Posts Tagged ‘hard left’

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Looking-glass Labour: what happens next

16/09/2015, 10:42:43 AM

by Rob Marchant

On Monday, a smiling photo was published of the first Cabinet meeting. A plucky attempt at “business as usual”. But business is now anything but usual, as the disarray at his first parliamentary meeting showed.

As John Slinger wrote at Uncut back in July, we are now in the realm, not of New Labour or Blue Labour, but “looking-glass Labour”. A strange, almost psychedelic parody of what chimes with the public and wins elections for Labour.

Just like with Alice, from the other side of the mirror things look as if the looking-glass side is exactly the same. But it is only when you get through to the other side of the looking-glass, that you see the parts which you could not see so easily before. The bit behind the mantelpiece. The part through the parlour door. They are different.

This is not a prediction. Things will happen at different speeds, and perhaps some will not happen at all. But, according to well-travelled historical precedent, the following is what generally happens in this party, when it develops a critical mass from the far left, as it did in the 1980s; it is essentially the manner of warring factions and coups on which the SWP runs. It is effectively what is happening now within Labour.

One. Corbyn is not a leader. The people around Corbyn now hold the power, he does not. The kitchen cabinet. They are likely to start to agitate early on, in terms of policy and running the party machine. When we talk about the leadership, we therefore mean the leader’s Office, trusted hard-left MPs inside and outside the shadow cabinet, selected members of the NEC and the main trade union leaders, particularly Unite. These people will collectively call the shots, not Corbyn.

Two. There will be an attempt to take over party machinery, as there was a more modest attempt under Miliband: the NEC and the party staff. Many of the party’s longest-serving staff are Blairites and Brownites, and may well be forced out.

Three. Policy will, at the beginning, be a disorganised free-for-all. After the new cabinet have spent some months looking like a rabble, things will settle down, as sensible voices are drowned out, side-lined or reshuffled out, to give way to reliable hard-left thinking. As to the direction of policy, the death of public-sector reform, fairy-tale economics and isolationist foreign policy is probably a good bet.

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Corbyn’s silence over child abuse in Islington is typical of how he picks and chooses his causes

31/08/2015, 09:25:29 PM

by Richard Scorer

“After that meeting, we never heard another thing. No letter, no phone call, I never, ever saw him speak about it. In fact, whenever I saw Jeremy afterwards, at Stop The War marches and events like that, I’d always go up to him and say: ‘This scandal is still going on, Jeremy.’ He’d be very polite, but he never did anything.”

These are the words of Liz Davies, a former social worker who tried to blow the whistle on the sexual abuse of children in council-run care homes in Islington in the 1980s and 1990s. Davies was talking recently to the Daily Mail about her attempts to persuade her local MP, Jeremy Corbyn, to support victims and whistleblowers -and his silence on a major public scandal.

For readers unfamiliar with events in Islington, a brief synopsis: in the 1980s and 1990s, children were abused in Islington council care homes on a shocking scale. An official report in 1995 blamed the scandal on the policies of Islington’s hard left council, which came to power in 1982, and condemned its response in damning terms. A particularly abhorrent feature was the way whistleblowers were accused of homophobia, and victims derided: the then council leader eventually had to apologise to one of the victims for dismissing his allegations as those of an “extremely disturbed person.”

It’s pretty indisputable that throughout this appalling saga, Corbyn remained virtually silent; apart from a couple of brief statements in the early 90s calling for allegations to be investigated, he said next to nothing. This, it should be remembered, was a long-running scandal in Corbyn’s own constituency, and over the same decades, Corbyn called for public inquiries into Bloody Sunday, Iraq and the death of anti-nuclear protester Hilda Murrell. Not to mention the tendering process for local bus routes.

The Daily Mail piece aside, Corbyn’s lamentable record over child abuse in Islington has attracted little comment. John Mann, the Labour MP and anti-abuse campaigner, recently published an open letter accusing Corbyn of “doing nothing” to prevent the abuse.

