WeeklyWorker

14.10.1999

Blair loads the dice

Livingstone for mayor?

Frank Dobson’s declaration that he is to seek the Labour nomination as candidate for London mayor came as no surprise. Labour needs a candidate who can defeat the irksome Lord Archer. More to the point, New Labour needs a candidate who can at least semi-democratically defeat the enemy within - Ken Livingstone. Dobson might well do it, though of course he had to be pushed into standing. It was either that or being sacked by Blair and dumped in the political wilderness.

The Dobson move allowed Blair to announce a wider cabinet reshuffle: Mo Mowlam leaves the Northern Ireland office to take over from ‘plutonium’ Jack Cunningham as cabinet enforcer; chief treasury secretary Alan Milburn moves to health; and, after a short period of disgrace, the resurrected Peter Mandelson resumes his career at the Northern Ireland office.

Despite Livingstone’s sycophantic open letter to Blair and his nauseating support for Nato’s Balkans blitzkrieg, latest developments shows that, although he has every chance of getting onto the shortlist he has only an outside possibility of securing official nomination. It is not that Dobson is so popular. Rather that Millbank Tower has put in place a voting system which favours bureaucracy - ie Dobson - over populism - ie Livingstone. There are to be three equal electoral colleges in London:

If Livingstone can be beaten here, albeit only semi-democratically, it would end all talk of Red Ken standing as an independent and providing an alternative pole of attraction for working class discontent. The Millbank mafia will be pulling out all the stops, employing all the usual behind-the-scenes chicanery and arm-twisting to ensure the votes go where they are supposed to: ie, to Dobson - the official Blairite candidate in all but name.

Livingstone’s initial reaction was equivocal. One the one hand, he recognised that the electoral college system - the same method used to select Labour leaders for Wales and Scotland - was weighted in favour of Dobson. On the other hand, “It also nails the lie that I was going to be ruled out on some disloyalty grounds.” No doubt recalling how Rhodri Morgan was stitched up in Wales with the help of the union bureaucrats, he called on all London unions to ballot their members before announcing support for any candidate. Even if that occurred and Livingstone won a majority of union votes, in addition to the expected huge support he will surely get from individual members, Blair’s trump card is the one-third vote from London’s 57 MPs, four MEPs and 14 adopted candidates for the Greater London Authority. Backing for Dobson from amongst these career-ists is likely to be so overwhelming, it will - hopes Millbank - swing the balance against any Livingstone majority among unions and individuals.

In addition, Labour’s national executive committee announced strict spending limits for the campaign - another blow directed against the Brent East MP, who has raised a small fortune as a result of his ‘Let Ken stand’ appeal earlier this year. Nevertheless, Livingstone is a match for the Labour machine when it comes to spin-doctoring and pulling media strings. Blair may have loaded the dice in Dobson’s favour, but the outcome of the contest is far from settled.

So what should our attitude be to Livingstone’s candidacy? Clearly communists must oppose Blair’s gerrymandering and demand a free and open contest. We must also insist that the union tops allow one member, one vote. We make these demands not because of any love for Livingstone, but in order to expose New Labour’s anti-democratic regime. More importantly, tensions and divisions within the Labour Party will open up room for the left to take steps towards the creation of a genuine working class alternative.

And what if Livingstone won the nomination in opposition to the Millbank pro-Dobson campaign? That too would open up possibilities. It is bound to encourage Livingstone himself to assert a greater degree of political and organisational independence. However, unless he agreed to stand on a minimum platform of democratic and working class demands - openly differentiating himself from Blair’s programme - we would only consider backing his campaign critically. There is no way we could support a New Labour manifesto. Livingstone as ‘Independent London Labour’ would demand a similar approach.

There are those, on the other hand, such as the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty who, while quite happy to call for a vote for New Labour in 1997 on the basis of the quite illusory gains to be had from the so-called ‘crisis of expectations’, incredibly see no contradiction in opposing support for Livingstone, even as an independent, on the grounds that his leftist veneer is just that - a veneer.

The AWL correctly attacks Livingstone’s record as leader of the GLC. But this misses the point. If Livingstone, as he and his confidants have intimated, fails to win the Labour nomination and then stands as an independent candidate - now less likely, but still not to be ruled out - his resulting expulsion and ensuing campaign has the potential to become a pole of attraction for many dissident Labour activists and possibly trigger the onset of a deeper and wider split in the party. This must be welcomed. While we may predict with some confidence that under those circumstances his manifesto would be an unprincipled and cynical mish-mash of populist leftism and ‘realistic’ commitments, the fact remains that such a development could provide a launching pad for a new left party project. The correct tactical approach therefore, for partisans of our class, would surely be to orientate towards such a movement, calling for a critical Livingstone vote.

Talking of the ill-fated ‘crisis of expectations’, there are, believe it or not, still those who are awaiting its arrival. Socialist Party general secretary Peter Taaffe may even still be waiting for a cavalry-like 11th-hour rescue of his Red ’90s schema.

To put it brutally, there is no ‘crisis of expectations’. Such opposition as there is to Blair’s New Labour is inevitably muted, weak and isolated. Set in the wider context of the current period, which is one of reaction, Blair’s relationship with the British electorate, far from exploding into demonstrations of mass anger, could well turn out, barring unforeseen developments, to be the longest honeymoon in history. We, therefore, support every initiative, development and overture that can provide the widest possible unity of forces to the left in opposition to New Labour.

Such developments could well become the seedbed from which a mass workers’ party grows. It should not need saying, but - given our opponents’ penchant for distorting much of what we say - let us be clear: our support in such cases would not be uncritical and would in no way foster illusions. Quite the reverse. Given our consistent and principled commitment to the concept of revolutionary openness, we strive for such pacts, alliances and so on to be characterised by the widest possible openness, democracy and freedom of criticism.

Under such conditions it would be possible to develop the fighting revolutionary programme our class needs.

Terry Fenton