16.03.2000

Livingstone factor

Kate Ford, candidate on the LSA's PR slate and a member of Workers Power, gave her name to this interview with the Weekly Worker. Like the SWP and Candy Udwin, WP comrades asked for the questions well in advance - so this is a very considered response. Unlike the SWP, however, WP did not refuse to answer any questions

Can you tell us about your record in the labour, trade union and workers' movement?

I have been a revolutionary socialist for nearly 20 years. I work on the editorial board of Workers Power. I was active in the Leicester Miners' Support Committee during the great strike of 1984-85, working closely with the 'Dirty 30' - the minority of striking miners in the Leicestershire coalfield. When I moved to London I fought against rate-capping and the abolition of the GLC inside and outside the Labour Party, campaigning for illegal, deficit budgets and strike action against the Tory-imposed cuts.

I have been a teacher in Hackney for 14 years, always active in the NUT. A former president of my teachers' association, I am currently the associate secretary.

I have been involved in the many campaigns around education in Hackney à° fighting the closure of Hackney Downs School, boycotting the Tory-imposed SATs, defending jobs of section 11 teachers, successfully opposing the deportation of a teacher at my school, Rabi ul-Islam, and three Angolan pupils.

I have also been involved in pro-choice campaigns. I have a long-standing record of solidarity work with east European workers à° now the brunt of a racist media and Labour-led campaign.

How do you view the London Socialist Alliance?

The work around the elections that the alliance has carried out is a positive development. But I think the reason it has made such a splash is the political context of the London elections - the Livingstone factor, if you like. Simply having an alliance of left groups on its own is not going to conjure up mass support for socialist politics. But agreeing to fight the elections together through the alliance, in a situation where thousands upon thousands of people are genuinely fed up with New Labour's manoeuvring against Livingstone, has given us the opportunity to organise real opposition to Blair. Providing we use the election campaign to really build support for the workers in struggle - like the South West Train workers - to prove to the youth in the anti-capitalist movement that revolutionary socialism is the way to fight capitalism, to link up with the anti-racist struggles taking place, and so on, then the LSA can be a positive means of taking forward the resistance to Blair and the bosses.

What is your view of the LSA platform?

I think it is too limited. Workers Power believes that any programme purporting to be socialist should not only say what we are against - the tendency of the platform at the moment - but what we are for. I think telling people what we are for involves more than just a catchy slogan or two. We need to show that workers, by their own struggles and through their own organisations, can lay the basis for an alternative to capitalism and fight in the here and now for that alternative. For example, the LSA programme is against police racism and corruption and calls for disarming the police. A worker would be quite justified in asking us - what is your alternative and how are you going to disarm them? The platform doesn't answer these questions.

Workers Power say that a real socialist programme on the police would spell out the need for picket lines, anti-capitalist youth and the communities who bear the brunt of police racism to organise their own physical defence against a police force that always and under all circumstances under capitalism will attack them. These organisations will be the means of disarming the police - and they lay the basis for a totally different means of running society, one in which the mass of people themselves, through their own defence organisations, can run their own communities free from the repressive rule of an outside police force.

Why has Workers Power agreed to stand on this platform despite your differences with it?

First, for the reason I explained above. That is, the LSA has the potential to act as a focus for the mass anger with Blair. It would be real sectarianism to stand aside from such a development - involving living forces - simply because we felt the programme was inadequate.

Second, as you know, we fought for our own version of the programme. When that was defeated inside the LSA we accepted that, provided there was no restriction on individual organisations presenting their own programme in their own name (which there isn't). There is nothing unprincipled about being part of an electoral bloc.

The platform is inadequate, but its limited demands are supportable. We do actually agree with most demands; we just don't think they're enough in the fight to secure a decent life for all: for that we'll need a revolution.

How do you see the LSA developing in the interests of the working class?

That depends on how successful the campaign is at mobilising and organising real forces inside the labour movement. At the moment we're concentrating on making sure it does this in the run up to May 4.

Workers Power did not participate in the aborted LSA bloc for the June 1999 EU elections, yet by August 1999 you signalled your intention to play a full part in the 2000 elections. However, you called for the LSA to be a 'united front', not an 'alliance', which WP seemed to imply would be unprincipled. Which of the two categories do you think the LSA now falls under, and is there any real difference between the LSA of 1999 and 2000?

The EU elections were a fiasco from the point of view of the LSA. Not only was the LSA platform weaker; the alliance was split on the key issue facing European workers à° opposition to Nato's bombardment of Serbia. That's why we called on workers to spoil their ballots. But, vitally, there were no serious forces rallied around the LSA banner. As I explained above, we felt the Livingstone factor was going to change all that in terms of the 2000 elections, and that has proved to be the case. For us, this is always the key test - are real forces breaking with Labour?

