Millions of people will vote Labour in the general election on 12 December. They will look at its Manifesto and its promises of ending austerity, of revitalising the NHS and sorting out social care. They will look at the nationalisation proposals, the plan to outlaw zero-hours contracts and end ‘food bank Britain’, and the much-trailed provision of a million new jobs in a green economy. ‘For the many, not the few’ will strike a chord after years of widening inequality and shameless displays of obscene wealth. Those millions will be voting for what they hope might be a different life, one where there are educational opportunities denied at present to the working class, and where social justice prevails. ROBERT CLOUGH reports.
Underpinning this, however, is an illusion: that parliament can shower benefits on the working class, and that putting a cross in the appropriate box on a ballot form is all it takes to unlock this potential. The truth is that parliament serves to broker the interests of the ruling class, and will only display any concern for the working class if there is a massive movement threatening to tear it down. Those who imagine that the answers to the devastation the working class has experienced can be found through the polling booth seem to believe that the working class has no need to struggle to advance its interests and that these can be addressed through what amounts to state charity. This view has already had consequences in the more or less complete absence of working class resistance over the past four years.
Thus when Labour’s Manifesto declares ‘this is our last chance to tackle the climate emergency’, a resolute action plan should have followed, one which sought to mobilise a popular movement to ensure that its aims were met. Yet the dilution of policies on climate change which took place at the September Labour Party Conference and subsequently in drafting the Manifesto shows that Labour in government will bend under pressure from the ruling class, as there is no countervailing force from a working class mobilised in defence of its interests. This is especially true of the Manifesto’s more radical, social democratic proposals such as those on nationalisation and the proposed National Care Service.
The Manifesto attempts to paper over divisions on Brexit by saying a Labour government would negotiate a new deal within six months and put it to a referendum with Remain as an option; Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has said he would remain neutral to better implement the outcome. But whatever form Brexit takes, or indeed whether it happens, the ruling class is faced with an insoluble crisis, and it will not willingly allow a Labour government to infringe its sources of profit. In 1945 it had no choice: reconstructing a post-war economy demanded state intervention, and fear of the example of the Soviet Union and a possibly rebellious working class meant political concessions in the form of extensive state welfare provision and education. The ruling class could also rely on tribute from the colonial empire, and an industrial position unchallenged by a Europe destroyed by war.
All this has changed: growing inter-imperialist rivalries signal a world in economic crisis, one in which British capitalism cannot hope to compete on an independent basis. With Europe or with the US, that is the only choice for the ruling class; either outcome threatens the position of the City of London. A huge balance of trade deficit in goods, £25.2bn in 2019 Quarter 2, 4.6% of GDP, exposes the relative decline of the industrial and manufacturing sectors. In 2018, the overall deficit on trade in goods of £142bn was only partially offset by a surplus of £105bn on trade in services leaving an overall trade deficit of £38bn. The current account, which includes investment income and transfers as well as trade, saw a deficit of £92bn (4.3% of GDP) in 2018, compared with £72bn in 2017 (3.5% of GDP). These figures point to a weakening of British imperialism’s financial position and present the possibility of a future run on the pound.
In these conditions, the balance of class forces is crucial in determining the possibility of what a social democratic government can achieve. Yet the four years of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party have seen a complete demobilisation of the working class. Figures show record lows of strike action over the period: in 2017, the lowest number of workers involved since records began and the fewest stoppages; in 2018, the second lowest number of workers striking and the number of stoppages. 2019 has seen a pitiful 77,000 days lost by the end of September. In the face of the massive onslaught on working class conditions that austerity represents, the major trade unions have stifled significant resistance. Even the various anti-cuts groups that sprang up following the advent of the ConDem coalition have all but disappeared. There has been no organised opposition to the savage cuts in state benefits since 2015 or to the bedroom tax, or to the benefit cap. It is now accepted by Labour-led councils that they can slash budgets and services with impunity.
Following Corbyn’s election as Labour leader in September 2015, we wrote that ‘throughout the coming period Corbyn will have to decide which is more important: building a movement against austerity or preserving the unity of the Labour Party. The two cannot be reconciled.’ We pointed to the lessons of Greece, where in January 2015, Syriza had won an election standing against the austerity demands of the IMF, EU and European Central Bank, and yet capitulated days after a resounding ‘no’ vote in a July referendum on the brutal bail-out terms the Troika demanded. We concluded:
‘Syriza refused to mobilise the Greek working class to oppose the ever more brutal terms of the Troika. In Britain, Corbyn has said that he wants to see a massive campaign against austerity. We agree. However, to win, its purpose must be to defend the working class and defeat the ruling class, not to serve as a vehicle for the electoral ambitions of the Labour Party. The coming months will be the test of whether Jeremy Corbyn’s socialist ambitions are real.’
