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.