The May Day Manifesto. Part One. Defending the Welfare State by Michael Barratt Brown. Spokesman. £6.99.
Last year two Labour MEPs, Hugh Kerr and Ken Coates, were expelled from the Labour Party. They have formed an Independent Labour Network which (with money from the European Parliament) has published this pamphlet.
It is unashamedly Old Labour, proposing to extend the welfare state, restore full employment by Keynesian techniques of increased government spending, and to tax the rich so as to create a more equal society. It’s all pie-in-the-sky of course since such policies, which imply that capitalism can be reformed so as to work in the interest of the majority, have been tried and failed, most recently under the Callaghan Labour government in the late 1970s and under Mitterrand in France in the early 80s.
New Labour, Kerr and Coates complain in the introduction, has abandoned what Labour used to stand for:
“Redistributive policies, and planned public intervention to create jobs and uphold higher social standards have now gone. Instead, the new Government defends an economic strategy based on ‘the enterprise of the market and the rigour of competition’, a philosophy of deregulation, and ‘a partnership with business . . . that puts industry first’. It seeks ‘to enhance the dynamism of the market economy, not to undermine it’. It is determined ‘to extend the flexible labour markets to the rest of Europe, not to import Euro-sclerosis’. These engagements are linked with a policy of less direct taxation, and refusal to ‘impose burdens on business’ . . .”
All this is very true, but in the argument between them and Blair as to what is possible within capitalism today—and this is where this particular argument is situated—Blair is right: capitalism is incapable of offering the reforms Kerr and Coates are campaigning for. The alternative to New Labourism (the management of capitalism on its terms and according to its rules) is not reformism but socialism.
Adam Buick
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