ALMOST FOUR years after Tony Blair’s government swept to office promising to "make a difference", many of Labour’s core voters are still waiting impatiently for signs of real change.
Instead Blair’s team, which came in with such a huge majority in the Commons and such a fund of good will, and which has faced little significant opposition, has failed on almost every front.
The government’s own figures confirm that Blair’s first two years saw a widening of the gulf between rich and poor - with an extra 500,000 people dropping below the poverty line even after John Major’s Tories bit the dust. The pitiful level of the much-heralded minimum wage, and the feeble way in which it has been enforced have also contributed to the long-term problem of growing poverty.
Despite Labour’s boasts, an extra 100,000 children have sunk below the poverty line since 1997, bringing the official number to a shameful 3.4 million.
Incomes of the rich have grown three times more than those of the poor: but the biggest losers have been pensioners.
Numbers of pensioners living in poverty rose by 20 percent in Labour’s first two years. Bitter pensioners protested throughout much of 2000 at Labour’s broken pledge to restore the link - which Thatcher broke - between pensions and average earnings.
They were been even more galled to see that they had plunged further down the incomes ladder at the same time as Gordon Brown had been stacking up record unspent surpluses at the Treasury, including a windfall of £22 billion from the sale of new mobile phone franchises.
The private sector has been blatantly strengthening its grip. With privatised railways lurching from crisis to scandal, government whips worked flat out to force through the privatisation of air traffic control. Ministers remain adamant on the part-privatisation of the London tube system despite the supposed climb down on management structure in February.
Labour has privatised more council houses in three years than the Tories did in 18, and this sell-off is set to escalate, while housing costs, especially in the south east, spiral out of control. A growing number of new hospitals are being financed and built by profit-seeking private firms, to lease back to the NHS under the "Private Finance Initiative".
NHS hospital Trusts, struggling to cope with insufficient beds after three grinding years in which Gordon Brown stuck pointlessly to Tory spending limits, are now being told by Alan Milburn to send patients for treatment in private hospitals.
After all the talk of "education, education, education," new Labour has launched a fundamental assault on comprehensive education through its proposals on specialist schools which will result in a major extension of selection. Inner city schools are axing lessons for lack of teachers, and class sizes are rising. Further education is braced for a new round of cost-cutting, and possible bankruptcies as they compete for limited cash for "lifelong learning".
University students and their families - with partial relief for Scottish students - face an upward spiral of debt, and mounting bills for tuition. A Department for Education report found levels of debt among students in 1998-99 were three times higher than during the previous such survey in 1995-96, with 90% of students reporting financial problems. Applications for University places from the poorest families are predictably falling.
New prisons are being built to house growing numbers of detained refugees, while asylum seekers eke out a miserable existence on vouchers as a result of racist restrictions imposed by a Labour government - which still prates hypocritically about the evils of "social exclusion".
Unemployment numbers have been massaged downwards by the continuation of the Tory "job-seekers allowance" system, and increasingly brutal ’workfare’ schemes under the so-called "New Deal". At the same time, jobs are being axed by the thousand far and wide - by car and steel manufacturers, textile firms and banks. New Labour is continuing to "get tough" on the unemployed, with new plans to compel claimants with inadequate reading, writing and arithmetic skills to take a course on pain of losing benefit.
Even democratic reforms which cost next to nothing to implement have been botched and bungled: the abolition of the unelected House of Lords has been followed by a deal with the Tories which has created … a new, smaller, unelected House of Lords. There is no sign at all that Blair intends to move to any elected or accountable second chamber.
The Freedom of Information Act offers no freedom and little new information; instead the party which brought us the Special Patrol Group and the Prevention of Terrorism Act has now brought in new, draconian restrictions on freedom in the Regulation of Investigative Powers Act and the Terrorism Act.
In the workplace, the "Fairness at Work" Employment Rights Act leaves the core of Thatcher’s anti-union laws intact. Section 28 is still a charter for bigots everywhere but Scotland.
