12.05.2016

Fragmentation of election picture

CPGB members have been discussing the May 5 elections and the forthcoming EU referendum. Mickey Coulter reports

On an unusually hot Sunday in early May, CPGB comrades came together in a members’ aggregate last weekend to discuss the political situation following the recent council, mayoral, Scottish parliament and Welsh assembly elections and in the run-up to the European Union referendum.

Mike Macnair of the Provisional Central Committee led off on the post-election political landscape. For comrade Macnair the artificial ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign generated by the bourgeois media, in which the Labour Party stands accused of harbouring a pronounced anti-Jewish trend within it, was inseparable from the latest council and mayoral elections.

While this angle of attack upon the left will continue to be relentlessly pursued, one thing that has changed, explained the comrade, is what could previously be understood as the ‘British’ political dynamics. These now appear to have broken down more or less completely into distinct cantons; London, the rest of England, Wales and Scotland - each affected now by differing elements.

This realignment is most apparent in Scotland, where the parliamentary results were dire for Labour. The Scottish National Party is holding on to what used to be the traditional Labour vote, and the Conservatives have leapfrogged over Labour to become the second largest party at Holyrood. The constitutional question seems to remain most important in Scotland, and we can conclude that Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of Labour and thus its move to the left has not dented the SNP vote, so tarnished by its past rightwing domination is Scottish Labour.

In Wales comrade Macnair noted that Labour lost a little ground to Plaid Cymru, and also to the UK Independence Party. Robert Paul, a Welsh comrade, suggested in the following discussion that the success of Plaid in previously staunch Labour areas such as the Rhondda was due more to the personality and hard work of the PC leader, Leanne Wood, and the fact that there is no longer the clear red water between Welsh Labour and the national party, that protected it from some of the taint to Blairism, now that it stands as a more centrist element in comparison with the Corbyn leadership. For the same reasons comrade Macnair was doubtful that the same kind of catastrophe that befell Labour in Scotland at the hands of nationalists would be replicated in Wales.

London saw a resounding win for Labour centre-left and Corbyn critic Sadiq Khan, though it was, in the comrade’s view, a vote for the party rather than for Khan personally. As for the Conservative Party, it has badly damaged itself with its racial dog whistle campaign in a city like London (where white British make up only 44% of the population) and Goldsmith’s attempts to woo the Indian community with anti-Muslim sentiment sank like a lump of fool’s gold. As for the rest of England, it was almost a ‘no change’ scenario, said the comrade.

Anti-Semitism

Seeking to dissect the politics of the media’s fraudulent ‘anti-anti-Semitism’ campaign, comrade Macnair judged that here is an issue that the right within Labour can cohere around, while it has hit a nerve amongst the left, which is accustomed by reflex to react against any and all accusations of racism, the sin above all others. Here, capital was exploiting the decades long-march of the left into the warrens of identity politics, safe spaces, immediate suspensions based merely upon accusation, and so on.

Here the Labour right, the Tories and the press could bank on Corbyn, McDonnell and the Labour left to collapse immediately - which much of it has - rather than dismissing loudly and publicly the concocted frame-up job. The timing is too perfect, and the digging up of sometimes years-old comments, social media postings and so on too great for all this to be a series of spontaneous events.

Concluding, comrade Macnair drew an analogy between the battles undertaken by Labour’s bourgeois wing to reclaim the party during the 1980s and the present situation: from the point of view of the right, a meltdown on the scale of 1983 was the realistic minimum needed to get rid of Corbyn, given that - as Tony Blair himself has pointed out - Corbyn almost certainly cannot be kept off the ballot for any new leadership election. As an aid to this, it would be necessary for Ukip to do well, so as to take votes from Labour in its areas of traditional support.

We cannot expect the ‘anti-Semitism’ push to stop either. Rather, as Jack Conrad noted in the following discussion, it will be pressed home all the more, moving up the Labour ranks from lowly members nobody had heard of until recently, through people like Livingstone and eventually, they hope, to the head of the party itself. After all, Corbyn has over the years made many anti-Zionist comments and if Ken had to go for his comments, the logic runs, what about the leader himself?

