Weeks of unremitting scandal, sleaze,
and disaster for Blair’s government culminated in a humiliating
defeat in last week’s local council elections. Labour lost 319
council seats and control of 18 councils, finishing third on 26
percent of the popular vote nationally, behind the Tories on 40
percent and the Liberal Democrats on 27 percent.
Labour
lost control of Crawley, plus the London boroughs of Brent, Camden,
Ealing, Lewisham, Bexley, Merton, Hounslow, Hammersmith and Fulham,
and Croydon.
Blair
and co’s defeat was most dramatic in London, accentuated by the
fact that all the council seats in the capital were up for grabs,
whereas most of the districts outside, and all of the other
metropolitan councils, were electing only a third of their members.
London accounted for 40% of the 4,361 seats contested across England.
Twenty-three million people were entitled to vote, although turnout
was estimated down three percentage points at a miserable 36%.
There
were rare triumphs for Labour in the capital including retaking
control of Lambeth in south London, previously a hung council, and
gains in Islington. Lewisham's Labour mayor, Steve Bullock, clung on
despite the party losing 15 council seats.
Blair’s
problems were not confined to London, though. Labour lost seats and
councils in the Midlands and the north. Derby, Stoke-on-Trent, Bury
and Redditch slipped out of their grasp. Labour lost six seats in
Barrow, five in Newcastle-under-Lyme and four in Warrington, and
control of the council in all three. Labour also lost control of
Plymouth in the south.
In
Stoke the Labour council leader, Mick Salih, lost his seat and
promptly resigned from the party, which he said was a "Tory
party in disguise". "It is not the Labour Party I joined
years ago," he added. Other defeated councillors blamed problems
at Westminster – including the health service crisis, the foreign
prisoners debacle, and John Prescott's affair – for their demise.
Of
course none of these scandals are new. Much of the sleaze, corruption
and incompetence of Blair’s government has been known for quite a
while. The timing of their release onto the front pages of the
newspapers, and the television news headlines is no accident. Having
made ample use of Blair and co over the last nine years to implement
privatisation and attacks on public services, the ruling class are
now preparing to unceremoniously dump them like the empty husks they
are. They are out for the return of their first eleven, the Tories,
to office. They are concerned that the mounting militancy in the
trade unions, and the revolts on Labour’s backbenches mean that
Blair, Brown or any other successor will no longer have a stable
enough base from which to launch the attacks upon the working class
which their crisis ridden system requires.
Blair’s
response to this shattering defeat and the deafening cries from all
quarters for him to go was to sack one third of his cabinet in a
woeful attempt to cling on a little longer. If Blair does not
bow to the pressure to retire to his millionaires’ row mansion
backbench MPs claim they will publish a letter, possibly by the end
of next week, with as many as 75 signatures calling on him to agree
‘the transition’ (the hand over to Gordon Brown) or face a formal
challenge.
Brown
called the election result a "warning shot" that showed the
party needed to renew itself in the same way as it had in the 80s.
The truth is that there is no difference between Blair and Brown over
policy. The idea that Brown once in office would even revert to ‘Old
Labour’, i.e. old right reformism, let alone move significantly to
the left is a fantasy. The only difference between Blair and Brown is
over whose turn it is to be Prime Minister. There are very real,
material differences between the Blairites and the Brownites,
however. Both cliques are squabbling over who gets to bury their
noses deepest in the trough. That explains the ferocity of briefing
and counter-briefing from ‘aides’ and ‘sources’, not a
political difference of principle, but a power struggle over
privilege and position.
The
threat from backbench MPs begins to resemble the slow revolt that
eventually felled Margaret Thatcher. Once a process like this starts,
it develops its own momentum; it can be impossible to stop. In
seeking to emulate his idol Thatcher in longevity as well as in
policy, Blair may well achieve the same fate.
Nothing
about this latest reshuffle at the top suggested a prime minister
preparing the ground for the "orderly transition" which he
himself first proposed when he announced that he would not seek a
fourth term, using the carrot of a promised departure to demand unity
in votes in parliament. More importantly nothing in this reshuffle
signaled an eventual handover to Brown at all.
