Labour’s National Policy Forum took
place in Coventry over the weekend of the 25th, 26th and
27th July. The policy objectives were to be known as Warwick 2
The Forum took place against the backdrop of
the disastrous by-election defeat in Glasgow East. This in turn was only the
latest in a list of electoral humiliations over the past few months. The
Henley, Crewe and Nantwich by-election defeats, the council elections and the
defeat in London’s mayoral elections, are all a reflection of the utter
frustration felt by the working class electorate after ten years of New Labour
pandering to big business.
Union leaders met with the Prime Minister and
other senior ministerial figures to press over 130 demands for inclusion in the
Party’s policy that could have gone some way to reversing this disastrous trend
in the run up to the general election.
The unions were pushing for the implementation
of the Trade Union Freedom Bill which would give union members in Britain the
same right as workers in other countries to participate in solidarity action if
other workers were in dispute.
Union leaders were also pushing for a windfall
tax on the super profits of the energy companies and many other issues,
including an end to private contractors in cleaning in the NHS, free school
meals for an extra four million school children and the abolition of
prescription charges.
For Marxists the demands put forward were
limited enough. This is a reflection of how far our movement has been forced
back since the defeats of the miners and the printers in the mid-1980s.
Despite these demands being argued for very
forcibly by union leaders the resistance from the Prime Minister, ministers and
party apparatchiks was successful in ensuring most of these demands were
rejected.
Unless the situation can be reversed
dramatically this will guarantee defeat at the next general election.
Waving the red flag (unfortunately to his business
friends to signal danger rather than doing what he should be doing) Gordon
Brown sternly warned that there would be no return to the chaos and industrial
unrest of the 1970s.
Chaos and unrest in fact was caused by the
then Labour government bowing and scraping to the dictates of the International
Monetary Fund and attacking the very working class people who had put them into
office (sound familiar?).
The idea of a windfall tax on energy companies
was rejected out of hand. After all according to the energy companies they
already pay lots and lots of tax and need the money for investment in future
development.
THE BOSSES GLOAT
Gloating at the paucity of the proposals to
come out of the National Policy Forum the voice of big business, the Financial
Times, stated on Tuesday 29th July
“Gordon Brown was yesterday praised by
business for resisting the worst union demands on policy”. It went on to brag
that “Facing a list of 130 union demands, Mr. Brown rejected the vast majority
outright and gave little ground on the rest.
Within a matter of days Shell announced six
monthly profits of almost £4bn. This was pipped by BP whose six monthly profits
came in at £6.75bn, which was a twenty three per cent increase. At the same
time British Gas announces that bills will be going up by an astronomical
thirty five per cent and, just to rub salt in the wound, energy firm Centrica
announces a huge payout to their shareholders following a massive £992m profit.
Never mind the twenty four thousand pensioners
who die of the cold in this country each year according to the official figures
(and even those ‘official figures’ are set to rise dramatically) but, as long
as the shareholders and the speculators and the dealers and the button counters
and assorted parasites and spivs are ok, then that’s all right.
Talk about all of us having our noses rubbed
in it Rob Griffiths, the Secretary of the Communist Party summed it up well
when he amusingly and aptly entitled his article for the Morning Star on the
whole fiasco “Alas Poor Warwick”
WHAT’S REALLY NEEDED TO WIN THE NEXT ELECTION
It is clear that, without serious and radical
policy change, Labour cannot win the next election.
A windfall tax on the energy companies as an
immediate policy, with the revenue being used to alleviate the fuel poverty
suffered by the elderly and the poor, should be a priority.
This in itself is no solution and plans have
to be drawn up to bring the major energy companies into public ownership and
under democratic control operating for the needs of the majority of this
countries people not the profit of a small unrepresentative clique of ruthless
gangsters.
A crash public house building programme is
clearly needed creating jobs in the stalled building industry, which, could see
up to one hundred thousand building workers thrown out of work this year as a
result of the deepest recession since the early 1930s. This in turn would
provide affordable housing and secure rented accommodation for mainly young
working class people.
The fact that the number of repossessions up
by forty eight per cent on this time last year cannot begin to express the
utter misery that must be felt by the 19,000 families who have lost their homes
at a time when the joint total in profits for the banks in the first six months
of the year were touching £12bn.
Add to this the dramatic rises in food prices
that are bought on a daily basis and make a mockery of the ‘official’ inflation
figures and people are literally struggling to keep a roof over their heads and
food on the table.
Bringing the troops out of US imperialism’s
war zones and developing our own foreign policy based on peace and co-operation
rather than the humiliating role as bag handler in chief for the bullying aims
of Uncle Sam is an essential if Britain is ever to realize the much vaunted but
forlorn aim, first expressed in the nineties by the ever so new New Labour
ministers of an “ethical foreign policy”.
