<Next: The Conservative Party>
<Prev: Introduction>
<Back to Contents>
The Labour Party was never "socialist", however you understand that word. From its birth it has been the parliamentary mouthpiece for the trade unions, or rather, their bureaucracies. Early indications of its role can be seen in the First World War. In August 1914 they denounced war as unjustifiable. Soon they had entered the War Cabinet, and condoned the crushing of the 1916 Easter Uprising in Ireland and the execution of the Irish socialist James Connolly. By 1918 the Labour leaders were able to declare that "the Labour Party is not a class party but a National Party".
With the massive increase in the Labour vote in 1922, one might have thought (though not us!) that the Party would have become more adventurous. Henderson, the Party Secretary, said: "Trade unions should undertake not to seek to alter existing conditions by declaring a strike". What fighting talk!
In the November 1922 elections , Labour again made great advances. Another Labour leader stated that a "Labour Government...would not be a class government". He went on to defend the British Empire as something that "we cannot lightly cast...off at all".
By 1923 Labour was able to form a minority government with Liberal support. Its first action as a government was the signing of the Dawes report, the Allied bankers' measure against the revolution in Germany. The 1924 dockers' strike was smashed by the government. In 1925, a successful miners' strike under a Conservative government had the Labour leader Ramsay Macdonald spluttering that : "The Government have handed over the appearance at any rate of victory, to the very forces that sane, well-considered, thoroughly well-considered socialism feels to be probably its greatest enemy".
In 1929 the Labour Party once again took power with a minority. The incoming government took a leading part in reducing the wages of textile workers. They applied the Tory Trade Union Act to strikers; they passed the Anomalies Act against the unemployed (over 1.25 million at the time). They endorsed the arrest of 31 workers' leaders in India. By 1930 they had agreed to the arrest of 10,000 Indian Nationalists. Strikes and uprisings in Egypt, Palestine and Nigeria were crushed.
But the heights, or rather depths, of Labour rule came in 1931. The economic crisis had the Labour government considering raising unemployment contributions, cutting insurance benefits to 26 weeks of the year, cutting teachers' pay, reducing spending on roads and grants under the Unemployment Grants Scheme, and the most crucial, a 10% cut in dole. Some in the Cabinet rejected this, so Macdonald dissolved the government and set up a "National Government" in coalition with Tories and Liberals. In doing so, he and other ministers and MPs split from the Labour Party. An election confirmed them in power. The remaining Labour leaders had been too heavily involved in Macdonald and Snowden's policies and continued to defend their role in the Labour government. The treachery of Macdonald, rising unemployment and the looming threat of fascism failed to bring them to a more radical position. The prevailing ideas in the Labour Party were "Macdonaldism without Macdonald" in the following years.
Labour won a massive election victory in 1945. Within 6 days of taking office they had sent troops into the London docks to break a strike. Three months later troops were again called out against a national docks strike. The antagonism between dockers and the Labour government came to a head in 1948 when Labour used the old Tory Emergency Powers Act and again sent in the troops. Other striking workers were also subject to strike-breaking by troops during Labour's term of office. Abroad, Labour helped Dutch imperialism by sending in troops to crush an Indonesian nationalist uprising. They used surrendered Japanese troops to back them up in this dirty business. They again employed Japanese troops to crush the Saigon workers' uprising in 1945.
The re-run of slavish devotion to the needs of capitalism came with the 1964-1970 Wilson government. It put means testing forward in its policies on social services; it pioneered the abolition of free milk for schools; it tried to bring in an anti-strike act; its housing record was appalling, and it backed everything the USA did in Vietnam.
The Wilson and Callaghan governments between 1974 and 1979 proved no different. Unemployment continued to rise; the numbers of the poor continued to increase; public expenditure on roads, transport, housing, etc fell drastically. The monetarist policies implemented by the Thatcher government were pioneered under Callaghan. Wage restraint resulted in a massive revolt among public sector workers.
When Neil Kinnock became Labour leader he presided over a party where changes were already taking place. The old ideas of welfarism and nationalisation which had given Labour some sort of pseudo-socialist veneer were beginning to crumble. Kinnock came out in clear support for Government secrecy during the Zircon-Duncan Campbell episode in 1987. The Labour leadership implied that the US military presence in Britain was OK. Official support to the miners was refused during the Great Miners' Strike of 1984-85. Kinnock also proposed a National Assessment, a repeat of Callaghan's Social Contract which had led to wage restraint and 1.5 million unemployed.
But the changes that spelt a clear end to allegiance to the Welfare State were to be carried through to their conclusion with the new leadership under Tony Blair (elected in 1994). The document Labour into power: a framework for partnership launched in January 1997 completed the changes that have come about within the Laboutr Party. The reforms outlined in this are part of the "Americanisation" of Labour, the finishing touches to turning it into a US-style Democrat Party. The annual conference would become a "showcase" rally where the Great Leader gives a stirring soundbite speech, with plenty of happy-clappy loyal supporters. And indeed this was graphically illustrated at the first Party Conference after taking power, in September 1997.
The leadership planned on clipping the wings of the old National Executive Committee (NEC) by stripping it of its powers and blocking what remains of the Labour left from influencing it. This watered-down NEC would zealously support any Labour leadership and never cause it embarrassment. In this strategy the leadership has been blocked by the Left, who managed to capture a number of seats at the 1998 Conference. This victory will be short-lived , as the leadership thinks of new ways of marginalising and weakening the Left. The leadership have to be victorious in this, as the transformation of Labour depends on the defeat of Old Labour.
