A Labour of Love?

Two recent sets of comments have shone some more light on Labour's troubles with the May 7 General Election, especially about its understanding of Britain's political crisis. Milliband made a statement ruling out a coalition with the SNP.
'There will be no SNP ministers in my Government' he tried to thunder. (March 16.)

This was followed later in the evening by Newsnight, the BBC current affairs programme, that held an interview with Jim Murphy, the Scottish Labour Party's guardian angel, and which was designed to fill in Labour's thinking about the SNP. Kirsty Wark, the interviewer, tried to drill into what had been left unsaid by Labour regarding the SNP after May 7. In this she was just following the media pack. More interesting was Murphy's key message to her which he felt needed to be repeated. Of course Labour did not require a coalition with the SNP. It clearly gave him great pleasure to tell us all that in the deeply unlikely event that Labour did not win an outright majority, then surely the SNP would anyway want to vote for all the progressive measures that Labour had lined up and keep Labour in government. If they did not, he murmured silkily, they would have to take the consequences in Scotland of bringing down a Labour government at Westminster and letting in the Tories.

You can imagine the Labour Party 'thinkers' and 'political advisors' sniggering in delight at their coup. The Tories' fox shot. The SNP between a rock and a hard place. At least Milliband had the grace to wear his permanently shell-shocked expression when delivering his first half of the new policy. Poor Jim was unable, as he purred his new inspiration to a by now rather sickened 'Kirsty', to avoid looking like the cat who had got at the cream.

The day before, another Labour leader who has obviously thought harder than some of his colleagues on these matters was reported in the media:

'During a debate about digital democracy, he was asked whether Labour might in go the same way as social democratic parties in Greece and Spain which have been outflanked by radical anti-austerity movements such as Syriza and Podemos.
Asked whether the Labour Party might "not exist" within ten years, Mr Cruddas, a renowned free-thinker, replied':
“Yes, yes.”
“There is no safe ground for any orthodox parties and the stakes could be high potentially. They could just disintegrate in real time. And I include in that the party that I represent." (Daily Telegraph 15 March 2015.)

Jon Cruddas was made the Labour Party policy coordinator in the shadow cabinet in 2012. In a negative reaction to the Blair premiership he received the highest number of votes in the first round of the 2007 Labour Party Deputy leadership election. He has clearly been studyng the new realities of British political life. His latest thoughts seem at least to grasp something of the scale of Labour's crisis.

In contrast, Milliband and Murphy's reactions to the SNP feel like a desperate and utterly sectarian attempt to hang on to Labour's past. But now it is any old sort of past that will do. The last time the SNP were 'trapped' into support by a minority Labour Government was in the days of Jim Callaghan. And the lesson to be learned?  When that 'agreement' with Labour broke down, what happened next? -  demanded a flushed Jim Murphy on Newsnight. Why, the SNP action brought in Thatcher! Well; now we have got that clear let's all hope that sort of thing doesn't happen again! It is the SNP that is responsible for Tory success. In Jim Murphy's mind, Thatcher's victory had nothing to do with the combined failures of Wilson, Callaghan and the bulk of the trade union leadership to challenge Britain's ancient status quo with a real alternative. It was the knavish, parliamentary tricks of the SNP to blame. And, thank goodness for the rest of us as we struggled through 10 years of Thatcherism, that at least the SNP were 'exposed.' This is coming from top leaders of the Labour Party. You could not make it up.

Looked at from both the point of view of the interests of the vast majority of the British people AND from the interests of the Labour Party, of course Labour should form a coalition government with the SNP if there is no majority on May 8. A new alliance with the present leadership of the Scottish people against austerity would have tremendous force in England and in Wales as well as Scotland. The combination of the social forces on the ground around such a political alliance would have the real potential to isolate the right in Britain and could start the process of revivifying the whole left. This is not a claim that the leadership of the Labour Party or the SNP would be able to deliver and anti-austerity policy or even could lead the fight for one. But mass action and a mass movement would feel energised, legitimated and able to demand anti-austerity measures from the government.

It is painfully obvious that if the Labour Party does not regroup, both politically and organisationally around anti-austerity, it has no independent purpose or future. It becomes part, a more and more minor part, of the politics of austerity. That, Jon Cruddas is right, is what happened in Greece and will happen in Spain. And, we might add, is leading to the political disaster that is coming in France.