16.05.2007

Labour left in crisis

Jack Conrad and Jim Moody comment on John McDonnell's failure to get onto the ballot paper for the Labour leadership election

As expected, Gordon Brown is to be crowned the next Labour leader and therefore become prime minister on June 27. There is to be no election. On May 16 John McDonnell conceded that it was mathematically impossible for him to even get on the ballot paper. Despite tirelessly campaigning up and down the country for 10 months comrade McDonnell fell well short of garnering the necessary 45 nominations from fellow Labour MPs.

Talking to the media, McDonnell did the usual routine and warmly congratulated Brown. But there was, thankfully, a barb. McDonnell expressed his bitter disappointment on behalf of ordinary Labour Party members, rightly branding the coronation a "blow to democracy". Labour's parliamentary grandees and the whole rotten system of ministerial patronage has ensured that trade unions and rank and file members have no say in who is to be their leader. It is easy to understand why the leadership did not want a vote.

On Saturday May 12, The Guardian carried a letter signed by a whole array of Labour Party members, councillors, NEC members, trade unionists, activists, community workers and campaigners, which stated: "We believe that a coronation of Gordon Brown that excludes party members and trade unionists from having a say will be inconsistent with the proud democratic traditions of our party." Is this the tradition which saw Labour ministers and governments contemptuously ignore conference and NEC votes?

Leave that aside. If McDonnell had managed to get on the ballot paper he would have embarrassed Brown by showing the strength of leftwing sentiment at a rank and file level. According to Sky News political editor Adam Boulton, "Mr McDonnell could probably count on a respectable 30% of the trade union and constituency votes if he does stand" (http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30000-1265496,00.html).

That was not something the Labour establishment wanted. The same cannot be said about the CPGB and the Weekly Worker. If McDonnell had got his name on the ballot paper, then that would have unleashed a nationwide debate. The Labour machine would have had to organise 10 hustings around the country ahead of a special conference, which was to have been in Manchester on June 24, when the new leader would have been formally named.

We would have energetically intervened at every meeting and sought to inject democratic politics into the McDonnell programme: a democratic republic, proportional representation, a single-chamber parliament, abolishing the standing army and replacing it with a system of people's militias, self-determination for Scotland and Wales, disestablishing the Church of England, health and other services to delivered according to the principle of need, workers' control over hiring and firing, etc. That would have helped to revitalise and, just as importantly, reorientate the whole of the left in Britain.

There is, of course, more to the Brown coronation than a lack of democracy. The failure of the John for Leader campaign throws the organised Labour left into crisis. No official spin from the McDonnell or any other leftwing camp can hide it.

The 24-strong Campaign Group of MPs revealed itself badly divided and without any serious parliamentary purchase. There are insiders who bitterly complain that the entire McDonnell campaign was a mistake from the beginning, foisted on them by an over-ambitious individual and a small clique of Trotskyites. Even now there are voices to be heard saying 'Never again'.

The left-speaking leaders of affiliated trade unions certainly showed themselves to be cowardly windbags. Neither Derek Simpson, Tony Woodley, Dave Prentis, nor any of the other general secretaries of the big unions were prepared to back McDonnell. Instead they grovellingly look for little crumbs coming from prime minister Brown's table. Doubtless he will be treat them with contempt.

As for the plans of the rival sects, fronts and publications dedicated to the 'reclaim the Labour Party' project, they are in tatters. All of them over-hyped the chances of the McDonnell campaign - 'The 45 nominations are in the bag', 'The launch of the Meacher leadership bid is doing us a favour', etc, etc. True, there were those who joined, or rejoined, the Labour Party in order to support McDonnell. But today many of them are in despair. They were not told the truth. They were fed on empty promises. A steady trickle will quietly leave the Labour Party over the coming weeks and months.

Respect, the Campaign for a New Workers' Party and the myriad other halfway house projects are jockeying to welcome them. Though they all publicly express heartfelt regret at McDonnell's lack of success, in private they are cock-a-hoop. They see the end of the McDonnell campaign as, variously, proof that the Labour Party (a) has betrayed its working class heritage, (b) is thoroughly capitalist, (c) is dead as a site of intervention, (d) is a diversion from the real struggle.

However, perversely, their 'alternative' is to create another, albeit an ideal, Labour Party mark two. A hopeless and altogether useless perspective. Of course, the fact of the matter is that, while Labour governments, including Tony Blair's, delivered concessions to the working class, especially its better off, better organised, sections, the Labour Party - because it relies on using the existing state, because it embodies the subordination of the labour movement to the national interest - was from its origins an organisation which loyally served capitalism at home and abroad.

Less than a year ago John McDonnell was issuing warnings along similar lines. A "turning point has been reached", he solemnly announced. The future of the Labour Party was about to be decided. In the past, he claimed, "the battle within the Labour Party" was about how it spoke and acted "on behalf of our movement". New Labour poses a different question: is the party "capable of representing the movement at all"? (Foreword to G Bash and A Fischer 100 years of Labour nd, p4).

Obviously McDonnell presented himself as the true saviour and his leadership campaign as the solution. Neither being the case, some halfway housers are banking on the left cleaving away from the Labour Party in the manner of the Independent Labour Party of 1931. It will not happen. Certainly not in the short term. The ILP disaffiliated in the most exceptional circumstances. Under the impact of a huge and destabilising world slump prime minister Ramsay MacDonald and the leading members of the Labour cabinet had just established a national government alongside the Tories and Liberals. As for the ILP, it quickly spiralled into decline, split, lost its MPs and finally winked out of existence altogether.

The left and the right in the Labour Party are organically tied. The Labour left always generates hope in the next Labour government, the next leadership contest. And it is doomed to always be disappointed. That is its nature. Moreover, the nearer the Labour left itself gets to power, the more it speaks and acts like the right. After all, it too is committed to using the existing state and defending the national interest.

In the final days of the McDonnell campaign we saw such a worrying drift. The deal with the former Blairite cabinet minister, Michael Meacher, was seen as both tactically astute and necessary if the numbers were ever to be made to stack up. But this went hand in hand with unprincipled political concessions. McDonnell began to play to the right. An unwelcome decision.

Meacher, who declared his candidacy in February, agreed to stand down and urge his supporters to give their nominations to McDonnell. He could only gather around 20 MPs and was under intense pressure from the left. But to get his supporters onside McDonnell felt compelled to put on display his capitalist realism.

This was seen at last Saturday's hustings jointly organised by Labour Against the War, Labour CND, and Labour Action for Peace in London. Meacher and McDonnell both spoke.

Understandably the former was given short shrift. When asked why he did not leave the government over Iraq, he drew the humility card, declaring it was "overwhelmingly the worst political mistake in my life ... I was fundamentally wrong." Not the best recommendation for someone seeking high office, as a subsequent questioner pointed out. He got zero hustings votes.

However, as a measure of how far McDonnell was prepared to go to attract the 'middle ground', he spoke in favour of linking up with "progressive Democrats" in the US in order to "start setting a date for withdrawal" from Iraq. A significantly different position from what he said quite clearly only a few months ago, when he was one of the few MPs bold enough to call for immediate withdrawal from Iraq.

McDonnell then went out of his way to praise the rightwing Labour Party leader, John Smith. He united left and right in a broad church. Oh what heavenly days. McDonnell was therefore busily appealing to the right and backtracking. Frankly, we should expect just that from lefts who are committed to unity with the right in the name of promoting British national interests.