What are the tasks for the Labour Left? That was the theme of a three-way discussion at the recent International Facing 1984 event between the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, Socialist Action and Ken Livingstone. We reprint below Ken's speech.
Let me start by saying that I think that it is wrong to say that the problems of the labour movement are because of simple tactical errors made over the last two or three years, about who did or who did not agree or disagree with somebody else on the Left.
They are the result of longterm historic, political and economic forces and I don't think they have a great deal to do with whether the Labour Co-Ordinating Committee (LCC) or the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (CLPD) could agree with Socialist Organiser at any one particular point. I have no doubt that all groupings on the Left make these errors and I can recall several of mine which fortunately have faded into the distance and hopefully people won't recall. We grant ourselves too much influence amongst the British working class to think that it is our errors which have led us to this particular position. I detect, and I speak at meetings all over the country and I largely speak not to organised groupings on the Left but to the rank and file party members and to the general public, that there is a real fundamental demoralisation. Not just on the soft Left — the sort of view that Labour may never win again — but large numbers on the hard Left have, I think, got in their hearts a degree of doubt about whether we can ever see a breakthrough in the present conditions.
I think that misreads the real economic position in this country and the real balance of forces between Labour and Capital. I can understand the reasons for that demoralisation. People have spent 4 years or more working to achieve constitutional changes and are rewarded with the election of Kinnock and Hattersley which wasn't what they had in mind when they started out down that road.
There is also the very important ideological onslaught from people like Hobsbawm who put forward an argument which has come up again and again over the last century. I should imagine we could find half a dozen Hobsbawms in the 1930s arguing then that Labour was never going to win again in the 1931 and 1935 elections and that we should look for a broader array of forces including progressive Tories, radical priests and so on. It is a very recurrent theme and in many instances that theme has been followed by a major breakthrough in the working class as it was in 1945.
When you look at the present political situation what you see is that capitalism in Britain and internationally is more vulnerable than it has been in decades. The Tories have been re-elected with the smallest proportion of their vote for some fifty years. Because we are in the Labour Party, we spend all our times looking at how bloody awful were Labour's election results. We mustn't forget how massive has been the erosion of the vote of the Tories over the last fifty or sixty years from the point when they were a supreme political force in Britain. The Tories are aware of that weakness and Capital is aware of that weakness. That is why the SDP has been created. Capital foresees that in the very short term it may no longer be able to elect Tory governments to defend its interests and seek to create an alternative to the Tories which is safe and can be controlled. It sees that it will no longer be able to control the Labour Party.
If we look outside of our national boundaries we have been, for the last 18 months, hovering at the brink of a major international disaster for finance capital. One country after another has gone to the brink of default. One bank after another has been vulnerable to total collapse. And if at any time in the next 18 months or so one group of politicians puts a foot wrong or one bank miscalculates, there could be a wave of collapses of the international banking system which would make 1929 look like a tea party. The reality is that international capitalism is at its most vulnerable point for a generation or more. That is reinforced within Britain. It may be that will all the patching up international capital can survive this series of major refinancing of loans and there won't be a major international collapse. But there is no way that British capital can look forward to its own particular position being secure.
British capital has gone through a period of a hundred years or so when it has used the profits of imperialism to buy off sections of the working class in this country and that option is now foreclosed to it. Tremendous profits from imperialism are no longer there and that is why there has been such a series of trenchant attacks on the trade unions and labour movement in this country, and why so much is put into destroying the possibility of a Labour government. The British ruling class knows and Capital knows that it goes into a period of intense vulnerability, and it cannot be certain of the outcome of the next two or three years.
It may be that all that happens is a further economic decline and unemployment and inflation go up and there is a further contraction in economic activity. That is the optimistic scenario as opposed to one of total economic collapse. In that sort of situation then there is a potential for industrial disorder on the scale of 1926 and civil unrest that would make the riots of 1981 look like merely a curtain raiser for what would follow in some of the most deprived areas of Britain today. That is why the SDP has been created, that is why there are attacks on Labour councils and why there are further constraints on the rights of trade unions.
So what does our strategy have to be? In the first place we have to say that Labour can win — socialist can actually win in the period ahead. The mere fact that you have just had an election where you reached a low point doesn't mean that this is irreversible. We can break out of that situation. But we have to do it on the basis of policies. And here is another place where I fundamentally disagree with the line we have just heard from the CLPD speaker; I do not believe that the problem we now face is that our leaders in Parliament are out of touch with opinion in the Labour Party. For us to break through we have to tackle the question of the control of Capital. We have been round the route twice in the last 20 years of electing Labour governments with wonderful shopping lists. They have got in. But because they were not prepared or willing or even aware of the need to tackle the control of Capital, to use that wealth to fund our programme of reconstruction and expansion, they were forced back into policies of tax increases which fractured the unity of the working class and turned one section against the other.
