Gregor Gall | ukwatch.net

Bank Role for the Left

Ellie Keen — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

State intervention and nationalisationare both back with an incredible bang. Suddenly, the neoliberal orthodoxy of “Tina” – “there is no alternative” – to the free market looks as hollow as Brown’s promise to end the cycle of boom and bust. It reconfirms that in this age of hyper-globalisation and neoliberalism, the state and market regulation are still important.

The bail-outs we’ve seen in Britain and the US are nationalisations by the neoliberals and for the bosses. If they were carried out at the behest of the left and for the workers, taxpayers and citizens, they would look entirely different.

So when the senior management was changed when Northern Rock was nationalised one set of capitalist managers was merely replaced by another. The same will be true of Bradford & Bingley. The nationalisations were not to safeguard jobs or workers’ conditions or people’s savings but the British financial system upon which profits heavily depend.

If the left is to make headway right now, it must start getting its ideas about public ownership out into the media, into union members’ heads and onto people’s radar screens.

The left needs to start off with what public ownership is and what it is not. This would make it clear the left was not calling for a return to the age of nationalisation, where civil servants ran the industries in an undemocratic and unaccountable ways. Jobs were not safeguarded and services were often poor. It would also make it clear the left was not calling for a situation of a command economy, where the centre dictated what was produced without consulting the consumers and the localities.

The lessons of history are that while coordination and planning are needed, there should be decentralised structures that allow participation and that the process is one of bottom-up democracy, not top-down diktat.

One model of public ownership, for say, transport would be that the boards of management consist of a third of seats allocated to representatives from the travelling public, a third from the workforce and a third from the local authorities. Here, there would be a balance between producer and consumer interests.

The issues to be resolved would include whether the unions would be the only representatives of the workforce, whether businesses would be entitled to seats and whether local authorities are closely connected enough to be the genuine representatives of the public at large.

Another model would be that all members of the board of management would be elected directly by citizens and those wishing to be board members stand on platforms of representing workers’, business and passengers’ interests and so on.

These are all issues which can be explored in more depth later once the debate has been won on the need for this version of public ownership. The key thing here is that the primary purpose of these services (including financial services) being in public ownership would be that they are run on the basis of social need and not private profit.

What this means is that the constitution or articles of association of these organisations would be changed from the objective of pursuing private shareholder interests to providing services. The organisations would not then have to be concerned with chasing profits, market value, market share or being taken over by a rival.

The banks would then operate under this system by creating social justice and social inclusion by keeping open wide branch networks (with one in each community), practice safe lending, work by the principles of ethical investment and return surplus back into their operations to increase service provision.

The way in which the left can do this is by questioning each and every action of the governments by saying “Whose interests are being served by this?”, “Whose money is being used for this?” and “If public money is being used, where is the public control?”

There is a role for left MPs like John McDonnell in laying bills before parliament to put organisations into public ownership instead of allowing this Labour government to remain the bankers’ friend by doling out hand outs to them.

The unions need to use their influence inside and outside parliament to support these moves. Rather than being overly fixated on windfall taxes and curbing bonuses, they could tackle the underlying causes – rather than just the symptoms – by supporting social ownership. The odd call for public ownership of the utilities needs to be made writ large.

Discontent Rising

Ellie Keen — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 15:58:47 +0000

The prospect of a four-day strike over pay by the tanker drivers that supply Shell petrol stations has begun to generate near apocalyptic newspaper headlines. Primed by the government invoking emergency procedures last Friday and the panic buying response of motorists after the refinery workers’ strike at Grangemouth in April, the message the media is peddling is “oh no, here we go again”.

But given that Shell has only one in every 10 filling stations across the country and that these are concentrated in the south-east, the north-west, central Scotland and parts of the Midlands, the headlines are over-egging the pudding.

But what is giving rise to the overreaction is an emerging sense (pdf) of “feel-bad Britain”, where issue after issue adds to a sense of gloom, hopelessness and powerlessness as standards of living for the majority of people begin to plummet.

The rising cost of fuel and food, the credit crunch, the fall in house prices and the tailing off of demand in the housing market have all come thick and fast. Wages are not keeping pace and a small minority of wealthy individuals as well as many companies seem immune to and unmoved by what is happening to the majority of people. And on top of this, our public services are not improving despite the money ploughed into them.

In the case of the threatened fuel strike, the workers are demanding a 13% rise but are being offered 6.8% when their bosses got a 15% rise plus bonuses and the company is benefiting as the price of a barrel of oil climbs inexorably to $200.

