07.10.1999

Blair realigns UK politics

Labour Party centenary

To call last week’s proceedings at Bournemouth a conference would be to abuse the English language. What we witnessed was more akin to a CPSU congress from the 1930s. No speech from the platform was complete without some reference to the monolithic unity of the party and the genius of its leader. The role of the 1,500 ‘delegates’ was a simple one - to acclaim their approval for every resolution and to punctuate every speech with stormy applause.

On one occasion they somehow lost the script and voted the wrong way. The solution to this embarrassment was obvious: tell them to vote again.

Only one speech mattered - that by the Leader himself. Its objective was to consolidate New Labour’s expropriation of the centre ground by making mainstream politics definitionally identical with Blairite orthodoxy. Those who accept it can join Blair’s crusade to “create a model 21st century nation”; those who do not are ridiculed as “weird”. They constitute the devilish “forces of conservatism” (whether of the right or the left) against which Blair launched a sneering and splenetic assault.

Blair’s denunciation of conservatism was to some extent misconstrued by the Tory Party and its press as being directed exclusively at them. Of course, this centenary year, it served the purpose of playing to the audience’s prejudices and establishing in rhetorical fashion that New Labour, despite its relentless drive to the right, has not lost touch with its roots. But, as any fool knows, everything the Blair government has done so far - in economic policy, law and order, maintaining anti-trade union legislation, military intervention on behalf of the ‘international community’, the constitutional revolution, etc - has served to extend or complement the Thatcherite project.

Where Thatcher renewed British capitalism by attacking and defeating the organised working class, Blair renews British capitalism by rewinning popular consent. The real point of Blair’s attack was political, to establish new polarities involving a specific repudiation of traditional Labourite ideology.

Hence his assertion that the 21st century will not be

“the battle between capitalism and socialism, but between the forces of progress and the forces of conservatism ... We were chained by our ideology. We thought we had eternal doctrines when they are in truth eternal values - solidarity, social justice, the belief not that society counts before individual fulfilment, but that it is only in a strong society of others that the individual will be fulfilled”.

The language of values was pervasive and represented another (failed) attempt to give some concrete meaning to the flatulent banalities of the ‘third way’. The ‘value’ which dominated Blair’s speech was equality. Not the equality of outcome which lies at the core of left social democratic reformism, but equality of opportunity in the form of what Blair, with the air of a man introducing us to a startlingly new idea, described as “true, classless meritocracy”:

“Not equal incomes ... But true equality - equal worth, an equal chance of fulfilment, equal access to knowledge and opportunity. Equal rights. Equal responsibilities. The class war is over. But the struggle for true equality has only just begun.”

The reference to the end of the class war was another attempt to shift the ideological focus away from traditional polarities and introduce a “new progressive form in British politics”. The assertion is, of course, pure hypocritical cant and nonsense. Class division and antagonisms will exist as long as capitalism itself. The war is not over but many battles have been lost in recent years. The victors have been the bourgeoisie - precisely that class which finds in New Labour and Blairism a congenial and compliant servant, the class in whose interest Blair’s administration has created ever deeper, substantive inequality. The vanquished have been the working class - atomised and demoralised by a succession of defeats.

The slogan dominating the podium at Bournemouth - “for the many, not the few” - aptly illustrates the paradox and the deceit at the heart of Blairism. The ‘many’ refers not to the Labour Party’s supposedly natural base - ie, the working class - but to that amorphous ‘constituency’ which brought Blair to power in 1997 and which he needs to maintain as the foundation of support for his long-term vision of a ‘radical’ liberal, centre coalition, capable of dominating British politics in the 21st century. There should be no room for misunderstanding about this fact. In a sentimental passage in which he quoted Kier Hardie, Blair alluded to the foundation of the Labour Party as a “mistake”, the clearest indication of his fundamental attachment to liberalism, and indeed to the tradition of ‘one-nation Toryism’, another political force which he hopes to harness to his ‘radical’ project.

This became evident on the day after his speech, when he launched an overt appeal to disaffected Tories to join ranks with New Labour: “There must be many people in the Conservative Party today, sensible people, one-nation Conservatives, who believe in sensible engagement in Europe, who believe in fairness and enterprise going together, who see a Labour government that is now a modern party and feel more at home in today’s Labour Party than they do in a Conservative Party more extreme than ever before ... they can join us because they’re not people who want to hold the country back.” This bold, some might say impudent, invitation fitted seamlessly into the strategy enunciated in Blair’s Bournemouth address: marginalise the opposition by making it appear extreme and reactionary; widen potential support by flattering it as “sensible” and “modern”, terms that encompass Blair’s definition of ‘radicalism’ - “to be modern and sensible is to be radical”.

