25.11.1999
Revolt against Blairism
So, round one to Livingstone, then.
The mere fact that the man has cleared the formidable number of hurdles cynically placed in his way by the Labour Party apparatus simply to appear on the shortlist for Labour’s London mayoral candidate is a blow against Blair. The whole format of the arduous selection procedure and the following tripartite electoral college is a crude attempt to block Livingstone. The convoluted lengths to which Millbank is having to go to spike ‘Red Ken’s’ candidacy underline that he represents for something more than just a nakedly ambitious career politician: ie, himself.
If the man did not have behind him a mass left sentiment amongst the Labour rank and file as well as broader society, the machine hacks and time-servers would have unceremoniously told him to bugger off long before now. As Livingstone’s November 19 letter to his supporters notes, “For over a year Labour Party members, trade unionists and thousands of members of the public have been urging that I should be on the ballot paper for Labour’s selection of a candidate for mayor of London. Yesterday we achieved that objective. It would have been impossible without your help.”
Having come this far, the Livingstone campaign has built up a real head of steam and must stand a good chance of securing the official nomination. Palpably the other two hopefuls lack conviction, pazzaz or even a real London-specific programme of any kind.
Dobson’s campaign only took off - if that is the right phrase - late last Friday, after frustrating weeks of “being stalled in procedural wrangles over Ken Livingstone’s eligibility to stand” (The Guardian November 20). His politically inept first rallying cry for the capital’s population was his commitment “to fight crime on the London Underground”. Giving advance warning of the type of moronic campaign he intends to run, he snottily added for Livingstone’s benefit that “extra trains and frozen fares would be worthless without more security”.
The ‘security’ that most London commuters would like to enjoy when travelling along the capital’s creaky transport infrastructure is the confidence that they will not be involved in a rerun of the Paddington and Clapham disasters. Not being ripped off by some stroppy adolescent or impoverished east European refugee is certainly a consideration, but comes much lower on the list of commuter priorities. This is why Livingstone’s opposition to the break-up and sneaking privatisation of the tube strikes a real resonance with millions of people. Whatever the limitations of his alternative, it is in tune with the mass revulsion against the effects of the unbridled market on the basic fabric of our society and the ugly greed of blatantly parasitic capitalist enterprises such as Railtrack.
The problems of the official Labour apparatus go much deeper than the distinct lack of sparkle of the bumbling Dobson, however. Blair’s despotic conduct has handed the banner of democracy to Livingstone. In a Labour Party which seems to remain stubbornly unBlairised at grassroots level, there is a growing sense of hostility the so-called ‘modernisers’, widely perceived as a credit-card-thin layer of pushy pups in the organisation. The resentment felt by wide swathes of ordinary members was given expression in the vote for the Grassroots Alliance at this year’s Labour Party conference. This saw three lefties elected onto the NEC.
The best outcome that Millbank and the Blairites can hope for now is a ‘Welsh’ one. The political editor of the Western Mail comments in connection with the London mayoral contest: “There’s something of a sense of déjà vu about the Labour Party’s problems.” He detected “uncannily striking parallels” between the sordid machinations in the capital and “the election contest between Alun Michael and Rhodri Morgan for the leadership of the party in Wales” (November 19).
Morgan, the popular choice of ordinary Welsh Labour Party members, was stitched up by the control-obsessed Labour Party centre. “Morgan won every democratic vote in the Welsh Labour movement, but lost the rigged election” - as Nick Cohen puts it in The Observer (November 21). However, the resulting disillusionment of members and Labour’s electoral base was not long in being expressed. Labour in Wales won 54% of the vote in the 1997 general election. In the 1998 assembly contest, its support slumped to a third of the votes cast. Blair’s imposed candidate - Alun Michael - now leads a minority government in Cardiff and even has to make semi-nationalist speeches about the future of devolution in order to secure Plaid Cymru support for his shaky administration.
Dobson would not fare much better. The popular perception of him as an imposed stooge will not dissipate for most Londoners, even with the campaigning period now lengthened to allow him to gather some sort of credibility - perhaps space for contempt to breed a form of familiarity. Dobson was even struggling to keep pace with Jeffrey Archer before the public disgrace and subsequent fall of the seedy Tory fantasist.
The fragility of Millbank’s hold over the party is confirmed by the problems Blair has been having with even his ‘safe’ candidates. Both Jackson and Dobson have expressed opposition to the crude gerrymandering on show during the selection panel fiasco. Dobson went as far as to announce that he would withdraw if Livingstone were not allowed onto the short list, although this clearly had less to do with a real commitment to democracy: more a basic survival instinct. Obviously, the man did not want to be tainted with the opprobrium of such a blatant stitch-up. Similarly, it is hard to say whether Livingstone’s overtures to Jackson to run as his deputy will be successful. If they were, such a team would be well nigh unassailable.
