We are about to witness yet another Battle for the Soul of the Labour Party, which might be an awe-inspiring spectacle were it not for the fact that the amount of inspiration will be in inverse proportion to the degree of understanding.
Cynics will take hot-blooded part in this Battle, rather like troops who have just swallowed their rum ration before going over the top. They are convinced that it is a significant event which will affect the history of the British working class. Realists will know that it has all happened many times before. The prize in the Battle is less the Soul of the Labour Party (whatever, and wherever, that may be) than its seat, which it wants to restore to the benches of power as quickly as possible. And that, really, is what all the excitement is about; the Battle is being fought only because Labour was defeated at the last election.
The battle lines, as usual, are drawn up left and right, and each side has begun bombarding the other with missiles stuffed like shrapnel with nonsense. From the left comes a pamphlet called Labour Activist, which splutters:
The last Labour government ignored the advice of the trade unions and the party at large, and let the Tories in . . . The only question is whether the unions and the party will be mugs enough to fall for this a second time around.
Obviously there is something wrong with the left’s arithmetic if they think that this is only the first time a Labour government has disappointed its own supporters. However, they show a proper concern, for a party of capitalism, for winning and holding power, and this is shared by their opponents on the right. Sailing over from them, in a pamphlet called Labour Victory, is this:
The Left’s preoccupation is in controlling the Labour Party, it is not in achieving government.
Leaders
Clearly, since the left and the right have been lobbing grenades like those at each other for a very longtime, there has been small progress in the techniques of manufacturing political ammunition. There is little better to hope for from the ambitious ones, whose main contribution to the Battle will be their bid for the Labour leadership. People like Healey, Benn, Shore, Silkin and Hattersley will be trying to convince their party that they each offer the best hope of misleading enough workers into voting for another dose of Labour government. They have little more to sustain them than unsavoury memories; apart from that, they are a drab lot. Indeed, one of them — Sam Silkin — thinks that becoming unexciting was the big problem with the last government, that it ran out of steam — which makes it sound as if the working class can most easily be induced to vote for capitalism in a state of sweaty hysteria.
There is as much to be said for that point of view as for another which is more popular — the idea that the working class are a stolid, reliable lot who want a new society and are only waiting for the Labour Party to be true to itself before they vote it into power for evermore. Part of that theory is that Labour was once on the right track but has somehow lost its way. Labour Activist, for example, complains about Labour MPs who supported “. . . incomes policies, public spending cuts, or any other policies which fly in the face of the Labour Movement.” Roy Hattersley (The Guardian, 30 July 1979) puts a different slant on this idea when he worries that Labour’s defeat came because “We appealed to the public simply as good managers who could run the economy more efficiently than our opponents.” Hattersley does not complain that there was anything wrong in that appeal, nor that it exposed Labour as an anti-socialist party; only that as tilings turned out, and capitalism’s crises overtook them, they were seen as bad managers of the economy.
Profits
Far from having lost their way, the Labour Party have remained steadily on course. For example, soon after they won power in 1964 there was a flurry of anxiety on their part that nobody should take seriously anything they might ever have said about abolishing capitalism. Perhaps, in some unguarded moment at a miners’ gala, one of them had made an unwise statement. The capitalist class needed to be reassured:
Profits, provided they are earned by efficiency and technical progress, and not by restrictive practices or abuse of monopoly, are the sign of a healthy economy. (Douglas Jay, at the International Chamber of Commerce, 20 October 1964.)Business men have more hope of making progress and money under a Labour government than they had before. (George Brown, interview in The Director, April 1965.)
That government, which was intending at one time to solve all our problems, grappled for a few years with the crises of British capitalism, and then, discredited and in disarray, was turned out by the working class. That defeat was followed by — yes — an inquest and a Battle for the Soul of the Labour Party. At that time the leading opponent of Harold Wilson was Roy Jenkins, whose reputation was for an elegant, witty, ‘liberalism’. Jenkins was obviously pretty desperate to become leader because he went to the lengths of almost speaking the truth about the Labour Party, which is akin to a boxer hitting his opponent below the belt after the bell has gone to end the round. To begin with, he debunked the promise on which the Wilson government had won a lot of support in 1964, that the ‘technological revolution’ would bring greater prosperity for us all:
. . . there is some reason to believe that the social and technical changes which accompany and make possible a faster rate of economic growth may even intensify inequality, unless strong countervailing measures are introduced.
And he summed up the achievements of that government:
The poor are still poor. Property speculators — and some others — are as relatively rich, as were those with an accepted position at the top of the social structure. The result, quite inevitably, is increasing social strain. (The Observer, 12 March 1972.)
Inequality
After that it would have been difficult for Jenkins to ignore the part he had played, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, in keeping the poor and the property speculators in their respective poverty and riches. “Not enough”, he said, “was done to change society. I take my fair share of the responsibility.”
Well, Labour ministers seem to have learned a little since then; so far there are no signs of any member of the Callaghan government taking any blame for their record. No minister has yet put their head on the block to atone for the fact that the rich actually got richer during the first two years of the last Labour government. According to a report published in July by the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Wealth and Income, between 1974 and 1976 the richest one per cent of the population increased their share of wealth from 22.5 per cent to 24.9 per cent. During the same period, the richest ten per cent had their share increased from 57.5 per cent to 60.6 per cent. And this after their share had declined under the Heath government.
So after all the risky fulminations from people like Jenkins, and the implication that it would be different next time, the property and share speculators continued to prosper under Labour. One example is Tory MP Edward du Cann, who in March, while Labour was still in power, made £1.4 million from a deal involving Cannon Assurance, in which he was a major shareholder.“The country”, he commented, “needs people who are prepared to be adventurous.” (Financial Times, 9 March 1979). The day after that, the Daily Mail reported what had happened to someone less adventurous, from the non-property speculating, non-share owning class: a foreman at a GEC factory, who committed suicide when he and eight workmates were made redundant.
Lie
There is no prospect of this situation being changed as a result — whatever it is — of the great Battle for the Soul of the Labour Party. Indeed, one of the most prominent participants in that Battle, Tony Benn, seems to think that Labour has been steadily advancing backwards for over forty years. In his recent book, Argument for Socialism, Benn says:
I have copies of Labour’s election literature which 1 distributed in the 1935 election . . . That manifesto was far more left wing — with its demand for the nationalisation of the Joint Stock Banks — than the Labour manifesto of 1979.
In spite of this, Benn’s loyalty is unshaken: “. . . I was born into the Labour Movement, like millions of others, and I intend to be in it when I die.”
Those millions are fighting a mock battle over the details of organising the capitalist system in which property speculators grow rich off the workers who suffer — and often crack — under the strain of it all. The great lie of the Labour Party, which its members are required to swallow and to regurgitate at times like elections, is that basically they stand for a different society. Sometimes, says the lie, one or two things go wrong which delay Labour’s plans to bring in the new world. But always they are working towards it.
It is fair to ask how much more profit the du Canns need to make, and how much more suffering the working class must absorb, before the lie loses its attractions. The failures and the frustrations of the Labour Party have been with us for a very long time now, and promise to be with us for a very long time to come. So, too, have their great purges and their historic Battles for their Soul.
In the excitement and the chaos of the fighting, one fact will be obscured. When the gunsmoke clears it will be the ruling class, people like du Cann. who will survive to drink a toast to victory — their victory. And it will be members of the working class who will populate the casualty lists.
Ivan
No comments:
Post a Comment