Socialist Outlook : SO/10 - Summer 2006

The Fourth Stage of Realignment: The Three Main Political Parties

Piers Mostyn

Piers Mostyn analyses the state of the three main British political parties as they fight for the same narrow ground.

New Labour has been in a state of semiparalysis for several years now. Its troubles range from core policy crises to allegations of corruption. Tension over Gordon Brown’s leadership transition has provided the constant mood music. Media pundits explain this as the flip side of Labour success in dominating the centre ground of politics. The solution, they say, lies in the technicalities of party funding and the need for fresh blood at the top. For the ordinary socialist on the street it can be difficult to stand back from the fray and distinguish spin and tittle tattle from more profound processes. Is this surface froth or are deeper undercurrents at play? Where do shifts in leadership and programme by the Tories and Liberal Democrats fit in?

Cash for Peerages

The ‘cash for peerages’ affair is a good starting point. Secret loans were made to the Labour Party by rich individuals. Labour has an ‘operating deficit’ of £14.5 million (almost double what it was after the 2001 election) and total debts of some £27 million. With the party ten points behind in the polls, membership less than half 1997 levels and the government lurching from one political crisis to the next, serious fundraising is difficult. In the circumstances is it credible that Labour ever intended to pay off debts of such enormity? If they were to be written off or repaid on non-commercial terms would this have been declared? Can it really be a coincidence that nearly all loans were linked to seats offered in the Lords?

An explosive moment came when party treasurer Jack Dromey went public stating he had been kept in the dark. A faithful career bureaucrat, Dromey is number two in the Transport and General Workers Union, a consistent supporter of the party’s right wing and married to a government minister. He is now being ‘investigated’ by the union leadership for his disloyalty. There are undoubtedly serious divisions at the highest levels of both party and unions over Labour’s future identity, alliances and organisation.

Blair has feebly responded that people who ‘pay bills’ should be able to serve in the Lords because places were reserved for party supporters. But when property developer Sir David Garrard and stockbroker Barry Townsley ‘lent’ £3.3 million between them were these really acts of selfless ‘party supporters’, with nothing expected in return? We may never know. When interviewed by the police under caution they refused to answer any questions. The discovery of this new species of ‘socialist’ will no doubt fascinate political scientists for years.

Constitutional Reforms?

The furore emphasises one of Blair’s greatest failures. Democratic constitutional reform was an early New Labour watchword. But here we are in the 21st century, one hundred years on from Labour’s formation, the party nearly ten years in government, and still no prospect of an elected House of Lords. If reforms are triggered by this scandal, opportunities for the left could follow. Putting aside the merits or otherwise of state funding of parties, we may see a further recalibration of an already weakened relationship between Labour and the unions and proportional representation back on the agenda.

But the roots of ‘cash for peerages’ run deeper than outdated parliamentary institutions and the creaking machinery of the party system. The evolution of a neo-liberal, capitalist economic system since the 1970s, has driven growing inequality, declining social mobility and the slow dismantling of the welfare state. Labour, historically seen as guarantor of the needs of the underprivileged majority, is now chief cheerleader of this process.

Plummeting Memberships

These factors have fuelled mass alienation from mainstream politics. Forty years ago the combined membership of the Tory and Labour Parties was measured in millions, now it is hundreds of thousands and falling. Election turnouts have declined to an historic low. Despite New Labour’s much trumpeted success there has been a slump in electoral support – only 9.5 million backed Blair in 2005 compared to 13.5 million in 1997. With government policies increasingly tailor-designed for the new super-rich elite, ‘cash for peerages’ was a scandal waiting to happen.

But it is not the only difficulty facing Labour. Years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq have been marked by expensive and dramatic failure. The price for Blair’s criminal support for Israel’s assault on Lebanon and Gaza may also be high. The much vaunted ‘reform agenda’ for education and health service has seen revolt after revolt against ‘selection’ and ‘choice’ and super profits for big corporations at the expense of job-cuts and chaos. The lurch into an increasing authoritarianism on law and order and immigration has spectacularly backfired with tabloid exposure of incompetence in these areas.

Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee claims that Blair’s difficulties stem from ‘cowardice’ – a post-Iraq need for support tying him to lowest common denominator politics. That is hardly how it looked as, while Beirut burned, Blair jetted to Murdoch’s annual bash in California to be feted by the neo-cons. New Labour, having tied its flags so securely to the mast of neo-liberalism, had no choice but to go all the way in this direction. The notion that through ‘triangulation’ it is possible outflank the right whilst remaining on the left was always an illusion.

Brown, a repackaged Blair?

Against this backcloth, ongoing leadership tension, individual scandals, cash for peerages and the collapse in public confidence over core policies, may all be seen as rooted in the New Labour project’s disintegration under its own internal contradictions. Few now pretend that Brown’s call for ‘renewal’ represents much more than repackaging. He backed Blair over Iraq, is a vociferous supporter of private finance initiatives, talks up ‘security’ and backs a new generation of £25 billion worth of nuclear missiles.

Many in the party, some at high levels, despair at Labour’s loss of strategic direction and its crumbling base. The ‘big ideas’ that sustained them through the 1990s and Labour’s right turn – constitutional reform, ‘education, education, education’, ‘joined up government’, ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’, the ‘third way’, human rights, a new cross-class alliance, multilateralism and humanitarian interventionism internationally – have all bitten the dust. No amount of stony-faced serenity from Gordon Brown can cover for the absence of a new defining project of real substance.

