The Case for a New Mass Workers' Party
The Case for a New Mass Workers' Party
1. A big business party
TWO YEARS AFTER the election of the first New Labour government, half a million more people were living in poverty than under the Tories.
The United Nations found Britain guilty of one of the worst records of relative childhood poverty in the industrialised world; below even Turkey, Poland and Hungary. At the same time the gap between rich and poor widened. The income of the richest 10% of households rose 7.1% compared to a rise of 4.3% in the last two years of the Tories.
These were the inevitable consequences of a government for whom, in the words of the then Trade and Industry Secretary Stephen Byers, "wealth creation is more important than wealth redistribution" (Guardian 3rd February 1999). "We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich", commented Peter Mandelson, Byers predecessor at the Department of Trade and Industry, in 1998. And they have; or at least the rich have got richer. In 1989 the top 2000 richest people owned wealth worth £38 billion. Ten years later that staggering figure had doubled to £75.9 billion (The Sunday Times Rich List).
One of these ‘filthy rich’ is Lord Sainsbury. In 1999 he and his family were worth a cool £3,100 million. Lord Sainsbury has managed to shove £6 million of his massive fortune New Labour’s way. New Labour returned the favour by making him science minister. The fact that his businesses invested in GM foods was apparently not a ‘conflict of interest’ because he left the room whenever the issue came up!
Rich business backers now contribute a third of all Labour Party funds; for the first time in the party’s history more than the trade unions. And of course they don’t give away that kind of money out of the kindness of their hearts. They expect to get something in return.
‘Tony’s cronies’ haven’t been disappointed. Lord Hamlyn, another £2 million donor, is one of eleven people who have been honoured by New Labour after donating more than £5,000 to the party between 1996 and 1999. Robert Bourne handed over £100,000 to the party at almost exactly the same time as Legacy, the consortium which he headed, was named as the government’s ‘preferred bidder’ for the Millennium Dome.
It’s not surprising that the stench of scandal and sleaze has surrounded New Labour just as it did the Tories. In fact after Peter Mandelson resigned from the cabinet (for the second time) because of dodgy dealings with a millionaire businessman, opinion polls showed that people thought New Labour even more sleazy than the Tories. Yet Tony Blair declared that he was "absolutely proud" of gaining the support of entrepreneurs. (Financial Times, 27th January 2001).
Putting big business first
FROM DAY ONE the New Labour government was crawling with big-business representatives. Martin Taylor, former chief of Barclays bank, was given responsibility for welfare ‘reform’.
One of New Labour’s first acts was to cut lone parent benefits. From there they moved on to attacking the disabled and offering pensioners just 75p a week extra to live on. Sir Peter Davis, formerly head of the insurance company the Prudential, was made an adviser on ‘welfare to work’, code for forcing the unemployed into dead-end jobs on pain of losing benefits. And Lord Simon, who was head of the oil giant BP, became a minister with responsibility for ‘deregulation’. Whether setting the level of the minimum wage, deciding employment rights, or introducing ‘family friendly’ policies, the interests of big business have always come first.
The market has invaded every aspect of our lives and big business is making a killing – in some cases literally. The Hatfield rail disaster, which resulted in four deaths, was blamed directly on privatisation and the fragmentation of the railways. One month later, Railtrack, who accepted responsibility for the crash, raised its half year dividend to shareholders by 5% (£50 million).
After Hatfield, over 75% of people polled supported re-nationalisation of the railways. But blinded by free market ideology, New Labour not only defended privatisation but insisted on pushing ahead with selling off 51% of the National Air Traffic Services, creating a ‘Railtrack of the skies’ and putting more lives at risk.
Health, education, transport, everything is for sale to the big business vultures. In its first year in office, New Labour agreed projects totalling £16 billion under the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) – three times as many as the Tories in 18 years. It amounts to a gigantic public sector mortgage to private multi-million companies such as the construction company Tarmac who will be raking in profits for years to come.
Big business tentacles are closing further over education through Education Action Zones (EAZ’s), specialist schools and increasingly open privatisation. The selling off of local education authority services, for example, which is underway in several areas, will create an estimated ‘market’ of £1.6 billion for profit hungry companies such as Nord Anglia and even Group 4.
Blair has made it clear that in New Labour’s second term the government will go even further in encouraging private companies to manage as well as finance the provision of key services in health and education.
Embracing the free market
NEW LABOUR SOLD its soul to the capitalist free market in the 1980s. And it was not alone.
Leaders of the Labour, Social Democratic and Communist parties throughout the world abandoned any idea of fighting for fundamental change in the capitalist system or even for reforms in favour of working class people. Instead they swallowed the dominant ideology, reinforced by the 1980s boom, that there was no alternative to the capitalist market and neo-liberal policies such as privatisation and deregulation.
The disintegration and eventual collapse of the Stalinist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe played a decisive part in this process. These societies were not, of course, examples of genuine socialism, but grotesque caricatures. Economic planning in their nationalised economies took the form of central command from above by a privileged ruling caste, which had consolidated its power under Stalin. This ruling bureaucracy eliminated every last element of workers’ democracy originally established during the 1917 revolution, leaving not a trace of democracy at any level. Although claiming to run society in the interests of the working class, the Stalinist regimes were, in reality, ruthless dictatorships.
