Alex Nunns | ukwatch.net

2014: A Tory dystopia

JamieSW — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 10:14:39 +0000

The year is 2014. The Tories, led by David Cameron, are preparing to go to the polls, seeking a second term in government. Back in 2010 they crushed Labour in the general election, and promised to bring about a social transformation to match the economic reforms of the late Margaret Thatcher. And it’s true that four years of Cameron government have certainly brought many changes – they’re just not the ones the voters expected.

Cameron’s first term has been marked by two main themes: painful restrictions in public spending, primarily focused on the welfare budget, and a dramatic acceleration of privatisation in the public services. Many health services are now routinely provided by the private sector, and most new schools have been ‘new academies’, set up by private benefactors. But privatisation has been given far wider scope: the task of getting people into work has been privatised, prisons make a profit, and media deregulation and budget restrictions have sent the BBC into a spiral of decline.

This has not gone unnoticed by the public. Services that used to be taken for granted are no longer available. Others are harder to access. The quality of service has declined, and there is frustration that companies cannot be held to account for their mistakes. And there has been a series of scandals as corporate contract negotiators have ripped off the taxpayer for millions of pounds.

While privatisation has proved controversial, the big headlines have been reserved for the severe restrictions Cameron has put on public spending. The Tories found themselves in a bind after the election. They had promised to ‘share the proceeds of growth’ by reducing public spending as a proportion of GDP, but the global economic slowdown that began in 2008 was far more intractable and lengthy than they had expected.

Cameron’s chancellor, George Osborne, seemed to have little room for manoeuvre – the Conservatives had promised to match Labour’s spending on the NHS, and education was one of their flagship policy areas. So Osborne turned his sights on the welfare budget, the largest component of public spending, where cuts could be made without much political risk. The government launched a propaganda campaign deriding benefit scroungers, incapacity cheats and immigrants on state handouts.

This rhetoric proved popular, encouraging the re-emergence of the nasty streak in the party. But gradually news seeped through of the losers – those who had fallen through the now-threadbare safety net into destitution; vulnerable people, unable to speak up. The public noticed an increase in homelessness. Poverty, including child poverty, rose dramatically, regardless of the new Conservative rhetoric about helping the poorest. Crime ballooned, as it had under Thatcher, despite harsher penal policies. The Daily Mail carried screaming headlines about the ‘feral underclass’ and their lives of crime, drugs and prostitution. It was all a far cry from David Cameron’s promise to fix the ‘broken society’.

Workfare

The Conservative government’s earliest reforms were designed to make the benefits system more difficult to access and far more judgemental of the citizen, in order to reduce the welfare budget. Benefit claimants who don’t participate in back-to-work programs now lose their benefits. The penalty for not accepting a job offer is the denial of a month’s jobseekers’ allowance. Three months’ benefit is docked for refusing a second offer, and if a third offer is turned down then the allowance is stopped for three years. Furthermore, anyone who has received jobseekers’ allowance for two out of three years is required to do community service.

The policy has achieved its objective – it has saved money – but it has proved far harder to actually get people into jobs. Instead, large numbers have simply disappeared from the system and descended into a black-market world of poverty and hopelessness, causing further social breakdown.

Those that have taken work have found that unscrupulous employers are well aware of their situation. Afraid of being left without jobseekers’ allowance, the new pool of unqualified labour is in no position to question illegal practices and poor conditions. They simply have to grin and bear it, clinging onto jobs with zero prospects for money that is never a penny over the minimum wage (which has risen far slower than inflation).

The problem has been exacerbated by the continuing long-term decline of manufacturing. The proportion of skilled employment has fallen, and the economy is now dependent on unskilled jobs. Eastern Europeans previously occupied many of these, but there has been a trend for migrant workers to return to their home countries – the workfare labour army has taken their place.

The Tories believed that the real treasure chest in the welfare budget was the money being spent on incapacity benefit. They thought that they could save more than £3 billion a year by 2014 – like New Labour before them, the Tories had a preconceived notion that many, if not most, of the two and a half million people claiming incapacity benefit were well enough to work. So the first step was a massive programme of ‘work capability assessments’, not just for new claimants (New Labour had already instituted much tighter criteria here), but for all existing incapacity claimants too.

This was a vast and hugely costly exercise, but the results were not what the Tories wanted. It has proved extremely difficult to significantly reduce the numbers on incapacity benefit. Those found partially capable of work by the assessments have been placed in jobs that are often inappropriate and stultifying.

It is the mentally ill who have suffered the most – because of the nature of their illnesses, their attendance at work is impossible to guarantee and confidence easily dashed, especially when the resources are not there for the kind of one-to-one support needed. For some, the harshness of the new regime has exacerbated their condition. So, despite making life very unpleasant for people on incapacity benefit, the Conservatives have not managed to make big spending reductions.

Poverty, tax credits and marriage

The Conservatives intended to use the savings from benefit cuts for other social ends, such as making marriage more fiscally rewarding and tackling poverty. But even if this had been possible, the problem of poverty has had its own impetus.

In opposition, the Tories were critical of Labour’s tax credits system, and so it has been no surprise that the value of tax credits has diminished. Child poverty is a hot issue. The Conservatives never committed to Labour’s target of ending child poverty by 2020, and this has served them well, as there is no way of achieving the target without massive investment. New Labour had believed the solution was to increase dramatically the number of parents in work, and to this end they ended income support for lone parents with children over the age of seven just before the election. But even before this change, low pay meant that two million children were living below the poverty line in working households.

Under the Tories, little has been done to combat bad employers. People have simply been moved from workless poverty to in-work poverty, and their inflexible, poorly paid jobs have undermined family life – the very thing that Conservatives said was essential to fix the ‘broken society’.

Cameron and Osborne championed marriage as one of their distinctive themes in the 2010 election. They promised to eliminate what they called the ‘couple penalty’ in the tax credit system. But the marriage issue came back to bite them when several cabinet ministers later went through messy divorces – to the delight of the tabloid press.

Housing

Some families have stuck together, but more out of necessity than desire. The ever-rising waiting list for dilapidated social housing has led to overcrowding in bad, privately-rented accommodation that has drawn parallels with Victorian times. But the most significant change has been to abandon the idea of mixed communities.

Particularly in London, under Ken Livingstone, it was accepted that the relationship between social housing and poverty, ill health and poor-quality education should be tackled by planning for mixed housing provision – having rich and poor living side by side, doing away with so-called ‘sink estates’. A clue to the different direction the Tories would take came immediately after Boris Johnson was elected as London mayor in May 2008: one of his first acts was to allow Conservative-led Hammersmith and Fulham council to cut all planned social housing from a new development in White City.

Under the banner of ‘decentralisation’, the Conservatives have reformed the housing revenue account – the mechanism Labour used to redistribute housing money from rich areas to poor, causing Conservative councils to claim that they were being ‘robbed by Whitehall’. Already-struggling estates have been left to deteriorate, while the more affluent Tory-controlled areas have built up surpluses. For inner cities, this has meant a return to the very worst kinds of neglect seen in the 1980s and 1990s, with huge backlogs of repairs. ‘Shameless estates,’ as they have become known (the Shameless TV show is now in its 17th series), are areas where unemployment is rife, prospects poor, and health bad.

Crime

With so many disappearing from the benefits system and living in poverty, often on abandoned estates, it came as no surprise that crime rocketed – except, that is, to the right-wing press and the Conservatives. They had thought that a tough penal system would deter people from breaking the law. Certainly, the small armies of mainly young people doing community sentences, dressed in their distinctive overalls designed to shame, are a visible symbol of punishment. But they also draw attention to an uncomfortable question: why are there so many criminals?

The prison population, already sky high under Labour, has grown exponentially. The Tory government has changed the sentencing rules so that judges set a minimum and a maximum sentence, ending automatic release. They had anticipated that this would lead to a 10 per cent increase in the average length of determinate sentences, but they thought this would be compensated for by a much-vaunted ‘rehabilitation revolution’, to be brought about by the involvement of private companies. It wasn’t: the effect of the Conservatives’ other social measures contributed to the sharp increase in crime, and that, in turn, kept prisons overcrowded, despite a prison-building scheme. This made rehabilitation work much more difficult.

Pensions and social care

For the elderly, times are hard. The pensions system has not yet reached complete crisis – that will be for the next generation – but the state pension has fallen further behind earnings, and pensioner poverty is rife. The Cameron project’s political strategy has been aimed at younger people from the start, as can be seen in George Osborne’s call for ‘fairness between the generations’ back in 2008, which suggested that the young were bearing the burden of an older nation. The elderly were never at the top of the priority list.

The most severe consequences have been in social care. The Tories have not cut spending on social care, but neither have they raised it to meet the enormous extra need. Since Derek Wanless’s social care report for the King’s Fund in 2006, it has been known that costs would rise from £10.1 billion in 2002 to £24 billion in 2026 just because of the ageing population. But under both Labour and the Conservatives the English government (unlike its Scottish counterpart) has been unwilling to take responsibility. The question has therefore been whether the state should ensure that the poorest in need of care get as much help as possible, or simply protect the assets of those who have property wealth.

