In some of the major urban areas of Britain a strong element of the neo-colonial world – semi-favelas – already exists.
A TV programme on Burnley, just before Christmas 2001, gave a picture of the scale of collapse in housing and the morale of workers in areas like this. Both Asians and whites are trapped in the hulks of what were once thriving communities, when people had jobs and industry flourished in these areas.
They are monuments to the devastating effect of Thatcherism in Britain – almost as if an invading army had smashed everything and then moved on – which Blairism, rather than correcting, has reinforced. Workers, Asian, Black and white have been abandoned by their traditional party, the Labour Party. There is an element in this situation of workers turning on one another rather than those who are responsible for their problems. However, the riots were primarily a product of the intervention of the BNP to exploit the situation and the heavy-handed provocative methods of the police.
Britain is allegedly the fourth richest country in the world in terms of income, and yet much more than any other major European power, even before the effects of recession or slump, already has horrifying social conditions. We have a deteriorating health service, a dilapidated education system and a housing stock which, through the application of Thatcherite ‘privatisation’ policies which are still continuing, is simply collapsing. The recent report from the Audit Commission on hospitals showed that waiting times in accident and emergency departments are worse now than when New Labour came to power in 1997.
New stage of privatisation
Charles Clarke, the chairperson of the Labour Party, personally appointed by Blair, admitted that this was the case. The health secretary Alan Milburn proposes to utilise the superior medical facilities of European countries in order to deal with the bloated NHS waiting lists in Britain?
It is not just Germany, with no waiting lists for knee operations or hip replacements, which is being turned to, but also Greek hospitals! This situation has even led to The Mirror calling for the head of arch-Blairite health secretary and ex-’Trotskyist’ Milburn. He has attacked the ‘centralist’ legacy of Aneurin Bevan, who set up the NHS, for the latter’s alleged preoccupation with ‘nationalisation’. Milburn is matching his deeds with words in moving at full speed towards de facto privatisation. This will probably not now be pursued mainly through the discredited PFI, but by shuffling more and more patients towards the private sector. This in turn will give a big incentive for the private health sharks to build more health facilities and hospitals, which would absorb more and more patients incapable of being handled by a smaller and less effective NHS. A two-tier health service is being constructed by New Labour. This in turn could prepare the way for a campaign to introduce health charges, not just the current scandalous prescription charges, but ‘hotel charges’ for entering hospital or a basic charge for visiting GPs.
Iain Duncan Smith’s Tory party has floated this proposal in the last period. Blair has declared that New Labour will not go down this road but similar noises have been made in the past only for the government to follow the Tory agenda. Even if health charges are not introduced, it is quite clear the privatisation of the health sector will continue apace under New Labour. With this will also go a deterioration of the working conditions of health sector workers as a whole. There will be no need to ensure that workers who are ‘privatised’ out of the health service will maintain the same rights and conditions. In the private sector, new workers will be taken on and, given the experience of the past ten years, will have worse rights and conditions than today.
This has gone hand in hand with a campaign to prepare the way for tax increases, to ‘fund a modern health service’. Even hardened New Labourites, who set their faces against any hint of tax increases in the 1990s, are now moving in the opposite direction. Peter Mandelson is for a ‘hypothecated’ tax for the health service. On the other hand, Sharon Storer, who famously attacked Blair during the general election in May 2001 in full view of the media, was lauded by the press at the time. In December, she was interviewed on Newsnight, in which she again attacked the government for “not doing enough” but was then asked by Jeremy Paxman if she would support an increase an increase in taxation and she replied: “No, the working man and woman should not pay”. For this she has been vilified by the very journals which praised her in May, such as The Mirror, for “wanting her cake and to eat it as well”.
But that is precisely what the working class do want but which capitalism can never guarantee. Although the press has given the impression that the British people are more ready than they were in the 1990s to support a policy of ‘tax and spend’, it is not as clear as that. For instance, there was a majority opposed to ‘tax increases’ in an opinion poll from respondents in the North, where living standards and wages are lower. In the more prosperous areas of the South, however, there was a greater willingness to contemplate some increases in taxation. This is because of the shameful state of British public services.
