Brexit and Labour's crisis

The paradox of political crises is that they are rarely resolved - unless they are broken through by the new. Efforts directed at simply re-establishing the status quo invariably fail. The existence of the original crisis does not itself create a new reality. It is only human interaction, with and inside the existing crisis that has that potential. The British Labour Party is exactly in that position today.

174 Labour MPs have voted 'no confidence' in Labour leader Corbyn. (40 voted in favour of Corbyn's leadership.) It is obvious that by this means the right wing of the Labour Party, concentrated in the parliamentary section of the party, was trying to lever Corbyn out, starting by trying to avoid a vote by the whole party on who should be its leader, but which the rebels have now to face. (This is a maneuver fraught with dangers as a big vote to keep Corbyn as Labour Party leader would mean that those Labour MPs who have struck their blows at his leadership instantly become a group identified as anti Labour Party as a whole.)

What is this division in Labour based on? The first thing to note it has little to do with Corbyn's efforts, or lack of them, on behalf of the 'remain' (in the EU) campaign - or his supposed inability to win elections - or his mild manners and 'poor show' in Parliament. (Attlee who led the country into full employment, the welfare state and the state ownership of basic industry was generally described as modest and shy. ('He has a lot to be modest about' scowled the post war election loser Churchill.) In fact Corbyn has presided over a couple of good results in by-elections; a great result for London Mayor and, according to polls, 'won' 63% of Labour voters to the 'remain' cause (much more than several of his most prominent opponents managed in their own constituencies.) This attack has been planned by Labour's right wing and started by Hilary Benn, in an organised, last ditch effort to remove Corbyn, as right wing Labour MPs realised that they might have to go into an early General Election as a result of Brexit. Their original timetable for their coup was premised on the time they had available given a 2020 election.

But Britain's political crisis exposes in detail the real dynamics of the Labour Party. Close to the time of Labour's foundation a minority of the international left analysed the British Labour Party as a 'bourgeois, workers' party; supported by the working class at its base; led, organised and politically operated by those who supported the system. The friction, contest and finally the battle between these two forces would, in the end they surmised, seal Labour's fate.

This original class character of the British Labour Party has moved on from the time of Lenin's considerations. Most recently, Blair's efforts destroyed the traditional loyalty of millions of working class people for 'their' party. And the removal of the famous Clause 4 of Labour's constitution, which called for the workers 'by hand or by brain' to have control over the means of production, duly replaced by liberal managerial drivel, marked the point where the British Labour Party had abandoned the seminal idea that it stood for a different sort of society than that which was offered by capitalism. Accordingly, the active base of the Labour Party shriveled and virtually died. This of course followed the halving of trade unionism as a result of a decade of terrible defeats.

Nevertheless, despite the SNP's victory in Scotland and despite UKIP's 3.6 million votes and despite taking the blame for the Banker's crisis, the Labour Party still mobilised 9 million votes in the 2015 general election. Among millions of blue and white collar and service workers and their families, Labour was still the choice made against UKIP, the Liberals and the Tories in England and Wales. Meanwhile an enormous anti-austerity movement had grown up and it rolled forward, dramatically confronting a weak Tory victory in 2015. Realizing that the political system must change to block austerity, tens of thousands of mainly young people and those disgusted by Blair's warmongering then flooded into the empty Labour committee rooms under the new rules to vote for the new leader. Naturally they wanted an anti-war and an anti-austerity Labour leader.

This almost entirely new base of membership of the party suddenly reproduced some of the internal conditions of the Labour Party at its origin. A new contradiction between the classes roared up, bottled for the moment inside the Labour Party. From a position of almost unassailable (if empty) domination of the party by a post socialist, rich-loving cabal, the Labour leadership found itself under siege from its own membership. The roots of the decaying post Blairite leadership in the British ruling class were always temporary and proved utterly fragile at a single assault from several hundred thousand young people who had walked through the Party's door. From the point after the 2015 election where they made a lot of sound and fury about the need to restore Blairism, those would-be leaders toppled, almost without a push, in the party leadership elections.

Now, this time perhaps as 'farce', Labour's right wing MPs, still scared of the future, still aching for a quiet turn back to the 1995 status quo, have launched an all out assault ... on the party membership! And the historic friction and ultimate class contradiction of Labour re-emerges, as the remnants of a bourgeois, worker's party fight out which sections of society should be represented by the Labour Party. But this time there is no 'Imperial preference' to pay off a vast labour bureaucracy and the aristocracy of labour, there is no Keynsian compromise to be made with globalisation, there is no forced 'consensus' between the wealthy and the rest on the requirement for a social wage. Therefore this has turned into a fight to the finish for Labour.

