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Blair’s Crisis and the Renewal of Social Radicalism
Forthcoming article from the Spanish journal ‘Pueblos’.
Both the two main political parties in Britain – Tony Blair’s Labour Party and the right-wing Conservative Party – are more unpopular now than at any time in the past 90 years. Support for both is undergoing an historic decline. But it is difficult to work out who, if anyone, will gain politically from this twin crisis. The radical left and the social movements, despite building a giant anti-war movement, are having extreme difficulty articulating a global alternative with mass appeal (except in Scotland). There are dangerous signs that the far right British National Party (BNP) could start to make significant gains. On the other hand, the hundreds of thousands of young people being drawn into action by the anti-war movement represent a vast potential, and a break from the long-term trend towards the depoliticisation of the youth – and not only them.
Here we discuss the dimensions of the current crisis of ‘official’ politics, particularly the impact of the Iraq war; then some considerations about potential alternatives, as well as the long-term social changes in British society which are the essential background for understanding the crisis.
Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’ is the longest period of continuous Labour government ever – he has been prime minister since May 1997. For a long period, perhaps the first three or four years, Blair enjoyed widespread popularity and huge leads in the opinion polls over the Conservatives. His popularity was based on two things. First, the simple fact that New Labour is not the Conservative Party, which since the departure of Margaret Thatcher has been in free fall, and is the object of hatred and derision among huge sectors of the population.
Second, the British economy, linked more to the cycles in the United States than in continental Europe, enjoyed sustained growth and very low rates of unemployment. Only since 2001 has the decline of the ‘dot.com’ boom significantly impacted the British economy. But even now unemployment rates are much lower (about 3% officially, about 5% in real terms) than in Germany, France and Spain. More people in work meant rising incomes among employed workers, and the consolidation of the salaried middle class, particularly among financial services workers and those in sectors linked to information technology.
The price for both employed workers and the salaried middle class has been a counter-revolution in working practices and the welfare state, an attempt at a complete ‘Americanisation’ of the British economy. British workers work longer hours than any others in an advanced European economy (on average 48 hours a week). Trade union organisation has declined significantly, but with a recent modest revival (see below). Since unemployment pay is now worth nothing, unemployment is a personal disaster; as a result labour discipline has been transformed, with huge levels of stress and sleep disorders. In addition, Blair’s government championed every form of privatisation, including the railways, the London Underground, the health service and – tentatively – the education system.
Two things have undermined Blair – the results of these social policies and his actions over Iraq, which border on political suicide. All the public services are in an acute crisis, fuelled by privatisation. Transport is in disarray, with a collapsing railway network and a road network permanently choked by 24 million vehicles. Mrs. Thatcher’s Great Car Economy is coming to a stop – literally. In London there are 24-hour a day traffic jams, only marginally relieved by the Congestion Charging system. All that New Labour can think to do about it is to build more roads, which immediately become clogged. The M-25 orbital motorway around London is a classic case. Its seven-year existence, with three or four lanes in each direction for 80 miles, is one of permanent congestion. New Labour’s solution – of course – is to build another two or three lanes in each direction. Everyone knows that we shall soon have eight, 10 or 12 lanes of permanent congestion!
The health service is chronically under-funded and the Blairites are pushing hard for a ‘two-tier’ service, on the American model. The first private accident and emergency unit has just been opened for the wealthy victims of accidents, while the poor will continue to wait up to eight hours to see a doctor. And the education system remains in permanent under-funded turmoil.
An added twist to this general chaos of public services has been given by the turmoil in the financial markets, and their impact upon ordinary people through the crisis of pension fund investments. Many companies, including some of the biggest, have re-written the terms of their pension schemes, to drastically reduce the payments to future pensioners. Workers in the late 50s or early 60s, due to retire soon, have found that their pension will be 30% or 40% less than they expected. After 30 years or more of regular pension payments, their future life horizons have been massively revised downwards by executive decision. At the same time pay for company chief executives and directors continues to rise at between 10-15% a year, to astronomic levels – again on the American model.
