After the election

In an interview with GQ magazine this week John McDonnell enraged many Labour supporters by telling Alistair Campbell that if Labour did not win the forthcoming election Jeremy Corbyn would follow tradition and stand down. There now seems little doubt that we are going to have a General Election very soon, perhaps by Christmas. This gives us the very tantalising prospect of a Labour Government led by a leadership with a genuine commitment to radical change. 

However, McDonnell’s comments, whilst not as hostile to Jeremy Corbyn as many assume, do remind us that victory is not a given and that a loss whilst clearly catastrophic for the poorest and most vulnerable members of our society, could also give rise to a period of Labour introspection.

In this post I want to consider the possibility that Labour suffers a heavy electoral defeat and what that might mean for Labour’s left. Whilst hoping and working for victory, we need to prepare ourselves for the worst. Labour could lose in a manner which makes Jeremy Corbyn’s continued leadership untenable. Were that to happen the right-wing of the party would rejoice and the left in parliament would quiver. 

The headline no Labour voter wants to see
repeated

In such a doomsday scenario it is not just the replacement of a leader, but the replacement of an ideology that is at stake. There is little doubt that many on the left will campaign tirelessly for a Labour Government, even in seats containing right-wing Labour candidates. It is a strange phenomena in the Labour Party that whilst the right will not lift a finger to assist the left,  the left still provide the backbone of any parliamentary election campaign, regardless of whether the candidate will then denounce them as “Trotskyist dogs” or other terms of endearment.

A General Election, particularly one in which we lose, is going to leave many activists burned out and disillusioned. Moreover, we will be subjected to a gloating Labour right, supported by the massed ranks of the media, telling us that Labour lost a ‘winnable’ Election because it was too left-wing. Some MP’s we currently consider to be on our side will join in with the demand that we must pursue “sensible” policies for there is no point in having great policies if you cannot implement them.

It almost goes without saying that if we do lose it will have little to do with our policies but will be a consequence of a campaign waged by the right wing to destabilise a left they despise, and Brexit where Labour have been forced into a position of supporting a second referendum in order to keep ultra-remain MPs on-board. A policy shift, incidentally, which failed as those same MPs having got the commitment to a second referendum immediately changed their tack to revoke article 50, a policy adopted by their friends in the Liberal Democrat’s.

The establishment would like to pick the next Labour leader
but it is not going to happen

In the event that Jeremy were forced by circumstances to stand down, we would need a new leader. There will undoubtedly be attempts to change the rules to prevent that leader being anybody who can utter the word socialism without choking. In reality, the rules as they stand make it unlikely that the members will not choose somebody seen as a close ally of Jeremy. It is also likely, as McDonnell suggests in GQ, that the party would seek to elect a woman as Labour leader for the first time. For the benefit of any Times journalists who happen upon this there is absolutely no chance that this would be Jess Philips.

But to elect a new leader who sees the problem for Labour as primarily caused by Brexit and not a radical manifesto which has huge public support will mean members bottling their disappointment and disillusionment and working to ensure that the project is not derailed.

Whoever becomes leader will have a massive task on their hands. They will be faced with a resurgent Labour right determined to return to the days of Tory-lite, a nervous parliamentary left looking for a compromise to hold the party together and a diminishing membership by no means convinced that eventual victory is achievable.

How do I know this? Because I first joined Labour in 1983 and saw Michael Foot replaced first by Neil Kinnock and eventually Tony Blair. I saw Kinnock take on and expel good socialists, and Blair complete the job with the removal of Clause 4. Like many, following the miners strike I left the party because it no longer seemed relevant in socialist terms. Over those years I saw Kinnock and Blair move the party further and further rightward and abandon any hope of a radical alternative to Tory individualism and attacks on working class communities.

We need to reinvent our trade unions 

One of the great mistakes made by the left following the defeat of the printing unions at Wapping and then the historic defeat of the miners was to allow trade unionism to be demonised as part of the problem rather than the answer to the economic problems that still confront us. A strong trade union movement would not have allowed local services to be undermined, or swathes of the NHS to be sold off. They would not tolerate zero hours contracts or need a government imposed minimum wage. A strong trade union movement would have stood together, because unity is strength, and opposed austerity and all the devastation that it has brought.

So, if we lose (and I hope we don’t) we must prepare ourselves to re-invent trade unions as part of a left movement that rather than relying on parliamentarians to save us, encourages working people in their workplaces and communities to defend themselves. 

One policy announcement at Labour Party conference that is probably three decades too late is the commitment to repeal the anti-trade union laws enacted by Thatcher and every Tory Prime Minister (and that includes Blair) that have followed. Had the trade union movement had stronger leadership those laws which tie their hands would never have been allowed to be enacted in the first place. But, many so-called moderate trade union leaders have no stomach for a fight to defend our working conditions. They are, in essence, bureaucrats who are only too happy to accommodate the demands made on workers by unscrupulous bosses.

It is unlikely that the commitment to democratise workplaces is a major vote winner, particularly amongst those with no workplace or in non-unionised workplaces. But trade unionism was the reason why the Labour Party came into existence in the first place and it may, ironically, be the thing that saves it in the future. At times, with some honourable exceptions, union leaders have seemed like a bloc to radical change. Their interest has been to maintain their own powerful positions both within their own unions and the wider party.

It has been difficult to democratise the Labour Party against the obstructive presence of a right-wing led Labour establishment. That establishment has allies in the massed media who have successfully managed to lose the right-wing tag in favour of calling themselves centrists. This was no accident, these people know full well the importance of language. Right wing puts them in the same company as Tories and fascists, centrists makes them sound reasonable and moderate. This shift in language is explained in the film ‘Vice’ if you doubt my interpretation.

From: thecounter.org

I do not need to remind readers of this blog that there is nothing reasonable or moderate about policies that support austerity, dehumanise benefit claimants, support wars, or help to privatise the NHS. But, the term left-wing is still used to signify something far more sinister than a desire for justice, equality and peace.

Should Labour lose the next General Election the reasonable and moderate centrists will want to ditch any policies that can be labelled left-wing. Of course, they will keep the veneer of radicalism by championing the downtrodden. But whereas the right of the party see poverty as a chance to do something for the poor, the left need to emphasise policies that allow the poor, the dispossessed, the marginalised, and all those currently voiceless to do things for themselves. It has always been difficult to argue against alleviating poverty. But, our goal should not be the alleviation of poverty but its elimination. That task will be made even harder following a Labour defeat because there is little doubt that in order to reward their corporate and financier backers, the Tories will want to reduce taxes on the richest by reducing state aid to the poorest.

The task facing the left will be greater still because a victory for Boris Johnson, quite likely propped up by Jo Swinson, will bring such devastation to our communities that in addition to facing a massive internal battle we will be confronted with a tsunami of hostile policies from an emboldened Tory right-wing determined to shred the last vestiges of public provision and to create a society in which their elitist class will be further empowered to enrich itself at the expense of the rest of us.

Parliament is not the only way to change things

With a Worldwide economic recession looming (which is entirely independent of Brexit, by the way) the stakes in the next election have never been higher. The planet, as Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg remind us, is in crisis, but so is the social system that relies on producing more and more profits by producing ever greater amounts of consumer goods from ever diminishing natural resources.

If it turns out that we cannot rely on parliamentary means to socialism, then we will have to start looking more closely at alternative models. But even if Labour win we should not rely on Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell et al to deliver socialism for us. Rather the task of developing democratic institutions will be more enduring if done at a local and community level. Socialism will be the exact opposite of the “nanny state” it will be a state in which ordinary people will no longer be acted upon but will act for themselves, collectively and democratically.