A Short draft Essay on a strategic weakness of the current Left in Britain.
(Comments, criticisms and alternatives welcome.)
1
When the British Parliament took on its modern form, after the English Revolution of the 1640s and later the Restoration of 1660 to 1667, Parliament had a real and decisive purpose. The compromise between the new classes, the Merchants, the City of London and the post Tudor landowners now in alliance with the traditional aristocracy and the monarchy, against the more radical forces unleashed in the 1640’s, required an heterogeneous instrument to take the recomposed ruling class’s political and economic interests forward. It also needed to legitimate the suppression of those that still favoured a radical, democratic, alternative to monarchy and the ‘Lords of misrule’.
There needed to be an organised political and economic discussion between all the elements of the new dominant, social amalgam. Despite the frictions and contradictions, and the relentless movement in the direction of capitalist accumulation, in the English then British circumstances of the time, neither the royal court nor any republican parliament could do it alone The parliament that was created was corrupt, gerrymandered, dominated by ultra-rich cliques but, until the late 19th century, ultimately immensely effective in promoting the unified interests of a new and evolving capitalist class.
As Parliament was essentially a committee of an adolescent, fragmented and only latterly a fully-grown, single, ruling class, it had to debate and resolve a common interest on major questions of state and finance. This included the retreat from the American colonies, the hundred years of war with France, down to the Corn Laws. But then everything changed. And Parliament had now to deal with two, antagonistic social classes that could not share a common interest, which, naturally, changed everything.
The first uprising of the British working class per se was centered on the nature of Parliament and democracy. Indeed the actions of the Chartists (1820s to 1840s) drew together a new working class from its entire multitude of circumstances and conditions. This new working class was first born through a direct political struggle rather than through social experience of large-scale industry. It was defeated but left a profound legacy that paralleled (sometimes indistinctly) the later, trade union base of mass working class struggle in the late 19th and early 20th century.
The successful 100 year battle by labour and by women for the franchise; the overthrow of Empire; and now all of that capped by the reorganisation of capitalist economics via globalization, has rendered the original role of the British Parliament marginal, indeed dysfunctional in its historical terms. The adaptations that Parliament made to these new realities were always insecure; always underpinned by the effort to get the big decisions out of the place. That state of affairs remains true for both the main classes, albeit for different reasons. Which is why, despite much greater venality of the parliaments in the past, so many millions regard ‘their’ current parliament as worthless and rotten to the core.
Since the rise of labour and political rights for women, Parliament now has one signal purpose and two main functions for Britain’s rulers. Parliament, sometimes by concessions during a period of working class advance, presents itself as providing access to the system of society for those who do not own it. Also by that means the endless measures designed to ‘free’ capital and restrict labour are legitimated among the population as a whole. And those have been its main concerns on behalf of a capitalist class challenged in Britain since the full franchise was won and labour organised itself at work and then politically. Parliament reached the apogee of its concessionary role in 1945 when the USSR had defeated Hitler and, as the future Lord Boothby said at the time,
‘If we do not give them reform, they will give us revolution.’
Since then the British capitalist class, broadly abetted by the leadership of the Tory and the Labour parties, have collaborated in the gradual shift out of Parliament of all the great decisions concerning wealth and power in Britain. Parliament has increasingly become an echo chamber for strategies decided by others, in different places and, once in a while, as with the 2008 crisis, a means of distributing their failures. Parliament has therefore become more and more marginal, uncertain, hapless, with its membership driven in the main by individual ambition.
(This is another example of how an historical trend can emerge from a kaleidoscope of personal ambition, from the fear of one’s opponents and the desire for short-term gain. Despite the fractured chaos of actions and reactions there emerges a pattern of both individual and collective development, invariably conflicted and contradictory, but shaped by a coherence, over-determined by overall class interests and struggles.)
2
The most recent political developments in Britain demonstrate the grossly deformed and impotent character of Britain’s modern parliament.
The Scottish referendum for independence, initiated by an SNP led Scottish Parliament, following the political collapse in Scotland of the post Blair Labour Party, turned into a triumph of modern, democratic, debate. A huge proportion of the Scottish people participated in discussions, meetings, conferences and arguments, at every level, over months, more and more focusing on the sort of society that Scotland could or should be. There was an upheaval in Scotland of political discussion. When the high level debate in Scotland is measured against the intervention into the Scottish referendum of the British mainstream political leaderships and of Britain’s Parliament, which amounted to the crudest threats in the last two months, their embarrassing threats hit the lowest possible level in the debate. The British Parliament’s ‘success’ in frightening the mainly middle classes of Scotland has simply left a wound that will not heal. As British economic conditions worsen over the coming years as Europe as a whole reels at the latest failures of globalisation with or without Brexit, so the demand for a new referendum in Scotland will grow and Scottish society will further polarise. The British Parliament and its main parties categorically failed to respond at any strategic level to the Scottish people and their debate. They have therefore been sidelined in Scottish political life. Even the Scottish Tories have had to ‘nationalise’ themselves in the face of British turmoil.
