Peter Taaffe: Can Labour win?

(Militant International Review, No. 39, Spring 1989)

By Peter Taaffe

The guiding principle of Labour’s leadership has been ‚NUNGE‘, (Nothing Until after the Next General Election). Indeed it has at times been their only ‚principle‘! Any attempt to go outside the prescribed narrow parliamentary boundaries has evoked the wrath of Labour’s front bench.

In the looming battle on the poll tax Thatcher does not need to take time out to denounce the idea of mass non-payment. Neil Kinnock, Donald Dewar and John Cunningham are doing the job for them. But the puerile attempt of the labour and trade union leadership to ‚out-Thatcher‘ Thatcher has had exactly the opposite effect to that expected by Labour’s right.

Neil Kinnock’s assault on the left, beginning with the public attack on the heroic Liverpool City councillors in September 1985, did not result in the enormous electoral bonus which his group of ‚advisors‘ confidently predicted would accrue to Labour. Labour has lagged behind the Tories in opinion polls, when it should have been well ahead. Labour’s narrow lead in recent polls entirely reflects the growing anti-Tory mood.

Kinnock’s personal popularity is lower than at any time since he was elected leader in 1983. His lamentable performance both in the House of Commons and his general stewardship of the Labour Party has provoked dark mutterings about the possibility of his removal from the leadership of the party itself.

Pessimism

Given the changes in the constitutional mechanism of elections for the leadership, Kinnock himself would have to ‚voluntarily‘ vacate the scene rather than be ‚forcibly‘ removed through an election. However, further disastrous election results in the forthcoming County Council elections and the June Euro-elections could increase the pressure on him both from the PLP and also from the right-wing trade union leaders to go.

The speculation, however, as to Neil Kinnock’s state of mind or the prospects of his remaining leader of the Labour Party are entirely secondary to the perspectives for the labour movement and the working class.

Indeed, his preferred replacement (that is by the right-wing dominated Parliamentary Labour Party and right-wing trade union barons) is John Smith. The King is dead, long live the King! Smith, by his own admission, has been entirely at one with Kinnock in his assault on the left and in the proposals to swing Labour’s policy and internal organisation sharply to the right.

Nor have any of the other candidates who have been floated – from Robin Cook to Gordon Brown – either clearly worked out policies, perspectives or leadership qualities which could represent a decisive advance on Kinnock.

Nevertheless the speculation on this issue does concern the ranks of the labour and trade union movement. The question of Kinnock’s leadership is intimately bound up with Labour’s standing in the opinion polls which in turn is linked to the question: can Labour win the next general election? The strategists of capital, in the main, have already written off Labour for 1992.

This is mirrored by the almost corrosive pessimism bordering on despair which grips the summits of the labour and trade union movement as to Labour’s electoral prospects. In December the Sunday Times revealed in a survey of one third of the Parliamentary Labour Party that one in four does not believe that Labour can win an overall majority in the next election.

A full canvass of the PLP would probably reveal that a majority now rule out a Labour victory in 1992. Moreover, one in two, according to this survey, believe that the Labour Party should drop its longstanding opposition to proportional representation and one in five would support an electoral pact with the Social and Liberal Democrats.

According to the Mail on Sunday of 19th February, „one in four of Labour MPs are willing to allow David Owen to rejoin the Party.“ There is little, if any, chance of this happening but it indicates the swing to the right within the Parliamentary Labour Party.

Indeed the lemming-like rush towards proportional representation has left Neil Kinnock and Roy Hattersley, together with Bryan Gould, as a minority within the Shadow Cabinet on this issue!

Their closest allies have seemingly undergone a Pauline conversion. Robin Cook and ‚Plutonium Jack‘ Cunningham, along with the Kinnockite and former left wing Labour Coordinating Committee, have become recent converts. John Evans, MP for St Helens, has even drawn up a list of 60 seats from Bath and Hereford to Basildon and Battersea where a deal with the ‚centre‘ parties would guarantee the victory of an ‚anti-Tory‘ candidate.

