The preparations for the Labour Party Conference at Blackpool this September are nearing their conclusion, The atmosphere is heavy~laden, After the cheers of last October died away d after the warm, selfcongratulatory mood of the December victorf inion replaced the 1964 Conference, Labour's activists went home to their constituencies to meet a cooler mood among their supporters, This has not lifted: rather the gloom has intensified. As Labour's election pledges have been revoked, deferred, transmuted or forgotten, first in single apologetic announcements, then in clusters, curtly explained, and lately in wholesale bulk, So it has come home to the constituencies that their expectations for the future must be frigid, austere and possibly painful, No harvest festival, the Blackpool Conference will mourn lost hopes, console troubled conscimces and prepare for dearth and discord, Mikardo's balance sheet
The record is almost too dismal to bear recital. Few of Labour's major spokesmen have had the intellectual or political courage to assess it clearly. One who has is Ian Mikardo, perhaps the most significant Parliamentary figure who has been left to the left by recent events, Speaking at a conference of Labour students at the end of June, Mr. Mikardo was able to list three achievements on the credit side of the Government's performance, It had properly flouted the opinion of the bankers in order to augment pensions; it had laid out a commendable programme of legislation in the Queen's speech; and the Prime Minister had properly decided to govern as if he had a majority of fifty. But when the Government's pledges were compared with its actions, there were most serious deficiencies,
In at least thirty important sectors election promises had either not been sutained, or had actually been dishonoured. In the field of economic policy the failure to apply physical controls, even such obvious ones as exchenge control, import controls, or effective regional development controls, forced the Government to rely upon fiscal manoeuvres, bribery and exhortation as its main 'planning! weapons, Of course these are totally insufficient. No rational overall fuel and energy policy was being elaborated, No transport plan was being counterposed to Beeching's measures. Taxes were not being used selectively... Concerning public ownership, no measures had yet been announced to take over water, and more important, the pledge to start new public enterprises on a competitive basis in growth areas of the economy was not yet being taken up. In the field of exports, the promised long-term contracts with Commonwealth territories, based on state trading, had not materialised. Neither had any significant expansion of East-West trade. As for the question of incomes policy, no attempt whatever had been made to synchronise wage planning with overall planning, which thus made Mr. Brown's policy quite unfeasible,
Concerning social policy, the balance sheet was no less unhappy. The minimum income guarantee was to be deferred until next session, (1), While this could be understood, it provided no’ reason at all for the deferment of action to rectify outstanding injustices. Many sever hardships existed which could be alleviated by administrative action which was not being taken, Educational expenditure was being curtailed. As for housing, which had been Mr. Wilson 's central election issue, the pledge to repeal the Rent
Act was being honoured by a measure which threatened to introduce a most dangerous element of decontrol in rents, while building was being thwarted by sky-high interest rates, A two-tier system of finance, or cheap money, was essential to the housing problem, In the field of equal Pays no steps were to be taken to ratify the ILO Convention on that question. The policies which had been expected on immigration had not materialised. Lastly, in the forei-n and defence policy sectors the picture was alarminge The defence estimates had not been subjected to serious overall cuts, whilst the Polaris base and the British nuclear arm were both presere ved in flat contradiction to party policy. If anything, Labour's foreign policy showed an even closer dependence on the USA than did that of Sir Alec, This had revealed itself in innumerable areas: apart from Vietnam, in Guiana, in the total abandonment of disengagement in Europe, and in the equivocation about the supply of war materials to South Africa, among many otherse Callaghan!s measures Since Mr. Mikardo elaborated this most discouraging catalogue, condittons have deteriorated with