For all the hullabaloo about the abolition of the House of Lords, we are now living under the most punitive, anti-working class government for the last 50 years, and probably longer. We have fewer rights than at any time in the past 50 years, and those that remain are going to be eroded even further. Yet such is the pathetic state of the British left that they still urge us to vote Labour, and support charlatans like Ken Livingstone. Labour’s conference and the recent pre-budget statement from Gordon Brown makes quite clear that there will be no let up, as ROBERT CLOUGH reports.
In the absence of any opposition, Labour has been able to attack sections of the working class with impunity. Eligibility for disability benefits is to be reduced and they are to be means-tested under the new Welfare Act. The closure of Remploy factories that provide employment to the disabled is another cost-cutting exercise in the absence of any meaningful legislation on employment discrimination. The vicious attacks on asylum seekers in Dover; Straw’s outburst against travellers, the mooted removal of the right to strike from firemen protesting against service cuts, Labour’s overall penal and prison policy, the nonsense of the Freedom of Information Bill, are all examples of a totalitarian government determined to crush dissent before it emerges.
Labour is as much committed to a deregulated economy as the Tories ever were. But the government’s dominant position in parliament is allowing to consider what was unthinkable to the Tories – privatising air traffic control and the Underground. It allows Gordon Brown to cut £700m from planned pollution taxes whilst giving pensioners just 73p a week more – a pitiful 1.1% increase. This is being, in Brown’s words, ‘pro-enterprise, pro-competition’ with a vengeance. Yet this is not all. In his pre-Budget statement he announced cuts in capital gains tax on buying and selling business assets and shares from 40% to 10% if they are held for more than five years. He will also set up what he calls Enterprise Management Initiatives which allow companies to award up to £1m share options tax free, changing the current position where pay- outs on share options have been limited to four times annual salary. Furthermore, all employees holding shares for five years will be exempt from income and capital gains tax. From April 2000, employers can make a tax-free gift of £3,000 worth of shares to an employee, whilst employees can buy up to £1,500 tax-free.
Yet there is an aspect of Labour’s policy which is very different from the Tories, and that is its approach to the impoverished sections of the working class. There are a large number of initiatives dealing with what it describes as ‘Social Exclusion’. The latest is the tests for three-year-olds, but they include Sure Start, Quality Protects, Education and Health Action Zones, Health Improvement Programmes, housing and regeneration initiatives. One thing these all have in common: they do not give money directly to the poor. Quite the opposite: Labour is not prepared to raise levels of benefit, extend eligibility or restore the link between pensions and earnings. Instead it is engaged in a process of social regimentation. The Tories were content to leave the poorer sections of the working class to stew in the ghettos of social housing that could not be sold off. Labour is not: it wants to discipline the poor, to hound them into submission. Hence the curfews for children, social control orders, Youth Offending Teams, youth ID cards: there will be no hiding place, no refuge from the forces of the state.
Active policing will be the order of the day. 10,000 or 15,000 extra police will be recruited depending on whose figures you believe. There will be legislation to extend the national DNA database so that it has samples from 3 million supposedly ‘active’ criminals as opposed to the present 650,000. Compulsory drugs testing will complement compulsory DNA testing. Those in breach of community service orders will have their benefit stopped. The oppressive regime of the JSA will be extended to the over-25s. People who are suspected of benefit fraud will be required to sign on daily. And if they are hauled before the courts, they will have lost the right to jury trial if they are accused of ‘either way’ offences.
A deregulated economy demands a highly regulated workforce, and Labour is demonstrating its commitment to the repressive legislation necessary to ensure that entrepreneurs can flourish, new millionaires spring up. Once more we have to ask ourselves: how can the left continue to support Labour? How can they begin to think that campaigning for Ken Livingstone will make the blindest bit of difference when he has made absolutely clear he will not break from Labour? The only position that socialists can adopt is one of outright opposition to this racist, imperialist and anti-working class party.
FRFI 152 December 1999 / January 2000