At the same time, the division between rich and poor has never been greater. The class gulf exists in every part of Britain and between different regions. But even London, which has some of the richest areas in Western Europe, also has some of the poorest. A shocking picture has emerged, in the first report of the London Office of Children’s Rights (ORC). This shows that 43 per cent of the 1.65 million children in the capital live in poverty, more than in any other part of the country. More than a quarter of schoolchildren in London are eligible for free school meals, rising to two-thirds in boroughs such as Tower Hamlets, higher than in any other region of the country. High property prices mean that people spend a higher proportion of their income on housing in the capital than elsewhere.
A new health crisis looms, probably this winter, particularly in hospitals, and one quarter of general practitioners are so overburdened that they want to quit “within five years”. A devastating crisis also exists in education, reflected in the government’s hasty retreat over tuition fees in England and Wales. Stung by the anger on the doorstep during the general election, even Blair has now hinted that, following the example of the Scottish parliament and, probably, the Welsh assembly, in abolishing tuition fees and restoring the grant. However, all indications are that this will be a partial retreat from tuition fees to a ‘graduation tax’, in other words deferred tuition fees. An alarming number of students are dropping out of university because of the fear of debt, amongst other things, even before they complete their first term.
The adoption of the Tory agenda in schools has continued apace under the Blair government. Comprehensive education, an Ark of the Covenant of ‘Old Labour’, has now effectively been jettisoned. The return of selection in education and the grammar school is encouraged by Estelle Morris, the education secretary. The Financial Times has declared triumphantly: “The government is getting bolder in its determination to break down the monolithic comprehensive school system”. Four out of ten teaching students drop out before they complete the course because of the worsening conditions and prospects for teachers. The White Paper from the government floated in September is a charter for the wholesale dismantling of an effective national education system. It will give greater ‘independence’ to head teachers to set teachers’ pay and to change the curriculum. The madness of privatisation could lead to some ‘successful’ schools actually take over the running of ‘unsuccessful’ schools. These changes are proposed despite the fact that in those instances where the local education authority has been taken over by a private firm, some have proved to be a failure and companies have either gone bankrupt or withdrawn from these schemes.
The empirical, shambolic approach to ‘faith schools’ shows just how unprincipled New Labour has become. It is not socialist principles which are being abandoned but a bourgeois liberal approach to education. Blair and the whole New Labour educational hierarchy were enthusiastic supporters of ‘faith schools’ prior to the riots in Bradford, Burnley and Oldham. But a government commission report into them concluded that, “Faith based schools could pose a significant problem for community cohesion”. Northern Ireland, with segregated religious schools, is an indication of how they can aggravate racial and religious tension on all sides. Education alone, mixed schools, are not sufficient, as some educationalists imagine, to overcome deep seated racial, national or religious divisions. A class approach and programme is the only way to achieve this. But their existence and, shamefully, the extension of church schools in Britain can only serve to aggravate the problems which already exist.
Incapable of seeing what is carved on his nose by events, Blair repeated his support for faith based schools in December. Then, trying to square the circle, New Labour education theorists have come up with the proposal that at least a quarter of pupils in any religious school, to give it the correct title, must come from a different religious background! The argument that ‘faith based’ schools exist already, with the state financing of Catholic, Anglican and Jewish schools, is no argument for extending them. These schools already reinforce divisions amongst working class people and why should we therefore support adding to them?
In transport, Britain, both under the previous transport secretary Prescott and now Byers, staggers from one catastrophe to another. Britain’s road congestion is the worst in Western Europe. Complete gridlock is predicted in a recent report on the future for road travel in Britain. If Blair and Byers allow the discredited privatisation of the tube to go ahead this will be enormously compound the problems of travel in the capital. It is not certain that they will proceed in this fashion, maybe preferring to hand over the tube system to Livingstone and his transport chief, Kiley. Their programme, however, is just a variation of Blair and Brown’s proposals; privatisation will continue but the management of the tube will be in the hands of a single authority.
