[Militant No. 536, 23rd January 1981, p. 8-9]
The Labour Party must campaign to oust the Tories and fight for socialist policies
The 24th January will be a crucial day for the Labour Party.
By Lynn Walsh
The great majority of Labour Party members will be waiting for the Special Conference to write into the constitution new clauses which give effect to the Annual Conference’s decision to widen the franchise for the election of party leader.
That decision together with the constitutional amendment implementing automatic, mandatory re-selection for MP’s, made last year’s conference the most important since 1918, when the party adopted Clause IV, the socialist basis of the constitution.
The right wing of the Parliamentary Labour Party, however, look to the special conference with gloom and foreboding.
David Owen recently described any decisions to establish an electoral college as “a fix”. Indicating to journalists the gang of three and about a dozen allies would be leading a breakaway from the Labour Party. Owen predicted that the conference would mark an “irrevocable change” in the Party.
According to Shirley Williams – much quoted in the capitalist press as usual – the special conference will be a “miserable business”, even apparently, if it adopts an electoral college giving half the votes on leadership to the Parliamentary Labour Party.
The right of the PLP are clearly in complete disarray. They are all equally opposed to the democratisation of the party. But as the recent “Campaign for Labour Victory” conference showed, they are deeply divided over their tactics. Some are clearly in favour of splitting from the party immediately (like Rodgers, Williams, Owen, Horam, Wrigglesworth).
Some right-wingers like Sandleson and Horam have openly announced their support for David Steel’s invitation to join up with the Liberals, in an alliance or an electoral pact.
Others, however, like Roy Hattersley and Giles Radice, are less confident that a new centre or social democratic party would get off the ground. They are still determined to battle on inside the Labour Party, opposing conference policies from within, and with a view to blocking the implementation of socialist policies by a future Labour government.
Clearly, many right-wing MPs are waiting to see exactly what constitutional amendment is adopted on the 14th before deciding on their next step.
But one thing is clear: Shirley Williams, David Owen, William Rodgers, and the other right-wingers who have been discussing a break-away social-democratic party have lost the argument over policy within the Labour Party.
Both constituency and trade union delegates at the Blackpool conference, drawing the lessons from the disastrous record of the last Labour government, decisively rejected the right-wing policies that led Labour to defeat and opened the door to the Thatcher government.
The measures to democratise the party were long overdue reforms, which express the determination of Labour’s ranks once again to take control of their own party.
Urging the right wing that it was “now or never for the big break”, (‘Daily Mail’, 9 January) Dick Taverne, himself a Labour renegade, made a telling point. Unless they jumped now, he said, right wingers would be pushed out through re-selection. Then they would be seen as rejects. Any new party set up under those circumstances would be seen “as the Dustbin Party” – and its slogan would be: “rejects of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your seats!”
Even if they jump now, however, the right-wing MPs will still be Labour’s rejects. While taunting the right for their cowardice, Dick Taverne is apparently oblivious of the fact that he himself took a “one way ticket to oblivion” when he decided to stand against Labour after being “re-selected” by his Lincoln constituency. True, with the fervent backing of the capitalist press, Taverne won a by-election in 1973. But in 1974, Taverne was defeated by the Labour candidate and passed into political oblivion.
Taverne was simply one of the first of the Gaitskellite rump to be rejected from the Labour Party. He himself admitted that he originally obtained his seat through Hugh Gaitskell’s personal patronage. This was by no mean untypical of the Party in those days, when the constituency parties were treated by MPs simply as election machines there to ensure they regained their seats at general elections.
Under Gaitskell, the party leadership attempted to remove Clause IV, part 4, from the LP constitution. This attempt to remove the party’s basic socialist aim was defeated by the constituency activists and the majority of the trade unions. But in practice the Gaitskellite leadership, which continued to dominate the party until the defeat of the Callaghan government, abandoned any attempt to implement socialist policies.
The Labour governments that came after Gaitskell’s death made no attempt to implement socialist policies, abandoning even the reforms promised in the election manifestoes of 1964 and 1974.
In the last few years, the right wing of the PLP have attempted to bolster their position by attributing the swing to the left to the work of Marxist “infiltrators” and “plotters”. But it was the right-wing Gaitskellites who entered the party in the 1950s and 1960s who were the real “entrists”.
In a period of relative economic boom and political stability, they saw the PLP as a vehicle for their own careers. Socialism, they argued, was no longer necessary in the old form: Keynesian economics and the “welfare state” could make capitalism fair and acceptable to all.
It is the shattering of this myth – with the return of economic crisis, mass unemployment, and a viciously reactionary Tory government – which has brought the defeat of the right, and the demand for the return of genuine socialist policies.
