Events within the Labour Party are driving it towards a split. The attempt to depose Jeremy Corbyn as leader has pitted the majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party against the majority of the Party’s membership. The vast majority of Labour MPs never supported Corbyn, and have wanted to get rid of him at the earliest opportunity. Following the defeat of the Remain campaign in the EU referendum, Shadow Cabinet members resigned en masse over the weekend of 25/26 June, and on 28 June Labour MPs voted no confidence in Corbyn by 172 votes to 40. A fresh leadership election is now underway with former Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Owen Smith as Corbyn’s sole challenger. Robert Clough reports.
Corbyn won the leadership election in September 2015 on a tide of opposition to austerity. Yet he has failed to turn the Party into a force fighting austerity, choosing instead to instruct Labour-run councils to set legal budgets this year and implement savage cuts to services and jobs. The reason is simple: the Labour Party is an imperialist, racist and anti-working class party, and Corbyn cannot change that. Its purpose is to defend the interests of the British ruling class, an entirely parasitic layer whose enormous wealth is obtained through the ruthless robbery of the rest of the world principally through the City of London. A tiny proportion of this loot is directed to providing a small section of the working class with material privileges to guarantee its allegiance to British imperialism. Made up predominantly of university-educated public sector workers, this section looks to the Labour Party to defend its conditions and, along with the Labour Party, it saw continued EU membership as essential to this purpose. Now, in conditions of a deep and continuing capitalist crisis, the privileges of the middle classes and better-off working class can only be preserved at the expense of ever-increasing numbers of impoverished working class people (see Labour: a party fit for imperialism, Larkin Publications, 2014).
Parliamentary democracy?
Loyalty to the interests of British imperialism brings with it a commitment to parliamentary democracy – the argument that social change can only come through parliament and the electoral process. Former Labour leader Neil Kinnock made this clear in a speech to Labour MPs on 4 July when he said of those who established the Labour Party ‘In 1918, in the shadow of the Russian revolution, they made a deliberate, conscious, ideological choice, that they would not pursue the syndicalist road, that they would not pursue the revolutionary road – it was a real choice in those days. They would pursue the parliamentary road to socialism.’ He added that ‘the people that joined the party are joining a party committed to the parliamentary road and that makes it crucial to have a leader that enjoys the support of the Parliamentary Labour Party.’ This means that it is the MPs who count, and because they overwhelmingly supported a vote of no confidence in Corbyn, Corbyn had a ‘duty’ to resign. ‘Obviously there’s no basis on which Jeremy really could or should stay,’ he declared. Kinnock’s view of what he calls the ‘democratic provisions of the Labour Party’ means that the opinions of the mass of the membership, who supported Corbyn in 2015 with 59.5% of the vote are now of no account.
Kinnock ‘knows’ anyway that those members have ‘deep residual doubts’ about Corbyn’s suitability to be prime minister, and that, on the ‘basis of [personal] acquaintance with members of the union’, so do members of Unite the Union. In fact, more than a century of pursuing Kinnock’s parliamentary strategy has resulted in a pro-imperialist Labour Party and has left the working class without any political representation.
Kinnock’s view of the supposed democratic processes within the Labour Party is shared by those 172 MPs who voted against Corbyn: as a party committed to the defence of British imperialism’s interests, it has to expel or suppress any progressive opinion within its membership.
Mutiny
There was no way that the Parliamentary Labour Party was going to accept Corbyn’s victory, based as it was on a wave of anti-austerity sentiment. From the start of his leadership, the behaviour of Labour MPs was shameless: right-wing backbenchers such as John Mann and John Woodcock were given tacit encouragement by Shadow Cabinet members to denounce Corbyn, and the media gave them every opportunity, especially the BBC. Faced with constant mutiny, Corbyn had two options: either compromise with the Parliamentary Labour Party, or confront it and build a movement against austerity. His stated priority, however, was to maintain Labour Party unity, and so he chose the first course. Granting MPs a free vote over the bombing of Syria, and backpedalling on railway nationalisation and NATO membership were examples of this strategy.
Corbyn’s conciliation policy was never going to work. With Labour committed to a Remain position in the EU referendum, the Brexit victory came as a shock for the mass of the Parliamentary Labour Party. Blaming Corbyn for the result, and terrified that an early general election might be called with devastating consequences for their careers, Labour MPs swung into action. On the day after the referendum, 24 June, Angela Eagle’s political adviser surreptitiously registered a website, angela4leader.org. On 25 June, Shadow Foreign Secretary Hilary Benn told Corbyn he no longer had confidence in his leadership and began to organise a coup. Corbyn sacked him, triggering a mass of carefully-synchronised resignations (which Benn had organised) from the Shadow Cabinet over the next three days: 20 in all, together with 28 ministers and 11 Parliamentary Private Secretaries. This culminated with the vote of no confidence on 28 June. Eagle then stated that she would stand against Corbyn in a leadership election if Corbyn did not resign.