But the other side to the story of feel-bad Britain is that there is no sense that the government is exercising any control over events. Brown made pleas to both the banks to pass on cuts in interest rates to the customers and to the oil companies to cap prices. They either said no or politely ignored him as nothing has changed. Then Brown tells us he is listening and that he “feels our pain”, but still nothing seems to change.

The sense of a government on the slide (but nonetheless immovable until May 2010) adds to this despair. What may bring things to a head – over fuel at least – is if hauliers start to exercise their collective disruptive power as they did back in late 2000 by stopping fuel leaving the refineries and organising go-slows on the motorways.

Already, there have been small signs of this in Scotland and Wales.

If the reaction of the Spanish hauliers is anything to go by, our reliance on private road transport to move goods and products about will be cruelly revealed. In Spain, where mostly small owner-employer operators are protesting over rising fuel costs, the supermarket shelves have started to go bare within just three days.

The general sense of malaise would also become even more apparent if the owners and operators of fishing boats started to blockade ports, as they have done in Spain and Portugal in recent weeks, over the cost of fuel.

For all the headlines that talk of a return to the “dark days” of the 1970s in Britain, only if the hauliers acted en masse would we come close to a replay of those times.

In the Name of Efficiency

Ellie Keen — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 21:48:02 +0000

Under New Labour, the public services have increasingly been subject to modernisation programmes as government policy has attempted to introduce private sector practice in order to gain supposed efficiency savings. A key facilitating instrument here have been so-called “new management techniques”.

In civil service, the new management techniques have taken the form of Taylorist means of work organisation. Bespoke packages have been introduced following millions being spent on reports from management consultants. In Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, the Lean technique – originally derived from the Toyota car company in Japan – has been the result. It provoked a strike during its test pilot.

Alongside Lean, and as part of the same overall neoliberal vision of modernisation in the HMRC, a new regime of hotdesking has been implemented. Hotdesking is predicated on no worker having their own, particular desk in order to maximise utilisation of desks and to reduce the existence of “surplus” desks. Cost-cutting and cost-saving have been the order of the day here. This has meant civil servants in the HMRC are barred from having tea, coffee, sweets, crisps and paraphernalia like photographs of family and teddy bears on their desks because these suggest ownership and desk rigidity.

In one HRMC office in the north west of England, local management established what the workers there have labelled a “Guanteddymo Bay”. All staff’s teddy bears were removed, staff said, by “dawn raids” and “special rendition” from their desks and placed in a locked glass case so the workers can still see their teddy bears but not touch them.

The local branch of the HRMC workers’ union, the PCS, highlighted the absurdity of the situation in its recent newsletter with photographic evidence of the practice.

In another HMRC office in the north west, a worker was leaving late one night, having stayed on to finish some tax returns. Instead of showing concern for the worker being late getting home or congratulating the worker for their diligence, the manager at the office asked whether the desk that the worker had used had been cleared, adding the night shift was coming in. The worker responded: “But we don’t have a nightshift!” The manager told him: “No, but we’re twinned with another office and they do, so this means we have to do what they do.”

In another civil service office, this time a much larger one in central London and nicknamed the village, hotdesking is also used. People who work there are referred to as “village people” but others have been turned into nomads as each morning they turn up for work, they have to roam the building looking for a desk to work at. It looks like a playground of small kids where there is competition to be first in line.

Such unusual, if not bizarre, management practices highlight that the zealous search for efficiency savings has become a search at all costs. Management look for huge savings as a result of central government diktat. They are, thus, willing to pay consultants, as outside experts, huge fees to dream up new means of lean ways of working. And as we know to our cost, the chances of management consultants’ ideas working are not great.

Quite apart from the dehumanising side to the experience of these examples of work, such new ways of working easily create inefficiencies themselves. They either stop work from being done at all, or slow down the existing rate of work because of plunging morale and ill-feeling by staff.

But in an era of dogma about the superiority of market methods, this does not seem to matter. The competition for the political kudos of cutting the size and alleged waste of the public services remains king. And that is why the current government has established a risk assessment mechanism which implicitly recognises the craziness of these new works of working at the operation level.

Thus, the civil service has a monitoring practice of what is called “looking for elephant traps”. Departments and offices are asked to centrally report on any instances or phenomenon that could lead to bad publicity. With this information sent in, monitors come round to carry out a risk assessment of whether remedial action needs to be taken. In the case of Guanteddymo its removal was ordered. The fear is that bad publicity, possibly instigated by the PCS union, could lead to public pressure to row back on the government’s modernisation programme.

