Serious business for the left
FEW LABOUR activists will have bothered to hide their grins and guffaws as they watched the silly season' split in the ranks of the SDP. But the sight of David Owen stepping suicidally out into the snow CI may be some time") should not distract us from the fact that this year's Labour Party conference will offer little to smile about.
The prospects of a truly massive purge of the hard left have receded as the hard left forces have been reduced in size and influence in the pre- and postelection calignment: however there will be some grim battles fought as left and right draw their opposite conclusions from the June election debacle.
To the delight of the soft left, the union bureaucracy and the right wing press, Captain Kinnock will launch his starship 'Compromise" from Brighton on the second Icg of his ten year mission — to explore strange new policies, and boldly go where not even Gaitskell boldly went.
Of course few of the policy-makers admit to being right wing; evcry move to ditch socialist policies is trendily dressed up as new thinking" in wordy articles in the Guardian and Marxism Today.
NUPE chief Tom Sawyer urges Labour to turn away from his own low-paid members and focus instead on the "home-owning, credit-card-carrying majority' Michael Meacher is trying to out-do Norman Willis in devising schemas for a 'new image" for the unions as a cross between Access', the RAC, and a firm of unpaid management consultants. Bryan Gould Boats the idea of dropping Clause 4. In every case the new idcas of the so-called left' wind up compromising with or embracing Thatcherism's ruthless focus on the individual at the expense of the majority.
Leading the pack of trethinkers' has been the Labour Coordinating Committee, once seen as left wing. but now suggesting a wholesale abandonment of socialist policies on council house sales, privatisation, renationalisation, share issues, tax cuts and Tory plans to hive off schools and council estates from local authority control.
Not to be outdone, Tom Sawyer's union, together with the new-style trendy GMB and the TWU, have gone further again and drawn up a pay deal for one million local authority manual workers which opens wide the door for at least 100,000 redundancies and the abolition of premium payments for overtime and weekend working: these unions have surrendered to competitive tendering without the slightest attempt at resistance, before the Tories even get round to legislating it!
Small wonder Neil Kinnock approaches the Small Brighton conference with confidence. and with block
ONE
votes on the key issues already in the bag.
But none of this means that the struggle is over.
Though reduced in numbers, there is still an active, committed hard left which rejects the Kinnock line, and which has become even more determined to fight on after the clection catastrophe. Though the hard left can expect to win few battles this year, its actions and policics are not by any means irrelevant. Indeed the speed of the pell-mell dash to the right by the erstwhile 'Jell' ICC and Tribune group of MPs has caused something of a crisis within the TCC itself. Four prominent iccers, Ken Livingstone, George Galloway. Joan Ruddock and Peter Hain have broken ranks and joined with three leaders of Labour Left Liaison to co-sign a 15-point platform appealing for a new unity of the left. This platform makes a welcome change from the defeatist common coin of the ICC: it centres on opposing coalitionism; defence of socialist policies; defence of black scctions, and opposition to further. witch hunt expulsions.
There are some curious omissions from this new unity appeal: though the document rejects business unionism'. it fails, even in the midst of renewed miners' struggles, to call clearly for class struggle methods in the unions; there is no specific call for nationalisation or renationalisation; there is no reference to the local government crisis and the fight against cuts; and the whole document is angled towards action by a future Labour government rather than any kind of fight now.
It remains to be seen in practice whether these are chance omissions or whether they really reflect the limitations of the unity on offer: it is already clear, however, that the majority of LCC forces are bitterly opposed to this new platform and firmly wedded to Kinnock's approach. The processes of division and realignment are by no means complete within the labour movement.
In this respect then, the actions and words of the hard left can be decisive in maximising the opportunities to build a real fighting unity against the Tory offensive and against the rightward-moving forces of the Labour and TUC bureaucracy.
For our part. Socialist Outlook will continue to press for the broadest democratic unity of forces prepared to fight in practice for action and solidarity on the key class struggle issues of the day. With Captain Kinnock's crew now reinforced by the soft-left 'Clingons" on the starboard" bow, real unity of a mobilised left in the Labour Party and in the trade unions is a crucial element of the fightback for socialist policies. *Starboard: on the right looking forward' (Oxford Dictionary): ie on the left looking back. SOCIALIST OUTLOOK na 1 September/Opober 1987