New Labour: the end of the affair

The split in Labour over Ken Livingstone threatens to be the biggest division for generations. People who have devoted their whole political lives to the party, and who have accepted past defeats with grudging regularity, now find this latest insult too much to take. Leading activists have called a halt, declaring that they can only campaign for socialist and left wing ideas outside of Labour. Pensioners are leaving after a lifetime of commitment to Labour's cause. And for every one who leaves, there are probably another ten who are staying in but refusing to canvass for Frank Dobson, and who feel betrayed and embittered by what their party has done to them.

In particular, for those old enough to remember the 1960s and 70s, the Livingstone affair marks the final and conclusive failure of the hopes and aspirations of the Bennite dream. The left has not, since the early 1980s, had a better chance of defeating the right. And since the height of Bennism the left has accepted so many retreats and defeats that it seemed it could never win again. Livingstone's candidacy for mayor looked to change that--to provide a faint echo of the GLC days and to once again raise issues which proved increasingly popular. But it was not to be--or, at least, not within the confines of Blair's Labour Party.

The outrage now felt at Blair over the stitch-up is in part that democracy in the party has been betrayed and traduced--the man who could command only a quarter of the popular vote of Labour members and trade union affiliates is now the official candidate. But the discontent is focused on the non-delivery of basic Labour promises and the adoption of policies which favour the rich and powerful. When Labour enthuses over further privatisation but pays its pensioners only a 75p a week increase, when it attacks asylum seekers but allows Pinochet to go free, then it is clearly badly adrift from the fundamental values of its members.

The turmoil and division in Labour are greater than at any time in its 100 year history, and there have been no splits of the sort we are now witnessing since the 1930s. Under pressure first from the betrayal of the MacDonald government in 1931, which broke from Labour to form a coalition with the Tories, then from unemployment, fascism and war in Europe, Labour was convulsed with divisions. Its activists wanted to organise, to do something about the increasing horror of the world. Its leadership (loyally backed by the union block vote) refused to countenance any radicalism. This led to splits: of the ILP in 1932, the disaffiliation of the left wing Socialist League in 1937 which led to it disbanding, and the expulsion of leading left winger Stafford Cripps for proposing a popular front against war and fascism in 1939. Other left wingers such as Aneurin Bevan were also expelled for refusing to withdraw support from Cripps's campaign, although he was allowed back in when he accepted the conditions of Labour's executive.

The echo of Bennism

In size and influence the Livingstone issue is as important as the movement around Tony Benn in the early 1980s. The important differences are, firstly, that Bennism was the dramatic reaction to six years of Labour government which had presided over mass unemployment, vicious cuts and the first shoots of privatisation. This is a government which has provoked a serious reaction while still in office and while its nominal popularity rating remains high. The second difference is that the mood inside the working class is very different from that of the early 1980s. Today workers are recovering from the long years of downturn that they began to experience in the late 1970s, and their political confidence is much higher. In addition, the left is much weaker inside the Labour Party. This leads to the third difference: there is no organisational form for the protest to take. The left has very few channels of protest open to it inside the Labour Party. There is no doubt that substantial numbers of Labour activists are no longer committed to the party in principle. If Livingstone set up an alternative, many of them and many others would join it despite the wrench of leaving Labour. But Livingstone has expressly ruled out such an option, instead urging his supporters to stay inside the Labour Party and expressing hope that he will be allowed back in.

This view dovetails with that of many of the best activists whose anger is matched by a level of demoralisation at the thought of beginning again outside Labour. They are unable to envisage life outside and therefore hang on in the increasingly unrealistic hope that they will somehow see the left revive and gain control of the party. But this is simply not going to happen. The left has never won control of the party, despite its policies often winning the support of the majority of ordinary activists; the unions have always used their block vote to back the leadership. When there is any substantial challenge from the left, it is the right wing which splits away.

The experience of Bennism bears this out. The party's right wing split in 1981 to form the Social Democratic Party because they thought that the left was too strong and was winning too many policies. The breakaway had the effect of disciplining Labour, weakening the left and pulling the whole party back to the right. The lesson was rammed home by the SDP's electoral tactics, which ensured that Labour stayed out of government and allowed Thatcherism to appear invincible.

There is an inevitability about this process, but only because the left has mistaken the battle within the party's structures as the key area of conflict. The fight over Bennism was seen by most of the left as a seminal moment in Labour's history. The years 1980 and 1981 were to be a turning point in allowing the left to advance and democratically control the party's structures. The euphoric terms in which the struggle was put seem almost impossible now. Socialists such as Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn believed Bennism marked the possibility of creating a 'mass socialist party' rather than the conservative, labourist, bureaucratic party that Labour had historically been. In fact, the fight inside Labour took place inside what was increasingly a hollow shell. Labour's highpoint of membership post Second World War was 1 million members; the experience of the Labour governments of the 1960s and 70s drove many out and failed to recruit a new generation. By the late 1970s the membership figures stood at 300,000.

The promise of left revival led many of the generation of 1968--socialists and radicals from the various movements and protests--into the Labour Party as Benn gained support. But their aim was not to recreate the struggles of the 60s and early 70s--rather it was to support a form of resolutionary socialism, to win positions which then allowed a degree of left wing policies (usually only on paper) and rhetoric. The left was prepared to use the block vote against its opponents; eventually it found that the block vote would be used against the left to prevent any fundamental challenge to the status quo. There was political life outside the rows in Labour Party meetings: the party itself organised mass demonstrations against unemployment in the early 1980s in cities such as Glasgow and Liverpool; there were riots of blacks and whites against the police in areas such as Toxteth and Brixton; there was the issue of political rights for Irish prisoners as Margaret Thatcher allowed ten hunger strikers to die.

