16.11.1995

Challenge to Labour

Arthur Scargill’s call for a Socialist Labour Party to challenge Blair’s party at the next election has struck a chord with thousands in our movement

AT A series of secret meetings in Glasgow and London, activists from unions such as the National Union of Teachers, Unison and Rail Maritime and Transport, as well as members of Militant Labour and other organisations, have been urged by the leader of the miners’ union to support the launch of a Socialist Labour Party on May Day 1996.

Some have dismissed Scargill today as simply a forlorn general desperately in search of a new army after the decimation of his NUM. In fact, there is clearly something more fundamental going on.

Large sections of the left in this country have looked to Labour as a vehicle - however imperfect - to achieve socialism. This project has been thrown into crisis courtesy of the Blair leadership. Significantly the RMT at its conference this week rejected a motion to “campaign vigorously” for a Labour election victory.

The possible launch of the SLP might perhaps represent the beginning of a break - even though partial - of the stranglehold that Labourism has held on our class throughout this century. This should be welcomed by all of us. The establishment of the SLP could begin to focus the minds of some of the very best elements of the working class movement onto building an alternative to the treacherous Labour Party.

The question is - what sort of alternative?

The most important organisation so far to respond positively to Scargill’s call for a new socialist organisation has been Militant Labour.

Both in their public journals and - we are told - internally, ML is debating its attitude to Labour and the possible launch of an SLP. For example, leading member Peter Taaffe writes in ML’s theoretical magazine Socialism Today (November 1995) of an “historic realignment of British politics”.

Apparently, the Labour Party under Blair is “in the process of being transformed from a workers’ organisation at bottom, with a pro-capitalist leadership, into a wholly ‘liberal’ capitalist party”. The “only issue” now under dispute is “whether this process has been completed, [whether] the Labour Party has now exhausted any historical role as a vehicle for socialists and workers in the struggle against capitalism, or is it is still possible to halt the Blair juggernaut” (p10).

 Like the SWP, ML is preparing its organisation and its periphery for life under a vicious Blair government (see Weekly Worker 116). Unlike the SWP, however, it has a rather more serious assessment of the tasks facing those who call themselves revolutionaries.

Noting that splits to the left are the most likely result of a Blair government, ML underlines that it is then - when Blair is actually in power and attacking us - that the present mood for a “new socialist party” can be translated into action. Thus, in contrast to Scargill it is not issuing the slogan for an SLP now: it is raising the idea more generally and beginning to prepare its comrades for the initiative.

Whatever the timetable of the launch of the SLP, whether it comes together before or after the next general election, the potential combination of figures such as Scargill, a layer of activists in unions like the RMT and Unison, along with an organisation of the weight of Militant Labour, could create a serious leftwing organisation in this country. An organisation like this could sink real roots and have an ability to mobilise relatively huge numbers.

We welcome ML’s assertion that the new organisation must not be “a Labour Party Mark II”; that instead it must represent a “new point of departure for the British working class”.

“Militant Labour,” it writes,

“will do all in its power, together with others on the left, to establish such a party. It will probably not take shape before a general election, but events, and mighty events at that, will lay the ground for the emergence of such a force” (Socialism Today, November 1995).

Communists should welcome the discussions around the possible launch of the SLP. However, rather than passively watch events as they unfold, we will intervene vigorously in the debate. We are concerned to ensure that any split from the Labour Party is not simply organisational, but fundamentally political.

In our view, there would be no point in creating another Labour Party, only smaller. Surely the last 100 years of the history of our class has taught us that we need a fundamentally different sort of political organisation, a combat party committed to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.

Given the freedom to agitate and organise for this point of view, communists should join any SLP as individuals and affiliate as organisations. Blair and his Labour Party believe that the left wing of the movement can be treated with utter contempt, that no alternative can be built.

The rebellion of many of the very best militants of our class against this high-handed disdain offers us a chance to remould that alternative, to ensure that it emerges as an enemy that Blair never dreamed of in his worst nightmares - a mass, revolutionary party competing not for the ‘socialist soul’ of the Labour Party, but for the loyalty of the working class itself.

Mark Fischer

“Do we meekly accept New Labour? Do we passively concede that the Party has abandoned socialism and any commitment to common ownership?

“If so, why were we all opposed to the policies of the Gang of Four and the now-defunct SDP? - because these are the policies which New Labour (now constitutionally indistinguishable from the Tories and the Liberal Democrats) has adopted.

“Do we, and others who feel as we do, stay in a party which has been and is being ‘politically cleansed’?

“Or: do we leave and start to build a Socialist Labour Party that represents the principles, values, hopes and dreams which gave birth nearly a century ago to what has, sadly, now become New Labour?”

Future strategy for the left: a discussion paper
Arthur Scargill, November 4, 1995