socialism | ukwatch.net

Not the death of capitalism, but the birth of a new order

JamieSW — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 17:51:44 +0000

As the dust of the credit crash clears and the real world recession kicks in, the ideologues of capitalism are scaring themselves with spectres. “He’s back,” the Times warned its readers on Tuesday over a portrait of Karl Marx. Not only are sales of his masterwork Das Kapital booming, but the virus of the newly fashionable revolutionary has, it seems, spread to the heart of the capitalist camp: the French president Nicolas Sarkozy has had himself photographed leafing through its pages while Marx’s analysis of capitalism has been hailed by everyone from the German finance minister to the Pope.

In the US, John McCain has been lashing out at Barack Obama for his supposed “socialism”, the High Tory writer Simon Heffer excitedly dubbed the state bail-out of the banks “neo-sovietisation”, and the BBC broadcast a prime-time debate last week on whether the crisis signalled the “death of capitalism”. Meanwhile the Economist, the Pravda of the neoliberal ascendancy, has been trying to mobilise true believers for a fightback: “Economic liberty is under attack”, its current issue thunders. “Capitalism is at bay, but those who believe in it must fight for it.”

Of course, they are running ahead of themselves in a panic. If Marx’s central ideas about class and exploitation were really taking hold across the western world, you can be sure the mainstream media wouldn’t be running quirky, cartoonish pieces and debates about them, but something much more ferocious and alarming.

It’s certainly true that the events of the past few weeks have exposed deregulated capitalism as bankrupt and its ruling elites as greedy and inept. But it is the free-market model, not capitalism, that is dying. That is reflected in public opinion: a Financial Times-Harris poll conducted across the advanced capitalist world this month found large majorities believe the financial crisis has been caused by “abuses of capitalism”, rather than the “failure of capitalism itself” – only in Germany did the proportion blaming capitalism as a system rise to 30%.

As Sarkozy has pronounced: “Laissez-faire is finished.” It is not Marx who has really been rehabilitated in short order, but John Maynard Keynes, out of dire necessity. In the wake of the largest-scale acts of state economic intervention in capitalist history, politicians are now having to make a virtue of it. “Much of what Keynes wrote still makes sense,” the chancellor Alistair Darling declared at the weekend, as he announced plans to bring forward large capital projects and the prime minister defended higher borrowing to counter falling demand.

The symbolic significance of this official return to Keynesianism shouldn’t be underestimated. It’s 32 years since the then Labour prime minister Jim Callaghan bowed the knee to monetarism, nearly three years before Margaret Thatcher came to power, and announced to his party conference: “We used to believe that we could spend our way out of a crisis, but I tell you … it is no longer possible.” Faced with financial collapse and the threat of a full-scale economic depression, such fancies have now had to be consigned to the dustbin of history.

But claims that the current crisis signals the end of capitalism or the birth of a new socialism simply set up a straw man and divert attention from what is in fact at stake. If we’re talking about socialism as a systemic alternative, that is clearly not currently on the agenda in the heartlands of capitalism – or elsewhere, with the arguable exception of Latin America. And both its post-communist collapse of confidence and the weakening of the working class as a social and political force make it difficult for the left to take full advantage of capitalism’s stark failures.

That has led some, such as the historian Eric Hobsbawm, to conclude that the main beneficiaries of the crisis will be the right, as in the 1930s. There’s certainly a danger of growing support for rightwing populism on the back of mass unemployment; but if the new enthusiasm for Keynesian intervention and public ownership can be channelled to protect those most vulnerable to the crash – rather than make them pay the price for it, as now seems more likely – that need not be the case.

What the crisis is bound to do is increase the demand for alternatives both within capitalism and beyond it. It has already discredited the economic model that has dominated the world for a generation at a cost of endemic instability, rampant inequality and environmental devastation. In its defence of free-market capitalism this week, the Economist argued that, in the past 25 years of market liberalisation, hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of absolute poverty and speculated that this decade may see the fastest growth of income per head in history.

But most of that growth and poverty reduction has been in China’s state-directed and still heavily publicly-owned economy, while India’s lesser capitalist success story is so grotesquely unequally distributed that the proportion of its children who are malnourished – at 47% a global leader – has remained almost unchanged for a decade. For the rest of the world, growth was faster and far more equally shared in the postwar decades of Keynesianism and socialism.

An opportunity has now opened up for those political leaders prepared to use this meltdown to reshape the economic system, from Obama to Hugo Chávez. It’s often said that the left has no alternative model after the implosion of communism and traditional social democracy. But in reality no economic and social model, left or right, has ever come pre-cooked: all of them – from Soviet power to the Keynesian welfare state and Thatcherite-Reaganite neoliberalism – have grown out of ideologically driven improvisation in particular historical circumstances. Marx himself famously offered no blueprint.

Instead, the pressure to respond to economic need – as in the New Deal or postwar Europe – will shape the way the new economic order develops. Already, the forms of intervention have been sharply different from past crises, with bank nationalisations offering a potentially powerful new economic lever. We are no doubt heading into a new kind of capitalism as well as a period of growing support for more far-reaching social alternatives. But what form it takes will be decided by pressure, from above and below.

After the party

tim — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 22:00:37 +0000

There had been a long-running debate in the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) about our affiliation with the Labour Party going back to the 1980s. But it all came to a head during the 2002/2003 disputes. Our members were taken aback by how suddenly the pressure was put on by the government and the harshness with which we were treated. One Labour politician even described us as fascists. We settled the disputes in 2003 and at the following year’s conference we disaffiliated from the party.

An overwhelming percentage of the FBU membership supported the decision. I suspect that in the beginning a lot of our members just wanted to give Labour a bit of a kick but they have continued to back disaffiliation in the following years. Since then we have been thinking through how we develop: what we do politically as a disaffiliated union.

There was a concern among our officials that we would be left isolated and politicians wouldn’t talk to us anymore. I don’t think that has happened. We have a very good relationship with a lot of MPs and have also rebuilt some of our relations with government. Ironically, it seems that since disaffiliating we have formalised a lot more of our parliamentary work.

Using the political fund

We continue to use our political fund to support individual Labour MPs, such as John McDonnell in his leadership bid. Our regional groups have supported Green and Respect candidates, although the FBU nationally has not supported any other parties’ candidates since Labour.

In Scotland being disaffiliated has opened more doors for us. We have backed a range of candidates, including the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP). We have a good relationship with the Scottish government, possibly better than the one we have at Westminster. It strikes me how different the political debate in Scotland is to England. The first minister goes to the Scottish TUC and talks openly about council housing and opposing the war – stuff that a politician would never tell you here.

We also support plenty of single-issue campaigns. This year we have worked closely with the anti-fascist movement, funding the Love Music Hate Racism march and festival.

Some people think we should be moving further towards an approach where we pick out individual candidates and campaigns. I don’t agree. I feel strongly that there needs to be a wider approach – the left and the working class needs a political party but there isn’t one for them at this time.

No longer Labour

In theory, you would think that if the Labour government is on the ropes it would be an ideal opportunity for the trade unions to put some demands to them. I’ve not seen any evidence, although I hope this will happen.

Instead, it seems that among the affiliated unions there is currently a move to rally round the Labour Party as the election approaches. I’m pleased we don’t have that in the FBU, as I don’t think it washes with either members or people generally. There is no sign of a change in direction now and there is unlikely to be any change after an election either.

There is a huge amount of frustration with mainstream politics. There is consensus among the three main parties around a neoliberal agenda. For us as trade unions that is about the privatisation and restrictions on trade union rights that have alienated Labour’s core supporters.

I am no longer a Labour member. I am not convinced the party can be reclaimed in the way people want it to be at the moment. But we need to be political and the working class needs representation in parliament. How we achieve that is a drawn-out process. The trade unions that are clearly opposed to the mainstream agenda need to discuss and co-operate a lot more. The challenge for us is the need for a fundamental debate about the type of society we want.

For me as a socialist, I’d like a socialist society. I think there is a growing unease about some of the developments – ever-growing inequality and climate change, for example – and the fact is the policies around which Labour, Liberals and Tories address those issues – a market based approach – can’t do anything.

Tommy Sheridan pitches to the Scottish National Party

tim — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 11:30:53 +0000

One question posed by the recent by-election in Glasgow East is just how long it will be before Tommy Sheridan joins the Scottish Nationalist Party?

Sheridan is the former leader the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) and now heads the breakaway Solidarity, Scotland’s Socialist Movement. The two parties split in September 2006, after Sheridan took out an ultimately successful defamation case against Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World, over allegations that he attended a swingers club, which the SSP leadership refused to back. Both parties stood candidates in Glasgow East, which saw a humiliating defeat for Labour by the SNP with a 26.1 percent swing in what was Labour’s 26th safest seat.

Solidarity was formed by Sheridan’s closest allies within the SSP and backed by Scottish members of the Socialist Workers Party and the rival Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI). With no programmatic differences between the two parties, support for Sheridan was based largely on the belief that his high profile would provide the best means of maintaining the influence won under his leadership by the SSP in the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood, where it had six MSPs. In the event, neither party won enough votes in the 2007 May elections to gain a seat, and most of their support collapsed and went over to the SNP.

Sheridan even then made clear that he was in favour of an SNP victory. But the most striking feature of the Glasgow East by-election campaign waged by Sheridan is how he took every opportunity to make what amounted to a sales pitch on his own behalf, to the SNP.

