20.11.1997
For a federal republic
Workers need an alternative both to Blair’s new constitutional monarchy and all shades of nationalist separatism
We are in the midst of constitutional metamorphosis. The old monarchy system is going. A new monarchy system is being invented. The United Kingdom will never be the same again. There has not been anything like it since 1867 - when working class men were given the vote, or the 1910-14 death of the great Liberal Party. Tony Blair is not proceeding according to some pre-packaged, let alone fully theorised, blueprint. In spite of that he is transforming the way we are ruled.
The scope of Blair’s programme and its likely consequences bear repetition. During the course of this parliament hereditary peers are due to lose their “sacred and inviolable” voting rights in the House of Lords. The massive in-built 350 Tory majority will be abolished at a stroke. The Church of England’s profane privileges as the established religious cult is thereby put into question. Logically the extended royal family too. Northern Ireland is already up for renegotiation and perhaps a joint sovereignty treaty. After 75 years Ireland is back on the dissecting table. Scotland will soon have its parliament, Wales its assembly. Elections are to include a 50% element of proportional representation - the most undemocratic form. Via coalition politics Labour thus has the tempting prospect of permanent domination.
What goes for Scotland and Wales also goes for the country as a whole. There will be PR and a 100% party list system for European elections. The objections of the Strasbourg four count for nought. More importantly some form of PR appears probable in forthcoming Westminster elections. Significantly Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown sits on the cabinet’s constitution committee. In effect this semi-or proto-Lab-Lib pact heralds the future. If we get PR that means coalition politics. William Hague’s wing of the Tory Party - as opposed to the Clarke-Heseltine wing - is poorly placed here. Except for the Ulster Unionists it has no natural allies. Blair on the other hand can with the Liberal Democrats, and if need be the Scottish and Welsh (and Irish) nationalists, form a bloc of permanent government. Blair wants to remain prime minister for 20 years. Evidently the Labour-Tory two-party system that emerged from the collapse of the Liberal-Tory two-party system is about to end. First-past-post creates its own party system. So will PR. PR is the politics of 50% plus, not the politics of 42% parliamentary landslides.
Anticipating the new party system, Blair has remade the Labour Party. New Labour is eminently safe for capitalism. Not only in deed but word. Labour is nowadays openly committed to the system of unlimited exploitation and the endless accumulation of dead labour at the expense of living labour. The Labour Party has been ideologically thrown back to its liberal origins. The famous 1918 clause four of Sidney Webb is obliterated. Blair’s smug new-old palinode celebrating the market squats in its place. The gospel of this ‘pious Christian’ has nothing to do with Jesus’s communistic sermon on the mount. His god is Mammon, Adam Smith his prophet.
Blair’s Britain is an unhappy country of draconian anti-trade union laws, vicious spending limits, unfree education and enormous inequality. A recent UN report shows the disparity between the richest and the poorest to be the greatest for over a century. Tony Benn, Ken Livingstone and Roy Hattersley can protest. But they have no coherent alternative programme. Social democracy and its British variant Labourism is no longer intellectually convincing. National socialism has visibly failed. The Alternative Economic Strategy of old Labour, be it Scargillism or Bennism, is today the socialism of fools.
Labour Party democracy has been neutered. The annual conference no longer has the power even to embarrass. Next year will see a US-style showbiz rally. The NEC has undergone similar treatment. Labour has to all intents and purposes been de-Labourised. Sociologically New Labour closely resembles the Liberal Party of Gladstone. In addition to borrowed bourgeois like Sir David Simon, the ranks of Labour MPs are now made up of career politicians, former local government bureaucrats, consultants, doctors, journalists, broadcasters, lawyers and ex-NUS officials. Trade union functionaries are marginal.
The dogma endlessly peddled by the pro-Labour left - the SWP, CPB, Workers Power, NCP, et al - that New Labour is a party of the trade unions stands totally exposed. It is a pathetic excuse for choosing the ‘lesser evil’. It is certainly a travesty of the facts. Where the sects fool themselves everyday experience of struggle tells the truth. Liverpool dockers and Hillingdon hospital strikers know full well that New Labour is no friend of theirs. On the contrary New Labour is the enemy of all those in struggle. It is the Bernie Ecclestones of the world who set Labour’s agenda, not rank and file trade unionists. As shown by the below-subsistence level of the proposed minimum wage, Blair’s programme is about making Britain profitable for capital, not habitable by rounded, fully human beings.
Amazingly, faced with Blairism and all that it entails in terms of how we are ruled, the left has either been reduced to bewildered silence or the pathetic attempt to return Labour to an imaginary golden age. Take the SWP’s Pre-conference Bulletin. No mention, no thought, no attempt to grapple with or grasp the nature of what is afoot can be found. Unsurprisingly the November 8-9 conference proved little better. Blair’s government is essentially viewed as a rerun of the “Labour governments of 1964 and 1974” (Socialist Worker November 15 1997).
Instead of formulating constitutional demands, the SWP reflects and panders to existing trade unionist consciousness. Mired in strikeism and economism, the SWP’s main slogan for the forthcoming period is ‘tax the rich’. This is, of course, a perfectly correct demand. But unless placed within the context of a communist minimum programme it neither challenges the way we are politically ruled nor economically exploited. The Liberal Democrats entered the last election under the flag of increased taxation. Communists must raise political - ie, constitutional - demands and slogans. We need a working class alternative to Blair’s new constitutional monarchy system.