Great expectations
Opinion polls at the time of the 1997 election showed that few of those who had swung against the Tories did so believing in the threadbare political doctrine of "New Labour". Most - despite Blair and Brown’s pledges - expected to pay more tax. Many even thought there would be some nationalisation. Above all, people wanted an end to 18 years of mean-spirited Tory rule: they wanted a revival of flagging public services, an end to privatisation, and a government committed to the welfare state.
They have been sorely disappointed. Behind their feeble phrases extolling the value of "partnership" between workers and employers, Blair’s team has continued the Tory government’s craven toadying to big business - the banks, the corporations, the media moguls and the arms peddlers.
The confused and confusing rhetoric arguing for a "third way" in politics has served as the most flimsy smokescreen to mask an eager promotion of Thatcherite neo-liberal policies at home and abroad. Blair has modelled himself on President Clinton - who left a legacy of massive welfare cuts, the failure of half-baked health care reforms, and an extension of new low-paid jobs.
Indeed the "third way" governments are increasingly running into crisis arising precisely from their conservative and reactionary programmes: Blair’s prize pupil, Germany’s SPD Chancellor Schroder, is still looking for ways to hold down pensions and cut public sector spending in order to finance his programme of tax cuts.
Whatever the rhetoric of "partnership" and "community" bridging the gap between the two main classes in capitalist society, the harsh realities keep coming back to the surface.
Blair’s ignorant efforts to rewrite the history of the Labour Party, as part of his drive to reverse the 100-year old split from the Liberals, have run alongside New Labour’s increasing alienation from its traditional working class base of electoral support, and the promotion of coalition deals with Liberal Democrats in Scotland and Wales. But top Tories have also been courted by Blair, not least in the periods of campaigning to pave the way for the European single currency, and it is clear that Blair’s long-term coalitionist ambitions include a merger with the Clarke-Heseltine wing of the Conservative Party.
In this blurring of party lines, Blair revisits many of the themes of his late and unlamented predecessor Ramsay MacDonald, the Labour Prime Minister elected in 1929, who in 1931 formed a coalition with the Tories in order to force through an austerity package including cuts in unemployment benefit. The deal split the Labour Party, and led to its greatest-ever electoral debacle (winning only 52 seats in October 1931) - and 14 years of Tory rule.
In 1924, in the turbulent years leading up to the 1926 General Strike, MacDonald consistently argued against strikes for increased wages. He complained that workers "are tempted to forget that they are all interdependent members of a social unity, and that consequently they only injure themselves by punishing those against whom they have a grievance to such an extent that they injure the society to which they belong."
A socialist, according to MacDonald "Does not stop the life of society in order to try new experiments or to put a brand new system into operation. … He has ideals and they guide him, and he rejects everything of the nature of violent breaks and brand new systems. He is an evolutionist par excellence…"
New Labour, like latter-day MacDonalds, have held a consistent line of opposition to the struggles of the working class, and steadfast resistance to any sweeping or radical changes. The refusal of Labour shadow ministers to back the demands of the striking Liverpool dockers and Hillingdon Hospital workers in the closing years of Major’s government showed exactly what side of the barricades they would be on from May 1997.
Three years’ later, ministers’ initial refusal to compromise with the fuel protestors during their first blockades in September can be understood at least in part as a knee-jerk reaction against what they saw as mass picketing. This stand followed John Prescott’s earlier hostility to the blockades of Channel ports by French farmers and lorry drivers, in which he had also asserted the "rights" of British lorry drivers and holidaymakers to travel unimpeded through France at any time they choose, disregarding any rights of French workers to strike and protest.
Since 1997 New Labour ministers have consistently tried to persuade other EU governments and global bodies to embrace even more neo-liberal policies of "flexibility of labour", pointing to the alleged success of these "reforms" in Britain. The reluctance and inability of other EU governments to do so is based most decisively on their estimate of the level of trade union and working class resistance, as shown in struggles in France and across Europe since 1995. Nothing could underline more clearly just how much Blair’s government now takes for granted and depends on the Thatcherite legacy of anti-union laws.