malicious speed. Yet further draconian and debilitating economic measures have been brought forward by Mr. Callaghan. Far from getting Britain moving, the Government has moved round to a new and resounding stop phase in its economics, With usual candour, the Financial Times led its account of these savage new restraints with the headline: "The Pound Before Politics". Small wonder that epithets like "Rams:y MacWilson" have begun to appear in the Economist, in col umns by Malcolm Muggeridge, and mong the maverick political commentators, Just how far before politics Mr. Callaghan has thrust the pound has scarcely begun to filter through to the understanding of Labour's rank and file, but it can clearly be discerned in extraordinary outcries of the liberal business presse The Hconomist reacted pugnaciously with a leader entitled "Labour Men -- Tory Measures" which speculated whether Mr. Wilson may be heading towards an October election on "what is virtually a National ticket," The weight of these measures falls on precisely the people who returned Labour to office, If anything, a Conservative administration would have moved with greater caution, and would have placed heavier burdens on the business community, because it would not have been labouring under the same drastic imperative to regain the lost confidence of the City, Mardest cut of all are the local Labour councillors, chafing at the reins of more than a decade of central restraint, and now, just as they thought the race was about to open out for them, savagely bridled in. The only truly astonishing thing about this raging mayhem of Labour's election pledges is the solemn quiet which has descended on the backbenches, The only substantial revolt which the Callaghan measures precipitated was the demand for cuts in military expenditure, To an outsider, it looks as if this upheaval was outmanoeuvred without a shot being fired. True, the Parlianentary Party accepted a motion, carefully filleted of any specific dates or figures, which demanded substantial cuts, The fate of this entirely proper decision will probaly be found to turn upon the definition of "substance"; and Mr. Wilson is clearly capable of determining this in light of the needs of the pound. While Mr. Callaghan was immobilising the production drive, Mr, Brown's attempts at acceleration’ in the control of incomes and prices were not
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abaede The fact that the members of his own union brusquely rejected the incomes policy, while neglecting to invite him to observe the event, was widely remarked. So was Mr, Cousins! flying visit to the conference of the T & GWU, during which he received the ovation of a hero for discreetly congratulating his members on the stand they had taken, But the really ominous accompaniment to these events was the statement that Mr. Wilson made after the Callaghan measures had been revealed, that should the Prices. and Incomes Board be found to fail in seéuring voluntary co-operation, it might quickly be given coercive legal teeth. Although in theory such sanctions might apply to refractory employers, the record of the Government does not encourage the hope that their main effect will tell in that direction. As one surveys the ruins of Labour policy, and the cautious and entirely orthodox pattern of Mr, Callaghan's economic policy, one cannot but conclude. that Mr, Wilson's warnings are aimed pre-eminently at the unions, Such a confrontation would be the reductio ad absurdem of the Wilson strategy: if it were to begin,the last figleaf would fall away, revealing that hoary old Adam, Ramsay Mac., naked in all the vigour of his National impotence, Surrender to Smethwick
As significant as these unhappy portents is the blow which Mr, Bowden has administered, on the eve of the adjournment. From the principled opposition to the immigration controls of 1961 which had been evinced from Mr. Gaitskell, Labour had already slid, before the election, into postures of equivocation, dissembling and vagueness, But Mr. Bowden's White Paper on Immigration, far from remaing equivocal, unleashed a truly shattering blow, Immigration from all Commonwealth territories was restricted to a maximum of 8,500 a year, including the 1,000 quota which had been guaranteed to Malta, Worse: the White Paper established a'fine and sharply screened double mesh through which would-be immigrants must filter, This imposed checks along both national and occupational lines, establishing a sharp class preference for skilled and professionally qualified labour.
