Editorial
Sacrificing Labour's core support
THE HONEYMOON is ending. After two years of seeming to walk on electoral water, Tony Blair and his team are getting increasingly damp, and showing themselves to be fallible. Although the clearest warning sign came in Labour’s feeble showing in what might be seen as a special one-off event — the European elections —it is not so easy to dismiss the wider implications.
Welsh leadership contender Rhodri Morgan is only one of those who have warned that the results reveal structural flaws in the New Labour project itself and its strategy of securing a majority by implementing conservative, right-wing policies to draw in middle class floating voters.
In the Euro-elections, Morgan pointed out, the turn-out in Labour’s traditional "core" areas — the inner cities and council estates, — was generally as low as 10 percent; in the more affluent areas, the turn out was 20 percent, while in the most prosperous Tory-voting areas the turn-out was closer to 30 percent.
Although there are obviously more people on the lower income scales, Morgan points out that Labour paid the price for mobilising too few of its core voters at a point where the Tories were having some success in reviving their support.
New Labour has offered too little to galvanise the enthusiasm of low-paid working class voters, warned Morgan: and though the demoralised and disappointed have so far largely rejected the option of voting for alternative left wing candidates, Labour would be in big trouble if these core voters decide at the next election not to vote at all. The are not enough middle class votes to be won by New Labour to compensate for a drop in its heartland vote on the scale of recent local and European elections.
All of a sudden, with the shattered Tories beginning to reawaken and regroup, the previously unthinkable prospect of Blair — like the Wilson government of 1966, which lost to Ted Heath in 1970 —going from a large majority in one election to defeat at the next, has become a tangible danger. Wilson’s stumbling block was his determination to confront and shackle the trade unions, with the damaging attempt to impose Labour’s own anti-union laws in 1969.
Interestingly among those participating in New Labour’s post-mortem on the Euro Elections was TUG general secretary John Monks, himself an eager "moderniser" and advocate of "partnership" between unions and bosses.
M onks attacked New Labour leaders for seeming embarrassed by Labour’s traditional supporters and what they believe, and warned that the Party cannot win without them
"I always understood the new support was supposed to be in addition to Labour’s traditional support. The worrying Euro-election result shows a real danger that some of it may now be at the expense of core support.
After the grovelling silence of the union bureaucracy had been broken from this unlikely quarter, one or two other union chiefs have nervously raised their heads above the parapet. John Edmonds of the GMB plucked up courage to criticise the feeble £3/£3.60 level of the minimum wage, while still leaving room to argue that the problem was the "presentation" of policies.
But there is no sign that Tony Blair and his inner team of modernisers and spin doctors have any intention of changing course.
Blair’s response to the electoral setback was to seek ways of bringing back the high priest of New Labour’s electoral strategy, Peter Mandelson, and to insist to a docile meeting of Labour MPs that Blair himself and his cabinet remain "100 percent proof New Labour".
There is talk of a reshuffle to purge the few remaining ministers associated with "old Labour" values. The government’s brutal attack on welfare rights for the disabled, for single parents and for refugees is to be stepped up by the arrogant Alistair Darling.
Within the party itself, the inexorable logic of New Labour dictates a further dismantling of the local party apparatus.
A secret internal report leaked to the Independent proposes scrapping, both the membership fee —effectively obliterating the distinction between members of the party and members of the public —and abolishing the local CLP committees in order to reduce even further the influence of "activists Instead there would be occasional meetings of members to discuss policy issues.
This suggestion — already implemented by one CLP in Enfield — raises a number of interesting questions. Of course, if the party works hard enough to do so, it can eventually drive away its remaining activists: but then who will do the work of getting out the vote, and who will organise it?
The Blair project still has important factors helping it along. The utterly spineless composition of the Parliamentary Labour Party, dominated by careerist, apolitical Blairite droids with neither roots nor scruples, is his big asset: the cowardice of the union bureaucracy and low level of strikes and rank and file union activity another.
Blair will be pleased that the Tories remain discredited on the key issues where Labour has not stolen their policies: and the far left, with few exceptions, has failed to win electoral support.
But with New Labour’s links with Murdoch and the press under strain, the Irish "peace" process on the edge of crisis, John Prescott’s transport policies a sick joke, scandals brewing over GM food, and the full cost of the bombing of Serbia still to emerge, there is still scope for things to go horribly wrong for Blair.
His reforms have cut off the mechanism for democratic debate within the Party, neutered the Party conference, gagged the activists and surrounded himself with a cabal of sycophantic spin doctors.
So it is not clear whether he knows a wheel has come off his bandwagon, or has any idea of how to repair the damage.
And to win back Labour’s core support means adopting radical policies which are anathema to Blair, Brown and the New Labour team.
Will any leading figure in the trade union or Labour movement have the courage to get up and fight on this platform?