20.01.2011

Cuts and rebuilding

Unison Labour Link activist Stan Keable reports on the Labour Representation Committee's AGM

“No cuts at all, no privatisations at all” - that is how John McDonnell MP set the militant mood of the Labour Representation Committee’s annual conference in London on Saturday January 15. Describing the coalition government’s austerity programme as an all-out attack on the working class, using capitalism’s systemic crisis as the excuse to eradicate the entire post-World War II welfare state, he called for mass struggle “using all the means at our disposal” to bring down the government, combined with a fight to democratise the Labour Party and transform it into a real party of the working class.

“There is a left within the Labour Party, and it is the LRC - no matter what others call themselves,” he said. “It is this organisation that has consistently campaigned for socialism within the party.” And with a 25% increase during 2010, individual membership is over the 1,000 mark and rising. Local groups are being formed around the country, and - for the first time this year - are directly represented on the national committee.

Comrade McDonnell outlined the futility of limiting the party to electoral politics: “We can await the next general election, win the occasional by-election and cheer. But whilst that is happening we will be seeing the end of the welfare state, the end of council housing, the privatisation of the national health service, the withdrawal of free education from this generation. Yes, we will work for the election of a Labour government, but we will be mobilising to bring this government down.”

Although several platform speakers had been advertised - veteran Tony Benn, Christine Blower (NUT), Matt Wrack (FBU), Jeremy Corbyn MP and student leader Clare Solomon - I am pleased to report that their speeches were short, and the conference was not reduced to a mere rally.

Unprepared

The Fire Brigades Union, which disaffiliated from the Labour Party in 2004, is one of four national trade unions affiliated to the LRC (along with Aslef, the BFAWU and CWU). FBU general secretary Matt Wrack, one of its two delegates on the LRC national committee, told the conference a reduced fire service budget will increase the fire risk to property and people, and described the “horrifying” cuts as “a general attack on our class … This is not a war on the poor - it is a war on the majority.” He described his frustration at how “woefully ill-prepared” our class is - the official movement, the left and the anti-cuts organisations. The official labour movement leadership, he said, “lacks a challenge to the basis of the cuts”, only arguing that they should be less deep and less quick. The FBU “rejects the cuts agenda completely”.

The fragmentation of the left is laughable, he said. The Life of Brian scene is funny because it is true: ‘The only people we hate more than the Romans are the fuckin’ Judean People’s Front ... Splitters!’ And the anti-cuts movement is riven with division and sectarianism. “I am fed up with being presented with faits accomplis: “We have created a campaign: will you put your name to it?” What is needed is a “genuine, viable, democratic mass movement against the cuts … There is a huge thirst for the idea of coordinated industrial action”.

Councillors were in short supply at the conference, and the only one to speak was ‘anti-cuts but cutting’ councillor Charlynne Pullen from Islington - who received a remarkably tolerant hearing, laced with some muted hostile heckling. Pullen had joined the LRC before she joined the Labour Party, and became a councillor last May, when Islington borough council had been won back from the Liberal Democrats. There is now a 35-strong Labour group and only 13 Lib Dem councillors. The Labour group was “campaigning against the government’s cuts”, playing a prominent part in the local anti-cuts campaign, helping to mobilise the local community for the TUC’s March 26 demo - but implementing a cuts budget, while “trying to do good things”. They have brought the cleansing contract in-house, for example, and are paying the ‘Living Wage’. “If we vote against the cuts today,” she said, secretary of state for communities and local government “Eric Pickles will write our budget tomorrow”.

Although the next speaker, LRC treasurer and Labour Briefing stalwart Graham Bash, was “pleased the councillor spoke” and praised her “bravery” in speaking up, he replied well to her argument that ‘Labour cuts are better than Tory cuts’, pointing to “the political price we pay by taking political responsibility for the cuts”. The LRC does not have “a sole orientation to the Labour Party”, he said. We are committed to developing the class struggle, but “the class struggle needs political representation”. If we fail to transform Labour, then “we face the more difficult task of creating a new party”. Having thus - quite correctly, in my view - located the fight to transform Labour within the class struggle, comrade Bash went on to join the attack on motion 10, which sought to downplay the importance of the struggle within Labour.

