Left Labour's gallant last stand – neither laugh nor cry but understand

May 16, 2007

3–4 minutes

Every month the ultra secret Socialist Resistance inner circle meets to decide on the theme of the next London forum. Our working title for June is “The Labour leadership election and the triumphant rise of Gordon Brown contrasted with the left’s difficulty in getting its candidate nominated – what does this tell us about the state of the bourgeois workers’ party in Britain?” We are open to suggestions but it’s unlikely anyone can come up with a sexier title than that.

It’s a public event on Wednesday 13 June at 7.30 in the Indian YMCA, 41 Fitzroy Square, W1 (Warren St tube)

The BBC is reporting that Gordon Brown has 313 MP nominations and John McDonnell 29 MP nominations.

It’s dismal but I insist that you have a look at the list of candidates for Deputy Leader and how much backing they got. I dug out an old badge so you can contrast and compare if you are of an age to remember a previous leadership struggle.

Hilary Benn 40 MP nominations
Hazel Blears 49 MP nominations
Jon Cruddas 46 MP nominations
Peter Hain 50 MP nominations
Harriet Harman 61 MP nominations
Alan Johnson 68 MP nominations

Andy at the Socialist Unity site has made a case for backing Cruddas. Let’s set that aside for a moment. Without exception all the others are as rotten as New Labour gets. In my Union of Communication Workers heyday Hain was one of the main people behind Time To Go!, a Labour movement campaign in favour of British withdrawal from Ireland. Now he’s the vice regent. Can anyone remind us of one positive or progressive thing the others have done in the last fifteen years?

A glance at the comments on Dave Osler’s site shows that there are a lot of raw emotions about John Mc Donnell’s failure to get nominated. (Anyone with a taste for abuse veiled as discussion is advised to go there.) I think it is more interesting to try and work out why a candidate who had the virtually unanimous backing of the serious left did so badly. Make no doubt about it, if John had won I’d be back in the Labour Party like a shot. It would have been firm evidence of a vibrant Labour left. Ditto if he had got a significant percentage of the vote. He is one of less than five Labour MPs it is virtually impossible to criticise and he is considerably more impressive than the joker in this constituency.

His failure to get elected is no reflection on his calibre as a candidate not the hard work put in by his campaign team. It illuminates what a dreadful state the Labour Party is in. Even before Labour got into government it was moving right so rapidly that it had ceased to attract real numbers of radical new members. Up and down the country the selection procedures for councillors and MPs seemed weighted in favour of middle managers and self seekers. Has one radical new MP emerged since Blair took office? Where are the councillors fighting PFI schemes and outsourcing?

This selection battle was fought in an arena where the left has been decimated. This is more than a demoralising setback. This shows what Labour now is. Those thousands of socialists who remain in it have been told by the parliamentary party that they much prefer a privatising neo-liberal and they are content that the party continue evolving in that direction.

Bitter experience has taught me that the attempts at building alternative class struggle organisations outside Labour have failed too. The obvious big contributory factor in all this is not the stupidity or sectarianism of individuals or organisations (though these do not help) but the low levels of militancy and class consciousness in the British working class. The long term effects of the defeat of the Miners’ Strike have now lasted almost a generation. John Mc Donnell’s defeat is a sharp reminder of that. Those of us committed to the creation of a class struggle mass party in Britain have been given a lot to think about by this.

He fought well and he was right to fight.

11 responses to “Left Labour's gallant last stand – neither laugh nor cry but understand”

AN

May 16, 2007 at 11:22 pm

Has a single radical MPO emerged under Blair.YES – Linda Riordan, who confirmed it by niminating mcDonnell.But she really is the exception that proves the rule, because Millbank tried to overrule her selection by the CLP, and only the effoorts of Alice Mahon and Jeremy Corbyn, who apparnetly threatened to take the LP to court, managed to get her on the ballot paper.Elsewhere the left have not controlled the CLP when a selection has come up, and have not had such a formidable ally as Alice.

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AN

May 16, 2007 at 11:36 pm

And Liam.Do you realy think Labour is a bougeois workers party?

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Louisefeminista

May 17, 2007 at 11:10 am

“Do you realy think Labour is a bougeois workers party”? Yep, I for one do. Liam: You could call it -Dissecting the Labour Left and the McD Campaign: post-mortem starts here

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Liam Mac Uaid

May 17, 2007 at 10:56 pm

Well Andy your own accounts of union discussions about internal Labour politics suggests that a lot of people still think so.