On
the contrary, Blair simply dug in, surrounding himself with ultra
loyal supporters. The promotion of John Reid to Home Secretary, for
example, the retention of Tessa Jowell, and even more provocatively
the appointment of arch-Blairite Hazel Blears as party chairman. Like
a motorway pile-up, the cabinet reshuffle took place at high speed
amid great confusion and left the landscape covered in wreckage. It
was certainly dramatic and bloody, in part designed to disguise the
scale of Labour's defeat in the local elections, crudely diverting
attention onto ministerial culling instead. But the nature of the
changes, especially the exhausted quality of some of the ministers
promoted, only emphasises the limited possibilities open to Blair. At
once stale and erratic, they reek of decay, the last big reshuffle of
the Blair era. There was little sign of rejuvenation or novelty, and
little sign either of the orderly transition that both the chancellor
and the prime minister say they want. This was simply a case of
rearranging the deckchairs on the sinking Titanic.
What
Blair has installed is a Final Days administration. It is a bunker
cabinet.
After
a weekend of calls from disgruntled Labour MPs, including allies of
Gordon Brown, to name a date for his departure, Blair said he would
fight any attempt to reverse the New Labour project, something which
would, he said, return Labour to opposition. Any move against Blair
will mean the return of the Tories, they intone. In terms of argument
as well as personnel, the Blairites are now scraping the bottom of
the barrel.
This
is now a constant theme in the media. From where this threat to the
New Labour project is supposed to come they do not enlighten us.
Anyone reading these articles would be forced to conclude that there
is some kind of left versus right struggle taking place at the top of
the Labour Party. In reality the project to transform the Labour
Party into a second capitalist party like the US Democrats failed
some time ago. Admittedly it went a lot further than many of us
thought it would in advance. Now Blair and co, and more importantly
the ruling class, recognise that the end of Blair will mean the end
of that project, and, for the time being at least, the end of the
usefulness of the Labour Party to the capitalists in implementing
their programmme for them. Not because Brown has any intention of
moving to the left, but because behind Blair and Brown stand
backbenchers ready to revolt: some out of principle having swallowed
all they can, others out of self-preservation, fearful of losing
their seats at the next election as Labour’s vote continues to
hemorrhage. Worse still from the viewpoint of capitalism, over their
shoulders can be seen the assembling ranks of workers preparing to
fight back, their militancy growing, no longer held in check by the
promises of a Labour government that has failed them.
Labour
MP Clive Betts explained in a post-election interview: "I had
people say on the doorstep to me… that they wouldn't vote Labour
again while Tony Blair remained prime minister and that is an issue
that we have to address."
The
Labour Party’s former deputy leader Roy Hattersley wrote in The
Guardian: “Last Friday, the government was reconstructed not to
assemble an administration that will solve the nation's problems, but
to demonstrate that Blair continues to put his hope of a decent
political epitaph ahead of all other considerations. The interests of
both party and country are ignored. There is no rational reason why
Blair should remain in office until 2007 or 2008. And he knows it. So
he plays charades to assert what he could not sustain in logical
argument.
“There
was a time when the prime minister believed in something. His vision
of the good society was one which I did not share. But I accepted
that he wanted more than power alone. Now he believes in nothing
except hanging on, in the hope of regaining some of his lost
reputation. Not even the present Labour party will tolerate that for
long.” (Roy Hattersley, The Guardian, 08/05/06.)
Blair
is deaf and blind to all such appeals, desperate to stay past the ten
year mark at least, and as personally ambitious as ever to outlast
his idol Margaret Thatcher’s tenure in office.
