04.02.1999

Blair moves against ILN

Another witch hunt has begun. In an effort to stem the rising tide of grassroots disaffection with Blair’s authoritarian leadership and his government’s relentless rightwards trajectory, Labour’s NEC last week turned its guns on the Independent Labour Network. The pioneering Leeds branch of the ILN, founded in June 1998, has been selected as a suitable case for treatment.

Leeds in general, and the Leeds North East Constituency Labour Party in particular, have been a thorn in Millbank’s side for some time. As readers will recall, Leeds North East infuriated the party centre by democratically selecting a leftwinger, Liz Davies, as their candidate to fight the 1997 general election. With a characteristic contempt for the rank and file, the Labour leadership simply vetoed the CLP’s choice and imposed its own candidate on the constituency in the form of the safe Blairite, Fabian Hamilton, who was duly elected. (Ironically Ms Davies was elected onto Labour’s national executive in 1998, much to the chagrin of Tony Blair.) Unsurprisingly, this diktat from London served merely to exacerbate tensions. In the interim a number of local party bodies have been subjected to suspension. Four individual party members have been expelled and two suspended. The NEC has since moved to expel another party member, Jane Young, specifically on the grounds of her involvement with the ILN, which it denounces as an organisation “operating contrary to the aims and values of the party” (The Independent January 26).

By declaring that the Leeds branch is “ineligible for affiliation to the Labour Party”, the NEC is making use of a time-dishonoured bureaucratic mechanism designed to isolate and destroy dissent - the same tactic that was used by Kinnock in the 1980s to neutralise the threat posed by Militant. Somewhat ironically, the target this time is not a group of ‘revolutionaries’ intent on ‘subverting’ the Labour Party, but a network of old Labour’s left social democrats, for whom John Smith’s brand of socialism was quite acceptable. It is a measure of New Labour’s iron-fisted authoritarianism and paranoia that such people as make up the ILN should now be cast into outer darkness.

As Mike Davies of the Leeds ILN told the Weekly Worker, the objective of the NEC’s resolution is to prevent cross-membership of the two organisations: the message is that you can either be a member of the Labour Party or of the ILN, but not both. This intimidatory edict is targeted both at members of the Labour Party already involved with the ILN and those who are minded to join forces with it. Asked about the effect of the NEC’s action on the ILN’s work in the area, comrade Davies told us that they were unsurprised and undaunted by this turn of events. Leeds had been the focus of Millbank’s hostility for some time and the reaction among Labour’s deeply disillusioned members and supporters locally, according to comrade Davies, was: “Stuff them; we’ll carry on”.

Of course, New Labour’s dishonest attempts to bully and smear the ILN are hardly new. Back in June 1998, poor Tony Blair had to suffer a whole 90 seconds of criticism from Ken Coates MEP in the European parliament. Coates had the temerity to suggest that Blair had turned his back on the poor and to accuse the Blair regime of being undemocratic. Blair’s response was characteristic:“I think that Mr Coates said that the British government was undemocratic. I would like to respond by saying that they [Coates and his colleague Hugh Kerr] were elected as Labour members of parliament on a Labour ticket. They left the Labour Party. They still sit as members of parliament without any democratic mandate for doing so at all. That is not my idea of democracy.” The falsehood of this statement was brazen indeed. Messrs Coates and Kerr did not “leave” the Labour Party at all, but were unceremoniously ejected from it. As Coates himself remarked, “We were thrown out on our ears, without the courtesy of any hearing, still less of any investigation or enquiry” (K Coates President Blair and democracy June 1998).The same dishonesty, hypocrisy and lack of democratic openness lie behind the NEC’s decision on Leeds. No investigation has taken place; no ‘crimes’ have been proven; it is enough that the omniscient Excalibur database indicates that members and supporters of the ILN are “rebels” and must therefore be declared persona non grata.

Neither in theory nor in practice can the ILN credibly be described as hatching some kind of Marxist conspiracy. Though support is by no means drawn exclusively from Labour ranks, its theoretical platform overtly eschews any desire to constitute itself as a formal ‘split’ from Labour as a new party.

The aims and objectives of the ILN, as formulated by Coates and Kerr, are pretty unexceptionable:

“The Independent Labour Network ... does not seek to become another political party. It seeks to promote association between those who have supported the traditional social programme of the Labour Party, and to help organise protests against the ill-effects of New Labour’s attacks on those policies. This has become necessary because the new rules and structure of New Labour, pushed through in the 1997 post-election honeymoon, prevent Labour members and Constituency Parties having any control of, or even influence on, New Labour policy. This disenfranchises not only members but, more importantly, all those ordinary people who lack wealth and power. No party now speaks for them. The Independent Labour Network seeks to ensure that there is a political party speaking for ordinary people. Its preferred means of achieving this is by exerting sufficient pressure, internal and external, on New Labour to force the Labour Party to return to this role. Only if this proved impossible would it be necessary to consider forming a new Party of Labour” (Ken Coates and Hugh Kerr The Need for an Independent Labour Network 1998).

Despite our big political differences the CPGB has no hesitation in supporting the ILN comrades in Leeds and any others who may be the target of future attacks by the Blair leadership. We oppose all witch hunts.

Mary Godwin