Does Scargill have an alternative?

Once again Arthur Scargill is headline news. The decision by the miners' leader to split from Labour to form the Socialist Labour Party has focused many of the discontents forming around Blair's 'New Labour' and has led many socialists to reconsider how best they can channel their energies.

The Blairites have predictably tried to dismiss the whole thing. Tony Blair claimed on television that this was proof of Labour distancing itself from the unions. The Independent's editorial (15 January 1996) crowed that 'already, left wingers from all over Britain are queuing up not to join him'. The Guardian's editorial of the same date sees the move as a vindication of everything Tony Blair stands for:

'Mr Scargill's departure is without question Tony Blair's triumph. The Labour leader has achieved, without really trying, what Neil Kinnock would have sacrificed almost any thing to do. It is a windfall beyond the dreams of even the most right wing of his advisers.'

The paper concludes that 'Mr Scargill's party is a doomed project.'

This view underestimates Scargill's move, which is significant in that it is the first time since the 1930s that Labour has split to its left. It is led by the best known trade union leader in Britain. Scargill's left wing views and his record of struggle during the 1984-85 miners' strike mean that there are tens of thousands of workers who look to him and support many of his ideas.

More importantly he speaks to a feeling inside the labour movement that Blair is just too right wing. His statements over education, crime, his praise of the vicious dictatorial regime of Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, and now to cap it all, the decision by his ally Harriet Harman to send her son to a grammar school are too much for many people who are lifelong Labour supporters but who feel that the party is simply becoming the SDP mark 2.

Scargill's avowed plan of building a party like Labour used to be strikes a chord with many of these people. It also strikes a chord with those who may not have been Labour activists or even Labour voters but who want a party which speaks out over a range of issues--from trade union bread and butter issues to deportation campaigns--which at present are dismissed by 'New Labour'.

This is why socialists should welcome such a move and why we are opposed to the attitude of those left MPs such as Ken Livingstone who have dismissed the new formation as 'just a small group of supporters and quite frankly a small group of nutters as well in many cases'. To argue that those who want to challenge Blair by defending public services or attacking his refusal to tax the rich are 'nutters' is to cut mainstream Labour off from exactly those people who are fighting for change.

Nor should we accept the right wing Labour argument that no one has the right to split from the party, however much it abandons its one time commitments. We have always argued that Labour will not deliver on its promises, that it is a party which is committed at best to taking over and managing the capitalist system in a more humane way than the Tories have done, and that those left wingers active within it will become increasingly frustrated as they find that they cannot bring about fundamental change.

It seems that Arthur Scargill is now accepting at least some of our arguments. He wrote in The Guardian (15 January 1996):

'Many on the left argue that it [Labour] was never socialist, that it was at best social democratic and that people like me were deluding ourselves in thinking we could campaign for socialism effectively within it. I now accept that argument, and believe that New Labour can no longer be a "home" to socialists.'

The more people accept this argument the better it is for the left in general and we welcome Scargill making the same point to a wider audience than socialists usually are able to reach. That is why when SWP members in the Hemsworth constituency in West Yorkshire were approached to nominate the SLP candidate, Women Against Pit Closures activist Brenda Nixon, they were happy to do so.

However, we also oppose the orientation of the SLP which we believe will present it with problems in trying to build a fighting alternative to Blair. The first is that, bluntly, it has many of the politics of 'old Labour'--crucially it centres on an electoral strategy which has led Labour to its present state. Although there is a verbal commitment to extra-parliamentary struggle from the SLP, in practice most of its orientation so far has been about elections.

Labour was created by the trade union bureaucracy to represent its interests in parliament and its whole history has been about getting Labour governments elected in order to improve the lot of workers. This has always been counterposed by the Labour leadership and the majority of its activists to struggle outside parliament. What has been the net result? That every Labour government has presided over a period in office when the balance of wealth and power did not shift at all in the direction of ordinary people. Not only that, when workers have organised under a Labour government to defend their living standards and conditions, they have been attacked by precisely those same people who were elected to defend their interests.

This has been true even when the leadership was elected on a much more left wing programme than is on offer today--as was the 1974 Labour government which went on to preside over record postwar unemployment and cuts in workers' living standards. The reason is simple: real power in capitalist society does not lie in parliament but in the monopoly of wealth and power held by the bosses. Working people's greatest strength lies in their organising to challenge this monopoly--especially in the workplace.