The loudest voices in the debate have been the middle classes, understandably worried that they will have to sell their houses to fund care. So the Conservatives have looked for market-based solutions that protect property. For those without any assets, the quality of social care is in decline. It is the worst-case scenario – people have to get very poor or very ill before they can receive care that is patchy and poor quality.

The situation has attracted much political flak – and not just from the left. Tory councils, still in charge in most of the country and quite a force, have been under pressure to meet everyone’s needs with inadequate resources. Their rebellion has placed the issue in the spotlight, and it is looming large in the 2014 election.

Environment

The gravest consequence of the dearth of public investment has been the lack of progress on climate change. The ‘vote blue, go green’ slogan was a key part of the Tories’ rebranding exercise in opposition, but in 2011 the PR strategy backfired when journalists noticed that Cameron’s personal wind turbine kept on turning even when there was no wind. It transpired that it was powered by mains electricity, and was just for show.

Even so, Cameron has continued to make worthy speeches on climate change and has pushed for more international action. Unfortunately, the measures needed to avert climate catastrophe are ultimately incompatible with Conservative market philosophy.

The key area has been energy policy. The Tories went into the 2010 election with an ambitious plan for the micro-generation of energy, with German-style feed-in tariffs allowing individuals to sell sustainably-generated power to the national grid. In some pockets of the country, this has worked very well. However, coverage has not been national, and it has allowed the Conservatives to pose as a green party without bringing about a fundamental transformation of the energy sector.

Such a transformation would require a major role for the state, with massive investment in renewables, carbon-capture technology and energy efficiency. Britain’s private energy companies are simply not up to the job. There has been huge under-investment in energy infrastructure ever since the Conservatives privatised the sector in the 1980s and 1990s, and we are now starting to see the results.

Today, policy is adrift. Frequent climatic disasters keep the issue close to the top of the agenda, but all of the major parties still see the world strictly through the prism of the market. The political impetus to tackle climate change is lacking.

Privatisation

That same prism has refracted the state into a privatised entity. The second main theme of Cameron’s term in office, after the spending restrictions, has been the sweeping privatisation of public services. In many ways, it was laid out on a plate for him: New Labour fatally undermined the idea of public provision and changed the funding structures in areas such as the NHS, ready for an influx of private companies. It was as if New Labour had arranged all the dominoes in line, inviting the Tories to knock them down in one go.

Nowhere was this truer than in the English health service. By the time Tony Blair resigned, the English NHS was run on a payment-by-results basis, putting hospitals in competition with each other. Huge corporations such as Virgin and United Health were running GP surgeries, with a select few contracted for the crucial commissioning function, giving them control of billions of pounds of public money. (Blair, incidentally, has just taken up a £450,000-a-year part-time job as president of the Washington-based Institute for Christian-Muslim Relations, following his successful stint with the Exxon-sponsored Iraqi Freedom Foundation.)

It was difficult to see how the Tories could do more damage. In fact, they have managed to go even further down the market route. They have instituted what they call a ‘true payment-by-results system’ whereby hospitals are paid according to health outcomes rather than activity. This has been a disaster. Hospitals have no idea how much money to expect, leaving them with no ability to plan. The bureaucracy required is immense. League tables are produced for every conceivable treatment, with unintended consequences – private companies misreport their performance, as their profits depend on it, while NHS facilities are routinely pilloried in the tabloid press for supposedly poor (but in reality more honest) results.

All NHS hospitals are now foundation trusts, and, freed from Gordon Brown’s rather weak restrictions, they can now borrow like private hospitals. (Since resigning as an MP, Brown has focused on his writing, but his publisher has cancelled the release of his latest book, Vision, the follow up to 2007’s Courage.) Unprofitable treatments are no longer available. Again, this process began under New Labour with the denial of hernia operations in Oxfordshire, but it has greatly accelerated.

Conversely, the market leads hospitals and corporate-employed GPs to find ways to treat lucrative cases while shunting others aside. Also common is the levying of fees for extra services – some hospitals have even attempted to charge ‘bed rent’.

The public has perceived a degradation in service, but there has been no commensurate reduction in the cost of the NHS – indeed, the enormous performance bureaucracy created by the Tories, combined with the billing, contracting and accounting necessary in a market, means that costs are rising. Curiously, the public places the blame for this not only on the Conservatives but also on the NHS itself, feeding the frenzied calls of right-wing commentators for the complete handover of the service to the private sector.

Education

The same privatised vision informs the Conservatives’ education policy. In England the key Tory idea has been the establishment of ‘new academies’ (although they aren’t really much different from the old academies). They can be set up and run by companies, charities, trusts, voluntary groups, philanthropists or co-operatives, and all the same fears attached to New Labour’s academies still apply, especially in regard to sponsorship and the capitalist – and sometimes religious – ethos of the schools.

New academies are outside the national curriculum and independent of the local authority – in fact, they compete with local authority schools, as their funding depends on the number of children who attend. They can be established even in areas where there is a surplus of school places. This is justified on the grounds that it ‘drives up standards’.

While the Conservatives have drawn on the Swedish example of diverse schools, studies have shown that Finland’s fully-comprehensive system is more successful. Although new academies are supposed to be non-selective, the schools are outside local authority control and deal with their own admissions, which has inevitably led to a more socially-segregated education system.

The policy’s only saving grace has been that there were not many people who wanted to establish a new academy. They are still not allowed to make a profit, so business wasn’t interested, and the Tories were surprised to find that parents were largely indifferent to the idea of opening and running their own schools.

Wider education policy has been marked by inconsistency and contradiction. Despite the rhetoric about ending central control, the Conservative government has insisted that schools must have a formal uniform, place children in sets, and use synthetic phonics. It has also required the teaching of a skewed version of British history that amounts to propaganda, designed to stir national sentiment.

Public dissatisfaction in England has been exacerbated by the contrast with the rest of Britain. Even under New Labour, the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly set themselves against privatisation in health and education, and with the Tories in power the disparity has become even more pronounced. It is now a common theme of news coverage and pub conversation that the Scottish and Welsh are getting a better deal.

Welfare privatisation

As well as squeezing the benefits system, the Conservatives have privatised its job placement function. Jobcentres now grade potential benefit claimants according to their capability for different kinds of work and refer them to a private company to find a job. This fundamental reshaping of the welfare system built on New Labour’s reforms – Tory ministers defend their policies by saying they are only continuing James Purnell’s work.

The ‘payment-by-results’ system, under which companies’ funding depends on getting people into jobs and keeping them there, is meant to provide the state with the levers it needs to control the process. But it doesn’t work like that. The Tory plans were largely based on the Australian system introduced by the Howard government, but in that country the profit motive produced perverse outcomes and fraudulent behaviour. There was no real market, because the ‘customers’ (unemployed people) didn’t pay for the service and couldn’t choose to switch between companies. Although private providers were paid by results in Australia as in the Tory scheme, there was minimal competition once a few companies became dominant. To compensate for the failure of the market, the Australian government was forced to tighten regulation and central control – undermining the original aim of cutting bureaucracy and costs.

The Conservatives chose to ignore this evidence, and promptly repeated the Australian experience. They also faced an outcry from the voluntary sector, which had been promised a key role delivering job placement services but didn’t have the capital necessary to win many contracts. The sector belatedly realised that its involvement had been used as PR cover for privatisation.

Prison privatisation

Conservative rhetoric on prison reform also emphasised the voluntary sector, but the reality has been the privatisation of prisons. To use the jargon, there is now an ‘offender management marketplace’. All public prisons have been made into Prison and Rehabilitation Trusts, along the lines of Foundation Trust hospitals, with financial independence. The government has encouraged the private sector to build more prisons, which then compete for the same funding as the public prisons through a tariff system. Prisons are paid a set amount for each convict, and get a premium if a former prisoner doesn’t re-offend for two years. Newly-released prisoners are handed over to the private workfare companies to be put into work.

But if the market fails in welfare because the jobseeker is not a real consumer, then it can hardly work for prisoners, whose defining characteristic is a lack of choice over their destiny. Re-offending rates have proved stubborn. Ex-prisoners don’t seem too bothered that their activities might cost their former institution its premium tariff.

The media

The erosion of the public sphere has even spread into the broadcasting industry. The Tories have never been fans of the BBC, and the snappily dubbed ‘multi-channel, multi-platform era’ has provided the perfect excuse for Cameron (a former director of corporate affairs at Carlton Communications) to undermine it.

The Conservatives argued that it was unfair to expect commercial channels to carry current affairs or children’s programmes without a subsidy. Thus, the licence fee has been ‘top-sliced’: a proportion of the money is now distributed to commercial channels, leaving the BBC with less revenue and forced to close down channels.

Impartiality requirements on non-publicly funded broadcasters have been relaxed, meaning TV news on commercial channels can now wear its biases on its sleeve. While the BBC’s news still has to be impartial, all the editorial pressure now comes from the more boisterous and slanted end of the market, pulling even the publicly-funded newscasters rightwards. Newspapers have opened stations that follow their editorial line – and worse, Rupert Murdoch is in the process of launching a UK Fox News. The BBC has seen itself relegated to the role of making up for market failure, as it gradually loses out against its competitors. This has eroded faith in public broadcasting. People no longer expect to be treated as citizens by the broadcast media – merely as consumers.

