This is the cover of a very old Private Eye for Friday, 2nd October 1998. The caption reads ‘Blair Calls For Unity’, and has Blair saying in the speech bubble ‘There’s a leftie – chuck him out!’
This was the time when Blair was trying to modernize the Labour party by removing Clause 4, the part of its constitution formulated by the Fabians and other socialists, which committed the party to the nationalization of the means of production and distribution. In short, socialism. Blair instead was determined to turn it into another Thatcherite party committed to privatization, including that of the NHS, welfare cuts, and job insecurity. Its traditional working class base were to be ignored and the party instead was to concentrate on winning swing voters, who might otherwise vote Tory. He attempted to win over the Tory press, including the Murdoch papers. Despite owing the start of his career to union sponsorship, he was determined to limit their power even further, and threatened to cut the party’s ties with them unless they submitted to his dictates. His ‘Government Of All the Talents’ – GOATs – included former Tory ministers like Chris Patten. Tories, who crossed the floor and defected to New Labour were parachuted into safe seats as the expense of sitting MPs and the wishes of the local constituency party. Blair adopted failed or discarded Tory policies, including the Peter Lilley’s Private Finance Initiative and the advice of Anderson Consulting. This was satirized by a computer programme that made anagrams from politicians’ names. Anthony Blair came out as ‘I am Tory Plan B’.
The direction in which Blair wanted the party to move was clearly shown by him inviting Margaret Thatcher to 10 Downing Street to visit the day after he was elected. And she thoroughly approved of him, declaring that New Labour was her greatest legacy.
Blair and New Labour were also staunch supporters of Israel. It was money from Zionist Jewish businessmen, raised by Lord Levy, whom Blair had met at a gathering at the Israeli embassy, that allowed him to be financially independent from the trade unions.
Now all that is being threatened by Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters. Which is why Blairite apparatchiks and MPs have done their level best to purge the party of them by smearing them as Trotskyite and Stalinist infiltrators and anti-Semites. The charges are ludicrous, hypocritical and offensive. Corbyn and his supporters aren’t far left: they’re traditional Labour, supporting a mixed economy. And far from being anti-Semites, the vast majority of those accused are decent, anti-racist people, including self-respecting Jews and dedicated campaigners against anti-Semitism. People like Marc Wadsworth, Jackie Walker, Ken Livingstone, Tony Greenstein, Mike over at Vox Political, Martin Odoni and many, many others. Many of the Jews smeared as anti-Semites are Holocaust survivors or the children of Holocaust survivors, but this is never reported in the media. Except when the person supposedly attacked is a good Blairite or member of the Israel lobby.
The cover was made in jest when it came out, though it had an element of truth even then. Now it’s even more true. Blair has left the party leadership, but his supporters in Progress and similar groups are determined to cling on to power by carrying out a purge of Corbyn and his traditional Labour supporters.
Just as Blair himself emerged to urge Blairite MPs and Labour members to leave and join his proposed ‘Centrist’ party.
In this short video from The Jimmy Dore Show, the American comedian and his co-hosts, Stef Zamora and Rob Placone, rip into the New York Times for publishing a bit of non-news from Chelsea Clinton. She’s the daughter of Hillary and Bill Clinton, and the NYT saw fit to publish on its pages a tweet from her, saying that the she read Fahrenheit 451 in 7th grade, and it still makes her feel uncomfortable. It’s widely considered that Chelsea Clinton is being groomed to follow her parents into politics. That’s the message that Dore, Placone and Zamora got from this tweet. They feel it’s a puff piece for her. And so did several of the NY Times’ readers. One Mr Flugennock tweeted back that the newspaper should come off it, as ‘we aren’t going to vote for her’. Accompanying this was a photo of Clinton junior with the caption, ‘Mommy, your clothes fit me now.’