The ‘no cuts, no privatisations’ policy was endorsed in resolution 9 on council cuts, moved by former Lambeth council leader comrade Ted Knight on behalf of the Croydon and Crystal Palace branch of the Unite union. Labour councillors must not allow themselves to become “local agents of this anti-working class coalition government”, he argued. In order to “be able to join and strengthen local anti-cuts actions” they should refuse to implement cuts budgets and “refuse to vote for a single cut”. There is no surcharge facing them, as there was in his day. And we cannot build a campaign on the slogan, ‘A Labour cut is a better cut’. “If they choose not to join us, the movement will sweep them aside.”

Students

Students played an invigorating role among the nearly 300, mostly middle-aged activists present in London’s Conway Hall. Two student activists heavily involved in the recent demonstrations and college occupations topped the poll for the 16 individual members’ seats on the national committee: Mary Partington with 118 votes, and Owen Jones with 103 (out of 158 ballot papers cast).

Expressing his concern at the punitive sentences being handed down to activists by the courts to scare others away from direct action, LRC chair comrade McDonnell said that “the students have demonstrated that we have been on our knees too long”. And towards the end of the day, student leader Clare Solomon came away from the first national committee meeting of the Coalition of Resistance to tell us about the London Student Assembly which meets every Sunday with about 200 activists present, and to ask us to mobilise workers to join the student demonstrations - starting on Wednesday January 19 - and not leave them to face police violence and kettling alone. The fight for free education, against tuition fees and to defend the education maintenance allowance is everybody’s business. The lecturers’ University and College Union came in for particular praise from comrade McDonnell for coming out so forthrightly to demonstrate alongside the students.

So it seems most appropriate that motion 13, on “trade unions and the Labour Party”, should be moved by the youngest speaker of the day, Callum Williamson, on behalf of Communist Students. The motion, which after some controversy was carried with a small minority against, calls for the LRC to campaign for the full involvement of trade unions and trade unionists in the Labour Party, as well as opening up party democracy to the whole of our class by removing the bans and proscriptions which exclude “communists, revolutionary socialist and left groups” from the party.

Focusing on the task of “uniting the workers’ movement and transforming the Labour Party into an organisation fit for class struggle”, comrade Williamson argued that political differences are no obstacle to unity. “Discussions on programme and strategy are best conducted in the same organisation rather than from afar in a sectarian manner … For the left to carry on in the way it is behaving now amounts to suicide and will condemn us to defeat.”

Surprisingly, while no-one spoke against the removal of bans and proscriptions, point one of the motion - “The LRC will campaign for all trade unions to affiliate to the Labour Party” - was contested by LRC activists in the Public and Commercial Services union (PCS), members of PCS Labour Left. They seem to have been swayed by the Socialist Party in England and Wales, which dominates the leadership of that union. How strange that a ‘Labour left’ organisation does not support affiliation! One University and College Union comrade announced that “we in the UCU pride ourselves on being non-affiliated”, while Barnet trades council secretary Austin Harney said he “would be lynched” if he proposed affiliation to Labour in his union. Comrade Harney then launched into an anti-Labour diatribe, listing the sins of the last government and arguing that unions should not support Labour until Labour changed its tune. A self-defeating strategy, unfortunately, and contrary to the theme of the conference, which was convened under the slogan ‘Resist the cuts, rebuild the party’.

The PCS, of course, has never been affiliated to Labour, but the Peter Taaffe leadership of SPEW is still pursuing its futile Campaign for a New Workers’ Party, attempting to create another ‘old Labour’ party in parallel, and in competition, with the real thing. This is a silly aim. Having been hounded out of the Labour Party by Neil Kinnock, SPEW (formally Militant) has tailored its theory to match its practice, deceiving itself that Labour has lost its organic links with the working class, is no longer a bourgeois workers’ party, but is just another bourgeois party, in essence no different to the Tories or Lib Dems. Now that things have so obviously changed, and the prospects for the Labour left are on the rise, I hope we will see the SPEW comrades thinking again and joining us in the fight to transform Labour.