The British Parliament then launched its own referendum, which had been spat out from a factional effort to stitch back together Britain’s main political party, the Tories. The evolution of the truncated discussion that there was on leaving the EU was entirely controlled by mainstream party leaders, a self-censoring BBC and shrieking, racist hysterics from the billionaires’ broadsheets. Social media did not counter these influences as it was broadly unavailable to the over 40s. People ended up watching a debate between various Donald Trumps, in set-up forums. And the mass of British voters were kept well out of any serious discussion.
Part of the EU referendum’s low level debate and gross failure to focus on the key questions was, of course, because the referendum itself posed a non-question. Whether the British people should remain in an international organisation set up by a continent’s rulers to deal with globalisation - via neo-liberalism, or instead whether to be a single nation state as a means of dealing with globalisation - via neo-liberalism, is not much of a choice. Both ex ‘remainers’ and ex ‘leavers’ in the political mainstream are at pains to insist that it is business very much as usual. The necessary tax concessions to global companies and the accompanying destruction of the social wage and living conditions to appease the dominant corporations of the world will continue.
However, there were political formations that Parliament and its rules had completely excluded, who were able to fill the ‘real meaning of the referendum’ gap among sections of the UK population, primarily UKIP. The British EU referendum was not a debate about the future of British society but rather a means of registering an anti status quo, anti immigration view of the world held, albeit tentatively, by millions of people. There were no mainstream debates at all on the real reasons that basic services were running down or on Britain’s role in the catastrophic wars that have injured the planet and millions of its people.
Why is Britain’s Parliamentary structure culpable? Because it was unable and unwilling to lead the discussion on who really had wealth and power in the EU or in the UK: on why services were declining: on who was responsible for war and cuts: on what sort of society British people want. Instead it had whistled up a referendum from the head of one crafty politician that thought he could put Humpty Dumpy together again. Britain’s voting rules had totally ignored then excluded 5 million voters for UKIP and the Greens in the 2010 General Election, whose voices and argument would have then been heard across the nation, both positively and negatively, months before the vote. If Parliament had actually represented those who voted for something at the General Election, then the character of the coming referendum could have been exposed. Certainly, as the antics of UKIP MPs in Parliament became more visible across a range of issues, the debate would have had the chance of becoming something more substantial and significant than it was.
More broadly and more desperately still, the British peoples’ finest achievement, the NHS teeters on the brink of disaster. Parliament fouls its own greatest moment in the last 100 years by its abject failure to defend the people’s most important service. Maintaining and developing the NHS should be Parliament’s most important job. It is of course a class issue, but Labour leader Blair, Labour’s most successful Prime Minister in terms of office, led the now Tory charge to dismantle it. Parliament is the only place within the British state that has the systematic and overt function of ‘reconciling’ class differences in the modern era (albeit depending on the balance of social forces in the country.) On the NHS the Labour leaders forced no positive compromise, they simply started to give the NHS away. Who among the British working class wanted that?
In other words Britain’s political system distorts and holds back Britain’s political life. Like its lop-sided economy, its ‘permanently’ unresolved national questions and its deep failure to hold up living standards of the majority over the last 20 years, Britain’s Parliament has been built in modern times on the principle of no principle. That is to say that the political system is an accretion of ad hoc measures mainly taken in the immediate, day-to-day interests of Britain’s real rulers – sometimes under pressure from the working class and its compromised leaders and sometimes, as in the case of the NHS – not.
3.
Within the framework of the continuing failure of Britain’s political system; (think of the current joke where 24% of voters voted for what turned into a government in 2010 that has now replaced its Prime Minister, its Cabinet and most of its policies, yet fully expects to sail on for another three years) where is the Labour Party?
The title of this essay suggests a strategic weakness in the left’s approach. This weakness is most fully revealed by an examination of the question of power. The execrable Owen, Labour Party challenger to Corbyn’s leadership and puppet of big pharma for many years, with a programme ‘virtually the same as Jeremy Corbyn’s’, wrote down his differences with Corbyn in a recent interview with the BBC’s news political editor Laura Kuenssberg (13 September 2016.) He chose the word ‘power.’ What he meant was Labour winning its own 24% of voters and forming a government at the next election in 2020 could only happen with anybody other than Corbyn (i.e. him) at the helm. But that is a complete fantasy, even were the weathercock Owen able to take Labour’s tiller.
