From Keir Hardy to Tony Blair
When the Labour Party fought its first general election its banners proclaimed
"VOTE for the LABOUR PARTY the hope of the WORKER.
"SOCIALISM - A system of government that will make poverty impossible"
Now, 100 years after that historic meeting in Farringdon, what have we got? Not socialism but capitalism, apparently triumphant. Why is this?
Labour has been in government five times - in government, but not in power.
Despite decisive majorities in 1945 - and again in 1997, it only tinkered with the capitalist system.
To Labour's leadership, from Ramsay MacDonald in the 1920s to Attlee, Wilson, Callaghan and Blair, what mattered was the trappings of ministerial office.
MacDonald openly betrayed by not only entering but leading a so-called "national government", which was actually a Tory government.
MacDonald held the office of Prime Minister, but it was the Tories' iron master, Stanley Baldwin, who pulled the strings.
George V approved of MacDonald - and he enjoyed risqué joke sessions with right wing union leader Jimmy Thomas. Elizabeth II apparently gets along very well with Tony Blair.
Tony Blair has gone one better than MacDonald, transforming the Labour Party into a more efficient Conservative Party.
Someone in Millbank must have slipped up. The Centenary issue of the New Labour magazine quotes Robert Browning's poem The Lost Leader (written against Alfred Lord Tennyson when he became Poet Laureate), which was used to attack MacDonald.
"Just for a handful of silver he left us,
"Just for a riband to stick in his coat"
Does it remind you of someone - perhaps a little more contemporary?
Banking mad
For the greater part of the century, one of the major planks in Labour's platform was the nationalisation of the financial institutions, especially the Bank of England.
Labour's current Chancellor of the Exchequer (what a grand name for a Finance Minister) has handed over control of the nation's finances to the Governors of the Bank of England - not a worker amongst them!
The working class, in whose interest the Labour Party was founded, has very little reason to celebrate its 100th birthday.
It now has to start all over again to build a party - a real socialist party - the only hope for the workers.
In black and white
In the days, no the years, when the people of South Africa were fighting against apartheid, some of us tried to explain that apartheid and capitalism were intertwined, that you could not get rid of the one without the other.
We were derided, not least by the Stalinists of the South African Communist Party (SACP) and even some who owed allegiance to the Fourth International.
When President de Klerk proclaimed the end of apartheid and the release of Nelson Mandela, when the ANC-led coalition was swept into power with a huge majority, they jeered - we told you so! Who was right?
Addressing a meeting of the in Queenstown, the SACP regional chairperson, John Kibi, called for parity pay for all races in South Africa, saying that blacks continued to receive poorer wages than other race groups.
"We live in a very rich and happy land," he said, "but we know that it is a land of suffering and starvation The fascist (sic) government and its friends abroad talk about the wave of prosperity in South Africa - prosperity for whom?"
He failed to remind his audience that his party, the SACP, was an integral part of the government which serves owners, farmers, and foreign investors.
White workers had also benefited from the boom and had been given a monopoly of skilled jobs.... the masses of non-whites, especially Africans, have not benefited at all from this so-called prosperity... the payment gaps between black and white miners were also widening... annual African income was up to 15 times less than annual white income more and more profit was being squeezed out of cheap black labour.
"The only solution was equality in pay at all levels - from management to workers."
Sounds almost like socialism!
Tee bloody hee, David
So now we know. New Labour's ministers are not serious politicians but just a bunch of stand-up comedians.
When David Blunkett told the Labour Party Conference "Watch my lips - no selective education under a Labour government - no selection by examination or interview" he was only joking.
When pre-1997 election Labour leaders promised a democratic Second Chamber to replace the House of Lords, or when Tony Blair promised one-person-one vote for the election of a candidate for London's Mayor - they were only joking.
What a laugh!