04.11.1999

Ken ups tempo

To much for the tactical brilliance of the control freaks at Millbank. As the electoral college stitch-up - their supposedly foolproof answer to the problem of Ken Livingstone - shows signs of unravelling, the question of who actually wins the fight to become the Labour Party’s nominee for London mayor takes on an almost secondary character. Whatever the outcome, it is likely to spell bad news for the party’s leadership and its myrmidons.

If, as still seems most probable, Frank Dobson manages to secure the nomination, it will be on the basis of the sort of bureaucratic gerrymandering that shows an arrogant and brazen contempt for democracy. Such a Pyrrhic victory would offer the people of London a flawed and to some extent already discredited candidate; it might even induce Livingstone, as the moral victor who enjoys overwhelming support among London Labour members, to go it alone. If, on the other hand, Livingstone springs a surprise and wins the nomination contest, his victory will have been achieved in the face of immense obstacles and will represent a resounding defeat for Blair and Blairism, demonstrating more eloquently than anything else the fact that, for all the media hype, New Labour as an ideological construct remains an amorphous, superficial and largely elitist phenomenon, lacking deep roots in the Labour Party and the labour movement generally.

The question that is of primary interest to us as communists and revolutionary democrats is this: does the campaign for Livingstone - let alone the possibility of his victory - offer a realistic channel for a revival of class-conscious activity and an interest in real socialist politics among the passive and demoralised mass base of the Labour Party in London and beyond? We believe that the answer is yes, and that it is consequently our duty to give qualified and critical support to the Livingstone campaign, even if he emerges as the official Labour candidate for mayor. We take this position in full knowledge of the dubious political record and chameleon characteristics of the man himself.

Some comrades are inclined to view this stance as opportunism or tailism towards Labour, an abdication of our responsibility to unite with others on the left in order to fight for a real socialist alternative candidate. They contend that support for Livingstone conflicts with the position previously argued by Weekly Worker writers earlier this year.

Their charge rests on a failure to understand the qualitative changes that have taken place in recent months. For example, back in June Maurice Bernal wrote that

“Whatever the outcome [of the ballot for the Labour nomination] it is essential for the left to prepare itself to fight for an authentically socialist mayor of London ... In the event that Blair bites the bullet and allows Livingstone to stand as Labour’s official candidate, we argue it is the duty of the left to fight for a socialist mayoral candidate: ie, a candidate endorsed by a united front of socialist organisations” (Weekly Worker June 24).

What has changed since the comrade wrote these words? Essentially two things. In the first place, it needs to be remembered that our attitude in June was adopted in the political context of a possible (even if highly improbable) compromise between Blair and Livingstone, whereby the latter would toe the New Labour line in return for the ‘gift’ of nomination. Far from having ‘bitten the bullet’, however, as everyone knows, Blair has used every means at his disposal to thwart Livingstone’s ambitions. So Livingstone would not be New Labour’s tame representative in the mayorality. Indeed a victorious Livingstone would now constitute a living manifesto against everything that Blair represents and would become the focus for exactly the sort of grassroots opposition that we, as communists, seek to make the audience of our own politics.

Secondly, and no doubt to some extent in the light of these developments, some organisations on the left, such as the Socialist Workers Party and the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty have recently drawn the same conclusions as we did before them and have adopted a position of critical support for a Livingstone candidacy. As was demonstrated only too clearly by the London Socialist Alliance’s ignominious collapse before Scargill prior to the June EU elections, it was in any case doubtful whether the LSA election bloc would stay the course. The commitment of most of the participating organisations - particularly the SWP - was questionable, to say the least. In effect, therefore, earlier and very tentative plans for a united left intervention in next May’s election have been abandoned in all but name. Though it may still meet, the LSA is dead so far as this question is concerned.

What comrades need to grasp is that the central issue raised by the Livingstone campaign is one of democracy: the democratic right of London’s 70,000 Labour Party members to vote for Livingstone, if that is their wish; the democratic right of millions of Londoners to elect as mayor the man whom, according to every poll, they want to see in charge of their city. Democracy is a weapon we can wield against Blair and New Labour.

The Millbank machine has failed to learn any lessons from previous attempts at telling the party’s membership how to vote, such as the debacle in Wales, where foisting Alun Michael on an unwilling Welsh electorate actually cost Labour its expected majority in the Welsh assembly. Millbank’s novel form of OMOV (‘our man, our voting system’) represents a flagrant perversion of democracy, giving vastly disproportionate influence to that one third of the electoral college comprising the payroll vote of London MPs, MEPs and those ever so carefully selected (but unelected) candidates for the Greater London Authority, each of whom will cast votes equivalent to those of nearly 1,000 rank and file members or nearly 6,000 trade union members.

From the outset it was obvious that the payroll vote would do what they were told. Indeed, so enthusiastic have some of them been in their support for Dobson that they have reportedly fallen foul of the Data Protection Act by giving Dobson’s campaign team access to constituency membership lists. The legal niceties of this question are of no interest to us, but it has certainly had political consequences in terms of deepening the distrust and anger felt by many Labour Party members in London.

