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5,000 march against the war at Labour Party conference

JamieSW — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 10:48:37 +0000

5,000 protestors marched to the Labour Party Conference on Saturday demanding an end to the government’s slavish support for Bush’s wars. The march was organised by the Stop the War Coalition and CND and called for all troops to come out of Iraq and Afghanistan and for an end to a foreign policy that risks spreading war.

The demonstration brought together trade unionists, students, pensioners, muslim activists and peace campaigners of all sorts. It was led off by Rose Gentle and other members of Military Families Against the War. As it approached the conference centre the demonstration stopped to hand in a letter of protest to the Prime Minister.
There was then two minutes silence to respect the hundreds of thousands who have been killed as a result of this government’s foreign policy.Then protestors marched right up to the conference centre fence chanting ‘Troops Out’ and ‘No to Nato’ loud enough for every delegate in the conference to hear. Many came out to listen.

The march ended with a rally nearby addressed by Tony Benn, Jeremy Corbyn, Tony Woodley, Lindsey German, Rose Gentle, Seumas Milne, Karen Reissman, Andrew Murray, Nahela Ashraf, Kate Hudson, Sabah Jawad and others. They all spoke of the need to continue and expand this remarkable campaign.

Another Labour is possible

eddie — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 13:48:10 +0000

Most of us are only spectators as we watch the latest and deepest crisis of capitalism being played out in Wall Street and the City of London. Bewildering discussions take place about a range of exotic financial instruments -– which even many senior figures in financial institutions now admit they failed to comprehend, and which proved to be disastrous. The majority of us can only look on with growing unease as the storm begins to break over our heads, bringing with it the unemployment, wage cuts and falling living standards associated with all past major crises of our economic system.

There are two conferences convening in Manchester this weekend which could help to explain why this crisis has occurred, what its potential consequences are for us, and what could be done to avert future turmoil. Delegates from local Labour parties and trade unions assembling for the Labour conference will be looking to hear Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling’s take on the nightmare on Wall and Threadneedle Streets. They will be desperately seeking assurances about the actions the government plans to take to protect our people from the dire combination of rapidly increasing food, energy and fuel prices and recession-led rising unemployment. Leadership questions are being put to one side in the hope that Gordon Brown demonstrates a real understanding of how this crisis has occurred, and commits to an urgent programme of policy changes needed to safeguard and reassure our people in these difficult times,

Labour party members and trade unionists will also be attending the Convention of the Left, bringing them together with socialists and radicals outside the Labour party, with greens, with campaigners for civil liberties, peace, public services and against deportations, with representatives from the resurgent women’s movement, from LGBT groups and from new social movements like the climate camp and with the many international solidarity campaigns supporting progressive movements in countries from Venezuela to the Chagos Islands.

In the past many of those attending the convention would have been active in the debates and discussions taking place -– either on the Labour party conference floor or in the many fringe meetings that used to be packed with rank and file delegates. Alienated by New Labour’s policies in office on issues like the war in Iraq, the privatisation of public services and the attacks on civil liberties, many have just dropped out or turned away. The closing down of democratic debate and policy making at Labour’s conference has also left many natural Labour supporters feeling that attending conference is futile. The event which is rapidly degenerating into a mixture of trade fair and US-style televised rally for the leader.

The contrast between the conference and convention couldn’t be starker. The Labour conference is isolated behind a high security wall and stage managed for televisual perfection. The convention, on the other hand, is open to all, rejecting the status of top table speakers and encouraging everyone attending to participate.

But the contrast in politics between the rank and file delegates attending conference and those at the convention is likely to be a great deal less. The majority of delegates to both will have opposed the war and the renewal of Trident, will be opposed to the privatisation of public services and will have supported demands for the protection of civil liberties and trade union rights. They are all part of the same radical, progressive, socialist movement that has been divided by the policies of New Labour.

The aim of the convention is to explore how socialists – within a range of organisations and none – can reunite to promote an understanding that there is an alternative to the crisis-ridden economic system we live under. It is not just threatening our jobs, public services and civil liberties but is also creating wars and putting the sustainability of our planet at risk.

It is not a call to establish a new party or to displace existing campaigning organisations. Instead it is a refreshing and exciting attempt to find ways to develop and promote alternative policies of peace, social and environmental justice, public ownership, workers rights, civil liberties and equality. The finance crisis and the emerging recession have made these ideas as relevant as ever.

An invitation to join the Convention of The Left

Ellie Keen — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

This bold venture comes as a result of people from different left and radical traditions – or none – getting together in Greater Manchester to say that there IS an alternative to Labour’s policies of war and privatisation.

We are from green, left, internationalist, communist, socialist, radical and anarchist backgrounds. We are involved in civil liberties, anti-deportation, trade union, climate change, peace and public service campaigns. What we have in common is that we believe the wealth exists in society to pay for our essential needs – but we do not believe that an unbridled free market is sustainable.

We cannot have socialism if the planet has been destroyed, but we [probably?] can’t save the planet unless we have socialism.

So when New Labour comes to Manchester for its so-called “Conference” (an event generally believed to be without debate or decisions), we have decided that we want to host a “Convention of The Left” – just a stone’s throw (or a balloon’s flight) away from the security-surrounded official event, we will be holding a day of action, a full day conference, and three days of themed debates and discussions (Saturday September 20th – Wednesday September 24th 2008).

Our Convention will be both a protest at Labour’s war and privatisation, racism and pollution, authoritarianism and inequality, and a practical demonstration that there is an alternative.

Our Convention will be about an entirely different world – one that can be built by working people for working people.

Our Convention will be united in our determination to combine our strengths and develop through open and participatory debates the rebuilding of The Left today.

The agenda is evolving, because we have been seeking the comments, suggestions and involvements of many more people – and we are going on doing so, between now and then. We don’t just want a one-off conference (good though we hope the debates in September will be). We want to encourage everyone to start debating the topics and the possibilities across the pages of the left press and the websites and blogs, all the way from now till then.

So our blog (www.conventionoftheleft.org.uk) has started with a few contributions for debate – on Planet, Peace, People not Profits, Politics: Power and Participation – and hopes to encourage both responses to these and suggestions on many more (including Prejudice and Oppression for example). The topics don’t all have to start with “P” – but, for the meanwhile, Give “P”s a Chance… and we look forward to the comments that come in.

Then, as we get closer to the event itself, we hope we will have a body of material already debated widely across the left that can start the Convention off on a sound footing – and encourage yet more participation and debate in the sessions that follow – all of which may lead to the development of “charters” or even a “manifesto” of The Left, on which we can all agree to mobilise our forces in unity so as to campaign more effectively.

The Convention is currently organised by an Organising Group, meeting in Manchester. All meetings have been open to others to come and make suggestions. As a practical result of this, we have agreed that we must take some action already – anti-fascist work for example is not going to wait until September, but is starting now.

Similarly we have been looking for ways to involve the left around the rest of the country, who cannot necessarily make meetings in Manchester (and from our neighbours north and west of the borders – in Scotland and Wales – and hopefully from the European Left and beyond). Debate in hyperspace is encouraged, but maybe people can also organise their own meetings in their own localities; to which those of us in Manchester would be pleased to come along and give some information on the progress so far.

Confirmed participants include Tony Benn, John McDonnell, Jeremy Corbyn, Mark Serwotka, Colin Fox, Pam Currie, Frances Curran, Sue Bond, Jeremy Dear, Matt Wrack, Maria Exall, Jane Loftus, Carolyn Jones, Rahila Gupta, Tariq Ali, John Lister, Jonathan Neale, Kate Hudson, Andrew Murray, Lindsey German, Bill Greenshields, George Galloway, Abjol Miah , Ken Loach, Rob Griffiths, and Derek Wall. Sponsoring organisations include the Labour Representation Committee – and the Left Women’s Network and Left Economics Advisory Panel; Scottish Socialist Party; Communist Party of Britain; Green Left; Respect; Morning Star, Socialist Workers Party, Greater Manchester Association of Trades Union Councils, Manchester Trades Council, Liverpool Trades Council and many others.

So if you want to support actions ranging from stopping the war(s), supporting the anti-nuclear blockades, fighting racist deportations, stopping housing sell-offs, defending the NHS – do feel free to get involved. If you want to hear (or even to organise) debates and discussions on Palestine, Iraq, Pakistan, or the break-up of the UK, climate change, human rights (including the rights of migrants and refugees), reclaiming health and (secular) education, and the struggle for a fairer economic system – do make suggestions and put your own contributions onto the blog.

We want to start defining a new way of working (even to reclaim that word “new”) so that we can work together in practical campaigns, regardless of the organisations we may belong to, and so that we can stop the war and nuclear proliferation, the cuts and privatisation. Much more than elections and individual campaigns, we want to develop a critique of capitalism as we now know it and an alternative strategy that is environmentally and socially just, inclusive and peaceful, pluralist, tolerant, and doesn’t rely on “top-table” speakers but on discussion from us all – in pursuit of a bigger common objective that benefits the many and not the few.

