THIS WEEK, A secret Labour Party report will admit that the party is dying as a mass movement. The report, by the finance working party, will tell the national executive that individual membership will fall below 200,000 and union-affiliated membership will drop by a million within the next four years, unless there is ‘a new spirit both to attract and retain members and to mobilise support in the community’. In many areas, says the report, ‘the party on the ground has deteriorated . . .’5
There is a call for ‘new ideas’, one of which is a recruitment campaign that includes ‘new techniques’ such as telephone canvassing and subscription fees linked to income. The irrelevance of this when set against the unstated causes of the ‘deterioration on the ground’ is striking, though not surprising. There is no mention of the principal cause: that tens of thousands of Labour Party members and activists have been driven away from the party by years of executive thuggery and witchhunting and, above all, by the abandonment of the pretence of opposing the now rampant reactionary forces in Britain.
At the end of two extraordinary months in politics, during which the Conservative government has shown itself to be corrupt and run by liars – a government more deeply unpopular than any since the Second World War – Labour has proved itself to be an enfeebled component of a rotting system, further disenfranchising those millions of people who still look to it as the constituted opposition.
John Smith and his people are not wholly to blame. This is an historic process at work, perhaps in its final stages. Modern labourism based its postwar credibility on the reforms of the Attlee Government. ‘Social justice’ and ‘welfare rights’ were not seen by the public as a new form of charity. They were at the core of a contract that made it possible for the powerless and the poor to consent to be governed. They made popular democracy seem possible, even though its premises – employment, state education, a national health service, decent housing – were always more tenuous than was widely realised. ‘Gentling the masses’, rather than liberating them, was the aim of a ‘consensus’ which masked the collusion between capital and the defenders of labour, between the imperial state and those claiming to speak for democracy.
In fairness to the Labour hierarchy, be it in the party or the Trades Union Congress, its history was there to be read. From the 1926 general strike to the 1984–85 miners’ strike, the trend was an unerring one of surrender and collaboration. From the British occupation of Ireland to the slaughter in the Gulf, Labour’s leaders have not been equivocal. ‘During the long period of collusive silence,’ wrote Jeremy Seabrook a few years ago, ‘a majority of us became accustomed to what we had gained, so dependent upon it continuing that way, that we were prepared to accept all kinds of repugnant social by-products of so fortunate a state of affairs, as long as it seemed that nothing would impair our rising standards of living. This is how new forms of ugliness and violence came to be assimilated into our daily lives . . .’6
In Labour’s municipal bastions a flatcappery that depended upon apathy condoned corruption and failed to root out slumlords. Margaret Thatcher may have spoken out about Britain being ‘swamped’ by immigrants, but it was a Labour home secretary, James Callaghan, who introduced the most racist immigration bill more than a decade earlier. Attacks on the gains of the ‘consensus’ – on the health service, education and welfare rights – began under Labour, not Thatcher. The doctrine of a ‘free market and a strong state’ – with its high secrecy and ‘privateers’ within the bureaucracy – owes as much to Labour as it does to Thatcher. Thatcherism, it is fair to say, began under Labour.
The behaviour of the Labour leadership during most of the 1980s, as it tried to catch up with Thatcher, while witch-hunting those who were often Labour’s most committed defenders, all but destroyed the party as a great popular movement; the collapsing membership now tells us that. Should further proof be required, I recommend the book Defeat from the Jaws of Victory, whose authors, the Labour historian Richard Heffernan and Mike Marqusee, editor of Labour Briefing, take us behind the closed doors of the ‘modernised’ party to witness the Labour hierarchy in action. It is a chronicle of rigged voting, stage-managed meetings, patronage dispensed to favourites, score-settling and McCarthyism.7
‘By the end of Neil Kinnock’s tenure as leader,’ they write, ‘investigations of local parties and disciplinary action of one kind or another had directly affected party members in over 80 constituencies in all regions of the country.’ Although Militant was singled out for attack, the real target was always wider; in many areas, the majority of members expelled had nothing to do with Militant. An official register of unaffiliated Labour Party groups was drawn up in 1982, leading to the expulsion of any group and anyone espousing ideas on the left – be they socialist, Christian, anti-war, whatever – who were deemed to ‘bring the party into disrepute’.
‘Violations of natural justice were legion,’ write Heffernan and Marqusee. ‘The presumption of innocence was hopelessly subverted. Guilt by association became commonplace. Smears, innuendo and catch-all charges proliferated. Hearsay and other forms of uncorroborated evidence were uncritically accepted. Judgments were made on the basis of secret dossiers compiled by anonymous figures whom the accused could never confront . . .’