During a BBC “Newsnight Scotland” roundtable interview of representatives of the smaller parties in the early stages of the campaign, Sheridan, speaking for Solidarity, opened his remarks by stating baldly, “If I am being absolutely honest, I hope the SNP would win rather than Labour. If we are honest, we are fighting for third place….”

Later, he returned to his theme, stating, “We’re not going to win the election, we want to take third…but if you put me on the spot and say who would you rather win, I would rather Gordon Brown got a political kicking….”

Sheridan made no mention of his party’s candidate, Tricia McLeish. While he made references to “big business parties,” at no time did he make any explicit criticism of the SNP.

Sheridan’s proposal that voters could give Gordon Brown “a kicking” by voting SNP dovetailed with the campaign of the SNP, which played down its demand for Scottish independence due to the unpopularity of the idea of independence with the working class.

Solidarity literature distributed during the campaign portrayed the party as left advisers to the SNP. A two-page article, “SNP in Power—One Year On,” took up half of its free news sheet.

In this article, Phil Stott and Steve Arnott pledged that “Solidarity will continue to welcome positive reforms from the SNP and say why and when we don’t think they go far enough; we will criticise the SNP when they put the interest of business and the wealthy before the interests of the majority of society, and we will point out consistently that it is the left leaning measures of the SNP that have so far also proved the most popular.”

Arnott and Stott explicitly aim to build Solidarity as a left cover to the SNP, but Sheridan’s uncritical praise for the SNP seems to be generating tensions within Solidarity.

At a Solidarity eve of poll meeting, in response to a question posed by myself, Sheridan made clear just how far removed he is from socialist politics.

In his speech, Sheridan noted that “the SNP is now the party of protest. SNP is to the left of Labour, so is Glasgow East.”

Voters, Sheridan went on, should seek to pressure the SNP. They should ask the SNP, “...are you supporting public ownership of oil?”

Speaking from the audience, this writer noted that Sheridan had “highlighted bad social conditions in Glasgow. The same conditions hold in London, Liverpool, Sheffield, Newcastle, and Hartlepool. A unified struggle by working class in Britain against poverty, inequality, the consequences of war in Iraq, the attack on democratic rights, and all the policies of the social elite for whom Labour and the Tories speak, is needed. In what sense does your proposal of Scottish independence advance this?”

Sheridan replied with a forthright call for Scottish “nationhood” on the basis of capitalism. Echoing the SNP’s long-standing perspective of “an independent Scotland in Europe,” he stated that the European Union “has recently expanded to incorporate 10 new nations with a lower population than Scotland. Scotland has the economic strength to survive.”

“Internationalism,” he added, “is ‘inter’ and ‘nationalism’...a collective of nationalisms”.

Thus, rather than expressing the strivings of the working class to overcome national divisions and to take forward a world struggle for the replacement of the profit system, Sheridan’s conception of “internationalism” is simply an alliance between the bourgeoisie of smaller regions and powers. This outlook defines his indifference towards the working class in the rest of Britain. His outlook is entirely nationalist. He concluded his reply by declaring, “I don’t feel British or part of British imperialism…. Labour is a British party.”

Sheridan has no similar reservations when identifying with a smaller imperialist nation, Scotland, and with the governing Scottish party, the SNP.

Commenting on the result in Glasgow East, Sheridan proclaimed, “This is a historic victory in Glasgow East for the SNP and I congratulate John Mason. Let us be clear it is a victory for a left of centre party which carries on Glasgow’s radical tradition….”

Sheridan is a man with an eye on the main chance. He is someone who won the admiration of sections of the Scottish establishment during his years in the Scottish parliament for his tireless promotion of Holyrood. He clearly has aspirations to revive his parliamentary career. Initially, he is attempting to do that by aligning Solidarity as close as possible with the SNP and, should circumstances allow, by joining it and acting as its left face.

Sheridan is still facing perjury charges as part of the fallout from the libel case he pursued against Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World. A major legal and police operation has subsequently been mounted against him for his humiliating defeat of the media giant for securing $200,000 compensation. Sheridan’s insistence on fighting the case, against his own party’s advice, split the SSP in two and saw SSP members giving evidence against him.

Defending the good name of “family man” Sheridan from lurid allegations was, clearly, more important to him than the very existence of his own party. For this was a question of maintaining “Brand Sheridan” and safeguarding his own future career.

The SSP, however, still has no differences of principle with Sheridan and Solidarity. Like Solidarity, the SSP proposes a “Scottish socialist republic” as a means to provide a platform for the social reforms once proposed by the Labour Party. Both parties support Scottish independence as proposed by the SNP as a necessary stage towards this goal.

Like Solidarity, the SSP bears full responsibility for the ability of the SNP to benefit from the collapse of the Labour Party, as expressed most dramatically in Labour’s latest by-election disaster. They always refer to the split with him as “a tragedy,” which prevented a more effective struggle for their own nationalist and reformist politics. Their struggle is reduced to which is the bigger and more viable vehicle for championing independence.

The SSP’s analysis of the campaign, authored by Richie Venton, focused heavily on the fact that its candidate and former MSP Frances Curran polled a few more votes than Solidarity in Glasgow East—555 compared to 512. This was most important for them in reversing the relative position of the two parties last year.

However, their line was exactly the same as that of Solidarity. Venton sought to misrepresent the huge swing against the Labour Party as representing support for independence. He admitted that “There was not widespread, overt, explicit talk on the streets of this being a vote on independence.” But then, echoing Sheridan and the SNP, he went on to assert that “it clearly is a clash of contrasting opinions on the Westminster Labour government compared to the Holyrood SNP government—and is a massive impetus towards independence.”

The SSP will continue to make its occasional denunciations of Sheridan and decry the SNP as a capitalist party. But it cannot distance itself from that fact that he was the party’s leader and public face for close to two decades. And it is within the opportunist and saltire waving milieu of the SSP that Sheridan’s politics germinated and bore fruit. As to his current allies in the SWP, they will find their alliance with the “best known and greatly respected” Sheridan to be a perhaps greater political embarrassment than their disastrous relationship with George Galloway.

People Before Profit Charter strikes a chord across the picket lines

JamieSW — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:41:02 +0000

The cost of food, petrol and fuel is going through the roof, with gas bills predicted to hit £1,000 a year in coming years. Meanwhile workers are being told they have to swallow pay cuts in real terms.

Yet at the same time chief executives at the BBC and Network Rail are getting bonuses and pay rises of hundreds of thousands of pounds.

All this has underlined the urgency of the People Before Profit Charter, which lays out ten demands to defend workers’ living standards in the face of mounting economic crisis.

Magnificent

Hundreds of people have signed up to the charter since its recent launch, including many involved in last week’s magnificent strikes by local government and Argos workers

“I visited the picket line at Argos’s Bridgwater depot last week,” reports Simon from Bristol. “Some 37 pickets signed the charter.”

Many people reported great enthusiasm for the People Before Profit Charter from council workers’ picket lines on Wednesday and Thursday last week.

The week before some 17 striking workers at the British Museum signed up to the charter. Others signing it include Jeremy Dear, general secretary of the NUJ journalists’ union.

The People Before Profit Charter has been launched by trade unionists, housing campaigners, students and pensioners as a response to attempts by bosses and government ministers to make workers pay for their economic crisis.

The charter’s ten points put forward proposals on a number of issues that would improve the lives of millions of people.

These include decent pay rises, taxing corporations, improving workers’ rights, opposing privatisation, building council homes, opposing racism and war, improving pensions, abolishing tuition fees and increasing the minimum wage

Supporters of the charter are now calling on people to raise support for it in their local union branch, pensioners’ group, student union, housing group and other campaigns.

People should also continue to ask their workmates, neighbours and friends to sign up to the charter. The level of support already garnered shows how deep the anger and concerns of working people go.

The People Before Profit Charter can help to mobilise the growing resistance to the attacks on workers – and it can help provide a left wing answer to the current crisis and halt the right in its tracks. Put your name to it, if you haven’t already.

Sign up to these demands

Wage increases no lower than the rate of inflation as given by the Retail Price Index. No to the government’s 2 percent pay limit.
Increase tax on big companies. Introduce a windfall tax on corporation superprofits, especially those of the oil companies.
Repeal the Tory anti-union laws. Support the Trade Union Freedom Bill.
Unsold houses and flats should be taken over by local councils to ease the housing crisis. No house repossessions. For an emergency programme of council house building.
Stop the privatisation of public services. Free and equal health and education services available to all.
End the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and use the money to expand public services. Stop the erosion of civil liberties.
Abolish tax on fuel and energy for old people and the poor. Re-establish the link between wages and pensions.
No to racism. No to the British National Party. No scapegoating of immigrants.
Reintroduce grants and abolish tuition fees for students.
Increase the minimum wage to £8.00 an hour.

Many workers and trade unionists are now engaged in strikes and protests to defend their pay, jobs and services.

