After Glasgow East: party like it’s 1931
Posted on Friday 25 July, 2008
Filed Under Scottish National Party
Those radio alarm clocks can be right inconsiderate little bastards sometimes. I turned in last night in the full expectation that New Labour would hold on to Glasgow East, if only just.
I awoke to hear that the seat – held by Labour or the far left for 80 years – had fallen to the Scottish National Party on a 22.5% swing.
Just for once, that early morning emptiness in my stomach resulted not from urgent need for a bowl of organic muesli drenched in soya milk, but the realisation that the Tories are now almost certain to form the next two or three governments, minimum.
If a stronghold like Glasgow East can topple that easily, the outlook for 2010 is surely a Labour defeat of 1931 proportions. Those who need a recap of the relevant history could do no better than turn to a book by Ralph Miliband – hey, whatever became of his two boys? – that tells how a governing party was reduced to a rump of just 46 MPs.
Eventually Labour recovered, of course. Miliband notes on page 192 of Parliamentary Socialism: ”Though powerless in parliament, Labour had retained massive support in the country, most of it, obviously, from within the ranks of the organised working class.’
The difference between now and then is that in many constituencies Labour exists largely on paper and working class organisation is at its weakest since the second world war. In short, Labour as we know it may never recover from the coming meltdown.
Many on the left don’t grasp just how calamitous the coming decade could prove. I’ve spoken to revolutionary defeatists within Labour who believe that a spell in opposition will strengthen the small socialists layer that remains.
Doubtless others will maintain that the smack of firm Tory government will dispel illusions in reformism, providing the most propitious circumstances for the formation of a new workers’ party, or whatever other nonsense they picked up at last weekend’s cadre school.
Unfortunately, that is not the most likely trajectory. The British far left – and I’m not excluding the Scottish comrades from this criticism – remains organically incapable of serious politics. It’s worth noting that the combined Scottish Socialist Party/Solidarity vote last night was enough to have secured fourth place ahead of the Liberal Democrats. Yet that division is not going to be overcome rapidly, even though it is devoid of real policy substance.
Instead, we are likely to see social democracy draped in the saltire establish itself as the party of choice for the Scottish working class, something that alone will be enough to ensure we never get another Labour government again, while the British National Party slugs it out with depoliticisation south of the border.
Should Brown go? I don’t think that would make much difference. All of the politicians with a realistic shot of becoming Labour leader are indelibly linked to the ancien regime; swapping one New Labourite in a dark suit for another isn’t going to undo the damage New Labourism has wrought.
Blog posts like this should ideally end up outlined the way out. This one will not, largely because I do not see one. I’d just like to urge readers to look at the jubilation evident on the face of last night’s SNP victor John Mason – pictured – and reflect.
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29 Responses to “After Glasgow East: party like it’s 1931”
I understand your concern, but it’s Labour’s own fault, for not being better than the Tories and even worse in some ways. If Labour is smart they should see the SNP’s victory from the left as a wakeup call to rediscover their roots as a party of the left, rather than Tory-lite, “but we like the gays” socially repressive domestically, murderously imperialist abroad party.
Spot on. It’s a pity that it’s the poor that will suffer, rather than the current Labour Party membership, who deserve to be burnt at the stake.
Unbelievable.
Sneering at the idea of a new workers party and slagging off the British Far Left as remaining ‘organically incapable of serious politics’.
As opposed to ‘realists’ like you who rejoined the Labour Party during its irrevocable slide into the failed and empty shell it now is. And that’s the serious politics you’re talking about is it?
”It’s worth noting that the combined Scottish Socialist Party/Solidarity vote last night was enough to secure fourth place ahead of the Liberal Democrats. Yet that division is not going to be overcome rapidly, even though it is devoid of real policy substance”
You could argue that the SSP could have secured an even bigger vote, if there hadn’t been the split in the first place.
I doubt whether the far left would get a vote of over a 1000 votes anywhere in England or Wales.