Although a special body, the national constituency committee, elected by party conference and independent of the NEC, was set up to adjudicate on expulsions, only one case was ever heard by the full NCC. This was the case of Sharon Atkins, who had been removed as the candidate for Nottingham East before the 1987 general election because of remarks she had made at a black sections public meeting.
General Secretary Larry Whitty presented the NEC’s case against Atkins, who was defended by Lord Gifford QC. As Heffernan and Marqusee show, Gifford tore Whitty’s case to shreds, pointing out legal, logical and factual errors in charges he described as ‘fundamentally misconceived’. He expressed ‘utter astonishment that they are being seriously put forward’. The NCC was forced to recognise that no grounds could be found for expulsion.8
All other cases were heard by panels of three NCC members, the majority always on the right. The kangaroo ‘investigations’ of Terry Fields and Dave Nellist are told in shaming detail. As the authors point out, one of the main reasons the Labour Party is now deeply in debt, with little hope of making up the losses, is the squandering of the party’s finances on ‘discipline’.
The value of this book is that it helps to dispel myths. For example, the British people did not overwhelmingly support the Gulf slaughter, yet the Labour leadership was at times even more committed to war than the Government, even rejecting Edward Heath’s attempts at a diplomatic solution. The Sun’s evaluation of ordinary people became Labour’s; the popular consciousness, according to Walworth Road, could never be raised above ignorant certainties.
This almost total failure of political imagination – if that is not being too charitable – ensured that the issue of the ‘peace dividend’ remained outside the public arena. The enormous savings to be had from reducing Britain’s defence spending to that of Germany were never mentioned. All discussion about Trident was suppressed.
To many people, the consequences of such ‘collusive silence’ are now provided daily by the demolition of industry, training schemes, social services and of lives once remote from the fear of poverty. Today, the bodies of ‘redundant’ people found on the railway lines wear cheap copies of designer jeans and trainers. Scan the reports of coroners’ inquests in the local press and you will get an idea of the number now taking their own lives. They are the victims of a revolution no modern Orwell has yet described.
Perhaps the real tragedy of the Labour Party is the time its wilful distractions have lost. The ‘market’ revolution has begun and there is now the popular will to resist it; but where is the mass-movement banner? Soon, capital will no longer need living labour, except as minor disposable servants. With an entire workforce being de-skilled and their communities destroyed, the balance of dependency between capital and labour is being altered as never before – so much so that capital will soon be able to free itself of labour, while still holding labour captive. That is, unless people fight.
The lessons of how not to fight were demonstrated on December 9. The defenders of labour, led by Norman Willis, the staunch royalist, called a National Day of Recovery. This was the TUC’s response to the two great demonstrations in October that followed the Government’s proclamation that it was virtually closing down the coal industry. The TUC general council first sought the views of employers, while ‘ruling out a general strike’. In other words, all that the defenders of labour can offer is a call to working people to consummate a union of shop-floor, boardroom and government while their only power – their labour – is emasculated by their new conjugal partners.
Willis’s successor, John Monks, has been rewarded for his modernist thinking with a promise of two confidential meetings a year with the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kenneth Clarke. ‘I think’, said Monks, ‘there is a recognition that things are going to go in a direction inimical to the traditional values that the prime minister claims to espouse, and that the world of work may be connected with this development.’9 Although the TUC denies it, the model appears to be the American system, where one in five of all workers, and nearly half of all young workers, earn poverty-line wages; where working hours are longer and holidays shorter than in most advanced industrial countries; where the rate of accidents in the workplace doubled in the 1980s as a result of deregulation and imposed overtime.
And what of Labour? John Smith did turn up at the great rally in Hyde Park in October 1992. His absence would have been embarrassing; this was a time when even the Daily Mail was discovering the ‘nobility’ of Britain’s miners. When Smith spoke, he urged the ‘public’ to keep up the pressure. As mining communities were attacked during the winter and spring, he said nothing. He did not even reply to the NUM’s appeal for support for a one-day strike. He went on to address the Confederation of British Industry’s conference and, according to the Daily Mirror, caused his audience to laugh nine times.
While many Labour Party members despair at this, they remain fixed in the belief that there is no alternative to Labour. They should look to New Zealand. During the 1980s the New Zealand Labour Party and the conservative Nationals became indistinguishable as the ‘New Right’. At the general election in November 1993 the breakaway Alliance, representing Labour’s activists, took 18.3 per cent of the vote. Alliance leader Matt McCarten has refused to join a coalition with Labour. ‘The main arena is now going to be in Parliament’, he said, ‘because Parliament is going to be democratic, at last. We will vote for laws that move towards our manifesto and against laws that go against it. We are a mass movement, and we shall address issues of class and race and gender. It’s a beginning.’10
December 1992 – December 1993