suffered by US President Bill Clinton in the November elections should sound a warning note for even the most complacent of Labour's right wing leadership.
While Tony Blair's 'modernisers' set out to scrap Clause 4, sever Labour's remaining link with the working class, and remodel the party along the lines of Clinton's Democrats, November showed that this is no automatic road to electoral success.
There is no doubts that US workers expected to make gains, and have been more willing to struggle for their rights since Clinton's election. There has been a four-fold increase in strike-days during 1994, with unions actually beginning to reverse their long decline in membership.
But the Democratic Party remains as it always was, a bosses' party, unambiguously committed to capitalism and to US imperialism.
Coalition
It is an uneasy coalition, with relatively few 'liberals' coexisting alongside a hard core of conservative reactionaries, notably in what were the old Democratic strongholds of the southern states.
When Alabama's right wing senator Richard Shelby announced his defection to the Republicans, nobody would have noticed any serious change of political ideology.
The Democrats embrace the demands of big business on the one hand, and the need to win votes from blacks, hispanics and other oppressed groups on the other.
One result has been Clinton's feeble and half-baked reforms to health care, for which he crusaded during the Presidential elections, only to find his scheme paralysed by the lack of support from his own party in Congress.
And while millions of unemployed and low-paid US workers have seen their living standards stagnate or fall, have seen Clinton spelling out new plans to get tough on welfare claimants, and ALL IMMIGRATION controls are squander a massive $30 billion on a crime bill that would boost prison-building and put 100,000 more cops on the streets.
Many of Clinton's problems are too easily brushed aside as irrelevant by Blair's coterie of admirers and advisors in Britain.
The architect of Neil Kinnock's electoral defeats, Peter Mandelson, in a complacent assessment in the Guardian, puts much ofthe blame for the setbacks onto Clinton's personal problems (Whitewa ter, women and the like), and smugly expects Blair to do better.
He also blames Clinton's poor choice of a White House team. But labour activists looking at the lacklustre performance of Blair's toothless front bench, or his even more wretched clique of back-room spin-doctors, will be far from reassured that a similar problem is not in store for a Labour government. they Mandelson repeats his view that Labour should put no policies on taxation until the last minute, for fear of scaring and related — it involves in particuReach out and touch somebody: now Clinton is reaching out to Republicans working class. faced confession. away voters or making promises that can't be kept. As if two more years of evasions and empty sound-bites could galvanise the enthusiasm of the British Increased taxation of the rich should be a popular campaigning slogan to appeal to the working class, not a shamePredictable What is clear from Clinton's failure -and was predictable from the outset - is party. that a party tied hand and foot to the interests of big capital can only be as "radical' as the capitalists will allow.
As Tony Blair touts his timid programme around, gathering plaudits from polite gatherings of British bankers and industrialists, we should reflect that Clin- workers. ton's failure has not just ushered in a new influx of Bible-bashing Republicans to Congress and state governorships, but opened the door to outright racist policies, like the endorsement of Proposition 187 in California, designed to withdraw schooling and healthcare from the families of 'illegal ' immigrants.
As Clinton buckles down to negotiate with Republican leaders on a package of welfare cuts and tax reductions, and seeks new Congressional allies on the 'left' of the Republican Party, we see again that the Democrats, floating free from any roots in the working class movement, function purely as a capitalist The US working class needs a Labour Party that will represent the class interests of workers, of blacks, hispanics, and other oppressed minorities, of women, of youth, and the millions of unemployed, Come to think of it, so do the British That's why Blair's 'modernising' offensive against Clause 4 and the very notion of socialism must be stopped before it ends in Clinton-style fiasco.