Beyond Bread and Butter

JamieSW — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 11:21:30 +0000

Last year proved again that the public sector is where the unions still have both strong organisation and the ability to act strategically. Strikes by the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) and Communication Workers’ Union (CWU) on pay cuts, job losses and backdoor privatisation, and by the Prison Officers’ Association (POA) over industrial rights and pay, showed that industrial action and popular campaigning are not only still possible but that they are the most potent challenge to the government’s continued pro-market policies.

These unions have raised the question of alternatives to New Labour’s public sector reform and its insistence that ‘there is no alternative’ to introducing market mechanisms. Unions are increasingly pressing alternatives based on principles of democratisation.

The importance of these strikes is that they have been high profile, actively involved the membership and have had some successes. They have begun to break the pattern of large-scale defeats experienced by unions – like those of the miners and printers – in the 1980s.

Wider challenge

It is also significant that the unions have framed their demands not merely in terms of economistic, ‘bread and butter’ issues but as part of a wider challenge to government policy. They have begun to move beyond simply campaigning against the effects of neoliberalism to challenge this economic orthodoxy itself.

The CWU leader, Billy Hayes, lambasted the government for being willing to intervene to bankroll hand-over-fist the failing private financial organisation, Northern Rock, while remaining unwilling to intervene to settle the postal workers’ dispute and safeguard a valued public sector service like the Royal Mail.

The POA leader, Brian Caton, used the occasion of his union’s illegal national lightning strike to condemn the government’s policy of locking more and more people up in prisons while running down the restorative justice system. He made it clear that ‘prison does not work’ on its own and that the POA does not support the ‘hang ‘em and flog ‘em’ brigade.

Mark Serwotka, the PCS leader, made the connection between deteriorating working conditions and the declining quality of service provision. Thus, job cuts leading to work intensification, pay cuts leading to falling morale and outsourcing leading to cutbacks have been convincingly put forward to explain why service standards are falling.

In these broadsides against government policy, market-defined notions of efficiency, effectiveness and productivity have increasingly come under scrutiny and the importance of a public service ethos is being explicitly asserted. Such a process is essential to creating receptiveness to ideas about how public services can be genuinely ‘public’ and fulfil the aspirations that most people have for them. It is a process that can take hold in practical, lived ways in local communities.

Here, the public sector unions need to do more imaginative thinking. It’s no use just repeating the demand to renationalise. It was people’s dissatisfaction with their experience of nationalisation that opened the way for support for actual and de facto privatisation. The unions need to develop further positive solutions based on popular participation and control. In this way these public service unions could spearhead a political form of trade unionism, effectively providing the backbone of a progressive opposition to a government that only has credible opponents to its right.

The opportunities to do so will be present again in 2008. Teachers, lecturers, local government and health workers, as well as civil servants and police and prison officers, will all have disputes with the government this year over pay and jobs.

Private and public sector unionism

Is all this just the preserve of public sector unionism and not applicable to the private sector? Sure, in the public sector unions are stronger, line management more supportive and bargaining units larger and more coherent than in the private sector. Consequently, unions have more facility-time and can organise more easily.

Indeed, union density in 2006 in the public sector was 59 per cent, compared with only 17 per cent in the private sector, while 83 per cent of working days ‘lost’ due to strikes were accounted for by public sector action.

But the public sector only looks good in comparison with the private and when we look at the overall picture we get a measure of the difficulties afflicting unions in general.

The overall density of union membership was 28 per cent in 2006 and the pattern of recent decades – falling overall in both sectors, albeit with a big gap between private and public – continues. While public sector strikes have dominated since the late 1990s, overall action has fallen and strike days ‘lost’ have only exceeded one million once in the past decade.

We need to recall that although private sector density is abysmally low, it still accounts for just over 40 per cent of all members because the private sector dwarfs the public sector by numbers employed. Moreover, the growth of numbers employed in the public sector since 1997 has now come to an end and the public sector continues to fragment as more services are contracted out or given over to the voluntary sector. Organised labour cannot keep to its comfort zone of a small and shrinking public sector.

Political trade unionism

But can the idea of political trade unionism be applied to the private sector? There are some obvious pointers.