Abroad, everything but the cost of Mr. Wilson's commitment East of Suez has been crumbling around him, His farcical and demagogic peace mission to Vietnam was exploded before he had finished the blueprints. Mr. Davies, who bravely put in jeopardy all his frimdships in Hanoi in a loyal effort to voyage to the rescue, returned, chastened, home to the muzzle. Trouble in the Rann of Kutch has been transferred to Kashmir. Cruellest indignity ofall, Malaysia, that most streamlined essay in neo-colonialist intrigue, carefully assembled to the credit of the pound and as a fearful deterrent to Indonesian "bolshevism", suddenly and without warning blew upe Britaints autonomous impefial zone revealed its true crisis level of instability.s Meanwhile, President Johnson intoned sympathetic dirges about the agonies of sterling, as he fortified the dollar by the slaughter of Vietnamese childrens
In unrelieved gloom, this record may be left where it stands, incomplete and undocumented, because, partial though it is, it establishes beyond reasonable doubt the most important thing about the Governments its tendency - the line of march, the main drift, which implies that wmless there is a sharp re-orientation, amounting to a complete reversal of policy, the- Fourth Labour Government will be the most catastrophic ever, Later, socialists will have to itemise this balance sheet with miserly precision
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aml analyse its every grey nuance. Now, the key question is not“8narting of each isolated, broken pledge and shattered hope, but the appeciation of the wood rather than the leaves of the tree, The bankers! way Scag socialist journals have already begun the labour of analysis and explanation which is urgently required. Hee ee eee in the introduction to the July-August number, quite righ % "Yow regimes have so immediately loet all credit or respect", went on to insists “The first task is... to try to understand the logic of the political experience we have witnessed since October, 1964. Why has Labour. administration performed so badly, even in its own terms? Why has it abandoned eo mich of ite programme, 80 soon?...The labour Party's abysmal record since October reveals much about its own character; but it has revealed, more clearly than ever before, the real secret of the impasse of British society today < the at once indispensable and insupportabdle heritage of imperialisn." In elaborating and refining this insight, the article by Tom Nairn, “Labour Imperialism”, makes some extremely telling points. Tracing the structural integration of industrial capital into the nexus of finance cap ital's interests, as all the major industrial giants like ICI, MX, Unilever expend their networks of direct foreign investment and association, Nairn shows that this “annulment of old frontiers” leaves an insoluble dilemmas whereas Wilson had aligned himself with the dynamic soul of the
the restrictive spirit of conservative rentiers and benkers, the two ghosts in fact inhabit one machine, and there in torment savage one ancther, This must lead direct to the question, succintly posed by Nairns is it possible for any government to “master the British dilemma in quite the way which seemed entailed by Wilson's original approach? May it not be too late for even a ‘radical! solution of that kind, given the 20% ms vy Oovween 11nanola. snc
~? May 1% not be too late, in ott rds, for any solution to the problem which remaine within the terme of the national capitalist system itself, in any of ite form?" Trade union independence
This ia clearly a central question. Part of the answer, though, was offered years ago by Lenin, when he remarked that there were no "final crises” from which capitalism could not escape, ite replacement was not
are other contradictory features of British capitalism which need an examination as careful as that which Tom Nairn has begun to devote to the relationship between industrial and financial capital, if all the potentialities for capitalist survival are to be thoroughly evaluated, Principal among these is the prolonged and apparently inexhaustable intractability of the British trade unions, about the degree of integration into neo-capitelism which Mr. Brown is attempting to secure with the Prices and Incomes Board. In most countries the trade unions have been far more effectively assimilated into the structure of nec-capitaliem than their British equivalents, It is
