Every sensible delegate to this year's Labour Party conference will include in their luggage some long, sharp knives so that they can participate in a not-very-fraternal bout of blood-letting known as Taking Stock. In fact, stock is something the Labour Party need to take all too often for their own comfort but in 1983 they are under unusual pressure. No delegate can be in any doubt about the gravity of their situation and just in case there are any lingering optimists making their way to Brighton next month the leaders of the party are writing warnings like this, from Roy Hattersley:
For the Labour Party to succeed (perhaps even to survive as a major party of government) the long hard climb back to popularity and power has to begin at once . . . . Unless we swiftly demonstrate both our will and power to win in 1988, the Liberal-Social Democrat Alliance will successfully pose as the real alternative to Thatcherite Conservatism (Guardian 8 August 1983).
Everyone knows that people like Hattersley are gloomy about Labour’s crushing defeat in June, which diminished his ambition from Prime Minister to a columnist in Punch. Groggily, his party now contemplate the fact that they have not lost so conclusively since 1931, when MacDonald’s National government was returned with a majority of over 7 million votes, sweeping almost every former Labour minister out of Parliament. Since those (for them) calamitous days the Labour Party have worked hard to convince themselves that it could not happen again.
Michael Foot has paid the penalty for losing the election, hustled into retirement and likely to disappear almost without trace. If he had won it would have been very different; he would have been Labour’s hero and apart from anything else would have had a number of desirable jobs to distribute among faithful friends and followers. Now, his role in Labour’s future seems to be to make appearances at those empty emotional rallies of the faithful where the reality of both past and present is so distorted that eventually the same misguided view can be taken of the future. At such events, almost anything is possible; Foot may well become, like many a Labour politician since 1931, an aged conscience of the party to help them both forget what has happened and to believe that it will not happen again. Much hope is being invested in Foot’s successor as leader, whoever he may be, and in the prospect of a “dream ticket" — a leader and a deputy whose reputations and talents are such that between them they are able to assuage the prejudices and frustrations of all sections of the party. So that if one can’t pull off a particular deception, the other can.
It will be quite unprecedented, if Labour’s stock-taking is anything other than the familiar exercise in evasion and reassurance. There may be some criticism of their election manifesto, either on the grounds that it was not attractive enough or that it was too antagonistic. The party leadership might have expected a battering except that Foot and Healey have prudently taken their leave. A lot of hard things will be spoken about Labour’s organisation and their election machine, much of it in the conviction that it was nothing more than a matter of bad communication which left the voters in ignorance of the delights of living under another Labour government. Saatchi and Saatchi may prick up their ears at resolutions like this, from Oldham: "The Labour Party is sadly lacking in the modern techniques of organisation, administration, communication, advertising and public relations and even within a very limited budget much more effective action could be taken in the business of winning votes”.
It will not, then, be an enquiry into Labour’s basic nature as a party of capitalism, its appalling history and its dismal prospects but into why they lost the election — why didn’t they get their turn at trying to run the affairs of the British capitalist class? Some of the brainier delegates may agree with New Society (26 May 1983) which thought that the “skilled" workers who are buying council houses and installing central heating and video machines have decided that a Labour government could not be trusted to defend what they think of as their affluence. It is, of course, not only “skilled” workers who get it wrong about their class position under capitalism; sometimes they are compelled to get it rather nearer correct, when they take part in unpopular strikes which get some scathing publicity. If Labour’s enquiry comes up with some sort of an answer their next step will be to fashion a programme to attract the disaffected voters back. It won’t particularly matter what is in the programme: in any case it can all be forgotten soon after the election. The important question is — will it help in that “business of winning votes"?
We shall have to endure again the spectacle of those boring irrelevancies — the left wing and the right — parading their differences as if these are matters fundamental to working class interests. The left are already blaming the defeat on defective leadership. "The only hope", shrieked Tribune “is that in the autumn elections for the National Executive Committee and the Shadow Cabinet, the tired, ideologically impoverished, obsessive men and women who have led the Labour Party to the brink of ruin will be swept away for ever”. The right are less optimistic; they don’t think in terms of Labour’s problems being solved "for ever”, nor that they need ideologically wealthy people in the leadership. What they are sure about is that the party have lately been showing suicidal tendencies, like conference opting for unilateralism, like the confusion over Militant, like the hungrily-publicised blunders of Ken Livingstone.
