Labour Party future?

When Teresa May, Britain's new Tory Prime Minister, announced her programme after Brexit, she dropped a large part of the 2015 Tory Manifesto. (Which is another reason why there should be an early General Election.) Ex Chancellor of the Exchequer, Osborne, quietly announced that the government debt targets had been dropped and George's main economic policy, the 'long term plan', duly caught a cold and died. 'Austerity' has suddenly dissolved. May wants an 'industrial policy' (a swearword for the previous Tory Cabinet), workers on company boards and share holders to have binding rights to limit company manager's salaries. May is pointing to a post Brexit future via ideas  from the early 20th century and Lloyd George!

The significance of all this for the future of the Labour Party goes right to the heart of its current struggle. And the first thing to understand is that the battle for Labour's leadership is a decisive class battle.

Following Brexit and the latest, large-scale contradictions erupting within globalisation, by no means has the Tory Party finished with its own changes in the turmoil of ruling class politics in the UK. Tory grandees are full of fear, wondering what they can base UK ruling class politics on when the City of London demands, as a first step, a major cut in its annual £67 billion tax payment, and the £1 trillion annual foreign investment figure shrivels. They also look over their shoulder at Farage's 4 million voters in the UK, and Trump's presidential prospects in the US, with further alarm. But what frightens them most in their particular world is what is happening in the Labour Party.

The Tory's specific evolution (and ruling class politics in general) depends, indeed at the moment essentially depends, on the reaction of the global and the UK working class movement, facing those same national and international convulsions. The major economic shifts and cracks post Brexit are certainly coming. But today the line of class conflict in Britain is most obvious in the country's political struggle. It is centred in the fight in the Labour Party.

Lenin's 'bourgeoise / workers party' was always an algebraic formula for the Labour Party. That is to say Lenin's description did not of itself provide a measure of the content and weight of the two different contradictory aspects of the party during Labour's development through its history. By the time of Blair's premiership the content of the second part of Labour's contradiction had little, if any, substance. It was then that the overall crisis of the Labour Party began in earnest, with its losses in Scotland and to UKIP (for without its contradictory character it could find no particular role in late capitalism's political spectrum.) As reality is always richer than a thousand theories, so Labour's empty halls marked 'workers' suddenly began to fill from a new layer of hundreds of thousands of active trade unionists and from the mass movements against war and austerity that had bedevilled first Blair and then Cameron.

Today Labour is a party where society's two major classes are contesting, over nothing less than the leadership of the working class, going into the next stormy period. And despite all the jokes and the trivia, Britain's rulers are terrified that a new, radical, working-class based party could be born.

As many have guessed but only suspected we now have the first ever generation to record lower lifetime earnings than their predecessors. Today’s 27 year olds (born in 1988) are earning the same amount that 27 year olds did a quarter of a century ago and have actually earned £8,000 less during their twenties than those in the preceding generation. (Stagnation Generation: the case for renewing the intergenerational contract. Resolution Foundation. 18 July 2016.) At the same time mass movements have been built and unions have fought back. A new working class in Britain is also 'becoming' itself, underpinned by the new brutal material conditions, but now focused ideologically by this process of the end of traditional social democracy in Britain, and the search for a new political leadership.

The economic factor, the relationship of labour power to the means of production, remains essential in the creation of the working class, but historically this has gone through many forms. Today the working class movement, the best unions, the mass campaigns, bring together a new working class experience summed up in action against war and austerity and now in a first stage but still critical battle over which class (the 'labour' representatives of a ruling class status quo or those who want a different society) should win the political leadership first of the whole of the working class and then of society.

Which brings us back to the new PM's dumping of her 2015 Tory manifesto.

On July 18 in Parliament Corbyn argued and voted against the £32 billion submarines that float Trident nukes. Another wave of Labour MPs were 'shocked' that their elected leader did not 'stick to official Labour Party policy.' And some did just argue the case to keep Britain's nukes. Every Labour MP was able to speak for their own opinion. But what wretches are these parliamentary tribunes of Labour's holy writ as they turned on Corbyn! And how revealing is the force of the policy argument in this Labour Party battle.

Teresa May unceremoniously dumped the Tory Manifesto and spelt out her new platform. Of course Labour Conferences are sovereign over Labour's policy but now the leadership battle has officially started in the party the hesitation over Corbyn's main proposals for post Brexit Britain must stop and his policies presented, front and centre. Millions of working class people in Britain have no idea, bar opposing nukes, why Corbyn's leadership struggle is so important to them. And, following Brexit, the submergence of Farage and the destruction of Johnston and Gove, means that working class people who might have been attracted to an anti-immigration political course and a new right wing in Britain, are in flux and open to bold arguments, unavailable in any official defense of a decaying and anti-working class EU during the referendum campaign, but available now.

The left and Corbyn need to nail exactly what no more austerity means, given that everybody is now forced to sit on that particular carpet. Now is the time to denounce the gap between the rich and poor by promising to implement a basic living standard for all citizens, with priority community regeneration plans in the most deprived areas, with across the board standards for housing to health, from employment to enjoyment. In this context it makes a huge difference to the argument that Britain should share labour and its future with anyone in the world who wants to, or who has to come to the UK.  Finance needs regulation and control. National and regional investment banks focussed on key infrastructure projects and subject to popular accountability would begin the fight to 'bring down' the City. Some experts are already arguing for a legally fixed proportion of the nation's overall wealth, on a sliding scale according to need, for the health service. It is a principle that is open to a democratic consensus and and might be widened to all the key services.

One critical policy must be the total renovation of a decrepit, corrupt and remote political system; starting with elections, like the EU referendum, where every vote counts.

The new leadership of the Labour Party, based on its members and the best unions, have a chance to show what a new Britain would look like if they use the platform of Labour's leadership election in the outward, hopeful, inclusive and radical way they should. And if the result of this campaign results in winning the leadership of the Party, many, perhaps the bulk of Labour MPs may be lost to hopes of positions in a future National Government, but a new political expression of a new working class will have a national voice and be at the heart of mainstream politics as the crisis of the system unfolds.