Labour and the Struggle for Socialism

An ON THE BRINK Publication WIN Publications Summer 2020

On the Brink Editor: Roger Silverman, [email protected]

Published by Workers International Network (WIN), contact: [email protected]

Front cover photo: Phil Maxwell Labour and the Struggle for Socialism

By Roger Silverman From THE RED FLAG (still the Labour Party’s official anthem)

The people’s flag is deepest red, It shrouded oft our martyred dead, And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold, Their hearts’ blood dyed its every fold.

CHORUS: Then raise the scarlet standard high. Beneath its shade we’ll live and die, Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer, We’ll keep the red flag flying here.

With heads uncovered swear we all To bear it onward till we fall. Come dungeons dark or gallows grim, This song shall be our parting hymn. A Turning Point The recently leaked report of the antics of a clique of unaccountable bureaucrats ensconced in Labour headquarters has sent shock waves throughout the movement. Shock – but little surprise, because these creatures had always been in effect “hiding in plain sight”: ostensibly running the party machine, but actually hardly bothering to conceal their sabotage. All that was new was the revelation of the depths of their venom; their treachery; their racist bigotry; the vulgarity with which they bragged about their disloyalty; their contempt for the aspirations of the hundreds of thousands who had surged into the party behind its most popular leader ever, Jeremy Corbyn. They had betrayed the party that employed them and wilfully sabotaged the election prospects of a Labour government. This is not a question of a few “bad apples” or stray mavericks. These officials were simply carrying out the explicit policy of the former leadership which had hired them. The report has exposed the truly vile nature of the party machine put in place by New Labour. After all, it was former prime minister Tony Blair himself who sneered that anyone voting for Corbyn “needed a brain transplant”; his closest sidekick Alastair Campbell who openly boasted that he would be voting against Labour; his mentor Peter Mandelson who bragged that “not a minute goes by when I am not working against Corbyn… Every day I try to do something to save the Labour Party from [his] leadership”. Another Labour MP announced that he was “doing everything I can to stop Corbyn becoming prime minister”, and Labour’s designated “Head of Political Strategy” called Corbyn “a lying little toe rag”. A wave of disgust is sweeping the ranks of the Labour Party at these revelations. But what is needed most of all is a clear understanding of how this situation has come about. Such visceral hatred goes well beyond the commonplace factional rivalries that characterise every political party. It is the aim of this pamphlet to place this story in its necessary historical context. While the left has always behaved with magnanimity and chivalry, the right has always shown the utmost malice and ruthlessness. The key to understanding the outcome of the conflict that has raged within the Labour Party, especially in the last five years, is perfectly encapsulated in the following two quotations from the left and right of Tony Benn, Photo: I, Isujosh 1 the party respectively: First, from the most revered champion of the socialist left, Tony Benn: “The Labour Party is a very broad party, reflecting a wide variety of opinions from left to right. This diversity of view is a great source of strength and we must vigorously resist any attempt that is made to drive the left or the right out of the party… We must be very clear that we are not interested in a narrow, sectarian, purist party all taking one view…We must be a broad church.” The second, from former Labour MP Tom Harris, who as one of the leaders of the Scottish Labour Party shares responsibility for what is still the most shattering political reverse in modern British history: the total annihilation of Labour’s once rock-solid base in Scotland. He writes: “The conclusion to be drawn is not that the Labour Party is, as it has always claimed, a broad church of diverse opinions and priorities, but that it is an uneasy alliance of two separate parties, each with separate, diverging and even opposing aims and principles. And each side sees the defeat of the other as a necessary prerequisite to its own success.” In other words, it is a one-sided and undeclared civil war, fought tooth and nail by one side while the other vainly seeks an unattainable peace. A recent book on the history of the Labour Party is circulating among party members. Its author is so taken with one casual throwaway comment by Tony Benn that he even borrows it to serve as the title for his book: “The Labour Party has never been a socialist party, although there have always been socialists in it”. With all due respect to Tony Benn, one of the most honest and courageous champions of the socialist cause in Labour’s history, on this point he is historically wrong. Much to the distaste of its leaders, the Labour Party was at its base an unrelentingly socialist party for more than three quarters of a century – i.e. for most of its lifetime: from 1918, when under the impact of the Russian revolution it adopted Clause Four, through 1959 when it implacably resisted Hugh Gaitskell's proposal to remove it, to 1994 when it finally succumbed to the seizure of the party by a hostile crypto-capitalist clique masquerading under the label New Labour. Up to that time, the Labour Party had undoubtedly always been weighed down by a conservative right-wing millstone; but until 1994 the leadership had always had to justify its hesitations, its retreats and even its betrayals on the pretext of prudence, caution and “gradualism”, gratefully seizing on Aneurin Bevan’s ambiguous formula: “The language of priorities is the religion of Socialism”. The arrival of New Labour represented something very different: a capture of the party by alien forces. It was the election of Corbyn in 2015 that marked the beginning of a reclamation of the party – a liberation from captivity. The explanation for the ferocity of the conflict is, as Harris has so conveniently spelled out for us, that there are two hostile forces fighting for occupation of this territory. The election of Corbyn represented an attempt by hundreds of thousands of newly awakened activists to wrest control of the party back from 2 Police attack a demonstration of women matchmakers. One of a series of movements that strengthened the call for working class political organisation in the late 19th century the clutches of the now discarded political tools of the capitalist class. The Birth Of Labour Implicit in the very name of the Labour Party is an understanding that workers have their own distinct interests, and need their own party to fight for them. Unlike all those other parties that claim to stand for the “people” or the “nation”, its name proclaims itself the party of the working class. In the words of the Labour anthem The Red Flag, mumbled at party conferences with embarrassingly obvious distaste by a succession of Labour leaders: “Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer, We’ll keep the red flag flying here.” Never have hymns contained such appropriate words. There is a myth, carefully fostered by the ruling class, and eagerly embraced by these “cowards and traitors”, that – unlike the rude uncouth French and Russians – Britain has a tradition of moderation, reason and compromise. The truth is that England (and still more so, Scotland, Wales and England’s oldest colony Ireland) has a long and militant history of revolution. In the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, the king was besieged by an angry mob and barely escaped with his life. In 1649, England was the first country in the world to chop the head off a king (144 years before the French), and to wage a bloody civil war to overthrow the then ruling class. As far back as then it brought forth the forerunners of socialism, the Levellers and Diggers. As Britain became the birthplace of industrial production, trade unions were formed and grew in the teeth of draconic repression, as exemplified by the case of the Tolpuddle Martyrs. Following the Napoleonic war, throughout the first half of the 3 nineteenth century Britain was constantly ablaze and teetering on the verge of revolution, from the brutally crushed protest demonstration that has gone down in history as the Peterloo massacre to the Cato Street conspiracy and countless more manifestations. A formidable industrial working class took root, soon emerging as an independent and militant political force in its own right in the form of the Chartists, who mobilised literally millions of workers. Later, it was under the direct and active influence of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who were by then based in Britain, that the London Trades Council formed the bedrock of the world’s first workers’ International, the International Working Men’s Association (a name that still reflected the prejudices of the time). So much for the myth of the British way of “compromise”. One important milestone on the road to the mass organisation of low-skilled workers, extending beyond the exclusive craft unions, was the famous strike at Bryant and May in 1888, in which thousands of mostly Irish women went on strike in protest at their fourteen-hour working day, a regime of summary fines and sackings, and horrific working conditions, which put them at risk of phosphorus poisoning and the disease known as “phossy jaw”. This strike highlighted the double burden on working women of looking after their home, family and work. Another landmark was the great four-week strike in 1889 of 100,000 dock workers in the Port of London for the so-called “dockers’ tanner” (six old pennies per hour). The Labour Party was formed when, following this rapid organic growth of the trade unions, they found themselves blocked when they crashed against vicious laws designed to illegalise strikes and curb their power. A “Labour Representation Committee” was formed to break away from the coat-tails of the Liberal Party – in Victorian times the chosen party of the capitalists against the traditional Tory landowning party – and create its own independent political voice. In response to the rising strength and combativity of the trade unions, both the Tories and Liberals mounted political and legal attacks on trade union rights: parliament banned picketing in 1896, and in 1901 the High Court’s infamous Taff Vale judgement cleared the way for companies to claim damages from unions and union leaders. Formed to prepare the way for a Labour Party, a Labour Representation Committee met in 1900. This historic meeting brought together delegates from a range of workers’ organisations: trade unions representing more than half a million members; the 13,000-strong Independent Labour Party, which had already established socialist nuclei in several industrial areas and recruited such notable figures as James Connolly and Sylvia Pankhurst; the Fabian Society, a socialist propaganda circle with a membership of around 800, named after the Roman general Fabius Cunctator (“the delayer”), a byword for his chosen tactics of gradualism; and the Social-Democratic Federation, led by the eccentric and flamboyant self-styled Marxist Hyndman, which claimed 9,000. When 4 Hyndman’s ultimatum demanding that the LRC instantly “recognise the class war” was, predictably, rejected, he soon stormed out into oblivion. Soon afterwards the aspirations of the LRC were ratified by a vote at the TUC to found a separate party, and in due course the Labour Party came into existence. It was not yet explicitly socialist, though most of the existing socialist groups did affiliate to it. In deference to the party’s federal nature, up to 1918 there were no individual Labour Party branches; membership was secured through the trade unions and other affiliated organisations, notably its principal forerunner the Independent Labour Party. In the general election of 1906, 29 MPs were elected on the Labour ticket. From the beginning, Labour was the creation of the trade unions: the political voice of the working class. A Socialist Beginning There was already a formidable organised international socialist force in existence: the Socialist International, formed in 1889 by social-democratic parties throughout Europe, inspired by the teachings of Marx and Engels. (“Social democracy”, in those days, was the term Marxists had adopted to differentiate their programme from those of the liberals, who had campaigned solely for political democracy.) Restrained by pragmatic considerations, the Labour Party hadn’t at first sought affiliation to it. Lenin nevertheless recommended it be accepted for membership, on the grounds that it was the political voice of the trade unions. “The Labour Party may not recognise the class struggle,” he argued, “but the class struggle will inevitably recognise the Labour Party.” And so it proved. Already in the years leading up to the world war, there had been a rising tide of political and industrial militancy sweeping Britain,

Kier Hardie early leader of the Labour Party

5 encompassing the suffragette campaign for votes for women, agitation for Irish home rule, and an upsurge of strikes. In one notorious case, the then Liberal home secretary Winston Churchill dispatched troops to open fire on the starving locked-out coal miners of Tonypandy in the Rhondda valley. This trend was briefly cut across by the initial patriotic fever that accompanied the First World War, but this soon subsided. The war ended in a wave of revolution that swept throughout Europe and beyond, bringing the ruling dynasties of Russia, Germany and Austria crashing to their downfall overnight. Britain too was ablaze with strikes, army mutinies and uprisings. Inspired directly by the Russian revolution, in 1917 the ILP called for the “establishment in every town, urban and rural district Councils of Workmen and Soldiers’ Delegates”. In 1918, under its direct impact, the Labour Party adopted the socialist Clause Four: “to secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service”. The rather flowery language was that of the Fabian pedagogues Sidney and Beatrice Webb; but the meaning was plain and unmistakable: the wholesale transfer of the productive resources of society out of the clutches of private profiteers into the hands of the working class. In its document Labour and the New Social Order, the conference pledged to “play no role in reconstituting or defending capitalism” and to enact “fundamental redistribution of power from the bosses to the working class”. For its part, the Manchester Guardian had no hesitation in recognising the historic significance of the 1918 conference, calling it “the birth of a socialist party”. Clause Four remained the proud goal of the Labour Party for the following 76 years. It was boldly printed in black and white on every member’s party membership card. When a later right-wing Labour leader, Gaitskell (in many ways an early precursor of Blair), tried to remove it in 1959, his proposal was scornfully rejected and swept into the dustbin by a mass revolt of the rank and file membership and the affiliated trade union branches. Though “cowards flinched and traitors sneered”, it was to remain proudly in place for another 76 years until 1994, when Tony Blair managed to tear the socialist heart out of the party. We are still engaged in the struggle to restore it to its proper place. A Triple Alliance was concluded in 1919 of miners, railway and transport workers to co-ordinate joint strike action. In 1920 councils of action were formed and a Hands Off Russia campaign. East London dockers blockaded the Jolly George warship, refusing to load it with arms sent by the British government in aid of the counter-revolutionaries in Russia. In the same year George Lansbury, the Mayor of Poplar in East London and a future leader of the Labour Party, was jailed along with thirty fellow Labour councillors for defying the government under the slogan “rather break the law than break the poor”. 6 Delegates attending the Second International’s Congress in Stuttgart in And1907 1922 saw the election of the famous Red Clydeside MPs on a Labour ticket, greeted by a demonstration in Glasgow of 90,000. There was little doubt then as to Labour’s socialist character. Lenin, for one, had no hesitation in urging Britain’s fledgling Communist Party to seek affiliation to it. His advice was rejected in a flush of ultra-left exuberance – a manifestation of the malady Lenin ruefully diagnosed as “left-wing communism: an infantile disorder”.