The furore in London is part of a wider fluidity in mainstream politics. The Labour Party itself has been in a process of change, with a disturbance in the relationship between the bourgeois and working class poles of what is still a bourgeois workers’ party. Despite the Livingstone controversy Labour has been becoming more of an outright bourgeois party over the past period. Indeed, this Livingstone crisis could be an important moment in actually precipitating official Labour cutting its links with the workers’ movement and relaunching itself as a pure ‘third way’ organisation, purged of all its association with trade union politics and state socialism.
However, the very fact of Livingstone’s challenge and the huge problems it is causing Blair underlines that this process is not yet complete, no matter what a sect like the Socialist Party has to tell us in order to justify its own relatively recent departure from Labour. The SP reckons 80% of trade union members would vote Livingstone given the chance. His success “will show an enormous union revolt against Blair and his policies”, The Socialist correctly notes (November 19). So why does the SP leadership not openly and unambiguously call for a Livingstone vote if he manages to beat Millbank and secure official nomination?
In the red-baiting article in the London Evening Standard of November 15, the political commentator Peter Kellner comments that the Communist Party supports the candidacy of Livingstone in service of our real agenda - “wrecking the [Labour] Party”. He is quite right. A Livingstone challenge for London mayor contains that potential. It poses the possibility of a mass political movement either breaking to the left from Labour, or perhaps provoking the expressly bourgeois wing of the party to kick out the left. Either way, the flux created would offer the opportunity for communists to intervene, to fight for the labour movement to assume very different political forms from the past.
This is what must dictate our tactics. While our strategic aim of overcoming Labourism remains constant, by definition tactics employed to achieve this will be infinitely flexible. If they are not, frankly they stop being tactics. Thus, some of our critics featured in recent letters - members as well as friends of the Party - are very wide of the mark when they suggest that our backing of Livingstone is a “flip”, an about-turn designed to support the Labour Party so beloved of much of the rest of the left until very recently.
For instance, Michael Farmer (Weekly Worker November 11) asks if we will now “support ‘critically’ any other Labour left mouthing some socialist-sounding platitudes who manages to get some support”. We can easily turn the tables on comrade Farmer by concretising the question.
We are faced not with a dream scenario where an abstract ‘left’ Labourite has “some support”. The active majority of the rank and file of the Labour Party in London are revolting against Blairism - the form that the expressly pro-capitalist pole of this bourgeois workers’ party currently takes. Beyond that, the incipient rebellion strikes a chord with mass democratic sentiments in wider society and - crucially - with militant transport unions in the capital, some of whom are already seriously considering standing GLA candidates against Blair’s nominees.
Mass discontent and restlessness has found a hero in the form of Ken Livingstone, a man with a long history on the left of the party. Conscious of this, the right of the party has thrown everything but the kitchen sink at the man to prevent him from standing. Paradoxically, this blatant gerrymandering and manipulation has probably increased his support, as tens of thousands, possibly millions across the country, have found themselves alienated from New Labour’s contempt for democracy.
It is these concrete - and potentially highly favourable - conditions which dictate our support for Livingstone. A vote for Livingstone is a revolt against Blairism. It is the job of communists to intervene vigorously to push such a rebellion forward, while at the same time exposing the limitations of Livingstone’s reformist politics. Another phrase for the same process is to merge the communist programme with a mass movement in society. The alternative is to reduce communists to stallholders for passive propaganda for socialism and communism.
The situation is thus qualitatively different to the general election of 1997. Our opposition to Labour then - including to those on its left who refused to differentiate themselves from the programme of Blairism - was absolutely correct. People did not vote for New Labour as an act of elementary rebellion against the explicitly pro-capitalist wing of the workers’ movement and the damage the market is inflicting on them, their families and communities. The illusions that filled people’s heads in 1997 were mainstream bourgeois illusions - that Blair and Labour would be ‘better’ than the Tories, or perhaps that they ‘could not be as bad’. In other words, they were an expression of the standard cycle of illusion and disillusion that dictate the alternation of governmental parties in the ‘normal’ model of a two-party capitalist system. The United States provides a good example of this Tweedledum-Tweedledee safety valve which serves the system of capitalism so admirably.
The illusions that Livingstone articulates and personifies are left-leaning and express an alienation from Blairism. This alone dictates that our attitude to them must be more sympathetic, more partisan. Communists in the capital will intervene energetically in any Livingstone candidacy for mayor. We will fight to take any movement it precipitates way beyond the politics of ‘Red Ken’.
Mark Fischer