There are aspects of Labour's 2019 election campaign that remind me of Theresa May's 2017 election campaign. The most obvious example of her 2017 campaign was the policy on elderly care, which she had to almost immediately retract, whilst insisting that “Nothing has changed, nothing has changed.” It meant that the Tories could be continually attacked for this policy having announced it, but that, in retracting it, whilst claiming that nothing had changed, they were also then seen as dithering and duplicitous. That was just on one policy, but today, Labour seems to have fallen into that trap on a whole series of policies.
Part of the background to the Tory problems under Theresa May was that she had a large number of right-wing MP's, though they did not form a majority of her parliamentary party. What they did represent was the vast majority of Tory party members, and Tory voters. That is what tied her hands over Brexit. Labour faces a similar, but worse problem. On the one hand, Corbyn, and the small number of MP's around him that support his political standpoint, are massively isolated within the PLP. But, Corbyn, and his parliamentary allies, do reflect the politics of the vast majority of Labour Party members, and the majority of Labour voters. At least, they do when it comes to things like the NHS, trades union rights, education, ownership of the railways, energy companies, water companies and so on. But, the problem for Corbyn, and many of his parliamentary backers, is that they do not represent the vast majority of party members, and Labour voters, when it comes to the crucial issue of the day, which is Brexit. The core Cobynite bloc in parliament is divided between Corbyn himself, and his Stalinoid backers centred in his office, and their connections to Len McCluskey, and on the other hand, those like McDonnell, Abbott, Thornberry and Lewis who are much closer to the party membership in opposing Brexit. That explains the confusion, dither and obfuscation over Labour's Brexit position that is likely to lose it the election. It comes down to the same requirement for party management over principle that also scuppered David Cameron, and forced him to have the referendum in the first place.
But, its not just over Brexit that this confusion, dither and backtracking has been seen. It has been a feature of Corbyn's leadership over the last four years. The first thing that Corbyn should have done was to ensure that the enthusiasm that was unleashed in 2015 was channelled positively, turning the party outwards into local communities, so as to begin the long-term work of winning people over to socialist ideas. We were promised that Labour was going to do just that, to build a large social movement, rather than be focused purely on parliamentary activity. It has done the opposite. The largest social movement seen in the last four years – The People's Vote Campaign – was organised by Liberals and Blair-rights, not by Labour, which studiously avoided involvement with it, or building a more principled, socialist alternative to it. Instead, Labour has backtracked, triangulated, dithered and obfuscated on the issue. It has essentially appeased reactionary nationalist sentiments over the question, under cover of wanting to bring unity, rather than taking a principled position and fighting militantly for it.
The other thing that Labour needed to have done, and which should have flowed naturally from the above, was to bring new life into Labour branches and constituencies, and by extension also into trades union branches. It needed to democratise and renew the labour movement itself. It has again done the opposite. Given the influence of Stalinoid forces within the trades union movement itself, particularly within UNITE, that is not at all surprising. The whole modus operandii of Stalinism is via bureaucratism, and top down control. Despite the large influx of new members, reports from across the country indicate that actual attendance at local branch and CLP meetings remains not significantly altered from what it was before Corbyn was elected. Large numbers of people are mobilised on the ground for elections, but this again emphasises the nature of what has been built as being a purely parliamentarist, electoralist machine, not a social movement, permanently mobilised and turned outwards. It again conforms to the basic Stalinoid model that sees large scale involvement by the membership only in terms of them fulfilling the role of foot soldiers when required. So, when it comes to party conference, for example, the last thing the leadership, and the trades union barons want is for those tens of thousands of party members to be actively involved, in making decisions.
That was manifest in relation to Brexit, where first the party leadership prevented it being on the conference agenda to be discussed, then when they were no longer able to do that, they used the trades union block vote from UNITE to push through a composite motion that enabled the leadership to continue to obfuscate for another year, and then, this year, we saw the refusal to hold a card vote, when it looked like the leadership's further obfuscated position looked likely to be defeated. One vote that did go through, by a large majority, however, was the decision to defend Free Movement, but here we have seen not only sections of the party leadership obfuscate over including that in the Manifesto, and try to water it down, but we have seen McCluskey come out openly to demand that the conference decision must be ignored! That is totally in line with McCluskey's Stalinoid, reactionary nationalist politics over Brexit. He insists that the referendum vote of reactionaries, which won by only a small majority, must be upheld at all costs, whilst demanding that the large majority vote of Labour members be ignored. Stalinoid theory and practice in a nutshell.
