05.01.2006

Umbilical cord joins New Labour to Cameron's Tories

Graham Bash (Labour Left Briefing) assesses the left's prospects for 2006 - and urges support for an unusual candidate to the new Labour Party NEC

The potential recovery of the Tories under David Cameron is a good starting point in assessing the next 12 months. I believe that Cameron has as much right as Gordon Brown to claim the mantle of Blair’s natural successor.

Some of New Labour’s more odious so-called reforms (such as those proposed for education) could be forced through parliament with Tory votes. It has been argued by some in and around the party that this is positive. It will open space for the Labour left to lead the more mainstream sections of the party against New Labour. It is true that this could help us win some policy arguments. But winning arguments and losing battles is no particular cause for optimism.

As for Blair himself, his position as prime minister and leader of the Labour Party is at least safe until May 4, the day of the local elections. But after that, his fate will depend on the scale of the electoral disaster that is looming for Labour. And there is little doubt that it will be a disaster - the only question is its scale.

The threat to the Labour Party posed by Cameron is a real one. But I don’t think it will intimidate the rising tide of opposition to Blair as an increasingly isolated political figure. Yet, with New Labour in decline and possibly on its way out, the real danger is that there will be a political continuity in anything that succeeds him. This could take the form not only of a Brown leadership for an interim period before the elections, but a Cameron premiership afterwards. I think there is an umbilical cord that links Thatcherism with New Labour and the new Cameron-type Tory politics. All of them represent the direct interest of capital. However, there is a change happening and we would be making a mistake to underestimate the Tory challenge.

I do not believe that at this stage the Tories could win an outright majority at the next elections. But there is every prospect now that Labour could lose its majority. It is possible therefore that the Tories could form the next government as a minority, although this is all speculation, of course.

How would the Labour left behave in the face of a significant Tory revival? I can only hope that it will not toe the line in the party. On the contrary, I think there should be a burning anger over the mess New Labour politics has led us into.

RMT conference

The RMT conference on ‘working class representation’ on January 21 looks very much like being a non-event. The RMT itself is not committed, as I understand it, to supporting any national political alternative to Labour. Nor is it prepared to exclude its branches or regions from supporting alternatives to the Labour Party - and will therefore will not be allowed to re-affiliate. So the RMT very much looks like it has the worst of both worlds. I cannot see that this conference can be anything other than a talking shop.

I very much sympathise with the RMT and its leadership, which is one of the best in the trade union movement. However, it is rather sad to recall the issue that forced it out of the Labour Party. The union supported the Scottish Socialist Party at the last general election - a force that today looks very much in decline and disorientated. The SSP is certainly not capable of mounting a real coherent alternative to seriously challenge Labour. It did not win any parliamentary seats even during the stage of its ascendancy and I can hardly see an electoral breakthrough for it in the coming period.

The brutal truth is that, however difficult things are for the Labour left, there is currently no viable alternative on offer from outside.

Key issues

Walter Wolfgang looks like standing for the constituency section in the elections for the next national executive committee. After his brilliant performance at Labour Party conference (where he was thrown out of the hall after shouting “nonsense” during a speech by Jack Straw), I think he stands a real chance of receiving support from all sections of the party and the Labour left will certainly be supporting him. I do not want to overestimate the meaning of such an election result if it comes - but it would undoubtedly express the scale of dissatisfaction across wide sections of the party.

The key issues in the next 12 months will be the counter-reforms on education and probably on health. If Blair is not forced to retreat, he will almost certainly be able to push through these ‘reforms’ with the help of the Tories. That will be the first step towards coalitionism and government by ‘national consensus’. This would represent a very important moment in Labour’s evolution. After all, it was established in the first place through a political break with the parties of the bourgeoisie - on a recognition that the working class and dispossessed needed a party of their own to represent their distinct interests in contemporary society.

So, while there will certainly be fluidity in the coming period, we are still in a period of defeat. Any opportunities that open up for the left must be seen in this context. Material defeats normally speak louder than a won argument, as Trotsky pointed out to his followers in the aftermath of the crushing defeat of the Chinese revolution in 1927 - and that material reality was what would shape coming events, as the rise and eventual victory of the Stalinist bureaucracy confirmed.

Personal notes

On a personal note, I am just in the process of completing along with another comrade an historical analysis of the Labour Party. As always, the issue for me is the extent to which this party can be a vehicle for socialists; whether anything can be achieved through the existing depleted structures or whether these must be rebuilt or replaced.

This is something that needs constant re-evaluation. Despite all the difficulties and seeming impossibilities of socialist work in the Labour Party, still I cannot see space for an electoral alternative while the trade unions have that organic link to this organisation, weakened and under threat though it is. This is what distinguishes Labour from so many of its European counterparts.

The failure to build viable electoral alternatives to the left is not primarily the result of subjective errors on the part of the extra-Labour left. Instead, it is a function of that objective reality: Labour’s integral link to the organised section of the working class itself. The Weekly Worker’s criticisms of the Socialist Workers Party’s rather shoddy record in the Socialist Alliance as was and in today’s Respect - while perhaps well aimed on occasion - are irrelevant in the broader scheme of things. Such formations could never have succeeded in the first place.

Over the holiday period, I have been reading Robert Fisk’s new book The great war for civilisation: the conquest of the Middle East. It is a magnificent encyclopaedia of the Middle East since World War I. What stands out is Fisk’s moral courage and integrity, and his ability to tell uncomfortable truths.

He is no traditional socialist and in the book he refers to resigning from the National Union of Journalists during the industrial dispute with The Times at the end of the 1980s. His very occasional political naivety is counter-balanced by the brilliant skill of his investigative journalism and his ability to uncover the truth. His searing indictment of US and British imperialism and Israel - and also of the barbarous regimes of Iraq and Iran, the pathetic pretensions of Arafat and the hopeless Oslo agreement - are all reasons why anybody who wants to understand what is going in the Middle East should read this book.

One of the things I admire most about it is that it doesn’t shy away from the truth, whatever the immediate considerations and constraints of today’s political priorities. I think there is lesson there for the wider left. Telling the truth - however uncomfortable that is for us in the short term - is an absolute necessity for effective socialist practice.

I heartily commend both the book and author’s brave method to all left comrades engaged in struggles in 2006.