The labour movement

The hurricane of privatisation has been opposed tooth and nail by the trade unions, and for good reason – union power is overwhelmingly centred in the public sector. Foundation hospitals, prison trusts and new academy schools have opted out of national pay bargaining agreements. The new, hostile employers make it difficult for unions to recruit members working for the private organisations that now deliver so many services, such as the health corporations or job placement companies.

Most of Margaret Thatcher’s anti-union legislation remained in place after 13 years of Labour government – it was nice of them to save the Tories the job of reintroducing it – but that hasn’t prevented further attempts to undermine the unions. In the first year of Cameron’s premiership, Boris Johnson, who had been kept on a tight leash before the 2010 election, was given free rein to take on the RMT transport union. He believed this would be popular with commuters. A drawn out battle ensued as the RMT surprised the Tories with its doggedness, and the dispute marred Cameron’s early period in office, casting an image of social strife.

Since then the Conservatives have been more subtle. Behind the scenes, the government has encouraged public sector employers, particularly in the NHS, to derecognise unions in areas where branch membership is not what it might be. After disputes in the health service and the fire brigades (where the Fire Brigades Union is fighting another wave of ‘rationalisation’ by cash-strapped local authorities), there is talk of strike bans in essential services.

A more fundamental change has been the end of direct union funding of the Labour party. Labour had the chance to settle the party funding issue before they left office, but lacked the political energy. So, under the guise of cleaning up politics, the new Conservative government outlawed donations of more than £50,000 from individuals, companies, organisations and trade unions, rejecting desperate pleas to allow individual union members to pay an optional affiliation fee as part of their annual membership. This was a financial disaster for Labour, as 90 per cent of the party’s money came from the unions in 2010.

Former Labour affiliates were left with a sudden surplus of cash that they could use for political ends, but only as third-party campaigning organisations. So, as the 2014 election looms, the big unions are agitating for a rise in the minimum wage and supporting candidates who back it, without directly mentioning the Labour Party. In many ways, this has made the unions higher-profile, more vibrant campaigning organisations.

For Labour, the change has made the party reliant on its members – and wealthy donors. This has pulled it in two different directions, causing tensions that have not been resolved as we go into the general election. The party has to compete for members in a political marketplace (an analogy the Conservatives are delighted with), and has found it easier to attract supporters by sounding social democratic and mildly left wing, keeping quiet about Blair and Brown. But the big £50,000 individual donations, which have started to pick up after four years of Tory government, generally come from unreconstructed Blairites who still want Labour to be like the US Democratic Party.

One of the great problems for Labour in opposition has been its inability to make political capital from unpopular Tory reforms. Whether it’s NHS privatisation or the brutal tightening of welfare, Labour has no credibility, thanks to its record in government. The Conservatives’ most effective defence has been to say ‘we’re only finishing what you started’. Without this handicap, Labour would be far more likely to win in 2014.

Tory England

Even if Labour can scrape back to power, though, its long-term future in England is threatened by developments north of the border. The SNP narrowly lost the first referendum on Scottish independence in 2010, throwing Alex Salmond’s party into temporary disarray. But seeing a Conservative government in London soon revived the nationalist cause, and opinion polls now suggest that the Scottish public will vote for independence if given another chance – a referendum is expected imminently. Welsh nationalism is also on the rise. (See ‘Break up of Britain’, p33.)

The secession of Scotland would leave a very Conservative England – a Tory dystopia of a neoliberal, privatised state, dominated by a political consensus that stifles any hope of challenging the market. It would be a truly broken society.

Yet there are rays of hope. It was not public clamour for right-wing policies that brought the Tories to power in 2010, but recession and an apparently bereft Labour party. Cameron’s programme in office has been blunted – sometimes by lack of public interest, sometimes by obstruction – and where policies have been put into action, they have rarely worked as expected. The results are already generating opposition, and how this opposition will be expressed is the key question for the future.

Alex Nunns is a Grammy award-winning rock star. His band’s fourth album, Singing the Blues in Red, was the biggest-selling record of 2013

With thanks to the Fire Brigades Union for their support

Greens On Trial

Ellie Keen — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 22:48:42 +0000

There is a party, ostensibly of the left, that has more than 100 councillors (and rising), holds seats in the European Parliament and London Assembly, and might just drop an electoral bombshell by securing its first MP in the next general election. It’s called the Green Party. But for reasons either of jealousy or good socialist sense, it is regularly hauled up before the Court of Left Opinion, suspected of being overly electoralist, unduly white, middle class, and Not Sufficiently Left. It doesn’t even have factions that hate each other.

Confusingly for the presiding judges of the court, none of this seems to matter too much to the public jury, who are giving favourable verdicts to the Greens in growing numbers. Quietly, unassumingly, the Green Party of England and Wales has been making strides over the past few years, propelled by the ever-increasing urgency of the climate catastrophe.

Nevertheless, Red Pepper proposes a retrial – a trial by media, after a fashion.

A party of the left?

One of the main reasons why the left is suspicious as to whether the Greens _ can be counted among its number is that it contains many people who simply do not associate themselves with the British left and its glorious history of defeat.

One such man is Chris Rose, the party’s national election agent, who points out that ‘many Green Party members wouldn’t like to describe themselves as left. If we positioned ourselves as explicitly left it would be dangerous, with no guarantee of success. We need to keep our reputation on the environment.’

But London Assembly member Darren Johnson, who is not on the left of the party, takes a different view: ‘I’m not a socialist but I feel comfortable about being on the progressive left. Not the far left – we never will be. But we’re the serious party of the left and a potential power broker working with centre left parties, like the SNP in Scotland and Labour in some areas.’

One thing is beyond doubt. Whether or not they see themselves as left, the Greens have a manifesto as radical as any other, based on sustainability and equality, which if implemented would constitute nothing short of a revolution. Their espousal of an end to economic growth is unique, and has resulted in attacks from parties who believe in either capitalism or the traditional Marxist model of growth leading to a world of plenty. Instead, the Greens promote economic localisation, and say wealth should be measured not in GDP but in overall wellbeing.

And the party’s policies stretch far wider than the environment. They would (if they could) make income tax more progressive; replace VAT with eco-taxes; replace benefits with a non-means tested citizens’ income for everyone; increase the pension; nationalise the railways; welcome asylum seekers; stop the privatisation of council housing; reverse the privatisation of health and education; scrap PFI; scrap prescription charges; scrap tuition fees; scrap ID cards; scrap nuclear weapons and scrap wars.

Coalitions

So far so good. But other leftists squeal that when it comes down to electoral politics the Greens can be bloody uncooperative, as when they refused to make a pact with Respect before the last general election. Darren Johnson is defiant: ‘We often get criticised by left groups for standing against them, but they can’t even sustain coalitions with each other! It would have been a disaster if we had had a coalition with Respect – look where they are now.’

But hang on. The Greens do form alliances on councils – and have even been known to work with Tories. Most controversial was a coalition with the Conservatives and Lib Dems on Leeds City Council. The Greens eventually pulled out over plans for a new waste incinerator in 2006, after two years, but in many other places the Greens co-operate informally with other parties, including Tories.

Chris Rose doesn’t care: ‘We say none of the mainstream parties are worth anything. So, if the situation demands it, it doesn’t really matter which one we work with, just what the outcome is. We can’t sit on the sidelines forever.’ Others on the left of the party, like the party’s male principal speaker Derek Wall, are much less keen on such arrangements and are clearly embarrassed by the Leeds example, but in a decentralised party they have had to learn to live with it.

The potential for such unholy alliances goes further than just the council level. In December David Cameron announced that he wanted a ‘progressive alliance’ with the Lib Dems and the Greens to push for decentralisation. They rejected the offer as a publicity stunt, but it pointed to a new and unexpected problem for the Greens – they’re suddenly very popular with the other parties.

For Caroline Lucas, MEP for South-East England and the party’s female principal speaker, this is a double-edged sword: ‘If the mainstream parties really were going green we’d react with delight, but there are no signs that it’s anything more than words. In fact it’s dangerous that they are using the rhetoric without taking action – just look at Labour with coal-fired power stations.’

‘But on the other hand, look at how our vote has gone up since Cameron started talking green,’ she says. ‘I think people are savvy, they see through the empty words, but they are alerted to the issues and go looking for the real Greens.’

Darren Johnson believes the existence of the Green Party over the years has contributed to people taking the environment seriously, but that this is not enough. ‘We have put pressure on the other parties to green up their act,’ he says, ‘but we aren’t just a pressure group. In terms of making things happen you need Greens elected – not necessarily in government but in a position to really push the agenda.’

Concrete green advances

For Chris Rose, what matters is the outcome – the ‘need to make concrete green advances’. He points to Kirklees and London as examples.

