Letter: Should we have voted Labour? (1997)

Letter to the Editors from the June 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

I was highly disappointed, when reading April's issue of the Socialist Standard, to find that you seemed to be supporting an apathetic view towards voting in the forthcoming election.

While it is painfully clear that none of the major parties offer any policies which could be remotely linked to Socialism, not voting would be highly damaging to the left-wing cause.

What readers of your publication must surely understand is that only a tiny minority in Britain actually supports "true" socialism.The word “socialism” is viewed, by the majority of people, to have evil, backwards and foreign connotations to it. and is bandied around by Tory MPs in a (successful) attempt to scare voters of parties who dare to stand for equality. We must accept that we are ruled by a right-wing government, and by and large are a right-wing nation. It was indeed the (Sun-reading) working classes, that your journal idealises, that kept the Tories in power in the last election.

Britain is not going to become socialist overnight, it will be a long and slow process.This process will not be helped by allowing a right-wing government to be returned to power at every election. Should we vote the Conservatives in for another two decades we might just as well have lost World War II. To surrender a left-wing sympathiser's vote by abstaining, is to offer the country to the Conservatives on a silver platter. You can rest assured that members of the BNP or directors of companies eager to maintain the lack of workers' rights in this country will use theirs. I for one would rather see a centre-right government (as New Labour will be) working with the centre-left liberals, than a radical "ultra conservative" government (as John Major has pledged his will be).

New Labour has swung right to appease voters. Should the voters’ opinions be changed they would swing left again. If there is to be another Tory government left-wing politics will all but disappear (with New Labour continuing to swing right until they are voted in). Britain may well be a divided society but, under a government that cannot even recognise this, or even accept the term "society", what hope have we got?

So excuse me if I exercise my right to vote but I would rather take my chances with Blair than a government which openly promotes inequality.

Dominic Linley, 

Leeds

Reply:

Well, you have got your way. The Tories are out and New Labour is in. So we’ll be able to see if it makes any difference.

To a certain extent we can understand why you wanted the Tories out. They’re an arrogant lot who think they’ve got some divine right to rule while grinding down the poor and lining their own pockets. But it is better to act on the basis of reason rather than such a gut reaction.

The question to ask is: will their replacement by another group of politicians make any difference to our lives? Your argument that it will is based on the illusion that governments have a power to improve economic and social conditions which they don’t actually possess and that all that is needed is to replace one set of politicians who accept inequality by another set who claim that they don’t. Our argument is that what happens on the economic and social field is determined not by what governments want but by the blind workings of the economic laws of the profit system. In other words, it is not governments that control the way the economy works but the way the economy works that places limits on what governments can do and indeed, in the end, virtually dictates what they do. Governments exist to run the political side of the profit system but the profit system can only be run as a system in which priority has to be given to the profit-making. "Profits first” is a basic economic law that all governments must respect.

So any government, whatever its political colour or the promises and aspirations of its members, has to do this. This is why a Blair government will be no different in practice from the Tory government that has just been voted out, not that the Labour Party is against the profit system even in words.

Maybe you are too young to remember the last Labour government but we can assure you that, if there is a need to maintain or increase profit levels, the new Blair government will cut back spending on education and the NHS and will discourage trade-union action—just as the Callaghan government did and before that the Wilson government (which even imposed a statutory wage freeze which no Tory government has ever done). If you don’t believe us, just wait and see. — Editors.