The British Labour Party has lost Scotland. Even the critical left that is (rightly) emerging in Scotland sees Scottish Labour as part of the problem. Large sections of Labour's traditional vote, especially in the North East and in Wales are on the cusp of losing the remnants of their loyalty to Labour. Part of the Labour right wing MP's enervation, even hysteria is spawned from the dawning realisation that Labour has little chance of forming a government in the foreseeable future - outside coalition - whatever they manage to do with Corbyn and the left. The truth of it is that 'traditional' Labour has run its course. It is done. That is the unbearable vision of the future, opened up by the current crisis that has terrified 174 Labour MPs, who, up to now, were full of ambition and their own sense of entitlement.

Time to create a new fact.

To create a new political fact it is necessary to see clearly the existing ones. No wonder Lenin described facts as revolutionary. First, the historic shift of the Scottish working class and intermediate layers of society away from the Labour Party and towards the SNP is unlikely to change back outside of an entirely new social convulsion. Certainly Brexit shows no signs of signaling such a convulsion among the Scots. On the contrary, it is taken as further underpinning the argument for independence. The Labour Party has lost at all three levels; the leadership, the membership and the social base of support, in Scotland.

In the North East, the East Midlands and in Wales a measure of the traditional Labour vote had already deserted to UKIP in the 2015 election. This was consolidated broadly in a nationalist and racist direction by the 'exit' vote in the EU referendum. Unlike the call for Independence in Scotland, the Johnson, Gove, Farage perspective does not constitute a general political project with a new version of society and remains very contestable especially in the very likely context of worse austerity, more rationing of services and no change in the gap between the rich and poor. But, so far, that contest has not been had and the consequences of denial of the current reality grow larger for the Labour Party as the 'return' to a fantasy British history festers.

If Labour's 174 anti-Corbyn MPs had an SDP to join (the party that emerged in the 1980s to defeat Labour led by Michael Foot and Tony Benn) they would join it. Even so their attack on Corbyn takes place despite their secret knowledge that the traditional Labour Party may never again be able to form a government (and therefore they will not get a government post and the ladder into the City of London etc., will not, after all, be let down for them and therefore Lord Mandelson and his hero Blair are to be the last of the golden Labour spiv generation accepted by Britain's real rulers who hold wealth and power.)

If these people nevertheless win Labour's husk and defeat their own new Party membership, they will not confront racism in the Welsh Valleys or in Sunderland; they will avoid it and then concede to it. They will not be able to open the door to a new left in Scotland, accepting the right of independence, making alliances with the SNP on Trident and austerity and driving that through in ways that expose the limits and concessions that the SNP leadership constantly make. Instead they will try to tackle the SNP from the right! Their vote will drop substantially from the 9 million that Labour scored in 2015. In the final analysis they will become a wing of a 'national government' to 'defend Britain' together with the new Tory Party right wing, either by a worked through agreement, de jure, or in day to day practice, de facto.

But it also has to be accepted that Labour's left, even should it win the present battle and isolate its new right, will not be able to form a new government autonomously. A new government from an early General Election is more than possible against the reeling Tories. A freed up left would be able to reach directly into some of the traditional Labour heartlands with a bold new emergency programme - completely unavailable to their opponents in the Party. However, the old certainties are over and Labour's left leadership, even were it to hold the 9 million, will still need to face some of its own MPs opposing its measures, it will need to build a government in alliance with the SNP and the Greens and Plaid Cymru on its radical programme. Old Labour, and its false unity, circa 1950s to 2007, is dead. Blair, Brown, Miliband and the current battle have made sure of that. In other words, a new type of working class based political formation is required in mainstream politics and Labour's left leadership can be in a position to begin that construction. Better smaller, but better.

This is the end for the Labour Party, as it has existed since 1900. The choice is how can its best elements, its membership against austerity, poverty, war and racism; its leaders who will fight for the disadvantaged; its voters in the past and in the present, can win out over those who would serve the system first. Of course it is better if all of the Labour Party can be won to challenge the failures past and the failures to come from a system that just doesn't work and has not worked for years for the majority. Unfortunately (and from its birth) that schism has run through Labour. Now it has broken wide open. It may well mean a smaller group of MPs and Labour leaders have to speak to the largest classes in society after this battle. But the words will be heard if they are clear and sure. No more austerity: New wealth taxes: End poverty: Protect the poor: Build our services and communities: No foreign war and no nukes: Get rid of racism: Houses for all; and, after the power of the referendum, let us continue with - Fair Votes. This would be how to build a potential new fact that can break through the crisis.