In relation to Britain’s rail network, The Mirror’s political editor, Paul Routledge declared in despair in 2001: “We invented railways – now they are better in Bolivia than in Bradford”. Such is the overcrowding on commuter trains that Connex, which runs trains in the South-East, have seriously proposed that toilets should be taken out of all their trains and more seats should be eliminated to allow for greater standing room. The proposed system has echoes of the cattle trucks in apartheid South Africa, which herded workers from the shantytowns, the labour reserves, into the urban areas like Johannesburg for work.
Government U-turns?
The complete failure of Railtrack (‘Failtrack’) forced even arch-Blairites such as Byers, under the cover of the Afghan War, to introduce backdoor renationalisation.
This earned him the scorn of the City and a press campaign denouncing his ‘confiscatory’ measures in place of the plaudits he previously received from big business. Indeed, during the war, the government attempted “to bury bad news”, in the words of the unspeakable New Labour apparatchik Jo Moore. She is a product of the Blairite counter-revolution and has long been a hitwoman for the Labour right wing. Her dark arts of ‘spindoctory’ were first honed in the bureaucratic struggles she and her cohorts waged against Militant supporters and the left in the Labour student organisation in the 1970s and 1980s. She did nothing new on 11 September to what she had done previously, that is spin, lie and vilify opponents on behalf of the New Labour hierarchy. But her crime in their eyes is not that she sought to seek political capital from the WTC tragedy in order to bury unpopular New Labour decisions, but that she was caught out by a stupid e-mail. The first response of the New Labour tops was to say that this incident had led to a line being drawn under their past methods. But nothing could be further from the truth. Blairism, from the outset, was built on a lie, proclaiming it stood in the traditions of Old Labour and the struggle for socialism. But, as he subsequently admitted, the Blairistas programme was for the construction of an entirely new non-socialist, non-working class party.
On a whole series of issues the government has been forced to perform one U-turn or body swerve after another, greater than the moves circus acrobats have in their repertoire. Thatcher was “not for turning”. It led to her downfall when she refused to abolish the poll tax, which Major promptly accomplished when he came to power. However, this government is busy jettisoning every unpopular policy which it introduced in its first term of office. In last year’s general election, and even after, New Labour spokespersons implacably opposed the renationalisation of Railtrack. This was thrown overboard last year. The significance of this step should not be underestimated. It marks the first breech in the twenty-year programme of privatisation begun under Thatcher. It is a ‘state capitalist’, rather than a socialist measure; Byers has been compelled to rescue an industry ruined by the capitalists. He may seek to renovate it and sell it back to private owners, if he gets away with it, at a later stage.
New Labour – bourgeois and sleazy
But in a deepening capitalist economic crisis even this is not certain. The appetite increases with the eating, the old saying has it.
How workers besieged by factory closures and redundancy will view this action will be entirely different to the fat cats in the City and the boardrooms. There will be pressure to take over failing industries. It is however, a measure of how far to the right New Labour has moved that it does not emulate, in relation to the recent redundancies at Rolls Royce, how the Heath Tory government acted in 1972. That government, when the company threatened to go bust, nationalised it in 24 hours. There is not even a mention or a hint of this by New Labour. Not one of the feeble left of New Labour, in parliament or outside, has raised this proposal. But there will be pressure to take over failing industries. Labour MPs are now pressurising the government to reconsider the recent privatisation of air traffic control – the National Air Traffic Service (NATS) – which is already facing difficulties because of the contraction of the airline industry following 11 September.
However, these retreats or semi-retreats by New Labour do not signify, as some commentators have suggested, the beginning of the regeneration of the Labour Party and the triumph of Old Labour over New Labour. The bourgeoisification of the Labour Party, which we were the first to predict, is complete. This has not stopped Polly Toynbee in The Guardian, herself a ‘Blairite’ before Blair, and a Labour defector to the Social Democratic Party in the early 1980s, from arguing that New Labour policies have been defeated by a variation of ‘Old Labour’ ideas of ‘tax and spend’ and partial nationalisation. Even the clash between Blair and Brown is pointed to as an indication of divisions over policy, which could find an echo amongst the party rank and file and the working class.