We pledge ourselves to support their action and to support the campaigns that are dedicated to protecting working people, including

Unite Against Fascism
Public Services not Private Profit
Defend Council Housing
Stop the War Coalition
Keep Our NHS Public

Recent signatories include:

Tony Benn, NUJ general secretary Jeremy Dear, Jeremy Corbyn MP, POA general secretary Brian Caton, PCS vice president Sue Bond, CWU vice president Jane Loftus, Bfawu general secretary Joe Marino, John Pilger, chair of FBU South Wales brigade Cerith Griffiths, PCS DWP group executive member Helen Flanagan, vice chair of PCS Wales committee Marianne Owens, Unison Wales youth forum chair Chris Daw, PCS rep Cardiff magistrates court Liz Taylor, Unison rep in Vale of Glamorgan Karen Tyre, Lambeth Unison rep Jon Rogers, Stop the War Coalition national convenor Lindsey German, former leader of Lambeth council Ted Knight, Lambeth college UCU branch secretary Susan McDowell, Croydon Unison branch secretary Malcolm Campbell, Lambeth Unison convenor for finance and resources Chester Danners, Newham Unison branch secretary Irene Stacey, PCS Defra London branch organiser Niaz Faiz, Socialist Worker editor Chris Bambery, senior regional Unite industrial organiser Livie Reid, Argos Unite reps Nigel Jones and Joely Bendall, Unite convenor for Bristol council Steve Panes

All signatories are in a personal capacity

SEP speaks to voters in Cottingham and Willerby

tim — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 17:23:39 +0000

Chris Talbot is the candidate of the Socialist Equality Party in the July 10 by-election in the constituency of Haltemprice and Howden in the East Riding of Yorkshire. It was called following the resignation of sitting Conservative MP David Davis in protest at government “anti-terrorist” legislation enabling police to detain individuals for up to 42 days without charge.

Angela Morkos is a mature student at Hull University and lives in Cottingham.

“I am familiar with all the issues that people are standing for. The SEP stands for more or less what I agree with,” she said.

“I am against the war in Iraq, I don’t like big business and I think David Davis is mobilising right-wing policies in Britain. I watch the news on TV and I suspected this. And I would never trust a Conservative anyway, to be quite honest.”

Angela said she fully agreed with the SEP’s aim of preventing Davis mobilising the popular hostility to the Labour government for his own right-wing agenda. She explained that she opposed all the attacks on democratic rights carried out by successive Conservative and Labour governments.

“I think Gordon Brown has been disappointing. I supported Blair when he first came into power but I was disappointed over the Iraq war. I didn’t believe all this about weapons of mass destruction when I heard about it on the TV. I think it was a bit like Maggie Thatcher and the Falklands War, that Blair wanted to be the next Churchill. I think he had delusions of grandeur.

“Before this election I have tended to support Liberal Democrat policies in Parliament.”

Angela said that she wasn’t aware that the Liberal Party were not standing their own candidate and that they were calling for a vote supporting Davis. The SEP explained that this showed how far the Liberals have moved in a right-wing direction, that they can now support an avowed anti-working class politician such as David Davis.

Angela said she supported the fact that only the SEP was putting forward a coherent programme representing working class people.

In response to questions about the impact of the worsening economic crisis on working class people, Angela said, “I think it very worrying. I am on a low income. I feel that around here businesses exploit me. I am on Disability Living Allowance. I think there is a prejudice against people who are unable to work. I am doing my best and am actually studying to improve my situation and I find I am just exploited.

“All the basics are going up—milk, cheese, butter. I have to live on lentils basically and people lending me a couple of quid because they feel sorry for me. That is not very healthy and I’m anaemic as it is.

“Then there are dental charges and I don’t know how I am going to afford those. I also have to take regular medication and I am just glad that at least prescription charges are free at the moment for people on Disability Living Allowance.

“I think all this stems from Margaret Thatcher anyway. Tony Blair said that he agreed with her and I think it all worsened right from the beginning with her. And the governments after Thatcher have just continued in the same vein since then”.

Kate Webster is a retired doctor’s receptionist and lives in Cottingham.

Socialist Equality Party members and supporters campaigned in the villages Cottingham and Willerby on July 2 and a reporting team from the World Socialist Web Site spoke to workers, students and youth about the issues raised in the election.The WSWS reporting team asked her what she thought of David Davis, the Labour Party and their attitude to the question of democratic rights.

“I don’t think David Davis stands for democratic rights. I thought the Conservatives are always for the richer people aren’t they? What I can’t understand is him resigning and then trying to get re-elected. What is all that about?”

Katie agreed that both the Labour Party and the Conservatives are right-wing formations, hostile to the working class.

“I wouldn’t have voted for Davis and I think the Labour Party are too right-wing. I saw that the NSPCC [a national child protection organisation] was trying to get smacking stopped, but Davis wasn’t interested in that.

“I didn’t agree with the Iraq war. The Labour Party are more like capitalists now. They are giving themselves a great big raise and the credit crisis is not affecting their pay is it?

“There is no party now for the working class. I will read the SEP election statement and I will vote for Chris Talbot,” Katie said.

During the campaign in Cottingham several other local residents told the SEP that they had heard about the party’s campaign and would be supporting Chris Talbot. Among these was a currently unemployed bricklayer, who said that he had read the SEP election statement a few days ago and that he agreed with a revolutionary socialist programme. He said he would like further discussion on the role of new left formations in Europe and the Socialist Workers Party. He added that he was going to attend the Eve of Poll meeting being held by the SEP at Cottingham Civic Hall on July 9.

During the day Chris Talbot was filmed and interviewed by a student from the University of Sheffield who was covering the by-election as her final project.

Is Britain moving to the right?

JamieSW — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 02:07:20 +0000

It’s hard to remember that only nine months ago 1 May was projected as a likely general election day. Then, the theory went, Gordon Brown would be able to take Labour to a fourth election victory, strengthen his position as elected prime minister and continue for another four or five years. Brown was at that time – again hard to remember – enjoying a honeymoon following the unlamented departure of Tony Blair.

Instead the local elections in parts of England, Wales and London on 1 May, alongside the Crewe and Nantwich by-election, were terrible defeats for Labour. On the basis of these results, the Tories would have a 116 majority in parliament if there were a general election now. We can therefore be pretty certain that there will be no election, if Labour has anything to do with it, until late in this parliament.

These elections mark a watershed in a number of ways. Most importantly, they presage the return of a Tory government for the first time in more than a decade. May also saw the election of a Tory mayor, after eight years in office for Ken Livingstone, who won first as an independent against Labour in 2000, and then as the Labour candidate four years later. Alongside the election of Boris Johnson, the fascist BNP won a seat on the London Assembly.

None of this is good news for the left. While some right wing candidates made advances in the London elections (the notable exceptions being UKIP and the English Democrats) candidates from the Lib Dems leftwards either lost votes or only just maintained their previous ground (as in the case of the Greens).

It would, however, be a mistake to see the result as simply a shift to the right. Much more it represented a collapse of support for Labour with the Tories being the main beneficiaries. Why did that happen? Firstly, the election as a whole was fought on the basis of right wing politics. Crime and immigration dominated the issues being discussed, and this was a deliberate decision on the part of the main parties. When that happens it is much harder for a space to the left to open up, especially when Labour goes along with the consensus of more police on the streets and being tougher on crime.

More fundamentally, traditional Labour voters were punishing Labour for the 10p tax, the rise of food and utility prices, the housing crisis and much more besides. In the circumstances of a right wing and unpopular Labour government, staggering on after 11 wasted years, it is unsurprising that some voters saw little difference between Labour and the Tories.

It is instructive to consider two feature articles which both appeared on the same day a week after the election results. One, by Ken Livingstone in the Guardian, heralded his support for and in the City of London. The second, by David Cameron in the Independent, appealed to all those who were progressive on green or equality issues to join the Tories. No wonder voters were confused.

At the same time as these electoral gains for the right, there was another story during the election period. Teachers, lecturers and civil servants struck and demonstrated on 24 April. The demonstrations on that day were some of the youngest and most militant workers’ demonstrations for at least a generation.

The carnival held in London’s Victoria Park the weekend before the elections attracted 100,000 in opposition to the BNP.

Immigration

In addition, there is no evidence that attitudes on a range of issues – from privatisation to war – have changed in the course of the election or that the results are likely to lead to such a change of views. In many instances the general public remains to the left of politicians on these questions and on many more. There is one major exception to this – immigration.

The consensus here is much more right wing, with even those who claim to be anti-racist and pro-diversity (which even Tories like Johnson now boast) saying that there have to be limits on immigration. Or, as it’s sometimes put, “the country’s full up”. This, plus the growing wave of Islamophobia, has given a base for the BNP to grow. Even liberal opinion has played its part in this. The BBC’s White Season showed a concern for the “white working class” not evident when reporting strikes, or the class bias in education, or the housing crisis.

Even in the case of the BNP vote, however, it is clear that for many it represented a protest against the Labour government by people who felt they had been ignored or left behind by Labour. That does not mean we should dismiss the vote. While the proportion of the vote was not much higher than four years ago, the absolute number of votes was higher, and the election of an assembly member for the BNP gives them a profile and a level of confidence which they have not had in London for many years.

The BNP vote also highlights the contradictory nature of the politics in the recent elections. There is a sense of frustration and disgust with the policies of the mainstream parties and politicians, who are widely seen as corrupt and only in it for themselves, and this sentiment can be channelled in different directions. In these last elections the main beneficiaries were right wing parties, particularly over the question of immigration. But this was at least partly because the main parties have taken up and promoted anti-immigrant policies.

Most shamefully, New Labour continued to do so in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election, held just weeks after the local elections. Literature for the Labour candidate highlighted “concerns” over immigration and invited voters to consider, “What do you think is the biggest problem facing the area?” offering “immigration” as a tick box reply.

