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DEFEAT FROM THE
JAWS OF LICTORY
Taside s
Defeat from the Jaws of
Victory: Inside Kinnock's
Labour Party By Richard Heffernan anc
Mike Marqusee Published by Verso, 1992,
£11-95 Reviewed by Geoff Jones
FOUR-TIMES DEFEATED
A parliamentary leadership
trying to out-Tory the Tories; councils scared to raise a whisper of opposition to the destruction of jobs and services; a shrinking membership with an average age nearing • fifty; no national youth organisation, no womens' organisation, no party newspaper and no internal debate: this is the Labour Party today. How did it happen? Heffernan and Marqusee attempt an answer.
Their book falls into three roughly equal sections. The first, The fall and rise of the Labour right, outlines developments between the Tory victory of 1979 and the election of 1987.
The second, Kinnock in command, covers the way in which the party leadership, with the assistance of the Labour Co-ordinating Committee' (LCC), took over the party apparatus and set about 'reorganising, to ensure control from the top of all party activity. The third part discusses in more detail the party's aboutface on unilateralism and the purges of left-wingers which formed a prelude to the debacle of 1992.
As someone
invol
30 Reviews
Book Reviews
Labour Party at all levels during this period, I found the book generally factual and fair. One partial exception is the coverage of the struggles in the National Organisation of Labour Students (NOLS) and the Labour Party Young Socialists (LPYS) in the early 1980s. Heffernan and Marqusee do not emphasise strongly enough the 'police state' atmosphere which existed in NOLS, although they describe well the way in which these budding bureaucrats carried over into the trade unions and Labour Party the manipulative skills which they had developed in student politics.
Developments are almost always seen merely from a London perspective. Battles 'on the ground' outside London are ignored. The 1984-85 miners' strike receives less coverage than convulsions in Lambeth council chamber; the battles in Liverpool are hardly mentioned and, amazingly, for what was the greatest movement of mass revolt since the general strike, 'poll tax does not even figure in the index.
One is left with a feeling of inadequacy. To the question, 'why did Labour lose in 1992?, one receives an answer compounded of the intellectual and psychological inadequacies of Neil Kin-
SUPPOR RETRUCTURING
yoUR
EMPOYEES
REDUNDANCES
NO!
Inside Kinnock's Labour Party.
On the other hand they quote, apparently without irony, that these gangsters tried to instil some democracy in the LPYS" (p172) One thing was certain about the LPYS. All regional and national bodies were run absolutely consitutionally and democratically. If they had not been, the party leadership, who had found the LPYS a thorn in their side since the 1970s, would have been very quick to close them down.
There are other
nock, the machinations of a few dozen members of the LCC, and the weaknesses of a handful of trade union leaders. Surely these cannot be adequate reasons for the implosion of a political party of a quarter of a million members, with social and political roots going back at least a century?
Why did the left-wingers' of the 1970s and early 1980s give up so easily? Heffernan and Marqusee quote numerous examples of left-wing firebrands such as Hewitt, Short, and Ruddock be-
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coming tame right-wingers. But implication that this was their due to lust for power and the scent of patronage is inadequate. Those individuals were only the leaders of a stampede to the right up and down the country, in Town Halls and Labour Party GCs, where squatters' leaders transmutated into the fiercest employers of bailiffs, and longtime CND members gave support to 'our boys' in the Gulf. Why did the left-wingers' of the 1970s and early 1980s give up so easily?
Obviously, part of the answer lies in the objective political situation of the late 1980s and early 1990s: the defeat of the miners; the failure of Labour councils, with the exception of Liverpool, to stand up against central government; a background of an economic boom, however shaky; and the ideological assault against 'socialism' as Stalinism The Welfare State in Britain since 1945 By Rodney Lowe Published by Macmillan, 1993, £10-99 Reviewed by Mike Waddington • Aprl), April, soda seco VER THE WEEKEND of minister Peter Lilley and his team retreated to Chevening in Kent.
This private country residence is where ideas to 'shake up' the social security system were to be brainstormed'. These included whether benefits should be withdrawn if private insurance was available for the claimant and the question of universal child benefit being targeted' to those who really need it - despite the fact that it has been frozen in value for many years. Tarcollapsed.
But the answer has to go deeper. On what programme did the majority of the left fight in the 1970s and 1980s? It is hard now to remember. Those impassioned arguments on 'indicative management and pump-priming, on import controls and the 'alternative economic strategy, on local empowerment and municipal socialism, on 'creative accounting and broad-based resistance, all seem from another epoch. The reason, of course, is that each of these in turn was found empty when a fighting strategy of opposition to the capitalism of the 1980s was required. All the various left' alternatives trumpeted in the pages of New Statesand Labour man, Tribune Briefing, were shown to be wanting.
For the whole period there was only one real alternative. In the Labour Party and trade unions, only Militant consistently pushed forward the unpalatable truth that to bring down the Tories would involve confronting them on the industrial plane, legally if possible but illegally where necessary.