Indeed they do. Both Chelsea and her vile parents seem to be highly critical of state medicine. During her election campaign last year, Killary declared that single-payer healthcare was ‘utopian’. As Dore and the other left-wing American newscaster repeatedly pointed out, it’s a utopian institution that every other country in the developed world has, except America. And Chelsea seems to think the same thing. I distinctly remember her saying something sneering and dismissive about socialised medicine or single-payer health care a few years ago.
Dore, Placone and Zamora joke about the essentially vapid content of the tweet. Zamora commented that she also read Green Eggs and Ham by Dr Zeuss in the 1st Grade, and it still makes her feel uncomfortable about green eggs. Rather more seriously, Dore remarks on her comments seem to suggest that she expected to feel more comfortable with age about the book’s dark subject matter. Fahrenheit 451 is one of SF and Fantasy author Ray Bradbury’s classic novels, alongside The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man. The book takes its name from the temperature at which paper burns. It’s a dystopian book, set in a future where a despotic government has banned literature and reading. In this world, firemen are people, who start firesm not put them out, consigning books and learning to the flames. Of course it’s a disturbing book. It follows the real life burning of subversive literature by oppressive regimes and movements, like Nazi Germany. It’s why Dore also makes a heavily ironic joke about not getting used to the Holocaust either.
The NY Time’s also mentions that Chelsea Clinton has also co-authored a book herself. This is Governing Global Health, an ‘unbiased’ book, which examines public-private healthcare partnerships around the world, and looks forward to them becoming increasingly important in tackling world health. Dore, Zamora and Placone miss the serious undertones for this, joking instead about its supposed connection to Clinton’s comments about Bradbury’s masterpiece. This is supposed to have disturbed her so much, she wrote a book of her own.
But Clinton fille’s authorship of this tome has serious and very ominous overtones for state healthcare elsewhere in the world, and most immediately in Britain. Public-Private Partnerships are basically the Blairite ‘Third Way’, which they in turn inherited from the Tories’ foul Peter Lilley. This capering bigot was upset that private enterprise was locked out of the NHS, and so created the Private Finance Initiative. This is where the state bales out and subsidies private firms for building and managing NHS hospitals. It’s more expensive, and so the hospitals built under it are fewer and smaller. Even worse, perfectly efficient and excellent state hospitals have had to be closed, so that Blair and the Tories could provide more lucrative work for their friends in private healthcare.
Blair took over the Clinton’s electoral strategy and their corporatist, anti-working class ideology and injected it into the Labour party. Bill Clinton’s campaign was based on rejecting the Democrats traditional base in the working class, and abandoning what little welfare provision there was, in order to win votes from Reaganite Republicans. And the policy’s continued under Obama and Shrillary. Chuck Schumer, the leader of the Democrats, famously stated last year that he wasn’t concerned if they lost blue collar voters, as for every one they lost, they’d pick up two or three suburban Republicans. This is the same attitude that infects Blairite Labour. Blair, Mandelson, Broon and Campbell targeted affluent swing voters in marginal constituencies, sacrificing the interests of the working class in order to appeal to middle class Thatcherites. The policy didn’t work, and is creating massive poverty. But the corporatist elite love it, and so the Clintonites in America and Blairites over here are still pushing it.
And just as Blair took over the Clintonite free market ideology, the same corporate interests that infest American politics also came over her to win contracts in healthcare, the prison system and other parts of the state infrastructure. Companies like the notorious health insurance fraudster, Unum. The American private healthcare companies realised that the market in America was in serious trouble, due to rising costs. There was an excellent article in Counterpunch a month or so ago, which reported that in some areas it almost broke down before being rescued by Obama’s affordable care act. With the market in America glutted and sinking, they’ve come over here to win contracts from our NHS. And our politicos have been stupid and malignant enough to give them to them.
I think Dore and co. are right. Chelsea Clinton is being groomed to succeed her parents. And as a believer in private healthcare, she does want to push the privatisation of our NHS for the profit of her country’s private healthcare firms. She has to be stopped. If she enters politics to push her vile agenda, it’ll be bad for America and terrible for Britain and our NHS. Keep her – and them – out of politics and out of Britain.