A rejuvenated labour movement would not only have ensured that right-wing Labour councillors were replaced, providing a basis for local resistance struggles against the Tories, but it would have ensured that right-wing and Blair-right MP's were deselected via a process of mandatory reselection. But, in the same way that Corbyn, and those around him, appeased right-wing and reactionary elements over Brexit, they also capitulated and backtracked over deselection too. It has been a feature of Corbyn's leadership. Faced with Tory media criticism over his position on Ireland, he and McDonnell, backtracked and capitulated, offering up rather pathetic explanations of their position as being about wanting merely to be impartial arbiters seeking peace. Put under pressure in relation to the Monarchy, again Corbyn capitulated. When the Tories supported by Blair-rights and Liberals saw an easy way of attacking Corbyn vicariously, by attacking party members on the grounds of supposed anti-Semitism, Corbyn again capitulated, and hung out his supporters to dry, thereby, as always only emboldening the witchhunters to step up the hyperbole and intensity of the attacks, until they ended up at Corbyn's door itself. Corbyn was assisted in that by Lansman's Momentum Company, a further example of a top down bureaucratic organisation, whose focus is almost exclusively geared to electioneering.
This is a weak, unprincipled and dithering leadership. It is reaping what it has sown. As with the 2017 election, and the European Parliament elections, earlier this year, what we have seen is the same old Blair-right, and soft left candidates being reselected. In a small number of seats, where the incumbent was standing down, we have seen candidates imposed from above, often meaning that the Stalinoid dominated party machinery has put its apparatchiks in place, almost guaranteeing that, in the near future, these candidates will come into conflict with local party members. No wonder, around 100,000 party members have left, and the large ground campaign, now being waged, is likely to simply lead to even greater burn out and demoralisation, when all of those efforts go to waste, because of the party leadership's reactionary position on Brexit, and its confused and dithering position on other major issues.
Immigration and Free Movement
If we take the issue of immigration and free movement, the party conference was clear. We are in favour of free movement, and that means scrapping immigration controls. That applies whether Britain is in the EU or not. The argument put forward by Labour leaders that free movement ends if Britain leaves the Single Market is nonsense. If Britain is outside the EU, it is perfectly free to scrap all immigration controls, and so enable free movement. It should do so, because all immigration controls are racist; racism is the problem, not race.
Yet, McCluskey wants Labour to ignore the large majority at conference that voted for that position, and instead to implement immigration controls. That is consistent with his Stalinoid, reactionary, nationalist politics that effectively lines workers up along national lines with their own domestic capitalist class, in opposition to the workers of other countries. It is the same reactionary nationalist ideology that is behind Brexit, that separates off workers in Britain from their EU comrades, and instead calls on them to join with British capitalists, and the British capitalist state, in competition with those other workers. It is the same reactionary nationalist agenda that was behind the Communist Party's “British Road To Socialism”, and the demands for import controls and so on that comprised the Alternative Economic Strategy. Those that propose these solutions may not be explicitly, and consciously racists – though the same demands are raised by those on the far-right, who are – but the demands themselves are racist. They say to British workers that they have more in common with British bosses than they do with foreign workers; they say that the problems they face, as workers, are not due to capitalism, but are due to foreigners. They are necessarily racist.
The suggestion by some Labour leaders that there can be some kind of “non-racist” immigration controls is nonsense. Len McCluskey has claimed that the only people who benefit from free movement are bosses, who use it to undercut workers pay and conditions. That is clearly not true. An unemployed worker on Tyneside, for example, who moves to London, where there are jobs, and often better paid jobs, clearly benefits from free movement, a right that workers had to fight hard and long to achieve as against their feudal masters who wanted to keep local labour supplies penned up. The same demand was made by employers in the 19th century, who even when workers were starving, in the early 1840's, wanted to prevent them emigrating to the United States, Canada and elsewhere, via the Emigration Societies that the trades unions and Chartists organised. Tens of thousands of Irish workers and peasants benefited from their ability to emigrate freely to the United States, rather than face starvation due to the Potato Famine. In the 1980's, when Thatcher brought mass unemployment back to Britain, thousands of British workers benefited from being able to move freely to Germany and elsewhere, to obtain employment, as dramatised in Auf Widersehen Pet.
Thousands of Polish, Romanian and other EU workers, previously trapped in low paying employment, or unemployment, have benefited from free movement by being able to move to jobs across the EU. But, McCluskey has no interest in these workers, because he is a reactionary nationalist, not an international socialist. For him, and those that think like him, these foreign workers do not count. The short-term answer to the low paying employers in Britain, is not to prevent our fellow workers from elsewhere being able to come here to work, but is to ensure that all workers can be unionised, and obtain trades union rates of pay, it is to introduce a decent level of minimum weekly wage, and ensure that it can be enforced. But the real solution is to end the system of wage labour altogether, so that instead of haggling over the price to be paid for our labour-power, we take control over the means of production themselves, and use them for the benefit of the whole of society rather than simply to produce profits, and the interest and dividends of a miniscule minority. That socialist answer is the last thing on the minds of nationalists and bureaucrats like McCluskey.