Diverse but not divisive, we want participation in debate and unity in action.

What do you think?

Labour faces wipe-out after defeat in Glasgow East

Tim Holmes — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 20:57:08 +0000

Labour’s defeat by the Scottish National Party in the Glasgow East by-election is a devastating blow to the party and leaves Prime Minister Gordon Brown one of the walking dead.

Labour saw its vote collapse in what was previously its third safest seat in Britain, losing a majority of over 13,500 in the 2005 General Election. The SNP, which came in a distant second three years ago, gained 11,277 votes on Thursday, a narrow majority of 365 with a massive swing of 22.5 percent from Labour.

It is Labour’s third by-election defeat in nine weeks, not counting the recent Haltemprice and Howden vote in which the government would not even put up a candidate.

Up until the last hours of voting, most pundits speculated that Labour’s huge majority would be eroded or even halved. Labour, while acknowledging the possibility of a big swing against it, pointed out that it had campaigned extensively in the seat, with local activists and party workers from across Scotland visiting over 20,000 homes.

In the end voters expressed a level of hostility towards the government that far exceeded these expectations.

Turnout was relatively high for a by-election in an inner city area, particularly during the period when businesses in Glasgow have their holidays. At 42.2 percent, it was only slightly lower than the figure for the seat at the last General Election.

If the swing away from Labour in Glasgow East was replicated in the next general election, the party would retain just one of its current 41 seats in Scotland. Among those who would lose office would be Gordon Brown and Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling.

Expressing the growing hostility of millions of workers across the UK to the party and the government, many traditional Labour voters either switched to the SNP or stayed at home. Journalists and candidates have reported the mood in the constituency—among the poorest in the UK with high levels of unemployment and ill-health—as one of disillusionment with and hostility toward Labour, which has dominated the city’s politics for generations. Many voters cited rocketing food and fuel prices as key factors in their opposition to Labour, as the government holds down or cuts public sector wages and welfare benefits.

In May 2007 the SNP won a plurality of seats in elections to the Scottish Parliament, overtaking Labour to become the main party in Scotland. The SNP campaigned heavily in the area, with party leader and First Minister of the devolved Scottish government Alex Salmond visiting the constituency 12 times. Commenting on the campaign, Salmond said that the election was a “test of strength between two governments.”

During the campaign the SNP deliberately tried to play down its key policy of independence for Scotland, focusing on local health problems and rising domestic prices. Despite the SNP’s claims that the vote represents a ringing endorsement of their policies at Holyrood, most commentators have put the vote for the SNP down to the collapse of Labour’s support.

The Conservative Party could only poll 1,639 votes in Glasgow East, only slightly higher than three years ago. It only came in third because the Liberal Democrat vote also collapsed to just 915 votes—suggesting that many of its supporters, along with traditional Labour voters, stayed at home or switched directly to the SNP to give the government a beating.

Conservative leader David Cameron responded to the result by calling for a general election. In response, Brown said lamely, “My task is getting on with the job. It’s exactly what people want me to do.” Looking like a condemned man, he commented on the loss of an area that Labour has held since the 1920s, “We’ve got to listen and hear people’s concerns and that’s exactly what we are doing.”

The Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) and Solidarity also stood in the constituency. The parties split from each other in 2006 after founding member Tommy Sheridan left the party over a successful libel case against Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World, which the SSP refused to support. Both parties, which have identical programmes, campaigned largely on local issues. Francis Curran, the SSP candidate, received 555 votes, with 512 votes cast for Solidarity.

At just over four percent, the combined result for the two parties is slightly higher than the 3.5 percent of the vote garnered by the SSP alone in the constituency in 2005. It is lower, however, than the result for the SSP in the 2001 election, when it received 6.8 percent of the vote in the now defunct constituencies of Glasgow Baillieston and Glasgow Shettleston.

At the count in the early hours of Friday morning, Labour’s candidate Margaret Curran requested a partial recount, claiming that some of her votes may have been wrongly awarded to her rival from the SSP, Francis Curran. Following this recount, Labour actually lost 11 votes.

Brown may have rejected calls for his resignation, but pressure is mounting on the prime minister from within the party. Reflecting concerns among Labour MPs fearful of losing their seats at the next election, Graham Stringer, MP for Manchester Blackley, commented: “We need a new start and that can only come from a debate around the leadership. I hope those discussions take place.”

An unnamed Labour MP told the BBC that the party “could not simply ignore” such a bad defeat, and predicted that Brown would face senior figures “shooting from the hip” at the party conference in the autumn.

There is little wonder. The pro-Labour Guardian newspaper was moved to ask: “Does Labour face defeat at the next general election—or obliteration? The result from Glasgow East early this morning was more than simply terrible for Gordon Brown: it raises the spectre of a parliamentary wipe-out from which his party would struggle to recover.”

It added, “Perhaps the closest parallel is the 1990 Eastbourne by-election, which saw a 21% swing to the Liberal Democrats and triggered Margaret Thatcher’s ejection from office a month later. Some will speculate that the same could happen to Brown this autumn.”

Labour is a party on its last legs. Labour membership has rapidly declined since 1997, falling to fewer than 200,000 mostly inactive and elderly members. In 2007 Labour reported that it had 17,000 members in Scotland, a fall of almost 50 percent since 1997. In 14 Scottish constituencies the party has fewer than 200 members, of whom only a small fraction participate in local meetings and campaigns.

Electorally, Labour has lost the support of those sections of the middle class who jumped ship from the Tories in the mid-1990s to give it the victories in the 1997 and 2001 general elections. In May, Labour lost a by-election in the safe seat of Crewe and Nantwich, in which its majority of over 7,000 was turned into a 7,680 lead for the Conservatives.

More fundamentally, having alienated millions of working class voters with its right-wing policies, militarism and slavish subservience to big business, even the safest of Labour strongholds can no longer be counted on to return a Labour MP.

New Labour plc?

Tim Holmes — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 15:18:18 +0000

Recently support for New Labour registered at 23% nationally, the lowest since opinion polling began back in 1938. The party has lost 53% of its membership between 1997 and 2006 and will undoubtedly have lost considerably more since. It is struggling to pay off loans which with interest amounts to an estimate of between £24 to 28 million. Annual running costs amount to £25 million and private donors are understandably refusing to step up to the plate. And why would they? It’s not as if New Labour will do something for them that the Tories won’t.

As for the unions, calls to hold a vote on whether to disaffiliate are becoming more frequent. The GMB have threatned to withdraw funding from 30 Labour MP’s. Stephen Ladyman, vice-chairman of the party described the move as “tokenistic and hard-left”. That the kind of response is not likely to help mend bridges. Meanwhile senior officials in the Labour party, including Gordon Brown, could become personally liable for millions of pounds in debt unless new donors can be found within weeks. Almost unbelievably the New Labour response is to consider changing its status to a company – so that it would limited liability! Which is apt as they are set on privatising everything else.

The party has four weeks to find £7.45m to pay off loans to banks and wealthy donors recruited by Lord Levy, Tony Blair’s former chief fundraiser, or become insolvent. A further £6.2m will have to be repaid by Christmas – making £13.65m in all. The sum amounts to two-thirds of the party’s annual income from donations.

The figures are a conservative estimate as they do not include interest that will also have to be paid. A Labour source said that although the total debt was listed as £17.8m on the Electoral Commission website, the true level, with interest, was nearer to £24m.

The possibility that party officials and members of its national executive committee could become liable is being taken seriously by union leaders, and has been underlined by the decision of equity fund chairman David Pitt-Watson not to accept the post as Labour’s general secretary.

Though he was Brown’s candidate for the post, he declined the offer after receiving independent legal advice that he would be personally liable for repaying the loans and could be bankrupted if Labour’s finances collapsed.

The advice from City solicitors Slaughter and May said unequivocally that leading party officials and members of the NEC would be ” jointly and severally” responsible for the party’s debt.

The reason is that the Labour party constitution is framed like a local club or society, and has no provisionfor limiting the liability of its officials or managers.

A Labour source said: “The party’s constitution is like a five-a-side football club, or the local cricket club. The big difference is that the most club officials and managers could expect to have to fork out is an unpaid bill for hiring the pitch. In Labour’s case, it’s tens of millions of pounds.”

The advice was the sole reason why Pitt-Watson, a committed Labour supporter and former Westminster City councillor, turned down the job this month.

But the reverberations inside the party have been enormous. Earlier this month the GMB union’s executive decided to indemnify its two members on the NEC – Debbie Coulter, the union’s deputy general secretary and a former Labour party conference chairwoman, and Mary Turner, GMB’s president – to protect their homes and savings. A GMB spokesman told the Guardian: “They told the executive they would not continue to sit on the NEC unless they were indemnified. It’s too much a risk for them.”

