Trevor Fisher reflects on lessons learned after his 50 years
in the Labour Party
The experience of more than half a century’s active membership of the Labour Party results in some degree of objectivity which might be mistaken for cynicism. For instance when John Eaton, the New Statesman’s Political Editor, claimed to see an inevitable way forward for Labour as the result of John McDonnell’s interest in Leninist and Trotskyist ideas my mind went back to the 1980s.
Certainly some of the similar unleavened political atmosphere can be observed at a McDonnell meeting. Speakers talk about the injustices they are experiencing, but few are able to place this in any political context except to point to an injustice arising from inequality. When the obvious question arises as to why McDonnell is in the deep blue south when other more fertile territory should be explored his response is that he is creating a movement for change. But there is also a dangerous corollary to this: how serious is he about Labour gaining power in 2020? One of the features of the 80s enterists was their dismissal of practical politics through local government and community activism. I wondered whether all they believed in was permanent opposition.
For the right of the Party and the careerists who assembled around Blair, fear of what they boasted of representing offered justification for defining the limits of what Labour hoped to achieve. For most of the Party remembrance of the morning after the 1992 election was enough to silence any doubts about the character of what Blair and Brown presented as an acceptable programme. Another factor was genuine doubts about whether the Left possessed the competence to produce a workable alternative programme to that of the Tories. When Mandelson appeared in the spotlight what he was saying might be anathema to the Left, but it still had a competence to provide Labour with credibility within his terms as a way forward.
McDonnell is right in that Labour is nothing if it is not an organised movement for change. As Harold Wilson said, “Labour is nothing if it isn’t a crusade.” Within months of Labour’s ‘97 victory, riding high in electoral popularity, the impetus for socialist change was waning. Apart from a range of social changes like the minimum wage Blair’s refusal to place housing as a priority immediately caused disillusion. Almost from the beginning Labour started to lose council seats in the south, only saved by disarray within the Tories and the advantage Brown had in being able to produce spending budgets because of a boom in the economic cycle. Brown operated on the basis that if the system he inherited from years of Thatcherite economic policies produced seeming prosperity why seek economic policies to change it? Thus parts of our manufacturing were allowed to slip away seemingly following Lawson’s dictate of expecting the service sector to take up the slack. When I pointed to the loss of council seats in the south to Blair in 1998 he registered surprise and anger, clearly convinced that from within the Westminster bubblebasic support for Labour was not ebbing away.
Many leading Parliamentary figures in the 1997 government appeared to regard their contribution towards national politics as being above that of any relationship or obligation to Labour. Foremost amongst these is Andrew Adonis, the architect of academies. One has only to read Adonis’ championing of the virtues of private schools to be aware that the traditional relationship between communities and their schools was to be destroyed. Labour in office must be held responsible for not seeing the Trojan Horse implications behind his proposals. Now the Tories are clearly following the prescription they inherited and are bent on privatising the whole education sector, removing it from any form of democratic accountability. Meanwhile Adonis works for the Tories on a national infrastructure project, seemingly providing it with a seeming impartiality through a nominal connection with Labour.
John Hutton and Alan Millburn have accepted similar sinecures offered by the Tories. Coupled with this has been the alacrity with which they have appeared in the media to criticise the new Labour leadership. One has to ask whether the opposition to Corbyn among Labour MPs has as much to do with annoyance at the inheritance of the patronage associated with the Leader of the Opposition by someone prepared to put socialist policies on the agenda and not compromise with the Tories. Corbyn’s critics have sought to portray this as being tied up with deselection when the real issue he and McDonnell talk about is seeking to produce a new politics away from expenses scandals which cripple Labour more than the Tories. Peter Skinner, for many years Labour’s sole MEP in the South of England, is about to go to prison following his conviction for appalling expenses embezzlement. It is hard to underestimate the consequence for Party morale of witnessing the revelation of this kind about someone Labour in the south worked so hard to get elected. In 1947 when Atlee discovered one of his Junior Ministers has accepted a small amount of money from the gambling industry for a favour he was sacked immediately – how things have changed.
Perhaps Atlee is the closest parallel for Corbyn’s style as opposition leader, not least in refusal to allow political discourse to descend into name calling. In the late 30s, when he took over, Atlee was subject to a barrage of criticism, not least from Mandelson’s grandfather Herbert Morrison. But as a result of the war Atlee operated in an environment where the state was omnipotent and all social movement took place by collectivist agreement. In contrast Corbyn is fighting an uphill battle against deeply reactionary Tories determined to continue Thatcher’s policies. This is exemplified by Gideon Osborne’s tears at Thatcher’s funeral and Tory moves not only to privatise the NHS but education as well as part of a desperate search for public sector pickings to plunder. In essence it is not the chimera of a budget surplus that he seeks but the reduction of the public sector to levels last seen in the 1930s.