The Four Day Week
A classic example of the confusion, dithering and backtracking of Labour, almost identical to May's farce over elderly care, is the proposal for a four-day week. The proposal is eminently sensible. Microsoft Japan introduced a 4-day week in August and saw its productivity rocket by 40%. The same thing was seen in the 1970's three-day week, when output fell by much less than the 40% that would have been expected. Yet, instead of arguing confidently for the measure, Labour spokespeople have been shamefaced, dithering and backtracked. We are told that it is something that will only be an aspiration to be achieved over ten years; Jonathan Ashworth, the Shadow Health Secretary has flatly contradicted John McDonnell on the issue in relation to whether it will apply to the NHS, whilst May like pronouncing that the two positions are identical, and so “nothing has changed”.
Its quite obvious that the 4-day week does not mean that all workers would clock off on a Thursday, though that is what Microsoft did, which meant they made savings on heating, lighting and power for the extra day. In the NHS, there would obviously be people working on Fridays, just as now there are people working on Saturdays and Sundays. It only means that each individual worker gets to work just four days a week, though which four days will change. In the short term, it may indeed mean that additional workers have to be employed. That's one reason that Brexit has to be stopped, so that these additional workers are available from across the EU. But, as Microsoft showed, such reductions in work-time always result in increased productivity, so that the number of additional workers will be reduced. Microsoft reduced the work week by 20%, but got a 40% increase in productivity, meaning actually it required fewer workers to do the previous volume of work.
Labour arguments in support of the 4 day week have again been confused, dithering and backtracking. They have the argument the wrong way around. They argue that the working week can be gradually reduced as productivity rises, but all experience, going back more than 200 years, shows that it is reductions in working time, and rises in wages that bring about the rise in productivity, not vice versa. If businesses find that they have to pay workers higher wages, or what amounts to the same thing, if they have to employ more workers, because workers work fewer hours, it is that which encourages them to find more efficient ways of producing, to invest in research to develop new labour saving machines and so on, and it is that which brings about the rise in productivity. By contrast, if wages are low, or workers have to work long hours, there is no incentive for businesses to innovate, to introduce new labour saving machines and so on. That is why the low wage economy that has been built in Britain over the last thirty years has meant that we have such appallingly low levels of productivity today, where on average a worker in France or Germany produces as much in four days, as a British worker does in five.
Labour has put this proposal out there, thereby allowing the Tories to attack it, but because it has not properly thought out why it wants to introduce this measure, as soon as the Tories attack it, Labour has backtracked, dithered and obfuscated so that it gets the worst of both worlds.
The same approach can be seen across large swathes of Labour's programme. It is systemic. I have previously described what is wrong with Labour's programme for nationalisation, for example. The same with the proposal to transfer 10% of shares to workers. These are vastly expensive and unnecessary measures. Yes, the shares of companies can be effectively converted to bonds, so that the government gets the dividends on the shares not the shareholders, and looked at from the perspective of the Balance Sheet, the additional government debt is matched by an increase in its assets, but it still represents a significant short term increase in the debt on that Balance Sheet, and that debt could have been used more effectively in other ways to rebuild the country's infrastructure etc., rather than handing over hundreds of billions of Pounds to shareholders to buy their shares.
Instead of such an expensive measure, the government only needs to reform company law on corporate governance so as to remove the unjustified right of shareholders to elect Boards of Directors and so on. It should simply make sure that Boards of Directors are elected by a company's workers and managers. That would extend democracy then to all companies and corporations, not just those that Labour proposes to nationalise, and there would be no cost to do so.
Labour has had four years to have been thinking through all of these policies, but it has come up with a badly thought out mish-mash of half measures and compromises, which, like its Brexit policy, falls between two stools. Because its policies have not been properly thought out, and because it has a mentality of compromise, and appeasement, whenever it comes up against opposition, it fails to be able to clearly and militantly defend those policies. On Brexit, at least, now its position is clear. The trouble is that having made its position clear, it simply underlines the fact that the position itself is nonsensical. It means a Labour government pushing a pro-Brexit stance of saying it will negotiate its own fantasy Brexit, but then asking voters to vote against it in a referendum! The reason it comes up with this position, is, of course, that Corbyn, McCluskey et al, want to retain the option, ultimately, of themselves arguing, in that referendum, for Brexit. Parties that go into elections on this kind of divided and dishonest basis, rarely win.
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