‚There is no gratitude in polities‘. Kinnock has gone to great lengths to save Evans‘ political skin from the irate members of his St Helen’s constituency party by suspending it for over two years. The raison d’être for Evans‘ panicky proposals is the analysis of Hugo Young in The Guardian that: „The determining fact of current politics is that the Conservatives believe they will be in power until 1995 and probably until 2000“. Evans and his growing band of supporters in the Parliamentary Labour Party have swallowed this hook, line and sinker and are proposing that Labour should rush to embrace such ‚anti-Tories‘ as Owen and Ashdown!

Leon Trotsky said that a party is the „memory of the working class“. A reformist party, he said, was a party of short memories. But even he could not have anticipated the political amnesia, not to say political short-sightedness, of those like John Evans. Owen, the hammer of the miners, of the Liverpool councillors, an advocate of the ’social market‘ (read capitalism) as an ‚anti-Tory‘ ally of Labour.

PR

Proportional representation was canvassed by the strategists of capital in the 1970s. With the spectre of Chile before them – the Allende government had come to power as a minority government but had been pushed by mass pressure into taking over 40 per cent of industry – they were terrified at the resurgence of the left within the labour movement and the possibility of the election of a minority left Labour government. They therefore wished to alter the rules of the parliamentary game which had suited them perfectly in the past.

So long as Tory or ’safe‘ Labour governments were elected, the electoral system in Britain was ‚the best in the world‘! Indeed the British bourgeois never hesitated to deride their French and Italian counterparts whose electoral systems resulted in ramshackle and very short lived coalition governments. The British system ensured stability, they argued.

The alleged ‚unfairness‘ of governments elected on minority votes were dismissed out of hand. Indeed Churchill’s famous declaration that a majority of one was enough to govern was often quoted. It was the inherent ’stability‘ of the British system for them which was pre-eminent.

But given the profound social upheavals of the 1970s and their effect on the trade unions and the Labour Party, the strategists of capital seriously pondered switching over to proportional representation. Thatcher, safely ensconced in power for 10 years, now confidently expects to be in the saddle until the next century! Moreover, by their political posture, the leaders of the labour movement incredibly seem to share her view of the future. It is now they who trumpet the idea of proportional representation as the panacea for Labour’s ills.

Underpinning this campaign is the idea that Labour cannot possibly win an overall majority in 1992. Jeff Rooker, ex-left MP for Perry Barr, has gone further. He has resigned as a front bench Labour spokesman in order to campaign openly in favour of PR. Armed with the latest computer print-out, he seeks to prove that even if Labour wins the 1992 general election, the changes in the electoral boundaries in 1993 will mean that Labour will lose 20 of the seats it presently holds. To such brave souls the climbing of Mount Everest without ropes or the aid of Sherpas is an easier task than storming Thatcher’s electoral citadel, particularly in the South and the West Midlands.

To secure victory for Labour at the next general election would require an eight per cent swing from the Tories to Labour and the capturing of 100 plus seats. The political earthquake which Govan undoubtedly represented certainly makes a Labour victory in 1992 even more difficult. That by-election, as another article in this issue of the MIR illustrates, was a crushing indictment of the philosophy, the tactics and the organisation of the Kinnockite-dominated Parliamentary Labour Party.

The discontent of the Scottish working class at the Labour leadership’s stand on the poll tax has now resulted in the situation where Labour is only four per cent ahead of the Scottish National Party in the opinion polls. Labour currently has 36 per cent, the SNP 32 per cent.

Scotland

It is not possible at this stage to forecast accurately the alignment of support or seats in Scotland in the next general election. Events on the economic field together with class polarisation could prevent a massive stampede of Labour voters into the camp of the SNP. Not the least of the factors which could prevent a growth of the SNP is the development of a powerful Marxist tendency around Militant which is developing in the labour and trade union movement in Scotland.

It is only the policies of Marxism which in the long run can prevent the Scottish working class from being infected by the poison of bourgeois nationalism. (See article by Eddie Donaghy in this issue).