Many right-wingers used the Labour Party as their ladder to a parliamentary career, only to abandon it when it had served their purpose – people like Lord George Brown (who never misses an opportunity to attack Labour), Sir Richard Marsh (now a well-paid spokesman for the employers), Ray Gunter, Reg Prentice, and many others like them.
Another of the professional infiltrators was Lord Vaizey, formerly Professor John Vaizey, given a life peerage by Harold Wilson. He resigned from the Party in 1978. By that time (he wrote to ‚The Times‚, 3 December 1980) “there was scarcely a Labour policy that I could support.”
“The chancellor’s economic policy was half-hearted monetarism that led uniquely to rising unemployment and a collapse in currency. The vaunted re-distribution of income and wealth had made the poor poorer and the rich richer.” Was Lord Vaizey moving to the left? Hardly!
Underlying Lord Vaizey’s disillusionment is the recognition that the Keynesian ideas on which the right-wing Labour leaders based themselves are utopian in this period of capitalist crisis. “There is no longer a set of social democratic ideas that will work. Keynesianism is intellectually dead … Nobody, not even Shirley Williams, has the faintest ideas how to redistribute income … social democratic theory is just plain wrong … is Shirley Williams going to nail her colours to that fallen mast?”
Vaizey’s conclusion, however, is not that the Labour Party should return to fundamental socialist ideas. No, he concludes that “the only workable set of political principles in free Europe today is Tory pragmatism.” Margaret Thatcher, he asserts, is “honest, a patriot, and ready to listen.”
Well, at least Lord Vaizey has followed the logic of his argument. Unlike Shirley Williams and David Owen, he is not attempting to blame Labour’s defeat on the left wing of the party.
David Owen (‘Daily Mail’, 7 January) claimed that if the special conference agrees to the electoral college, “Labour could lose millions of votes.” Owen ignores the fact that it as he and the right who presided over Labour’s decline.
The weakest and smallest constituency parties are not those which support the left, but precisely those with right-wing MPs. It is parties where there has been a growth in membership and increased activity which have demanded a return to socialist policies and the democratisation of the party.
On the other hand, there are parties like Bill Rodgers’ constituency, Stockton-on-Tees, where, according to recent reports, there is a far from healthy situation.
A ‘Financial Times’ reporter recently told how Bill Rodgers pre-empted criticism and a possible vote of censure on his opposition to the party’s policy on nuclear arms by making a special summons to his sympathisers – “some of whom have not been to party meetings for years.”
“Over this period [the 18 years Mr Rodgers has held this seat] the party has grown complacent – less than half the 90 management committee members attend meetings regularly – and has become a rather cosy family affair noted for its large number of husband and wife teams.”
“Few [of Rodgers’ strongest personal supporters] are active in day-to-day party affairs beyond the purely social, and some share the widespread disillusionment with the last Labour government, and in particular, its 5% pay policy.”
And yet, it is Bill Rodgers, the “gang of three” and their sympathisers, who have the blatant nerve to accuse the left of bringing about the decline of the party!
However, the FT’s report did not stop another ‘Financial Times’ correspondent from contradictorily claiming that “Mrs Williams is acknowledged to be by far the biggest vote-winner on the right.” Apparently this lobby correspondent not only forgot that the last labour government (with Mrs Williams as a leading minister) lost the election, but Shirley Williams herself lost her own seat in Stevenage! This paper and the rest of Fleet Street really mean that Shirley Williams is the one they would like to see leading a breakaway social democratic party.
The millionaires’ press also ignores the enormous upward turn in the LP’s new membership in the last year or so – precisely the period when the party has moved to the left. There has been an increase in active membership, despite the campaign of the PLP right wing against the decisions of the NEC and the party conference, despite all the attacks on the Labour Party and despite media attempts to whip up a witch-hunting scare campaign against the Marxist left around the ‘Militant’
Another of ‘The Times’s’ recent correspondents made a telling point. A supporter of the extreme right-wing National Association for Freedom, Professor Anthony Flew, has no patience with those “moderates” who still believe that the Labour Party can be saved for “social democracy”.
They have failed, he claims, to come to terms with the party’s “constitutional commitment to total Clause IV socialism.”
“Clause IV is not something which has been insinuated into the party by a bunch of Trotskyite entrists: it has been there since 1918: it has been printed on every party card as the statement of the party’s aims for as long as anybody can remember; and, as few people seem to know, words to much the same effect are to be found in the rule books of most of our major trade unions.
“It is idle to advise ‘Labour’s real leaders’… to ‘define a new set of principles’ and to tell ‘the militant rank and file‘ either to bury these or to ‘seek another party’. It is the non-socialists who should long since have left the party whose clearly reiterated aims they do not share…”
On this one point we can agree with Professor Flew!
