Turning things round in Labour

Keir Starmer has had a 15 to 20% poll lead over the Tories for a year, since the Liz Truss episode in September-October 2022. As with Blair in 1994-97, many people in the labour movement will go along with him if only not to rock a boat which could end a decade and a half of Tory rule. But an audible left-wing minority voice in 2023 will be a vital marker for the future.

We are realistic about this. A lot of the “soft left” and “centre”, even people like Neal Lawson and Jon Cruddas, are scornful of Starmer. We thought maybe they would push him somewhat off his Blair-tribute path before now. It didn’t happen.

There has been much talk about a new “left of Labour” party. But so far we see the Transform coalition, with almost no non-electoral activity, little electoral activity, and poor politics.

Blair never realised his plan to break Labour’s link with the unions and, as he himself put it, “correct the defect from [Labour’s] birth” which separated Labour from the old Liberal Party in the early 20th century.

He did, however, shift Labour’s structures from a dominance by union officialdom (from 1928 to 1980, Labour Party HQ was some floors in the head office of the TGWU union, a forerunner of Unite) to a dominance by a new category of political apparatchiks. The union leaders were and are subject to at least some democratic scrutiny within their unions and at Labour conference; the apparatchiks are not.

The apparatchiks are numerous and well-funded — through official payments to the parliamentary opposition (dating from 1975, but upgraded in 1993 and 1999), MPs’ offices (money for which has increased over the decades), and sometimes outright donations by wealthy people (think Sainsbury). They move to and fro between Labour politics and think-tanks and NGOs (and sometimes posts like Rachel Reeves’s at the Bank of England).

The balance shifted a bit under Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn, but only a bit (the unelected Leader’s Office remained a powerful factor). Starmer is shifting back again to the dominance of back-office people like Morgan McSweeney and Matt Pound. The axis is showing Labour “pro-business”, as Starmer puts it himself (while still calling it “the party of working people”).

Blair had favourable world-market economic conditions when in office, and increased spending on the NHS, on schools, and on tax and pension credits. Starmer faces a time of economic dislocations, debt overhang from Covid, and unrealistic schedules from the Tories for paring down government debt which he has promised to match.

His anxiety to give “certainty” to “business” by ruling out increased taxes on the rich means continued rundown of the NHS and public services and continued pauperisation of many people dependent on benefits. His anxiety to placate “red wall” vote-switchers (rather than seek to convince them) means a “social conservative” profile which can rule out left-wing social policies with no tax cost.

In Blair’s early days, the unions were dominated by “new realist” leaders who would do almost anything for Blair as long as he ended the long period of Tory rule. Today most union leaders, despite their largely-poor record in the current strikes, are in broad terms on the left.

But at the 2022 conference the union leaders gave Starmer an easy ride, prioritising topics for debate which would minimise dispute. For 2023, CWU and FBU (but not Unite) have put motions seeking to tighten up Labour’s “New Deal for Working People” policy; Aslef and TSSA have called for keeping rail ticket offices open; Unite calls for public ownership of the whole energy industry, or at least the National Grid, but that must be read together with Unite’s push for licensing more fossil-fuel fields in the North Sea; other union motions are bland.

Agitation

Historically, unions have pushed Labour to the left when pushed themselves by rank-and-file agitation within the unions and by pressure from the local Labour Parties, even if only in the form of getting motions on the conference agenda which unions then vote for because their own congress policies tell them to.

Only an interlocking process of self-assertion by both unions and local Labour Parties will push a new Labour government even into opening up possibilities. That is what we work for.

The sober fact is that the strike wave since June 2022, the biggest for a generation, has not yet really increased union political activity or shifted it leftwards. Unions have made no big mobilisations for the political aims of restoring the NHS or defeating anti-strike laws, let alone against the Tories’ attacks on civil rights (Police Act, Public Order Act) and asylum rights (Illegal Migration Act, Borders Act).

It takes time for new young activists, generated by the disputes, to reshape the union structures and spur on the older activists. How much time? That is not fixed. It depends on what the most dynamic and undaunted of the already-organised left activists do to help.

Inside the local Labour Parties, the falling-away of Corbyn-era “returner” activists may have bottomed out. Membership figures have nudged up slightly. New activists may start to come in as the general election approaches, wanting to get rid of the Tories but also to reverse the Tories’ legacy.

That is not sure. More activists may yet disperse by way of resigning or offering themselves up for expulsion just for the sake of one-off local “protest” election candidacies (Driscoll for North East Mayor, Corbyn in Islington North). But we will seek to rally activists who have stuck to it since 2020 to prepare the necessary left kickback from within the unions and the Labour Party to a Labour government set to govern as “pro-business” in times where “pro-business” means the ruination of public services in the name of “fiscal discipline”.

What we can do at the conference and in the coming months is make the left more visible and audible; extend its broader alliances on many issues (NHS, anti-strike laws, housing, Europe, asylum rights, decriminalising abortion, and more), and quite possibly score some victories on some of those; make sure the left is prepared to take the chances of the next political explosion in the labour movement, as we really were not in 2015.

In 1931-32 the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci argued that socialists must work with a “dual perspective”. He got the wording from the 1925 Fifth Congress of the Communist International, where it was only a fudge or equivocation. He developed it, however, into a useful discussion of combining an “urgent” understanding of the need for rapidity and radicalism with a “patient” understanding that only transforming the existing labour movement will suffice, not any short-cut gimmick. We know there will be explosions; we don’t know when; we can’t create them at will; but we must never rule ourselves out by tacitly accepting stillness and stability.

“The active politician is a creator, an initiator; but they neither create from nothing nor do they move in the turbid void of their own desires and dreams. They base themselves on effective reality, but what is this effective reality?.. [It is] a relation of forces in continuous motion and shift of equilibrium...

“If one applies one’s will to the creation of a new equilibrium among the forces which really exist and are operative… one still moves on the terrain of effective reality, but does so in order to dominate and transcend it (or to contribute to this)”.