Fight the Tories – not our members!
AS LABOUR PARTY CONFERENCE MEETS for the first time in two years, we are indeed at a decisive moment.
The future of our planet is on a knife-edge. As we graphically explain in this issue, if the world does not urgently change its present trajectory, it will be too late.
United States imperialism has suffered a decisive, terminal, defeat in Afghanistan, the end for sure of the ‘American century’. In Britain this clueless Tory government reels from crisis to crisis, which no amount of cabinet reshuffling can affect in the slightest. Johnson’s programme for funding social care has destroyed the notion of the Tories as the party of low taxation.
Only one thing can, and probably will, save the government – and that is the absence of any serious opposition – in the words of Alan Simpson’s article (pages 4 and 5), “Labour’s deafening silence”. What is criminal is the failure of Labour’s front bench to support, to connect and to try to give leadership to those movements of resistance to this government. This will become critical as the government attempts to solve the post-Covid crisis of the economy on the backs of the poor, the dispossessed and the working class.
The situation in the Labour Party has gone from bad to worse. At conference itself there are even attempts to rule motions on the Green New Deal off the agenda. Previous issues of Briefing have detailed the attacks on our members and on party democracy - the shutting down of debate, the imposition of candidates for national and local elections, the closing down of constituency parties, the gerrymandering of annual general meetings, the suspensions and the witch-hunts and, in particular, the cynical use of false or wildly exaggerated allegations of antisemitism to purge the party membership (see Leah Levane’s article on page 15 in this issue).
This has got worse over the summer. The bans and proscriptions of socialist organisations have been used as a pretext for threatening auto-expulsion of those who may have supported a petition, ‘liked’ a post or were interviewed in the journal of these organisations – often months, sometimes years, before they were proscribed!
It is, of course, contemptible and outrageous. It is brutal and ferocious. Many of us facing expulsion have been party members for 40, even 50 years. But to complain about how unfair all this is entirely misses the point. It is appalling, but it is not surprising. What we see in this conflict is class struggle!
The leaders of the party are from the establishment wing of the party. They are, when it comes to the crunch, more loyal to the establishment than to the party. With Corbyn in control, they had the fright of their lives. They are prepared to attack our members, destroy our mass base, even sever the historic link to the trade unions – if they must do this to ensure they never lose control of the party again.
This is the price that the left, the working class, is paying for failing to consolidate its power in the party during the Corbyn years – for squandering what FBU General Secretary Matt Wrack referred to as “an opportunity of a lifetime”.
So this purge has a purpose. Indeed, it is more than a purge – it is the potential destruction of our party. This task was begun by Kinnock in the ’80s and Blair’s New Labour in the ’90s. They didn’t have to finish the job. But Starmer and Evans may have to do just that!
Already at least 100,000 have left the party. Another 100,000 will leave if we do not mount a visible fight back. This is not business as usual. This is not the time to keep our heads down – waiting for this party conference, and then the next.
There is a fight back in the party – seen by the excellent results in elections in the constituency sections for the National Women’s Committee and for the Conference Arrangements Committee. There is a struggle too in the world outside the Labour Party. It is happening in the trade unions – in the Unison NEC elections, and in the election of Sharon Graham as Unite General Secretary. As she writes in her recent letter to Unite members, “now is not the time to batten down the hatches. Workers cannot be made to pay for the Covid crisis.” There is a struggle too in the climate change protests and in the enduring legacy of Black Lives Matter.
One thing is certain. We cannot win this fight in constituency parties alone. The movement for change will come from below – and our task is to find a means of connecting these struggles and giving them a political expression. For the moment, for the foreseeable future, that means the Labour Party. But even the Labour Party is not an historical absolute. “All that exists deserves to perish”, as Hegel explained.
But we will not give up on Labour without the fight of our lives. We must fight this establishment onslaught. We have to do different but complementary things at the same time – rebuild on firm political foundations, and build alliances where we can. And we have to learn how to give leadership. But time is not on our side. As another article in this issue puts it, there is “no socialism on a dead planet”.