On the alliance versus united front, what we wanted to make clear - and perhaps we weren't clear enough at the time - is that we don't believe the LSA or any other socialist alliance is a party alternative to Labour. We firmly believe that we need a revolutionary party and alliances are no substitute for that. However, that doesn't preclude cooperation between different groups in particular situations (a united front).

What we wanted to make clear is that for us - given the range of forces involved in the LSA - we are not dressing the LSA up as something it isn't: a new party, or the nucleus of a new party. It is a bloc between different groups. Now while you may be clear that it isn't a party, there are many people who are not so clear and actually see alliances as an alternative to a revolutionary party.

Actually, I think the LSA is probably best described - in its current form - as an electoral bloc, united on a minimal programme and within which the constituent parts can make clear what their own positions are and what sort of party they want. That is why, time and again, you'll hear me saying I want to build a revolutionary party. The extent to which the LSA can play a positive role in building such a party is being decided at the moment, as they say, in struggle.

This is the first time WP has contested elections since it came into existence. Previously, with a couple of exceptions in 1997, you always called for workers to vote Labour. Has the Labour Party ceased to be a bourgeois workers' party in your view? If not, to be consistent, shouldn't we still vote for it?

Your history is wrong. We have called for workers to vote against Labour in a number of cases - for example in the Walton by-election in the early 1990s we called for a vote for the 'Real Labour' candidate, Lesley Mahmood (a supporter of Militant). There are other examples from the 1979 election on.

However, to answer your main points. Labour is clearly still a bourgeois workers' party. Only an idiot or a sectarian could fail to conclude that after the Livingstone affair. The working class made its presence felt with a vengeance (look at the votes for Livingstone in the FBU, the TGWU, the London Labour Party, etc). Of course Blair has ignored the votes of the workers - that tells us that the bourgeois side of the equation in the party is on the rampage and is, as we have been saying for a very long time now, desperate to free itself from the influence of the organised working class that can still be felt inside the party. Blair himself has said often enough that he would prefer the split with the Liberals never to have taken place to indicate that the man wants to reshape the party and transform it.

But the point is he hasn't yet succeeded. There is still a struggle going on (and the Livingstone affair will probably remain part of that struggle in the months to come). We are not neutral in that struggle. We fight Blair's attempt to destroy the remaining influence of the working class over the Labour Party.

But because something is a bourgeois workers' party does not mean that you are always obliged to vote for it in elections. You will not find us saying that anywhere. The key question is the attitude of the great majority of the working class itself. Where workers clearly see that party as theirs, as their alternative to the open parties of the bosses, then it is frequently necessary to unite with them at the ballot box (ie, vote Labour) in order to put what they see as their leaders, their representatives, to the test. The failure to do this strengthens reformism because it can hide its real nature while it's in opposition.

But there are circumstances when there can be no such unity at the ballot box. In Walton the working class was in sharp conflict with the local rightwing Labour leadership who were attacking council jobs and services. Meanwhile the rightwingers used bureaucratic means to impose Peter Kilfoyle as a candidate in the by-election. Thousands of workers were up in arms about this. In other words, real forces were breaking from Labour to the left. In those circumstances it is perfectly legitimate to not vote for Labour, even though you still regard it as a bourgeois workers' party. This categorisation of the party is not a guide to electoral tactics. Its concrete relationship to the working class in each and every election is the starting point for deciding tactics.

In retrospect do you now think it was wrong to have advocated a Labour vote in 1997? How, specifically, has Labour aided a working class fightback?

No, we were right. We wouldn't be in the position we are in now - of thousands of workers backing Livingstone against Labour - if we hadn't put them to the test of office. The fact that Labour promised change, but delivered attacks, strengthens our argument for a revolutionary break with reformism. It helps expose them to ever greater numbers of workers, workers who, if they hadn't voted in a Labour government, would still be nurturing illusions in Blair as their saviour from the Tories.

In the past WP stated that it would be correct to vote for left candidates standing on a reformist programme only if they had a mass base. But surely the LSA is standing on a reformist programme without such a base?

So, you were saving the trick question for the end!

If you've gleaned anything from what I've being saying, it's this: the Livingstone factor, whether or not he was selected as official candidate (and we always estimated that the Millbank mob would work out some way of blocking him), was always going to create mass ferment. That ferment has mobilised thousands around the London elections. While those thousands are not yet backing the LSA (though many are), the split opened up in Labour creates the potential for the LSA to attract mass support.

That potential is important. Relating to it separates the sectarian from the revolutionary. For us it would be sectarian not to try and organise, direct and win over that mass base. Agitating for a vote against Labour and for a positive alternative, in these circumstances, is the only means of doing this. To say we can only decide afterwards if the mass base was real, rather than make an appraisal about the potential and then actively seek to realise it, would be wrong. That is something we have learnt, including by our mistakes, in previous elections and struggles. Having learnt it, we are now applying it in a revolutionary way.