Change in Britain and the Labour Party

INTRODUCTION

Dead end for the Tories - for now

The nemesis of the British Tory government grows nearer. It is a reality that looms in sharper and sharper outline as efforts to cobble together a Brexit deal, 'fix' the NHS, to apologise for the insult to black citizens, to cover economic failure, to deny desperate poverty and homelessness, to ramp-up foreign wars and lose a Cabinet Minister every six weeks, are all demonstrating failure. The clock is ticking towards March 2019. A vote in Parliament which might dump any Tory Cabinet deal with the EU is becoming a reality. An emergency General Election (before March 2019) seems the only means for the Tory leadership to get themselves out of the line of fire and start sorting out their mess.

A shift in mass politics

As a result of the dangerous impasse created by the Tories shambles, where the traditional Tory ruling-class party is politically dislocated, the nation is pounded by relentless attacks on Corbyn's Labour Party (led by the BBC). Meanwhile, and despite wave after wave of mainstream media attacks, at deeper levels, core aspects of the Corbyn Manifesto of 2017 and some deeper reforms are still surfacing as a new 'common sense' in majority parts of the voting population.

This is an historic 'moment' in the evolution of Britain's prevailing political crisis. Large scale shifts in the relationship between British society and its political system are now emerging. The most significant of these shifts in the short term is the end of the idea that a British General Election will simply swap its allegiance from a Tory government to Labour in the 'normal' way. The standard creation of yet another Labour Government-led class-consensus, the main pattern of British politics in the past 60 years, is now dead in the water.

PART ONE

A decisive shift in the Labour Party

And here is the potential dilemma that is facing a future Corbyn-led Labour government. A possible Labour Party victory in the next General Election in Britain will not be able to recompose yet another temporary alliance between today's disappointed and worried ruling elite and the angry and unsettled working class population that has begun to act against the system and to vote for change. In fact a Labour victory in the polls will not even unify the Labour Party in the current conditions. It will instead open out Labour's own, internal, class differences, that have haunted the British Labour Party since its foundation.

Looking deeper at Labour

It would be an error to judge that Corbyn has taken total control of Labour. Certainly, most Corbyn supporters in the ranks of the Labour Party do not believe that for one minute. If Corbyn had truly 'won' the battle with Labour's right wing inside the party then, after a successful General Election, it might be possible to imagine a serious retreat and substantial concessions accepted by Britain's dominant class - while it tried to reorganise its way out of its political mess. But the facts of the Labour Party point otherwise. To begin with, despite the massive influx of hundreds of thousands into the Labour Party - and despite the advances that these new party members have made in the local Constituencies and on the National Executive (let alone with the younger electorate) - they do not rule the party. On the contrary, large parts of the trade union leadership and a big majority of Labour MPs, and a decisive part of Labour's day to day structure, remains profoundly hostile to Corbyn's politics and remains dedicated to his removal.

PART TWO

The Corbyn leadership; the critical factor for both main classes: first for our rulers.

Yet despite the battle still to come in his own party, Corbyn (along with Macron) remain the most significant mainstream political leaders in western Europe. (Indeed the Corbyn/Macron contrast is becoming the critical political battle there.) Not surprisingly, both the British left and the right are reorganising themselves in respect of that fact. Far from the hints in the Financial Times, that aspects of Corbyn's programme would be bearable and could be lived with, Britain's ruling class is developing a series of contingency plots and plans designed to minimise the damage to the Tories, while at the same time trying to break up Corbyn's advances. For example new parties are being conceived, not in order to create another stab at Britain's (reactionary) political system; far from it. The creation of another UKIP or the Social Democrat Party of the 1980s is not on the cards, and still less is there any idea of promoting the Liberals. The new-party talk is instead designed to recompose the next Parliament.

The creation of a new political 'force' in Parliament is the British ruling class's favoured Macron miracle. The deepening social and youthful support for Corbyn's leadership of Labour and the polarising rightward shift of the Tories, plus the British voting system, prevents a Macron style election. The British version of Macron, designed to 'fill the space' left by the absence of the 'Liberal centre' in the UK Parliament, is to be a mainly post election operation. It is nothing less than the rigging of the next Parliament. Tony Blair and the mini-Blair, Chuka Harrison Umunna, are already lined up for the purpose.

Parliament - versus Labour

Disassembling MPs from their loyalty to the traditional parties in Britain could initially have a wide appeal. The new cohort of MPs after the next General Election would, thereby sound as though they were a democratic advance in a society sick of its traditional politicians. In reality what it would mean is a large group of right-wing Labour MPs and some Tories would, in effect, follow the dictates of Britain's billionaires. In this model, Parliament begins to look like the US House of Representatives, where votes are bought and sold. Pardon. Where votes are (regularly) counted according to individual consciences. These conditions would for example allow 'wise, EU 'remainers' in such an 'open' Parliament to make their move, which would be a very big and successful deal for British big capitalism indeed. And this is only one of the emerging political tactics being constructed to defeat a possible Prime Minister Corbyn leading the country.

Labour - versus the people: some views of the left?

For some of the organised far left of British politics, the Labour Party's future is often defined only by its limits. Sectarians go as far as presenting PM Corbyn as a future Kerensky, and the Corbyn LP government as a lame and defeatist project, so tied will it be to the need for unity of the party. And so lame is its program. Therefore no real advances for the working class people of Britain can be expected under Corbyn, as concessions to right-wing Labour MPs and to big Capital are inevitable.

