(Socialism Today No 19, June 1997)
The Blair government ‘hit the ground running’ with a raft of early measures, giving the impression of change. But, argues Peter Taaffe, impressions of change will not satisfy the aroused expectations reflected in Labour’s election landslide.
The 1 May British general election has opened up a new and decisive period for the working class, for the trade unions and for socialists. The effects of this political earthquake, which saw the Tories reduced to their lowest share of the vote since 1832 and their lowest number of seats since 1906, are still being felt in Britain and internationally.
The Socialist Party predicted the broad outlines of the 1 May result. We said that it was likely to be a massive anti-Tory landslide and yet the smallest turnout since 1945 (see The Socialist No.12, 25 April). But no-one could have predicted how the deep-going anti-Tory mood would translate into parliamentary arithmetic. New Labour has a majority greater than the total number of Tory MPs in the new House of Commons.
Blair’s sycophants speak of ‚Tony’s victory‘ and attribute New Labour’s victory to the superior ‚managerial‘ skills of New Labour’s spin doctors. Yet the British general election was won not in five weeks but in the previous five years. It was a crushing verdict on the five years of Majorism and eighteen years of Thatcherism. It is ironic then that the British people have ruthlessly repudiated the sado-monetarist, brutal anti-working class policies of Thatcher and her acolytes (witness the delight at the defeat of Portillo, the supreme embodiment of the continuation of her doctrines, on election night), yet the new government accepts the basic tenets of Thatcherism. It intends to restrain and further cut public expenditure; it will maintain most of Thatcher’s anti-union laws: and its new credo of ‚welfare-to-work‘ will be nothing but an attack on the unemployed and claimants.
All of this was not obvious, of course, to the mass of working people in the days and weeks that followed the election. A huge wave of relief and celebration swept throughout the working class and labour movement as the yoke of eighteen years was lifted from their back. It was as if the country had been liberated from foreign occupation. The mood was reminiscent of the aftermath of the overthrow of a dictatorship. It was the scale of the victory which had such decisive psychological effect on the working class. This must terrify Tony Blair and his New Labour cabinet more than anybody else, as it has generated huge expectations.
The general election campaign, by common consent, was the most boring in history. Scepticism and outright hostility were shown to New Labour canvassers on the doorstep. The message coming from Blair and Brown of ’no change‘ clashed with the enormous yearning for change which existed at all levels of British society. But size does matter. A small Labour majority, as welcome as it would have been, would not have evoked the kind of response which was seen immediately after the election.
It was quite common to hear ordinary workers saying ‚this government can now do anything. On the day after the election school teachers, as reported in the New Statesman, were taken aback by the illusions which had been aroused by the scale of New Labour’s victory. Single parents, many of them unemployed, enthused that the government was ’now going to give them jobs, proper education for their kids, and homes‘. Teachers themselves, as Socialist Party members have reported, gave children an extra five minutes playtime, partly to celebrate the victory over the Tories, but also to take out time to discuss in the staff room the effects of the victory. Sceptical workers, even those who didn’t vote, were swept along as a mood of expectation and big illusions was generated amongst the broad mass of the population.
Amongst the more advanced thinking workers the mood of apprehension and scepticism towards the intentions of Blair and his cabinet remained. Yet the government in its first few weeks ‚hit the ground running‘ and has given the impression of change. A moratorium has been declared for at least six months on the closure of London hospitals. Barts, we are now informed, will be kept open, although the casualty unit will be closed. Class sizes are to be reduced, nursery vouchers are to go and the government has sanctioned a whole series of investigations into issues like ‚Gulf war syndrome‘. Bills preparing for devolution in Scotland and Wales have been announced. Jack Straw, the new Home Secretary, and the butt of the left’s hostility prior to 1 May, has stopped the deportation of the Nepalese adopted son of a millionaire. Trade union rights have been restored at GCHQ, albeit with pressure being exerted for a ’no-strike agreement‘.
Socialism Today argued in the past that the policies of New Labour were now no different to the Tories or Liberals. Therefore, with some justification, it would appear that supporters of the new government could now claim ‘you were wrong, see the government is initiating change’. Impressions can play an important role in politics as in life. But only up to a point and for a short period. A diet of impressions will not satisfy the aroused expectations and hunger for change reflected in the results of 1 May.
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The government measures announced, welcome as they are, have actually cost very little in real terms. Moreover, closer examination, both of the character of this government and what is really promised, demonstrates that substantial improvements in the lives of the majority of the population will not take place. Compare the composition of this government to previous Labour governments and its character becomes transparent. The bourgeois entertained some apprehensions about previous Labour governments. They were governments partly subject to the pressure of the organised working class through the trade unions. Neither Attlee in 1945 nor Wilson represented any real danger to the possessing classes. But the ruling class feared that the pressure of the working class could compel them to go much further than the Labour right wing was prepared to go, and encroach on the power and income of the ruling class.
