A New Leadership? - Part 11 of 11

In the June Labour Briefing National Supplement, I wrote a short piece on the decision to go ahead with cuts and rent and rate rises in Stoke, and the failure of the soft Left, including those that were members of NSLB to raise any objection whatsoever. 

At that Labour Group meeting, I had proposed that any decision be postponed until such time that the DLP had discussed the proposals, as was actually required by the party constitution. I noted that there was not one word spoken to support this proposal by the District Party representatives, and 

“Things got worse at the following District Party Meeting. When the part of the agenda for the Labour Group report arrived, it was said that there was no Report! Only when this was challenged by someone asking about the decision to make cuts was an actual report given, and then it was the Leader of the Group who, of course, gave whitewash to the whole thing. Yet soft left District Party Secretary, Andrew Dobraszcyc, who is also Secretary of North Staffs Labour Briefing, was at the Labour Group meeting, and knew what had happened. Just as at the Labour Group meeting, he sat silent, and let the right wing get away with it.” 

It concluded that there were obvious lessons for Briefing in not allowing such people to use it to provide them with left cover. Not long after, as I have previously described, the NSLB group was disaffiliated from the Labour Briefing National Network, and those of us who had been distributing the National Supplement set up a new local Briefing group. 

These are details of what happened 35 years ago in Stoke, but they are more than just historical documents and events. Something similar could be detailed in many other parts of the country of the way, at that time, the soft left acted to betray their former allies in Broad Left organisations, as they sought to accommodate themselves to the Kinnockite regime, and its long march to the right in search of electoral respectability. The same trends exist today, and are arguing similar positions requiring the left to row back on its programme so as to build broad alliances, and to give critical support to Starmer, in a vain hope of him opposing the Right. Those siren calls must be resisted, today, as much as they needed to be resisted in the 1980's. 

In the late 1980's, demobilised, and with the working-class in retreat, large sections of the Left, gave up on the political struggle inside the Labour Party. The Militant used the excuse of expulsions to split from the Labour Party, and set up the Socialist Party, which was a thoroughly adventurist, dead-end exercise. Today, is not the 1980's, and the strategy of the Left must be to stay and fight Starmer's new leadership.

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