Dangerous Times

These are dangerous times for the UK and the EU. Those who would be mainstream political leaders need to use their opportunity to speak to the mass of the UK population with care. The best example of a leader offering a way forward in the context of Britain's new right wing as it consolidates its weight and power in the UK, was Nicola Sturgeon. Whatever view might be held in the English and Welsh Labour movement about Scottish independence, the Scottish National Party leader and chief minister in the Scottish parliament was able to give a clear route out of the gathering mess in English and Welsh politics. Scotland needed to re-look at its own independence. She managed to create a message of hope in the confusion and defeat (for nearly two-thirds of Scottish voters) following the EU referendum. That is the approach that genuinely 'steadies the ship'. It reorganises the big political and economic perspectives in a tangible and positive way; for the people.

What 'walking dead' PM Cameron could offer in his speech outside number 10 was his best efforts on behalf of the country he loved (not reciprocated). He will stay on until September, he said, to 'steady the ship'. It was a lachrymose, self-pitying performance that will not alter one particle of the damage he has done. And the political tidal wave that he has unleashed, the re-composition of right-wing politics (and economics) in Britain, is unaltered as it surges forward, accepting one Eton boy's 'sacrifice' and promoting another on the crest of its wave.

The trembling uncertainty now manifest in Britain's so so solid political institutions, and the terrible cracks opened up among the population at large, (youth against the old, London against the North East Wales and the Midlands, Scotland against England etc., etc) are the context now for mainstream (indeed any) political leadership. And 'steadying the ship' by itself is not any sort of answer.

(It is worth noting that it is the pressure from the new and switching pro EU-exit voters, mainly from the working class, that is causing UKIP leader Farage such a headache. Should he bring his UKIP battalions with him inside the new Tory party, dissolve them into its organisation and seek a central leadership position himself? Or will the inevitable 'shilly shallying' of the globalista Tory elites (now already denying that they will reduce immigration) mean that the UKIP army needs to be kept intact on the lawn of the new Tory edifice as a permanent warning?)  

Which brings us the leadership of the Labour Party. Bankers, confused leaders of the Civil Service, multi-nationals and Russian property owners want a steady ship. They want nothing else to happen for a good long while so they might make their self-serving arrangements to put their wealth and resources in the most accessible and lucrative places without further disturbance. But the mass of ordinary people are not seeking 'deep breaths' or 'time to calm down', especially those millions of previously Labour voters or those previously disenfranchised by the total unrepresentativeness of the main political parties. On the contrary; they want to see action - as a result of their decision.

It is a time for the new, left Labour leadership to make its mark and re frame the next stage of mass politics. Leaving the ship steadiers to their own business, what Corbyn should have made of his first post Brexit speech, which would have forced his testy MPs into line as well as directly speaking to the new layers in society now politically aroused, is the elaboration of two great proposals. First, Labour should lead the charge for a new General Election. No new PM without a new election. No more austerity. No more poverty. A minimum and a maximum income for all. Rebuild Britain. Save our services. Second, fair votes. Let all the peoples' votes always count and in all elections.

Defensive formulations and steadying the ship will not cut it either inside or outside the Labour Party. Not now. Instead the crisis must be faced, redefined and transformed. In great political moments, that have not yet lead to definitive victory or defeat, only the boldest actions carry the day.

Brexicated

There is a temptation to shout 'hurrah' when the establishment take an insurgent blow as brutal as the June 23 British vote for Brexit. Major corporations, huge banks and finance houses, a whole European and British political class, are stunned at the insouciant temerity of millions of poor people pissing on their lawn.

But history has used insurgency in many times and forms. London's Gordon Riots of 1780 were an early sign, but with a reactionary face, of what was to become a great radical, progressive and revolutionary wave, led in action by the 'sans culottes', across France in the 1780s and 90s. In 1966 Chairman Mao used millions of revolutionary minded youth, mobilized as a result of a faction struggle in the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, as he sought popular (and murderous) defenses against his critics. Alas mass commitment, even with an apparently democratic twist, does not in itself signify that the interests of working class people have been served, despite any emotional fall out gained from 'dissing' the fat cats. (And arguments from the left that rely on such notions are worthless.)

Nevertheless it is worth an initial look at the social voting patterns for Brexit across the UK to begin to root any political analysis of meaning of the vote in healthy ground.

