourably". This is Labour’s lowest point in the
polls since the fuel protests in September 2000, and on a par with Labour’s
support in the 1992 general election. It is true that the poll is run by an
organisation called ‘Populace’ and is managed by Tories, former employees of
Michael Portillo. But even these polls concede that Labour’s plummeting support
has very little to do with a revival in Tory fortunes. Their poll standing has
remained static but the decisive new factor is the intention of those who
supported Labour in the past to abstain. As Jackie Ashley put it in The
Guardian: "The real threat to New Labour just now is not from Iain Duncan Smith,
but from not bloody voting". Even New Labour luminary, Blunkett, has conceded
that the turnout at the next general election could be 50% or less, which would
mark the culmination of a process of ‘Americanisation’ of British politics.
If this was to come about, no doubt learned electoral
scribes could then write more treatises on the ‘apathy’ of the British
population towards politics. Yet February 15 gives the lie to that argument.
Only weeks before, those very same bourgeois journalists, who in awe recorded
the sweep of the mass movement, had bemoaned the lack of ‘involvement’ of people
against the war and the seeming indifference on all the great issues affecting
society. In reality, bitter anger exists at the state of Britain and the world
but this could find no ventilation. The anti-war movement provided such an
outlet. Direct action will deepen and reinforce this mood but for a sustained
challenge to capitalism to be mounted requires a political alternative to be
created.
In this sense, the speech in Hyde Park on February 15 of
George Galloway was the most significant of the day. In the tumult of
denunciations of Blair and Bush, his message, his foreshadowing of crucial
developments in the British labour movement, was perhaps submerged.
Nevertheless, their importance remains. He warned that if Blair supports war, as
he fully intends to if it goes ahead, then the Labour Party would split and
Galloway and others would "refound the Labour Party" on socialist principles. To
those looking for an alternative to Blair, this raises the prospect that a new
formation is now on the agenda.
Contained in this threat – notwithstanding the limitations
of using the now discredited label of ‘Labour’ – is the implicit recognition
that Labour cannot be ‘reformed’, as others on the Labour left still imagine.
For instance, Mark Seddon, the editor of Tribune, which still describes itself
as the journal of the Labour left, recently seemed to make a similar point to
Galloway but drew the wrong conclusion (February 7). He wrote that the
government is "against many of the policies and principles that have sustained
the Labour Party since its inception". This is nothing new, Mark; this was and
is the essence of the New Labour ‘project’, which has unfortunately succeeded in
completely obliterating the principles upon which the Labour Party was
originally built. He then goes on to add: "There have been Thatcherite responses
from ministers to the fire-fighters’ dispute: proposals for foundation
hospitals, top-up fees for students, and a massive expansion of the Private
Finance Initiative (PFI)". The conclusion he draws is: "The time has come to say
‘enough is enough’. It is time to reclaim the Labour Party and refound it. In
constituency parties and in the unions this proposition is being advanced with
increasing urgency. What is currently lacking is the organisational base to
bring all these forces together". So far, so good!
But then, crucially and fatally, he adds: "A Labour
refoundation would eschew the path chosen by the old Labour right when it broke
away to form the ill-fated Social Democratic Party". In other words, he opposes
a split from the Labour Party. This is the same warmed-over dish which the
Tribunite left served up as the Blairites marched to power, crushed the left and
established a party in the image of the US Democratic Party. A left split from
Labour, on the other hand, backed by the left trade union leaders in particular,
would tap into the huge radical constituency created by the anti-war movement.
If just 20% of the one to two million on the march supported such a bold step,
that would give a base of 200,000 to 400,000 members. Even 10% would mean the
creation of a force of 100,000, roughly equivalent to the 100,000 or so members
of Rifondazione Comunista (PRC) in Italy. Such a force could attract new forces
who are looking for such an alternative and they would be joined by tens of
thousands of trade unionists, socialists, environmentalists and radicalised
blacks and Asians.
