Time for a new workers’ party

Fight for a Socialist alternative

KEN LIVINGSTONE’S decision to stand as an independent candidate for London mayor will mean a big change in British politics. After the frustrations of the last three years, it will be welcomed by everybody who’s fed up with Blair’s Labour government.

Jim Horton

Millions across London want to see an alternative not just to privatisation of the tubes, but also a solution to the continuing crisis in our NHS, our poorly-resourced schools, our run-down housing estates and the congestion and pollution of our over-crowded, underfunded transport system.

The blatant ballot-rigging, which let Dobson become Labour’s official candidate outraged most people, particularly those disenfranchised by Blair’s policies.

Devolution for London, as for Scotland and Wales, was to be a farce. Livingstone’s decision to stand will breathe life into what would have been a dour election.

The hapless Frank Dobson, whose campaign launch was scuppered by Livingstone’s announcement, is now in dire straits. Dobson says he wants to concentrate on the issues, but the campaign will clearly be bitterly fought with vitriolic attacks on Livingstone.

A Livingstone victory will be seen as a blow against the ‘control freak’ tendency around Blair. It will show the anger existing on working-class estates across London towards New Labour.

New Labour’s abandonment of its once traditional working class base in favour of the rich and big business goes beyond the London assembly elections and the issues of democracy for London and tube privatisation. People support Livingstone because he’s seen as a radical alternative.

The Socialist Party welcomes Ken Livingstone’s decision to stand as an independent. But he needs to go much further.

Livingstone needs to signal a total break with New Labour. He should use this opportunity to build on the opposition to the government and call a conference of trade unionists, community campaigners and socialists as a step towards building a new mass party to represent working-class people.

Top of page     Home page

Defend Jobs and Services

Across the country, local authorities are drawing up their budgets for the next financial year.  For many council workers this will mean job cuts and further attacks on wages and conditions.  Showing how council workers and people dependent on council services will not take this lying down, ELAINE BRUNSKILL spoke to workers fighting to defend Newcastle school meals service.

LABOUR-CONTROLLED Newcastle city council plans to cut the school meal budget by £1 million. This will result in up to 200 women losing their jobs and an increase in the cost of school meals.

Gillian Battista, one of the threatened workers said: “I’ve worked on the school dinners for 19 years, most of the staff have been around for at least ten years. In the past I’ve always voted Labour... but now there’s no defining line between them and the Tories”. Gillian explained that now all the food is cooked in the school kitchens, with a wide choice of nutritious food but the cuts mean frozen convenience food. “For some kids their school dinner is the only decent meal they’ll get.”

Newcastle city council is in for a rude awakening if they expect the predominantly female workforce to take this without a fight.

Anne Harrison, another worker whose job is under threat said: “They think because you work as a cleaner or as a kitchen assistant, the Cinderella services, that you haven’t got a brain.”

These workers are becoming skilful in organising to defend their jobs. Within days of hearing of the proposed cuts, they were out on the streets. Within two weeks they had collected 13,000 signatures on petitions.

Encouraged by the overwhelming support of people on Tyneside, they have voted to ballot for one-day strike action. Anne Harrison explained that most of the schools in the area don’t have local election day off (4 May). “It would be a perfect time to have a strike. We could cover every polling station and cause maximum embarrassment to the Labour Party.”

They have also floated the idea of standing against Tony Flynn, the council leader, whose seat is up for election. If they do decide to stand it will have an electrifying effect across the city, such is the hostility against the cuts.

Anne Harrison summed up the anger felt by kitchen staff: “We need to be more like the French, we need to be militant”.

Top of page     Home page

1900 – 2000: Fighting for a new workers party

ON 27 February 1900, the Labour Representation Committee met for the first time, beginning the Labour Party’s 100-year history.

Steve Score

The party was born out of workers’ mass struggles against the system, which showed the need for the working class to take independent political action. Today Tony Blair sees his "modernised" New Labour as a "progressive" party, re-uniting Liberalism and Labourism, balancing an "enterprise economy" with "fairness".

How much has the Labour Party changed in character? And does the history of how Labour was created teach us how a new party of working class people could grow?

Inside Labour magazine quotes Blair: "Why is it that 100 years after Labour came into being to eradicate poverty there are still millions who live without hope? Why is it that thousands of adults still cannot find work because they cannot read or write? Why is it that people still have to live in run down estates, in unfit housing...?"

