No space for two Tory parties

Former Labour MEP Ken Coates campaigning in Chesterfield

Because Clause Four of the Labour Party constitution had originally been drafted as the constitution of the Fabians before the end of the 19th century, it is not surprising that its recycled version (crafted towards the end of the First World War by Sidney Webb) had come by the 1990s to seem somewhat archaic.

But Clause Four did perform one highly practical function. It fixed a ratchet to protect the scope of public enterprise, ownership and service. With that ratchet in place, Labour's mindset could easily understand the aspiration of Tony Benn to achieve 'a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of wealth and power'. Of course, Thatcher has subsequently reversed many irreversible conquests of the welfare state. But for New Labour to put her project at the heart of its alleged 'reform' programme was something altogether new and, in the event, altogether unacceptable.

Once the Labour Party had officially embraced the neoliberal doctrine, any overlap it may have had with the interests of working people, trade unions or the nonconformist conscience would become purely coincidental, not to say rather infrequent.

Labour's public onslaught against the welfare state began with an attack on lone parents. Making brutal use of legislation and administrative practice bequeathed to it by the Conservatives, it opened a full blooded offensive against disabled people, cutting off their benefits or subjecting them to means tests instead of assisting them in recognition of their rights. New Labour has reinvented the 'undeserving poor' and done everything possible to punish them for their poverty. While paying lip service to Beveridge, New Labour has been the party of means testing as a sustained social policy. It is as if the Department of Social Security were to be seen as the last inheritance of evil statism due to be liquidated, as all its functions were either abolished or swallowed up by a greedy and parsimonious Treasury. In this spirit, any indexation of pensions has been categorically rejected, so as to render means testing sovereign.

As the Treasury's welfare commitments have expanded, so welfare efficiency has diminished. Almost one third of the 1.5 million families eligible for Working Families Tax Credit are not actually claiming it. The casualties of welfare reform owe only grudges to New Labour, and few of them will be persuaded to vote for it. But the potential casualties are far more numerous, and if they withhold their votes New Labour may be in more trouble than it suspects.

New Labour's privatisation offensive has been largely devoted to the destruction of public services. Usually this drive has been conducted under the banner of George Orwell, by the Ministry of Truth. Instead of creating a deregulation taskforce, we thus have a 'better regulation taskforce'. We are bound to take interest in the presence on this task force of Dr Chai Patel, managing director of Westminster Health Care. Dr Patel, head of Britain's third most extensive nursing home empire, and prominent donor to New Labour funds, has been able to use his position as chair of the Taskforce Working Group on NHS Bed Use to recommend the transfer of older patients into private homes.

More and more public provision has been contracted out to private companies at a price. In the university sector, schools, hospitals, prisons...you name it, anything that is not screwed to the floor seems fair game for the private sector, and a second term for these enterprising salesmen will probably see the privatisation of the remaining screws.

The none too thin end of the wedge is seen in the Education Action Zones, to which schools 'with low standards' may be handed over. Not infrequently local business is invited to take over a management role. So the EAZ in Lambeth is led by Shell; that in Wythenshawe by Manchester airport; those in Hull, Plymouth and Teesside by British Aerospace; while Tesco, ICI, Cadbury Schweppes, Kellogg and McDonald's each have their trawl of management responsibilities.

In February 1999 the Sunday Times anticipated that 200 state schools would be managed by private companies before 2004 had run its course. The Private Finance Initiative in the health service tells a not dissimilar story, as new hospitals are mortgaged to provide less bed space at ruinously higher costs.

Of course, when essential services are sold off for someone's gain, we cannot expect a sudden up-rush of public conscience in the sector of the economy given over to productive industry. New Labour has simply stood and watched while the high pound, predatory takeovers and commercial rationalisation have squeezed out ever larger parts of British manufacturing industry. Neither has anything been done to reclaim those parts of industry which were stolen by the Tories.

Public ownership of the chaotic and collapsing railway system is anathema to the Blair government, so that any idea of a safe and efficient transport network must be postponed until New Labour falls, and a more accountable and honest replacement can assert itself. None of the historic achievements of the Labour Party are actually defended by the Blair administration, which rather sees itself as the continuator of Thatcher's radical reforms.

It is widely believed that this extraordinary mutation in the British conscience has found a secret formula for sanctifying opportunism, and that Blair is about to walk to a second term. I am not at all sure about this. Blair could still be defeated, and may be. He speaks often about apathy as his main enemy, but it is not apathy which confronts him. Rather, it is disgust. The alienation of the poor, and of the victims of neoliberalism, is not passive, but active and determined. No one is able to focus this. Those who are hostile to the Blair project are not, for the most part, revolutionaries, and indeed they are understandably impatient of all politicians, not excluding would-be reformers.

Some protest votes will be gathered by the Socialist Alliance, or other independent oppositionists. I very much hope that the protest vote will be a large one. But the real problem in British society is that there is no space for two Conservative parties, and if Blair has really taken over the Thatcher mantle, then we need to work out how to create a genuinely new labour movement, which can really represent labour interests to the full.

See The Captive Party, by Michael Barratt Brown, Socialist Renewal £2