Don't Let New Labour Carve Up the Party

John McDonnell MP, Chair of Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MP's and Chair of the Labour Representation Committee writing for Voice of the Unions.

The behaviour of the Labour leadership elite in recent weeks has looked more like an episode of 'the Sopranos' than the workings of a Labour Government in office. Instead of concentrating on the preparations of the policy programme for the next election and mobilising the party for the looming election campaign, the small New Labour elite grouping which now dominates the party is spending its time plotting and faction fighting in an attempt to carve up the succession to Blair.

The discussion within New Labour is not about how best to serve the interests of the party or about listening to the concerns of our members and supporters but about which candidate to back in the scrabble for position in the post Blair regime. Blair like monarchs and dictators before him wants to ensure that he chooses his successor and therefore has brought forward Milburn as his protégé. Milburn's 'time with his family' was most probably part of the agreed strategy. It is typical of New Labour arrogance that it believes that it can manipulate the party members and affiliated unions to back any candidate of its choosing, no matter how atrocious his track record.

The infighting in the New Labour elite is a distraction from the real effect of its policies. When the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced in July that 100,000 public service jobs were to be cut and there was barely a murmur within the Parliamentary Labour Party. No mounting calls of condemnation from the majority of Labour MPs.

Without any real consultation with the PCS, Government Ministers calmly cast tens of thousands of mainly poorly paid public servants into unemployment. Many of the staff who currently manage the dole queue will now be forced onto the dole queue. And yet there was barely a question raised even by many MPs with trade union backgrounds.

The heaviest burden of job cuts will fall on the Department of Work and Pensions to be administered by former trade union general secretary and newly appointed cabinet member, Alan Johnson.

The people who depend on the DWP's services will therefore be the hardest hit. This includes the poor, the unemployed, pensioners, people with disabilities and anyone dependent on benefits. Welfare rights advice and assistance in claiming entitlements will be harder to obtain. Access to personal support and to appeals procedures will be made worse.

Put bluntly the job cuts will mean hardship and poverty for many civil servants who lose their jobs but the loss of their skills and services will extend this hardship and poverty across the large number and wide range of their clients who need their assistance to survive.

Does this seem to bother the consciences of New Labour policy-makers. Of course not. They do not live in the same world as the job centre staff, the pensioners or the unemployed claimant. They no longer live in the same world as most members of the Labour and trade union movement.

There are now two worlds of Labour. There is the real world inhabited by most Labour Party members in which their main concerns are the security of their jobs, the quality of the local health service, the standards of their local schools, the safety of their streets and the state of their local environment.

Yet there is also another world of the New Labour elite. A world inhabited by a party leader who has no comprehension of the distaste of ordinary Labour Party members feel at the sight of seeing a Labour Party leader cavorting on holiday with a multi millionaire Italian fascist. A world in which the interests of the party are overridden by the faction fighting between the holders of the two main offices of state and their respective gangs of sycophantic supporters. And a world in which the central concern of the leader of the party is not the long term future of the Labour party but short term manoeuvrings to stitch up the leadership succession.

Whilst the members of the New Labour elite squabble between themselves over the spoils of office, the supporters who ensured the election of Labour after the long night of successive Tory governments are being alienated from the party. There is an increasing sense of disgust at how far New Labour has demeaned the traditions and undermined the principles and values upon which the party was founded.

Individual members have left the party in droves, bringing overall party membership down to its lowest level in the party's history. Trade unions, which founded and maintained the party for nearly a century, are no longer even affiliated. Large sections of traditional Labour supporters, especially amongst the ethnic minority community, have been mobilised by the war in Iraq not only to vote against Labour but also to actively campaign against the party.

Labour retains office not by the positive support of a convinced electorate but by the failure of any electoral alternative to emerge. The New Labour government drives through policies which bear no relation to the principles of equality, justice and tolerance which formed the basis for the creation of the party. Instead New Labour's policy programme is producing a society more unequal, with increased economic insecurity and exploitation, more divided and at greater risk of violent attack than at any time in its peacetime history.

Even if Labour wins the next election its legacy will be little more than a confirmation of how far Thatcherite ideology had penetrated the political agenda. In due course the political disillusionment which it has engendered is likely to cause a sudden and overwhelming collapse in support. Having achieved so little in office to inspire, New Labour could lead the party to the loss of office for a generation.

To head off this danger the foundation of the Labour Representation Committee has brought together all those socialists within the Labour Party to develop the policies, the rank and file organisation and the momentum to take back the Labour Party for its members and to its founding ideals. Since July hundreds of party members have joined the LRC and work has now commenced on organising policy seminars, workshops, research groups, open meetings and regional conferences around the country. Linked to the revival in the left in the trade unions, the Left within the Labour Party is at last on the move once again. This is the time for all socialists within the party and trade union movement to back the LRC's campaign in stating firmly that the Labour Party is the party of its members not a leadership elite.

Voice of the Unions website