There are no end of reforms that need
examining from the level of and discrimination against young people in relation
to the minimum wage to the proper financing of the Health and Safety Inspectorate
to ensure a more effective prosecution of rogue employers who flaunt safety
legislation and put workers lives at risk.
Bringing privatised services back in house so
as they are accountable and run properly, abolishing practices like PFI where
all of the massive investments into public bodies that the government has made
in a genuine attempt to improve services has ended up in the back pockets of
the gangsters who run the building industry and their coterie of suited and
booted thugs and number crunchers.
In short, working class people need
socialism. If the Labour Party is to win next time, it needs to steer a course
for socialism
THE EMBARRASING LEADERSHIP DEBACLE
Unfortunately, while some in the movement have
been urging the need for an immediate change of policy and an urgent
implementation of pro-working class policies others, besotted by the New Labour
dogmas of privatising it if it moves and selling it off if it doesn’t, have
been engaged in an embarrassing and degrading beauty contest for a new leader.
Imbued with the shallow ideology of the role
of the individual, old New Labourites personified by David Miliband have been
arguing that the Party isn’t pro-business enough – which is why Labour isn’t
winning elections.
So it isn’t the fact that anti-working class
dogmas like those we have outlined that have kept working class people at home
at election times or even worse coming out to support other parties. It is the
fact that they haven’t had enough poverty and misery inflicted on them. You
really couldn’t make this stuff up.
Then we have the sitting incumbent Gordon
Brown, who was one of the architects of New Labour who and who is now doing a
first class impression of a rabbit caught in the headlights. He knows moving
even further to the right means electoral oblivion but a move to the left means
coming out against big business that he and New Labour have been pandering to
for the last eleven years of government.
Knowing he will be squashed to the right,
squashed if he stays where he is but frightened to move to the left – barring a
miracle he looks doomed.
The left, particularly in the unions, on the
other hand has been arguing strongly for policy moves to the left but this
inevitably raises the question of who would be the left candidate in the event
of an internal party election.
There is even a view that the left should not
stand a candidate and that New Labour should be left to sink in its own effluent
– but that would be an abdication of responsibility.
JOHN MCDONNELL MP
Therefore Marxists should oppose that
position, however uphill the struggle looks. To abandon the political fight is
to abandon the poor devils who will be repossessed, the old age pensioners who
will have to choose between heating and eating this winter and the young people
who will have no chance of finding a job as capitalism’s worst recession since
the thirties descends ever deeper.
It is true that the workers’ collective voice
is extremely weak in the Party and that reflects the hangover of the dramatic
industrial defeats of the mid eighties.
Despite that being over a generation ago the
unions at steward, workplace and branch level are still weak. The fundamental
task must be to rebuild the unions at the rank and file level. Apart from the
immediate economic gains that would bring about, eventually that would be
reflected in the increased strength of the left in the party.
But we cannot put off to some dim and distant
time in the future expressing a political opinion and Marxists should do their
utmost to support John McDonnell in seeking enough nominations to get on the
ballot paper if the lunatic wing of New Labour decides to challenge for the
leadership of the party.
It was the fact that, through arm twisting and
promising the careerist MPs a better career, that three hundred heroic and self
sacrificing Labour MPs nominated Brown for the leadership last year.
John McDonnell could not get enough votes
among these invertebrates to get on to the ballot. Hence Gordon Brown was
anointed the new leader and new Prime Minister and the first mistake was made.
This was swiftly followed by conning
the public that there was going to be an election so as the Party leadership
could bully the unions into accepting anti-democratic changes to the Party’s
constitution so as progressive policies could be blocked in future. Second
major mistake, with the public now feeling conned and having had an unelected
leader foisted upon them. Then we have the 10p tax fiasco and things just went
from bad to worse.
The ruling class clearly decided that with the
departure of Blair they were not going to tolerate the second eleven batting
for much longer under the captaincy of Brown or anyone else. The fact that he
has played into their hands and that he now cuts a rather sad figure who
realises that he got it wrong doesn’t help the victims of an obscene system
that condemns the majority to intellectual and physical misery.
The preening of the perennial careerists as
they jockey for position like vultures circling looking for their next free
meal is an embarrassment. Their ‘me, myself and I’ approach based on
shallowness and lies has been seen through by the majority.
If they force it let’s try and get John on the
ballot sheet, although getting seventy of our parliamentary heroes to sign
might be asking a bit much. But if it is achieved let’s get behind our man,
more importantly get behind socialist policies and get behind the building of
the unions at rank and file, steward and branch level. That will ensure that in
future such political betrayals can never happen again and that there is never
situation where after three Labour governments, working class people are hardly
any better off.
ELEVEN WASTED YEARS – NEVER AGAIN
