New Labour’s Manifesto: The road to social fascism

Labour’s new manifesto was launched to a huge fanfare on 4 July. ‘The Labour Party has changed’, it announces. ‘Now we are seeking the trust of the people to change Britain’. A ringing sentence indeed: but what does it signify? Nothing, for as The Economist pointed out, ‘neither in economics, nor in health, nor in education, nor in welfare reform does this pro­visional manifesto justify the claim that [Blair] and his party make that they are seeking to change their country.’ For The Economist and other ruling class opinion-formers, what is reassuring about New Labour is how little it differs from the Tories: ‘…the thrust of Labour’s macroeconomic policies is much the same as that of John Major’s Tories, differing only in detail. Indeed that is their appeal. Labour now embraces free trade, free markets, and fis­cal and monetary stability…’

The Economist is absolutely right in its assessment. It could have added that the other side of such economic liberalism is social authoritarianism, and that this is present in the manifesto in bucketsful. What appears in the document confirms the oppressive conservatism of New Labour, its dedication to the defence of the status quo. At the manifesto’s launch, Blair made much of five specific promises: a New Labour government, he said, would:

• Cut class sizes for 5 to 7-year-­olds using cash from abolishing the assisted places scheme;
• Introduce fast track punish­ment for persistent young offenders;
• Reduce NHS waiting lists by 100,000 patients using £100 million from cutting NHS bur­eaucracy;
• Take 250,000 under-25-year­olds off benefit using cash from a windfall tax on private utilities;
• Implement tough rules for government spending, ensure low inflation and keep interest rates down.

In practice this means an infini­tesimally small change for the daily lives of the working class. Implement tough rules for gov­ernment spending? That’s what we have had from the Tories these past 17 years. Introduce fast-track punishment for per­sistent young offenders? This is just another bid in the grotesque auction to find the party who can be the most vicious towards working class youth. Reduce NHS waiting lists by 100,000? Everyone knows how waiting list numbers can be manipulated at will. And there is a world of difference if the wait­ing lists that are reduced are for serious, expensive operations such as heart surgery or hip operations, or whether they are for minor operations which require minimal investment. With 34,000 children on assisted places, the money released would make a minimal impact on class sizes, whilst the removal of 250,000 from benefits will undoubtedly mean forced training with no guarantee of any job at the end of it.

A manifesto for managers

Reading the document is like reading the latest management-speak. ‘This is the era of learn­ing through life’, ‘value-added performance tables’, ‘quality’ this and ‘quality’ that; it is also full of meaningless gibberish such as ‘New Labour will estab­lish a new trust on tax with the British people.’ Can anyone understand what this means? Does it mean that for instance Murdoch and his News Inter­national will now have to pay corporation tax, having paid none on £l billion profits over the past ten years? Pigs would fly – it’s certainly not the reason Blair went to see him in Aus­tralia last year.

Under the Tories, there has been a major shift from direct tax on income to indirect tax on purchases. This means that the poorest pay proportionally more tax than the middle class. When the document says that ‘under new Labour there will be no return to the penal tax rates that existed under both Labour and Conservative gov­ernments in the 1970s’, it really means that nothing substantial will change. The poor will still be penalised.

Voting Labour is a vote for…

As many on the left exhort us to vote New Labour, we need to remind ourselves what we are being asked to vote for.

• A vote for Labour is a vote for Trident. ‘A new Labour govern­ment will retain Trident’, the doc­ument says, and Blair has said he would be prepared to press the button. Only after there is ‘veri­fied progress’ towards the elimi­nation of nuclear weapons would New Labour ‘ensure British nuclear weapons are included in such negotiations.’ No wonder CND chair Janet Bloomfield has described it as ‘a coward’s mani­festo’. We hope she will not be voting New Labour.

• A vote for Labour is a vote to sell weapons of mass destruc­tion to barbarous regimes through the world to preserve the interests of a handful of monopoly arms manufacturers such as British Aerospace. This includes the continuing sale of Hawk fighter-bombers to Indonesia. But then this is an example of continuity: it was the last Labour government which sold the first batch of Hawks to the Suharto regime, and these were used in the genocidal war against the people of East Timor.

• A vote for Labour is a vote to stigmatise and exclude working class youth. If they refuse com­pulsory and meaningless train­ing they will be denied benefits. Jack Straw will declare open season on ‘winos, junkies and squeegee merchants’. There will be curfews, since according to Jack Straw, punishment must take precedence over the wel­fare of the child. And what of those ‘persistent offenders’? As one magistrate recently said, ‘I have been a member of a com­mittee that traced every aspect of the lives of all persistent young offenders in one part of the country; what emerged about every young person whose records could be traced was a history of massive disrup­tion (many had moved school and home more than a dozen times by the time they were eight or nine), poverty, poor housing, ill-health and random or specific acts of violence and abuse.’ In other words, persis­tent offenders are young people whose lives have been des­troyed by capitalism, and Jack Straw’s solution is to send them to prison quicker.