Yes, it is a little bit difficult to see ‘the way out’ this morning. What struck me most this morning was that when I told my wife – a leftie by instinct/local action but not up with the relative minutae of the body politic – the result this morning, she simply shrugged in a ‘What did you expect?’-type manner. When people like her are starting to lose interest in an apparent inevitability, even though she followed the London Mayoralty with a passion just three months ago, it does start to seem a bit bleak in a self-fulfilling way.
But, call me a naive old loyalist thicko as you wish, I’m still not utterly, utterly convinced we’re headed for the meltdown you and now many others predict (self-fulfiling prophecy?).
Bye-elections remain, in the end, bye-elections; horrible as they may have been the recent ones did not lead directly to Cameron waving his arms around in the air outside no 10, glad that he no longer has to pretend to cycle around everywhere.
There seems little doubt to me that Crewe and Nantwich was lost quite so badly as it was because of the ‘toff tactics’, which treated voters like children at a pantomime (though there may still have been value in pointing out Mr Timpson’s lack of person-from-the-real-world credentials if it had been articulately juxtaposed to the Labour’s candidate experienced).
In Glasgow East as well I do think we need to recognise that the SNP is still on something of an electoral high after 2007 and has mmedia-managed well in the last year(remember Labour’s popularity in 1998?).
So I still do think there’s some hope. The closer we get to the real thing, I suspect or at least hope, the more people will start to say to themselves and to others ‘Well just one last time then’, just as many people said it to me on the doorstep in 2005 in the aftermath of th Iraq war beginning, when more people than we gave credit for were able to set aside the Blair effect and look at the party as a whole, again in justaposition to the Tories/Libdems. In that respect I think you’re right, it doesn’t matter that much whether or not Gordon Brown is leader – again, people are not stupid on the whole and it’s the party they look at.
Certainly out on the doorstep, where I was half caseworking/half just having a bit of a natter last night, people actually do still say they are socialists-really-though-it’s-tricky-now, and they like having a Labour councillor ‘cos it’s better than having a Tory one….
But yes, of course there got to be a decent possibiltiy of some form of meltdown, and your comparison with 1931 is an interesting one. Electorally, of course, the 1931 election was significantly different because the Tories and liberals did the deal for only one to stand under a ‘national’ banner, and this wiped out more seats than might have been the case. notwithstanding that, the popular vote did drop from 8 to 6 million (vaguely comparable with the drop in Glasgow last night). Howwever, I think a main difference between 1931 and now is that then the party was only 30 years old; surely in light of the MacDonald defection, some of the electortate might have been tempted to think that the Labour party was, in the end, just a passing though welcome phase and that if you were no talking about a party no longer totally solidly linked to union interests, there wasn’t really any point in voting Labour anymore (it’s to be noted that the Welsh valleys kept their Labour MPs, perhaps because if the enduring uniion closeness?).
If we do see some meltdown, I think the more likely comparator is still the 1970s/early 1980s, and for the obvious reasons (mass loss of membership in 70s etc), and it’s also to that period that I think we need to look for the ‘way out’ you can’t see the morning after. The ‘way out’ has for me to be a something likes that period of strategic alliance building, often at local level, in the way for example Manchester Labour managed pretty well (and which has had its ocnsequences in terms of local electoral success some 25 years later). It’s about renewing those campaign and action links with the ‘other left’ – easier in opposition if it comes to that – including a proper re-engagement with feminism.
But before that happens what is needed is to renew the dull-but-necessary administrative structure of the Labour party, so that it can become a proper ’secretariat of the struggle’. That’s where many local Labour parties used to excel, but you’re right when you say thay many are now epty shells. Even where there are active memberships, some of the systems are sloppy, as though the age of technology has somehow reduced the need to keep minutes, take actions that were agreed etc. In my own little way I’m trying to do this in my own back-of-beyond branch, by ensuring that monthly meetings which had fallen into abeyance ARE held with proper agendas and competent minutes, and it’s working – slowly. Members are starting to turn up again and talk about stuff.
It’s a start, but it’s a start many of us can take, and one we need to take whether or not there is meltdown.