“Your inaction in the 1980s and 1990s says a lot – not about your personal character, which I admire, but about your politics, which I do not.”

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Labour’s in a mess because the soft left has disappeared

20/08/2015, 06:03:58 PM

by Trevor Fisher

The Labour leadership election is becoming a gift to the Tories, because of the Corbyn surge. The politics of Corbyn now dominating the agenda has revived talk of the soft left, which commentators including Luke Akehurst think is capable of intervening. Dan Hodges in The Daily Telegraph, rightly bemoaning the disastrous new electoral system, commented that “pragmods” wanted the current individualised membership plus “many elements on the soft left of Labour.” Pragmods may be right, but where the elements of the soft left are, is another matter.

As someone active in the Labour Coordinating Committee (LCC), the main soft left group in the 1980s, I can endorse what Luke Akehurst says about its grassroots effectiveness in tackling the hard left and shifting the national agenda. But the successor organisations are now dead, except for Compass which is now outside the Labour Party orbit.  Luke Akehurst wants to bring the remnants of the soft left into action, Dan Hodges believes they already are. So something needs to be said about the soft left and whether it has any role to play in the current drama.

As Akehurst has said, the soft left of the eighties had much policy agreement with the hard left. But there were at least two major differences.

Firstly, the soft left did not believe the barrier to political progress was the party establishment. Though there were sharp differences with the leadership through to 1983, the real problems to advance were seen as the Tory party and the deep roots in popular culture the Tories had and still have. From this, the second big difference was the soft left wanted to work with the leadership, the hard left to replace it.

It is sometimes said the hard left do not want power. They certainly do. In the eighties they controlled a number of local councils. But they did not want compromise. They shared with the far left the desire for purity, but unlike the far left Trotskyists’ sects, the hard left did want elected position.

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Corbyn needs to be crushed in the vote. If he’s not, we’ll be out of power for decades and deserve it

27/07/2015, 11:42:13 AM

by Ian McKenzie

This whole “should Corbyn be on the ballot paper or not” thing is now out of hand. It is really very simple. The left in the Labour party has not been crushed since the mid 1980s around the end of the last era during which they were a malign influencing force. Unless the left are crushed Labour can’t win a general election. Unless Labour wins a general election the Tories will carry on running the country doing things the left and centre left don’t like.

Contrary to popular mythology (including my own at the time), Tony Bair didn’t vanquish the left. Sure, in 1994-5, there was the months-long Clause 4 national tour, I was at its last rally at Crofton Park’s famous Rivoli Ballroom, but the left knew the game was up and faded away. It was all a bit inevitable. What we really needed then, and desperately need now, was to be locked in a room until the fight was won. Blair’s true opposition inside the Labour party wasn’t the left. It was Brown. And we all know how that turned out.

In a few weeks, about a quarter of a million members of the Labour party will receive leadership election ballot papers. Sadly, membership numbers will be swelled by rather too many Trots and Tories to whom some idiot decided to give a vote for the sum of £3, but we will all have a vote.

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Jeremy Corbyn is a homeopathic politician plying snake oil remedies

26/07/2015, 08:30:53 AM

by Ian Moss

The Labour leadership campaign has seen some pretty unedifying accusations about the commitment of members and candidates to the core purpose of Labour.

The hard left, gathering behind Jeremy Corbyn, are whipping up anger against those that have a different view of the best policy solutions to further Labour’s principles, to their pure form of socialism.

But policies such as public service reform are not important because they might be popular with voters, they are important because they help the very people that Labour is there to represent.

The policies the Corbynites are aggressively wedded to tend to be about structures – public ownership or democratic control. That is because Corbyn is a homeopathic politician in a world that is medically complex, happily doling out homespun remedies passed down from history instead of engaging with evidence and trying to find modern solutions.

A principle is ‘improve education outcomes for those from disadvantaged backgrounds” or ‘improve health outcomes whilst ensuring free healthcare at the point of access’. It is not a principle to ‘defend a certain organisational form of institutional delivery decided at a specific point in history’. Whilst the Corbyinte left may share the principles of the reformist right, he and his supporters appear to have no curiosity about what evidence exists on how those principles would best be implemented.

