01.07.1999

Labour after the elections

For the first time, Tony Blair is almost beginning to look like the prime minister of a mid-term British government. Almost. The fixed smiles are cracking; the teflon is wearing thin - even though New Labour’s popularity remains unusually high.

This week 44 MPs - including junior minister Peter Hain - openly challenged Tony Blair by signing a declaration that Labour must remain a “democratic socialist party” and reject a centre-left coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Senior trade unionists are also to be heard calling for the government not to ignore its ‘traditional working class support’ - ie, give recognition and due weight to the opinions of the TUC bureaucracy. With the rise of the SNP and Plaid Cymru, the threat of an ‘ermine revolt’ in the Lords and the Irish peace process spawning new contradictions, major problems are now beginning to trouble the Blair government.

This shift was marked by Labour’s poor showing at the European elections and its defeat at the hands of the Tories. New Labour’s honeymoon is now just a fond memory. ‘Normal’ government is becoming the reality. The Tories, dubbed a “dead parrot” by The Sun just a few months ago, smell blood over Blair’s wavering on Europe and the sinking fortunes of the single currency. The Tories also see chinks in the armour over Ireland. They have effectively broken from bipartisanship over the Good Friday agreement by calling for the halting of prisoner releases until guns start being handed in - clearly outside the terms of the peace deal.

The government’s spin doctors have been trying to paint the European election results as a side issue - of no significance except to amateur psephologists. The low turnout reflects a complacent satisfaction with government policies, they say. Eight percent support for the Tories from the total electorate against 6.5% for Labour will hardly be of significance, claim the spinmeisters, once the punters come out to actually choose who governs.

And while they may have a point, the spin has very poor flight. While the low turnout was clearly significant, it was more a case of what The Guardian’s Larry Elliot calls a “sullen indifference” than the ‘seething anger’ that many on the left insist on seeing at every turn. Yet the poor results are causing doubts from within New Labour’s own ranks. If this was coming from the usual suspects - Benn, Livingstone or Seddon - then it would not worry Blair too much. However, loyal ‘modernisers’ and true believers of the New Labour credo have bent under the pressure.

John Monks, the very New Labour general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, has accused Blair of treating Labour’s loyal core voters like “embarrassing elderly relatives”. He was backed up soon after by the leader of the GMB union, John Edmonds, who said: “I think there’s a feeling among many Labour voters that they have somehow been left out of the government’s strategy. Activists need policies to boast about.”

Given the control-freakery of the Millbank regime and the rigid loyalty demanded from Blair, such a statement from the until now Dalek-like Monks must be seen as a very public rubbing of salt into the wounds of Labour’s European defeat. ‘On-message’ TUC general secretaries are just not meant to act like that.

Blair - with his close allies - has not shown the slightest sign of compromise. At this week’s annual conference of the Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union, general secretary Ken Jackson attacked the recent comments from his ‘brothers’. Recently knighted Sir Ken accused Blair’s critics of “sneering at Labour’s successes”, arguing that the “more you carp from the sidelines, the more you conspire in your own decline”. He clearly sees the role of organised labour as supporting Her Majesty’s government and selling paltry crumbs to the membership with a view to ensuring they vote the right way at election time.

Before becoming embroiled in the D-day negotiations over Ireland, the prime minister re-emphasised the New Labour message. He said: “While I am leader of my party and prime minister of this country, I will never again have Britain forced to choose between a Labour Party that ignored the importance of business and ambition and a rightwing Conservative Party which ignored the need for justice and compassion.”

His party would remain “100% proof” New Labour. Blair warns that there is to be no U-turn. This man is not for turning. Former trade and industry secretary Peter Mandelson is being rehabilitated. Mandy is now cutting a much more public figure. Speaking at the AEEU conference, he insisted that Labour must retain its new supporters and avoid retreating to the party’s traditional core vote bunker. Holding out an olive branch of some sort to the union bureaucracy, Mandelson also pressed for “a new partnership between the party and trade unions, aimed at getting the message of Labour’s strategy and achievements across to union members and working people”. It is now not a question of if Mandelson will be back in government, but when.

While Monks and Edmonds, despite their comments, remain firmly with the New Labour project, a new labour left is now cohering. Mark Seddon and Liz Davies - just re-elected to Labour’s national executive - are proof of it. Likewise the statement from 44 MPs published in this week’s Tribune. It will be launched at a ‘Keeping the party Labour’ conference called for July 17 in London. More than 90 Labour MPs have already pledged support. Extending the Grassroots Alliance into a broad coalition of traditionalists, old Labourites and left reformists is their core strategy.

After the announcement of last week’s results of the NEC elections for the constituency section, Millbank claimed some satisfaction at having pared back the Grassroots Alliance from four to three out of six. After a low-key campaign deliberately brought forward from the autumn so as not to overshadow the annual conference, turnout dropped by five percent to 30%. However, the Labour left grows in influence. In spite of losing a seat on the NEC the Grassroots Alliance’s share of the vote actually went up from 45% to 47%.

It is clear that Blair’s de-Labourisation of Labour is creating a space on the left - both inside the Labour Party, but also, crucially, outside it. A vacuum exists.

Yet the party leader is not too worried. Blair believes in himself. That is both his strength and his weakness. He believes that socialism is dead and that Labour as a representative party of the workers is a finished project to be shed as the new millennium is born. While his third way has all the hallmarks of a re-invented 19th century liberalism, it has a concrete basis in both the national and international defeats that the working class has suffered. Blairism, like Gladstoneism before it, gains strength from an atomised and passive working class. A class with no self-awareness which does not exist at all in the active-political sense. While we as a class remain weak, Blair is strong.

The declaration of the 44 appears to have a strong grasp of history. Yet while criticising Blair for wanting to go back to liberalism, it - equally forlornly - proposes to go back to Labourism. It states:

“At the turn of the millennium, poverty and gross inequality still disfigure our society and destroy the life chances of millions across the globe. That challenge cannot be met by a reversion to 19th century Liberalism, out of whose failure Labour was born. Labour’s future will be as a forward-looking, internationalist and democratic socialist party fighting for social justice into the 21st century.”

However, re-inventing a failed social democracy - whether pursued inside the Labour Party, as Tribune intends, or outside, as some recently decamped Trotskyites want - cannot provide answers for our class.

The challenge for the left is not to recreate such a servile creature, which in its original form could always be relied upon to serve the interests of imperialism and capitalism, but to build a mass revolutionary party. We do not need to go through the horrors, disappointments and betrayals of Labourism yet again. The working class deserves better.

Marcus Larsen