05.01.2023

Abolition versus reform

Brown’s proposals amount to mere tinkering and the left’s response is woefully inadequate. Kevin Bean calls for a single-chamber parliament, a federal republic and national self-determination

It was perhaps inevitable that in the midst of a strike wave, a deepening cost of living crisis and growing fears that the NHS was facing breakdown, the release last month of a Labour Party report with the riveting title A new Britain: renewing our democracy and rebuilding our economy should have received so little attention.

The 155-page report was the product of an enquiry chaired by former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown, and is seemingly an attempt to give Keir Starmer a big idea that he can put before voters in the run up to the next election. In the jargon of the advisors and spin doctors surrounding the Labour leader, reports and proposals like A new Britain are supposed to ‘set the narrative’ and show that Starmer has a vision beyond competent management and safety first.

The launch event in Leeds on December 5 featured both Starmer and Brown and was clearly meant to be politically important. However, the report was, in the main, ignored by the media and so failed, at least initially, to do its job. When it was reported, the focus was on the central proposal to abolish the House of Lords and replace it with an elected second chamber representing the UK’s nations and regions. Given the long-standing criticisms of the cronyism and political patronage involved in the creation of peers and the continuing allegations made against the Tory baroness, Michelle Mone, the lords is an easy and rather safe target, if the Labour leadership wants to show some radicalism. Who can object to House of Lords reform? After all, its been Labour policy in one form or another since the early 1900s.

The Brown proposals are essentially an attempt to save the authority and legitimacy of the institutions of the British state which have taken a severe battering with the Brexit vote, continued demands for Scottish independence and widespread political disengagement and alienation from the status quo.

If New Labour in the 1990s framed its politics in terms of modernisation and renewal, Brown takes this rhetoric several steps further in his project to shore up the British state and revitalise British capitalism. So, we are promised greater national and regional devolution, with more power and revenue-raising powers being given to new regional government structures and super-metro mayors. Taken together with proposed national strategies in the form of an Infrastructure Bank, a British Regional Investment Bank and various incentives for regional investment, these institutional changes supposedly put flesh on the bones of the ‘levelling-up’ agenda and provide:

a locally-owned and fairly-resourced prosperity plan for growth in every part of the country, under which cities, towns and communities will take power from the centre and use it in their communities.

With sub-headings and sign-post phrases such as “a country of potential”, “the change Britain needs”, and “a reunited kingdom” liberally scattered throughout, we get an image of the dynamic transformation Labour will offer to overcome the “loss of trust” and the “scourge of inequality” that characterise “our country”.¹

However, despite the language of change and modernisation, in practice these policies are simply a rebranding of the Tory agenda since 2010 - devolving responsibility, without real power and resources going to democratically elected local councillors. The bonapartist metro-mayors, the financial starving of local government and the development of yet more quangos and ‘partnerships’ such as the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, and the competitive bidding regime for investment and finance, are features of the current structures which Brown’s proposals will not only maintain, but actually expand and intensify.

Just as the sections dealing with the economy start from the assumption that there is no alternative to capitalism and that only very limited modifications are possible, the same is true for the proposed reform of the state and political institutions. The most radical change - the much-hyped ‘abolition’ of the House of Lords - is actually a reconfiguration, not abolition, of the second chamber. Its deliberative, revising and delaying functions are retained, so the possibility remains strong that this new assembly of the nations and regions - populated, as it would be, by professional politicians and placemen of one kind or another - could not only block unwanted reforms but act as an alternative centre of authority.

Second chamber

The retention of a second chamber, no matter how ‘democratic’ it is structured, keeps in place a backstop and an obstacle to change. That is why bourgeois states establish or retain them, and why the working-class movement should call for their outright abolition and a democratically elected single-chamber parliament.

The gaping hole at the centre of the report is the fundamental question that lays at the heart of any constitution: where does power and sovereignty ultimately reside? It is clear that for Brown and the rest of the pro-capitalist leadership of the Labour Party the current constitutional forms and mystifications of crown-in-parliament will continue. The concentration of executive power in a largely unaccountable presidential power wielded by the prime minister and the higher levels of the state bureaucracy goes unmentioned in Brown’s report.

Given the nature of Labour as a bourgeois workers’ party and the historic role of its leadership in serving the interests of British capitalism, such constitutional conservatism should not surprise us. Maintaining the institutions of the capitalist state and obscuring its real nature has been a vital function of the Labour Party since its formation. Its unwavering loyalty to the constitutional order is central to its role within British society, and it is that ignoble tradition which the Brown report continues to uphold. So, no call for the abolition of the monarchy and the presidential powers of the prime minister; no demands for republican democracy and a single-chamber parliament elected by proportional representation, annual elections, and MPs salaries set at the level of a skilled worker; and no proposals for real local democracy in which services, planning and tax-raising are radically devolved downwards as far as possible.

Furthermore, for all the rhetoric about the nations and regions, the essential democratic right of self-determination for Scotland and Wales is ignored, leaving the UK and its concentration of power at the centre essentially intact. So, if Gordon Brown thinks that his proposals to give Scotland representation on powerless international bodies or tinker with the functions of the Scottish parliament will head off demands for independence, he is surely mistaken. The working class approach is not to try to patch together an unravelling and dysfunctional UK, but rather to recognise the right to self-determination and call for a federal republic of England, Scotland and Wales, and the reunification of an independent Ireland.

Whilst it is unlikely that most of the constitutional changes advocated in the Brown report will get anywhere near the statute book, some tinkering with the clearly indefensible lords at an undefined point in the future might figure in the next Labour manifesto. Similarly, the regional devolution and levelling-up proposals, which simply develop current practice and structures, could also feature as one of Sir Keir’s ‘big ideas’ and prove to be a key element in his “vision for a new Britain”.

Even if much of the report will simply gather dust, the left should use the proposals to develop and advance a real democratic, working class alternative to the constitutional status quo. The rather deafening silence in response to Brown’s commission tells its own story. Those on the left that have responded have either dodged most of the important issues or misunderstood the significance of constitutional questions. The problem for the Morning Star is that much of what Brown advocates, especially in relation to Scotland, comes very close to its own “progressive federalism”, so any fundamental critique becomes rather tricky for the Communist Party of Britain and its supporters.² The replacement of crown-in-parliament and the demand for a democratic federal republic are glaringly absent from their assessment. Likewise, Anticapitalist Resistance focuses on largely irrelevant details, such as the absence of proportional representation for the proposed elections to the new second chamber. By supporting the concept of a revising backstop and not raising the demand for a single-chamber republican parliament and an end to a presidential prime minister, they too, like Brown, ignore the major questions of constitutional power and popular sovereignty, and so leave the status quo intact.³

Counterfire’s initial response was a little better - they supported the abolition of the second chamber - but they too shied away from raising root and branch democratic republican demands when it came to posing an alternative to Brown’s report.⁴ The economistic focus on ‘the real struggle’ on the picket lines and in the streets is now so dominant on the left that the questions of high politics and the nature of the capitalist state - implicit within, but ignored by, Brown’s report - are similarly left to one side by those claiming to be Marxists.