Ultimately
it will not be up to him. There is a momentum now behind the campaign
to oust him that may well come to a head at the Party’s national
conference in the autumn. His support in the rank and file of the
party and the trade union withered some time ago, now it has
evaporated even inside the Parliamentary Labour Party. Events at home
and abroad will decide his fate. An economic crisis beckons. Oil
price rises are beginning to bite, unemployment is rising, and the
next move for interest rates is likely to be up with dramatic
consequences for consumer spending house prices, and the economy as a
whole. The occupation of Iraq is a festering wound that is far from
finished. In the weeks and months to come there will be yet more
stories of sleaze and corruption. Blair will be lucky to survive
another year, though he will strain hard to do so. All around the
cabinet table he perceived enemies and threats to his continued rule
who had to be removed and replaced by loyal supporters. Home
Secretary Charles Clarke had to go replaced by Blair favourite John
Reid. Next out of the door was Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.
Despite
the message of support sent by Condoleeza Rice to Straw, a former
Bush speech writer claims that Blair “has removed the foreign
minister who says military action against Iran is inconceivable and
replaced him with someone who hasn’t said anything.” The new
Foreign Secretary, Margaret Beckett, is described by the media as ‘a
safe pair of hands’. A more appropriate metaphor would be a glove
puppet. In her first public statement on the developing crisis over
Iran’s nuclear ambitions she stopped noticeably short of calling an
attack on Iran "inconceivable".
Geoff
(Buff) Hoon, Defence Secretary at the time of the invasion of Iraq
was duped into believing his demotion from Leader of the House to
minister for Europe was actually a promotion, with a big pay cut to
boot.
The
fate of deputy prime minister John Prescott illustrates the real
meaning of the cabinet reshuffle. Prescott must have been unable to
believe his luck. Despite the loss of his Whitehall departments –
his responsibilities – he is to carry on as deputy prime minister;
keep the ‘grace-and-favour’ homes at Admiralty Arch and
Dorneywood; keep his fat salary of £135,000-a-year and
his ministerial Jaguar. His ‘workload’ will be as special envoy
to the Far East, sending him on endless junkets, but for none of this
is he to be responsible to parliament. This is his ‘punishment’
for his role in the scandals of the last few weeks. Why is he to be
paid for doing nothing (officially that is, as opposed to those other
government ministers who at least have a job to do in name)? He is
Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, if he were to resign and force an
election, the idea of an election for a new leader at the same time
would contain a logic that even Blair would find it hard to oppose.
Brown’s
ambition to be prime minister is well known. However the insoluble
conundrum facing him now is that if he takes over the reins soon
plenty of time will remain for him to be exposed as nothing more than
Blair Mark Two before the next election. If instead he is handed
office shortly before that election the illusion that he might offer
something radically different to Blair might be enough to prop up
Labour’s vote. Yet by then that vote may have already collapsed to
an irreparable level.
The
Blairites it seems want Blair to stay on long enough for them to
prepare a candidate to take on Brown. According to a ‘senior
source’ quoted in the Sunday Times, “The strategy of those
who work at No.10 is that if they can persuade Tony to go on and on,
then someone else will emerge who will challenge Gordon Brown.”
(Sunday Times, 07/05/06)
Such
a candidate could never win, and would reinforce this bizarre and
desperate illusion that Brown would somehow be to the left of Blair.
Blairism has no support in the party rank and file nor in the trade
unions. This myth that Brown is to the left of Blair is being peddled
by the trade union leaders who would back Brown against any new
Blairite candidate. Whilst there is no difference in practice between
Blair and Brown, the desire to replace tweedle-dum with
tweedle-dummer is a reflection of the desire for change inside the
labour movement. That desire will not be satisfied by Brown’s
leadership, but it will play a central role in the struggles to
reclaim Labour in the next period, in the post Blair-era that now
beckons.
The
other Blairite candidate most likely to challenge Brown to succeed
Blair is in fact David Cameron. The Tory leader has been desperately
claiming the ‘centre ground’ in the last few months. This does
not mean the Tories have moved to the left, indeed the so-called
centre ground in British politics already stands a long way to the
right of majority opinion. Instead their spin-doctored image in
opposition will give way to a shift to the right once they were to
win office. Beneath this Emperor’s New Clothes lies the same old
naked Tory reaction.