In the cases of air, rail and bus transport, as well as food production, childcare and pensioners’ homes, unions could easily set themselves up as the honest and true defenders of quality provision. By robustly establishing that investment in staffing levels, pay, working conditions and training are essential to providing the high quality goods and services that people demand and expect, unions can replicate the kind of producer-user alliances that are emerging in the public sector.

Whether public or private sector based, working with communities outside the workplace is crucial if these alliances are to grow popular roots. Most towns and cities have trades councils, which exist to coordinate campaigns across unions. They are starting points to approach the various organisations in their localities for these alliances.

The campaigns by the London and Birmingham Citizens groups involving unions, faith groups, community and voluntary organisations over ‘living wages’ and social provisions offer one model of how to construct local alliances (see Red Pepper, Aug/Sept 2007). Another is the way in which the PCS union has worked together with the National Pensioners’ Convention over issues of benefits provision; from this, mutual support against job losses and real cuts in the level of pensions has followed. A final example can be found in the various short-lived campaigns against ward and hospital closures, which generate new networks among local communities but usually have unions at their hearts.

There is a rider to establishing such producer-user alliances, however. Unions must work to become much more visible and credible partners.

So unions must interpret the nostrums that ‘unity is strength’ and ‘an injury to one is an injury to all’ widely. In 2008 this would involve taking coordinated industrial action to beat the next three years of public sector pay restraint. The success of the joint action on pensions in March 2006 should be a salutary lesson here.

Just as importantly, and particularly for affiliated unions, when unions criticise Labour they must be prepared to follow through on their criticisms. This means not just the criticisms on Radio 4 but popular mobilisations to back up the criticisms, especially when those criticisms are invariably ignored. Otherwise, unions fall into the trap of identifying Labour as the problem but then appealing to the self-same Labour to be the solution through the rationale of reason alone. Interestingly, the leading left Labour MP, John McDonnell, has recently argued that this means understanding that the levers of power open to the unions now lie outside Labour and parliament.

Unity is Possible - Look at Europe...

Ellie Keen — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 02:36:14 +0000

The radical left unity projects in Scotland (the SSP) and England (Respect) made small but significant electoral breakthroughs between 2003 and 2005. However, their implosion in the last two years as result of internal disputes and splits has cast doubt on whether the radical left can ever move away from its Life of Brian depiction of incessant hair-splitting on questions of political purity, much less exercise any influence on the political process. However, the objective conditions of hegemonic neo-liberalism, continuing imperialism and the decomposition of social democracy demand that the idea of a radical left unity projects is not jettisoned for reasons of any short-term difficulties. For the radical left, in these aforementioned conditions, to be a credible option for a growing body of disillusioned and progressive opinion, unity and cooperation amongst itself are vital. Uniting the radical left together is not just about making one new alliance or organisation the sum of its constituent parts so that it is not divided, important though that is. Rather, it is about making the new organisation more than the sum of its parts. Therefore, unity can help prefigure growth of members and influence through pooling resources, pushing in the same direction, working to common priorities and being more credible to wider social movements and the like.

Unity can take different forms. The basic form is working together in genuine, full and trusting ways in campaigns, while the higher forms involve electoral alliances and organisational fusions. Joint-working or electoral alliances may be the pre-figurative basis for subsequent organisational fusion. For any of these forms of collective working to be possible, respect and tolerance of differences are vital while differences must also be discussed constructively. Unity must be achieved on the foundation of openly discussing and resolving differences for ‘paper’ unity will dissolve when strong differences emerge. But the basis of collective working together in the same electoral alliances and party organisations must be that overwhelming consensus on the grand political questions of our age amongst the radical left forms the bedrock of a common ideology for radical left unity, from which questions of how to operate are secondary and subject to fraternal discussion and debate. This has often been described as the ‘80:20 equation’, where the 20 per cent of disagreement is not allowed to get in the way of agreement and action on the 80 per cent of issues where there is common ground and consensus. Consequently, to facilitate agreement (the 80 per cent) and fraternal discussion (on the 20 per cent), radical left projects must be characterised by pluralism, openness and relative broadness, with some degree of interim internal autonomy to the pre-merger constituent parts.