The left failed to meet the challenge presented by this election. In London it became a Boris and Ken show, with little substantive differences on most policies, and some of those not to Labour’s advantage (for example on ID cards or conductors on buses). The other parties were squeezed, especially UKIP whose vote fell most dramatically from over 100,000 to just over 20,000 and who lost two seats previously held on the assembly; and the vote I received in 2004 for Respect at around 61,000 first preferences fell to under 17,000 this time. It’s clear that many voters did not want to risk voting for a smaller party for mayor in case it led to the defeat of their favoured candidate.

While this squeeze affected the votes for mayor, the split in Respect and the divisions on the left did no one any favours in the list elections when they were in direct competition. The left vote was therefore split in London, with neither the Left List nor George Galloway’s Respect getting close to winning. There was clearly great confusion over the name. In addition, any division leads to political confusion with some people taking the view that they will vote for neither. The Left List vote was disappointing. It is clear that the weeks which we had to publicise a new name were not sufficient and that some people voted for Respect thinking they were voting for us.

It was, however, right to stand in the elections. When we took part in hustings we made a real impact, helped to pull the campaign to the left and put distinctive policies on housing, crime and immigration onto the agenda. We were also able to intervene around the teachers’ strikes and against the BNP putting a political alternative. It would have been wrong to take part in an election campaign where no one challenged the dominant consensus.

At the same time, it was also right not to put all our emphasis on elections. Elections are a very useful snapshot of consciousness among working class people at any one time, but they don’t tell the whole story. Of necessity, they reflect the past more than the present in the sense that people still vote mostly on past loyalties or on issues which particular parties have or have not taken up in the past. The different groups of workers going on strike over pay, or the 100,000 who attended the carnival, or those becoming radicalised over the banking and economic crisis and the high cost of food and commodities, or the students who have campaigned for fighting unions, have a specific weight regardless of if or how they vote.

Any socialist or left organisation has to relate to them, as well as to ethnic minorities suffering immigration raids, or the Muslim community suffering racism and attacks on civil liberties. Opposition to the war continues, as does defence of women’s rights, especially over abortion and the reactionary attempt to reduce the time limit. The outcome of the various struggles that take place in the coming months can have a greater impact on the balance of class forces, on people’s lives and their willingness to engage in further struggle than where they put their cross on a ballot paper.

Where does the left go from here? Firstly, this is a time when many on the left want to discuss why Livingstone lost, whether a Tory government is inevitable and how the left can organise to defend ourselves. We have had nearly a decade when the movement has seemed on the rise, since Seattle in 1999, and this is a reverse which requires explanation and serious analysis if it is not to lead some to despair.

Secondly, we have to engage in activity which can counter despair and point a way forward for the left: whether against fascism, for higher pay or over housing needs. But that activity on its own is not enough. We also need political solutions to the major ideological and political questions that face us. Socialists are well placed to do this: we have a set of ideas which attempt to understand the world in order to change it, also because we take a wider view of the working class movement.

The crucial questions facing the movement today are how do we develop successful struggles and how do we build an alternative to Labour which has so badly failed generations of working people? The election results were bad for the left overall in London – although even here there were some very good votes in north and east London which show the left can present an alternative – but in parts of the country the results were extremely good, for example in Sheffield and Preston. Other results, for example the anti-academies councillors in Barrow, who won four seats, show there is space to the left of Labour that needs to be filled.

That is why it would be a mistake to abandon the electoral field, and why the Left List should continue to organise locally, through meetings, networks and activities which can allow us to build a base in the localities. In London we began to establish very good networks among different ethnic minorities and trade unionists, but in this election they did not translate into votes. We have to build on our areas of success to find a way of winning more votes in future.

The left also needs to build links and organisation on every issue which confronts us – war, fascism, a growing housing crisis, attacks on living standards – which at present will fall short of total electoral or programmatic unity, but which should aim to go beyond single-issue campaigns. Labour MP John McDonnell has put forward a list of demands that Labour should adopt to win the next election and these sorts of issues are ones which can unite the left.

Finally, socialists are too few in number to bring about the changes and policies we need. That has to change, both by winning more people directly to socialist ideas, and by deepening our influence where we can make a difference and where we have already shown the importance of socialist organisation. That also means spreading our influence geographically, especially to areas such as outer London where the fascists have gained support in recent years.

The world is changing very fast. We do not know the full extent of the economic crisis – only that it is already affecting jobs, wages and housing. We can see the terrible impact of neoliberal policies as people riot in different parts of the world to gain enough to eat. We know that there is great disillusion with existing politics and a sometimes inchoate desire for change. Socialists can give a lead and make a real difference by fighting on the economic, political and ideological fronts.

Crisis and revolt

JamieSW — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 01:56:32 +0000

One year on from Gordon Brown becoming prime minister, we have passed a tipping point. At some time in recent weeks a number of events have added up to create a shift in the political situation in this country.

Since late last year Gordon Brown’s government has been in a tailspin that it cannot pull out of.

But what was a crisis for New Labour has become a much wider one, with growing numbers of people questioning what were once regarded as economic and political certainties.

The central issues are very basic ones – the cornerstones of life, such as food and fuel. People know that prices for these necessities are surging way ahead of the official inflation figure of 3.3 percent.

There is a growing realisation that these hikes hit working class people hardest, including pensioners, those out of work and the very low paid.

They all spend proportionally more of their income on fuel and food than the rich.

Chancellor Alistair Darling, the governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King and newspaper editorials are all telling us to tighten our belts and accept below-inflation pay “increases”.

But despite the growing global recession there is no sign of anyone accepting below-inflation pay increases in the City of London’s boardrooms.

Instead, the rich continue to flaunt the wealth they’ve accrued under New Labour and the Tories at summer social events, such as last week’s Royal Ascot race meeting.

When asked about the impact of a global recession on Britain, Darling dismissed the question saying the country had weathered such things in the 1980s and 1990s.

What he failed to mention was that these were times of historically low levels of working class resistance as strike figures fell.

Today if you read the financial pages there is a sense of panic about the economic downturn, reminiscent of fear accompanying the 1973 crash, which followed a surge in the oil price and collapse in profits.

Then the global ruling class faced an insurgent working class and a wave of national liberation struggles that peaked with the Vietnamese victory over the US in 1975. Rulers were terrified that a recession would pour petrol on the flames.

Today newspapers such as the Financial Times are charting the growing number of food riots spreading across Asia, Africa and Latin America.

They are nervous about an economic downturn combining with the failure of George Bush’s “war on terror” to achieve victory in Iraq and Afghanistan. This threatens to destabilise key Western allies, such as Pakistan and Egypt.

Finally, they see “strong” right wing governments, whose recent elections they acclaimed, crumbling in the face of working class resistance.

Such has been the case with the government of Kostas Karamanlis in Greece and that of the South Korean president Lee Myung-bak.

Confrontation

But the world’s rulers’ biggest disappointment is with Nicolas Sarkozy, who was hailed by some as the new Margaret Thatcher on his election last year as France’s president. Sarkozy has backed away from some major showdowns in the face of strikes and mass demonstrations.

Thirty five years ago the international ruling class decided they had to be seen to make concessions to workers in order to be able to return to the attack at a later date.

In Britain and elsewhere they turned to centre left governments, like that of Labour’s Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan, to broker a deal with the trade unions. These governments promised the unions would be consulted over economic matters and that they might even be allowed a say in political decision making.

In return union leaders agreed to limit pay increases, dissuade workers from striking, accept cuts in welfare spending and the rationalisation of “uneconomic” industries.

In the 1970s mass struggles followed a long post-war boom which had brought increased living standards, better housing, and free education and healthcare.

The recession seemed a blip, so the proposition that short term sacrifices would be followed by a return to better days had some credibility – especially when it was sold by the Labour left and trade union leaders.

Once the Labour government in Britain and the Democratic president Jimmy Carter in the US had contained and defused working class insurgency, they were replaced by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

Since the end of the 1970s the boot has been firmly on the foot of the employers.

Yet that has left a legacy of class bitterness which has grown in recent years as working class, and even some middle class people, find themselves priced out of their cities and towns.

Few think life is going to get better, let alone return to the days of council housing available for those in need and free education for all.

The government has imposed public sector pay limits at levels way below inflation rates and is urging private sector employers to follow suit. This is an enormous gamble which can easily go badly wrong.

The victory of the Shell tanker drivers, the show of strength by Grangemouth refinery workers and the 24 April strike by 450,000 teachers, lecturers and civil service workers means that the idea that working class people have no power has taken a huge knock.

Even if people don’t feel confident enough to walk out of the door, they like the idea of striking.

Constituted

On a lesser scale the decision of the police to baton anti-war protesters banned from marching against George Bush’s visit to Britain showed what their real role is – to protect the state and private property.

This brings us back to the tipping point. The first half of this decade saw massive protests against neoliberalism and then war.

The millions of people who took part in these protests virtually all worked, were training to work, or were retired from work. But the idea that they constituted a working class that had the power to collectively change society seemed remote.

Many people who would never previously have considered joining a union or who believed themselves middle class are facing a new reality.

This is accompanied by a popular rejection of the political, social and economic template championed by our rulers.

The Irish referendum on the European Union’s Lisbon treaty brought that home. Working class people formed the bulk of the successful no vote, rejecting what the Irish establishment told them to do.

When New Labour’s Jacqui Smith urged us to back 42-day detention without charge she said, “Trust me, as a minister and as a home secretary.” But she seemed blissfully unaware that the response would come back, just as in a pantomime, “Oh no we won’t.”