What is notable about Blair’s programme of constitutional reform at this point in time is the complete absence of any working class input or alternative. Indeed, as we have long argued, it is the atomisation, the (temporary) disappearance of the working class from the political stage, that has created the conditions whereby Blair can propose and feel safe in carrying through his programme. Though millions are alienated from the state, there is neither pressure nor threat from the working class. That can, must and will be ended.
Chris Bambery claims the SWP is committed to “politics, politics, politics”. By that he means giving strikes a political coloration. “Every strike becomes political,” he feebly says (Socialist Worker November 15 1997). When it comes to real politics - ie, the relationship between all classes and the state, and the way we are ruled - the SWP miserably tails Blair.
Like the rest of the pro-Labour left the SWP supported New Labour at the ballot box on May 1. Blair was thereby given some form of militant blessing or kudos. Then there were the September 11 and 17 referendums in Scotland and Wales. Again the pro-Labour left, not least the SWP, tailed New Labour. They endorsed Blair’s referendum from the left.
The bourgeois nationalist SNP and Plaid Cymru, the SSA majority and virtually the entire spectrum of the left joined New Labour, the Liberal Democrats, dissident Tories and prominent representatives of big business in calling for a ‘yes’ vote for Blair’s plan to reform the constitutional monarchy. Together they formed a rotten, cross-class front. Together they underwrote Blair’s sop. Together they voted for a royalist parliament in Edinburgh and a royalist assembly in Cardiff.
The CPGB found itself in a difficult but enviable position. Alone, we and the Campaign for Genuine Self-Determination, intransigently defended and boldly advocated independent working class politics: ie, the right of Scotland and Wales to self-determination. Our call for a boycott of Blair’s rigged referendum earned us hatred from all manner of high-ups. Scotland Forward coordinator Paul Vestry unsuccessfully tried to eject us from meetings. Donald Dewar’s cronies banned our leaflets in Glasgow. Allan Green wanted to expel us from the Scottish Socialist Alliance. Taking into account the collapse of the left and the still rudimentary level of CPGB organisation in Scotland, our campaign was a resounding success. Our message found a definite, mass, echo amongst nationalist and radical workers.
Of course, we in the CPGB must do more than take pride in our stand and the relative, but very real, successes of the boycott campaign. We must think and constantly rethink.
In the aftermath of the Scottish and Welsh referendums it is vital to shift the focus of our propaganda and agitation. Self-determination remains a strategic and principled minimum demand for communists. Scotland and Wales (and Ireland) must have the right to freely and democratically decide their own futures, up to and including forming an independent state. However, in terms of emphasis in our propaganda self-determination must now take second place to the demand for a federal republic of England, Scotland and Wales. We must win mass support for the ‘federal republic’ slogan and give it organisational form. What is immediately needed is a Campaign for a Federal Republic.
In the period up to the September referendums we had the advantage of providing virtually the sole articulation of the mass democratic sentiment for self-determination. There was the chance, the possibility that we could find ourselves not only a mass audience, but a mass movement. We could therefore flow with and try to ride spontaneity; and if that proved successful we would most assuredly be well placed to imbue the movement for self-determination with a conscious revolutionary communist programme. The gap between what the masses - crucially in nationalist and proletarian Scotland - wanted and what Blair had on offer was certainly enormous. That is why the fight for an active boycott was necessary and correct. The demand for a parliament with full - ie, full constitutional - powers was supported by huge numbers in Scotland, but had been betrayed or deserted by both the SNP and the SSA majority. Apart from ourselves there were no serious candidates presenting themselves as a leadership.
Now things are different. We must resolutely stand against spontaneity. Scottish Militant Labour and the SNP will soon be banging the self-determination drum for all they are worth. That can be guaranteed. Yet their music is separatism. They look forward to the March 1999 elections and exploiting a platform of independence. Both SML and SNP want a nationalist break-up of the United Kingdom state and a separate capitalist Scotland (for SML a ‘first step’ towards a Scottish ‘socialism’). Against bourgeois and socialist nationalism the CPGB must fight for the unity of the working class - not only in, but against the UK state.
The federal republic slogan encapsulates both the democratic right to self-determination and the unity of the working class in Britain, in opposition to Blair’s plan for a new constitutional monarchy system. It also encapsulates the unity of the working class in Britain against nationalism.
SML will attempt to steer the SSA towards nationalism. The CPGB will assert and concretise the SSA’s founding aim of a federal republic. Where Peter Taaffe and the Socialist Party leadership will turn a blind eye to separatism in Scotland and Wales, while they and most of the left ignore Blair’s constitutional revolution, we will fight for an organised alternative - an all-Britain Socialist Alliance committed to the federal republic slogan and the reforged Communist Party.
Blair is unwittingly doing us a great service. In remaking the UK constitution - albeit to strengthen the system of class rule - he shows everyone that the constitution is neither timeless nor natural. It is plastic, artificial: a product of human history and, more to the point, contemporary activity. Consequently the call for constitutional change is no longer fringe politics. Constitutional change today lies at the heart of political debate and action. What Blair can do from above we can do from below using proletarian methods.
Jack Conrad