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movements of practically every common market nation. But if we are to search out the basic distinction between labour in Britain and Europe, it is not to be found in the hallmark of sturdy independence which is branded on every British buttock. Careful examination of the appropriate limbs of Sir William Carron or Mr. Jack Cooper would be likely to reveal a quite cosmopolitan clarity of skin complexion on their part. Thre basic reason why British capitalism has shown a marked inability to restrain and contain the appetites of its labour force is that it has had no long-term counterweight to full employment, Wage drift has thus constantly pushed to take up the diminishing slack that an ailing economy had to offer, In Italy, large-scale unemployment with a declining rural population have produced effective disciplinary force during much of that nation's postwar historye Before Herr Ulbricht's wall intervened, the Federal German Republic had abundant labour quarries in the East, Since, it has threshed about for substitutes as far afield as Greece and Spain, but without effectively replacing the East as goad and stimulant to a loaded labour market, De Gaulle, too, in his agrarian rationalisations, and later with the pied noirs (the returned colons from Algeria) has found easement for labour shortage. In the United States, the depressed Negro population has provided its reserves of labour, But in Britain, only limited immigration has taken place, and that counterbalanced by a constant outflow. As Labour has been forced to abort its housing programme, the pressure of a strident minority of xenophobic electors has brought it in a shamefully misguided way to staunch even that limited trickle to the large discomfort of George Brown and the business press, whose liberal sympathies may not be large, but whose appreciations of the labour shortage in Britain are certainly realistic. Each stop that has been imposed on British economic growth has produced its momentary growth of unemployment, but the check to that growth has not been administered simply by renewed expansionist oprrtunities: rather it has flowed from the inevitable and sharp recoil than an independent and undefeated labour movement can administer in the political field, (2)
The work of “ationalisation could not proceed uninterruptedly in such a context. Capital found itself confronted by persons who not only claimed rights, but were able to punish their violation, It was surely for this reason that successive governments were forced to tread into the most dangerous terrain of a search for a political solution to the problem of labour costs and wage-control, And Mr, Wilson's usefulness to capital can scarcely be appreciated outside this field, What is most noteworthy in the record of this administration is the valiant way in which its opponents have striven to keep it alive. Tory chairmen who cast their votes in chivalry; Tory MPs who with touching gentility lose themselves between the bars and the lobbies when the fatigue of Government supporters proves greater than the will to rule; these remarkable phenomena scarcely signal a return to the sporting traditions of British parliamentarism, They do appear to make sense in a context in which the opposition does not wish to prevail, until the Government has performed the role which has been alloted to it. As more and more of the unions' teeth are drawn, as the Prices and Incomes Board recruits first whips, then scorpions to its armoury, and as usual, all the while, the unions are disarmed by Mr. Wilson's rhetoric, so the oppostion can begin to flex its mucles and prepare for the resumption of control. Is this not a natural way for Mr, Heath to think? Meantime, the Government continues to develop all the rationalisations of Dr. Beeching on the railways, and to drive through the explosive re-orientation of the mining industry, as if its one object in life were
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to establish the truth of this pessimistic view of its role. (It is even rumoured that, in order to secure the complicity of the railway trade unions! leadership in the creeping denationalisation involved in the liner train scheme, Mr. Wilson has promised extensive new nationalisations after the election. Alas: Mr. Heath need have no sleepless nights on this matter).
Incomes policy, cuts, rationalistions: all these amount to the classic solution which capital, itself sick, prescribes for labour as well, I am too ill; here, you take my pill...all that is new in this situation is the ministering physician, And what is astonishing is the way in which Mr. Wilson plays the role. ,Malicious gossips even claim that he enjoys itecce
Where is the left? Yet is is not all that is strange. Perhaps the most truly amazing thing about the post-October situation is to be found in the becalmed tranquility of Labour's back benches. After the storms of the unilater~ alist campaign perhaps the largest left intake into any Parliament since 1945 has appeared, only to discover that discretion is rather the more responsible part of valour, This strange event has staggered the Economist, which returns week after week to discuss the reason why, half in malice, half in pique. The leaders of the traditional left, Anthony Greenwood, for instance, were wisely co-opted by Mr. Wilson into peripheral complicity in his arrangement, Their behaviour has been scandalous. Whether Mr, Greenwood has gained a final victory over the schoolchildren he gassed in Bahrein, as they threatened to undermine the East of Suez design, it is too early to saye What does, however, appear quite clear is that he has finally routed and liquidated his own conscience, Perhaps this is the most significant political victory Mr. Wilson has scored: he has benumbed, confused, and outwitted the left in a