More than the two Porsches and the giraffes in the back garden the thing most people envy about my lifestyle is the frequent opportunities to spend a full Saturday at Trotskyite cabals. What follows is a version of something that I delivered at one this weekend. It is a reminder that the Labour Party hasn’t gone away and is likely to loom large in local political activity for all sorts of people who’ve been in the habit of ignoring it.
Over the last decade Labour’s vote has been in decline.
In 1997 it won 13,518,167 votes or 43.2%, its best result since 1951.
In 2001 it won 10,724,953 votes or 40.7%
In 2005 it won 9,562,122 votes or 35.3%
In 2010 it won 8,601,441 or 29.1% giving it 258 MPs but we can see that there is a steady downward trend.
The party claims that 10,000 people joined it in the few days after the Conservative victory. This fact; the electoral support it gains from millions of working class people and the continuing affiliations of many unions to Labour make it indisputable that many of the most politically conscious workers in Britain see it as their party. This may not be something we are happy about. It is a situation we are committed to changing but it is the reality in which we have to work.
In the short term we are going into a situation where it will be absolutely essential to begin joint work with some of the 4,831 Labour councillors, MPs and party members in a series of defensive struggles. In many cases they will bring with them a refreshing commitment to pluralism and democracy and a healthy aversion to phony front organisations that will make them easier partners than some on the far left. Among other things this means that we will have to pay closer attention to what is happening inside Labour than we have done for quite a while. We will have to be able to identify which councillors, MPs and activists are willing to become engaged in campaigns which defend the services and conditions of working class people. There will be a differentiation inside Labour.
Brown’s resignation has opened up a leadership election. Without doubt the best candidate politically is John McDonnell. It is impossible to find an issue or a struggle on which he has been on the wrong side. It’s a sign of Labour’s collapse to the right that he is finding it difficult to garner sufficient nominations to get on the ballot paper, though weirdly his nominees include hard right wingers Kate Hoey and Frank Field. Another sign is the notion that Diane Abbot is a left challenger. We have heard from a variety of sources that Socialist Action encouraged her to stand with the express purpose of wrecking John McDonnell’s campaign. She has no record of engagement with industrial or social struggles in the New Labour period and her “leftism” has a dilettantish quality when it’s not being deliberately obstructive. To illustrate with a trivial example, a web search of her name and the phrase “picket line” threw up no useful images.
The remaining candidates are a rogues’ gallery of New Labourism. Someone somewhere may be able to tease out the ideological differences between the Miliband brothers, Ed Balls and Andy Burnham but that would need to be a person without much in the way of a life in the real world. A search on both their websites for their views on what’s been happening in Gaza drew a blank though Burnham’s most recent Twitter feed had the message “ Not veggie but aubergine version good too – key is good stock, plenty of oregano and lots of cheese sauce.”
One of these people will be elected Labour leader and while we can predict a bit more social democratic rhetoric to fool people who were daft enough to think that Gordon Brown was a repressed left winger they will be committed to the neo-liberal project.
Nevertheless Labour activists, including some MPs and councillors will be obliged by local movements to engage with community and union struggles and we have to get into a routine of engaging with the willing and pressurising the reluctant.
It’s entirely possible. Earlier this week the Guardian carried a letter from the former chair of Tower Hamlets Respect Glyn Robbins which said “The real enemies of Tower Hamlets are poverty and inequality, not Islam. At Cable Street in 1936 the people of the East End united to block the way to Mosley’s fascist blackshirts. We stand ready to do the same to the EDL.” It was signed by, among others, ultra lefts like the Chair and Secretary General of the Tower Hamlets Council of Mosques and the Labour leader of the council as well as several Labour councillors. The pressure of events and the movements we help build will oblige people like this to take the right side in some of the defensive struggles and while we understand that they will, at other times, do what the Tories instruct them, we have to appreciate that they are not an undifferentiated bloc. We have to get back into the habit of following what’s happening in our local Labour parties.
Liam redux 
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