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Centre Left collapsing as Europe swings right Phil Hearse 4/04/08 The partial local elections in Britain on 1 May were a catastrophic defeat for Britain’s Labour Party and a victory for the right wing Conservatives, who also won the race for the Mayor of London. Outside London the popular vote gave 44% to the Conservatives and only 24% to Labour.
Centre Left collapsing as Europe swings right
The partial local elections in Britain on 1 May were a catastrophic defeat for Britain’s Labour Party and a victory for the right wing Conservatives, who also won the race for the Mayor of London. Outside London the popular vote gave 44% to the Conservatives and only 24% to Labour.
The outcome was a damning indictment of the pro-war, anti-working class policies of Gordon Brown’s Labour. Just days before the election the government was embroiled in a big fight with its own MPs over the abolition of the 10p in the pound low tax rate for exceptionally low-paid workers in order to fund tax reductions for the better off. Hitting the 5 million poorest people in Britain was not a good electoral strategy.
In addition the Labour government’s popularity has been hit by its imposition of ultra-low pay rises for public servants in a situation of sharply rising inflation, and its general inability to defend living standards in the face of the economic crisis – a crisis that is hitting Britain particularly hard because of its close links to the US economy.
But the start of Labour’s sharp decline in popularity was the decision of previous Prime Minister Tony Blair to give total support to the war drive launched by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11.
While there are special features that give Labour’s decline a particularly savage twist, its new crisis is part of a right wing tide sweeping over Europe – at least at an electoral level.
In the past three years we have seen: the accession to power of the CSU/CDU right in Germany thanks to the capitulation of the centre left SPD, in the form of a coalition with Angela Merkel at its head; the election of an openly right-wing government in Portugal for the first time since 1975; the recent election of a new very right-wing Berlusconi government in Italy; the victory of the Sarkozy right wing alliance in France in 2007; a right-populist government in Denmark; and a right-wing anti-immigrant government in the Netherlands. Spain and Britain are the only countries where the pro-neoliberal ‘centre-left’ remains in power – and in Britain the 2010 general election seems certain to produce a Labour defeat.
Marxists need to analyse this situation carefully, without falling victim to simplistic alarmism. However it would be foolish to ignore the danger signs. As we enter a major economic crisis that will also be a major new attack on working class living standards, the aggressive neoliberal anti-immigrant right is on the offensive, sometimes with a fascist or hard-right component. The result in the election for the mayor of Rome, where an openly neo-fascist candidate won, is eloquent in that regard.
Responsibility of the social democratic centre left
Without doubt, this situation will lead to many new debates inside the European left and it is often the case that out of defeats activists can draw pessimistic right-wing conclusions, rather than class struggle militant conclusions. It is important to pin down where the responsibility lies.
The truth is that the centre left in power has done nothing to fundamentally address class inequalities, has done nothing to combat the racist assumptions of the anti-immigrant right and has done little to address the insecurity and unemployment affecting workers on much of the continent.