A similar sense of rejection must greet the continued claims by politicians and journalists that the occupation forces are winning in Afghanistan, even as British and US casualties mount.

Following the mass prison breakout in Kandahar last week, defence secretary Des Browne delivered this gem:

“The Taliban are losing in Afghanistan. I know it may not appear like that at the moment, but we are enjoying a degree of success.”

Fundamental

Socialists, anti-capitalists and those in the anti-war movement have to face a fundamental change in the political situation. But the enormity of what’s going on can seem to dwarf us, leading to a danger of passivity.

Economic crises lead people to question the capitalist system we live under. It can lead people to resist. Yet there are other forces looking to prosper from the situation.

For weeks the Daily Mail and Daily Express have carried front pages on price increases that could have been printed by Socialist Worker. But they were accompanied by a campaign blaming immigrants for our woes.

Further right the fascists of the BNP seize on false stories that expectant Polish mothers are blocking British mums from maternity beds. It is more likely that British babies are being delivered by Polish doctors or Nigerian midwives.

It is vital we follow last Saturday’s demonstration with a sustained drive to push the Nazis back into their sewer.

The lesson of the Stop the War Coalition is that the left can play a central role in initiating mass movements that pull in broad layers of society. The global “war on terror” continues to be a cancer at the heart of the system.

Yet while we continue to build opposition to the war, we must also look for other opportunities to spread resistance.

The 24 April strike is a harbinger of what might lie ahead on the pay front. Bus workers, London Underground workers and others must be looking at the Shell drivers’ success with relish.

Others, like health workers in the Unison union who accepted a below-inflation three-year pay deal, will become aware that they are going to suffer badly unless something is done.

Other issues can also lead to resistance suddenly surging up. We are seeing the return of bread riots around the world. Even in Britain the potential is there for anger over prices to reach breaking point.

Housing is the great issue rarely addressed in British politics. There has been a successful campaign to defend council housing, but now we are seeing evictions and flats built by speculators lying empty.

Young people are forced to stay with their parents and overcrowding blights the lives of young families. And this year will see the lowest numbers of houses built in Britain since 1945.

The job facing socialists is to act as detonators for mass resistance against the plans of our rulers.

We need to create a network of activists across Britain who can do that and explain to smaller numbers, in more in-depth discussion, what the alternative is to capitalism – socialism.

Those who have struck and marched represent a huge force that is capable of galvanising the majority of the British population for radical and ultimately revolutionary change.

That’s the possibility. But failure to address what is possible can lead to a high price being paid by us all.

Searching for the Left

eddie — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:25:00 +0000

Faced with a Labour government which is resolutely set on ensconcing itself as a centre right nationalist party, it is time for the left to start making new connections.

Compared with its counterparts in Continental Europe, the organised left in Britain has been unusually stable. Founded in the late nineteenth century, twenty or thirty years before the British Labour Party, most European socialist parties underwent at least three great convulsions in the twentieth century: they were split by the Bolshevik Revolution, driven underground by fascist dictators and reinvented after the collapse of Communism. In this sense these parties have a history written into them, which acknowledges that the world can change and that political formations are not immutable. Even now, the map of the European left is shifting, with realignments under way in both Germany and Italy. Britain, however, remains an exception to the European norm. Here the left has revolved around a single political formation, the Labour Party, which has been largely untouched by any of the convulsions, partly because of its late formation and partly out of simple contingency.

The mirror image to Labour’s stable position on the left is that of the Conservatives on the right. For almost a century, Great Britain has been a two-party state in which power alternates between left and right. Indeed, if one substitutes Liberal for Labour, this system has dominated British politics since the mists of time. The first-past-the-post voting system has reduced other parties to electoral impotence, whilst the ‘broad church’ posture of the two main parties has neutralised, if not absorbed, the extremes on either side.

The current national political scene might, superficially, suggest that this two-party system remains in full flower. However, this is not the case. The high point of two-party dominance was in 1951 when Labour and Conservatives between them polled 98 per cent of a popular vote of over 80 per cent of the electorate. Since then there has been a slow but steady erosion of their position. In 1966, the Labour/Conservative vote totalled 90 per cent of the total, taking 97.8 per cent of the seats on a 72.9 per cent turnout, whilst comparable figures in 2005 were 67.5 per cent, 85 per cent and 61.4 per cent. Two stark conclusions follow. First, it is now possible for a party to obtain a clear parliamentary majority with the votes of little more than one-fifth of the adult population. Second, the gap between the aggregate share of the vote of the two main parties and their share of seats won has grown significantly. The stability of the two-party system has become precarious.

In a parallel development, the broad-church nature of both parties has also diminished. The Labour Party shows this more obviously, with its socialist left component reduced in both numbers and influence to humiliating obscurity, but the Conservative Party has also become much narrower in its political spectrum, both to the left (where Labour has hoovered up any spare ‘wets’) and to the right, where both the BNP and UKIP have taken over. Again the effect is to destabilise the two-party system.

The great political achievement of the Blair/Brown regime has been to impose the policies of neo-liberal Thatcherism on the Labour Party whilst retaining electoral power.(1) I want to take this as read and to focus on the current political problem faced by the new leader, Gordon Brown: how to manage the shift in political position required to cement Labour as the dominant electoral force in Britain. In particular, I want to consider three ways in which the political base of Labour has moved, and the implications of this for the left. These concern, respectively, the diminished strength of British trade unions, the decline of the socialist tradition and the hollowing out of the British state.

The shifting context for Brown

Historically, trade unions have played a more prominent role in the British labour movement than in Continental Europe, where their support has been welcome, but not decisive, for the parties of the left. They have performed two distinct functions: as a politicising agent within the working class, and as a prop for the Labour Party leadership, which, for most of its history, has been to the right of most of its members. These roles have often been contradictory, but until the last two decades most of the left, both inside and outside the Labour Party, has argued that the ruling right wing could be defeated if grass roots trade union members were properly mobilised. In the mid-1960s, this was a realistic prospect and was, indeed, pursued with some success; forty years on, it has vanished. The unions are, numerically, much diminished. Their previous grip on large parts of the private sector has all but disappeared and continues to decline, whilst their membership is ageing. Union density is now amongst the lowest in Europe. This is a long-term trend which began in the Thatcher years, but has continued unabated throughout the whole period since 1997.

That this is a tragedy for British workers is undoubted. However, the political implications of this long-term decline have yet to be assimilated – at least on the left, for it is clear that Brown and Blair had long taken them on board. Nowadays, the unions do little more than service their dwindling band of members and their support for Labour’s leaders is largely undiminished, unchecked by countervailing pressure from below. Hence, any left project which involves attempting to shift the unions to the left has effectively disappeared. If anything, the political issue has reversed; the left now needs to find ways to assist unions to recover something of their previous vigour.

The second shift in context is more subtle but, in its way, more important. In the mid-1960s, the Labour left held on to a broad moral and intellectual hegemony both inside the Party and also outside in the wider left. This ascendancy was based around ‘socialism’ as it was then understood. In Eley’s words:

For roughly a century between the 1860s and the 1960s, the socialist tradition exercised a long-lasting hegemony over the Left’s effective presence … If the Left was always larger than socialism…socialist parties also remained at their indispensable core.(2)

Eley writes of the European left. In Britain, much of the membership of the Labour Party plus that of the Communist Party was the essential socialist core of that broader left.

In 2008, this central hegemony of socialism as the normal language of the left and as a sheet-anchor on the ultimate practice of Labour’s leaders has disintegrated.
Again in Eley’s words:

Socialist languages of politics, socialist models of organising the economy, socialist projections of the good society, socialist ideas in general have all been catastrophically delegitimized … Socialist ideas now have a more embattled and less legitimate place in the public discourse than one might ever have anticipated even two decades before (ibid).

I am not arguing that this is a good thing; I am simply stating a fact about the place which socialism now has in political discourse even on the left. It has no pull, even a residual one, on the Labour leadership, who are now evidently free to pursue whatever policy seems most fi tting their own designs; and it has little attraction within a wider activist left. Yet, and this is something that becomes startlingly obvious as one moves around the various public debates centred on the Labour Party, the left within that party as well as various fragments of the old socialist groups seem largely oblivious to this fact.

The third shift in context is the overall hollowing out of the British state and of the two-party system which has sustained it for so long. In the mid-1960s, Britain was a unitary state governed within the framework of a two-party system, historically largely dominated by the Conservatives, but with Labour the only credible and legitimate opposition and, within Labour, a socialist left which could visualise itself as being a government-in-waiting. This system has almost fallen apart. Scotland and Wales have started down paths of a legal national identity, whose future route is uncertain, but which has already given their nationalist parties a leading role. In England, a slow edging towards a more pluralist political structure has given a third party an increasingly prominent role, despite the obvious unfairness of the electoral system. All this has taken place against a background of growing disillusion with the political system as a whole, refl ected in the decline in electoral turnout.

The destruction of the socialist left inside the Labour Party, together with the effective demise of its socialist outriders, has left the British left leaderless and without any coherent political strategy. However, Gordon Brown, as he searches for the political base necessary for an extended period in power, also has serious political problems, despite his success as co-author of the project to shift the policies of Labour into the new centre ground of the neo-liberal hegemony.