To confront the ideological offensive which underpinned Tory policies meant confronting capigeting usually involves means tests, which are generally used to prevent people claiming when they find out that a benefit is available. In the 1970s 50% of those entitled didn't claim supplementary benefit and 60% didn't claim FIS or even rent rebates. The Labour Party's Commission set up by on Social Justice, John Smith, is itself looking at the benefit system and apparently considering diverting child benefit into child care to 'allow' mothers to work. David Blunkett's proposals on workfare are now well known. A new 'we can't afford the welfare state' consensus between the parties is thus being created.
Rodney Lowe's book analyses the history of the welfare state. He concentrates on its heyday (up to 1975), when another 'contalism with a programme of na-l tionalisation, state planning and democratic control of trade and industry. Putting forward such a programme based on Marxist ideas might have seemed visionary in the high noon of the Tory boom. Now, with the ruins of British capitalism even apparent to the Tories, it represents the only programme on offer for the working class. No wonder that, more than any other group in the labour movement, Militant supporters have been the subject of hatred and loathing by the right-wing, and, it must be added, dislike by many remaining leftwingers.
History is a guide for the future. Defeat from the Jaws of Victory provides a good picture of the who are now in control types of the Labour Party and a useful record of their background. But it provides only a limited perspective for the future development of the Labour Party. The present leadership will continue the destruction of the party rather than give up power. A process of regeneration can only begin from a return to the socialist values and perspective that inspired the founders of the labour movement.
sensus' existed in favour of welfare reforms: on Labour's part as apparent steps to equality (the Labour leader Gaitskell said in 1956, "If you don't feel strongly about equality, then I think it is very hard to be a genuine socialist, and if we were to abandon this, then I think there would be very little to distinguish us from the Tories"), and on the Tory side, the minimum necessary measures to maintain social stability.
This consensus was always underpinned by economic growth, so when growth slowed, counter reforms were brought in. In 1951, for example, Labour brought in charges for glasses and false teeth. Just after the 1951 general election the new Tory government proposed raising the school entry age and lowering the leaving Reviews • 31
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Why not guarantee your copy of the MIR. Mailed direct to your Gaitskell age, to save money.
However, there can be no doubt at all that the welfare state benefited millions of working class the operpeople by suspending ation of the unfettered market, particularly in areas such as health, housing, education and jobs. In fact the Beveridge report (produced during world war two) specifically said, "Experience has shown... that under modern conditions this process of self recovery (of the economy - MW), if effective at all, is likely to be extremely prolonged and to be accompanied by widespread distress, particularly in a complex society like our own".
There is a slightly daft section to this book where there is a thankfully brief discussion about Marxism' and whether the revolution' was helped or hindered by the welfare state, tending towards the caricature of the for everyone the better worse for the Marxists, a nonsense pedalled by academics or right wing Labour politicians to damage the Marxists.
The welfare state, however, did not bring about fundamental change. The bottom 50% of people had 23.7% of income in 1949 and this increased to 24.3% in 1975-76. I discovered from the book something known as the "Gini Coefficient', which denotes greater equality as it declines towards zero, which only fell from 41.1 to 36.6 over the same period.
More importantly, the number of people in poverty increased on the minimum measurements from 600,000 in 1953 i to at least two million by 1964. Brian Abel-Smith and Peter 32 • Reviews Townsend produced a report in 1965 that showed that 40% of the poor (nearly three million then) were the working poor and up to 1976 the rule was that if you lost your job you had to wait for a when benefit was paid it had to be no more than your last wage even where that was below the poverty line! The Child Poverty Action Group and Shelter were formed in response to this This consensus was always underpinned by economic growth.
In 1941 social security was adopted in the Atlantic Charter by the Allies as a war aim. Copies of the Beveridge Report were dropped by bombers on British troops to bolster morale. The confidence of the capitalists had also been severely battered by the depression of the 1930s. T WAS THE economic crisis of 1974 which broke the growth of the welfare state. It was the last Labour prime minister James Callaghan who abandoned full employment as a policy and further cut deeply into social spending. This was primarily aimed at saving money.
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, however, whilst wanting to save money, also wanted to shift resources to the better off. It sounds incredible but even in the 1970g the top 20% of earners used more of the free facilities in the education sector and NHS than the bottom 20% (respectively three times and two thirds as much). This was developed further by Thatcher not only with tax cuts but through mortgage relief; some £5bn a year now of which £3bn goes to people who earn more than £20,000 a year. It's worth remembering that the Council of Europe's Decency Threshold is £5-52 an hour or £11,500 a year for a 40 hour week: 46% of all employees earn less than that. The Low Pay Unit recently took up the case of a group who earned 67 pence This book is a very good description of what happened. In particular it graphically demonstrates the break of 1975 and the development of the 'new right'. The poll tax gets a brief mention (twenty words actually) which Lowe says contributed to Thatcher's fall. He follows this up with the comment "the public appeared uninterested" over unemployment, failing to see that it is the inadequacies of the official opposition' to the new right that fails to address the real concerns of people. Or as Harry S Truman said to his party, if you put up a own republican to defeat a republican lean ve surprised if the repub. lican wins.
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