Back on Monday, or thereabouts, I put up a series of four articles on Workfare, drawn largely from Guy Standing’s A Precariat Charter, which has an entire section detailing why it is unjust, cruel, and just plainly factually wrong. Contrary to what we’ve been told, it does not help people into jobs. It may even do the opposite, as forcing people to perform deliberately degrading jobs intended to stigmatise them as one of the Nazis’ Arbeitscheu will demoralise and deter people from pursuing work, and not persuade them that it’s actually at all rewarding. There’s also, contrary to the lies peddled by the media, actually very little evidence for multigenerational families, who’ve lived without working. A couple of academics found that only about 1 per cent of Britain’s families actually consist of two or more generations of the unemployed. As for cutting down on expenditure on the welfare state, it doesn’t do that either. It’s actually far more expensive in terms of administration costs and subsidies to the companies taking on workfare labour than simply letting people draw their dole. It also has the effect of driving down wages for low-paid workers, and throwing permanent employees out of their jobs, and denying work to the short-term unemployed, who would otherwise be hired. But I suspect that’s the real point of it all: to supply cheap labour for big business like Asda, Homebase, Sainsbury’s, Tesco’s and the other companies, who are part of the scheme.
Standing also shows how the Labour party backed the scheme, giving quotes in support of it from Liam Byrne and Ed Miliband. Stewart Lansley and Joanna Mack also have a very telling piece about Miliband’s attitude towards the unemployed in their book, Breadline Britain: The Rise of Mass Poverty (London: Oneworld 2015). When Cameron introduced sanctions against workfare, Miliband told his shadow cabinet that they were not to vote against them, but abstain. If they did not do so, they would be forced to resign.
A number of people have made this point before, including several commenters to Mike’s site and here, if not Mike himself. Johnny Void and Ian Bone, who are both Anarchists, were bitterly critical of Miliband because he appeared to offer platitudes instead of tackling Tory austerity. And they have a point. New Labour’s electoral strategy was based on copying the Tories in order to appeal to swing voters in marginal constituencies. One of them – I’ve forgotten who – even promised that once in power, Labour would be even harder on the unemployed than the Tories. And so Ed Miliband’s outright refusal to have the party oppose one of the worst aspects of the Tories’ austerity campaign against the poor and unemployed.
This is what the Blairite Right represents. They do not represent working people, but corporate interests and the middle class. And it’s because of policies supported by many of the parliamentary labour party, that so many are now in grinding poverty.
Mike today has posted up another piece about the anti-democratic dirty tricks pursued by the Blairites to stop Labour party members voting for Jeremy Corbyn, according to an article in the Evening Standard. Mike reported yesterday how Conor McGinn, the Labour MP for St. Helen’s North, had misdirected Corbyn supporters to Century House for a meeting over a vote of confidence in Jeremy Corbyn. McGinn and at least six of his cronies held the real meeting behind closed doors over in the Town Hall. When a group of women, who had come to support Corbyn and been misled, tackled him about it, McGinn reported them to the police and then wrote a completely misleading account of the incident for Politics Home, claiming to have been threatened and intimidated by them.
This process has been repeated in Blaenau Gwent, where Labour party members were prevented from attending a meeting to nominate, who they wanted as leader of the Labour party. The CLP instead chose Smiffy. It is not remotely coincidental that the local Labour MP is a director of Progress, the Blairite faction in the Labour party.
Now it also appears to have been done in Chuka Umunna’s local party in Streatham. The party’s grassroots members were locked out of the meeting, and the nomination was made by the party’s general committee, which chose Smudger. A party spokesman told the Standard that they had to do it like that, as the party’s membership was too large for everyone to be notified at such a short notice.
