Labour Party Plc, by (Mainstream LABOUR PARTY PLC Publishing €15.99), reviewed by John Lister
F, LIKE ME, you are the sort of
person who reacts angrily to
each revelation of New Labour's subservience to big business and indifference to the working people who elected them ... but tends to lose track of just who is who, and how the various misdemeanours link up into a wider picture, this book is for you.
Dave Osler has ferreted away behind the headlines to pull together a documented account of many of New Labour's less endearing connections and concessions to big business.
Amusing examples of the ways in which the Labour Party itself has been shafted by the failures of the companies and methods it has foisted on public services run alongside figures charting the party's haemorrhage of members
and mounting financial crisis.
The style is lively enough
to carry the reader through
some of the apparently less
obvious and more complex
episodes, as well as hitting the
mark on the daily scandals of
PFI and rampant privatisation of public services.
Osler begins with one of the most blatant statements of Labour's abdication from any concept of principles, quoting Northern Ireland Secretary John Reid defending the Party's acceptance of a £100,000 hand-out from Richard Desmond, the porn-king who now owns the Daily Express:
"If you are asking if we are going to sit in moral judgement and have a political judgement on those who contribute to the Labour Party, the answer is no."
Labour Party Pic goes on to point out that money from this porn-merchant has run alongside donations from "the tobacco advertising lobby, sundry unionbashers, arms manufacturers... Osler argues "still has no real organic links with the ruling class " ... •• businesses accused of human rights abuses in the Third World."
It looks at the Blair team's fawning to media moguls - and its willingness to install business and other wealthy cronies in key quango posts.
It charts Labour's descent from a party largely funded by the unions and its members, to one where everything at its annual conference is up for sponsorship from the private sector.
In the "Formula One Million" affair, involving the donation from Bernie Ecclestone, Osler correctly points out that what was most worrying was not that Ecclestone's donation had shaped party policy, but that Blair insisted Labour had caved in to the tobacco advertising lobby independently, or as Dave puts it, we have "a Prime Minister who acts in the interests of the rich while on autopilot."
But Osler does not fall into the trap of harking back to a mythical "golden age" of Labour as a true and principled advocate of working class interests, at loggerheads with the employers.
is historical compar isons, however don't go I back much further than the well-known links between Harold Wilson's Labour Party and "a select coterie of businessmen".
In fact the history of subservience to big business, the wealthy and the establishment goes right back to the earliest years of the Labour Party, which has always politically identified itself as the party seeking parliamentary reforms within capitalism, and therefore one which has to accept and do deals with the capitalist class.
Leon Trotsky in 1925 (Where is Britain Going) poured scorn on the spinelessness of the British Labour and trade union leaders, mocking the obsequious behaviour Labour leaders such as Ramsay MacDonald - who later took his line of class collaboration to the logical conclusion, splitting the Labour Party to form a coalition with the Tories.
But in those days the unions and Labour Party effectively amounted to a division of labour within a single labour movement.
What is new in British politics is the extent to which the Labour Party, headed by the Blairite modernisers, has been dragged off in one direction, while the trade unions, as evidenced by recent leadership elections and the votes at TUC and Labour conference, have increasingly pulled back and refused to be pulled into line.
Osler's devastating accumulation of evidence, he concludes, shows that "New Labour is institutionally corrupt, in the same sense that the Metropolitan Police is institutionally racist." D ut he correctly pulls back
from simply branding New
Labour as a bosses party pure and simple. He argues that it can still ... only just ... be regarded in some sense as a workers' party, and that it has failed - despite the efforts of the Blairites - to establish itself as "the" party of business.
New Labour is susceptible to influence from big business and the media, but "still has no real organic links with the ruling class. .. most of the controversial donations have come not from the FTSE 100 crowd, but from the sort of business wide boys still worried enough about their social position to pay to shore it up."
It's a good and useful book with an excellent index to assist future use of the book for memory-jogging.
Every socialist should want one: and if you know anyone still in the Labour Party, make sure they read it, too!
page 21 of the scan
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