Municipal reformism (2014)

Book Review from the March 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Militant Liverpool: A City on the Edge by Diane Frost and Peter North, Liverpool University Press, 2013, 218 pages, £13.22

Frost and North look in detail at the Militant Labour Liverpool City Council of the 1980s but also set it in the context of the 1970-80s world capitalist crises. The authors rightly point out that Liverpool’s ‘urban problems derive from broader structural factors’ such as the shift in world trade, and were all part of the ‘long term decline of its industrial and commercial bases.’

For the Trotskyist Militant Tendency ‘capitalism had failed the population of Liverpool’ but what had failed was Keynesian capitalism in Britain which was unable to prevent mass unemployment and ‘stagflation’ (stagnation and inflation of over 25 percent). Labour Cabinet Minister Tony Crosland said in 1974 that ‘the party is over’ while Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan said in 1976: ‘we used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists.’

The stage was set for the return of economic liberalism and free market capitalism with the election of a Conservative government in 1979.

The authors see the 1983 Liverpool Labour/Militant council as a ‘socialist labour council with a radical socialist programme’ which is absurd as the Council were operating municipal capitalism. The Liverpool Trots believed large amounts of money would be needed from government to fix the city’s problems, they fixated on the Tories having ‘stolen Liverpool’s money’ and ‘the council resolved on confrontation to provide the resources it argued the city needed.’ A lot of the book deals with local government finance and there is even a need for a definition of ‘capitalisation’ as ‘moving spending from day to day spending – revenue – which needs to be raised from the rates to long term spending on infrastructure that did not count against day to day spending – capital.’ There is the grim irony of reading about the Trots in Liverpool securing £30 million from a consortium led by nationalised French bank Banc Paribas, negotiating a £30 million facility from London stockbrokers and getting a £60 million loan from Swiss banks described by the Guardian as ‘the gnomes of Zurich have rallied to the Trotskyists on Merseyside.’

The Militant Trots in Liverpool wanted to turn the Labour Party into an explicitly Leninist party. It used it as a recruitment vehicle, while their ‘democratic centralist tendencies left little room for dissent or reflection, even when mistakes were made’ and they described in exaggerated fashion how Liverpool 1984 was ‘Petrograd-on-Mersey’ or the Paris Commune. Eventually the trade unions realised they were being used by the Trots as a stage army, foot soldiers and cannon fodder, and were especially shocked by ‘the grotesque chaos of a Labour council hiring taxis to scuttle around the city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers’ (Kinnock).

Former Liverpool City Councillor Paul Lafferty’s inquest on Militant in Liverpool said ‘all the lighting on pavements point out onto the road and we thought why don’t we turn them around and point them on the people? And I think that says everything about us really.’ It does.

Steve Clayton