Companies are also closing their pension schemes to new workers, meaning that young people will now have to make their own private, and very expensive, pension provision. While all this has been happening, millions of people persuaded to invest in new and complex financial products, are finding these are worth very little, again with a big impact on their future life chances.
Into this general malaise and disillusionment came the Iraq war, and the birth of an anti-war movement, which on the eve of the war in May of this year mobilised two million on the streets of London. On the first day of the war, thousands of school students walked out of their classes to participate in demonstrations, building widespread links on the Internet, on their own initiative and outside the main mobilising coalition (the anti-war movement is further described below).
Why was this outcome so completely different to the 1991 Iraq war, which never saw more than 50,000 on the streets? The answer is contained in one joke – that the British and Americans speak the same language, unfortunately for Blair and Bush . The crude, bellicose militarism of Bush and key aides like Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz was only too available on British TV screens, and very unpopular. Britain is still a country with a large left-liberal intelligentsia, and a population still wedded (despite Blair) to core Keynesian, welfare state, left-of-centre values. Equally, the past 20 years have seen a massive increase in popular environmental and feminist consciousness; Bush the warmonger came after Bush the ‘toxic Texan’, who sabotaged the Kyoto climate change agreement, and Bush the Christian fundamentalist warrior against abortion rights. Even sections of the Conservative Party were appalled by the prospect of the unlimited US use of military power. And a largely hidden story has been the questioning in British military and intelligence circles about whether Blair’s pro-US stand will increase the danger of terrorism in Britain – which obviously it will.
In late 2002 and early 2003 Blair, faced with an anti-war majority in the opinion polls, decided on a simple but reckless gamble – to gain a parliamentary majority for war through the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ issue, with fraudulent intelligence dossiers, implying that Iraq could launch an international biological, or even nuclear, strike within 45 minutes. (Paul Wolfowitz, US deputy secretary of defence, explained to a Senate committee that the concentration on weapons of mass destruction was a ‘bureaucratic decision’, designed to optimise support for the war, but not at all a key issue! Such admissions did nothing to help Blair).
The second part of Blair’s gamble was that once the war was started, and Saddam Hussein overthrown, anti-war sentiment would collapse in support of ‘our boys’ in Iraq. As everyone now knows, this gamble was spectacularly wrong. Weapons of mass destruction have not been found, and the occupation of Iraq continues to claim American and British and other lives, while social chaos and violence (especially against women) is endemic and well advertised in the British mass media. Opinion polls show 70% think Blair lied about Iraqi weapons. This discrediting of the government and Blair personally has been deepened by the David Kelly scandal, in which Britain’s chief weapons inspector committed suicide, after having told journalists of his doubts about government dossiers on the issue. Blair and his defence minister Geoff Hoon are widely believed to have personally authorised the public persecution of David Kelly which led to his suicide.
If Blair and New Labour are at a low ebb, what about the Conservatives? This is a party which is gradually dying, metaphorically and literally. Its membership is at an historic low – about 300,000 compared with 1.2 million in the 1950s. Its membership has an average age of 64(!), and is generally not very active. Most of all, it is associated with starting the whole privatisation, neoliberal, nightmare which is impacting so hard on the mass of ordinary people. Conservative leader Ian Duncan Smith (‘IDS’) is a former army officer who is totally charisma-free, and referred to sarcastically as ‘the quiet man’. The key problem is the overall political identity of this party, its popular profile, which is so out of alignment with the social profile of modern Britain.
The dilemma can be shown in the following example. When the Conservatives elected a new leader in 2001, the front-runners were pro-European Kenneth Clarke, and Conservative ‘moderniser’ Michael Portillo, easily the best speaker and most charismatic leader – and the one that Labour most feared. Both had been ministers under Thatcher, both had big public reputations, but neither had any chance of winning. Clarke’s pro-Europeanism excluded him in what has become a narrowly nationalistic and anti-EU party. Portillo, the son of a fighter for the Republican cause in the Spanish civil war who took exile in Britain, argued for social inclusion. This meant an open attitude to lesbians and gay men, to women’s equality and to Britain’s black and Asian population. But his speech on this issue at the 2000 Conservative conference was heard with astonishment by the aging, socially conservative and (mainly) racist delegates. Modernising this party is impossible.