In The Corridors Of Power Labour had not joined the Socialist International, but in any case at its first real test that institution had already proved a spent cartridge, an empty shell: the first and most fatal casualty of the First World War. At its Stuttgart conference in 1912 it had passed a resolution containing the ringing words: “The Congress… calls upon the workers of all countries to oppose the power of the international solidarity of the proletariat to capitalist imperialism… Let the governments remember that… they cannot unleash a war without danger to themselves… It would be insanity for the governments not to realize that the very idea of the monstrosity of a world war would inevitably call forth the indignation and the revolt of the working class. The proletarians consider it a crime to fire at each other for the profits of the capitalists, the ambitions of dynasties, or the greater glory of secret diplomatic treaties…” On the very eve of the war in November 1912, it had repeated the same defiant message at a special conference in Basel, where the French socialist leader Jaures warned that war could create “the most revolutionary situation imaginable”. But once war was declared less than two years later, what happened? A 7 monstrous betrayal! The next time rank-and-file members of the respective parties of the Socialist International met, it was not to debate resolutions in a conference hall but to fire shells and bullets at one another across the battlefields of Europe. Internationalism had become just another discarded tattered banner. This outright betrayal came as a shock. Even Lenin, with all his criticisms of the German Social-Democrats, could not bring himself to believe it. When he saw with his own eyes a copy of its paper Vorwärts, he initially took it for granted that it must be a forgery perpetrated by the German military high command. It was on the ruins of the Socialist International that the Communist International was formed, soon itself to fall into the clutches of a new breed of criminal usurpers – the gangsters of Stalin’s Kremlin – and eventually in turn strangled. But that story belongs in another book. It was not until 1923 that the Labour Party finally established international affiliations, joining the so-called Labour and Socialist International, a pale imitation of an international which five years after the end of the war cobbled together the tattered remnants of the old socialist parties. And yet the words of the Stuttgart congress proved literally prophetic. Revolution did sweep across Europe. Three royal dynasties crumbled: the Hohenzollerns, the Habsburgs and of course the Romanovs. Their cousins the Gotha-Saxe-Coburgs in Britain (who had hastily anglicised their names to Windsor) were tottering and barely survived. The following vignette gives some hint of how this happened. During the massive strike wave which was rocking Britain in 1919, a trade union delegation descended on 10 Downing Street to confront the government with its demands. Prime Minister David Lloyd George listened to them patiently, and then replied: "If you carry out your threat and strike, you will defeat us. But if you do so, have you weighed the consequences? The strike will be in defiance of the government of the country, and its very success will precipitate a constitutional crisis of the first importance. For, if a force arises which is stronger than the state itself, then it must be ready to take on the functions of the state, or withdraw and accept the authority of the state. Gentlemen, have you considered? And if you have, are you ready?" According to the memoirs of the miners’ leader Robert Smillie: "From that moment on we were beaten, and we knew we were." Offered power on a plate, they shrank in horror – a clear case of cowards flinching! Labour was first allowed to form a brief and inglorious minority government in 1923. MacDonald’s lieutenant Philip Snowden set out plainly its intentions: “We must show the country that we are not under the domination of the wild men.” Desperate to prove Labour’s loyalty to the establishment, a wholesale purge of communists from the Labour Party was imposed, and party branches which refused to comply were summarily disaffiliated. At the request of George V, 8 MacDonald excluded Lansbury, leader of Labour’s left wing, from the Cabinet. In yet another gesture of good faith, MacDonald ordered the prosecution of a Communist Party militant who had called on soldiers to disobey orders to shoot strikers. Lansbury defied him by reading out this same seditious speech again to an audience of ten thousand. Despite its craven subservience, the Labour government was soon sent packing by the shadowy forces of the secret state, deploying the dirtiest of dirty tricks: a forged letter, purportedly written by Zinoviev, the head of the Communist International, but actually concocted by MI5, implausibly branding Labour a bunch of wild revolutionaries with knives in their teeth. The letter called on British communists to mobilise "sympathetic forces" in the Labour Party to support an Anglo-Soviet treaty, including a loan to the Soviet government, and to encourage "agitation-propaganda" in the armed forces. The forged letter was widely circulated, including to senior army officers, in a bid to inflict maximum damage on the Labour government. On October 25, 1924, four days before a new snap election, the Daily Mail splashed this headline across its front page: “CIVIL WAR PLOT BY SOCIALISTS' MASTERS: MOSCOW ORDERS TO OUR REDS; GREAT PLOT DISCLOSED”. Labour lost the election by a landslide. Britain’s first Labour government had lasted just 259 days. Only now, a century later, has it been officially admitted that the Zinoviev letter was forged by a source of the MI6 agent Desmond Morton, a friend of Winston Churchill who appointed him personal assistant during the second world war, and leaked to the Conservative Party by the MI5 officer Major Joseph Ball, who was later employed by the Conservative Central Office. Stewart Menzies, a future head of MI6, then sent a copy to the Daily Mail.

The armed forces of the state against the workers in struggle during the 1926 General Strike 9 On the industrial front, the scenario performed in 1919 was soon to be played out to even more catastrophic effect. On May Day 1926, the coal bosses threw down a gauntlet by imposing a lockout on the country’s 1.2 million miners. A head-on confrontation between the classes could no longer be avoided. Backed into a corner, the TUC reluctantly mobilised its forces, calling out its three million members on a general strike. This was due not so much to any sudden access of courage on the part of the trade union leaders, but to cold, calculating, deliberate provocation on the part of a cynical and malevolent ruling class. The rank-and-file trade union membership responded magnificently. Typesetters and printers at the Daily Mail refused to print the paper’s inflammatory editorial. The workers downed tools. The machines fell silent. Not a wheel turned, apart from the slapstick antics of a bunch of jolly strikebreaking hooray Henry volunteers. An alternative society was coming into being. Transport convoys and food distribution networks were improvised overnight under the direction of trades councils. Councils of action sprang up throughout the country, and in some areas workers’ defence forces. MacDonald was alarmed: “I don’t like it. Honestly, I don’t like it. But honestly, what can be done?” And just as the strike was gathering further momentum by the day, challenging the functions of government and the very survival of capitalist rule, and presenting the Labour Movement with not just the opportunity but the absolute accomplished fact of power which already lay in its hands… after a mere nine days the TUC crumpled. The strike was called off, not because it was failing but precisely because of its leaders’ panic at its outstanding success. More people were on strike the next day than ever. But after its leaders’ capitulation, the trade unions were crushed for a generation. Once again, the cowards had flinched. The Great Betrayal Defeated on the industrial front, the working class turned back to the political arena. In the 1929 election, Labour emerged for the first time as the biggest party in parliament, and Ramsay MacDonald formed a new government. In the depths of the great depression in 1931, the government applied for a massive short-term loan from American banks. On 23rd August an emergency Cabinet meeting waited with baited breath for their decision. It promised the loan, but only on the most stringent condition: that the Bank of England approve a programme of spending cuts including a ten per cent cut in the already pitifully meagre unemployment benefit. The Cabinet was split. MacDonald submitted his resignation and asked King George V to dissolve parliament and call an election. The King refused point- blank, flagrantly overstepping the carefully calibrated etiquette of royal prerogative, and blatantly intervened to negotiate with the capitalist parties the formation of a right-wing government in which MacDonald would play the role of token figurehead prime minister, adding the warning: “If a socialist government came into power and carried out their extravagant promises to the 10 Ramsay MacDonald (left) and Phillip Snowden (right), were principal Labour leaders that formed national government with the conservatives. electorate, this country would be finished.” The Liberal leader Herbert Samuel later recorded that he had advised the king that MacDonald should be maintained in office "in view of the fact that the necessary economies would prove most unpalatable to the working class". He added that MacDonald was "the ruling class's ideal candidate for imposing a balanced budget at the expense of the working class." MacDonald duly dissolved the Labour government and formed a so-called National Government principally composed of Tories, with a sprinkling of former Labour renegades. MacDonald gloated to his fellow defector Philip Snowden that “tomorrow every Duchess in London will be wanting to kiss me!”. This time, an unmistakable example of a traitor sneering! MacDonald was summarily expelled from the Labour Party. Many of his former cabinet colleagues were outraged by his betrayal. Clement Attlee complained that he had "shed every tag of political convictions he ever had" and called his so-called National Government a "shop-soiled pack of cards shuffled and reshuffled". This was "the greatest betrayal in the political history of this country". Another saw the brighter side: "I found Members delighted that Ramsay Macdonald, Philip Snowden and J.H. Thomas had severed themselves from us by their action. We had got rid of the right wing without any effort on our part!” Unemployment had doubled to 2.7 million, and the National Government inflicted a 10% cut in the dole, a penny pinching means test, and a range of harsh austerity measures, including an across-the-board reduction in the pay of all public employees. MacDonald’s savage policies did not go unchallenged. Rank-and-file sailors in the Royal Navy had suffered a whopping 25% cut in pay – a provocation

11 which sparked off a full-scale uprising at the naval shipyard at Invergordon. (Its leader Len Wincott later sought refuge in Russia, where ironically he ended up languishing for more than ten years in a Stalinist labour camp.) The Invergordon mutiny lit a flame of resistance, causing panic in financial markets and a further run on the pound. Desperately trying to shore up the currency, within three days the Bank of England had depleted practically its entire treasury of gold and foreign exchange reserves worth almost £100 million (the equivalent of £700 billion today). The Cabinet abandoned the Gold Standard overnight, devaluing sterling and throwing the entire global financial system into turmoil. Sidney Webb, a minister in the now deposed Labour government, complained: “Nobody told us we could do that!” Under Lansbury’s leadership, the Labour Party turned left. Its 1933 conference pledged a general strike in the event of war, and soon afterwards adopted a programme “For Socialism and Peace” committing it to wholesale nationalisation – something which Snowdon called “Bolshevism run mad”. And in 1936, tens of thousands of anti-fascist workers victoriously blocked the march of Mosley’s Fascist Blackshirts in the famous Battle of Cable Street. After agonies of indecision and heated debates at two consecutive conferences, in 1932 the leftward-moving ILP voted to disaffiliate from the Labour Party, an act described at the time as “suicide during a fit of madness”. The ILP’s membership had declined from 50,000 in the mid-1920s to less than 17,000, and its parliamentary representation from 140 of the 287 Labour MPs elected in 1929 to just five. Moreover, their departure was over relatively trivial and pedantic issues – an arcane dispute over whether or not its five remaining MPs were bound by the Parliamentary Labour Party’s standing orders – and with disastrous timing, coming as it did right on the heels of MacDonald’s right- wing split and a leftward shift in Labour’s policies under George Lansbury.

Arch enemy of the working class, Churchill headed the wartime coalition, with Labour Leader Attlee as Deputy Prime Minister 12 Nevertheless, as an isolated but honourable left alternative to the by now thoroughly Stalinised Communist Party, the ILP acted as a pole of attraction to a generation of youth, many of whom went on to fight and give their lives in the Spanish Civil War. MacDonald and Snowden had accepted the role of bribed puppets of the ruling class – but to do so they had to be wrenched apart from the movement from which they had sprung. A New Beginning Labour’s leftward tide in the 1930s was checked by the declaration of war in 1939, when Labour had dutifully joined a Tory-led coalition government, thus effectively depriving the workers and soldiers of any independent voice. When at the end of the war Labour won a landslide victory, no one was more surprised than the Labour leaders themselves. The two pre-war Labour governments had been tolerated by the ruling class only in emergency conditions, and even then with gritted teeth, under relentless pressure, and for the briefest of periods (a total of just three years between them). But in 1945 the establishment was paralysed. The economy was in a state of collapse. Three million armed soldiers were returning home intent on building a new world. Revolution was in the air worldwide. Power could have fallen into the hands of the working class without a shot being fired. Fearing a spate of mutinies like those following the First World War, this time the government hastily demobilised the army and disarmed the soldiers. The ruling class was desperate to cling to power, but its grip was fatally weakened. Churchill hurled increasingly hysterical slanders at Labour, matched later only by the recent unremitting campaign against Corbyn, desperately trying to frighten the electorate with the ludicrous rant that once in power Labour would impose a “Gestapo” state. Attlee countered by reminding the electorate that the Tories’ hypocritical defence of freedom meant only “freedom for the rich and slavery for the poor”, and Bevan famously retorted that he considered the Tories “lower than vermin”. The mass of the population and especially the ordinary members of the Labour party and trade unions were radicalised as never before. In defiance of the leadership, Labour’s conference in 1944 had passed overwhelmingly a resolution moved by Ian Mikardo in favour of wholesale nationalisation and workers’ control. The claim made in a recent book that “the Attlee government ruled with the consent of the British ruling class” is absolute nonsense, as is the assertion that “the Tories fundamentally agreed with Labour’s essentially state corporatist policy”. On the contrary, the ruling class was terrified at the insurgent mood sweeping through society and at Labour’s victory and radical programme.

