Please don't go

Should I stay or should I go, must be the most over-used reference to a Clash song since London Calling (a song about a nuclear catastrophe incidentally) was the backing music for almost every reference to the London Olympics. This time around it is the theme to debates amongst the left in the Labour Party with a number of people, including former MP Chris Williamson, arguing that the left project (if there ever was such a thing) within Labour is dead and that the only viable option is a new party of the left. I will state from the outset that it is my view that such a party is doomed to failure and for the time being the best place for anybody who wants to continue what Jeremy Corbyn started is in the same party of which he remains a member.

I should start by saying that I have no great emotional attachment to membership of the party. I have been politically active since 1983 and have spent far more time outside the Labour Party than in it. I joined for the second Jeremy Corbyn leadership campaign because I liked what he stood for and was disgusted with the behaviour of a PLP determined to put the left back in its box. But, for those staying because they are worried that there is a political wilderness outside the party I can assure you that does not need to be the case.

In fact, I can assure you that the nexus of left-wing activity will shift away from the Labour Party toward extra-parliamentary activity. That being the case retaining membership of the party does not have to preclude getting involved in local and national campaigns. If the coronavirus crisis ever ends, and that is by no means a certainty, then politics as normal will return. As I’ve said before the climate emergency is going nowhere, poverty has not been solved and will probably be exacerbated by a fresh round of austerity, and the anti-trade union laws still need repealing. At the same time social issues such as housing, domestic violence and the, sadly, ever-present racism are not going away.

For many people the Labour Party is seen as a socialist party that has been hijacked by liberals and careerists. This is not strictly true. In his ‘Arguments For Socialism’ Tony Benn makes the case that the Labour Party has always been a broad church. What this has meant in practice is that the party has allowed a left-wing element to thrive so long as it was a minority. 

What has rocked the Labour establishment to its core over the past three years has been the fear that Labour might transform into a socialist party in which the left was a majority not just of the members but of the PLP also. The leaked report shows clearly the abhorrence of those at the centre of the party to the very idea that the left might control the party’s future direction. Whilst what was so shocking to many about that report was the level of vitriol aimed at members, the leader and those closest to the leader, the real revelation was that the inner core of Labour was so virulently anti-socialist. This was not just a doctrinal difference but a deep-seated, irrational, hatred of the left. 

As Henry Pelling describes in his excellent, though quite dry, book ‘The Origins of the Labour Party’ the Party has had arguments about its purpose since day one. An alliance of trade unions, social reformers and Marxists was inevitably going to be a party built on convenient compromise. Even the original clause IV which is often held up as the commitment to socialism was, as Tom Blackburn has noted, a compromise which was drawn up by Sidney Webb as a fillip to the revolutionaries in Labour but to ensure that the party was never a party of Bolshevism. It’s commitment “to secure for the workers by hand or by brain the fruits of their labour” shows the paternalism of trade union leaders fearful of workers securing these things for themselves. Right from the beginning there has been a strong tendency within the Labour Party which saw their role as tempering the revolutionary instincts of the working class.

What’s more the majority of those at the top of the party never had any intention of implementing that clause in anything but the broadest terms. They remain however fully committed to the, often forgotten, Clause 1 which makes the Labour Party’s primary aim to maintain a parliamentary party. No reference to making it the government so the treacherous vipers at Millbank were not in breach of that rule, at least, when they were busy sabotaging our chances of electoral victory in 2017 and 2019. Not that it would have bothered them if they were.

The removal of Clause IV by the Blairites was largely symbolic for no Labour Government had ever tried to implement it anyway. For Blair it was a means to signal to the left that there was no room in the party for sentimental attachments to outmoded ideas. That if Labour was to put him in office and cement his place in history it had to be “electable” and that meant jettisoning ideas which the Labour establishment considered to be unpopular, and so the red flag was replaced by a red rose and the word socialism expunged in favour of social democracy. That so many fell for this trick once was, even with hindsight, a catastrophe for the left who became victims of the very party they had championed. That so many are falling for it a second time is an absolute tragedy.

The establishment within Labour always saw the party as a means to become part of the wider establishment not a means to challenge that establishment. It was the ideas of Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb rather than The Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels that drove the party. As Ralph Miliband makes clear in ‘Parliamentary Socialism’ once the party had a presence in parliament it was soon absorbed into the mainstream of British politics, as a reformist party.

The adherence to the idea that the party is at its heart socialist is more a result of romanticism than an analysis of its actions over more than one hundred years. In essence, the Labour Party has always been the radical wing of liberalism. A current in British politics that champions the lower classes, that believes in state intervention, that is less complacent and judgemental than the Conservative Party certainly, but not a party of socialist revolution. To label the likes of Starmer, Reeves, Philips et al as Tory is a mistake. They are conservative certainly, but they also have a softly radical edge. The problem is that the closer they get to power their radicalism is shown to be without substance whilst their conservatism comes to the fore.