As leader of the party and a member of the NEC, Brown is also potentially vulnerable. Other prominent members of the committee are Harriet Harman, the deputy leader; her husband, Jack Dromey, the party treasurer; Pat McFadden, minister of state at the department for business; Angela Eagle, exchequer secretary at the Treasury; Dawn Primarolo, public health minister; and former ministers Keith Vaz and Janet Anderson.

Anderson said last night: “I am very concerned and we should look into the situation immediately. If this is the case, I can’t see how anyone, unless they are very wealthy or are indemnified, like in the case of the GMB, can serve on the NEC. I can’t see who would want to be general secretary following this advice.”

The party’s financial plight can be shown by the current negotiations taking place with banks and donors.

The Co-operative bank, whose £2.61m loan is due to be repaid on June 30, has told the party it wants its money back, even though it is getting 7% interest. The bank has asked the unions to offer loans to Labour so the party can pay its debt, but some are refusing to do this. Paul Kenny, the GMB’s general secretary, has told the Co-operative bank it will refuse to help unless the bank withdraws its de-recognition of the union, which represents staff at Co-operative Funeral Services.

Three other loans are due to be repaid on June 30 and July 1. They are a £1.54m loan from Unity Trust bank, also at 7%; a £1m loan at 6.75% from Nigel Morris, founder of the Capital One financial group, and £2.3m from Sir David Garrard, a property developer. He had already extended the loan by 15 months from April 2007.

Labour is hoping that the donors can be persuaded to extend the loan period. Sir Richard Caring, owner of the Ivy and Caprice restaurants, has agreed an indefinite extension of his £2m loan, due to be repaid last March. He has agreed to give 180 days notice if he wants it repaid.
The party’s financial crisis could be compounded this autumn. Three of the biggest unions, Unison, the Communications Workers Union and the GMB have tabled motions at their annual conferences this month calling for members to disaffiliate from Labour. If this goes ahead, Labour would lose £4m of its £19m a year in donations.

The Labour party is said to be investigating whether it can change its status to a limited liability company to protect its officials and NEC members – but such a move could be open to legal challenge until it clears its debts.

Be brave and take a radical turn

Ellie Keen — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 22:06:26 +0000

LABOUR appears to be in political freefall without a parachute. This is partly because of the collapse of many “new” Labour orthodoxies – the triangulations and trimmings based around a mythical middle England. This model now almost appears to belong to a different era, but to many it seems there is no coherent alternative to put in its place or too little time to implement it. That doesn’t have to be the case. I believe there is a way to regain the trust and support of those who are deserting Labour by meeting their aspirations for their place in a fairer society.

Recent election results demonstrate that support for the Labour Party is disintegrating. In Crewe, London and across the country in the local elections, the verdict was damning. But, as many of us have been flagging up over the last few years, this did not fall out of the sky, with the biggest shifts among public services workers and more generally among working-class labour voters.

In response, all we heard was: “Let’s not go back to the 1980s”. As if anyone wanted to. The other false accusation was that we wanted to retreat to some “old Labour” comfort zone. These are trite responses to a careful analysis of the trend in electoral decline. A year ago change was promised, but little delivered, as the general election that never was meant a rewind back to the old playbook of triangulation and tacking to the right.

Increasingly we are outflanked by a modern conservatism than maintains a more literate language. It talks about values and relationships, it empathises with people who are struggling, it appears to be going with the grain of people’s vulnerabilities. Meanwhile, some on our own side are adding to this topsy-turvy atmosphere by pitching for public spending cuts and tax cuts. We are in danger of trading off the very essence of social democracy.

At the heart of the debate is what the people of this country aspire to. These aspirations are not defined by individualist, Thatcherite, pro-private, anti-public greed, but by expectations of a political process that will focus on removing the barriers to realising aspirations in terms of poverty, child-care, access to housing, leisure, arts, culture and so on. It is not the aspiration of climbing the ladder and breaking the rungs after you. There is a formula at the heart of the Government based around a fundamental rupture between marginal seats and Labour’s heartlands. It cynically counter-poses aspiration and our core vote. We need politicians to break from this disparaging segmentation of the country and its associated patronising in terms of who is and isn’t aspirational. Politically, we need to reclaim the very nature of aspiration. We need to decontaminate it from the toxic interpretation of those such as Business Secretary John Hutton who see aspiration as a call for more millionaires and tax protection for fat cats. Voters are leaving Labour because of our failure to deal with their real aspirations, in terms of housing, their working poverty, their scramble over limited resources, their desperate desire for mobility and resources. These aspirations depend on collectivist social democratic actions.

So we need to start again. Simply put, why don’t we say that our purpose is to build a fairer, more equal and sustainable country and planet? With that as a goal, we need to get behind some policies which are promoted in a language and story that allows people to render intelligible their concerns and aspirations. They could include:

* a windfall tax on oil companies to help those struggling with escalating fuel bills, specifically those in fuel poverty;
* a new fair employment clause in all public contracts to end the race to the bottom in the world of work;
* building homes for families, allowing councils to build for renting;
* a fairer tax system with a new top rate and a cut in taxes for the low paid with all new revenues hypothecated to boost benefit levels for the poor;
* a moratorium on the private sector role in delivering front-line public services;
* protection for the universal service obligation of the Post Office;
* help children get healthy with free schools meals for all;
* access to all local authority sports facilities free for children under 16;
* make work pay by ending the national minimum wage rates and paying the rate for the job;
* abolishing health inequalities through proper funding of primary care;
* democratising the police through greater local accountability and elections;
* pioneering local area agreements to offer real and enduring devolution drawn up and delivered locally;
* a new radical covenant between the people and the military funded by the scrapping of Trident;
* workplace environmental reps to make work healthier and more fulfilling;
* greater working time flexibility for parents;
* tackling the legacy of Home Office failure with the introduction of earned regularisation of unregularised migrants.

These will meet the real aspirations or real people in real need – not least that half of the population which shares just 6 per cent of Britain’s wealth, while the top 1 per cent owns a quarter of it. The very rich have become the new untouchables through the myth that their massive wealth will somehow flow to the rest of us and that, if we dare tax them fairly, they will jump ship to another country. A new politics of hope must start with idealism and the belief that another world is possible. No one’s life should be compromised by the brute luck of birth.

Utopianism has been given a bad name by those who want everything to stay the same. The National Health Service, full employment and even the minimum wage were all initially decried as hopelessly utopian, but people had the courage and the desire to struggle to make them a reality. Political leaders are reluctant to take a lead. They play it safe, caught in the trap of electoral timidity when the moment demands bravery. This is not a surprise. History teaches us that lasting changes – from the vote and the NHS and on to greater women’s equality – were not handed down from on high by benevolent politicians, but fought for by millions of people, convinced that the time for change had come.

The bottom line is this. We can fight to change the direction of the party – but only if we have the political will. Given the patterns of injustice that we see every day, it is no less than a categorical imperative that we accept the challenge to change this country. It cannot be beyond our collective wit to do so. We could start by organising – and quickly – a lurch to the centre-left.

Jon Cruddas is Labour MP for Dagenham. This is an edited extract of a keynote speech given to the annual Compass conference in London last weekend.

Labour Pains

Ellie Keen — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 20:05:41 +0000

Stoke-on-Trent is a Labour city or at least it should be. In the mid-1990s the Labour Party held all 60 seats on the council and the three local MPs had five-figure majorities.

Those days are long gone and today we face the appalling prospect of the British National Party seriously challenging for mayor in next year’s election.

In May’s local elections the Labour Party won just four of the 20 seats up for election, leaving it with only 16 city councillors plus the directly elected mayor. The City Independents have 15, the BNP and the Conservative and Independent Alliance have nine each, the Liberal Democrats five, the Potteries Alliance two and there are three non-aligned and one Libertarian.

The BNP beat Labour in eight of the ten seats they both contested. Labour averaged 25% across the city, while the BNP averaged 24% in the wards it fought.

There are now two wards where the BNP holds all three seats, though its performance overall was overshadowed by the strong vote for the City Independents, who gained six seats. However, in next year’s Mayoral contest there are likely to be several independent candidates, who will no doubt split the vote, leaving the BNP to battle it out with an increasingly unpopular Labour Party and the former independent mayor Mike Wolfe, who himself used to be in the Labour Party.

In the first mayoral election in 2002 the BNP took 18.7% of the vote, missing out on going through to the second round by only 1,500 votes [see table above]. In 2005 the BNP polled 19%, which was a remarkable achievement considering that the election was on the same day as the general election.

Since then support for the BNP has grown. Over the past three years it has averaged between 24% and 28% in the wards the party has contested and the BNP has now moved out of its previous Stoke-on-Trent South heartland into other parts of the city.

A vote in excess of 20% is likely to take the BNP into the second round in next year’s mayoral election, in which the second preferences of the defeated candidates are distributed. Given the strong anti-Labour feelings in the city a run-off between Labour and the BNP might well see the fascist party gain its most high-profile victory to date.