manner that outbids the most bizarre predictions of the most hostile opponents of that grouping. Perhaps the fact that the Government had its own left cover has given other members of Parliament pause. With very few honourable exceptions, the Parliamentary left has bought every dud Peace Mission, every hoax and placebo that has been offered. The flight of Steel Nationalisation through the lobbies is a signficant case in pointe If Mr. Gaitskell had attempted such manoeuvres as those which Mr. Brown (and presumably Mr. Wilson ) have accomplished, he would have been denounced from every platform in the land. Instead of raising hell, the left has melted into the landscape, The significance of this must not be under-estimated, Had the left spoken out, the constituencies would by now be in a turmoil, The unions are already full of bewildered, often bitterly disappointed men, At the local level, the party preserves its peace, because loyalty is the first rationality of one who knows rightly that unity is strength. Monolithic in its piety, the traditional left leadership defers to that peace, as if it were the ultimate in political wisdom. In fact it is the reverse, If there were any hope for Mr, Wilson, it would lie in an outcry from the Labour movement, Only the strongest pressures from his supporters could prevail over the ruthlessly implacable logic of the barkers, which grows more persuasive each day as the vacuum left by its application yawns wider through the party. If anyone had spoken earlier, perhaps the first fatal steps might have been turned aside, But if is no answer: the problem of the left was not shortage of force, lack of numbers, or even lack of faith or goodwill. What the left lacked was any sense of programme,
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any notion of the direction of events, any first faint beginning of a strategy. It fenced in the foggy lobbies of the politics of previous decades, bound by the imagined supremacy of institutions which were in fact at their last gasp, (4) while the real rulers enmeshed its protectors and champions in their own completely alien objects, Recriminations are the very last thoughts that this sad history should inspire: there but for the grace of the polls goes every last fundamentalist red sectarian also, What does emerge is the paramount need for a strategy of socialist advance which rests on solid theoretical foundations, and which lives in the present world, A _new programme
The work of elaborating a programme is not one which can be passed across to three part time research workers, It involves a whole protracted labour of discussion and education within a very wide area of the Labour Movement, Precisely what has gone wrong with the fourth Labour Government has been this old, elitist conception of programme, Policy is left to the wise, to the ones who know, Everyone else knvks doors. In the event, the knowledge of the wise was insufficient : what they needed was no.longer an insight into the wickedness of the world, but the social understanding and the political #<th. which to. aseault-that wiekednese.-. This can-xnly-be created in painstaking political discussion and organisation, starting from the fundamental premise that the richest source of socialist potential is the self confidence and self activity of the workers themselves,
The natural tendency which will emerge from the accumulating disillusionment of labour's activists will be to seek immediate, partial solutions to what are global problems, There is diminishing scope for effective, purely local, trade union miiitancy though, Labour needs a socialist perspective, designed for practical application. To those who see the impossibility of picce meal solutions, there may arise the alternative of self immolation in a purely abstract and doctrinal socialism, The failure of labour to meet its immediate, bread and butter commitments may impel : many on the left to reject all bread and butter demands as a deluding distraction, and to seek in their place to elevate a purified and spiritualised vision of commonweal as the motivating goal of socialist activity.
While it is acutely important to discuss the idea of socialism, and to widen constantly the circle of peopb for whom its problems are already a living reality, this can never be a suffident answer to the difficulties in which we find ourselves today. It will not help the railwaymen to be told that "socialism is the only snsver to Doctor Beeching", true though that aphorism may be. Unless we can offer some practical immediate steps to socialism, our railwayman is likely to choose either to belt hell out of someone in the union, or, more probably, to look for another job. Even slogans which in themselves could contribute to the growth of an explicitly socialist awareness, like the demand for an integrated transport policy, need to be linked inseparably with a whole series of complimentary conceptions, which taken together can form the mental bridge over which the workers may pass from capitalist to socialist forms of reasoning and action. Simple reiteration of demands for nationalisation alone do not form such a bridge.