It was equally obvious from the beginning that a majority of ordinary members of the London Labour Party would vote for Livingstone if given the chance. The decisive factor, therefore, would be that third of the college composed of trade union votes. Here the arrogance and political miscalculation of Millbank is most glaringly apparent. They evidently assumed (perhaps with some justification) that the unions’ leaders, servile as always in their relationship with the Blair administration, would cast their block votes in favour of his preferred candidate. Where Sir Ken Jackson of the AEEU is concerned, their calculations were, of course, correct. Despite pressure from his members, Jackson is still adamant that he will cast the AEEU’s block vote for Dobson, securing him some 10% of the union vote and in the process effectively disenfranchising some 50,000 trade unionists. What Millbank clearly did not reckon with, however, was that, thanks to the vigorous demands of their members, every other major union in the capital will be balloting. This is undoubtedly a major setback, with potentially fatal consequences for Dobson’s chances of getting the nomination next month. It is also clear evidence that the grassroots in the labour movement, provoked by the undemocratic manipulation of the party’s centre, may at last be shaking off its passivity and torpor.

The general revulsion and anger felt by many Labour Party activists and ordinary members in the capital should not be underestimated. It made itself felt, for example, at the October 30 rally organised by the ‘Livingstone for London’ campaign and attended by some 500 people in the Camden Centre. Speaking from the platform, both Ruth Clarke, a CLP secretary from south London, and Lucy Craig, a Haringey councillor for the last 10 years, denounced the electoral college system as an abuse of democracy which made rank and file members feel disenfranchised and marginalised. Craig insisted that any democratic method of selecting the party’s candidate should take account of the views of the more than 1,000 councillors working in the capitals’ local government. They, at least, have been elected, unlike the ‘safe’ GLA prospective candidates. Both spoke of the widespread anger and frustration in their respective organisations caused by the machinations of the party centre. To stormy applause, Craig demanded, “Give us back our party”.

The issues which, to judge by this meeting, London Labour Party members feel most strongly about are transport, racism and the metropolitan police - especially transport, which dominated Livingstone’s 30-minute speech. Alone among the potential candidates, and in tune with two thirds of Londoners polled on the subject, he is opposed to the privatisation of the underground by means of the Public Private Partnership, which would hand over large tranches of the tube’s infrastructure to none other than Railtrack, probably the most despised company in the entire country. Vowing to maintain the underground as a unified service in the public sector, Livingstone told the meeting that he intended to fund the revitalisation of the tube by a bond issue and to use the projected congestion charge as a means of shifting resources into the bus sector as a priority. Promises to restore conductors on the buses and guards on the underground were very enthusiastically received by the audience.

On the subject of racism, Lee Jasper of the Black Alliance and anti-racism campaigner Kumar Murshid both commended Livingstone’s anti-racist initiatives during his time at the GLC, during which time more than 20% of the GLC’s workforce was recruited from ethnic minorities. Livingstone accepted the speakers’ demand for the full implementation of the McPherson report and for greater metropolitan police accountability.

Livingstone’s carefully crafted speech, largely devoid of any direct criticism of his rivals and of the government, predictably gave no clues whatever as to what he will do in the event of being blocked from the short list on November 16 (a highly unlikely but not impossible contingency) or being defeated by Dobson as a result of the skewed electoral college. But active efforts to recruit people to the Livingstone campaign (with potential supporters limited to Labour Party members and those who belong to no other political organisation), while ostensibly a fund-raising initiative, will provide him with a database of potential support for an independent challenge. On this question we say to Livingstone that in the event of defeat in the Labour Party contest he must demonstrate his sincerity and determination by standing as a London Independent Labour candidate for mayor.

As I said, both the SWP (Socialist Worker October 30) and the AWL (Action for Solidarity October 29) have come out in support of Livingstone’s campaign. The poor cadre of the SWP must be mightily confused. Having been urged to support the ‘Let Ken stand’ initiative earlier in the year, they were later told that Livingstone’s support for Nato bombing of Serbia debarred him from receiving the SWP’s support and constituted a ‘line in the sand’ which the SWP would not cross. Evidently the line has been washed away by the tide of events. Similarly, the AWL leadership appears to have overcome, to some extent, its chronic aversion to Livingstone, which dates back nearly 20 years. It justifies its turn by a comparison with the Socialist Campaign for a Labour Victory, which fought for the re-election of the Callaghan government because the alternative was even worse: ie, lesser-of-two-evilism. The AWL now proposes a Socialist Campaign for a Livingstone Victory, along similar lines, rightly drawing attention to the damage which such a victory could inflict on New Labour and its potential as a force for renewed working class mobilisation from below.

By contrast, the position taken by the Socialist Party is a lunatic paradox. Since, according to the SP’s ‘theorists’, Labour is now a fully-fledged party of the bourgeoisie, to support Livingstone as Labour’s official candidate for mayor would be unthinkable. Nonetheless, the SP backs his efforts to win the ballot: ie, to become precisely the candidate whom they cannot support.

As we have said before, the Labour Party’s change, dictated from above, from being a bourgeois party of the working class to being a bourgeois party of the bourgeoisie has certainly gathered pace since Blair’s election victory. But the ‘Blairisation’ of the Labour Party as a whole is a still a myth, a Millbank pipe dream. So long as the Labour Party retains its mass base in the working class and is reliant on workers’ votes, these class forces can and will make themselves felt. Livingstone’s campaign to become mayor of London could galvanise these forces. That is why we support him.

Michael Malkin