Economic decline

Labour’s fall from grace in Stoke-on Trent began at the beginning of this decade, was reversed a few years later, but has gathered pace in the past two years.

There is no single explanation for this but rather a multitude of inter-related issues that have discredited the party locally.

The city was once home to heavy industry, manufacturing and skilled work, but much of this has now gone. The coal mines and the steel works have disappeared and there is little left of the ceramics industry, which once employed tens of thousands of people.

New employment has come in but much of it is in the service sector and short-term. “Many of the old jobs were tough work but they were well paid, they were secure jobs and they were skilled jobs,” says Jane Heggie, who works for Stoke-on-Trent South MP Rob Flello.

“The new jobs that have come in are less skilled, temporary and are not as well paid.”

The change in employment has led to the city becoming poorer over the past ten years. According to government statistics the city has slipped from 34th most deprived borough in 2000 to 18th in 2004 and now to 16th in 2007.

Movement out of the city reflects this declining economic situation. In 1981 252,509 people lived in Stoke-on-Trent. By 2001 the population had fallen to 240,636, with most of the decline in the latter part of this period.

Between 1991 and 2001 the population of Stoke-on-Trent fell by 9,000. By comparison the population of England and Wales grew by 2.6% over the same period, while the West Midlands experienced a 0.7% increase. Most of those leaving appear to be the more educated and qualified who have been able to move on to better jobs.

But there are also more local factors that have contributed to the collapse of Labour and the rise of the BNP. The mayoral system, which has handed almost total power to the elected mayor and the council’s chief executive, has been a disaster for the Labour Party and increasingly unpopular with the electorate. Many local councillors resent their weakened role and some Labour councillors have openly campaigned for the mayor’s abolition. Others have left the party.

In an effort to widen the decision-making process the current Labour mayor introduced a Cabinet to involve local councillors and, given Labour’s weak position, has formed a coalition of the three main political parties.

While this might have helped break down some of the factional infighting it has enabled the BNP to contrast itself with the old political establishment. An example of this emerged over the contentious changes to secondary schooling in the city, in which several schools will be replaced by fewer new schools. This has proved deeply unpopular and while many people in the Labour Party are opposed to the plan, including all three local MPs, the BNP has grabbed some local media headlines through its opposition.

“The BNP can present themselves as the only alternative,” says Jason Hill, of the local anti-BNP group NorSCARF.

Other commentators list a raft of unpopular council decisions which the BNP has exploited. Last year the council announced the closure of several care homes for the elderly and more recently the axing of the splash pool leisure facility at Dimensions in Burslem.

Jane Heggie points to a simple explanation for Labour’s decline and the BNP’s rise. “We are not addressing the concerns of voters and we have not been active enough.

“Of course the removal of the 10p tax rate had an impact, especially here where many people were affected, but there is a danger that we use the Government as an excuse. We really have to ask ourselves why is Labour collapsing here and not to the same extent in other areas which are doing even worse economically such as Sandwell or Manchester?”

Heggie cites recent results in Stoke-on-Trent South to support her case. Last year Labour won Fenton with a 400 majority over the BNP; this year Labour finished a poor third. “We had a candidate in his eighties who wasn’t able to campaign and simply had not done enough as a councillor,” she asserts.

In Longton North, by contrast, Labour has bucked the trend. It was once the city’s main BNP heartland, a ward the BNP had won three times in a row. Now it has three Labour councillors. “We have worked hard in the ward and people have responded positively.”

Certainly organisational factors and choice of candidates dramatically hampered the Labour Party’s chances in Mark Fisher’s Stoke-on-Trent Central constituency. Last year the BNP walked into a second seat in Bentilee and Townsend ward after Labour reselected a councillor who was in his late eighties, housebound and had just lost his wife. It was hardly surprising that the BNP won the election with very little campaigning.

The Labour Party in the constituency does not have any modern voter software, such as the new Contact Creator, and carries out little canvassing or Voter ID work. Not only is Labour unable to identify and so turn out voters in an election, but the lack of face-to-face contact with voters reinforces the impression that the party does not care.

The BNP alternative

Of course it would be wrong to place the entire blame for the BNP’s rise on Labour. The absence of other mainstream political alternatives, a common theme in areas where the BNP has emerged as a force, has resulted in the BNP appearing as the only alternative. However, given the economic and social make-up of the city it should be a Labour stronghold and much of the reason why it is not must lie in Labour’s own decline.

The BNP meanwhile has grown steadily over the past few years and has earned itself a reputation as a normal political party. Its councillors sit on committees, it is regularly quoted in the local media in the same manner as any other party and a growing number of people, from the editor of the local newspaper to the former mayor, believe it should be involved in decision making.

The BNP acts as though it is just another political party. Its recent election leaflets hardly touched on race, preferring to focus on local issues around schools, the closure of care homes for the elderly and jobs. However, it is quick to whip up racism and racial lies when it suits the party.

Over the past three years the BNP has repeatedly stoked up racism by means of a leaflet targeting plans for a mosque in the city. Full of lies, exaggeration and racial and religious stereotypes, it was designed solely to inflame the issue and whip up racial tensions.

A national priority

The growing respectability of the BNP puts it within reach of winning the mayoral election next year. Let us not be under any illusion about the severity of the situation as any success here would have national repercussions.

The job of anti-fascists must be to challenge the culture on the ground, not an easy job when the BNP is so entrenched in local communities and is viewed as a normal political party by so many people.

The mainstream political parties must finally get their act together. The Labour Party, regionally or nationally, must take control of the party campaign locally. Some will oppose this but unfortunately many of these same people have shown an inability to lead themselves. Locally, Labour needs to find a way to unite the party before next summer, address some of the more contentious issues and develop a clear understanding of the role of the mayor and its relationship with other elected officials and the voters at large. The stakes are too high.

The unions must also devote attention and resources to Stoke-on-Trent. There are thousands of union members in the area and these must be the focus of proper work and education. Some of it might not be easy but we have to take on the BNP’s arguments and dispel its myths in the workplace and in the community. For too long the regional unions have largely ignored the city, favouring other parts of the West Midlands, but again the stakes are too high.

The usual sort of anti-fascist leaflets are not adequate for the task. Producing leaflets that say don’t vote BNP because they are racists and fascists will simply not work in the BNP’s strongholds. We must produce local material which at least tries to address some of the issues that are making people support the BNP. Anti-fascists are not necessarily party political but we must highlight the shortcomings of the BNP approach while obviously reminding voters of its true intentions.

More importantly, anti-fascists can help identify and turn out the anti-BNP vote. This will require a more sophisticated approach than we have adopted so far and to achieve success will need a national anti-fascist effort. With a low turnout expected in the mayoral election, we need to identify and build up a relationship with 30,000 people who will vote for a party other than the BNP. While we cannot tell people whom to support we must convince people to cast their second preference vote for a party that they think can beat the BNP.

Searchlight and NorSCARF is calling for support from anti-fascists across the country to make Stoke-on-Trent a national priority. In addition to national days of action we will ask people from specific regions to work the area throughout the year.

Not to do this work could hand the BNP its greatest political prize to date. The stakes are that high.

Stoke-on-Trent at a glance

Stoke-on-Trent is the second most deprived local authority in the West Midlands, and 16th nationally. 33% of its 160 Super Output Areas (SOAs) – the geographical areas used in the Indices of Deprivation 2004 – are in the 10% most deprived areas nationally. Over 60% live in the worst 25%.
36% of Stoke-on-Trent’s SOAs are in the 10% most deprived nationally in employment (which measures long-term unemployed, people on incapacity benefit and those on New Deal schemes), making it the worst local authority in the West Midlands. Over 65% of the local population live in the most deprived 25%.
Stoke-on-Trent experiences the worst health deprivation in the West Midlands and ranks 12th nationally. 42% of its people live in the most deprived 10% of SOAs, while over 80% live in the worst 25%.
The city ranks second in the West Midlands in educational deprivation and 7th nationally. 34% of local people live in the most deprived 10% and 66% live in the worst 25%.
Stoke-on-Trent is the least deprived borough in the West Midlands, and 12th least deprived nationally, in the “Barriers to Housing and Services” domain, which measures ability to get local housing and homelessness. However, this figure reflects the declining local population.
22% of adults of working age are claiming a key benefit, compared to a national average of 14%. 13% of adults, twice the national average, claim incapacity benefit.
At the last census 42.9% of adults in Stoke-on-Trent had no educational qualifications, compared to a national average of 28.8%.

New Labour plc?

Ellie Keen — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 17:47:28 +0000

As for the unions, calls to hold a vote on whether to disaffiliate are becoming more frequent. The GMB have threatened to withdraw funding from 30 Labour MP’s. Stephen Ladyman, vice-chairman of the party described the move as “tokenistic and hard-left”. That the kind of response is not likely to help mend bridges. Meanwhile senior officials in the Labour party, including Gordon Brown, could become personally liable for millions of pounds in debt unless new donors can be found within weeks. Almost unbelievably the New Labour response is to consider changing its status to a company – so that it would limited liability! Which is apt as they are set on privatising everything else.