But left and right are agreed on one thing; there is nothing fundamentally at fault with the Labour Party. Both wings think that it is possible to control capitalism and to make the system work in the interests of the majority and that Labour is the party best fitted to do this, even if they call it socialism. They both think that capitalism produces war, famine, poverty, by accident; it could be a benign, peaceful, abundant society provided there are one or two adjustments to the personalities and the programmes of the Labour Party. So at the election, when the working class might have voted for socialism. Labour’s left and right wings were hard at work inviting them to vote as if they were brainless, forgetting Labour’s wretched history, ignoring those ideologically impoverished leaders. In this cause Neil Kinnock nearly lost his famous Welsh voice and Denis Healey cheerfully allowed his equally famous, luxuriant eyebrows to be experimentally tugged at by children whose parents, he hoped, would thereby be persuaded to vote for the party of Ken Livingstone.
These were the events which led to the Labour Party being annihilated at the 1931 election and to them taking stock at their conference the following year. They quickly decided that there was nothing basically amiss with their party: “The events of last year,” said Charles Trevelyan, who had been MacDonald's Minister of Education, "Were a great shock to this party in its confidence in men. but there is no shock to its confidence in itself . . .’’ The problem was that too much power had been given to too few men — in particular to one man. the hated (although not by duchesses) MacDonald. The delegates were properly impressed and passed a resolution moved by Trevelyan that a future Labour government should immediately promulgate “. . . definite socialist legislation . . .” and should “. . . stand or fall in the House of Commons on the principles in which it has faith”.
At the 1933 conference another critic of MacDonald emerged into prominence, in the diminutive and reticent figure of J.R. Clynes, who had been Home Secretary and who again was quite clear on the reasons for the 1929/31 Labour government’s dismal collapse: "Never again should any one leader of the party be empowered singly to use his personal authority, and himself alone choose his cabinet or appoint his ministers”. Clynes was recommending a proposal by Labour’s NEC that a future Labour Prime Minister should select ministers only after consulting and acting in conjunction with the other party leaders. The delegates were predictably in favour of this; they seemed to be unaware that this was in fact the method used by MacDonald and Clynes did not tell them, although he himself had come to be Home Secretary in this way. Under the impression that they were making some triumphant, significant change, the conference left things as they were. The next time Labour came to office. in 1945, Attlee simply ignored the whole thing and chose the ministers he wanted.
There is no reason to believe, in 1983, that Labour Party members are any likelier to grasp reality than were those who were so readily deceived by Trevelyan and Clynes. The plain fact is that, such is Labour’s recent record and present condition. the working class are unlikely to consider them a possible administration of British capitalism. It is not permissible for the Labour Party to avoid all responsibility for this. They cannot blame it all onto poor, bookish, bumbling Foot or the reptiles of Fleet Street or the diabolical smoothies Saatchi and Saatchi. They have persistently argued, in opposition to the case for socialism, that there is no need to campaign for workers to understand and consciously oppose capitalism; for them the important thing has been to win votes by whatever method. This has left untouched — indeed it has usually stimulated — the support which the working class give to the capitalist social system; the Labour Party have overlooked the fact that workers who are so ignorant of their class interests that they will vote for capitalism under a Labour government will at other times opt for capitalism under the Tories, unemployment and the Falklands notwithstanding.
A useful enquiry into the Labour Party would expose its ideological poverty. It would denounce Labour's theory, held to so stubbornly through all the evidence of history, that by a policy of opportunism and duplicity capitalism can be reformed out of its essential character. The facts speak for themselves, through the fog of self-delusion which will be the Labour Party conference. After decades of compromise and deceit, of cynical grubbing in the business of winning votes, the Labour Party has made such progress that the Tories are back stronger than ever and Labour are back at 1931.
Ivan
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