Democratic
Socialism vs 19th century Liberalism
Paper by KEN LIVINGSTONE MP for "Debating Labour's Future"
conference, 17 July 1999, Congress
HE initial response to Labour's disastrous Euro election results was to consider bringing Peter Mandelson back to run our election campaigns. From the moment Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party, Peter was the political figure most closely identified with the strategy of concentrating on middle England. It has underpinned every campaign and policy document since, not as a way of uniting low and middle income earners, but as a policy of pandering to the middle at the expense of Labour's heartlands.
Often in private it was said that it didn't matter if Labour's traditional supporters were unhappy because "they have nowhere else to go' . How do we expect teachers to support us when we continue to support attacks on their hard work in the class room? How can we expect staff in the NHS and other public services to march happily to the polling station when they are still earning insulting levels of pay in the third year of a Labour government? And how do we expect young working class people to enthusiastically endorse us after our attacks on lone parent benefit and our exclusion of young people from the full minimum wage?
### European debacle
In the European elections New Labour actually presided over a Labour share of the vote lower than at any nationwide election since the 1920s. Moreover, recent events are just a foretaste of what will hit us if the Millbank Tendency's infamous 'project' to break Labour's links with the unions, silence its rank and file and merge with the Liberal Democrats is ever allowed to reach fruition. If we ditch our links with, and accountability to the working class communities who elect us, big business will inevitably move in to oil the wheels of 6 International Viewpoint #320 April 2000
House, London. government by buying the political influence it needs.
That is why I believe we have to dig beneath the headlines and unearth the fundamental issues of principle posed to the party by this crisis. The basic premise of "the project' is quite clear. It is the claim that the very foundation of the Labour Party at the beginning of this century was a sectarian mistake, which, they say, by splitting Labour from the Liberal Party, fatally divided 'the left' and allowed the Conservative Party to dominate British politics.
### Blair's analysis
Tony Blair may share this analysis. He told the 1997 party conference: "Division among radicals almost one hundred years ago resulted in a 20th century dominated by Conservatives." Only in this perspective does the seeming absurdity of a government, with the biggest Labour majority in history, boosting the Liberals at its own expense make sense.
In reality, this entire perspective is based on fantasy. It was not the creation of the Labour Party which brought about the demise of the Liberals and their so-called progressive tradition. The Liberals were in decline for nearly half a century before the Labour Party was formed in 1900. And the reasons for this are clear. The Liberals were the party of classical laissez faire capitalism in the period when Britain dominated the world economy, before the working class got the vote. The demise of the old Liberal Party and the rise of the Tories, as with all profound political shifts, was brought about by massive changes in the real world. In the second half of the nineteenth century Britain lost its pre-eminent world role with the rise of the United States and Germany. Ireland demanded home rule. The working class won the vote
- and the Liberal Party went into crisis.
British capitalism created the modern Tory Party, as a coalition of the most reactionary forces in society, to meet those challenges. The great split in Liberalism, which broke that party's backbone and sealed Conservative hegemony for a century, was not the formation of the Labour Party. It was the split of the Liberal Unionists in 1886 to join the Tories and oppose Irish Home Rule - 14 years before the Labour Party came into existence. The Conservatives vote then rose inexorably to peak at 55% in 1931.
Far from the creation of the Labour Party being an unfortunate sectarian error, only a party based upon the newly enfranchised working class was, unlike the Liberals, capable of standing up to the Tory onslaught. Only the formation of the Labour Party allowed a progressive tradition to survive into the twentieth century and expand.
The splits in the real 20th century progressive coalition, the one built up around the Labour Party, occurred not in 1900 but, first, in 1931 when Ramsay MacDonald joined the Tories to cut unemployment benefits and, second, from the mid-sixties, when successive Labour governments destroyed their support among skilled manual and white collar workers by imposing statutory pay restraint.
It was these attacks, by Labour in office, which finally repelled millions of skilled and white collar workers into the hands of Margaret Thatcher. Labour's vote peaked between 1945 and 1966 and fell thereafter, not even regaining its previous high points in 1997.
### Opportunity
We now have the opportunity to recreate and expand that progressive coalition around the Labour Party - uniting white and blue collar workers, home-owners and council tenants, women and the black communities. Moreover, given the irreversible decline of the Conservative Party, our rising opponents, not allies, will be the Liberals, and, north of the border, the Scottish Nationalists - as party members in virtually every English and Scottish city know. Those who believe we should abandon that battle and merge, or ally, with the Liberals should have the courage to put their views to a party conference. I'd be surprised if they mustered more than 20 per cent of the vote! *
Mora diame recent creater EANWHILE, the far-left has formed an unprecedented electoral alliance for the new Greater London Assembly - the London Socialist Alliance (LSA). The new left-wing Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) has won an MP in the new Scottish parliament. The Blairite leader of the Welsh Assembly was toppled in a revolt against control-freakery from London. Yet Tony Blair and new Labour, although badly shaken, retain a huge opinion poll lead for the next Westminster election. So what is going on?
### Union defeats
The overarching factor which makes the British political situation unique in Europe is the ongoing effects of the defeats inflicted on the trade unions during the 1980s. The most important was the betrayal and defeat of the miners, in 1984/5, which led, in less than 10 years, to the smashing up of the core centres of militant trade unionism in Britain. This led to the introduction of the most draconian anti-trade union laws in Europe, which have seriously undermined the right to strike.
The political reflection of this disastrous situation was the rise of Blairism, which goes well beyond the general rightward shift of social democracy across Europe. Blair's objective is to transform the LP into a straight bourgeois party occupying the centre ground of British politics. He wants to heal the rift with liberalism which took place at the beginning of the 20th century, which he regards as an historical mistake. He has not achieved this yet but he is well on the way.
As a result politics at every level have been reshaping in Britain. The Tory party has been semi-destroyed and its political terrain systematically occupied by new Labour. It has been pushed further towards the xenophobic right and is deeply divided on Europe. Only Britain's scandalous first-past-the-post voting system prevents it splitting. The Liberal Democrats (secondstring party of British capital) are now well to the left of new Labour but reduced to clinging to its coat tails in the hope of electoral reform for Westminster. The left, and the far-left, have had to confront these radically new political conditions and have begun to reorganise and reshape in response.
The high point of the Labour left was (left Labour MP) Tony Benn's challenge for the deputy leadership of the Labour