WOBBLES over education aside it is commonly held that the Tory party is in crisis and that Labour is on an unstoppable roll.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Such is the crisis facing the British economy and polity - one further revealed by the end of the cold war and the developing inter-imperialise conflict - that both political parties are in an historical crisis of unparalleled proportions.
The crisis of the Tory Party is made worse by the fact that is in government. When, and if, Blair wins power the It is no accident that both the idcolo. gies of Conservatism and Labourism are beginning to disintegrate under the impact of the new world order.
This is highlighted further because Britain is in an economic downturn. It has gone on so long that commentators have almost stopped commentating on It is this fact that makes the apparent desire of Thatcher" seem so peculiar. delivering If Thatcherism was so good why have the results been so bad?
Thatcher spent a decade creating a more flexible labour market throogh a legislative attack on the trades unions. It was an attack of such breadth that union membership fell by over 40 per cent.
As John Rentoul in The Rich get Richer argued, at the end of the 1980s there was a shared perception that, "the Three Nations... are the haves the have nots and the have lots."
Yet despite the rigours of monetarist • if it isn't hurting it isn't working - the British economy is still spiralling downwaros. natcoer was unable to dispense the right medicine that would address the structural weakness of British capitalism.
Essentially the problem of the British economy is that since the tum of the century i nas occa stuck in a low in vestment low producavity trap relatively to other major capitalist cconomies.
This was a consequence of Britain being the first major capitalist country to industrialise. The vast commercial empire that it was able to build generated massive profits which allowed British companies to develop on the basis of self financing rather than hav. ing to rely on the banks or the state for their money.
At the same time Britain was able to defeat its major European rivals and build a global empire which was to play a central role in protecting UK manufacturing industry from foreign competition.
Throuch industry. commerce and plunder of colonies Britain was able to develop its financial sector to give it a chird way by which maintain its economic leverage in the 20th Century.
It was this cushion that insulated British industry from the need to innovate and to introduce advanced producThatcher was not able to find a way of out this predicament.
The deregulation of the financial sector reinforced the UK as a world centre for financial speculation. At the same time taxation policy ensured that companies paid less tax for paying out dividends to shareholders than for investing in new machinchy.
Added to this Thatcher remilitarised the UK economy by giving unparalJeled support to UK military industry and the expense of civil manufacturing.
In this sense Thatcher was the ultimate ideological expression of what had been central to the Tory Party bloc for over 150 years-the alliance between finance capital and the military. built upon an Empire which had given it the resources to win over a section of the skilled working class After the war the Bretton-Woods financial system and US pump priming of the European economies allowed the Bausn ruling class to cocoasa a nich system of economic regulation. It delivered mator social provision to le working class and ensured that British capital could function in the new world COURTUREY But no post war government was able to reverse the lone term decline from empire. Each administration has nao to grappic with the problem of reducing the. wage levels of the working class and increasing domestic investment within the context of the 1945 settlement. ( The conclusion was unavoidable. If British capital was to survive embed. ded in a medium size power the whole of 1945 had to be trashed.
While Thatcher did deliver massive blows to the political and organisation strength of the working class she was unable to reverse Britain's long term decline. The failure of the Thatcher project has tipped the balance inside the ruling class in favour of an integration with European capital and an industrial modernisation strategy.
It has now become common sense to many political leaders and industrialists that the only safe place for British capital lies in an alliance with those on the other side of the English Channel.
So Atlanticism is over.
Yet the mass membership of the Tory Party are incapable of accepting such an outcome and its leadership are thus incapable of delivering such a modernisation strategy which could only work under the protective umbrella of EMU. It contradicts everything that the Conservative Party-the party of flag. sterling and Empire-stands for.
It will be rent asunder by the contradiction between the forces of Maastricht, and the forces that made up its own historical tradition which are ideologically nostic to curopcan mickta tion and the end of Britain's great power status.
It is in this context that Blair's project becomes obvious-the standard bearer for pro-European capital.
The bourgeoisie hope that the party that cared for the welfare state in its cradle will now be able to supply the poison that will put it into its grave.
Riaie will therefore have to attack the idcological and material heart of labourism—education health and wel. fare. This is why Blair will depend on image, spin, anti-Torysim and joke big ideas such as 'communitarianism' and "stakeholding' to get him though to the next election.
Blairs project is based on the d to transform the role of the British state. In this he is building on Thatcher.
But the difference is that Blair's reorientation of the British state is based on an allempt to moochise tie cooll Miners' strike was a decisive moment for the British labour movement omy and to regenerate the level of in. vestment in British manufacturing inTo do this Blair will create an industrial policy that will codify and develop new relations between labour and capital. The basis has already been laid through the emergence of new man agement techniques. This will be cou. pled with appeals to voluntary sacrifices "for the good of the nation and the community.
This means shrinking the "social" state and expanding its role as an organiser of industrial policy, building an alliance with the manufacturing sector of capital within the project of a single European currency.
This implies an attack on labourism and everything that Labour has said it stood for. Someone has to pay for reThis will have a cataclysmic mate. rial effect on the working class, the first in line to suffer the cold winds of modernisation.
The ideology of labourism at the political centre of the labour movement grate because it is as based just as much on the material benefits of Empire as is the Conservative Party as an historical bloc.
In this context the labour left will have to put up or shut up.
So far it has shut up. It has very little to say of substance about how Britain. as a declining imperialist power, could reorganise its economic and social structure to avoid the Maastricht road.
The production of a coherent coonomic and social programme is the only way out for the labour left. Such a development would be able to challenge Blairism not just on the basis of opposition, but in providing a credible alternative.
Toby Brewster
Socialist Outlook 96 • February 3, 1996.