|
After Labour’s conference…
Critical Moments for Blair
For the first time since Tony Blair became
leader of the Labour Party, there is open speculation about his future. While at
this stage rumours of his political demise may well be exaggerated, they do give
a hint of what could come. But would a change in the leadership change the
character of the Labour Party? CLIVE HEEMSKERK writes.
AS UP TO 400,000 people marched through the
streets of London on September 28 in a massive protest against war on Iraq,
delegates to the Labour Party conference prepared to set off to Blackpool for
their annual gathering. The Stop the War demonstration, probably the
biggest-ever anti-war protest seen in Britain, followed the TUC congress at the
beginning of September, where a new mood reflected the growing discontent with
Tony Blair’s New Labour government.
The formal decisions of Labour’s conference,
however, gave the impression of a government united and unmoved by the gathering
storm outside. The leadership did suffer a high profile defeat, when a union
call for a review of the private finance initiative (PFI) scheme to fund public
services was backed by 67.19% to 32.81%. This was more of a polite rebuff to the
government rather than a determined defence of the public sector, by the leaders
of the bigger unions in particular. But even this was immediately dismissed by
the chancellor, Gordon Brown, and, in his leader’s speech 24 hours later, Tony
Blair re-iterated his determination to break up the ‘1945 universalist model of
public services’. This was an address, The Economist magazine declared, that
"Mrs Thatcher in her heyday would only have dreamt of" (12 October).
The then Labour Party chairman Charles
Clarke (now the education secretary) compounded the snub to the unions when he
subsequently wrote that "the party leadership overwhelmingly won the argument
about the need for PFI investment both before and during the conference". The
vote against, after all, was merely the response of "producer-interest trade
unions, which voted 92%-8%" against PFI while "the consumer-interest
constituency Labour parties voted 58%-42% for continuing the investment".
(Guardian, 2 October) It just needed the unprecedented appearance of a US
Democratic Party politician, the ex-president Bill Clinton, addressing a
conference ‘where our guys are still in office’, to confirm that British
politics really has been ‘Americanised’, with two dominant capitalist parties
and the working class denied political representation.
Certainly, Blackpool didn’t meet the
pre-conference expectations of what remains of the Labour left who, at a
conference organised by the Campaign Group of MPs in July, had spoken stridently
of ‘reclaiming the Labour Party’. There John Edmonds, the general secretary of
the GMB general union, announced he had ‘come to bury New Labour, not to praise
it’. Subsequently, under the heading ‘Conference must vote for moratorium on PFI’,
he wrote in the pre-conference issue of Campaign Group News "that a large vote
against government policy looks inevitable". Yet, once in Blackpool, the demand
for a moratorium on new PFI deals was dropped by Edmonds in a futile attempt to
get Gordon Brown’s agreement to an inquiry.
Other issues pushed by the left fared no
better. Prior to the conference, following the 17-13 vote at the July meeting of
the national executive committee (NEC) against re-admitting London mayor Ken
Livingstone into the Labour Party, left NEC members were confident they could
get the decision overturned. But it was not to be.
The Fire Brigades Union (FBU), whose general
secretary Andy Gilchrist conceded to The Guardian that he has "fought hard over
the past two years to ensure his union remains affiliated to the Labour Party"
(21 October), was unable to even get a debate on a motion on the union’s looming
pay dispute. Despite the outpouring onto the streets of London two days earlier,
a clear anti-war position was defeated by 40% to 60%, in an blatantly
stage-managed debate with pro-government speakers outnumbering anti-war speakers
by 13 to four.
In the elections to Labour’s national
executive committee (NEC) – now serving two-year terms in a further erosion of
democracy – the left-wing Grassroots Alliance (GA) candidates polled an average
of 25,958 votes from individual Labour Party members for the six constituency
places. While a marginal improvement on last year, and the three sitting GA
candidates were re-elected, it compared poorly with the average 46,537 vote they
scored as recently as 1999 (showing that the exiting of left-Labour voting
members has not been reversed). The left also had little success in elections to
the Conference Arrangements Committee or the National Policy Forum, which will
be the only place policy documents will now be voted on until the 2004
conference.