Blair's answer is that Labour's 22 years in power have not been long enough to tackle these problems. He says: "At times we failed ... to keep the trust of the people... because the ideology on which [our ideals] were built became fossilised and out of date." The ideology he attacks is a socialist one of a party representing and fighting for working-class people.

In reality, when Labour’s leaders lost "the trust of the people" it was because they failed to stick by those principles, instead carrying out polices in favour of big business and the so-called "enterprise economy".

The massive achievements under Labour governments such as the creation of the NHS and the welfare state, came because of the mass movement’s pressure on past Labour leaders.

Blair has now created an out-and-out capitalist party that insulates the leaders from those pressures.

His anniversary speech blamed those who spoke out against pro-capitalist polices in the past: "The revolt against the 1924 government on unemployment benefit cuts; the 1949 resignations over health charges; the disputes over public spending in the 1960s; to the winter of discontent in the 1970's".

He doesn't see anything wrong with Labour governments’ attacks on working class people, just the criticism inside the Labour movement!

Blair has returned to 19th-century ideas of "progressive liberalism", of "partnership" between bosses and workers. But the Labour Party’s establishment originally broke with those ideas.

IN THE years up to the 1870's there was a big economic upswing for British capitalism. Millions of workers still faced appalling poverty but small sections of skilled workers improved their living standards.

The old craft unions maintained wages by restricting entry to the union; their leaders saw no conflict of interests with the bosses. These union leaders, such as TUC leader Broadhurst, supported the Liberal Party.

But British capitalism’s heyday was passing and the economy went into depression. From 1889 to 1913 real wages fell 10%. This precipitated a massive upsurge in the class struggle. It also prepared the ground, with the help of active socialists, for a change in working-class people’s consciousness.

From 1886 Burns and Hyndman, leaders of a small Marxist group the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) led demonstrations of up to 100,000 against factory closures and conditions facing the unemployed. The police brutally attacked these mass protests, resulting in the deaths of some demonstrators.

Burns and Tom Mann, socialists who wanted to break with class collaboration policies, launched the "Eight Hour League" with policies of "work sharing without loss in pay" to tackle unemployment by reducing long working hours.

Ayrshire miners, who previously supported the Liberals, were threatened by bosses that union members would be replaced by the unemployed.

The miners then took up the campaign for an eight-hour day. The army attacked their strike and the workers received no support from the Liberals. These events affected the ideas of miners such as Keir Hardie, who set up the Scottish Labour Party in 1888.

New mass unions, organising millions of the unskilled into ‘general’ unions, came into being. The gasworkers, led by SDF member Will Thorne, won an eight-hour day. New sections of workers organised and went into struggle: Bryant and May ‘matchgirls’, agricultural labourers, textile workers and railworkers.

In 1889 dockworkers, exploited by the casual labour system, struck for "the dockers' tanner"- 6d an hour. They marched through the streets carrying red flags and stinking fish heads - showing what they had to live on - and won a victory with the support of other workers.

THESE STRUGGLES raised the need for an independent party of Labour. They came up against not just the bosses but also their government, laws, police and army. Workers needed to fight for political power to change the laws, the government and the system that created their exploitation.

However, the creation of the Labour Party was no easy task. Whilst socialists in the new unions fought for an independent party of Labour, the TUC leaders, still linked to the Liberals, opposed it.

SDF members as individuals played key roles in these events, but the sectarian SDF itself opposed the creation of a new mass workers’ party.

The SDF failed to link workers’ day to day struggles to the need for socialism even though these struggles developed workers’ understanding of the need for socialism. In contrast Karl Marx's collaborator, Friedrich Engels, advocated a Labour Party as a step forward for the working class, helping it come to revolutionary conclusions about the need to change society.

Many SDF members such as Tom Mann left after their journal condemned strikes as a "diversion" from the struggle for socialism.

In the Manningham Mills strike in Bradford, workers fought cuts in wages imposed by bosses who supported the Liberals. The police attacked them and starved back to work, but workers learned the need for a new party of labour.

In Bradford in 1893, a number of workers’ organisations and socialists including Keir Hardie's Scottish Labour Party, met to form the Independent Labour Party (ILP).

Following its formation though, the movement ebbed and the ILP didn't develop as the mass party itself, although it played a key role in fighting to create the Labour Party. It also meant, along with the SDF’s sectarian role that more "gradualist" leaders came to the fore.

