The Labour Party have launched a "consultation" exercise around a document called ‘Refounding Labour. ‘ What issues are involved and what response will best serve the movement now as the Tory led coalition government attacks our public services? These questions are considered in a response to the document written by a party activist from Coventry which we publish here.
The Labour Party have launched a "consultation" exercise around a
document called ‘Refounding Labour. ‘ What issues are involved and what
response will best serve the movement now as the Tory led coalition
government attacks our public services? These questions are considered
in a response to the document written by a party activist from Coventry
which we publish here.
Despite the lack of an alternative programme and a robust
leadership in the Labour Party, working class voters instinctively turned to
their mass party in the local elections in May and the LP made impressive gains
in Wales and England. Even in Scotland, despite the victory of the SNP from
mainly Lib Dem desertions, the LP vote only fell by 0.5%. The question that now
arises however is what could have been the result if the LP had had a
programme, structure and leadership that could have challenged the ConDem
government and offered a real alternative for working class people.
In this regard the publication of the LP document
“Refounding Labour” should be welcomed by all LP members as for the first time
for many years all members at all levels of the LP have the chance to
participate in deciding the direction of the LP in the coming period and are
invited to submit their responses to the document by June 24th.
In several places in the document it is recognised that the
LP was “beaten badly” in the general election last year where between “1997 and
2010 Labour lost nearly five million voters”. It also states that we “lost touch with many of the people we
were founded to represent”, that “we won our lowest share of the poll since
1922”, that “we lost support in our working class or ‘core’ vote – many of whom
just didn’t bother voting”, that “sometime we lost our way” and that we “were
in a rut”. Many members “felt disillusioned” and “began to feel disengaged”
with “tension between rank and file members, affiliated organisations and
elected representatives”.
The result was not only a massive decline in electoral
support but also in membership which fell to just over 150,000 in 2010 compared
to over 400,000 in 1997, a 60% drop. Since the general election this process
has been partly reversed with 60,000 new members joining. However, in many
areas of the country “the party activist base had been seriously depleted” and
where Labour’s vote is small “our party barely functions”. We who are LP
activists know that in many areas LP Branches and even CLPs had ceased to
function.
The document is therefore very honest or “frank” in
recognising the need for the Party to be rebuilt. It is also bold in recognising
that “trade unions set up the LP to gain representation in Parliament” and that
“unions still provide a link to working people that no other party has”. These
statements are in complete contrast to the Blairites in the LP who sought to
break this organic link between the industrial and political wings of the
labour movement.
So what is to be done? The LP needs to change by reaching
out to “new supporters”, by giving “those we lost good reason to return” and by
“encouraging those who have stood by us to stay the course”. In other words
consolidate and build by also being “more representative of the communities we
seek to represent”. The LP must therefore “refound” itself and reach out.
Some fundamental questions are therefore posed. What are we
as a political party? What do we stand for? Who do we represent? What do we
want to achieve? Why has Labour “been abandoned by people who used to support
us”? And is the point of winning elections merely “the chance to serve”?
The document correctly states that “our policies and
promises may command more credibility if they are promoted enthusiastically by
volunteer party members on the doorstep”.
But nowhere in the document are any specific policies referred to except
for the “party’s progressive, egalitarian, and communitarian values and
history”. This lack of discussion around policies is not accidental as almost
all the document is about being “frank about weaknesses inherent in Labour’s
organisation, culture and outlook”. Right at the beginning, in the introduction
by Ed Miliband, the parameters of the discussion are defined. The reason we did
not suffer an even worse defeat in the general election is “because of the
determination and organisation of LP members and activists” and that “our task
now is to ensure that the same level of energy is replicated at every level of
the Party”. So energy and enthusiasm can win elections, not policies. And this
is said despite the recognition that one of the factors that saved us from an
even worse defeat was the “justified doubt (on the part of our voters) about
whether the Tories had truly changed”.
In other words, despite what the Labour Government had done,
our working class “core” voters, especially in inner-city areas, turned out at
the polls to defend the LP and try to prevent a Tory victory. The memory of the
anti-working class policies of the Tories between 1979 and 1997 remained din
the collective memory of our core voters. And they were successful as the
Tories did not win and now only have political power by being propped up by the
Lib Dems. But Labour too did not win and we are now facing the consequences –
the biggest attack on the living standards of working class people for
generations. The failure therefore of Labour to retain its share of the vote
meant that after only 13 years in office they were ejected by the electorate
when the Tories managed to cling on for 19 years! Any analysis therefore of why
this happened must begin with policies and practices. Organisational issues are
secondary.