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neprimerimye

May 18, 2007 at 12:15 am

Are you seriously suggesting that the erosion of the social base of the Labour Party is due to the defeat of the Miners Strike? I’m sorry but that is baldedash given that the roots of the Labour Party have been rotting away since the 1950’s.The point is that Labourism was rooted in a manual working class that has been in numerical decline for decades and even those sections unionised in the 1960’s and 70’s were never as fully incorporated into Labourism as the old manual sections had once been.As for using the Miners Strike as a base point from which to measure the decline in class consciousnes, as expressed by the membership and votes of the LP, that too is arguably wrong. Surely we need to point to the failures of the Labour Party and its left wing, influenced by the CPGB reformists, to fight decisively against the Social Contrick?I would argue that it was that failure that propelled a layer of socialists to take refuge in the Labour Party and to seek to win a basethrough that party they had failed to win outside its ranks. And that they were wrong to do so, despite the relative success of Wedgewoods Benns campaignfor deputy, given that the roots of the LP werealready by then uch reduced.What has changed since those days ios that the latest restructuring of British capitalism laid the groundwork for a qualitative change in the nature of the relationbetween the bourgeois and proletarian elements within Labourism. With the result that, as the McNDonnell campaign starkly illustrated, we can now see that the Labour Party serves no function for socialists whatsoever.

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SimonD

May 18, 2007 at 6:27 am

The problemm with ‘Labourism’ is precisely that it still maintains a hold over class consciousness. It’s no point trying to look at the defeats of the left inside the party and completely ignore the fact that the left is in just as much decline everywhere else. If anything, since the defeat of the miners the left outside of Labour has declined more. If for some odd reason you could gather the members of every far left group and their close supporters in one organisation, I doubt their numbers would be much more than 5,000, whereas twenty years ago the largest three far left groups each had more than that.If the solution to all this was simply to leave the Labour Party, then why hasn’t a mass alternative emerged. You can’t argue both that the problem is Labourism, and that the Labour Party is no longer relevant. 200,000 people have left the Labour Party in the last ten years, yet the left has been incapable of relating to even this more politically conscious layer of the class in any meaningful way.

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AN

May 18, 2007 at 5:48 pm

With regard to the bougeois Workers party thesis, as I have argued elsewhere in a rare foray for me into the works of the fathers, that lenin himself had no clear idea what he meant by it.It is one of those categorisations that actually obscures rather than clarifies understanding.I prefer to decsibe it as a thoroughly bourgeois party, but with features inhereted from its historical relationship with the workers movement.There is very little working class composition in the party now.

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SimonD

May 19, 2007 at 7:31 am

“There is very little working class composition in the party now.”This simply shows how little you have to do with the party. For a start most CLPs and branch meetings that I have had anything to do with, while clearly having shed activists remain overwhelmingly working class in composition. While there was an influx of middle class people at the height of Blairism, most have since left. That isn’t really the point however, as the unique feature of the party is its organisational links to the trade union movement, and the fact that the organised workers movement has an automatic right to places on every level of the party from the NEC to local CLPs. That is what makes it fundamentally different from an ordinary bourgeois party. The problem is that the trade union bureaucracy have supported Blair, Brown and the transformation of the party without a whimper, kidding themselves that they are somehow influencing their agenda.

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AN

May 19, 2007 at 10:01 am

SimonDI dunno, how many unions actually send delegates to the CLP? Almost none in my experience.I am pretty familiar with the working of the Labour party in my town, and it is a very very far cry from only a few years ago.Wards have been merged for meetings, only councillors are active in elections. The fact that 4 coucillors have defected from labour to the Tories, including the South Swindon CLP secretary tells you something.The fact that the North Swindon CLP had the (right wing) trade union official they had voted for deselected by Millbank, and a public school TV producer friend of Grordon Brown parachuted in, suggets sthat the influence of the unions isn’t that strong :o)

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Nick

May 21, 2007 at 10:56 pm

If McDonnell was right to fight, and you’d have been “back in the Labour Party like a shot” if he’d got on the ballot paper, haven’t you answered your own question already? All those left activists who recognise that McDonnell was right to fight the Blair-Brown axis inside the Labour Party last week must accept that he’s right to fight them this week, too, and therefore they should join the LP and help that process.

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neprimerimye

May 22, 2007 at 2:29 am

Simon’s reply tomy post was a good one. At least it would have been had he actually replied to the points I raised.Rather than reply to my point that the decay of Labourism, which I do not equate with the Labour Party as simply as does Simon, has been developing since the 1950’s we are told that the left groups outside the ranks of the Labour Party have been in decline since the Miners Strike. Which is true but has to be seen in the context of the restructuring of Bitish capital and thus of the working class. The very reason I suggested that Labourism was historically in decline from the 1950’s onwards.Certainly Labourism retains a hold on the consciousness of large sections of the working class. But it must also be recognised both that unlike in the near past many sections of the class have next to no conception of Labour as being in any way ‘their’ party and that the very concept of Labourism has less content than in earlier years.

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Liam redux