New stage in Britain
After the TUC and Labour Party conferences action to stop the Tories selling off their tical attention of the vast anti-missiles
Brian HERON
The Labour Party and Trades Union Congress Conferences clarified the British political situation, summarising the state of the labour and trade union movement following the Malvinas war. The notable feature of both of these congresses was the degree to which they reflected the same fundamental trends inside the labour movement. This in itself is a dramatic confirmation of the increasing extent to which the struggle in the unions is producing deep and immediate repercussions inside the Labour Party and
Although some sections of the British left are uncomfortable in the face of these developments, the fundamental trend in working class politics in Britain is the further deepening of the interdependence of the struggle in the unions, the mass campaigns and the political focus provided for these struggles by the divisions in the Labour Party.
British politics, for all classes, is dominated by the issue of government. For the ruling class, the problem is how to align what will become a deeply unpopular Tory Party and the new SDP/Liberal Alliance parties to prevent the disaster that would be represented by an unstable Labour government coming into office under mass pressure. On the other hand, the publie sector and health workers, who are now leading the strike battle against the Tories, are the same workers whose 'Winter of Discontent' in 1979 helped to bring about the collapse of the previous Callaghan-led Labour government. Today those same workers seek a Labour government of a different type. They are looking for every way possible to win a Labour government that would be a total break from a government of the WilsonCallaghan type. The relatively short-term prospect of the most important election since the war means that such concerns on the part of both classes will come into sharper and sharper focus in the next months.
In this framework we are seeing a tremendous eruption of working class struggles, which are breaking up the social peace that the Malvinas war was partly designed to create. The days of action around the health strike (which involved solidarity-strike action with four million workers) are to continue. Post Office Engineers have already decided on strike profitable nationalised industry. Water 10 workers are preparing a national strike.
Steel workers are on a similar course. And now the miners at their conference have decided on a pit-head ballot for strike action in defence of jobs and for a 30% wage increase. These moves on the whole have been forced on a reluctant and fearful trade union bureaucracy, who are being offered no concessions from Thatcher that could help to guarantee their own stability when they find themselves under siege from their own ranks.
The bureaucracies' desire to put a shot across the bow of the Thatcher government has given focus to a furious wave of anger against the Tories. Despite the truly massive unemployment, the serious setbacks and the defensive struggle of the last three years, the basic trade union strength of the working class remains intact. Each national focus that emerges underlines the capacity and will to fight of the mass of workers in the trade unions.
Such conditions are the base from which very important policy advances were registered at the TUC and the Labour Party Conferences. These included a resolution against incomes policy passed at the TUC, and the emphasis placed by many speakers on the need to take forward the wave of trade union solidarity actions with the health workers (which completely transgresses the new trade union laws enacted by the Tories.) The Congress specifically stated their intent to break these laws.
At Labour Party Conference, the battle for unilateral disarmament received a tremendous victory with a two thirds majority of votes registered for the policy - which traditionally guarantees Manifesto status for this policy. Additionally resolutions were passed in solidarity with the struggle of the Palestinians and a big programme nationalisation was confirmed.
In part, the victory over unilateralism and more specifically the resolution on the PLO was the product of the emergence of new forces that first surfaced in opposition to the Malvinas war and which have begun to construct an anti-imperialist amongst the youth active in the mass movement against the missiles. The decisions of Labour's Conference not only give a tremendous boost to these forces in the British labour movement - they further serve to direct the polimovement to the problem of winning a
Labour government that will implement these policies.
The rise in the fightback against the Tories is one side of the current stage of working class politics in Britain. The other is a big administrative and political shift to the right within the labour bureaucracy as a whole. The bureaucracies' response to the new stage of struggle is the fight to 're-stabilise' the Labour Party. The message which they wish to issue to their own ruling class is that the Labour Party is on the way to becoming a stable and valuable instrument through which the ruling class will be able to express its interests. Along side this political fight, which was opened with a vengeance at the TUC and LP Conferences, the bureaucracy hopes to persuade the ruling class to begin again to open the door to negotiating and balancing role in the polarising struggle between the classes.