The first is that the British state is slowly falling apart, with the effective separation of Northern Ireland, the slow-motion departure of Scotland and a slower, though still palpable, process in Wales. It remains uncertain just how these three national situations will evolve. None is near completion but each has acquired a momentum which will now be hard to slow, though it may well stop short of full independence. The formation of coalition governments where once there was effective single-party domination is one of the milestones along the line, a result of the various kinds of proportional representation which now exists in these quasi-states. This by itself offers a serious, if as yet muffled, challenge to the first-past-the-post system which now so distorts Westminster elections.

So far, Gordon Brown’s response has been to try to muster political support around the idea of ‘Britishness’, one of those weasel words whose real and surface meanings diverge. In this case, ‘British’ actually means English, a none-too-well concealed drive to give Labour the majority in England which it will increasingly need, but so far lacks, as the Celtic nations move towards greater autonomy. That he should adopt direct from the BNP the slogan ‘British jobs for British workers’ is evidence for just how seriously this issue of Englishness is taken by the Brown cabal.

The second problem is that the drop in electoral turnout, combined with the steady advance of third-party voting, threatens to become a crisis of political legitimacy if it continues much further. It should be emphasised that both these trends, and in particular the former, have been a feature of the Blair/Brown regime, notwithstanding claims that in 1997 it embodied the popular will.

The third problem is more complex but no less serious. Brown and Blair drove New Labour to adopt all the clothes of neo-liberal capitalism, so that now Brown’s central political position is essentially that of a right-centre (English) nationalist party. However, this terrain is already occupied by a previous incumbent who is unwilling to vacate it and still loosely ‘owns’ it. To appreciate this it is only necessary to note how often Labour is said to have outmanoeuvred the Conservatives by occupying ‘their’ territory. In other words, Labour is still seen as a party which has taken power, rather like a cuckoo, by stealing another’s nest. (David Cameron is now attempting to emphasise this by his refrain that Brown simply ‘steals’ his policies.)

The result is a political system which has shifted from apparent stability to one perpetually unstable, as potential voters swing from one centre-right nationalist grouping to the other, depending on which manages to push the right buttons at the right moment, whilst others simply turn away from voting on the entirely rational basis that there is no difference between the only two parties which can achieve power. The extraordinary shift in the opinion polls in October 2007, apparently because of one small policy claim on inheritance tax, is a vivid reminder of this. Neither to the left nor to the right is there a real alternative to this duopoly – at least not in England – though there have been lurches in specifi c constituencies towards both extremes (Respect, UKIP and the BNP), as well as towards independents like Richard Taylor in Wyre Forest, which suggest that there is some repressed desire to find one. The Liberal Democrats also waver around the centre, uncertain which way to swing as they seek to offer alternatives to both sides, sometimes taking away their supporters only to find them turning back as the specific issue that attracted them, such as opposition to the Iraq war, fades.

Brown’s central problem is that New Labour achieved power in 1997 essentially by offering a new take on Thatcherism. In this it had considerable success. However, sharing a house with another tenant means that, ultimately, the other partner will have their day. If politics becomes simply a struggle between the Ins and the Outs in which, inevitably, the labels are reversed at regular intervals, then New Labour is doomed to defeat; the only issue is the precise timetable. On this inexorable law Brown is now hung. His only way out is to claim legitimacy over the premises now shared with Conservatives and to move them out, something that requires them either to relinquish it or to be erased from it. In this endeavour he has two key advantages: fi rst, he has power, that is he has the ability to offer real political office and honour; and second, he leads a party which is, apparently, unsplittable, whatever policies are espoused. Ironically, given Labour’s history, the Conservatives are now more vulnerable in this respect because the internal structure of the party, whilst hardly democratic, does offer much more room than Labour for disaffected groups to organise into factions, and there are a number of issues – notably Europe, but also others on social policy and the environment – over which the factions are bitterly divided. The electoral fright occasioned by the rather absurd UKIP shows up this fragility. This factor may prove decisive, as the open disputes within the Conservatives in summer 2007 showed, even if they superfi cially united under the potential threat of a snap election. Brown’s great disadvantage is, of course, events – in particular, the rapid deterioration of the economy or any support for the USA over a new war, this time in Iran.

In first, tentative steps, Brown has begun to lay out his stall. In policy terms he will stay rock-solid on the nationalist centre-right whilst, politically, beginning to offer a home to disaffected or possibly just bored members of both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. He will play tunes on the theme of being the big-tent party and hope that, at a suitably opportune moment, he can turn over the national unity card, split the Tories by filching a chunk of their MPs and possibly some of their leadership, and humiliate the Liberal Democrats by doing the same thing with them. Until the moment comes, he will continue to appoint non-party business leaders such as Digby Jones as junior ministers, and assorted Tories and Lib Dems in the hitherto unknown constitutional role of ‘government adviser’.

This will be a hard trick to carry off. If successful, it may come to be called in future political science textbooks an inverse Ramsay Mac. On the other hand, it could fail. Either way, it is a manoeuvre that Brown is almost forced to try as it offers a solution to all three of the political problems noted above. A centre party reorganised on such lines would almost certainly retain political legitimacy by securing a large share of the popular vote – at least at its first general election – and could thus fend off the tricky question of electoral reform. It would obtain such a margin most securely in England and would allow Scotland and Wales and their beleaguered Labour Parties to sail off to whatever destination beckoned, defusing the national question at least until specific and unavoidable demands for further national autonomy were tabled. But the one issue which Brown almost certainly ignores is how the left in his own party would react to such a manoeuvre, however adroitly carried through. The Labour leadership election debacle showed just bereft is the Labour left of any leader who might threaten defection. However, the political imperatives of Brown’s position may yet open up new possibilities for the wider left.

Where is the left?

The process of political hollowing-out discussed above, combined with the catastrophic, if partially self-inflicted, defeats of the 1970s and 1980s, have produced a left in Britain which is scattered, fractious and unable even to recognise itself except by largely meaningless labels of affiliation. The key, though apparently paradoxical, question is just what constitutes the left and where it can be found. It is, in other words, a process of self-discovery. There are many over-lapping answers to the former question of course but the following may serve:
The left encompasses those who believe:

that, in general, collective responses to general social, environmental and economic issues are to be preferred to individual ones;

that, in particular, market mechanisms are undesirable ways of providing public services;

that these public services include education, health, welfare, policing and national security, as well as some other areas, which might include some natural utility and transport monopolies and some aspects of housing;

that health and education should be free to all without discrimination;

that practical and functioning forms of democracy should exist in all areas of social activity, including the economy;

that forms of ownership other than private are preferable in many sectors of the economy;

that all citizens are entitled to receive a basic level of financial support from the state if they are without personal resources;

and that equality is a public good in its own right.

There is plenty of scope for the argument and dispute traditional on the left over these, and they could be expanded, particularly at the international level, but they encompass what most would think of as forming the broad left.

It should be clear that this left is wider than what, historically, was called the socialist left, whose core belief was that society operated under a general social and economic system called capitalism, which could and should be replaced by an alternative system called socialism, both systems being essentially defined by ownership. It needs to be recognised that a significant part of the left, as defined above, is resistant to the very idea of overarching systems and does not recognise any neat dichotomy into capitalist and socialist.

It also needs emphasising that much of the left now lives inside political areas which are by no means ‘owned’ by the left. There is left participation in areas such as nationalism, the environment, feminism, the peace movement, and a whole range of international issues such as resistance to Israeli oppression of Palestinians or the war in Iraq, as well as dozens of local and regional initiatives, but none of these are wholly of the left. The environmental movement is a key example. Although the left has a prominent role in the Green Party, it is by no means the only grouping there, whilst figures such as Zac Goldsmith have perfectly sustainable environmental credentials whilst being, politically, on the right.

So where does this left now reside? Perhaps a division into five, overlapping sectors is helpful. First, there is a core of left-wingers within the remaining membership of the Labour Party, including some elected Labour representatives. Second, there is a left fraction of a number of other parties including the three nationalist parties, the Green Party and, yes, the Liberal Democrats and which will also include some of their elected representatives. Third, there are the members of those small socialist groups which still retain an explicit attachment to the Communist or Trotskyist parties of the past. Fourth, there is a body of individuals who have been members of the Labour Party as well as those Communist or Trotskyist parties, who retain left ideals but have detached themselves from active national politics. Fifth, and probably the most numerous, there is a body of individuals who are active in some form of political action, both local and global, and who regard existing political formations at least with scepticism and often with downright hostility. Some of these actions are descendants of the local campaigns once organised by Labour and Communist members but now largely detached from any organised political body. Others are part of wider and looser assemblies such as the anti-globalisation alliance.

Just how many people could be assembled under these headings is impossible to know; a personal guess would be around a quarter of a million activists, with the majority in the last two categories. In electoral terms, a left platform based upon the above principles might be able to get ten to fifteen per cent of votes cast in most constituencies. But numbers are, at least for the moment, largely irrelevant. The task faced on the left is how to fashion some kind of network from these disparate groups, in which they can acknowledge each other and engage in debate about political strategy, without attempting to denigrate the choices that have led to individual places of residence, but with the objective of developing some discernible impact on practical politics. This is not a new project. It first surfaced forty years ago in the May Day Manifesto group and re-emerged nearly thirty years ago in Rowbotham, Segal and Wainwright’s vision of a left Beyond the Fragments; and there were efforts in the 1990s to form some kind of red-green alliance which effectively amounted to a new kind of left unity. All failed, though not without some initial success. Why should any new endeavour succeed now?