No such fears are entertained by the bourgeois with regard to Tony Blair’s government. For the first time in history shares on the Stock Exchange rose on the morrow of a Labour victory. They have continued to rise in the following weeks. Trade union leaders were drawn into previous Labour governments; Ernest Bevin became Foreign Secretary in the Attlee government of 1945, while Frank Cousins became a minister in the Wilson government of the 1960s. Conversely, sometimes businessmen were drawn into Tory cabinets, such as a former head of the CBI John Davies, who became a minister in the Heath government in the early 1970s. Now Blair, as if to make plain the character of his government, a pronounced pro-business, pro-capitalist, ‚pro-market‘ government, has proffered ministerial portfolios to the captains of industry.
David Simon, chairman of BP, has offered to work for nothing – although generously cosseted by the £1 million pay-off from his company – for the national ‚well-being‘. Appropriately, as a ruthless representative of big business, his task is to further the process of ‚deregulation‘, which has already wreaked havoc with the lives of millions of workers through short-term, temporary contracts, the de-recognition of unions, etc. Peter Jarvis, former chief executive of Whitbread, is being touted as head of the government’s Low Pay Commission. The Guardian reported that, while he was implacably imposed even to the £4-26 an hour demanded by many unions, he gets in effect £521-38 an hour, 122 times the rate proposed by the Trade Union Congress. Correctly, Bill Morris, the general secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union, warned the government ’not to put Dracula in charge of the blood bank‘. Undaunted, the government has gone ahead and appointed Howard Davies, the former director of the Confederation of British Industry, the bosses‘ trade union, to head the new body supervising the banks and financial markets of the City.
To cap it all Barclays‘ Bank chief Martin Taylor has been drafted in, again ‚free of charge‘, to ‚reform‘ Britain’s welfare system. This task will be shared with Frank Field, MP for Birkenhead, and a hate figure for pensioners and claimants. He recently met the former pensions minister in the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, which impoverished thousands of workers in that country. In March, in a speech in New Zealand, Field advocated the introduction of workfare in Britain, identifying single mothers who would be compelled to seek work, at virtually any rate, once their children reached the age of four and entered nurseries.
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The real character of the government is not immediately evident to the mass of the population. The tendency of British workers has been to extend time and a fund of credit to governments which they consider are acting in their interest. It takes time and experience for illusions to be shattered. Does that mean to say that there is an unquestioning or uncritical mood in all layers of the population? Not at all. At national level the government appears to be setting about changing the situation while on the ground Labour councils can give exactly the opposite impression. Cuts are still taking place and with them teachers, nursery nurses and local government workers are threatened with redundancy or are actually being sacked.
Without new resources this government cannot effect fundamental change. That in turn is dependent on the perspectives for the British economy, which is in turn determined by developments in the world economy. The engine of world capitalism, the US economy, appears to be steaming ahead with an annualised rate of growth of just under 6%, with unemployment just below 5%. Yet, unlike Gordon Brown, who believes he can escape the cycle of boom and bust which is organic to capitalism, serious American capitalist economists speculate whether the next recession, which they take for granted, will involve a ‚hard‘ or a ’soft‘ landing. All serious capitalist economists agree that some time in the next 12 months to two years, world capitalism will slow down, and possibly enter a recession deeper than the one in the early 1990s.
The economic straitjacket which the government willingly placed on themselves by refusing to go outside Tory spending limits for the next two years, means inevitably they will be forced to rob Peter in order to pay Paul. Nowhere is this clearer than in education. The proposal to reduce class sizes has undoubtedly met with genuine enthusiasm. And yet, restricted as it is to three, four and five year-olds, this is an extremely modest proposal which will lighten the burden of very few teachers. There is also no guarantee that the extra resources resulting from the ending of the assisted places scheme can be automatically translated into reduced class sizes. The Local Management of Schools means that governors can decide themselves how these resources will be deployed, and they may not necessarily use them to reduce class sizes. Moreover, this measure will be phased in over a seven year period.
Nevertheless the promised concessions to the primary sector of education will be offset by savage reductions in higher education. Students and lecturers who probably swung over decisively to Labour in this election, are due to come down to earth with a bump. The Tories‘ voucher scheme has been utterly discredited by the campaign of the teachers‘ unions and particularly by very successful rank-and-file campaigns like CAVE. Yet now we learn, via The Guardian, that the Dearing committee, set up by the previous Tory government, is considering a student voucher plan to ‚revolutionise the funding of universities and colleges‘. Free access to education will receive a big blow if Bearing’s proposals turn out as The Guardian expects. Parents will be encouraged to save for their children’s higher education. Students whose parents who do not take out special credits might, according to The Guardian, ‚graduate owing £10,000 to £20,000‘. This is in effect a graduate tax. Dearing has been encouraged by David Blunkett, the new Education Secretary, who told him to ‚think the unthinkable‘. The ‚unthinkable‘ will be found to be totally unacceptable to the mass of students. The anger of students at what has been proposed can produce a period of extreme radicalisation. The situation in Britain in some of the universities now has some of the features of developments prior to the massive student radicalisation of the 1960s.