The Labour Party is now, and for the immediate future, barred from that sort of ‘power’. Courtesy of years of Blairite management and wars, Labour has lost its mass base in Scotland (and 30 or more MPs.) It is losing its traditional bases in the North, particularly the North East, to right wing populism spearheaded by UKIP. The anti EU vote in the North and in Wales shows further trends away from Labour. And now the Tories are preparing a re-composition of constituencies that threaten a further 30 Labour seats. In other words Labour’s Parliamentary crisis has nothing to do with Corbyn’s leadership (nor, as claimed by some on the left, because the remnants of Blairism in Parliament are now splitting the party and this is putting voters off – although no doubt it is) but it is rather the longer term break up of Labour’s traditional political base inside the British working class in general. And despite all the hope, energy and momentum, as things stand, including the emergence of a public faction of Blairite MPs which makes things worse, even Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party will not win the 120 odd seats needed to win a traditional Labour government in the next General Election.
In Britain, working class people cannot now rely on traditional parliamentary means to install a government that they feel represents them and their class (whether or not its leadership compromises that goal). And Parliament’s current structure reinforces, indeed promotes, such a dismal future.
4.
How could a Corbyn led Labour Party get into government? How can working class people be represented politically in the Britain that is today? Some of the far left in Britain advise reliance on the ‘historical process.’ Fed up with MPs and all their works, working class people will adopt soviets (called Councils of Action in the English translation) as their platform for power. Apparently that is where the ‘historic process’ is leading. Unfortunately ‘history’ has the habit of making fun of soothsayers and it is probably more useful to start from the place where the only state leader who lived with soviet power started, from the ‘concrete analysis of the concrete situation’ – and leave ‘history’ to do its own work. Taking theoretical abstraction to the highest level of the concrete is indispensable for any sort of clarity in class politics.
There are three pillars that need to be constructed for a Corbyn led government to come into office (when the real trouble will begin!) Later this essay will examine some of the continental European experiences but first and absolutely indispensable for any Corbyn led government is a mass movement against austerity, war and racism, which is rooted in every community. The Peoples Assembly, with the support of key and currently fighting unions, is at the centre of such a project today. Thousands of its supporters have joined up to Corbyn’s Labour Party because, not surprisingly, they want a government that will deliver their goals. But it is the movement of hundreds of thousands, of millions of people, being part of something momentous that brings a sense of potential power - through unity and action - to those who are denied any access to power. A mass movement in action describes who your enemies are and who will be your natural friends – and who you need to be together with, to unite with, to win what you need. It is a crucial part of the apprenticeship of ‘a class for itself’. A Corbyn government will need an immense mobilisation in action. Even some of the more extreme political outriders of the western ruling class understand a distorted version of that most modern truth in the course of their own candidacy and trajectory to power. Only the rising sea of a class movement will lift a Corbyn led Labour Party to success.
Second, British politics is not a previously coherent structure now full of holes left by the retreat of the main parties from their traditional bases in the main social classes they once rested on. It is more accurately described as a set of bunkers designed for defense and attack against potentially insurgent classes that might threaten ruling class rule. Parliament (underpinned by Empire and the emergence of malleable trade union bureaucracy) was a mechanism within this endless struggle that was redesigned by the franchise laws in the late 19th and early 20th century to reduce friction, concede ground when necessary and create the national myth of a common interest between opposing classes. As this function has become less and less needed or desired, so new formations have emerged to create new versions of political life that might create new bridges now that traditional ones have fallen.
In Scotland the SNP argue that the national interest is the common interest between classes but not in neutral terms. They propose a new social democratic society, unavailable south of the border, as the end result of embracing the national interest. The Greens similarly argue for a new ‘social contract’ between the classes based on the ‘human’ principle of survival against ecological catastrophe – and again this would be a most radical contract, unavailable in the current status quo. Plaid Cymru embraces both concepts, again within a left social democratic perspective.
A Corbyn led government can only come about at the centre of a network of alliances that share the objective of a substantial shift in favour of the working class, albeit starting from a broad social democratic perspective. Those who want a substantial shift will never believe that the old, traditional Labour Party will provide it. Those who might become interested in a substantial shift will see no sense whatsoever in the idea that this is the exclusive property of the Labour Party alone. Those who have already consciously abandoned the Labour Party as part of their despair at all mainstream parties, will require a new alliance to renew their confidence that something different is happening and something useful could be done. On Trident, on war, on immigration, on racism, on austerity, such a new programme could be put together. It has to be put together to win a new majority of voters. A Corbyn led Party needs to start now to build the social and political bloc and the associated alliances to make a fresh start and give a fresh appeal to millions of people who despise Britain’s traditional politics.