First, the argument that a great northern and working class rebellion in England 'won' Brexit does not stand up. Sheffield (518k population) narrowly voted to leave the EU. But Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Newcastle etc., (1.75 million) voted to remain. The section of traditional Labour Party voters in the North of England who voted for Brexit, came mainly from smaller towns and were concentrated particularly strongly in the Northeast (but not Newcastle.)  58% of voters in the Northeast voted Brexit compared with the UK average of 52%. The working class vote in the North of England as a whole on EU membership was divided - and this is not news. UKIP scored high votes in a number of traditionally Labour constituencies in the Northeast in the 2015 election - particularly in the smaller towns. And it was the Northeast of England, along with the Welsh Valleys, that had their economic and social structure most destroyed, without any reconstruction by any government, as a result of the defeat of the Miners in the 1980s and 90s.

In other parts of the UK working class reaction to Brexit was also divided, but with majorities for staying in the EU. This was apparent from the vote in the poorer boroughs of London, Cardiff, Bristol, etc. In Scotland the 'remain' vote was victorious in every part of the country. And a (still) profoundly working class city and its environs, Glasgow, voted 2 to 1 to remain in the EU.

Significantly young people who voted were 72% more likely to vote to stay in the EU and those from 25 to 49 years voted in their majority for 'remain'. (UGov poll 23 June.) It is difficult to believe that these millions of younger voters are any sort of a part of the establishment!

To draw out some provisional conclusions from this initial survey; the result of the EU referendum is not fundamentally a class uprising against the status quo. We are not seeing the alienated poor intent on damaging the economic and political system of Britain and of the EU. In some of the most shattered and shredded regions of England and Wales, poisoned by Thatcher and then hung out to dry by the UK rulers' universal embrace of globalisation, we see a negative, often an anti-immigrant and racist reaction to any opportunity afforded to make a mark on the history of the country. But in areas with similar social and economic conditions, where working class people, abandoned by Labour's Blairism and then austerity, built new leaderships and new perspectives that offered a different route forward, the vote was to 'remain'.

Scotland's working class grasped new perspectives, the prospect of creating a new country, as the traditional Labour Party abandoned them. No such possibility applied in the Northeast or the Midlands and it is the relentless, one sided loyalty to Welsh Labour that has turned the Welsh Valleys into the opposite of their progressive past as Plaid Cymru was unable to break even that tenuous link. In Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein assured a majority for staying in the EU.

Elsewhere, traditional 'middle England' played its normal arcane role, totting up its hurts since the end of Empire, and spitting them back at the Tory party leaders that had become too metropolitan.

Undoubtedly the EU troubles and the ongoing British political crisis (see many previous blogs) will both heighten as a result of Britain's unexpected turn from orthodoxy. But it must be remembered that the referendum was never about who should hold power or wealth either internationally or in Britain. Both 'sides' argued for deepening globalisation. Indeed, the exiteers were most vociferous in their desire to roll back all the European 'restraints' on employers. In that they have begun to construct the British version of Hungary and Poland's new right wing regimes and are a UK echo of Trump's fight for power in the US. All these new leaderships (plus the Austrian and the French and Dutch far right) use opposition to the EU as a fig leaf for their deep commitment to the destruction of labour and of immigrant rights; two of the major social forces, along with youth, that can challenge globalisation from a non-nationalist standpoint.

Before the Brexit result, the opening out of the crisis of the Tory Party was the main consequence of the EU debate in Britain. Today, 24 April, the main aspect of the British political crisis is with the Labour Party, more precisely with Corbyn's leadership of it. Besides the loss of 25 Scottish MPs and the renewal of the prospects of another Scottish referendum, Corbyn has now inherited the further consolidation of a right wing oriented social base in a large section of what were traditional Labour voters. It is of course absurd to blame Corbyn for these developments, for not campaigning hard enough for the wretched EU. The break up of Labour's base starts even earlier than Blair. And defending the EU 'remain' vote as anything other than a means of stopping yet another Bullendon Boy from grabbing the leadership of the Tories under a new and more right wing banner, was never going to raise much enthusiasm. In other words, the referendum had to be used by Corbyn and Labour for something else.