The advice from City solicitors Slaughter and May said unequivocally that leading party officials and members of the NEC would be ” jointly and severally” responsible for the party’s debt.

The reason is that the Labour party constitution is framed like a local club or society, and has no provisionfor limiting the liability of its officials or managers.

The advice was the sole reason why Pitt-Watson, a committed Labour supporter and former Westminster City councillor, turned down the job this month.

The party’s financial plight can be shown by the current negotiations taking place with banks and donors.

The Threat of a Good Example

Ellie Keen — Sun, 18 May 2008 01:33:06 +0000

On a night where Labour were deservedly massacred across the whole country how were a bunch of lacklustre candidates able to win two out of three against the IWCA in Oxford?

In the local elections on 1 May, the IWCA lost two of its four councillors on Oxford City Council. In Churchill ward, Claire Kent’s vote from 2004 –where she won by 10 votes from a standing start- stood up, but Labour were able to add on over 200 to theirs. In Blackbird Leys, Labour were able to turn Lee Cole’s 80 vote majority from 2004 into a 230 vote deficit. These results were greeted with unrestrained glee and relish by Labour at the count. In Northfield Brook, IWCA group leader Stuart Craft held on, though his majority was reduced from 116 to 66.

Elsewhere, the BNP officially took 5.3% in the London Assembly elections and now have one of the 25 Assembly members. They also added a dozen or so councillors and now have over 100 elected representatives at various local levels. In the individual London Assembly constituencies, the British Nationalists took 5.7% in Greenwich and Lewisham, 5.6% in Bexley and Bromley and 4.5% in Ealing and Hillingdon. Respect and the BNP only faced each other in one constituency, City and East, where they finished third and fourth respectively with 14.3% and 9.6% (City and East is made up of the Respect/ Galloway fiefdoms of Newham and Tower Hamlets, and the BNP stronghold of Barking and Dagenham). The Left List stood a candidate in every constituency, and the best they could manage was 3.56% in Enfield and Haringey. The Left List’s Mayoral candidate, Lindsey German, pulled in just under 52,000 votes, compared to over 120,000 that she got running under the Respect banner last time. By way of comparison, the IWCA’s Lorna Reid pulled in just under 50,000 votes in 2004 on a significantly lower turn-out (37% to 45%).

On a night where Labour were deservedly massacred across the whole country and posted their worst electoral results for forty years—the Observer’s Andrew Rawnsley wrote: ‘The genius of New Labour was to create an election-winning alliance of both traditional supporters and converts, of Labour heartlands and new territories. Labour was not hammered in one or the other – it was slaughtered in both’—in Oxford they were able to successfully unseat two dedicated, born-and-bred independent working class representatives.

How? The Labour candidates that were stood against the IWCA were in themselves hardly A-grade material: in Churchill Labour stood Mark Lygo, a man relatively new to the area with no track record of community work or local activism, and who himself said he was ‘surprised by the margin of victory’. In Blackbird Leys Labour stood Val Smith, an incumbent county councillor and wife of the sitting Oxford East MP Andrew Smith. The Smiths are New Labour personified, and Andrew Smith is holding onto his Parliamentary seat by his fingertips: his majority in the last general election was cut from over 10,000 to less than 1,000. Labour’s candidate in Northfield Brook was a corporate lawyer from wealthy North Oxford. So how were this shower able to win two out of three against the IWCA?

In January an Oxford Green councillor, Matt Sellwood, predicted precisely this very outcome. His reasoning?: ‘part of their [the IWCA’s] problem is that they’ve made such an impact that they’ve scared Labour half to death, and so Labour are going to do everything they can to defeat them … even more so than against the Lib Dems, and much more than against the Greens (Labour have pretty much abandoned most of our wards these days, and given up trying to get them back). So basically their seats are Labours #1, #2 and #3 targets, and that is hard to resist in a city that still has a lot of Labour funding and volunteers. Not impossible, but very difficult.’

The Smiths are the biggest political fish in Oxford and they have taken personal charge of the campaign to defeat the IWCA. In September 2004, soon after the IWCA increased its number of councillors in Oxford from one to three, Andrew Smith suddenly and mysteriously resigned from his post as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions ‘to devote more time to the responsibilities I enjoy in my constituency and to my family.’ And in their efforts to stop the IWCA the Smiths are not averse to bringing in outside reinforcements: in this local election campaign no less than Gordon Brown himself paid a visit to Oxford, where he made three stops: Blackbird Leys, Churchill, and Stuart Craft’s workplace (‘Brown backs slur-hit city estate’, Oxford Mail, 8 April 2008). Brown never visited Bury, a key swing battleground where Labour eventually lost the council to the Tories.

So Labour pulled out all the stops and threw everything they had at us, up to and including the Prime Minister. Does that explain everything, particularly the large, and unforeseen, swing towards Labour away from Lee Cole? Perhaps not. This is not the first time that Labour, increasingly nationally unpopular and devoid of decent personnel, have been able to produce a large vote against the IWCA seemingly from nowhere: the same thing happened in Islington in 2006.

The day after this years elections, the Guardian reported on comments made by members of the Labour controlled Public Administration Select Committee on postal ballot fraud. Labour MP Gordon Prentice said: ‘Our elections are wide open to fraud. We have judges that have said in recent months and years that the UK is like a banana republic when it comes to an election.’ Tory MP Charles Walker said: ‘In many parts of this country, it is one man, one woman, three or four hundred votes.’ Labour’s Kelvin Hopkins has argued for the introduction of individual voter registration to clamp down on fraud, while adding with admirable candour: ‘I hesitate to say this, but one of the reasons our party is reluctant to do this, is because it might actually dent our support in certain areas,’ (‘Election fraud: Labour failed to act, say MPs’, The Guardian, 2 May 2008).

The Lib Dem MP John Hemming has written: ‘Labour’s strategy (called the L Vote) in recent years has been to identify where their own supporters are, and address the campaign to them. This may result in lower turnouts, although having postal votes where individuals fill in a few hundred votes each has helped increase the Labour vote. Happily the more recent changes to election law will reduce the amount of electoral fraud’.

An undercover investigation by the Sunday Times into the Labour party in Leeds showed the ‘L Vote’ strategy in action, with canvassers ‘chasing’ postal votes by going door-to-door prior to election day collecting postal ballots from voters, and filling them out on their behalf if need be. When one of the group suggested that the practice was illegal, the team leader responded with: ‘Yes it is. But we’ve done 25% already, so …’ (( ‘Get the votes and we can win, but don’t get caught with them’, (The Sunday Times, 29 April 2008 ).

A report by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust published in April found: i) ‘Greater use of postal voting has made UK elections far more vulnerable to fraud and resulted in several instances of large-scale fraud’; ii) ‘There is widespread, and justifiable, concern about both the comprehensiveness and the accuracy of the UK’s electoral registers – the poor state of the registers potentially compromises the integrity of the ballot’; iii) ‘There is a genuine risk of electoral integrity being threatened by previously robust systems of electoral administration having reached ‘breaking point’ as a result of pressures imposed in recent years’.

But far less important than the ‘how’ of Labour’s victory is the ‘why’. Why would Labour—the Prime Minister included—go to all this trouble to try and knock out three councillors on the eastern edge of Oxford? Because of the threat of a good example: if working class people—with virtually no resources—can get organised, sling out Labour and demonstrably start to take back control on the eastern edge of Oxford then they can do it elsewhere (when Gordon Brown visited Blackbird Leys he remarked that the estate had ‘made a huge step forward’ and that ‘there is so much improvement taking place on Blackbird Leys’, forgetting to mention who was the source of this improvement or who was responsible for the previous neglect). Will Hutton wrote in the Observer on 4 May: ‘There has not been a gap between the rich and poor on the current scale ever in history. It is unstable. Sooner or later, there will be popular outrage and a political response… Who isn’t spooked by the renaissance of Italian fascism? Challenging times require courageous responses.

None is in prospect,’ (‘Feeble government lets the superclass soar over the rest of us’, The Observer). As we have seen above, the renaissance of Italian fascism is being mirrored by the far right’s greatest ever electoral success in the UK. Neo-liberalism is becoming increasingly unstable, yet only fascism is positioning itself as a viable alternative. Meanwhile, the middle class left, in the shape of the Left List, with sufficient resources to make an impact, continue only to provide further proof of Peter Wright’s claim that the British left ‘are about as dangerous as a pondful of ducks.’

The IWCA is not: the BNP’s current success is largely based on the same analysis of New Labour that led to the formation of the IWCA in the first place. In 1997 the BNP’s Tony Lecomber said, ‘The people who have been abandoned by Labour and have never been represented by the Tories will, in their desperation, turn to us. This is unlikely to happen next May, since people will still be giving Tony Blair’s Labour Party the chance to show what they can do. After that, though, disappointment will set in.’