The big unions’ feeble opposition to PFI,
the defeat of the anti-war position, and the continued stamping down on internal
democracy, were all a rebuff to the hopes of those who wish to ‘reclaim the
Labour Party’. Yet, at same time, the conference also gave an outline of how the
unity of the leadership could be shattered in the events ahead, as economic
difficulties mount, the battle over public services intensifies and, most
significantly of all, if Britain goes to war against Iraq.
A dispute surfaced at the conference between
the chancellor Gordon Brown and the Blair-loyalist health secretary Alan Milburn
over the latter’s plans to allow some so-called high-performing national health
service (NHS) hospitals to become independent ‘foundation hospitals’. Brown has
been a zealous advocate for privatisation – insisting on public-private
partnership (PPP) funding for the London underground and pushing the
part-privatisation of air traffic control. He is undoubtedly fully behind
Blair’s potential showdown with the FBU, to curb at source pressure for better
public sector pay and make it easier to push through changed working practises
and ‘efficiencies’ throughout the public sector. But in objecting to the
proposal to allow the foundation hospitals to borrow ‘off the government balance
sheet’, in other words, with no central control, he allowed the impression to be
put abroad that he opposes competition in the NHS between them and other NHS
institutions (although the foundation hospitals will own their assets, retain
all surpluses and decide their own wages policy). Behind this nuanced difference
over methods, between the brutal discipline of the market and the brutal
discipline of the Treasury (on behalf of the market), The Economist points to
the "tension building between him [Brown] and Mr Blair over public-service
reform [that] is potentially far more serious than their previous differences
over the euro" (5 October).
Then there was the debate on the war. As the
conference got under way, the NEC was forced to withdraw its own statement on
the Iraq crisis because it risked defeat for failing to place sufficient
emphasis on the United Nations (UN). Instead there was a stage-managed ‘debate’
between a clear anti-war motion and a vaguer resolution, which was carried,
referring to military action "within the context of UN authority". While the
foreign secretary Jack Straw interpreted the motion as making a fresh UN mandate
"desirable but not essential", the international development minister Clare
Short, who resigned from Labour’s shadow frontbench during the last Gulf war,
argued that "the conference is insisting that the government must act through
the UN" (The Guardian, 1 October). Previously, fellow cabinet member Robin Cook
had publicly stated that "no military assault should be launched without the
UN’s agreement", a stance which earned him a reprimand for ‘public posturing’
from ‘government sources’ (The Guardian, 23 September).
As The Economist concluded, for all Tony
Blair’s "display of confidence, two things stand out at the end of this week:
the great difficulty he will have in realising his public-service agenda; and
his vulnerability should the cabinet split, as is entirely possible, over
British involvement in a non-UN sanctioned attack on Iraq" (5 October).
Could Blair be deposed?
TONY BLAIR IS not the first ‘unassailable’
prime minister. After all, his political inspirer, Margaret Thatcher, was also
considered ‘irreplaceable’ in her time, but ultimately was removed in November
1990 as opposition grew in the Tory parliamentary party. As the late 1980s boom
came to an end, as divisions over European policy deepened and, above all, as
the anti-poll tax non-payment campaign reached mass proportions (under the
leadership of Militant, the forerunner of the Socialist Party), Tory MPs rose in
revolt. Thatcher was replaced by John Major who immediately cut poll tax bills,
at an initial cost of £4.3bn, prior to its subsequent abolition. The
pre-Maastricht Tory divisions over European economic and monetary union
persisted, however, relating to British capitalism’s position on the world
stage, becoming a running sore throughout Major’s premiership.
On the surface, it is true, it appears more
difficult for dissident Labour MPs to unseat Blair in comparison to the
challenge to Margaret Thatcher in 1990. Then just two Tory MPs were required to
nominate a challenger and trigger a leadership ballot. Labour’s constitution,
‘where there is no vacancy’ for leader, requires a challenger to win the
nomination of 20% of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) before the annual
conference decides whether to proceed with an election. Yet even the most
‘refined’ constitutional defences can be overcome when serious social forces
begin to make themselves felt.
Blair is not in the same position as
Thatcher was when profound divisions, which had developed over time, finally
exploded into the open: these surfaced as a challenge to her leadership with the
‘stalking horse’ candidacy of Sir Anthony Meyer in 1989, which prepared the
ground for a serious contest the following year. In warning that "a pre-emptive
strike against Iraq" could change things, The Economist commented that
"remarkably, in five years of office, Labour has not suffered a single
resignation by a cabinet minister" on policy grounds (7 September). But there
are sources of opposition emerging which, if they were to coalesce at some
critical juncture in the future, could still unseat him.
