By Neil Murray
Currently the opinion polls put Labour 18 points above the Tories. With the Tories beset by allegations of corruption and deeply divided over Europe, it is difficult to see them being able to turn this situation around by the time of the general election, which has to take place by May 1997.
Since his election as Labour leader, Tony Blair has built on the work done by previous leaders Neil Kinnock and John Smith in taking Labour's policy to the right and making it acceptable to the ruling class. He and his co-thinkers have been prepared to challenge some of the basic tenets of the Labour Party and to jettison pledges about the limits of this assault.
Kinnock took on the task of gradually reversing the gains made by the left in the trade unions and constituency parties in the late 1970s and early 1980s in policy and party democracy. Blair has gone further in attempting to ensure that similar policy gains could never happen again.
His "project" is to ensure that a future Labour government could carry out the requirements of capitalism unhindered by the wishes of the rank and file of the workers' movement. He knows that a Labour government carrying out its monetarist policies will meet resistance from the working class, particularly in the public sector, and wants to forestall this by legally shackling the unions and limiting their ability to influence Labour's policies.
Since the demise of the Liberal Party and the growth of Labour in the early 20th century, the British bourgeoisie has recognised the Labour Party as a possible alternative government when the Conservatives are unpopular. They have always preferred the Conservatives, but recognise that Labour is also committed to the maintenance of capitalism and often in a better position to discipline the working class. But they have always been wary because of the input of the working class into Labour's policy making through the involvement of the unions. Blair hopes to radically reduce or eliminate this altogether.
Three levels
Blair's assault has been on three levels — policy, ideology and party structures. Rather than gradually trimming policy, he has virtually rewritten it, in line with the perceived requirements of capitalism. This has been accompanied by an attack on some of the basic views of the party, such as Clause IV of its constitution, which supposedly committed it to the socialist transformation of society. Blair has attempted to reduce the involvement of the unions in policy making and to turn individual members into a passive supporters by use of mechanisms like the referendum on policy and the severe reduction of the role of annual conferences.
Labour policy now includes a commitment to European monetary union. Blair refuses to contemplate the restoration of any serious level of progressive taxation, even on the 1% of the population who earn over £100,000 a year. He is committed to keeping the anti-union laws brought in by the Tories. No attempt will be made to tackle unemployment, currently at least 4 million. Labour will continue the Tory dismantling of the benefits and pensions system. There is no commitment to do more than tinker at the edges to repair the damage done by the Tories to the National Health Service and education.
Labour attempts to be more populist than the Tories in tackling crime (not the causes of crime), and Blair promises that not only will Britain keep nuclear weapons, but he would be prepared to press the button.
Labour's Clause IV supposedly committed it to bring the means of production, distribution and exchange into common ownership. No Labour leadership has ever had any intention of carrying this out, but nevertheless it was seen as the raison d'être of the party. Previous attempts by leaders to erase it had to be abandoned in the face of opposition. Blair succeeded in getting it replaced by a vapid formula, which, while still claiming Labour to be a socialist party, also committed it to acceptance of the market.
Blair has attempted to prepare the party for the severing of the link with the unions, championing the view that there is no longer any conflict between workers and bosses, and that the job of a Labour government is to represent all the British people.
After Kinnock succeeded in the 1980s in "cleansing" the party of much of the hard left through expulsions, leaders have tried to ensure that a tamed membership would never again have the channels for rebelling against a Labour government. They have replaced many areas of collective, delegate decision making by postal ballots, reduced the proportion of votes cast by the unions at annual conference from 90% to 50%, and introduced an unaccountable "national policy forum" in the hope of displacing conference as a place where policy is discussed and decided.
Blair has taken this a stage further in extending ballots (which exclude the many trade union members who are not individual members but pay a kind of collective membership, the "political levy" through their trade unions) into policy making, using it to gain endorsement for his new Clause IV and currently seeking endorsement of a manifesto which conference was not allowed to discuss.
Labour leaders have built on the "achievements" of the Tories. In the 1980s the Tory government, with the assistance of a trade union bureaucracy unwilling and unable to defend jobs and conditions, scored many significant victories, weakening union organisation in the workplace. The Tories gradually extended their advantage to the privatisation of many industries and the establishment of trade union law which makes it very difficult to call legal industrial action and impossible to take lawful solidarity action.
Despite a recent wave of important strikes, the level of industrial action has still not recovered from the lowest figures for 100 years. This mood has been exploited by the Labour and trade union bureaucrats (who were partly responsible for the defeats in the first place) to encourage the view that the only alternative was to get Labour elected and that a dilution of Labour's policy was essential in order to make this possible.
Blair, however, has gone much further in expressing admiration for Thatcher and her achievements, declaring openly that he has no intention of reversing her legacy. Thus the commitment to keeping the anti-union laws, and even floating the idea of extending them for the public sector.
Union leaders assist
The leaderships of most unions, particularly the largest ones, have been more than willing to smooth Blair's path. Thus at this year's TUC, the leadership (General Council) did its utmost to ensure that no policies were passed which might embarrass the leadership of the Labour Party. Repeal of all the anti-union laws was clearly defeated.
However, Blair was determined to demonstrate to the ruling class his "get tough" approach to the unions. Education spokesperson David Blunkett used the TUC conference to announce plans for the introduction of compulsory arbitration of public sector disputes and compulsory ballots when employers make "significant new offers". Stephen Byers, Labour's employment spokesperson, then told journalists that Labour would scrap the link between the unions and the party.
This made no difference to the decisions of congress, but it had usually moderate union leaders lining up to make public statements in defence of the link and against further encroachment on the right to strike. John Edmonds, moderate general secretary of the GMB [general] union, called for Byers to be sacked. John Monks, general secretary of the TUC, made a scathing attack on Blair at a dinner at the TUC.