I don't believe that amongst the rank and file of the Labour Party there is an understanding of the need for us to take control of the banks and precisely how that will work. And I don't believe that if you had a vote among the rank and file of the party it would be dramatically different from amongst the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP). It's not just a question of changing the structures to make the MPs accountable. You have got to win the intellectual battle that commits the Labour Party to taking control of Capital and using the existing wealth in this society in the interests of the broader labour movement. Until we have done that we are locked into an endlessly repeating pattern of electing Labour governments, perhaps with support from the Liberals or the SDP if we are lucky and with a narrow majority if we are even luckier and then going down the route of demoralising the people who put us in office.
So I think we have actually still got to win the argument on which we would base the transforming of society because whenever we discuss nationalisation of the banks for instance we usually lose the vote in Labour Party conferences. We have workers in the banks arguing most strongly for the banks to remain in the hands of private capital. That is a thing we cannot overlook. We are not in a position where we have just got to change the constitution. We have still got to win the basic arguments for socialism within the party. That is why a beefing up of the Alternative Economic Strategy (AES) just isn't going to work. I actually believe that we wouldn't see the weaknesses of the AES until a Labour government tried it. But I didn't believe we would see it to be so bankrupt in the election campaign — it's hardly the best forum for having an exchange of ideas about the control of the economy. We will see I think that the present leadership and most of the forces on the left of the party will now look for a slight beefing up of the AES and see that as the way forward for building support.
We have also got to stop talking in terms of workers' control merely as a slogan. The party and the Left in the party haven't worked out what we mean by that. I think that we have a potential to do that in terms of workplace branches. Left activists in the Labour Party have now got to put as much effort into the construction of workplace branches as we put into that appalling structure of wards, General Management Committees (GMCs) and Local Government Committees. Up to now we have allowed the electoral system to determine the labour movement in Britain.
We aren't in a position where we can tap into the thoughts and views of workers at the point of production, distribution and exchange. We expect them to come and sit in someone's front room and discuss workers' control rather than bring together the workers in each particular area of employment and have them debate it. There is a real paucity of views about what we really mean by workers' control in the Labour Party. Talking about workers' control so easily degenerates into talking about cooperatives because that is the best you can get — it's certainly what the Greater London Council (GLC) is doing. I recognise the weakness of that and workers' participation because you eventually end up supporting someone like Harold Lever saying we will give workers shares in the company. We have got to win that particular argument in the party.
I also think, and it is an area which the CLPD have rightly identified, that there is one major link that is missing and that is the question of accountability. We have made progress in many instances by getting mandatory reselection and MPs are paying more attention, but at the moment there is no way by which MPs control the party leadership. We are not in a position with the parliamentary party like the local Labour group where the leadership of the group comes back to group and presents policies which are either rejected or accepted. The Parliamentary leadership sits down in a vacuum from the PLP. Labour members of parliament go along to the PLP meeting once a week and they are told what votes are coming up, they have a great debate, they sometimes attack each other and then go away again. No one actually sits down and discusses what the Labour leadership is doing. There is no way by which the MPs we are trying to make accountable can make the leadership of the party accountable to them. You wouldn't tolerate that for 10 minutes on the GLC or Lambeth or Hackney Council, because you know exactly what would happen — you would have an alliance between a few leading party members and key civil servants and the party would be excluded.
We have to argue over the coming period for the accountability of the leadership and a shadow cabinet to the PLP. Otherwise we are going to find that we have selected a wonderful leftwing MP, he or she has got into the PLP and they come back every week and say I have fought for this or that, but if they aren't going to be able to impose their will on the cabinet they are going to fail. Now I think that is important because if you look at the Heffer vote there is an interesting position. For the first time in the history of the Labour Party the Left got a better vote out of the PLP than they got from the CLPs. Eric Heffer got 4 per cent of the PLP and 2 per cent of the CLPs. In a sense that reflects the changes that are starting to work their way through the PLP and this is an area to which we will have to pay much more attention.