Mindful of this, this article presents short, thumb nail sketches of the radical left unity projects in continental Europe before making some preliminary conclusions about what they can teach us in Scotland and Britain. It should not be assumed that all radical and far left groups and parties in each of the countries covered are involved in the radical left unity projects outlined below. Indeed, the communist parties with sizeable numbers of elected representatives still exist in Portugal, France, Italy and Greece outside radical left unity projects and here both radical left unity projects and sizeable communist parties exist alongside a plethora of other assorted leftists groups. Even outside the radical left unity projects – where they exist – other left and progressive groups and forces exist so the unity projects are not ‘finished products’. And in Belgium and Sweden, long-existing left parties predominate so there have been no radical left unity projects. Nonetheless, the following survey gives some idea of what happened, when and why. Readers are urged to use the free encyclopedia, Wikipedia (wikipedia.org), to learn more about these projects and their components part by typing in the name of each country, finding the section on politics, then political parties. From here, there are entries and links to the various organisations’ own websites (some of which are in English).

Denmark

The Red-Green Alliance was formed as an electoral alliance in 1989 by three leftwing parties (left social democrats, communists and Trotskyists) with Maoists joining in 1991. The Alliance then developed into an independent party based on individual membership, with the founding parties having no official influence and a majority of members not having has a past in one of the founding organisations parties. It then gained parliamentary representation in 1994, having six MPs (three per cent vote) in the 2005 elections and four MPs (two per cent) in the 2007 elections.

Finland

The Left Alliance is a green socialist party, formed from the merger of the People’s Democratic League, the Women’s Democratic League, and the Communist Party in 1990. Given the different political persuasions, divisions have been common with defections to the social democrats and the forming of a new communist party. Electoral performance has ranged from 17 to 23 MPs (nine per cent-11 per cent) for the parliament to 1,000 to 1,300 councillors (10 per cent-12 per cent vote) and one to two MEPs (nine to 10 per cent vote).

France

In addition to the Communist Party, there are three Trotskyist parties, of which the larger two (LutteOuvrière and Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire (LCR)) have jointly worked together on a sporadic basis in the electoral arena (regional, presidential, European). However, their enmity towards each other is also marked although the LCR has recently made a call for a broader, anti-capitalist party to be created. It remains to be seen what the reactions of the other two Trotskyist parties, Communist Party and social movements are to this.

Greece

The Coalition of the Left of Movements and Ecology is commonly known as Synaspismos or SYN. Until 2003, it was called the Coalition of the Left and Progress and is a major component of the parliamentary Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA). SYN emerged initially as an electoral coalition in the late 1980s, with two communist parties being its largest constituents, and securing over 10 per cent of the vote in parliamentary elections and a substantial number of MPs. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the coalition moved to become a party in 1991. Electoral fortunes were mixed in the early to mid-1990s but parliamentary representation was secured (10 MPs in 1996 on five per cent vote, two MEPs in 1999 on five per cent vote). In elections in 2000, SYN was supported by left ecologists, gaining just over three per cent of the vote and six MPs. In parliamentary elections of 2004, SYN together with several smaller left and left ecologists parties formed SYRIZA alliance. The alliance with the smaller parties was formed again at the end of 2005, providing a firm basis the 14 MPs gained on a five per cent vote in the 2007 parliamentary elections, which makes SYN the fourth biggest party. SYN also has many councillors, being the third biggest party in local government, and a sizable, semi-autonomous youth wing. SYN aspires to be an ‘umbrella’, where people of varying left ideological and theoretical backgrounds can find a natural home. Therefore, SYN members are encouraged to form and participate in internal platforms which mount open discussions and publish magazines, but may not work against party policy. These platforms are invited to put forward theses on party policy and strategy at triennial congresses. SYRIZA’s genesis arose in a forum of the radical left in 2001 called the Space of Left Dialogue and Common Action, which in turn led to an electoral alliance for the 2002 local elections, and provided the basis for its formal establishment in 2004. However after the 2004 election, the smaller parties accused SYN of not honouring an agreement to have one of its MPs resign so a member of one of the smaller parties could take the seat. This crisis led SYN to run independently from the rest of the Coalition for the 2004 European elections but later in that year SYN returned to SYRIZA. By 2007, several new radical left and green organisations joined SYRIZA, helping it secure its breakthrough.

Germany

The important development of Die Linke, fusing together the former PDS, a breakaway section from the social democrats (SPD) and various far left groups is an important development. It is amply analysed in Victor Grossman’s article in this edition of the magazine. Suffice it to note The Left has polled eight to 13 per cent, is the only left party in Parliament (unless one still views the SPD and the Greens as left-of-centre) and has become the strongest of the oppositional parties. The German Communist Party (DKP), the traditional party of the left in western Germany, retains some roots among some workers and students. Although often critical of the Left, it supports The Left in elections and has friendly ties to that party’s Communist Platform. The newer Communist Party of Germany (KPF) also has some such ties but rarely supports The Left. There are also smaller Maoist and Trotskyist parties or groups, very visible at demonstrations, as well as ecological and immigrant groups and the anti-globalisation Attac.

