In a Guardian Comment article on 21 April, Owen Jones openly called for a Labour vote to stop the cruel society being built by the Tories. The extremes of austerity, he said, would be challenged by Labour’s £50bn spending promise. Never mind Labour supporting benefits sanctions, anti-immigration laws and refusing to meet the £8bn gap in NHS funding. Never mind that the Institute for Fiscal Studies predicts a dramatic fall in schools funding under both main parties. We can have austerity-lite. Pepsi instead of Coke. But Jones went further than that and credited Labour with following the demands of a mass movement by pledging to abolish the bedroom tax. He paints a picture of trade union ‘activists’ and ‘dogged NHS campaigners’ forcing Labour into progressive campaign promises, making struggles under a Miliband government more winnable. Under the Tories, he argues, resistance has ‘no chance’ of success. The reality is very different: Labour has consistently failed to respond to the needs of working class people who have been at the receiving end of the ConDem government’s austerity programme. On the contrary, it has promised to continue the attack. All that Jones does is offer a feeble excuse for spineless trade unions and covers up for the reactionary role of Labour councils while ignoring the victories of the Focus E15 Mothers and other housing campaigners in winning the right to stay in London because they don’t fit his opportunist model.
Labour and the bedroom tax
Beginning with a moving story about a bedroom tax sufferer, Owen Jones hails those who took to the streets: ‘They say protest doesn’t work; “they” are wrong, because that campaigning paid off. Labour committed to repealing the bedroom tax as a consequence.’ Actually, for bedroom tax victims and people involved in campaigns, the response from Labour was connivance with the system. Labour councils operated the bedroom tax locally and their councillors repeated ad nauseam that we should ‘wait for a Labour government’ to excuse their collaboration. They did nothing to organise against it. Stoke Labour council went so far as to evict 25 families for non-payment in the 18 months up to October 2014. Labour’s promise to repeal the tax has not come from any progressive conviction; it is not promising to refund or reinstate residents. For over three years Labour politicians did nothing to oppose it whatever they may be claiming now.
Don’t mention Labour racism
None of Owen Jones’ recent statements have criticised Labour’s racist ‘tough new approach to immigration’ – one of Labour’s five key election pledges. Labour promises to end all benefits for migrants for two years and that all people ‘who work in public services in public-facing roles should be required to speak English.’ The idea that public sector employment practices do no already require this is obviously absurd, and in fact the last Labour government cut free English lessons to asylum seekers aged 19 and over when it was in government in 2007. On the campaign trail earlier this year, Owen Jones went to Cambridge ‘to talk politics and back [Labour candidate] Daniel Zeichner’s efforts to boot out the Lib Dem MP.’ In 2010 Zeichner supported biometric ID cards for immigrants. Zeichner’s campaign leaflet supports ‘Labour’s new Australian-style points-based system’. This system is totally racist and is designed to keep out all ‘unskilled’ immigrants seen as useless to British capitalism.
Useless unions or real resistance
Jones credits trade union action for winning a ‘commitment from Labour to clamp down on zero-hours contracts.’ This is not all that it seems. Labour does not oppose zero-hours contracts: it opposes ‘exploitative’ zero-hours contracts, as if they could be anything else. What this means is that it will end exclusive zero hours contracts and limit their length to three months. After that, we are told, workers will be given a ‘regular contract’ – or more likely, they will just be sacked. Jones’s claims about union resistance are a total fantasy. Trade unions have done nothing to organise these poorly paid workers and are barely defending their own members – the yearly number of strike days has only broken the million mark four times since 1991. The Unite union has actually employed workers on zero-hours contracts and is being sued by them! In January Unite approved a £1.5 million donation to Labour’s election campaign. Jones’s politics are tied to the failed strategies of the old left: vote Labour and hope the unions will mount a fightback. With young working class people increasingly disaffected with Labour and the political class it represents, real resistance is being built by the poorest in society, not by pro-Labour, union fatcats like Len McCluskey.
At a time of intensifying cutbacks, whether in government or opposition, the Labour Party will continue to force savage ‘savings’ onto the poorest sections of the working class. It is committed to ConDem spending plans for this year and has not the slightest intention of rolling back any of the cuts of the last five years. If it wins the election it will lead a vicious, anti-working class, racist and imperialist government. The likes of Owen Jones or his fellow Guardian columnist Seumas Milne would have us believe otherwise: they will always support Labour whatever crimes it may commit. The job of socialists is to organise amongst fighting sections of the working class as they take action in defence of their conditions. This means opposing the Labour Party and its privileged apologists as it defends ruling class interests.
No vote for Labour! No cuts, full stop!
Louis Brehony
