Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism, No. 102, August/September 1991
‘2600 Votes for Socialism’ – ‘an excellent base to build a fight-back’ – so trumpeted Militant and the SWP in the aftermath of the Walton by-election. Yet what did this represent in reality? In a city where one in six is out of work, where thousands of redundancies are threatened by the Labour-led City Council, where five out of six Broad Left councillors had been elected in the May local elections, very little indeed. Walton had long been the powerbase for Militant, and there is no doubt that when they decided to field a candidate, they anticipated far greater support.
However, Militant had never been enthusiastic about standing in the first place. It was only pressure in the wider Broad Left movement that bounced them into proposing Lesley Mahmood; the reasons for their reluctance can now be seen in the renewed drive to expel Terry Fields, further threatening their position within the Labour Party. Added to his will be the heads of hundreds of other Labour Party members who canvassed for Mahmood, as Kinnock purges the remainder of the diminishing left-wing of his Party.
The man who won, Kilfoyle, epitomises Kinnock’s Labour. Architect of the witch-hunt against all those who had fought the rate-capping of the council in 1983-84, he has endorsed the cuts and redundancies that the Labour council is forcing through to balance its books. What we see in Liverpool is a foretaste of what a Kinnock government will do if it wins a general election.
Within Liverpool itself, the impact of the cuts is being felt in many different ways – the refuse collection being privatised with the loss of 460 jobs, closure of children’s homes, restrictions on all sorts of services such as libraries. A campaign of strike actions continues, but already the union leadership is attempting to split it in order to defeat it: last week, the chair of Liverpool NALGO called for GMB picket lines to be lifted just as over 2,000 of her members refused to cross them.
If Labour and its trade union allies are showing exactly what they are made of, the left are showing just how little they understand the process. Municipal socialism, the basis on which Militant built its support in the 1980s, is dead. The very notion that Labour ‘belongs to the working class’ (Militant) is being exposed for the nonsense it is. The SWP changes its mind from one week to the next – one week it wants to vote Labour, the next Real Labour; their only certainty is that they need a constituency on which to build themselves, and Militant seems to have got there before them. Hence the plethora of Open Letters from the SWP on the one hand, and Militant refusals to accept SWP canvassers on the other. What both of them have in common is the desperate need for an alliance with the left-wing of Labour in the unions, in CND, wherever.
The election revealed the extent to which Thatcher and Kinnock in their different ways have destroyed the left of the Labour Party. What remains are two rather mangy dogs squabbling over the carcass.
Robert Clough and Lorna Reid
