14.05.2008

Labour left looks right

Mark Fischer reports on Labour Left Briefing's AGM

The only real point of (mild) contention at the Labour Briefing AGM on May 10 was enough to see the 60-strong meeting divide into three roughly equal groups. The controversy - such as it was - revolved around the relationship of LB as a journal to the Labour Representation Committee and its central figure, John McDonnell MP.

One motion from the LB editorial board proposed to instruct the incoming Briefing editorial board to “submit a paper to the LRC national committee as a basis for negotiating the establishment of an LRC Briefing”. Despite the fact that this was hardly a demand for an immediate liquidation of Briefing as an independent entity - a “report of the outcome of negotiations” would go to a general meeting which would then decide “whether to proceed or not” - the vote was tied 20-20.

A second motion, from LB production team member Jenny Fischer, took a rather harder stance. While it welcomed the way LB and the LRC “have worked together over the last year”, it urged the AGM to reject the notion that “LB should become the journal of the LRC”. It should “promote and work” with the LRC, of course, but its “independent publication” should continue unchanged.

This divided the conference 19-19, revealing two fairly hard blocs, plus a large number of waverers - a third of those present.

While LB is a numerically small section of the Labour left (its circulation hovers on or around 1,000 per month), the division surely reflects a general disorientation of this section of the party in the aftermath of the May 1 election disaster. This gives the meeting its significance: as the chair put it, it was the “first meeting of a section of the Labour left” since the May 1 meltdown at the polls not simply of Labour, but of more or less all the electoral projects of the extra-Labour left as well.

So, the AGM asked itself, what do we do next?

Richard Price - LB editorial board member and prominent London PCS activist - put the case for a right-leaning “orientation”. The choice was a stark one, he suggested. LB and others could “face left” to work with those outside the ranks of the party; or it could turn towards “the centre-left” (the trend in and around the Compass think tank plus MP Jon Cruddas were specifically mentioned).

“Let’s be real,” the comrade appealed. “Who are the forces around us in Labour?” The answer, he said, was to LB’s right in the shape of “the centre-left”. These were composed of “thousands”, while at best there were “hundreds to our left”. The numbers for any other orientation just did not add up, he suggested. An alliance with the extra-Labour left was simply “unworkable”, given the failure of all of their projects - “with the brief exception of the Scottish Socialist Party”, the comrade conceded.

Presumably something in comrade Price’s orthodox Trotskyist background pricked him to dub this rather miserable perspective as the “ABC of united front politics”, but other comrades who took the same essential line made little attempt to claim anything for it other than expediency. Simon Deville of Walthamstow called on the meeting to break out of its “marginalisation” and look to a “new coalition” with the centre and those who had previously supported New Labour.

London assembly member Murad Qureshi, speaking from the platform at the beginning of the day, went further down this route when he spoke - without contradiction from any section of the meeting - of the need to “marshal a new progressive alliance” across parties in the assembly and the country at large, a manoeuvre he dubbed altogether “cleverer” than the left’s previous go-it-alone efforts. (And, of course, a conscious echo of Ken Livingstone’s Guardian article of May 9: “Following May 1 some people are posing the choice as between moving ‘to the left’ or ‘to the right’. This is not the right question. Labour must place itself at the centre of a progressive alliance that can solve the problems facing the country”).

Tami Peterson - another editorial board member and leading supporter of the Hands Off the People of Iran campaign - took these sorts of arguments to task. In particular, she dubbed the stance of Richard Price in rejecting any working relationship with the left outside Labour as “dangerously wrong”. She had no objection to working with the likes of Compass on areas of mutual concern, but comrades had to “be realistic about the Labour Party” and the prospects that existed for ‘reclaiming’ it.

Similarly, John Rogers of Unison - after citing the poor soundings coming back from his union’s branches about the possibility of industrial action on pay restraint as an antidote to the more overblown talk from some about the state of the movement outside Labour - stated correctly that there was no need for the meeting to counterpose allies in or outside the party. The LRC and LB were in a position to work with both.

Leading figures in LB were pleased overall with the conference - and particularly so seeing that it had completed its business without the type of acrimonious splits that seem de rigueur on much of the rest of the left at the moment. There appears to be a degree of wariness about what is perceived of as the loose, slightly impatient and ‘leftist’ nature of the LRC as presently constituted, but this did not produce any schism.

However, it seems logical for LB to evolve in the direction of the LRC - concerns about becoming a “John McDonnell fan club”, as one comrade put it to me, notwithstanding. Reality must intrude. McDonnell is the undisputed leader of the Labour left; he is a powerful and effective speaker, as he proved again at the beginning of this AGM; potentially, as a personality, a strong point of cohesion for the disparate forces on that wing of the party and - quite frankly - one of the very few positive assets the Labour left actually has.