John Ross wrote that the Left was totally unprepared for the tremendous shake up of British politics which had just begun. We asked him how the article British Politics in the 1980s has stood up to the recent elections and the political events of the last two years.
There are two fundamental approaches to the dynamics of British politics today. The first is to see a basic continuation of the old system where the Tories fight the Labour Party; that's the way it has been and that's the way it always will be. I think this has been proved to be fundamentally wrong by the election result. Rather the second model has been confirmed where you have a break up of the whole British political system. It's wrong just to look at the decline of the Tory vote or of the Labour vote, or at the rise of the Alliance/Liberals. The whole British political system has come to the end of its period of existence. Therefore the ruling class needs a general reorganisation of things. Previously there was a simple situation with a dominant Tory Party, and a Labour Party allowed into office periodically whenever there was a temporary crisis of the Tory Party, who then came back to dominate things again. Underneath the recent election result strangely enough lies the weakness of the Tory Party, which does not have authentic mass support and therefore continually faces the danger of new political forces expressing themselves through the Labour Party and erupting on to the political scene. In this situation the ruling class has to reorganise the political system. First, to create a new stronger Tory Party, but no longer dominant in the way that it was between the first and second world wars when it got between 50 and 55 per cent of the vote, dominating all the areas of the country; nor even of the MacMillan/Eden type government of the 1950s, when the Tories had almost 50 per cent of the vote. That's no longer possible. The bourgeoisie cannot recreate that type of Tory Party.
It therefore has to create a new type of political instrument to the Tories to politically weaken the working class. The working class cannot be won to Conservatism. It has been fighting the Tories for 200 years. This election proves it — the Falklands, oil revenues, an hysterical press campaign and yet 700,000 less people voted for the Tories than the last election. The problem is that the Labour Party never won over the working class actively to socialism. It is after all the British Labour Party not the Socialist Party. And therefore the obvious solution for the bourgeoisie was to create an alternative to the Tories that was not Labour. And that was the Alliance's job — they took the votes away from the Labour Party.
But at the same time the Alliance is a destabilising element in British politics in the long term. That's because the interests of the ruling class are not the same thing as those of the Tory Party. Thatcher has absolutely no interest in any of the institutional changes that are necessary from the point of view of the Alliance, like proportional representation. Therefore the bourgeoisie is building up the Tory Party as its strongest instrument, while on the other hand other sections of the ruling class are building up the Alliance as an alternative to the Labour Party. The political system cannot be restabilised. If Thatcher had won an authentically mass vote she would have ended this period of political crisis. Thatcher's 144 majority in parliament is obviously a very dangerous threat but she hasn't rebuilt the popularity of the Tory Party. Thatcher is a link in the political crisis in Britain not the solution.
[illegible] government in its present form. Do you still think that's true?
Absolutely. The election shows that. Of course there's been one technical hitch in that analysis, namely that it's going to take more than one parliament to get rid of this government. But this Thatcher government is only a continuation of the last one, [illegible] mass popular party like the Tories cannot [illegible] Britain [illegible] on a 42 per cent vote. Therefore the bourgeoisie must put into place new political mechanisms, which cannot rely on reviving the Tory Party.
Think back to the election of October 1974. The Tory Party vote fell to its lowest level for 115 years. There was talk of proportional representation and coalition governments. The ruling class and the press were frantic to keep Labour out of office. Thatcher came in to put a stop to all that. She said forget all this PR stuff, we will rebuild an authentically mass, popular Tory Party. She pulled out everything — racism, law and order, appeals to skilled workers to buy their own houses — all to rebuild a mass popular Tory Party. She had a big initial tactical success in 1979. If she had gone on to increase the Tory Party vote up to 47/48 per cent, then one could say that she had succeeded in reversing this decline of the Tory Party and one could restabilise the old system of political domination. But Thatcher has failed to recreate a mass base for the Tory Party. That in the long run is more significant and powerful than any immediate repression from the Tories.
Do you think that she now has a more coherent economic formula?
Thatcher has no economic formula for dealing with the problems of British manufacturing industry. I think the whole left underestimated, including my article from two years ago, the weakness of the industrial sections of the British bourgeoisie which is far more pronounced than most people supposed. The Thatcher Government has no interest in or intention of rebuilding British manufacturing industry. It's quite prepared to dump and sacrifice British manufacturing industry, not to replace it with an efficient service sector, but rather to use the oil revenue and the huge powers of the banking system to prop up the balance of payments. That's why you now have the extraordinary situation of a huge deficit on manufactured goods in the balance of payments, a decrease of competivity of British industry of 25 per cent, and yet there is still a balance of payments surplus. I think we all underestimated the economic room for manoeuvre which that allowed.