One such possible future ‘critical moment’
was outlined by the former deputy leader of the Labour Party, Roy Hattersley, as
negotiations at the UN over a new security council resolution appeared to be
stalling. Pointing to the need for a military campaign against Iraq, if it is to
be conducted, to begin by the early spring before rising temperatures make a
land battle impossible, he asked what would happen "if the UN agonises on for
weeks" and the US began action "before the deliberations were complete and
concluded"?
"Whatever the limits of gaining UN approval,
refusal to wait even to see if it is available would be an intolerable display
of imperial arrogance. That would be the moment at which the prime minister
would have to make his reservations public… choosing the US instead of the
United Nations could only lead to absolute humiliation" (The Guardian, 7
October). Former Labour chancellor Denis Healey has also warned that "I don’t
think he [Blair] would survive overwhelming public and party opposition to
British support for an American attack".
These rumblings, which have also been aired
within the PLP, reflect the position of a section of the ruling class who are
more conscious of the catastrophic possibilities of an Iraq war for the Middle
East, for Britain’s relations with Europe (with Germany and France trying to
counter the unilateralism of the Bush administration), and for Britain’s world
role, including trade links to the Muslim world. Not the least significant fear
is that expressed by Gerd Häusler, the IMF’s director of international capital
markets, who warned, in something of an understatement, that "purely from a
financial markets perspective a serious conflict with Iraq would not be a very
healthy development" (13 September).
The ‘authority of the UN’ is also an
important consideration for these establishment critics. The United Nations is
an assembly of the governing classes of competing capitalist powers, not a
genuine expression of international collaboration (although it serves the
interests of the different governing classes to present it as such). Its very
structure, with the five permanent members of the executive security council
each having a right of veto, means that the essential interests of the ruling
classes of the ‘big five’ powers (the US, China, Russia, France and Britain)
will not be compromised. Yet, in a post-Cold War position as the world’s only
superpower, US imperialism increasingly objects to even its secondary interests
being made subject to ‘international control’. On the other hand the European
powers grouped together in the European Union (EU), economically a challenger to
the USA but militarily a ‘pygmy’ (in the phrase of the NATO general secretary,
the former Labour minister George Robertson), are concerned to maintain any
‘multilateral’ means they have to exert diplomatic and political pressure on the
US. As The Guardian comments, "while Mr Bush is right to say that the UN’s
credibility will be undermined if its resolutions are ignored… the damage may be
even greater if, faced ultimately by a UN that will not do its bidding, the US
goes ahead and attacks Iraq anyway… For Mr Bush and the US, a la carte
multilateralism", in their opinion, "is not an option" (13 September).
Blair’s unflinching support for Bush,
however, threatens to weaken both the position of the UN and the EU against the
US superpower. In the European parliament debate on Iraq even the German
Christian Democrat chairman of the parliament’s foreign affairs committee
complained that Blair’s differences with French president Chirac and the German
chancellor Schröder were "harming efforts to forge a joint European position"
(The Guardian, 6 September). The former defence minister and Liverpool MP Peter
Kilfoyle, hardly a left-winger, expressed his opposition to Blair’s policy in
similar terms. The Bush administration acts "in America’s immediate national
interest, regardless of international opinion and convention", he argued. It has
"unilaterally rejected Kyoto, the international criminal court, the
Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, the Biological Weapons Convention, World Trade
Organisation provisions and much more – all in favour of narrow American
interests. It openly despises any restraint on its autonomy… what value is the
UN when the world’s only superpower treats it with open contempt? What of the EU,
derided as wimps?" (The Guardian, 23 September).
Ironically, Blair, who portrays himself as a
‘leader of Europe’, is effectively denounced by Kilfoyle as an ‘Atlanticist’.
Britain’s so-called ‘special relationship’ with the US, Kilfoyle argues, means
"we end up as America’s handrag, with diminished credibility within Europe and
facing increasing hostility across the globe. Is this in the British national
interest?... Are we to be Europe’s heartland or America’s frontline?"