Five per cent of all the solar energy generated in the UK is concentrated in Kirklees, the west Yorkshire borough that includes Huddersfield. The Greens hold four of the 69 seats on the council, which is under no overall control. This position has been sufficient to put some of their ideas into practice. Their latest success is a scheme for 30,000 homes to receive free cavity wall and loft insulation. The policy was voted through on a combined Green, Conservative and Lib Dem motion and means households will receive £400 of insulation measures free of charge. The project is funded jointly by the council and private company Scottish Power – something that might alarm many on the left, but which most Greens seem comfortable with.

In London, the Greens’ two Assembly members have found themselves in a pivotal position. Since Labour lost four seats in 2004, mayor Ken Livingstone has had to rely on the Greens to get his budgets through each year, giving Darren Johnson and Jenny Jones great bargaining power. They claim the credit for tripling the cycling budget from £21 million to £62 million and increasing the climate change budget for greener homes from just £100,000 to £12 million in four years.

Electoralist?

So the Defence can present the court with evidence of creditable achievement. But now the Prosecution brings a new charge: electoralism. Chris Rose still doesn’t care: ‘We need to ensure that in everything we do we make the maximum electoral advantage. I’ve been on plenty of demos but I’d rather put people in power who don’t need to be demonstrated against.’

Even some on the left of the party, like health spokesman Stuart Jeffery, would prefer more electoralism: ‘I do a shed-load at grass-roots level in Maidstone, like Keep Our NHS Public and community groups. We’re not wholly electoralist. We’re probably not electoralist enough. We should be more targeted and systematic.’

Perhaps one of the reasons why many Greens aren’t too bothered about being called electoralist is that they’re getting pretty good at it. In last year’s local elections the party increased its number of councillors by 20 per cent to 110. This year, in May, the party expects a further 10 per cent boost to that number, and is looking to increase its London Assembly representation from two seats to three.

But what the Greens are most excited about is the prospect of their first MP. Their sights are set on Norwich, where they are likely to be the second biggest party on the council after May; Oxford, where uber-activist Peter Tatchell will stand as a Green candidate in the next general election; and most importantly Brighton, where Caroline Lucas stands a real chance of winning.

In the Brighton Pavilion constituency at the last general election, Keith Taylor finished third for the Greens with 22 per cent of the vote, only marginally less than the second-placed Conservatives. Support in the city has been increasing ever since – 27 per cent in the European elections; 30 per cent in the locals; and 41 per cent in the last council by-election before Christmas. Added to that, the incumbent Labour MP is standing down.

‘In theory 26 per cent would win it,’ says Chris Rose, who really does care about this. ‘The big worry is that the Tories will come through. So we need to convince progressive people in Brighton to vote Green not Labour.’

Greens hope the Brighton electorate will be inspired by the significance of the choice before them. On Caroline Lucas’s election leaflets the appeal ‘Help us make history’ is emblazoned across a picture of the Houses of Parliament. ‘All the evidence suggests that once you get the first Green elected to a council or authority, you break the credibility barrier and more follow,’ Lucas comments. ‘Remember Labour’s first MP was elected in 1900, and by 1924 they were forming a government.’

First past the post

One of the reasons why the Greens have so far failed to break through that credibility barrier at the national level is the first-past-the-post voting system. In Germany, and more recently in Ireland and Scotland since devolution (where there is a separate Green Party), the Greens have fared well under proportional representation. Ironically, the experience of these successes suggests that the barriers erected by the electoral rules might be one reason why the English and Welsh Green Party tends to be more left than its European cousins, which have often been sucked into the prevailing system.

But ideological purity has limited appeal against success, so in Brighton the Greens are thinking tactics. The obvious response is to throw resources at the city. This will happen, but the Green version of targeting is less severe than that practised by, for example, Respect, which focuses relentlessly on a few core areas. At the last general election the Greens stood candidates in more than 200 constituencies.

Part of the reason is that the Green Party is more decentralised. Its 170 branches all sign up to national policy but retain a high degree of autonomy. But it is also a deliberate decision. Chris Rose explains: ‘In the British political system you’ll be laughed at if you only stand ten candidates. Unlike Respect we’re a proper national party.’

The first-past-the-post system is also forcing the Greens to tailor their political message. ‘The threshold is so much higher that we have to think about how we appeal to people who don’t see themselves as Greens,’ Caroline Lucas says. ‘We need to be far more creative in the way we communicate to win in a first-past-the-post election.’

But does this mean a compromise with electoralism, that the programme will be sanitised and weakened in the fashion perfected by New Labour? Lucas claims not: ‘Our roots are so strong in the social movements that there is no risk that our policies will be watered down. We offer integrity in our policy package, which is entirely decided at party conference. That’s what people buy into when they join the Greens. It’s just about how to communicate those policies.’

Leadership

This feeling that the Greens need to communicate better with the public and the media was the main factor behind an upheaval in autumn last year. In a referendum the party decided by 73 to 27 per cent to change its structure and adopt a leader, replacing the strictly non-hierarchical system of two principal speakers.

The debate echoed previous divisions between ‘fundis’ (fundamentalists) and ‘realos’ (realists), terms first coined in relation to splits in the German Green Party in the 1980s which have since been used to describe similar conflicts elsewhere. On the ‘fundi’ side was one principal speaker, Wall, and on the ‘realo’ side was the other, Lucas. ‘The leadership question was simply about how we get the message across,’ Lucas says. ‘Social change is still also about building on the ground outside parliament, but having a leader, a recognisable figure to articulate our views to the public, is not in any way incompatible with that.’

But others saw the move as substituting ‘the “eco” of serious ecological commitment with the dreary “ego” of conventional, shallow, careerist British politics,’ as Green Party London Assembly member Jenny Jones put it in the heat of the leadership battle.

In response Lucas insists that the Greens ‘should always be involved in non-violent direct action and consciousness-raising’. This, she says, is not in conflict with her own aspiration to be an MP. ‘Having a Green MP would scale up the impact of what the social movements and campaigns do outside parliament. It would be an incredible breakthrough. It would send shockwaves through the political establishment.’

Factions?

In any other left party such a fundamental question as whether to adopt a leader would have been marked by fierce faction fighting. But the Green Party is curiously lacking in this department. It has survived for more than 30 years without splitting up into five different sets of acronyms.

The closest thing to a faction in the Green Party today is a group called the Green Left. Conceived by, amongst others, Derek Wall, Peter Tatchell and Green mayoral candidate Sian Berry in 2006, the group’s job is to reach out to the wider left and link up with other socialists, with the added hope of bringing more left activists into the Green Party.

Through its email list the Green Left also loosely coordinates action in the party. It comprises hundreds of eco-socialist activists, but represents nowhere near a majority in a party of 7,500 members. Nevertheless, as Wall points out, he has been elected to the principal speaker position twice on a platform of ‘eco-socialism without apology’, suggesting that the group does have some organisational strength.

On a practical level Wall believes that Green Left has been ‘very successful in bringing through policies and bringing socialists into the party’. He believes passionately in forging links with committed activists of the Labour left, Respect (both versions), the Communist Party of Britain, the Socialist Party, and beyond to what he sees as the eco-socialist movements of Latin America, especially in Venezuela and Bolivia.

The unions are a particular focus. In February, Wall and Green MEPs Caroline Lucas and Jean Lambert addressed a trade union conference on climate change. The Green Party supports the TUC’s proposed trade union freedom bill, which would roll back Thatcher’s anti-union laws. And unions that are not affiliated to Labour, like the FBU and the RMT, have already funded Green Party activities. But Wall aspires to the example of Australia where Green-union links are far more developed, to the extent that construction unions have imposed ‘green bans’ and refused to work on certain developments on environmental grounds.

White, middle class academics

One obstacle to closer relations is the suspicion in the trade union and labour movements that the Greens are just a bunch of white, middle class academics. A cursory glance around the Green Party’s conference in Reading in February revealed that delegates were indeed overwhelmingly white and well-spoken; many of them boasted a Dr before their name; and an improbably high proportion of members seemed to have a perfect grasp of the most intricate details of green energy technologies.

But this is unfair. Something similar is true of most party conferences (with the exception of Respect), and the Greens had a higher proportion of women than is usually seen.

Away from conference, Greens insist they have been picking up support in ethnic minority and working class areas. The best example of this is Lewisham in south-east London where the Greens occupy six of 54 seats on the council. Darren Johnson, who has been a Lewisham councillor since 2002, as well as a London Assembly member, tells how he ‘started campaigning in Lewisham in the mid-1990s. By 1998 we got 30 per cent in my ward. That was the Guardian-reading middle classes, but it proved enough of a base to then widen our support. The big difference now is that we’re getting votes on the council estates, which make up about a quarter of the ward. You can’t get 50 per cent in Lewisham without significant support from ethnic minorities and the working class.’

Meanwhile, Stuart Jeffery thinks the class accusation is outrageous. ‘We’re not middle class idiots,’ he barks (as your intrepid questioner ducks for cover). ‘That’s quite offensive. I don’t mind being called an idiot but don’t call me middle class.’