Corbyn stood up on television last week and said that the 50p tax rate would raise £5bn, a figure plainly picked out of the air and not close to the sceptical position on positive revenues suggested by the IFS, the recognised independent authority on this issue.

When pressed on this, his response that his source was “some research” “by “clever people”, made it clear that this is not a man with an inquisitive mind. (His ‘research’, of course, is arithmetically impossible, given the aggregate income of people earning over £150,000 in the UK, even in the unlikely event that they all paid it).

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Unite’s takeover of PCS will have big implications for Labour if Ed doesn’t make it into Number 10

30/04/2014, 07:00:32 AM

by Rob Marchant

While we all want the morning of 8 May, 2015 to be defined by a triumphant Miliband glad-handing a crowd of jubilant supporters in Downing Street, it is worth taking a moment for a cold, hard look at the opposite: the Armageddon scenario of Labour returning to opposition.

Although this may be seen as a distasteful or even a disloyal task, neither is it, if the direction of travel of poll lead continues, one that is unthinkable in an election still far too close to call. Forewarned, as they say, is forearmed.

What will surely weigh heavily in the minds of all the major players at that point are the desires of one man, who over the last couple of years has shown himself to be the party’s trickiest stakeholder. That man is Len McCluskey.

While the furore of the Falkirk selection disaster has died down and the party reform agenda has largely gone through for the long term, Unite has been quietly preparing itself for a post-election world. It seems fairly obvious that, should Labour win, the chances of a split with Unite look remote; it would be a short route to instant marginalisation. As Prime Minister, Miliband could afford to face down a little union cage-rattling, and potentially even expand his party reform agenda.

But were Labour to lose – and presuming losing were deemed a “hanging offence” for the current leader, though we should not rule out, by the way, that Miliband might not look to hang on as a unity candidate –there would be a leadership election in which, as Uncut has observed before, it would be politically impractical to preclude unions from taking part “in the old way”. That is, such that candidates would need to court them just as they did before the Collins reforms. McCluskey would, at this point, have three important levers at his disposal.

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Please, let’s remember Tony Benn and Bob Crow for who they were, not bland Diana-fied national treasures

14/03/2014, 10:32:06 AM

by Atul Hatwal

To hear tributes to Tony Benn this morning and Bob Crow earlier in the week, is to enter an alternate reality, one of saccharine reflection and anodyne dolour.

In the myriad of CGI memories that are being publicly broadcast, the defining characteristic that made Tony Benn and Bob Crow national figures is all too often omitted: threat.

There are lots of committed socialists who lead their lives, unflinching in their beliefs and whose passing is not remembered.

What made Tony Benn and Bob Crow different was that they attained positions where their proximity to power meant they threatened the status quo in their respective worlds.

Threat isn’t a bad thing. It’s the essential precursor of change and both reveled in their ability to threaten the established order. But it brings with it costs: confrontation, fear and anger.

To overlook the visceral conflict which both generated is to suck the vigour and colour out of their professional lives. Without at least acknowledging this threat, the commemorations lapse into the North Korean.

We remember Tony Benn and Bob Crow because they were men of consequence. For many that consequence was far from benign. In the case of Tony Benn in the early 1980s, it threatened the future existence of the Labour party.

Both men were comfortable with confronting opposition and crushing it under foot. They were there to fight and be fought.

To recall the passion, bitterness and division does not sully their memory. Quite the reverse. It is why they are remembered, because they mattered and people cared enough about what they were doing to get involved, either for or against them.

The Dianafication of the deaths of Tony Benn and Bob Crow is perhaps the least fitting tribute possible to the lives they led. They were not bland national treasures but powerful and threatening political figures.

Along-side the warmer words about their personal virtues, it’s worth remembering this. For people in the business of attaining and wielding power, such as Tony Benn and Bob Crow, to adapt a common refrain following Diana’s death, it’s what they would have wanted.

Atul Hatwal is editor of Uncut

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