While Blair may want eventually to eject the union leaders from the party, he needs their support in the meantime. So he argued, ambiguously, that the relationship between the unions and party would "evolve and develop" while claiming that Byers had not said what journalists reported (a claim no-one believes). Blunkett claimed he had been misunderstood.
At Labour Party conference three weeks later, the trade union bureaucrats were on the spot. They could either show they were willing to stand up to Blair and vote for the policies required by their members, or they could turn a blind eye and continue to provide him with an easy ride.
Most chose the latter path. They refused to debate emergency motions in defence of the union-party link. On many policy issues they voted with the top table, giving Blair and his manifesto the endorsement they needed. There were several issues, such as economic policy, on which the votes of one or two large unions could have reversed the outcome.
The whole charade culminated in the endorsement by the unions of Labour's draft manifesto "New Labour, New Life for Britain", a document which encapsulates all the rotten pro-capitalist policies outlined above. No discussion was allowed. It was voted through 18-1, indicating that, at most, only the smallest unions voted against.
The Opposition
Blair succeeded in securing this smooth ride only with an exceptional amount of manipulation of delegates by party officials, with a large amount of help from the union bureaucrats.
European monetary union, Maastricht and especially the social chapter are supported by virtually every union. Opposition is limited to a fairly marginalised section of Labour MPs and activists. Although the recent conference of UNISON voted overwhelmingly to reject moves to a single currency, not one of its national officers is prepared to argue publicly for this policy.
While many unions have conference policy commitments which go beyond Labour's program around the anti-union laws, benefits, low pay and social spending, very few of their leaderships are prepared to countenance either leading a fight over these issues against the Tories now or challenging Blair's policies in the Labour Party.
The constituency Labour Parties, made up of individual members and local trade union delegates, have moved significantly to the right over the years, not mounting any serious opposition to the policy changes. Nevertheless, the left still manages to take two of the seven places on Labour's National Executive from this section of the party, and at the conference a majority of constituency delegates voted against the leadership on nearly all the crucial issues.
This is why Blair seeks to go further in removing the rights of constituency parties to determine policy by means of postal ballots, bypassing collective decision making and leaving members subject only to influence by the party leadership and the supportive media.
Much is made of the large influx of new members over the last few years. They are often portrayed as unthinking Blair supporters. The reality is more complicated. Many are trade unionists joining on the newly reduced rate, and nearly all join because they wish to see an end to the destruction the Tories have brought to the welfare state. No doubt they are by and large politically naive and see Blair as leading Labour to victory, but none of this means that they cannot be convinced of the inadequacies of his program when its realities become apparent.
Battles to come
Blair's intention to scrap the party-union link shows his wish to transform the Labour Party into either a social democratic party on the continental European model or into a straightforward bourgeois party on the lines of the US Democratic Party.
However, wanting such an outcome is a lot easier than achieving. While socialists will defend the link as an essential requirement for the working class to have an independent voice, the trade union leaders will also defend it for their own reasons. The last thing they wish to be deprived of is a say in the policy of a Labour government, not only because it would deny them a place in the corridors of power, but also because it would deprive them of a smokescreen behind which to hide the fact that they are unwilling to defend their members' interests.
Speculation is rife that if Blair wins the election, he will attempt to get state funding for political parties in order to remove the need for the unions to fund the Labour Party. Labour still gets half its funding from the unions.
The debate around the link and Clause IV has sown confusion among many socialists as to the nature of the Labour Party and the changes it has undergone. Some, including Arthur Scargill, president of the National Union of Mineworkers, argue that Labour used to be a socialist party, but with the scrapping of Clause IV it ceased to be one. This was his justification for forming the Socialist Labour Party (SLP).
What defines the Labour Party is not its ideology — this has always been politically "bourgeois". The Labour Party came about when the trade unions became convinced that the Liberal Party (which they had supported until that time) could not represent the interests of the working class and broke with it to form the LRC/LP. The break was organisational rather than ideological, but nevertheless was a basic assertion of class independence. Blair has gone so far as to recently state that the split with the Liberals was a "mistake", a clear indication of his intentions.
The Labour Party has never been a socialist party in any meaningful sense. Unlike much of European social democracy, it did not degenerate from a revolutionary party. The Labour Party represented an organisational break from liberalism but not a political one, exhibiting the limitations of trade union consciousness, or more correctly, that of the trade union bureaucracy. From its inception Labour has been a social democratic party or, in Lenin's words, a "bourgeois workers party".
To say that the Labour Party has not fundamentally changed is not to deny that Blair is attempting to do so. Success in breaking the union link would alter the character of the party qualitatively, and Blair is promoting an ideology which goes far beyond traditional Labourism in its explicit support for the market and the denial of class conflict. Those who argue the Labour Party fundamentally changed with the dropping of Clause IV declare a battle lost which is still going on.
Despite the reluctance of the trade union bureaucracy to challenge Blair, the battle over the union link will happen. Many union leaders are making statements in defence of the link now in the hope of scaring off those who want to scrap it. Even the Engineering and Electrical Union (AEEU), for long the bastion of the hard right in the union movement, has come out against any further dilution of the link. A major fight is brewing over this issue in the next period. and it cannot be assumed, as the SLP would have us believe, that the outcome is a foregone conclusion.
Within the unions a central task for the left is to hold the leaders to account for the support they are giving to Blair and to promote a fight back against the attacks still going on under the Tories and against the austerity program which will be continued by Blair. One of the most important developments in this respect is the decision of left formations ("broad lefts") in about 12 unions to work together as a federation.
[Abridged from International Viewpoint.]