The negative answer to this is that there is really no alternative. Efforts to work through the Labour Party have failed whilst the left outside the Labour Party has fragmented in all directions without any clear purpose. The positive answer has to be that Britain is approaching a general political conjuncture which, as the previous analysis argues, is unstable and likely to give rise to seismic movement as the great, colliding, tectonic plates of Labour and Conservative, moving over rather than confronting each other, fi nally give rise to sudden shifts. In this sense, the Brown project, which I described above as being essentially forced, may be precisely the political opportunity the left needs. The fi nal, explicit centring of Labour, the moment when the cuckoo tries to change into a blackbird, is the time when a clear left formation could emerge, just as a clear right formation may also develop as the
Conservatives split up.

The problem with this is that, although the broad idea of such a shift may be accepted, its timing and scope remain in the hands of others, in particular a notoriously secretive and manipulative other. Perhaps the key is that the next general election is likely to be both close and chaotic; chaotic in the sense that it will have a great variety of dynamic strands running through it whose interaction is very hard to forecast. Many on the left voted against Labour in 2005 on an anti-war basis and some of these have permanently changed their affiliation to other parties. Others will return to voting Labour on the age-hold grounds of keeping the Tories out. Still others will never have left Labour though retaining grave doubts over the New Labour project. Others have already voted for other parties such as the Greens or Respect. In Scotland and Wales, the formation of nationalist governments, albeit on a coalition or minority basis, means that old voting patterns are being dissolved, with many on the left choosing to fight their corner inside the nationalist parties. These are just the confusions and dilemmas existing on the left. The more Brown pursues his big-tent theme, opening up to all and sundry on the right, the more confusion will reign there too.

Organised and systematic tactical voting based upon simple criteria for being ‘on the left’ could have a swift impact in such circumstances. There is no possibility that these disparate elements can be reconciled into any common voting at a national level at least at the next election. However there does exist a chance that the electoral dilemma can be recognised and a common approach worked through locally in some cases, whilst the very process of recognition could be a major step on the road of reconciliation.

Where to begin? Perhaps the best approach is to change the metaphor used to describe left political action, which has traditionally been dominated by the quasi-Darwinian slogan that from acorns do big oaks grow – though only one acorn succeeds, crushing out all the other seedlings from failed acorns. Instead let us turn to the metaphor of rain-making by seeding clouds with silver iodide particles, no one of which is decisive but in which all are necessary. The left exists in Britain as a large amorphous cloud without measure and without purpose. Just what would happen if it could all shift in one direction is hard to know but it would certainly be spectacular. We should take as our alternative slogan that from many drops a flood can come.

This essay is a summary of a longer appraisal by David Purdy and Michael Prior on the definition and historical role of the British left, which can be seen at hegemonics.co.uk

Notes

1. A full analysis of this process can be found in Feelbad Britain, available at
hegemonics.co.uk.

2. G. Eley, forthcoming.

3. Ibid.

The Union Busters

tim — Fri, 16 May 2008 10:14:22 +0000

Union busting is as old as trade unions themselves. Ever since workers started to form their own organisations back in the 18th century to fight for decent working conditions, employers have tried to break them. In the old days workers would be beaten, imprisoned, and sometimes killed for participating in trade union activities. Better working conditions meant less profits for the boss, and a harsh hand was dealt to keep the rich ruling minority firmly in charge.

Nowadays, in developed countries like Britain and the USA, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this kind of oppression towards working people had become a thing of the past. After all, we live in a democracy. But the case studies below show quite the contrary. Although techniques have changed far from becoming a thing of the past, union busting has swelled to become a multi-million dollar industry.

After the 1935 US National Labor Relations Act established the right to join a union and bargain collectively, companies seeking to operate union free could no longer use the bare-knuckle tactics of old. They needed more subtle and sophisticated tactics to fight the trade unions. What they needed were private expert companies that they could hire to do their dirty work for them, companies specialising in union avoidance services. Until the 1970s, however, professional union avoidance consultants were small in number and were not yet part of mainstream industrial relations. Most employers kept quiet about the idea of hiring consultants. One consultant stated that employers “used to sneak to seminars about keeping your plant non-union. They were as nervous as whores in a church! The posture of major company managers was, ‘Let’s not make the union mad at us during their organising drive or they’ll take it out at the bargaining table.”

That mindset changed dramatically in the 1970s and ‘80s, a period of significant expansion for the union avoidance industry, when most employers shed their inhibitions about recruiting union busting consultants. The size of the consultant industry increased tenfold during the 1970s, as employers sought out firms that could help them defeat trade union formation and expansion. Union busting consultants organised thousands of anti-union campaigns, targeting areas of growing importance to unions like healthcare, and white-collar employees. Today, the monopolisation of big business has led to giant companies accumulating enormous profits, and with them, the resource for union busting has grown to unprecedented proportions.

Genesis of Union Busting

The Logan Report, produced earlier this year by the British Trade Union Congress (TUC), reveals some startling statistics. It is estimated that companies in the USA alone are spending a whopping $4 billion each year on union busting! If you take into account that this money is directed mainly at a small number of workers actively engaged in struggle at any one time, that works out at thousands of dollars per worker. Add to that a staggering 25,000 lawyers that are apparently committed to preventing trade unions developing across the USA, and you have what has been described as a genesis for union busting policy.

The Burke Group (TBG), based in California, is one of the worlds’ biggest union busting consultants. It advertises itself as a ‘management consulting firm specialising in union avoidance’. TBG has conducted over 800 union busting campaigns since its establishment in 1981, with clients such as Coca-Cola, Mazda, General Electric, Heinz, DuPont, and Lockheed Martin, with whom they boast a 95% success rate!

The tactic used by union busters like TBG is to get into the workplace and convince the workforce against voting in favour of union representation, or recognition. As trade unions benefit workers’ interests, the only way to achieve this is to lie. Workers are given company leaflets warning that if they join the union they are likely to be permanently on strike. They mislead workers into believing that the union will start harassing them in their homes, risk their job security, and cause them a loss of earnings and benefits. In other words they convince workers into believing exactly the opposite of what trade unions actually offer.

One textbook example of TBG’s union busting campaigns was for the Chinese Daily News (CDN), the largest Chinese language newspaper in North America. In October 2000, 152 mostly Taiwanese workers started a trade union organising campaign after management announced plans to cut pay, and force employees to sign a statement that they could be fired at any time. Within a month, 95 percent of the employees had signed union authorisation cards. In response, CDN hired TBG who immediately started an aggressive anti-union campaign. In March 2001, the workers stood solid and voted again for union recognition. The CDN management told the workers that it was prepared to spend $1 million on defeating the union. True to its word, by September 2005, after an intense five-year anti-union campaign, the union lost a rerun ballot. The head of the Newspapers Guild subsequently described the events as the “fiercest anti-union campaign I have ever been involved in.”

But isn’t this against the law I hear you ask? The simple answer is yes! The trouble is that legislation is so weak that it’s cheaper for the company to pay out damages to individual workers in court, than to give in to the trade unions. In 2007, the US Court of Appeals awarded CDN employees $2.5 million for numerous labour law violations committed by the company, but they will probably never gain union recognition.

Organisations like TBG have been so successful that, despite some 60 million Americans saying that they would like to join a trade union, national membership currently stands at only 7.5 percent of the US private sector workforce.

Bringing It Back Home

And if you thought this kind of thing could never happen here, think again! The Burke Group has been accused of bringing union busting tactics to Britain. In fact, a 2008 survey of trade union organising campaigns in Britain found that employers used anti-union consultants in about one fifth of the cases. TBG has attracted large companies operating here in Britain to its sinister services, including T-Mobile, Amazon.co.uk, Virgin Atlantic, Calor Gas, FlyBe, Cable & Wireless, and Kettle Chips. Many of TBG’s anti-union campaigns have had a devastating impact.

In the case of T-Mobile, George Rankin, an organising officer from the Communication Workers Union (CWU), has described some of the tactics that were used. He said that TBG sent a 7-minute video to the homes of five hundred and fifty T-Mobile workers in order to convince them against voting in favour of recognition of the CWU. TBG used scare tactics like those listed above. Workers were moved away from trade union influence by outsourcing their jobs to private companies. Trade union members were also intimidated and harassed. The union lost the vote for recognition by two to one. It’s a similar story with Cable & Wireless, and with Kettle Chips. The Graphical Print and Media Union involved in the Amazon case stated that “we had never faced this level of serious professional resistance before”, after the union also lost the vote for recognition.

But the FlyBe case is most revealing. In 2006, Europe’s largest regional low-cost carrier hired TBG when 400 cabin crew tried to join the Transport & General Union. However, midway through TBG’s union busting campaign, the union (now called Unite) persuaded FlyBe to drop TBG, and subsequently a huge shift by the workers in favour of union representation led to an election landslide, with 94% of the workers voting in favor of unionisation in an 89% turnout.

Fight Back

What does all this show? It shows that if the workers are left to organise they choose the trade unions. It shows that the only way for companies to avoid trade unions is to lie, to cheat, to manipulate, and to attack. It shows that the argument about capitalist society being governed by the natural forces of market trading is utter nonsense. Capitalist society is, in part, maintained by employers who squander billions of dollars to ensure that the rich stay rich, and the poor stay poor. These battles between trade unions and employers effectively mark out the boundary between the workers, and the business owners in society. It is a boundary between two classes. One side is fighting for decent working and living conditions, and the other side fighting to preserve exploitation and maintain its profits. For one side to gain the other must lose. True we live in a democracy, but it’s a parliamentary democracy, where legislation favours the interests of big business owners, not working people. The enormous resources currently being poured into blocking the unions in the workplace serves to exacerbate this problem. It means the discontent of the exploited workforce is trapped beneath the surface of society and will fester until it can find an avenue of expression.