Finally there is the reform of Parliament itself. In virtually every respect the British Parliament is a scandal: from the ministers, who are embedded in senior positions in companies a fortnight after they have left office, to the 800 plus Lords, (117 new ones so far this year), who together with the Commons form the largest parliament in the world per head of the population. (India for example has half the number of parliamentarians with 20 times the population.)
Right at the heart of the British political system is this parasitic cesspit of the House of Lords, constantly reproducing itself through patronage and party donations by the rich. Meanwhile the ‘elected’ house at Westminster consolidates a political life that no longer exists in the country; a government and opposition that largely represent their members own ambitions; the British state machine - and a small minority of its population. All together this is a structure deeply out of kilter with the society it is supposed to lead. It is not framed by the needs of the British people. It is a poisoned anachronism.
Reopening the discussion and insisting on the demand for fair votes is only part of the reform bill to be presented to our rulers. But it is nevertheless essential. There is no need here to rehearse the dangers and mistakes that have arisen as a result of a voting system where only a few hundred thousand votes count in a handful of constituencies. The government is arguing their plan for equalising the size of constituencies (despite the 2 million new voters unaccounted for and special role of cities in all peoples’ lives) on the basis that everyone will now have a fair vote. In our current system that means that every voter will have the same utterly, infinitesimal chance of making any difference with their vote. This lowers all votes to the lowest common denominator. Corbyn’s Labour has to shout from the rooftops for fair votes; that the referendums showed that every vote (and voter) should count. Dissolving this point into a school class discussion about voting systems is the worst thing to do. This argument belongs as part of a series of measures to clean up Parliament and the Parties; to take wealth out MP’s and Party pockets; to sent their Lordships packing; to change Party, Government and Parliament’s relationship with the people; a major point that will be expanded in part 6.
A mass movement of active millions; alliances building new political fronts on key policies and the reconstruction of voting and Parliamentary democracy are all preconditions for a Corbyn led government; preconditions for wide ranging inroads on the bastions of wealth, power, including state power, and privilege, which are all choking our society to death.
5.
A series of significant, anti-globalisation parties sprang up across Western Europe from the beginning of this century. In some cases the collapse of traditional social democracy and the rise of radicalising movements, from both the left and the right, either created serious pressure on traditional social democratic parties, or as in the case of Greece, removed them virtually entirely from the scene.
The UK Labour Party has not avoided this development. But like other nations across Western Europe it evolves its own unique combination of these wider trends. The impact of Blair’s Labour’s war mongering, the rise of the national question in Scotland against Labour’s support for austerity and the alienation of parts of Labour’s traditional base - as the party supported austerity and promoted cuts and UKIP provided the political ‘solution’ of immigration - broke down Labour support both from the right and the left. The mass movements against war and austerity gathering on the left have now made their own political move by ‘entering’ Labour’s withering and empty party structures at the party’s base. They are busy trying to create their own ‘new party’ from its ruins. Britain’s version of the European experience of new parties may be quirky but the fundamentals are the same.
Looking at some aspects of the left and parliaments in other European countries; popular movements and associated parties erupted either along side traditional social democratic parties or even replaced them from the left. (This is not always the pattern regarding traditional left parties. As with UKIP’s ‘bite’ into traditional Labour support in Britain, so the ‘bite of the French Front National into traditional Communist Party areas has been very deep.)
In Spain two year old party Podemos fights austerity from the left and continues to contest with the main social democratic party neck and neck in the polls while the social democrat leadership refuses to break with austerity and challenge Spanish political corruption. In Portugal a small left bloc has supported a new social democratic coalition, whose new leadership has promised to challenge austerity.
Political conditions in Greece have gone furthest in this connection. Social democracy was wiped out as a result of its corruption and its relentless support for EU led austerity. The mass movements, first in the squares and then in social solidarity and anti-fascism, actively and consistently involved hundreds of thousands of Greek people and touched millions in a country of ten million. History sped up in Greece and the political formation that placed itself at the head of those mass movements (with a rather more ambivalent relationship to some of the mass actions) rapidly replaced Greek social democracy, but sadly not only in form but also in content! Syriza now implements EU led austerity. New people – old politics is the slogan on Athen’s walls.
The Greek movements remain intact (although smaller) and have even been renovated by the turn they made to Greece’s refugee crises. The movements remain by and large independent of Syriza and are a tremendous pressure on the government. An estimated 60% of the Greek population has taken part in some sort of action to support the refugees. The movements and some key unions are the working class ‘bunker’ as the debate begins across society as to whether any strictly parliamentary force and focus can meet the Greek peoples’ need for a political leadership that will really reject austerity. Meanwhile Greece’s right is reorganising and preparing its next steps.