13 Ernest Bevin, Labour’s ‘cold war’ foreign secretary, with leader Clement Attlee Despite the ruin of those basic industries upon which the economy depended, and the lifeline offered by state investment, the Tories bitterly resisted nationalisation and only nervously tolerated it in the prevailing conditions of economic devastation and their own political impotence. Once back in power, the Tories lost no time in bringing back into private ownership the more profitable steel and road haulage sectors, and later hired the services of two renegade Labour MPs, Wyatt and Donnelly, to block their renationalisation under the Wilson government. Eventually of course, the Thatcher and New Labour regimes went on to hand back to private profiteers every scrap and particle of the economy. The continuing loyalty of succeeding generations towards Labour, demonstrated still today in its consistently solid core vote of ten million plus, is a legacy of the substantial reforms of the Attlee government of 1945: the nationalisation of the Bank of England, coal, steel, railways, telecoms, gas and electricity, and above all the foundation of the National Health Service. No matter how cautiously these measures were enacted, however unjustified the lavish and unwarranted compensation offered to the previous owners of these companies, and however unwieldy the monolithic bureaucratic corporations established in their place, the record of Labour’s government in 1945 shone in contrast to the timid equivocations and shameful retreats of its short-lived predecessors. For all their shortcomings, these reforms left a valuable heritage which it took successive governments decades to unravel. Having been swept to power on the crest of a mass wave, giving it the scope to make genuine reforms, the Labour government was undermined above all by the slavish collusion offered by its foreign secretary Ernest Bevin to American imperialism in ramping up the cold war; developing a British atom and hydrogen bomb capability; sending 100,000 troops in aid of the US invasion of Korea; joining NATO; promoting German rearmament; and fighting a dirty 14 civil war in Greece against those same heroic partisans who had single-handedly liberated the country from Nazi occupation, and then, like the French in Indochina, delivering it into the murderous hands of the US military. These policies triggered continual left-wing revolts against the Labour leadership, especially towards the end of Labour’s period in office and continuing into the 1950s after its downfall, over the introduction of NHS prescription charges, participation in the Korean war, the military rearmament of Germany, and other issues. Those still denying the socialist foundations underlying the base of the Labour Party in those days have an obligation to explain how it was that in 1948 the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party resolved to celebrate the centenary of the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels by publishing a new edition, prefaced with an introduction by its general secretary Harold Laski, who called it “one of the outstanding political documents of all time… a philosophy of history, a critical analysis of socialist doctrines and a passionate call to revolutionary action”. Retreat The Attlee government fell after one and a bit terms. It should not be forgotten, though, that in both the 1950 election, which it won by a hair’s breadth, and even again in 1951 when it narrowly lost, Labour still scored more votes and a higher percentage than the Tories. However, it was thirteen years before Labour regained office. The postwar upswing was beginning, employment was soaring, and at the cost of long hours of overtime the so-called “affluent society” had arrived. In these conditions, trade union organisation was strengthened, wages were rising, and capitalism was booming. By 1957 the Tory prime minister Macmillan could boast “you’ve never had it so good”. In 1959 the new Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell, an early forerunner of Blair, made an abortive attempt to renounce Clause Four of the party constitution, which set out Labour's socialist aims. Even Gaitskell, however, did not dare oppose further nationalisation in principle. He limited himself to demagogic sneers against the idea of nationalising "the whole of light industry, the whole of agriculture, all the shops, every little pub and garage" – something that no one had been suggesting in any case. While the parliamentary left, led by Nye Bevan and Barbara Castle, were willing to consider compromising on the issue, dismissing Clause Four as a mere totem, a token bauble, the proposal aroused a whirlwind of protest from the constituency parties and the trade union branches. Gaitskell was forced by the ranks of the party into a hasty retreat and quickly abandoned his attempt to destroy Labour’s socialist mission. Clause Four remained intact. As a token face- saving sop to Gaitskell, a supplement setting out “Labour’s Aims” was added, calling rather vaguely for control of “the commanding heights of the economy”, 15 Symbols of left and right within the Parliamentary Labour Party in the 1950s, Nye Bevan (on the left), Huge Gaitskell (on the right) and then promptly dropped. Labour had nevertheless fought the 1959 election on a programme of wholesale nationalisation, specifically targeting Britain’s top 512 companies. Its manifesto included the following commitment: “As part of our planned expansion, it will be necessary to extend the area of public ownership… Where an industry is shown, after thorough enquiry, to be failing the nation we reserve the right to take all or any part of it into public ownership if this is necessary.” And right up to the 1980s, the party conference was still committed ostensibly to "a fundamental shift in the balance of power and wealth" in society. For all the hesitations and prevarications of the leaders, that relentless underlying impulse towards social change remained the mainspring of the party. Even throughout the booming 1950s, the left continued to resist the party’s rightward drift under Gaitskell. This was demonstrated not only in the defeat of his attempt to remove Clause Four, but also by the rebellion in 1961 of five prominent left Labour MPs, including its future leader Michael Foot, in voting against the defence estimates, in defiance of the three-line whip imposed by Gaitskell. Their brave stand in thus upholding the democratic decision of party conference for nuclear disarmament led to their expulsion from the Parliamentary Labour Party and put them at risk of losing their parliamentary seats – an outcome which was avoided only when, in a rebuff to the leadership, the party’s National Executive Committee refused to ratify it. As a man who had built his career on the back of the Labour movement, Gaitskell had proved powerless to resist its instinctive aspiration towards a new society.

16 Back In Office Labour’s right wing suffered another setback when, following Gaitskell’s death, its preferred leadership candidate George Brown was defeated by Harold Wilson. Wilson still enjoyed a trace of his former left credentials, having resigned along with Bevan from the Attlee government in protest at the imposition of prescription charges. Wilson went on to win the 1964 general election by a hair’s breadth. Once again, despite the new Labour government’s very mild proposed reforms, the ruling class exerted massive pressure from the outset to blackmail and destabilise it. Wilson complained openly that his government was confronted with a “strike of capital”, and his sidekick George Brown denounced in colourful language the “gnomes of Zurich” dictating to the government. Wilson even went to the lengths of warning the governor of the Bank of England that he was prepared to dissolve parliament and fight a new election on the slogan “the people versus the bankers”. It was an empty threat which he dared not act on, but when it did come to a new election just eighteen months later, Labour’s vote soared to 48% and it won an unassailable majority of 98 seats. Rather than taking full advantage of its new majority to challenge them, Wilson appeased the capitalists by turning on the trade unions. Within two months of the election the National Union of Seamen launched its first national strike since 1911, demanding higher pay and a reduction in the working week from 56 to 40 hours. Wilson resorted to red scare tactics, branding the union leadership “a tightly knit group of politically motivated men”, and invoked emergency powers. Wilson’s token left minister Barbara Castle later introduced a White Paper, In Place of Strife, proposing legal restrictions on the right to strike by dictating a compulsory “cooling-off period” in any dispute. This provoked huge protests. The TUC organised demonstrations of hundreds of thousands, and the proposal

Classroom at the University of Lyon. Markings on wall read “DE L’HISTOIRE KARL MARX,” made during student occupation as part of the May 1968 events in France. Photo: BeenAroundAWhile at en.wikipedia 17 was hastily withdrawn. At this time there was a worldwide upsurge of protests, including riots in the American ghettoes and the rise of militant organisations like the Black Panthers, a student demonstration in Mexico that was ruthlessly gunned down, and above all the uprising across the Channel in France in which ten million workers occupied their workplaces and festooned them with red flags and insurrectionary slogans, while the ageing president General de Gaulle fled Paris to hunt desperately for loyal troops. The most immediate impact in Britain was a civil rights march by the downtrodden Catholic minority in Northern Ireland which was brutally attacked. This brought back to the boil the long-simmering conflict in Northern Ireland, which now erupted with full force. The rather rusty remnants of the Irish Republican Army were jerked back into life and a more militantly nationalist faction (the “Provos”) took control. The ruling tinpot Protestant police state sent in their paramilitary B-Specials army of Protestant thugs to terrorise the Catholic ghettoes in Belfast, and a full-scale conflict was gathering steam. The Wilson government sent in British troops to “pacify” the situation, with lasting repercussions that lie beyond the scope of this pamphlet. But it should be noted that, contrary to one recent account, when Labour sent troops into Northern Ireland, it was initially (and disastrously) welcomed by much of the left under the illusion that it might serve as a protection of the beleaguered Catholic minority. In foreign policy, Wilson’s attempts to appease the cold-war policies of the USA by offering verbal (though, to his credit, not military) support to the US war in Vietnam met massive opposition, culminating in a famous demonstration outside the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square. In contrast to its appeasement of the bankers and American imperialism, this government’s most lasting achievement was to make way for the introduction of some significant social reforms (abolition of capital punishment, liberalisation of abortion laws, decriminalisation of homosexuality, reform of the divorce and abortion laws, abolition of theatre censorship). However, it is inaccurate to attribute these, as has sometimes been done, solely to the party’s liberal right-wing (namely, to future defectors to the SDP like Roy Jenkins and Shirley Williams). The abolition of capital punishment, for instance, was achieved only after a decades-long crusade by the left MP Sydney Silverman in the teeth of ferocious opposition from successive Home Secretaries, Labour and Tory alike. Wilson bullied dissident Labour MPs with the threat of deselection, brutally warning them that “every dog is allowed just one bite before losing its licence”. As one example of the poisonous feelings already building up within party ranks, it is worth recording that Silverman, who had been jailed during the First World War for defying military orders and who was one of the five rebel MPs who had disobeyed the whip by voting against defence estimates under Gaitskell, expressed contempt for Wilson by quoting Meredith’s line “We are betrayed by what is false within”, and from Browning’s poem “The Lost Leader”: 18 Labour leader and Prime Minister, Harold Wilson (left) Sydney Silverman MP (Right) “Just for a handful of silver he left us”. When Wilson’s Chief Whip responded with a patronising backhanded compliment on Silverman’s “great memorial” in carrying through the abolition of the death penalty, he retorted bitterly: “The only ‘memorial’ I would value is that I have given a lifetime of service in the Labour Party’s continuing effort to establish a socialist society.” One faction of the ruling class went beyond economic sabotage. MI5 was buzzing with bizarre paranoid delusions about Wilson’s supposed connections with the Soviet KGB. Alarmed at the uprising in France, in which ten million workers were on strike and occupying their workplaces, and at the worldwide wave of radicalization in May 1968, and taking their cue from the colonels’ successful coup in Greece the previous year, there were fringe elements within the ruling class already toying with the idea of a military takeover. The prime mover in this plot was the newspaper magnate Cecil Harmsworth King – the Rupert Murdoch of his day, and himself an MI5 agent, who approached the Daily Mirror’s managing director Hugh Cudlipp (who also had links to MI5), and Earl Mountbatten, who was both Prince Philip’s uncle and a second cousin of the Queen. Cudlipp reports in his memoirs that on 8th May 1968 King convened the first of two meetings with Mountbatten and Sir Solly Zuckerman, Chief Scientific Adviser to the government. There King “expounded his views on the gravity of the national situation, the urgency for action… He explained that in the crisis he foresaw as being just around the corner, the Government would disintegrate, there would be bloodshed in the streets and the armed forces would be involved. The people would be looking to somebody like Lord Mountbatten as the titular head of a new administration, somebody renowned as a leader of men, who would be capable, backed by the best brains and administrators in the land, to restore public confidence. He ended with a question to Mountbatten—would he agree to be the titular head of a new administration in such circumstances?" Mountbatten reported that the Queen was “concerned over the very large number of letters she had received protesting about the Wilson government”, 19 but before committing himself he asked the opinion of Zuckerman, who replied bluntly that the plan amounted to “rank treachery” and he would have nothing to do with it, before standing up and leaving the room. Subsequent conspiratorial meetings took place at the Defence Ministry, and King was even permitted to address a meeting of young officers at Sandhurst at which he called for the Army to rebel. Up to thirty MI5 officers were involved in the plot, which even included plans to designate the Shetland Isles as the site for an internment camp. However, once Mountbatten had prudently withdrawn his support, the balloon had burst. King subsequently overrode the Daily Mirror’s editorial independence and published a front-page article calling for Wilson’s removal by extra- parliamentary action. The board of the IPC met and demanded his resignation for this breach of procedure and the damage to the interests of IPC as a public company. He refused, and was summarily dismissed on 30th May 1968. However, the Times, edited by Jacob’s father William Rees-Mogg, further encouraged King's proposal in an editorial published under the heading "The Danger to Britain", suggesting Wilson's removal in favour of a government of business leaders. At this stage, however, it was only the lunatic fringe of the ruling class that seriously considered such tactics. As we will see, the threat became more serious a decade later. It was not Wilson that these gentlemen were afraid of, but the power of the trade unions that stood behind him and circumscribed his freedom of movement. The Battle Lines Are Drawn Following the familiar “good cop, bad cop” routine, Labour’s failed attempt to pacify the trade unions was followed by a harsher effort to crack down on them, under a new Tory government elected in 1970 led by Edward Heath. Again and again, however, it too found itself helpless in face of the sheer combativity and solidarity of the working class. The 1970s witnessed a surge of industrial conflict without precedent in the half a century since the general strike. In 1972 the coal miners launched their first national strike since 1926 in protest against appalling wages and conditions. They brought every coal mine in the country to a standstill, starving the power stations of fuel, and at one crucial point mobilising 15,000 ”flying pickets” from Yorkshire and South Wales to lay siege to the country’s last remaining stockpile of coke at the famous Battle of Saltley Gate in Birmingham. The police found they were powerless to disperse them and withdrew their forces. This victory brought the strike to a swift and successful conclusion, winning the miners a 16% pay rise. Against a background of soaring inflation, the miners’ strike was followed by a huge wave of national strikes by car workers, postal workers, building workers, railway workers, electricians, dockers and more. The Heath government bared its claws by imposing jail sentences on building site pickets in Shrewsbury and on leading militants on the London docks.