Over the next few years, the bosses responded to economic crisis by increasing their attacks on the unions, using scab organisations, the police and the law. Eventually in 1899 TUC conference passed a resolution calling for a Labour Representation Committee to be established.

WHEN THE LRC met in 1900 only half the TUC was affiliated. The Taff Vale judgement in 1901 was a turning point. The courts allowed Taff Vale Railway Company to sue the rail union for thousands of pounds for lost trade and damages in a strike - threatening the very right to strike.

Such events pushed more workers towards the LRC. By the time it was renamed the Labour Party in 1906 900,000 workers were affiliated.

Unfortunately people like Ramsey MacDonald and Lord Snowden, who originally opposed the Labour Party, were now in its leadership. Politically they were close to Liberalism, and still did deals with them.

From the start there was a struggle with those who stood for socialist ideas and independent class action.

In 1908 conference passed a resolution calling for: "... socialisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange, to be controlled by a democratic state in the interests of the entire community, and the complete emancipation of Labour from the domination of capitalism, and landlordism, with the establishment of social and economic equality between the sexes."

This was echoed in the famous Clause Four, put into the constitution at the 1918 Labour conference following the mood for socialism after the 1917 Russian revolution.

So Labour always had this dual character: a pro-capitalist leadership with a working-class base. At times Labour’s base could push the leadership towards achieving reforms such as those of the 1945 government. But, under the bosses’ pressure, the leaders always went from reforms back to counter-reforms.

IT IS different today. The world political situation changed after Stalinism collapsed in the former Soviet Union. The triumphant pro-market propaganda of the capitalists affected the former mass workers’ parties internationally.

In Britain, Blair led the way in swallowing market ideology and destroying any real chance of workers being able to influence Labour’s leadership. Labour is now an openly capitalist party.

Working class people need to create a new mass party to represent their interests. This will not be an easy task; it will need the impact of big events and struggles. The process will not simply repeat that of 100 years ago; much has happened since then and even a century ago, it was no straight line development.

However socialists will play a key role in building this party. Socialists can’t create something out of thin air where the forces don't yet exist but Blair has not abolished the class struggle and future events will have a big effect on consciousness.

But we don’t just wait for events either. In the past socialists played a crucial role - intervening in events and putting forward socialist propaganda.

Today the Socialist Party can have an important effect in raising the need for a socialist alternative. That will not only speed up the creation of a new mass workers’ party but lay down a marker in the inevitable battle of ideas within that party.

Top of page     Home page

London mayor elections:

Another crisis for ‘control freak’ Blair

THE SOCIALIST Party welcomes Ken Livingstone’s decision to stand as an independent. Many workers, already angry at New Labour’s pro-big business policies, have been outraged at the blatant ballot-rigging which prevented Livingstone becoming Labour candidate for mayor.

Livingstone gained overwhelming support from London Labour Party members and in particular ordinary trade unionists. His decision will generate enormous enthusiasm amongst workers who are looking for someone to confront Blair’s anti-working class policies.

Livingstone’s candidature further undermines New Labour’s ideological stranglehold. This important break provides an opportunity to start the process of building a mass workers’ alternative to Blairism.

Control-freak Blair has faced one crisis after another. Having learnt nothing from Wales where Blairite Alun Michael was forced to resign, Blair’s tarnished image is further stained with Frank Dobson’s selection as the official Labour candidate, despite only receiving a quarter of the total vote cast.

The latest opinion poll, just after Livingstone’s announcement, puts Livingstone on 68%, Dobson on just 13% and Norris on 11%. Livingstone has majority support amongst not only Labour voters, but also Tory and Liberal voters.

The election campaign for mayor will be bitterly fought. Out will come vitriolic attacks on Livingstone’s policies and record, with a dose of personal abuse for good measure.

While Livingstone’s lead in the polls could be reduced by polling day, the full use of the Millbank spin machine won’t be able to obscure the enormous anger that now exists towards New Labour.

Support for Livingstone reflects growing discontent as New Labour, openly pursuing a Tory big business agenda, fails to improve the lives of millions of workers.

Under Blair’s government the gap between rich and poor continues to widen. Across London, schools lack decent resources, housing estates are run-down and neglected, hospitals are stuck in a mire of crisis and local services are being cut to the bone.

