where is Labour? JOHN MAJOR admitted his govemment got a bloody nose in the New bury and county council elections. The Tories are still in crisis over Maastricht, and their backbenchers are in revolt over economic recession.
Devaluation of the pound and historically low interest rates have brought only very limited signs of cconomic recovery.
But Major's embarrassment is little comfort to the miners, who are watching as the pits start to shut. Despite public outrage over the butchery of their industry, the miners have become victims of the do-nothing attitude of Labour and the TUC. Neither is Tory political turmoil much use to the four million unemployed, or the millions hit by welfare, health and social security cuts.
The TUC has gone into hibemation and Labour is a total shambles. What happened in Newbury says it all. Peter Mandelson, Labour's by-election strategist, admitted his role was to maximise the anti-Tory vote: Labour as good as told its supporters to vote for the Liberal Democrats.
Whatever the rhetoric of John Smith and Margaret Beckett, there is an underlying drive towards coalitionism and anti-Tory deals, especially at a local council level. And the nett result is to boost the role of the Liberal Democrats.
There is an inevitable logic in this. Labour cannot stand immobile. crats. to become unstoppable. There are two possible strategies -either the road of class struggle and defiance, backing industrial struggles and mass campaigns, or alternatively looking towards some form of de facto alliance with the Liberal DemoFlying pigs There is as much chance of Labour adopting a class struggle strategy as there is of pigs flying. The consequence is that, especially as the next election approaches, the drive towards an anti-Tory coalition is likely the At a policy level of course there is no major obstacle to coalitionism with the Lib-Dems; on many issues Labour is well to the right of the Liberals. And this is having a devstating effect on the Labour Party itself. the 1950s.
Figures for Labour Party membership are the lowest since the last war. In Scotland local party membership has just collapsed, to around 20,000 members, and of course a lot fewer than that are in any way active. Pigs will fly before they adopt a class struggle strategy The present Labour membership and activism is a political selection; thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of left wingers have dropped away. Most who join now do so on a rightwing basis.
The Policy Forum has now effectively replaced party conference as the policy-making body. And while the trade union link will not be destroyed rapidly, the fundamental threat of breaking it in the next few years remains.
The struggle to defend the role of the Labour Party as a party based on working class now devolves wholly onto the terrain of the class struggle itself. The Smiths, Blairs and Browns and firmly in command of the Labour Party, and the left is at its lowest ebb since the Bevanites in The only effective means of organising the left now is to focus its activities on uniting working class struggles, pushing the fight of teachers, miners, railworkers and others are far as it will go.