20 The jailing of the five dock workers met an instant response from the working class. Thousands of workers downed tools to mass in protest at the gates of Pentonville prison, the TUC threatened a one-day general strike, and the government was forced into a hasty undignified scramble to dig up a face-saving legal device to release them, using the services of an obscure court official (the “Official Solicitor”). A second national coal miners’ strike was called in 1974, demanding not just an immediate 35% pay rise, but the election of a Labour government pledged to a socialist programme. Once again there was rock-solid support for the strike. Power stations shut down, causing nationwide blackouts. Heath retaliated by imposing a three-day working week throughout industry – in effect a national lockout. Britain was paralysed. Perched uneasily astride a country racked by strikes, to say nothing of a quadrupling of oil prices, the first deep recession since the war, and a civil war in Northern Ireland, the Heath government soon crumbled to defeat. In the period between 1950 and 1970, only on two occasions had a state of emergency been declared. During his period of less than four years in office, Heath declared no less than five. The country’s top civil servant Sir William Armstrong suffered a breakdown and was carted off to a mental hospital. The first Tory government since the general strike to confront the trade unions head-on had found itself halted in its tracks. Bruised and battered, Heath staked his survival on one last desperate gamble – a snap general election to decide the question: "who runs Britain: the government or the trade unions?". He received an unmistakable answer – and it was not the one he’d been hoping for. Labour found itself unexpectedly hoisted back to power, at the crest of an explosion of trade-union expectations. Reaching Boiling Point As in 1964, Labour had won only the narrowest of victories over a hopelessly inept Tory administration, without a majority in parliament and dependent on the questionable support of first the Liberals and later also the Ulster Unionists. From the beginning the new government was rocked by economic crisis, runaway inflation, industrial unrest, and a wave of terrorist bombings. British society was in deep crisis. The government found itself helpless in the face of the overwhelming contradictory pressures of labour and capital. Buffeted by these two irresistible opposing forces, the Labour government swung drunkenly from concessions to the trade unions, to surrender to the IMF, to collapse in the face of a tidal wave of strikes. The new government had come into office on the crest of a wave of industrial militancy not seen for decades. Swept to power by the trade unions, it granted significant labour law reforms, reversing the Tories’ harsher curbs and restoring

21 many trade-union rights. Against a background of economic turmoil and runaway inflation, it brought the miners’ strike to a swift conclusion by meeting their claim in full, granting them an immediate pay rise of 35%, to be followed the following year with a further rise of 35%. One shining example of the rising morale of the working class at this time was the extraordinary two-year strike at the photo processing company Grunwicks. The company was a Dickensian sweatshop, employing 440 workers, almost exclusively Asian women, for up to 12-hour days and paying them just £28 per week (the average national weekly wage was then £72). The slightest infractions were punished with instant sacking, and union membership was strictly forbidden. In 1976 the diminutive but heroic Jayaben Desai was sacked for standing up for a fellow worker. She staged a mass walkout and looked for a union to join, at one point staging a hunger strike outside the TUC headquarters. At its height up to 20,000 trade unionists joined the mass pickets besieging the workshop, including contingents of Clydeside shipbuilders and Yorkshire miners fresh from their own victorious strikes. Such was the surge of sympathy for the strikers that even serving Labour Cabinet ministers joined the picket lines, including Shirley Williams, who was soon to become one of the Gang of Four that defected from the Labour Party. Local workers refused to service the company – garbage collectors, electricity supply workers and, most crucially for a company solely dependent on mail orders, local postal workers, who refused both to touch Grunwick mail, either for collection or delivery, and even refusing to hand over parcels to managers collecting them from the local sorting office. This miniature drama encapsulated the growing tensions within society. Thatcher’s ideological mentor Sir Keith Joseph ludicrously accused Mrs Desai’s band of strikers of “red fascism”. For the first time in an industrial dispute, the Metropolitan Police’s special paramilitary unit the Special Patrol Group, notorious for its brutality and racism, was deployed. On one occasion they arrested 80 women pickets, kicking and punching them and dragging them by the hair into police vans. The total of 550 arrests made during the strike was at that time the highest such figure in any industrial dispute since the General Strike. In a microcosm of the later titanic struggles of the 1980s, however, at the crucial point the TUC and Labour leadership shrank back from their responsibility and an exemplary struggle eventually fizzled out. Rocked by crisis, the government soon switched course, turning to a policy of savage public spending cuts dictated by the International Monetary Fund. In 1976 it borrowed $3.9 billion from the IMF – at that time the largest loan it had ever granted. It turned out later that treasury officials had deliberately submitted to the chancellor Denis Healey grossly exaggerated overestimates of the true public sector borrowing requirement figures. Only half of the loan was ever actually drawn, and Labour dutifully repaid it in full by 1979, at the cost of imposing a so-called “social contract”, putting a 5% cap on public sector pay 22 rises at a time when the annual inflation rate was soaring towards a peak of 27%. Once again the Labour leaders had surrendered their precious reforms, pitifully small though they were, to the dictates of the bankers. The consequence was a virtual mass uprising by the organised working class in a rash of public sector strikes – the so-called “winter of discontent”, a virtual though unco-ordinated general strike drawing into its wake car workers, railway workers, road haulage workers, oil delivery workers, firemen, even gravediggers, refuse collectors, and hospital porters. In 1979 alone, nearly 30 million days were lost in strikes. The fact that the leadership of the Labour Party had once again betrayed the workers’ cause is certainly nothing new. Labour's first Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald in 1931 had broken his electoral mandate, split the party and formed a National Government -- in effect, presided over a Tory government -- in order to carry through savage cuts. After an initial wave of radical reforms, the 1945 Attlee government too had reverted quickly to counter-reforms. The same trajectory had been repeated by the Wilson and Callaghan governments in the 1960s and 1970s. And yet they had found themselves crushed between two irresistible forces: the ruling class which was toying with their careers like a puppeteer, and the trade unions which had hoisted them to power and which loomed ominously behind them. Coup Plots This time the ruling class was seriously contemplating more drastic contingency action. As we have seen, the Zinoviev letter in 1923 was by no means the last attempt by the security and intelligence services to destabilise a Labour government. Even in the 1960s, tentative contingency plans were considered in some circles to overthrow the very mild and moderate Wilson government. But this time the threat came far closer. In his memoir Spycatcher (1987), the former MI5 officer Peter Wright revealed that elements in his agency worked even more effectively to undermine the second Wilson government in the 1970s. The ex-KGB Soviet defector Anatoliy Golitsyn – now confirmed by Christopher Andrew, the MI5’s official historian, to have been an "unreliable conspiracy theorist" – had fed MI5 with the false information that Wilson was a KGB operative, and that the former Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell had been assassinated by the KGB to clear the way for Wilson to replace him as party leader. James Angleton too, the notoriously paranoid red-baiting chief of the CIA's Counterintelligence Division, had told him that Wilson was a Soviet agent. Later defectors provided MI5 with a list of Labour MPs and trade unionists that they branded Soviet agents. Fellow MI5 agents had told Wright: "Wilson's a bloody menace and it's about time the public knew the truth… This time we'll have him out". It is now officially confirmed that in 1975 contingency plans were under 23 active consideration within a section of the military and security services to overthrow the Wilson government and establish a dictatorship, with Lord Mountbatten once again serving as a royal figurehead at the head of an interim administration. Once again this cabal had drawn inspiration from a successful model abroad, this time the Pinochet coup in Chile – a favourable precedent spelt out in so many words as such in a notorious Times editorial in 1973. A number of former generals were actively recruiting private armies, including a former Deputy Director of MI6 and a number of retired and serving officers from the armed forces, to a sinister secret group, ironically called Unison. The shipping company Cunard was approached with a request to requisition the liner QE2 for use as a detention centre for the Cabinet. In 1974 the Army itself even staged surprise military manoeuvres at Heathrow Airport, without permission or even prior notice to the government. The Heathrow operation was later justified on the pretext of training for a possible IRA terrorist threat, but it is beyond doubt that it was intended as a thinly disguised warning to the Government. Wilson’s aide Marcia Williams was convinced that it was a practice run for a military takeover and at the very least a show of strength. In 2006, a BBC programme “The Plot Against Harold Wilson” confirmed that Wilson felt undermined by MI5 and was aware of both coup plots, in the late 1960s and mid-1970s respectively. The Coming Storm The power of Labour had yet again been dissipated by its leaders’ cowardice and treachery – in 1969 by the attempt to clamp legal curbs on trade-union activity, and in 1979 by imposing swingeing cuts at the dictate of the IMF. The resulting storm of national public-sector strikes in the so-called “winter of discontent” brought down the Callaghan government. Now a very different kind of Tory government was to hold office for the following eighteen years, first under Thatcher and, after her overthrow, Major, which all but crippled trade union power and undertook a wholesale demolition of the public sector. Successive governments since the Second World War having proved incapable of subduing the Labour Movement, Thatcher’s mandate was to surgically sever its arteries and cut off its lifeblood. In her decade of power, she single-handedly clawed back many of the gains won by previous generations, privatising the country’s nationalised assets (“selling off the family silver”, as former prime minister Macmillan put it) and demolishing the “heavy battalions” of industry. But first she had to overcome sustained resistance from the most combative sections of the Labour Movement. And in the process, the inner tensions within the Labour Party intensified almost to breaking point. The industrial conflict between millions of workers on the ground and a Labour leadership by now beholden to the dictates of the IMF now found a political expression within the Labour Party. In the leadership election, the leftish MP Michael Foot, a former dissident rebel, narrowly defeated Denis Healey, Callaghan’s favoured successor – a surprising result, given that the electoral 24 The policies and hostility to trade unions of the Labour government 1976-1979, (Labour leader James Callaghan on the left), led to the right wing Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher (right) franchise was still restricted to the Parliamentary Labour Party. This was the cue for four prominent Labour right-wingers, the so-called Gang of Four – Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Owen and Bill Rogers – to stalk out of the Labour Party and form the short-lived Social-Democratic Party. Although they succeeded in their primary mission – to cut into the Labour vote at the subsequent general election in 1983 – their clique soon fizzled out and became swallowed up by its allies the Liberals. After the shock defeat of that Labour government in 1979, there was a sharp swing to the left among the rank-and-file. A groundswell of revolt brought some long-overdue democratic reforms to the constitution: among them, an elementary procedure to establish a “trigger ballot” for determining whether sitting MPs should be automatically reselected as parliamentary candidates, and a modest widening of the franchise beyond the parliamentary party for future leadership elections. Under the new rules, an electoral college was established giving Party members 30% of the votes, with the balance divided between the top-heavy trade-union delegations (which rarely consulted their members) and the MPs. In 1981, Tony Benn, now the left’s most prominent and radical representative, stood against Healey for Deputy Leader. His campaign brought forth a flood of poisonous abuse from the media only matched by their later campaign against Jeremy Corbyn. For daring to stand, he was branded a rabble-rousing demagogue, a traitor and even, bizarrely, a would-be Stalinist dictator. (As he wryly remarked, the problem with Stalinism was precisely that they didn’t hold elections for the deputy leadership). At the time the normally robust Benn was suffering a rare health problem, and seriously suspected that his famous beloved flask of tea had been poisoned with arsenic – not the last of some mysterious illnesses to afflict troublesome characters. Benn nevertheless toured the country indefatigably, addressing enthusiastic crowds, and eventually lost the vote in the electoral college, still heavily tilted to the right, by just a 25 whisker: less than one per cent. Once the leftward tide had ebbed under the blows of Thatcher, privatisation and the Falklands War, came a right-wing revenge: the breakaway of the short-lived SDP, soon to be swallowed up by the Liberal Party; a witch-hunt which drove Militant and other left tendencies out of the LP; and the eventual takeover of the party by a completely alien force: New Labour under Blair and Brown. Thatcher’s mission was above all to curb the power of the trade unions. The key to achieving this was to start by inflicting a crushing defeat on the coal miners, and then to shut down the mines themselves, along with the other major manufacturing workplaces: car plants, steel works, shipyards, etc. The struggles of the 1970s had convinced the ruling class that the only hope of safeguarding capitalist rule was to shift Britain’s economic base from manufacturing to finance. Under Thatcher’s leadership, an overtly political strategy was put in place to put this into effect. A Civil War Without Guns At the time of the general strike there had been well over a million coal miners. By now there were still a quarter of a million left. (Today there are none.) As in 1926, and in stark contrast to the strikes of the 1970s, this time the government had meticulously and strategically prepared in advance for the coming conflict, stockpiling coal, passing anti-union laws and firming up the role of the police. The former Tory minister Nigel Lawson described the Tories’ preparation for the strike as "just like rearming to face the threat of Hitler in the 1930s". Once it felt ready, it lit the fuse by leaking its secret agenda to impose a massive programme of pit closures. 150,000 miners took up the challenge. The strike lasted more than a year, clocking up the total number of lost working days to over 26 million, making it the biggest, longest and most bitterly fought industrial battle since the 1926 general strike. Thatcher inflamed the conflict with a shrill denunciation of the miners as “the enemy within”, and later accused the Orgreave pickets of “mob rule”. Police spies and paid provocateurs were deployed, and the state benefits system abused to starve the miners back to work. 11,300 miners and their supporters were arrested during the dispute, 5,600 stood trial and nearly two hundred were jailed. It cost the government £6 billion to win the dispute, the equivalent of £26,000 for every striking miner. This was much more than a mere strike. One commentator called it “a civil war without guns”. The conflict dominated the whole of society, mobilising mass pickets and flying pickets, drawing in local support groups and solidarity campaigns. Miners’ wives and women workers organised in Women Against Pit Closures. Thousands of people collected food and money, joined picket lines and demonstrations, organised solidarity meetings, travelled to mining areas and hosted miners’ pickets in their homes. Over £60 million was raised for the miners, and warehouses full of food and toys were donated to the strikers and

26 their families. Among many violent encounters the worst was the “Battle of Orgreave” on 18th June 1984. Five thousand striking miners had gathered to blockade the Orgreave Coking Plant near Rotherham. They were met by thousands of lavishly bribed and brainwashed London police who had been bussed to the site. Mounted police charged the crowd with truncheons drawn. 51 pickets were injured, 71 were charged with riot and 24 with violent disorder. (The maximum punishment for riot was life imprisonment.) The police were later proved to have colluded in fabricating false evidence, and the BBC famously and shamefully broadcast switched footage to brand the miners as the aggressors. The barrister Michael Mansfield called the prosecution of Orgreave pickets "a mass frame-up", and the South Yorkshire Police Commissioner admitted that the police had been "used as an instrument of state". In 2015, the Independent Police Complaints Commission upheld complaints against the police of undue violence, perjury and a massive cover-up. South Yorkshire Police later had to pay almost half a million pounds in compensation to 39 falsely charged miners for assault, wrongful arrest, unlawful detention and malicious prosecution. As the miners’ leader Scargill commented: “The intimidation and the brutality that has been displayed are something reminiscent of a Latin American state.” Despite the odds, the miners came within a whisker of winning. They came closer to defeating Thatcher than they realised. The director of operations at the Central Electricity Generating Board director of operations later revealed that the situation at this time was verging on the "catastrophic", and a former

