19.07.2006

Come back and fight (and vote)

John McDonnell's decision to contest the Labour leadership opens up opportunities for the left, writes Graham Bash of Labour Left Briefing

Readers of my occasional Weekly Worker column will be pleased to hear that I was considerably cheered up last week when John McDonnell announced his intention to mount a campaign for the leadership of the Labour Party. So the tone this time may have an uncharacteristically upbeat feel to it. Or perhaps cautiously upbeat might be more accurate.

Many on the right wing of the party and outside it will not regard a McDonnell challenge as serious. They are obsessed with the lifeless parliamentary arithmetic that dictates that any contender for leader when a vacancy arises (probably some time next year) needs the initial support of at least 44 Labour MPs. But this is to confuse the end of the process with its starting point.

What John is doing is to campaign throughout the movement - in the constituencies and in the trade unions - both for basic socialist policies and to put pressure on Labour members of parliament to support him when the moment comes next year. This is a chance for the Labour left at long last to raise its head above the parapet and make itself visible again.

Indeed, if John had not made this move, you could well ask whether there was any point in being in the party at all. If there were to be no socialist campaign to replace New Labour, and to prevent a seamless coronation of Gordon Brown, the project would be dead in all but name.

I have long taken the view that this is not simply an 'ordinary' crisis of the party - of the sort we have seen many times historically, where the right takes control and attacks the working class. This has been the normal state of affairs for most of the party's history, after all. New Labour, as I never tire of arguing, is different from its rightwing predecessors and represents a qualitative break in the direction of destroying the class base of the party.

If there were simply a coronation of Brown - without even an attempt to mount a left challenge - this would be yet another nail, possibly a final nail, in the coffin of not only the Labour left, but also the Labour Party as a class party. John's brave attempt to raise the banner of core Labour and socialist values is either the beginning of the fightback or, if it makes little impact, the beginning of the end for the Labour Party itself.

Whatever happens in the next year or so, I am confident that the voice of the working class in this country - despite the huge defeats we have suffered over the last generation - cannot be entirely silenced. If indeed this period turns out to be the end of 100 years of history, then our task as socialists in the British labour movement will have to be to start all over again and rebuild a new party of the working class. We cannot even begin to go along that road, however, while the remnants of the existing Labour Party still exist.

John's decision to stand represents the type of leadership we have desperately needed for quite some time. This is a year-long campaign to get the 44 MPs' votes needed to mount a challenge. If he were successfully nominated that would be some achievement in itself, but I also think that there is every prospect that in any eventual ballot the size of John's vote could surprise comrades.

You must remember that it is an electoral college that chooses the leader. When this was first created, it was composed of 40% trade unions, 30% constituency parties and 30% MPs. This has now been changed to a third for each of the component elements. It would not be easy for John to get a significant vote from the parliamentary section - but it would be up to us in the ranks of the movement to put pressure on our parliamentary representatives.

But the trade union section would be different. He would have every chance of getting substantial support, especially if it were a simple run-off against Gordon Brown. This would give us the opportunity to campaign in key unions such as the Transport and General, the AEU, GMB and Unison - all of which must hold a ballot to pick a candidate.

In terms of the leaderships of the major unions, I would hope that at least some would be sympathetic to a McDonnell candidature. But where that is not the case and unions are led by people whose loyalty is ultimately to the New Labour machine rather than to their own union's policies, even then our task must be to circumvent them, to pitch our appeal to the base of movement and ensure the union is guided by the views of its members, not simply the machinations of its leaders.

Having said that, I would hope that there are some leaders who will actually bite the bullet and actively campaign against New Labour and Brown and for a McDonnell challenge. But that will require pressure from the rank and file - and that's our task.

Obviously, such a McDonnell-Brown contest would be the best possible scenario for the left. Brown has clearly given up any pretence of being a leftwing alternative to Blair. In fact, he was at pains to stress his loyalty to nearly all of Blair's policies - his recent support for Trident is just the latest example - and it would be practically impossible for some trade unions who might prefer to back Brown rather than John to argue that he was anything other than a Blairite with old Labour packaging.

The hard work will be getting John on the nomination paper. That is what the campaign over the next year or so will be all about. It has to be a very open, diverse campaign, representing not only the existing Labour Party and trade union movement, but also those who have left the party in despair and disillusionment and - above all - those who in the last generation have been alienated from the political process as a whole and who have not found a political party to represent them.

So our constituency in this campaign must be huge. It must encompass not just those who have fallen away from the party in disgust at New Labour's betrayals, but also those many hundreds of thousands who found their natural home on those historic anti-war demonstrations, who are in the anti-globalisation movements and are active in the various ecological campaigns.

John's campaign has to be - and I am confident it will be - a combination of a very simple political message opposing all the fundamentals of New Labour and advancing basic socialist alternatives and, at the same time, an appeal to the political diversity of people outside the ranks of the traditional Labour left. The first stage in this vital campaign for the soul of our party is the Labour Representation Committee conference on Saturday July 22 (see 'Action' column for details). I appeal to comrades to come to that conference, to rejoin the party and get involved in the fight, as it moves onto a higher level with this important initiative from John McDonnell.

Of course, I confidently expect Labour Left Briefing to throw its authority and any organisational muscle we have behind the McDonnell campaign - indeed, let me just say that it had better do so!