05.06.1997

Unemployed top Labour’s hit list

Behind all the user-friendly committees of inquiry and referendum sops, New Labour has set itself firmly on course for collision with the working class.

The technocratic tinkering that has characterised the first few weeks of Labour’s government has been given a radical gloss by many bourgeois papers. In reality the first few bills and pronouncements have all been distinguished by a lack of radicalism.

Nevertheless behind all the smiles and talk of government “free from ideology” the intention to attack the working class head on has been made clear.

So far, Britain has not witnessed the angry scenes between workers and government that have taken place in France, Germany and other European states. This reflects the complete lack of combative working class organisation in this country. But primarily it reflects the fact that Thatcher has already done much of the work that Kohl and Chirac have been attempting to do in recent years - to bleed the workers dry in the service of capitalist profit which is facing economic decline, and in the process destroy their organisations.

But Blair wants to go further. On two of the main election issues, the National Health Service and education, Blair’s government has given us little to look forward to. Hospital closures continue, as in the case of Edgware in north London. The first bill on the NHS proposed little more than a ‘committee of inquiry’. Apparently our health is not a priority, and whether or not to reverse the Tory cuts and re-open hospitals and casualty wards is too complicated an issue to rush into. Of course we know that in reality Labour has never promised to put more cash into the NHS. At best it is only committed to rationalising some of the worst irrationalities of privatisation.

After the spectacle of the Royal College of Nursing’s round of applause for health secretary Frank Dobson’s promise to cut their pay, we have now seen head teachers dutifully clapping the education secretary, David Blunkett. The applause certainly had a sting in its tail as head teachers voted against the appointment of Chris Woodhead to head the new ‘task force’ for failing schools.

The appointment continues the trend which has totally squeezed out any union representation. It was followed by the appointment of Professor George Bain, principal of the London Business School to head the minimum wage committee of inquiry. This was a neat compromise candidate since Bain has all the credentials of a pragmatic and intellectual business friendly candidate without the sting in the tail of the originally preferred candidate, Peter Jones, head of Whitbread and long-time opponent of a national minimum wage.

Chris Woodhead is hated and despised by teachers across the country for blaming them for the failures of an education system which puts teachers in charge of classes of anything from 30 to 40 pupils. Tim Brighouse, critic of Woodhead, is also to be on the committee, but this is hardly a compromise to fill teachers with optimism.

Though reducing class sizes will take time and money, we are told, Labour has made the closing of ‘failing’ schools its Trojan horse, with the first on the list already axed.

This week, New Labour’s well-planned centrepiece was unfurled with all of Blair’s usual theatricality accompanied by an elaborate script which however lacks a plot.

Chancellor Gordon Brown’s ‘Welfare to Work’ budget on July 2 is not just an attack on 250,000 young people or on lone parents. The scheme to extend the Jobseekers Allowance into the depths of slave labour workfare threatens the whole class with poverty wages. Unemployed workers forced to do work as dogsbodies for a pittance will drag down the wages of all workers.

No specific proposals were announced during the week, but the message was loud and clear. The unemployed will be forced to become slaves, or be thrown into abject poverty and further criminalised as if unemployment was a creation of the unemployed themselves. Lone parents will be ‘encouraged’, if not compelled, to join the ranks of workers who have to turn up at the Jobcentre once a fortnight to explain their activities to local civil servants.

In short, New Labour will offer no concessions to the working class, rather it will go on the frontal attack against us, particularly the most unorganised and lowest paid sections. Rumblings of discontent are already beginning to invade Blair’s ‘honeymoon’. Unfortunately the ‘crisis of expectations’ that much of the left has been talking about is so much hot air. Blair’s government had clearly indicated its intentions prior to and during the election campaign. The only ‘enthusiasm’ on May l was for getting the Tories out, and the hope against hope that something had to change with a new government.

The working class at the moment is not organised as a fighting class which demands its rights from the Labour government and on the streets. This does not mean that the situation is hopeless and we will have to passively sit and watch our living conditions being steadily eroded. But it does mean working class activity cohered around a positive solution to capitalism will not be the inevitable outcome of New Labour’s attacks.

The success of the working class in any future collision with the government depends on its organisation. That is why the left at the moment cannot afford to sit pretty in its old sectarian practices. The organised left is a potentially powerful force if united. Any unity requires vigorous and open debate around issues that divide us, as well as activity to bring a mass of the class into this ideological and political battle.

Helen Ellis