Ed Miliband’s narrow victory over David Miliband in the Labour leadership contest by 50.65% to 49.35% was quite possibly the consequence of David Miliband’s refusal to endorse the TUC’s march against the cuts during the leadership hustings at the Congress. Diane Abbott, the candidate of the left, received the lowest vote of the election and was eliminated in the first round. What was striking was how little support she had from the membership – no more than one in 14 voted for her. It once more confirms that the left is a negligible force in the Labour Party.
So ends a campaign whose irrelevance for the working class defies description. It only narrowly avoided farce when the Labour Party leadership engineered the inclusion of Abbott on the ballot; otherwise the contest would have been between four white, male, 40-something former Oxford cabinet ministers. That the darling of the left John McDonnell had to concede to this arrangement demonstrates how pitifully weak the Labour left is: he himself had less support than when he attempted to confront Gordon Brown in the 2006 leadership campaign. As it was, the attempts of Ed Miliband, Andy Burnham and Ed Balls to distance themselves from the war on Iraq (but not the current one in Afghanistan) and the last Labour government’s proposed spending cuts lacked any credibility.
Abbott’s role was to provide a slightly left but absolutely loyal opposition. This was never expected to garner significant support from those who could vote in the ballot. However, her opposition to both wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, to Labour’s immigration policies and the planned Labour spending cuts meant that the opportunist left could latch on to her candidacy in its drive to rehabilitate the Labour Party and prevent a real movement from being built. The reactionary character of this standpoint became evident towards the end of the campaign when the opportunists adopted an ‘anyone but David Miliband’ position. Thus Socialist Worker editorialised under the heading ‘Labour must break from Blairite past’ (25 September 2010) that ‘It’s already clear that it will be disastrous if David Miliband is Labour leader’, and then made the case for Ed Miliband:
‘If Ed Miliband wins then it will mean that union leaders such as Dave Prentis, Tony Woodley and Paul Kenny have won out against the most rotten elements in Labour – such as Peter Mandelson. This should not encourage any illusions about how left wing Ed Miliband is, but it will be a defeat for the Brown-Blair legacy project.’
So – support Ed Miliband without illusions. But the illusions are already there: within the SWP itself and the rest of the petit bourgeois left. Everything they do is driven by the myth that Labour can play a progressive role. That is why there is always space in the leadership of their stitched-up campaigns for all the same old Labour hacks – the Tony Benns, the Jeremy Corbyns, the John McDonnells, whether it is in the Right to Work, the Stop the War Coalition, the Coalition of Resistance, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, the Convention of the Left, etc etc etc. Never are these Labour figures put under pressure, never are they challenged about their continued membership of a racist, imperialist, anti-working class party.
Compounding this is another myth: that the Labour Party has a ‘mass membership of workers’ (Socialist Worker 24 July 2010) and that ‘Labour remains a party of over 150,000 members, many of them working class… While the party has less than half the members it had in 1997 more than 20,000 have joined since the May election.’ Yet as far back as 1987 the Whitty report revealed that 60% of Labour Party members had a degree or equivalent compared to 11% of the general population. This was years before the Blair membership drive of the mid-1990s brought a new influx of middle class New Labour enthusiasts, while those who have joined since May are generally acknowledged to be former middle class Lib Dem supporters disillusioned with its involvement in the coalition.
Beyond this, Socialist Worker expresses clearly the paralysis of the opportunist left, arguing that we should avoid a ‘kneejerk response’ to Labour Party members wanting to participate in campaigns against the cuts, and that we should not demand to know what these members did when Labour was in office. Indeed, ‘we could make ultimatums, stating that only Labour members who oppose all cuts in all circumstances can join our campaigns’ but this ‘will win us few friends’. So, what we have to do is drop all this nonsense about challenging Labour Party members – Tony Benn et al – and instead form ‘united fronts with Labour figures and campaigning and speaking alongside them.’ In other words, never, ever, make them accountable for their actions, keep them centre-stage and prevent a real movement from emerging against the ruling class onslaught.
Robert Clough
FRFI 217 October/November 2010