He
attempts to bolster his caring sharing image – in a clear attempt
to win votes from the Liberals by promoting the Tories so-called
concern for the environment. This is PR straight out of the Blair
handbook, with the Tory leader filmed cycling to work and so on. It
was inevitable that the Tories would recover over a period of time,
not because of clever publicity or soundbites, but because at a
certain stage the capitalist class would need to reinstall their main
party into government, once Blair and co had done as much of their
dirty work as they could.
The
Tories were certainly the winners in these elections. They became the
dominant force in London, taking six councils, mostly in the outer
boroughs. Croydon, Bexley and Ealing were taken from Labour, and
Harrow and Hillingdon were previously hung councils. In Bexley the
Tories took 23 seats from Labour and in Ealing they took 20 seats, 19
of them from Labour.
Hammersmith
and Fulham went from red to blue for the first time since 1968, when
Cameron was one year old. Outside London, the Tories took Bassetlaw,
Crawley and Mole Valley for the first time.
By
taking Coventry, the Tories now control a majority of metropolitan
councils in the West Midlands. Losses of Gosport, Harrogate and West
Lindsey councils took some of the gloss off the success, but more
serious was their failure to make inroads in the northern cities.
The
Liberals, meanwhile, stood virtually unchanged, gaining a net
increase of just two council seats across the whole country. Whilst
their leaders tried to claim that this represented an ‘act of
consolidation’, the truth is that the protest vote against Labour
blew to the four winds but it did not land any more ballot papers on
their pile. An overall share of the vote of 27% pushed Labour
into third place but was below the 30% the Lib Dems achieved in 2004
and was the party's lowest share in local elections since 1999.
In
a swings-and-roundabouts set of results, the Lib Dems took St Albans,
Hertfordshire, and South Lakeland, Cumbria, winning 17 of the 18
seats up for election there. In the south-west London suburb of
Richmond-upon-Thames, the party seized control by grabbing 16 seats
from the Tories and one from independent.
They
made significant gains in the London boroughs of Camden, Haringey,
Brent and Lewisham. But they lost 12 seats and formal control of the
council in Islington – though they may be able to hold on to power
through the mayor's casting vote, fell away to Labour in Lambeth and
lost four seats and control in Milton Keynes. They also lost three
seats in Liverpool, which they continue to dominate, and one seat in
Sheffield, where they had hoped to remove Labour's majority.
Now if they move left to try to pick
up votes from Labour they will lose some to the Tories. However, if
they move right to take votes from Cameron and co. they will
encourage many to simply vote Tory. After all if you are going to
vote for a Tory Party you had just as well vote for one that can
actually win the election, and get rid of Blair.
It is the
Liberals fate to be crushed between the main parties, and so it will
be again at the next election. With the Tories standing every chance
of winning, some will vote Labour to keep them out; others will vote
Tory to get Blair out. The Liberals are as redundant as a fifth wheel
in British politics. They will be crushed by the polarisation to left
and right now taking place in British society.
The
Tories scored 40 percent of the popular vote for the first time since
1992 (the last time they won a general election). The latest opinion
poll conducted by Populus for The Times shows the
Conservatives eight points ahead of Labour. The Tories are on 38%, up
four, with Labour down six points, at 30%, and the Liberal Democrats
down one on 20%. Half the public surveyed want the prime minister to
step down by December and half agree that "the government's
biggest problem is Tony Blair himself". But the poll finds that
Mr Cameron's lead extends to 10 points when he goes head-to-head with
Mr Brown.
The
Daily Mail and co are now urging Cameron to shift to the right. It is
no accident that the press played up the position of the BNP over the
last few weeks. Endless polls were published demonstrating that
whilst they had no truck with the BNP, “it cannot be denied that
many share their concerns over immigration” and so on. This was not
an attempt to promote the fascists vote, but to put pressure on
Cameron and the Tories to move to the right where they believe enough
additional votes can be found to win a general election. As leading
old Tories have been at pains to explain, the ‘smiley’ image is
all very well for publicity purposes, but in government the Tories
will need to pursue a hardline on every front.