The verdict

Back in the courthouse both sides have finished presenting their arguments. The judge bangs his gavel and addresses the court. ‘Members of the jury, it would be difficult for any leftist to read the Greens’ last election manifesto (Exhibit A) and not agree with the vast majority of it. At the heart of the party’s policies is a desire to stop all exploitation, not only of the planet but of the people too.

‘Yet the Greens will clearly never satisfy some on the left. They do have an electoral slant, they do encompass a range of political traditions and they do take a pragmatic attitude that, while refreshing, can lead to alliances with Tories.’

The jury retires. In the public gallery, Derek Wall looks nervous. Chris Rose still doesn’t care. In the visitors’ section, a fight breaks out between a member of Respect and someone from Respect Renewal.

The jury returns – it has failed to reach a verdict. The judge declares a retrial … by you, the readers.

Car Crash on the Left

Tim Holmes — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 20:37:09 +0000

‘A spectacular car crash’ is how George Galloway MP describes the split in the Respect coalition. An initiative that can boast more electoral success in England than any other left group outside Labour since the Communist Party in its heyday, has torn itself apart less than four years after its inception. The row exploded in late August when Galloway penned a letter critical of the Socialist Workers Party – by far the biggest group within Respect. In response, according to one member of Respect’s national council, the SWP leadership decided to ‘go nuclear’.

A brief period of compromise quickly gave way to escalation on both sides, ending in a complete breakdown. The balance of forces made for a fairly even split on the national council, and soon there were two groups claiming to be the legitimate Respect. In one corner stood the SWP and Respect national secretary John Rees (also of the SWP’s central committee), presiding over the apparatus. In the other was Galloway, Salma Yaqoob, Ken Loach and nearly all the non-SWP members of the national council. The SWP described it as a left-right split, saying that Galloway and his allies had moved right, chasing Muslim votes for the expected snap election, and had then attacked and witch-hunted the left. The other side dismissed this as fantasy, instead slamming the SWP leadership for its control freakery.

Genesis of the row

The genesis of the row lay in the manner of Respect’s formation. The coalition was hastily pulled together after the Iraq war to give electoral expression to the anti-war movement. The aim was to reach out to a wide constituency – peace activists, Muslims, socialists, disaffected Labour supporters and trade unionists. But due to a tight electoral timetable, some felt that the new formation came as a fait accompli that failed to capitalise on the breadth of the movement. Others from the Socialist Alliance, the previous electoral initiative which the SWP dumped in favour of Respect, saw the new coalition as opportunist and bound to fail.

There was also concern about an organisation based on an alliance between the SWP and a controversial charismatic figure. Galloway, one of the best orators in the country, has been central to Respect’s success. But he is regarded even by supporters as a maverick. For its part, the SWP has a habit of building spokespeople up, seemingly always to knock them down again. And sure enough, where once it defended him, the SWP can now be heard attacking Galloway over Big Brother and his earnings.

Whatever George Galloway is, he is not a control freak, and he has come to agree that the coalition was not broad enough at the outset. ‘The roots of this problem definitely are in the fact that not enough groups, trends, parties or individual personalities came into Respect,’ he told Red Pepper. ‘Therefore the perception was created that it was an organisation dominated by the SWP, who have form, or dominated by me, or, later, dominated by Muslims.’ In particular, Galloway and others regret that the Communist Party of Britain voted against joining, which they believe would have acted as a counter-balance to the SWP and influenced developments on the Labour left and in the unions – an area where Respect has not forged the alliances it had hoped.

Successes

Yet despite these factors Respect did well. At its high point it could boast 16 councillors, 12 of whom made up the official opposition on Tower Hamlets council. In Birmingham, Salma Yaqoob was elected with 49 per cent of the vote; in Preston, councillor Michael Lavalette increased his vote as a Respect candidate after initially being elected for the Socialist Alliance in 2003. And famously Galloway was elected MP for Bethnal Green and Bow. More than this, in Muslim areas Respect gave a political voice to some of the most disadvantaged and alienated people in society, bringing them into democratic politics and acting, in Galloway’s words, as ‘the antidote to fundamentalism’.

According to John Rees, these achievements brought an electoral pressure that ultimately led to the split. The SWP leadership does not accept that its conduct was the issue. ‘With success came problems,’ he says. ‘When we started we had to hunt around for people to stand as candidates. Now tens of people come forward for nomination in Tower Hamlets and Birmingham. Some of these people are there because they’ve been frustrated elsewhere, and not because they agree with the principles.’ ‘The key question is how do you respond to that electoral pressure?’ says Rees. ‘Do you select people who are community leaders no matter what, or do you say we want electoral success but not at any price?’

Communalism

This logic led to the most incendiary accusation levelled in the row: communalism, a word that in Respect circles is equivalent to saying poppadom on Big Brother. In March the SWP used the term in an internal publication, saying that in Birmingham ‘serious elements of Respect are pulled by communalist forces’. (Like all the key documents throughout the crisis, it found its way on to the internet. Blogs have been the battlefield in this war, making democratic centralism infinitely more problematic and forever changing the way left political groups fall apart.)

A later SWP release explained: ‘Promising favours to people who posed as the “community leaders” of particular ethnic or religious groupings if they would use their influence to deliver votes … is what is known as … “communal” politics’. In Birmingham, because Respect had in February this year selected seven Pakistani men to stand in its target seats, it was ‘doing what our opponents had always accused us falsely of doing – acting as a cross-class party whose horizons were limited to representing just one “community”’. These events ‘could seem to confirm’ to others that Respect was a ‘communalist party’.

Salma Yaqoob, at whom these accusations were especially directed, rebutted them fiercely, saying she is the figure most closely associated with addressing ‘communal’ tensions between African-Caribbean and Asian communities in Birmingham. She believes the criticism stems from frustration at the low number of SWP members elected as councillors.

‘They should be working hard to build in weaker areas, like they have in Preston and Bristol,’ she says of the SWP. ‘But the leadership want to put their candidates into ‘safe seats’. To me it’s like leeching behaviour. When Muslims are their vote fodder, we’re the community. When they don’t get their way, we’re the communalists.’

The underlying factor is the uneven development of Respect across the country, and the tension between a predominantly socialist and SWP-influenced national organisation and a localised, not exclusively socialist support base largely centred in Muslim community groups. Partly this is down to the strategy of targeting areas with the best chance of success – a necessary response to the British electoral system. As John Rees says, ‘Under first past the post you have to do it to make a breakthrough and establish yourself as a serious player’.

The result was great success in east London, Birmingham and Preston, where a significant proportion of the voters are Muslim, as well as Bolsover, where there are no Muslims, but nothing in many other areas. Some Respect branches are moribund, while Tower Hamlets is huge, with around 570 members, entitling it to around a quarter of the delegates at the coalition’s annual conference.

Tower Hamlets

This has made the borough the centre of the strife. First, the selection of conference delegates was contested in a series of highly charged meetings, then four SWP-sympathising councillors resigned the whip, prompting the other side to declare that the SWP had split Respect.

The row centred around Abjol Miah, the leader of Respect’s Tower Hamlets councillors and close to Galloway, and councillor Oliur Rahman from the SWP camp, who led the breakaway group. Miah, tipped as a parliamentary candidate for Bethnal Green and Bow when Galloway moves to neighbouring Poplar at the next election, believes the SWP was reacting to a loss of control.

‘They never forecast that the community would outgrow them in Tower Hamlets,’ he says. ‘To start with they had a majority in meetings of eight people, but now we have 570 members of which they are about 30. They can’t bully people. If anything the SWP were being communalist in the way they acted. When it was an advantage for them to use so-called Muslim “businessmen” they did. It was like a chess game for them. Now it’s not going their way they have a problem with it.’

According to one former leading SWP member, the turning point was May 2006, when John Rees stood for Tower Hamlets council but came 200 votes short of winning a seat. All 12 elected councillors were Bangladeshi. The SWP leadership started to fall out of love with Respect, believing it was increasingly controlled by ‘reformist’ forces and that the SWP was not getting its fair share of the spoils or growing its own membership. Nevertheless, according to the source, the leadership continued to compromise for the sake of getting SWP central committee member Lindsay German elected to the Greater London Assembly in 2008.

Even John Rees believes he made errors. ‘The mistake I made was not to raise the situation in Tower Hamlets nationally, because I didn’t want to make a local issue into a national argument. We [the SWP] gave away too much ground in Tower Hamlets and were too soft with George. But that’s the real world … We should have raised the issue of the accountability of our elected representatives after the 2006 local elections.’

Personal or political?

It can seem like the split in Respect is entirely down to organisational issues and personality clashes, and nothing to do with policy. But both sides in the dispute insist it is political. For Yaqoob, ‘the way the SWP works has become a point of principle, because that’s not how to build a pluralistic coalition. People can’t believe they are the sole repositories of the truth. We were trying to replicate the experience of the anti-war movement, where the SWP were good – to give credit and support to the broad movement without taking over.’

Galloway echoes this vision. ‘There are people who agree with us on quite a significant number of things, who definitely don’t describe themselves as radical left. However, if we’re to have a meaningful force, you have to have them on board. So it has to be pluralist, democratic, mutually respectful, and no one section or force can be allowed to dominate it. Now I thought the SWP agreed with that, but if you will the end you have to will the means.’

