Reluctantly
Facing a Bleak Future
By Michael
Faulkner October 11, 2009
There are
dates in post-war British electoral history that are clearly landmarks. In the past sixty-four years there have
been three such landmark elections – those of 1945, 1979 and 1997. On
each occasion a change of government marked a sea-change in British politics.
The next significant date will be 2010.
The July
1945 election, just a few months after the end of the war, brought the Labour
Party to office with, for the first time, a big overall majority. Based on a
radical social-democratic programme of domestic reform, the Attlee government
reflected the widespread desire in Britain for an end to the
Conservative-dominated politics and economic policies of the interwar years,
which had led to the Depression, mass unemployment, and ultimately to war. Although the Labour government only survived until 1951, the reforms it
introduced, including the creation of the National Health Service and nationalisation
of the “commanding height” of the economy – the mines, the steel
industry, the railways and public transport – created the “mixed economy”
that, despite alternating Tory and Labour governments, remained in place for more than
thirty years.
1979 was
another such occasion. There has been much mythologizing about the election
victory of Margaret Thatcher. Her admirers – including New Labour’s
Blairites – claim that there was overwhelming public hostility to Callaghan’s
Labour government and the supposed excessive power of the trade unions. It is
claimed that public opinion had shifted decisively to the right and favoured
the dismantling of the whole social-democratic project in favour of
privatisation and deregulation. The evidence does not support this claim. Had
Callaghan called the election in October 1978 is quite likely Labour would have
won. In May 1979 the Thatcher government was elected with a majority of 43
seats on the basis of 43% of the vote. This was hardly a landslide. In 1945 Labour had a majority of 146 seats
with 49.71% of the vote. Two years after her election unemployment had doubled
to over 2.5 million. In December 1981 her job approval rating had fallen to
25%, lower than that recorded for any previous prime minister. There was no
popular mandate for the neo-liberal policies she introduced. Her recovery was
largely dependent on the media-fanned mood of xenophobic nationalism in the
build-up to the Falklands war. This was an important factor in the Tory
election victory of 1983, which also marked the nadir of Labour fortunes. Nevertheless,
Thatcher’s election in 1979 was a significant turning point. It marked the end
of the post-war consensus between the parties based on Keynesian
interventionism. Her conviction that there was “no alternative” to free-market
neo-liberalism drove her government through the 1980s and contributed to the
disarray and schism that was to seriously damage the Labour Party.
Another
myth has it that Labour remained unelectable until Blair, Brown and Mandelson
hi-jacked the party and turned it into New Labour in the mid-nineties. In terms
of seats (though not of votes) the 1992 election was narrowly lost by Labour
under the leadership of Neil Kinnock. In terms of the left-social democratic
tradition that had always existed in the party, Kinnock was no left-winger. But
he was firmly committed to social democracy and fought the election on a policy
of redistributive taxation and opposition to further privatisation. The Tories
were re-elected at the beginning of a recession and for the next five years
under the leadership of John Major, they lurched from one crisis to the next. The
government never recovered from the humiliation of “Black Wednesday” (September
16th 1992) when sterling had to be withdrawn from the European
Exchange Rate Mechanism. After Kinnock’s resignation, the Labour Party remained
committed to a distinctive, though far from left, social democratic agenda
under the leadership of John Smith. Labour soon gained a commanding poll lead
of 20% and more over the Tories. There is little doubt that had Smith lived to
take the party into the 1997 election, he would have won. It was after his
death and the election of Blair to the leadership that the party was
high-jacked for the New Labour project. Although it is fruitless to speculate about what a government led by
Smith might have achieved, it is highly unlikely that it would have gone the
way Blair’s government went. The point is that a Labour election victory in
1997 did not depend on the party jettisoning its social democratic heritage and
reinventing itself as “New Labour.”
The 1997
election is the third landmark. It marks the most profound ideological change
in the Labour Party – its transformation from a party of
social-democracy, committed to the management of capitalism along Keynesian
lines, with all the restraints on the operation of the free market that
entails, into a an electoral
vehicle in the service of neo-liberalism. The party was high-jacked in the
mid-nineties by a group of people who, whatever may have been their subjective
motives, subordinated everything to the need to acquire power. The Blairites
played upon the understandable frustrations of the party’s rank-and-file and
affiliated trade unions, faced with the unbroken string of Tory electoral
successes. The foot-soldiers would
be kept on side with a cluster of popular initiatives. Thus such schemes as
Sure Start, the Minimum Wage, Scottish and Welsh devolution, pledges to cut
hospital waiting lists and increase funding for education and the NHS were
promised. All were of real value and addressed issues that cried out for
action. But such initiatives did not express the real purposes of New Labour.
For the
first time ever in 1997 Rupert Murdoch threw his weight behind a Labour leader,
favouring the election of a Labour government. In 1992 Britain’s most brazen
tabloid, The Sun, had, as usual backed the Tories in the election and when they
won declared in a banner headline “It’s The Sun Wot Won It”. A slight exaggeration perhaps, but more
interesting is the fact that Blair was desperate to gain the support of
Murdoch. For such people, nothing comes for nothing and he recognised in Blair
a kindred spirit – someone who would act unerringly in the interests of
corporate power. He was not to be disappointed.
In 1997
Labour was re-elected with its biggest ever parliamentary majority. Anyone who
still harboured illusions about New Labour should soon have been disabused of
them when, shortly after the election, the government made plain that it had no
intention of re-nationalising the railway network that had been broken up by
Major’s Tory government in the most unpopular, ideologically driven
privatisation of all. The Tories were so unpopular that in 1997 they recorded
their worst election result since 1906. On the basis of 31% of the poll they
returned only 165 MPs, as opposed to Labour’s 418 with 43%. Their recovery was
not to begin for years, and since 2007, their opinion poll lead has had more to
do with the unpopularity of the government than with any enthusiasm for the
Tories. Disillusionment with New Labour has increased steadily since 1997, as is
clear from the subsequent election results. In 1997 71% of the eligible
electorate voted. In 2001 this had fallen to 59% and Labour’s share of the poll
dropped to 41%. In 2005, on a 61% turn-out Labour was re-elected with only 35%
of the vote, only 3% more than the Tories’ miserable 32%. The decline in New
Labour’s fortunes pre-dated Blair’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, but that was a
decisive factor in the dramatic decline in support thereafter.
The Labour
Party conference concluded last week. It is almost universally assumed that the
government will be heavily defeated in next year’s general election, and the
conference did little to suggest that the party’s fortunes have changed. The only
question seems to be whether the forthcoming electoral defeat will wipe the
party out or be somewhat less catastrophic. Some have detected a glimmer of
hope that the recession may have rekindled the flame of social democracy and
that at last Brown will be able to rally public support for a progressive
agenda that will take the fight to the Tories. This is almost certainly wishful
thinking, but even if such an attempt should be made, it is almost certainly
too late.
There is
little enthusiasm for the Tories. In the present circumstances widespread
public anxiety about the future, and anger towards the bankers might suggest a
swing towards the Liberal Democrats – the only one of the three main
national parties with anything like a credible record of opposition to the Iraq
war and response to the financial crisis. But even if they do better than their
opinion poll ratings suggest, they are unlikely to exceed 25%. Given the
grossly unfair British electoral system and the prospect of a melt-down for the
Labour Party, the Lib Dems will not return enough MPs to hold the balance of
power.
Of course,
the other question that needs addressing is why, in the midst of the most
serious crisis for capitalism since 1929, there is no sign of a serious left
alternative to the dominant parliamentary parties. That will be discussed in a
forthcoming Letter from the UK. 