Thanks for listening if you got this far. My, I needed to get that off my chest.
Trouble is Dave I can recall idiots on the left saying just that (Labour needs a spell out of office) in 1979. And look what that bought us.
Brown must go and soon, and his replacement must take the attack back to Cameron and his paymaster, Ashcroft.
I weep when I see the majority that was wasted not imposing a clean up on the corupt funding of the Tory Party and the press.
GW
Doug
Socialist Labour Party. Socialist Alliance. Respect. Respect Renewal. Left List. Left Alternative. Scottish Socialist Alliance. Socttish Socialist Party. Solidarity. Campaign for a Marxist Party. Campaign for a New Workers’ Party. The track record doesn’t fill me with confidence.
Well if you actually understood what the CNWP is about then your ‘confusion’ might be lifted. It is NOT another attempt to unite the existing Left organisations, which as you say, were by and large failures (the SLL probably the biggest tragedy of all as it had real potential).
The underlying principle is that workers in struggle and key trade unions will provide the impetus. This won’t happen overnight and it can’t just be proclaimed. After all, the Labour Party was founded on the back of trade union struggles.
I can’t believe there are (presumably) Leftists mourning the defeat last night. Where have you been?! Why do you think people are deserting in droves? Something to do with the shitty treatment of the poor, the disabled, the grotesque gap between the poor and rich, the obsession with privatising, not to mention having a leadership who should have been at The Hague years ago. NL isn’t salvageable – for God’s sake, they’ve sorted out the whole structure to prevent it.
Meanwhile, before that fantasy future when the Left ‘reclaim’ the Party, they are going to be the election-time footsloggers for MPs and councillors, most of who are unlikely to be socialists and may be the gutless privatising, expenses fiddling, cutting and redundancy voting fodder you’re supposed to be fighting against.
So you end up actually helping to prop up an organisation now despised by millions of its former supporters. Is that really a good idea?
the combined Left of Labour vote was about 4%, 1067 votes, which is pretty piss poor given the class nature of the constituency
even the Tories managed 1,639
if the Left can’t make much of a showing in a place like Glasgow East, then where?
Labour needed to lose the last election, dump the warmongers and neo-liberals and let the Tories deal with the credit crunch and recession. Next time is too late. Its seems like the trade unions will have to reform a party of labour from scratch. 1900 all over again.
Gordon Brown has already overtaken MacDonald in the Class Traitor of the last hundred years race. His plans to put the out-of-work sweeeping the streets, mud-Larking the environment clean, and washing the toffs’ walls, overseen by Mr Bumble and Mrs Bountiful, contracted from Artful Dodger PLC, give a head-start. Not to mention that he has presided over a cut in the real value of most Benefits greater than his forerunner made in his term of office. Brown is a one-man National Government, holding together hard-faced men and women who did very nicely out of the Thatcher and cling to their privileges.
Whatever the holy smoke around them tries to hide, these Christian grinders of the poor, lap-poddles of the US, yapping, clip-clopping, wolves of the bourgeoisie and all-over fiends of human kind….
Er, where was I?
Anyway, as for the SNP… Salmond is a man who likes himself so much I read somewhere that he drinks his own bathwater.
Some social-democrat.
Oh, and the Tories, Va-t’en! Band de larves!
It’s lucky we can escape the right wing anti Scottish parties with independence.
…into the arms of good socialists like John Mason?
Heh.
What happens if the Tories do come to power and make a fair job of it. which might not be to hard after New labour, what then 20 30 years out.
I remember at the time of the Clause 4 debate, that one political commentatot (can’t remember who) said that eventually the need would arise for a Labour Party, based on the values of the Old labour Party. This particular commentator reckoned it would be in around 2020. Have we got that long? History never repeats itself, the Britain of 2008 is not the same as the Britain of 1931, neither is the world. I admire Paul’s determination to breathe new life into the moribund Labour Party, but the task will be immense. Robert, I don’t think the Tories will make a fair job of it, there’s not a lot of wriggle room left in the ecomony, and anyway, ‘fair job’ by whose standards? Don’t forget, they are Tory bastards, not Sunday school teachers.