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j aborate, neither maximalist de paper ee prions - e a blind needs to lead from and entirely abstract, nor minimalist an ? the particular ills of capitalism,es it is,to the general solution we have to offer, and from the partial, schizoid outlooks which are fostered by capital to a fully socialist world view. Such a programme must attack, not only the organisational failures,but the feel of capitalism, of subordination : it must expose its alienating effects plainly, so that they are devoid of mystery and terror. Clearly, in the fight against alienation which the workers suffer as producers, the major answering socialist resporse is the demand for worker's control. This becomes increasingly urgent as neo-capitalist rationalisations gather force. Workers control of job organisation, the speed of work, re-tooling, is no mere panacea. It can very well be understood by shop stewards and local union officers as fitting present needs. But neo-capitalist reorganisation extends from new practices in the shops up to the attempt to elaborate a comprehensive policy for incomes : and so too can the fight for workers’ control, as it takes up the demand for complete and democratic accountability, the opening of the books, and the abolition of business segrets. All the work of elaborating a :detailed campaign on such lines only be done in the creation of a movement for industrial democracy + no amount of blueprints will replace its living agents in the factories. At the same time, the struggle for self management in the nationalised sector can feed and inspire such a movement. This already began to shape up in the steel industry in the discussions around the new Bill : and its embryos can be clearly seen in the mines, the railways, and, among the white collar staffs in particular, in the other nationalised industries. Outside the sphere of production, the New Left has frequently documented the manipulation of men as consumers. Here too, the socialist movement has a traditional answering response : the transition to welfare forms of distribution. Free public transport : free housing : these are no more utopian in modern Britain than the National Health Service or free compulsory schools. To a nation embarking on the structural change from capitalist to socialist organisation, they would not be frills, but essential means of obtaining a human focus on the inherited economic difficulties. If the Bow Group can put forward the notion that the roads be metered as a counter to the fact that rail computes its costs comprehensively while roads do not, cannot we respond by demanding the opposite kind of parity? Here surely is a real answer to Beeching, which would enable some true picture of the travelling needs of Britain to be compiled. In a context of public welfare, norms of consumption, the pressure for extended public control of industry becomes enormous. Arising out of the pioneer movement of a fight for more welfare and a fight for workers' control at every level, the arguments about the need for more national isation cease to be ritual incantation, and take on a more and more immediate necessity. Around the central core of such a programme as this, there are many issues to be resolved. But if someone speaks out, to say that socialist options are possible and practical, then there will be an answering call from very many people in the unions and the workshops. Only if the left is silent is there danger : for then each worker feels alone, his doubts his own, his conscience an isolate, and therefore, his will paralized. Voices must be found to enunciate the new socialism. The left must organise.
NOTES.
Te Soon after Mr. Mikardo had spoken, it was of course, deferred still further by Mr. Callaghan's measures. Mr. Callaghan had, it must be said, warned us in advance. He told a Fabian gathering at the 1963 T.U.C. that, "A Labour Government must not rush its fences... its first job is to get industry moving again. Then we can start paying ourselves a dividend." The Guardian reported that Mr. Callaghan felt this interval might be eighteen months. In this most dire case, which deals with Labour's pledge to the least fortunate, most penurious of its supporters, the time limit has now more than doubled and is stillextending. 2e These points have been elaborated in detail in a paper which has been written by Pat Jordan, to which I am much indebted. 36 On August 6th, Michael Foot wrote in Tribune about this question. He spoke of the potentially dangerous eulf between leaders and led, and called for sustained left pressure. "Sustain the left pressure and sustain the Government." This in itself is not an objectionable call : nobody would suggest that "the Government should be torn to pieces by the actions of the left inside the party," as Mr. Foot puts it. What the left should do is move towards an integrated focus both in terms of policy and organisation. What the sundering of the left into sectarian fragments, which is a present fact, not, as Mr. Foot seems to think, a future possibility, involves is the continued fostering of the illusion that there is no alternative to Wilson's policies. The left must look to its own problems : it must continually hammer out its own suggestions, and then promote them. This is the only realistic way of "putting pressure" on the Government, and until it happens,the incidental outbursts of resentment at this or that intolerably reactionary measure will all be met and deflected by Mr. Wilson, without occasioning him the need for any significant change of policy. 4. Parliamentary cretinism is a polite term compared to that which is necessary to characterise most of today's left. Not the slightest attempt has been made by the overwhelming majority of M.P.'s to do anything at all to mobilise external pressure on the Government. For years more and more of Parliament's perogatives have passed away from it : to the hands of banks and oligarchies, to the executive, to the international organisations, and of course through them to Washington. Parliament no longer knits the bourgeoisie into a coherent grouping : the concentration of economic power does this outside its confines. In a world in which their leaders were hemmed in and surrounded by such hostile forces, one would have thought that M.P.'s would have sensed the need to mobilise some effective countervailing power at the grass-roots. Not soe The only significant demonstration of socialist activists, that on Vietnam, was carefully handed over to Mr. Wilson by its parliamentary spokesmen almost as a thanksoffering for his piddling peace mission. 5. They haven't known anyhow. the complete mental laziness of empirical British socialism was sharply revealed by Ermanual Shinwell in his autobiography, when he wrote that in 1945 he arrived
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