At a meeting in Manchester on 22 February to organise a local demonstration against the Labour council’s cuts, leading Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) member and president of Manchester Trades Council Geoff Brown argued that Labour councillors known to be in favour of cuts should be invited to speak at the demonstration. He said he would be glad to see Labour leader of Manchester council Sir Richard Leese on the platform even though Leese is committed to axing 2,000 jobs and savaging local services. Despite opposition from FRFI supporters and others at the meeting, the SWP got its way and will go cap in hand to pro-cuts Labour councillors begging for their support.
Brown’s stance was no aberration. At the Right to Work People’s Convention in London on 12 February, other leading SWP members such as Candy Udwin said that it was a good idea to put on meetings with vacillating or even pro-cuts councillors since ‘then they feel the pressure’, while Michael Lavalette stressed the importance of ‘working with people to our right’ and that he would still include councillors who voted for cuts in his anti-cuts movement. Socialist Worker subsequently criticised Dave Nellist, Socialist Party councillor in Coventry for arguing that ‘we shouldn’t work with Labour councillors who don’t renounce all cuts.’ The spokesperson for the Coalition of Resistance (CoR) at the conference, Andrew Burgin, agreed with the SWP: while the CoR too opposed all cuts, it also ‘believed in working with people who don’t hold that view’.
Up and down the country Labour-led councils are falling into line and implementing the savage cuts in local state spending that have been demanded by the ConDem coalition on behalf of the City of London. They use police to clear public galleries of protesters. They will shed tears, emote, wring their hands, blame the ConDem coalition, the bankers, anyone but themselves for the attacks they are authorising on much-needed services and jobs. They hope that people will have short memories and forget that it was the last Labour government that insisted on the most draconian cuts in a generation, and that for the last year councils have quietly implemented those cuts. They act in this way because the Labour Party is committed to defend the interests of the bankers and the City of London – British imperialism. The one thing that Labour councillors reject absolutely therefore is resistance. They have no choice, they say. They lie. They are just class enemies.
Now the SWP et al are telling us that these class enemies should be part of the anti-cuts movement. They say it is the interests of maximum ‘unity’. But where is the ‘unity’ for the workers who are sacked by Labour councils, for the workers whose services Labour councils are destroying? As Dave Nellist said at the People’s Convention, even one council refusing to make the cuts would ‘electrify politics.’ Yet by allowing these pro-cuts Labour councillors to pose as being anti-cuts, the likes of the SWP and CoR make such an event even less likely.
Like Labour councillors, socialists have a choice. We can choose to shackle the anti-cuts movement to the rotten Labour Party and embrace class enemies. Or we can stand beside the working class. We cannot do both. The SWP et al have chosen ‘unity’ with a tiny, very privileged stratum of politicians and trade union leaders who have been bought by the ruling class and who will do their utmost to sabotage any resistance.
Remember that the SWP et al (including Counterfire, which is behind the Coalition of Resistance) told us to vote Labour at the last general election and so vote for more war, more millionaires, more racism, more cuts and more attacks on the working class. As they give yet another helping hand to these class enemies, we have to conclude that there is nothing that will make these people break with the Labour Party, no matter what crimes it commits. No to the cuts – full stop!
