04.10.2012

CPGB motion: Progress and Aslef’s Labour motion

The following text was unanimously agreed by the September 29 CPGB aggregate

1. The left-led train drivers’ union, Aslef, has submitted a constitutional amendment to the Labour Party conference in Manchester. It would introduce a changed rule 5B and the following reformulation:

“B. Political organisations not affiliated or associated under a national agreement with the party, but who engage in internal activity, shall be required to:

(i) notify the national party of all legally reportable donations received;

(ii) transfer 50% of all donations received beyond the first £25,000 per annum to the national Labour Party.

C. Incorporated organisations that engage in internal activity shall be required to provide upon request all legal, constitutional and financial documentation to the National Executive Committee to ensure that they meet acceptable standards of democracy, governance and transparency. These organisations are expected to abide by the authority of the NEC in such matters.

D. The NEC shall be responsible for the interpretation, implementation and enforcement of these rules.”

2. In the highly unlikely event that this amendment is passed, the new rule could become a doubled-edged sword. A catch-all. Leftwing organisations such as the Labour Representation Committee, the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy and Labour Party Marxists could find themselves targeted. Of course, the Aslef motion is not aimed at the left. It is squarely aimed at Progress. That is the New Labour ‘party within the party’. When considering various tactical options, this should be a central consideration.

3. Progress is mainly, though not exclusively, financed by Lord David Sainsbury. He has donated around £2 million since 2001. That amounts to roughly two-thirds of its total income over the 2001-11 period. And his annual giving has increased considerably since the election of Ed Miliband as Labour leader. So Progress is very well financed. Progress is also very well organised and doing its utmost to promote its people into positions of power and influence. Potential councillors and MPs are provided with one-to-one mentoring, all manner of valuable advice, stepping stones and friends in high places. In short, everything the aspiring careerist requires.

4. Progress has numerous establishment sponsors: eg, Barrow Cadbury Trust, the British Council for School Environments, Brook, DEA, Nationwide, the Parliamentary Committee Against Anti-Semitism, the Police Federation, the Institute for Government, the Open University, City and Guilds, UnionLearn, the Local Government Association, Elephant Family, the IPPR and Unions21. Clearly Progress is thoroughly integrated with the ruling class and the state bureaucracy.

5. Chaired by former transport minister Lord Andrew Adonis, Progress produces a glossy monthly magazine, boasts over 2,000 paid-up members and includes within its ranks a whole pack of rightwing Labour MPs and prominent grandees, including Peter Mandelson. Politically it should be characterised as the hard right of the Labour Party. Its barely hidden agenda is to reconstitute the Labour Party along the lines of the US Democratic Party.

6. Towards that end Progress enthusiastically embraces neoliberalism, fetishises electability and opposes any manifestation of trade union militancy. In the not too distant future it would not be unexpected to find Progress splitting off from the Labour Party and, in the name of the ‘common interest’, joining a national government of some kind. In that sense Progress is a pre-split formation.

7. Progress has been vigorously attacked by heavyweight trade union general secretaries, such as Dave Prentis and Paul Kenny. They have compared it with Militant Tendency and complained about it being financed by “external interests”. It would be wrong, however, to dismiss the Aslef motion - and the statements coming from Prentis and Kenny - as nothing more than a minor squabble within the labour and trade union bureaucracy. Though we cannot support it in its present form, the Aslef motion should be welcomed. It represents an attempt by the left in the trade union bureaucracy to hit back against the openly pro-capitalist right and those intent on de-labourising Labour. Marxists and other revolutionary socialists have every reason to take advantage of this dispute. Our position on the Aslef motion should therefore be one of ‘sympathetic opposition’.

8. The agreed perspective of the CPGB is to call upon the revolutionary left to conduct a strategic battle to transform the Labour Party into a workers’ united front of a special kind. Special because we envisage the Labour Party as a permanent united front (similar in that respect at least to the soviets in Russia). That not only means opening up the Labour Party to the affiliation of all pro-working class parties and organisations. It means winning the Labour Party to oppose the existing state and constitution, and a commitment to working class rule, socialism, internationalism and universal human liberation.

9. The Labour Party remains what Lenin famously called a “bourgeois workers’ party”. That means it can feasibly be won from the pro-capitalist right that has historically dominated it. Certainly the Labour Party should not be dismissed or ignored. That would be akin to giving up on the unions and the mass of the working class. Obviously, achieving the goal of transforming the Labour Party will necessarily entail defeating and driving out the pro-capitalist right. Long experience tells us that the right, backed by the capitalist media and the courts, usually splits away once the left becomes strong. But we do not rule out taking tough, decisive, even draconian organisational measures against the right. Who exactly and when exactly is, of course, a matter of tactics.

10. We do not adopt a ‘live and let live’ stance towards the pro-capitalist right. That would be sheer liberalism. We are engaged in a form of the class struggle and the pro-capitalist right is not, and should not be regarded as, a legitimate part of the workers’ movement.

11. Even with the Labour Party as presently led and presently constituted, it can be advantageous to deploy tactics demanding the expulsion of the openly pro-capitalist right, even when that means just a few particularly obnoxious individuals. Eg, the Weekly Worker led with the front-page call to “Expel the collaborators” - namely Frank Field, John Hutton and Alan Milburn (August 26 2010). That call was and remains correct. Field, Hutton and Milburn have worked hand-in-glove with the Tory-Lib Dem coalition government and helped legitimise its austerity and cuts. If the Labour Party, even as presently constituted, was to expel these collaborators, then we should support that move. It would not mean that the LP had been transformed into a united workers’ front. But it would be a significant victory for the left and serve to intimidate, warn and reduce the right.

12. In that light it would be better to have a clear-cut political motion that would exclude Progress and its supporters from the Labour Party. Not because Progress fails to maintain “acceptable standards of democracy, governance and transparency”. No, because politically Progress is pro-capitalist, because politically it seeks a coalition deal with the Lib Dems and because politically it opposes any hint of militant trade union resistance to the coalition government’s savage programme of austerity and cuts.