‘Whatever the holy smoke around them tries to hide, these Christian grinders of the poor, lap-poddles of the US, yapping, clip-clopping, wolves of the bourgeoisie and all-over fiends of human kind….
Er, where was I?
Anyway, as for the SNP… Salmond is a man who likes himself so much I read somewhere that he drinks his own bathwater.’
‘
LOL!
Andrew, have you ever considered doing stand up?
“the combined Left of Labour vote was about 4%, 1067 votes, which is pretty piss poor given the class nature of the constituency . . .”
By my reckoning the Left of Labour vote last night was just over 50%. (That’s me being generous by including the Lib Dems.)
“even the Tories managed 1,639″
That part of Glasgow has always had working class Tories, going back generations. My Granny and Grandad immediately spring to mind.
“Instead, we are likely to see social democracy draped in the saltire establish itself as the party of choice for the Scottish working class, something that alone will be enough to ensure we never get another Labour government again..”
Not one you can really blame the Scottish comrades or the Scottish working class for! Faced with Tory Lite or Real Tory we’re saying no to both and will continue to do so. It’s the English Left that have made Scottish independence near inevitable by their failures to build genuine support for either socialism OR social democracy.
New Labour are intent on privatising the health, welfare and education systems that my parents and grandparents fought for. They have no problem with massive profits being made by the power companies whilst 10s of thousands of elderly people freeze to death each winter. But they’re still better than the Tories? No they’re not. They abandoned their “core” supporters years ago. Their core supporters are now returning the favour.
At least the SSP attempted to create a united left built around a real socialist agenda – not something that you could really accuse Respect of. Just wait till 2010 when Salmond stages the Independence referendum. With a massive Tory majority already installed by English voters the Scots will say, “Bugger this for a game of soldiers we’re off!”
“Its seems like the trade unions will have to reform a party of labour from scratch.”
and who will vote for it? election results for left of Labour parties don’t suggest any popular demand for such a party, and I’m not sure there is any great desire amongst the unions either.
I think the challenge is much deeper than “Labour doesn’t do enough things the unions like” and the related call for yet another attempt at creating an alternative. we should be thinking about the future of the labour movement more generally – why don’t people join unions anymore?
and personally I think thatgiven the Tories are likely to get in next time we ought to focus serious energy on rebuilding the unions, because we can expect, for example, a major attack on pension rights. Labour won’t have the power to resist this (and don’t underestimate how little Labour has tweaked public sector pensions given the climate) so the unions need to be ready.
Not like 1931 Paul ?
its very like it. And for very similar reasons.
The traditional supporters have been shat on.
The promises not fulfilled and the grievences unaddressed.
1931 : “The government faced the problems stemming from the impact of the Great Depression. On the one hand, international bankers insisted that strict budget limits be kept, on the other trade unions and, particularly, unemployed workers’ organizations carried on regular and massive protest actions, including a series of “hunger marches”.
People didn’t have enough money for food and a Labour government couldn’t do anything about. the money was spent. The USA refused to keep giving credit and Britain defaulted on its war debts.
“In the summer of 1931 it was gripped by a political and financial crisis as the value of the pound and its place on the Gold Standard came under threat over fears that the budget was unbalanced. During August 1931 the Cabinet struggled to produce budget amendments that were politically acceptable without causing mass resignations and a split in the party. The issue on which the split occurred was the vote of the cabinet to reduce benefit paid to unemployed people. On August 24, 1931 the government formally resigned.”
Or, more simply, they ran out of money.
They ran out of borrowing.
They ran out of gold.
And Tom P: how could a Tory attack on pensions be any worse than the total disaster the Labour government has made of pensions, for short term tax receipts? everyone is affected.
You must be aware of the fury of the CWU that the ‘Gov’ refuses to do anything about the pension black hole or changes to EXISTING and new workers rights.”its a Royal Mail matter”
Bollocks it is. Brown owns the mail. He could intervene whenever he likes. but he won’t.