Yet these developments take place against the background of the bourgeoisification of the Labour Party at all levels. This is underlined by incidents such as the financial malpractice in the Geoffrey Robinson affair. This was followed by the forced resignation of Henry McLeish, Labour leader of the Scottish parliament who claimed expenses for his office while he was renting part of it out to a solicitor. Imagine if a poor claimant had been in a similar situation, receiving state benefits over a long period while subletting a room in his house, how the state and the courts would react. In many cases they have received a severe fine and sometimes a custodial sentence. Yet McLeish gets off without even a rap over the knuckles. This was followed by three Scottish MPs admitting to similar malpractices without losing their positions.
In Labour’s ranks are the very people who accused great fighters for socialism and the working class, including the socialists and Marxists in Liverpool from 1983 to 1987, of “corruption, literal corruption” (in the words of Roy Hattersley). There is not a word by Hattersley or others in condemning this New Labour corruption on a massive scale. Also, Lady Porter, Tory heroine of the 1980s, has had her surcharge of £27 million for council malpractice in Westminster reinstated. There is no danger, however, that the heiress of the Tesco millions, even in the unlikely event of being forced to pay, will face the prospect of having her house seized, as devoted working class councillors in Liverpool, Lambeth and elsewhere did. It was the present leaders of the Labour Party, together with current European Commissioner Kinnock, who most viciously maligned and stabbed in the back these councillors. However, events are now going to severely undermine the grip which Blair has exercised in the 1990s, even over New Labour.
But it is entirely false, as some continue to argue, that even a clash within the apparatus, which is what the Blair-Brown struggle is about, can find a working class echo within New Labour. That struggle is summed up by an alleged promise from Blair that he would retire in the second term of a New Labour government and the crown would pass to Brown. But the ‘president of the universe’, as Blair was called by a previous US ambassador to Britain during the Afghan War, does not want to loosen his grip on power. Indeed, the Afghan War and his enhanced ‘international reputation’ have had the opposite effect. A split in the apparatus, in a viable party with an active base, can find an echo amongst the ranks sometimes. The problem with New Labour is that it has been completely sanitised. Real socialists have either been systematically expelled or dropped out of the party. The rank and file is there to merely rubber stamp the decisions made above.
The weakness of the parliamentary left (and this is echoed even more within the party) was highlighted over the Paul Marsden affair during the Afghan War. He came into collision with New Labour, was undoubtedly bullied, and in reaction deserted to the Liberal Democrats. What is striking, however, is that despite the presence of the left-wing Campaign Group, it seems no attempt was made to systematically try and win over and influence a former right-wing Blairite who had come into collision with New Labour. The result is that the left was not seen as an alternative. For the first time since the early 1980s, a Labour MP has gone over to the side of the Liberal Democrats.
Just how far to the right New Labour has travelled was illustrated by a comment of a former Labour Party member who wrote in The Guardian: “Post-1989 and the communist death, traditional parties themselves died. They represented something real when organised capital confronted organised labour, but take away that binding thread of mutually assured conflict and hark, what hollowness follows. There is plenty of noise but it is a cacophony of a democratic oligarchy which has replaced the aristocratic oligarchy of old. And the oligarchy’s shares – in the despotism of its mild conformity – a similarity at the centre of taste, dress, accent and views. The absent voice is that of the poor. For British democracy has always operated on the premise that they do not vote.”
This is, of course, a reflection of the thinking of a certain layer of former Labour intellectuals that the class conflict is over. Yet even during the 1990s significant class clashes took place, especially towards the end of the decade with the rise of the anti-capitalist movement. Yet what is undoubtedly true is that the Blair “oligarchy” which controls the Labour Party in a way no leadership has done before, does believe that the class struggle has been abolished. Therefore, this intellectual is persuaded that the very raison d’etre (reason for existence) for the Labour Party’s birth has disappeared.
From this flowed the “project” of Mandelson and Blair to convert the Labour Party into a new version of the US Democrats. At the end of almost a decade of the “project”, despite the noises about “Old Labour” policies, the project remains intact. It is true that a vital element of this was an alliance with the Liberal Democrats, possibly leading to a fusion in a new centre party. They were given consultative status on some cabinet committees, and Blair and former Liberal Democrats leader Ashdown were involved in a semi-public political love-fest in the immediate period after the 1997 general election. Blair subsequently admitted that if he had had a minority or even a smaller majority government then the Liberal Democrats would have been taken into the cabinet. The overwhelming majority which Labour amassed in that election shattered these plans.