Mike points out that this is rubbish. They could have used email. If the problem was that the membership was too large to fit in the usual premises, then they could have done what Jeremy Corbyn does, and booked larger premises. Mike speculates that the people, who’ve arranged such anti-democratic tricks, don’t realise the amount of ill-will they’re creating for themselves, ill-will that will be expressed later on. Or they simply don’t care, as they’re trying to create a literal party within a party with Labour.
Mike concludes his article with the following recommendation
In the meantime, anyone who feels mistreated by this attempt to sidestep democracy is entitled to express their displeasure to the NEC – perhaps in the form of a multiple-signature letter or petition; perhaps with a motion of no confidence in the nomination decision and the process by which it was made.
I’m not surprised that Chuka Umunna’s CLP in Streatham have tried this trick. Umunna is a Blairite through and through. A little while ago, when it seemed the party was going a little too far to the left for his liking, he warned that if it continued to do so, he and other ‘aspiring’ Blacks and Asians would leave the Labour party. This was part of a general warning by Blairites that a leftward turn by the Labour party would lose them the votes of all the aspirant, upwardly mobile ‘swing voters’ Blair, Broon and Mandelson had cultivated as part of their electoral strategy.
In Umunna’s case, there’s a nasty undercurrent of racial entitlement in this. The Labour party was founded to protect the interests of the working class and poor. At the heart of Socialism is a profound belief in equality, a belief that also motivates Socialists to support the independence movements that arose in the British colonies abroad, and support Blacks and Asians in their campaigns for racial equality at home. But Umunna’s statement suggests he believes that the majority of British people, regardless of colour, should continue to suffer if they are poor or working class, in order to reward Black and Asian swing voters, who are, like their White part counterparts, likely to come from the more affluent sectors of the population. It’s a nasty, racist attitude, though I doubt Umunna sees it as such. He probably sees it as supporting the rights of Blacks and Asians to join the affluent White groups, a demand for equality, even if it means the further impoverishment of everyone poorer than them.
It’s also particularly toxic politically in the present climate post-Brexit. Brexit has led to a massive increase in racism and racist incidents across Britain. Many racists believe that the vote to leave the EU has given them tacit permission to express publicly their private racial hatred. Dissatisfaction and frustration by the White working class was one of the fundamental causes of the Brexit vote. By pursuing the votes of affluent ‘swing voters’, Blair, Brown and Mandelson left very many members of the working class feeling left behind, as conditions for the working class generally worsened. Tory papers, such as the Scum and the Heil have consistently attacked affirmative action campaigns to improve opportunities for Blacks and Asians, and immigration, as discrimination against the White British. Umunna’s comment could easily be seen by disaffected Whites as confirming their belief that New Labour has no interested in helping the poor or working class, unless they are Black or Asian.
Owen Jones, in his book, Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class, makes the point that despite the abandonment of the working class by New Labour, the working class as a whole isn’t racist, although the Tory press has done its level best to claim that it is. He describes a strike at a large industrial plant against the use of cheap immigrant labour. Yet while the Tory press claimed that this was purely a racist attack on the employment of migrant workers, the trade union that called the strike did so partly because it was concerned about the exploitation of the migrant labourers, who did not share the same working conditions as the British fellows, and were forbidden to join a union.
The demands by Umunna and his White counterparts that the Labour party should continue to focus on getting the votes of the middle class, and promoting the ambitions of the aspirant few against the impoverished many, should be strongly rejected. Mike himself has quoted surveys from Labour supporters that show that social aspiration rarely, if at all, figures as one of their concerns. Furthermore, the neoliberal policies Umunna and the rest of the Blairites have embraced, have actually destroyed social mobility.
If Umunna and the rest of them are serious about restoring social mobility, and enabling Blacks and Asians, as well as Whites, to rise higher, then they need to go back to the old Social Democratic consensus. The architect of this strand of Labour ideology, Tony Crosland, argued that it was in the interests of business to support the redistribution of wealth through the welfare state, as this allowed the workers to buy more of their products, and so stimulated both production and profitability. And he also argued that there was no need for more radical forms of industrial democracy, such as works councils and worker directors, if trade unions had an active role in negotiating with management, and workers had good chances of promotion.