Millions of workers will look to Livingstone to provide solutions to all these problems.

Can Livingstone Deliver the goods?

KEN LIVINGSTONE says that the mayoral election’s two key issues will be that London shouldn’t have a candidate imposed on them, and that Londoners overwhelmingly reject the break-up and privatisation of the Underground.

This is true, but Livingstone’s decision to stand as an independent for London mayor raises issues beyond that.

His decision will provoke the labour movement to debate how best to forge a working class alternative to capitalism. This debate will inevitably centre on issues of programme and the type of party workers need.

During the election campaign, workers will want to know Livingstone’s policies on health, education, housing, local services and low pay. The election will not just be a referendum on how best to finance the underground, but on all those issues.

Livingstone has said that the only policy difference he has with Frank Dobson was over the tube. Last year he also said that socialism is no longer relevant and that the capitalist market is the most efficient way of distributing goods.

But the perception of the 68% of Londoners who support him is that he represents a radical alternative far to the left of Blair. Moreover, he has once again started to talk about ‘socialism’.

Worryingly, he boasts of having majority support amongst London’s business community. He claims he can successfully represent all classes in London but he’ll find it impossible to be a friend of London’s business elite and satisfy working-class people’s expectations.

Livingstone will face a choice of either acceding to capitalism’s wishes or fighting for a socialist alternative. If he fails to offer the latter, a real opportunity could be missed to provide a mass alternative to Blair’s capitalist policies.

EVEN BEFORE Labour’s gerrymandered selection process, opinion polls consistently showed that Livingstone could win as an independent. Millions of workers, across Britain, no longer see New Labour as their party.

However Livingstone says he has no intention of setting up a new political party. He asks his supporters to remain in the Labour party, believing he’ll be readmitted one day, while asking Londoners to finance and support his campaign.

We believe that Labour is an openly pro-capitalist party which is carrying out attacks on the working class as bad as under the Tories. Moreover as Ken Livingstone’s experience has shown there is no possibility of stopping Blair inside the Labour Party.

 On the agenda now is the need for a new mass party of the working class to achieve change on behalf of working-class people.

Over the past few years, particularly under Blair, New Labour’s transformation into a pro-capitalist party has politically disenfranchised ordinary working class people.

Even Peter Kilfoyle, who couldn’t be described as even remotely left-wing, has lambasted Labour’s leadership for abandoning its working class constituents.

Ken Livingstone says he’s agonised for weeks over his decision to break with Labour. But having made this important break he needs to go the full way and break decisively from Blairism, politically and organisationally.

Politically this means fighting on a socialist programme. Organisationally this means using the authority he now has to take steps towards building a new mass party of the working class.

The Socialist Party has already shown that socialist policies can win support, with election victories for our members in Lewisham and Coventry, and to the Scottish parliament. Livingstone’s support shows that workers perceive he could offer a radical alternative to Blairism.

Livingstone should not be looking to rich backers. He should instead use this opportunity to call a conference of trade unionists, community campaigners and socialists.

This conference could decide on a slate for the assembly elections and act as a step towards the building of a new mass party to represent working class people.

Top of page     Home page

Trotsky’s “planet without a visa”

“PLUS ÇA change; plus ça reste la même chose” (the more things change the more they stay the same ) as the French say.

Peter Taaffe, Socialist Party general secretary

New Labour Home Secretary Jack Straw today refuses the right of asylum in Britain for the victims of oppression and murder throughout the globe. His predecessor JR Clynes, Home Secretary in the MacDonald Labour government of 1929-31, acted in a similar fashion as previously secret government papers have revealed. He denied the right of entry into Britain of the persecuted revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky.

Four times Trotsky applied for asylum in Britain between 1929 and 1934 and four times he was turned down.

Hounded from pillar to post by the Stalinist bureaucratic elite and the capitalists, the whole world was for Trotsky, “a planet without a visa”. Yet the possibility of a MacDonald Labour government coming to power in 1929 raised his hopes.

In a meeting with Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Fabian co-thinkers of MacDonald, Trotsky expressed his intention to apply for a visa from the MacDonald government. Webb expressed the view that the government may not find itself strong enough, because of its dependence on the Liberals, to grant Trotsky’s request. Trotsky replied that a party that “isn’t strong enough to be able to answer for its actions had no right to power”.

