Although the Left Horizons website carries editorial comment on a wide variety of issues, this new booklet contains only editorials that dealt specifically with the Labour Party, from the general election defeat of December 2019 to Summer 2021. It has been produced as a contribution to the discussions taking place in and around the Labour Party in the approach to the national conference 2021 in Brighton.
The booklet maps out, over almost two years, the dangerous and destructive trajectory of the Labour Party since the election defeat of December 2019 and the entrenchment of a new, right-wing leadership. It offers an analysis and explanation for the dramatic decline in Labour’s support, far worse even than in that general election, and it reinforces the argument for socialist ideas and a socialist fight in the Party.
Right wing happy to see Tories in office
As we have argued in several articles, the right-wing who have taken over the leadership of the Labour Party, including many MPs, would be equally at home in the Liberal-Democrat or the Conservative Party. They would be happier to see the Tories permanently in office rather than have a radical Labour Government. Many so-called ‘Labour’ MPs are today so far to the right that they would have opposed the measures of the 1945 Labour government, including the establishment of the NHS, as ‘too radical’.
When it comes to the general ‘health’ and well-being of the Party, they are equally destructive. They would rather have a tiny, compliant membership than a large one that questions and challenges the policies and actions of MPs and leaders. Under their stewardship, the Labour Party has gone from being the largest political party in Europe, with bulging campaign coffers, to a party on the brink of bankruptcy.
Allowing members to have a decisive say in electing the party leader has proved to be a significant change and, although the right-wing would dearly love to go back to having MPs alone select the leader, the genie is now out of the bottle and refuses to go back in. Had it not been for the residual radicalism of most Labour members – even today – it is possible that Labour MPs might have ditched the hapless Keir Starmer long before now. However, the ‘danger’ of a left leadership being elected again is still all too real.
Thousands of good party members have walked away
Part of the longer-term strategy of Labour’s right-wing is to undermine the membership of the party. Hundreds if not thousands of good party members have been witch-hunted out of membership – and we use that word in its proper meaning, because party ‘rules’ are applied in different ways to different wings of the party – and tens of thousands more have walked away. The most recent round of bans and proscriptions, leading to the ludicrous expression, “auto-exclusion”, is aimed exclusively at the left, not at right wing MPs to organise against the party or who write columns in anti-Labour newspapers.
It is a tragic situation when two trade unions are already debating whether to disaffiliate from the party. Disaffiliation would, in our opinion, be a mistake, even if the anger against the leadership is understandable. But the right-wing will be happy to see unions walk away, because they have always wanted to break the historic link with the unions, even though the party has rested on the trade unions in the whole period of its existence. Trade union affiliation fees will be compensated for, the right-wing hope, by donations from wealthy supporters and big business. The favoured trajectory of the right wing is to turn the Labour Party into a new version of the Liberals or a Tory-lite Party, with a tiny membership.
But in the final analysis, it comes down to politics and what political policies and programme are on offer. What will be the undoing of Labour’s right wing is the fact that they have nothing to offer working class people. On low pay, in-work poverty, the housing crisis, social care, the NHS, or a myriad of other social problems, including the climate crisis, they have little to offer besides a warmed-up version of Tory policies.
Corbyn’s leadership sabotaged from Day One
What they do not understand, because it is not in their political DNA, is that the movement around Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership – which they sabotaged from Day One – reflected real social needs and the aspirations of millions of ordinary people.
Those aspirations have not gone away. Indeed, faced with even more austerity to pay for the Covid pandemic and an increasing precariousness in everyday life, their significance will be intensified. If they are not reflected through constituency Labour Parties, because of the baleful effect of David Evans’ clampdown on free speech in the Party, then they will be reflected in the affiliated trade unions, which retain a mass membership and are inevitably closer to those in work.
Labour’s right wing find it impossible to admit it, but opinion polls have shown repeatedly that the reforms outlined in Labour’s elections manifestos of 2017 and 2019 were and remain very popular. Having been at great pains to distance himself from Jeremy Corbyn and those two manifestos, Keir Starmer’s leadership is notable for its utter lack of concrete policies. Indeed, even the modest commitments he made in his leadership campaign – the Ten Pledges – have been binned.
Socialist policies more relevant than ever
The 2021 conference is therefore an important milestone in the development of the Labour Party. We would argue that socialist policies are more relevant than ever before. Labour needs to go back to its Clause IV roots because that clause signified a basic social and political reality – that public ownership and the planning of the main levers of the economy are an essential pre-requisite for resolving the problems facing working class people – and we would add to that today, meeting the challenge of climate change. The capitalist ‘free market’, to which so many Labour MPs are wedded, is utterly incapable of solving a single social problem.
The question is whether the Labour Party continues on its present path towards its own destruction as a working class, socialist party, or whether it corrects its present course and shifts back towards being a party of greater democracy and radicalism.
Copies of this booklet (P&P charge only), can be requested from: editor@left-horizons.co.uk
