is Assistant General Secretary of the rail union RMT, one of the unions that has been at the forefront of debates on the unions' links with Labour. He spoke to ALAN THORNETT. ALAN: So Blair stands alongside George Bush in an invasion of Iraq, and we have had resignations of Labour ministers including Robin Cook. What do you think the implications of all this are for New Labour/ How deep a crisis do you think they are in? PAT: I think it is the biggest political crisis Labour has been in since the last world war.
What I think is open to debate in the movement is exactly how this is going to work out organisationally. What has happened is that the neo-liberal and imperialist project of the Blair faction has come brutally out into the open, and it has dragged the Labour Party into an international far right coalition.
The problem is that this project has taken place on the back of so many defeats for the labour movement that whilst there have
been heavy hearts in some quarters there
has been absolutely no success in halting its
progress.
I believe that we can contrast this crisis
with the crisis in the Labour Party back in the 1930s over the introduction by Ramsay
MacDonald of means testing for the dole.
Labour split. But MacDonald only took a
very small minority of the party with him
into the national government. However in
the current context it seems to me to be
certain that Blair will continue to lead the
vast majority of the party, and that it is very
much an open question as to whether or onto the streets opens up a new opportunity for something new to be built to the left of Labour? PAT. Well of course it does open up that opportunity. The clearest example of this is the impact of the movement on the prospects for the Scottish Socialist Party in the May elections.
Because the SSP have already made the crucial breakthrough by achieving the election of Tommy Sheridan as an MSP, they now have a realistic chance of gaining enough seats to form their own group inside the Scottish Parliament. They are polling support in double figures.
In England we are someway behind these developments. The Socialist Alliance could benefit from the explosion of the mass movement but it is an open question whether they can convert this into any electoral breakthrough.
I don't think the Alliance is seen as being anything like the SSP, not just because the SSP has an MSP, but there is something about the Socialist Alliance which conveys a narrowness which is not conducive to achieving an electoral breakthrough.
The SSP got it right by setting itself up as an individual membership party campaigning consistently in the housing schemes and the communities on bread and butter economic issues as well as on the issues of the Faslane nuclear installation - all of which have allowed it to benefit politically and organisationally from the present anti-war movement.
The Socialist Alliance is not able to relate
directly to the new movement. It is a federation of far left groups, which of course is de
facto dominated by the SWP which is by far the largest among them. But it is quite rightly the broad based Stop the War Coalition
that is seen by millions as organising the
mass movement. It is not clear to me where
the Socialist Alliance is in all this.
This is very important for all those wanting to see something bigger and more stable
to emerge, because the most energetic supporters of the movement are massive numbers of young people, who couldn't give a fig for the trade unions or Labour or indeed any other political party. I mean what have we done for them over the last years?
In that and in many other ways they clearly are most heavily influenced by the antiglobalisation movement. ALAN. In my view the Socialist Alliance is a very important development but it does not see itself as the final answer to the problem of a left alternative. How can a new development come about which can go beyond where the Alliance is at the present time? Do you see any way that the parts of the 'awkward squad' in the unions could be a part of a new development at the political level? Something which maybe could link up with the Alliance at some stage? PAT. Here's my view. The situation we have got is that there is going to have to be a response from the unions to what is a major crisis of political representation.
At the same time there is a radicalising constituency out there in the unions which has been shown in certain unions through the election of left-wing general secretaries.
They have been elected on a platform which is clearly anti-new Labour and antiBlair. In fact you could not get elected now as a general secretary if you were identified as a Blairite. That's going to be even more the case after this war, there is no doubt
about that.
The awkward squad spoke against the war in the TUC debate on the war. In fact
most of them spoke definitively against any war at all, UN resolution or not. It was the
right-wing who used the UN card to try and
stop the anti-war amendment going
through.
Then of course there are issues like privatisation and the long-standing issues of the
anti union laws which define the left /right
divide in the unions at the moment
All this is now going to have to be taken
to its logical conclusion and the unions are
going to have to start breaking Labour's
monopoly hold. The unions are going to have to support those who support our policies.
They will emerge from the SSP in Scotland, the Socialist Alliance in England members of Plaid Cymru in Wales, and others who will be to the left of Labour. Also it will involve socialists still inside Labour.
For instance in the RMT, we have annual conference decisions from last year which has mandated the EC to bring forward rule changes this year to allow the union to support socialist candidates outside of Labour. This has led logically to the need to get rid of the rule that stipulates that all branches must affiliate to the constituency LP in their area.
This only recognises the reality, which is that the vast majority of branches long since ceased to affiliate to Labour
What is being done here is the working out of a new method of political representation for the unions. This will include the unions looking in their own ranks for people to put up as candidates, as was the case at the time of the founding of the LP
At the moment the debate can easily get bogged down by the view that in seeking alternatives to Labour there has to be a ready made party out there to which we must affiliate immediately. That's wrong. For now there has to be a mixed approach to find the best candidates ALAN. But the thing about the early years is that the issue of labour representation and union backed labour candidates - with a small I - led to the formation of a party PAT. Yes that's right, that will be posed. That
is the process which we think will emerge.
ALAN. But such a process would need
a catalyst at some stage to move
towards a party. Do you think there are
those on the left of the unions who
would come forward to propose a new
Party?
PAT. Yes. But I think the experience of the
Socialist Labour Party is a warning that you