But, of course, you do not have to believe in revolution to be a socialist. There has always been a strong current on “the left” that advocates a gradualist approach to socialism. This is an approach that sees gaining “power” through elections as the road to socialism. Once in Government, so it is believed, the socialist party will be able to gradually reform away the worst excesses of the capitalist system. This socialism has nothing in common with Marx, and is based in a paternalistic socialism of people such as Robert Owen, and is often described as social democratic to distance it from revolutionary Marxism. The point being that what some describe as social democracy is a long way from the socialism imagined by generations of socialists and far closer to liberalism than many of its supporters would admit.

When Jess Philips declares herself to be a socialist this is what she means. Not a radical change, though I’m sure she would support it if she thought it was viable and would get her on the cover of Time, but a paternalistic social liberalism that wants to help the poor and the abused rather than have them help themselves. You might wonder, and if you are fully committed to the Labour Party have to wonder, what is wrong with that?

The problem is fairly obvious. Over one hundred years of social democracy has brought advances for working people, but what it has not done is alleviate poverty or challenged a social system that has inequality wired into its DNA. Indeed, the number of people in poverty has increased at the same rate as the gap between the richest 5% and the rest has widened. Over time the establishment has become more desperate and more vicious as the inevitable economic cycle of boom and bust has shorter booms and ever more catastrophic busts.

At no point in its history did the Labour Party have debates which mirrored those of Bernstein and Luxemburg in the German SDP, which spurred Luxemburg to write her booklet ‘Reform Or Revolution’, in which she favoured the latter. There was never any serious attempt for the Labour Party to be anything other than a capitalist supporting party. Of course, in supporting capitalism it was to be a nicer and more worker-friendly capitalism, but it was still to be capitalist. The issue for Labour has never been reform or revolution, but rather how much reform was acceptable to a wider electorate that were not socialist by inclination. Indeed, since the 1990’s the issue has not really been one of what was acceptable to electors, but rather what was acceptable to the media and the establishment. That tendency was disrupted only fleetingly by Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. And, now it is very much business as usual.

You might think, therefore, that my conclusion must be to leave the party. But, at the moment that is not, in my opinion, the best option, although to be fair it would not be my first such leaving. I gave up on Labour following the miners strike and Neil Kinnock’s attacks on Militant. What is the difference from the aftermath of the miners strike, you might ask? Well, what is the same is that being defeated by a combination of the establishment and traitors within tastes no less bitter. But, there are important differences.

In 1985 the party had around 200,000 members (though accurate figures are hard to come by) and the networks of miners support groups up and down the country had absorbed the majority of the left who, as now, were totally demoralised. The Labour Party now has over 500,000 members and viable networks of activists connected via social media. Many of that 500,000 are engaged in politics for the first time in their lives. Many of them are young activists who having tasted defeat within the party are desperate for success. They are not leaving any time yet. Yes, those members have just handed the party back to the right without putting up much of a fight, but even now some of those who supported Starmer are beginning to realise that what attracted them to the Labour Party when Jeremy Corbyn was the leader has already gone. Jeremy’s support for internationalism, his compassion, his genuine concern for the disadvantaged, his democratic impulse, all of which endeared him to thousands of new members doesn’t simply hang by a thread. The thread is being cut with a kitchen knife, whilst its wielder, the man who conspired to develop a policy that led to the party’s defeat, declares it was all his predecessor’s fault. 

I am staying in the party, for now, because it is the right thing to do. Those of us who believe in socialism as a viable project must be there to keep raising the awkward questions, to question the leadership, to put pressure on our elected representatives. As a friend of mine was keen on saying: “MPs are like prams, they only going as far as you push them.” You can’t push from outside the party. But, more importantly, all those people newer to politics and who have inspired so many of us with their enthusiasm deserve us to stay and fight alongside them for the policies they joined to support. We may lose. That is a definite possibility, but if we don’t fight we lose anyway.

Of course, some of the people remaining in Labour are doing so because they believe that Starmer will deliver electoral victory. But it is not just his betrayal of Jeremy Corbyn that will see Starmer disappointing anybody who joined the party because they believed it was socialist. There is no doubt at all that in order to be electorally popular Starmer will accommodate policies that are, essentially, Tory-lite. He is already back-tracking on conference decisions that he thinks will put off the electorate. Because, it is well known that when people go into the ballot box in the UK, Kashmir and Palestine are uppermost in their minds. The fact is that jettisoning policies that Starmer knows are popular with the left, is akin to the decision by the Blairites to get rid of clause IV. It is a signal to the left that their days are gone. The party is under new management, so withholding your subs is not likely to bring the party to its knees, as they don’t want you as a member anyway. 