However, the 49 seats which Labour now holds in Scotland are crucial for securing an overall Labour majority. Even if the SNP takes a few seats from Labour, which appears to be the minimum damage which Labour will suffer in Scotland, this will affect Labour’s national position in a general election. Hence the idea of proportional representation as a step towards what some have called ‚a popular electoral front‘. Shades of the Stalinist concept of the ‚popular front‘.

Indeed, it is Marxism Today, organ of one wing of the ‚Communist‘ Party, which has coined the phrase. In the past the Communist Party furnished the ideas of the reformist left within the unions and the Labour Party. Bert Ramelson, their Industrial Organiser in the 1960s, once boasted that „what the Communist Party says today, the Labour movement adopts tomorrow.“ Now, in an incredible historical volte-face, from advisors to the ‚reformist‘ left, one wing of this now shattered party fulfils exactly the same function, only this time to the extreme right of the labour movement.

Peter Riddell political correspondent, of the Financial Times, pinpointed the secret of the success of Marxism today, (at least in capitalist circles) when he wrote in that magazine in November 1988: „The very irrelevance politically of the Communist Party in Britain is one of the reasons why the Marxism Today writers have such influence.“

Influence with whom? Certainly not with the socialist rank and file of the labour and trade union movement. But this journal and its writers are perfectly suited, covered as they are falsely with the name ‚Marxism‘, to act as a conduit for the ideas of the bourgeois into the labour movement.

Riddell praises „writers like Andrew Gamble and Stuart Hall (who) have been able to use their freedom of manoeuvre to express thoughts still heretical within the Labour left“. We would say that their thoughts are heretical to the whole labour movement. Long before the tops of the labour movement embraced proportional representation or ‚electoral pacts‘ the idea is set out in a brutal fashion in the pages of Marxism Today.

Eric Hobsbawm considers that Thatcher presides not so much over a government but over a ‚regime‘. Thatcher uses „the language of an authoritarian one-party government which is systematically setting about creating the conditions for staying that way.“ Moreover this government is „an experimental model for post-democratic bourgeois society in the 1980s, as fascism (which was a very different species of political animal) was the model for bourgeois regimes in the 1930s which felt they could no longer afford democracy.“

Heartlands

Andrew Gamble in the November issue of the same journal has gone a lot further. Like other shallow observers, he has spoken about „the dominant party system“. He blithely writes off any prospect of Labour success in 1992: „There is remarkable agreement amongst specialists (amongst whom he includes himself – PT) on voting behaviour that Labour cannot win the next election. There are two main reasons. The social groups from which Labour voters have been most heavily recruited in the past, and the regions where Labour voting and the Labour culture is most strongly established are both shrinking.“

He goes on: „Labour and Conservative support has become concentrated in their own heartlands, but whereas the Conservative heartland is larger and growing, the Labour heartland is smaller and shrinking. Labour has a very marginal presence now throughout much of the Conservative heartland, while its own heartland is not enough to bring it a parliamentary majority in Westminster“ In other words, support for the Tories, if not set in concrete, is ‚larger and growing‘. Labour, unless it links up with the Democrats, is forever condemned to a marginal existence and incapable of preventing the progress of the Thatcher juggernaut.

This is the ‚optimistic‘ perspective set out by these ‚theoreticians‘. They seek to underpin their arguments by the mobilisation of a galaxy of writers who attempt to vindicate their analysis that deep-going social changes have shattered Labour’s ‚constituency‘.

John Lloyd, former writer on the Financial Times and failed editor of the New Statesman, has sought to prove that „the unions are on the decline: numerically, socially, industrially, in most advanced countries.“ Moreover the transformation in the industrial landscape, from what Marxism Today calls ‚Fordism‘, that is the era of large scale manufacturing production, to ‚post-Fordism‘, means that the prospects for the unions are dismal.

These observations are entirely superficial. This purely surface view of events – in the language of Marxism, ‚impressionism‘ – is the hallmark of this new breed of ‚Marxists‘.