The failure of Seddon, and the handful of Labour lefts on
the National Executive Committee (NEC) of the Labour Party, to win the party to
radicalism, never mind socialism, is transparent. The character of Blairism is
well understood even by its relatively recent converts such as Kim Howells, the
‘culture’ minister and former socialist firebrand in the South Wales National
Union of Mineworkers. He recently spelt out the real intention of the ‘project’:
"New Labour is about running capitalism better than the Tories". (The Guardian,
17 January)
The trade union link
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS, THERE are those on the left like
Seddon and Labour MP Alan Simpson who seek to feed the massive discontent with
Blair into the Labour Party in a futile attempt to change it. Unfortunately, the
same idea predominates amongst right-wing trade union leaders. Since 1979, the
trade unions have given the Labour Party a total of £200 million and what have
they received in return? A totally inadequate minimum wage and now the promise
of ‘parity’ for privatised workforces to those in the public sector. On paper
the promised new code defends the rights of ‘privatised’ workers, much to the
fury of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) which was expecting a code
which at least allowed new workers taken on in privatised industry to be
employed with worse rights and conditions than in the public sector. Now,
according to UNISON’s general secretary Dave Prentis, all new workers taken on
by companies to provide public services within local government should enjoy "no
less favourable" pay and conditions than their "comrades in the public sector".
While it is to be welcomed that the more brutal demands of
the bosses have, it seems, been defeated, it remains to be seen whether this is
enough to safeguard the rights and conditions of public-sector workers. But this
‘concession’ should not mean that Labour should be financially rewarded by the
trade unions. It should be axiomatic that a real ‘Labour’ government should
eschew privatisation and support the public sector. Yet this government is still
pursuing a policy of privatisation, whereas the trade union movement as a whole
and the working people of Britain are implacably opposed to this. Moreover, the
Tories’ vicious anti-union laws remain. The only one that Labour MPs are
demanding should be repealed is the stipulation for ballots to ratify the
political levy!
Bill Morris, the leader of the Transport and General Workers
Union (TGWU), has been organising a ‘whip round’ estimated to come to £40
million over five years, in order to bail out New Labour. This was put into cold
storage during the fire-fighters’ dispute and now in the flare-ups over the war.
But it is absolutely scandalous that Morris can promise further largesse from
union members’ pockets, more resources to Blair and New Labour to undermine the
rights and conditions of working people. This is comparable to what happens in
China where the families of those to be executed are forced to pay for the
bullets of the firing squad!
This is in flagrant opposition to the mood within the
unions. Even a pillar of New Labour, former TUC general secretary John Monks,
recently warned that "it was virtually impossible for anyone to win a union
contest standing on a Blairite ticket". The election of the so-called ‘awkward
squad’, Mick Rix and Bob Crow in the railworkers’ unions, ASLEF and the RMT,
Mark Serwotka in the PCS civil service union, Andy Gilchrist in the Fire
Brigades Union (FBU) and Derek Simpson in Amicus, all signify a rank-and-file
revolt against New Labour’s stooges in the unions. The TGWU is likely to join
the growing ‘awkward squad’ with the prospect of Tony Woodley winning the
general secretary’s election to replace the discredited Morris.
A break from New Labour
THE LEFT GENERAL secretaries (in the aforementioned unions)
have raised the need for change, some of them suggesting or hinting at an
alternative outside the Labour Party. However, unlike George Galloway, their
public statements have indicated a certain inconsistency, which also contradicts
the growing mood within their own unions. Within the RMT and certainly the FBU
there are probably clear majorities to get out of the Labour Party and, as an
alternative, stand their own candidates or finance those who support their
members in struggle. Eighty per cent of fire-fighters are reported to have
promised to, or have already, contracted out of the political levy which is
currently paid to the Labour Party. A preferable position would be to continue
to pay the political levy but for the FBU to disaffiliate from New Labour at its
next conference.
