The British Labour Party

The glory days of the British Labour Party are long behind it. It won the 1945 General Election and used the next six years in office to nationalize the Bank of England, the railway network, electricity, the steel industry and road transport. It built large numbers of new homes which working class families could rent cheaply. In 1947 it introduced the National Health Service (NHS) which provided free medical care for the whole population. None of these measures were in conflict with the needs of British capitalism. Efficient, modern industries were to be an essential part of post-war reconstruction and a healthy workforce was needed to work in them. But what obliged the government to introduce these reforms was the fact that the working class in Britain and much of Europe having endured the slump of the 1930s, privation and war was in combative mood and eager for change.

These reforms have shaped the British working class’ view of the country. The NHS is considered the bedrock of a civilised society. Opinion polls consistently show strong support for the re-nationalisation of the railways and a willingness to pay more taxes to pay for healthcare and education.

The party was formed in 1900 on the initiative of trade union leaders and small organisations such as the Independent Labour Party and was called the Labour Representation Committee. Originally it did not have individual members and represented only affiliated organisations, mainly unions. It is from this connection that the party has its links with the working class, predominantly represented by the union bureaucracies. It is they that Labour leaderships can usually trust to deliver block votes of tens or hundreds of thousands at party conferences to make sure the voting goes their way.

Tony Blair has been in power now since 1997. A comparison with his government’s record and that of other Labour administrations throws up a number of continuities and contrasts.

The 1945 and 1974 Labour governments used troops to break strikes and the 1974 administration passed legislation making strikers liable to imprisonment. Blair has used troops during a fire-fighters’ strike and boasts that British employment law is the most business friendly in Europe. His government wears as badge of honour its refusal to repeal the anti-union legislation passed by Conservative governments from Thatcher onwards.

Construction of public sector housing has come to a virtual standstill. In the south-east of England buying a new home costs eight times the average salary. The Conservatives decimated the public housing stock by allowing it to be sold to individuals. Labour is transferring the rest to all sorts of non-state bodies.

The NHS has been in permanent crisis since Thatcher’s time. Nurses are so poorly paid that the service relies on agencies who import staff from developing countries, so depriving health providers there. While it is true that patients do not have to pay for their treatment medical prescription charges rise every year. In many parts of the country it is virtually impossible to register with a NHS dentist, obliging workers to pay enormous dental bills and there is a severe shortage of family doctors.

New hospitals, schools, prisons, leisure facilities are built under a scheme called the Private Finance Initiative. Private companies pay for their construction and keep the revenue for twenty-five or thirty years. It has been compared to buying a house with a credit card. It is much more expensive but it has the advantages of keeping the expenditure off the government’s accounts and earning a lot of money for the companies which make donations to the Labour Party.

Blair has a slightly different approach to Britain’s imperial destiny than other Labour prime ministers. Harold Wilson refused to send British troops to Vietnam. Blair, a former member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, was a keen advocate of Clinton’s policy of the mass murder of Iraqis through sanctions. His support for Bush has been decisive in permitting the colonisation of Iraq on behalf of Halliburton.
It was the defeat of the National Union of Mineworkers’ (NUM) strike in 1984 that made Blairism possible. The government of Margaret Thatcher had come to power following a massive upsurge in trade union struggle that culminated in the Winter of Discontent in 1978/9. Twenty eight million working days were lost in strike action that year. Labour failed to hold on to office because it was attacking the wages of those whose votes it expected to win. The Thatcher government had a project to destroy the most class-conscious workers’ organisation in the country. The strike lasted a year. It was the biggest confrontation between the trade union movement and the British state since the general strike of 1926. Its defeat was a huge blow to the whole trade union movement. Twenty years on the movement has been reduced to half its size, and much of Britain’s productive industry closed down.
It is only in the last two or three years that a small new layer of union leaders has emerged who are willing to talk in terms of class struggle. However the contrast between then and now shows that the British working class still has a long way to go to regain its confidence. The miners struck because one colliery was threatened with closure. Earlier this year the government announced plans to shed 40 000 civil service jobs. The union’s response was to threaten that it would ballot for a series of one-day strikes and its leader, Mark Serwotka, is considered to be one of the most militant of the new “awkward squad” of union leaders. When levels of industrial struggle are very low this will inevitably have an impact on what happens inside the Labour Party and since the defeat of the miners a series of Labour leaders have been shifting the party to the right. It is now commonplace to hear people saying that they cannot tell the difference between the Conservatives and Labour and in terms of civil rights legislation, war, economic policy, asylum and immigration and union law there are no significant divergences between them.
The party has paid a price for this. Its membership is at a record low, having fallen by 50% since 1997 and large numbers are saying that they can no longer bring themselves to vote Labour. Many local branches don’t function and the party is sustained by councillors and paid officials. For the first time a number of important unions are discussing not supporting Labour candidates and giving money to candidates who support union policy. These include the Fire Brigades Union and the Communication Workers’ Union. The Rail Maritime and Transport Union was expelled from the Labour Party early this year for allowing branches to support the Scottish Socialist Party.
The war has had an electrifying impact on British politics. Two million people took part in one of the anti-war demonstrations in London after the shooting started. This is unprecedented. Everything that happens in Iraq tends to make Blair a bit shakier and it is notable that other Cabinet members, while occasionally paying lip service to collective responsibility, are more likely to say nothing on the subject so that they aren’t too tainted by support for Bush. It is not out of the question that Blair will be made to stand down before the next election but it would be a major setback for the “New Labour” project and one that the party would prefer to avoid.
Is the Labour Party still a workers’ party? The answer is “yes, but barely.” It has proselytised for neo-liberalism across the globe. Its campaigning slogans are almost identical to those of Silvio Berlusconi in Italy. It has provoked disputes with important sectors of workers and it is up to its neck in blood. However the fact is that it still has the affiliations of many of the major unions, its core vote remains the working class and it is still identified with the Welfare State. And along with other European social democratic parties it has shown in the past that when the class regains its confidence that a new left can grow up inside it. The difference this time is that the anti-war movement has led to the creation of an explicitly anti-war socialist proto party, Respect. Its figurehead is George Galloway MP. He was expelled from the Labour Party because of his opposition to the war. This has been successful in getting some union support and is growing rapidly, particularly among the traditionally Labour-voting Muslim community. If there is to be a new party for working people in Britain it has to be born from struggles, self-confidence and big events. That is why you find many more socialists in Respect these days than you do in the Labour Party.

The writer is an editor of the British socialist paper Socialist Resistance http://www.socialistresistance.net.