If New Labour returns to this policy, then it will both bring prosperity back to working people, regardless of their colour, and get more Blacks and Asians into the middle classes. It isn’t social democrats like Corbyn blocking the social advancement of Blacks and Asians – or anyone else, for that matter. It’s neoliberals concerned to hold on to the status and privileges of the rich at the expense of the poor, no matter what colour they are.
Mike also put up another piece reporting that Owen Smith had been verbally tackled by a former miner over his use of Orgreave, as the place to launch his policies. Smudger finally unveiled his programme of reform at the town a few days ago. Of the twenty policies he announced, Mike reports that 13 of them were either lifted from Jeremy Corbyn, or were inspired by him.
But what angered the miner, John Dunn, was that Smiffy had chosen the town as the place to make his grand statement. Orgreave was the site of one of the most notorious incidents during the 1980s miners’ strike, when the police physically attacked the striking miners. Footage of the struggle was edited by the BBC, and then broadcast to show the miners as the aggressors, rather than the victims. Dunn said on his Facebook page that he had asked Smiffy to stop what Dunn saw as ‘shameless opportunism’. Smudger then started saying something about his own background in South Wales, but this cut no ice with the irate miner. Dunn reminded him that when Smudger was working for a pharmaceutical company, he and the others were struggling for justice. He further asked Smiffy why, if he was so keen on the issue of Orgreave, he hadn’t signed Ian Lavery’s early day motions about it. He then compared Smudger to the UDM scabs, who undermined the strike. Smudger didn’t have an answer to that, and ‘scuttled’ back into his car.
Mr Dunn is, of course, quite right. New Labour has done everything to cave in to the Tories’ demands to destroy the abilities of the trade unions to fight to protect people’s jobs and employment rights. Blair himself threatened to cut the party’s ties with the trade unions, if he didn’t get his way reforming the party’s constitution. Once in power, he did everything he could to minimise their importance within the party, despite the fact that the Labour party was partly founded to defend the trade unions and their right to strike after the Taff Vale judgement. As for Smudger himself, he worked for Pfizer, a pharmaceutical company, for which Smiffy issued a PR puff lauding Blair’s privatisation of the NHS as a great opportunity for the company. In parliament, Smiff abstained from voting on the Tories’ welfare cuts.
Smiffy therefore stands for everything which the Labour party was founded to oppose – the impoverishment and exploitation of the poor and working people, the denial and sale of welfare support and healthcare, and the expanded power of private industry and corporate profit, against declining wages and conditions for workers and employees. Yet, like New Labour, he continues to use the iconography and rhetoric of radical Labour history to present himself as far more radical than he actually is. He isn’t. New Labour has consistently pursued a strategy of appealing to big business and swing voters in marginal constituencies. Corbyn has challenged this tactic by articulating a genuinely left-wing programme of renationalisation, renewed trade union rights, and genuine welfare reforms. This is ardently supported by an expanded party membership. This has clearly frightened New Labour, which took the working class for granted. So they have now taken to adopting some of his policies, and invoking the memories of past battles between Labour and capital. But it’s all a sham. Smudger’s new, left-wing policies are simply a disguise for the neoliberalism that he really favours. He and the rest of the 172 anti-Corbynite MPs have shown themselves willing to lie and smear in order to discredit Corbyn and his supporters anyway they can. I have no doubts that Smudger’s lying about these policies as well. Once in power, they’re liable to be swiftly forgotten, or watered down to the extent that they’re useless. Or maybe he’ll just say that the time isn’t right just now, so wait a bit.
We’ve waited too long. We’ve waited for over thirty years of privatisation and welfare cuts. It’s long past the time this was all stopped, and Smudger, Eagle and the other Red Tories voted out in favour of the true members and supporters of the Labour party, Jeremy Corbyn and his followers.