What do you think the Alliance strategy will be now?
Undoubtedly to try and get a base in those sections of the working class which have broken from the Labour Party. All the polls show that the biggest increase in votes for the Alliance was amongst skilled workers. I'm extremely dubious that Thatcher can consolidate all those skilled workers who voted for her in 1979 in places like Birmingham and the West Midlands. I don't think the Labour Party will find it easy to win them back. So the Alliance will go for these workers, those who supported Duffy in the AUEW and Chapple in the EETPU.
That would go hand in hand with the Tories' offensive against the political levy?
Yes, the Tories and the Alliance on all practical questions work hand in glove, so they will organise a joint campaign in the unions under the banner of non-political trade unions.
Would you revise your opinion on proportional representation in the light of the election?
The question of PR is a tactical issue. The key question is the consciousness of the working class. The working class has to be won politically from the coalition orientation, not prevented from supporting it by tricks of the electoral system. I personally think that the best thing for the Labour Party would be to support PR and to wage a mass struggle against coalition government. The only way to finally smash the SDP/Liberal Alliance is by them being forced to go into coalition with the Tories, and for the Labour Party to show that it is resolutely opposed to them.
This is purely a personal view, not necessarily that of the Socialist League. The struggle which will be fundamental over the whole next period will be against coalition government. Because there are only two ways forward for the Labour Party: one is to rebuild itself as a mass popular socialist party to fight the SDP/Liberals, and the other is to go to the right and form a coalition with the Alliance. The struggle against coalitionism in all its forms will be decisive. It won't always be against a coalition government: in the last election it took the form of a struggle against 'tactical voting', in the future it might take the form of nasty things from the trade union bureaucracy. But the general drift will be towards forming a so-called 'progressive anti-Thatcher alliance'.
Of course in the short term this might have some negative [illegible]. The banner of PR is [illegible] by those who back the coalitionist approach with the Alliance and therefore you would need a tremendous struggle in the labour movement and the unions against that orientation. But it's better to have that out on the open political terrain of support for or opposition to coalition with the Alliance than an utterly mystifying debate on the electoral system. Finally, if the working class has not been won away from this position of coalitionism, whether you have PR or not, it will find some way of expressing itself. It's better to have that fight out in the open.
You talked about the Labour Party becoming a mass campaigning party. The main obstacle to that is obviously the trade union and labour bureaucracy which waged the battle against Bennism, which was the only force proposing anything like that orientation. Do you think there is any chance of such a struggle achieving success in the Labour Party?
I think the bureaucracy would rather sabotage the Labour Party than allow it to become a mass socialist party. But that's not where we're at at the moment. Looked at historically there is no doubt but that the left continues to gain in the Labour Party. The classical formula in the 1950s was the Parliamentary Labour Party plus the trade union bureaucracy totally isolating the constituencies. The left has maintained its position in the constituencies — it's stronger there than it's ever been. And importantly the trade unions are now divided. The left shifts in the POEU and the NUR, Scargill's victory in the NUM, all show not that the trade unions will now support the left in the Labour Party but that they are seriously divided. There won't be a short term victory of the left in the Labour Party but over the long term it is gaining. That's why the ruling class needs the SDP/Liberal Alliance to attack the Labour Party on its leftward evolution. I'm convinced that the number one task of socialists at the moment is the defence of the Labour Party and the unions against the attacks that the bourgeoisie intends to launch against them.
The most important thing is for the left to build a mass open left wing inside the Labour Party. The policy of Benn during and up to the election of not criticising the right wing was a disaster even from the point of view of the Labour Party as a whole. It left the door open to Callaghan and Healey. My judgement is that a left wing campaigning Labour Party would have got more votes in this election than the existing policies and leaderships. That's not just a traditional Trotskyist response. I think all the evidence suggests that a clear left wing Labour Party would not have lost one single vote, but would have generated more enthusiasm. I'm not saying it would have won the election necessarily, but I'm sure it would have got more votes.
Are you saying that because the material basis of the trade union bureaucracy's attachment to imperialism is being eroded that it is no longer a reliable instrument for the ruling class to use?
It's extremely reliable but it's also weakened. You no longer have Deakin running the TGWU with a rod of iron. You don't have 'Carron's law' in the AUEW. You have Duffy and Chapple who try very hard, but even there left oppositions are developing. The labour bureaucracy is extremely reliable in being one hundred per cent in support of the capitalist class, but it is definitely weaker than it was.
JOHN ROSS is the author of a forthcoming book on the Tory Party in Pluto Press' Arguments for Socialism series, and a member of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International.