The centrepiece of the bureaucracies' offensive is the witch-hunt. Labour Party Conference set up a register of approved and non approved groups which work in the Party. Vast numbers of union block votes were cast in favour by trade union General Secretaries despite union conference after union conference voting against any witch-hunt. The immediate target of the witch-hunt is the Militant tendency and its constituency-LabourParty-adopted parliamentary candidates. But the witch-hunt's longer term purpose is nothing less than the break-up of the power of the movement behind Tony Benn and the radical policies with which this mass current is associated and defends. It is this current that is 'destabilising' the Labour Party from the standpoint of the bourgeoisie.
The right wing offensive took other forms. Despite the vote against incomes policy at the TUC, the TUC and Labour Party Conferences agreed a joint document on economic policy which, under the euphemistic title of the 'national economic assessment includes incomes policy. The document was passed virtually unanimously at Labour Party Conference. Secondly the TUC General Council has shifted to the right around a technical manoeuver increasing the representation of smaller unions. The National Executive Committee of the Labour Party elections were worse. Benn supporters on the NEC have been whittled back - especially in the women's section - where the bureaucracy was determined to block the radical impact of Labour Women's Conference
on Labour Party policy as a whole. But this has not benefited the 'centre' of the Party and Foot, and Party leader. On the contrary, the right wing leader Healey now has an NEC majority. This has important consequences.
There is now a majority on Labour's extra-parliamentary leadership (as well as amongst members of parliament) who are opposed to unilateral nuclear disarmament and other major policy gains won by the left at Labour's conference over recent years. These gains for the right were sufficient for Labour right wing leader Roy Hattersley, who appeared on television immediately following the historic decision for unilateral disarmament, to confidently announce that the decision would never be applied by a Labour government.
The deep contradiction in the labour movement, which has unfolded around the TUC and Labour Party Conferences, between the evolution of its leadership and the big upturn in struggle against the government, has had immediate and dramatic effects. The strain of trying to drive to the right and at the same time deal with the growing force of the gathering mass movement against the Tories, produced the most anarchic and disorganised Labour Party Conference for years. Albert Spanswick, right wing leader of a section of the health workers demanded all out support from the Labour Party virtually up to a general strike. All day, following Hattersley's T.V. speech against unilateralism, delegate after delegate demanded assurances on the implementation of the policy.
In a well received speech, unemployed steel worker Ray Hill launched a vitriolic attack on sell-out steel union leader Bill Sirs. Such an effective deflation of Sirs' demagogic pretences of defending steel workers' jobs, required the chair to recall Sirs to defend himself. When rail leader Weighell was discovered using his union votes for a right wing candidate on the NEC against his mandate, he was denounced in every corner of the Conference and, in an attempted manoeuvre to re-establish his base, has subsequently resigned his post as National Secretary of Britain's largest rail union.
If one person could be said to have summed up these contradictory pressures it was Tony Benn. After the deputy leadership campaign of 1981 which brought Benn a few fractions of a percentage point from the deputy leadership of the Party, Benn has insisted that he will not open the fight against the Foot leadership unless certain conditions applied. These included the opening of a witchhunt, or the attack on established Conference policy by the leadership of the Party. Both of these conditions now apply with a vengeance. Yet in the face of the mounting frustration of his base within the labour movement, Benn has adopted the policy of reaching out to embrace the Foot leadership.
At one of the biggest meetings on the fringes of Labour Party Conference following the defeat on the register and the vic-
Benn said: 'we stand for the same Party membership, the same policies and the same leadership.' Terrified of the right's campaign to blame the left in the Party for Labour's disastrous showing in the opinion polls (the latest shows Labour trailing the Tories by ten points), Benn wants to break his isolation by building further links to the labour bureaucracy. In this process he is lead to those prepared to fight the Foot leadership now. But the pressure building up for such a lead was graphically shown by the annoucement of a new left wing Parliamentary group which broke from the old "Tribune' group, of which Foot is still a member. Benn supports the break-away. But what will it do? Several of the MPs involved are for the calling of a national conference of the trade union, Party and parliamentary left. But such a course is completely out of the question in Benn's current perspective. 'Why should we', he asks, 'minoritise ourselves?'
