WeeklyWorker

21.04.2004

Find answers in Labour, not Respect

Labour Left Briefing’s annual general meeting on Saturday April 24 (details, p3) will be concentrating on two key issues. First, the Labour-trade union link and the crisis of working class representation. Second, Blair’s support for Bush’s war against the world.

Both are obviously very important and the anti-war section of the AGM will, I hope, provide general agreement on the main issues, but with some important fine-tuning on the question of how the labour movement makes its presence felt and helps to build the anti-war movement.

There is a danger here. To some extent - this is by no means the whole truth - the anti-war movement has allowed itself to be associated with Respect. Partially, it has collapsed itself into the electoral arena. This is an error. Last year, we saw the most magnificent mass anti-war movement against the establishment in British history. To reduce that huge social phenomenon to a hopeless electoral adventure, one doomed to failure, can only limit the significance of what can still be achieved.

Yes, there is no question that the millions of people on the streets must find a political expression. But it should be so much more than what Respect offers. However difficult it is to begin to transform the movement into a vehicle that can address the crisis of working class and progressive representation, that is the key task. And once you start to think about that, you are talking about the Labour Party because of its links with the mass organisations of the class, the trade unions.

That is addressed in the first part of Saturday’s Briefing AGM. What the resolution from the editorial board effectively says is that those sections of the far left that are seeking an electoral alternative have totally screwed it up. First time travesty, second time farce. It’s no good relying on Respect to come up with the results on June 10. That is not the answer.

But the Labour left is embroiled in its own crisis. The fact is that New Labour still dominates the Labour Party, the trade unions are not punching their weight and they are actually not using their power to challenge the hold of Blairism. Gains have been made in the last year or two in the fight to re-establish the Labour Party as an organisation that can truly represent working people, but they are all very partial, very fragile.

There is no groundswell of revolt from below in the unions: if anything, it comes from above. Therefore, we are dealing with a wing of the bureaucracy - a layer that can never be totally relied on unless there is a mass movement strong enough to hold them to account. And the movement is not strong enough yet in the unions or elsewhere to find a political expression that can shape developments in the Labour Party.

The point of the resolution is therefore to say we should stop comforting ourselves by saying how useless the far left is; we have our own, extremely deep crisis to deal with. The danger is that the leadership is drowning out the genuine voice of the Labour Party and therefore the organisation cannot attract new elements. Realistically, it cannot in the near future appeal to the masses of people who were on the streets last year. Until it finds a way to do so, we will have a massive crisis of representation without the political means to solve it.

Blair’s crisis

The practical invisibility of the left - in terms of coherent political representation, not presence on the streets - is dramatically highlighted by the depth of Blair’s crisis.

Blair is in a desperate situation over Iraq. Ultimately I cannot see any way out for him because of the totally false basis on which he took this country to war, his flouting of international law. This is now magnified by the significant, but lesser issue of his U-turn on the European constitution. His crisis-management approach is simply not working. He lumbered himself with a referendum that he probably cannot win. He is clearly wary of a resurgent Tory Party - although it is important not to overstate that.

The left is not setting the agenda on this question. Clearly, it must not do what it did 30 years ago and sacrifice its independent position on Europe for the sake a campaign alongside anti-European Tories and rightwing xenophobes. But I differ with the Weekly Worker comrades in that I would like to see that agenda consist of an internationalist and socialist case against the euro and further integration of Europe on bourgeois terms.

Another straw in the wind that underlines the problems of New Labour is the party leaflet for the upcoming Greater London Assembly elections. It is quite remarkable. On page 1 of this four-page brochure, there’s a photo of Ken Livingstone. Page 2 - another photo of Ken. Nowhere is there reference to Blair and only at the bottom of page 4 is there a reference to the Labour Party - and that it is the legally required statement, “Printed and published by …”!

It really is hilarious. They have a graph showing the votes of what they dub “the three main parties”. Those parties are the Tories, Lib Dems and “Ken”! This is the Labour Party apparatus attempting to shed its Blairite clothes and for the sake of cynical electoral expediency imply a more traditional ‘old Labour’ image, personified in the shape of Ken Livingstone. Another measure of the New Labour crisis - the Blairites have to make themselves invisible for Labour to win. This has been foreshadowed by their defeats in union elections, but it is a huge step forward to see the same essential phenomenon assert itself in wider society.

Blair’s crisis is positive in and of itself, but we have to take advantage of it. That means creating the only alternative to New Labour that can be created in this period - the Labour Party. And - despite our gains - we are only at the very early stage of that process.

LRC

This is where the question of the Labour Representation Committee comes in. The LRC has its founding conference at the TUC on July 3. It is a step in the right direction. However, it is vital that it becomes much more than a talking shop that proclaims policies in opposition to New Labour. It has to set out a road map for the trade unions to organise to reclaim the party - constituency by constituency, ward by ward.

There is no question that, unless the trade unions take a leading role in this, it cannot happen. The New Labour leadership repels the type of people who could transform the situation in the party - those from the mass anti-war movement and, above all, the best in the trade unions.

It is a very encouraging development, but I remain cautious. It has to do far more than simply exist. It must organise to win back the party and put the trade unions at the centre of that fight. Its first steps must be designed to activate trade unionists to ‘recolonise’ the party they set up in the first place. In turn, that would invigorate the constituency party activists to join in that long process.

Lastly, I am going to be insulting in this column to my hosts. I hope that on June 11 - after the fundamental error the Weekly Worker comrades are making with their support for the forlorn Respect stunt - you will re-engage with the real problems of the workers’ movement. I take no enjoyment in predicting disaster for Respect. Nor, as I think I have made clear in this column, am I contrasting Respect’s problems with the robust state of the Labour left. Nonetheless, some of the stuff I have read in the Weekly Worker has argued that the new coalition must be supported because the Socialist Workers Party are in there - so that is where the ‘action’ is. Hardly a Marxist analysis, in my opinion.

You have to start from what is in the broader interests of the labour and working class movement, not from where your paper can make the most impact. The cutting edge is to rebuild a party of labour. Without such a mass party, we are nowhere as a left. That’s where the ‘action’ is, that’s where we have got to engage, no matter how difficult it is.

On June 11 I believe you and other comrades are going to wake up to this after the latest far left electoral debacle. As I have said many times before, I hope comrades’ thoughtfulness and intelligence will start to be applied in an arena where they can actually make a difference to the world and their talents are not squandered.