Fight for a Labour victory!

Submitted by AWL on 18 April, 2017 - 3:56

Left-wing activists, and those who are not yet activists, should throw themselves into campaigning for a Labour victory in the 8 June General Election.

Workers’ Liberty members, including those expelled from Labour by the party bureaucracy, will be out campaigning. If you’d like to work with us on that, get in touch. Whether or not you’re a Labour Party member, you should get active campaigning; if you haven’t joined, now is the time to do it.

We understand that many of those enthused by Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership campaigns feel disappointed or frustrated by how things have gone. Moreover the circumstances of the election are daunting; and the possibility of Corbyn being replaced with a more right-wing leader if Labour loses is depressing.

Don’t get depressed – organise! Things are difficult, but we don’t know the outcome, either in terms of the election result or of how things will unfold in the Labour Party. Even if Labour does lose the election, the margin is no small matter. Even helping to prevent a huge Tory landslide which will strengthen their ability to impose their nationalist, anti-working class agenda is a goal worth fighting for.

Corbyn should organise big rallies around the country, to recapture some of the excitement of his leadership campaigns, bring people together and build confidence.

We need to maximise campaigning. Campaigning should not be counterposed to democratic organising or political debate. With most local Labour Parties shutting down for the duration, Momentum groups should continue to meet – or start meeting again – and use the election to rally and organise people for campaigning, and to discuss Labour’s programme and our political demands.

Socialists should continue to make the case for radical anti-capitalist policies like expropriating the banks. Meanwhile the left should argue for Labour to emphasise the best, boldest, most radical of its existing policies and campaign for them vigorously.

Over the last 18 months Corbyn, John McDonnell and the party itself have proposed left-wing policies such as rail renationalisation, free education, council house-building, a £10 an hour minimum wage, reversing NHS privatisation – but not campaigned for them in a sustained way. This is an opportunity to begin doing so. We should also argue for Labour to campaign for left-wing policies agreed by its conference but not yet taken up, like public provision of social care and restoring the right to strike in solidarity with other workers.

In an election pitched by the Tories as a referendum on Brexit, Labour needs a clear policy on that. We can’t help but notice that Jeremy Corbyn’s statement responding to Theresa May’s announcement did not mention the issue! There is a real danger that the Liberal Democrats will succeed in pitching themselves as the main opposition to the Tories, with Labour caught looking incoherent in the middle.

Even on the basis of its existing policy, Labour could argue for opposition to the Tories’ Brexit plans, for defence of free movement and migrants’ rights, for remaining in the single market. We should fight for this. Otherwise Labour will go into the election echoing, or scarcely contesting, the Tories’ main message.

Labour needs every activist it can get. In addition to launching a membership drive, the party should stop wasting members' and affiliates' money on paying officials to witch-hunt the left, put a stop to expulsions of socialists for being socialists and extend an amnesty to those who have been expelled.

Beyond individual policies, we need to fight for the idea that socialist – indeed all left-wing and democratic – politics is about politically convincing and persuading people, shifting the political consensus. During Corbyn's first Labour leadership contest, we argued that:

“...a left-wing Labour Party could and would have to inform, shape, educate and re-educate ‘public opinion’. That is what a proper opposition party does. A serious political party is not, should not be, what the Blair-Thatcherite Labour Party now is – an election machine to install venal careerists in ministerial office... The ideas, norms, consequences and ideology of market capitalism have not been contested by the political labour movement. All that can now be changed...”

We think it is a mistake for Labour to vote in Parliament for an election now. No democratic principle obliges us to accept the Tories calling a snap election at a moment chosen to suit them – before things get sticky with Brexit – and when Labour still needs time to do the necessary job of re-educating a public trained for decades now in bleak, no-hope, no-options conservative thinking.

Seeking to educate and shift public opinion, rather than manoeuvring cleverly or not-so-cleverly, is what Corbyn has not done – not just because it is difficult, but for want of trying. A labour movement that fights hard to do that should remain our minimal goal. Organising and mobilising as hard as we can for a Labour victory on 8 June is the best starting point for that.

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