Stan Kelsey noted that two relatively new Labour MPs who had previously supported Corbyn had now had a change of heart and decided they no longer agreed with his approach. For Jack Conrad the election votes across the board were predictable: he observed that the success of the media in creating a new ‘common sense’ - that Labour really does have a problem with Jews - has been a stunning success. He was disgusted at the way much of the left had folded over the issue without even lifting a finger, noting that the Labour Representation Committee and Jon ‘Don’t mention Zionism’ Lansman were particularly bad examples. They were content merely to be an echo chamber, or fan club, for the new Labour leadership. But their behaviour exposed the failed thinking behind their ‘Labour victory in 2020’ strategy - as if this, rather than intransigent opposition and a communist programme, was somehow a greater source of strength for the working class. Ben Klein doubted that a resurrection of Ukip was on the cards, and many others agreed with him in thinking that after the EU referendum Farage’s party would lose steam.

Providing an uncharacteristic ray of sunshine amongst the gloom was Phil Kent, who suspected that, whatever else, the kind of polarisation we are seeing in the USA in opposition to the ‘moderate’ establishment would follow in the UK too - he thought there was a fair chance that the Conservative Party would implode over the European Union, shaking politics up further. Dashing our raised hopes, however, he then speculated that if the Tories do not implode a 2020 election for Labour would be a disaster, as it would have to manage the inevitable crisis of capitalism that is looming.

EU referendum

On the subject of the EU, Jack Conrad emphasised in his report that referenda are generally a bad thing, tending to divide parties. Corbyn’s change of heart on Europe and subsequent refusal to go for ‘leave’ has confused and split the left.

Ben Klein later noted that referenda also create strange alliances, such as that between George Galloway and Nigel Farage. Likewise, going for the lesser evil in a straight ‘yes’ or ‘no’ poll often means having to prettify one side or the other. So the existing EU suddenly appears responsible for all sorts of progressive things, according to people like Luke Cooper, while support for Brexit is equally based on fantasy thinking, for both left and right. The left imagines that, instead of seeking to build up real strength through the fight for a serious unified party, it can settle for merely trying to ‘bugger things up a bit’ for David Cameron.

Capital in Britain had not been demanding a referendum, noted comrade Conrad. It had resulted from what is purely internal manoeuvring within the Conservative Party, which threatens to blow up in their faces. What seemed before to Cameron merely a way of dealing with Ukip and his own right wing has become a terrible reality, albeit a farcical one. There is no post-Suez style reorientation of British power in the world going on here, and the idea that Britain would actually leave the EU was “bullshit”. The arguments of the ‘leave’ campaign that the UK could free itself from EU ‘red tape’ are bogus, said comrade Conrad, and Obama’s remarks about Britain about going to “the back of the queue” post-Brexit were basically correct.

No, what this is really all about is a choice between David Cameron and Boris Johnson. If ‘remain’ wins you keep Cameron; if ‘out’ is victorious you get Boris. He was scathing about the Socialist Workers Party, which, among others, imagines that Brexit would somehow represent a blow against ‘British imperialism’. In the following debate Paul Demarty was even less kind, commenting that the SWP’s ambition does not even reach the heights of buggering things up a little for imperialism, and in fact the organisation itself says that a ‘leave’ victory would be good only for getting rid of Cameron. Apparently replacing him with Johnson would be a victory for socialism. The UK will stay in the EU one way or another, even if Boris ends up atop the Conservatives.

In the following discussion Mike Macnair stated that the right’s ‘back to the 1950s’ level of independence was utopian nostalgia. What independence Britain had then was a dead letter due to the more or less explicit handover of power to the USA during World War II and was confirmed by the 1956 Suez crisis.

Comrade Conrad concluded that it was unimportant which side won. Instead of taking one side or the other, the left should prioritise the development of an international strategy based on a genuine Marxist programme.