The union link will be further weakened, and Blair will try hard to get membership of his Party based on individual membership. Indeed, one group of "modernisers", the 500-strong Second Term group, is pushing for the divorce between the Party and the unions to be final. They hope to capitalise on pronouncements by "left" trade union bureaucrats like Ken Cameron of the Fire Brigades Union, who for their own reasons want a divorce. Phil Woodford, a director of Second Term, said in September 1999 that he believed "the break with the unions will happen in the next five years". The old Labour left around Benn, Skinner and co. will continue to be marginalised, a minority increasingly unwelcome inside the Party.
The accelerated rotting of old-style Labourism has taken place because, like similar parties throughout the world, it cannot adapt to the end of Keynesian economic strategy, which involved the development of a Welfare State and "full employment". It can no longer make any promises that it can carry out a reformist programme to transform capitalism into something more "humane" (but still exploitative). But even mild reforms cannot now be granted under capitalism because of the development of the global economy. If the boss class is to stay competitive on a world scale it cannot offer concessions. It has to press ahead with its austerity packages and redundancies, in order to streamline national economies and make them leaner and meaner, able to stand up to a bout in the global economic ring.
Labour, unlike the Conservatives, is fairly united on Europe. A large section of the British boss class realises that its best chances are inside the European bloc. It needs access to these markets. It thinks it can rely on Labour to help this come about. Integration into a Single Market will mean even further attacks on the working-class. The bosses hope Labour can oversee these attacks. Blair is planning more repressive police actions, more people sent to prison for longer, greater State surveillance. He was elected in a situation of continuing mass unemployment and increasing poverty. Indeed the situation has become worse with the worsening economic situation worldwide. Gordon Brown, Labour's Chancellor, has promised that he will not increase income tax on the top 10%. He announced that there would be no "blank cheques" and that public sector workers could expect no more than the graduated 3.3% pay increase already promised by the Conservatives. Labour will need increased police powers as he attempts to carry on the work already put into operation by the Conservatives, the attacks on living standards, wages and benefits against which many may decide to act.
Blair sent out messages via his conference speeches and his comments on redundancies in the North-East that he does not intend to apply state intervention against the "natural" workings of the world market. He signalled in his conference speech that more attacks would be coming on workers in education and the public sector.
We noted before the 1997 election that an incoming Labour government would very quickly exhibit strong authoritarian tendencies. This has come true in various Cabinet pronouncements, particularly those of Blair and Home Secretary Jack Straw. New measures under the guise of "anti-terrorism", in the aftermath of the 1998 Omagh bombing, will weaken civil liberties and can be easily used against "the enemy within" - anyone who dares to struggle against the measures of repression and austerity that Labour will attempt to implement. The so-called Left within the Labour Party could only muster a handful of votes against these new repressive measures.
Labour has increasingly moved in to occupy the political ground of the Conservatives. This has resulted in a considerable weakening of the Tories. At the same time other parties, in particular the Scottish and Welsh nationalists, and the Liberal Democrats to a certain extent, are moving into the space vacated by Labour in its "Old Labour" guise.
If anything, the overwhelming victory of the Blair leadership has strengthened the hand of the modernisers. Old-style Labour activists are continuing to leave the Party in droves, whilst Blair is aiming at Tory and Liberal Democrat constituencies to replenish its base. He has made several open appeals to these sectors. This will further strengthen the trend towards "modernisation" although the Party, transforming as it is into a US Democrat-style machine, will rely more on soundbites, spin doctors and controlled events than on an activist base.
The Trotskyists in the main have talked about a crisis of expectations with the coming to power of Labour. They hoped that the working-class had voted for Labour with great expectations of radical and levelling reforms. In fact, in some areas there was mass working-class abstention, whilst the victory of Labour depended to a great extent on a willingness to vote out the Conservative government. The Trots hoped that these mythical expectations would be transformed into disappointment and then radicalisation. In this fake scenario, they talk about Labour betrayals. But Labour never betrayed in the first place. The Blair leadership made its intentions clear long before the 1997 election. There were no massive cuts in the arms bill, no repeal of repressive legislation, no moves towards taxing the rich. Even mild reforms, for example a fox-hunting ban, have been abandoned. The Labour government has shown itself an enthusiastic ally of the USA, eagerly assisting in war moves against Serbia and Iraq. The "ethical dimension" to foreign policy of Robin Cook has been shown to be a complete sham with the continued supplying of arms to Indonesia, as well as Bahrain, Zimbabwe, Colombia, Sri Lanka, etc. Labour has continued to maintain strict control over asylum seekers and economic migrants. Blair continues to send out strong messages that Labour is a friend of big business by his many conferences and sponsored meals with businessmen, and the Government's friendly attitude to the CBI.
In the long-term, the transformation of Labour may well open up new opportunities for the construction of movements based on anti-parliamentarism and direct action. Already growing numbers of people, whether ecological activists or workplace militants, are seeing that they cannot rely on lobbying or pressure on Parliament and are increasingly turning to such tactics. It is up to revolutionary anarchists to do their utmost to help create this movement. The Labour government threatens many grim scenarios for us, the working-class, but also new possibilities for a revolutionary alternative.