For Rees it is political in a different way. ‘In an electoral organisation it’s very important who gets selected,’ he says. ‘If you have candidates who rarely turn up on demos and don’t articulate policy effectively then the candidates become an issue as to whether the policies come off the paper. And the lack of a strong socialist spine allows us to be picked off – one of the Tower Hamlets councillors defected to Labour.’

Galloway wholly disagrees. ‘You cannot have a Leninist group micro-managing a Respect branch of 570 people,’ he says. ‘What does it matter if Mr A or Mrs B is the branch secretary of Respect? If you decide that not only do you prefer Mr A, you’re going to whip all your members along to a meeting and try to exclude other people on bureaucratic grounds, you will be suspected, in this case correctly, of control freakery for the sake of it. This is impossible.

‘In my concept these organisational issues first of all are not that important, and secondly if decisions are not made by negotiation it’s the beginning of the end if you start packing the meetings to decide them on a hands-up for dumpling basis. That’s fatal.’

Front organisation?

A further criticism of the way the SWP has operated is that it has treated Respect as something to be taken out of the drawer at election time, without allowing it to have an independent life. This allegation is made about Manchester, where there are two Respect branches, North and South.

The North branch has a core of members who have left the SWP, such as Clive Searle from Respect’s national council and his brother Richard. It has regular meetings and produces a 12-page newspaper. The South branch is largely made up of SWP members and, according to Richard Searle, did not meet for six months: ‘The difference is that SWP members see the SWP as their main thing whereas in North Manchester people are simply Respect members.’

Clive Searle believes the SWP has come to see Respect as the competition. ‘For the previous 10 years there’d been nothing in the space between the SWP and New Labour. But now they’ve created something that is becoming a route out of the SWP. They’ve lost a lot of people.’

In the SWP’s defence, John Rees points out that its members are highly active in a plethora of campaigns from council housing to the NHS, and can’t do everything. But he denies that SWP-dominated Respect branches are less active. ‘In branches where the SWP is influential there is lots of activity, like in Preston and Bristol. It’s got nothing to do with differential numbers of SWP members.’

Indeed, Preston is a success story, an example of the SWP at its best. There councillor Michael Lavalette has helped build just the kind of open movement that Respect was supposed to be, involving ex-Labour elements and Muslim community activists.

‘The aim is to work with as broad an alliance as possible,’ Lavalette says. ‘I have meetings with some left Labour councillors; we have a newsletter that goes out to local unions; we’ve been central to Preston Keep Our NHS Public; we’re carrying on with the anti-war movement. This is about new ways of working.’

On the ground Lavalette has put in the effort. ‘The first thing I did was have surgeries – no other councillors were doing that. At first no one came so I took it out to where people were meeting – the church, the mosque, the temple, trade union meetings, community events. I started to gather casework’. As a result his vote shot up in 2007.

The Preston coalition, in which the SWP is a minority, has run so smoothly that when the national crisis exploded Lavalette was ‘completely disorientated – it came out of the blue. I decided to try to find my own way through as best I could. In Preston we are united. We hope that long term we can get back to being a coalition.’

Critics point to an apparent discrepancy between the SWP on the ground and the central committee in London. Even Galloway and Yaqoob laud the work of local SWP activists. But Lavalette does not renounce his party’s leadership. He says that Unite Against Fascism and Stop the War have shown that the sectarian stereotype is out of date. And he has signed the SWP appeals and epistles that have defined the party’s position in the crisis.

John Rees’s analysis is revealing as to the thinking of the SWP leadership and its relationship with the coalition: ‘In Preston Michael Lavalette and Val Wise, who is ex-Labour not SWP, have shaped the project and others have come into that structure and it has worked very well. In Tower Hamlets it hasn’t been shaped in a way that enables the left to participate meaningfully.’

Left-right split?

The presentation of the crisis as a left-right split has been the SWP’s key line. In October an ‘Appeal against the witch hunt’ was launched, which claimed ‘there is a campaign of vilification of the left in Respect that can only result in Respect’s destruction as a serious left wing force’. John Lister, a member of Respect’s national council from the International Socialist Group, is scathing. ‘One hundred per cent bollocks,’ he says. ‘There is no left-right split. How could anyone believe that Alan Thornett and Ken Loach are engaged in a socialist witch-hunt?’

For Lister the tactics smack of desperation. ‘It’s hard to imagine how the SWP leadership could have played it worse. They’ll come out with no credibility having lost members. They’ll be faced with 20 years of oblivion and rebuilding. I never thought they would smash up something they’ve put so much into. That takes a special talent.’

Lister, Galloway and co now believe that the SWP is embarked on a scorched earth policy to ensure that no viable competitor is left behind. Rees denies that. But the sudden death of Respect is a real possibility. As Richard Searle says, ‘It could end up like the Scottish Socialist Party, and you don’t hear anything from Scotland.’

The SWP will carry on in the original organisation. But without the strongholds of Tower Hamlets and Birmingham and national figures like Galloway and Yaqoob, not to mention a distinct lack of coalition partners, it is difficult to see it going far. Meanwhile, the other side hopes to attract sections of the left that were initially put off by the SWP – trade unions, greens, communists – to their pluralist vision. But the fact remains that with the SWP gone they will have lost at least half the membership and a good number of key activists.

Ultimately there were two visions at the heart of Respect. The SWP saw it as a ‘united front of a special kind’, a catchy term for an electoral alliance that came second to the party’s interests, while the others regarded it as something more permanent and the primary focus of their activity.

But on one point they are agreed – there is still a yawning gap to the left of Labour. With the split in Respect, the British left has once again shown a particular skill in failing to fill it.

‘The roots of this problem are in the fact that not enough groups, trends, parties or individual personalities came into Respect’ George Galloway, Respect MP

‘The key question is do you select people who are community leaders no matter what, or do you say we want electoral success but not at any price?’ John Rees, Respect national secretary

‘To me it’s like leeching behaviour. When Muslims are their vote fodder, we’re the community. When they don’t get their way, we’re the communalists’ Salma Yaqoob, Birmingham Respect councillor

‘I was completely disorientated – it came out of the blue. In Preston we are united. We hope that long term we can get back to being a coalition’ Michael Lavalette, Preston Respect councillor

What Became of the Labour Left?

JamieSW — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 18:31:07 +0000

When John McDonnell conceded that he couldn’t get the 45 MPs’ nominations needed to challenge Gordon Brown for the leadership of the Labour Party, commentators leapt into action, gleefully declaring the death of the left. ‘It’s pathetic,’ Andrew Neil said to Diane Abbott on the BBC’s weekly political show, This Week. ‘Your lot can’t even muster 45 backers.’

Six weeks later it was different. Jon Cruddas’s strong showing in the deputy leadership contest prompted headlines such as ‘Why Labour is lurching left’ in the Sun. All of a sudden the left was a force that Brown couldn’t ignore.

So what is the true state of the Labour left after Brown’s coronation?

Sealed tomb

After a long period in power under the most right-wing Labour leader ever, who initiated a disastrous aggressive war, the left should be on the ascendant. The grass roots should be rebelling, and MPs should be getting braver. This would follow the pattern of other times – such as the end of the Wilson/Callaghan government.

But Alan Simpson, longstanding Labour MP and a key figure in the left Socialist Campaign Group in Westminster, believes the left is in ‘a seriously weakened position in parliament, consistent with the declared New Labour objective that the parliamentary left would be a “sealed tomb”’.

When journalists refer to the Labour left, they usually mean the Campaign Group. Formed in the aftermath of the 1981 deputy leadership contest, the group endured but is now steadily losing members – comprising just 24 of 353 Labour MPs. ‘The difficulty is the numbers,’ says Campaign Group MP Neil Gerrard. ‘We lost members at the last election. Next time a big chunk of the Campaign Group is leaving parliament. There are no new left MPs joining because they aren’t being selected for winnable seats. Is it going to be able to sustain itself?’

How can this gloomy picture be reconciled with the Cruddas result? In a way it is not comparing like with like. It was when Cruddas got beyond the parliamentary protection barriers that he really scored – in the trade unions especially. MP Neil Gerrard believes the deputies’ contest became a proxy for the leadership battle that never was. Parliamentarians felt more secure in nominating Cruddas due to the lack of an obvious front-runner.

Cruddas is also distinctly not of the Campaign Group. He is associated with the Compass think-tank. The lineage of this group is best illustrated by Cruddas’s own biography – he worked in Number 10 during Blair’s first term, representing the trade unions within government when, he says, ‘there were still spaces to occupy, like on the minimum wage’. He became disillusioned with the rightward drift in the second term.

The Cruddas campaign was not intended as a challenge to Brown – in fact Compass came under pressure from some of its own members because it refused to back either John McDonnell or Michael Meacher. Some see Compass as the re-emergence of the ‘soft left’ after years of loyalty to New Labour. But the breadth of involvement from across the left and the organisation’s openness to non party members indicates an attempt to go beyond the debilitating division between the ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ categories. However in parliament Compass has none of the organisational strength or purpose of the Campaign Group.