But even Labour's left found it hard to imagine a politics based on such struggles rather than on the party's internal machinations. This was, in turn, because they saw capturing positions as more important than anything else--the means by which other things could be achieved. In fact, the decisive turning points in British working class history did not coincide with electoral contests, nor was Labour as an organised party ever central to these struggles in the 20th century. The General Strike of 1926 was a defeat for workers in which the betrayal of the trade union leaders was key; the major fight against the fascists in Cable Street in 1936 was denounced by the Labour leadership; the Jarrow March of the same year--the most respectable and class collaborationist of all the unemployed marches--was attacked by the Labour leadership. The big postwar movements--the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the great strikes of the early 1970s, the Anti Nazi League, the miners' strike of 1984-85, the fight against the poll tax--were all organised outside of, and often in the teeth of opposition from the Labour Party. The backbone of many of these campaigns and movements was Labour Party supporters and activists, but this was in spite of Labour's official policies, not because of them.

Although the high tide of Bennism was reached in 1981 with his campaign for deputy leader, which he lost by the smallest of margins, the successes of the left in taking over sections of the party machine had an effect, especially in giving them positions in local government. A number of local councils were controlled by the left--the 'socialist republic of South Yorkshire', 'fortress Islington', Liverpool, Lambeth and the GLC--and continued to adopt policies in defiance of Thatcher's government and sometimes of Labour's leadership as well. During the miners' strike in 1984 it seemed at one point that the struggles of the left councils against ratecapping could be part of a much wider movement. But the councils, including Ken Livingstone's GLC, capitulated one by one and accepted attacks on their spending policies.

The success of the left in taking over sections of the party machine had an effect

Failure of the left The left's inability to defend itself in local government fed into its inability to do so inside Labour. Neil Kinnock launched repeated witch-hunts on the left. Blair has continued these attacks through his abolition of Clause Four of the party's constitution and the various 'reforms' which have destroyed any power that the left had in the party conference or on the NEC. Despite his contempt for the left, Blair has not been slow to use its leading figures to attack those like Livingstone who challenge the Blairite consensus. So Michael Foot, Clare Short and John Prescott are used to defend the indefensible. The policies have also undergone fundamental change. The postwar consensus has been torn up, to be replaced by a neo-liberal consensus among the ruling circles which Blair has embraced with as much enthusiasm as Thatcher. The clash between Old and New Labour epitomised by the fight between Livingstone and Blair represents the outburst of anger at all the disappointments and defeats which Labour activists have suffered in the past two decades. Positions and policies have been trodden on, and far from the period after 1997 representing one of reconciliation between Blair and the people who go out canvassing on his behalf, he has continued on course, building up alienation and resentment as he goes. It would seem from the debacle over Livingstone that absolutely no lessons have been learnt--the Blairites know no way but their way. All this leaves the real left extremely isolated inside Labour. There are still a handful of principled socialist MPs but they are able to do little inside the Labour Party. Livingstone has fewer principles--he did after all support Nato's imperialist war in the Balkans last year, and he goes to great pains to stress that he can work with the City and big business. He has broken with Labour, although he hopes this is only temporary, but not on a particularly principled left wing basis. Indeed, his politics have moved to the right since his GLC days. It is a paradox that Livingstone is leading a split to the left but at the same time his own politics tend to be those of rightward-moving reformism. This creates a space for revolutionary socialist politics. But despite himself, Livingstone represents a fundamental challenge to Labourism as the traditional party of organised labour through the unions. Not just in London but nationally, Labour is split. Even those who backed Dobson, or who are committed to staying in the party, are embittered at the treatment of ordinary members. Blair finds himself more isolated and unpopular than at any time since he became leader. For the first time, too, there is a danger that he will so destroy Labour's base among its activists that it will rebound on him at the next election, no more than two years away. It is accepted wisdom that Blair's majority cannot be wiped out because the Tories are so unpopular. But mass Labour abstentions plus the challenge of nationalists, Liberals and even Greens and socialists on the ground, could begin to change that view. Blair is still locked in a loveless marriage with the trade unions, and he will need them more as the election approaches. However, the Livingstone affair has also split the unions, which all showed substantial majorities for Livingstone over Dobson in the campaign for Labour's candidate for mayor. The leaders of the TGWU and Unison have declared that they will campaign for Dobson, but how will the rank and file feel about that? The RMT rail union's London region has said that it will back Livingstone--it was, after all, denied even a vote in the rigged election. And the FBU voted 94 percent for Livingstone. Already some union branches around London have passed resolutions backing the London Socialist Alliance, the grouping of different socialist organisations and non-aligned socialists whose platform goes well to the left of Livingstone in attacking privatisation and cuts. The LSA has a resonance well beyond the sum of its component parts and can lay the basis for a serious, if still small, left wing electoral alternative to Labour. Already this has begun to happen in Scotland and Wales. This electoral break with Labour is very important. It is happening because the policies of the LSA, and those like them, are based on working class anger--over council house sales, tube privatisation and the NHS. The furore over Livingstone can help to give confidence to those and other struggles. They are caused by the same discontent with the market that produced the eruption over Seattle at the end of last year--the ruptures of Labourism are part of that same crisis over the market and the future of capitalism, and expose the bankruptcy of the new reformism. Livingstone looks set to win on 4 May. But the arguments and divisions will not end then. The outcome can only be deepening doom for Blair as he finds the Tory press turning against him over issues like Europe, and his own supporters refusing to put up with his attacks any longer. This will be seen as a turning point for the Labour Party--as the time when it could no longer command unswerving loyalty from the mass of its working class members and as a time when people began to see the possibility of creating a new left wing alternative. Whereas in the 1980s the argument of the left was that to be effective you had to join the Labour Party, now it is the exact opposite. To be effective and active as a socialist you have to be outside--part of an ever growing number of people.