In 1997 Labour achieved political power after a thorough
rejection of Tory policies by the electorate. The massive majority that Labour
held could have meant a ground breaking reorientation of policy development in
the economy and society. What did we do? For the first two years we carried on
with Tory inspired economic policy. Gordon Brown became the “Iron Chancellor”
and “Prudence” his handmaiden. We could only spend in terms on social reforms
what the country could afford. For country read capitalism. If we wanted more,
it had to be off the books.
The guidelines were that public pending would not exceed
more than 40% of GDP. So schools and hospitals were built or refurbished under
PFI where the initial cost was borne by the private sector which then leeched
off the state in terms of repayments under contracts that guaranteed fixed
returns of up to 30%. And this was at a time when average profit ratios to
capital invested were less than 5%. Under our government we built up a PFI debt
that will take generations to pay off. Yet when the banks failed due to their
credit policies of lending money they did not have to people who could not or
would not pay it back, what did our government do? It made available credit to
the tune of £1.3trillion. Then banks took in various forms £950billion. They
still have £512bn of public money. For the labour government, our government,
the needs of the banks and financial sector were more important than schools
and hospitals. For the government to bail out the banks it had to borrow money
from the bond markets and government debt rose to over 80% of GDP as Prudence
was ditched.
Despite therefore some real and meaningful reforms under
Labour – such as the minimum wage, Surestart programmes and child poverty
reduction plans – the end result was that working class people were made to pay
the price for the failure of the capitalism. Under Labour the rich got richer,
the poor poorer. Wealth gaps widened. Our core voters could see that while
Gordon Brown was at the Lord Mayor’s annual banquet in the City of London in
June 1997 lavishing praise on the “wealth creators”, the bankers and
financiers, our living standards were being squeezed. We were seen by many as a
banker and business man friendly Party rather than one that represented the
real creators of wealth, working class people who kept body and soul by selling
their labour power, their ability to work. And the organisations that workers
formed to protect their interests, the trade unions, were still hamstrung under
Labour by Tory anti-trade union laws that labour failed to repeal.
We can also add to this dodgy dossiers and the invasion of
Iraq and Afghanistan. Our overseas policies were an extension of our home
policies. We defend capitalism from itself at home and we also defend its
interests abroad, especially its oil interests. We are now reaping the
whirlwind for one of Blair’s ventures, the overtures to Gaddafi in 2004 to
secure oil supplies. It is not for nothing that Blair now makes up to £400,000
for making one speech to the rich and powerful around the world or that Gordon
Brown was recently paid £70,000 for making a speech to hedge fund managers.
They were not alone. Many of the leadership of the LP who were once ministers
made a seamless transition to being advisors to or even sitting on the board of
multinational corporations while earning huge sums when the living standards of
working class people were being hit. Furthermore, we had on our watch the
scandal of sleaze and MPs expenses where three of our elected political
representatives quite rightly ended up in jail for their greed. We has
certainly “lost our way” when in office. We had sold out soul to the altar of
high finance.
Many of us in the LP would say that the programme of the
ConDem government in making workers pay for the crisis of capitalism is in fact
built on the programme of the Labour Government. If we had been in power, we
would also have cut spending on social and public services and introduced wage
freezes or even wage cuts for our people – but we would have done it more
slowly and therefore over a longer period of time. The end result, however,
would have been the same. We would have made our supporters, our voters, pay
for a crisis they did not cause. It is little wonder that many “abandoned” us!
And all the enthusiasm of our members when out canvassing could not overcome
the living reality that our people, our voters, were experiencing. If we are to
campaign “enthusiastically” for “credible” policies, we must have policies that
met the needs of our people. It does not matter how good you are at selling, at
the end of the day the quality and appropriateness of the product is the most
important thing. If you peddle form over substance, you will be eventually
found out. A restructured party without substance has no future.
The crisis of capitalism we are now experiencing is the
worst since the 1930s. And the crisis is profound. Over the past 30 years the
owners of the means of production, the capitalists, have experienced a growth
of profits as a percentage of GDP from 13% to 21%. At the same time the share
of wages in GDP has fallen from 65% to 53%. A greater and greater portion of
the wealth or value created by working people is being appropriated by the
capitalists. Yet it is still not enough. They want more. They want us to pay
for their crisis through job losses, wages cuts and cuts in services.
