New Labour boasts that it has abandoned ideology. It hasn’t. lt abandoned socialism and social democracy and fell in love with free market capitalism. It embraced the ideology of right wing conservatism that in recent decades has been called Thatcherism.
Every politicaI party has an ideology which literally means a body of ideas that reflects the beliefs and interests of a nation, a political system, a political party, a social class. Ideology underlies and underpins political action. To say you have no ideology is as daft as saying you have no philosophy, which would mean you have no view of the world. Everyone has views about the world and voices them frequently; even those who claim they have no philosophy. Politicians who say they have no ideology are simply trying to conceal their abandonment of previously held beliefs.
That, I suggest, is a fairly good working definition of New Labour.
The British Labour Party was founded to serve the interests of the British working class. Its very name made it clear that it was a party for those who have to sell their labour. ln 1918, after the senseless slaughter of the First World War, the Labour movements of Europe swung to the left; the British Labour Movement was no exception. The Labour Party Conference of that year introduced a clause into its constitution that was of historic significance. lt became known as Clause 4. It defined socialism as the strategic aspiration of the Party. To embrace free market capitalism, New Labour had to rid itself of this encumbrance. This is what the abandonment of Clause 4 was all about. All the talk of updating the language was a load of tosh. Getting rid of the clause was a necessary pre-condition for transforming the Labour Party into a party of the status quo; the capitalist status quo. New Labour is essentially a conservative party. It talks of modernity and the need for change but that, even conceptually, is confined to technology and it’s promotion. The ownership of technology, and every other resource that can generate wealth, will remain unchanged, in the hands of the few.
What’s new about that? Blair also tells us to forget about class. That class is a thing of the past; implying that Britain is a classless society. This in a society where the disparity between rich and poor has never been greater; where the actual concentration of wealth in the hands of the few has reached obscene proportions. The accumulation of wealth by the mega rich today is much greater than that of the kings and barons of feudal times.
If class is a thing of the past then the Labour Party, whose raison d’etre was to represent the working class, is historically redundant. The reality is that many millions still sell their labour for wages or salaries and want to get as much as they can for it. Others, naturally fewer, buy their labour, and would like to do so for as a little as possible. There is in this relationship a conflict of interests between employers and employees. The sellers and buyers of labour. It’s an objective factor and cannot be wished away. ln the political arena the Tories represented the bosses interests and Labour was supposed to represent the interests of the workers.
All this is stating the obvious but New Labour now denies this reality. The Party that was founded and funded by the trade unions tells the unions to expect no favours from it. But it’s worse than that. It woos the mega rich like Rupert Murdoch and is so big business friendly that his newspapers and other media bastions of the Right tike the Express newspapers and the Daily Mail are now supporting New Labour.
Blair’s long term electoral strategy is to root himself in the territory that Thatcher carved out for herself. Middle England, as it’s called. This required a lurch to the right greater than anything we’ve ever seen in the history of Britain’s Labour Movement. It meant adopting the Thatcherite economic strategy, which Brown has so meticulously followed at the Treasury. Such a strategy is absolutely incompatible with progressive social policies.
The mass privatisation, by the Tories, of public facilities will remain forever in private hands, if the Blairites have their way. Private Finance Initiatives will place the very structures of schools and hospitals in private hands. Some prisons have been privatised. They want to privatise Air Traffic Control and the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency. It won’t stop there. Far from promoting social ownership and the state regulation of market forces, even along Keynesian lines, to safeguard the wider public interest, Blair and Brown are enthusiastic advocates within the European Union of the same de-regulation of markets that Thatcher ruthlessly imposed in Britain during the 1980s.
New Labour, in all fundamentals, is now a party of laissez faire capitalism. This was the socio-economic system that dominated the world from 1850-1950. It led to economic slumps of a severity never seen before. People starving in the midst of plenty. Crops rotting in fields as people rotted in villages, towns and cities. It was the century of two world wars where slaughter was maximised by the latest technology and sciences. ln Scotland under nourished children died in disease-ridden slums, like flies.
