Labour’s National Policy Forum took place in Coventry over the weekend of the 25th, 26th and 27th July. The policy objectives were to be known as Warwick 2

The Forum took place against the backdrop of the disastrous by-election defeat in Glasgow East. This in turn was only the latest in a list of electoral humiliations over the past few months. The Henley, Crewe and Nantwich by-election defeats, the council elections and the defeat in London’s mayoral elections, are all a reflection of the utter frustration felt by the working class electorate after ten years of New Labour pandering to big business.

Union leaders met with the Prime Minister and other senior ministerial figures to press over 130 demands for inclusion in the Party’s policy that could have gone some way to reversing this disastrous trend in the run up to the general election.

The unions were pushing for the implementation of the Trade Union Freedom Bill which would give union members in Britain the same right as workers in other countries to participate in solidarity action if other workers were in dispute.

Union leaders were also pushing for a windfall tax on the super profits of the energy companies and many other issues, including an end to private contractors in cleaning in the NHS, free school meals for an extra four million school children and the abolition of prescription charges.

For Marxists the demands put forward were limited enough. This is a reflection of how far our movement has been forced back since the defeats of the miners and the printers in the mid-1980s.

Despite these demands being argued for very forcibly by union leaders the resistance from the Prime Minister, ministers and party apparatchiks was successful in ensuring most of these demands were rejected.

Unless the situation can be reversed dramatically this will guarantee defeat at the next general election.

Waving the red flag (unfortunately to his business friends to signal danger rather than doing what he should be doing) Gordon Brown sternly warned that there would be no return to the chaos and industrial unrest of the 1970s.

Chaos and unrest in fact was caused by the then Labour government bowing and scraping to the dictates of the International Monetary Fund and attacking the very working class people who had put them into office (sound familiar?).

The idea of a windfall tax on energy companies was rejected out of hand. After all according to the energy companies they already pay lots and lots of tax and need the money for investment in future development.

THE BOSSES GLOAT

Gloating at the paucity of the proposals to come out of the National Policy Forum the voice of big business, the Financial Times, stated on Tuesday 29th  July

“Gordon Brown was yesterday praised by business for resisting the worst union demands on policy”. It went on to brag that “Facing a list of 130 union demands, Mr. Brown rejected the vast majority outright and gave little ground on the rest.

Within a matter of days Shell announced six monthly profits of almost £4bn. This was pipped by BP whose six monthly profits came in at £6.75bn, which was a twenty three per cent increase. At the same time British Gas announces that bills will be going up by an astronomical thirty five per cent and, just to rub salt in the wound, energy firm Centrica announces a huge payout to their shareholders following a massive £992m profit.

Never mind the twenty four thousand pensioners who die of the cold in this country each year according to the official figures (and even those ‘official figures’ are set to rise dramatically) but, as long as the shareholders and the speculators and the dealers and the button counters and assorted parasites and spivs are ok, then that’s all right.

Talk about all of us having our noses rubbed in it Rob Griffiths, the Secretary of the Communist Party summed it up well when he amusingly and aptly entitled his article for the Morning Star on the whole fiasco “Alas Poor Warwick”

WHAT’S REALLY NEEDED TO WIN THE NEXT ELECTION

It is clear that, without serious and radical policy change, Labour cannot win the next election.

A windfall tax on the energy companies as an immediate policy, with the revenue being used to alleviate the fuel poverty suffered by the elderly and the poor, should be a priority.

This in itself is no solution and plans have to be drawn up to bring the major energy companies into public ownership and under democratic control operating for the needs of the majority of this countries people not the profit of a small unrepresentative clique of ruthless gangsters.

A crash public house building programme is clearly needed creating jobs in the stalled building industry, which, could see up to one hundred thousand building workers thrown out of work this year as a result of the deepest recession since the early 1930s. This in turn would provide affordable housing and secure rented accommodation for mainly young working class people.

The fact that the number of repossessions up by forty eight per cent on this time last year cannot begin to express the utter misery that must be felt by the 19,000 families who have lost their homes at a time when the joint total in profits for the banks in the first six months of the year were touching £12bn.

Add to this the dramatic rises in food prices that are bought on a daily basis and make a mockery of the ‘official’ inflation figures and people are literally struggling to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table.

Bringing the troops out of US imperialism’s war zones and developing our own foreign policy based on peace and co-operation rather than the humiliating role as bag handler in chief for the bullying aims of Uncle Sam is an essential if Britain is ever to realize the much vaunted but forlorn aim, first expressed in the nineties by the ever so new New Labour ministers of an “ethical foreign policy”.