It is true that because of the massive de-industrialisation of the British economy, now barely 23 per cent of the labour force is employed directly in manufacturing industry. Together with those employed in extractive industry, transport etc., manual workers are now probably about 45 per cent of the workforce.

Nevertheless their ’specific weight‘ within the working class is still decisive. Their immanent power is still decisive. They have the capacity both to immobilise industry, to paralyse capitalism, and to draw behind them other sections of the working class and the middle class.

Precisely such a development, at least in embryo, developed during the miners strike. Undoubtedly in the wake of the miners strike the industrial proletariat has adopted a cautious attitude towards struggle. This is due to two factors: the economic boomlet from 1982 which has still not exhausted itself, and the absence of leadership from the top of the unions.

The boomlet has allowed the capitalists, particularly in the last two years, to give concessions to employed workers. The rate of wage increases has sometimes been in excess of the official rate of inflation. The working class does not go on strike for the sake of it but only when all other avenues have been closed off for defending and increasing living standards.

The other side of this process has been the increased pauperisation of the unemployed, the disabled, those on social security etc. At the same time the main reason for the decline in union membership is not because of some alleged ‚unpopularity‘ but is undoubtedly rooted in the drop in manufacturing, the field in which the unions were more firmly entrenched.

At the same time, new layers of the proletariat, formerly standing outside the unions, have been drawn in. Witness the colossal movement of the health workers in the earlier part of last year. Nurses were probably in the main hostile or at best neutral as far as the unions were concerned a couple of decades ago. The bitterness which was engendered in the health service dispute which has continued in a savage battle over ‚degrading‘ has left an indelible mark on the outlook of nurses and health workers in general.

The same process has unfolded amongst local government workers and civil servants. Those in education who are presently feeling the hammer of Baker’s onslaught will be radicalised both in union terms and politically.

Discontent

The movement of the students in the latter part of last year is a symptom of the as yet subterranean revolt of the working class in Britain. It was not for nothing that Trotsky described the students as „the light cavalry of the revolution“.

We are not faced with a revolution or even a pre-revolutionary situation in Britain at the present time. However, the accumulated discontent which 10 years of Thatcherism has engendered will burst out in a savage explosion of the class struggle at a certain stage.

It is impossible to predict the timing of the character of such a movement. The very factors which the writers in Marxism Today argue weaken the unions and thereby Labour in the long run will have the opposite effect. It is undoubtedly true, as John Lloyd argues, that the capitalists are attempting to create a ‚core‘ of highly trained professionals, managers and technicians with the latest word in technique at their elbow and paid relatively high wages.

Services provided in the past by a permanent labour force are ‚contracted out‘ often to firms employing „part-time and predominantly female labour on much lower wages than before.“ This undoubtedly initially weakens trade unions in some fields.

At the same time personnel managers are being discarded. They are now seen as a relic of the previous discredited ‚consensus‘ approach to industrial relations. Now vicious industrial relations managers, usually on the line, are employed who look on human labour as „another resource on a par with the energy source, raw and semi-finished materials, capital and so on.“

But is it not a fact that precisely these measures have hardened and steeled the proletariat for battles which could break out a lot sooner than the soothing words of Marxism Today indicate? The enormous intensification of labour on the production line and the slave wages of part-time workers is a guarantee of an outburst of the class struggle at a certain stage.

John Lloyd argues that the ’new‘ philosophy of the employers has a ‚hard‘ side, which is true, but it has a ’soft‘ side also. Their dream is that industrial relations can be transformed into a „cooperative, commitment inducing process.“ Tell that to the line workers in Fords or Jaguar! They could acquaint the writers of Marxism Today with the brutal and hellish realities of ‚industrial relations‘ as management are attempting to screw the last ounce of profit out of the labour of the proletariat. Where the employers are forced to give concessions it is either because they are faced with strike action or the fear of strike action.