Nevertheless, up until the early 1970s, the nationalised economies were able to produce impressive advances, providing basic education, healthcare, and other social amenities to the majority of the population - now sorely missed as they have been destroyed by the emerging capitalist market. While they remained intact they provided an alternative system, however distorted, to capitalism.
Once that alternative model was removed, the capitalists were presented with a huge propaganda gift. Socialism, they declared, was dead. The free market ruled OK. Tony Blair and his friends internationally agreed, moving their parties further, and in the case of New Labour, decisively in a capitalist direction.
Labour ditched the historic Clause Four of its constitution, which committed the Labour Party to the "common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange". In its place the party embraced ‘the rigours of competition’, ‘enterprise’ and free market forces. By 1998, Sir Clive Thompson, then president of the bosses club the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), felt confident enough to declare that ‘Labour is now the sort of centre-right party for which I could consider voting’.
An independent party
HISTORICALLY THE LABOUR Party was a ‘capitalist-worker’s party’ (see Appendix). The leaders at the top reflected the outlook and interests of the capitalist class. And the capitalists relied on them to keep the profit system safe for themselves.
But at the bottom of the party, workers were pulling in a different direction. They had taken the initiative, through the trade unions and socialist organisations, in forming the Labour Party so that they could have their own independent political voice. This had meant breaking with the Liberal Party which, for many years, claimed to be a ‘broad church’ representing both bosses and workers.
In the course of strikes and social struggles, workers discovered that the Liberals always came down on the side of the bosses. They drew the conclusion that they needed an independent party to represent their specific class interests. Having set the party up, workers demanded that the Labour leaders implement policies which put their interests first. A constant struggle took place between the two, but workers were always able to make their voices heard and have an influence over the policies and direction of the party.
This ‘dual character’ of the Labour Party, a capitalist leadership at the top but with a working-class, socialist base, always presented a latent danger for the capitalists. Consequently, while in periods of economic or social difficulty the capitalists in the past were compelled to tolerate Labour governments, once they had stepped in to bale out capitalism in its difficulties, Labour governments were usually undermined and subsequently defeated. From the standpoint of capitalism, the purpose of Labour governments was to hold the working class in check. When they no longer proved capable of doing this, the power held by the capitalists, through the media, their control of the economy etc, was used to create the basis for bringing them down. This was the experience of the Labour governments of Ramsay MacDonald of 1924 and 1929-31, as well as the last Labour government before Blair’s, between 1974-79.
Until the early 1990s the Socialist Partly (then called Militant) campaigned for socialist ideas inside the Labour Party. At the same time however, we argued that to achieve socialism it was necessary to have a cohesive party with a clear programme for fundamentally changing society. Workers and young people in or around a mass capitalist-workers’ party, as the Labour Party was, could, we argued, be won over to the idea of a fundamental transformation of society.
The weight of the pro-capitalist forces inside the Labour Party would likely mean that at a critical time it would not be able to be used as the vehicle for ending capitalism and bringing about socialism. This was clear from the experience in Europe after the first world war, for example, when the mass Social Democratic parties split and new, mass Communist parties were formed. Nevertheless the Labour Party provided a mass forum for debating and comparing the ideas of fundamental socialist change with those of gradual reform of capitalism. In the new era opened up by the collapse of Stalinism however, with the counter-revolution carried through by Blair in policy and organisation within New Labour, this is no longer the case.
Blair’s ‘project’
FOR BLAIR THE historic step which workers took in breaking from the Liberals and forming their own independent party, has to be reversed.
"I am absolutely determined", he stated, "to mend the schism that occurred in the progressive forces in British politics at the start of the century" (The Ashdown Diaries, quoted in The Financial Times, 7th November 2000). At the 1999 Labour Party conference he declared that "the class war is over". The 21st century, he said, would not be a battle between capitalism and socialism, but between the ‘forces of progress’ and the ‘forces of capitalism’.
Blair’s aim was to sever the historic ties between Labour and the trade unions, and transform the Labour Party from a ‘capitalist-worker’s’ party into an openly capitalist one. "I want a situation more like the Democrats and the Republicans in the US", he told the Financial Times. "People don’t even question for a single moment that the Democrats are a pro-business party. They should not be asking that question about New Labour" (16th January 1997).
At the same time his ‘project’ envisaged a ‘progressive’ alliance between New Labour, the Liberals and even left-wing Tories, which would, he hoped, dominate politics for generations. "I would prefer to have a government in which Liberal Democrats are present", he told the Liberal peer Lord Jenkins, "than a government made up entirely of the Labour Party – and that applies whether I get a majority or not".
In the end, when decision time arrived, Blair pulled back from bringing the Liberals into the government. The massive size of New Labour’s majo rity in May 1997 stayed his hand. But that doesn’t mean he has abandoned that part of his project. He has confessed since that his biggest mistake was not giving the former leader of the Liberal Democrats Paddy Ashdown a cabinet seat.
Liberals have however been given places on cabinet committees and Lib/Lab coalitions have been formed in the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly. In the future, if New Labour becomes a minority government or is elected with a narrow majority, Blair could still move towards a coalition at Westminster, especially if he’s facing unrest from working class people. In the meantime, the quest to consolidate New Labour as a capitalist party goes on.
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