Blairites Victory over Brown means certain defeat by John Wight
http://www.socialistunity.com/?p=5136
Harold Wilson’s sage words that a week is a long time in politics have never been truer than this past week, which in terms of the upcoming general election in a few months’ time will undoubtedly prove to be among the most significant in determining its outcome. For during it the final seeds of Labour’s almost inevitable defeat have been sown and now surely nothing short of a miracle can succeed in turning their fortunes around.
The first of those seeds was planted with the attempted leadership coup initiated by former cabinet ministers Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt. Though a crude attempt, it succeeded in placing the Blairites within Brown’s government back in the ascendancy and reversing Brown’s orientation to the core Labour vote with a menu of Keynesian economic measures to tackle the recession, involving progressive taxation, wealth redistribution, and government investment, married to an effective attack on the privileged backgrounds of the occupants of the Tory front benches at the same time. Now, at the insistence of the chancellor, Alistair Darling, swingeing cuts are on the agenda, along with the new buzz word of aspiration at the insistence of Mandelson, a man who still harks back to 1997 and the glory days of Tony Blair and his passage into Downing Street on the back of middle England.
As if this wasn’t enough, the ongoing Chilcot Inquiry into the war in Iraq is starting to blow up in Gordon Brown’s face after Alastair Campbell’s appearance. By firmly reminding the nation that in the run up to the war the prime minister was in the loop when it came to key meetings and the decision making process, the war has returned to haunt the present government like the ghost of Christmas past. Indeed, with Tony Blair’s imminent appearance on the horizon, it’s a fair guess that Gordon Brown will be finding a peaceful night’s sleep hard to come by at present.
The damage that the war has done to Labour’s prospects was further illustrated on the most recent edition of Question Time, when former anti-apartheid activist Peter Hain was handed a roasting over the war by both the audience and the panel that he isn’t likely to forget in quite some time. The irony of the likes of Kelvin MacKenzie and Ken Clarke articulating the antiwar argument in no uncertain terms should not be lost on those who continue to believe in Labour as a progressive alternative to the Conservatives. The truth is that ideologically and economically, with the Blairites reasserting their dominance, there is little if anything to choose between them.
As Thatcher herself affirmed at the end of her political career, her most significant achievement in politics was the creation of New Labour, which in effect put an end to the Labour Party as the political expression of collectivist ideas within British society and brought with it the advent of Britain, following the example of the US, as a one party state with two right wings. Indeed, when Tony Blair took political centre stage, he did so as the capitalist embodiment of the aphorism: ‘Cometh the hour. Cometh the man’.
The free market fundamentalism of the Thatcher-Reagan era had succeeded in defeating and de-clawing the organised working class in both countries. It also brought into being the conscious underdevelopment of the southern hemisphere as the condition for the super profits of the northern, in line with the prerogatives of that extreme variant of capitalism, neoliberalism, which reflected the global economic, military, and political dominance of the United States in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Yet while Thatcher’s nakedly anti-working class and anti-trade union policies, which manifested in the unleashing of a class war, may have succeeded in leaving the organised British working class beleagured and demoralised, they also led to her eventual undoing when, imbued with the arrogance of victory, she made the mistake of implementing the Poll Tax. It was a tax so draconian and iniquitous it rejuvenated and united a class whose defeat had largely been the result of her previous policy of taking it on a section at a time. However, by the time of her eventual defeat and ousting from Downing Street in 1990, when she was replaced by a less than able successor in the shape of John Major, the ideological battle with the Labour Party had been won. Blair assumed the leadership of the party after the death of John Smith in 1994 and abandoned Clause IV in 1995. Along with it came the refusal to pledge the repeal Thatcher’s anti-union laws and a commitment to privatisation and the needs of big business and the City, reflected in the handing over of the control of interest rates to the Bank of England. For the first time in its history the Labour Party turned it face away from the trade unions, in whose interests it was originally formed, and instead focused on attracting the support of a growing middle class in line with the growth of Britain’s financial, property, and service sectors at the expense of manufacturing and industry.