At the present time, with profits increased in the last quarter of 1988 by 17 per cent compared to the equivalent quarter of a year earlier, some of the employers can give concessions. Hence the 15 per cent wage rise for Nissan workers, although this still leaves them below the rates and conditions in other car factories. At the same time the Jaguar employers were refusing to give more than six per cent wage increases. At the time of writing this could result in strike action.

On the other hand the leadership of the National Union of Seamen accepted a measly six per cent increase with the rate of inflation at least double that. This in turn was only possible given the disenchantment and lack of confidence that the union leadership would lead a proper struggle on wages in the light of their stand on the P&O strike.

The carefully constructed scheme of John Lloyd, together with other Marxism Today writers, of a hopelessly divided working class – both economically and geographically – falls to the ground on closer examination.

Their perceptions of the past are equally rose-coloured. The working class is of course the most homogeneous class in society. But it is divided between different layers, manual workers, white collar workers, male and female, black and white, skilled and unskilled etc. Its heterogeneity is overcome in a pre-revolutionary or revolutionary period and then can only be sustained by a far-sighted leadership and mass party.

These ‚Marxists‘ conveniently forget that in the 1950s and 1960s there were many ‚demarcation‘ disputes between different sections of skilled and unskilled workers.

Moreover the British bourgeois, and their echoes within the labour movement, never expected that they would see the day when white-collar workers would flood into unions. Indeed they jeered at their French counterparts when teachers and civil servants went on strike in the inter-war period. In the post-war period they have precisely seen a ‚Frenchification‘ of the British working-class, in the sense of a growing union consciousness of these sections of white collar workers.

White-collar

What is to stop workers employed in high technology industries, part-time workers, and women workers filling out the unions? All that is required is precisely the incapacity of capitalism to satisfy their demands, and confidence that the leadership of the unions were prepared to lead a struggle.

This has already begun to happen with recruitment amongst women workers, in particular, beginning to halt the decline of key unions like NALGO and the CPSA. Moreover, between 1959 and 1987, support for the Tories among non-manual workers fell by 12.5%, while it increased among manual, pre-dominantly skilled workers. The crude equation that manual equals Labour and non-manual Tory is a completely mechanical method of analysis.

Viewed from the heights of Marxism Today, Labour is condemned almost to a permanent minority status by the seemingly impregnable position of Thatcherism in the south. Incredibly, Andrew Gamble argues in the November 1988 issue: „To become a majority party again Labour needs to rebuild itself in the south of England. But there are not the institutions or social networks in place that would promote Labour voting on the scale needed to bring success.“ From the lofty academic vantage points of this worthy, the denizens of the south are high-earning, high-living ‚individuals‘ without consciousness of class.

Yet the very superficial successes of Thatcherism in this area are ploughing the ground for a colossal swing against the Tories which will be greater in the south than in any other area of the country. It is perhaps the area of the greatest class contradictions, with obscene displays of wealth mocking the homeless occupants of cardboard boxes in Waterloo and other parts of London.

The concentration of more and more of the population into the south-east means a nightmare in terms of travel to work on the tube or the roads. The average speed of a car in London is now eight miles per hour. The average car owner wastes 111 hours a year at a cost of £1.4bn in wasted fuel and time sitting in traffic jams.

The inhabitants of ‚Roseland‘, the leafy suburbs of London, begin to see their comfortable existence undermined by massive increases in rail travel, colossal increase in demand for houses, not to say the spiralling cost of buying a house.

Twenty per cent of the labour force in the London area is involved in banking. This is one sector, given the trickle of recent redundancies, which, with a serious downturn in the market, could become a flood, in which battles by bank workers could break out on a par with anything in which their Spanish and French counterparts have engaged in the past.

The poll tax, the Housing Act and the general transformation in the overall economic situation will in turn dramatically alter the outlook of millions of workers in the south-east.

Indeed the most striking feature of the present situation in Britain is the profound unease, the insecurity, of millions who have benefited by the boomlet.