One of the IWCA’s early breakthroughs came in the London borough of Havering, where we took 25% of the vote the first time out in the wards of Gooshays and Heaton in 2002. Since then, unfortunately, the IWCA branch there has had to cease activity due to pressures of work and time on the key activists. However, this gave the BNP the chance to move in, win Gooshays marginally in 2006 and then decisively in 2008.

This, in microcosm, is the choice we face. The IWCA analysis, applied from the left rather than the right, calls into question the very legitimacy of the Labour Party, of it’s alleged reason for being as the party of the working class. More than that, pound for pound the IWCA strategy works and has been proven to work where we’ve been able to apply it and so the Labour party –‘scared half to death’- has had no choice other than to try and stop it at source. We now know how hard and how dirty Labour will fight in order to safeguard their position and prevent a progressive, working class alternative to the barbarism of neo-liberalism, and the greater barbarism of fascism, from emerging. We now know that the working class will have to fight all the more effectively in terms of organisation, numbers, tactics, resources and ideas if that alternative is to be made a reality. We will.

We Get the Message

Ellie Keen — Sun, 04 May 2008 11:57:52 +0000

THERE is only one thing worse than suffering electoral meltdown and that is emerging from a disaster with no idea how to overcome it.

It is simply useless to repeat the bland twaddle parroted by John Major’s Tory ministers in the mid 1990s that “we’re not getting our message across.”

Voters are having no difficulty in understanding the Brown government’s message or in responding to it and they don’t like it. They won’t vote for it and, unless it changes, cataclysmic defeat awaits Labour at the general election.

Gordon Brown claims to be a listening and learning Prime Minister, but his actions give a contrary message, despite his belated recognition that doubling the 10p tax rate for five million low-income people has been a political disaster.

But this isn’t the only policy decision to have shocked or disgusted Labour’s natural supporters.

There are a whole raft of policies that have been chalked up in recent years at Labour Party conference, with decisions carried against the platform and dismissed with cavalier abandon by the party leader, whether Tony Blair or Gordon Brown.

When Mr Brown took over the reins of power from his new Labour twin, his spin doctors whispered that, unlike Mr Blair, the incoming leader was Labour through and through and he promised a new start.

But neither the propaganda offensive nor the nods and winks of his team have delivered real change.

In fact, he has continued his predecessor’s approach of treating the labour movement as the enemy, fighting tooth and nail to appoint his personal candidate, City fund manager David Pitt-Watson, as general secretary rather than Unite union official Mike Griffiths – a decision that is even the more remarkable since Mr Pitt-Watson has left the job without starting it.

Mr Brown’s apparent positive response to the conference decision in support of the fourth option for council housing has been illusory.

It’s the usual half-baked dog’s dinner of housing associations and part-own, part-rent rather than a programme of council-built, council-owned properties to tackle the acute shortage of affordable housing.

The PM has uttered warm words about the need to help agency and temporary workers, but he is the man who authorised his minister to filibuster proposed legislation.

He refuses to win easy popularity by taking the railways back into public ownership, even though, in light of the tens of billions of pounds handed over to greedy and reckless banks, no-one will take seriously his claim that renationalisation cannot be afforded.

Mr Brown has failed to draw up an industrial policy, being utterly attached to a free-market, easy come, easy go attitude to inward investment that has seen manufacturing jobs haemorrhage out of the economy.

And he rides roughshod over widespread complaints about his privatisation programme that hands public assets over to privateers while demeaning and short-changing public-service workers.

Unless the labour movement forces a change of political direction or, failing that, of leadership, there will be no fourth Labour term.

There will be a return for a Tory Party that is already planning further restrictions on strikes in public services. The time for polite advice is over. The labour movement has to act.

A Failing Relationship

Ellie Keen — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 22:01:50 +0000

IF Justice Secretary Jack Straw really thinks that, as a part of doing a chummy little deal with the other parliamentary parties over funding rules, he can haul every penny of trade union cash given to the Labour Party straight into its central funds, to be dispensed as party HQ sees fit, then he has got another think coming.

One can only wonder what view of the relationship between the Labour Party and the trade unions Mr Straw holds.

While Labour loyalists are struggling to hold the Labour-union link together, pleading that things will get better in the face of serial betrayals by new Labour that have left an enormous majority of the trade union membership in this country disillusioned and bitter, Mr Straw seems only to see an endless source of funding that new Labour’s upper echelons can commandeer. Well, it simply isn’t so.

The days of blanket support for Labour are long gone and trade unionists are becoming ever more distrustful of the party’s leadership, and with good cause.

The recruitment of CBI bigwigs into the government, the dismal treachery of the non-delivery of most of the elements of the Warwick agreement, the abolition of the 10p basic tax rate for the low-paid, the lack of movement on pensions justice and, most visibly of all, the government’s grovelling self-abasement to big business and its refusal to do anything about bringing the City fat-cat profiteers into line have all but destroyed the credibility of Labour in the eyes of most trade unionists.

Union after union has severed ties with the party and many more are now demanding the more discriminating use of their funds.

Support is being increasingly directed only at constituencies and members of Parliament who have earned the trust and the respect of the unions and that trend will inevitably continue and intensify.

And it is in this atmosphere that Mr Straw thinks that he can manipulate away even more of the unions’ input into policy.

Labour Party conference has already been effectively neutralised and this dirty little deal could, if Mr Straw got away with it, almost entirely sever the trade union link with Labour, while keeping the money conduit open and running – in one direction only, of course.

There is, it is said, no such thing as a free lunch and that holds as true for the Labour-union link as for anything else.

Mr Straw and his Downing Street master need to remember that the unions do not support Labour and keep it financially afloat merely because of Mr Brown’s nice smile or because the MPs are such jolly good chaps.

They support it when it serves, as it was formed to do, working-class interests. And when it opposes them, as it is increasingly doing, that support will be more and more difficult to win.

It is almost unbelievable that, as John McDonnell MP points out: “When the Labour Party is at its lowest ebb in the polls for years and we are facing local elections in a fortnight, the Labour leadership is picking a fight with its most loyal supporters.”

Take note, Mr Straw. New Labour and its luminaries have abused the trade union movement for long enough. It is time to mend your ways, not to try and wriggle out of your commitments. If new Labour thinks that it can stand alone without the unions, it will fail and no amount of subterfuge will keep this failing marriage from the divorce courts.

Alan Thornett’s Denunciation of Trotskyism (Part 2)

Ellie Keen — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 22:00:55 +0000

Part 2 (See here for Part 1)

Alan Thornett’s diatribe against Trotskyism provides an occasion for a re-examination of his own political evolution. It is instructive in that it demonstrates how a false political conception regarding the development of socialism became the starting point for a pronounced shift to the right by a layer of workers and middle-class people who were once attracted to revolutionary politics. This political shift was bound up with profound experiences made by the working class with Labourism in Britain.

In his denunciation of “Trotskyist groups” in Britain for ultra-leftism, Thornett makes particular mention of the Socialist Labour League (SLL) and its successor organisation, the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP). The SLL/WRP was formerly the British section of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), which publishes the World Socialist Web Site. Thornett’s tendency originated from a split in the WRP in 1974.

Thornett was part of a substantial layer of militant workers won to the Socialist Labour League in the 1960s as a result of its political struggle against the Labour and trade union bureaucracy. A leading shop steward at the massive British Leyland car plant in Cowley, Thornett quit the Communist Party and joined the SLL. He led many struggles in the plant, becoming chairman of the Transport and General Workers’ Union 5/55 branch and of the Joint Shop Stewards’ Committee at Cowley. He was also the leader of the SLL’s industrial wing, the All Trades Union Alliance.

Thornett joined the SLL at a time when it was understood that the development of the revolutionary party would necessarily involve a substantial leftward movement developing within the Labour Party and the trade unions that had the allegiance of millions of workers, who believed these organisations to be socialist. The task was to carry out systematic work to expose the socialist pretensions of the Labour and trade union bureaucracy in order to win the most politically advanced workers to the revolutionary party by breaking them from illusions in Labour. In this struggle, the unions, which represented more than 10 million members and had a very active rank-and-file, were vital arenas of political struggle.

The tendency that Thornett came to lead emerged as an opportunist orientation towards the very bureaucratic leaderships and organisations the SLL had sought to oppose. In opposition to the waging of a political struggle to win workers away from the leadership of the Labour Party and the trade unions, he was to develop the conception that a left tendency would emerge from within the bureaucracy itself that would be won to socialism.

In a period of sharp political shifts in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which in Britain took the form of major struggles against the Conservative (Tory) Party government of Edward Heath, this became the starting point for Thornett’s organisational and political break with Trotskyism.