Italy

In 1991, when the Italian Communist Party became the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS), dissidents founded Communist Refoundation (PRC) as a party to unite all communists. It was joined by Proletarian Democracy, a Trotskyist party. PRC was led by Fausto Bertinotti, a long-time CGIL union leader (from 1994-2006), helping it achieve nine per cent in the 1996 election. The party’s MPs supported and then opposed the Olive Tree centre-left coalition leading to its fall and a split in PRC with the setting up of the Party of Italian Communists. In 2004, PRC joined the centre-left opposition, The Union, entering government when it won power in 2006. The decision to participate in the coalition government, particularly in light of the government’s policy on Afghanistan and Lebanon, attracted much criticism. Internally, the PRC has recognised tendencies ‘Being Communists’, Critical Left (which quit in 2007) and the Communist Project (which quit in 2006). PRC has around 70 MPs currently based on gaining seven per cent votes.

Luxembourg

The Left was formed in 1999 by activists from existing political parties (communist, New Left, Revolutionary Socialist Party and Socialist Workers’ Party) and won three per cent vote and one MP in that year. But a dispute between the communists and the majority of the Left led to both running separately in the 2004 elections, with the Left losing its MP.

Netherlands

Although the Socialist Party (originating from a Maoist communist party in 1972) is currently larger in parliamentary terms, GreenLeft is a larger extra-parliamentary organisation. It began life as an alliance of four parties (communists, socialists, greens and Christians). Initially, it had 16 MPs in 1972 but this fell to six in 1977, precipitating further cooperation albeit of an uneven outcome involving splits from each party and leading to a situation where only two of the four parties had just three MPs between them by 1986. This increased the pressure for full fusion, particularly from unions and environmentalists. In 1989, an interim organisation was formed for the 1989 European elections, leading to the creation of GreenLeft in 1990 as a party and the dissolution of the four former parties. Again this precipitated splits, leading to the formation of splinter groups. Political unity was slowly fashioned out of diverse opinion, although divisions remained over issues of Kosovo, Afghanistan and individual freedom. Between 1990 and 2007, GreenLeft has had between nine and 19 MPs, one and four MEPs, 50-odd members of provincial legislatures and tens of other elected position in local government.

Norway

The Socialist Left Party was founded in 1975 although it began life in 1973 as the Socialist Electoral League (SEL), an alliance of the Socialist People’s Party, Communist Party of Norway, Democratic Socialists and independent Socialists following the victory for the ‘No’ campaign in the European Community referendum of 1972. In the 1973 elections, the SEL achieved an 11 per cent vote and 16 MPs. However, as SEL moved to become a party with its constituent parties disbanding, the Communist Party left, and it was not until the late 1980s that its first level of electoral success was repeated. In 2005, with nine per cent vote and 15 MPs it joined the centre-left Red-Green government coalition. Meanwhile, the Red Electoral Alliance (REA) was founded in 1973 as an election front for the Maoist communist party, becoming its own independent party in 1991. From 1993 to 1997, REA had one MP but despite recording its highest ever vote (two per cent), it lost its seat and failed to regain it in 2005 with a lower vote (one per cent) although it maintained around 60 councillors. This retrenchment led in 2007 to a fusion with the Maoist communist party to form Red.

Portugal

Left Bloc (Bloco de Esquerda, LB) was founded in 1999 from a number of far-left parties from Maoist, Trotskyist and communist backgrounds. All of these parties had stood in elections and became currents within the LB. Initially developed as a coalition, the LB has since become a party while its constituent components have maintained their existence and some levels of autonomy, leading to a loose structure. This structure may also provide an umbrella for other interested socialist organisations. In 1999, the LB polled two per cent in the Portuguese parliamentary election with this rising to three per cent in 2002. These results were generally better than the collective results of its predecessor components. In 2005, the LB achieved a breakthrough with 6.5 per cent and eight MPs. It also has one MEP and many local councillors, making it Portugal’s fifth biggest party. The LB’s presidential candidate in 2006 received 288,224 votes (five per cent). With support from students and unions in particular, the LB is becoming to be seen as a credible left alternative to the older, more established communist party and the more centre-left socialist party because it has become a pole of attraction for many involved in various social movements. The BL proposed Portugal’s first law on domestic violence, which was passed in parliament with the support of the socialist party. Portugal is unusual in that it has another radical left unity project, the Unitarian Democratic Coalition (UDC), consisting of the Communist Party, the Ecologist Party and Democratic Intervention. The coalition was formed in 1987 to run in the simultaneous national and European parliamentary elections, and in every election since these parties have stood together at the UDC, even though the Communist Party is the major element within it. Tensions are minimalised by the sharing out of lead candidatures. Since 1987 the UDC has had in: the national parliament between 12 and 31 MPs (eight to 12 per cent vote); local government in excess of 200 councillors (11 to 13 per cent vote); and the European Parliament two to four MEPs (nine per cent to 14 per cent vote).

