05.03.1998

Reaction marches

New Labour running scared as Tories take to the streets

Aristocratic money and social leverage, landowning selfish­ness and connections, Tory parliamentary weakness and naked opportunism, BBC plugs and gener­ous media support, rural blood-lust and deep-felt discontent combined to bring reaction, in Barbours and tweeds, flooding onto the streets of London on March 1.

Numbers were certainly huge. It was one of the largest demonstrations ever seen in this country, certainly the big­gest since the early 90s. The organis­ers claimed 285,000 walked the short distance from the Embankment to Hyde Park. However, this was a dem­onstration of the ‘haves’, not the ‘have nots’. There has never been anything quite like the Countryside Alliance before. Respectable Britain is seeking to express its politics using the old methods of the working class and the poor.

The following day the rightwing press was ecstatic. The Express told its readers that it was the “biggest political march of modern times” and praised “people power” and the “revolution” of “gentlefolk”. The Daily Mail enthusiastically dubbed it the “rural revolt” and a “mass protest without precedent”. Not to be out­done, neither in hyperbole nor in expropriating the language of the left, The Daily Telegraph spoke about “solidarity” and the “spectacular, poignant and historic” style of what Charles Moore, its editor, called a “genuine mass demonstration”. No rent-a-mob this, he thundered, despite ample evidence of powerful financial backers, but “good, true British peo­ple”: ie, white and middle class (the mega-rich Duke of Westminster saw to it that a special licence radio sta­tion, March FM, got onto the air to pump out pro-hunting propaganda).

Undoubtedly the catalyst was Mike Foster’s dogs bill and the move to ban fox hunting. Nevertheless, the general theme on March 1 was ‘countryside versus town’. Placards not only de­fended what are euphemistically called ‘country sports’ but attacked the ‘ur­ban jackboot’. Every rural issue and grievance has been skilfully melded into a united but fragile reactionary bloc by the shadowy figures pulling the strings behind the Countryside Alliance (so fragile that there were no speakers at Hyde Park).

Obviously there is more to the Countryside Alliance than fox hunt­ing. The March 1 demonstration and the whole movement in fact takes place under and in response to a unique political conjunction. There are two main factors at play.

Firstly, the working class as bearer of an alternative system to capitalism has for the moment been removed from the stage of history - both in Brit­ain and internationally. ‘Official com­munism’ and social democracy have ignominiously collapsed. Despair, not Marxism fills the vacuum. Though Blair retains the Tory’s anti-trade un­ion laws, though he rides roughshod over the unemployed and students with ‘welfare to work’ and tuition fees, though he is gearing up to ditch the remnants of the post-World War II settlement, the working class is pas­sive, if not comatose. Leftwing pro­tests are as a result tiny and muted. Strike figures remain slumped at a record low. As any sort of an active social agent the working class has temporarily disappeared. It is there­fore no longer perceived as an immi­nent threat to the system of capital or its economic logic.

Secondly, in Britain the Tory Party is a parliamentary rump. It has no MPs either in Scotland or Wales. Even in the shires it is much reduced. More than that, it is deeply divided between the anti-EU Hague wing and the pro-­EU Clarke-Heseltine-Patten wing. But Tory problems do not stop with its divisions, the general election deba­cle and the dramatic grass roots membership implosion. Blair’s project puts a question mark over the Tory Party as the dominant party of government - a position it has enjoyed more or less throughout the 20th century. Reform of the House of Lords promises to re­place an in-built 350 Tory majority with serried ranks of docile prime ministe­rial appointees. Crucially proportional representation and the de­-Labourisation of Labour could leave the Tories permanently out in the cold. Where New Labour has many poten­tial coalition partners - from the Lib­eral Democrats to Sinn Fein - Hague’s Tories have no one apart from Ulster Unionists.

Lack of fear of the working class and fear of permanent opposition lies at the heart of Hague’s inchoate un­constitutional thoughts and proclivi­ties. Hague, the entire shadow cabinet and every Tory MEP demonstrated on March 1. Mori estimated that 79% of marchers were Tory supporters - only 7% Labour.

Hague’s Tories appear to be mov­ing towards reconstituting them­selves as some sort of British version of the Poujadists (Pierre Poujade led a mass movement of French small employers and farmers, shopkeepers and anti-Semites - he won 50 seats and three million votes in the 1956 general election). Not only have Hague’s To­ries attempted to articulate rural reac­tion, but their Little England position on Europe and the single currency stands directly counter to the stated interests and wishes of big business. The Hague Tories should also be expected therefore to rally behind open rebellion against a London-Dublin ­brokered ‘peace deal’ in the Six Coun­ties if Ulster was yet again to say ‘no’. Shades of 1913.

As Labour leaves behind the incu­bus of the bourgeois workers’ party in order to embrace the ‘modern’ poli­tics of international capital, the Hague Tories are becoming the organised expression of besieged landed inter­ests, uncompetitive national capital and middle class bigotry.

The Countryside Alliance has sent Blair’s New Labour running for cover. Mike Foster’s bill will almost certainly be killed through lack of parliamen­tary time. Jack Straw is reportedly try­ing to make it impossible to amend the criminal justice bill to ban fox hunt­ing. Michael Meacher - an incongru­ous marcher - also promised vague measures to re-invigorate rural life. As a rapidly evolving political formation New Labour lacks deep and well es­tablished social roots. It is therefore prone to compromise. Links with the supine trade union bureaucracy have been consciously weakened. But La­bour’s relationship with the City and big business, as it strives to become the preferred party of the bourgeoi­sie, is still tentative, to say the least.

After the May 1 1997 general elec­tion the left - the SWP, Socialist Party, Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, the Morning Star - talked a great deal of nonsense about a crisis of hope and expectations faced by the incoming Labour government. Trapped in a mechanical mind-set whereby the elec­tion of a Labour government must be a class act by the workers and must result in an upsurge of the class strug­gle, the left has kept up its own flag­ging morale by ignoring the period of reaction we are living through. Like a child it seems to believe that reality can be made to go away simply by closing one’s eyes. Ironically it is only the old pro-Labour left that had any socialistic or progressive expectations in Blair’s Labour Party.

Things can go wrong for Blair very suddenly. Britain is highly vulnerable to any serious disturbance in the world economy. Indonesia, Hong Kong, Thailand and Japan all look very shaky. Capitalism faces not a new golden age, but a general crisis.

Nevertheless without turning it into a doctrine we have argued time and again that change will in all likelihood begin in the first instance above rather than below. Here is both the neces­sity and the opportunity to remake ourselves - not merely as a strikeist class, but as a hegemonic political class. That is why we communists have placed such stress on Blair’s constitutional reforms (Scotland and Wales, the monarchy, House of Lords, Ireland, PR, etc).

It is splits within the ruling class, within the state and establishment, that promise to conjure into being mass mobilisations of sections of the population, as one faction vies and struggles with the other.

The turnout for the Diana Windsor funeral and the Countryside Alliance march surely point to the shape of things to come.

Jack Conrad