Thornett had remained very much a trade union militant in his outlook and came to view the struggle waged by the SLL as running contrary to his own work as a shop steward in Cowley, which focused on efforts to work with various left Labourites, Stalinists and left radicals in defence of jobs and working conditions. Thornett wrote later that “Trotskyism, for us—and being a Trotskyist then tended to mean being a member of the SLL because of its size and influence—provided an analysis not only of capitalism but also of the trade union leaders, their role in society and relationship to the employers.”

However, he continued, “The SLL took this to the sectarian extreme. It saw the role the officials played in general as applying equally to them all. It failed to see the different strands within them and that some could play progressive roles. It was, therefore, unable to construct alliances with those who did stand on principle” [Emphasis added].

Thornett’s adaptation to the Labour and trade union bureaucracy developed under conditions of a growing political disorientation within the central SLL leadership of Gerry Healy, Cliff Slaughter and Michael Banda.

As is explained in “How the Workers Revolutionary Party Betrayed Trotskyism,” the split with Thornett unfolded in the aftermath of the unclarified break with the French Organisation Communiste Internationaliste (Internationalist Communist Organisation—OCI) in 1971.

As early as 1966, the OCI had insisted that the Fourth International had been destroyed and had to be reconstructed. Denying that the ICFI represented the continuity of Trotskyism, it rejected the significance of the struggle that had been waged against the Pabloite movement’s political liquidationism and wholesale adaptation to the Stalinist, social democratic and bourgeois nationalist parties, which it proclaimed to be “blunt instruments” through which socialism would be achieved.

In the tumultuous social and political struggles that wracked Europe following the French General Strike of May 1968, the OCI began to build a substantial youth movement, but on the basis of adaptations to various centrist tendencies in France and internationally. It subsequently formed the Committee for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International and the Workers Party (PT) in France as centrist vehicles, through which it established a leading position within the Force Ouvriere trade union. The OCI was responsible for placing Lionel Jospin in the Socialist Party in 1971. Jospin went on to become a key ally of Socialist Party leader Francois Mitterand, who served as president of France from 1981 to 1995. Jospin later became prime minister of France.

The SLL failed to conduct a thorough-going political struggle against the OCI, declaring instead a public split on November 24, 1971, before any real attempt had been made to clarify the cadre of the then-French section of the ICFI and win them away from the centrist perspective of the party’s leadership. This meant that the SLL was politically disarmed and weakened when Thornett’s tendency emerged as a result of a similar centrist deviation and became a direct conduit for a political counterattack by the OCI.

In 1973, the SLL took the decision to launch a campaign to become the Workers Revolutionary Party. The founding documents of the new party represented a major shift away from the SLL’s Trotskyist moorings, under conditions in which a militant anti-Tory movement was at its height. The new party’s declared aim was to “undertake a specific political task: to unite the working class behind a socialist programme to throw out the Tory government and replace it with a Labour government.”

Thus the new party was largely defined in terms of an electoral, tactical policy, rather than as an instrument for achieving the strategic goal of mobilising the working class, on the basis of the historic legacy and international socialist programme of Trotskyism, of overthrowing capitalism, establishing workers’ power and constructing socialism in Britain and internationally.

The demand for the return of a Labour government pledged to socialist policies was, in itself, correct, and provided the possibility of taking workers through the experience of a political struggle against the Labour and trade union bureaucracy. The SLL/WRP anticipated that, with Labour having been brought to power due to an offensive by the working class against the Heath Tory government, millions of working people would expect Harold Wilson’s new Labour government to implement major social reforms. This, in turn, would bring them into conflict with Labour and create the best possible conditions for a political reckoning with social democracy and the building of the revolutionary party.

The WRP’s founding document stated that the subsequent struggle “for socialist policies under a Labour government” would enable the party to “win many thousands to Marxism and throw out the reformist leaders of the trade unions and labour movement.”

However, the SLL/WRP made impermissible adaptations to reformist illusions in the working class. The WRP advanced an essentially electoral programme that made the most minimal reference to the party’s Trotskyist character and the international perspective and political authority of the ICFI. The programme of demands it outlined were framed as a series of “basic rights”—for employment, a higher standard of living, social benefits and better housing, and to “change the system” in an unspecified way. The launching of a mass recruitment campaign requiring only agreement on this programme meant that workers who had not politically broken from reformism and begun their political education as Marxists could flood into the party.

Subsequent events were to develop in a more complex and protracted manner than was anticipated by the WRP. The party was not wrong to predict that the working class would come in to conflict with the Labour government. (Strike action throughout the public and private sector against Labour’s enforced wage restraint resulted in the loss of 30 million working days in the “Winter of Discontent” of 1978-1979.) But it was wrong to assume that a movement against Labour would develop as an uninterrupted extension of the militant movement against the Tories.

Heath had called a general election on May 3, 1974, under the slogan, “Who rules the country, the government or the unions?” Labour won power just four months after the founding of the WRP, but as a minority administration. Its victory had the initial effect of strengthening illusions in the Labour Party and in reformism, not weakening them, including amongst workers recruited to the WRP.

The working class was not politically prepared to immediately wage a struggle against the Wilson government, which it had placed in office, especially after Wilson made significant wage concessions to the coal miners. The reticence to challenge the government was compounded by Labour’s minority status and concerns that the Tories might return to power. Wilson was forced to call a second election on October 11 of that year, in which Labour’s vote actually increased and secured it a parliamentary majority.

The WRP had clearly underestimated the strength of the illusions in Labour in the working class. It was forced by these developments to place renewed emphasis on its Trotskyist identity and its historic opposition to the Labour and trade union bureaucracy. But this met with ferocious opposition from Thornett, who articulated a right-wing reaction to the WRP’s efforts to deepen its struggle against the Labour and trade union bureaucracy.

As the ICFI later explained, Thornett “had developed a close relation with sections of workers on the basis of the centrist basic rights deviations of the 1973-74 period” and “now resisted the return by the WRP leadership to sharp attacks on the Labour government, especially under conditions where it retained a precarious hold on power and was faced with the imminent necessity of calling new elections.”

An additional factor in shaping Thornett’s view that the WRP leadership was being “sectarian” towards Labour was the fact that British Leyland’s future was in jeopardy and depended on the support of the Wilson government. In 1974, British Leyland announced projected losses of £16.6 million. It sought an overdraft facility of £150 million and began talks with Labour’s Department of Trade and Industry. Labour’s Tony Benn spoke in Parliament in December to urge that, because British Leyland was a “leading exporter” and a huge employer, it was essential that government money be used to assist it. This was agreed.

The role of the OCI

Thornett’s general discontent with the party and hostility to its leftward turn made him receptive to political advances made by OCI supporters in Britain, organised in the Marxist Bulletin Group and led by two middle-class renegades from the SLL, Robin Blick and Mark Jenkins. The aim of the two, who were later to pass into the camp of open anti-communism, was to create a faction inside the WRP with the initial aim of removing Gerry Healy from leadership. This, in turn, was considered only a step towards shifting the WRP to the OCI’s position that the ICFI should be liquidated.

Blick wrote in 1980 of how the Bulletin Group contacted Thornett through the WRP’s Western Region Central Committee member Kate Blakeney, who was met in August. Blakeney had told them “there existed an unofficial and rather secret opposition” grouped around Thornett that “had no clear platform or understanding where the WRP had gone wrong, but was rather a coming together of people who for various reasons were dissatisfied with the national performance of the WRP” [Emphasis added].

Blick states that he wrote “substantial sections” of Alan Thornett’s first oppositional document, including “the section on the Transitional Programme, the section on workers’ control, the section on corporatism, the section on Social Democracy.” He also collaborated with Thornett on an almost daily basis, preparing his reports “up to and during the expulsion of the opposition.”

The sections cited focus in large measure on opposing the WRP for its position that “the entire leadership of the trade unions and the Labour Party have been designated as ‘corporatist.’ ” Thornett’s faction platform stated that this was tantamount to calling them social fascists, as the Stalinists had called the Social Democrats in the Third Period.

The WRP’s political critique of Thornett’s right-centrist positions was correct, but Healy repeated and thus compounded the mistake made with the OCI of moving to an organisational settlement before fully clarifying both the party and the working class as to the political issues at stake.

Thornett’s provocative and disloyal behaviour no doubt played a part in Healy’s decision to do so, and he was soon proved right in his supposition that Thornett was working with the OCI. But this well-founded suspicion did not obviate the need to probe the essential theoretical issues raised by Thornett’s platform, which would have meant revisiting the conflict with the OCI and thus taking to a higher level the ICFI’s struggle against revisionism.

As a result of the confusion the split engendered, Thornett was initially able to take several hundred members with him when he was expelled, and the party lost its most important industrial base.

The split with the WRP liberated Thornett and his supporters to pursue “entry work” within the Labour Party, while he continued his trade union career at branch and national level until the late 1980s. Now in his seventies, Thornett has spent more than three decades trading off of the political confusion created by the WRP, while establishing a niche for himself as an advisor to whichever reformist or Stalinist bureaucrat desires his services.