Mike the other day also put up a piece on Owen Smith’s performance on BBC’s Newsnight. Mike and a number of other opponents of Blairite neoliberalism found it a cheering experience. It wasn’t quite a car crash, but, according to Mike, there were still some heavy swerves. He also observed that although Smudger mostly managed to control himself over Corbyn, he still felt constrained to sneer at him for his perceived lack of patriotism, and claimed that Corbyn had only had just over half the votes in the election, far underestimating the amount of support Corbyn had and has.
What I found particularly telling was the way Smiffy refused to use the word ‘Socialism’. He instead used the term ‘Labourism’ instead, to the manifest incredulity of the interviewer. In actual fact, historians of the Labour party and political scientists have for a long time made a distinction between ‘socialism’ and ‘labourism’. Socialism means the collective ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange. It can take many different forms, from co-operatives through to state ownership, or collective ownership by trade unions, as in Syndicalism. It may also involve different degrees, from complete nationalism, as in the former Soviet Union, to a mixed economy, as in Britain and most other western European countries before Thatcher and the Neoliberal devastation of our public life.
Labourism, on the other hand, simply means anything that benefits organised labour. For a couple of decades after its foundation, there was a tension in the Labour party between the trade unions, or some of the elements in the trade unions, and the various Socialist bodies. Some of the trade union members wanted the Labour party to concentrate on protecting union rights, such as the right to strike and picket, and fighting to obtain better wages for working people. Furthermore, under Lloyd George’s introduction of the first, preliminary foundations of the welfare state, trade unions could serve as the official bodies for the administration of the social security and healthcare schemes, along with private insurance companies. This has been described as a ‘labourist’ policy, as it was designed to help working people, but was not a socialist measure in that it did not involve the state or collective ownership.
I was also told by a friend last week that the Labour party has removed the term ‘Socialism’ from its constitution. I’m not surprised. Blair was not a Socialist by any stretch of the imagination. He got rid of Clause 4, the clause in the Labour party’s constitution that pledged the party to nationalisation and collective ownership. I’m not surprised that New Labour, in order to endear itself to all those darling swing voters and the aspirant middle classes, as well as rich donors, dropped the ‘socialist’ label as well.
But Smudger isn’t a labourist, either. Blair and New Labour hated and distrusted the trade unions, and have done everything they can to deny them any effective power to oppose the increasingly punitive and exploitative employment legislation. Legislation introduced not just by the Tories, but by the Labour right. Blair and Brown talked rubbish about the need to support flexible labour market policies as well as social justice. In practice, the Warmonger and his grumpy sidekick jettisoned social justice, as again, swing voters, the aspirant middle class, and the media barons, like Murdoch, all had the vapours when faced with it.
So Smiff isn’t a Socialist, nor proper labour. He didn’t oppose the Tory welfare cuts, and I doubt very much that he wants to anything about the employment legislation that is driving people in this country into poverty – the zero hours and short employment contracts, the proliferation of unpaid internships, workfare and all the rest of the vile schemes designed to make working people as poor and as desperate as possible.
He and the rest of New Labour – Progress, Saving Labour and the rest, are bog-standard Tories, and nothing else. They should leave the party and cross the floor to their true political home.
On Saturday, Angela Eagle announced that she was going to run against Jeremy Corbyn for head of the Labour party. In this video, Chunky Mark, the artist taxi driver, gives his view of Angela Eagle, her support for Blair, the Blairites’ policies and their effective trashing of the Labour party. It’s an impassioned, shouty rant, as you’d expect from the big man. But he’s got a point, and with everything he shouts about, there’s a reason to scream and be angry.