Symbol of the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign

27 electricity board chairman admitted that "our predictions showed on paper that Scargill would win certainly before Christmas”. And yet the miners lost. After a year of struggle and sacrifice, they marched back proudly to the collieries, brass bands playing, but soon the coal mines and a whole culture of mining village communities had been wiped off the face of the earth. Why did the miners lose? Not for want of courage and self-sacrifice, or the solidarity of rank-and-file trade unionists and Labour activists. Once again, defeat had been snatched from the jaws of victory by the flinching cowards and sneering traitors in the leadership of the TUC and the Labour Party. The Liverpool Challenge In another titanic struggle of the mid-eighties, Liverpool City Council was waging a five-year struggle against the Thatcher government, establishing a record of model benefits for the population. In 1983 Labour gained twelve extra seats in local elections, winning 40% of the poll and 22,000 extra votes and taking control from a Tory-Liberal coalition on a programme of city regeneration and a refusal to raise rents and rates. In 1984, the council launched an Urban Regeneration Strategy to build 5,000 houses, seven sports centres, six new nursery classes, new parks and schools and other works. The 1,200 redundancies planned by the previous Liberal administration to balance the books were cancelled, and a thousand new jobs were created. The office of Lord Mayor was abolished and the ceremonial horses sold. During this period Labour's vote rose from 54,000 in 1982, to 77,000 in 1983, to over 90,000 in 1984. In the 1983 general election, the firefighter and Militant supporter Terry Fields won Broadgreen, the only former Tory seat to be won by Labour. Liverpool’s stand inspired a rate-capping rebellion in seventeen other left Labour councils throughout Britain, though one by one most of them capitulated, eventually leaving just Liverpool and Lambeth to fight alone. The council threatened all-out strike action "in the event of Tory threats of bankruptcy and possible arrests". Even Lord Reg Underhill, no friend of the left and a former witch-hunting General Secretary of the Labour Party, was overwhelmed by Liverpool’s record. He wrote to The Guardian: “I went to see the effects of Liverpool's regeneration strategy... The five year plan is to get rid of outdated and sub-standard housing, the crumbling tenements and soulless systems-built tower flats... How much is being saved to the Treasury by this employment?” In their determination to serve the needs of the people rather than the bankers in the best traditions of Lansbury’s Poplar, Liverpool councillors had defied the government’s budget restraints and transformed the city. In response to the government’s threat to send in the troops, they called local strikes and demonstrations. A local one-day strike was held in which tens of thousands of workers participated. When the government used the courts to throw out of 28 A protestor in front of riot police during the Poll Tax Riots on March 31, 1990 Photo: David Fowler office Liverpool's popular and democratically elected councillors, these were promptly replaced at by-elections by a “second eleven” of substitute councillors; and they received solidarity compensation in local donations when vindictive surcharges of thousands of pounds were imposed on them. Thatcher’s Waterloo Liverpool’s stand was immediately followed by an even more widespread campaign: the struggle against the hated poll tax, a new regressive flat-rate tax deliberately placing the heaviest proportionate burden of payment for local government services on the poorest of the population. This was a mass movement of civil disobedience, the third great battle of the Thatcher years, and the one which finally put an end to her decade of rule. A campaign was launched, in the course of which dozens of activists were jailed. Fourteen million people refused payment and a quarter of a million people mobilised for one of the biggest demonstrations in British history. Within little more than a year, the campaign had achieved total victory, with the scrapping of the tax and the overthrow of Mrs Thatcher personally – the world's most enduring symbol of reaction. On 31st March 1990, a week before the implementation of the tax, a quarter of a million protesters participated in a huge demonstration against it. Although at the end fragments of the crowd (some of them possibly wilful provocateurs) engaged in a full-scale riot, the event marked the writing on the wall for the Thatcher regime. At the height of the struggle up to fourteen million people were defying the law and refusing to pay. The sheer volume of prosecutions overwhelmed the legal system, and enforcement proved impossible. In November 1990, South Yorkshire police (the same force responsible for the Orgreave massacre) were refusing to arrest non-payers because it would be 29 "physically impossible… because of the large number of defaulters". At the 1989 Labour Party conference one delegate from Glasgow tore up her poll tax payment book at the rostrum, declaring: "Without the Tolpuddle trade unionists and the suffragettes breaking the law, we wouldn't be here at this conference... I'm ripping up my poll tax book not as an individual but as part of a mass campaign of non-payment". When the MP for Liverpool Broadgreen, Terry Fields, refused to pay, he was jailed and served 58 days in Walton prison. He also faced expulsion from the Labour Party. Neil Kinnock condemned the poll tax campaign organisers as "toytown revolutionaries", and the party’s outstandingly successful youth wing the Labour Party Young Socialists was shut down for its role in supporting the campaign. Within weeks of the poll tax fiasco Thatcher was defenestrated, and the first act of Major’s government was to abolish it. Militant It was supporters of the weekly paper Militant who had formed the backbone of Liverpool’s stand, and founded the All Britain Anti-Poll Tax Federation, initially to the jeers of other left groups. For all its mistakes, it deserves the main credit for the victory of this campaign. Militant had established firm roots on the basis of thorough democratic discussion and genuine political education in every Labour Party ward organisation and Labour Party Young Socialists branch in which its supporters were active. Up to then it had commendably avoided the deluded sectarianism and ultraleftism of other left groups. As early as 1972, the Labour Party conference passed a resolution moved by a Militant delegate on behalf of his party branch calling for nationalisation of the top monopolies, and towards the end of the Callaghan government another of its supporters moved a resolution opposing wage restraint which was passed by a two-to-one majority. Thousands of young activists were recruited to the Labour Party Young Socialists. Three of its supporters were elected as Labour MPs on the popular propaganda slogan "a workers' MP on a workers' wage", a pledge they strictly observed once elected, brilliantly and irrefutably highlighting both their personal integrity and their political principle. Militant supporters also won control of the biggest civil service union the CPSA (later the PCS). These achievements worried the ruling class, and rightly so. Trotskyism had been established as a mainstream current within the Labour Movement. Militant supporters had been in the leadership of Britain's fifth city in a prolonged struggle against the Tory government, mobilised millions of people in one of the most successful civil-disobedience campaigns ever, and overthrown a Prime Minister. For good measure, within the space of a decade or so they had built an autonomous youth movement under the auspices of the Labour Party, built a base in several trade unions, organized a Europe-wide demonstration 30 against racism, and made connections with youth and labour activists internationally,. Their public representatives were no faceless zombies but personalities in their own right with deep roots in the movement. The establishment was alarmed when the future MP Pat Wall gave an honest warning that retreats by the Labour leadership now ran the risk of preparing the way for civil war later; when the anti-poll tax campaigner Tommy Sheridan won an election in Glasgow from a prison cell; when Terry Fields MP was jailed along with dozens more activists by poll-tax courts. They launched a police operation involving 280 officers against Derek Hatton, deputy leader of Liverpool Council, at the end of which he was cleared of all charges. Their alarm was expressed both by Kinnock, who publicly called its supporters "maggots", and by Mrs Thatcher, who shrilly denounced Militant in Parliament. Michael Foot had expressed his exasperation with Militant, calling it “a pestilential nuisance”, and under his successor as Labour leader, the renegade former left Kinnock, a classic witch-hunt was launched to drive its supporters out of the party. Hundreds were expelled in the first mass purge of the Labour Party in decades, and the High Court intervened to disqualify elected Militant councillors and overturn the election of Militant trade union leaders. The very name became a household word, figuring in popular parlance, in crosswords and game shows. It is tragic that Militant’s exemplary record was later frittered away in a sectarian spasm, with the tragic consequence that when a real mass left wing did arise in 2015 in the Corbyn surge, its dwindling supporters found themselves missing in action, having impressionistically dismissed the Labour Party as just another bourgeois party. They had forgotten a basic fact which the ruling class never did: that no matter how treacherous or cowardly the party leadership, it was the trade unions which stood behind it. Yes, the Labour leadership had betrayed the miners, the people of Liverpool, and the millions of council tax payers. Why then could the Labour party not be written off as mere alternative secondary agents of the ruling class? Because the Labour leadership and the Labour rank and file were very different. It was precisely Labour militants who had been the ones to take up the struggle against the Tories: Liverpool’s Labour councillors, the miners’ union which was affiliated to the Labour Party, and poll tax campaigners who were largely members of the Labour Party and its youth wing. New Labour “New Labour” was something entirely different. Tony Blair became the Labour Party’s new leader in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union amid a prevailing mood of bourgeois triumphalism, expressed in Francis Fukuyama’s somewhat premature celebration of “the end of history”. Against this background, Blair was able to successfully impose changes on the Labour Party that were so fundamental as to represent a qualitative transformation. Let us remind ourselves how far these took the party's nature, programme, constitution 31 The trajectory of the Labour Party towards embracing neo-liberalism and away from its own socialist history - a process from Kinnock (left) to Blair (right) and declared aims even from the time of Attlee and Wilson. First of these was the removal from the constitution of the party's commitment to socialism: Clause Four. For decades such a retreat had been resisted tooth and nail. The Labour rank and file had forced Gaitskell to abandon his attempt to take the same route in 1959, when he was defeated by a mass revolt and forced to abandon his attempt. The fact that in 1994 Clause Four was dropped with hardly a murmur of protest was a significant fact to be taken into serious consideration. The "curious behaviour of the dog in the night", as Sherlock Holmes might have put it -- the absence of any major rank-and-file protest against this act of political vivisection -- itself suggested a significant change in the character of the party. One recent disappointingly superficial history of the Labour Party glosses over this most fundamental definition of the class character and socialist commitment of the party as a negligible triviality. It is casually dismissed as “the social democratic Clause Four… Clause Four was largely a symbolic commitment… the left’s commitment to Clause Four entailed nothing practical…” This was “a symbolic change…” But symbols are sometimes crucial. What this act symbolised was nothing less than an explicit betrayal of Labour’s socialist traditions and aspirations. Under New Labour, all political constraints were lost. New Labour politicians showed brazen disregard for even the mildest of the old Fabian aspirations for social change. Certainly, the Labour leaders had always capitulated. But in the past they always had to be careful to justify themselves in terms of the need for "realism", "gradualism", "priorities", etc. They dared not question the overall goal of a social transformation. When Ramsay MacDonald swung towards direct frontal attacks on the working class, he had no option but to break with Labour 32 and rely on the capitalist parties in a National Government, to take a path that New Labour later trod with impunity from a relatively quiescent rank and file. The Labour Party traditionally had had a socialist constitution, a decisive trade union block vote, an elected national executive committee, a policy-making conference, an active working-class base, and a parliamentary party largely composed of former workers and trade-union officials. It was created by the trade unions, stood for a socialist transformation of society, and actually carried through some nationalisations of basic industries, the foundation of a national health service, and comprehensive education. It took years of struggle by the working class to achieve them, and their implementation by Labour Governments had been rightly celebrated as a historic victory. The Tories bitterly opposed every one of these measures, and did all they could to reverse them at the earliest opportunity. For all its corruption and bureaucratisation, Labour was manifestly a party based on the working class, and, no matter how hypocritically, its leaders had to justify each and every twist and turn with reference to the overall cause of labour and social reform. New Labour, in contrast, expunged the Labour Party's socialist aspirations, undermined the link with the trade unions, destroyed any semblance of party democracy, bad-mouthed its Labour heritage, and carried through ultra- Thatcherite policies that even the Iron Lady herself had shrunk from. The New Labour MPs were not just a new incarnation of the old-style reformists of yesteryear – tainted individuals perhaps, cowardly, treacherous, bribed or intimidated, but with roots still firmly implanted in the labour movement. An openly pro-capitalist grouping had now assumed the leadership of the Labour Party. Its leaders explicitly proclaimed themselves champions of big business. One of them, Mandelson, openly boasted: “I am supremely relaxed about people getting filthy rich, so long as they pay their taxes”. They shrugged off Labour’s socialist and trade-union traditions and in so many words proclaimed a new identity. They even adopted a new name, to differentiate themselves from Labour's historic traditions. On the steps of 10 Downing Street following his election triumph in 1997, Tony Blair spelt it out: “I know well what this country has voted for today. It is a mandate for New Labour, and I say to the people of this country: we ran for office as New Labour, we will govern as New Labour. This is not a mandate for dogma or for doctrine, or for a return to the past.” For New Labour’s new-found capitalist sponsors, it was a calculated strategy to push further to a conclusion the programme of Thatcherism once Thatcher had been defenestrated and Major discredited; to carry through to a conclusion the Thatcherite counter-revolution once the Tories were losing their own grip on power. Once Thatcherism was no longer politically viable, it had needed Blairism to impose the same neoliberal policies under a thin veneer of reformism and a new disguised brand name. Tony Blair has frankly described the historic turning-point when organised 33 labour first tore itself loose from the shackles of liberalism – the very birth of the Labour Party – as “a tragic split”. His mission of “New Labour” was to wrap the living body of labour back within a capitalist straitjacket. Even the old right wing were uneasy; they could see at least a crucial difference in timing. As Neil Kinnock put it, in a comment that implicitly illuminates the real distinction between Old and New Labour more clearly perhaps than he might have wished: “He’s sold out even before he’s got there”. Counter-Reforms The Blair government did of course bring in some welcome reforms: it introduced a minimum wage, though at a very low rate; it granted devolution to Scotland and Wales; it concluded a peace deal in Northern Ireland. In some respects, though, it carried further than even Thatcher had dared to go some counter-reforms: privatisation of air traffic control and of whole swathes of the NHS, a return to de facto selection and even disguised privatisation in state education, the introduction of tuition fees for higher education, an astronomical rise in the prison population, etc. At the same time it imposed three fundamentally reactionary policies: tuition fees for students, the private finance initiative, and the invasion of Iraq. The effect of imposing tuition fees on students was to ensure that future provision of the doctors, scientists and engineers required by society was to be secured free of cost, at their own personal expense, landing them with lifetime debts. The lame justification offered – that they could look forward to higher incomes – deliberately left out of account their future higher income tax rates. The so-called private finance initiative was accurately described by no less an authority than the chairman of the Royal Bank of Scotland as “a fraud on the people”. A classic case of New Labour’s so-called “Third Way”, this scheme claimed to square the circle by delivering new schools, hospitals, roads, railways and prisons without landing the state in debt. In practice, the terms of these lucrative deals gave corrupt monopolies a free licence to print money. The state became locked into compulsory leasing deals with private conglomerates stretching over decades, at a total aggregate cost up to ten times their actual value. Another trick was the practice of subcontracted “facilities maintenance”. Nominated contractors had a monopoly on every maintenance job, including changing plug sockets or light bulbs. As a result, one hospital for instance was charged £52,000 for a job which would normally have cost £750. Another had to pay £5,500 for a new sink. Having royally ripped off the state, the hyper- conglomerates Carillion and Capita both collapsed, each having built huge empires by providing outsourced services to public authorities. The total debt to the taxpayer came to over £300 billion for infrastructure projects with an actual value of £54.7 billion – four times the size of the state’s total budget deficit. The National Audit Office has calculated that PFI projects will have cost the taxpayer a further £199 billion by the 2040s.

