Respect’s pitiful share of the vote in the Southall by-election on 19 July reveals the crisis that faces the opportunist left as it fails to establish itself as an electoral force. It follows the disastrous showing of Solidarity and the Scottish Socialist Party in the May elections to the Scottish Assembly.
Turnout in the by-election was a mere 42.95%, 13.25% down on the 2005 general election. Respect failed to provide the ‘real impact’ or ‘left alternative’ that Socialist Worker claimed it would the week beforehand. Meanwhile one of Respect’s 12 Tower Hamlets councillors elected in May has defected to Labour, and another resigned.
Respect has more and more openly positioned itself as an electoral organisation with the politics of ‘Old Labour’. A recent leaflet argued that ‘Respect supported John McDonnell in his challenge to Gordon Brown for the Labour leadership … because John McDonnell promoted policies in favour of working class people, which are a cornerstone of Respect policies’. A leadership contest would have shown that ‘an alternative socialist vision within Labour still remained’. McDonnell’s failure, Respect says, ‘is a devastating indictment of New Labour’.
In truth, the devastating indictment is of the bankruptcy of Old Labour, its attempted modern reincarnation in Respect and the force behind it, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP).
SWP: covering up for Labour imperialism
Critical to the SWP’s adaptation to what it styles as ‘Old Labour’ is its belief that that Labour’s imperialism is not a necessity for a party committed to run the British state but a policy choice. Thus Alex Callinicos has recently argued that Blair’s and Brown’s ‘main “innovation” in economic policy, giving the Bank of England independence to set interest rates, was a surrender to neoliberal conventional wisdom. Its effect was to remove key economic decisions from any form of democratic control…the two have continued Thatcher’s policy of closely aligning the British economy to the US and mimicking its free market policies. This has meant the continued decline of manufacturing industry, and growing dependence on financial markets. The City of London has flourished under Blair and Brown.’ (Socialist Worker, 12 May 2007)
What else were Brown and Blair to do? Once you have thrown in your lot with British imperialism, you do what is required to defend its interests – in that sense there is no choice. Surrendering to neoliberal conventional wisdom, mimicking US free market policies, supervising the continued decline of manufacturing industry, stimulating a growing dependence on financial markets – this is what British imperialism required of Labour if it were to be allowed to govern. Callinicos and the SWP however imagine that something else could have happened had Labour remained Old Labour: indeed Callinicos later on in his article complains about ‘the distance the Blair government has travelled from traditional Labourism’ in its treatment of poverty.
This is why the SWP supported John McDonnell’s campaign to become Labour leader after Blair since it believed that a defender of ‘traditional Labourism’ would be able to govern British imperialism and defend working class interests at the same time. This is a pernicious myth which covers up for Labour imperialism. Socialists can have no truck with it.
FRFI 198 August / September 2007