The press, which speaks for big business, is not really concerned about the damage being done to Labour’s “electoral prospects”, for which they pretend to show a touching concern. What they are really concerned about is that the Labour Party has begun a process of transformation into a mass, socialist party committed to a fundamental change in society.
The Labour Party is no longer a reliable “second eleven”, headed by a right-wing Labour “alternative” to the Tories. They are afraid that the party will now begin to campaign for its aims, to defend workers’ class interests, and to challenge the wealth and the power of the capitalist class.
Now they are faced with the prospect of re-selection, many right-wing MPs who have never, in reality, accepted the party’s socialist aims, are considering breaking from the party. Clearly, people like Roy Jenkins, who deserted the party for a highly paid job in the EEC, have a direct personal interest in the formation of a new centre party – to provide a position for the continuation of their parliamentary careers.
David Steel, the Liberal leader, is also keen on the formation of a new centre grouping, if he cannot persuade Labour renegades to join the Liberal Party. David Steel’s recent “ten-point programme for economic recovery,” which consisted of unworkable “Liberal-Tory” economic policies, was not so much an economic strategy as “a political stratagem designed to provide common ground on which politicians of the centre could unite.” (‘The Times’, 13 January)
But as ‘The Times’ editorial commented: “One should not exaggerate the contribution that the Liberals can make at this stage to encouraging a social-democratic break-away.”
The spokesman of capitalism realise that the Liberal banner will have little appeal for millions of workers suffering from the break-down of “private enterprise” in Britain, and demanding bold solutions to their burning problems.
But the prospect for a new “social democratic party” are no more rosy than those for a Liberal centre party.
The policies of the right wing “moderates” or “social democrats” would be the same as those put to the test – and found wanting – under previous Labour governments. Of course, the Labour renegades would get generous support from the capitalist media, and initially might have some successes. But in the long run, their policies would be no more successful than when right-wing Labour governments were in power.
Working class voters and even middle-class voters, persuaded to vote for them in a coming election, would very soon be disillusioned with their “pink Tory” policies.
While the main concern of right-wing MPs is with not wasting “promising careers in the wilderness” and “avoiding political oblivion”, the strategy of big business is cynically to use Labour’s defectors or a new social democratic party to inflict the maximum damage on the Labour Party. They want to block the return of a Labour government that would pose a challenge to the capitalist system.
“The people who are contemplating embarking upon this adventure (a new party),” remarked Peter Jenkins in ‘The Guardian’, “are not setting out to wreck the Labour Party, but that could be their first result.”
Many of the serious commentators, however, are sceptical whether a break-away party would gain any significant basis at all. “At some time,” wrote Alan Watkins (‘Observer’, 14 December 1980), “if Mr Jenkins and the BSW (Blessed Shirley Williams) are serious, someone will have to get out on the doorstep and sell the double glazing.”
In other words, where would the active supporters, the organisers, the election workers, the rank and file trade union support come from for a new social democratic party? If the right wing have already lost the support of the great majority of activists in the labour movement, from where, how will they attract the activists to build a break-away party?
David Woods, in ‘The Times’, confessed that he could hardly “believe in a new radical party of the centre-left.” But he believed “in its necessity for moderate radicals, without being able to believe in the practical circumstances that could bring it into being.”
“If it matters, what I do believe is that a break-away moderate Labour group could keep the Labour left out of office for the rest of the 1980s – if enough PLP moderates were prepared to stand against official party candidates. Are they?”
There we have it! The big-business support for a new party – and it is being reported that business interests have offered £15 millions to Roy Jenkins for the founding of such a party – is aimed at blocking the coming to power of a Labour Party committed to radical socialist policies.
Doubtful about the effectiveness of a new party, however, David Wood has also confirmed that the strategists of capitalism would prefer at least some of Labour’s right-wing MPs to stay within the party to inflict maximum damage on Labour in the event of a new Labour government.
“In a day of Labour government, it would be different. Assume that Mr Foot makes 10 Downing Street in 1983 or 1984 on anything less than a landslide, then Mr Rodgers, Dr Owen, and the Gaitskellite rump of the PLP, if they had the courage to risk constituency re-selection, would have a blocking vote on the wilder lunacies of new party policies.”
The election of Michael Foot – by the PLP – to the leadership of the party itself reflects the profound swing to the left. Left to themselves, the PLP would undoubtedly have voted for another candidates, probably Denis Healey. But aware of the pressure from Labour’s ranks, particularly in view of re-selection, and fearing “civil war” in the party if Healey were elected, a majority of MPs voted for Foot.