Trotsky pointed out that the religion of capitalist progress was perhaps stronger in Britain in the past than in any other advanced capitalist country. The contraction of its world domination and loss of Empire has undermined this. Yes, the world economic upswing of 1950-75 engendered enormous illusions in the ability of capitalism to deliver the goods. This was the material foundation for the 13 years of Tory governments between 1951-64 and the consolidation of right-wing reformism within the labour and trade union movement.

Unpopular

The present boomlet in no way can be compared to this. Its background is mass unemployment, despite the fiddling of the figures since 1979 and mass pauperisation.

The population of the south-east is not composed of predominantly home-owning, middle-class inhabitants of leafy suburbs. The mass of the population is proletarian, whether in council estates or forced to own their own houses – which are increasingly out of reach of millions of workers in Thatcher’s ‚property-owning democracy‘.

Marxism Today and following them, the Labour leadership, have been mesmerised by the present conjuncture. They have failed to recognise the profound and stoked opposition which exists to Thatcherism just below the surface.

On practically every major issue the government is unpopular in opinion poll after opinion poll. One recent poll pointed out that government policies are „unpopular, including the heartland issues of its economic strategy“. Seventy-two per cent oppose privatisation of water and electricity; 66 per cent are against the poll tax; 77 per cent want to spend more on the NHS; 65 per cent oppose the abolition of top tax rates. Moreover more than half believed that the benefits for the unemployed are too low and cause hardship.

Christopher Huhne in The Guardian comments: „if part of the problem is a lack of intellectual self-confidence, a more fundamental part is opposition MPs‘ own inability to believe they can win the next election“. The absolute catastrophe which Thatcher’s policies have meant for the British economy is hardly commented on by the spokesmen of Marxism Today.

To his credit, Gordon Brown, who deputised for John Smith in debates in the House of Commons while the latter was ill, gave a searing indictment of the collapse of British capitalism under the stewardship of Thatcher and Lawson. A total of £120bn resulting from North Sea oil, the alteration in pensions calculations and privatisation has filled out the coffers of the government. This treasure has not been used to refurbish British industry but to pay the unemployed. It has led to massive investments, mostly in property or abroad by the short-sighted British capitalists.

Thatcher has claimed an economic miracle for Britain, underlined by increased investment, productivity etc. And yet Brown pointed out that Portugal and Taiwan now invest a higher proportion of their economy than Britain. The much vaunted economic miracle, when compared to the growth of other economies since 1982, pales by comparison.

Human thought is in general very conservative. Consciousness, particularly in relation to economic processes, in general lags behind the objective development of events. However the decisive feature of the epoch is the collapse of British capitalism revealed in the staggering £14bn deficit on the balance of payments which is approximately three per cent of the gross national product, the same as the deficit of US imperialism.

An economic downswing, still not ruled out despite the temporary upward gyrations on the stock exchange this year, or even a slowdown in the rate of growth of the world economy, will have calamitous effects for British capitalism.

Last year the economy grew at four and a half per cent but even the more favourable predictions of the capitalist experts themselves envisage that the economy will grow at a mere two per cent this year. Hence the gloom of the CBI and the industrial capitalists as opposed to finance capital.

The higher cost of borrowing, as a result of the rise of interest rates to 13 per cent, the contraction of retail trade, as well as the drop in the housing market all point to an economic slowdown, at least of the British economy, in the next period.

In the thousands of words and dozens of pages of Marxism Today throughout 1988, one would look in vain for a glimmer of understanding of the real processes at work in British society. Incredibly it is only in an interview with former Tory leader Edward Heath that some light is shed on the real situation.

Heath, now in ‚internal exile‘ from Thatcherism, is a shrewd strategist of capitalism. In answer to the proposition that Thatcher has achieved an ‚economic miracle‘, he condemns Thatcher’s dogmatism „which allowed the pound to rise up to $2.22. We lost 20 per cent of our industry that is not coming back. Not at all. That’s a permanent loss. It happened in my own constituency“.

Miracle?