Today, this point of view is entirely abstract. The key question is still - can Corbyn win the Labour Party? Arguing about the priorities of a future government program and putting the fire to the Labour leader's feet is one thing, especially if a key reform represents a direct demand from a section of people who are battling for a half-decent life. It is quite another if we are actually discussing the general preconditions for a socialist future! Such arguments are broadly necessary in the scheme of things, but the concrete reality of people taking action against the system that oppresses them and winning results, is the most profound argument of all. And it is in this movement and in those actions that the pressure will come into Corbyn's leadership in Parliament both in numerical terms and in the potential radicalisation of his government's policy.

The rebirth of 'The British Road to Socialism.'

Another left view of a possible Corbyn led Labour government has also become significant. After WW2 the British Communist Party, in collaboration with the then Soviet CP, developed a strategy called the British Road to Socialism. While the British CP declined into a tiny formation after the war, its strategy had a huge impact in the wider labour movement for decades, and still has weight inside the much of the remains of the official labour movement today. The BRS argued that the unions could produce a left wing Labour Party that would be able to create genuine socialism in Britain. A sort of super-plus Attlee government.  The weight and strength of a powerful labour movement and the social movements that could be built, united by a Labour Government, could, in British conditions, breakthrough against the capitalist system. Virtually the whole of the Labour Party, including its MPs could be won to the BRS perspective in such conditions.

But this idea does not face (and never did face) the class divide that passes through Labour. The BRS does not answer the opening up of that fissure under the pressure of contending class interests in the circumstance of a Corbyn led government. Some will fall for the theory and argue for a deadly party unity where the left will tail-end a galloping right. Others will ditch the theory and fight it through.

PART THREE

The theories - and what is really happening?

In the first place, political, economic and social life in British society are coming together, not as a combination; but rather as a combined set of conflicts and contradictions. And in this melee it is the political that is currently pre-eminent.

Not only has the Tory party lost its prime purpose of defence of Britain's ruling class; not only has the British political system overturned, where the traditional Labour / Tory axis has crashed; but the declining, decaying Labour Party has also turned upside down.

The division of classes in society is increasing. The Tory party, the political expression of the rich, is failing to provide leadership across society. A new political current has created an alternative political perspective that challenges the domination of the rich and they have chosen the Labour Party as their vehicle. To challenge the rich, this new current, led by Corbyn, will have to defeat its own traditional party in order to be able to start changing society. The new working class in Britain on the ground, in the trade unions and outside the unions, building new associations and fighting insecure service work, see the Corbyn leadership as their best chance to get essential changes in their lives. Defeating right wing Labour as it evolves fully into a new ruling class party in Parliament, will take Conferences, Constituency battles to remove MPs and, most of all, the determined movement of the new working class. The next fight, just beginning will involve party splits; more elections; political reform; all to enable the battle for a substantial change in society to begin. It will succeed if it combines this essential process with complete identification with and support for the energy, demands and the action of working class people; the engine of progress against big Capital and Labour's right wing.

The heart of the matter

The heart of the matter, from a working class perspective; what might be called the real 'moment' in Britain's recent political (and economic) history, is the beginning of the maturation of a new, mass, political current that opposes the system that they live in and whose mainstream objective is to secure a new type of government. Their idea is both the expression of an independence from Britain's historical political party rigmarole and at the same time a central focus on one of those old parties as the means by which they can achieve structural change - including the end to the old political system. And the reason why they have chosen Labour is Corbyn - because of the optimistic fact that Corbyn, in the enfeebled, shrinking, post-Blair Labour Party, could win the leadership and therefore turn the party into something else.

The weakness of Labour's Manifesto and a new consensus?

Whatever the weakness and concessions of the Labour Manifesto, in the potential political (and economic) crisis that a Labour victory would exacerbate, from the very first day of a Corbyn led government, there will be major upheavals in the Labour Party in Parliament. Even if we might fantasise about a stable, Keynesian based, Labour 'unity compromise', where Corbyn conceded on soft reforms in the economy, and on the continuation of nuclear 'defence'; where a mutual reconstruction of a single market with the EU was accepted (as a possible first step back to full EU membership) it still will not hold.

The dissolution and failure of the traditional ruling class party, the Tories, not least over the EU, is a seminal problem for the class that they have historically politically defended. But this failure will not be 'solved' for the ruling class, even temporarily, by any version of the Labour Party headed by Corbyn. Britain's ruling class may despair at the Tories but they are for the elimination of Corbyn and more precisely for the destruction of the mass political current in the working and middle classes that he has helped to build and lead. This is more important than their annoyance with May et al. In so far as there is any strategic thinking on this matter among ruling class circles, it is not any version of reliance on a 'soft' Labour government (although they do not manage the future.) It is for the end, as they see it, of the terror of 'left wing populism.'

An (early) conclusion.

In the next period, a period marked in and around the coming General Election, the critical battle for the new, mass, radical current in society is to win a Corbyn led Labour government. However historically limited that purpose might seem, it remains the premise for the the further advance of the most radical sectors of British society, at this moment. It is a paradox that the greatest changes in a rotten society must pass through the gateway of a second rate clash over the future of a corrupt Parliament. Waves of resistance to poor wages, benefits, housing may erupt. In the future, these battles are the platform for a new type of society and its politics. Today, they are the crucial lever to open out the possibilities of a Corbyn led government, and the defence of that gain. The focus on the success and security of those struggles will be the chance of a Corbyn Labour government winning. Politics, for now, will dominate economics. The class struggle inside any new Labour government, which will take the simple form of the battle against Corbyn, will also open the door to a completely new politics. Working class people can then set their own terms - because they will have made the successful fight for Corbyn and thereby won a new, mass, mainstream political formation for socialism, and because they have to, as only the involvement of millions of people in active struggle can fundamentally change society.