With the right wing in control, is the Labour Party ‘dead’?
By John Pickard
Unfortunately, it is being suggested once again by some on the left that the Labour Party is ‘dead’. Some of those arguing along these lines are even in favour of trade unions disaffiliating from the Party.
The rationale for this view is the tight grip that the right-wing bureaucracy and the Labour leadership around Starmer have on the Party. Many CLPs have been suspended and thousands of individual members investigated, suspended or expelled. There no seem to be no lengths to which the right wing will not go to manufacture a case against a CLP or an individual.
The right wing not only trawl through social media accounts going back years, they effortlessly lie, distort, cheat and break Labour Party rules to get their supporters into positions and get the left out. Despite the Forde Report, the factional behaviour of the right is utterly brazen and now more or less open. All of the charges the right-wing throw against the left, the overwhelming majority of them false, are actually true when it comes to their supporters: they have cheats, bullies, racists and misogynists in their ranks, and they get away with it scot free.
Accusations of antisemitism
We know from the leaked report on antisemitism, further exposed by the Al Jazeera investigations and the Forde Report, that from the first day of his election as Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn had to battle against the opposition and outright sabotage of Labour’s apparatus. Many accusations against Corbyn’s supporters concerned charges of antisemitism, a charge that eventually came to be directed against any critic of the policies of Israel.
It must have shocked the Labour right wing and the Party apparatus to their core, to see the auditorium festooned with Palestinian flags at Labour conference in 2018. Now there is so little freedom of speech that it is forbidden to criticise Israel, or even to speak in opposition to NATO, to support the Stop the War Coalition or to appear on a trade union picket line.
Although it has taken years for the right wing to succeed after Starmer’s election in 2019, they now control not only the PLP and the party apparatus, but they have bludgeoned the conference into submission. At the conference in Liverpool the right wing put the seal on their control.
The lefts in the CLPs and the unions were in a minority and on some issues even the largest ‘left’ union, Unite, voted with the right wing. The large Union Jack backdrop behind the top table, and the singing of God Save the King before it started, are fitting symbols of the changes that have taken place.
Has this conference, therefore, sounded the death-knell to the Labour Party, as some have suggested? Many of the best lefts are utterly repelled by what has happened in conference and the bureaucratic purges of the left in the years leading up to. It is not surprising that as many as two hundred thousand members have resigned or let their membership lapse, although it has to be said that this is ten or a hundred times more than the number actually expelled.
Labour is now polling well ahead of the Tories
The left may be marginalised in the Labour Party and are hanging on by the skin of their teeth, but what is important for Marxists is that for the man and woman in the street the Labour Party is not so much ‘dead’ as revived. The opinion polls published during and just after the conference, one showing a record 33-point lead over the Tories, are an indication of the shift in public attitudes that has taken place. With variations from time to time, these polls are now likely to be a permanent fixture in the political scenery.
The rise in the polls is not due to the policies of Starmer, because up until the conference itself, no-one could have cited a single policy for which he stood. Nor have voters been charmed by the Labour leader’s ‘charisma’, because he has none.
The shift in the polls is entirely down to the election of Liz Truss as Tory leader and the mini-budget that was a massive give-away to the rich. Even though elements of the budget have since been reversed, there now a widespread perception among the voting public that the Tories are the party of the rich, and a view among economists that Truss and Chancellor Kwarteng have ‘lost control’ of the economy.
The working class is facing the biggest cuts in living standards for generations and increasingly, it will not be just the low paid and those on benefits who feel the pinch, but formerly well-to-do and well-paid workers. Everyone is finding it difficult to make ends meet.
The cost of rent, transport, energy, food and all the necessities of daily life are rising at unprecedented rates in modern times. We have seen a wave of strikes among postal workers, rail workers, dockers and even barristers. Other groups of workers are balloting soon on strike action, including teachers, firefighters, NHS workers and junior doctors in the BMA, to name a few.
Combustible social material accumulating
What is surprising is that there has not been more social unrest over the cost of living. The inner-city riots in the early years of the Tory government have yet to be repeated, but the dry combustible social material accumulating, and it is inevitable that at some stage a spark will set it alight.
What we have to understand is that the mass of workers are becoming utterly repelled by the Truss government. They are much more inclined to vote Labour than before, not because of Starmer, but despite him and because they do not see any other alternative, at least in England.