His group was particularly active in the Chesterfield Socialist Movement, grouped around Tony Benn. For several years, he specialised in seeking to regroup various dissidents and splinters from the International Committee. But this was only a step towards ditching his pretensions to Trotskyist orthodoxy and making his way into his natural political home in the Pabloite USec. His International Socialist Group was recognised as a sympathising section of the USec in 1991 and became its British section at the 1995 World Congress.

With his latest writings, Thornett makes clear that his joining the Pabloites was only a step towards the repudiation of Trotskyism that he has now carried out, a development echoed amongst a substantial number of former radicals who have traded in their tattered credentials for well-paid positions in the higher echelons of the Labour and trade union bureaucracy.

In an additional polemic with the British SWP, Thornett writes a political paean to Galloway, describing him as “still the only left Labour MP to make a break with Labour,” “the best public speaker on the left,” and a “central leader of the anti-war movement” with “the biggest electoral base of anyone on the left outside of the Labour Party.” He adds that Galloway is “left Labour in his politics…. But it was this which he brought into Respect from the outset—a genuine component of left-Labour politics.”

Ultimately, this is what Thornett is concerned with: Ensuring that any new party must be a vehicle for various dissident Labourites and Stalinists that is implacably opposed to genuine socialism. “The strength of Respect Renewal, “ he declares, “is that it is serious about approaching other sections of the left, such as the trade union left and the [Communist Party of Britain], about a wider regroupment of forces to tackle the crisis of working class representation.”

Concluded

Why is Britain arming far-right militias?

Tim Holmes — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 05:16:37 +0000

On the website of the British Foreign Office, a small photograph recently appeared. It shows Kim Howells, our Foreign Office minister, looking into the camera, smiling, as he is surrounded by gun-yielding men accused of murder. He had not been taken hostage. No: he was there to represent a government that gives these men money and military aid.

By tracing the story of this photograph, we can trace the worst aspects of British foreign policy – and find clues to why the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have crashed into their current bloody dead-end.

Howells was in Colombia, a country locked in one of the worst civil wars of the past century. It began over forty years ago, when parts of the hungry, mixed-race majority began to fight against the fact that a tiny white land-owning elite held virtually all the country’s wealth. Since then, it has hardened into a conflict between two gnarled human rights-abusing wings.

To the left, there is a slew of guerrilla groups – most prominently the FARC and the ELN – who fund themselves by kidnapping, extortion, recruiting child soldiers and ‘taxing’ drug-producers.

To the right, there is the Colombian government and the right-wing paramilitary death-squads it has unleashed against any community of civilians suspected of leftish sympathies, or of challenging the elite. That’s why to be a trade unionist in Colombia – organising for better wages and working conditions for your colleagues – is to carry a tombstone on your back: more than 3000 have been assassinated since 1986, more than in the rest of the world combined.

Between them, these violent wings have killed more than 30,000 people and driven three million people from their homes.

And Howells – our representative – was posing with some of the worst abusers. He was huddled with the High Mountain Brigades, who Amnesty International says have been involved in hunting down and murdering trade unionists. Standing next to him was General Mario Montoya, who is so densely linked to paramilitary death-squads that even the US Congress has cut off chunks of his funding.

Here’s what our taxes and support deliver to ordinary Colombians. On January 10th, at 10.30am, Colombian soldiers wearing balaclavas burst into the house of Rosa Maria Zapata house, a 56 year old indigenous woman. When the soldiers pointed their guns at her and barked that they wanted to know where the guerrillas were, she screamed back that she didn’t know; she doesn’t know any guerrillas. They told her she was hiding weapons for the FARC. They told her they knew. She howled and protested. So they started searching – and a moment later she heard gunfire. The police announced they had killed the guerrilla. She went running – and found her severely disabled 22-year old son dead.

The British pro-peace group ‘Justice for Colombia’ believes these soldiers received British training. They have documented 36 other civilians murdered by British-trained forces in a six-month period, and they are asking the Foreign Office to finally outline exactly where our money goes – rather than hiding behind the shroud of National Security.

Worse, we are funding a military that is so densely enmeshed with the union-slaying paramilitaries that they are known as the “sixth brigade” of the Colombian armed forces. The relationship was symbolised in a famous football game in the 1990s. The local community in Cacarica were made to gather at the local football field to watch a match. It sounds touching. But the head of the local left-leaning community leader, Marino Lopez, was used as the ball, after being hacked from his body with a chainsaw. Uribe is now offering a ‘peace deal’ to the right-wing paras like this that allows them to escape proportionate punishment, but offers no such deal to the left.

So how has Howells responded? Easily: he has called his critics supporters of terrorism. Last week, in the House of Commons, he declared, “This has all been created by the organisation ‘Justice for Colombia’, which supports FARC, a band of gangsters and drug smugglers.” He also announced that the FARC is responsible for “most” of the murders in Colombia.

Both were straightforward repetitions of the Colombian far right propaganda line. In reality, ‘Justice For Colombia’ – which is supported by more than half of all Labour MPs – is opposed to all violence within Colombia. And the FARC – while unequivocally disgusting – are responsible for far fewer murders than the government and right-wing death-squads, according to every major study.

So how did this happen? How did a minister in a Labour government end up defending a hard-right Colombian regime?

The British government says they have become the second biggest military donor to Colombia (after the US) because they want to promote human rights there. But if you had a few million pounds to support human rights in that country, the idea you would give it to the High Mountain Brigades is simply surreal. Sure, the government claims to be giving “human rights training” along with their weapons licenses and cash, to “iron out” abuses. But as the historian Mark Curtis explains: “The Colombian military is responsible for its violations not by accident… It is part of a concerted and active policy to nullify the opposition and terrify the general population into further submission.”

No – the explanations for British backing lie elsewhere. The first is a desire to support the United States, because we project our power in the world largely by being a loyal adjunct to American military might. If Britain wasn’t offering these funds, the Bush administration would be alone in the world in backing Uribe, against a Latin America tipping towards the left and urging peace talks with the FARC.

And we are doing it to support the global, unwinnable ‘war on drugs.’ Since Bill Clinton’s Presidency, the US has been spraying hundreds of thousands of tonnes of chemical poisons onto the vast tracts of Colombia where the coca leaves essential for cocaine production are grown. All plants and trees die in their wake. Birth defects and cancer rates are rising. Some of the most precious biodiversity on earth is destroyed. And the effect on drug production? It simply moves to another area.

(It is only the drug-producing areas controlled by the FARC that have been fumigated. The areas in the North, controlled by the right, remain untouched.)

Drug production is so profitable and so popular it cannot be fumigated off the face of the real world. Drug prohibition hands great swathes of the Colombian economy to armed criminal gangs, from the FARC to the right. It ensures they will always have enough money to buy enough guns to outshoot the government and preserve their patches of territory.

There is another way. More and more Colombians believe it is only by brining drugs into the legal economy – where they can be controlled and taxed – that the guerrillas and paramilitaries can be stripped of their cash-flow, and the Colombian state slowly unified. The people arguing for this are wildly diverse: from the current Conservative Interior Minister, Carlos Holguin, to the former Attorney General Gustavo de Greiff who busted the notorious Medelin drug cartel, to the coutnry’s most popular singer, Juan Esteban Aristizabal. They all believe an end to drug prohibition is the only long-term solution to the civil war. Yet Britain demands the opposite.

There is one more crucial reason why we are supporting the Colombian military. The British oil firm BP controls half of Columbia’s petrol output. The historian Mark Curtis argues the UK is keen to ensure resources “remain in the correct hands” – that is, “our” hands. In a highly unequal country angry at seeing its resources siphoned off by foreigners, that means supporting an elite who are willing to use violence to keep the majority in their place.

These three factors can help us to understand why the military actions thousands of miles away from the jungles of Colombia – in Afghanistan and Iraq – have gone so wrong. As in Colombia, we got in, in large part, out of loyalty to the US: Tony Blair bragged he had “not disagreed with the US on a major issue” in his whole time in office.

We have misgoverned Afghanistan so badly because we are inflicting on the country the same ‘war on drugs’ we have wished on Colombia. If we turned up in any country on earth and announced we were there to destroy 40 percent of their economy, the people would fight back. The fact that the 40 percent consists of opium fields makes no difference to dirt-poor farmers. This is why we are losing Southern Afghanistan even to the hated Taliban.

And the US-UK government has misgoverned Iraq so catastrophically because – as in Colombia – it was primarily driven by a desire to ensure that control of the country’s resources went to The Right People. The protection of the Oil Ministry, while Baghdad’s museums and hospitals and universities were looted and burned all around it, is only the most bleak symbol of this.

The image of Kim Howells squatting with a unit who have tortured and butchered trade unionists can be seen as a Rosetta Stone for the dark side of our foreign policy. It is a reminder that, if we want to turn Britain into a force for human rights in the world, we have to campaign long and hard to turn much of it around. If we don’t, it will end with more women like Rosa Maria Zapata, clutching her dead disabled son and asking why.