The witch-hunt now in progress in the Labour Party is beginning to bring together all of these trends. Every possibility of winning a leadership and policies in the Labour Party that will begin to reflect the big struggles underway against the government is threatened. In that sense, the witch-hunt strikes a blow directly at the mass movement. The right wing in the Party intend to start with the leaders of the Militant tendency. They will continue with the eviction of the Bennites from all of the key policy committees in the leadership of the Labour Party. Protracted war will break out in many constituency Parties, as right wingers demand the 'registered credentials' of left wingers. The witch-hunt is already well underway in some unions, with Weighell in particular leading an attack on socialists' activities in his union that is aimed at breaking up the leadership of the reform movement that arose in response to his spectacular sell-out of the other major rail union, ASLEF, in their recent strike.
In this respect, Tony Benn and other leading left wingers at Labour Party Conference, consistent with their approach to the Party and union leadership at this stage, gave out the line that we may basically ignore the witch-hunt. Rather they propose that the left should concentrate on the policy advances registered at the Labour Party and TUC Conferences. In reality, without fighting the witchhunt, such a line neither protects those policies nor mobilises the left for the battle it will certainly face.
The line of advance for the left in the unions and the Party today demands a frontal challenge to Foot and his allies in the trade union leadership. Naturally this is not a question of demanding immediate leadership elections in the Party. Rather the witch-hunt, led by Foot, must be fought, and socialist policies defended. This stand, together with deepening joint Labour Party and trade union action to kick out the Tories can ensure a Labour victory in the coming election. Today it is the right in the Party and the unions who are proving by their massive disruption that they are more frightened of a Labour victory with the present policies than of losing the next election.
The perspectives for the labour movement in the coming months in Britain flow in part from the upsurge of the mass movement against the Tories, and in part from the right wing offensive opened up at Labour Party and the TUC conferences. These two have to be brought directly into collision. Mass forces at the base of the unions, amongst youth and in the anti-missile campaign are more than prepared to fight. They are coming up against the rightward shift of the labour leadership, and, on the crucial question of the witch-hunt, the immobility of the left leaders. Such conditions are guaranteed to increase the differentiation and divisions in Benn's base. Such divisions are inevitable when Benn's base is already coupling the prospects of a Labour victory with their own capacity to lead mass and industrial action against the Tories.
Over the past three years, support for Labour within the working class has been whittled back to that section of the movement which associates the Labour Party, however abused by previous leaderships, as the only serious prospect of any radical solutions to the crisis which they face. One third of the working class has traditionally voted Tory in Britain. At the 1979 elections one third of trade unionists were polled as supporting the Tories Traditionally the only alternative to the Tories has been Labour. For the last two years, as the Tories drove home their attacks, sections of the workers detached their support from the government, became politically de-stabilised as the SDP/Liberal Alliance emerged as an alter native to voting , Tory; were re-centred briefly by the Tories around the chauvinism whipped up by the Malvinas war, and today remain undecided as to their political direction. Labour has been pushed back to its basic working class bastion, and, even in today's conditions, trail the Tories in the polls. It is from this point of view that a fundamentally new development within the workers movement is beginning to emerge.
The only prospect for a Labour victory and for driving forward the reform movements in the Party and the unions was for the minority of the workers movement around Benn and his counter party in the unions, Arthur Scargill, president of the National Union of Mineworkers, is to take the lead inside the working class movement as a whole. And it is precisely that which is beginning to be posed by the current upsurge of the mass move. ment and the trade unions. Whatever the manoeuvres of the labour bureaucracy, thousands of workers no longer believe that vigorous industrial struggle disrupts the prospects of a Labour victory. On the contrary, in however unformed and confused a way, the mood is gaining ground that only the bitterest fightback against the government has any chance of changing the political relation of forces within the working class itself.
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