But does the state of the left of the Labour Party really matter? Many people working for social change decided long ago to focus their efforts outside parliament and the Labour Party.

Powerful actor

Like it or not, though, the Labour Party is a powerful actor. Due to the first past the post electoral system, it has significance even for activists who do not believe it can ever deliver radical change. Sooner or later, every campaigning organisation comes up against some noxious piece of legislation, or needs the help of an MP to discover information or get something done. Given the enormous strength of the British executive, when Labour is in power rebellions from the party’s left are among the few ways of holding the government to account.

The balance sheet over the past ten years has not been completely in New Labour’s favour. An early revolt over benefits cuts, led by the Campaign Group, provided the context for Brown’s tax-credits policy. On foundation hospitals, government concessions meant hospital trusts could not act as completely commercial organisations. Alan Simpson points out how ‘since the Kinnock years the Campaign Group has worked collaboratively with a wider coalition of dissenters, for example in opposition to tuition fees, academies and immigration legislation.’

The Campaign Group’s advantage is that its members have a shared lack of interest in conventional parliamentary careers. Government patronage has been the main mechanism for taming the left but it does not work on the likes of Lynn Jones or Jeremy Corbyn, especially when such MPs are organised in a group. One of the worries over the MPs loosely coalesced around Compass is that they might be more easily bought-off by Brown. Critics point to Compass’s failure to back a leadership challenger as evidence that this process has already begun, while in response supporters emphasise Cruddas’s decision not to take up Brown’s offer of a job.

But how did the left reach this state of apparent weakness on the one hand and vulnerability on the other? Any explanation must be set against the context of a decades-long beating at the hands of Neil Kinnock and then Blair. Since Kinnock’s 1985 Conference speech and the expulsion of the Militant Tendency, the Labour leadership has sought to delegitimise the left. Helped by the electoral system, Labour turned smashing the left to its advantage, secure in the knowledge that leftists had nowhere else to go.

These trends went into hyper-drive under Blair. For Simpson, ‘the weakness of the left is seen in the extent to which the party machine has become involved in virtually every selection of neutered parliamentary candidates, using open shortlists in a fast and loose way, mainly to ensure that left candidates are excluded or defeated.’ Neil Gerrard concedes most of his Campaign Group colleagues would have ‘great difficulty being selected as parliamentary candidates now compared to 15 years ago’.

The extent of New Labour’s control-freakery and the crippling impact it has had on the left is remarkable. Under Blair, No 10 and the Labour Party head office were obsessively concerned with every parliamentary candidate’s selection. Left-wing hopefuls, like Christine Shawcroft or Mark Seddon, were stopped at all costs. Party workers were tasked with personal lobbying for the leadership’s preferred choice, or were even told to chase up certain postal votes but not others. On the flip side, safe New Labour candidates were coached before selection meetings – events often packed with supporters. Blair was said to have taken a close personal interest in many selections.

These tactics have been used for elections to policy forums and in choosing Labour conference delegates. Conference management has been staggering. The renowned ‘delegate liaison’ staff – experts in arm-twisting – work tirelessly to ensure correct speakers are chosen and votes go the right way.

The upshot of this style has been the loss of many activists. Alienated by war and policies like the patchwork privatisation of the NHS, many feel a lack of influence over the direction of the party and leave. Labour’s membership tumbled from 407,000 in 1997 to just 177,000 in May 2007. Ironically, this hollowing-out has accentuated the effectiveness of these tactics – it is easier to manage a party that is an empty shell.

The weakness of the parliamentary left follows from this. Critically-minded MPs take strength from local campaigning groups. Without them they can feel isolated and more vulnerable to pressure from the leadership. This was demonstrated starkly in the failure of a challenger to secure enough MPs’ nominations to take on Brown.

Fragmentation

But it would be wrong to see the left as a helpless victim of attacks from the Labour right. Alan Simpson traces the left’s weakness back to its own ‘fragmentation’ in the mid 1980s. He says that vents like the Socialist Conferences in Chesterfield – which drew together a broad spectrum of activists and thinkers between 1985 and 1987 – ‘contributed to the erosion of the left. There was nothing wrong with getting Tony Benn to stand, but this happened at the same time as people were jumping ship. It led to a diminished left in the Labour Party.

‘The Chesterfield stuff was the origins of Blairism because we lost the discipline of the collective and said ‘the personal is the political, so everyone go off and do your own thing’. The right then picked up this individualism and ran with it. The left was dispersed, resulting in the chaos we have now.’

An alternative view would posit that Chesterfield-style connections between social movements and the Labour left could not have such a causal impact; after all they have not led to fragmentation in other times – for example, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when activists joined a more open Labour Party in significant numbers and added their energy to the Bennite campaign.

Indeed, it was these kinds of connections that John McDonnell attempted to rebuild in his leadership campaign, which comprised nearly a year of travelling and speaking to countless meetings. He is now channelling this momentum into the Labour Representation Committee, ‘a national network of Labour Party activists and trade unionists who are fighting for socialism in the Labour Party’, which is pointedly ‘open to members of the Labour Party or of no party at all’. Many argue that it is in opening practical and intellectual connections with campaigning movements that the future of the Labour left lies.

McDonnell’s leadership bid caused ruptures within the Campaign Group. He did not enjoy the full support of its members, some of whom, including Alan Simpson, backed Meacher instead.

The big unions refused to back either Meacher or McDonnell, despite the fact that both men stood on a platform that promised to increase union power and stop privatisation. Unions work within constraints – they often take the view that their members’ interests are best served by working with the Labour leadership, or in this case the leader-in-waiting. Within the union movement there is also a dense network of reciprocal ties that inhibit a union from going it alone. The large unions believed that a challenger to Brown would have no chance, and most of the smaller ones followed suit.

Billy Hayes, general secretary of the Communication Workers’ Union, believes that the process wasn’t helped by tactical errors. ‘I think there was a miscalculation in the deal between Michael Meacher and John McDonnell on that Monday afternoon,’ he says. ‘I never thought it would be the case that Meacher’s supporters would all switch to McDonnell, but I think most of McDonnell’s would have backed Meacher.’

By contrast, when it came to the deputy leadership contest the lack of an obvious front-runner meant unions were more willing to throw their weight behind a candidate – Cruddas had the backing of the UK’s largest union, Unite.

Cruddas’s success surprised everyone, including himself. The Compass/Unite combination was key. In the first round of voting he actually came first with the highest percentage among trade unionists and good support in the constituency parties – gaining 19 per cent overall in a field of six candidates. Eventually he finished third, beating ministers Hilary Benn, Peter Hain and Hazel Blears.

Life in the party

‘There’s much more life in the party than I thought,’ says Cruddas. ‘When I started I thought the party had been hollowed out. But the result shows that the ‘virtual’ politics practised at the centre, the politics of positioning and messaging, was out of touch with the party.’

Cruddas set the agenda throughout the contest, raising issues of housing, immigration and foreign policy. ‘All the other candidates were saying the same things to start with but the terms of the debate moved as they realised that the centre of gravity in the party was not where they thought.’

‘Blears coming last was a fantastic outcome,’ he continues. ‘It showed that her message of what the Labour party is about was wrong. ‘ Neil Gerrard, too, sees the contest as a positive process that ‘opened up many opportunities – policy debates and stronger links with unions.’ But Alan Simpson is much more circumspect. ‘It’s important not to get carried away,’ he says. ‘Cruddas has a voting record outside ministerial responsibility that is not very adventurous.’

Indeed, ask Cruddas what he intends to do with his new standing and he is less clear. ‘How do you get alliances built across the unions, in parliament and in the grass roots?’ he asks. ‘Is there a case for an organisational capacity? That’s a debate we have to have.’

An interesting feature of the Cruddas result highlights a further dynamic within Labour. The left is now stronger in the unions than in the local Labour parties – a turnaround from the days when right-wing union bosses were the bastions of the Labour establishment against the Bennite constituencies.

In a supreme historical irony, this shift has come at a time when Labour’s financial crisis has left the party dependent on the unions for money. The concomitant influence was manifested in the Warwick agreement, in which the unions wrought concessions from the government in the run-up to the 2005 election.

Billy Hayes points to Labour’s last election manifesto as an example of the extent of union sway. The CWU was able to secure a government commitment not to privatise the Royal Mail, but only after swallowing glowing language about the liberalisation of postal markets. Hayes believes this limit to union influence is largely down to the left’s lack of a well-presented economic alternative. The left agenda has retreated from the ambitious Alternative Economic Strategy of the late 1970s to a more defensive position of opposing privatisation, PFI, and private equity.

But union influence can be expected to grow. Hayes says the Labour right has given up trying to win back the unions, in part because of the mechanisms imposed by Thatcher’s union laws. In the mandatory elections for union leaders, turnout is generally around a quarter. That represents activists, who tend to vote left.

This worries the right. As New Labour blogger Luke Akehurst wrote following Cruddas’s result: ‘If we don’t ensure that the successors to the current generation of general secretaries are from the moderate wing of the party, we’ll end up in a decade’s time with Brown’s successor in a contested election being from the left.’

