This title begs (at least) two major questions: Who are the Left in Britain? And, how will this Left emerge from the May General Election? For deciding where you are going must start from where you think you are now.
The answer to the first question always requires a concrete analysis and judgement rooted in reality. In today's, post 2008 situation it is at least reasonable to draw the left / right boundary as between those opposing and those supporting austerity. Even that notion is controversial. There are class struggle oriented national trade union leaders who would argue right now that the SNP's opposition to austerity is inconsequential in the left / right divide, and that the SNP, because it wants a separate Scottish nation, is indelibly on the right. (And, in comparison, Miliband was presumably on the left?) Nevertheless this argument among some trade union leaders (most of their members in Scotland have already taken their own decision) does not change the main fact of the Western class struggle. That battle is over austerity. Ask the Greeks.
How the left is now emerging from the General Election has already inspired some familiar and some more novel thoughts. Among the latter is Mark Steel's piece in the Independent (May 9). He argues that Labour needed a mass movement like Obama to prevent the effects of negative, anti-Labour campaigning, producing isolation and fear. This opinion assumes that the choices between Miliband and Cameron were in some way similar to the prospects of the election of the first black president in the US, who promised the end of foreign wars, closure of Guantanamo and the first national health service. Austerity versus austerity 'lite' doesn't quite make it.
Most Labour Party leaders who have spoken are rehashing the 'we want Blair' formula, as though we had not already 'had Blair' and learned how poisonous that particular mistake was.
The main point here is that if the Labour Party's discussions about what went wrong remain at the level of the need to salute the aspirant small business person - then they will remain a wet, ambivalent, shifty version of the Tories, competing with them for the magic (but declining) 34% of the voters - and losing. Some Labour supporters have picked up the hesitancy of the leadership over supporting their handling of the economy when last in Government. Yes. Their leader's cowardice on that point could not fail to be noticed. But it was rather Labour's decisive support for austerity in the recent past, now and in the future, that ruined their chances. Unsure, uncommitted, unsafe, Labour's leadership made a major contribution to the victory of the right on May 7. Looking ahead it will be anti or pro austerity that will remain the left/right dividing line, for both the newly elected Labour's MPs and their leader.
The new fact for the future of the left in Britain that has emerged from the election then is that the direct, public and mainstream proposal to end austerity has now got an enormously influential new voice. The SNP, Plaid Cymru, the Greens are explicitly anti-austerity. That is nearly 3 million votes, 60 MPs and a whole country better than the 5 Labour MPs who voted against £30 billion worth of cuts for the new Parliament earlier this year.
Two obvious first steps for the left therefore reveal themselves. First, the mass movement outside Parliament, led so far by an alliance of key unions and the Peoples Assembly, have to make strong links with the opposition to austerity inside parliament. Second, a massive, friendly offensive needs to be directed at the Labour Party to use its election of a new leadership (more than Miliband has fallen, and in Scotland Blairite Jim Murphy is under pressure) to define Labour or those in Labour that want to fight, as part of the new anti-austerity movement.
Some of this can be brought together in the most important demonstration since the anti-austerity campaign in Britain began. On June 20 the Peoples Assembly have called the first national demonstration against the new austerity government. This is not just an opportunity to lick our wounds. Yes, we are starting again, but not at the beginning. The demonstration is a great new opportunity to begin to open up the new anti-austerity alliance across Parliament and the wider country.
Next blog: What did the far left and independent candidates achieve?
No comments:
Post a Comment