So where do we stand as a Party? Do we defend the real
creators of wealth, the working class, or do we defend the capitalists? In
“normal” times when there isn’t a crisis of this magnitude, this is a hard
choice to make as at one time it seemed that when capitalism was expanding by
investing in plant and machinery and then selling the products made, there was
some fat in the land that could be shared out, although unequally. Those times
have gone. We are now in a completely different period. If we do not defend the
gains that we have made through the struggle of our movement over the past
period, they will be gone. And that does not only apply to wages, terms and
conditions. It also applies to our social wage. The NHS will be carved up and
sold off to private companies. Job centres are already being privatised and
schools are under threat of privatisation through academy status. State
provision that was brought about as a result of “market failure”, that is of
capitalism, is under attack. The provision will be privatised, private
companies will make super profits and we will be back to Victorian times – if
we do not defend what we have won!
We cannot straddle two diametrically opposed interests. We
either defend our class – workers, pensioners, women working at home, the
unemployed, the homeless, the poorest and most vulnerable - or we defend the interests of the bankers, financiers and
capitalists. The trickledown theory does not work. We cannot tolerate those in
our Party like Mandelson who see nothing wrong in people getting “filthy rich”
while working class people struggle to make ends meet. We have to decide as a
Party whose side we are on. If we decide that we must defend working class
people against the ravages of capitalism in crisis, then that can only be done
by having policies that will fight against capitalism, that is, we must have
socialist policies. To overcome the present crisis, for example, we could start
by taking the banks and finance houses into public ownership under democratic
control. By owning and managing the levers of finance we can plan the building
of homes, schools and hospitals without PFI. We can put people to work and
raise living standards. We cannot do that on the basis of capitalism.
Once we have democratically decided on our policies we can
then discuss what kind of organisation we need to campaign for these policies
to convince our people, our supporters, that our policies correspond to their
needs. And it is here that the document does make some interesting points about
the nature of the structure of the LP and how that can be improved. It
recognises the importance of formal structures “to prevent abuses (not defined)
and to keep the party going through bad times and troughs in membership” but it
also acknowledges that CLPs have discussions to attract members “without any
tangible link to actual policy making in the eyes of the target audience”.
This is tantamount to admitting that while we had leaders who
indulged in foreign wars in the name of protecting democracy, the last thing we
had in our Party was the democratic right to decide policy despite CLPs
existing to “provide opportunities for members to help develop the aims and
policies of the Party” and therefore “fundamental questions arise about what
CLPs are for and how local members link in to national policy making”. “Too few
members feel part of the process” for developing policy through the National Policy
Forum. It is therefore important that the “original stated purpose of the
Policy Forum Process is re-established” thereby admitting that something has
happened to prevent the process functioning as it was supposed to.
So do we stick to the present model of remote policy
development through the NPF or do we include all members? If we include all,
how is it to be done? Do we continue with resolutions at all levels of the
Party that are put forward to influence Party policy or do we have consensus
meetings where report backs are given and those reporting back only mention
what suits them as we have no “audit trail”, nor accountability, nor
transparency? Should discussion material be circulated to all members? If yes,
how is this to be done? How can new technology serve us in this aim? How does
the LP reach out to the different communities? How can it establish a vibrant
and democratic youth section to try and guarantee the future of the Party as we
have an “ageing membership”? How should the leader be elected? How can we
change the undemocratic present structure of the Electoral College where the
votes of 400 plus MPs and MEPs have the same value as those of 200,000
individual members and 2.7 million affiliated members – and where to be able to
stand to be leader you have to have sufficient nominations from the MPs. Are we
not to be trusted to exercise our democratic right to nominate and vote for a
candidate of our choice?
The leadership of the LP is to be congratulated for having
the courage to give members the opportunity to have their say in the future
direction of the Party. But that discussion must involve policies as well as
structures and it must not be seen to be a paper exercise where the leadership
listens but does not hear what the members are saying, nor where democratically
arrived at decisions are ignored, where those at the top of the Party are seen to
be more equal than those at the bottom.
If we are to defeat this bosses’ government of 22
millionaires and defend and enhance the living standards of our members, we
must return to our roots enshrined in Clause 4, Part 4, of our Constitution
- To secure for the workers
by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable
distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common
ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best
obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or
service.
Darrall
Cozens
Coventry NW CLP.
