Notwithstanding these successes on important individual questions and the resulting consolidation of a more advanced Labour Party leftwing than at any time in recent decades, the overall result of the conference was that Kinnock was able to assert his dominance over the basic line of march of the Labour Party into the next general election and reduce this fighting left to a small minority on questions of overall direction of the Party.
Kinnock and the fighting left are the forces whose struggle will dominate the life of the Labour Party between now and the general election. They represent the basic choices facing the labour movement.
Kinnock won the plaudits of the Tory press in Bournemouth by signalling that his programme is not to reverse Thatcherism. Instead he aims to take Thatcher's chief planks as the starting point for any Labour government.
Hence the essential content of the economy debate was abandoning the objective of restoring full employment and the promise to renationalise the industries privatised by the Tories. On trade union law the aim is to retain the key elements of Thatcher's anti-union legislation. (2) In addition Kinnock wants to be able to guarantee a deal with the unions to restrict pay increases.
its fundamentals this programme is the same as that of the Liberal-SDP Alliance, where they differ is that the Alliance, unlike Kinnock, wishes also to break the links between the unions and the Labour Party, and, ultimately, to
Liverpool City Council, which is led by supporters of the Militant tendency (see Note Three below) is the only council in the country which is still refusing to comply with the government's attempts to restrict the spending powers of local authorities through delimiting the amount they are allowed to raise through local taxation, that is rates. Neil Kinnock has publicly denounced the stand taken by Liverpool in particular in a speech delivered at Labour Party Conference which received wide acclaim from the bourgeois media.
2. In September, 1984 a whole series of anti-trade union measures went through parliament. These included obligatory voting by secret ballot for industrial action and an obligatory ballot on unions affiliation to the Labour Party.
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Labour Party
drive through a political split in the TUC [Trades Union Congress ] itself.
But Kinnock's project is not viable unless two conditions are fulfilled. The first is to achieve a deal with the key sections of the trade union bureaucracy on pay policy and trade union law. Kinnock has made some progress on this front but Ron Todd's [the leader of the largest union the Transport and General Workers - TGWU] impromptu defence of the NUM, in which he specifically ruled out pay restraint, showed just how far Kinnock has to
Kinnock's progress is the fact that Ron Todd, Jimmy Knapp [of the National Union Rodney Bickerstaffe [of the National Union of Public Employees - NUPE]
Neil Kinnock and Margaret Thatcher on Remembrance Day (DR) any alternative. They accept that Labour can only have a chance of winning the general election if it is united under the leadership
The problem accept this argument is that unity under Kinnock's leadership inexorably necessitates unity around his programme and policies. This is why the new realist left' - the Labour Co-ordinating Committee - LCC, Tribune formerly a newspaper of left MPs inside the Party] Blunkett, [Labour leader of Sheffield City the Greater London Council] and so not be able to maintain the position they argued at conference: support Kinnock and Liverpool. Stab in the back from the Tribune left
In a cynical editorial Tribune advocates voting with today's 'emotional light', following the strike, and betraying that vote
Labour forms a government. Thus has Kinnock succeeded in winning over a section of the left. aligned' or 'Kinnock left' is right. It is not a product of Kinnock's arguments. It reflects the impact of the miners' strike on Party, and the failure of a section of the left to organise support for that strike, followed by the collapse of the majority of the opposition to the Tories' rate-capping laws.
This Kinnock left, in particular around Tribune and the LCC, is the spearhead of his efforts to build up a base of support in the mine and coopt the campaigns around local government, CND, and women's representation within the party. This 6 means a fight not only against Militant supporters (3) but also against the Campaign Group of MPs, the Scargill leadership of the NUM and their supporters.
This relates to the second fundaof Kinnock's project: to win the Labour Party to turn its back on the Thatcher's policies have provoked in British society. On this there can be no compromise.
No section of the British ruling prepared to countenance a did in the miners strike, or which stands for city councils defying the law in their confrontagovernment, or which defends Black youth involved in the greatest urban revolts in the twentieth century in Britain. That is why Kinnock and his spokespeople have been so vicious in their denunciof the miners' picket lines, of Liverpool and of the youth Handsworth, Brixton and Tottenham [flashpoints of the recent riots].
But to win the Labour Party as a whole to turn its back struggles Kinnock has to isolate and defeat the fighting class struggle left - which has acted as the voice of these struggles within the organised labour city council, the Black sections and the only section of the Parliamentary Labour Party [PLP] supported them, Campaign Group of MPs.
Kinnock will find it difficult to defeat this new Labour left minority because they that embody a fundamentally ferent line of advance for the labour movement than Kinnock against the government. As the Campaign Group's response to Kinnock explained: We believe that the next general election will be won by uniting rather than condemning those in struggle against the current Tory government.
These forces represent something quite remarkable in the British labour movement. At the 1984 Labour Party conference, the NUM came forward in defence not only of its own members but in support of Black sections, in defence of gay and lesbian rights, and in support of women's demands for greater representation. At this year's conference the Black section speakers took the floor in defence of the NUM, in support of the Women's Action Committee, which is campaigning for greater representation of women in the structures of the Party, as well as in support of Black sections. The Campaign Group laid the ground for the conference through an enormous number of meetings in support of the NUM (over 1,000), the publication of Private Members Bills on questions such as miners' amnesty, Ireland and racial attacks, and through giving 100 per cent support to local councils like Liverpool and Lambeth actually fighting the Tories.
In conference itself the Campaign Group was the only section of the PLP to stand up to Kinnock and Hattersley's attacks on those in struggle. Individuals like Dennis Skinner and Tony Benn went out of their way to spell out the kind of alliances for socialism that the miners' strike
3. "Militant' defines itself as a Marxist paper for Labour and its supporters are dominant in the youth section of the Labour Party the Labour Party Young Socialists. At the 1983 conference of the Labour Party five members of the Militant editorial board were expelled from the party. "Militant' supporters have been subjected to a continued witchhunt which also threatens the whole of the left of the Party. International Viewpoint 28 October 1985
demonstrated are possible and necessary.
Kinnock is leading the Labour
Party to disaster by reviving incomes