It goes without saying that Blair’s commitment to the ‘values’ of equality and opportunity, like his commitment to abolishing poverty, sermonised in terms of emetic mock-humility - “while there is one child still in poverty in Britain today, one pensioner in poverty, one person denied their chance in life ... there is one prime minister that will have no rest, no sense of mission completed” - is merely hot air and empty rhetoric. How else can one explain his bizarre assertion that “You can’t solve the problem of poverty by simply giving people more money”, or the parenthetical statement that the defence of personal freedom amounts to “libertarian nonsense”? How else can one interpret a policy on education that, leaving aside all the blather about meritocracy, has as its centrepiece the idea of making truancy an arrestable offence - not for the children (at least not yet) but for the parents? Those parents who cannot pay fines of up to £5,000 will presumably find themselves in prison, where they will be competing for space with those refused bail because they have tested positive for drugs. Does this authoritarian criminalisation of a social problem reflect the “new moral purpose” supposedly at the core of New Labour’s project?

The peroration gave the game away: “To every nation a purpose. To every party a cause. And now, at last, party and nation joined in the same cause for the same purpose: to set our people free.” Have we not heard something like this before? “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer”. Only his customary modesty forbade Blair from including himself in this rapturous evocation of a party and a nation that have become one. What, in the name of all that is rational, has this got to do with the Labour Party that is celebrating its 100th year of existence?

The time cannot be far off when Marxists will have to undertake a fundamental theoretical re-evaluation of the Labour Party, one that seeks dialectically to grasp the complexity and contradiction of the problem as a process, rather than as a motionless category. Traditionally, following Lenin, we have theorised it as “a bourgeois party of the working class”: bourgeois - because politically it has consistently taken the side of imperialism; a party of the working class - because of its organised mass base in the trade union and labour movement. In formal terms, so long as the party maintains its organic link with the trade unions this definition must still hold. There seem no grounds for believing that Blair intends to sever that link in the foreseeable future - the suggestion by Ken Cameron of the firefighters’ union at last month’s TUC that it was time for the two wings of the labour movement to seek an amicable divorce fell on deaf ears.

The unions, despite the haemorrhage in membership (down to around six million from a high of 12 million), still give some £6 million a year to the Labour Party and, however much the bureaucrats may moan about being marginalised or treated like an embarrassing relative, they have little choice but to maintain their allegiance and hope (in vain, one suspects) for better times. This means accepting Blair’s stated determination not to change one clause of the anti-trade union, anti-working class legislation currently on the statute book. As Sir Ken Jackson of the AEEU put it recently, “The choice is not between a Labour government we want and the Labour government we’ve got, but between a Labour government and a Tory one” (The Independent September 28). A message that will doubtless be made clear whenever they step out of line.

What of Labour’s relationship with the working class as a whole? Nobody can maintain or believe that Labour any longer seeks to represent them or further their interests as a class. In the event of any confrontation between capital and labour, it is absolutely clear whose side New Labour will be on. The party’s approach to the class is marked by tension and ambiguity. In the light of recent mass abstentions by the core vote, the Millbank machine is reportedly about to set up a “unit aimed at reconnecting Labour’s leadership with the party’s grass roots” (The Times October 1). It is difficult to reconcile this attempt at ‘reconnection’ with Blair’s apparent desire further to tighten his grip on the party by abolishing general management committees, a move that, according to David Evans, Labour’s regional director in the north west and an ardent Blairite, “will empower modernising forces and marginalise old Labour” (The Independent September 27). For “old Labour”, read any party activist who is still a partisan of the working class.

There has always been a contradiction in the relationship between the Labour Party and the class it historically has purported to represent: the active pole constituting the leadership’s consistently bourgeois, reactionary politics; the subaltern pole formed by the grassroots membership among trade unionists and passive voters. The same contradiction is mirrored in the trade unions themselves. With the Thatcherite offensive that began with the miners’ strike, followed by the period of reaction ushered in by the collapse of ‘official communism’ and the relegation of socialism to the margins of political life, the contradiction has become ever wider. The extent to which the link between the party and the class can any longer be regarded as a living, organic one, rather than a formal, historical one, is now open to serious question.

Of course, life is constantly changing. Thus far, Blair has enjoyed double good fortune. He has presided over a ‘golden’ economic legacy (golden that is, for the bourgeoisie and sections of the middle classes) and he is faced by an opposition party that is still traumatised by the catastrophe of 1997 and has a leader whose approval ratings, even among Tory supporters, are in minus quantities. In time, all of this could, and no doubt will, change. It will then remain to be seen to what extent New Labour is forced to retreat from its present course.

A year ago, I wrote that “Labour is well on the way to transforming itself from a bourgeois party of the working class into a bourgeois party of the bourgeoisie.” The transformation is still not complete, but, as Bournemouth demonstrated, it is gathering pace.

Michael Malkin