It is patently obvious from even this small collection of European experiences that any simple formula that new left parties can simply re-conquer the ‘space’ left by moldering traditional social democratic parties in their dissolution is suspect. Equally a strategy for ‘scooping up’ traditional social democratic / communist party votes, where the goal is a majority or at least an effective minority in Parliament, makes little sense.
To get to the heart of the matter it is necessary to understand that most Western European parliaments have deeper roots in society that in Britain. Many of those parliaments came out of the successful defeat of Hitler and German occupation. In Spain and Greece’s case, popular sentiment supporting parliaments devolves from the overthrow of fascist and military regimes as late as the 1970s. And although there was a hiatus in the British Parliament’s history between 1945 and 1948, it entirely missed the democratic reforms, including proportional representation systems of voting, that the new European parliaments popularly embraced. Nevertheless, some mass hostility to various degrees, for the political class, is universal across the whole of Western Europe including Britain. Substantially, what this condition means is that any new political formation (whether inside or outside formal social democratic structures; whether in alliance, coalition or face to face battle with social democratic parties, even whether social democracy has already been replaced in parliament) has to challenge the role of parliament itself.
In whose name should this challenge be made?
6.
Parliament and all its members have to be re-formed, root and branch. The Corbyn led Labour Party needs to spend as little time as possible on those MPs who are organising against the new party (which is re-forming itself in line with its own future objectives.) The essence of such a reformation is an utter change in its relationship with the people and particularly working class people who need it. Focusing this new approach to Parliament and the people just on one or two questions by way of example, how should the new Labour Party act?
It should act as though it were responsible to mass of ordinary people who are going to live in a country with nuclear weapons, with all that implies, or not. First the mass membership of the party itself needs to organise their debate and their decision, in preparation to lead society. This should take as long as it takes. Second a mass discussion should be opened, from social media to town halls, where all the implications of the decision are available, but where those national media that are privately owned are obliged to provide equal weighting to the arguments if they wish to participate. Then the argument should be put to a referendum. Perhaps the Labour Party’s position would be defeated. It would nevertheless retain its view and continue to campaign. The significant point is that this potential leadership in Parliament would be responsible to, and subordinate to, the people. All key questions on wealth and power and the nation’s future - secure funding for the NHS, military engagement, minimum wages and wealth taxes - could face a similar process.
There is no sign that the Scots were ‘put off’ from (mostly) democratic debate in nearly 18 months of fierce campaigning. Work was still done. Children went to school. Society managed to continue. And the substance of the matter was not avoided by a Parliament, and dealt with by an unelected elite but instead decided by Scottish people.
In this context what do MPs, elected by fair votes, become? They are not delegates that take a position already decided into a conference. They are not, as they are now called, representatives, who ‘re-present’ their own position (usually on something of second rate significance) because the people who voted for them are too busy to think. They are to be, to borrow a phrase, tribunes of the people. Their business is to lead the debate of the people on the critical matters in their lives, and to take responsibility and be accountable for that. In other words Parliament becomes the sounding board and the direct instrument of the people ‘to get things done.’
The ‘common sense’ lies can be confronted. How can ‘equality of opportunity’ mean anything but its opposite when a select group inherit vast wealth as infants, barely born? How is a policy for peace reconciled with active warmongering in several of the poorest countries across the world? These ‘newspeak’ phrases are part the cultural web of hypocrisy that can be torn away – if the leaders in Parliament walk alongside the people who have elected them in a great rising for truth and for institutional change.
The key to this change in the relationship between a Parliament, led by Labour and its allies and the people it serves, is that leaders must mobilise the people to win their own victories. In the case of the battle with austerity, enquiries and commissions of those who have been most damaged should be established around the country. Those who have suffered most should be encouraged to speak out against their conditions. Together with their new political formations, they would collectively debate and resolve those national actions that Parliament needs to take to end their misery and to build genuine equality. Informed referendums; local organisations acting not just to work out local solutions but to carry them out; great conferences, carnivals, social movements that confront the damage in the lives of the majority, all these forms and formats have their place in a real and developing democracy.
Over the next weeks and months there will be a serious and significant battle to democratise the Labour Party itself, now the biggest political party in Western Europe. But this will mean very little if Labour does not put a bold plan to the people to democratise Parliament, which then offers a lead on the key political and economic issues of our time. And that will only succeed if Parliament in turn is transformed to be able to promote the rising into democratic life of the great majority of society.