NINETY YEARS after the Labour Party was formed as a working class and trade union alternative to the Liberals, David Blunkett and Tony Blair are spearheading calls for Labour to introduce new anti-union legislation.
What is perhaps most bizarre is that Blunkett and others seek to prove their conservative credentials by pledging repeatedly that there will be 'no return to the past'. sentation.
Yet their frenzied efforts to sever Labour's historic links with the untong and wit Politically, the union link the working was all that separated threaten pre- Labour from the Liberals. cisely that: a return to the miserable, muddled right wing politics of the Liberal Party before 1906, the period in which the working class had no independent political voice.
The 1899 lUC resolution which set up the initial Labour Representation Committee, to ctrike. which unions, socialist societies and cooperatives could affiliate, arose from the consistent failure of their traditional allies, the Lib- action. Ben Tillet, one of the founders of the Transport Workers' Federation, addresses the Dock strikers in 1911 erals, to uphold the interests of The unions deals acedsingly concerted employers' offensive in the 1890s.
A succession of hostile court judgements had begun severely to restrict the right to strike; even the dimmer sections of the Labour Party. emerging union bureaucracy could see that the only way to halt and reverse such legal attacks was through legislation - and that required parliamentary repreMembership of the LRC more Later in ner dar on than doubled during 1901-2, pri- the unions. The 1906 Act marily as a response by hased on ace mons prepared by the to the Taff Labour Party and Vale judge- the TUC. Politically, this mell UDheld by the Lords in 1902. This union link was all awarded hefty (£23,000) com- that separated Lapensation to the Taff Vale Rail- bour way Company against the main Liberals. rail union, which was found li- constitution, able for damage to property and Ireland and even business losses caused by a on issues of social Union leaders under- welfare Labour standably feared that this judge- from the outset ment could also apply to any had no coherent other union involved in strike alternative to offer.
deals with the Liberals.
British imperialism and sought no more than parliamentary reforms within the framework of capitalisin Blair is not the first Labour leader to prepare for a general election by attacking the trade unions and the working class. But the precedents are not inspiring. Ramsay MacDonald's attacks on the unemployed split the party and paved the way for the decimation of the Labour vote in 1931. Attlee's government attacked the unions and backtracked on its own welfare state reforms, opening the door for the Tory return in 1951. Harold Wilson's attempts to bring in anti-union laws helped usher in Ted Heath in 1970. Jim Callaghan tried to bludgeon public sector workers into line, and left the way clear for Margaret Thatcher in 1979. And Neil Kinnock's wretched attempts to sabotage the miners' By 1906 - though lacking any strike helped guarantee defeat in socialist (or other) political pro- 1987. gramme - the LRC had consoli- However the savagery of the dated its position as the voice of Rlunkett-Blair onslaught. tolthe working class and trade un- lowing the trauma of New Laions, winning 29 seats in parlia- bour's ditching of Clause Four ment. It changed its name to the and almost every shred of radical policy, has begun to create a deOne positive result of Labour bate among some on the left in Party intervention was the 1906 the unions. Trades Disputes Act, which gave How can it make sense for the unions the limited legal im- unions to donate millions in munities which Thatcher swept members' subs to fuel a party 75 years was drafts the on Ramsay Macdonald machine which takes such deIndeed as early as 1913 impa- light in attacking trade unions? tient socialists were dismissing In a recent Tribune article, the Labour Party as no more than UNISON activist Geoff Martin "a wing of the Liberal Party". raised the call for a new Labour failure of its official leadership. leadership by a brutal Tory high command. and union rights. pensioners, of the black communities, in Ireland and worldwide. ing into right wing hands. not bring socialism.
ployers with sacsee ces, the or raing classin Britain A mass unemo ment rampant c hard-won public services, the working class in Britain faces a real crisis - an avoidable crisis created by the historic Socialist Outlook exists to build a new type of working class leadership, based on the class struggle and revolution. ary socialism. The capitalist class, driven by its own crisis, and politically united by its need to maximise profits at the expense of the workers, has had determined, vanguard The Tory strategy has been to shackle the unions, and to fragment and weaken the resistance, allowing them to pick off isolated sections one at a time. In response, most TUC and Labour leaders have embraced the politics of "new realism", effectively total surrender, while ditching any pretence of being a socialist alternative. Every retreat encouraged the offensive against jobs, wages, conditions New realism is the latest form of reformism, seeking only improved conditions within capitalism. We reject reformism, not because we are against reforms, but because we know that full employment, decent living standards, a clean environment, peace and democracy can never be achieved under capitalism. Nor, as we argued long before the collapse of Stalinism, could these demands ever be achieved under the bureaucratically deformed workers states and degenerated USSR, whose regimes survived only by repressing the working class. We are a marxist current, based not on the brutish totalitarian parodies of state marxism nor on the tame, toothless version of "marxism" beloved by armchair academics, but on the revo lutionary tradition of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky.
Our socialist alternative is not based on parliamentary elections or illusions of peaceful legislative change. We fight to mobilise and unleash the power of the working class to topple the corrupt and reactionary rule of capital and establish its own class rule. We struggle against fragmentation by building solidarity, to unite the various struggles of workers, the unemployed, of women, of of lesbians and gay men, of students, of youth - and of those fighting imperialism Socialist Outlook is above all an internationalist current, in solidarity with the Trotskyist Fourth International, which organises in over 40 countries. Unlike some other groups on the British left, we do not believe a mass revolucan be built simply by proclaiming ourselves to be one. This degenerates into sectarian posturing and abstention from struggles in the labour movement, play.
Nor do we believe that the demands of women, black people, lesbians and gays or the national demands of people in Scotland, Ireland and Wales should be left to await revolution. The oppressed must organise themselves and fight now for their demands, which are part of the struggle for socialism. But propaganda alone, however good, will The fight for policies which can mobilise and politically educate workers in struggle, must be taken into the unions, the Labour Party and every campaign and struggle in which workers and the oppressed fight for their rights.
To strengthen this fight we press for united front campaigns on key issues such as racism and fascism - in which