New Labour is using a closed PR list system to stitch up the selection of Labour MEPs who have been vulnerable since they magnificently opposed Blair’s ditching of Clause IV.
Nearly every LLB reader will sympathise with the frustration that Hugh and Ken have endured recently. Everything they say about New Labour is right. But politics is about timing and strategy.
Even though the Labour hierarchy is seen to have prejudged their cases, it is next to impossible to garner sympathy against the expulsions when most Party members will see their intention to stand against Labour candidates as incriminating. Many will feel Hugh and Ken consciously walked into a trap set for them. There is a layer of Party members who support a broad church and oppose witch-hunts. But they balk at defending those who stand or threaten to stand against the Party, and neither MEP appears to have any real support for their move within their ECLP. This puts Labour left comrades on the back foot when seeking to argue that Hugh and Ken’s political objections to New Labour’s course are correct.
Most importantly, the declaration that the comrades would stand against Labour cuts across developments in the Party. As the Government moves to the right the Party is moving, admittedly all too slowly, to the left. We must not get impatient. It’s easy to get mad but we need to get even. We must not accept that Blair is invincible within the Labour Party. We have just witnessed a major parliamentary rebellion on cuts to lone parent benefits. The main debate in society is now between New Labour and the Labour left, with outside forces to right and left of the Party lining up accordingly.
Massive battles loom on the horizon. The conflict is bound to reach a crunch before the next General Election. Blair’s Partnership In Power changes have forced a wide section from the Party’s centre-left to hard-left to begin to work together.
A united slate of candidates for this year’s NEC elections is for the first time a possibility. After over a decade of defeats, something new is happening. An alliance of those who fundamentally oppose Labour’s leadership is developing. Of course this is the result of devastating defeats but while New Labour controls the apparatus of the Party, the mass of the Party and unions, while too timid and disorganised yet to rebel, do not agree with their politics. Many were so desperate to remove the Tories that they have voted within the Party for things that they disagreed with. Many beyond the ranks of the hard left are horrified at the reality of “governing as New Labour”. Yet Hugh and Ken argue the divide is elsewhere. The immediate task for socialist MPs and MEPs is to focus, and dare I say it, actively help organise the resistance of all those who oppose Blair in the Labour Party.
As the Government moves to attack the welfare state a central arena for focusing opposition will be within the Labour Party at all levels — and possibly even within Council chambers. As MEPs or just plain Party members, Hugh and Ken would have been in a powerful position to help build a Labour left revival. We’ve hardly even started to try to organise the Labour opposition to Blair.
Of course the key component missing from all our equations is the existence of any meaningful trade union resistance. I cannot see any way in which this episode will help us on this score.
Could these events assist the establishment of a socialist alternative to New Labour as some comrades hope? I think not. Ken and Hugh’s alternative political trajectories (one to the Confederal Left, one to the Greens/Scottish Socialist Alliance) since their expulsion offer little coherence and example to comrades seeking a new framework for socialist activity. This is because they have acted as individuals. There cannot be a big bang if all your powder has been spent. This event is part of a fragmentation of our forces not a reassembly. Sadly the shards of socialist crystal will be hoovered up into the cleaner bag of history.
Our task now is to work with those who believe that Labour’s core values are the redistribution of wealth and the maintenance and extension of a meaningful welfare state and can be encouraged to fight for those principles. We admire your sentiments, comrades, but cannot condone your tactics.