Liverpool TUC IN MAY 1998 the Liberal Democrats gained their only metropolitan council - in Liverpool. The Labour Party suffered a crushing defeat at the polls. This defeat was caused by a number of interconnected factors. The right wing Labour Group had imposed years of cuts and redundancies combined with poor council services and the highest Council Tax in the country. The scale of the defeat prompted the Labour Party NEC to set up a 'Liverpool Taskforce'. It comprises three unelected members (including Richard Arthur, leader of Camden Council) sent to mount a witch hunt against the Liverpool Labour Party in an attempt to find out what had gone so wrong, given that cuts and redundancies are the main policies of Blairite councils across the country. The Taskforce could not blame the left for the defeat, as most left activists had been expelled at the time of Lesley Mahmood's Walton bye-election campaign of 1991. In the recent elections left candidates from the SLP and the Socialist Party (including Mahmood) got derisory votes that did not split the Labour vote at all.
What the Taskforce did focus on, however, was an attack on the 'Old Labour'right wing Labour Group.
Their report makes clear that despite the already decimated membership levels, there will be no more local Party democracy for the Liverpool Labour Party. In future all candidates for local elections will be vetted by an NEC-ppointed Regional Director, with no rights at all for local wards or CLPs to choose their representatives.
All potential candidates must also swear a loyalty pledge to Blairite New Labour policies, while existing councillors will be vetted before they are allowed to be reselected. In other words all local accountability will be ended permanently.
The report also makes clear that local trade union branches will play no role whatsoever in the local Party, and that the District Labour Party (suspended for a decade since the witch hunt against the left will not be allowed to be reformed. Indeed, activists from both wards and trade union branches will have absolutely no role in this new organisation.
This authoritarian attack on Old Labour within the Liverpool Party sets a dangerous precedent and should be vigNETT Led byk activists today. Right wing helped pillor Haiton - now they face chop orously opposed by all socialists.
We should not hesitate to block with these right wingers against the New Labour purge, but we need to keep our separate identity as socialists intact.
Above all, we must attempt to rebuild a socialist opposition within the Party that can link with union and community struggles outside it.
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