34 As for the Iraq war, quite apart from the million deaths in Iraq, the destruction of an entire country, the lasting destabilisation of the region and the whole world, the impetus given to Islamic terrorist fundamentalism, and the unquantifiable blow to Labour’s political authority resulting from a string of lies and fake dossiers, the Iraq war cost Britain £8.4 billion and 179 lives. The most lasting damage was the annihilation of Labour’s formerly rock- solid stronghold in Scotland. In 1997 Labour had scored 45.6% of the vote in Scotland and got 56 MPs elected. Thirteen years of disappointment with New Labour then fostered an overwhelming appetite for Scottish independence. When the referendum was held in 2014, almost 45% voted to leave the UK, and at the following general election in 2015, the SNP’s vote shot up from around 20% to 50%, while Labour’s slumped to 24.3%, saving just one solitary seat. Even Labour’s left turn under Corbyn proved powerless to reverse this decline. After a small bump in 2017 to 27.1% and seven seats, Labour’s vote sank again to an abysmal 18.6% in 2019, once again winning one seat. New Labour had won a landslide in 1997 through a combination of popular disgust with eighteen years of Tory rule, the drying up of funding by big business to the Tory party, and the sudden rush of support from the Murdoch press. For a decade, big business had explicitly patronised New Labour as their preferred instrument of government. Rupert Murdoch – who had boasted in 1992 that “it was the Sun wot won it!” for the Tories – openly switched his allegiance to Blair for that very purpose. Top companies showered donations on New Labour. Contrast the treatment of the Attlee, Wilson and Callaghan governments – the media abuse and shadowy plots – with the deference shown to Blair and the contempt heaped on the Tories under the successive failed leaderships of Hague, Duncan Smith and Howard. What finally finished Blairism off was the financial crash of 2007-8. The ruling class had no further use for the smoke-and-mirrors “third way” policies of New Labour. With perfect grace and timing, Blair had withdrawn from the scene, and a hapless Gordon Brown was left to cope with the mess. That was when the establishment decided to change track, undermining Brown and rehabilitating the Tories under Cameron. Now that New Labour had outlived its usefulness, the capitalists contemptuously cast them aside and returned to their traditional 35 party of government. After a brief and inglorious interval under Brown, it was time for a reinvigorated Tory government. The consequence of policies some of which were verging on the outright criminal, was to squander the wave of hope and goodwill shown in 1997. Tens of thousands of members had left the party during the New Labour years, and in successive general elections under its rule Labour lost in total nearly five million votes – almost one-third of its previous support. New Labour was the product of a skilful operation by hostile forces to carry onward the Thatcherite counter-revolution wrapped in new packaging, once the Tories had become too discredited to do it themselves under their own banner. It served a very specific historical purpose. It was only after the financial crisis in 2008 that New Labour was deemed to have outlived its usefulness; once having served its purpose in government, it was unceremoniously ditched, and the reins of power firmly grasped by Britain’s traditional masters. Blair and Brown owed no allegiance to the Labour Movement and, in contrast to every previous Labour government and until not long before the end of their reign, their policies were directly dictated to and approved by the ruling class, just as those of every Tory government had been. That is what was “new” about New Labour. And yet even they were dependent on the membership dues of their members, the affiliation fees of the trade unions, and the loyal canvassing teams of their local constituency parties. Why Corbyn Won It was only after the ignominious eclipse of New Labour that the Party began a gradual, halting, contradictory inching back towards some restoration of its mauled traditions. And, as often happens, it was due to the arrogance of the old guard that this process inadvertently led so quickly to the election of a leader from the left. Up to 1981, the appointment of the leader had been determined by a self- perpetuating formula whereby he (always a “he”) was elected solely by the MPs, and was therefore unaccountable to the rank-and-file membership. In deference to the new mood for accountability after Labour’s defeat in 1979 and a step towards some measure of democratic control, this system had been replaced by an unwieldy electoral college consisting of the parliamentary party, the trade unions and the party members. When the ineffectual Ed Miliband won the leadership in 2010 rather than his smoother Blairite brother, the right wing correctly ascribed that result to pressure from the trade union leaders for a more pliable alternative. Deluding themselves that they still enjoyed mass support, they committed two major blunders. Blinded by their delusions of mass popularity, and insensitive to the subterranean shift in opinion especially among the youth, they threw open the franchise to any self-declared “supporters” willing to pay £3, imagining that by bypassing the trade-union block vote and throwing open the franchise to all and 36 The Labour Party leadership passed from Ed Miliband (left) to Jeremy Corbyn (right) sundry, they could secure victory for their own preferred candidate. Actually it was a questionable exercise of "democracy" to allow the party leadership to be determined by selling cheap votes to all and sundry, irrespective of their proven commitment to the party. However, such was popular outrage at New Labour's record, and anger at the election by default the previous year of yet another even more right-wing Tory government, that hundreds of thousands of people registered as supporters, exercised their voting rights as affiliated trade unionists, or joined the Party outright. The right wing then compounded their mistake by grudgingly lending Jeremy Corbyn enough MPs' nominations to cross the threshold and enable him to stand as a candidate, hoping thereby to demonstratively humiliate the left. This too backfired on them spectacularly. Jeremy Corbyn duly won a decisive majority in all three sectors, with 60% of the vote and a popular mandate from 250,000 people. The introduction of the one-member-one-vote principle for electing the party leader, and the innovation of selling additional voting rights to non-members (supporters) on payment of a token fee, had been intended as a device to swamp the left: in its lingering delusion of New Labour popularity, it had been hoping to swamp what it considered the noisy handful of troublemakers in the constituency parties with a flood of right-thinking citizens more susceptible to the propaganda of the mass media. They were aghast at the outcome, and tried their damnedest to reverse it: by staging a parliamentary no-confidence vote, raising the stake for “supporters” to £25, opening the floodgates to a tsunami of vindictive suspensions… all in vain. Under a left leader, Labour became the biggest political party in Europe, with over half a million members. It came as a nasty shock to them that after years of Tory/LibDem austerity, there was now a radical mood for change. That is the explanation for Corbyn’s landslide victory, not just in 2015 but once again with an increased majority in 2016. Corbyn’s election marked the beginning of a renewal of the party. Just as in 37 Europe there were many examples of new and mostly youthful left parties springing up – SYRIZA in Greece, PODEMOS in Spain, France Insoumise in France, Die Linke in Germany, etc. – so too in Britain there was an influx of new and mostly younger members who reinforced the ranks of veteran Labour activists and trade unionists to create a replenished and reinvigorated party, already numbering half a million members. Hundreds of thousands of people who flocked to join the Labour Party felt legitimised by the election and then the re-election of Jeremy Corbyn on a mainstream Labour programme. Without a thoroughgoing renovation, however, all the efforts to bring a Labour government to power would in any case have been doomed. Electing a socialist as leader is only the first step. It needs socialist MPs and a socialist full-time apparatus. If Labour had won the election in 2017 or 2019, at the first signal from the ruling class the right wing could always have staged a mass defection and deprived a Corbyn government of its majority. The revelations in the leaked document expose beyond doubt the malevolent sabotage of the Blairite officialdom. But supposing a Corbyn government had been elected even in spite of their efforts? How long would it have been before it would have had the rug pulled from under its feet? Labour came close to winning the 2017 election. Whether we would have avoided a Johnson Tory government by 2019 even then is very much open to question. Above all: without mandatory reselection – the elementary democratic right of party members to be represented at elections by a candidate of their choice, without which parliamentary democracy is a mere meaningless charade – all our work on the doorsteps to elect a Labour government will have been futile. Those rejected MPs who protest that they are personally accountable to their constituents and not to the party activists who work the doorsteps are welcome to put that to the test: to stand as independents against a party candidate, and see how far they get. The token acknowledgement of the right of local, parties to begin the process of trigger ballots, and the trickle of right-wing defections under Corbyn, could have given a welcome impetus to the process by which the working class was beginning to reclaim the Labour Party. The refusal of unions like UNITE, and of Corbyn and McDonnell themselves, to endorse automatic mandatory reselection dealt a body blow to the entire process. Two Failed Coups In 2016 Britain was suddenly plunged into turmoil, becoming, for the moment, the most unstable country in Europe. Within a few weeks, it witnessed the murder of a Labour MP by a Nazi assassin, the shock outcome of the EU referendum, an upsurge of xenophobia and bigotry, the sudden resignation of a prime minister, and the reaffirmation by an even stronger majority of a socialist Labour leader. In a desperate rearguard action, by a four-to-one majority, 172 MPs – largely the New Labour residue – had flaunted their contempt for the rank and file by passing a vote of no confidence in Corbyn, despite his overwhelming support 38 among the membership, thus precipitating an immediate showdown. For many of them, it was not, as they pretended, the risk of defeat in a coming general election that the MPs were afraid of; it was the prospect of victory under a socialist leadership. Jeremy Corbyn had received the biggest mandate of any political leader in British history. Hundreds of thousands of people were inspired to join the Labour Party to support him. Labour had begun a dramatic recovery from years of decline under Blair, Brown and Miliband. Having failed in a brazen plot to keep Corbyn off the ballot paper this time – a provocation that risked an immediate split – in an act of pure spite they disenfranchised over 100,000 Labour members at a stroke by imposing an arbitrary cut-off membership date, and raised the affiliation fee for new supporters from £3 to £25, while giving them a deadline of just two days to register. And yet all these tricks blew up in their faces. The outcome of the right wing’s failed coup? Corbyn won with an increased majority of over 300,000 votes. When the new prime minister Theresa May glimpsed a chance to consolidate her flimsy parliamentary majority by calling a snap election in 2017 (the previous election in 2015 had been the first for 23 years in which the Tories had won a majority)… she too got an unexpected shock. She lost her majority and her lame duck government limped along unable to win a single major vote in parliament. Labour had regained another 3.5 million votes. Excluding Scotland, which had been lost to Labour by decades of bureaucratic corruption, it was Labour’s best ever result – better than 1945, better even than 1997. If Labour had managed just 2,227 more votes in a few key marginal constituencies, it would have been in a position to form a government. As was to be revealed later, it was the treachery and sabotage of the official party bureaucracy that ensured that it was not.