That
coalition of racists, knuckle-dragging Neanderthals, football
hooligans, fascists and their apologists that can be abbreviated to
the BNP scored headline grabbing success in their main target of
Barking and Dagenham. The BNP gained 11 seats in east London,
and picked up enough elsewhere to hold 46, more than doubling its
previous drain on the public purse. It follows their 2002 local
election successes in the North; a narrowly missed London Assembly
bid; and a 4.9 per cent showing in the Euro elections in 2004. It
took 7 per cent of votes cast in the 2005 London mayoral elections.
For the first time, an openly racist party has sustained the support
of more than one in 20 British voters over several contests. The
BNP's share of the vote was 0.19 per cent in the 2001 general
election.
These creatures do not pose a serious
threat from the point of view of coming to power, even in a local
council, let alone on a national scale. Yet they do pose a very real
threat to local people and the local communities they poison with
their racist filth. They need to be driven back under the stones from
which they crawled. A concerted campaign by the labour and trade
union movement can pull the rug from under them. However to do this
requires a socialist programme which not only exposes their lies
about immigration but also explains how enough houses can be built,
and jobs created, for all. An example of this was to be seen in
Barking and Dagenham where some Labour candidates fought and defeated
their BNP opponents by conducting such a campaign. (A separate
article on this will follow).
Several smaller parties and fringe
groups thrived in the atmosphere of discontent and polarisation which
defined these elections. In Oxford, Labour even lost a seat to
the Independent Working Class Association. The Green Party increased
their vote too, winning 20 seats, representing a net change of plus
14 across England. They contested a total of 1,294 seats.
George
Galloway’s Respect made significant gains in Tower Hamlets, however
one has to ask what exactly is the point of this party? They
have 12 councillors in Tower Hamlets. However these councillors are
not committed to a socialist programme. According to George Galloway:
[W]e're a coalition, and we don't bind
a Muslim candidate in Yorkshire to the explicitly socialist parts of
our programme…Many of them are small business people and wouldn't
describe themselves as socialists and are not bound to accept it. And
the same goes for other issues including tax." They are not a
socialist party, nor are they an alternative workers’ party. They
have gained a protest vote against Blair and particularly the
profoundly unpopular occupation of Iraq. However, in the future, any
shift to the left in the Labour Party will act as a strong pole of
attraction for that discontent and completely undermine such protest
candidates and groups.
From
this vote we can conclude that there is an enormous volatility in
society, reflecting the instability and insecurity that dominates
life in Britain in 2006. This same trend is repeated across Europe,
and further afield. It represents a growing polarisation in society,
to the left and to the right, which flows from the mounting crisis of
capitalism on an international scale.
Elections, even local ones like
those described here, always provide us with a snapshot of opinion at
a given moment. If we analyse them carefully, in the context of all
other events, we can learn a great deal about what is happening in
society. It is our task to uncover the processes of change at work
beneath the thin veneer that generally covers the surface of British
politics. The ruling class is increasingly split and divided over how
to proceed, how best to defend its ailing system. The middle class
feel a profound discontent with the war and the failures of the
Labour government. There is a class polarisation of society, where
previously blurred lines are daily being sharpened.
Blairism
is finished. Blair will go soon, and despite the best efforts of his
clique, or that of his successor, the attempt to transform Labour
into a version of the US Democrats has reached its limits. The Labour
government faces new crises on every front. Brown – or whoever –
will inherit a party where the process that brought Blair to power in
the first place is moving into reverse. He will inherit a divided
group of MPs. The economy will not come to his rescue. On the
contrary, the slide into recession will add to his woes.
At
the same time all the conditions are being created for major class
battles, even generalised struggles such as this country has not seen
for 80 years. The combination of all these factors is preparing a new
period of class struggle, of inner differentiation within the labour
movement, big changes inside the trade unions and, as night follows
day (though perhaps not quite as quickly) inside the Labour Party
too.
The
post Blair-era is approaching. In the context of major political and
economic crises, the class polarisation of society will have a major
impact within the labour movement. The Marxist tendency will find
fertile ground for its ideas and its programme in those struggles to
come.