But there was no campaign against austerity. Quite the opposite: every avenue of working class resistance was closed down under Corbyn’s leadership. So what can we expect of a Labour government with a Manifesto seen to be the most radical in decades? Do those on the left who urge us to support Labour imagine that nationalising water and electricity will be achieved by a mere Act of Parliament to which the ruling class will meekly submit? Or that BT will willingly give up a major part of its business to enable the government to provide free broadband without all sort of legal challenges? And what about the threat to their positions from other providers, such as the litigious Virgin or Sky? Or that implementing the National Care Service will not in reality require the active mobilisation of hundreds of thousands of care workers to ensure that there is no sabotage by care home operators and the hedge funds that own so many of them? And then the proposal for a 32-hour week – how is that to be achieved without massive struggle of the sort that trade unions have run away from for years? These are real questions that socialists have to address.
Conceding to the Zionists
A foretaste of these pressures has been the renewed attack on Corbyn’s alleged tolerance of anti-Semitism within the Labour Party. The campaign over the past few years has been orchestrated by the Israeli embassy with the vitriolic support of the mass media and most mendaciously that of The Guardian and the BBC. The reactionary alliance has included Zionist sections of the Labour Party, in particular the Jewish Labour Movement and Labour Friends of Israel. The whole purpose of the campaign has been to eradicate any Labour support for the Palestinian people by deeming it as necessarily anti-Semitic, and it has led to numerous supporters of Palestine being driven from the party, in particular Derby North MP Chris Williamson. None has been shown to have been anti-Semitic so that activists such as Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein have been excluded on other grounds.
On 21 November, minor celebrity Rachel Riley published an adulterated photograph of Jeremy Corbyn following his arrest at a picket of the South African apartheid embassy in 1984. Her version changed the text on the placard Corbyn was wearing from ‘Defend the right to demonstrate against apartheid; join this picket’ to ‘Jeremy Corbyn is a racist endeavour’. Reaction was quick: a Twitter storm denounced the racist dismissal of the fight against apartheid, with many calling on Channel 4 to sack her. As if to repair the damage she had caused, The Times wheeled out the Tory Zionist Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis four days later to accuse Corbyn of being ‘complicit in prejudice’ and ‘unfit for office’, claiming that British Jews are ‘gripped by anxiety’ at the prospect of a Corbyn government. Mirvis had said that he was ‘delighted to congratulate’ Boris Johnson when he won the Tory leadership election; he had no comment on Johnson’s record as a serial racist. The hypocrisy of a South African-born Zionist lecturing Corbyn on racism when every Zionist organisation in apartheid South Africa was white supremacist, and the Zionist state was arming it to the teeth, is breathtaking.
Yet Corbyn has no answer: by accepting the two-state solution he has conceded the legitimacy of the Zionist ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people and their dispossession. None of those who denounce his alleged racism are at all bothered about the racist treatment of the Palestinian people or the brutality of the Zionist occupation, and Corbyn with his ‘kinder, gentler politics’ is no match for their absolute ruthlessness. He cannot turn the tables on the BBC’s reactionary Andrew Neil when he is asked if he is going to apologise to British Jews for his supposed failures on rooting out anti-Semitism. He could easily demand that these people denounce the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people, the racist Nation State Law, and the virulent racism of the Israeli leaders Avigdor Lieberman, Benjamin Netanyahu, Naftali Bennett and Benny Gantz, let alone the war crimes the racist state has committed. But he seems to have lost sight entirely of the intolerable conditions the Zionists impose on the Palestinian people. So the question has to be asked: if he concedes so easily at this stage, of what use will his ‘kinder, gentler politics’ be when he faces the full force of the British ruling class?
Timid taxation
As if in answer to this question, the Manifesto’s tax targets are astonishingly timid given how radical it is compared to predecessors. Corporation tax, currently 19%, will rise to 26% – but despite the protestations of the bourgeois press, this will still be lower than Germany (30%) and France (33%), and below the G7 average. Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell has told the BBC that Labour would want the rate to remain ‘competitive’. Tax rates would rise for those earning over £80,000 pa from 40% to 45%, the top 5% of earners. But there would be no change to national insurance rates which fall from 12% to 2% of income earned above £50,230 pa, a bung for the highest earners. There is talk of a further band for those earning more than £125,000, but there are no details of how much this will be.