Despite their trenchant criticism of New Labour, however,
neither Rix nor Crow have clearly come out for a break with New Labour and the
‘refoundation’ of a new political alternative. Despite our warnings to them,
particularly in discussions with Bob Crow, they burnt their fingers in Arthur
Scargill’s ill-fated Socialist Labour Party (SLP). Both are fiery workers’
leaders who resonate with the rank and file of their own unions and the wider
working-class movement. But both are reluctant, probably because they cannot see
a ready-made constituency for a new mass party existing at present, to make a
bold call.
Bob Crow has unfortunately made ambivalent statements about
chancellor, Gordon Brown. He was reported by the Financial Times as saying that
Brown was "closer to the working class" than Blair. However, Brown is no real
alternative. A few weeks ago he once more elaborated his mantra of support for
capitalism, the market, berating the ‘old left’ for its ‘fetish’ in supporting
the public sector. He argued that New Labour "now had a radically different view
of markets to the one it held in the past". He is the most enthusiastic advocate
of PFI in the cabinet, although he has clashed with the health secretary, Alan
Milburn, over the ‘foundation hospitals’ proposal. There are certain illusions
amongst workers and trade unionists, however, that he harkens for a return to
‘Old Labour’ principles, because of the recent boost in public expenditure which
he sanctioned. Nothing could be further from the truth: the election of Brown as
New Labour’s leader after Blair’s resignation or overthrow would mean a
continuation of the ‘project’ (with minor variations) with all that would mean
for the working class of Britain.
Too much time has been wasted already since 1997. The price
for prevarication will be paid by the British working class if the trade unions
and authoritative figures don’t act now. The time when Labour could be changed
by the mobilisation of forces from within and into Labour has long gone. The
channels for organising such a change have been blocked up, dynamited in some
cases, which makes it impossible to organisationally break the grip of the
Blairites.
To his credit, this is recognised by George Galloway. His
threat that the Labour Party would split should Blair go to war, leading to an
attempt to ‘refound the Labour Party’ on socialist principles, is still posed as
an initiative to take place under the signboard of ‘Labour’, probably designed
to attract Labour dissidents. This may not be of decisive significance
particularly for a transitional organisation, which is what George Galloway’s
idea probably implies, but it is not the best one. It may pull in, as Socialist
Party councillor and former Labour MP Dave Nellist has commented, perhaps a few
thousand existing older Labour Party members, but will not be attractive to the
young fresh layers who poured onto the streets of London on February 15. They
need a new, clean banner, with a clear commitment to fighting capitalism and for
a new socialist society.
The Socialist Party will argue the case for this if debates
on Galloway’s ideas open up in the next period. But the kernel of the proposal,
for a break from Labour and the construction of a political alternative, is more
important than the outer shell, a temporary label. What is vital now, while the
mood on the war and other issues is white hot, is for George Galloway, and any
other left MPs and trade union leaders who support his call, to take firm
political and organisational steps to bring to fruition what could be a vital
step forward for the British working-class movement.
The mistakes of Scargill, and the narrow cul-de-sac which
the SWP-dominated Socialist Alliance has also unfortunately become, need to be
avoided at all costs. Organisational proposals on the precise form of this
alternative should be kept to a minimum at this stage but it must be open to all
on the left and, by necessity, federal in character. British workers should
borrow from the best examples of their brothers and sisters worldwide. The
construction of a mighty mass party, which stood clearly under the signboard of
socialism in the first instance, the Workers Party (PT) in Brazil, began its
life in a series of ‘assemblies’ where the idea of such a party was propagated
by authoritative figures such as Lula, then a workers’ leader. Similarly George
Galloway, who has assumed great prominence and authority as one of the main
spokespersons of the anti-war movement, together with left trade union leaders
and other authoritative figures such as Dave Nellist, could play such a role now
in Britain. If they speak with one voice on the need for a new formation, for a
political and organisational break with the Labour Party, then this would
resonate throughout the length and breadth of Britain. A new chapter could then
be opened for the working class.
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