Waiting in the electoral wings are four potential opponents to both Labour and Conservatives. Easily the most important electorally are the Liberal Democrats, who currently have nearly 60 of the 650 parliamentary deputies (MPs), by some distance the third biggest party. The Lib-Dems, who recently won a by-election seat from Labour in a working class London neighbourhood, are in reality only marginally to the left of Labour. But they played the Iraq war carefully, raising sceptical questions, only to support it when it began. Their local bases are built on reactionary populism, making municipal alliances with either main party to get into local government. This party can gain at the next election, on the basis that it is the main party which is neither Labour or Conservative. Its impact, like all the minority parties, continues to be limited by the British ‘first past the post electoral system’, which stacks the cards in favour of the two main parties. Without proportional representation, it is quite possible for a party to win 8% of the votes and end up with zero MPs.
The most dangerous political force is the fascist British National Party. This has to be put into perspective; the far right is nowhere near as powerful in Britain as in France, Italy, Austria, the Netherlands or Belgium. So far, it only has around 20 municipal councillors and no MPs. But its strategy is an intelligent one, and it is winning support. First, like the Vlaams Blok and the Front National, it has divest itself of all Nazi trappings. Jackboots and fascist salutes go down spectacularly badly in Britain, because of the historic memory of the Second World War, still a potent symbol in the British national myth. Second, the BNP concentrates on its two areas of strength – oppose the European Union and the Euro, send the asylum seekers back. The issue of asylum seekers is the most potent mobilising banner for all reactionary forces in Britain, and one area where government panic and repeated attempts to limit immigration only give ammunition to the extreme right.
Significant support for the BNP comes from two sources. First from ultra-poor white social housing estates where unemployment is high, and where there is a large ethnic minority population. Most of the BNP’s municipal councillors are from towns around Manchester where the old textile industries have collapsed, and where 50% of the population is Asian. Poor whites typically claim ‘the government is doing nothing for us’, and contrast their situation with the success of a (very limited) number of Asian small businesses, and alleged government help for ethnic minority communities. This situation is repeated in a few towns where the number of asylum seekers is high. The other main area of support (for example on the north east edge of London) is in white middle class suburbs which border multi-ethnic communities. Here we see a rather classic model of building support for a fascist organisation on the basis of the poor unemployed and the frightened middle class.
The Green Party, which has no MPs but dozens of municipal councillors and several Euro MPs, is a very green party (and not a red-green party), one in which overall social radicalism is weak and which seems to have drifted to the right. Its central campaigning issues are GM crops, transport and similar more strictly environmental issues, although it fully supported the anti-war movement. Today it is in effective coalition with the Liberals and New Labour in the London administration around mayor Ken Livingstone. Nevertheless, it remains a party in opposition to mainstream parties, in a way which the German Greens and some other north European green parties are not.
The fourth significant electoral minority is the Socialist Alliance, mainly a bloc of far left organisations. To talk about that, we need to review the whole spectrum of social radicalism, the forces for fundamental change and the workers movement. Without doubt the forces of social radicalism are – despite everything – growing and optimistic. Let’s start with the anti-war movement.
The anti-war movement was organised by the Stop the War Coalition (STWC), whose national council of 40+ represented just about every facet of radicalism. Key organisers and full time workers of the STWC came mainly from far left groups, in particular the largest one, the Socialist Workers Party – a group of Trotskyist origin with about 5000 members. The politics of this grouping need not detain us for the moment, the important thing is that its national network in many places provided initial organisers – it was able to play the role that the Communist Party would have played in previous decades. Key allies of the STWC were the long-established Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), and (controversially for some) the Muslim Association of Britain – who were not however the main mobilisers of young Muslims who attended the demonstrations. Among NGOs only War on Want – by far the most radical – had a noticeable presence. By contrast an organisation like Oxfam predictably ignored the movement.