In the meantime, it has taken four years of Corbyn’s leadership for Labour to agree to scrap Universal Credit – but without developing a single idea as to how to replace it. In common with all recent Labour election manifestos, there is obfuscation on the level of state benefits. While there are headline-grabbers about ending the bedroom tax and the overall benefit cap, these vicious policies affect only a small proportion of claimants, and there are no plans to roll back the benefits freeze of the last four years which have amounted to a cut of around 10%. The Resolution Foundation calculates from the Manifesto that more than half the benefit cuts that the Tory government put in place after the 2015 budget would continue. Labour under Corbyn has not shed its past hostility towards claimants that led leading figures at the time to argue that being seen as soft on benefits had resulted in Labour losing the 2010 and 2015 general elections. The continued freeze on benefits is in marked contrast to the 5% annual pay increase to public sector workers to allow them to catch up on the wage cuts of previous years.
Everywhere the Labour Manifesto is not quite what it seems. Ending NHS privatisation will involve complex legal action in terminating contracts which may be ten years’ duration. In making the visa system ‘fairer’ there is no mention of the iniquitous charges the Home Office levies on applicants, or a proposal to end the equally unjust NHS surcharge. Anti-trade union laws will be repealed – up to a point, as the right to secondary picketing will not be restored, according to John McDonnell in a BBC interview.
Green colonialism
Nowhere is the vagueness more obvious than in the much-trumpeted climate change policy. Labour’s 2019 Conference had rejected a 2030 zero emission target in favour of a net-zero target where carbon emissions from say, air travel or petrol-driven vehicles, would be balanced by increasing carbon absorption for instance through reforestation strategies. For the Manifesto, this was watered down further to the point where it says that Labour would ‘aim to achieve the substantial majority of our emissions reduction by 2030.’ Yet as Asad Rehman from War on Want has pointed out, ‘even with the most ambitious 2030 decarbonisation target, the UK would still not be able to fulfil its own actual fair share of effort within its own borders. Other poorer countries will need to undertake these emissions reductions on behalf of the UK.’ (Red Pepper, November 2019). This he calls ‘carbon colonialism’ as any relaxation on emission commitments by the imperialist countries effectively requires underdeveloped countries to emit less in compensation if the calculated global limit on future emissions is not to be breached. Thus the concessions demanded by the trade unions in the Manifesto’s target will be paid for by the people of the underdeveloped countries.
Time and again the Manifesto shows almost complete indifference to the position of what it calls the ‘Global South’. There is nothing about relieving the indebtedness of the underdeveloped countries, a form of bondage which is used by the World Bank to force underdeveloped countries to complete land titles on their common lands as a prelude to selling them to agribusiness multinationals for the imposition of ruinous monoculture. It berates the 100 largest companies ‘that are responsible for the majority of carbon emissions’, but the only sanction it proposes is delisting from the London Stock Exchange if they fail ‘to contribute to tackling the climate and environmental emergency’. Nothing about handing back the resources they are looting from the underdeveloped world – and yet the Manifesto protests that Labour ‘will reset our relationships with countries in the Global South based on redistribution and equality, not on outdated notions of charity and imperialist rule.’ This is just a lie.
Red Pepper, a left Labour fanzine, has declared that ‘During an election campaign that pits socialism against barbarism, the stakes could not be higher.’ But as we have seen, the Labour Manifesto has little to do with socialism. Furthermore, Red Pepper and other left supporters of a Labour vote deliberately downplay the concessions made by Corbyn and Labour which foretell how a Labour government would back down in the face of any real ruling class resistance. The trade unions and the Labour Party have done immense damage by their refusal to mount any sort of campaign against austerity, and there is no evidence that there would be any change in their approach if there were a Labour government. There has been no sense during the election campaign that Labour leaders or their supporters appreciate the enormous obstacles that the ruling class will place in the way of implementing the Manifesto’s proposals. There has been no political preparation of the working class for the struggle that would be necessary. That is why the job remains to build a massive movement outside the structures that keep capitalist parties in power – in communities and on the streets – rather than seek short cuts through parliament. That is what we are committed to.
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 273, December 2019/January 2020