‘Acts of sabotage’
Unexpectedly for the plotters, Corbyn refused to fall on his sword. On 29 June, the general secretaries of 10 of Britain’s largest trade unions including Unite, Unison and the GMB, signed a joint statement supporting Corbyn, stating that their members would be ‘looking with dismay at events in parliament’ and calling on Labour MPs to ‘respect the authority of the party’s leader’. Attempts over the following week by Unite general secretary Len McCluskey to broker talks between Corbyn and Labour MPs to find a compromise were scuppered on 9 July by deputy leader Tom Watson; McCluskey describing Watson’s actions as ‘looking like an act of sabotage’. Watson claimed that there could be no progress unless there was a commitment by Corbyn to resign; McCluskey said that the explicit precondition for the talks was that Corbyn would remain in post. There was nowhere for the conspirators to go other than to launch a formal leadership challenge, and Angela Eagle committed herself on 11 July.
Attention then turned to whether or not Corbyn needed the nominations of 20% of the Party’s MPs and MEPs in order to stand. There was no doubt in Kinnock’s mind that he did, nor in Eagle’s; she told ITV’s Robert Peston on 10 July that ‘he will have to find the nominations’. The key lay with Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC), which decided by 18 votes to 14 in a secret ballot on 12 July that he didn’t. This was a further shock for the plotters: they had demanded a secret ballot in the hope that it would raise the chances of them excluding Corbyn from the election. On a rising tide of manufactured accusations against Corbyn, one NEC member, Johanna Baxter, tearfully complained after the meeting that Corbyn had opposed such a ballot and so ‘endorsed bullying, threats and intimidation, by the fact of that vote’. This demand for secrecy did not stop her from splashing her views about in a lengthy interview with The Guardian. A subsequent challenge to the NEC decision in the High Court by wealthy Zionist Michael Foster, who has given £400,000 to the Labour Party, was rejected on 28 July.
Rigging the vote
The same NEC meeting, however, arbitrarily decided that anyone who had joined the Labour Party after 12 January 2016 would not be eligible to vote unless they paid a £25 supporter fee in the two days from 18 July. This is now subject to a legal challenge to be heard on 4 August, although more than 180,000 people paid their £25 in that two-day period. The NEC suspended all meetings of local Labour Party and Constituency Labour Parties for the duration of the election campaign because of ‘possible intimidation’. Democracy only matters when it serves the interests of the Labour Party bureaucracy.
A ‘new’ left-wing candidate
On 13 July, Owen Smith joined Eagle in seeking nominations to challenge Corbyn. Smith has defended PFI in the NHS, voted for a Trident replacement in Parliament on 18 July, says he does not know how he would have voted on the Iraq war, and supports a cap on the total benefits that any individual can receive. Eagle supported the Iraq war, also voted for a Trident replacement, and abstained along with Smith on the Welfare Bill in 2015. Eagle, however, was tainted by her position on Iraq, and in the end secured nominations from only 72 MPs and MEPs as against 90 for Smith. Having one challenger presented the only chance of defeating Corbyn, so Eagle stood down in favour of Smith on 19 July.
In an effort to bolster his position – polls suggested both he and Eagle would be trounced, with only 34% support as against 56% for Corbyn – Smith is eagerly re-inventing himself as an anti-austerity candidate. He wants a wealth tax for the top 1% of earners. He pledges an annual increase in NHS spending of 4%, presumably to cover up his promotion of privatised services when he was a lobbyist for the giant Pfizer pharma monopoly, a £200bn infrastructure investment plan and an end to the public sector wage freeze. He proposes a change to the Labour Party’s constitution commiting it to fight inequality. He is turning the campaign into an auction, bidding 1.5 million new homes in five years, an end to zero-hours contracts, scrapping anti-trade laws and reversing cuts to corporation and inheritance tax. He has however nothing to say about the savage cuts in state benefits. On the other hand he is prepared to press the nuclear button which will make him acceptable to the ruling class.
A fantasy Labour Party
The opportunist left within and outside the Labour Party is desperate for a Corbyn victory. The Socialist Workers Party says its ‘task is to be part of the movement in support of Jeremy Corbyn’, and the Socialist Party agrees: ‘The immediate task is to mobilise for Jeremy Corbyn’s re-election. But also to organise to ensure that this time victory is consolidated by remaking Labour as a working class, socialist party that really can be the voice of the 99%.’
The idea that Labour was once a working class party and that it can be returned to its working class origins is a reactionary fantasy. Corbyn’s election campaign has nothing to do with the mass of the working class but with the preservation of the material interests of a privileged minority. 76% of Labour members before 2015 and 75% of those who joined after the general election were ABC1 social groups (managers, professionals and skilled workers), 56% and 58% respectively were graduates. Their average age is 51, with only 6% of members under 24. This is the social base of Momentum, which, although proclaiming itself to be a new social movement, focuses its attention on internal Labour Party politics. In Liverpool, it organised a rally for Corbyn on 2 July which attracted over 1,000 people – yet ignored the protest two weeks later about the death of Mzee Mohammed at the hands of Liverpool police. Momentum and the opportunist left are in a completely different political world from the black and poorest sections of the working class, for whom the Corbyn campaign is an irrelevance.
The result of the leadership election will be announced on 23 September. Corbyn is almost certain to win, and the vast majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party will reject the result. At that stage, an enormous amount of backtracking will be necessary to avoid a split. Corbyn and Momentum will then have to decide whether they want to build a party committed to struggle against imperialism, austerity, racism and war, or stay in an imperialist party which will promote all of these. There is no other option.
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 252 August/September 2016
