A number of political donations to a new, shadowy organisation, “Labour Tomorrow”, have recently come to light after being declared to the electoral commission. This organisation, established by prominent Blairites such as Lord Blunkett and Baroness Dean, is another attempt by the right wing to counter the influence of Momentum and of Corbyn’s supporters on the left of the party, and is being touted as the potential organising centre of a split in coming months.
A number of political donations to a new, shadowy organisation, “Labour Tomorrow”, have recently come to light after being declared to the electoral commission. This organisation, established by prominent Blairites such as Lord Blunkett and Baroness Dean, is another attempt by the right wing to counter the influence of Momentum and of Corbyn’s supporters on the left of the party, and is being touted as the potential organising centre of a split in coming months.
In one line however, its raison d’être is revealed, namely to “broaden the funding base of mainstream Labour causes.” As most “Labour causes” are funded by donations from ordinary working people – be it through a mass of individual donations, or through collective trade union donations – there remains only one other possible direction in which to “broaden” fundraising: in the direction of big business.
Indeed, a handful of wealthy big business Labour backers (and not a few Liberal backers!) have shown tremendous largesse in funding this start up project. £180,000 has been donated by a wealthy hedge fund manager, Martin Taylor. Another £25,000 has come in from Lord Oakeshott, a Liberal peer in the House of Lords and an unlikely source of funding for “Labour causes”.
All other significant donations have also flowed in from various sources close to big business. This comes on the back of a number of large donations by wealthy individuals and businessmen to individual right wing MPs including a £200,000 donation to Tom Watson from Max Mosley, the former Formula One boss; and a £65,000 donation to the right-wing pressure group, Progress, from Lord Sainsbury, a previously prominent big business donor to the Labour Party in the pre-Corbyn era.
Beyond its success in raising funds from big business however, Labour Tomorrow seems to have fallen flat on its face. Its twitter account has mysteriously come into the possession of thousands of spam-bot followers. Clearly these bots were purchased with the intention of projecting an appearance of popularity on social media, but when they were activated they began automatically retweeting nonsense adverts including an invitation for other twitter users to “eat a bag of d*cks”. One can only assume that there was some head scratching at Labour Tomorrow HQ as to whether their wealthy backers’ money had been particularly well spent.
Despite the blundering and occasionally laughable efforts of the Blairites, the threat that they represent to Labour’s cause should not be underestimated. As demonstrated by the constant barrage from the media and the success of Tom Watson and Ian McNicol in facing down members in the courts, the right wing of the party can count not only upon the treachery of the majority of our own MPs and the vast personal fortunes of Liberal philanthropists; but also upon the courts, the media and all other pillars of the bourgeois Establishment.
The timing of these efforts however demonstrates a certain amount of resignation among the Blairites: whereas until now they have been able to hold on to certain positions in the party bureaucracy, the disaster of the “chicken coup” has only accelerated their decline. Whereas the dead hand of the Blairite bureaucracy had the Labour Party in a vice-like grip for decades, that grip has now been broken by the hundreds and thousands of ordinary workers and youth moving into the party. A new organising centre and parallel channels of funding are now an urgent requirement for the party right, and represent a preliminary step before an open split can be placed on the agenda.
Some on the left, such as Owen Jones, have shown clear signs of demoralisation and confusion at these symptoms of a brewing split. Such demoralisation is unwarranted and can only flow from a failure to understand the true significance of the current crisis.
The Labour Party has, since its inception, always had two souls. In its mass support – in terms of membership, voter base, and trade union affiliations – the Labour Party has always had its foundations in the working class. On the other hand it has always carried with it the dubious loyalty of a layer of Liberals, businessmen, philanthropists and petty bourgeois do-gooders, who have tended to rise to prominence as the working class turned away from the political sphere in resignation. The defeats of the 80’s paved the way in this regard for an unprecedented degeneration of the leadership of the labour movement and for the rise of Progress and the Blairites in particular. As long as capitalism continued booming these contradictions could be papered over and the party held together.
The crisis of capitalism since 2008 however has propelled the working class down the road of struggle once more, and since Corbyn’s election last year hundreds of thousands of angry, class conscious workers and youth have been drawn into the party. That the newly politicised and energised ranks of the party have come into conflict with the existing Parliamentary Labour Party is no accident. This old layer of bureaucrats and politicians represent a past in which the interests of the bourgeoisie predominated.
In the present struggle – consciously or unconsciously; as open right-wingers of the Blair archetype or as “born again” socialists of the Owen Smith variety – it is ultimately the interests of the bosses that these middle class careerists continue to represent. Their sole purpose now is to do as much damage as possible. The clear aim of the Blairites since the coup unfolded has been to create an image of chaos and disorder in the Labour Party; to throw as much dirt as possible at Corbyn and the movement around him in the hope that some of it sticks; and eventually they will seek to split the Labour Party and the Labour vote.
These efforts will have had some effect: certainly some of the electorate will have bought in to this idea that Corbyn is “weak” or a “poor leader”. The Blairites may succeed in keeping Labour out of power for a period. But a far more active and therefore significant layer are the hundreds of thousands awakening to socialist ideas, who are being radicalised in mass meetings up and down the country, and who are now organising in the Labour Party and Momentum. Then there are the millions more who look to Corbyn with sympathy and who under the hammer blow of events will increasingly find themselves similarly drawn into political activity.
Capitalism in Britain stands on foundations of inertia and resignation. The Blairites stood once quite firmly on these same foundations within the Labour Party. These foundations are giving way to turbulence and anger. Over the coming years the ground is being prepared for a revolutionary crisis in Britain and the stage is being prepared for a left wing Labour government. It is hard to resist observing that in this context “Labour Tomorrow” has a very bleak tomorrow to look forward to indeed.