New Labour set out to try to loosen if not break Labour’s links with the unions and create what Peter Mair dubbed a ‘partyless democracy’: consensus government ‘for the people’, which purports to be above special interests. But this project failed, and not just in the unions. The attempt to ‘marginalise’ the party brought with it all the features of control freakery that proved so devastating to the left. But this left the party without a campaigning base – which has turned out be much more important than the Blairites realised, especially for wining local elections.

Cash for honours has, for the time being, scuppered the project. This presents a golden opportunity for the left. Lack of money has reduced the party machine’s control. There has been a huge cut in staff – up to 70 per cent in some areas – meaning there is no longer the capacity to manage every selection.

What can be achieved in the absence of this management has been shown in elections to Labour’s National Executive Committee, where the one member one vote system has reduced the scope for manipulation. The Grassroots Alliance has been successful in getting candidates elected through simple but effective campaigning. If the left can get its act together, the chance is there to replicate this at all levels of the party.

And what about Gordon Brown? Can the left sleep easier in its bed, or should it be up and fighting? John Cruddas is cautiously hopeful. ‘The jury is out but lots of what he is doing is healthy. There’s a sense of relief.’ Neil Gerrard, too, says that opportunities are opening up and is pleased by the change of tone from the government on issues such as the NHS. But Alan Simpson is scathing: ‘The leadership coronation has led us to the same mistake of honeymoon loyalty that the party made under Blair. It ignores the fact that unacceptable legislation is being pushed through in shed-loads and without opposition, right now.’

How ‘the left’ responds as the honeymoon effect fades will determine whether it really is weak, or vulnerable, or whether it has some life left in it yet.

A Healthy Choice

Tim Holmes — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 17:52:27 +0000

Just a few months ago you could have turned on the TV on a Thursday night for Question Time and seen any one of Harriet Harman, Peter Hain, Hilary Benn, Alan Johnson or – most likely – Hazel Blears dutifully defending every aspect of the government’s NHS reforms. They would have lauded ‘choice’, defended competition, praised the private sector and dismissed the concerns of the unions.

Not so now – at least for most of them. Chasing the votes of Labour members and trade unionists in the contest to be Labour’s deputy leader, the likes of Hain and Harman have had a miraculous recovery of their senses, saying things that would have got them sacked a short while ago. All have been pulled sideways by the threat of John Cruddas – the only backbencher in the line-up – who has crowbarred open a political space to the left.

This collective self-criticism springs from a recognition that the government’s NHS market reforms have gone against the grain of Labour instincts and have not worked. Despite massive investment, polls suggest the Tories are now more trusted to run the health service.

Peter Hain describes this as ‘absolutely astonishing’. ‘We need to raise our game,’ he says in response to a Red Pepper/Keep Our NHS Public survey. ‘As a first step, we need a moratorium on structural change and reorganisation in the NHS. The health service doesn’t need to be in a state of permanent revolution in order to deliver. It’s time to let the health service settle down.’

The extent of private sector involvement in the NHS has been one of the clearest points of division in the race to be deputy. Taking the outside lane on the far right of the track, unswerving but somewhat lonely, is Hazel Blears. She defends the use of the private sector, saying, ‘We should have no ideological opposition to it.’ Running just inside her is Hilary Benn. Asked if private provision should be continued, he says: ‘What matters most is … doing what is best for people who are sick.’

On the centre-right of the circuit is Alan Johnson. He is following a more nuanced course, saying that Labour ‘has a responsibility to monitor the success of its changes, and if outsourced services do not perform, we must act’. He says that ‘many people have closely associated the trust debt difficulties with the outsourcing of services, and Labour must take care to treat the root of the problems’. But for Johnson it is not a point of principle, and he would be quite happy to see GPs and primary care trust (PCT) services outsourced.

Hugging the inside line on the left is John Cruddas. His approach is direct, calling for a moratorium on all new private contracts for NHS work. Early on, the distinctive course taken by Cruddas left a big area of empty track between him and the others. Harriet Harman and Peter Hain have steered into this space. Harman broke the previous orthodoxy when she told a hustings in Sheffield: ‘We should never, ever be saying we need the private sector to do the innovation because the public sector doesn’t innovate.’

She believes that independent sector treatment centres – the privately run clinics carrying out NHS operations – ‘have not always proved to be more efficient or innovative’. She criticises the contracting out of cleaners, caterers and healthcare assistants, saying it is ‘breaking up the NHS team’ – sentiments echoed by Hain, although neither have said a word against Gordon Brown’s pet private finance initiative (PFI) policy, which often requires the out-sourcing of these services.

Hain does believe, however, that the preference for private over public has been a mistake. ‘Where we have failed is in being clearer about what the scope and limits of private sector involvement should be,’ he says. ‘As a very basic general principle, I believe public services should be publicly provided unless there’s a very good reason why not.’

Hain believes Labour ‘needs to be prepared to admit when we have made mistakes’. This may extend to running the NHS as a market. Hain supported the introduction of ‘payments by results’ – the new NHS financial system – but he now says cryptically: ‘Clearly, we need to learn from experience, and only proceed with such reforms if the evidence shows that they are working.’

Even Gordon Brown, when he faced a potential challenge from Michael Meacher or John McDonnell, expressed doubt about the market model, telling the BBC: ‘Healthcare is quite different from any other area of the economy. You’ve got people who rely on doctors for advice … you’ve got hospitals that are effectively monopolies because you’re not going to find another A&E very close.’

This is a world away from the insistence of Blair that patients are consumers and that competition will result in better health outcomes – a view shot down by Cruddas, who told the Socialist Health Association that healthcare ‘cannot be left to the vagaries of the market – by its very nature it would mean different levels and standards of care for people, and some losing out altogether’. He argues that: ‘The current reforms of introducing competition and contestability into the health service, and the drive for PCTs to commission, rather than directly provide healthcare, threaten the universal ethos of the NHS.’

Back over on the right-hand side of the track, Hazel Blears has gone beyond being on-message to being über-message, saying: ‘I don’t accept that we’ve introduced free markets into public services.’

One of her fellow Blairites, Charles Clarke, recently proposed that the NHS should start charging for more treatments. Despite being ‘instinctively against’ charges, Blears told our survey she ‘would need to see the detail before saying “never”’.

Indeed, before Blair’s resignation this seemed a fashionable idea. But all the other candidates, including Johnson and Benn, have voiced opposition. Peter Hain, for example, says the NHS ‘must remain free at the point of use, and I am opposed to any extension of charges for NHS services’. For Cruddas, charges are a consequence of ‘a system of multiple providers competing against each other for their income’.

After health secretary Patricia Hewitt was met with silence at Unison and boos at the Royal College of Nursing last spring, candidates have realised there needs to be what Hain calls ‘a new deal with NHS staff’. Unsurprisingly, given the electorate, on this issue the candidates are tripping over each other in the middle of the track.

Benn wants to involve unions in policy formation, instead of ‘handing down reform from on high’. Johnson agrees, and wants to see an increase in representation of the public sector unions on Labour’s National Policy Forum. At a hustings he said the government had ‘listened a bit too much to the British Medical Association and not enough to unions like Unison’ – possibly signalling a new divide-and-rule tactic, or more likely signalling that he is the Unison-backed candidate.

Cruddas goes a step further. The problem is ‘a top-down political structure with consultations over decisions already made and an adherence to a dogma that competition and markets always have the answers’. Instead, he wants policy to be ‘formed through the involvement of members and trade unionists at all levels’.

For Blears the issue is simply one of tone, not policy. She told the Guardian that staff were fed up with being told ‘You’ve got to reform because you’re not good enough.’ Everything would be hunky-dory if only the message was ‘Yes, we’ve got to reform, we’ve got to change, but we know you go to work wanting to do a good job, we want to help you do an even better job than that.’

Staff think Labour is telling them they’re not good enough partly because the government has placed such emphasis on ‘choice’ – almost selling the policy to patients as a chance to escape from the NHS into sparkly new private facilities. Campaigners have long suspected the rhetoric of choice as being a cover for privatisation. Cruddas has sympathy with this view, adding that choice will benefit those able to ‘work the system’.

Interestingly, even the more Blairite ministers are decidedly cool on choice. Johnson sees it as a secondary issue, saying: ‘Choice will only be valued if a good choice is on offer. The quality of healthcare per se is most important to the public, so the government must maintain its concentration on healthcare standards primarily.’ Benn prioritises ‘a good service and speedy treatment’, with patients being treated with respect. For him choice is merely ‘an important part of these aspirations’.

Whatever the fate of ‘choice’ in the NHS, choice within Labour is now in the hands of members and trade unionists. The deputy leadership race has highlighted the degree of unease over Blair’s NHS reforms. It remains to be seen if this will be reflected in real policies.

Keep Our NHS Public’s verdict: who is best for the NHS?

1. John Cruddas

2. Peter Hain

3. Harriet Harman

4. Alan Johnson

5. Hilary Benn

6. Hazel Blears