This is why the so-called "Fairness at Work" legislation - brought in as a sop to keep the union leaders obedient to New Labour - offers such a measly extension of union rights, leaving the whip hand with employers, and unions vulnerable to intervention from the courts as we saw during the recent strike action in defence of safety on London Underground.
The contemptuous attitude which ministers have shown to the trade unions is partly based on their (accurate) assessment that the union leaders are too cowardly and politically weak to fight back. But it also shows their willingness and determination to exploit Thatcher’s defeat of the miners, and the other body blows that were struck at trade union organisation during the 18 years of Tory rule.
Long yellow line
Blair’s is by no means the first Labour government to set out an unashamed pro-capitalist agenda, or to work hand in glove with large union-bashing employers. Labour has always been a party pledged to reform - but above all to uphold - capitalism.
The post-war Labour government may have nationalised many bankrupt industries, but it also used anti-union laws against strikers. It soon demoralised and antagonised sufficient support to lose its landslide majority, and open the doors for another 13 years of Tory governments.
Harold Wilson’s government, elected in 1964, launched a frenzied witch-hunt to smash the 1966 seafarers’ strike, and then attempted to impose anti-union laws in 1969. His government returned in 1974, only to impose successive rounds of pay limits which served to cut workers’ living standards for the first time since the 1930s - and which eventually triggered an escalating round of pay battles culminating in the ’Winter of Discontent’, 1978-79.
But Blair is the first Labour leader to see his Party as so heavily dependent upon large donations and political support from wealthy individuals and major corporations: indeed Labour’s conference now attracts more big business sponsorship and involvement than William Hague’s europhobic and increasingly extreme Conservative Party.
The fact that Mandelson, central to the new Labour project, has been forced to resign twice over sleaze is a graphic illustration of the way the Party has been hijacked by Tony Blair’s "modernisers". The involvement of one of New Labour’s backers in a highly suspect deal to buy the Dome at a knockdown price, with fat profits to follow, adds a further, if grimly familiar odor to the proceedings.
Of course Labour has often had its less savoury backers: who can forget the portly figure of Robert Maxwell, who would routinely double the collection at Labour conference and make other token gestures to keep his influence with Labour’s leaders?
Geoffrey Robinson was by no means the first millionaire to sit as a Labour minister. But Blair’s government has gone further than ever before in explicitly courting support from big business and the ultra-wealthy. And by no means all of their donations have been returned in the way that Bernie Ecclestone’s £lm had to be refunded in a storm of controversy.
The millionaires have certainly had a good deal from New Labour: taxes on top earners remain as low as under Thatcher, taxes on business have been held down, privatisation and speculation continue unfettered, while Thatcher’s antiunion laws hold workers in check and help keep profits rolling in.
Which raises the obvious question: just what has New Labour done to merit the millions it still receives from the unions?
Last summer the Communication Workers Union decided to hold back an increase in payments towards Labour’s electoral war-chest, seeking some sign that Blair’s team was at least prepared to listen to some of their concerns. Other unions have also debated whether or not to respond to the party’s request for a hefty £8m contribution to the campaign funds.
But Labour has carried on regardless, forcing through more privatisation, PFI schemes, and holding down public sector pay.
We say it’s time Millbank-dominated unions like UNISON, which alone pumps millions into Labour funds, were forced to carry out a ’value for money’ audit on the effectiveness of handing over this cash from low-paid members’ subs - to back a government that has consistently kicked them in the teeth?
Blair’s answer to the unions is simply to raise two contemptuous fingers: he knows that less than a dozen millionaires would be easily enough to stump up the £15m which Jack Straw is about to impose as a spending limit for the next General Election.
With friends like these, New Labour can shut its eyes and ears to the workers’ movement.
More thoroughly than any previous Labour administration, Blair’s team has consciously cut its roots with working class and its financial links with the trade unions - in order to court the support of a traditionally conservative and much wealthier layer of the middle class. Much more successfully and systematically than any previous Labour leadership, Blair has remodelled the Party itself, determined above all to cut off any democratic mechanism by which rank and file members can challenge or change the policies he - or any future leader - may have laid down.
