John McAllion with Frances Curran
The Death Of Labour
by John McAllion
I joined the Labour Party in Dundee in the late 1970’s when many socialists
believed that the party still represented the best hope for socialist
advance and for redistributing wealth and power in favour of working
people.
Callaghan’s right-wing, exhausted and politically bankrupt Labour government
was then heading towards an epoch changing defeat at the hands of a Tory
opposition reborn and restored under the extreme right wing leadership
of Margaret Thatcher.
Yet at the grassroots level, the Left in the Labour Party were on the
cusp of a challenge that would bring them within touching distance of
controlling the party’s parliamentary selection procedures and tying
the Parliamentary Labour Party to a Left Wing programme that really did
threaten to secure for working people the full fruits of their industry.
The city where I joined Labour was then known as the socialist republic
of Dundee. It defied the Thatcher Government by refusing to sell council
houses. It twinned with the Palestinian town of Nablus and flew the Palestinian
flag over the city chambers at a time when the PLO was being denounced
as terrorist. It massively increased the rate on local businesses so
as to increase spending on apprenticeships and on services for working
class areas in the city.
In the early 1980’s, a group of socialist thinkers that included Jimmy
Reid, Frances Morrell and Professor Peter Townsend, produced a manifesto
in which they identified a class based Labour Party in alliance with
shop stewards and women’s organisations, and with ethnic minority and
other disadvantaged groups, leading Britain toward a radical future in
which the British system of class privilege would be dismantled and replaced
by a new and egalitarian socialist society.
The story of New Labour’s ultimate betrayal of that vision along with
the destruction of the hopes of a generation of working class activists
is for others to tell. Here, I can only set down the slow, accumulative
series of disillusionments that finally forced me to face the truth that
today’s Labour Party is the enemy of socialists and of those who wish
to see what Labour’s 1982 Programme had once called for: “a massive redistribution
of income and wealth” in favour of working people.
The humiliating defeat in the 1983 general election sparked the revival
of right-wing control over Labour. The “dream ticket” leadership of the
now ennobled Barons, Kinnock and Hattersley, saw the miners betrayed
and the expulsion of socialist supporters of Militant begun. The two
modernisers ushered in the politics of “new realism” that saw the socialist1983
manifesto denounced as the longest suicide note in history and the Party
rebranded with a softer, more market friendly image by the sulphurous
Peter Mandelson.
When this lurch back to the right again failed electorally in 1987, the
leadership took the party even further rightwards by ditching nuclear
disarmament, completing the expulsion of Militant supporters and refusing
to support the mass campaign of non-payment of the poll tax. A policy
review process was set up to ditch Labour’s commitment to public ownership
and shadow Chancellor John Smith launched a “prawn cocktail offensive”
designed to woo the City of London and reassure finance and multinational
capital that Labour was on their side.
Yet another right wing failure in 1992 brought about the end of Kinnock
but not of Labour’s continuing jettisoning of any remaining socialist
baggage. John Smith began by introducing reforms designed to weaken the
influence of trade unions within the party. When Blair succeeded him
following his untimely death, the lurch to the right was completed with
the scrapping of Clause 4 and the creation of New Labour committed to
a low tax, deregulated, dynamic market economy.
Missing from the above analysis, of course, is an explanation of why
the Labour Left, so close to seizing control of the party in the early
eighties, should have failed to resist the right wing juggernaut that
ripped the socialist heart out of the party. Partly, it was down to these
changes having taken place during the wilderness of 18 years of opposition.
The focus for many on the Left then was resistance against the class
war being waged by the Thatcher and Major governments rather than on
internal Labour policy changes. Large numbers had in any case given up
on Labour to pursue the fight for socialism elsewhere. For those of us
who remained in the party, the priority remained first defeat the Tories
and then deal with New Labour. Some even clung to the hope that once
safely back in office New Labour might rediscover some socialist purpose.
Any such hope was quickly abandoned when the incoming New Labour government
immediately surrendered political control over the Bank of England, stuck
to Tory spending plans and attacked single parents’ benefit. Any lingering
hopes of socialist change steadily evaporated as first Blair and then
Brown continued to attack the unions, privatise public assets, celebrate
the rich, denigrate the poor and provide militaristic support for US
imperialism around the world.
Even then some of us clung to the hope that Scottish Labour would use
the opportunity of the newly created Scottish Parliament to re-discover
the party’s working class and socialist roots and pursue devolved policies
in support of public ownership and the redistribution of income and wealth
from the rich to the poor.
But yet again eight years of Labour-Liberal Democrat coalitions were
to prove that to be a forlorn hope. Privatisation and pro business policies
were continued under Scottish New Labour management with the added ingredients
of turning means testing into a bedrock party principle and of alienating
and criminalising a generation of Scottish youth who were written off
as anti-social.
The current New Labour campaign in Glasgow East with its focus on crime
and on keeping our prisons packed full of anti-social elements speaks
volumes for a party that long ago abandoned any socialist principle and
now clings loyally to an economic and social system that is the real
cause of the poverty and inequality that haunts Glasgow’s East End.
New Labour’s candidate in the by-election was one of the chief movers
in the Scottish Parliament who secured the defeat of the SSP’s anti-Iraq
war motion in 2003. She was personally involved in ensuring the Parliament’s
support for the illegal attack on Iraq that to date has claimed the lives
of over a million innocent victims. That obviously does not trouble her
conscience. It was the final straw that ultimately led me to quit a party
I had served for more than a quarter of a century.
It is the best political decision I ever made. The fight for socialism
goes on, but it goes on in the SSP and apart and away from the New Labour
careerists who over the past generation have utterly destroyed what was
left of the British Road to Socialism.