Spain

United Left (Izquierda Unida) was formed as a political coalition in 1986 during the mobilisations against NATO by several groups of leftists, greens, left-wing socialists and republicans but was always dominated by the Communist Party. After the electoral decline of the Communist Party in 1982 (from 10 per cent to three per cent), the UL slowly improved its electoral results reaching nine per cent in 1993 (1.8 million votes) and 11 per cent in 1996 (2.6m votes). From 1999, it went into decline, with its support slipping to five per cent in 2000. In that election it signed a pact with the Socialist Party. Following the tradition of the Spanish left, the UL does not have an organisation in Catalonia. Until 1998, UL’s counterpart in Catalonia was Iniciativa per Catalunya (IC-V). But IC-V moved towards the centre, and broke relations with the UL, leading the UL to set up its own organisation in Catalonia, Esquerra Unida i Alternativa (EUiA). In 2004, UL ran with IC-V, achieving five per cent and five MPs. UL has around 70,000 activists and more than 2,500 councillors. Founded in 1995, Alternative Space is a political organisation from a Trotskyist tradition but draws on anti-capitalist, feminist and ecologist perspectives following the different currents that formed it. It operates as a current with UL but is also an autonomous organisation and most of its members do not belong to this coalition.

Switzerland

In Switzerland, the radical left consists of three groups (Alternative List, Solidarites, Swiss Party of Labour) which have a smattering between them of elected representatives at the various levels. However, they worked together in coalitions when standing for elections in 2005 (as Left Alliance) and 2007 (as À gauche toute! Genève).

Lessons for the Scottish and British radical left

This brief cook’s tour around the most significant western European radical left unity projects has a number of lessons:

What seem like disparate groups can work and fuse together (although it is interesting to note that in nearly all instances they do not include members of sister organisations of the Socialist Party (ex-Militant) in Britain and where they include members of sister organisations of the British Socialist Workers’ Party, these members have no significant influence on the radical left unity projects). Working together and, ultimately, fusing is often brought about by prior campaigning activities and joint electoral slates. Of course, while such fusion should be welcomed in itself, sometimes the underlying recognition is that individual parties have often ceased to be credible or influential players on their own so fusion is required to regain some kind of radical left critical mass.

The degree of success for the radical left unity projects is sufficiently high that acquiring further knowledge about them, if not trying to emulate them, is desirable. This can be gauged by their presence in representative legislatures and membership numbers, particularly amongst members from formerly-aligned, non-aligned and independent backgrounds. However, success in attracting left members from social democratic, Labour-type parties has been less evident.

Despite successes, radical left unity projects do suffer from ups and downs reflecting wider changes in society, struggle and consciousness – in other words, left unity does not guarantee inexorable upward momentum.

Engaging in the electoral arena is vital but so is campaigning in extra-parliamentary terms outside elections (although this has been more difficult to show in this cook’s tour). Indeed, it would be a strange notion to counter-pose the two – elections and campaigning – as at cross purposes with each other.

Splits do take place, either as a result of deeply held policy differences or the reluctance to consent to the dissolution of an organisation upon fusing with others. However, fusion need not led to this outcome depending on the process and nature of fusion. Seldom have splits come about because of entering government coalitions – this will remain the great test of these projects given that any government in the foreseeable future in any of the European countries is likely to be dominated by neo-liberal, bellicose parties.

The history of radical left unity far pre-dates the watershed of the rise of the anti-globalisation and anti-war movements in the new millennium.

Different ‘models’ exist of radical left unity and activists should look at which they think are most appropriate to their situation.

Some Green/ecologist parties and organisations have been involved but this is far from standard practice and given an impending environmental catastrophe, opening up avenues to the left of the Green movement is an important future task for the radical left unity projects.