In the circumstances, John McDonnell’s left challenge to Brown’s leadership shoe-in is a welcome breath of fresh air. Any space that he can create for a new left alternative in the labour movement would be a positive gain and deserves full backing. Unfortunately years of trashing internal party democracy, an outflow of activists and the lack of any meaningful fight back may have taken their toll. The party looks set for a period of instability – with a weakened leadership acting as lightening rod.

Cameron’s answer

The Tories have belatedly taken advantage by appearing to place themselves to the left of Labour with new leader Cameron. But leftish noises on law and order, climate change, racism, women’s rights and the like have been little more than headline grabbing stunts. A flight to the melting polar ice cap drew attention to the issue but there were no serious proposals for change. The ‘hug a hoodie’ jettisoning of John Major’s call to ‘understand’ young criminals a little less and ‘condemn a little more’, addressed none of the big questions about penal policy or the causes of crime.

Standing for election of his party leadership with no programme allowed Cameron to engage in a voter-friendly tactical repositioning, but there is no reason to expect anything but the same old rightist politics he previously entertained. Take Tory double-talk on international questions and nuclear energy. The party consistently backed Blair on Iraq and Israel’s Lebanon onslaught. But by allowing shadow foreign secretary William Hague to freelance on these issues, an appearance of distance was created. Similarly, an internal party email revealed some members as reportedly furious that leading figures, ‘give the appearance of being stridently anti-nuclear’. If only.

The Tories are simply turning New Labour’s ‘triangulation’ tactic back on itself – giving the appearance of occupying space to the left whilst charting the same course as always to the right. It will certainly take more than spin to eradicate a deeply-etched public memory of two and a half decades of brutal Tory politics. The party’s bruising at the recent Bromley by-election may suggest that the current opinion poll high has superficial roots in an anti-Blair protest.

The Liberal Democrats

For a while the Liberal Democrats under Kennedy genuinely occupied a position slightly to Blair’s left. On the war, civil liberties, taxation, environment and education they stood for marginally more progressive policies – although sometimes (as on the fight over the control orders that replaced internment without trial, and backing for ‘our boys’ in Iraq) opposition of any substance evaporated under pressure. And in local government the story was completely different.

The booting out of Charles Kennedy – a successful seat-winner – ostensibly for his over-fondness for alcohol, was a clumsy attempt to shift rightwards to meet the growing Tory challenge. We now hear less from new leader Menzies Campbell about war, the pledge to increase the top rate of tax to improve education has been dumped and a clear turn to the right on law and order has been signalled. But the Lib Dems are nonetheless losing ground – with support dropping as they play a messy game of fighting both other parties on their own territories. Campbell will not last long.

Both opposition parties share New Labour’s leadership instability, constant policy vacillations and the lack of any defining strategic project. These factors are all rooted in a common economic perspective that drives a growing array of social and political problems. And as a consequence they suffer the same funding scandals - hence their silence over Labour’s. In the Tories case this is simply business as usual. The Lib Dems biggest fund-source is multiple fraudster Michael Brown, currently facing years in gaol.

How all this pans out is far from certain. The political mainstream yearns for a return to ‘politics as normal’. This projected re-stabilisation centres on a clean Brown versus Cameron fight - the new line from Rupert Murdoch whose enthusiasm for New Labour is cooling, despite all it has delivered for him - accompanied by reform of the Lords and party funding. But this may be wishful thinking.

The fourth stage

In historical retrospect we appear to be in the fourth phase of a succession of shifts in the structure of ruling party politics. Labour’s rapid growth in the early decades of the last century eclipsed the Liberal Party almost to extinction and led to a half century of relative stability. Labour and the Tories played out distinctive roles with relatively stable electoral bases. The Tories, as ‘the natural party of government’ representing capital and empire, rested on a strong alliance of the middle class with a substantial proportion of the working class. Labour, overwhelmingly dependent on working class support, came to power when the Tories ran out of steam or pressure for reform became too great to bear.

All that changed in the 1970s as economic downturn combined with a US defeat in Vietnam following decolonisation. In the first phase of change the Thatcherites refashioned Toryism to take on economic restructuring and build a new alliance centred more on the better-off working class. This fed into the second phase - a rightward split from Labour, (the SDP) that helped to halt a labour shift to the left and revitalised a three party system. The third phase was Blair’s ‘New Labour Project’ – abandoning the party’s social democratic heritage in favour of a version of free market capitalism claiming to ameliorate its worst side effects.

With the current fourth realignment, the absence of direction and shape is stark. The disarray of the parties’ foreign policy is an example: the Tories are dithering over their departure from the European Peoples Party in favour of a tiny new regroupment with a Czech party; Blair has for years bunkered down with Bush without a left wing ally on the planet, recently swapping Berlusconi for Olmert as other soul mate; and the Lib Dems one big idea - Europe - is up the creek after last year’s French referendum defeat.

There is an obvious political vacuum on the left, partially filled at present by the Respect Coalition, but this vacuum is across the board. It is a dangerous scenario of public insecurity as all main parties scramble around for a framework in the same narrow, right-wing ground.

Piers Mostyn

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