The two trade union federations in the USA and Britain, the AFL-CIO and the TUC, have signed a joint agreement to work together to eliminate the intimidation of workers who want to improve the quality of their families’ lives by joining or forming a trade union. The two union federations agreed to share information about the activity of union busting firms, to develop a shared database of union busting activity, and create “Busting the Union-Busters” training materials. Both will jointly lobby governments and relevant international bodies to restrict the activities of the union busters. But, the only way to beat union busting once and for all is to unite the workforce, and join and organise in our trade unions, our own class organisations. A collective problem requires a collective solution. Ultimately we must build a new society based on the needs of the majority, not the needs of the rich minority. These are the foundations of a workers’ democracy, of a socialist society.

Out-thought by the Tories

Ellie Keen — Sat, 10 May 2008 21:12:41 +0000

We could be at a turning point in the political life of the country. The electoral alliance that brought New Labour to power is disintegrating. Popular indifference towards the government is hardening into outright dislike.

While the government pretends nothing is wrong, David Cameron’s new Conservatives are staking out ground that once belonged to the left, talking about a social recession, taking the ideological initiative, hungry to win. Look at some of the rightwing thinktanks and you discover a profound shift in Tory thinking. It seeks a break from Thatcher and Hayek. The project is significant: to build a basic emotional connection with the people. Last week’s results suggest it is beginning to work.

This new pro-social, compassionate Conservatism is intellectually backed up by a focus on fraternity. The left, they argue, is wrong to think fraternity is another word for equality. And the Thatcherites are wrong to think that liberty will take care of fraternity. Fraternity is about society, wellbeing, and relationships. The Labour government, it argues, has failed because it has abandoned the fraternity of ethical socialism in favour of state management.

The government’s response has been woefully inadequate: it argues that the Tories have no policies, or they’re old Etonians with a financial black hole in their plans. They’re copying us. We’ll scrutinise their policies, expose their elitism. We’re for the many, they’re for the few. But these arguments miss the point. James Purnell has come out fighting: “We have a vision of the good society that the Conservatives cannot match.” Yet this is precisely what the Labour government lacks.

Rather than dismiss Cameron and Boris as Eton toffs, we should ask why is it that they are connecting with people. This government has lost the language of ethical politics – relationships, values, even social justice. It does not discuss fraternity or a culture of care and empathy. It doesn’t know how to speak to people’s insecurities. Its silence over the super-rich is matched by the harsh language deployed against migrants or welfare recipients. It has no vision of a more democratic way of governing. The joys, pleasures and frustrations of everyday life pass it by. Faced with a crisis it triangulates rightward. Initiative after initiative blurs into a white noise. It offers to listen. The danger is it hears only the echo of its own jargon.

And yet Cameron’s Conservatism is built on a major contradiction. It believes in social justice but thinks the state is the problem. Markets are the solution to social recession, economic development and the ecological crisis. But as the credit crunch leads us towards recession, markets won’t deliver security, let alone social justice. Yet the government can’t exploit this contradiction, owing to its own blind faith in markets.

Its time to take on the new Conservatism. We have to expose its own tensions and weaknesses. We must also spell out our own version of the good society. First, we need to reclaim fraternity – it’s not about brothers, it’s about togetherness in adversity and in joy. It goes to the heart of the question of what being human means. Fraternity is about living with and for others, building unity out of people’s differences.

Labour must re-establish its belief in equality. Equality is the moral standard of fraternity. It is the ethical core of social justice. It holds that each person is irreplaceable and of equal worth. As the dust settles on these elections, Labour needs to rediscover its soul.

Jon Cruddas is Labour MP for Dagenham. Jonathan Rutherford is editor of Soundings journal and professor of cultural studies at Middlesex University

cruddasj@parliament.uk

Reaping What they have Sown

Ellie Keen — Mon, 05 May 2008 22:11:08 +0000

The collapse of Labour ’s vote in these local elections is about something more than New Labour ’s Daily Mail electoral tactics and the stay-at-home revolt of Labour’s traditional supporters. Though this continues to be a factor – reinforced by the 10 per cent tax ’mistake’. But there’s something deeper going on and it’s less easy to reverse. New Labour is now reaping what it has sown: a cumulative weakening in values of social solidarity, public service and altruism which provide the invisible bedrock on which the electoral fortunes of the Labour Party ultimately depend. New Labour has lived electorally off the legacy of earlier eras of Labour politics without renewing it and it’s a renewal that has been direly needed.

From Mandelson’s celebration of the ’filthy rich’ and Blair ’s contempt for public sector workers to Gordon Brown’s present refusal to properly reward public servants and the contracting out of services to private business means self-seeking individualism has been valorised and public service ethics denigrated. In his first few months as prime minister, Brown appeared to acknowledge the need to explicitly advocate social democratic value but it wasn’t reflected in significant policy shifts. And he now seems to have abandoned even this relatively superficial effort to shift Labour’s presentational tone.

Brown’s strategy (the economic foundations of New Labour) has been to make Britain a fast growing economy competing on the terms set by finance-led global capitalism and to stealthily engineer a trickle down to the deserving poor. As we all know by now, this has meant being soft on the super rich and a micro redistribution from the lower end of the top 10 per cent highest earners to low income families.

This formula could more or less appear to work when the economy was buoyant but as soon as this speculation-led growth began to falter New Labour ’s uncritical attachment to the priorities of the City was visibly paralysing. As growth slows the government has less money to spend on tackling poverty or investing in services and it dare not borrow more or tax the wealthy because this will torpedo the Thatcherite economic model they inherited and developed. They’ve been outflanked by the Governor of the Bank of England who last week made the kind of statement attacking city pay and incompetence that we should have been hearing from Labour’s front benches .

Even Mayor Johnson expostulates about the growing ’inequality between rich and poor’. (It will be interesting to see whether he sticks by his commitment to London Citizens to maintain Livingstone’s use of the GLA’s power as employer and purchaser to implement a living wage of £7.50 an hour).We are seeing a new Tory rhetoric of fairness combined with a strong anti-statism aimed at a caricature of Gordon Brown’s ‘top-down government’. The combination has an appeal which New Labour is finding difficult to answer because it has neither a strategy for social justice nor a confident vision of the positive role of the state.

The two go together. Seriously redistributive and now green taxation is only politically possible if the state has real legitimacy; if there’s a popular belief grounded in experience, that it responds to people’s needs and the money paid in taxes is returned in responsive services which users feel are theirs.

Back to the future

The British state won this legitimacy throughout the post-war decades of reconstruction, building the welfare state and enjoying its first benefits. The result was a 20-year or so social democratic consensus legitimating taxation and redistribution. The administration and delivery of these social benefits, however, was via an unreformed mandarin state whose administrative hierarchies were imitated throughout the pubic sector and whose most powerful links with civil society were predominantly with business . The result was a daily experiences of state institutions – from universities and the education system through to local government and even the health service – that was contradictory and frustrating. Unresponsive to growing expectations and a new diversity of demand.

The movements of the 1960s and 1970s were one response. Arguably one reason for the significance and lasting memory of Ken Livingstone’s GLC was that it was one of the few politically successful experiments in translating the diffuse but creative radicalism of the 1970s into a popular political programme. It was cut short in its prime. We all know what happened then. But perhaps now after 1 May the significance of what didn’t happen is coming home to roost for New Labour – and tragically for Londoners as a result of Ken’s political downsizing to rejoin the party he once loved.

What didn’t happen was the Labour Party grasping the importance of the GLC experiment – in all its messiness -and showing the possibility of transforming, opening and democratising state institutions, and translating this on to the national level. It could have been the basis of a direct challenge to Thatcher’s privatisation and Hood Robin approach to redistribution. Indeed Norman Tebbit saw the threat when he remarked of the GLC on the eve of its abolition: ’this is modern socialism and we will kill it.’ It’s no real comfort but there was in Livingstone’s extra 14 per cent support on 1 May, on top of Labour’s share national vote, a residue of that old potential to present a modern alternative.

Reactivate public service values

We on the radical but pragmatic left cannot now simply say ’I told you so.’ It’s mightily tempting. But we are in no position to come out of the wings with a perfectly formed alternative strategy and means of implementing it. But the belief in public service values are still there on the ground, as is much thinking and experimentation in renewing them. But they lie dormant, unnurtured, lacking champions and increasingly overgrown in the jungle of competitive, self-seeking values.

It’s not to late to reactivate them. Drawing together the scattered left, across party boundaries, we need to resist the persistent and pervasive intrusion of a narrow, desiccated commercial logic into every public space. And to resist by celebrating the values of cooperation, of human ingenuity meeting urgent sometimes desperate social needs, of the satisfaction of helping to resolve the problems of fellow citizens. These values are still daily enacted all over the place; in hospital intensive care units, in what’s left of youth services working innovatively with voluntary organisations, in councils that have blocked privatisation and developed means of genuine improvements and so on.

Everyone has their own personal stories of public services values being practiced, unsung, not only within the public sector but in voluntary organisations working long hours and in the face of almost impossible funding pressures. These values and the kind of practices keeping them alive against the odds need the mutual reinforcement of some kind of broad based national movement. Addressing this need is surely a condition for reviving the electoral fortunes of the Labour Party or indeed any party on the left.