He goes on: „when I say to an American ‚are you aware that we are going to have a current account deficit of £13bn by the end of this year‘ (he was writing in November 1988 – PT), he says „no I did not know that, nobody’s told me that‘. I say to him ‚are you aware that the percentage unemployment is still in double figures?‘, he says: ’nobody tells me that‘. And these are the basic factors that matter. The same applies to interest rates. Why are our interest rates now almost four times those of Japan, the highest of any European country, and much higher than the US? How can you say that this is a strong economy with these facts? It is rather like saying a man is strong if you put him in iron stakes and put a chain round him then declare ’now he is a strong man‘.“

In an annihilating passage Heath completely explodes this myth, stubbornly defended as we have seen by the authors of Marxism Today, that Thatcherism is impregnable. In answer to the question: has Thatcher slayed the socialist dragon?, Heath bluntly replies: „No, and what you are really saying is, do I believe there is only going to be one party in this country for the rest of time to come“.

He goes on: „what will happen in this country is there will be a rebound … the point will come when people will just revolt … They are not interested in having 20 per cent taxation if they cannot get their lives looked after. Here the fallacies are innumerable. You can’t have private medicine for 53 million people“. He moreover answers the recent attempts of Clarke to dismantle the NHS: „what they (the government) are doing is to try, by every means, to deny it resources and force people to go into private health. That’s what they are trying to do“.

Heath is partly motivated by personal hostility to Thatcher. But his prime concern is the inevitable recoil of the working class and the labour movement to Thatcherism at a certain stage. In answer to the question „do you see Thatcherism as an aberration in the history of the Conservative Party?“, he simply answers: „yes“. In answer to the question: „but if Thatcherism is an aberration, it has certainly got a lot of people who follow it and believe it will be the orthodoxy of the Tory party, at least into the next century“, he says: „I think they are mistaken. The trouble is the more this becomes emphasised the bigger the reaction there is going to be against this“.

At the same time Heath indicts the labour leadership for their „incompetence and powerlessness … over this decade … they have never been able to make anything out of the unemployment factor. When we were elected in 1970 … unemployment mounted to over a million and of course immediately the House of Commons rioted. When I say riot, it literally rioted. An Irish woman MP, Bernadette McAliskey, (Bernadette Devlin at the time – PT) came over and tried to hit Reggie Maudling over the head“.

During an economic debate in October Lawson jeered in the direction of Kinnock that he had 18 opportunities in the previous 12 months for a debate and a vote of no confidence on the government’s handling of the economy and yet had refused every opportunity!

Tory victory?

If the present boomlet was to continue for a further four years with a rising curve of living standards for those who at least have jobs, combined with a further period of pusillanimity on the part of Labour’s leadership, then it is possible to envisage another Tory victory.

Even then Marxists would see this as purely ephemeral based on the temporary economic and social conjuncture which was bound to break down at a certain stage. There is nothing ‚messianic‘ in such an analysis. It is grounded in experience and a sober assessment of the workings out of the laws of capitalism and its effect on the relationship between the classes.

However, all the signs point to the government and the economy heading for the rocks. Moreover, while some employers will attempt to buy off their workers out of their present largesse, the strategists of capital in the Financial Times and the Economist, and not least the government, are urging them to hold the line against „wage inflation“.

The Financial Times recently condemned large wage increases as „wage geld“ (this was a comparison with the Danegeld which was the tribute paid by the English to Danish kings 900 years ago). Thus the cost of ‚industrial peace‘ is big increases to a section of the working class.

But the rise in mortgage rates, massive increases in rail, gas, electricity and now projected increases in water following privatisation is a guarantee of hefty wage claims in the wage round for the end of this year. It would take just one section to breach the dam and the whole elaborate structure of Thatcherism could come tumbling down.

It is not excluded that such a process could begin in the course of 1989. On top of this is the battle on the poll tax, the Housing Act, and the ferocious resistance to the Tories‘ measures to bury once and for all the NHS.