Yet, when the Labour government did refuse a visa it met with protest from the Liberals! They were joined by Labour MPs of the time and trade unions, including the National Union of Teachers. No public reasons were given other than Clynes declaring: “The right of asylum does not mean the right of an exile to demand asylum but the right of the state to refuse it.” As Trotsky himself pointed out at the time: “By a single blow it destroys the very foundations of so-called (capitalist) democracy”.

THE RIGHT of asylum was inherited from the Christian church which in turn inherited it from paganism. The pursued ‘criminal’ could make his way to a temple, sometimes just touching the rim of the door to be safe from persecution. The church saw the right of asylum as the right of the persecuted to asylum, and not as an arbitrary exercise on the part of the pagan or Christian priests.

In its historical origin the right of asylum does not fundamentally differ from the rights of freedom of speech or assembly. But Clynes infringed this right 71 years ago as Straw does today with his attacks on democratic rights.

Clynes spells out in the secret papers that Trotsky was refused admission to Britain because it was necessary for the Labour government to mollify Stalin. “His admission might be regarded as an unfriendly act by the Soviet government...Trotsky’s supporters in other countries, France and Germany, will be encouraged and would have an effect on their Communist Parties”. He further argued that Trotsky was “one of the Bolsheviks who made the Russian Revolution” and would see his admission as “shaking hands with murderers”.

This theme is taken up by Andreas Whittam Smith, co-founder of The Independent, who in retrospect defends Trotsky’s exclusion from Britain by Clynes. He professes “admiration for (Trotsky’s) amazing firmness of purpose, single-mindedness, courage – and for his literary skills”. But he then goes on to make the astonishing and false claim that Trotsky “wasn’t any less ruthless than Stalin was to prove, nor did he shrink from judicial murder”.

A few days before Whittam Smith’s diatribes against Trotsky The Independent declared in an editorial comment, in relation to the actions of the MacDonald government: “An almost normal revolutionary (Trotsky) was kept out of Britain on behalf of a mass murdering revolutionary (Stalin)”.

Whittam Smith conveniently ignores that Trotsky applied force to the representatives of the dispossessed landlords and capitalists in Russia who attempted to overthrow the first workers’ government in history. This government had been brought to power through democratic elections in the soviets (workers and peasants’ councils). Stalin on the other hand used mass terror on behalf of a bureaucratic elite to destroy the Bolshevik party, the most successful workers’ party and the most democratic in history.

But even if Whittam Smith’s “bloodthirsty” charges against Trotsky were correct why not admit him in 1929 and practically demonstrate the advantages of British capitalist democracy? This is what HG Wells argued at the time: “Trotsky”, he said, “had trenchant literary power”, and had an “extraordinary career which gave him a hold on the public imagination”. Wells argued that if Trotsky was to live in Britain he may “change his present state of mind”. Wells argued that Britain had long been the home of so-called “dangerous opinions”. Asylum had been granted to Marx and Engels and Lenin. Indeed Trotsky had entered Britain and lived in London in 1902 and Trotsky made a further fleeting visit in 1907.

However, Clynes declared to the Cabinet: “It would be futile to expect him (Trotsky) to abstain from politics”. An official commented: “The idea of Trotsky in quiet retirement is comic.”

Yet, Trotsky was one man and there was hardly a Trotskyist movement in Britain at that stage. The viciousness and fear of MacDonald and Clynes, as well as the cowardly acquiescence of others such as Sidney Webb, soon to be Lord Passfield, is to be explained not by the force of numbers behind Trotsky but the force of his ideas. He could have enormously aided the development of a genuine Marxist force in Britain at that time, which was beginning to develop around the Independent Labour Party which seperated itself from the Labour Party in 1932.

Jack Straw, was one of the initiators of the witch-hunt against Militant, now the Socialist Party, in the Labour Party in the 1980s. Clynes persecuted Trotsky 70 years ago and sought to outlaw his followers now seven decades later Straw also keeps out the victims of oppression who seek refuge in Britain while allowing Pinochet, the murderer of the Chilean working class, to escape justice.

Straw and Blair have not joined a national government like MacDonald only because there already exists an element of this in the present New Labour government.

There is a symmetry in the actions of Clynes 70 years ago and Straw today. The lessons of this should be learnt by the present generation. A world without passports, without fortresses to keep out the dispossessed, hungry and persecuted is not possible through New Labour but only if we create a socialist world.

Top of page     Home page