In this, Blair and his coterie of New Labour acolytes were inspired by Bill Clinton and the so-called New Democrats over in the States. Young, fresh, and idealistic, at the beginning of the nineties they’d replaced a decade of government under Republican administrations which had left American society battered and bruised. The same was true of Britain at the time of Blair’s ascent to Downing Street in 1997. The common denominator behind the disintegration of both societies was the free market structural adjustment of their respective economies throughout the eighties, responsible for the biggest transfer of wealth from the poorest sectors of society to the wealthiest since the 19th century. Under the new incumbents this transfer of wealth continued. In 1997, the year New Labour came to power, Britain’s richest 1,000 citizens were worth a combined wealth of £98 billion. Ten years later those same richest 1,000 were worth a combined wealth of just over £300bn - a staggering 204 per cent increase. Measures to alleviate poverty at the other end of the scale – such as the minimum wage – have merely succeeded in institutionalising low pay.
The intellectual foundation of Labour’s transformation, promoted utilising all of the slick marketing techniques associated with the promotion of a new range of cosmetics on the High Street, was the centrist doctrine known as the Third Way. It is a doctrine which claims to transcend left and right wing politics through a synthesis of the two, combining the supposed best of free market economic principals – innovation, risk-taking, competition, wealth creation – and those of social democracy – meritocracy, social justice denoted as equality of opportunity, emphasis on tackling poverty via introduction of work-related benefits such as tax incentives, increased decentralization, emphasis on community, and the contraction of welfare sold as a moral crusade to help the poor drag themselves up.
The universal and supposed ideology-free Third Way came to prominence in the mid to late 1990s in tandem with the ‘End of History’ era of globalisation, the benign-sounding name given to that extreme variant of laissez faire capitalism which, in its modern incarnation, evolved in response to the falling rate of profit throughout the industrialised world from the late sixties onwards and the outsourcing of industry to the developing world which followed. Capital was given unfettered access to markets and investment opportunities around the world, wherever they may be, regardless of the impact on local economies, exports, and the devastating impact of poverty on local populations. As mentioned it was an economic doctrine which reflected the economic hegemony of the United States, one resulting in a mountain of cheap imports flooding the industrialised word, driven by hyperconsumerism funded by the increased availability of consumer credit. This consumer credit slowly but surely replaced real wages within both the US and Britain, with the resulting debt bubble spawning an era of unregulated and evermore complicated financial markets, before crashing in late 2007.
Tony Blair and New Labour were determined that Britain would follow America’s example in order to reap a seemingly endless seam of prosperity from that mystical phenomenon, the free market. The City of London was effectively handed control of the British economy, as it sought to match its Wall Street counterpart in risk and unfettered trading on the money markets.
In other words, Blairism was and is nothing more than Thatcherism in a modern packaging. Initially, it was able to ride along on the continued economic growth produced by a virtual economy of financial services, stock market speculation, and the booming property market of the 1990s, which continued into the new decade. Thatcher had already done the dirty work of uprooting the nation’s manufacturing base and exporting it overseas in response to the crisis in capitalism of the 1970s; the fall in the rate of profit bringing an end to the so-called ‘Keynesian consensus’, which had constituted the lynchpin of the nation’s economy since the Second World War.
But now that this 30-year cycle of free market economic growth has collapsed, New Labour’s ideological foundations are in ruins. The consequence of this has been the utter confusion and disarray within the ranks of the government, which this week reached its nadir with the volte face that took place in its orientation back to Blairite orthodoxies of aspiration and the embracement of corporate power after a brief period of a return to something approaching Old Labour class based politics.
In concrete terms the degeneration of the Labour Party is embodied in a membership which fell by half between 1997 and 2005. Married to that are voter turnouts which over the course of Labour’s time in office have fallen by 20% since 1997, when Blair came to power with an overwhelming 43.2% of the vote.
Ideologically, the likes of Mandelson, Milliband, Johnson, and the still sizeable constituency within the ranks of the PLP and that diminishing circle of corporate and big business leaders which they represent, are a clear impediment to the leftward shift that had to take place if Labour were to have had any chance of halting David Cameron’s passage into Downing Street this year. Brown and his allies in government, Ed Balls and Nick Brown, had shown signs of trying to make that shift over the past few weeks, but the coup and its aftermath has effectively put an end to it, returning Labour back to the free market terrain it has occupied for the past 13 years.
The question the left has to grapple with now is if it is really appropriate to ask a working class which has endured a continuation of Thatcher’s neoliberal assault under New Labour to cast a vote in support of this party at the next election?
Given the last 13 years, such a policy seems as perverse as asking a woman to return to live with an abusive husband as a better alternative to making a fresh start.
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