Now Corbyn faces an early execution; another signal that the course of events in the UK, mirroring as they do the political developments in the rest of the West, is now flowing away from the promise and initiative of the left in the UK that flourished from 2012 to 2015. In reality the Corbyn leadership was never going to be able to 'win over' the bulk of the parliamentary Labour Party. He stood and stands for the working class interest above all and they do not. A schism was and remains inevitable in the old Labour Party although tactical astuteness is a critical factor in its emergence and conclusion. Corbyn was always fighting to lead Labour and to lead Labour into a general election. That continues to be the best context in which to marginalise the sections of Labour that will break from Corbyn's management. The direct and unambiguous call for an early general election by the Labour leadership is now indispensable. This will drive the mainstream political momentum back to the left taking the initiative from the right. A new (rightist) Tory PM has no mandate. A new economic world has to be built in Britain as the City of London prepares to set sail for pastures new (in Frankfurt or Paris unless Boris agrees that the City can be a tax free haven like Hong Kong or Singapore.) Scotland will have another referendum. All this requires an election asap and dramatic new politics and policies to bridge the gap between rich and poor and build a new society.

Out of that (and only out of that) will emerge the prospects of a new Labour Party with a significant number of MPs, that can lead the battle with the Tories and begin to make the alliances needed to build a genuine left in Britain

Next: Prospects for EU.

Brexit, the economy, immigration and the Labour Party

The hysterical pitch of Britain's public 'debate' about remaining in the EU or 'Brexiting' has had no room whatsoever for those on the left who argue that Brexit is in the interests of working class people of Britain and Europe and neither have the left who argue for remaining in the EU had any space. The only 'progressive' points on the side of Remain that surfaced at all in any of the large scale media were hyped up comments from Labour leaders about the merits of EU legislation on working hours, etc. (All of which are under attack in their own countries from the current European leadership!) Sadly, it would appear from the remarks made by those who follow it, that the on-line discussion has, on this occasion, largely taken its cues from the previously despised 'middle aged men' now in blue (not grey) suits.

Besides reflecting on the realities of the political relationship of forces in the UK and the wretched domination by billionaires and their frightened toadies that run the traditional British media, this absence of the voice of the left, and especially its most radical part, in Britain's European debate shows two things.

First, much of the left in Britain has no purchase on either of the two key questions on which the European debate has now centered. The Labour and the trade union leadership, while supporting Remain, have spent most of their time gleefully keeping out of what they immaturely believed was simply Tory bloodletting. Finally and belatedly, realising that a huge section of their traditional social base is in danger of being lost to a new right wing led by Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, they have simply defended the economic status quo 'for fear of something worse'.

There has been a call for 'more' reform in the EU, but nothing about the need for the root and branch overthrow of its leadership and structure as a loathed, unaccountable symbol of the worst of capitalism. Where are the economic arguments for anti-austerity; for a new equality, across Europe? Where are the demands for driving deep inroads into the power and wealth of the great corporations that, together with the banks, bestride it? Britons, like the inhabitants of many individual countries, are regularly told that if they do not continue with austerity then they will be punished by international capital. How is the call to remain in a European alliance used by the Labour and trade union leadership to offer the hope of a bloc of countries that might use their power to break the chains on labour and the poor across Europe, being forged by globalisation and the power (political and otherwise) of the super rich?

Similarly, but with one honourable exception, the left and its more radical component has had little to say on immigration. The honourable exception is the action mobilised by the Peoples Assembly to rally for Calais, in defense of the rights of those who are in the camps barring entry to Britain. This is already a hugely successful response to the terrible terms of the public debate about immigration in the UK. Otherwise and again, the Labour and trade union movement has been rehearsing the old mantras about the contributions made to the British economy by immigrants and reinforcing the view that British employers need cheap foreign labour! Labour's Deputy leader is now calling for a 'review' of the EU's policy of free movement.

This utterly defensive approach by Labour and the trade unions is a failure (rapidly) waiting to happen. It is already established that some of the greatest antipathy to immigration in the UK comes from areas like Sunderland in the North East of England - where immigration is small. In London, which has the highest levels of immigrants as part of its population, there is the least antipathy. What this shows is the fluidity in society and the potential weight of a fierce anti-racist policy; a policy to pull together a working class movement that unites against poor wages, which demands organisation and fair living standards for all, employed and unemployed, across the whole of Europe.

Ultimately, the timid failure of the leadership of the Labour and trade union leadership to give its own unique lead on the economy and on immigration, despite Jeremy Corbyn's (delayed) efforts, dramatically illustrates why Corbyn's victory in Labour's leadership elections is nothing like enough. In fact it shows that even Corbyn's leadership is, by itself, not even sufficient to rally what was Labour's traditional base before Blair destroyed it, much less to create a 'new politics' different enough to challenge our society. The huge numbers of British people and the large parts of the population who now oppose austerity and reject Britain's fear of immigration have not been brought together or nurtured by Labour or the unions and that is a failure that further opens the door to a more rabid right wing in British politics.