Nevertheless, a certain close collaboration between New Labour, particularly Mandelson and Blair, and the Liberal leaders, continued for some time. But the downfall of Mandelson and the pressures within the different parties, particularly in parliament with the struggle for position, power and influence, led to a certain cooling. Kennedy, the Liberal Democrats’ leader, has now withdrawn from involvement in the cabinet committees. He is pursuing a policy of leaning to the left on some issues (in words to left of New Labour) while maintaining a traditional Liberal ‘equidistance’ between New Labour and the Tories. He clearly hopes that they could replace the Tories as the second major bourgeois party in Britain. On the day that Marsden defected to them, the Liberal Democrats also managed to draw into their ranks a number of disaffected former Tory MEPs. But whether or not they succeed in displacing the Tories is problematical and is linked to the overall general political situation in Britain, and in particular the future political direction of the Tory party.
An additional factor keeping New Labour and the Liberal Democrats apart is the general disaffection with official politics, which Britain shares with the rest of the capitalist world. This is underlined by the fact that nearly one million fewer people backed Blair in the May 2001 general election than voted for James Callaghan’s Labour government when it crashed to defeat in 1979 after the winter of discontent. Only a quarter of the potential electorate put a cross by the name of a Labour candidate. Those voting for a Labour government in June were outnumbered three to one by those voting for other parties or not voting at all.
The position if anything has worsened since then. Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian [12 December] pointed out that millions of British people are leading “separate, parallel lives”. They don’t conform to “British norms” and clearly reject this country’s “institutions”. The monarchy, parliament and the official political parties are scorned by increasing millions, four out of ten of the population. It is worse when it comes to the young, with six out of ten not voting This mood is now infecting previously “civic minded” groups such as women over 55. A devastating comment on the lack of interest on official politics, never mind involvement, was shown by the votes for the inane TV programme Big Brother, where 35 million voted compared to 26 million in the last general election.Tory crisis continues
As we know, amongst 25 to 34 year olds the number voting was 46 per cent, while for the under 25s only 39 per cent voted. What has alarmed bourgeois political commentators is that this mood has spread from the very young, the under-25s, to a growing proportion of 25-34s and even to the 35-44s.
New BBC chief Greg Dyke declared: “We are losing a generation” and yet proposals are under discussion to reduce the limited political coverage on TV. This is not an expression of ‘apathy’ because, in the words of Freedland, these disaffected voters are becoming angrier and angrier, and while “under-44s are consuming a quarter less news than they used to – even when there is so much more of it available – that is more about boredom with parliament. It suggests that there is a large slice of the country, especially the young, that is tuning out of the national conversation altogether.” But, he points out, “substantial numbers of young abstainers are nevertheless ‘active citizens’ – going to meetings, lobbying for single issue groups. They are interested in politics; they just see no value in the traditional, parliamentary way of doing it.”
This alarming situation from the point of view of the bourgeois would be compounded by the fusion of the traditional parties, with the Liberal Democrats joining New Labour in a new party. The bourgeois parliamentary system needs fake oppositional parties that allow the capitalists to swing from ‘left’ to right and back again whenever social and political tensions rise. As improbable as it seems at this stage, the Tory party is attempting to renovate itself under the leadership of Iain Duncan Smith, by providing an alternative if support for the Blair government should crumble. ‘IDS’ has attempted to present a more caring image. He supported the abolition of the homophobic Section 28 and outlawed the Tories’ right-wing racist Monday Club. Moreover, he has refused, along with two other shadow cabinet members, to join the ‘holy of holies’ the Carlton Club, because of their discrimination against women for membership. (This was suspended to allow Thatcher when she was Tory leader, as an ‘honorary man’, to become a member!) In retaliation, the Carlton Club has threatened to cut off its £1 million annual donation to the Tory party.