Strong backing for the movement came from the trade unions, especially the minority of unions which have to one extent or another moved into opposition to Blair, and given rise to a new generation of younger trade union leaders collectively known to the media as the ‘awkward squad’. This includes Bob Crow, leader of the rail workers and seafarers, Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the government workers union and Paul MacNee, leader of the college lecturers’ union. These people represent an attempt by groups of mainly public sector workers to break out of the successive defeats of the unions under Thatcher and Blair. Theirs is an uphill battle, with only limited success so far in regenerating trade union militancy. Also, of course, involved in the anti-war movement were the leaders of the vestigial Labour left like Tony Benn and Jeremy Corbyn– important because they articulate opposition at a parliamentary and national level, but with small support in a party whose mass left wing no longer exists.
The post-September 11 situation has generated new peace groups with a more activist approach than CND, and a more open anti-imperialist dimension. Significant here are the very active British section of the International Solidarity Movement, the pro-Palestinian peace group which sends activists to intervene on the ground in the Occupied Territories, and Voices UK . The latter has been active in sending groups to make activist links with democratic and anti-US campaigners in Iraq.
But in this spectrum of social radicalism, one thing stands out dramatically. The vast majority of anti-war demonstrators and hundreds of anti-war groups weren’t mobilised by any organisation at all – even if they involved individual activists from a far left group, the Green party or even the Labour Party. In hundreds of small towns and villages – the heartland of the allegedly moderate and socially conservative ‘Middle England’ – people who had never been involved in politics at all decided to organise peace groups. Naturally, they were inspired by a growing movement whose originators had been from the so-called ‘hard left’, the unions and the peace groups. But in many places these groups were more or less absent. It is a significant sign of re-politicisation, and tremendous repudiation of the style of Blairism, which tries to depoliticise ‘politics’. It also shows incidentally that real ‘social movements’ don’t exist in Britain. There is no women’s movement , there is no anti-globalislation movement’ (Globalise Resistance is an empty shell, just a name), there is no anti-racist movement . There are political parties and groups (and their front organisations posturing as movements), there are mobilisations, there are NGOs, there are trade unions, there are activities. And massive green, feminist, anti-racist and anti-capitalist consciousness. But mainly this consciousness is not organised, and the small groups and fronts active on these issues have no mass structures. While some left groups think this is an advantage – fewer organisational obstacles to recruiting new members! – in the long term it will be a negative factor in sustaining long-term activism.
Among the anti-war youth the proportion of spontaneity to organisation was tipped decidedly in favour of the former. School-based peace groups and activists, some as young as eight years old, appeared from nowhere, even organising their own demonstrations outside parliament. It is a tremendous promise for the future.
However, a huge question mark hangs over of the whole spectrum of social radicalism in Britain. How to contest on the national political terrain, and to make a significant impact with an anti-capitalist and socially progressive alternative on the electoral level? Only in Scotland has major progress in this direction been made. In this year’s elections to the 79-member Scottish Parliament, seven Greens and six members of the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) were elected. Part of the reason for the SSP’s success was its achievement in building a broad left party in which all the major left formations have merged, while maintaining internal ‘platforms’. It is this dynamic of unity which has helped to make the party’s major spokeperson Tommy Sheridan one of the best-known and popular political figures in Scotland. This model of a pluralistic left party, with very diverse currents, seems beyond the left in England and Wales, and is especially obstructed in the Socialist Alliance by the Socialist Workers Party. Nonetheless, new attempts to generate a ‘red-green’ electoral alternative at the next general election are underway, animated especially by the independent anti-globalisation activist and writer George Monbiot. This is exactly what is needed.
Gary Younge, a commentator in the main left-liberal daily The Guardian , has described the absence of an electoral alternative as the “main failure of the left and the anti-war movement” and the “source of our disappointment”. Unless his words are heeded, reactionary forces can pick up the political fruits of the revival of radicalism, and the anti-war movement’s destabilisation of Tony Blair.