Strike action last year led to nothing. Royal Mail completely beat the union, who now want to try negotiations again, because they know that there is no appetite for another failed strike.
All observed by Brown who wants the management of Royal to win, so reducing the pension commitments, allowing them to sell off Royal Mail.
Probably for a pound to TNT. Or is my information from the Union incorrect?
Yet CWU still gives funds to….
The Labour party??
“why don’t people join unions anymore?”
I wonder.
Er, Bill, the strike action led to nothing because the union leadership – with a couple of honourable exceptions – sold a few crumbs off the table as the best deal they could get. And the honorable exceptions didn’t include one of the ’stars’ of the SWP’s Marxism event, their very own Jane Loftus. Remind me comrades what was her speech about?
RE the link with Labour. This year’s conference clearly showed only a narrow majority now who agree with this. However slowly, the tide is turning.
“how could a Tory attack on pensions be any worse than the total disaster the Labour government has made of pensions, for short term tax receipts? everyone is affected.”
If you’re referring to the impact of the abolition of dividend tax credits then I am very confident you are wrong. Even the Tories’ former pensions adviser Stephen Yeo says it isn’t one of the major factors. Longevity, the 2000-2003 bear market and changes to accounting rules probably did the most damage to final salary schemes in the private sector. But ultimately it is the decision of those companies to close such schemes that led to the demise of DB (other companies have kept them open).
The Tories have openly stated their desire to reduce pension provision for public sector workers – they want to actively reduce benefits. I find this both wrong-headed – it’s exactly the sort of sharing of misery that socialists are usually accused of – and vindictive. The Tories still see electoral value in beating up public sector workers.
This is a clear dividing line for me, and just one of the reasons that I don’t buy the rubbish (from either Left or Right) that Labour are no better than the Tories.
Tom P
its from the telegraph but there are various sourced. their is a link to the treasury records of the meeting.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1547173/Brown%27s-pension-grab-secret-is-revealed.html
“Gordon Brown was warned explicitly that he would cause the death of the final salary pension scheme and cost companies and individuals billions of pounds when he took the knife to the pension system in his first Budget.”
Yes, you are right that there is more to the story, longevity, stock markets, overtaxing provision over ‘x’amount by the major government.
But it is undeniable that the pension tax grab forced companies to close final salary schemes. Certainly forced them to close them to new employers.
Unions should have had him as soon as it became clear what it was doing to pensions.
Now that you can hardly find a pension scheme in the private sector, how much sympathy will there be for retaining public sector workers rights?
I’ll give you a clue. The number has a zero in it.
‘Unions should have had him as soon as it became clear what it was doing to pensions.
Now that you can hardly find a pension scheme in the private sector, how much sympathy will there be for retaining public sector workers rights?
I’ll give you a clue. The number has a zero in it.’
Well, the unions have just agreed at Warwick to back Purnells draconinian welfare reforms which will see single parents pushed back to work, private companies harrassing claimants and disabled people facing benefit cuts and coercion.
with frinds and allies like that, who needs enemies!
One has to say there really are some very strange things happening in Uk politics, tbh, I am amazed and baffled, 10 years ago, surely they would have laughed at such propositions, or would they. One can note they in fact have never questioned the operation of the New Deal as a example. The unions have also not just stabbed the poor in the back, but the PCS and its workers who will see their jobs taken by the private sector.
Shades of the thirties, indeed
Why have they accepted it all, ffs its a neo-liberal dream. the unions will see wages driven down as a result, turkeys voting for Xmas?
“‘The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.”
Meanwhile, I see projections of current anti New Labour (Hey, what other “Labour” is there?) swing at the next election would leave only a “rump” of secure (really?) deadbeat self-regarding Labour MPs in …South Wales! Don’t hold your breath ~ times are a changing here too.
“WE have seen the future and it’s…Chris Bryant”
No wonder (Pope) Don Touhig is desperate to hang on to his expenses. No brown shoes for him at the rump’s future garden parties.