There are no end of reforms that need examining from the level of and discrimination against young people in relation to the minimum wage to the proper financing of the Health and Safety Inspectorate to ensure a more effective prosecution of rogue employers who flaunt safety legislation and put workers lives at risk.

Bringing privatised services back in house so as they are accountable and run properly, abolishing practices like PFI where all of the massive investments into public bodies that the government has made in a genuine attempt to improve services has ended up in the back pockets of the gangsters who run the building industry and their coterie of suited and booted thugs and number crunchers.

In short, working class people need socialism. If the Labour Party is to win next time, it needs to steer a course for  socialism

THE EMBARRASING LEADERSHIP DEBACLE

Unfortunately, while some in the movement have been urging the need for an immediate change of policy and an urgent implementation of pro-working class policies others, besotted by the New Labour dogmas of privatising it if it moves and selling it off if it doesn’t, have been engaged in an embarrassing and degrading beauty contest for a new leader.

Imbued with the shallow ideology of the role of the individual, old New Labourites personified by David Miliband have been arguing that the Party isn’t pro-business enough - which is why Labour isn’t winning elections.

So it isn’t the fact that anti-working class dogmas like those we have outlined that have kept working class people at home at election times or even worse coming out to support other parties. It is the fact that they haven’t had enough poverty and misery inflicted on them. You really couldn’t make this stuff up.

Then we have the sitting incumbent Gordon Brown, who was one of the architects of New Labour who and who is now doing a first class impression of a rabbit caught in the headlights. He knows moving even further to the right means electoral oblivion but a move to the left means coming out against big business that he and New Labour have been pandering to for the last eleven years of government.

Knowing he will be squashed to the right, squashed if he stays where he is but frightened to move to the left - barring a miracle he looks doomed.

The left, particularly in the unions, on the other hand has been arguing strongly for policy moves to the left but this inevitably raises the question of who would be the left candidate in the event of an internal party election.

There is even a view that the left should not stand a candidate and that New Labour should be left to sink in its own effluent - but that would be an abdication of responsibility.

 JOHN MCDONNELL MP

Therefore Marxists should oppose that position, however uphill the struggle looks. To abandon the political fight is to abandon the poor devils who will be repossessed, the old age pensioners who will have to choose between heating and eating this winter and the young people who will have no chance of finding a job as capitalism’s worst recession since the thirties descends ever deeper.

It is true that the workers’ collective voice is extremely weak in the Party and that reflects the hangover of the dramatic industrial defeats of the mid eighties.

Despite that being over a generation ago the unions at steward, workplace and branch level are still weak. The fundamental task must be to rebuild the unions at the rank and file level. Apart from the immediate economic gains that would bring about, eventually that would be reflected in the increased strength of the left in the party.

But we cannot put off to some dim and distant time in the future expressing a political opinion and Marxists should do their utmost to support John McDonnell in seeking enough nominations to get on the ballot paper if the lunatic wing of New Labour decides to challenge for the leadership of the party.

It was the fact that, through arm twisting and promising the careerist MPs a better career, that three hundred heroic and self sacrificing Labour MPs nominated Brown for the leadership last year.

John McDonnell could not get enough votes among these invertebrates to get on to the ballot. Hence Gordon Brown was anointed the new leader and new Prime Minister and the first mistake was made.

This was swiftly followed by conning the public that there was going to be an election so as the Party leadership could bully the unions into accepting anti-democratic changes to the Party’s constitution so as progressive policies could be blocked in future. Second major mistake, with the public now feeling conned and having had an unelected leader foisted upon them. Then we have the 10p tax fiasco and things just went from bad to worse.

The ruling class clearly decided that with the departure of Blair they were not going to tolerate the second eleven batting for much longer under the captaincy of Brown or anyone else. The fact that he has played into their hands and that he now cuts a rather sad figure who realises that he got it wrong doesn’t help the victims of an obscene system that condemns the majority to intellectual and physical misery.

The preening of the perennial careerists as they jockey for position like vultures circling looking for their next free meal is an embarrassment. Their ‘me, myself and I’ approach based on shallowness and lies has been seen through by the majority.

If they force it let’s try and get John on the ballot sheet, although getting seventy of our parliamentary heroes to sign might be asking a bit much. But if it is achieved let’s get behind our man, more importantly get behind socialist policies and get behind the building of the unions at rank and file, steward and branch level. That will ensure that in future such political betrayals can never happen again and that there is never situation where after three Labour governments, working class people are hardly any better off.

ELEVEN WASTED YEARS – NEVER AGAIN