Such establishment opposition to Blair’s
policy is not an anti-war position. This was made clear in The Guardian’s leader
comment on Labour’s conference debate on Iraq. Criticising the conference
delegates for not insisting on a resolution requiring "a new UN security council
resolution, a specific vote by parliament, and a common European position" – by
which "they threw away a huge opportunity to speak out for Britain and unite the
forces of caution over Iraq" – the article peremptorily dismissed the left’s
anti-war resolution opposing all armed action against Iraq under any
circumstances (1 October). Nevertheless, it is not impossible to imagine a
future situation where growing ruling class ‘forces of caution’ coincide with a
broader groundswell of opposition – from the trade unions to nervous
backbenchers – to create the conditions in which Blair’s position could be at
risk.
A growing number of Labour MPs now fear the
electoral consequences of an unpopular war, particularly from Blair’s
tail-ending of Bush’s ‘US interests first’ unilateralism. September’s
parliamentary rebellion involved 53 Labour MPs, compared with eleven who voted
against the Afghanistan war, 13 who opposed the bombing in Kosovo in 1999, and
22 who voted against renewed air attacks on Baghdad in February 1998. One recent
poll recorded Labour’s support falling to 39% – with just a 5% lead over the
Tories – the first time it has scored less than 40% since the September 2000
fuel protests and only the second time it has done so since November 1993 (The
Guardian, 24 September). Other polls, showing the volatility of the present
situation, have shown significant fluctuations in levels of opposition to a war
on Iraq and, in late October, a recovery in Labour’s poll position. In the
immediate aftermath of the Bali bombing support for a military attack on Iraq
rose from 32% to 42%, only to fall again a week later. The only constant has
been that all polls have recorded less opposition if a war is conducted through
the UN.
Another factor that will undoubtedly wear at
the nerves of even the most Blairite MP will be the consequences of Blair’s ‘war
on the home front’ – his assault on public sector workers – possibly starting
with the fire-fighters. Although at the time of writing it is not clear how this
trial of strength between the fire-fighters and the government will unfold, it
appears that Blair has been spoiling for this fight: ministers blocked a 16%
offer from the local authority employers in July and, on August 28, five days
before negotiations broke down with the employers, secretly started army
training for strike-breaking duties.
Blair appears to have picked the most
difficult target in the public sector to deal with first. An ICM poll, measuring
the support for different groups of public sector workers, found that strike
action by the fire-fighters was the most popular – with 68% backing, including
63% of Tory voters, compared to 56% for teachers and 36% for London underground
workers (The Guardian, 26 September). Defeat the well-organised and popular
fire-fighters first, seems to be Blair’s thinking, and the road is clear to curb
other public sector pay claims and ‘reform’ working practises. But as with the
proposed ‘Baghdad first’, or ‘inside out’ strategy recently discussed in the
Pentagon for the war on Iraq (to take Baghdad first and then deal with the rest
of Iraq), a confrontation with the fire-fighters will be fraught with
difficulties!
On the eve of Labour’s conference The
Economist speculated that, as Thatcher’s "most active period of reform came
after she defeated aggressors abroad and doubters at home over the Falklands in
1982", so Blair could use the authority of a military triumph to "turn to
domestic affairs with new vigour" (28 September). Instead there is now a
possibility that he will be fighting on two fronts at the same time.
Thatcher’s military success in the
Falklands/Malvinas war undoubtedly reinforced her position. She had the
advantage over Blair, moreover, in being able to point to the 1,800 Falkland
Islanders – whose rights had been trampled on by the Argentinean dictatorship –
to cover up the real interests of British imperialism. Nevertheless, a
‘successful’ military campaign may, temporarily, reinforce Blair. "If military
action goes ahead, if it is successful, if Iraq looks reasonably stable
afterwards and if the world is a safer place as a result", the pro-war Economist
writes optimistically, "then all the carping [at Blair] will be instantly
forgotten" (7 September). But more realistically, military stalemate or, more
likely, an unravelling of the Bush scenario of post-Saddam regional stability –
or defeat on the home front combined with difficulties abroad – could once again
leave Blair isolated and open to a leadership challenge.
A new leader, a changed party?
