from Roger Silverman in London
The re-election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party with a
strengthened mandate is a sign of the change that has transformed British
society. After decades of relative stability, political life in Britain is now
in turmoil. In last year's general election, the briefly fashionable Liberal
Democrats were virtually annihilated, and the Scottish Nationalists swept from
relative obscurity, with just six MPs out of 59 Scottish seats, to a
near-monopoly of 56. Now the ruling Tory party is reeling from the shock result
of the Brexit referendum, following which the prime minister resigned
overnight, and the party is riven with barely concealed splits. Most
significant of all is the transformation of the Labour Party, which has more
than trebled its membership in a matter of months as hundreds of thousands of
working people and youth have joined to elect a left leader and begin to
restore it to its class roots.
This transformation of the Labour Party represents a decisive rejection of
the legacy of the Blair years. With Blair's accession as Labour leader in the
mid-1990s, there was an influx into parliament of career politicians owing
little or no allegiance to the Labour and trade union movement. This process
accompanied a conscious tactical manoeuvre by the ruling class. The
Conservative Party had become discredited beyond foreseeable repair by popular
revulsion at the effects of a decade of Thatcherism, and subsequently by the
disaster of Black Wednesday in 1992, when the value of the pound sterling
crashed. The decision was taken to abandon temporarily the Tories as the
traditional political instrument of the establishment. For the first time,
corporate donations poured into New Labour, with a mandate to carry onward
under a new banner, along with some minor reforms, the Thatcherite crusade of
privatisation. For the first time in its history, the Tory party found itself
starved of funds; media moguls such as Rupert Murdoch became miraculously
transformed into champions of Labour; and for the first time ever, under its
new pro-business leadership Labour won three elections in a row and ruled for
three full terms, from 1997 to 2010.
These Blairite MPs adopted an identity very distinct from Labour's socialist
traditions, proclaiming themselves explicitly as a separate party (“New
Labour”), and expunged the socialist aims embodied for eighty years in the
Party constitution, ditching in words as well as deeds time-honoured principles
to which previous leaders had had to pay at least nominal lip service, such as
defence of trade-union rights, an aspiration towards public ownership, and
opposition to colonial wars. It was only following the financial catastrophe of
2008 that the New Labour project was deemed to have outlived its usefulness.
Corporate support for Labour was unceremoniously withdrawn, funds began once
again pouring into Tory Party coffers, and the media switched to vicious and
unrelenting ridicule of Blair's successor Brown.
This left the spent political residue of Blairite MPs - a beached whale if
not quite a rotting carcase - awkwardly sprawled across most of the Labour
parliamentary benches, lacking either the confidence of the newly regenerated
Labour ranks or the patronage of a ruling class to which they have largely
outlived their usefulness, except as an obstacle to the democratic rights of
the Party membership. All that is left to them is to cling on to their careers
in parliament. The ferocity of their resistance to the spectacular revival of
Labour's membership is due to the fact that they are fighting not just for
discredited political ideas, but for their very livelihoods.
Blinded with delusions in their own status, these MPs have now precipitated
their own downfall. It was they who opened the electoral floodgates to allow
non-members to vote in leadership elections, deluding themselves that the wider
electorate would always flock to their support against the left; some of them
even nominated Corbyn as a leadership candidate in the mistaken belief that he
would be trounced in any leadership vote and the left humiliated for evermore;
and even after Corbyn had already proved them wrong by winning the leadership
by a landslide, it was they who imagined that they could still bring him down in
an orchestrated back-stabbing coup by resigning en masse from the Shadow
Cabinet, hoping that the left would crumple under their pressure.
At every stage they showed themselves blind to the change sweeping Britain
and the world. In their insulated Commons cocoon, what they had failed to
notice was the new mood of revolt, in Britain taking the form of a wave of
determined but scattered local grass-roots protests against housing evictions,
hospital closures, etc., and most spectacularly the unprecedented strikes of
hospital doctors. They have now perversely precipitated their own terminal
crisis, by wantonly undermining a democratically elected leader who already
enjoyed the biggest mandate in the party's history.
It is the new mass influx into the party which has transformed the political
outlook. According to some surveys, Corbyn's contemptible challenger Smith had
won a small margin among that minority who had been members prior to 2015; but
overall Corbyn won overwhelming majorities in all three sectors: among full
party members, registered supporters and affiliated trade unionists. His
victory is all the more impressive when account is taken of the outright
sabotage practised by the party officials surviving from the Blair years, who
grossly and blatantly rigged the vote, disenfranchising up to 200,000 party
members through the imposition of arbitrary membership deadlines, targeted
suspensions amounting to a wholesale purge, and even plain vote-stealing.
Behind these machinations stood the unanimous hysteria of the media, from the
BBC and the Guardian rightwards, who let loose an unprecedented barrage of
baseless smears of intimidation, sexism and even anti-Semitism.
Now that Corbyn is confirmed more overwhelmingly than ever as leader, the
entire establishment is clamouring for the winning side in this contest to
throw away its victory in a one-sided gesture of reconciliation which would
leave the defeated MPs in place for perpetuity. They have magnanimously offered
to resume their places in Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet… in return for just one
favour: a guarantee of jobs for life. By demanding a ban on the right of local
Labour Parties to hold democratic reselections of Labour candidates in future
elections, they are insolently putting the onus on Jeremy Corbyn's supporters
for avoiding the coming split in the Labour Party which they themselves have
made inevitable.
Labour today is a reinvigorated mass party, already numbering more than
600,000 members. They must insist on their right to select candidates who reflect
their interests. The right seem to have conjured up a new dogma: the divine
right of Labour MPs. It is those who deny their members simple democratic
rights who are paving the way for a split.
The old parties of social-democracy that had in more affluent times
succeeded in winning partial concessions and reforms are today in terminal
decline all over Europe: Greece, Spain, France, Germany, Scandinavia… In
Britain the eclipse of New Labour and the influx into the Labour Party of
workers and youth eager to transform it is a particular local variant of this
same worldwide trend.
What matters now is to formulate a programme adequate to the challenge.
Winning and then reaffirming the election of a left leader is only the
beginning of a long hard bitter struggle. With the active connivance of the
ruling class, the right wing of the Labour Party has succeeded easily in
outmanoeuvring the left, by springing clever traps in reshaping the composition
of the National Executive Committee, fixing the election of conference
delegates, manipulating conference procedures, etc. So far the programme of
Corbyn and his chancellor McDonnell is confined to inspiring visions (a
universal living wage, free lifelong education, a million new homes, etc.), but
rather more modest immediate practical proposals, limited to renationalisation
of the railways, limited curbs on the utility companies, etc. There are no
proposals even for the nationalisation of the banks. Among the population there
is a widespread thirst for far more sweeping measures.
Yes, Corbyn's decisive mandate has generated genuine hope for the first time
in decades; but on its own, hope is not enough. Now it is time to launch a
debate at every level about how that hope can be vindicated and translated into
deeds. Momentum has arisen spontaneously as a mass left movement within and
alongside the official Labour institutions, but it has yet to develop a
structure and a constitution, and above all a socialist programme. In their
absence, it has already lost impetus and needs to catch up fast. The time for
cheerleading is now over. What Corbyn and McDonnell need now is not just
passive support but active participation in a democratic debate drawing in the
whole revived movement.
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