The extent of the success Blair has achieved in this process of purging and realigning the Labour Party could be judged by the incredible vote on pensions policy at the 2000 Party Conference in Brighton.
Although a narrow majority voted to oppose the government’s refusal to reinstate the link with earnings, this majority was largely composed of trade union block votes. A staggering two thirds of constituency delegates voted - in the teeth of a massive surge of public opinion behind the pensioners - for the Blair/Brown line and against the link. Such a policy would have been unthinkable for CLPs at any time in the previous 50 years.
But these political changes have come at a price for New Labour - one that has been increasingly revealed in the succession of local and European elections in England, Wales and Scotland. Levels of turnout have been frighteningly low, and lowest of all in Labour’s vital core areas - the inner cities and working class areas, where voters have had least to celebrate since 1997.
Party structures at constituency and ward level, which once offered a mechanism to reach out to these alienated sections of the electorate, have dwindled and collapsed with the demoralisation and departure of activists, leaving a handful of Blairite officers in not-so-splendid isolation. The much-vaunted levels of party membership have also begun to plummet, as fewer punters see any reason to prop up a party that ignores them and their interests.
Losing the middle
Perhaps even more frightening for Blair and the relentless "modernisers" is the extent to which New Labour has also failed to hold the support of its new target base among the middle classes. Frustration at crumbling transport systems and public services at the same time as soaring petrol prices were doubtless part of the reason why the majority of "middle England" - and apparently large sections of the working class - gave at least tacit support to the bizarre coalition of farmers, truckers, and haulage firms who, with the connivance of oil company bosses, brought the country grinding to a halt in September.
The core of that action was a revolt by alienated and exploited - but also undoubtedly confused - layers of the petty bourgeoisie. Thousands of small farmers have been ruined by the profiteering of the supermarkets, the greed of the banks, and by damage done by the unscrupulous practices of the giants of agribusiness (most notably the feed manufacturers, the unsung culprits of the BSE disaster).
Self-employed truckers, working often long and illegal hours in an industry deregulated by Thatcher, also have legitimate grievances. The irony is that both sectors - the farmers, who use subsidised fuel at 24p a litre, and the lorry drivers complaining at the price of fuel at the pumps - were only able to protest so effectively because of the tacit support of the oil companies - which have systematically ripped them off, and ripped off the general public who supported them.
The obvious political confusion of the fuel protests, and the opportunist way in which Hague’s Tories and even less savoury right wing forces attached themselves to the movement, do not mean that the legitimate demands of the protestors cannot be supported.
Those who condemn them out of hand, like the trade union leaders who sat in the TUC Congress in Glasgow and called for government action to "smash" the protests, are in effect opening the door to new, draconian measures, that would inevitably be used against the trade unions if they ever took action that disrupted fuel supplies or other "essential public services".
But the TUC also failed to offer any political clarity to the confused protestors, effectively handing them over to the populist right - even while TUC chief John Monks reminded delegates of the tragic example of Chile in the early 1970s. Then, a mass movement of self-employed lorry drivers was one of the levers used by the CIA and the far right to destabilise Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government, and pave the way for Pinochet’s dictatorship.
The real lesson is that these sections of the petty bourgeoisie are politically unstable and capable of desperate acts, and the labour movement cannot afford to ignore the issues they raise.
The trade unions should take up and campaign for a reduction on fuel tax and other indirect taxes, to be funded by increased taxes on big business and the rich. They should expose the level of profiteering that takes place, and demand the nationalisation of the prime culprits - the oil companies, agribusiness, large landowners, and the supermarkets. They should press for an immediate cash injection and urgent plans for a massive new programme of sustainable public transport, starting with the renationalisation of the railways.
These demands would put the trade unions at the forefront of the fight for policies that would really address the problems faced by the petty bourgeoisie: but they would also echo many of the concerns raised in "middle England", and many of the frustrations of the working class.