He discusses how Eagle was interviewed by Andrew Neil yesterday, who asked her whether Blair should face prosecution for his invasion of Iraq. Eagle replied, ‘Well, Tony’s gone through the mill recently.’ Neil responded, ‘so he’s suffered enough?’ The artist taxi driver is right to be outraged. Blair is not the wounded party here. As Chunky Mark points out, his actions have destroyed an entire country, killed untold millions and led to the rise of ISIS. Eagle has said that Corbyn is ‘unelectable’. But Chunky Mark points out that thousands are joining the Labour party. The reverse is true. It’s Eagle and her soft left fellows, who are unelectable. The shadow cabinet of Eagle, Hilary Benn, Chuka Umunna and Tristram Hunt were soundly defeated at the last election. Ed Balls lost his seat. And they absolutely destroyed the Labour party in Scotland.
He points out that they despise Jeremy Corbyn as he stands for building more not-for-profit homes, decent healthcare, free education. They despise him because he’s like a hippy, a member of the old Left threatening to drag the country back to the 1970s, complete with the smell of patchouli oil. The artist taxi driver asks, ‘What’s wrong with free education?’ and then he asks them why they abstained from one of the Tories’ austerity bill, cutting benefits even further for the poorest.
He points out that Eagle and her fellow co-conspirators are Red Tories. They don’t believe in democracy. They’re trying to keep Corbyn’s name of the election papers. Their attitude is that only ‘the preferred candidate should win’. That means they don’t think people like us should have a say. They represent the establishment. They are the people, who sent men and women to die in Iraq for the banks and corporate profit.
Eagle and the rest of the Blairites put up such poor resistance to the Tories as they fundamentally agree with them. Blair tailored his campaign to winning the votes of middle class voters in swing marginals. And so the Blairites stand for exactly the same things the Tories stand for: privatisation and welfare cuts, including the privatisation of the NHS. These are bankrupt policies. They always were, but they’ve increasingly been to shown to be so through the massive unemployment they’ve generated, the immense poverty and hardship, and the fact that despite his constant promises, Osborne has not ended the recession. The Blairites have nothing to offer, except more poverty and rubbish services for everyone else, and massive profits for the very few.
Apart from the post-Brexit anti-racism rally on Bristol’s College Green yesterday, Points West also covered a rally in support of Labour’s leader, Jeremy Corbin, held at the same time and in the same place. They interviewed one of the rallies organisers, who had rejoined Labour after Corbyn had won the leadership contest. She had been a member, but had left, and was rejoining the part after twenty years. The interviewer raised the matter of the party’s MPs passing a no-confidence vote in him. Unfortunately, the three Labour MPs for the region, according to the programme, have also joined in this vote. The rally’s organiser replied that, whatever the parliamentary party may think of Corbyn, he was immensely popular with the grassroots members. The party membership was up to 200,000, with tens of thousands joining or rejoining the party thanks to Corbyn’s leadership. After raising the issue of the no-confidence vote yet again, and getting another, more positive response, the interviewer turned to the camera, and concluded the interview by saying that, while Corbyn was having trouble with his MPs, at least he could rely on some support here in Bristol.
In fact, throughout the country Jeremy Corbyn is massively popular with traditional Labour voters and the party’s grassroots base. Mike’s written a series of articles about this over at Vox Political. The members of the parliamentary party, who are desperately trying to oust him, are Blairites to a man and woman. And it’s disgusting that they should try and mount this coup against him, just as their bosses’ policies were. Blair took over the Tories’ policy of privatising everything that he could get his hands on, and sell to corporate fat cats. This included expanding their attempts to sell off the NHS. Like the Tories, they knew that this would make them lose the next election if the British public ever realised, and so, like the Tories now, they have deliberately kept its privatisation very quiet. Nevertheless, they did it, and the threat is very real. See Jacky Davis’ and Raymond Tallis’ excellent book, NHS SOS.
The Labour party has, under Jeremy Corbyn, overtaken the Tories in terms of mass membership. This is the complete reverse of the previous situation. For decades the Tories were easily the largest party in the UK, with a membership of about 2 1/2 million. Now it’s half that. Many branches have less than 100 members, and their members are, on average, of retirement age.