The strategy is to emulate the Blair years. This will include making Labour bland, uncontroversial and not pursuing “opposition for opposition’s sake”. We have been here before. And, for a while the strategy worked. Unlike in 1997, however, the Tories are not in any likelihood of losing popular support. Their handling of the current crisis may be abysmal and has undoubtedly cost lives but the most partisan media ever, particularly the BBC, will ensure that most people will believe that the loss of 30-40,000 lives is a success. At the same time they will get Brexit done.

Again, all of this points in the direction of leaving the party. So, why stay? The answer depends on whether, like the Labour Party itself, you are committed to parliamentarism. There is little or no chance that a small left-wing party outside of the Labour Party can break through the current electoral system to win any seats. At best it might have some success and get the odd councillor, but even that is a long shot. When people say ‘what about the Brexit Party or Macron in France?’, they conveniently forget that both these parties were establishment to the core.

The Communist Party, the oldest established left party in the UK, has not returned a single MP since 1945. The various Trotskyist parties have not managed any MPs apart from times when they could stand as Labour candidates. The vote share of all the parties to the left of Labour has not exceeded 1% nationally in any post-war election. In 2015, the most successful left party was George Galloway’s Respect which gained 9,989 votes, no seats and partly because George got bored with it, split shortly after. Socialist Labour, led by Arthur Scargill got 3,481 votes and no seats, but by 2017 could only manage 1,154 votes. There were various other left-wing parties none of which gained more than 1,000 votes (apart from the Communist Party with 1,229). The point is that each of these small parties had a small membership who had to work so much harder than the mainstream parties for every vote. Whilst some of them were just trying to raise the issues and did not expect to win, those advocating a new party formed by the disenchanted left from Labour, have every intention of not only replacing Labour but of winning. That is the folly.

It’s not that a party of the left could never break through the electoral system, but the conditions in which that could realistically happen would have to be so extreme that parliamentary elections would probably be the last thing on our mind. For the foreseeable future any party to the left of Labour is doomed to electoral failure. The problem is not failing to get elected so much as the amount of effort that gets put into that failure.

That brings us back to the Labour Party. Surely, it could be argued, if it is a waste of time putting effort into left-wing candidates outside of Labour then the same holds true for right wing candidates within Labour? This point I wholeheartedly concede. I refused to canvass for what turned out to be a winning Labour candidate in December, and if that person is still the candidate come the next election I certainly will not be giving up my time to foster their career. Indeed, unless I have a change of heart I will not vote for them either. I won’t vote for anybody else but I won’t vote for a candidate who clearly despises me and everything I stand for.

But, we should not forget that the Labour Party still holds an attraction for millions of people who have no interest in left or right, or whether this faction is more pure than that faction or, if we are honest, much interest in politics at all. Some 10 million of them voted Labour last December despite the onslaught of negativity created by the media and right wing. This support for an avowedly left wing manifesto is conveniently forgotten by a Labour establishment rewriting history to present December as the worst result of all time. As the Electoral Reform Society point out the Conservatives only gained 1.3% on their vote but gained an additional 48 seats.

Inside Labour the left have an opportunity to engage voters who retain their allegiance to Labour in much the same way they stay loyal to a football team despite a change of managers. And, in the same way sports fans don’t change their teams because they go through a bad patch, voters tend to remain loyal to the political party they have always supported. And, to stretch the analogy to breaking point, when a team performs poorly fans stay away but most of them do not switch allegiance to another team. 

Being political does not depend on membership of any particular political party. It is my decision currently to spend some of the time I devote to politics on the Labour Party. It costs me less than £1 a week to maintain my membership. Frankly, that is loose change. And, I do realise that not everybody can say that. Being a member does not mean I endorse everything the leadership says. It never has. But, retaining membership gives me an opportunity to vote for and support left-wing candidates. It allows me to talk to other members, some of whom share my views. It allows me to, at least, try to influence the policies. It commits me to nothing beyond that.

The point about staying is not that the left can only operate within the Labour Party. That has never been true. Most people on the left will also be trade unionists and members of other organisations or campaigns. But that outside the party we are, by definition, engaging a far more narrow range of people. That said, I understand those who want to leave and personally will continue to work alongside them where it is possible to do so. Allegiance to the Labour Party is a strategic position not a principle. So, if you choose to leave or stay I will still speak to you and this blog will still welcome your readership.