Clearly, a long way still has to be travelled until an alternative is built to the crumbling edifice of mainstream social democracy but these projects provide food for thought and for action.

Professor Gregor Gall is Professor of Industrial Relations at the University of Hertfordshire and author of ‘The Political Economy of Scotland – Red Scotland? Radical Scotland’ (University of Wales Press, 2005). He lives in Edinburgh.

Europe's Example

eddie — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 22:23:29 +0000

In the 1960s and 1970s, Britain was often referred to by Establishment politicians and commentators as the “sick man of Europe.” Its economy was wracked by rising inflation, the “stop-go” cycle of economic growth and then contraction and a devaluing currency. But at the top of the list of so-called woes for the capitalists was the complaint that British workers were far too strike-prone. The bete noire was the unofficial strike, the wildcat strike epitomised in the 1959 Peter Sellars film I’m Alright, Jack.

The Labour government under Harold Wilson set up the Donovan commission in 1965 to investigate industrial relations. Its report three years later asserted that wildcat strikes were the main cause of poor worker productivity. It claimed that this was the main reason for Britain’s poor economic performance.

Strike activity has declined in all Western economies since the 1980s. But it has declined in Britain far more so than in many others. As New Labour ministers often trumpet, Britain can now be described as the “healthy man” of Europe in this regard. Had last year’s planned public-sector-wide strike over the government’s attack on pensions taken place, however, this picture of labour quiescence might have begun to change.

The same issue could again provoke a strike this year by the 2.6 million public-sector workers.If it goes ahead, it could start to shift Britain’s workers towards European practices. There, labour movements have used mass strikes frequently to defend workers’ interests in the last 20 years. For this to start to happen in Britain, it would need not just a successful result to a mass strike over pensions but for the strike to be a non-passive one which gave workers a sense of their collective power and helped them to regain their industrial confidence. If this was to happen, it would be likely to result in pressure for more strikes of this kind.

So, what lessons can we learn from our European brothers and sisters who often use the tool of the mass strike? Their strikes are of a short duration, lasting between half-a-day and two days, and involving several million workers shutting down either the whole economy or large sections of it. They have concerned fighting against labour market reforms, labour law, spending cuts, redundancies and changes to pensions.

Compared to Britain, union density in Belgium, France, Greece, Italy and Spain varies widely, with some much lower and some a little higher. The level of membership is not the crucial factor in explaining the ability of these union movements to mobilise en masse. Neither is whether there are one or more peak union federations like the TUC. The most important aspect is that unions have been able to tap into keenly felt grievances, providing leadership and developing union attachment.

In a number of continental European countries, unions have created power bases by successfully contesting works council or workplace committee elections. Workers can respect and follow the lead of unions on the continent without being union members. Inter-union organising networks exist at the grass-roots level in France, Greece, Italy and Spain. These get more workers out on strike, ensure greater strike effectiveness and help to reduce sectionalism.

However, there are some important differences. Legislation regulating strikes in these other European countries is often less restrictive than in Britain, although this isn’t always the case. In Italy and Spain, for example, legislation has been introduced in recent years to restrict strikes in strategic sectors like transport. It is also worth pointing out that there is more of a tradition of extraparliamentary protests and actions in many continental countries, sometimes as a result of the previous exclusion of communist parties from the political process.

But it would be wrong to give the impression that all the mass strikes undertaken are successful either in their immediate objectives or in the implicit goal of helping to remove the incumbent governments. In fact, the aim of a strike is often merely to reopen negotiations or secure concessions rather than reversing the plans. And “going to the well” too many times can reduce the potency of the mass strike, as governments learn the ability to withstand such pressure. But none of this detracts from recognition that governments’ neoliberal attacks have often been stopped or stalled, with various governments falling not long afterwards.

The key factor in explaining the relative success of the mass strikes appears to be the political weakness of governments, whether right or centre-left, in continental Europe. The processes of political polarisation and fragmentation have meant that these short, sharp mass strikes are able to exert more leverage than might otherwise be expected.

This brings us back to Britain. Both Blair and Blairism are now holed below the waterline. In this situation, mass strikes over pensions and the like could force settlements on union terms and add to the pressure to end the “new” Labour project. A clear union victory on pensions could embolden workers and pressurise Labour to shift well to the left of Brownism. Time will tell whether we or not take the “European” road.

Professor Gregor Gall is director of the Centre for Research in Employment Studies at the University of Hertfordshire.