The RMT union under Bob Crow’s leadership dared to back the Scottish Socialist Party and was expelled for its sins. We must fight for the RMT to be re-admitted. It is not impossible - after all, Ken Livingstone rebelled against Blair, who was subsequently forced to reinstate the then London mayor.

The FBU, on the other hand, walked out of the party in protest. Understandable, but mistaken. United we stand, divided we fall. We must persuade the firefighters to rejoin and add their weight to the fight within.

As comrade Williamson quite rightly said in his reply to the discussion on motion 13, “Until the leftwing unions engage with Labour, it will be difficult to break the right wing’s hold on the leadership.”

Party

The conference slogan ‘Rebuild the Party’ turned out to be the focus of the sharpest conflict of the day, continuing an earlier national committee debate in which the minority, wanting to put the emphasis on the burgeoning anti-cuts movement, argued for ‘Rebuild the movement’ instead. The battle was initiated when comrade Owen Jones sharply condemned motion 10, saying that the LRC “must stand for the return of a Labour government” and must fight within the Labour Party - as well as working with all those outside the party who are fighting the cuts, etc.

I must confess that, at first, I found the heat generated in this debate surprising, as speakers on both sides, for and against motion 10, emphasised that they favoured struggle both inside and outside the party. Moving the motion, Nick Toms of Lambeth and Southwark LRC had spoken about the divided anti-cuts movement, and how one left group must not impose its politics on the movement. Non-controversial, in this conference at least.

But after comrade Jones opened fire nine more speakers joined the attack, including a number of heavyweights. After Jenny Lennox (Walthamstow) came Permanent Revolution’s George Binette, who asked the movers to withdraw the offending last three paragraphs. Then Jon Rogers, leader of the left caucus on Unison’s NEC, followed by Peter Keenleyside, who announced that the Communication Workers Union, which he represented, would have to leave the LRC if motion 10 were carried. Then there was joint LRC secretary Peter Firmin of Labour Briefing, who claimed the motion downgraded Labour Party matters, making them the private business of individuals, not the concern of the LRC.

It was LRC vice-chair Susan Press who had proposed the alternative slogan, ‘Rebuild the movement’, on the national committee, and who now described the conflict as a “false dichotomy”. But then comrade Simeon Andrews (who romped home onto the NC with 81 votes) gave the motion the kiss of death by announcing that he did not want to “transform” the Labour Party, but to “replace” it. And, sure enough, when I checked his election address, there it was in black and white: “… we need a movement that can not only bring down the coalition government, but can lay the foundations for a new party which can once again represent the interests and aspirations of the people.”

The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty’s John Moloney described the LRC as a bridge between the movement and the Labour Party, and implied - wrongly, in my view - that those who opposed motion 10 wanted to “destroy the bridge” and concentrate solely on the party. Fellow AWLer Martin Thomas disagreed with him, and spoke strongly against the motion himself. It not surprising that there are divisions in the social-imperialist AWL. A few years ago AWL tops were insisting that democracy in the Labour Party had been “concreted over”. Now its apparatus at least has changed its mind - good.

Motion 10 was defeated by a two-to-one vote. In truth the comrades opposing motion 10 were not downplaying the burgeoning mass anti-cuts movement, but emphasising that to be victorious it must be channelled into the fight to unite the left and to transform the Labour Party into a political alternative, a real party of the working class.

The lack of clarity about the nature of the alternative working class politics which are required, and about how capitalism is to be overcome, is a weakness which must be addressed. This fuzziness reflects the fact that the LRC brings together a mix of comrades ranging from electoralist reformists to Marxists of various hues.