For the mass of the workers it is not propaganda or ‚ideology‘ which changes their outlook. It is their experience, it is big events, which loom in Britain, which will shatter the illusions which millions have in capitalism and its political expression, Thatcherism, as well as in the centre parties. This in turn will mean a mass resurgence of support both for the unions and for Labour.

John Lloyd has urged the unions to become „semi-detached“ from Labour because their alleged ‚unpopularity‘ is tarnishing the image of Labour. This nonsense is being regurgitated by Bryan Gould, the Labour Coordinating Committee, and is shared by the tops of the Labour party.

Those who advocate these ideas are in reality themselves intellectually ’semi-detached‘. They have one foot in the camp of the labour movement and one in capitalist circles.

It is an historical irony that while the bourgeois and the Labour leadership themselves believe that Labour is doomed to inhabit an historical and political cul-de-sac, it is the Marxists who perceive a massive shift towards Labour at a certain stage. And yet it is we who are being expelled and hounded by the right-wing misleaders of the labour and trade union movement.

Like a First World War general, Kinnock has blamed his troops – „dis-unity“, lack of support for the leadership, etc., — rather than the generals for Labour’s defeats.

The movement of millions on the industrial plane which Thatcherism will guarantee will transform the labour movement from top to bottom. Millions will move from support of Thatcherism not just to the socialist but a revolutionary position.

Labour win

The more serious strategists of capital are terrified of the long term consequences of Thatcherism. It is not at all accidental that the Financial Times correspondent Michael Rutherford, ruminated on the comparisons between Thatcherism and the De Gaulle ‚regime‘.

For a decade the so-called ’strong state‘ of De Gaulle rode roughshod over the rights and conditions of the French proletariat. The stoked up anger of the French masses burst out into the streets in the immortal May-June days of 1968 in the greatest general strike in history.

That was the beginning of the end of Gaullism as the dominant capitalist force in French society. The downfall of De Gaulle has left in its wake the breakup and splintering of the bourgeois parties.

Thatcherism has resulted in the virtual extinction of the Tories in Scotland. Wales and the north of England have become virtual ‚Tory free-zones‘. A massive swing to Labour can take place in the West Midlands and in the south as already described. The Tory party, from being a very successful ’national‘ party, will be reduced to a rump concentrated mostly in the south-east.

The violent swings of opinion resulting from economic crisis and consequential social upheaval is a concept entirely foreign to the empiricists and sceptics of Marxism Today and their co-thinkers in the labour movement.

British capitalism is no longer cushioned by its empire and Thatcher has stripped industry to the bone. Labour can even win the next general election, but on condition that the lessons of the past are absorbed by the ranks of the labour and trade union movement.

The securing of a majority in Parliament is not an end in itself. It is a step to transforming the lives of the working class by realising in action the goals of Labour of a socialist society. This in turn is not determined by a brief election campaign fought primarily on television and aided by a battery of computers. It is only by the labour movement mobilising the working class outside parliament as well as within that victory for Labour can be prepared. The purveyors of pessimism, the architects of the defeats of 1983 and 1987, if allowed to go unchallenged, will once more dash the hopes of millions of working people. It is not by proportional representation, not by courting the ‚centre‘ parties, that success for Labour will be secured.

Action

A bold clear-sighted socialist programme, linking up all the day-to-day issues which face working people with the idea of a democratic socialist plan of production, could mobilise not just the working class but the middle layers of society behind Labour’s banner.

The task is not to form a bloc with ‚Dr Death‘ Owen or Paddy ‚Backdown‘ but to convince in action those workers who support these parties to come behind the banner of Labour. This is the way the Labour Party itself was built.

It was a combination of changed economic circumstances, the break of the monopoly of British imperialism in the late 19th century and the active fighting pioneering work of the founders of the unions and the Labour party which tore millions of workers out of the grasp of the Liberals and brought them under Labour’s influence.

A similar combination of factors not only can, but will result in Labour achieving victory in the stormy period that is opening up. The Marxists will play a decisive part in this process.