If we have a total economic collapse there will be a form of coalition required to deal with it. The Tories don't need any more votes in parliament but they will need the figureheads to give credibility to some sort of national government. So we mustn't lose sight over the next few years of the possibility of coalition politics really advancing very rapidly and the co-option of a few leading Labour front benchers and Steel and Owen into some coalition created to deal with an international crisis. If we don't have the collapse but rather the continuing decline of the economy, then the very real danger is that the leadership of the party, simply because of their ability to communicate and to fudge on many key issues, could be as effective an opposition leadership as there was under Wilson in 1963 and 1964. The memory of the last Labour government can recede and people become politically active who weren't politically active at a previous stage. And they can become so desperate to win and achieve change that they start to let drop some of the major struggles we should be making. There is a very real chance that we will live through that 1963/64 period again where everything hinges on the leader's ability to push the vote up in the polls. We suspend the debates that we need to have internally and find that there is a possibility that we might win, but God help us with what might follow afterwards.
That's why we need our economic policies clearly laid out and our ability to control that leadership when it is in power, to the new leadership. Now I don't want to think that the Left is going to spend the next year debating the minutiae of the Peter Hain letter on left unity. I can see people pick up the Hain letter and [illegible] with a kind of inner sectarianism. So much of it is vague, general, and it's very hard to know what there is to disagree within [illegible] but people are saying 'we know what is really behind it.' Now I think there is a danger once again of us being involved in major internal debates among groupings on the left, when what we desperately need is to turn outwards and build [illegible] for the sort of economic policies that I was talking about.
That is one of my major criticisms of so much of left activity [illegible] all the effort in that great struggle to decide whether [illegible] should register. I think largely a lot of that effort was [illegible] support outside the movement and particularly in [illegible] similar struggle was to get Kinnock [illegible]. I was one of those who fortunately can now say that I wasn't involved in the initial choice of candidates the Left was going to back. But I had great difficulty in considering whether it was worth putting in a major amount of effort to get Joan Lestor off the NEC and get Margaret Beckett on, because I could remember Joan Lester resigning in protest at the cuts of the last Labour government and Margaret Beckett taking her place and carrying on with them. That is the sort of internal struggle which is a waste of our time and effort. And it really will be a waste of time and effort if we get into a major struggle about the meaning of the Hain letter. We can meet Hain and argue about these sorts of policies but I don't believe we can construct an umbrella group on the left. I don't really think that it is possible — it would be wonderful if we could do it, but there are too many differences of views and opinions for us to cope with that at the present time.
I want to say before anyone gets up and condemns me that simply because I haven't mentioned all the other issues that I don't think they are important — Ireland, unilateralism, women's rights and so on. I do think that the party should turn out and support every group of workers in struggle — that goes without saying. What I am trying to focus attention on is that key economic policy which I don't believe that the Labour Party generally does accept and which we have to win support for. As we go through the next 18 months, as the NEC decides whether to extend the witch hunt and go beyond Tariq Ali; as the issue of Ireland continues to reoccur because we will be determined to make sure the issue of Ireland does continue to reoccur; as the issue of the defence of Labour councils comes up with all the consequences of legality and surcharge that flow from that, we will see in the year or two ahead how the leadership of the party responds.
I do suggest the most important thing in terms of the orientation of the left to the new leadership is to let the new leadership reveal where it stands rather than us spend a lot of time arguing about what we think they might do on the basis of their track record. I doubt if my perception of what they might do is any different from most other people's on the left. But we would misjudge the mood of a lot of ordinary people in the party who are so committed to the idea of unity if we are seen to be raking over the coals of old rows and internal disputes: we would be seen to be splitters and wreckers. It is better that we go out, build support around issues, industrial disputes, the need [illegible] discuss in the party how the leadership responds as each of these issues comes along.
I have always said that no one has been able to damage me in a long term way by their attacks on me. At the end of the day if I am damaged politically it's because of the things I have [illegible] Hattersley. I think it would be wrong, and it would alienate a lot of potential support in the party, if we go over what Kinnock and Hattersley have or have not voted for in the past. They have to be judged [illegible] by how they respond to the conditions that are being forced upon us. [illegible] at the start, I believe Thatcher's [illegible] crisis is not too dissimilar from those of us on the hard Left, and I am still delighted to think of myself as on the hard Left [illegible]. [illegible] major breakthrough. I think we have to reject decisively Hobsbawm and all his works and argue with those people that [illegible] country. All that we have argued over and about for the last [illegible] to do is to give the working class the confidence to see that it can be done. That hinges on our ability to persuade them of the [illegible] and use it in the interests of the [illegible].
KEN LIVINGSTONE is the Labour leader of the GLC.