THE SOCIALIST PARTY argues that, over the
last decade, the Labour Party has been transformed into an openly capitalist
party. Previously, from its inception in 1900, it had been a ‘capitalist workers
party’, a party with pro-capitalist leaders but with a democratic structure and
a working class base that could, through enormous pressure from below, force the
party leadership into taking a stand against ruling class interests. But while
Tony Blair has come to personify the process of ‘bourgeoisfication’ his
replacement would not, in itself, change the character of the Labour Party.
The main features of this process were as
follows: the ideological shift from any idea of fighting for a fundamental
change from capitalism or even for the old ‘social democratic’ idea of reforms
in favour of working class people (against the international backdrop of
capitalist triumphalism following the collapse of the Stalinist regimes of the
USSR and Eastern Europe); the driving out of the socialist left, starting with
Militant, the Liverpool councillors etc, which was necessary to carry through
this ideological shift; the subsequent erosion of the trade unions’ role within
the Labour Party, along with the systematic dismantling of the party’s
democratic structures; and the consequent changed perception of the Labour Party
amongst broader layers of the working class as no longer being ‘their’
organisation.
How far this latter process has gone is
revealed in newly available evidence from the British Election Study of the 2001
general election. This survey recorded that, for the first time ever, a higher
percentage of former trade unionists (often retired, with an average age of 56)
voted Labour than current trade unionists (with an average age of 46). The
difference in ‘strength of identification with Labour’ was even higher, with 30%
of former union members identifying ‘very strongly’ with Labour compared to 18%
of current trade unionists. The survey also confirms a MORI polling organisation
finding that, of 29 social and economic categories of voters, Labour’s share of
the vote in 2001 fell the most amongst 18-24 year olds, private tenants, the
unemployed and trade unionists. This is despite another MORI poll finding that
more people feel "working class and proud of it" today (68%) than did so in 1997
(58%) or 1994 (52%).
So how would a ‘Westminster Palace coup’
impact on these interconnected processes? Nothing can be ruled out in advance.
An open campaign to remove Blair by the new left trade union leaders developing
alongside growing mass protests – strikes and demonstrations on domestic class
issues as well as the war – if the new trade union lefts placed themselves at
their core, would raise their public authority. In turn, this might create a new
consciousness that the Labour Party could be ‘reclaimed’, in effect, that a new
party with the left unions at its core could be forged out of the shell of the
Labour Party.
But this is by far the least likely
prospect. Even the best of the new left union leaders who have denounced Blair,
do not see their task as removing the leadership, the majority of the
parliamentary party, and their supporters at local level, and effectively
re-founding the Labour Party with a socialist programme and a democratic
structure. Others merely look to Gordon Brown, or possibly Robin Cook, as a
replacement, with no alternative programme or intention of struggling to reverse
the democratic counter-revolution in the structures of the Labour Party. Prior
to this year’s TUC conference John Edmonds even appealed to Tony Blair to "bury
New Labour stone dead", arguing that "the prime minister has the perfect
opportunity to… [move] beyond New Labour and forge a new coalition for radical
reform" (The Guardian, 6 September). Dave Prentis, the UNISON general secretary
and another alleged ‘critic’ of Blair, nevertheless made a point at the union’s
Affiliated Political Fund conference of defending the conduct of the UNISON
representatives on Labour’s national executive committee (NEC) at its March
meeting when they voted not to discuss a resolution against privatisation and to
remove the NEC’s policy-debating powers (Labour Left Briefing, June 2002).
In addition, it is extremely unlikely that
Blair would face the prospect of being removed until he has led the government
into a war which itself or, more likely, its after effects, has gone badly.
Certainly, he will initially have the support of the Tory front bench whose only
criticism in September’s parliamentary debate was a call, from the defence
spokesperson Bernard Jenkin, "to expressly embrace the Bush doctrine of
pre-emptive attack"! (The Guardian, 25 September). It will be a protracted
process before the prospect of Blair’s removal is posed.
Yet the spectacle of a Labour government
going to war will itself create a further shift in consciousness amongst wide
layers on the real character of the Labour Party as another capitalist party.