• A vote for Labour is a vote to keep working class pensioners in poverty. New Labour will not restore the link between the level of the state pension and the rise in earnings. Breaking this link has cost single pen­sioners £20.30 per week since 1980, and couples £33.00.

• A vote for Labour is almost certainly a vote to keep the Job Seeker’s Allowance. Although officially ‘under review’, this is code that Blair wants to keep it even if others don’t, and Blair always wins on the important issues. New Labour in govern­ment will target social security for cuts; its high-profile local government campaigns against ‘benefit fraud’ are a foretaste of the oppressive regime it will institute against claimants.

• A vote for Labour is a vote to retain Tory trade union legisla­tion: ‘The key elements of the trade union legislation of the 1980s – on ballots, picketing and industrial action – will stay’. Of course, ‘people should be free to join or not to join a union’. But since New Labour will not reduce the qualifying period for minimal rights at work to the old level of six months, it means that those who need a union most – those who have been employed less than two years – will still be sacked for union activities regardless.

• A vote for Labour is a vote to retain selection in education ‘We will not close good schools’ – whether they be grant-main­tained or grammar schools. ‘The future of remaining gram­mar schools is up to the parents affected’ – and since when have the middle class ever voted to give up any of their privileges?

• A vote for Labour is a vote to continue moves to privatise the NHS through the Private Finance Initiative, which they are now starting to support after earlier opposition. New Labour will not commit any new funds to the NHS, which will add to the pressure for it to seek pri­vate sources. Demagogic at­tacks on bureaucracy disguise the fact that most managers could be turned into nurses or other healthcare professionals by a simple change in job title.

• A vote for Labour is a vote to retain the Criminal Justice Act. It is not seen to be worth a men­tion in the document since it involves working class rights. New Labour abstained on the Bill as it passed through Parliament.

• A vote for Labour is a vote to retain the current immigration laws; it is a vote for racism. Again, Labour have abstained as the Asylum Bill has passed through Parliament, confining themselves to minor amend­ments which would make it an even more reactionary piece of legislation. The front cover of the Road to the Manifesto has a picture of a nice white middle class family – two parents, two children – just to make clear where New Labour’s concerns lie.

• A vote for Labour is a vote to continue the British military occupation of the North of Ire­land. ‘We have supported the present government strongly in the Northern Ireland peace process. We will continue to do so.’ New Labour have been true to their word: their complicity with the government in attempt­ing to isolate the Republican movement over the last two years has been unwavering.

In other words, a vote for Labour is a vote for more of the same – as one commentator Larry Elliott put it, ‘New Labour’s sales pitch at the next election looks like being the 1960s in reverse: instead of Harold Wilson’s mix­ture of economic interventionism and social liberalism, we will have economic liberalism and social authoritarianism’. Should we be surprised at this when Blair announced during a visit to Singapore in January that the ‘success’ of the Singapore dicta­tor Lee Kuan Yew ‘very much reflects my own philosophy’. Such ‘success’ in Singapore includes the banning of trade unions, tight controls on the press and restrictions on all forms of individual rights. The so-called ‘tiger economies’ of the Far East depend for their suc­cess on extreme social control. It is illegal for young people to con­gregate in Malaysia for any pur­pose in a way that offends the authorities. Such a law would be like manna from heaven for Jack Straw as he contemplates his next bid in the repression stakes. It is highly unlikely he will remain satisfied with the Criminal Justice Act for long.

Thumbs up for the middle class: two fingers to the working class

New Labour’s manifesto has been accused of vagueness, timidity and conservatism. In reality, only the last point is true. It is certainly not vague when it comes to making a pitch for middle class votes, a point brought out by Blair in his com­ments at the press launch when he said that ‘consistent with the high quality services we need, you should be able to keep as much of the money you have earned to spend as you like’. And it is certainly not timid in its proposals for dealing with any resistance from the working class. Within days of its publica­tion New Labour came out against the striking under­ground drivers – they upset too many potential middle class voters in the marginal suburban constituencies. The document shows that between New Labour and the working class there is a gulf which no amount of words can bridge. Serious socialists should now be organ­ising against New Labour and fueling the hatred that the working class will undoubtedly develop for Blair, Straw and their sidekicks if they win the next general election.