Corbyn speaking at an anti Trident rally. Photo: Garry Knight 39 The ruling class too was reeling from the shock. Jeremy Corbyn had been elected Labour leader twice, overwhelmingly, on the votes of hundreds of thousands, and now he had come within a whisker of becoming prime minister. This was the signal for an unremitting bombardment of sneers, smears and poison from the establishment. At one point during a Prime Minister’s Question Time, Theresa May leaned over the despatch box and hissed at Corbyn: “You will never be Prime Minister. We won’t let you.” And this is far from the whole story. Just as in the 1970s, only with far greater urgency, sinister contingency preparations were being made behind the scenes for all eventualities. This time it was not a mere strike of capital as in the 1960s, or even the fantasy war games of the 1970s. A stark and unmistakable threat was posed. The odious Ian Duncan Smith announced that “Corbyn’s sole purpose in life is to do damage to the country”, a general openly threatened mutiny against a Corbyn government, and paratroopers were videoed using a photo of Corbyn for target practice. One Labour MP had already been murdered by a Nazi assassin, and another escaped the same fate only in the nick of time. This was not a game. The lesson of the Corbyn years is that we must never lose sight of the traps and threats and pitfalls that would be placed in the path of an elected socialist government. It would be undermined from the very beginning by economic sabotage, fabricated scandals, royal diversions, racist hysteria, foreign wars, assassinations and terrorist outrages both by far-right and Islamist fascists, each playing into the others' hands, committed as the security services look the other way or even as fully-fledged false flag operations. The British state has fiendish weapons at its disposal and has perfected a range of underhand practices over centuries of colonial rule. Most of the world's current trouble spots are the direct legacy of its time-honoured tactic of divide and rule – in Ireland, the Middle East, Cyprus, the Indian sub-continent, etc. Financial pressure would be harnessed to undermine a left Labour government. Whether economic destabilisation alone would be enough depends not on national characteristics, as was implied in Chris Mullins’ novel A Very British Coup, but on the degree of popular resistance. Economic sabotage alone was not enough to depose Allende, and it remains to be seen whether or not it would be enough to remove a left government in Britain. The fact is that military threats – overt or covert – have periodically been deployed in British history, from the Curragh mutiny to forestall home rule in Ireland in 1914, to threatening manoeuvres and tentative coup plots under even mildly reformist Labour governments in the 1960s and 1970s, to say nothing of the use of torture, blackmail and assassination in Northern Ireland and outright military terror in the colonies. Rather than dismiss these incidents as fanciful "conspiracy theory", let's remember that such devices are the normal stock in trade of any state's intelligence and security forces. That is the significance of the tentative conspiracy in 1966 to stage a royalist 40 coup under Earl Mountbatten, and, more seriously, in 1976 the mushrooming of private armies, the military manoeuvres staged at Heathrow airport, and the open media speculation about the viability of a full-scale military coup along the lines of Pinochet's recent operation in Chile. Dirty Tricks As a start, a sustained campaign of dirty tricks was launched. In the worst traditions of the Zinoviev letter and the abuse of Foot and Benn, but this time on a deafening and hysterical scale, Corbyn was now branded not as before just a harmless screwball pacifist vegetarian beardy digging his allotment, but now, somehow simultaneously, as a Stalinist spy, a terrorist sympathizer, and most bizarrely of all, an anti-Semitic racist. Not only had Corbyn all his life been the most prominent and outspoken of anti- racists, but it was an especially audacious slander to have come from the Tories and their press mouthpieces. It was their hero Churchill who had repeatedly peddled vile anti-semitic propaganda. Here, for instance, was his explanation for the Russian revolution: “The creation of Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution by these atheistic Jews… The majority of the leading figures are Jews… The principal inspiration and driving power comes from Jewish leaders … The same evil prominence was obtained by Jews in Hungary and Germany… The worst of the Jewish revolutionaries… This movement among the Jews is not new… Karl Marx, Trotsky, Bela Kun, Rosa Luxembourg and Emma Goldman … this worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation…” It was the Daily Express which in the 1930s carried the infamous headline “JEWS DECLARE WAR ON GERMANY”, and the Daily Mail which screamed “HURRAH FOR THE BLACKSHIRTS!”. More recently, it was the Mail which made a thinly veiled anti-Semitic attack on Ed Miliband, calling his father “the

Groups hostile to the Labour Party join the Labour right wing in attacking Corbyn 41 man who hated Britain… a refugee… a Marxist…” (no one could mistake the innuendo), and the Sun which published an unflattering picture of Ed Miliband eating a bacon sandwich – another covert wink-and-nudge anti-Semitic jibe. Hundreds of Labour Party members were suspended or expelled on spurious grounds of anti-semitism, mostly merely for protesting against the actions of the Israeli government, including its continuing killing of hundreds and wounding of thousands of Palestinian demonstrators in Gaza across the barbed wire border fence. Some, including the MP Chris Williamson, who had especially infuriated the Labour establishment for his long-running campaign for mandatory reselection of parliamentary candidates, were summarily expelled simply for their defence of other victims of the purge. The Labour Party was plunged into a Kafkaesque nightmare world. It must have been the only political party in history where renowned figures were generously rewarded for heaping abuse on it, lifelong members were summarily expelled for defending it, black and Jewish activists were branded racist. Which was more likely to “bring the Labour Party into disrepute”? Accusing it of racism, or refuting that accusation? And yet it was the latter who were thrown out, including popular MPs and former mayors. In the past, disloyalty to their leader had been grounds for expulsion. In this topsy-turvy world, on the contrary: people were expelled for showing loyalty to their elected leader. Disaster The December 2019 election result was a disaster. It not only cleared the way for more brutal Tory attacks on our living standards and democratic rights, it also put at risk the reclamation of the Labour Party as the party of the working class. There shouldn't have been any question about the result. Labour was offering the most radical manifesto since 1945: a green industrial revolution; a council house-building programme; an end to student tuition charges; renationalisation of electricity, gas, water, railways and the post office; a universal right to justice; a £10 minimum wage; free broadband; free medical prescriptions; free lifelong education; free lifelong social care; the prospect of a four-day working week... and so much more. And what were the Tories offering? Brexit, Brexit, and again Brexit; a continuation of zero-hours contracts, hunger and homelessness; and as prime minister, a vain, pompous, lazy, incompetent, arrogant, racist buffoon and puppet of the billionaires. There is a scene in one of Lewis Carroll’s stories where the masses are rioting in the streets demanding: “Less Bread! More Taxes!”. In Victorian England, that was a piece of playful nonsense fantasy, along with Humpty Dumpty or the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. In 21st century Britain, the population had in real life elected a grotesque pantomime prime minister who could easily have walked straight out of Alice In Wonderland, promising that very same programme. In most respects, opinion polls showed that Labour’s 2019 manifesto policies were popular. But the Tories had played their wild card: they had whipped up a 42 Support for Corbyn remained strong during 2019 General Election jingoistic frenzy to exploit Labour’s divisions over Brexit. Under pressure from the right, Labour had substituted the more balanced position it had taken at the 2017 election with a commitment to a new referendum, which was seen as covert support for Remain. On top of the four-year barrage of poisonous filth hurled at Labour’s leader, this was enough to ensure its defeat. Just as the media lied shamelessly throughout the campaign, so too from the moment they announced the exit poll figures at 10 pm on polling day they willfully misrepresented the result with their constant mantra that this was “Labour’s worst performance since 1935”. They based this comparison solely on the number of MPs elected. (Even on that measure this was grossly misleading: Labour had won 202 seats compared to 154 in 1935.) But how could they reconcile using this criterion with their constant dismissal in any other context of the “first-past-the-post” electoral system as being unrepresentative of public opinion? (While there are flaws in any voting system, what is intrinsically undemocratic about the idea that each area should be represented by the candidate who wins the most votes?) Surely the most obvious measure of a party’s popularity is how many votes it gets. And the truth is that in this election, under Corbyn’s leadership, Labour won over ten million votes – more than under Miliband in 2015, Brown in 2010… or even Blair in 2005, when he won! Labour also gained a higher percentage than in 2010 or 2015. Only in 2017 – also under Corbyn’s leadership – did Labour do better. And at this election too, Labour still commanded a majority in most of the big cities, among those of working age, and overwhelmingly among the youth. Neither was Labour’s defeat an isolated phenomenon. In comparison with the downhill slide of all the traditional workers’ parties throughout Europe – the Swedish Social-Democrats at 22%, the German SPD at 20%, the French Socialist Party at 6%, the Italian Communist Party annihilated – under its left leadership Labour did well to retain the loyalty 43 of 32% of the electorate. Labour’s collapse in some of its historic strongholds should not have come as a shock. Since the closure of the coal mines, shipyards and steelworks, many of Britain’s former industrial fortresses had been reduced to ghost towns. Only ten years earlier, 41 out of 59 seats in Scotland were still held by Labour; now, three elections later, it clings on to just one. It was a revolt against a corrupt provincial bureaucracy that wiped out Labour in Scotland. So likewise in Northern England – plagued by decades of decay and neglect, the shutdown of local industry, the cesspools of council corruption, scandals of child abuse and meddling racist agitators – an ageing population had been reduced to rage and despair. But the Scots had a national flag behind which to rally against London; lacking the status of a nationality but no less determined to defy a remote and callous establishment, these derelict towns voted to break from Brussels. A Step Backwards The election of Sir Keir Starmer as Labour’s new leader has come as a bitter blow to many thousands of left activists. But we have to question whether this result really marks a fundamental shift of opinion to the right. In addition to the 135,218 who had voted for Rebecca Long-Bailey, many of those who voted for Starmer may well have done so only reluctantly. Reeling from the shock of the December general election result, they could well have thought it more prudent to choose what they considered Starmer’s more plausible prime ministerial profile, while taking on trust his solemn campaign promise to maintain Corbyn’s “radical socialist tradition”. Starmer’s new right-tilted shadow cabinet and his emollient performance at the dispatch box soon changed their minds. Many party members left the party in despair; others are wondering how best to maintain Corbyn’s legacy and resist a slide back to Blairism. Their disappointment will only have been deepened by Starmer’s limp performance at its first test, during the pandemic crisis. Given their ten-year record of starving the NHS of resources; their callous initial policy of “herd immunity”; their failure to secure the necessary protective equipment, testing capacity and ventilators; their inconsistent instructions regarding the lockdown; and Britain’s appallingly high death toll, the highest in the world proportionately to population … all of this should have made the Tories a fairly easy target. Against Keir Starmer replaces Jeremy Corbyn as a background of tens of thousands of labour leader 44 avoidable deaths, Starmer’s mealy-mouthed remark that Johnson’s policy “left some questions unanswered” was hardly likely to shake them. Electing and reconfirming a left leader, and recruiting a quarter of a million new activists, were huge steps forward. The election of Starmer is a step backwards. The New Labour MPs may now be gloating over their electoral coup, but they remain the political remnants of a bygone age. Hundreds of thousands joined the Labour Party in recent years to support Corbyn and the left. The goal remains: to reclaim Labour as a socialist party. That was always going to be a long hard campaign. The main task always lay ahead: to cleanse out the cobwebs in the local councils, the parliamentary party, the party machine. The leadership ballot showed that there are still tens of thousands of socialist campaigners who remain loyal to the Corbyn political tradition. That’s an increase of easily twenty or thirty times over since the New Labour years. They will rally behind the belated commitment of the defeated left candidates Rebecca Long-Bailey and Richard Burgon to the democratic right of the membership to determine party policy and to choose their own candidates at elections – a crucial acid test. Nevertheless, having taken two steps forward, Labour has now taken one step back. But if the right wing imagine that a renewed witch-hunt will restore the stability and “moderation” of the New Labour days, they are in for a shock. Any attempt to wind the clock back to those years will only blow the Labour Party apart. They are lucky that the lockdown has temporarily frozen Labour Party meetings and kept Labour activists off the streets; otherwise they would already have found themselves bombarded with protest resolutions and lobbies of the NEC. But a storm is brewing. The right wing are deluded if they imagine that they can return to the policies of Blairism, “triangulation”, a “third way”. The more they try, the weaker will be their base, and the stronger the impetus towards a left alternative. If that delusion was already burst by the 2008 crash, then how much more so as we head into the social, economic and environmental nightmare of the catastrophic slump that lies ahead – the deepest since the 1930s Depression, and by some estimates since the Great Frost of 1709? Already before the pandemic, it was clear that there was no room left for a “middle way”. Look at the instant collapse into multiple fragments of the clique who left the Labour Party around Chukka Umunna, not so long ago tipped as a future contender for the leadership; where are they now? And why else did Tom Watson, until December Labour’s deputy leader, suddenly throw in the towel on the eve of the election? What happened, come to that, to the brief LibDem leader Jo Swinson, who started the election campaign one day as “our next prime minister” and finished it not even an MP a couple of weeks later? When in 1931 a long line of Labour MPs anxious to secure their careers queued up for jobs in the National Government under Ramsay MacDonald, his advice to them was to stay: “Your time will come” – a cynical comment which was echoed 45 recently and all too revealingly by Tom Watson, referring to the breakaway by Chukka Umunna & Co.: “I regret your decision to leave; it’s premature.” For the right wing’s key figurehead, these defectors were guilty not of treachery, but of nothing worse than jumping the gun too early. A timely and deadly warning! There are still of course many honest and conscientious Labour MPs. But there are also still far too many who have no links or allegiance to the labour movement, let alone any aspirations to a new society. Some are plain careerists who at a certain time found it opportune to jump on the New Labour bandwagon – relics of the influx of an alien force of lobbyists and "special advisers" with no stake in the workers’ cause. One trade union leader has called them a "virus". For them, this is not a political debate. They are fighting for their careers, their livelihoods, their privileges. The mass of trade-union rank-and- file Labour activists and the parasitic cabal who make up a large section of the parliamentary party cannot preserve for long their uneasy cohabitation. The recent leak of the secret report into the Labour officialdom has exposed the rot of treachery at the heart of the party machine for all to see. In case this might seem overblown language, then recent revelations of the antics of the officials at Labour headquarters – people paid by our hard-earned subscriptions – proves it beyond doubt. These paid officials repeatedly abused the party’s leader, MPs, and rank and file. They discussed “hanging and burning” Jeremy Corbyn and calling him a “lying little toerag”. Senior staff expressed a hope that one left Labour member would “die in a fire”. They said that “any Labour MP who nominated Corbyn ‘to widen the debate’ deserves to be taken out and shot”, and even that a fellow staff member who “whooped” during Corbyn’s speech “should be shot”. They were “working to rule” when Corbyn was elected and “coming into the office and doing nothing for a few months”. During the 2017 general election, they joked about “hardly working”, and created a chat room so they could pretend to work while actually speaking to each other (“tap-tap-tapping away will make us look very busy”). During the 2015 leadership election they described their work as a “Trot hunt”. Diane Abbott, always a favourite victim of racism and sexism, was picked on for especially vile and disgusting abuse. This is not the normal banter or everyday friction commonplace in any working environment; it’s the language and practice of a stinking cesspit. The report has exposed for all to see the utter squalor of the party machine. These creatures and those whose interests they serve have no place in the Labour Party. There is a cancerous growth in the vital organs of the Labour Party, and it needs to be cut out. The infestation of the upper layers of the Labour Party machine is nothing new. Such elements constituted a parasitic excrescence on the body of Labour. The Labour Party was always weighed down by a conservative bureaucracy. But let us repeat: the idea that Labour was never a socialist party, it just always “had Socialists in it”, is historically wrong. As we have shown, at its base Labour was a socialist party for most of its lifetime, stretching back decades: a workers' 46 Left activists still make up the base of the Labour Party party, a party of labour. The foundation of "New Labour" was a deformation, a distorted attempt to proclaim a new party quite distinct from the mainstream orthodox Labour tradition. The capture of the leadership grafted an incubus on to its back, denying its fundamental aims and its traditional base. But as throughout its entire history, it drew its lifeblood from the living body of the trade unions. Reclaim Labour Left activists are currently faced with an impossible choice: to leave the Labour Party or to stay and fight. On their own, neither alternative offers a very attractive way forward. Just walking out and going home in dribs and drabs is no answer: it means in effect giving up the cause. We are the members who campaigned and canvassed day in and day out and paid the wages of those who were sitting at party headquarters sabotaging Labour’s election campaigns. Let’s not give them the satisfaction of voluntarily leaving the field to them. That would mean amputating the party’s healthy limbs. There is a huge thirst today throughout society for socialist policies. This was proved beyond doubt by the overnight surge to join the Labour Party in support of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, pushing the membership up to 580,000 and making it the biggest political party in Europe. And yet the total aggregate membership of all the seventeen or so miniscule left parties outside the Labour Party put together amounts by comparison to a drop in the ocean. What is needed is not yet still more fragmentation, but the leverage to prise apart the mass membership of Labour in the constituencies and affiliated trade unions from the suffocating grip of the parliamentary leadership. Rather than walking out in ones and twos in despair, which would shatter everything that was achieved in recent years, it’s necessary to group together 47 and make a stand. Hundreds of thousands of people were inspired to join when Jeremy Corbyn was elected, and it would be a tragedy if they were to drift off into isolation, inactivity or little fragments. Especially since the New Labour years, the Labour Party consists essentially of two mutually hostile parties, and there is no room for equivocation. It was the trade unions which created the Labour Party and have sustained it for more than a century. It is up to them to make a decisive break from the policies of accommodation and reconciliation with capitalism, and place themselves firmly on the side of the millions of workers suffering squeezed wages and zero-hours contracts, the unemployed, the homeless, the dispossessed welfare claimants relying on food banks, the students weighed down with debt. In the disaster which looms ahead, there will be no room for compromise. The tensions within the Labour Party can no longer be reconciled. Just before the 2015 general election, Len McCluskey, General Secretary of Britain’s biggest trade union Unite, threatened in so many words to disaffiliate Unite from Labour and launch a new workers’ party if Labour lost. He warned that Unite’s affiliation to Labour could be “reconsidered” unless it showed it was the “voice of ordinary working people... the voice of organised labour... It is up to them. If they don’t, if they kind of inject more disillusionment in the party, then the pressure will grow from our members to rethink.” This should be no idle threat. Both the rail union RMT and the Fire Brigades Union disaffiliated from the Labour Party in 2004. The FBU rejoined again only following Corbyn’s election, and the RMT remains unaffiliated. The workers have no choice but to fight back; they need a political voice. If Labour MPs refuse to represent them, then the trade unions will have to find another route, just as they did more than a century ago. And yet if the alternative means spending another few years sitting in party meetings trying to get another Corbyn elected, only to see him or her undermined and elbowed out again, that is hardly an appealing alternative. That is like the endless torture of Sisyphus: to be forced to continually push a boulder up the side of a mountain, only to see it eternally roll back down again every time it reaches near the top. To appeal to members not to walk out in despair does not mean acceptance of the status quo. It is a recognition that the Labour Party is not the personal property of the MPs and the hired officialdom. It belongs to those generations of trade unionists who worked tirelessly to “keep the red flag flying here”. Our loyalty to the right is equivalent to theirs towards Corbyn – no more, no less. We are not willing to surrender the party to the “flinching cowards and sneering traitors” already warned against in the party anthem. The time will come for a coherent and orderly parting of the ways. Meanwhile, individual gestures of despair are no use. It is not a question of trudging along every month to a branch or General 48 Committee meeting voting for resolutions that will end up in a waste-paper basket anyway. That matters least of all. Whatever their formal affiliation, whether party members or not, it is up to socialist activists to engage in every conceivable manifestation of political agitation or class struggle: leafleting, standing on picket lines, speaking at street corners, going on demonstrations, contributing to online debates, writing, discussing… No one will be asking to check your membership cards. In the coming upsurge, everyone will be engaging in politics and searching for radical ideas and solutions. Many Labour parties are moribund. But until the lockdown, many were still hubs of political activity, particularly those with recently recruited members who were drawn into political life by the hopes aroused in the Corbyn era, and are now enraged by the corruption of local dignitaries, the sabotage of the malevolent apparatchiks at party headquarters, and the deferential timidity of the new national leadership. These comrades represent a precious resource which must not be squandered. We need to hold our ground. The Labour Party is our party. It was built over generations of blood, sweat and tears. We should not easily relinquish the fight to reclaim it. Too many of us cheered too early at the election of Corbyn and considered the cause already won. Equally now, it would be childish to succumb to petulance. Scattered individual desertions can do nothing but dissipate and undermine whatever we have gained. There may well come a point when there is no alternative but to start afresh. But then it must be as a coherent united body. We are fighting to reclaim the party for socialism because it is only a socialist programme that can point a way towards the salvation of the world from indescribable suffering and horror for the vast mass of humanity. If, goaded by the ruling class and their parliamentary cuckoos, the new party leadership dares to institute a mass purge, they will be taking a big risk. Let them be warned: that will only precipitate the split that has been developing for so long. The responsibility will be theirs. And this time it will not be the left who disappear from the scene. Two antagonistic forces can’t share one party forever. Where there are irreconcilable and fundamental differences, there is nothing reprehensible about accepting the need for a parting of the ways, in the interests of both parties. Just as with the Liberal Party in 1900, so now once again the task is to prise apart the working-class and pro-capitalist wings of the Labour Party. The Labour Party currently straddles two diametrically opposite points of view. The two wings can't be reconciled. That’s why there is nothing dishonourable about predicting a split and even welcoming it with relief. Preferably it will be without acrimony; but for both sides it would be desirable. It's entirely honourable to accept that where there are two political points of view that are completely incompatible, there is nothing to be lost by each going their own separate ways. The Labour Party is the traditional party of the working class created by the trade unions, with an alien layer grafted on top. The growing tensions that had 49 been tightly compressed for two decades within it can no longer be reconciled. Under the successive blows of the financial crash, the pandemic, the lockdown and the coming slump of unprecedented depth, nothing can prevent it bursting asunder. A new rank-and-file campaign group materialized in 2015 in the wake of the Corbyn surge: Momentum. It played an initially constructive role in recruiting supporters, mobilising activists especially during the 2017 election campaign, and staging successful fringe conference events. However, following widespread disappointment about its consistent failure to support victims of Labour headquarters’ witch-hunt campaign, its constitution as a private limited company personally owned by an entrepreneur, and its complete absence of democratic accountability, it remains an open question whether Momentum will undergo some form of regeneration, or become incorporated into the official Labour machine, or simply fizzle out. Whatever its nominal membership, Momentum is hardly a traditional institution; it was always just an ad hoc grouping, improvised as an afterthought scribbled on the back of an envelope, so to speak. If Momentum nationally still has a far bigger membership than any other groupings, that is largely because its local branches are now in effect autonomous bodies which haven't bothered to disaffiliate. It is also still unclear what future there will be for any of the several alternative ad hoc rank-and-file left groups which have sprung up: Left Labour Alliance, Forward Momentum, Labour Against the Witch-hunt, Don't Leave Organise, and others. These may all prove to be short-lived transitory phenomena, likely sooner or later to merge into a new broad left. The urgent need of the hour is a federation or amalgamation, or better still a complete fusion of all the genuine rank-and-file groups of socialist campaigners, comprising currently active, lapsed and unjustly suspended or expelled Labour activists, into a single common broad alliance with the sole aim of rehabilitating and reclaiming the Labour Party for the working class and restoring its socialist foundation, perhaps under the umbrella name RECLAIM. A New Beginning Capitalism today is in unprecedented crisis. The pandemic and the coming slump will create a wave of anger never before seen in our lifetimes. The further rightwards Labour moves, the smaller its political base and the greater the clamour for change. A huge tide of anger is welling up against capitalism and its political agents. The discredited policies of the past will be discarded. A regenerated socialist party could win mass support in these conditions. A crucial period has begun. The Labour Movement must prepare itself theoretically, politically, and practically. The flimsy tissue of capitalist “civilisation” has been torn asunder. This pandemic marks a turning point in history, as seismic as the first and second world wars or the great depression. So far more than 300,000 people have died worldwide; the final total could reach