And Britain was arguably, at the time, the richest country in the world and the centre of an empire on which the sun never set. We were supposed to have left this world behind in 1945, in a sense we had, with the advent of the welfare state, which in essence was a product of socialist thinking. But in the last twenty years we’ve been dragged back to the concepts of the 19th century.
Through these years Scotland voted Labour so that this process might be reversed with the election of a Labour Government. In 1997 New Labour was returned with a massive majority. We didn’t expect miracles overnight but did anticipate a change; the beginning of the dismantling of Thatcherism; instead we got Son of Thatcher. All of this has created a crisis of identity within the Scottish Labour Movement. The Scottish nation rejected Thatcherism as an alien ideology. This almost led to the disappearance of the Tory Party from the political landscape North of the Border.
Thatcherite New Labour is unlikely, in the long run, to fare any better than Thatcherite Toryism. It too will alienate Scotland’s political culture which would now seem to be significantly different from that which prevails in England. The advent of a Scottish Parliament can only accentuate this difference. The present government is different from any other labour Government in the sense that it isn’t really a Labour Government at all. The nearest comparison is with Ramsay McDonald’s government of 1929/32. But eventually McDonald was told to get out by his colleagues and had to walk the floor and join the Tories.
Could anything remotely like this happen in New Labour? It’s hard to envisage. Blair controls the Labour Party machine as no party leader has ever done before. Inner party democracy has been seriously undermined, some would say destroyed. The annual party conference is now a rally/platform for the leader with disturbing Nuremberg rally overtones. The role of the party executive has been reduced to rubber stamping the flow of instructions that emanate from the leaders office. Selection procedures are designed to ensure a constant supply of house trained, super obedient MPs; enough to carry the day, any day, in the Parliamentary Party.
The trade unions have been to some extent marginalised in terms of the party except when a block vote or two is needed to get selected a favoured son of the leadership, as it was deployed in Wales. The trade unions have been mostly obsequious in a frantic search for a few crumbs of favourable legislation. We got a minimum wage that is a disgrace. lf any employer is paying less than the rate set by the government he should be in prison. You could even argue that those that do pay this rate should be in the same place. What we do know is that the government promotes campaigns for inward investment to Britain pointing out as one of the attractions, the low wages prevailing here. As a life long trade unionist I find that acutely embarrassing. We also know that the Prime Minister in the early days of this government assured businessmen that despite anything his government might do, that British trade unionists would still be the least free in Europe. The fact is that the British Labour Party has been subverted by the Militant right, and not from the Militant left, as we had always been encouraged to fear.
I don’t think the present position can hold in Scotland. Labour party activists are leaving, others are hanging on, as they tell me, by their finger tips. Few are doing anything. Among Labour’s most committed supporters there is dismay and even despair and growing bitterness. Some are not voting. Others will vote SNP because it is to the left of new labour; no hard feat nowadays. Some will vote for the Scottish Socialist Party.
But more important than all electoral considerations is a more profound question: What is to happen to the Scottish Labour Movement? It cannot for evermore be in thrall to a party that has abandoned everything it stands for. The present situation is therefore unsustainable and cannot last. If Scottish Labour can’t be reclaimed by the membership for socialism and social democracy then a re-alignment of the Left in Scotland in inevitable. How or what form this wilt take is unclear. But any developments have to be thoroughly thought out in the Scottish context.
That is why we have launched Scottish Left Review. It is intended to be a forum of discussion. No voice of the left will be barred but political sectarianism will be frowned upon, putting it as delicately as I can. We want a broad kirk, chapel, synagogue, mosque, call it what you like. It will be composed of essays rather than articles for we want people to express themselves in depth and have the space to do so.
We hope that discussion groups might meet in the various regions of Scotland to discuss some of the essays. Some consensus might emerge. lt is my experience that when people begin to form collective judgements then one of their members will ask the pertinent question. Now that we have some agreement, what are we going to do? That’s when the real fun starts.