The Tory Party is split. Tory MPs are in open revolt: they have a leader backed by a minority of their MPs. Indeed, it was the threat of a revolt by a large number of Tory MPs that led to the Kwarteng U-turn over some elements of the mini-budget. There could be many more revolts by Tory MPs on other issues.
The ruling class is split. The chief economic columnist of the Financial Times, referred to the Tories in these terms: that they are “mad, bad and dangerous. They have to go”. Another FT columnist wrote, “The Tories have become unmoored from the British people.” It is not surprising therefore, that now it is led by a ‘safe pair of hands, the Labour Party is perceived as a ‘safe’ alternative government. Safe, that is, for capitalism.
When Keir Starmer made his speech to Labour conference, the press fell over itself to proclaim that Labour had returned to the ‘centre ground’. Steve Bell, the Guardian cartoonist, captured the reality that idea very well, when he portrayed Starmer appearing – Union Jack in hand, of course – in front of a huge hole in the ground.
Labour leadership is to the right of the average voter
What used to be the ‘centre ground’ of British politics has shifted markedly to the left, with polls showing that voters support reversing the privatisation of utilities. As we have shown, an article in the Financial Times, representing political parties graphically (with all the caveats to that) showed that Starmer’s policies are to the right, not only of all Labour voters, but around half of Lib-Dem voters and many Tory voters.
That narrative, that the ‘centre ground’ needs to be won, has always been the argued by the right-wing but it is wrong. What is true is that the shift of the Labour Party under Starmer, its courtship with businesses, the qualification of every reforming policy by the need for ‘fiscal responsibility’ have made the Party more acceptable to the capitalist class, especially given the crisis of leadership in the Tory Party.
The idea that Labour is now in the ‘centre ground’ that it is more ‘responsible’ will seep into the editorial offices of the media – with exceptions like the more rabid press, like the Mail – and from there out into the public at large. It is not by looking closely at policy but from a revulsion of Toryism and by ‘sniffing the political air’ that the ordinary voters in the street are also coming to the idea that Labour is ‘electable’. This is true, whatever the ultra-left may think of Labour and whatever the Labour left think of Starmer.
For the big majority of voters, the Union Jack backdrop and the national anthem being sung in the conference will not mean a thing. It will have passed them by. Nor are they even aware of the disgraceful, anti-democratic and bureaucratic control of the Party apparatus by the right-wing. The man and woman in the street will vote according to what they see as their best economic interests – which party they think will best eliminate the insecurity, uncertainty and prices spiral that plague their lives?
Labour got over 13 million votes in 1997…and will do so again
As things stand today, therefore, there is a strong likelihood that Labour will come to power at the next general election, an election that may take place before the prescribed five-year period in December 2024. Labour got over 13 million votes in 1997. Labour, supposedly ‘dead’, will get something around that number of votes in the next general election. In answer to those comrades who say the Party is ‘dead’, we would simply say that millions of voters will show that they disagree with that idea.
When that election campaign takes place, despite the leadership of Starmer and all the caveats he has used to hedge around Labour’s promised ‘reforms’, Left Horizons will call for and we will campaign for a Labour victory. With this difference: that we will call for Labour to win and to introduce policies that genuinely challenge the interests of capitalism.
We have to support any genuine reforms being promised by the Labour leadership, but we would have to warn Labour voters and Labour members that none of the reforms will be implemented unless a Labour government challenges the power, position and wealth of the ruling class. If it does not do this, reforms will turn to counter-reforms.
We cannot wish away mass illusions in Starmer’s Labour Party
Of course, the ultra-lefts will cry, “But Starmer will not do that, so why pretend he will?”. I would answer them by saying that Marxists always have to take account of the objective circumstances in which we conduct our political activity. For us, the illusions of the mass of the working class in a reforming Labour Party, are an objective factor that we cannot simply wish away. There is no other mass party now, or likely in the foreseeable future, that can replace the position the Labour Party has in the consciousness of the working class.
If workers have the illusion that all they need to do is put an ‘X’ on a piece of paper and then leave it all to Keir Starmer, then they will have to be disabused of that illusion. And the only way that can happen is to go through the experience of a Starmer Labour government.
Experience has always been the best political teacher and the experience of a ’reformist’ (in reality a counter-reformist) Labour government is a necessary stage in the political awakening of the working class and its arousal into political activity on a mass scale. It is a stage that we cannot just jump over.
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