Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No.68, May 1987
Election fever is running high as the three main political parties prepare themselves for a probable June General Election. This is supposed to be the highpoint of ‘democracy’ for British people. But in reality the choice we have is between one gang of racist, war-mongering liars and another. What is surprising about this election is that with rampant unemployment, escalating poverty for millions, a galaxy of anti-working class laws, and after eight years of the most reactionary rule punctuated by scandals and crookery, Margaret Thatcher and the Tories are likely to retain power. Kinnock’s Labour Party is unlikely to win, and may even take third place to the Liberal/SDP Alliance. Socialists of all varieties on the British left are arguing that you should vote Labour because it is traditionally the party of the working class – a lesser evil compared with the Tories. The RCG says that we don’t want Thatcher back in power, nor Kinnock and his cohorts who do not represent the working class in Britain. Those who call for a vote for Kinnock, sowing illusions in the class nature of the Labour Party, will stand in the way of building a fighting working class movement whose first task will be to destroy the Labour Party and every rotten tradition it stands for. If you vote Tory, Labour or Alliance you will be voting for British Imperialism.
The issue of whether to vote Labour at this election is posed more sharply than ever before. It has long been part of socialist doctrine that the nature of the Labour Party is contradictory: that it is a bourgeois party but it also represents workers and can be swayed to represent their interests. In an article in Socialist Worker (2 May) Alex Callinicos claims that:
‘Because it (the Labour Party) reflects workers’ resistance is the fundamental reason for calling for a vote for Labour. This is why the best militants inside the working class support it.’
Is this true of the Labour Party in 1987? Over the last eight years of Tory rule, even in the narrow trade union terms of the SWP, there have been major examples of workers’ resistance: the miners’ strike, the print workers at Wapping. Did Kinnock’s Labour Party reflect that resistance? Not at all. On the contrary Thatcher and the NCB could not have defeated the striking miners without the help of Kinnock and the TUC, whose main intervention then, and later at Wapping, was to condemn ‘violence’ when workers were defending themselves against police attack. The ‘best militants’ inside the working class ended up in gaol or without jobs, with a blank refusal by Labour to defend them.
‘To decide once every few years which member of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through Parliament – this is the real essence of parliamentarism.’ LENIN 1917
Indeed over the last four years Kinnock and Willis have presided over the trampling of democratic rights on an unprecedented scale. There have been no promises that any of the anti-trade union laws, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, the Public Order Act, the Criminal Justice Bill, will be repealed if Labour gets into power. On the contrary, Kinnock is proud to proclaim that Labour is the party of ‘law and order’ and ‘patriotism’.
The Left’s call to support Labour rests on the simplistic assumption that Labour must be put to the test and exposed before the working class. First, they say, we should, as socialists, go along with the working class and vote Labour; then we should point out that the Labour government is failing to honour its pre-election promises. In this way workers will be broken from reformism and take the revolutionary path. Callinicos again:
‘In a revolutionary situation, the immediate effect will be for wider layers of workers drawn into politics to look to the Labour Party. These are the people that revolutionaries want to win… The call for the return of a majority Labour government is an essential part of the relationship that Marxists have to have with them…
‘This provides an opportunity to put Labour to the test. This is vital.’
We are not in a revolutionary situation. But if we were, the first task would be to destroy the Labour Party before it killed the movement stone dead at birth. This is not compatible with holding a general election to vote Labour into power for five years. The opportunists that revolutionaries will need to combat at such a time will be well to the left of Kinnock and the Labour Party.
No comrades, we must leave the fairy tales behind in the kindergarten. We must also cease to pretend that this is 1920 and the Labour Party is freshly-born.
Let us return to 1987 and reality. For nearly 70 years Labour governments have been betraying workers’ struggles in Britain and abroad. Kinnock’s Labour Party stands well to the right of most of them. He made it very clear in 1983 that he has no intention of representing the ‘best militants’ in the working class.
‘…we can only protect the disadvantaged in our society if we appeal to those who are relatively advantaged. The apparent overconcentration of our energies and resources on these groups like the poor, the unemployed and the minorities – does a disservice both to them and to ourselves… if we are to be of real use to the deprived and insecure we must have the support of those in more secure social circumstances – the home owners as well as the homeless, the stable family as well as the single parent, the confidently employed as well as the unemployed, the majority as well as the minorities.’
Since 1983 Kinnock has engaged in the systematic destruction and purging of any forces which might hinder his path to the Prime Ministerial office. Kinnock at least has the merit of realism. At the 1983 General Election when Labour suffered a major defeat, more than a third of skilled and semi-skilled workers voted Tory. To win this General Election, he needs to win the votes of employed, white, male, well-paid, home-owning, privileged racists.
To accommodate their views the miners and print workers were betrayed, left Labour Councils have been branded ‘loony’ and abandoned to their fate, the fight against rate-capping collapsed, Militant were expelled as ‘aliens’ and ‘maggots’, black people were condemned for fighting back against police racism when one black woman was killed and another paralysed by police at Tottenham and Brixton, the defeat at the Greenwich by-election was blamed on supports for the rights of gays and lesbians. And now a black woman, Sharon Atkin, has been deselected as a parliamentary candidate for describing the Labour Party as racist and daring to proclaim her right to speak for black people.
‘A Senior Shadow Cabinet spokesman’ (said by some to be Roy Hattersley) spelled out all the Labour Party leadership’s hatred for the oppressed in an attack on black sections:
‘I want these characters out and I don’t mind if we lose a few seats to the SDP in the process. It is an insidious disease that has been allowed to spread. It is political AIDS.’
Any ‘best militants’ in the Labour Party would be lucky to escape expulsion and betrayal. All the forces who have waged a struggle against oppression will get the chop. Far from making left-sounding phrases and promises, Kinnock and his cohorts are laying their right-wing cards on the table in a bid to win the election. At the end of April, Tom Sawyer, chair of Labour’s Home Affairs committee and Deputy General Secretary of NUPE, spelled out Kinnock’s message very clearly when he warned the Labour Party ‘not to write off the white, heterosexual working class and replace them with a coalition of the dispossessed.’
‘the message is clear, the Labour Party will now abandon in words, as it has in deeds, the interests of the poorest and most oppressed workers.’ RCG MANIFESTO 1984
This is the Labour Party that Socialist Worker and most of the British left want to put into power for the next five years. In opposition, Kinnock has no real power except to lend the Tories a helping hand and wreak havoc on the Labour Party’s left wing. But in power, this Labour Mussolini would not just be able to insult the unemployed and poor, black people, strikers, gays and lesbians, indeed anyone who fights back. He would then have the might of British imperialism – its state, its police, its army, its courts – at his disposal.
Of course there is no alternative to voting Labour if, like the SWP, you think that the pre-requisite for being a ‘best militant’ is that you are employed, white, male and a trade unionist. In that case you must give your vote to British imperialism and take on the impossible job of convincing the labour aristocracy to take a revolutionary path against their best interests.
However, there is an alternative to voting Labour, with or without illusions. The forward for the working class is precisely to build the ‘coalition of the dispossessed’ – the rejects of Labour and Tory parties alike. Over the last eight years they have proved in practice that they are the ‘best militants’ in the working class.
At this election you can take the side of the oppressed only by voting for those candidates who make a stand against racism and immigration controls, against anti-union legislation, against British rule in Ireland, against British collaboration with apartheid, against police repression and the dismantling of our democratic rights.