50 millions. It is not an “act of God”; it is a crime of capitalism. The encroachment of agribusiness into the habitat of wild life and the mercenary practice of factory farming have bred new viral diseases and transmitted them from animals to humans. The crisis has proved that capitalism has become literally a mortal threat to humanity, despoiling the planet, poisoning the environment and encroaching on the natural habitat. It has also exposed the effect of savage cuts in state expenditure and public welfare. It is the failure of capitalism which is exposed by the rampant spread of this virus. Now the population of the world is languishing in lockdown. People are stunned, and society is gripped in fear. The immediate response is an instinct for compliance, but once this initial reaction wears off it will inevitably give way to outrage. Things will never be the same again. And this is just the first of the new era of convulsions gripping the planet. The deepest slump within living memory has already begun. According to one prediction, 1.6 billion workers – half today’s global workforce – are likely to be plunged into destitution. Already before the pandemic struck, there was an unprecedented global wave of uprisings, stretching across at least 35 countries spread across four continents, with tens of thousands on the streets, braving tear gas and bullets, and bringing several governments crashing to their downfall. The plague and the lockdown have temporarily cut across this process and there has been a sudden pause, but these experiences have stripped bare the incapacity of capitalism to meet human needs or sustain human civilisation, or even perhaps the very survival of the species. We can be sure of turmoil and social unrest for years to come. Daniel Defoe wrote a “Journal of the Plague Year”, and Albert Camus and Jack London both wrote dystopian novels envisaging such a future plague. In London’s novel “The Scarlet Plague”, written in 1912, a “Red Death” had wiped out civilization at a stroke; uncannily, London’s prediction was not far out even in its timing… he set it in 2013. Only rarely – with the Black Death in the 14th century and the flu epidemic of 1918 – has such a simultaneous health crisis gripped the entire world. The nearest equivalents were the two world wars, but they pitted countries into mutually antagonistic rival blocs, whereas this crisis strips bare a common threat to human life and the vital need for humanity to find a common solution. In the words of Dr Johnson, “when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully”. To be suddenly forced to confront life-and-death issues focuses the mind. In the same way, the advent of plagues and wars which threaten the lives of millions of people jolt them out of their everyday habits of thought and alert them to the fundamental realities. When normal life becomes impossible, they reach out for new ideas. Waves of revolution swept the world following both the first and second world wars. The Black Death was followed by the Peasants’ Revolt. The flu pandemic of 1918- 51 19 did nothing to stop the revolutionary wave that swept the world. Millions of people today are becoming politicised without even knowing it. In Britain there is an unprecedented rush to join trade unions. Once the shock of the immediate crisis recedes, there will be a tidal wave of anger against this rotten system. And this tide will flood over all the existing institutions, including the Labour Party with its 120-year history, and sweep them aside. With the Labour Party for the duration of the lockdown currently frozen by bureaucratic diktat, the old distinctions are dissolving already. Millions of people who had never given a thought to political ideas will be surging on to the stage in a bid to seize hold of their future. What is important is that socialists immerse themselves in the movement, irrespective of their former affiliations. The pandemic has exposed the failure both of capitalist politicians to handle the crisis and private enterprise to manufacture the protective clothing, tests and ventilators needed. It has demonstrated for all to see the crucial role of despised and poorly paid nurses, hospital porters, care workers, shop workers and cleaners, and the superfluity of grossly overpaid bankers and hedge fund managers. Above all, it has rekindled the flame of human solidarity demonstrated in the spontaneous development of street-level self-help networks, armies of volunteers and the co-ordinated doorstep clapping of health workers by tens of millions. This is the foundation for the birth of a socialist society. And that is why we need a regenerated socialist party freed at last from the pro-capitalist incubus on its back.

52 Suggested Further Reading

There are countless books and articles covering this subject, and many key references and quoatations can be found via Wiki- pedia. Here is a small selection of useful further background reading...

Dangerfield – The Strange Death of Liberal England (Serif) Fenner Brockway – Inside the Left (Spokesman) Picknett, Prince and Prior - The War of the Windsors (Main- stream) Michael Foot – Aneurin Bevan: A Biography (Faber) Tony Benn - Diaries (several volumes) (Arrow Books) Emrys Hughes - Sydney Silverman: Rebel in Parliament (Charles Skilton) Seumas Milne – The Enemy Within (Verso) Peter Wright – Spycatcher (Heinemann) Peter Taaffe – Liverpool: A City that Dared to Fight (Fortress) Peter Taaffe – The Rise of Militant (Militant Publications) Derek Hatton – Inside Left (Bloomsbury) Bad News For Labour (Pluto Press)

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