Kinnock's recipe for disaster
ONCE AGAIN, 'Spitting Image' has summed up the situation: the
Kinnock puppet in front of the shadow cabinet confessed 'We're useless; the only way we can win the election is if we do and say absolutely nothing at all.
If only they would! Instead the Kinnock team have, since the local elections, unveiled a grim package of economic policies - seemingly designed to appeal to the bankers and deter working class voters; and mounted a new witch-hunt against Militant and the Anti Poll Tax Federation - which is certainly intended to
THIS IS THE THIRD SMALL BUSINESS YOUVE isolate poll tax resisters, and will also give the red-baiters of the Tory press merry sport for months to
READY FOR A BIG ONE NOW come.
The local elections themselves saw Labour win 300 seats - which only the Tory press could portray as some kind of defeat. But since then there has been a falling back from the false dawn of opinion polls in which Labour held a 25 percent lead over the Tories, and
BANK MANAKER which suggested an unstoppable towards a
Labour momentum landslide combined with a total
Tory collapse. On the May 3 results, Kinnock could win a majority in parliament but not a huge one: worse, it seems that the element of Labour's support based
ROGER BEALE on gut anti-Toryism may already have peaked, while the Party has little to offer as attractive policies to win votes.
With possibly two years to the next election, and the Thatcherites regrouping, perhaps the most telling results were the abject failures of classic Kinnockite Labour Parties in Wandsworth, Westminster, Ealing and Brent.
The May results also underlined the extent to which the Labour leadership is squandering the opportunities presented to it on a plate by the crisis of the Thatcher goverment (some of which are discussed in more detail elsewhere in this magazine). There is scarcely any issue of substance on which the Tories are in difficulties - from poll tax to mad cow disease - where Labour has mounted an effective challenge. The whole focus has been on piecing together a programme that pleases big business and offers as little as possible to the working class. According to the latest policy review documents and recent statements, the menu goes something like this:
• Vote Labour, pay the poll tax: while workers seethe and refuse to pay, Labour's National Executive has voted with only four against to condemn those who have fought the poll tax - the Anti Poll Tax Federation - as a 'Militant front", and to instruct Labour Parties not to support its campaign for non-payment. Instead people are told to pay up now, and that a Labour government would retain the tax for at least two years, while its nebulous alternative ideas are worked out.
• Vote Labour, hold down wages! While John Major scrambles around in the wreckage of the Tory "economic miracle", admitting serious mistakes have been made, Labour's John Smith, the new darling of the bankers, has already committed himself to enter the European
Monetary System as a 'counter-inflationary' measure to pressure employers into holding down pay settlements. Labour apparently rejects an incomes policy, but is proposing ominous-sounding arbitration arrangements on public sector pay, including possible no-strike deals for ambulance and fire services.
i Vote Labour, for anti-union laws: none of the battery of Tory anti-union laws would be repealed or modified by a Kinnock government. The threat of sequestration will remain; mass picketing would still be outlawed, secondary picketing restricted, the closed shop abandoned, and a new, sinister "industrial relations court' would enforce the restrictions.
# Vote Labour, and wait: the state of the NHS as a weak link in the Tory armoury has been left unexploited by a timid Labour leadership scared to pledge the spending necessary to halt the cuts and reopen closed hospital beds. Even FAILED WITH, MR HARDAKER. I THINK YOURE the political pledges have been thin on the ground: next month the hugely unpopular NHS and Community Care Bill will become law, with the Labour Party and TUC having mounted no campaign and no demonstration against it, and with no promise it would be repealed. •I Vote Labour, and wait: restoration of savaged education, housing and social services, all of which require increased public spending, will have to wait until John Smith has restored the capitalist economy: I'm going to maintain a close control over spending commitments because I don't want them to get out of hand'. On many of these issues (sales of council houses, education policy) Labour simply tail ends the Tory line
#I Vote Labour, stay out of work: as the Tory squeeze on the economy begins once again deliberately to push up unemployment, and firms announce long lists of redundancies, John Smith, sounding like the CBI, argues that a Labour goverment would use similar means to contain 'inflationary' wage settlements, and would not intervene to prevent massive job losses.
• Vote Labour, back the police and judges: cases such as the Guildford Four, the Winchester Three and now the Maguires, the Birmingham Six and the Broadwater Farm Three have all helped expose class justice in Britain and the flimsy basis on which the police have been allowed to frame up victims "guilty' only of being Irish or black. The Labour leadership has consistently lagged well behind the Court of Appeal and the Tory press in any criticism of the judiciary or the police, and always sides instinctively against the victims of abuse - as in the Trafalgar Square poll tax riot.
# Vote Labour, fork out for defence: while even the Tories look towards a substantial cut in defence spending as a means of easing the pressure on the exchequer, John Smith refuses to count on any savings from that quarter. While Eastern Europe is transformed, the Warsaw Pact collapses and the mythical 'red threat' disappears before our very eyes, Labour insists on being the very last to propose any serious cutbacks in the armed forces, and will cling on to nuclear weapons.
• Vote Labour, keep the troops in Ireland: the Kinnock leadership's craven capitulation to the British state finds its most wretched expression in the refusal to contemplate a military withdrawal from the six counties of Ireland, and its condemnation of Tory minister Peter Brooke for even suggesting the possibility of talks with Sinn Fein.
• Vote Labour, ignore racism: as Norman Tebbit spearheads a new ugly wave of open racist agitation, giving a respectable focus to
is pathetically silent, offering no alternative to Thatcher's racist, elitist quotas for Hong Kong immigration.
the biggest mystery is why the Tory Party should bother to launch its
'summer offensive' to discredit Labour as a potential party of government. The Kinnock leadership parades itself as a group who have leamed nothing and forgotten nothing from the disastrous policies of the last two periods of Labour goverment.
policy scrapbook runs flatly opposite to the radicalisation of sections of the working class, reflected in more militant pay demands and a renewal of trade union struggle. While Thatcherism galvanises layers of workers the left has never reached, top union officials are still politically prostrate before the employers and the Tories: a real tension is building within the workers' movement.
killing any influence of the party rank and file or the unions over the policies of a new Labour goverment. This is the kernel of the new proposals for party conference (which will ironically be pushed through using trade union block votes). But while cutting off any means for the working class to use the party formed to defend its interests, and battening down the hatches against the storms of the class struggle, Kinnock is bottling up contradictions and troubles to come.
victory, but the expectations of many workers will increase if Thatcher as
AMID ALL the 'doom and gloom' economic figures churned out in the last few months - showing inflation, the trade deficit and now unemployment all up, manufacturing output and productivity down and the stock markets up and down - the statistics which most worry the employers are those showing the level of pay settlements.
This is not because the capitalist class are fooled by the argument wheeled out by Tory ministers (like their Labour predecessors under Wilson and
Callaghan) that 'excessive' pay increases cause inflation.
As Samuel Brittan recently summed up in the Financial
Times:
"Not much is gained by a high theory argument on whether pay increases cause inflation or not.
They are a link in the chain, but come fairly far along it. They are themselves influenced by price changes, labour market pressure, exchange rate movements and expectations about these variables, to name only a few. Counter-inflationary policy has usually been
EDITORIAL/UPDATE localised street violence against black families and communities, Labour
With policies like these on offer from Labour's ineffectual front bench,
Of course this wholesale plagiarism of the SDP's sub-Thatcherite
Kinnock's response has been to initiate still more 'reforms' aimed at
Workers' demands will neither be met nor eradicated by a Kinnock