Even the diminished ranks of the Labour Party itself will not be unaffected. The
Guardian reported "a senior cabinet minister" warning that "a quarter of Labour
Party members will resign if Britain goes to war against Iraq alongside the US
without explicit support from the UN in a fresh resolution" (8 October). In an
earlier survey of former Labour Party members, researchers Paul Whiteley and
Patrick Seyd found that an estimated 17,000 resigned as a result of the last
Gulf war (The Guardian, 27 September). Even supporters of ‘reclaiming the Labour
Party’, such as the Campaign Group MP Alan Simpson, recognise that "Labour faces
a haemorrhage in membership if it supports a war on Iraq". The task, however, is
"to say to everyone who opposes a war that they must stay in the party – or join
it"! (Labour Left Briefing, October 2002) In reality, the effect of a Labour
government going to war, even with UN backing, would reinforce the idea among
wider layers of workers and young people that an alternative to Labour must be
found.
Time for a new workers’ party
IN TIMES OF conflict the Labour Party
leaders, even when it was a ‘capitalist-workers party’, invariably backed the
war policy of the ruling class. From Arthur Henderson who, replacing the
anti-war party leader Ramsey MacDonald, joined the ‘war coalition’ government in
world war one, to Michael Foot, who propped up Thatcher against Tory backbench
discontent in the Falklands/Malvinas war, Labour rallied to the ‘national
interest’. Once the ruling elite go to war they mobilise all the resources of
the establishment – their control of the workplaces, the media, the legal system
etc – to face down any opposition at home.
Yet, as in domestic policy, so in times of
war – although the stakes are higher for the ruling class – the character of the
Labour Party in the past meant that it always presented a latent danger for the
capitalists, a potentially unreliable tool. Even Arthur Henderson, having joined
the war-time coalition in 1915, was obliged just four years later in 1919 to go
along with a general strike call by the joint council of the TUC and the Labour
Party in protest at the British war of intervention against the Russian
revolution. Blair’s notorious comment about Britain ‘paying a blood price’ to
preserve the ‘special relationship’ with the USA was in fact a reference to a
comment made in the 1960s, when US president Lyndon Johnson was attempting to
get Britain’s participation in the Vietnam war. The Labour prime minister Harold
Wilson, sensitive to the consequences at home, the mass anti-war movement and
its potential impact on the labour movement, refused to commit British troops.
The situation today, of course, is
completely different. Even the advocates of ‘stay and fight’ concede that the
channels to do so are completely blocked up. Diane Abbot, secretary of the
Campaign Group of MPs, admits that "the internal democracy of the party has been
systematically stripped out. Annual conference has become a PR event. The
national executive used to be a key body and a voice for the party in the
country. Under Tony Blair it has lost all its powers over policy", and
organisational decisions are "effectively taken by full-time officials"
(Campaign Group News, September 2002).
Particularly revealing in this context are
the comments of Roy Hattersley who, as deputy leader to Neil Kinnock in the
1980s, started this process in their battle with Militant, the forerunners of
the Socialist Party. "There was method in his [Blair’s] marginalisation [of the
party conference]. Voices that would have been raised against the
part-privatisation of the public services, the gradual return to selective
secondary education and the imposition of unwanted and unrepresentative
parliamentary candidates, have been stilled… The new constitution does not allow
them to be expressed by rank-and-file party members" (The Guardian, 22 July).
But things have gone too far and "it will take years of methodical and often
tedious argument to set Labour back on the long and winding road to socialism.
The unions should pay their subscriptions, vote their full strength and save the
party they created".
Far from accepting the advice to meekly ‘pay
subscriptions’ to the Labour Party, however, the new left union leaders should
seize the time to organise a cross-union rank-and-file conference to discuss
what steps are needed to build a new political alternative, a move which would
have a major impact on the situation unfolding in Britain. The Rail, Maritime
and Transport (RMT) union leader Bob Crow, at this year’s RMT conference, asked
delegates to ‘give us another 12 months’ to test out whether the new RMT
Parliamentary Campaign Group increased the political influence the union could
wield. But timing is the essence of politics. There have been turning points
before when it would have been possible for initiatives towards a new workers’
party to have won wide support. But the possibilities now are even greater.
The anti-war movement will undoubtedly
suffer ebbs and flows in support and its levels of mass participation, although
the magnificent 28 September demonstration is unlikely to be its high tide.
Other issues, such as the fire-fighters’ struggle or other flashpoints in the
public sector, may come to the fore. But in the turbulent times ahead,
ever-widening layers will be open to the need for a socialist solution to
society’s problems and the idea of a new mass working class alternative to the
Labour Party, with or without Tony Blair at its head. |