Looking to the not too distant future similar upheavals are being prepared within industry and the trade unions. The fund of goodwill from the teachers to Blunkett has already been depleted by the scandalous announcement of 18 schools on a so-called ‚list of shame‘. This is an echo of the worst methods of the previous Tory Secretary of State, Gillian Shepherd.
Frank Dobson was given a warm reception at the recent conference of the Royal College of Nursing. His proposal to restore national pay bargaining, in place of the chaotic local bargaining resulting from the establishment of NHS Trusts, was particularly welcomed. But he also set the face of the government against any increase in nurses‘ pay. At the same time the outpatients‘ department of the Edgware Hospital has been closed, despite the promises of Labour candidates in the area that if Labour was victorious it would stay open. There is a clear intention, through the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), supervised by Labour millionaire Geoffrey Robinson, to in effect carry out privatisations by the back door.
Industry minister Ian McCartney has promised that the Post Office will not be privatised. This is to be welcomed, particularly by Post Office workers. But it remains to be seen whether greater powers of ‚commercialisation‘ does not represent a ‚rose by another name‘, in effect privatisation. The contradictions between the promises of the government and the realities of what they will or will not do, will be borne in on the working class. The continuation of Tory policies in the public sector, particularly with regard to pay and cuts, means inevitable collisions. The anti-union laws of the Tories have been kept in place to be used if necessary against public sector workers who ‚get out of line‘. Trapped by the crisis of British capitalism the government at national and, increasingly, through Labour councils at local level as well, will be compelled to carry through attacks on the living standards of the working class.
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Tony Blair and the right have transformed the Labour Party. It is now a capitalist party. We have charted out in previous issues of Socialism Today the steps whereby the avenues to change the Labour Party have been obliterated by Blair. The ruthless centralisation of power in his cabinet office is paralleled by a similar process in the Labour Party. The ‚Blairistas‘ form the solid phalanxes of the new Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP). Six previous National Union of Students‘ presidents, who earned their spurs in attacking the left and particularly Militant, are the new gilded youth of the PLP. With the kind of majority which Labour has and given the attacks which will be made on the working class, revolts are inevitable. But as a sign of things to come Ron Davies, the new Secretary of State for Wales, has implicitly threatened Welsh MPs with expulsion if they refuse to vote for the government’s devolution proposals.
Blair is set on completely breaking the link with the trade unions. Will a serious battle to maintain the links with the trade unions open up in the foreseeable period? There is bound to be some resistance if for no other reason than the influence of the trade union leadership on the government would be neutered by such a move. But it is highly unlikely that there will be mass resistance to any steps that Blair may take. Armed with what he will picture as his ‚massive mandate‘, he is determined to complete his ‚project‘. The goal is to establish a British version of the US Democratic Party, a party shorn of any connections with the trade unions.
Any battle within the Labour Party on the trade union link will be taking place against the background of a resistance and growing anger to the cuts which will be introduced by the government. Workers faced with redundancies and cuts in living standards at the hands of Labour councils will not tend to go into the Labour Party and change it, as happened sometimes in the past. It is more likely that the disgust of trade unionists will be reflected in demands for disaffiliation from a party which in government will be acting no differently than previous openly pro-capitalist governments.
What of the left within the Labour Party? Opposition is inevitable. Fifty Labour MPs it seems, according to Alan Simpson of the Campaign Group, are threatening to vote against the effective denationalisation of the Bank of England. But any revolt will not resemble the mass left resistance of the 1930s around the Independent Labour Party, or the mass Bennite wing of the 1980s, which Militant played a key role in developing. Workers are now a minority within the Labour Party, filled out as it is with the largely middle-class Blairistas. The prime concern of many of these is for positions of power and influence at national and local levels. Left splits, which are possible, will not result in big chunks of workers splitting away from the Labour Party, for the simple reason that there are very few workers left within the Labour Party. It is more likely that if such splits take place, they will then seek to find support from workers outside. The abandonment of its working class and socialist base, which was foreseen by Socialism Today, led us to form first of all Militant Labour and now the Socialist Party.
The seeds of disintegration of political formations are evident even in their hour of greatest triumph. Not for the first time in history a party has been raised to power with a massive majority, as the Liberals were in 1906. But the day of their greatest triumph was also the beginning of the end of the Liberals as a major national party. With its crushing majority there can be no excuses for Blair, Brown and the New Labour cabinet. Failure to deliver the goods, inevitable so long as the government remains within the framework of diseased British capitalism, will produce a profound change in consciousness, first of all amongst the more thinking workers and then amongst the mass at a later stage.
The ground is being prepared in Britain for the creation of a new mass workers‘ party. The Socialist Party inscribes such a demand on its banner. We stand for the unity of all socialists. We have written to the Socialist Labour Party for the re-opening of the discussion on the need for a new mass workers‘ party. Even if this is not acceptable to them there is still a crying need for an agreement between all genuine socialist organisations for a common electoral programme to seize the undoubted opportunities which will loom in the next period. We will fight for this. We will also fight for the building of the Socialist Party, which is an essential precondition for the building of a powerful mass socialist force in Britain.
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