Thursday 4 September 2014

UKIP - a wide political regroupment.

Most commentators have picked up that the Labour Party also has a lot to loose from UKIP's advance. They no longer believe that UKIP is mainly to be understood as the current Tories version of what was Labour's nightmare in the 1980s, the SDP. Cameron may be sick with worry that he is never going to be PM again but in the longer term Labour is more at risk, and if Scotland goes independent, both the English and the Scottish Labour will be holed below the waterline. (Which is one of the very good reasons why the anti-austerity left will need to develop some intelligent tactics regarding Labour Party MPs, towards and through the next elections.) 

We will return to the Labour Party and the general question of MPs very soon but UKIP's rise is also a critical new fact in the arguments going on about political tactics inside the British anti-austerity left, most particularly among some of its more overt political formations. Establishing a new party to the left of Labour, whether the emphasis has been placed on the new party's potential British working class organisational roots or its possible parallel success given the rise of a new left in mainland Europe, preoccupies significant parts of the far left today. In fact it is an idea that first emerged in the late 1980s and its current popularity seems to echo the British Military General Staff's inevitable enthusiastic adoption of a war plan that might have won the battle that preceded current hostilities. 

There are three components of what might be termed the British working class movement today - four if you include Scotland. This claim is made in the sense that these are groups of people defined socially and economically as working class and who are in active political movement. Key trade unions spearhead anti-austerity action. A potentially enormous group, led by south Asian heritage communities, is anti-war. In Scotland the political choices of west coast working class people will determine whether Scotland becomes an independent nation. Finally an unknown section of mainly older working class people who used to adhere to Labour are shifting to UKIP. 

In Scotland, Labour's monopoly hold of the working class has already broken - whether or not independence wins. But the anti-austerity left, initially led by Sheridan's Scottish Socialist Party, fouled its own nest and missed the chance to challenge the hegemony of the SNP's left among the shifting politics of the scottish working class. Britain's enormous anti-war sentiment in parts of its population has not yet moved party political allegiances among these groups and one, ultimately farcical attempt, Galloway's Respect, has made that less likely in the near future. The RMT remains isolated even among radical unions in its disaffiliation from Labour.  Its chosen route to a new 'mass working class party' a campaign led by the Socialist Party, that has had a minute impact, seems to underline the futility of such an approach.  And finally, the disaffected millions that fell out of Labour's grip in England, that were an initial target for Scargill's failed SLP, that have even dropped out of the franchise as Blair evolved into Brown and then into Miliband, are currently regrouping around UKIP. 

The debate about new parties in the far left in Britain has mistaken important political shifts in and between the classes in society for a one way street in the case of the labour movement. Mass action against austerity and war has yet to become the centre of gravity for all the political movements with in the working class (a possibility that would be immensely strengthened by a new country in the UK at least initially defined as anti-Tory, anti-nukes and pro welfare state.)  Yet such mass action taking a central role inside the thinking of the working class has not yet happened and yet is the single biggest condition for any successful future substantial political regroupment of the left. 

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