The capitalist press attempted to ridicule and condemn Michael Foot before his election. But again, the serious spokesmen understand the significance of his victory. They are well aware of the cynical propaganda motives of attacks on Foot. “Mr Foot has very winning ways,” wrote Ronald Butt (‘The Times’, 13 November 1980), “and the Tories who believe he will be an easier opponent than Mr Healey could well be wrong.”
“Of course [Butt continues], there are dangers in Mr Foot. Capitalism in the mixed society is obviously in some present danger and Mr Foot’s capacity to promote political feelings and class sentiments without calculating the real consequences is obviously a danger for the mixed economy.”
Michael Foot’s election as leader has been welcomed by Labour’s ranks because it marks a strengthening of the left, the adoption of more radical policies, and the beginning of a new period of mass campaigning against the Tories and their system.
Speaking recently in Newcastle, Michael Foot said that the Labour Party must carry through a “socialist transformation when the party is returned to power.” The next government would have to be “much more socialist” than any previous Labour government.
Statements like this, as the response to Michael Foot, Tony Benn and other left-wingers on the 29th November showed, are welcomed not only by party members, but by masses of ordinary workers.
However, faced with the catastrophic collapse of British capitalism, in the context of a world-wide economic recession, such a socialist transformation could only be carried out on the basis of a bold socialist programme. The “alternative economic strategy”, advanced by the ‘Tribune’ left and largely accepted by recent Labour Party conferences, will not ensure such a transformation.
As ‘Militant’ has explained (16 January), the policy of partial nationalisation and an attempt to impose “planning agreements” on the big monopolies, will not give a Labour government decisive control of the economy.
Partial control, and attempts to implement reforms in the workers’ interests, will either be blocked or rapidly sabotaged by enormous economic and political pressure from the capitalist class.
Britain is facing the worst slump since 1929-31. As the stock-broking firm, Phillips and Drew, recently commentated: “The current recession in manufacturing industry is set to be sharper than the great depression of 1929-31. The cumulative decline in manufacturing output is expected to reach 14% between 1979 and 1981, the sharpest decline in manufacturing output this century. The equivalent drop in 1929-31 was 11%.” (‘The Times’, 5 January 1981)
The economic forecasters are all vying with one another to predict the highest rise in unemployment, with predictions of 3 million or even 3.7 million by the end of the decade (see page 6).
Within the framework of this diseased capitalism, there is no room for significant improvement of workers’ living standards, for lasting social reforms, or even for the defence of the past gains of the labour movement.
The crisis facing the working class demands the implementation of a rounded-out socialist programme based squarely on the aims of Clause IV, part 4 of the LP constitution. Common ownership of the means of production, under conditions of monopoly capitalism, must in practical terms mean the nationalisation of the 200 big monopolies which dominate the economy, together with the banks and other financial institutions.
Only then, with ownership and control of the “commanding heights” of the economy, could the labour movement integrate and develop the productive resources of the country in a planned way.
Enormous increases in output would be rapidly possible, making it possible within a short space drastically to cut the average working week, to increase holidays, to provide a comfortable standard of living for all workers, together with vast improvements in health, education, sport and recreation facilities.
Socialist nationalisation, moreover, would not be based on attempting to “compensate” the capitalists for the wealth they have extracted over the years from the working class. Compensation would be only on the basis of proven need.
Socialists nationalisation would not place the management of industry and commerce back in the hands of state-appointed ex-capitalists and bureaucrats. Nationalisation would be under workers’ control and management, with the industries being run jointly by representatives of the trade unions nationally, the trade unions in the particular industries, and the government.
A campaign on this programme, explained to millions of workers and linked to the immediate demand for an end to unemployment, for a 35-hour working week, for a reversal of government spending cuts and a programme of useful public works, and other immediate demands, would win overwhelming mass support.
The Labour Party’s national demonstration against unemployment held in Liverpool on 29 November marked the beginning of a new stage in the party’s campaign to channel mass opposition to the Tories and mobilise support for socialist policies.
Michael Foot, speaking before the 29th, supported the call for a demonstration with the remark that Aneurin Bevan understood the “association between the agitation outside Westminster and what happens in this place [Parliament]. He understood better than anybody in the Thirties that the House of Commons could be used as a sounding board for what happened outside. So if the demonstration we are holding in Liverpool [originally proposed on the NEC by LPYS representative, Tony Saunois – LW] has not already been in existence it would have been necessary to invent it.”
The massive Liverpool demonstration, probably the biggest demonstration held outside London since 1945, showed the way. Now, the campaign against the Tories must be stepped up on the basis of bold socialist policies.
The carrying through of a constitutional amendment to give effect to the conference decision to democratise the election of party leader should mark a decisive defeat of Labour’s right-wing infiltrators, the Tory “fifth column within the party”, and clear the decks for the vital struggle ahead.
Schreibe einen Kommentar