“Respect”, as they say in Tonypandy. Rarely.
After reading this morning that Labour’s National Policy Forum supported Purnell’s forced labour scheme (and the rest of his programme to end welfare and make us serfs for Bumble Beadle PLC), I am pretty sure that I will not vote Labour nationally in the next election.
Brown can rot in whatever Calvinist Inferno he believes in. Or, the next best thing, spend a holiday in the smuggest, twee, over-rated, and ludicrously over-priced, reactionary Hell dimension just off the planet – Southwold.
Reclaiming the Labour Party is not a realistic ambition. Reclaiming it to what? The particular configuration of political, economic and cultural factors that generated and sustained working class labourism in the 20th century have been largely dissolved by three decades of neoliberal restructuring.
It is simply not possible for a few hundred Labour Party activists and a handful of left-wing MPs to render Labour a radical social democratic party with a real prospect of winning power in the absence of working class industrial and political identities that are widely understood by its members to stand in legitimate opposition to the interests of employers and their political representatives.
Such identities can be mobilised politically only if economic and cultural conditions are such that workers routinely view their class membership as key to realising their political aims. Historically, in countries like France, such identities emerged in the context of world wars and occupations that involved a widespread experience of common suffering strongly differentiated by class membership, and which discredited the claims of the ruling class to be solely able to defend and advance the national interest. In these conditions, parties such as the PCF took root and their class-based agitation found politically significant bases of support.
The experience in Britain was very different. Significant sections of the working class certainly developed strong traditions of militant oppositionalism in the workplace. But this very rarely translated into significant and sustained electoral support for political radicalism. In the context of the continued authority and legitimacy of bourgeois democracy and its related state institutions and ideologies, political radicalism was always a minority and marginal pursuit.
If ‘reclaiming’ the Labour Party to a non-existent tradition of radical social democracy in the midst of a very hostile environment is highly unlikely, the development of a mass political party that is explicitly and consistently anti-capitalist is almost unthinkable. The same historical circumstances and labourist political traditions that ensured the British working class were largely unwilling and unable to mount coherent political opposition to neoliberalism have also contributed to assigning revolutionary socialism a minor (if sometimes noble and interesting) place in British political history.
In short, the dissolution of British labourism in the face of neoliberalism and New Labour revisionism reflects the crisis of the left as it was and is – not the removal of ‘artificial’ barriers to a more radical form of ‘real’ class politics. There is no anti-capitalist political tradition of significance upon which the radical left today can build. As a consequence calls for a party based on class radicalism have been met, and will continue to be met, with a mixture of indifference, cynicism and incomprehension from the vast majority of workers.
Those who have bothered to read this far will not be surprised to hear that I have no solutions to offer. The organised left in Britain faces a bleak period ahead.
As in the 20th century, the prospects for socialism in the 21st century will depend largely on the collective experience of traumatic events that act to reveal both the deeply flawed nature of capitalism and the inability and unwillingness of the ruling classes to act in the service of our common humanity.
As in the 20th century, the prospects for socialism in the 21st century will depend largely on the collective experience of traumatic events that act to reveal both the deeply flawed nature of capitalism and the inability and unwillingness of the ruling classes to act in the service of our common humanity.
Climate Change?
Hmn. I hope the tories do attack public sector pensions. I’m fed up of paying for a bunch of parasites to have a vastly better pension than I do, better holidays, and better benefits. It’d be just dandy for the public sector to have such wonderful benefits if it weren’t for the fact that they force taxpayers to foot the bill. That’s just unfair and they deserve to be stomped for even suggesting that it is fair or right for them to live off the labour of others at an unfairly higher rate of pay than those forced to pay for their indulgence.
To be just, their pensions should be the same and their holiday entitlements the same.
It will be good to have the tories in because they are the party of the payers, whereas labour are the party of the overclass – public sector workers. If there’s any class system in Britain anymore, this is it, and it’s labour that represent the privileged and the tories that represent the put upon.