Stop our rightward drift!

Submitted by AWL on 2 December, 2014 - 5:34 Author: Duncan Morrison

Colin Foster’s letter “Hyping it up” (Solidarity 345), in response to my initial letter, is peculiar, evasive and defensive. 

The backdrop to this is an ongoing discussion in Workers’ Liberty about the emphasis of our approach towards Labour in the general election. Colin was amongst the majority who supported a Socialist Campaign for Labour Victory, I was in a minority (albeit a significant one) which supported a Campaign for a Workers’ Government. The minority also argued for beginning to seriously re-visit standing candidates against Labour.

Colin starts by correctly pointing out that Miliband is partially responsible for the rise of UKIP, which Lansman seemed to deny. But even here Colin feels it necessary to defend Lansman by arguing “He probably meant that no other halfway-likely leader … could have stopped a rise of UKIP, wither, which is true.”

He argues that Lansman’s “article is a guest article and doesn’t reflect our line”, but with the corrective outlined above he defends the article. The fact that it was a guest article doesn’t really deal with my criticism, that the article does not informs us of anything most Solidarity readers would not be aware of already (by just following the news), it gives us no guide to action, it doesn’t present a view that would not be widely held by anyone to the left of the Blairites, nor does it even give us a position clearly to differentiate ourselves from. So what was the purpose of running the article? It wasn’t as though we had commissioned it and that Lansman would have been offended had we not run it. This was my point when I argued “… what do we propose that activists should do about it? Move motions of support in their labour movement bodies extoling the virtues of the current leadership?” I thought that was self-evidently ridiculous, that Colin takes it at face value is telling of a rightward drift, within the organisation.

Colin says I “censure the article for including its anti-cut call only in the headline”. In fact all I said was that “it should be noted…” which is actually just pointing out the truth. He then goes in to slightly paranoid speculation of whether I thought the Solidarity office had added the headline to “smarten the article up.” I had no idea who had written the headline when I wrote my letter. It was simply the case that the article did not mention anti-cuts or indeed anything else political other than Miliband’s leadership, no matter who wrote the headline.

I don’t recognise the criticism that I am hyping up how bad the Labour Party is at present. I really don’t need to do that when Miliband is on the television saying that Cameron can’t be trusted to keep immigration numbers down, or my local Labour council is pursuing the academisation of secondary schools, just because it agrees with it not under pressure from the Tories.

In my recollection in 1994 during the Labour leadership campaign we made an effort to draft a genuine left candidate. We then supported Prescott whilst recognising that Beckett’s election would also represent a brake on the rise of what would become “New Labour”. We certainly didn’t oppose a leadership election, as we are now, not least because it made no sense: the previous leader was dead!

In fact the 1992 leadership election is a better case for Colin to cite, it was run between two right-wing candidates, John Smith and Bryan Gould, again in my recollection we tried to draft a genuine left candidate and when this failed, we refused to support either candidate. However, even then we didn’t oppose a leadership election because again the party was without a leader, Kinnock having resigned.

We could argue for drafting a genuine left candidate in an upcoming leadership election, this would allow us to raise, the arguments for working-class socialism. My assessment is because of the state of the Party this would be futile. Does Colin agree?

I didn’t argue that Miliband “could be summarily replaced by Labour MPs”. What I pointed out was that if Miliband was to be forced out it would be through the MPs and that the Party and the labour movement could do little to affect that. If that isn’t the case, is there a widespread feeling in the Party and the movement that Miliband should be got rid of? I think not.

What can the Party and the movement do to stop Miliband being toppled? Virtually nothing, or can Colin or Lansman or indeed anyone else tell us what they can do?

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