All the decisive battles of the last ten years have been won or lost outside parliament. The defeat of the miners' strike in 1984-85 and of the printers' dispute with Rupert Murdoch at Wapping in 1986 were instrumental in setting back working class organisation and unleashing an employers' offensive. Conversely, the defeat of the poll tax and the fall of Thatcher, the marginalisation of the Nazis and the resistance to the Criminal Justice Bill all took place outside the bounds of parliamentary politics.

The Socialist Workers' Party's emphasis on organising round strikes, campaigns, pickets and demonstrations is precisely because of this. And it is through such activities that socialists can have the most influence on the workers' movement, because they are organised where they can in reality be most effective at changing things.

The SLP, on the other hand, appears to be doing the exact opposite. It is challenging Blair not where he is weakest--among the grassroots and rank and file, on the shopfloor, when direct action is beginning to change the ideas of workers--but where he is strongest.

For Blair is not riding high in the opinion polls because people like his messages about business and the market--he is riding high because people are desperate to get rid of a Tory government which has brought so much misery to their lives and see Blair as the only way of doing so. The SLP is bound to look weak in comparison with Labour on an electoral basis, and its electoralism makes it more vulnerable to attack for splitting and so on than it would be if it were based purely on struggle. And the split from Labour is a product of the weakness of the left inside the Labour Party. The various components of the SLP are on weaker ground than at any time certainly since the movement around Tony Benn in the early 1980s.

The electoralism also makes Scargill prone to tactical misjudgments which do not help his case. For example, his claim that the party will stand in all 600 odd constituencies in a general election is completely grandiose for a party which Scargill also claims expects to gain 5,000 members over 18 months.

This is not at all to endorse the arguments of those who criticise the 'timing' of setting up the SLP. It is almost certainly true that there would be more support for the SLP or any other left split from Labour a year or two into a Labour government than in the run up to the first potential Labour victory in 17 years. The argument about not rocking the boat or of giving Blair a chance will have some influence while the Tories are still in office and probably for a while afterwards.

However, the timing argument can also be a cover for some people on the left to distance themselves from Scargill. You can't help suspecting in the case of those like Hilary Wainwright, who believes a new party cannot be set up until the electoral system is changed ('Not yet, Arthur', New Statesman, 24 November 1995), that it is one thing talking about setting up a new party, another thing doing anything about it. With others, the suspicion grows that no time would be good to make a break.

But Scargill's stress on electoral politics makes this argument harder to defeat. Only by breaking openly not just with Labour but with Labour's methods could a new party hope to gain the support and roots among working class militants and socialists which could really help sustain it--not just now but under a Labour government.

Yet the SLP looks as though it will continue the separation between economics and politics which goes to the heart of the British labour movement. This means the SLP cannot be anything but electorally oriented. Scargill wants the support of the left in elections. But will he challenge the likes of Bill Morris over the TGWU's official strategy in the Liverpool docks dispute? Will he support unofficial action against even a left bureaucracy?

The precedents are not good. In 1992 Scargill had the opportunity to bring down the government over pit closures, firstly by using the mass mobilisations on the streets to challenge the Tories and right wing Labour, secondly by backing a strategy of pit occupations in Yorkshire and elsewhere which could have saved jobs. Instead he backed the strategy of the TUC general council, argued for a campaign based centrally on winning public opinion, and bitterly attacked those miners in the SWP and other militants who wanted to take action. He may have predicted the pit closures accurately, but he did not map out a strategy to save the pits and so ended up dissipating the wealth of support which the miners had.

The danger with the SLP is that it can become a weak electoral alternative to Labour, at least half oriented on a left bureaucracy inside the unions and which delivers little in terms of real struggle. We must hope that this does not happen. The stronger the SLP becomes, the better it is for the whole of the left because it moves political debate to the left and creates a bigger number of socialists who can hopefully work together on a whole number of issues in localities.

But the history of the left shows that such groupings have arisen before. The ILP in the 1930s broke from Labour to the left and was influenced in part by ideas of revolutionary socialism. But it tried to marry these with ideas of presenting a challenge in the field of parliamentary politics, and so was condemned to weakness. During the 1930s the Communist Party easily overtook the ILP as the party looked to by those struggling in industry or against the fascists.

Scargill will face the same dilemma. And unless he understands clearly the need to build a party which is based on and fosters that struggle then the SLP can just remain an electoral party which doesn't have the muscle to challenge Labour.