Blair reformed the Labour party according to Thatcherite, neoliberal ideas. Those ideas have run their course, and the consequences have been terrible. They have wrecked this country, and are reducing its people to poverty. But many of the members of the parliamentary party joined when Bliar was in the ascendant, and have swallowed the economic snake oil. Thus we had one Blairite MP saying before the last election that Labour would be even harder than the Tories on the unemployed. It’s all been to suck up to the middle class ‘swing voters’ New Labour targeted at elections, at the expense of their true, working class constituency.
One of the consequences of this is that the neoliberal political class, drenched as it is in Thatcherite orthodoxy, has refused to countenance any criticism of the private market policies that have generated this poverty and inequality. And so instead, the xenophobic right has arisen, under Nigel Farage, blaming the poverty and country’s ills on immigrants and the EU.
There are several good arguments against the EU. But Corbyn needs to be backed to return real life and vitality back to the Labour party and democracy. The country needs to be built back up from the devastation inflicted from three decades of Thatcherism, and working people, whatever their race or ethnic origin, given back their dignity and protection from the predatory factory masters that Thatcher, Major and Bliar released. And the country needs a true democratic choice between left and right, not merely between two right-wing parties, whose policies are now indistinguishable. As the Neo-cons and Neolibs intended all along.
As for the Blairites, if they cannot stomach what their party was founded to stand for, and what their grassroots members want, and what the party’s supporters want and need, they should leave. Go to the Tories. That’s their natural home after all. One of the first things Blair did when got into No. 10 was invited Maggie round for tea. Well, she’s dead, Blair’s out of power, and his heir and collaborator, Broon, lost the election. It’s about time the Blairites and their supporters either genuinely started representing Labour – organised labour, the labour of the unions, the working class, and the students and white collar workers Bliar betrayed. Or they should leave, and make way for those who will.
John Stevenson, in his chapter ‘From Philanthropy to Fabianism’ in Fabian Essays in Socialist Thought, ed. by Ben Pimlott, (London: Heinemann Educational 1984) remarks on how the improvement of living and working conditions by municipal councils in Victorian and Edwardian England were often opposed, not so much by the upper classes, but by the lower middle and upper working classes. These parts of the lower classes were bitterly opposed to further rises in the rates, and so bitterly criticised the sections of the working classes below them.
He writes
Although growing national wealth meant that rateable values were increasing, providing greater funds for local government, there was already evidence that rate-payers, particularly at the lower end of the scale where they included some of the better paid workmen, self-employed artisans, shopkeepers and other sections of the lower middle class, were often opposed to demands for greater expenditure through the rates. Often, the most damning indictments of the poor came not from the rich, but from the ‘shopocracy’ and ‘respectable’ sections of the working class. (p. 25)(My emphasis). This is the ‘aristocracy of labour’, whose emergence Marx believed had interrupted the increasing impoverishment and radicalisation of the working classes, holding up the emergence of Socialism and the coming revolution.
Alternatively, you can see here the emergence of working class Conservatism, the ‘Alf Garnett’s and ‘Thatcherite workers’ that hated and continue to hate the people below them, despising them as the undeserving poor and all too eager to find ways to stop any expenditure on them. Maggie Thatcher was very definitely a member of the ‘shopocracy’, and it was the central plank in her claim to be somehow ‘working class’, even though she wasn’t. It’s roughly the strata of society that reads the middle-market tabloids, the Daily Mail and the Express. And its roughly the kind of people New Labour targeted as the ‘swing voters’ they need to get into power by taking over elements of Conservatism – the worship of Maggie Thatcher and the free market as universal panacea, welfare cuts and conditionality, all while loudly talking about ‘aspiration’. Well, very many people have aspirations, and they’ve seen them blocked by the Thatcherite attitudes espoused by very many individuals in this section of society. It’s time these class attitudes were tackled and removed, for the good of everyone.
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